In a world where the lines between politics, spirituality, and personal belief often blur, conversations that delve into these complex intersections become incredibly significant. One such conversation unfolded on ‘The Ezra Klein Show,’ featuring New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who offers a thought-provoking exploration of themes ranging from the influence of former President Donald Trump to the roles of mysticism and psychedelics in contemporary society. This dialogue invites listeners to consider the spiritual undercurrents shaping our political landscape. However, as with any nuanced discussion, it is essential to fact-check the claims made and examine the ideas presented critically. In this blog post, we will unpack the key points from the conversation, scrutinizing their accuracy and relevance to both current events and enduring philosophical questions.

Find a fact check of this transcript on CheckForFacts

Transcript:

[00:00:00,000]: So I always enjoy conversations that I have no earthly idea how to describe and today’s fits into that that mold It’s a conversation with my colleague Ross Douthat He’s the author of believe why everyone should be religious a book I enjoyed very much even though quite a bit of it I had some questions about and he’s the host of the new and really excellent New York Times opinion podcast interesting times Very interesting times in fact where he has been Interviewing people on the modern American right and this is a conversation about belief as it is intertwined with the Trump administration and with this moment of politics sort of return of political mysticism and the belief as it operates in our lives Ross’s argument that we should all that I should be an organized religion and Me talking about some things

[00:00:50,580]: I did not expect to be talking about on today’s show as always my email as a client show at You Ross Douthat welcome to the show Ezra Klein is a pleasure to be here So last year after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump You wrote about Trump as a man of destiny that he was quote a figure touched by the gods of fortune In a way that transcends the normal rules of politics How are you thinking about that now

[00:01:22,220]: Well there were other passages in that column that are worth emphasizing but yeah I stand by that reading of the Trump phenomenon

[00:01:30,120]: I think one of the ways in which my sense of politics generally has changed over the course of the Trump era is just I have more appreciation for Weird forces that are outside certainly outside the control of people who write about politics You can’t have lived through the Trump era as a conservative columnist or newspaper writer and not have the sense of how fundamentally unimportant Columnists are what happens in American

[00:02:03,319]: Exercise in humility it is it well but but even but even beyond that there’s I think We you and I both you know grew up in a period that Was I think reasonably described as a kind of timeout from grand historical dramas you know it was not the end of history in the totalizing sense but the kind of Francis Fukuyama view of the post cold war era as one that had a certain kind of certain kind of predictability and order and stability under control history felt under control right and the reality is that much of human history is just not Under control in that way and there are forces that move through history generally forces that move through history that are sort of hard to predict and assess but I do think often they are connected to specific personalities and there is some kind of marriage between particular personalities and particular moments and the idea of a Happens as I think it has happened with Donald Trump the rise of populism the crack up of the liberal order and so on The reason I laughed at the outset is that it’s important to stress that someone can be a man of destiny and be bad Right

[00:03:26,919]: Someone can be a great man of history and be worth opposing

[00:03:29,979]: You can look back at Napoleon and say man he was you know he was sort of above and beyond in terms of Historical forces and also Root for Wellington at Waterloo

[00:03:42,080]: That’s okay right

[00:03:43,699]: how does the sense that Trump is a man of destiny because I agree with you and I think understanding The interpretation of Trump is somehow mystic is very important to understanding his relationship now with the right But specifically how do you think it has changed the way his staff and his allies treat him

[00:04:04,580]: I mean I think that it is very hard to go through the kind of drama that Trump himself personally went through in You know the world that ran

[00:04:17,279]: I mean we can go back further but let’s just say the world that ran from January 6th through his return to power and If you’re on his side through that story not come away with the feeling that You were sort of moving with the wave of history right

[00:04:34,579]: for people in Trump’s circle this sense of One one

[00:04:39,700]: There’s just a sense that you know it doesn’t matter what the polls say or the naysayers say Certainly doesn’t matter what you know Squishy New York Times conservatives say right they saw the bottom Trump was disgraced and ruined and persecuted and he was going to be Sent to jail and then the next thing you know Assassins bullets were you know missing him by a hair’s breadth and he was making this incredible unprecedented Historical comeback and having lived through that

[00:05:06,529]: I think it’s hard to be swayed by People saying hey guys you know your poll numbers are not looking so great You know this tariff rollout not that well thought out

[00:05:17,730]: What are what are the implications of you know

[00:05:20,670]: Sending people to El Salvador without due process like those are those are sort of normal Quotidian sounding Objections to administration policy and I think at least for some people Caught up in the Trump phenomenon

[00:05:33,850]: They just seem sort of incommensurate to the reality that you’re like riding Riding a historical wave but I don’t think it’s just the external world and it’s judgment of Donald Trump And you can tell me if you think this is wrong But I think one of the biggest differences between Trump one and Trump two is it in Trump one

[00:05:52,529]: His own staff the people who surrounded him were perfectly comfortable thinking President Donald Trump is very wrong about this That his judgment is bad

[00:06:02,250]: His impulses need to be foiled

[00:06:04,290]: We are the resistance inside the Trump administration and in Trump too I don’t think people around him are comfortable thinking that I think there is both a sense that they are there to serve him but also a sense that There is something in Trump to them not to me That exists beyond argumentation the fact that the tariff policy doesn’t make sense on its face The fact that what he’s doing seems like a bad idea Well if you knew better than you’d be in the chair and so the the unwillingness to question him Because there’s a belief in a either a mystic purpose to him or that he has a mystic Like beyond argumentation intuition about things I think he’s really changed the nature of the constraints around him or the absence of constraints around him Yeah I think there’s also a way in which the kind of mystic drama of his return to power is also sort of projected back Onto his first term right

[00:07:03,709]: So where

[00:07:05,929]: You know where The experience of Trump’s first term not just for liberals and Democrats But for a lot of Republicans was obviously sort of chaotic and bizarre and difficult and so on But there were ways in which the results of that term were better than people anticipated I think certainly they were better than I anticipated right I expected as again That’s like a columnist observer Economic crisis and foreign policy crisis to sort of define Trump’s first four years in office and prior to kovat they didn’t the economy was in good shape I think you can make a case that his foreign policy in the first term worked Better than Biden’s you can make a strong case actually that it worked better than Biden’s foreign policy And I think what’s happened now is that not just people around him in the White House But also congressional Republicans people who you know would have doubts about the tariffs and so on have sort of combined the mystical drama With the you know surprisingly successful first term record put them together and said it’s both that Trump has some sort of you know kind of mystic intuition about what to do And it’s also that we doubted him before but it all worked out okay now obviously the problem with that is that One of the reasons it worked out okay was precisely that there were a bunch of people in the White House the first time around who didn’t have a mystical sense of Of Trump’s perspective or his goals or anything like that right and that is I think very clearly What is missing this time around there are people in the White House who could play that role I think a lot of people expected You know Scott percent the Secretary of the Treasury or Marco Rubio the Secretary of State to play The kind of role that Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and HR McMaster played in the first term But no one is actually playing that role as far as anyone can sort of see and so in an odd way The yeah the very success of sort of Trump as man of destiny is unmaking the conditions that made his first term a success but that is itself like a Dramatic arc right like if you were writing

[00:09:15,690]: Oh it’s all there if you were writing an art you know if you’re writing the novel of the story of sort of Hubris right and and nemesis that would be a characteristic way that hubris and nemesis would manifest themselves well we tend to think of fortune now as synonymous with luck but you go back to Greek mythology and When you are touched by fortune when you get a fortune when you speak to the Oracle it often doesn’t work out that Well you get a clear prophecy that seems like it foretells your success right and laced inside of that is Your downfall I think what kind of story What kind of mystic structure you believe we’re in is it one that is providential Or is it one where the gods often laugh at human design

[00:10:04,330]: right well I mean I think a mistake that I think some religious people make is to see a kind of you know a kind of force of destiny at work in a particular figure and Assume that that force of destiny must mean that God the author of history wants you to be on that person’s side Directly but in fact if you read let’s say the Old Testament right there’s all kinds of moments when God is working through figures to accomplish something in the world or sort of to move History or you know this the drama the drama of salvation history to put it in Christian terms right in a particular direction But it doesn’t mean that the instrument that God is working through is In fact you know the Messiah or the Chosen One right like if God sends the Babylonians To chastise the wicked kings of Israel it doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to necessarily say oh hail Nebuchadnezzar You know you are you are you are the Chosen One sometimes

[00:11:08,070]: There are forces

[00:11:09,510]: I think I think you can see Trump in several different lights You could say he’s a man of destiny and therefore he is Bringing about in some weird way that we didn’t see coming the new American Golden Age right and this is obviously what a lot of people on the center right Wanted to believe especially when it became clear that he was returning to power or you could say He’s a great man of history Who’s

[00:11:35,510]: Unlocking some sort of change that was necessary But but bringing chaos in order to do it right so I you know I wrote a lot about the concept of decadence Right this idea that you know the West the developed world was sort of stuck in these kind of cycles and needed to break out Somehow but the reality is you often can’t break out of decadence without You know a big big mess so maybe Trump is the agent of that mess But doesn’t mean he’s you know a good person or finally it could just be chastisement for everyone right all are punished All right as Shakespeare said I think all of those possibilities Have to be taken seriously as readings of the Trump phenomenon how well do you remember Batman Begins I

[00:12:20,150]: Remember it but so as a person League of Shadows right destroying Joke in my head often in the past couple of months as somebody who’s Mythic analogies tend to come from the Marvel or DC universe more than the the older the New Testament There’s just like convince me We’re not being governed by the League of Shadows And I went back and I rewatched the piece where you know Rosal Gould sort of reveals the whole plan He says look we’ve infiltrated every layer of Gotham’s power structure The League of Shadows has been a check against human corruption for thousands of years We sacked Rome loaded trade ships with plague rats Burned London to the ground every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence We return to restore the balance

