The Divine Landscape with Jonathan Pageau

 

In this episode

 

Meaning is necessary for you to even perceive the world around you. It’s it’s baked in to the structure of reality.

 

Intro

 

Do you believe in God? Many people ask this question expecting a clear yes or no answer, but I’ve always felt the only appropriate response really is what do you mean by God? It’s not like the answer to this is clear and unambiguous. I mean, it can’t be with a concept like God. Do we mean literally a kind of sky tyrant who punishes us with thunderbolts and rewards us when we obey him? Is God just a metaphor for the forces of nature, or is it a sort of superintelligence that created the universe and is now watching it from a distance, like the disbelieved? And what does it mean to believe there’s only one God as opposed to many? Like so many pagan faiths, did my guest in this episode of the podcast, his religious iconography and public speaker Jonathan Pageau. He came down to the studio right after his multi-city tour with Jordan Peterson, and we went pretty deep into the rabbit hole in this one. On the idea of God, why the West is going through a kind of meeting crisis at the moment, the transcendent power of art, Walter White’s moral dilemmas, and much more. Jonathan’s at the forefront of a new kind of conversation about God and divinity, and he pushes back against the simplistic black and white concepts of both religious fundamentalists and new atheists alike. Anyone interested in religion, philosophy, and mythology will want to dive into this one. I hope you enjoy it. This is my conversation with Jonathan Pageau.

 

Chapter 1: The Thirst for Purpose

 

FRED

Jonathan Pageau. Thank you so much.

 

JONATHAN

It’s great to be here.

 

FRED

Yeah, it’s really cool that we were able to do this in person.

 

JONATHAN

It’s nice to also be talking to someone who is close to my house in Montreal. You know, this is great. I do encourage cultural discussion and intellectual discussion around here.

 

FRED

Definitely. It was definitely a plus when, when you actually said, I give you the option of doing this remote or in person and you say, well, actually, you know, we’re actually not that far from each other, so, really cool, really, really cool. So you just got back from a multi-city tour with, Jordan Peterson? I mean, that must have been quite the experience.

 

JONATHAN

It’s wild. I mean, it’s really amazing. I think the fact of the tour is amazing already. To be going from city to city and to watch, you know, 4000, you know, sometimes up to 6000 people in a room, just wanting to come watch a lecture. Seems like I don’t know if that’s actually been done before, maybe, maybe Mark Twain or something like that. But it’s really astounding to be able to participate in something like that.

 

FRED

How do you explain the thirst that’s out there? Because growing up, we didn’t have anything like this. I remember I, you know, I kind of did a little journey in the academic world and kind of seeing what’s out there in the entertainment space. This seems like a very new phenomenon in that people are thirsty and hungry for religious ideas symbolism. I mean, this seems to be a pretty new phenomenon. How do you explain the thirst that’s out there?

 

JONATHAN

Well, I think that, you know, we in the last few decades, we had the New atheists became very popular. They are maybe the closest to what’s happening with Jordan Peterson. And so Dawkins and Harris and these guys, you know, they sold millions of books. They actually could for a while fill up stadiums. But there was something about New Atheism that was extremely superficial, a kind of reductionist materialism that didn’t have much depth to it and also led to forms of nihilism, in society. It’s not just them, but they were just a general move towards nihilism. And the secularist, let’s say, argument had corollaries that the secularists didn’t intend, which is exactly this problem, which is that people became comfortable materially. They became smart. You know, everybody has education, but they lost purpose and they lost a sense of their place in the world. And there’s also a type of fragmentation. This community  broke apart. And I think all of that is in some ways what opened the door for people like Jordan Peterson to be able to speak back into that with ideas about meaning and about purpose. And it’s almost impossible to deal with those questions without realizing that they’re linked to transcendent good that are linked to something which is beyond, which is bringing the world into itself. And I think that’s what with Jordan is doing. I mean, his tour is called “Wrestling With God”. And I still wouldn’t say Jordan is a is a Christian. I don’t think so. Maybe? It’s hard to know he’s really coming close to it, but he’s definitely there trying to figure out the connection between these ancient stories, these ancient practices and our modern state. So.

 

 

Chapter 2: Art and Meaning

 

FRED

Interesting. And for people who don’t know, your background and what you do, I mean, I was looking into it. you’re an icon carver. and you work with religious ideas. I mean, it’s also a very unusual, background. What does an icon carver do? I mean, in the 21st century, can you really give us a little bit of colour on that? Yeah.

 

JONATHAN

I mean, it’s become a little funny to say that I’m an icon carver. I still play along with it. It’s funny. We have to understand the fact that I carve icons in a bigger scope that is within a frame of a transformation that I had in my 20s about how the world functioned. And, very similar to the thing that Jordan talks about, which is that I realized that things had to be connected. They had to be connected down here, and they also had to be connected to higher forms of participation. And so as someone who was interested in art, who had studied art, I was trying to understand how it is that I can apply this vision to the art practice that I have, and that ended up being this notion of carving things for the church. That sounds weird for a secular person to understand that, but the idea is that in the modern world, art is seen as art for art’s sake. and therefore it becomes its set. It is set adrift to kind of explore all kinds of ideas. But in some, at some point, you realize that there’s a kind of idiosyncrasy to it. There’s a kind of lack of vision and a lack of anchorage. And so, because I wanted to anchor things, I thought, we need to start with the highest, which is we need to start with a type of art that is both serving the community, because that’s what icons do, right? They actually are given to people now. They’re in churches, they’re doing that. But that is also aimed towards the highest thing possible, which is this transcended good, which is beyond the world. And so trying to kind of get that, first vision is also what led me to the other types of things that I do. Because now I write fairy tales, I do icons, I make T-shirts, I mean, I do all kinds of things, but they’re anchored in this vision of not just ideas floating up there and then a kind of business or technology floating down here, but some a way to connect them together.

 

FRED

And as an artist, I’ve worked with many artists as a, as a copyright lawyer over the years. And, it’s very interesting, that it’s true that art, when you look at art in a Western society today, I mean, some of it is just completely commodified, looked at as a consumer good to, you know, advance your career, make money. But even the sort of noncommercial art, which is viewed as kind of a higher iteration of art, you could almost make the argument that it’s been reduced to the field of esthetics, like making an esthetic contribution, or sometimes you can go as high as making social commentary. But it’s true that the broader, making a broader transcendent point or, divine art has been kind of shunned. It’s not something that we see very much in Western society. Do you think that’s ?

 

JONATHAN

No, I think that’s true. I think that there’s a whole trajectory of Western art, which leads to the commodification of it and so the first thing to see is how art at the outset becomes simply a relationship between a performer and a public. Whether it’s paintings that you make to be looked at, whether it’s music that you make to be listened to. We have to realize that in most traditional societies, art is participative. And so there’s a reason why there’s a connection between music and dance or music and liturgy or music and panegyric, because music used to be written for reasons. And so you write a dance and then people dance it, you write a song in church, and then people sing it. And this is a way in which art is integrated into the social fabric. Around the 16th century and moving forward, we start to create this idea that culture is in some ways people who produce culture, and people consume culture. And then you end up, you know, downstream from that, what you basically end up with is something like Netflix, where you just sit in your couch and you eat something, eat popcorn, and you just decide what it is that is going to entertain you today. But there’s a form of alienation in that type of art, and that is true at the highest level of art as well. Let’s say visual art now is, you know, you have museums that; what exactly is a museum? You know, you as a museum are the place where you put paintings so people can go and look at them. But this is the very alienated gesture. This is not a natural thing that people do in life. Usually a painting will be something to celebrate a moment. Let’s say, to celebrate your marriage, you know, you have a portrait done to celebrate something or celebrate the king, or to make you participate in a religious story or a folk story or all these things. That’s what traditional art is, and that’s what going into icon carving for me, was a way to reconnect with that ancient vision of art.

