Extra: Dinner In Jerusalem & The Middle East Conflict

Jordan, it's been amazing to be here in Jerusalem with you. So we were, we, this got started when you and I were talking about doing some informational kind of series and talks about Western civilization and the roots of Western civilization. I said, well, I'm going to Israel anyway, later this year, you want to come to Jerusalem and well, here we are in Jerusalem. You got the kind of center point of all of Western religion and one of the twin poles of what most people consider to be Western civilization, Jerusalem and Athens. Those two poles

coming together, I've argued before and I know you've argued in a similar way but differently about whether Jerusalem or Athens is more fundamental or whether they're sort of co-equal. But for me because Jerusalem proceeds Athens both time wise and sort of spirituality wise, I do wonder if in order to even get to the idea of human reason, you have to first take on faith that human beings are capable of understanding the universe.

There's been a touch, a handoff between man and God or God hands man something of worth. Well, you'd think that would be the case if you thought about it historically or biologically because it's pretty clear that human beings acting out religious presuppositions, predates, human beings acting out presuppositions that are rational by an immense margin and for hundreds of thousands of years in some real sense.

And so the narrative vision precedes the objective vision, that's for sure. And maybe you can't say that the Athenian vision is only the objective but it's... But in so far as it's the basis of the scientific endeavor which is really in some sense and the enlightenment endeavor which is in some sense how it's regarded then it's objective.

And that's a... It's very interesting how difficult it is for people to think objectively. It's very difficult for people to think scientifically. Even most scientists don't think scientifically. They still think in terms of consensus. You have to be an outstanding scientist before you actually let the data modify the theory.

So the fundamental basis of science too, I think this is an argument that I make in in right side of history. The fundamental basis of science is predicated on certain root assumptions. Assumptions like the possibility of an objective truth that's out there, one that the human mind is capable of grasping and that's worth investigating.

And all of that starts with an monotheistic faith and you know obviously if you look at the surroundings and if you hear the surroundings because I assume that during general meeting with a melezen call will hurt some Jewish prayers. And so on and over here and then you'll hear the bells of some of the churches going off. That sort of that monotheistic faith is the root of those faith propositions.

You might ask you know to what degree would you have to term it monotheistic and I would say you have to believe if you're a scientist in something transcendent. And you have to believe in something transcendent that transcends your theoretical domain. And it's outside of the map that you lay on the territory. You have to believe that encountering that is for the good for you. That it's a form of truth that you could understand it and that it would be beneficial to people if you did that.

And those are all pre-scientific axioms of approach. You know Thomas Kuhn when he wrote the structure of scientific revolutions he was one of the first people who delved into what you might describe as the anthropology of science which was science as something practiced as a habit or as a set of investigative practices rather than as a body of descriptive language.

And when you train to be a scientist you train as an apprentice in a laboratory. And partly what you're trained to do is regard the pattern that the data reveals if you're seeking for truth as something superordinate to the presuppositions that you bring to bear on the situation initially.

So you have to believe in this transcendent reality. Now is it unitary necessarily? Well you certainly believe that you're a scientist that it coheres and that it has a logos because otherwise you wouldn't regard it as comprehensible. And then you also make a moral judgment which is that encountering that is a good and that good will come out of it. And that's a statement of faith.

You know in the Frankenstein story is sort of the opposition to that in some sense right is that how do we know that if we continue to make contact with the transcendent object and update our knowledge that we won't just create an endless array of Frankenstein monsters because that's in some sense equally probable. But the scientist has faith that that's not the case. And I think it isn't the case if when you're conducting your science you do it ethically.

And that's an interesting thing too that to be a good scientist you have to act ethically. Right. The science would not provide limits around itself. And you've seen times in history where science certainly did not provide limits around itself. One of the first places that we stopped today was we stopped by the shrine of the book which was the text of the Kumaran sect which is unclear whether it was sort of a mainstream Jewish sect or whether it was sort of a carve off Jewish sect.

But these the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in these caves that are in the middle of the Judean desert near sort of the Dead Sea. These things are you know go back 2200 years and what's amazing about them for people who haven't seen them is that they're immaculately preserved and that the text in them when it's biblical text is either very close to our identical with the biblical text that we have today.

And one of the points you're making me when we're discussing there is really kind of amazing just that the we find it astonishing the text are preserved for this long or that ideas are preserved for this long. But that's sort of the sort of the natural state of things when something is important it gets preserved. Well and generally the natural state of things the farther you go back in time the natural state of things is that they stay the same.

So much earlier for example when he talked about let's say prehistoric people pre literate people we might say that no matter what they did so example when they're fishing if they're fishing people they act out the fishing activities of the exemplary fishing hero. And then that's just replicated across the centuries because we think that creative innovation is the standard mode of human being in some sense and that's just not true.

And first of all this expansive global technological society that we live in now is only a few thousand years old at the most it's 10,000 years old that's not very old we were we've been identical to what we are genetically at least in principle about 350,000 years and for most of that 350,000 years span everything stayed the same.

And so the rule is continuity the exception is change now you might say well people forget it's like do they pre literate people have quite the memories in ways that exceed our memory in any manner of ways that you can imagine. And because that's their primary in some sense their primary cognitive activity is remembering there's you don't write anything down how else are you going to learn to act and deserve.

Absolutely. And so the shaman in in prehistoric societies they often have a vocabulary that's four or five times as broad as the typical vocabulary of the typical person in that society not unlike someone who's extremely educated today in some real sense and they're the storehouse of the stories of the tribe of the people and they pass that down generation to generation.

And the only way there would be an exception to that is if you imagine that in one generation a stellar genius storyteller emerged who could somehow update the representations maybe that happens rarely but most of the time. I mean how many original stories does the typical person think up? It's like none. How many books does the typical person write fiction?

Zero. So no. Stasis is the name of the game. And that's stasis is the predicate to the change. I think we tend to see these things as in opposition but without the foundation of the stasis there can't be any change and that's sort of the story of the biblical corpus and the biblical text.