[00:13:07,489]: We tried to do this through financial engineering and destroy Gotham’s economy

[00:13:11,090]: It didn’t quite work Now we’re back for number two And the fact that we are here is proof of your decadence right the fact that we could do this get this close Shows that you deserve what we are about to do to you Yes and I’m not saying we are actually being governed by the League of Shadows But when you brought up the the decadence there is a dimension of that to me when you think about this and in those almost like narrative terms sort of reflection of very dark sides of our own Society well and I mean I’ve carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout The Trump era that you know are going to continue I guess and one is with People on the right who have a sort of League of Shadows view of the overall situation It’s like things things are so bad that you might as well You know unleash chaos right and this you saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs right people You know mostly on social media right not real politicians Don’t don’t say this with people on social media who are like fine We need a you know a 10 year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad and so on And I spent a lot of time disagreeing With those people I would prefer not to take the black pill but I’ve also spent time disagreeing with The kind of Liberals and sometimes you know never Trump Republican Critics of Trump who I feel like don’t quite grasp Why he’s successful And how you know what you need to do in response because I don’t think he could be This successful if you know well if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix to fix our problems Well clearly that didn’t that didn’t work right it didn’t work We tried that and definitely trying to elect him twice to fix our problems was not was not the winning move I was saying a couple months ago to Barry Weiss’s podcast and she had Louise Perry

[00:15:08,469]: Who’s a sort of British conservative gender and and and sexuality writer and Perry made this argument that I’ve been thinking about where she said that the difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate Is that Peterson is a Christian and Tate is a pagan and I think this might be unfair to historic pagans But the argument she was making depends on the pagans but also depends on the Christians so but the argument she was making is that Peterson is At least in his ethics somebody who thinks a lot about the weak who cherishes women Tate is more interested in power in dominance in Instead of driving his enemies before him and sort of fathering a lot of children for a lot of people potentially And I’ve thought about that question that sort of war between Again sort of crude paganism and Christianity as really playing out right now on the right and in the Trump administration there are ways in which those strands seem braided through everything the sort of Drive for power for sort of renewed 19th century masculinity Versus the the sort of more Christian dimensions of it There’s in a way like Vance as a emblem of the Christian side of the administration You know musk is an emblem of its pagan side with his many kids for many different women Yeah Trump is somebody who in his both traditionalism like as a person and also his Brashness and will to power as a person sort of has both threads inside himself at the same time maybe I think I mean honestly I Think Trump may have come to some conception of belief in God after the assassination attempt Just just sort of observing his comments a little bit but I I think of Trump as just sort of persistently as a kind of pagan or heathen figure Much more than he is than he is a Christian figure not withstanding the attempts to sort of claim him as a kind of You know King David or Emperor Constantine right

[00:17:14,469]: Like there’s sort of an idea that you get from religious conservative supporters of Trump that you know These figures in the Bible or Christian history who are rulers who are sinful in various ways But maybe in a way like I’ve been describing sort of advance God’s cause Despite their sins and failings

[00:17:33,030]: I don’t really think of Trump that way but he is committed in an explicit way to Christianity and Trump to me the bargain with Trump has always been for religious conservatives some mix of Protection and support a transactional bargain and then more recently a kind of hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can sort of bring Religion itself back with it which I will say is a hope that I have indulged indulged in myself right that it’s like okay You have different varieties of post christianity out there and you don’t want to ally with the Andrew Tate’s But you do want to ally with the people who have sort of you know big hopes for the future rather than a Woke progressivism that just seems sort of inflected with cultural despair right that that would be an argument that I think a Christian who you know was trying to sort of explain to themselves how they find themselves in alliance with Elon Musk Might say right like better you know better Elon who has some good desires and believes that humanity is good in some way and wants a sort of more dynamic future better that then You know pure pessimism You know the climate change is gonna kill us all and structural racism means we deserve it Kind of perspective that that would be the argument Let me ask about the idea that what you just described that was pure pessimism putting aside the idea that climate change will kill us All which I don’t believe I think most people even on the the left don’t believe they believe there’s a way out You just have to really work for it You give at the end of your book an account of why you’re a Christian and why you’re a Catholic and why you find it Persuasive and I find your account of it very moving

[00:19:21,770]: It’s a thing that appeals to me about Christianity and the account you give is about both the strangeness and the radicalism of Jesus Christ as a figure how uncomfortable it is to read him how challenging how it’s a religion About meekness all of the the rich man has a better chance of you know The camel is a better chance of fitting through the eye of the needle than the rich man of getting into heaven That there’s always been a radicalism in that Yeah I mean I know the meek will inherit the earth is a famous law I would say renunciation more than meekness But there’s a godliness of those who do not have power

[00:20:00,329]: Yes and At the same time then there is this administration

[00:20:05,410]: I think is very self consciously Tries to be a frame itself as Christian but people in it are like JD Vance And I do many many people and I do not see in them in the way they act in this world this Love of those who do not have power There’s the kind of putting out of memes where they’ve made a Studio Ghibli meme out of an immigrant crying right

[00:20:28,930]: There’s something about the interplay here of a self conscious Christianity and a self conscious mimetic cruelty that both feels like very appalling to me but also Un christian as I understand it yeah yeah I mean I think the the Christian the aspect of Populism right conservative populism right wing populism whatever you want to call it that does see itself in clear continuity with Christian ideas and Christian views basically holds that it is speaking on behalf of the weak and the oppressed people who don’t have a voice in society and those people are The native born working class of the Western world who have been asked to bear Inappropriate burdens beginning with economic

[00:21:20,829]: I’m just framing the case right right beginning beginning with the economic burdens imposed by Free trade regimes that sent their jobs overseas and continuing with the burden of Again this is this is the argument of sort of social disorder and breakdown associated with the drug trade in a globalized world the free movement of peoples that you know sort of transforms cities and neighborhoods and in ways that again fall most heavily on lower middle class Americans and are sort of avoided and evaded by The upper class right this is the narrative is basically that the beneficiaries of globalization are the equivalent of the rich person in Various of Jesus’s parables and certainly Jesus does not hesitate at various moments in the Gospels to say pretty harsh things About people who have betrayed their leadership role

[00:22:17,310]: So the one reason I pushed back on meekness is yes Jesus uses the word meek but Jesus himself is not a meek figure right and you can go through the New Testament and find plenty of cases where Jesus says incredibly harsh things about powerful mostly about powerful people about sinners right where Jesus cleanses the temple and drives you know drives the moneylenders out and curses the fig tree that doesn’t The powerful here what I’m asking about is the treatment of the powerless which even if you believe and I don’t I don’t contest this point That many many many people in this country have borne undue burdens

[00:22:59,569]: Like I understand that is central to liberal politics too It is the cruelty with which poor immigrants are treated the Kind of laughing about it that it’s fine

[00:23:12,170]: If you want to say they should be Unkind to Ezra Klein like a New York Times columnist right

[00:23:18,760]: I more mean that there is an embrace of mimetic cruelty not aimed at the powerful but aimed at other forms of the powerless Where as I sort of understand the radicalism of this ethic It is it you should you know whether whatever your border policy there should be a profound compassion for You know Haitians who came here fleeing some most desperate poverty in the world to work hard at jobs to Build up a life for their families There’s something about the weaponization of cruelty against the powerless

[00:23:51,819]: It is what I am trying to get at No and I I think you know as I as I said before I think you have what you’re describing as Christian and pagan tendencies braided together and the Trump administration and I think that not all but many of the things that you describe absolutely reflect more of a pagan sensibility than a Christian one But I agree with you that particular steps the Trump administration has taken in this term are Not Christian anti christian and I think the forces You know I mean I think it started with the cuts to foreign aid

[00:24:27,360]: I think you can completely justify some kind of renovation of the foreign aid program

[00:24:32,120]: Christians are not bound to support any particular set of programs but I think the way in which the foreign aid programs were reshuffled and cut off and so on was a failure of Christian duty in a pretty obvious way and the core motivations there were just different from the motivations the evangelical motivations of the Bush era and reflected frankly just overall the decline of Christianity in American life since then

[00:24:59,660]: I will just say though since you know we’re taking a pretty hard line of critique I think you you know you watch this happen all the time on the left in different ways over the last five or ten years right

[00:25:11,720]: Where people who I considered you know sensible good well meaning moderate people were in a coalition with people who had more intensity more passion more zeal who made a certain set of demands on them that led you know people I knew and admired and respected to I think compromise their own values in ways that also had sort of real world material consequences

[00:25:35,480]: I don’t want to like re litigate I don’t want to re litigate wokeness but if you know I think this is part of the nature of politics in a landscape where there’s no kind of religious consensus there’s no kind of moral consensus right is that forces that appear to have energy behind them again to go back to where we started world historical energy perhaps will sort of draw people who have convictions that should put them in tension with those views into certain kinds of compromises

[00:26:04,800]: But I agree

[00:26:05,720]: I absolutely think I do not admire the way that the Trump administration approaches any of the policies that you’re talking about from humanitarian aid to you know the deportations to El Salvador

[00:26:20,840]: I guess to me one of the things I’m getting at in life broadly but in the policies specifically or in the rhetoric in the comportment I think a lot about J D

[00:26:29,860]: Vance who’s a person in many ways I think should have had some protection from this