 

FRED

It’s interesting where you go with that, where when I refer to transcendence or to divinity, you kind of say, yeah, but it’s also embodied, right? In social practices, in actual society and in the, different rituals that a community will have as opposed to art today. And perhaps that’s why, when you see certain, you know, like the Taylor Swift phenomenon or, you know, I just went to a Snoop Dog concert, you go there and you see 20,000 people together. It almost prefigures a kind of communal experience that we’ve lost and that’s maybe why people feel so intensely about it.

 

 

JONATHAN

There’s definitely a desire to participate and you can see that, like you said, both in the idea of a fan base for an artist, you can also see it in, you know, in people who dress up as Star Wars characters, go to Comic-Con and, cosplay. All that type of stuff. It really is a desire to participate in a story, participate in an art in a manner, because in some ways, that’s the right intuition. Because that is how ancient art used to be in the first place. There’s something artificial, of course, about a fan base because, this sounds weird to people, but let’s say you have a folk dance in a community. So you have something in common, which is the dance. But that dance will be a corollary to other things you have in common, which is that we all live together. Maybe we’re infighting in the community. But now for the dance. We actually have to exemplify a form of harmony that will train us to, you know, embody that harmony, hopefully in other aspects of our life. But if you go to a Taylor Swift concert, all you have in common with these people is that you like Taylor Swift. And then everybody goes back home and then watches Netflix. And so there’s something real about it. I don’t want to deny it. I love going to concerts as well. We have to see how it’s not enough, I think, it’s not the best vision of what art can be. Let’s just say it that way.

 

FRED

Yeah. So it’s not as embodied in community values and community rituals and bringing together a community than it used to be.

 

JONATHAN

And the closest thing to that, and you’re right, you mentioned it earlier, the closest thing to that. And that’s what artists want to do, because they feel that pull in them, understandably, is to make their art, or at least, connect their art to a form of social activism. And because social activism is a way that people feel connected towards something because, okay, so I like Taylor Swift, but I also agree with their political causes. And so now I look at the people around me and I’m like, oh, now we’re together in this political movement. And it can give people, a kind of illusion of community. The community is far more, is grittier and far more organic than that. You know, it has to do with personal relationships with, you know, seeing the, you know, like in a family where you have to deal with all the faults and all the problems with everybody. There’s a there’s a kind of, desire to live in harmony despite our differences. It’s different – Political activism is something, but it’s not enough to really hold the world together.

 

FRED

I like the word gritty because anytime we get a sense of community or a sense of purpose, but there’s no obligations, or there’s no sacrifice, right? to your self-interest. When it’s just, hey, let’s feel virtuous and consume and now it’s a sense of community. I was a little bit skeptical of that. It’s like there’s things that are amazing. No, no, no. In a real community, people pay a short term price for a long term gain. People will sacrifice for one another. People have a sense of obligation. People have a sense of duty. And when I see that missing, it’s a simily to a community. It’s not a full community.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah. And community is annoying to be honest. I mean, sometimes it’s difficult because then you have the, you know, the person who’s speaking behind your back and you have the people that are judging you, like, these are real problems that exist in the community. And so it’s it’s understandable why some people are afraid of it, but it, really it is the only way to anchor meaning in your life, is to be connected to people. Family is the easiest way to do it because it’s still very available to us today. But there are still other ways of doing it. Clubs, churches, you know, you know, synagogues or groups that come together in a, you know, in a way that isn’t just either entertainment or activism. So there are others, there’s still ways to do it.

 

FRED

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. So before we delve deeper into the symbolic world and this whole terrain of symbolism and myth and stories. I want to just check in with you again, on the opposite conception that you’ve already mentioned about the new atheists. So the materialist view of the universe, of the cosmos, basically only things that you can touch, feel, measure are real. All this other stuff, it’s nice little stories. It’s fairy tales. Fairy tales in the demeaning sense. Or there’s a deeper [meaning] right? It’s perhaps an elaborate illusion. Perhaps it’s, a little bit, you know, I had a conversation with a neuroscientist, Daniel Levitan, who studies music, and he said he had a longstanding argument with Steven Pinker because Steven Pinker refers to music as auditory cheesecake. Okay? It’s just something that is pleasant but has no evolutionary [laughing] I can tell that sets you off.

 

JONATHAN

Oh my! That’s insane!

 

 

Chapter 3: The Indifferent Universe

 

FRED

But I may have a quote that’s going to set you off even more, and I wanted to give that because it kind of encapsulates the, it sounds, rational and objective and neutral when you describe the universe in a material sense. But it is connected to, also a nihilistic view, the cynical view of the universe. And so I took a quote from Richard Dawkins. I believe that brings those two things together very nicely in “River out of Eden”. And there’s a there’s a little bit of poetry here, but: “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect. If there is at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”. So that is the core characteristic of the universe that we live in according to the materialist argument. If we take, and there’s of course, different variants of this argument, if we take, let’s call it, a “standard definition” of materialism when it comes to the question of God, we can’t prove that God exists. All we can prove are these material things. Now, there’s a lot of places we can go from there. Nut there’s another notion that I want you to consider as you tell me what you think about that and it is that : the materialistic view in the West is also associated to the notion of scientific progress or technological progress. Everything we have in the medical space, everything we have in, telecommunications, I mean, all of that is also seen as an offshoot. So when people think materialist worldview, they also think progress. So if we could just take it really from the top, from the perspective of your perspective, what is it that we also lose, when we lose the old, some say, archaic view of a meaningful, full or divine universe?

 

JONATHAN

What do we lose? The first thing is… The first thing that we lose is we lose Richard Dawkins writing his book. Because why the hell is he writing that book if he doesn’t care? If the world doesn’t have care if the world doesn’t exist in a hierarchy of values in a higher tier of virtues, why is Richard Dawkins trying to convince me of anything? This is the problem with a lot of the new atheists is that they ignore themselves. They’re ignorant of their own place in the system. They’re ignorant of their own perception. And so, he says, the world is pitiless and without care. But that’s not true, because Dawkins cares and Dawkins has compassion and he’s part of the universe. So the notion that the universe doesn’t have this, while ignoring your own hierarchy of values in that universe is a kind of alienation, that is difficult. It’s so alienated that it’s almost difficult to pierce it. You’re faced with someone who is so alienated, they have no sense of themselves and no sense of their place in the universe. They somehow, without even realizing it, think of themselves that this weird thing that’s floating above the universe, this like universal observer that’s floating above the universe and can look at it without participating in it. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And so, you know, and it’s difficult because, I mean, I’ve talked to some of these types many times and some of the new atheists, and they just look at you with a blank stare. They don’t even understand the argument. They don’t know what you’re talking about when you say, what about you? If you include the measurer in the system, because you’re the measurer, then all of your arguments fall apart. And so this is, the truth about it, is that actually the world that you live in cannot exist without care, because care is, you need care even for identities to exist in the human world. Because the reason why we have identity, the reason why we see unity in multiplicity, is because it has a purpose for us, and that there’s no way to view the world outside of that. Right. And so because this is the problem, like we think we take for granted unities, but all things that are one are made of many objects, but nonetheless, we’re able to see that they’re one, but that unity is related to the purpose for why we see it as one. So we have categories, for example, like grass. Do you think that’s a biological category? That’s not a biological character?

 

FRED

Conceptual. Yeah.

 

JONATHAN

It is a functional category. And it’s the same actually for all categories. Ultimately they are at the first level functional. And then at the second level you could say they’re analytic and they describe, you know quantities and they measure quantities and they can predict quantities. But at the outset they are they are, purposeful. And we know that because it is actually impossible to distinguish science from technology. We try to. But you actually can’t, because even in the meta sphere. So think about science. Right? So you study a bunch of things. Care, bounds science just by funding. It’s like, what do we put our attention to? Like what do we actually decide to study at a higher level? It’s because we think that it’s useful for humans or for whatever reason, to study it. And therefore even science itself is always bound in care. And technology is not. Technology is the ultimate version of that, which is that we’re taking scientific theories about the world, and we’re applying them to things that are important to us. And therefore you’re already in a religious hierarchy there. You might get it wrong, you might aim, aim off.