I mean the kind of idea that this stuff was preserved over a serious period of time because it was important and so you better change incredibly gradually that that change has to happen with no revolutions rather sort of gradual evolutions over time because you're playing with fire every time you decide to change something radical.

Well that's the thing is so you can imagine here's a way of imagining the structure of human the human psyche is that you have a hierarchy of assumptions. Now you have a hierarchy of cognitive modules that's not even the right way you have a hierarchy you have a hierarchy of of perceptions and actions that's a better way of thinking about it.

You can think about those as descriptions of the world and that's how a modern person would think that we think but that isn't the way that we represent the world we represent the world in some sense as patterns of perception and action.

And those are hierarchically structured so what I want to do what I need to know is how to see the world and act in it and then there's a limited number of patterns of seeing the world and acting in it that are going to work for me now and me across time at the same time they work for you now and you and across you across time and all the other people that have to interact that's a tight system of constraints and. There are patterns that can make themselves manifest across that.

Tight system of constraints that are then stable across time logically because they're trying to deal with the expanses of time and those are incorporated in in stories are presented as the characters and deep characters and stories. And we're adapted to the pattern too in some real sense because if a story captures the pattern then it captures our imagination right because we've already adapted to the pattern that would guide us through social space in the real world.

It's like a it's like an unmanifest platonic form and then a story will come along and hit that you think oh that story makes sense.

Well that's a whole that's a very strange thing that a story will make sense right well so that means it has to find an echo right because it wouldn't make sense otherwise and then you might think well it's the stories that really capture our imagination that we remember well obviously we listen to them because they grip us and the things that grip us we remember so the story the stories that are remembered for a very long periods of time are adapted like the Dawkins meme in some real sense.

They're adapted to the contours of our imagination and that imagination is a manifestation of our even even more embodied being and so the stories have a concordance otherwise why would you remember them.

Exactly this is the point that soul makes when he's talking about types of knowledge and in modern society we're very focused on scientific knowledge because it can be theoretically replicated or because you can test it and you can falsify it although it's a half of science now is not about replication or falsification it's about active faith but the story is not a way to do it.

The idea that soul says is that if you have a piece of data that's been tried and tested across various periods and across various locations and that it works and that it's adaptive well then what you found is something that obviously is is a valuable form of data that dispensing with the generational general exactly would be a huge mistake to simply dump and then people wonder I think in the in the modern west why people cling to these stories and maybe the question is better why are you discarding these stories what what's so what's so threatening about.

The stories that you feel the necessity to dump them why not say that a profound piece of fiction is a story that has cross situational generality. I mean how could that not be the case because if it didn't have a striking cross situational importance significance utility you wouldn't find it relevant if you didn't find it relevant you wouldn't find it interesting you wouldn't attend to it you certainly wouldn't remember it and so we have this idea we juxtapose fiction against fact let's say.

Are we juxtapose narrative against fact and we think of them as antithesis well that's just fiction it's like no no you don't understand is that if the fiction's gripping it has it's because it lays out a pattern of perception and action that's cross situational valid and so that's and that's in some sense what makes the story deep it's it's not the only thing but it's it's it's definitely part of what makes the story deep let's say that's also why the stories of the Bible are so you know what I mean.

So you know durable over time is because one of the things we're talking about is we went to the city of David here and it's uncovered you know incredible ruins archaeology that goes back 3000 years in some cases and they think that they may have uncovered the palace of David we're talking specifically about the David and Bathsheba story and so you may have been standing like right where David looked out and saw Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop and this idea that that story captures the imagination because it's saying something that's absolutely true about what human beings.

Are and how human beings act and Bible doesn't sugar code it's it's a temptation of the king so what happens in that story is the king looks out on the expanse that presents itself to him and he sees a beautiful woman and he's the king and he thinks well I'm the king why can't I just have her which is and that that's what a way to work.

The thing is it the issue there is if you were a king why wouldn't you think that because obviously you're seeing something that well anyone would want let's say but certainly you'd want if you were king and turns out inconveniently that she's married but he's the king so who cares about the damn marriage and so he sends what's the general's name.

Right to the middle of the worst war around it just hasn't killed and you think well how reprehensible but the only reason you think how reprehensible is because you believe you have faith in the idea that the king is actually beholden to a transcendent authority because otherwise if the king is the last word because there's no transcendent authority then whatever the king does is right by definition and one of the things that's very interesting about the biblical narratives and it's something that almost every western person abides by even if you're not a king.

The reason the bides by even if they don't realize it is that the biblical narrative is at least part predicated on the idea that the prophet who speaks the truth has the right to chastise the king. You think well where does that idea come from that's such a preposterous idea how do you make sense of that idea outside of a religious framework or outside of a framework that at least accepts the notion of a transcendent lethic.

Right because the king cannot sin unless there's a pattern of ethics that transcends human kingship well what would that pattern be people say well I don't believe in God it's like well you believe in what do you mean yeah well what do you mean by that exactly do you do not believe that the king should have a conscience well that's right because then it just devolves into a power game and then there's no ethics in the power game the power game is sure the king can take bath sheba what's the problem of course.

That's the whole point of the power.

And that's the story of paganism too you know when it talks in the Bible about man being made in the image of God I think that what's really interesting is to compare that to to texts of the contemporaneous period where if you read Babylonian texts or if you read Egyptian texts the description of the king is that the king is made in the image of God the king is a God in many cases but the common people are nothing the common people are just the the chattel there whatever they're not part of the history.

And the Bible says no every person is made in the image of God and that's really a sea change in how we're supposed to see ethics because of every person is made in the image of God then you're supposed to see the face of the other and recognize that that person is reflective of your face which is why you know David it's utterly revolutionary it's an amazing idea it really is and we take it for granted because we live in the product of it and so we tend to forget you know what we're rooted in but it isn't amazing.