[00:26:33,480]: I think he is Christian

[00:26:34,500]: I think he does think a lot about virtue and ethics

[00:26:38,920]: And you brought up the tariffs

[00:26:40,600]: I don’t think there’s anything un Christian about the tariffs

[00:26:42,440]: I think they’re bad economics not bad religion right

[00:26:45,680]: And a lot of these policies I actually believe that about

[00:26:47,840]: I think people can have very mistaken views on policy because they are just wrong about what the policies will do in the world

[00:26:53,460]: I have had mistaken views on policies because I was wrong about what the policies would do in the world or the way they would be carried out

[00:26:59,400]: It’s more the compatibility between what I think has become a dominant tone

[00:27:06,700]: And I think we’re in a unstable era in terms of our what I might call like our political manners

[00:27:14,980]: Matt Iglesias had a piece about the way a lot of his Hitler revisionism is beginning to happen

[00:27:19,920]: Out of a kind of feeling that we have over penalized questions about race questions of anti Semitism and that in order to widen the boundaries of debate you have to have on World War II revisionists right

[00:27:34,740]: And there’s a sense that this sort of politics of manners didn’t work

[00:27:39,540]: And so politics of no manners needs to be tried now

[00:27:43,000]: And I think Donald Trump has sort of been an innovator and a pioneer in that

[00:27:46,740]: And it’s created a lot of mimetic imitators who on the one hand don’t have some of his I don’t know lightness or authenticity or funniness

[00:27:55,620]: But on the other it’s just that I think I am weirdly even though I’m not myself religious a little bit idealistic about religion

[00:28:03,620]: And I feel this about my own religion which I think should create very profound sympathy for refugees

[00:28:09,880]: And that has not been something I’ve seen in the past couple of years

[00:28:14,420]: And I think it’s a Christianity where it feels like it should create a kind of buffer against greed and cruelty that I often see broken when it would be politically viable to break it

[00:28:27,960]: Right

[00:28:28,180]: So well two things

[00:28:29,160]: One is that yes you are describing the story of both Judaism and Christianity’s engagement with history and fallen human nature right

[00:28:38,440]: And this is something that is in fact advertised in both the Old Testament and the New Testament and all of history since right

[00:28:44,520]: Is that the story of the Jewish people in the Old Testament is not a story of people who were chosen by God and given a bunch of commandments and then obeyed them all

[00:28:53,000]: It’s a story of people who remain the chosen people despite failing in every possible way including to fit our conversation repeated flirtations with heathenism and paganism and idolatry right

[00:29:03,620]: And then you can obviously tell a similar story you know the New Testament Christians don’t have political power but the apostles are always screwing up and messing up

[00:29:12,300]: And then of course the history of Christianity’s entanglement with political power is filled with sins and failings that again like this era’s set are you know are sort of not atypical I guess

[00:29:25,320]: But then the second point that I want to push you on is like what kind of argument is this that you think you’re going to win with religious believers who disagree with you

[00:29:33,080]: You’re like well I don’t believe in your religion but I really wish that you would follow your religion so that your politics were more aligned with mine

[00:29:40,960]: Like that’s just not much of an argument at all

[00:29:42,920]: And I think to the extent that all of liberalism the ideology that you subscribe to trades on inherited ideas from Christianity about morality and equality and so on while you’ve jettisoned the portrait of the universe the metaphysical structure that gives them meaning I think it’s really hard from that point of view for you to get anywhere in arguments with people who still believe in that structure because you’re essentially saying I’ve stripped away the conceptual framework that makes your moral ideas make sense but now I’m going to complain that you’re not living up to your moral ideas

[00:30:16,520]: I just think that’s a really weak argument

[00:30:18,880]: Oh but I’m not arguing it

[00:30:19,980]: Well you’re saying it to me

[00:30:21,420]: I’m right here

[00:30:22,380]: I’m asking you

[00:30:22,660]: I’m a Christian

[00:30:23,180]: I’m right here

[00:30:23,560]: I’m right here

[00:30:23,680]: You’re arguing you’re expressing sorrowful disappointment that Christians are not living up to a worldview that you think is false

[00:30:31,960]: Well I think parts of it are

[00:30:33,100]: Well the important parts

[00:30:33,620]: Well I am unconvinced on parts of it

[00:30:35,400]: We’ll talk about the view of the cosmos in a minute and I’m not trying to offend you here

[00:30:40,960]: I’m actually asking

[00:30:42,840]: Ezra has anything about our long relationship suggested you could possibly offend me

[00:30:47,820]: I’ve known you long enough to know when you’re getting a bit heated

[00:30:50,180]: That’s totally different

[00:30:51,240]: Heatedness

[00:30:52,200]: I mean as I was saying the New Testament is filled with heated encounters

[00:30:55,760]: I don’t think a thing I’m saying here is going to convince somebody on the Christian right to turn around their view of Donald Trump

[00:31:03,380]: I am genuinely curious how somebody of your politics and your religious background interprets somebody like J D

[00:31:09,320]: Vance

[00:31:09,400]: I’m asking you questions about it

[00:31:11,900]: Christianity does not provide some kind of incredibly strong bulwark against powerful people doing the kinds of things that powerful people do which means self interested conquest of various kinds and so on right

[00:31:27,560]: What it does provide is an ongoing internal critique that those powerful people have to wrestle with and address in ways that are fairly unique in the historical relationship of power and piety

[00:31:45,520]: If you look at something like to take the most famous example maybe the Spanish conquest of the Americas right

[00:31:53,180]: In terms of what is actually done in the course of the Spanish conquest of the Americas you can find plenty of terrible crimes that you as a client would say well what good is your religion if it licenses

[00:32:05,140]: If your civilization commits these kinds of crimes

[00:32:08,420]: But from the very beginning in Spain itself in the heart of super Catholic counter reformation era Spain there’s an ongoing and agonizing and sometimes intensely legal and practical sometimes high level philosophical theological debate that subjects the behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and others to this kind of sustained critique and leads to at various times sometimes successful mostly unsuccessful reform efforts driven by the Catholic monarchy of Spain and ultimately builds out and influences everything from the anti slavery movement in the 18th and 19th century that’s ultimately successful down to contemporary ideas about human rights and international law that again today’s secular liberals take for granted as a kind of scripture

[00:32:58,620]: All of that emerges out of the efforts of serious Christians in a context of profound historical temptation and constant sinfulness to sort of generate from within the resources of their religion

[00:33:12,140]: And I think if you take the Trump administration for instance it’s not as though you cannot find Christian critiques of Trump administration cruelty

[00:33:24,100]: They just are not at the moment the primary thing

[00:33:27,020]: I would expect I mean we’ll find out right

[00:33:29,940]: We’re three months into a kind of shock and awe administration

[00:33:32,800]: I think that people have been sort of baffled and surprised by some of the turns that things have taken but certainly people I take seriously within conservative Christianity have spoken out against things like the cuts to humanitarian aid or anything like that but again I completely agree with you that history supplies constant tests of what your religion is for and there’s no end until the end right to the testing and sometimes you succeed

[00:34:08,360]: More often you fail but hopefully you do something that has good effects down the road and sometimes you fail entirely and then maybe God sifts you and finds you wanting

[00:34:17,860]: I’m not kidding here right

[00:34:19,920]: This is actually like it is important to see every moment as a potential moral test that you might well be failing

[00:34:29,820]: I’m a conservative Christian

[00:34:31,660]: You could say I’m a member of the Christian right for your purposes right

[00:34:35,340]: As Christianity has weakened in American life a really hard question has become like you know who is the most dangerous of your different enemies or you know like who is most threatening to the Christian view of the good society right

[00:34:52,500]: Is it you know a woke progressivism that wants to Again this would just be the conservative right

[00:34:58,780]: I think it wants to abolish basic ideas about differences between the sexes

[00:35:04,540]: It supports abortion at any stage in pregnancy that’s hostile to the basic religious liberties of Christians

[00:35:10,320]: Again from the conservative Christian point of view

[00:35:12,220]: Is it Donald Trump’s populism with its heathen cruelties

[00:35:16,460]: Is it transhumanism

[00:35:17,740]: Like is the final boss of this era that religious believers will have to confront actually Silicon Valley

[00:35:25,060]: And if it is like can you make alliances within Silicon Valley

[00:35:28,340]: Is it better to be with Elon Musk and his 117 children than to be with you know some other people involved

[00:35:35,360]: I think it’s also Neuralink is

[00:35:36,240]: It’s pushing transhumanism forward very fast if it can

[00:35:39,600]: No there’s a lot of

[00:35:40,780]: But there’s also different transhumanisms like which you know what Anyway all I’m No these are actually These are things you know that I myself am profoundly uncertain about in this moment

[00:35:55,660]: Like who

[00:35:56,600]: What is the greatest danger from a Christian perspective to the future of the human race

[00:36:01,580]: I’m not entirely sure

[00:36:05,660]: So a big part of your book as I read it is about what happens when elite society becomes hostile in its view of the world to the human impulse to seek a picture of reality that runs deeper than materialism

[00:36:22,600]: What happens when the seekers have nowhere to go when organized religion weakens when Or not nowhere to go

[00:36:29,480]: What happens when they’re not channeled into organized religion

[00:36:35,320]: And what happens when elite society becomes too materialistic

[00:36:38,220]: And I understand for you and you can tell me if this is wrong that one of the forces I think that you believe is driving the era is a kind of frustrated seeking a sort of desire to re enchant the world that has run into an elite culture maybe its apex being the Obama administration and that sort of moment in American life

[00:36:59,440]: It’s the Ezra Klein show

[00:37:00,860]: The Ezra Klein show

[00:37:01,560]: It’s the apex Ezra

[00:37:02,440]: Let’s be honest here

[00:37:04,140]: Although that

[00:37:04,920]: Well we’ll get into this

[00:37:06,640]: I always joke the difference between you and me is more that I’m a You’re a Catholic and I’m a Californian than that I’m a materialist and you’re not because