 

 

FRED

You have a subjective system of values.

 

JONATHAN

But what do you mean by subjective?

 

FRED

In the sense that you are making a choice as to something that you ascribe the good to, to right? Even if it’s, reducing suffering, physical suffering, or increasing pleasure? Even the hedonist cares in a sense, because why should more pleasure, even be good? Right?

 

JONATHAN

So but let’s be even. Let’s follow the reductionist all the way. What is this subjective? There’s no subjective. Humans have hierarchies of care, and those hierarchies of care can manifest themselves in a variety of ways. And those variety of ways have a variety of results. And we can look at if you care about certain things, then this is the result that will that will from it. And the range of care that humans have is actually objective. You can describe it. You can actually predict, you know, relatively well what happens if, let’s say, a community begins to care about certain weird things too much? You can track it. You know, you can say, you know, I could have predicted, you know, in the 1950s that if we were obsessed with sex, we’re going to reduce the population. And that’s a thing you can show. You can say: “If you care for one thing too much, then downstream from that you will have certain results”. And that’s actually so much of religious hierarchy is based on that is saying if you care about money too much, here’s what’s going to happen. And the result, if you care about this too much, if you care about yourself too much, this is what’s going to happen in the result. And most of, morality is actually anchored in objective care. And the idea that human beings have hierarchies of goods that are related to their existence in the world, their existence together, and those can be described and you can predict the outcome now, I will have to admit, it’s not as simple as, you know, biology or, you know, predict, you know, predicting the, the arc of, let’s say the, the direction of a projectile because, we’re involved in it. And so there is a kind of self-referential problem with all forms of human sciences that we have to take into account. We can’t completely get away from it. For the same reason that I’m criticizing Dawkins is to say that, when I’m trying to apply the moral hierarchy of goods, I’m one of those people participating it, and I’m one of the people that is in danger of being, say, over obsessing with the good. And so I can completely get out of that problem. Now, the fact that it has that slipperiness to it, does it mean that it then is arbitrary and subjective in the way that people talk about it?

 

FRED

No. That’s right. So there’s there’s a difference between subjectivity and complete unmoored subjectivity. And so, you don’t exclude yourself from the problem. You view yourself as included in that process. Whereas a lot of times when you see these descriptions of the universe that these people, like you say, one of the issues is that they exclude themselves from the universe, like the no, I have cares in my life, in the world, but the universe doesn’t care. I was having a little discussion with…

 

JONATHAN

Because, you’re not part of the universe right?

 

FRED

But you’re not part of the universe. So what are you, then, if you’re not part of it?

 

JONATHAN

So if you care the universe, care. Because I don’t know what. Right. Like, which aspect of the universe do you expect to care? It’s like you can say the same about you. It’s like, you know, your fingernail doesn’t care, so you mustn’t care because your fingernail doesn’t care. Yeah, well, you know, a part of something and the thing itself is not the same. So you have an aspect of you that cares and that aspect of you makes you care. It’s the same with the universe. The universe cares because we care.

 

FRED

Yeah. So to take it like a philosophical terms, that’s why I always think it’s a truncated ontology. It presents itself as an all-encompassing ontology. But it is not because very clearly it excludes things. So I was having this discussion with, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, and he had a podcast episode with a guest who said something the same, like his big moral argument was: “The universe doesn’t give a fuck about you”. That was like the big wow. And by the way, there are some, I think, advanced, ideas and notions within that. It’s like, don’t make everything about yourself. There is the laws of entropy. There’s: “we are all going to go towards our inevitable death. Let’s be a little bit humble”. There are these moral ideas inside of it. But at the same time, and my argument was this and Scott really like that. It was like: Every single human life comes to be as an expression of some form of love, or at the very least, lust. But there was a union of two human beings. Then as a child, as a baby, you only survived because somebody cared. “Not true. My parents…”. “Okay. But the nurse”, like somebody, took care of you.

 

JONATHAN

Well even if it’s care in the basic sense, like, I mean, you know, it’s care that makes you do horrible things too. Right? But it is still care, right? The reason why I would kill someone is because I have a thrust. I have a movement towards a good even if I misrepresented and, you know, all human action is anchored in care. Anything you do, whether it’s drinking water, you know, or shaving or whatever. And so, you know, of course you could say that there is a hierarchy of care. But like you said, all life is based on care, and that is what life is. Life is the difference between inert matter and life is the fact that life is auto poetic, that it that it wants to preserve itself, and therefore that desire to preserve itself is care.

 

FRED

And then when you even like look at it a bit broader and you look at all the people that made all kinds of little contributions along the way, it was even a smallest technical contribution. So when you were a baby you had that little condition. So somebody wanted to relieve that condition. So they developed this medicine. And you look at the web of care that all of us. Right. We could very easily make the argument. The only reason you are here today is because the universe loves you. Yeah. No? Can we not? Or is all this stuff is not the universe?

 

JONATHAN

I definitely like the idea that “God loves you” I like that better. I think it’s a better expression because of course, the problem with saying the universe – this is the problem, right? The problem with saying the universe is because it is a reductionist argument. And so you get trapped in the problem, right? Because I could say if once when you reduce something to its parts, that’s – by the way, if you want to know that is the one trick. The one reductionist trick is always to reduce something to its parts and then to, let’s say, embrace the nihilism that comes from reducing something to its parts – It’s a trick. You can do it with anything, right? You could say, you know, you could say, why are we shaking hands like when you just touching hands? Is that what we’re doing? So now we touch hands, and now we’re friends because we touch hands with this ridiculous. But, you know, you you can do it with anything and reduce it. So the problem with when we say the universe, it’s a desire to reduce in the universe to its constituents. And that’s why you can say the universe doesn’t care. But if you would, like a person, if you would formulate the universe as a hierarchy, right.? So you, like I said, your fingernail doesn’t care. Your fingernail is part of you, but your fingernail doesn’t care. The aspects of you, when it’s differentiated part, don’t care. They only care when they’re brought together into a single being that is auto poetic. And so that’s why it’s better to say “God loves you” than to say “the universe”. God loves you because it’s only the manner in which the universe comes together into one head. You could call into one purpose, into something which is beyond its parts, like you are beyond your parts. That is the only way to understand that there’s care. and so you see it like people get. So it’s so interesting. You know, you probably noticed the fashion people have now to say, like, you know, “I send it out into the universe”; “I can ask the universe”, like, why are you asking the universe? It’s like if I’m standing in front of someone and I would say, you know, ask your body. You don’t ask – You ask a person like you don’t speak to parts. We don’t speak to multiplicity. We speak to unity. That’s the only way you can speak to –

 

 

 

FRED

So even the Universe is the beginning of a reductive view of, let’s call it, existence, because it’s kind of like this material plane. So we’re assuming that it’s a strictly material plane. It reminds me of a quote from, I don’t know if you know the, Rupert Sheldrake. So Rupert has a when he talks about the origins of the cosmos in the universe, he says, the materialists say, spot me one miracle and I’ll explain everything else. And the miracle is the sudden and unexplained apparition of all the matter, all the energy and all the laws of the cosmos at one place at one time, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Spot me that, and I’ll explain everything else. And it’s like, well, that’s kind of “you’re asking me to spot you a lot there”.

 

JONATHAN

Well, it’s a that’s exactly the – That’s exactly right. You know, the illusion that because people have come up with a theory about the Big Bang, that it somehow explains away things. It just doesn’t cause the problem is still there. The problem of and it’s really is it’s a technique. It’s in some ways it’s a technical problem. Right. Which is that the set of things that compose a being are not sufficient to explain it’s being. You need a hierarchy of beings in order to understand the set of beings. Like if you analyze all the parts of a car, you could not – I said – you cannot get to the reason for the car, right? The reason for the car is above the car. Ontologically, it’s beyond it. It’s in another level of care. And so it’s just a technical description. So it’s the same problem with all of the world. All of the world cannot account for its origin within the system. The origin of any system and the reason for a system cannot be held within the system. It’s very it’s a very simple thing and –

 

FRED

It’s embedded in a broader “something else”.