So if you're a human being you're supposed to see people in my audience often if they believe that's like would you believe that human beings are made in the image of God well let's take that apart so the first part is well do you believe that human beings can transform potential into habitable order well do you believe people have free will well no well do you treat them as if they have free will well try treating your wife like she doesn't have free will and see how that works try treating your children or yourself that way.

So I don't care what you say about whether or not you believe in free will if you don't predicate your social interactions on that presumption you're going to be a tyrant or a slave right right now if you accept that assumption well then you can have reciprocal relationships between in some sense between what would you call self determining visionaries and something like that and if you do that then you'll have people around you that love you and you'll have friends and if you don't do that you won't so I'm going to say if you don't do that you won't.

So the belief comes in the acting that out and so and you believe people are of essential intrinsic value well the same thing applies in your social relations you either do or you don't and if you don't well then you're a narcissistic macchi valian psychopath and so you can get somewhere with that it might be better than hiding under your mother's bed you know to go out and exploit people but it's not an optimized solution and so a lot of what's happening in the biblical narratives is an attempt to

place a characterization around these underlying ethical patterns and and to make them more clearly consciously apprehensible. This is one of the things that I think is so beautiful about the juxtaposition of the Saul narrative and the David narrative right you read when I read that section of the Bible and you have Saul who appears to be a pretty good guy generally speaking and he the

king'ship is taken away from him because he refuses to kill the king of amaleic and your fused to kill the cattle and all this stuff and you have David who commits what appears to be a much worse sin taking somebody else's wife and sending the husband off to die at the battle front appears to be a significantly worse than not killing the king of the opposing nation and and the cattle and and but the king'ship is taken away from the

Psalms all ripped away from him and the reason it's ripped away from him in the biblical text is because Saul's immediate appeal is but the people wanted me not to kill the king and want me not to kill the cattle in words his appeal is not a moral appeal about well the commandment that I was given like Abraham would make the commandment that I was get it's the people right I care what the people

populace is a populace what the people think is what really matters David when he's told you violated God's law his immediate response is to a tone and recognize that he's violated God's law and that's why he's seemingly a man who is a lot of him but is beloved of God what's wrong with being a populace because you could say well you're supposed to attend to the will of the people

it's like well yes but attending to the will of the people or let's say attending to the good of the people is not exactly the same as attending to the easily manipulable whim of the people and you know one of the things you see in modern in the modern political system it's got worse and worse as far as I can tell is that politicians governed by opinion poll right now when I look at that as a psychologist I think you know it's really really difficult to measure what people think

and you might think that you've crafted up a few questions about an issue and that what you get as an answer to those questions is a reliable and valid indicator of what people think but you have no evidence for that at all so if a psychologist wants to make a diagnostic questionnaire the first thing you do is imagine I wanted to think know what you think about Israel

so the first thing I would have to do is I would have to generate maybe a thousand questions about the political situation in Israel then I would have to give them to a thousand people to to answer the questions then I would have to do a statistical analysis to see how the questions clumped

because then I'd have some sense of what the underlying opinion structure of opinions about Israel is then I would have to take the questions that sampled that best then I would have to ask you those questions and then I might have to do it repeatedly right nobody does that no one does that no and so what happens is it's garbage in and garbage out and so what happens is the politicians pay the consultants to craft questions that deliver to the politicians exactly what they want to hear

and then they say well you know that's what the people that are exactly exactly this is one of the it's unbelievably it's unbelievably useless the the the Bible looks very a scant at people acting in direct opposition to a higher code more I mean people are just as capable of violating a higher code of morality as a king is

when the idea of the tyranny of the majority is falling out of fashion now because we worship at the altar of democracy democracy with a small d obviously the idea just being if the people wanted then it must be good but that obviously is not true look at Twitter and see how true that is I mean you can look all over the world at elections that have resulted in the election of actual terrorist groups

and the reality is that there's a lot of a culture that has to be created before democracy begins to actually channel the best values of the people rather than the worst model of the people and everybody agrees with this when when certain iterations are given right you can find the most ardent democrat in the United States would recognize that a state level piece of legislation in 1955 that bar black people from going to restaurants

that was a populist piece of legislation that presumably was passed by a democratically elected body and it was bad and it was wrong and it should be struck down but that it seems to me that democracy is almost become the all purpose club right now when you have it's an unthinking persons response to policy disagreements unless somebody's actually undermining the ability of human beings to vote yeah well it's funny because you do see people making a case for transcend ethics pretty often

even if they're democratic in that in that whim governed sense so I mean it's it's a it's a an axiom of faith on the left and on the right but let's say on the left to begin with that slavery is wrong and I'm not saying slavery isn't wrong the issue is why is it wrong and the answer is well is it wrong to both people voted itself right no exactly that it's not that it's all and we we know that

that I think virtually no one disputes the claim that despite the fact that in the southern US the fact that slavery existed was in part a popular expression of people's will didn't mean that it wasn't wrong in any sense

right I didn't help at all it didn't mitigate the wrong in any sense it's like okay well then you're saying that it's wrong in some transcendental sense okay well then it must we must violate some transcendental principles okay and that means there must be some transcendental principles and so

well what are they exactly well there's something like the autonomy of the individual in relationship to the pursuit of their own ends something like that well that's still not deep enough it's like well why should each individual be granted that right to sovereignty all because each individual is part of what would you say that possessed by a divine spark it's something like that associated with a transcendental

right fundamental made in the new god exactly yes exactly that and I do not see I do not see how you can make an argument against slavery except by walking down that road well I mean the abolitionist certainly didn't I mean that was literally the road that they that they took in order to convince everybody that slavery was wrong when it had been a common feature of nearly every

civilization in all of human history right I mean that is a that is a radical shift and it's a it's in a better understanding of the biblical text which is I think fundamentally conservative not in the American conservative sense which is in the general attitudinal sense which is that very often the good evolution is not an idea that came fresh out of somebody's mind