[00:37:15,440]: Well one can use the word materialist in different ways too

[00:37:20,060]: When you use it in this context what do you mean

[00:37:22,380]: I mean the view that all of existence life the universe and everything is finally reducible to matter in motion

[00:37:31,300]: That matter is primary and mind is secondary rather than the other way around

[00:37:35,880]: I don’t mean materialism in terms of Madonna’s material girl or something like that although the two can be connected

[00:37:44,320]: One of the various arguments in my book is that disenchantment is fake fundamentally

[00:37:50,560]: The idea that you can enter a secular age where once upon a time people had wild religious experiences but now we inhabit the iron cage of modernity and all of those are off the table that just doesn’t describe reality

[00:38:04,320]: Mystical experience religious experience it’s not just the impulse

[00:38:07,620]: I think secular liberals are very comfortable saying oh well there’s always a religious impulse but it’s more than that

[00:38:12,340]: It’s that people have encounters with God whatever God may be some kind of higher reality that enters them and transforms them and gives them visions and gives them intense experiences or maybe they have them on the verge of death and come back to tell about them

[00:38:27,140]: This is just a feature of human life

[00:38:29,060]: It’s a very profound and important feature of human life

[00:38:31,520]: Maybe it can be explained in non religious terms maybe there’s some reductive explanation but there isn’t a good one on offer right now

[00:38:39,240]: The persistence of that means that religion always regenerates itself because even under conditions where almost nobody is committed to a particular church or creed people are going to go on having dramatic encounters like someone like Barbara Ehrenreich who’s famous I had her on for this book

[00:38:59,180]: Right

[00:38:59,460]: She’s a famous left liberal writer wrote a whole book called And a famous atheist

[00:39:02,620]: Yes

[00:39:02,860]: Famous atheist called Living with a Wild God right

[00:39:05,620]: And it was just a book about a very secular person who had a lot of religious experiences like experiences that if you went and read William James or read like a medieval Catholic mystic or something would be totally familiar

[00:39:17,640]: And she didn’t have sort of a framework a conceptual framework to fully process them and wrote a great book really interesting book about it

[00:39:25,380]: Can you tell the story that you tell in your book

[00:39:26,720]: I don’t remember the man’s name but he’s the editor of Skeptics Magazine or something like that

[00:39:33,280]: So this is Michael Shermer who is one of the more famous professional skeptical debunkers of religious claims supernatural things and so on

[00:39:44,000]: And he in one of his books but he’s told this story several times to his great credit he was getting married and his wife had I’m going to butcher this slightly but had a great uncle who had been very close to her and was the kind of person who would have given her away at the wedding but had passed away right

[00:40:02,660]: So she was feeling sort of lonely and isolated and they had a radio that had come from him and the radio was broken didn’t work had never worked

[00:40:11,200]: Shermer had tried to fix it it just didn’t work it was broken right

[00:40:15,380]: And at the end of the wedding during the reception they heard music from the back of the house and went back into a back room and there was the radio playing a love song

[00:40:25,480]: And I think it transitioned from that to some kind of classical music for later in the evening and then shut off and never worked again

[00:40:34,340]: And this experience affected Shermer and again to his credit right

[00:40:39,420]: It was like evidence against interest

[00:40:43,340]: And I think again you have to sort of trust as always with these stories right

[00:40:47,880]: You have to sort of trust his general reliability and so on that it wasn’t just that like you know there was a battery that was jiggled or something the radio really didn’t work and really never worked again

[00:40:57,280]: There really was no obvious material way that this could have happened

[00:41:01,600]: Shermer in the end works out you know he wants to have a theory of the multiverse where in some different timeline much like in the movie Interstellar his wife’s great uncle is capable of accessing our timeline and to Shermer this is sort of an escape from like supernatural explanations

[00:41:18,700]: But one reason to just tell that story is that you know as I think you know because I was joking about your show being the epitome of secularization the apogee whatever

[00:41:30,860]: People have experiences like this all the time

[00:41:34,020]: Yeah this is why I’m not a materialist

[00:41:35,220]: This is a very commonplace kind of experience

[00:41:38,440]: Not super commonplace you’re not going to have one tomorrow probably

[00:41:41,460]: But like this stuff you know just is part of the warp and woof of reality and so to finally long windedly answer your original question I think what happens in conditions when you have weak institutional religions and a sort of secular expert class that is not you know militantly atheistic but sort of says you know officially these things don’t happen right is that people feel like they can’t really go all the way up to the Creator God Yahweh Jehovah outside of time and space and they start looking for sort of intermediate powers to sort of become a kind of locus for their own spiritual impulses

[00:42:25,380]: You know stuff with psychedelics stuff with literal paganism including stuff on the right and then the interesting zone in a way is AI which is the place where sort of science fiction ideas or scientific ideas meet a kind of you know slightly supernaturalist sense of you know like the machine God as this power that is—into which we are going to commend ourselves

[00:42:51,880]: But yeah and I think that tendency again this is what Christians would say but that tendency is bad

[00:42:58,880]: It’s not that secondary spiritual powers don’t exist in the universe

[00:43:02,900]: There are in fact you know angels and demons and things like that saints and powers that—other powers perhaps more mysterious still but not all those powers have human good in mind and it’s better to approach them through one of the big old traditional religions that tries to subject them to a kind of higher ordering

[00:43:23,820]: It says— Let me hold you there

[00:43:24,620]: Yeah

[00:43:24,800]: Because we’ll get to this

[00:43:26,880]: I want to distinguish two arguments that the book could make and that you take one path in particular

[00:43:34,820]: So I am somebody who believes deeply in mystery

[00:43:39,440]: I am that kind of agnostic where I’m— Californian

[00:43:42,440]: I’m a Californian

[00:43:43,020]: Exactly

[00:43:43,460]: Yeah

[00:43:44,160]: And the sort of first half of the book or for a third of the book is sort of about this

[00:43:47,720]: It’s an argument that you—I would call it an argument that you should believe that a kind of new atheist materialism is incompatible with any kind of reasonable understanding of the world in its complexity in its unruliness in the experiences people have in the things that it now increasingly requires you to believe like either human consciousness is somehow having some profound effect on quantum physics or though you know if you’re going to take a much more straightforward view of the math we’re splitting into uncountable new realities at all times

[00:44:21,840]: Right

[00:44:22,360]: The implications are getting weirder and weirder

[00:44:24,500]: So many podcasts

[00:44:25,520]: So many podcasts

[00:44:26,940]: I love I love all that stuff

[00:44:30,420]: But so there’s an argument for belief and then there’s an argument for channeling that And I understand the book to really be about the second argument

[00:44:38,920]: I actually think the first argument is pretty straightforward but it’s about channeling this belief into organized religion

[00:44:44,500]: So given the strangeness of everything you just described and then also given that you know the big organized religions disagree on many things a point you make on the book why go there right

[00:45:00,080]: Why is it not enough to just say you should believe that this world is not something we understand how to explain and you should be open to all these things that violate you know a materialist intuition about it

[00:45:12,340]: Why say or what’s the argument for going into organized religion as the answer for such profound unruliness

[00:45:21,880]: Well a couple of things

[00:45:22,660]: So first of all I don’t think that the case for not being a materialist is a case for sort of total unruliness

[00:45:32,460]: To the contrary I think part of the case for being a materialist for not being a materialist is precisely the order of the universe right

[00:45:39,980]: One of the problems that materialism has that you sort of gestured at right is accounting for the specific ways in which the universe is ordered the beauty and precision and symmetry involved and also as far as we can tell the extreme unlikeliness that this particular order would be selected for unless whoever selected it were interested in you know listening to lots of podcasts you know creating planets stars and conscious beings right

[00:46:09,080]: So you have the religious argument is an argument for overarching structure

[00:46:14,480]: And then the ways in which it is weird are not themselves entirely random like there are patterns in spiritual experience

[00:46:22,660]: Lots of you know there’s no sort of predictability to it overall but the kinds of experiences that people have have a certain kind of consistency

[00:46:31,720]: You can track different kinds of spiritual experiences across different cultures

[00:46:36,000]: You can track them in near death experiences

[00:46:38,020]: You can track them in terms of like you know studies of what appear to be miraculous healings and so on

[00:46:47,960]: And again there just seems to be a way in which you have this overarching order you have some sort of mysterious relationship between our consciousness and that overarching order and then you have a lot of religious experiences that seem like higher forces trying to be in touch with us and have some kind of relationship with us

[00:47:05,840]: That’s the basic picture of that again most of the big religions offer allowing for all their differences

[00:47:15,880]: You know Buddhism and Christianity have quite you know some pretty substantial differences but they each describe a universe that’s generally like that

[00:47:26,500]: So I want to be careful because when I say I’m a Californian I’m being jokey about it

[00:47:30,900]: They’re often there are of course many Orthodox Jews in California and committed Catholic Christians in California and so on

[00:47:36,460]: So but I am very familiar with a kind of California seeker mentality

[00:47:45,380]: And I think the answer from that perspective to what you just said is yes there are patterns

[00:47:51,520]: Yes there are buckets

[00:47:52,700]: There is a consistency or a couple maybe consistencies to near death experiences or to memories that young kids have of what at least some people take to be past lives or things like the radio turning on or or or or or

[00:48:09,200]: But none of these really fit all at least not all of them into any of the big religions

[00:48:15,560]: They don’t I’ve read enough of the religions to say that the what I describe as the unruliness when I say that I mean enough things that don’t fit a kind of simplified view of reality that it would make me wonder about materialism