 

JONATHAN

That has to be embedded in a higher in a higher form. Right. And that that’s just how the that’s just how the world works. And it works at every level of reality, you know, and then it works at the highest level as well. And that’s why we say that there is a transcendent infinite, like you can use the different types of words that people use to say that the infinite is beyond the – is the cause of the finite, that there is, you know, being itself or, and of course, in the Christian tradition, in the Jewish tradition, in the Muslim tradition, we say there’s a transcendent God that is beyond all things. And the way that we characterize God, because God is the source of the care and the reality of the world, it’s normal that we’ll characterize God with all the good aspects of what we see in the world today. All the reasons why we would care about things get brought into this image that we have of the source of all things.

 

FRED

And this reminds me of something that I read, in a kabbalistic text that says – and it’s just a poetic kind of statement – It’s not a – but it says that God created the universe with care, with, the notion of Chesed that God has which is which is compassion, empathy. That’s how – that’s the emotion, if you want, that God created the universe with. Because at the base of it, there is an act of this and not that. There’s an act of we can call it – WE can call it, like all kinds of anthropomorphic, concepts like intention or desire or lust or whatever you want. But it’s not necessarily an objective reason. Just because you’ve decided to elevate objective reason above all other values, that’s not necessarily what’s at the bottom of existence and what you say. It’s like this care like this and not that. Like that is like a gesture almost.

 

 

 

JONATHAN

And you can because and it’s an, it’s an analogy based on the realization that that is how WE act. Like we act in care. Everything we do is based on care and on desire and on the, you know, a thrust towards a particular. And that’s what we do when we make things, you know. And so all of this, there’s a reason why we, make – there’s a reason why we have children. There’s all these reasons. And those were analogical, brought into the, you know, the source of being itself.

 

FRED

And I think that’s what Richard Dawkins does as in his own, metaphysics, because, describing the universe as pitiless indifference – I believe in the, his moral universe – means I’m going to dispel illusions because I’m going to describe things how they really are. So that we can be more accurate and more truthful. I believe he is going for – his highest good is probably something like, let’s call it objective truth, and that’s what he’s attempting to do when he’s doing that. But even that is an expression of care. Yeah. Because why objective good. Why objective truth. If that’s not a good thing.

 

JONATHAN

And the problem again – and this is the problem of objective truth, is that I’m not saying objective truth doesn’t exist. Of course it exists. Objective things exist, but they always exist. We only describe them towards purpose. Right? Because when you say objective truth, at what level are you talking about? Are you talking about a quantum field of possibility? Is that the objective truth you’re really or are you talking about the atomic level, the you know, which level are you talking about and how high can you go? Because the complexity at the lowest level that comes into unity and that complexity moving into unity, you can keep going actually from the human we have cities, we have forms of, of being that bring us together right at higher level than the individual. But then Dawkins will say something like, well, those are illusions. Like those are just projections and all these things. But why? Why are they more projections? Because we are the body for it then. Then our bodies, right? It’s like and or the bodies that, that make our bodies like my body is made of stuff and that stuff is made of other stuff, and you just keep going all the way down.

 

 

FRED

So, so let me.

 

JONATHAN

I can be the stuff for higher Body.

 

 

Chapter 4: On Miracles

 

FRED

Yeah, I follow, I follow the line of thinking and I do really follow it personally. I think along the same lines. But I’m going to put you something that let’s say would come from a new atheist. That is something that people who want to experience the world as meaningful or as, purposeful have to contend with at some point, and it’s the question of miracles. So we have this whole, way of looking at religion as either, you know, literally true or symbolically true. Right? We have this this, this, this categorization. Right? Yeah. when there was a description of a miracle, is the intention of the text to say that that actually happened factually? Or is it symbolic of some kind of a moral lesson or something that we can really understand? And miracles are, ontological in terms of like a nature of reality, they are the phenomenon that we have to confront this question of literal or metaphorical, because do we believe that these things actually happen or not necessarily? the scientists would say, well, “this is not how the world works. This is not how we observe the laws of nature and everything that we’ve seen in recorded history since, let’s, call it the last few hundred years”. You know, “there’s no such thing as a splitting of the sea”, “there’s no such thing as coming back from the dead”, or “there’s no such thing as a human being walking on water”. These can be dispelled. And so some people try to recover, the religious text by saying, okay, but there’s a lesson there, and maybe this is how people described it. And I know Maimonides, in his book The Guide of the Perplexed, was very keen on, using, this idea of linguistic symbolism as, this is what, what usually when the text refers to miracles, it’s a, sometimes it’s just a figure of speech or sometimes it’s just, an allegory and there’s a lesson behind it. It doesn’t necessarily – and that he saw that as one of the keys to reconciling science and religion is making use of it. I have heard you say “yes, but that is also a cop out, because if there is an underlying pattern that describes reality, then it has to be true at both levels”. So I like that. I like the courage of saying: “well, if I’m if I am noticing a pattern of reality, then it must be true at both, at both levels”. And then some people will reply by saying, well, “okay then I guess I can’t engage in religious thinking because that’s not how I see the world working”. And so personally, I’m very attracted to the symbolic allegorical because I believe the power of the stories and the lessons are so monumental that I almost don’t need the miracles to be true in order to recover value from the text. But I wonder how you see it.

 

JONATHAN

So the question is, why do you recognize the story of the miracle as having value? What’s that? Right. And so if miracles don’t happen, or if we don’t have a scope in our existence for what we call miracles, why do we have them? Like why do we care about them? And why would someone like my Maimonides or the church fathers for all that? You know, because the church fathers do exactly the same. They’ll say the miracles are pregnant with meaning, right? They manifest meaning at a very high level, and they’re in some ways cosmic, because what they’re doing is showing you the structure of reality in a way that is more than everyday life. Okay. And so it’s important to understand that, like miracles, even the miracle described in the Bible are described in tradition. They’re never just freak things that happen.

 

FRED

No, they’re connected to a story.

 

JONATHAN

There’s a meaning to a story. And they have they have to have certain, certain form. Right. And so the first thing you have to ask yourself is what is it metaphorical to? So if a miracle is metaphorical –

 

FRED

The incommensurate and incomprehensible. So I experience or a group experience something that was incommensurate and incomprehensible to it. It could not explain it in the language of the time. It could not explain it in terms of regular reality, resorted to the language of miracle in order to encapsulated in a story. Yeah, that’s how I see it.

 

JONATHAN

And so a lot of that we I mean, we’d have to go through different miracles, but like a lot of the miracles, what they are is a conjoining of an event in the world with a reason for the event in a way that is more than, you know, than ever. So you could say, is it possible for, let’s say, waters to be split? Like, that’s not absolutely impossible. Like you could imagine some freak thing that would that would open up a sea, you know? And I don’t know what it is that happened because the Bible doesn’t care about describing mechanical causes. It just because it doesn’t try, because that’s not the point. And so, let me take an example that’s closer to us. Right. It’s like, you know, if a rock falls off a cliff, you know, and hits the ground, that’s not a miracle. But if I’m, I don’t know if I’m being robbed by someone and I pray to God, and then the rock falls off the cliff and hits the thief, that’s a miracle. Because it’s the conjoining of an event in the world with a type with the highest form of meaning. And so that is the way to kind of understand it, because the question is – is the world – does the world first and foremost manifest through meaning? That’s the question. I think it necessarily I think a lot of the things that are happening now, a lot of the cog.-sci. stuff, a lot of – the problems of complexity and of understanding ontological levels of reality and how they come together, is showing us that in some ways there’s no way around meaning. Meaning is necessary for you to even perceive the world around you. It’s baked in to the structure of reality.