it's a it's a reinterpretation of an older idea that had been limited up till now and now is being more broadly universalized right the the whole idea of man is made in God's image except for those people and then there's a reinterpret no no man is made in God's image for everyone and therefore that applies to it well that's one of the things too that annoys me so much about this narrative that the U.S. is fundamentally fundamentally predicated on the idea of slavery

it's like no human society in some real sense is fundamentally predicated on the temptation of slavery but there's a strain of human thought that's at a higher level you might say or on a higher plane that fights against that and fundamentally the United States is predicated on that straight and I think I can't see how that's not self-evident partly because it came out of the English common law tradition it's not like the English didn't fight against slavery

now people say well the English involved themselves in the slave trade too it's like fair enough but so did everyone else and so it's so I mean it's it's alive today this slave trade there are 20 million people in bondage in different places around the world

so yeah I mean that's the the question is what made these places different what made their ideas different what transforms and and the the only answer is whatever the culture was that developed along these lines that inconsent into the eternal ideas

well that's what it looks like to me I mean as far as I can tell that that insistence that's essentially a manifestation of Jerusalem let's say in this philosophic or theological sense that is the source of that idea that radical idea of true individual sovereignty and worth that's inelienable that's also as far as I can tell that's you either accept that as the origin point of the idea that you have rights or you make it part of the social contract which is very very risky thing to do

the social contract is dicey in far too many ways and also is not historic way accurate there's no point at which people got together and decided we are forming a social contract now is an evolution from smaller social units in conjunction with with others it wasn't like people actually got down and sat together and everybody recognizes this it's a it's a wild mystery of lock to think that when he talks about social contract

it's a matter for it best exactly it's it's an understanding that there's mutual gain to be had that the people are part of society as a as a matter of their continuing involvement in society because again contract means mutual gain there cannot be a contract without mutual gain but to read it literally the way that people do or Rousseau does

that that essentially you have to create a new contract where every single person signs on the dotted line and you have to do this generation after generation that's not right I mean as Berk talked about right and this is I think particularly true when you talk about it's way too proposition

yeah for for sure and as Berk talked about the reality is that we live you talk a lot about human beings living embedded in their bodies that we are not separate from our bodies but we're also embedded in time meaning that we are Berk suggested we are we are part of a contract not between the people who are alive today but between the past and the future right we're a link in a chain and so every time you suggest that

that consent is the only value that matters you're forgetting about what you're standing on and what you have yet to build and what your children are going to be born into kids aren't born into a desert island they're born into a social situation that already exists for them and that requires a certain level of gratitude depending on what kind of social situation they're born into because it's what shields them from the darkness outside

it's also suboptimal to give consent to yourself to engage in an activity that doesn't iterate well for yourself and this is I think I think it's easier to become aware consciously of why you would enslave someone than it is to become conscious of why you would allow them to be free

and I think the reason for that is is that the advantage to defeating someone in a one-off contest is obvious and the advantage is every child knows this because every child wants to win the game that game and might be annoyed if they don't win that game and the parent has to come along and say

well it doesn't matter whether you win or lose the game it matters how you play it matters whether you're a good sport and the child doesn't know what to make of that because obviously it matters whether you win or lose the game because you're playing to win and winning is a good thing

and the parent then is out of things to say because they have to degenerate parents have to degenerate into kind of a hand waving them but the truth of the matter is is that a game is a subset any given game is a subset of a set of games and the rules that govern a set of games aren't the same rules that govern a game and you have to play the game so that you're most likely to be victorious in the set of games

and so then you can say well if you're a good sport and you don't have a tantrum when you lose and you don't get too triumphant when you win and you distribute credit where it's due and you try to develop your teammates as you develop yourself then people are going to invite you to play all the time

and then you can play forever and then you win but that's way harder to think up than well I want to win the game this goes back to something we were talking about earlier today just because we're looking at an archaeological site that goes back layer upon layer upon layer and we were talking about the fact that Israel for example has a very high rate of childbirth it's the only western nation that has an above replacement rate childbirth in I think it's like three over here

and we were talking about why that is and when you feel a burden of the past and when you understand that that burden is oriented toward the future the iterations that you're talking about are repeated across time and in the west we because we don't have kids because we decided that we are essentially the last generation

because of that winning and losing is the only thing that matters if you don't have to iterate the game over and over and if you don't have to create a series of rules look the shorter the term the more winning in that moment is the only thing there is

right this iterated issue too is very this is another place where Athens and Jerusalem meet at least in principle right because it is possible that the narrative ethic of love your neighbor is a reflection of the necessity for playing iterated games

and so you could and it's interesting because Sam Harris for example has been trying to draw a universal ethic from the set of objective facts and there is something about the constraints that are placed on how you act by the necessity of cross temporal iteration for you but also you're the center of a concentric set of circles and the iteration has to be able to propagate itself across all those concentric circles

and so that's a very tight set of bounds you can say well you could have strapped out an ethic from that and maybe that ethic would look something like the narrative of reciprocity and that would be a place where the objective and the trend and it would meet and I think there's some evidence for that you know I mean France de Walles work with chimps shows pretty clearly that the dominant chimp which is a misnomer and maybe a Marxist

Marxist misnomer at that is the most reciprocal male in the group and often the most reciprocal individual in the group and also the best peacemaker and that makes for a stable polity among chimpanzees and there they have a male dominate society they can be pretty damn aggressive

but power even among chimpanzees is not a stable basis for either individual survival or for political stability so and it's not a good reproductive strategy so the thing is is that the tyrant chimp will have sporadic mating opportunities whereas the you know the completely dependent chimp that is crushed and defeated won't even have that so it's not ab maybe the use of power does not doom you to abject 100% certain failure but it's a suboptimal strategy at best

and you know I think that you know when we talk about these these iterated strategies and and how you create social buy and one of the things we were talking about is we walked through Jerusalem we happened to be here during the festival booths and we were talking about what the value of ritual is and how my suggestion is that what Judaism and Christianity and Islam too to a certain extent are in a time to concretize the spiritual that it's an attempt to take moral values