[00:48:30,440]: But also I don’t think Judaism explains them all

[00:48:33,060]: I don’t think that Catholicism explains them all

[00:48:35,260]: I’m not saying I know what does Hinduism

[00:48:38,320]: Well Hinduism is big enough

[00:48:39,560]: It’s quite big actually

[00:48:40,440]: Maybe it explains more

[00:48:41,600]: You could you could

[00:48:41,860]: I’m not saying that I know what does

[00:48:43,640]: What I’m saying is that I’m very sympathetic to how it can kind of spin you into a profound openness

[00:48:51,660]: I know many people who have gone there where what it seems to me now is having come to believe in these kinds of things

[00:49:01,920]: It’s very hard for them to say where to stop believing

[00:49:05,240]: And they now believe a lot of things that are maybe contradictory or they you know there are gurus who are all saying different things

[00:49:11,080]: But once you open yourself it can become hard to close back down

[00:49:15,000]: But for them you know some of them grew up in a faith tradition

[00:49:18,640]: For them the faith tradition didn’t explain too much of what they then began to see or experience or come to believe in

[00:49:28,480]: I don’t think any of the traditions have a really good explanation for why we have sort of weirdly consistent alien abduction experiences which I don’t believe to be alien abductions but I’m not sure what to make of them

[00:49:38,298]: How do you answer what is your response to someone like that

[00:49:42,658]: Yeah I mean I think that there is a balance that you have to strike in looking for a particular religious tradition right

[00:49:54,238]: As opposed to just being a kind of open ended seeker

[00:49:57,518]: And you want I think a religious tradition that has a set of sort of core views that makes sense of a lot of what you’ve described

[00:50:13,578]: And also a certain degree of flexibility and uncertainty about some of the things that don’t fit into exactly its world picture

[00:50:25,278]: But yeah the wide array of religious experiences I think just the data on its own would make you a kind of like the term I use in the book is perennialist right

[00:50:37,238]: This is the theory that all the great religions encode some of the truth about reality

[00:50:42,898]: You kind of can’t go wrong with any of them as long as they’re big enough and old enough

[00:50:47,758]: But none of them are like the fullness of truth

[00:50:51,678]: I would say though just as a Roman Catholic right that Roman Catholicism again one of the things that I appreciate about it is that it has a certain kind of supernatural capaciousness right

[00:51:06,798]: Not in terms of all its formal doctrines

[00:51:08,858]: It’s not like you open up the catechism of the Catholic Church and they’re like well here’s what we think about aliens

[00:51:12,938]: I mean it’s in there

[00:51:13,818]: It’s on but the pages are taped

[00:51:15,378]: Certainly in the Vatican there is quite a bit about it

[00:51:17,158]: In the Vatican

[00:51:17,758]: Here’s what we think about aliens

[00:51:18,418]: There is some stuff about that stuff

[00:51:20,278]: But you know if you look at actual the history of Catholic cultures right you know the zone for instance in terms of like the afterlife right zones like purgatory and limbo and so on have some kind of connection to people’s arguments about ghosts and hauntings and that form of the supernatural

[00:51:39,018]: Catholic cultures have always been pretty hospitable to ideas about fairies

[00:51:45,598]: I don’t know how I’ve ended up you know on a nice New York Times podcast talking about the good people but you know the idea of sort of like trickster that there are angels and demons and then there are these sort of weird like trickster beings

[00:51:59,498]: If you asked me to like make a case for Catholicism’s capaciousness I could make that case

[00:52:04,918]: But then the other thing is and this is I’m curious what you think about this right is that one of the things I argue in the book and it’s not an approvable assertion right but it’s the idea that if there is this overall structure and order to the universe and if there seem to be sort of higher powers interested in talking to human beings then maybe you should assume that like God is not out to trick you right

[00:52:29,158]: The universe is not a trick like it’s not actually presenting you with this sort of impossible open ended question

[00:52:36,138]: It’s basically you know there’s a certain number of big religions

[00:52:40,478]: They’ve stood the test of time

[00:52:42,518]: They’ve had a pretty powerful shaping influence on human history

[00:52:45,958]: Why wouldn’t you go in for one of them rather than saying you know in good California style like I just have to remain perfectly open right

[00:52:54,538]: Like I think that if you can accept that the universe might have been created with us in mind then you should give deference

[00:53:02,278]: So I want to say that I loved the book

[00:53:04,218]: I really really enjoyed it

[00:53:05,758]: And this was my the point where it helped me clarify where my intuitions maybe go very differently which is I think at a fundamental level I expect that anything that has worked at mass scale across many different institutional regimes as an organized religion is likely to have conformed so much to politics and institutions as to have strayed from how profoundly radical whatever kind of spiritual truth might exist is

[00:53:41,118]: This is a way in which the sort of gambit I had at the beginning about Trump was connected to the meat of this conversation

[00:53:47,858]: I found the argument that you should assume that a religion’s success over time is going to correlate to some kind of fundamental truth value

[00:53:59,818]: I felt you could take that both ways

[00:54:01,638]: I felt you could also take it the other way which is to say that the religions that survive are going to be the ones that are institutionally compatible with many different regimes and often contort themselves into those regimes

[00:54:11,938]: And we talked about the Spanish conquests and the Inquisition

[00:54:16,178]: I’ve been reading about the Renaissance recently Ada Palmer’s great book on inventing the Renaissance

[00:54:21,478]: And I wouldn’t say the popes of that era cover themselves in glory

[00:54:25,358]: I’ve seen this in I think you could say it’s about forms of Judaism about forms of Buddhism which Buddhism is a much more complicated institutional story than people who have been raised in America on like West Coast spirit rock Buddhism I think tend to believe

[00:54:42,638]: There are all these questions where I think that I believe that whatever sort of ultimate truth is out there is going to be extremely inconvenient and strange

[00:54:55,238]: And as you said earlier and something I thought was quite stirring the sense that every moment might be a moral test that a religion that took that truly seriously would end up being very incompatible with ruling regimes and would have a lot of trouble from them which of course at times these religions have

[00:55:11,418]: Haven’t they

[00:55:12,258]: But then they’ve often conformed to you know that as well

[00:55:14,898]: Right

[00:55:15,058]: I guess you know I guess to see I think you’re making actually precisely the case for in different ways both Judaism and Christianity as probably divinely founded which is to religions have survived and persisted across multiple different kinds of cultures multiple different kinds of regimes in each era exactly as you say elements of these religions have made compromises have intertwined themselves in profound ways right

[00:55:48,438]: Like you couldn’t get more intertwined than medieval Catholicism and medieval feudalism

[00:55:53,478]: This is like you know and I think if you are a secular historian looking at that intertwinement you’d say probably whenever feudalism breaks up you know Christianity is going to go away too

[00:56:05,398]: Or Judaism right

[00:56:06,938]: Judaism is a you know religion of temple prayer religion that’s centered on the temple and the holy of holies and everything else

[00:56:14,138]: You look at that as a secular historian you’re like well obviously you know if some empire we’ll call it the Romans comes along and destroys that then you know Judaism is going to disappear too right

[00:56:25,018]: That’s not what happens

[00:56:27,098]: Instead you have these periods of intertwinement that are then shattered in some way

[00:56:31,398]: And in each case one I mean the first thing to say is that the radicalism that you describe persists in those eras as well

[00:56:39,458]: And again to go back to the point I was making earlier this is something that religions themselves advertise

[00:56:45,078]: Like the Old Testament the Hebrew Bible right is a story where the Jews are failing your tests right

[00:56:53,378]: The test that you Ezra Klein are setting you’re like well if this religion was really from God they probably wouldn’t all become idolaters

[00:56:58,198]: And they’re like Ezra here’s our holy book

[00:57:00,278]: It’s all about how we became idolaters

[00:57:02,138]: But guess what

[00:57:03,358]: Then God did something new and people did something new and the story continued

[00:57:08,618]: And I mean I just think what you’re offering I think you think it’s I don’t want to impede

[00:57:14,618]: I think yeah I think you think it’s a you think it’s sort of a I think you think you’re setting God free a bit from what you see as the corruptions of Trump era Christianity or medieval inquisition era Christianity

[00:57:27,918]: And you’re like no God is bigger than that

[00:57:30,838]: Therefore a religion that is always getting entangled with worldly power that can’t be where God is

[00:57:35,858]: But what you end up with is a council of despair where you’re like well the only religion that would be worthy of God is one that would be exterminated within like 50 years of its founding by the cruel state right

[00:57:46,418]: Like that’s you’re ending up saying that a religion good enough to join could not exist on the earth

[00:57:52,658]: Well I don’t think I’m saying a religion good enough to join could not exist in the I’m not trying to set God free from anything because I genuinely am not sure right

[00:58:01,898]: Like it’s not a pose for me

[00:58:03,918]: I’m not I think a couple of times in this you think I’m making an argument when I’m actually genuinely confused or if not genuinely confused genuinely uncertain

[00:58:12,398]: I find the uncertainty radical and I will say within my own belief system to the extent it counts as a belief system which I’m not sure it should just mystery and uncertainty is both very much at its heart and to me very comforting

[00:58:27,298]: When I was younger I just had a crippling fear of death just really truly terrible mortality anxiety

[00:58:36,538]: And somehow what eased it for me was eventually coming to the view that I just was never going to know

[00:58:44,858]: And I don’t know why I found that comforting and I don’t know why that has stuck but I did and to some degree it has

[00:58:50,938]: So when I say this I am actually not saying that I think I have some answer here that you don’t