 

FRED

So would you say that? Like so let’s say in that example of the rock. Okay. What makes it into a story, what makes it a miracle is the attribution of divine intent. It’s like I prayed to God and then this happened. And so there is something in the structure of reality that intended for that thing to happen in response to my prayer. So it would still be embedded in a series of explanations by the human agent and a series of assumptions about the cosmos. The, I believe the materialist scientist would reply with the language of coincidence or no, these are just, coincidences or meaningless events that happened, and you formed an elaborate explanation around that. But if reality does manifest itself as meaningful, which is a very radical, and very –

 

JONATHAN

Well, let’s take the materialist to his task and say, okay, but then you also think that everything that’s meaningful is a coincidence. So why are you saying that? Why are you saying it’s a coincidence? Because you also believe that when I drink milk in the morning, it’s a coincidence. And so what makes it – What makes it important for you to say that something that happens at a level of will be on my own is a coincidence? When you think that all levels of meaning are coincidences.

 

FRED

Yeah. And this is where the materialist view has to content. So it oscillates between coincidence or the language of luck and the language of pure determinism. So there are the chemical and physical laws that it was – and it oscillates, right? And it becomes an explanatory style. It becomes like: “Okay, actually you have no free will”.

 

JONATHAN

But what I mean, what I’m trying to point to is that it’s miracles all the way down, folks. Like it’s just miracles all the way down. And so the idea that – okay how can I say this – the idea that you don’t notice that every single time that you experience unity in multiplicity, that you experience meaning in a bunch of jumbled stuff, that insight, right when something comes together. Right? You everybody had that experience. Like there’s all this multiplicity is all this stuff, and then it snaps together into one and you’re like, I get it. That’s a miracle, folks. Okay. And the problem with the materialists is that they think that insight materialist, you know, moment of multiplicity coming into unity stops at the human level that there is no corollary to that at higher levels of being.

 

FRED

Again, we are not part of the universe. Yeah. We are this separate thing floating in the air, and we’re observing all these things and we are invested with objective knowledge. But that is not a feature of the universe. This is something I’ve never – I have never understood that philosophical position. So we are not part of –

 

JONATHAN

Let me give you a little miracle. Let me – you know, magic exists, folks. Like, you know people – scientists are hilarious – they’re like “Oh, it’s so ridiculous. Action at a distance is so ridiculous, right? How can you have action at a distance? So stupid.” It’s like I do it every day. I ask my daughter to bring me a glass of water and she brings me a glass of water. Please, please explain the mechanical causes from the bottom up to why she brought me a glass of water. Good luck with that. You’re not going to get to it. The reason why she brought me a glass of water is related to meaning. It’s related to something which is beyond the material. Cause’ there are no underlying material causes for her to bring me the glass of water. You won’t get to it. Impossible. I said: “Can you please bring me a glass of water?” And then she takes a glass of water and she brings it. Magic, folks. Action at a distance.

 

FRED

Can you explain that with physical laws? Right?

 

JONATHAN

You can’t!

 

 

 

Chapter 5: Fundamentalisms, Old and New

 

FRED

And it’s strange, because a lot of this goes also in the notion of like, how much certainty can you, assert a certain position with. And I find it problematic to assert a material conception of the universe that’s based on just blind operation of physical and chemical laws when you don’t have a way of predicting even the simplest actions, there is no model that can accurately predict. Right? And so if it’s not predictive and if it becomes, an ex post facto explanation, there was after it happened, you’re like, “Well, it happened because of x, y and Z”. But that’s, that’s a, that’s a confirmation bias. That’s an ex post facto explanation that is not predictive. So it’s not predictive and it’s not falsifiable. Those are the two features of a scientific theory. And this is where like I believe science can bring you all the way up to agnosticism. And you could say “okay, I’m just not sure”. And I’m very comfortable in this position of agnosticism. Now, I believe that you can’t live life as an agnostic, really. You have to make judgment calls. You have to make decisions. You have to you have to route your, behavior in some pattern or toward some good. And so you’re going to have to make a judgment call at some point. You could be an agnostic for a certain period of time, but sooner or later, life is going to call you to task to prioritize what you really believe in or prioritize, what you consider to be good. But I feel a lot of what I see in science is a lot of like, material science in the New Atheist, is a lot of what I see with fundamentalists in religion, and that is a complete discomfort with uncertainty and a desire to have an explanatory style that pretends to understand everything about the universe. And that, to me is inimical. It’s absolutely not – the core genius I find in religion is, let’s call it, let’s call it the opposite of Nietzsche. Let’s call it the invention of God. Let’s call it a concept whereby we say, oh, wow, we are actually very limited. Everything we experience, everything we know; there are much higher forms of knowing, much higher forms of caring, much higher forms of order, that we can just very imperfectly have a relationship with him. And I choose to have a relationship with that as opposed to denying it. It’s a sentiment of humility that comes from an encounter with God, not a sentiment of : “Oh! This is what it is. And then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” And I see that with the New Atheist, are form of fundamentalism and that it’s –

 

JONATHAN

But they love fundamentalist, by the way.

 

FRED

That’s who they address.

 

FRED

That’s they do talk to each other.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah. Because they’re really at the same level of thinking. I totally agree. The thing with the fundamentalists. Most of the difficulty, especially modern fundamentalists, is that they confuse, again, levels of causality and levels of meaning. You know. Because in many ways, the fundamentalists have been seduced by a kind of scientific reductionism, but then they just slap god on top, right. And so it’s like basically, you know, they want their holy text to be scientific text. They want their their traditional description to be scientific description. It’s like it’s absolutely ridiculous. And there’s nothing more ridiculous than looking at Genesis one and thinking that that’s a scientific text. You know, God creates grass before he creates the sun. We have a bit of a problem, like in terms of this being some kind of scientific description. And then with the, you know, the fundamentalists will do is they’ll find some crazy thing – like I’ve heard of, you know, like, the young earth creationist type. They’ll like find some crazy explanation for why physically like scientifically, God would have created the earth and grass before he created, you know, the the stars, right?

 

FRED

It’s like “Yeah, I don’t I don’t think you ought to go there, man”.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah, man. No, seriously, it’s dark stuff.

 

FRED

Yeah, definitely. And, that’s why there’s a there’s a quote by, I believe, Rick Doblin, who said that the mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism because it’s the, acceptance of mystery with fundamentalism. There is no mystery.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah, yeah, there’s a desire to kind of contain God completely in a box and in a kind of systematic causality. When you look at the revelations of God, at least in the Bible, like at least in our traditions, that, you know, there is a sense in which God says, “you cannot see my face”, right? But God, you know, represents himself hidden behind veils and veils because – It reads a sense in which you’re trying to engage with something which is beyond the level that I have access to, and that is necessarily bound in mystery. Right? In the same way, like I said before, that if you try to take just the parts of the car, the reason for the car is a form of mystery to the parts it joins them together. It brings them together towards purpose, but you don’t have access to it in the parts. And that’s true – of it’s the same thing like if you if you just quantify the interactions between your family and you try to find the identity of your family by quantifying the interactions, you’re not going to find it, right? It’s something pulling you together that’s above you, and it necessarily manifests itself as a form of mystery in at the level that we are, because it’s beyond it. And so I think that that’s important to understand that the idea that God is a mystery, that God is beyond is not a superstitious, arbitrary thing. It actually is the way reality functions at every level. And at that – and the level that we now encounter this transcendent aspect of the world, then we have the same approach where it is like “I’m not going to find God. God is not a phenomena”. You know, I can’t find him. He’s not hiding under a rock. Like, that’s not how it is. He’s actually that which brings all the phenomena together.

 

FRED

That’s not the order of reality that you have to be attuned in, on some level, to understand the phenomenon of God.

 

JONATHAN

What do you mean? Sorry?

 

FRED

That’s not the level of reality.