and then if Brooks said that you can't teach morals and ethics you can only teach manners then it's an attempt to create a system of manners that are iteratable across this entire group of people and create skin in the game buy-in and that allows you an enormous amount of freedom of thought

because if you all agree that you're going to say keep Sabbath together and keep kosher together or if you're in the United States and you're Christian you're all going to go to church together on Sundays and that you're going there's going to be a you're not going to go out to party

then when you established a minimum an acceptable minimum of shared practice and when you do that that allows for the possibility of freedom because I trust you enough to know that you're not trying to destroy my in group you're part of my in group by putting this sort of skin in the game and so much of religion is about that it's about you know that those shared rituals that allow you to be part of the in group then the question becomes whether that in group is so exclusive as to bar outsiders

but ideally you know your in group should bind everybody together without being so exclusive that it creates you know an othering effect where everybody else is the enemy yeah well we we tend not to think of belief as that which underlies practice like because we're so we're so Athenian now I would say in some sense in our world view that we tend to think of belief as only descriptive practice description per se like here's the set of facts about the world that I believe are true

that's truth and that's and that's but but there's there's predicates of belief that are are what objects of of of faith I suppose but also they're part of what you presume to be true almost by definition because you wouldn't act them out and so one of the things that those

who criticize the religious enterprise don't understand is that there are immense elements of it perhaps the most important elements that aren't the least bit propositional so some of it is practice what do you do so how do you ritualize your activity

along with other people right and then there's a whole emotional dimension of it well they've called a prayer as part of that for sure right there's a musical element to that and there's the attempt to instill awe that's certainly characteristic of let's say great church architecture

that's particularly true of what the Europeans managed with their church architecture and to reduce it to a propositional description you make religion it's you can argue out of existence as soon as you do that exactly and I think that once once you do that people again the word embeddedness

comes to mind but religion is an embedded way of living and I think it's why the West has failed to come to grips with the strength of religion and the continuing strength of religion so in the West religion has been largely undermined in favor of a sort of secular materialism

and then everybody wonders why are all these weird ancient people clinging to their fades and it's like well you've created a set of new phase that seem not particularly wonderful and maybe it is just the fact that man is a faith creature who's always going to seek this sort of embedding

and the question is whether you accept methods of the past from embedding and then gradually change them to adapt to current circumstances or whether you're creating out of your own head systems of embedding to combine people in these forces and the systems you're creating out of your head like most systems created from pure human thought are really bad that's not the way that most thought happens we also think that in the West the way we act is a consequence of the way we describe the world

but the way we act is actually a consequence of let's say culture it's also 400 years of enlightenment manifestations, the dawn of the scientific revolution modifying the ways we act we think that we act because of a set of propositions we think if we just tell other people those propositions then they'll act that way because we think that's how we act that isn't how we act exactly and this is why when George W. Bush was saying there's a desire for freedom in every human heart

to say well maybe yes but not freedom as you define it meaning that George W. Bush's definition of freedom wasn't necessarily the definition of freedom people living in Iraq or people living in Israel or people living in China

like not everybody has the same definition of these wars they have ways of life that they wish to preserve some better or some more some not a moral relativist on this sort of stuff but this sort of idea that there's a universal language of freedom that every human heart speaks

runs in direct opposition to the fact that there are a bunch of conflicting values in the human heart and they are organized in particular hierarchies and those hierarchies are not always the same it was pretty cool to walk up the pilgrimage road with you so this is something that they've discovered

over at the city of David they were there a sewage pipe burst down in the middle of Solwan which is an Arab area and they didn't tear down any of the Arab housing they instead decided to dig and they've uncovered this entire pilgrimage road that runs about half a mile from the bottom of the hill

all the way up to the temple mount actually walking through history is kind of an amazing thing and it does lead you to the the literalism and spirituality of the Bible the idea that you're on a physical ascent to the Axis Mundi and that's a spiritual ascent as well that the physical is supposed to mirror the spiritual is perfectly evident in that road and that you're going up and up of course metaphorically is towards the good and so that's laid out on the geography

then you have that metaphoric idea made manifest in the road and then people can walk that and they're walking a spiritual path and a physical path at the same time and that is in some sense the union of Jerusalem and Athens right the physical

we talked about that today too with the discovery of the archaeological artifacts and so the archaeologists who are digging here are using scientific archaeological principles but they dig up artifacts that are objects that are reflective of the biblical narrative

because they've demonstrated that many of the people named in the biblical narrative actually existed and so now they're nailing the narrative which was starting to float off in space back down to the object and revitalizing the narrative as a consequence

I think you made a beautiful point about this we were talking about one of those seals and one of those seals had an ancient name on it that's described in the book of kings and you were pointing out that even the smallest things that we kind of discard in our daily life

may have ripple effects and resonances 2000 years into the future or 3000 years into the future in this particular case and I thought it was a really kind of great lesson for a lot of people yeah well that's another example of that sort of infinite iteration

you don't know how each of your actions or even your utterances echo you don't know what you're doing when you launch them forward into the world because there's a spirit embodied in them in some real sense that's certainly true of every sentence that you utter and God only knows

how that shifts and changes the structure of reality so it's a daunting idea I did get a kick out of you on the speakers platform over there they've uncovered the speakers platform which was essentially I guess the free speech zone of ancient Jerusalem

yeah I mean the idea that people were constantly bickering and fighting and trying to remind each other of the biblical values even at that time it gives number one the lies to the idea that there was sort of this golden pass where everybody acted well because obviously that wasn't true people are being chided throughout the Bible but it also reminds you that you know descends within the biblical context descent to the good was

was a vital component of biblical thought so everybody thinks that the Bible is particularly a dr. Nare there's the Old Testament and then there's a bunch of prophets and then the prophets come along and they're all they're doing for hundreds of pages

just chiding people tack better and reminding them of their obligations and that's that's a pretty strong form of descent to a to a sort of doctrine or ideal supposedly well it was very it was very interesting to see the archaeological dig of the road