[00:58:58,138]: I really don’t

[00:59:00,058]: Well I’m actually testing my intuitions against yours I want to hear your answers

[00:59:03,658]: You think right and I’m not trying to be too aggressive Ezra

[00:59:09,718]: I think that as you know from reading the book I think that the intuition that a lot of modern people have about that even if you can see that materialism is too limited there is just this fundamental unknowability hanging over everything I think that intuition is mistaken

[00:59:28,298]: I think it is correct about certain aspects of religion

[00:59:33,818]: I think there are issues in religion and questions in religion that hang over every tradition imperfectly resolved right

[00:59:40,718]: Like I don’t I’m not here to tell you I’ve resolved the problem of evil right

[00:59:45,098]: Problem of evil is a real problem it’s a real issue

[00:59:47,818]: Again I think it’s an issue that’s sort of there and acknowledged and wrestled with throughout the Old and New Testament but I don’t think you’re going to sit down and just reason your way into a solution to that problem

[00:59:58,518]: I do think though that you can get a little bit further like just even in the example that you cited

[01:00:05,018]: I mean I don’t know what your sort of metaphysical perspectives as a kid were but I certainly agree that I would personally find it more comforting to believe that death is a mystery than to be Richard Dawkins right and believe that death is just you know the absolute end and never could be anything else

[01:00:22,258]: I just think it’s it is in fact more probable than not that after you die you will you know meet God whatever God is and be asked to account for your life and so on

[01:00:33,058]: And that’s not always that’s not inherently comforting

[01:00:36,178]: Yeah you and I have had this conversation once before it can be quite terrifying

[01:00:39,878]: But I think it is that’s quite terrifying

[01:00:42,518]: But I think that it is something that is reasonable to believe that should give you a little bit more than just the sense of mystery

[01:00:53,098]: And more than that I think it is what God himself in his infinite mystery and power wants you to believe which is why he has me here talking to you

[01:01:03,338]: I have said I’m just working I’m no I mean I’m you know it doesn’t mean good things about you know my final destination

[01:01:12,518]: I’m just I’m just an instrument

[01:01:14,138]: But I guess the argument I’m just making is I think one can get just you know a little bit further than just mystery itself

[01:01:21,558]: One argument you make in the book you sort of give the example like the canonical example of if you believe in a merciful God how do you explain the child with leukemia

[01:01:29,638]: And you basically say that in any reasonable understanding of God any reasonable understanding of religion you can’t you can’t possibly understand the plan

[01:01:39,978]: You can’t possibly and we were in a way talking about this with Donald Trump that the sort of unfolding of things will always be so far beyond the human mind that the idea that you’ve like poked out a contradiction is a little bit ridiculous

[01:01:51,078]: I actually agree with that

[01:01:52,678]: But then I think that when it comes to the organized religions you say a few times that you sort of just have trouble believing a providential God would allow these religions that are wrong that are wayward to expand and thrive in the way that they have

[01:02:06,878]: And I think an intuition that probably people like me have is that it is hard to say that some things can be resolved by well a God who is good would not allow X to happen

[01:02:20,618]: And some things have to be resolved with you can’t possibly understand why God is allowing X to happen or Y to happen

[01:02:27,428]: And so questioning it or you know being unwilling to take this on faith is unreasonable

[01:02:35,378]: Yeah

[01:02:36,418]: I don’t think you should take on faith that the major world religions are providential

[01:02:45,158]: And I think you could imagine yourself in a world where you know if you lived in a world where the dominant set of religions all practiced human sacrifice and you know I think the case for taking the big religion seriously therefore you’ve pushed me on this effectively yeah can’t just rest on their size and scale alone

[01:03:15,558]: You do also have to think that you know in the aggregate they’ve had what you as someone who has you know particular moral intuitions given by God one hopes at some level have had a positive impact on the world and shaped it in you know in positive ways

[01:03:33,478]: And also that they have and this is also sort of important to my argument that they do have real overlaps

[01:03:41,418]: And I think that they do I think the major world religions if you look at them just and sort of analyze you know the ethical perspective of the major world religions you do see a certain kind of overlap

[01:03:54,298]: So yeah I think it is not enough to say these things are big and present and you have to take it on faith that they’re part of that they’re where God wants you to be

[01:04:02,738]: You do also have to actually look at them and pass some kind of judgment on them

[01:04:07,638]: Yes

[01:04:09,458]: As I so often do I want to go back to fairies

[01:04:12,978]: One of the other arguments you make is that the organize We should call them the good you don’t want to attract too much of their attention

[01:04:18,418]: So why don’t you call them the good people

[01:04:19,678]: The good people which I actually I will admit I am unfamiliar here and did not know that

[01:04:24,498]: So forgive me

[01:04:25,698]: You’ve come here to learn

[01:04:26,498]: Well actually this is exactly what I’m about to say what just happened right

[01:04:30,198]: Which depending on whether or not you believe in the good people I guess

[01:04:33,218]: Which is that one of your other arguments is that if you come to the view that the world has supernatural or extra human forces intelligences agents et cetera right

[01:04:44,598]: If you are a seeker of that sort that one thing the major religions have which is I think it’s fair to say has been largely downplayed in a lot of modern society is actually a belief about those dangers and arguably experience with those questions including maybe what to call and not call the good people

[01:05:05,138]: And that one of your arguments here is that there is more spiritual danger once you accept some of these premises than people often give credit to

[01:05:21,238]: That it’s not just about belief or unbelief it’s about the possibility of falling into the wrong beliefs of listening to the wrong voices of following the tricksters of following more demonic forces

[01:05:34,798]: And one thing you appreciate about Catholicism is a little bit more openness to that world of forces

[01:05:40,738]: I just found that interesting

[01:05:42,858]: I always find your kind of openness to the occult to be I don’t know

[01:05:48,138]: Openness to the occult is not what I want to advertise

[01:05:51,178]: Well I mean the reality is that in the book as you know I have an entire chapter on sort of supernatural experience and weirdness and I actually debated with myself how much to write about things that are explicitly demonic

[01:06:06,128]: Catholicism obviously has a special focus on this through the Office of the Exorcist

[01:06:11,198]: There’s lots of literature on the demonic and demonic possession and I ended up feeling quite uncomfortable writing about it too much and so there’s a couple paragraphs and some footnotes and people who are interested in it can follow that material

[01:06:26,158]: But there is a kind of yeah there’s a kind of balance that you want to strike as just an observer or a writer between sort of acknowledging those kind of weirder and darker and more disturbing realities but not like focusing too much attention on them and maybe my joke or is it about saying the good people right is sort of We both think we’re not joking Chris

[01:06:53,958]: Part of that hey now part of that perspective but I mean this is yeah this is there are one thing I’m absolutely certain about is that if there is a realm of supernatural experience that is real that is not just your brain chemistry you can access it maybe through altering your brain chemistry and taking ayahuasca and whatever but if that reality is real it is 100 dangerous like dangerous and especially Why 100

[01:07:27,158]: Well not 100 I don’t mean like it’s I don’t mean every aspect of it is dangerous but I mean it is certainly dangerous

[01:07:34,138]: There are dangers within it

[01:07:35,138]: There are serious dangers within it

[01:07:38,478]: Tell me about your views on psychedelics

[01:07:41,858]: I my not so I have never taken psychedelics

[01:07:46,658]: I’ve never been in an ayahuasca retreat

[01:07:48,478]: This is entirely based on reading and conversations

[01:07:52,218]: My view is that some psychedelics almost certainly open you to contact with non human spiritual experience in that it’s like again not in every case but it can be sort of a shortcut but that shortcut means that you’re entering these landscapes without the kind of preparation that not only the traditional religions but the shamans who use ayahuasca in the Amazon right or wherever they use it would say is necessary for for these these kind of And there’s you know a Twitter joke or a social media joke right about you know getting one shotted by a six dimensional Mesoamerican demon or something something something like that that people make about about these kind of drugs

[01:08:48,898]: And that’s a joke but I don’t think it’s entirely a joke

[01:08:52,958]: And so I think that that yeah I think that that possibility is real and it does not at the same time mean that lots of people can’t take these drugs and have mystical experiences that just sort of you know convince them that there’s more to reality than just the material and that is a correct view

[01:09:12,458]: So in that sense the drugs teach you something real about the world but it can be like like anything in human life right

[01:09:19,278]: And one of the points I try and stress is that religion is not like out there in some compartment where it’s totally different from every other thing and you can’t argue about it the way you argue about other things and so on

[01:09:30,518]: No like in other aspects of human life dealing with the supernatural is like dealing with the natural

[01:09:37,998]: There are good things and bad things and dangers and opportunities and you just want to be aware of that before you throw yourself into a realm of experience that you might not be prepared for

[01:09:50,778]: But I haven’t done it and you have or have you

[01:09:56,118]: Say what

[01:09:56,638]: Have you

[01:09:57,238]: Right

[01:09:57,618]: Have you

[01:09:57,858]: Yes

[01:09:58,588]: So you have you know immediate immediate information that I may not have but one could argue that doing those kinds of drugs and coming back from it not with a sense that you’ve been possessed by a Mesoamerican demon but coming back with a sense that man there’s more to the universe than I thought but I can never possibly figure out the truth

[01:10:22,378]: Also could be a deception that has been imposed upon you

[01:10:26,598]: Could be all kinds of things

[01:10:28,218]: I will say without going into any detail that I had once an incredibly profound and mystical experience that was to my genuine shock completely Jewish in nature and not from a side of Judaism that is a side that I had been brought up in and that I’ve never been able to shake

[01:10:51,458]: And that has made me much more open to my own tradition than I would have thought