 

JONATHAN

Exactly right. You’re not attending to the right level. You have to have the kind of, you know, put your head up and get a sense of it’s that which brings it together, you know.

 

FRED

And in terms of like a lot of these, when we talk about these phenomena, like reducing God to something you can understand or denying it altogether, a lot of these conceptions are also embedded in very human endeavors. So they will have a career, consequences. They will have, political, consequences. It’s entangled with these human – And just before we get on to the political, I wonder what you think about this is that, when I was looking at a lot of this fundamentalist type, religious thinking and also, like, the New Atheist type thinking, I – There’s a sense of certainty that I’m just uncomfortable with on a metaphysical level. And when I read the stories of the prophets in the Bible, it’s interesting to me in our tradition how encounters with God leave a prophet diminished, injured, humbled. They don’t leave him powerful exercising, you know, earthly power over others and getting super – you know. There’s always a sense of like: “Oh wow, I was stupid. Oh my God”. It’s always the revelation of God is always an expression of the limits and the ignorance of the human you. You leave it feeling your ego feeling diminished, but your spirit in a sense having being enriched.

 

JONATHAN

No, it’s it’s a difficult – it’s a difficult conundrum. Because and this is really an argument for all kinds of issues right. And so the way in which we come together in unity is always a mystery. It’s not fully accessible. Right? But there is also once that happens, there is a need to preserve that unity, right, to think about it that way. So it’s like, you know, the way in which a nation exists together is kind of mysterious, like, okay, so we just live on a land and now we’re the one thing like, why are we one thing? Why is there a border between Canada and the United States? what makes the United States one thing and Canada, one thing? It’s quite mysterious, right? And you can explain some of the levels, but ultimately there’s a type of mystery that holds that together. And so but – once a being exists, there are certain aspects of that being, certain aspects of the phenomena of unity, that will need to defend its existence and that’s inevitable right. So it’s like you have a family, so now you have a door and you lock it because you don’t want people that are not part of your family to come in and hurt the people that you care about. And that’s an inevitable part. And some of the aspects of fundamentalism, as you call it, are in some ways necessary for the protection of the being. So you have watchdogs that are like: “Hey, nope, nope, nope, hey, did you” –  you know, it’s like mom asking the kids “Did you lock the door tonight? You know, don’t come back. Don’t go back after ten”. Right. It’s like because I –

 

FRED

Did just call my mom a fundamentalist?

 

JONATHAN

It’s like, well, it’s like, you know, I want to. I, you know, I set rules. I tell my kids to come back like.

 

FRED

Clear black and white rules and protecting, yeah.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah, because I want to protect the unity of the thing I care about. And so the difficulty with that is that that can also sometimes go astray or become excessive. And then people start to protect something that they forget what it even – what it’s for and –

 

FRED

What the purpose was.

 

JONATHAN

They forget what the purpose was in the first place. Right. And we have that, you know, we experience that in our bit in our businesses and our in our in our in whatever team we have. At some point we start to be defensive and we want to protect our little, team in the company. And we stop to think like “Well, actually, okay, so we want to protect my little team here, but what exactly am I serving with the purpose?” And so I think it’s important to understand that, in some ways there is a way – like there’s a certain compassionate approach we can have. As you notice, I don’t like fundamentalist very much, but I can have a certain amount of compassion and understanding that the assault of the modern world on the religious sphere has created a bunch of warriors that are trying to protect their body.

 

FRED

And it’s interesting that, you know, Muslim fundamentalism that people talk about and so forth is an extremely modern phenomenon, definitely comes after the Industrial Revolution. So it would it would fit what you’re saying as almost a response to the assault of material science on the entire possibility of religion, on the entire possibility of an enchanted divine world.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah. So we don’t want to defend the actions that they pose. That’s not the point. But the point is, if you want to –  if you want to mitigate the effects of something, the first thing to do is to understand it. So to understand the fact that in some ways, fundamentalism is a side effect of modernism because it is a reaction to the assault, of modernity and enlightenment thinking on religion, then we can say, okay, well, how can we mitigate that and then point these guard dogs, you know, or at least connect them to something that’s more transcendent, that’s more mystical, that’s more mysterious. I think it’s not I don’t think it’s totally impossible. in some cases, I don’t know. Depends which one, though.

 

FRED

Yeah, it depends how far they’ve gone.

 

 

JONATHAN

Out, far they’ve gone.

 

 

Chapter 6: Religion and Politics

 

FRED

Exactly. So, this intermingling of religion and, and political factors is something that we see and something that we see really in all, all religions and in all traditions. And going back to, you know, Alexander the Great who used to create the gods, you know, these syncretic gods that he would create, that they would have a little bit of the Greco-Roman world and a little bit of the Persian world, so that when he conquered a new territory, people would be following something that they kind of recognize, but that also was conserving his power. Or, you know, you have that in every single religion, these political influences that will influence even religious doctrine and religious, symbology and so forth. And, you know, in Christianity, you have the Council of Nicaea, you know, the Roman Empire and those kinds of influences. It’s really something that we see in every because as when religion becomes a unifying factor for political community, it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to have that intermingling. How do we deal with that? With the – I call it the interference of the political in the I don’t know what you want to call it – Maybe purely religious. Some people, will apply the, comparative religion approach, like Young, like, Jordan Peterson does that. A lot of looking at the commonalities between different religions and then, okay, maybe then we’re getting to an approximation of something that’s a little bit more pure and universal. other people can maybe take one tradition and try to excavate and remove “Oh, you know, that was political. Oh, that was transcendent”. So almost like an excavation kind of, enterprise. How do you account for the influence of the political and how do you deal with it?

 

JONATHAN

Well. Okay. So the political is part of the world, right? It is an aspect of reality. You know, in some ways it usually is – Often the political is that aspect of the world that is there to provide material unity and defense against, you know, invasion or attack on that material unity. What I mean by material is like, let’s say, physical safety. Right? So it’s like we have homes, we have families, we live together, you know, and that exists in the political sphere. So you can’t get rid of the political sphere. It’s impossible. And because in some ways, the religion is there to provide that at a higher level. Right. So you could say we are united, one nation, the United States, you know, Eisenhower added this one nation under God thing. It’s not ba. Not a bad idea. So we’re one nation. We’re united politically. But we need to declare that unity is serving a higher purpose. And people say, “Well, why does the unity have to serve a higher purpose?” But you would really hope that the unity of your nation serves a higher purpose, because if it doesn’t, then it then it can devolve into really, really dark things, right? It can devolve into, you know, the Third Reich, which was one nation. Folks.Like one nation under what? Under Hitler? Under, an ideology of nation? An idea?

 

FRED

A transcendent idea, like God at least has the potential to fill us with a little bit of humility as opposed to a human ideology.

 

JONATHAN

That’s what you hope.  And so you can’t totally avoid that there’ll be interpenetration between the two. The best thing you can hope for is that the alignment is right. And so you could say God gives us the higher set values. He gives us a way of being, a way of living, you know, a set of values, a set of morals, all these things and that those feed into the political sphere. The danger, of course, like you said, is because the political sphere is a place where we have all the weapons.

 

FRED

And the money and.

 

JONATHAN

The influence, all that stuff. Then the tendency, the desire for the political sphere is to try to usurp that, authority. And it’s interesting because in the Bible you’ll find, really powerful examples of that. Right? The story of King Saul is a good example of that, where King Saul is the king chosen by God. But he’s constantly like wanting to be the one to do the sacrifice. He like wants to take over the religious sphere. And when that happens, then that’s when all hell breaks loose. It can happen in two ways. In the West, you saw it happen in in two ways. One is on the one hand, the religious authority trying to have temporal power. So you have the Pope, who now wants a nation and an army and like, the pope in the Renaissance had a standing army, which is insane, right? Think about it. He’s supposed to be the religious leader, but it is also at the same time a kind of political leader. And the other problem is when the religious, the state or the political power tries to use their religious power so that in history, in the Western world, you saw a lot of that, like the kings of France, for example, you know, trying to humiliate the pope, trying to take over, the religious sphere. The best way is to keep them separate and in the right balance.