and to imagine that now being laid back out so that that entire pathway up to the temple mount can be well it'll be underground but people build a walk on it again that's really something and to think that that was discovered because of a leak in a sewer pipe

and that was all buried underneath there and ready to be re excavated and restored that's that was really something to see that's Jerusalem your toilet breaks and you find a piece of 3000 year old archaeology that bespeaks the the book of kings or some things that's that's amazing

and then you know we were able to go to the culmination of that and that of course is when we went up on to the temple mount the hottest piece of property on planet earth definitely the the flashpoint for an enormous amount of conflict but also

spirituality that was the tensest part of the day very tense right explain why that is a bit yeah I mean so they just politically speaking Israel in 1967 conquers the rest of the old city of Jerusalem including the the temple mount compound the Muslims called the Al-Aqsa compound

you can hear the muhezin call going out right now from the from the Al-Aqsa compound and and Israel immediately hands the keys to the temple mount compound to the Islamic walk which is handled by Jordan so Jordan is in control of many of the sort of laws and regulations on the temple mount site

well the Jewish the Jewish state is in control of the territory but that actual part is is controlled by Islamic authorities Islamic authorities dictate the Jews and Christians are not allowed to I'm not allowed to pray openly on the on the temple mount you're not allowed to carry any open symbols of Christian and your Judaism up onto the temple mount your wife had to put her cross away well while we are walking up there I if I wanted to walk in certain areas I had to

put on a baseball cap I used to come for an extra wife and they were telling you he had to separate from your wife presumably because as with the old Protestant dancing jokes dancing may lead to you know so yeah so he's standing next to your wife was a threat so you know it's it's very heavily regulated there are people who are essentially following you around watching you to watch for violations if you violate those rules you could theoretically be arrested

and so it's it's it's very tense I mean it's yeah well you could see up there the the the battle between maps being played out on a territory itself so the dome of the rock had been built over the this the foundations done the holy of holies right right right and so it's the replacement of one center of the world by another center of the world and that center point in this city is the temple mount and so a huge part of the dispute that still exists here is what

map is going to predominate on that territory or what assemblage of maps and even though that's a psychological battle the battle is actually fought over actual territory by actual people and so in that sense I suppose it's it's actual as well as psychological it's very interesting to be in a place where the map meets multiple maps are are juxtaposed with the territory in such a self-evident way it's such a troublesome way yeah it's it isn't amazing

thing especially when when you know you're in Jerusalem and you can just look around the city and you see the proximity I think for people on just a political level to understand the Middle East conflict it's almost impossible

to do with that actually being in an area where you see just how close things are to one another I mean we walked out the cotton gate which is which is in the Arab quarter and you walk from there into the into the Jewish quarter back toward the western wall and these things are cheek by jaw with one

another I mean there is no separation you're talking about areas I mean literally right behind us is is still on on this area and this is a largely Arab area I a large in Muslim area and and back here up there is a largely Jewish area and they are right next to each other I mean they're in the same

camera shot and and that has significant ramifications when people say well why don't they just figure out a way to live together in peace around they just find a way to separate from one another right just for Jerusalem it's why don't they just find a way to live together in peace and the whole problem with that sentence is the just parts like well that's the simplest thing in the world to live in peace is like yes they're peace in your family you think that's so simple is

their peace in your heart and then you're trying to get all you can make a statement like that it well if people just you know grew up or they just got their act together they live in peace it's like I don't think there's anything more difficult to attain than peace for sure I mean I don't even know

if you can attain peace in your own heart in some sense unless peace also reigns all around you and so that might mean the peace that you have in your own heart can't even come about until peace is established everywhere well so the the in Hebrew the word for Shalom or for peace of Shalom which also

is the word for complete right Shalom means to be full or complete and so the idea of peace requiring fullness that it can't be divided is you know we tend to think of pieces that's the thing you make between opposites it's the thing you make between warring fashions but but you can't really make

me think about it as a compromise and that's also not true peace can't be made as a compromise there has to at least be a fundamental agreement on the principle underlying it or pieces just not to be a unity in a higher principle you know if you're if you're trying to make peace with your wife she

wants something and you want something the best way to make peace is for both you to put your heads together and think about how you can both have more than you could have separately together and then you have peace because people think oh that's a good deal I have more than I needed in wanted as a

consequence of that arrangement and that's a peaceful negotiation and that's a very difficult thing to do so yeah especially in in this region of the world is definitely a very rough thing to do I mean I think that the Abraham Accords are a great way of coming to some of those agreements it's it's people recognizing that they have priorities other than sort of the religious conflict we'll put that aside and we'll agree to the things that we can agree to and work

on those things together well we know in the temple mount you can see in some sense people of the three Abrahamic faiths are trying to fight out and somewhat peacefully thank God somewhat peacefully how that site can be wholly across three different yeah it is important to recognize here that

that only happens under Israeli auspices from 48 to 67 when Jordan ruled this area is completely bandages they wrecked they wrecked synagogues and churches you know it's it's it's an unfortunate reality that it's going to take reformers in you know all it seems like they're making progress on that front the United Arab Emirates right they're building that tri-faith facility there and there is some real attempt there as far as I can tell and this is part

of the spirit of the Abraham Accords to think that maybe there is enough commonality between the Abrahamic people to unite them especially maybe in the face of all the threats to that entire Abrahamic tradition that are making themselves manifest in the world well that's the thing that I've been discussing with Muslim friends of mine people who wildly disagree with me about things like Israel or Middle East peace you know we've been talking about the fact

that maybe the maybe the true threat to religious practice is not the people who practice the other Abrahamic faith either the true threat is an ideology that seems to dissolve the religious enterprise entirely and it doesn't even because what it does is the thing is is that what happens when you dissolve a functional religious tradition which would be one that was at least capable of uniting people over some span of time just speaking in the in the in the

least religious sense possible you tear that apart you replace it with some idiot ideology that can't propagate itself across time for even a couple of generations think well that that's not true it's like yeah this is one of the things that always bothered me about the about the new atheists like well what about the fascists what about the communists I mean those ideas sprang out of I would say something approximating a secular humanism is like oh no