[01:10:57,298]: And it actually Can you give me a bit more

[01:10:59,498]: No

[01:11:01,318]: Okay

[01:11:02,758]: Okay

[01:11:03,298]: Fair

[01:11:04,738]: But what I will say about it is that Okay

[01:11:09,318]: Okay

[01:11:09,638]: Wait wait wait

[01:11:10,358]: Yeah please

[01:11:10,718]: So I’ve done a lot

[01:11:11,498]: I’ve done I’ve done a lot of these these these conversations right

[01:11:14,818]: And this is not the first time when someone in a conversation who is officially sort of a Mysterian as you are has said oh but by the way I did have that one experience where it did sound like God was talking to me

[01:11:29,918]: I’ve had a few conversations like that

[01:11:31,858]: And so what I want to It was more frightening than that

[01:11:33,518]: Okay

[01:11:34,598]: Well even better

[01:11:36,658]: I’ll give you a little bit

[01:11:37,098]: I’ll give you a little bit

[01:11:37,858]: I wonder how happy our editors are going to be about this conversation

[01:11:40,198]: Oh I think they’re happy

[01:11:41,598]: I don’t know

[01:11:43,418]: It felt for a very punctuated period of time like a veil had been ripped open and you could feel how terrifying these forces really were

[01:11:59,858]: This is not the part where I’m a Mysterian

[01:12:01,698]: This is a part where some things are very hard to know where to put and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this within my own tradition right

[01:12:08,858]: In terms of what I am seeking I’m actually seeking something closer to home not something completely open

[01:12:14,338]: But it has to also feel real to me

[01:12:16,818]: I need to feel some gnosis from it as is put in the book

[01:12:21,198]: But do you have to

[01:12:22,638]: Well I feel I do or at least I But why I guess why isn’t that

[01:12:27,738]: So again without over describing your own experience to you why isn’t that enough to say okay the God of my fathers in some way gave me a glimpse of why we’re Jews and not Mysterians and I’m just going to go to my I mean you need to pick a politically appropriate synagogue and so on right and there are all kinds of issues with that

[01:12:56,158]: But I’m just going to go to synagogue even if I don’t feel gnosis

[01:13:01,038]: I mean I don’t feel gnosis from Sunday Mass with my oversupply of children right

[01:13:08,498]: I mean occasionally maybe You seem more comfortable with that than I am

[01:13:12,078]: Yeah a lot of

[01:13:12,638]: Well this is an interesting psychological thing that I’ve found in these discussions

[01:13:17,418]: I think part of it is having been around other people who had spiritual experiences right and sort of observed them and therefore accepted that like okay some people have profound experiences

[01:13:28,638]: I don’t

[01:13:29,398]: Maybe I would if I took ayahuasca but it’s okay for me to be a person who isn’t getting gnosis all the time but is like I feel good at Mass not always but most of the time

[01:13:40,098]: But it just seems to me that like you know when you’re called before the throne of you know the Most High and the cherubim and seraphim are there and you’re like well I wanted some gnosis and God is like I gave you gnosis

[01:13:53,578]: I gave you the big dose right

[01:13:55,658]: Here’s I think where the question of organized religion becomes then complicated

[01:14:01,358]: As I said it comes from a part of Judaism that is not the one I grew up in or even really know how to find out there

[01:14:08,238]: It’s definitely there

[01:14:09,238]: I can find it

[01:14:10,038]: I can talk to people in Judaism about it

[01:14:12,178]: But it’s stranger

[01:14:13,078]: And the reason it felt

[01:14:14,438]: You mean the mystical part of Judaism

[01:14:16,678]: Yeah it’s a much more mystical part of Judaism

[01:14:18,538]: Hold on let me finish my thing

[01:14:23,048]: And in part because I had so little experience with that I had to actually find the structure for what it was later that it didn’t feel like something my own mind had just invented right

[01:14:33,928]: Whoa

[01:14:36,988]: Part of the ceiling tape just fell down in front of Ross

[01:14:40,528]: You can take your signs where you get them

[01:14:42,628]: Okay

[01:14:43,348]: There you go

[01:14:45,688]: This will be better on video this particular episode

[01:14:47,828]: Yep

[01:14:50,588]: So and then you go to Things happen

[01:14:55,048]: Then you go to your sort of space that’s more organized and what you’re seeing doesn’t track that at all

[01:15:02,008]: No that’s fair

[01:15:02,968]: And honestly we had I mean as a kid we had experiences like that in my own family where my parents especially my mother we were Episcopalian which is you know a very anti mystical part of Christianity overall

[01:15:15,828]: And my mother had these intense experiences in a context of like charismatic healing services

[01:15:23,968]: And then we wanted a church to go to right

[01:15:27,068]: And it was hard to find starting in mainline Protestantism a church where it seemed like the thing that she had encountered was also there in some way

[01:15:38,528]: And I think in the end you know we went through a lot of places and ended up as Catholics in part because I do think Catholicism does a good job of saying look we’re not you know expecting the Holy Spirit to descend constantly all the time we have you know it’s a ritual religion you know in the sacraments work whether or not you’re feeling a blast of God’s presence but it is a reasonable desire to feel like the encounter you have has some relationship to what is being done on the altar or done in the rituals

[01:16:11,148]: I think that’s completely understandable

[01:16:12,788]: Let me ask you a broader question about psychedelics because the story I just offered a little bit on unwittingly is I don’t wanna say it’s common but I’ve read many like it from many traditions

[01:16:26,848]: One perception of these drugs or medicines or whatever you wanna call them is that they’re pretty profound spiritual technologies

[01:16:37,548]: If you believe in them from that perspective as opposed to you believe they’re just inducing some sort of random firings of chemicals

[01:16:43,748]: So you might imagine this is something that in a world that got disenchanted you would want these big traditions to try to take on to try to build some containers of safety and knowledge around them

[01:16:56,188]: But they seem like a thing that can pretty reliably create an experience that actually connects people in a very profound way to their home tradition

[01:17:06,508]: Now it can do other things too but as you say that’s true for a lot of things in religion

[01:17:11,488]: Why should they not be used as that

[01:17:13,728]: Why treat them as a cult as opposed to perhaps like a somewhat providential thing that emerged at this time when people badly need the help of things that create a kind of re enchantment and breaks the shell of logic that makes for many faiths so difficult

[01:17:32,488]: No I think that’s a fair question

[01:17:33,888]: And I think one answer is that they have they like all things that operate in reality from a Christian perspective they must have some providential expression

[01:17:45,748]: The Catholic view basically is that you’re not supposed to try and commune with spirits speak to the dead in certain ways

[01:17:58,568]: Like you shouldn’t go to a seance

[01:18:00,348]: Like there’s a certain set of things that Catholics certain set of supernatural experiences that Catholics are not supposed to seek out

[01:18:07,448]: And there’s some biblical warrant for this

[01:18:09,308]: And there’s sort of the explicit teaching of the church

[01:18:13,308]: And the simplest way to express why that is maybe is to say that the church thinks there’s a certain set of things that we know God is present in

[01:18:22,208]: And then there’s a certain set of things that are just like opening doors

[01:18:27,268]: And God and his providence can certainly be there when you open the door but we don’t have any kind of guarantee of that

[01:18:34,428]: And by opening the door you are opening yourself in a way that is fundamentally unsafe

[01:18:40,228]: Now again does that mean that someone can’t come to God by taking a psychedelic

[01:18:45,388]: No absolutely someone can under this theory

[01:18:49,568]: But for the church itself or for Christians in general there is a sense I think that like well once you are in then you aren’t supposed to go looking in those places anymore because we just don’t know what the potential dangers are there

[01:19:09,688]: Here’s the other skeptic interpretation of what I just said

[01:19:13,488]: The very fact that you can reliably induce mystical experience it just shows that this is just random firings of brain chemicals that this should make you much more skeptical all the way through that mystical experience has any truth value to it at all

[01:19:31,508]: The fact that something that in the case of LSD a Swedish chemist synthesized just mere decades ago can be some sort of reliable portal to people feeling like they had some kind of mystic experience

[01:19:45,928]: It actually implies that none of this was ever mystic at all that there’s some kind of pattern of brain chemicals that you can fire off that in the same way some patterns will make you depressed and other patterns will make you think your body is itching and other things will do that just one of those patterns creates the misapprehension of the numinous and that all this is actually not an argument for any kind of belief

[01:20:10,168]: None of it is a spiritual technology

[01:20:12,408]: What it shows you is that there’s kind of nothing here and it actually just explains away a huge category of experience that leads people towards these fantastical claims

[01:20:25,348]: Right and to be clear I don’t think that one should ever rest the case for the existence of God or the supernatural on psychedelic experiences alone anything like that

[01:20:41,028]: But Near death experiences in the book right

[01:20:43,208]: There’s fasting right

[01:20:44,288]: There’s a lot of induced mystical experience or mystical experience in moments of extremists and you do take it seriously so I guess I’m asking why not just the brain chemicals

[01:20:52,828]: I think what one should take seriously is the fact that clearly our minds exist in a dynamic relationship to our bodies and to physical reality and religious experience there are kinds of again to take the Barbara Ehrenreich example there is the kind of religious experience that falls on people unbidden in some way and I have seen this happen

[01:21:18,468]: And I think it’s a little bit hard to tell a brain chemistry story where it’s like why do human beings suddenly have this God apprehension thing that just sort of turns on

[01:21:34,248]: Like where did this apprehension device come from

[01:21:36,948]: All our other apprehension devices are evolved to meet some sort of actual reality

[01:21:41,588]: Well can I force you to steel me on this

[01:21:43,168]: Because I mean if you’ve ever read an Oliver Sacks book or familiar I mean as you are I know with mental illnesses there are many things that happen in our brains where you might say why do we have something like that that can ever turn on