 

FRED

Is that where you think the reason, the underlying reason behind why it’s the separation between church and state, let’s say, was such a such a powerful force.

 

JONATHAN

The best way to do it. The best way to do it, is to separate church and state. but we have to be careful that that separation isn’t like an absolute separation in the sense that we’re completely in our different spheres and we don’t talk to each other. That’s, a little ridiculous. It’s rather to say that you separate church, that you have spiritual authority, which is the highest. It’s a beautiful principle. Right. So you have spiritual authority, which is moral authority, which is showing us how to live. And then those people, they have no political power. They don’t have armies, they don’t have they don’t have a way to enforce their moral position at all physically. And then you have the political power that receives its way of being from the sphere.

 

FRED

Directed by the more at the –

 

JONATHAN

And then they have a way to. So you want to keep that balance. It’s very difficult. And obviously you could say the entirety of Western history, you know, from the fall of Rome all the way to like World War I is a problem of negotiating between spiritual authority and temporal power. It’s a ànearly impossible thing to do. But in some ways it is the only way for it to function.

 

FRED

I’ve always found that interesting. Jonathan, I wonder what you think of that in our tradition. So when I say our tradition, I mean we people say Judeo-Christian, but it’s really Judeo-Christian, Muslim. I call it Abrahamic. Let’s say, okay, the Abrahamic, tradition because there’s a commonality of, history. And, in the figure of Abraham, let’s say, as the starting point for something different. The story of Abraham, reveals itself as a rejection of the “Man-god” of the agricultural society. So before Abraham, there was a complete union of the two, the human being that was at the top of the pyramid was viewed as God on earth, God’s representative on earth. People believed that the Pharaoh was immortal. People believed that they had supernatural powers and so forth. Abraham comes along and says, wait a minute, this is just a human being. There is a higher order here. I need to leave. And even if that means a life of mine – and establish a new line and establish a new order in the Promised Land in the future, okay, that God. So God is revealing itself to me as the authority that is higher than, the “Man-God” of the agricultural society, in the sense that’s when we start right, kind of separating the realms of the political and the let’s call it the divine or the religious.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah. Well, you see, I mean, in, in the Bible, it’s tricky. It’s interesting because you in some ways you kind of see that separation at some point happen. Right. So when, Abraham received the blessing from Melchizedek, you know. Melchizedek is a priest king, right? So he’s both at the same time. And he received – So there’s this, this idea that there is a way, but it’s – There is a notion that there can be something that unites the political and the spiritual together. Right. But what happens in Abraham is that the whole book of judges shows you how dangerous that is, man. It’s like the book of Judges is just about these, like these spiritual figure that come up and then there are also like political figures and they start to fight and it’s like constant chaos, right? And it says in the book of judges, like, “there is not yet a king in Israel, there’s not yet a king in Israel”. And so when they finally establish kingship in Israel, then you have that separation where you have the prophet Nathan. That’s a good example of the King David, right? The prophet Nathan comes to King David. Father Nathan has no army. Prophet Nathan has no weapons. He comes to King David and he says, “You know David, you took that man’s wife didn’t you?” Right. And then David received that as spiritual authority and changes his ways because he could’ve killed Nathan. What is Nathan going to do? He’s just a he’s a barefoot guy walking into his palace, right? He could have just killed him. But instead he receives that spiritual authority from Nathan and changes his ways in the physical realm in order to align himself with that. Now, that’s the beautiful. vision of how those two things function, where you have a holy person that you know is recognized as being connected to God, but has no political power, no financial power. And then let’s say he gives advice to the king. And now the king listens. That’s the but that’s very difficult to maintain. It’s almost impossible.

 

FRED

So. Wow. where does that leave us in terms of our – right? Like when let’s say, an average human being wants to start looking at these texts, wants to start looking at these different traditions, they don’t know. Everything seems entangled today. “Is this person just trying to be an influencer? or is this person just trying to go for political office? Now they manifest themselves as the savior of the community and God’s chosen – Does this religious person…” It all seems so entangled in today’s world, maybe as a function of a loss of order. As we’ve gotten more sophisticated and advanced technologically, we’ve also lost the underlying spiritual order and that those clear separations are no longer there. This idea of a separation is also something that’s very connected to, the concept of holiness. Is that keeping you separate – we seem to have lost that…

 

JONATHAN

Still I mean, there’s still residue that can be resurrected. I think, like, for example, I can only speak for my own tradition in the Orthodox Church, we have monks, you know, and those – you know, a monk is someone who sacrificed everything, who, like, goes and lives in a monastery. You know, he fast. He prays for you nonstop, you know, and his whole life is a living sacrifice. And so that monk, in some ways and the monks are not allowed to have public office. This is true in theory, still in the Catholic Church. Also, like a priest, someone the bishop is not allowed to have a political office. And it’s not always been the case.

 

FRED

But rabbis are allowed to be entrepreneurs. They’re allowed to have their little, their little version of a community. Right. And then have it also be, a livelihood.

 

JONATHAN

If you have is there a separation like that in Judaism, where, for example, someone recognized that the spiritual authority would not run for office?

 

FRED

We do have that. Still somewhat respected, but there are very blurry lines. So they’ll be the spiritual leader, but they’ll have a very close relationship with the political leader of a political party. And sometimes those lines get blurry, but there is supposed to be a separation. They’re supposed to be, focused on – not on, you know, earthly power.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah. Well, even that small separation, which, like you said, sometimes can become a little tendentious, is already something and it’s already powerful because in some ways, it prevents a complete meltdown because the worst thing would be to have that’s a rabbi president who is like, who’s like the head of the state of Israel and  the army. And you’re saying, well: “Hey, I’m speaking for God, folks, so let’s do this”. That would be the worst. And that’s why like, in the times when the pope had a standing army, it was like, that’s dark stuff. Because he could say – he could actually – he could remove the sacraments from his political enemy and say: “There will be no baptisms, no marriages, no funerals until you follow my political desires”. And that’s – When that happens, it’s full-on corruption.

 

FRED

So the separation of the realms, that is something that is almost like axiomatic. We’ve got to go back to that as getting kind of signs of like, you know, are these two things being intermingled or – and it’s funny because we think of in the political realm, there’s a lot of religious talk as well. Right? More and more people are speaking for, a higher purpose, a higher truth. And in the absence of organized religion, they can almost claim that ground. it’s kind of, you see, the expansion of the political.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah. For sure. I mean, especially today, activism is often secretly a form of religious practice. You know, people who get involved in these causes and, really, you know, throw themselves and become completely taken up by certain political causes are usually lacking the truly transcendent and are giving to the political what should be given to God. Right. Like Christ-

 

FRED

Secular religions. Yeah.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah. I mean Christ says, you know : “Give to God to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God”. You know, the idea that these two, they have to remain, separate to some extent, and that one is not the other. That’s a danger. And it’s also the danger. And I think this is something that a lot of the new atheists are kind of realizing is that they thought : “We can just get rid of God, and then we could all be nice, happy liberals, you know, eating bagels and going to the coffee shop.” But it’s like, that’s not what happens, right? People have a yearning to participate in something higher, and then they end up throwing themselves into these weird, kind of activists mindset.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 7: Purpose Externalities

 