that had nothing to do with sexual abuse I mean this has been okay fair enough guys but you had what you had was the demise of one religious system and the instant emergence of a religious system that was so unbelievably pathological that it made the previous pathological pathological religion look like a complete paradise you want to have what you want it you want the zars or you want Stalin it's like read your history and you'll figure out that real fast

exactly and you know that again I think that goes back to the idea that if there is a higher ethic to be discovered and if it if it is out there subjective and if that ethic has been revealed and if it was revealed in Jerusalem let's say and that that's what Jerusalem represents then there that that higher ethic can't come out of us you know I think that the the lie of Marxism is that it was a discovery about the universe that was objectively true and therefore would

instantiate itself over time naturally and that of course was false I mean the predictions that Marx makes about economics and about what was going to happen in history were completely not true I know when they were true they weren't true for the reasons he thought they were true like the idea that capital accrues in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people is sort of true in that a minority of people always tend to have the majority of the control

over any given product creative product that seems like a natural law in some sense you see that manifested itself in all sorts of domains that aren't merely economic but he was wrong in that that was the cause the consequence of

capitalism per se he was wrong that other economic systems wouldn't produce the same end he was wrong also in that there's a there is a one percent that controls 90 percent but the the people who occupy that one percent are not a lot a lot any I mean most most clearly who's wrong about the

emissoration of the workers I mean the idea that the workers would be emissorated into their be worldwide revolution is clearly false and the faith was falsified so the the answer was changed in the nature of the of the claim in the fact that it's a sort of Lenin's Lenin's great discovery is if I just sort of pretend that the historical projections never happened or here's the reason why they didn't happen so they still might be fulfilled by a peasantry in Russia

which was precisely the opposite of what Marx claimed he thought it was going to be a lower class in or a lower class in Britain in industrialized nation who had been emissorated by working the factories and instead it turns out to be much of serfs in Russia who are rebelling against the landlords yeah it also turned out that people weren't comparatively emissorated by the factories in fact they were comparatively elevated by the factories right exactly so even though

those factories well you can see what happened when the factories got established in China is the Chinese decided pretty damn quickly that working on a farm was or an factory was a hell of a lot better than perishing well starving under Mao so the utopian creations of our own brains are significantly more dangerous historically speaking than a gradual evolution of a well accepted system of ethics that results particularly in a series of commandments that can be enacted in

daily life you know and and significantly less fulfilling also because again all all of the the modern theory that's based on sort of the Hobbesian notion that what man seeks his pleasure and seeks to avoid his pain that's just not correct I mean it's not it's not correct in any fundamental sense what would what what it may be true on a moment's a moment sense when people routinely seek out pain in pursuit of a higher pleasure right predicated on the idea that what

constitutes pleasure and what constitutes pain is momentarily self-evident which it isn't because sometimes the most pleasurable things require a fair amount of pain to attain and so again it's the problem of iteration is like well pleasure and pain computed over what time frame well we're not going to address that it's obvious it's like no it's not it's not obvious in the least and so it's just specious you see this with these with these arguments of that

sort that men pursue pleasure and avoid pain it's like you are acting as if what pleasure and pain constitute our self-evident our their self-evident descriptions of the structure of underlying reality you you crammed all of

underlying reality into those two two words then right like well here's what motivates us pleasure and pain you divide the whole cosmos into those two things and then you think well I'm just going to accept that axiomatic proposition you know what pleasure is then do you it's like well that's not so

simple it's certainly not so simple psychologically and you know when when economists test out those predictions say made on that narrow utilitarianism which is bound in the moment they find people don't act like that at all and the behavioral economists have demolished the conceptual pre-struct pre-conceptions of classical economists economics by playing by playing relatively simple trading games and showing well no people don't actually act like that at all

if you actually look at how they act so yeah and I'm I think that what would be in a place like this really reminds you of is is again the suppositions that we make in the west about how human activity and human motivation are just

plain wrong in many cases because again once that right that's that that's the flaw of rationalism right that's law of empiricism yep I mean this is the the the sort of Michael Oakshot or f.a. high point which is that you can rationalize your way into anything and you believe

again like you were saying that what you're doing is for a quote unquote rational reasons but the reality is that what you're doing you're doing because it was most likely handed down to you over an extraordinary period of time and you were brought up in it to the point where you are acculturated to it and to simply reject that heritage out of a fit of peak or an search for individual identity I mean that's the that's the real danger that I see right now is that it used to

be at least you can make the case and now I'm in a steel man Marxism for a second but at least you can make the case that it was a search for a better world that it was the search for a better form of humanity communally speaking we are all

going to live better together because if we commute if we transform our community then we'll transform the individual it's wrong but at least you make a case yeah well you could make the case that before it was demonstrated to be wrong it was at least arguably plausible right and now we've because

that failed the replacement for that was not okay maybe we ought to think again about what it is that that we lost maybe what we're actually thinking about is something is something more maybe what we're actually thinking about is should be just ourselves free-floating individual souls that are wandering about in the chaos and that's what we should be shooting for forget the community entirely forget transforming social conditions none of that really

matters the only social condition that ought to be transformed is the one that hens me in on an individual that's kind of the degenerate that's a degenerative liberal Protestantism I would say to some degree that so the only thing that's real is the ultimately atomized individual and that's such a catastrophic self-defeating view I mean I see this practically too I think part of the reason my lectures I know part of the reason my lectures have been attractive

to people is because I've been able to make the case that you're most likely to find the meaning that sustains you in life as a consequence of adopting responsibility and relationship to others and and then you can just explain to people how that works is well let's say you're really sick and you

say you're really sick something's gone wrong in your life and which is going to happen well hedonism isn't going to save you then that's for sure because that's gone and then well what are you going to rely on to get you through that well let's say you're alone and isolated and you've never taken

responsibility for anyone it's like oh good so now you're going to be sick and suffering alone that's that's going to end well or alternatively you know you've got some time and effort into the people around you and they're there to

boy you up when the catastrophe comes and all that's accrued through responsibility and maybe even there'll be something to you that's there to boy you up through catastrophe because you've sacrificed your narrow, whim-based, atomistic, liberal, Protestant, hedonism to something like

service of your service to your higher self that iterated self across time maybe across generations so you have some character to rely on when the storms come to people understand that very quickly if you explain it to them it's like

oh that's how it that's why I should take responsibility like yeah yeah that's building an arc man it's for sure it's also because you're speaking intergenerational I think that what what really gets lost in the sort of liberal ethic that you're talking about because it's so individualist

there's this peculiar version of what Marxist would call homo-economist right the the the Marxist critique of capitalism is the capitalism is largely about individuals who act in their own rational self-interest with regard to capital and that's not true that's not exactly how people work

so right well it's it's partly because what do you mean rational self-interest exactly right and so this is the work of condomin and the behavioral economists you're talking about is to debunk a lot of that and so the the corollary to that is this idea that human beings are always grown up

children are grown ups like they're they're sort of in a rational individual that individual is all that matters the heart of you and they're never a child they don't need any boundaries they don't need any rules they don't need any structures and so if we get rid of all that stuff then you can be the true you are a four year old you the true you but you start to see the set that creeps into that right now four year olds and five year olds can be

the true you right the true you is identified by mommy and daddy of course who can identify your your rule breaking behavior immediately right but they but the if you actually want to bring up a million against social order is the true you exactly what he dismal view that is and and dangerous to

kids because kids actually need these structures I mean what we're really talking about well kids actually manifest those rebellious behaviors precisely to discover the structures because they're looking to be hemmed in in relationship to their anxiety so they go they push and they push and

they think well I'm hoping I'm hoping I'm going to find a wall here because otherwise I'm in an infinite expanse and they'll keep pushing and if the expanse gets big enough then the child is in some sense just the child has no choice but to collapse into himself that's what happens when a child has

had enough it's like well that's too much there's too much choice there's too much possibility there's too much chaos and that's a terrible thing to do to a child they want they want the domain of constrained choice they're capable of mastering at their developmental level and that's what it's up to you to provide as a parent and no more challenge than the necessary no and this is why you know it's interesting my parents became more religious when I was a kid they

they'd always been interested in religion but they hadn't become fully religious they became orthodox when I was maybe nine ten eleven years old and one of the reasons for that is because my mom and dad basically decided there needs to be

some system within which we raise our children and that system has to both make sense to us but also has to provide a grounding and a set of boundaries that are behaviorally good for for our kids and as people abandon parenthood the easiest thing for yourself because you're your rational

adults of course and you can pursue your own self interest how you see fit is to abandon religion because it allows you to pursue whatever pleasure you wish to pursue but when you're whatever whim right exactly when it comes to your kids

this is where people start to get correctly defensive and it's one of the great tragedies of the west is that as we've had fewer kids it's tied you less to the institutions that are necessary to actually preserve the society because what preserves a society is how you raise your kids most important

thing you do not bound by the necessity of long term iteration which is the sustainability the left is always talking about that's really that that's a great that by the way that that is a great term meaning like we're constantly talking about environmental standard what a human sustainability

well those aren't even separable because if we destroy human sustainability we'll absolutely destroy the planet clearly obviously you know we'll degenerate into nuclear war or we'll demolish the environment in fits of starvation

and catastrophe and so there's no there's no there's no saving the planet outside the truly sustainable human enterprise for better or worse we're stewards of the garden that's that's that's the nature of the cosmos that's for sure and I don't think but I think we don't we don't think often enough

in terms of how do you sustain human civilization how do you how do you maintain or in your words how do you cultivate I think that we worry mostly about just walking around naked in the garden as much as humanly possible and that cultivation is a real thing like that's that's an amazing thing in Genesis like the notion that you're placed in paradise but you have a job apparently that's not the way that people think now right if you're placed in paradise

the first thing you do is you vacation right you don't have a job you don't have anything to do right exactly and the first thing God says is you're in the you're in the garden here's a few things for you to do right in the name some animals

you're gonna cultivate you're gonna keep and cultivate the garden because the idea is even in paradise human beings have to have something to do something to do and then and the thing to do is to continue to cultivate that garden and make sure that that garden is operational and better and better

and when you ignore that and when you just eat the fruit of the garden without continuing the cultivation you neglect your duty then that's when the snake wins presumably yeah so it's you know these are all concepts that I think that the

West has forgotten a little bit. Well it's something to be able to think of responsibility as opportunity and not constraint and that I mean I would say of all the things that I've been talking to people about that's the one that strikes home most particularly that responsibility is opportunity and not constraint the narrative world and the objective world it's the it's the juxtaposition of the narrative world and that would be Jerusalem in some real sense and the

objective world that defines Western civilization and you see that narrative spirit attempting to revive itself in the Jerusalem of today and it that's a good thing because that narrative spirit if that if that deep and meet narrative spirit doesn't rejuvenate itself it will just be replaced by far inferior variants far inferior variants dangerous shallow unsustainable anxiety provoking hopeless miserable vengeful murderous yeah so a better vision than that is

definitely something we need and it's certainly the case that everyone here I would say to some degree is striving to to produce that stumbling uphill towards the the temple on the mount and the city of God if the city of peace can be created it's going to be through the the principles of the city of peace which is why it's named that way and you know the place where Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac the place where Jacob had his dream of angels going up and down you know

my prayer at the end of the meal is that you know that the the angels that descend up and down in Jacob's dream continue to connect the higher realms to the lower and that we got to learn from that and that we got to strengthen that connection in ourselves and for our communities and for our civilization that's right we could add to that a prayer that we have enough senses individuals to allow that ladder to move its information its message up and down the the different

realms of being right within the confines of our own thought and our own life so yeah that's a good prayer that's for sure cheers garden cheers