FRED

Yeah. And political leaders can capitalize and they can hijack that desire for their own purposes. And if you don’t have the bulwark of religion, in a sense, then they become absolute. And, Nietzsche wrote about that. And many people, worried about that when you saw that separation, when science started becoming what science is today, a lot of very prescient thinkers, predicted that we might end up in something like this, very, very large, like secular religions, the, overtaking of the what was formerly religious power by the political, and it’s something that, you definitely described there. I know we’re coming up on a little bit. I really feel like this is like the kind of, like, rabbit hole stuff that is also extremely practical and extremely relevant to our reality that we live today. I mean, I could spend hours talking about this stuff. I, just love your perspective here on purpose and on – maybe a couple more questions for you. I’ve been dealing lately with, the issue of, purpose externalities. Okay, so a purposeful activity can be lived as purposeful by someone, but also impose, costs or damage other people. Okay? I mean, I always think, like, for me, like, the Nazis were living a life of purpose in their moral universe, and they’re rescuing the Aryan Nation. They’re willing to die for it. They it’s a clear purpose. They are sacrificing themselves for the cause. And they’re living with purpose. But look at all the potential for purpose that they eliminated as a version of that. So that’s a version in economics, there’s the concept of externalities when, okay, your company is making $2 billion of profit, but that’s only because the state has to clean up its mess and give it a $5 billion. So it’s really like a net negative. So there’s almost be a principle of, at the very least, in pop culture. Another classic example of this is, I don’t know if you saw the show Breaking Bad, but with Walter White. Right. And that the classic moral dilemma there, is that, okay. In order to sort of do what’s right for his family is he believes he has this cancer and he’s going to die. Well, look at the trail of destruction that he creates, right. But it’s really to rescue his children that are vulnerable and that have special needs and so forth. Yeah, but in order to rescue two lives, it’s a high purpose, but look at all the trail of the damage that he got. We would almost need a kind of a principle where when you follow your purpose, you should almost not at least be, like, neutral with respect to the rest of humanity. I mean, if you could contribute to the rest of now, that’s great. That’s very difficult to you, but at the very least, a kind of a silver rule of like, don’t harm others.

 

JONATHAN

It’s interesting because Breaking Bad is a great example. I mean, it’s so well written too. It’s a great example of an objective hierarchy of goods, which is that, you know, Walter White makes a mistake. Basically, he misunderstands how the universe works and therefore he misaligns himself. He says, well, I’m willing to do these horrible things in order to save my family. But in the end, he loses it all, right? Because he misunderstands what is the highest good and how the world actually lays itself out. It’s actually a really good example of understanding the problem of misalignment. And so I think that, you know, the – How can I say this? It’s like. When we throw ourselves into certain purposes, those purposes have to be set into higher purposes. Even if you if you can’t explain it, if you can’t see it explicitly, you should at least be able to understand it intuitively that you know – if I have the purpose of making a lot of money. It’s like that is not a sufficient purpose, right? Because I have to live with other people, and I can ruin all my relationships by trying to make huge amounts of money, and then I will be miserable. It’s an objective thing, right? It’s like my purpose can be like, I wanted to take as much heroin as possible and I’ll get like huge amounts of satisfaction for a very short time. And then on the longer arc, then it will swallow me up. And so the, the virtue hierarchy that we have in the West is an objective one. Like it’s not a if you – if you follow this hierarchy, you will have the longest possible sense of satisfaction and a purpose. But if you misalign it, then you will get high levels of purpose. But that will ultimately come, to get you.

 

FRED

If it’s not embedded in a higher purpose.

 

JONATHAN

Exactly. Like I a good example that I’ve seen recently, and I hate to pick on him because he’s I mean, he’s an amazing guy, I saw an interview with Mike Tyson where Mike Tyson was talking about the fact that he is suffering because all he is a rabid dog out to like, destroy. Like that is what he set himself out to do. And now, because his body is failing him, he is hopeless. And it’s like, that’s something to learn from because he is amazing. I mean, he’s an astounding athlete.

 

FRED

You know, the story of how [they] would heal him, mentally. So his hands were his instrument of mass destruction, right? That he was a boxer. And for, I mean, for a very long time, as a boxer and as that rabid dog expressed through his hands, the hands had all of that destructive energy in them. And he said that when he started healing was right around the time that he started, playing with pigeons with his hands. And it’s almost turning this blunt instrument of destruction into – with something very, very delicate, like the pigeon allowed him to start healing. And but I mean, you know, that challenge of like seeing yourself as an identity, as the destructor that could come back after you’ve healed yourself. He could come back, come back, come back. But I found it very interesting how turning the instrument of, let’s call it of war, into an instrument of peace itself. That is what created a lot of the psychological healing for him.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah. That’s amazing. And I think that in some ways, like for him, like as a person, that he has to do that. He has to be able to insert his identity into a new identity, into a higher identity, or else, you know, he will, for all intents and purposes, find himself in hell. Because his own desire – like we talked about this off air a little bit like – you know, if you want something completely and you throw yourself into it sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is that you get it.

 

FRED

The curse is that you get it.

 

JONATHAN

Because once you get it, you realize that it’s not enough, and then you can be completely devoured by your own desire, because now you’ve reached it, and now you still have this emptiness. And so what do you do? You’re tortured by your own desire and your own capacity to attain what you wanted. And so that’s why there is this hierarchy – of goods. Right? It’s like you want to be successful in the world, but you want to embed that into something higher, like a family, because, you know, you want your success to serve something, an example to your kids, a way to provide for them. But then even that it’s not enough, like you keep embedding it into how goes then you want to be. You could see it like a lot of people who become extremely wealthy, you know, and thank God for that. They turn around and they’re like: “Oh, okay, now I want to give. Now I want to, I want to help and do these great things.” And it’s like, that’s exactly how it should be, right? And if you don’t do that, you can really be in trouble.

 

 

 

FRED

I almost feel – I wonder what you think of this idea. I almost feel like purpose is the gift of being able to consciously direct what you contribute, whatever your achievements are, to. Because if you don’t do that, in the end, what they’re objectively is, is your death. And this is what happens at death: What actually happens is that – “Nothing!”. No. Not nothing. I always tell people to do the exercise. What actually happens is, let’s be objective scientists about what actually happens. What happens to all your money? nothing. No. Not nothing. What happens? Okay. It gets passed on to other people, right? Somebody’s going to take it. No, nobody’s going to take it, okay? The state is going to take it. Somebody’s going to take it. Okay, cool. What happens to your physical? Nothing. Nothing? No. Not nothing. What happens? It’s going to go back to the earth. Okay, cool. But I you know, that’s not all I am. I’m also stories. An idea. Okay. What’s going to happen to your stories and ideas? Nothing. No. Not nothing. Where are they going to survive? Oh, in the hearts and minds of the people who know you for a little bit. So in the end, everything is given, objectively. Everything. That purpose is the gift of being able to direct what and who you give it to while you’re still alive.

 

JONATHAN

Yeah. That’s great. That’s a great way to think about it.

 

FRED

Yeah. So maybe on that note, man, I have so many more questions for you, John. Maybe we can do this again. Since you’re so close, I would love to, continue the conversation. We haven’t even talked about fractal patterns. Oh, my God, the rabbit hole that you threw me down. When you start talking about fractal patterns in one of your interviews, like fractal. Fractal? What is that? It’s kind of like a leaf. It’s kind of like a. So I found a documentary. You know, if you’ve seen this documentary, you fractals The Hidden Dimensions, where they talked about the work of Mandelbrot. What a rabbit hole that is. But there is no way that is anything less than 30 minutes.

 

JONATHAN

Oh, yeah, that’s another conversation.

 

FRED

That’s another conversation. The embedded order in nature, that’s man, we’ll have to do that in part two. But, Jonathan, thank you so much. This was, you know, I do these interviews partly selfishly because, I do them to learn. Really. Learn, ideas from people that I look up to. People that I believe can teach me something. People whose work has inspired me and helped me. And it’s always like, asking these little clarifications, you know, along the way and, I really hope that it can help people who are thinking about these issues, thinking about these ideas. And definitely this has been, surprising and, very, very enlightening in a lot of ways. And, I could have predicted that just knowing your work and your depth of thinking. So thank you so much. And thank you for coming in and doing it in person.

 

JONATHAN

Thank you. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it.

 

FRED

Sounds great. All right. Thanks.