[01:21:55,728]: But we do

[01:21:58,088]: Yes but religious experience and spiritual experience are at the very least in a distinct category from mental illness

[01:22:07,788]: People who have religious experiences are very often entirely sane and entirely aware of the strangeness of the experience they’ve had and so on

[01:22:15,248]: Again which doesn’t I take your point about the Sacks you know the Oliver Sacks stuff right

[01:22:20,148]: Like you could just say okay well you know people’s brains can misfire in this way and it yields mental illness and they misfire in that way and you know they think they’re encountering they’re encountering the numinous or something like that

[01:22:32,648]: I don’t think that’s an impossible view to hold

[01:22:35,448]: All I’m saying is that the religious world picture sort of already takes it for granted that your body the physicality of your body has some kind of connection to your apprehension of the divine

[01:22:47,108]: And most of the time you are not supposed to be apprehending the divine

[01:22:52,148]: And this goes to your you know to go back to your vision right

[01:22:55,128]: The idea that like religion is a scaffolding

[01:22:57,928]: Okay like reality itself is kind of like the Silicon Valley guys that say it’s a simulation right

[01:23:03,488]: Okay well it’s a world that you’re supposed to be in right

[01:23:07,208]: You’re supposed to be in this world

[01:23:09,348]: Whatever God is up to doesn’t work if we’re not in this world most of the time

[01:23:14,428]: And having a spiritual experience is getting our mind a little bit out of this material world but it’s not the way things are supposed to work all the time

[01:23:22,408]: We’re here as material embodied creatures for a reason

[01:23:25,988]: But yeah I don’t think there’s anything internally contradictory about thinking that the clear link between the physical and the spiritual means that you could reduce the spiritual to the physical experience

[01:23:41,568]: Well I always enjoy that there are these two completely opposite theories of what the brain is doing

[01:23:46,068]: And I’m not saying one isn’t much more accepted than the other but there’s the understanding the more materialistic sense of it that everything in our experience is the brain

[01:23:57,968]: And then there’s the theory that I have heard from some consciousness researchers that exist in the near death experience world that some of the psychedelics people believe that the brain is a kind of like a reducing valve

[01:24:10,528]: Yes

[01:24:12,168]: Tell me about that thought

[01:24:13,688]: Yeah that’s just the idea that whatever the mind or soul or consciousness is is capable of this much wider apprehension of reality including divine realities whatever those may be that aren’t really fully compatible with like being an embodied creature in the world right

[01:24:32,468]: And so to be an embodied creature in the world you need to be your mind’s capacities and experiences need to be reduced funneled down to the sensory inputs being processed by your eyes and nose and mouth and ears

[01:24:49,228]: And so that’s why when you have moments when you shake up the brain through when you put the brain in extreme circumstances via fasting and these kinds of things or when you reach the threshold of death the mind’s experience doesn’t actually seem to contract it seems to expand

[01:25:07,908]: And one of the challenges in explaining something like near death experiences from the materialist perspective is that they are described not as fragmentary hallucinations dream like experiences random chaotic

[01:25:23,128]: They are described as more real than real incredibly intense

[01:25:27,188]: They carry back into people’s post near death experience lives

[01:25:31,788]: They cause big changes to people’s near death experience lives

[01:25:34,768]: And it really is a little bit hard to tell an evolutionary just so story about why the brain is wired for some Darwinian reason to generate its most intense experiences at a time when for most people you’re just gonna die

[01:25:52,128]: You talk in the book about something you call official knowledge

[01:25:54,868]: What’s official knowledge

[01:25:57,228]: Official knowledge is the knowledge about the world that is considered normal and respectable in publications like the New York Times Ivy League universities most Wikipedia entries

[01:26:13,268]: You know the thing You can find very strange things on Wikipedia

[01:26:16,008]: You can but you know to their credit in a certain way the editors of Wikipedia try to sort of impose some of the same assumptions about the world that are shared by most of the formal institutions of knowledge creation out there

[01:26:34,648]: One of the things that has happened to you over the years and you’ve written very beautifully about is you’ve had kind of profound struggles with chronic Lyme and it made you more open to the way a lot of people feel failed by official knowledge and the institutions that produce it

[01:26:57,328]: And I’ve been interested in how that experience which I think is laced in some ways through the book the generalizability of it for you like what happens when all of a sudden what is official knowledge no longer conforms to the world as you experience it and the sort of crowbar skepticism that places between not just you and you know that particular institution but maybe you and all of them simultaneously

[01:27:24,428]: If this could be wrong if this could have failed me so profoundly well who’s to say it’s not all failing me so profoundly

[01:27:31,588]: Yes

[01:27:33,228]: No I mean that is the feeling that you have right

[01:27:35,968]: And so I had still have to some degree but I’m much better a chronic illness that is not officially recognized by the Centers for Disease Control

[01:27:44,908]: And indeed to say that you have the chronic form of Lyme disease is to identify yourself in some way with you know just the world of everyone from RFK Jr

[01:27:56,568]: to you know holistic wellness practitioners and so on a whole world that is held in severe disrepute by official knowledge right

[01:28:06,348]: Official medical knowledge

[01:28:07,288]: You say kind of pointing at me

[01:28:08,888]: Pointing no no no

[01:28:11,068]: I mean I think at the you know this conversation has been the most serious blow to official knowledge since no I don’t know

[01:28:19,768]: Yeah and so that obviously like I really was sick

[01:28:24,048]: I really did get better using a combination of really strong antibiotics and other stranger things that are not recommended by the CDC but it really did work

[01:28:33,128]: And I am morally certain both you know that chronic Lyme disease absolutely exists and the CDC’s recommendations are absolutely wrong

[01:28:41,508]: So then the challenge is you know you’ve seen that the pillar of official truth has a hole in it

[01:28:49,528]: How many holes does that mean that there are

[01:28:52,308]: And something that I have very self consciously tried to do in my own thinking about this and this applies to arguments about religion and religious belief as well is to not assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing it’s wrong about everything

[01:29:12,168]: That seems like a big mistake

[01:29:14,688]: And two not to assume that because official knowledge is wrong about one thing one important thing that really affected my life that all sort of evidentiary standards should be thrown out or anything like that

[01:29:29,348]: But that’s clearly a really hard psychological balance to strike

[01:29:33,668]: I think you just see this

[01:29:34,748]: I saw it myself

[01:29:35,528]: I spent a lot of time in worlds of chronic illness and alternative medicine and people just for totally understandable reasons became full spectrum skeptics about anything the government said anything that the you know American Medical Association said

[01:29:51,128]: If they’re wrong about my illness and my experience they must be wrong about everything

[01:29:56,408]: The pull of that is incredibly strong

[01:29:59,128]: And in the case of religion right

[01:30:00,648]: Like I think one of the things understandably that nice secular you know agnostic people fear about going too far with like my arguments is that the next thing you know we’re going to be you know throwing out all of modern science and progress and locking up Galileo and you know and so on all of these things

[01:30:24,268]: And you know I don’t want to say that that’s not a legitimate fear

[01:30:28,028]: There clearly are ways in which religious belief and religious doctrine can end up being an impediment to finding out what is true about the world

[01:30:36,408]: I’m interested in what is true about the world in the end

[01:30:39,048]: That is my goal

[01:30:41,528]: And your goal right

[01:30:42,828]: Hopefully right

[01:30:43,508]: All of our goal as journalists is to figure out what is true about the world

[01:30:48,228]: And I think to my mind very clearly certain things are true about the world that have to do with God and the possibility of the supernatural that are not encompassed by current official knowledge

[01:31:00,728]: And I think the modern liberal project is correct that there are just limits to the kind of certainty you can have and how that certainty should cash out certainly in politics

[01:31:10,928]: So there is a balance

[01:31:13,108]: And yeah anytime you’re trying to correct an official consensus you are looking for a balance where the correction doesn’t become an overcorrection

[01:31:23,528]: When we were young bloggers so many years ago

[01:31:26,968]: So many many years ago yes

[01:31:29,528]: It felt then you know the political system seemed deeply polarized on taxes on foreign policy on the Affordable Care Act

[01:31:38,788]: And I’m not saying those polarizations don’t still exist

[01:31:42,108]: They do

[01:31:43,468]: But we seem more fundamentally polarized now on official knowledge than on anything else

[01:31:50,728]: And the parts of the Democratic Party that were sort of outside that consensus you know led by a figure like RFK Jr have sort of become parts of the Republican Party the parts of the Republican Party you know they’re more inside that consensus and want to stay there

[01:32:03,928]: Some of them like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney have sort of moved away from at least the Trump Republican Party

[01:32:11,248]: And so the coalitions which used to have a mix of people sort of inside and outside like official consensus now are split between them

[01:32:24,248]: And like this feels to me like one of the things that is really deranged are politics that the parties are sort of like imbalanced in terms of their relationship to institutions

[01:32:36,928]: Democrats may be too trusting Republicans much much much in my view too skeptical with sort of too little sort of empirical and grounding anymore

[01:32:47,148]: I guess I was curious before you said yep a bunch of times if you agreed with that way of framing it

[01:32:51,188]: No no I absolutely do

[01:32:53,008]: Although yeah I mean I would you know on your last point

[01:32:56,568]: Yes you would

[01:32:57,208]: Well I would push harder on you know I think one reason that Donald Trump is president again is precisely that the party of official knowledge seem to do a lot of really crazy things and that made people more sympathetic to the party of outsider knowledge

[01:33:16,148]: But look now the party of outsider knowledge is in power

[01:33:19,888]: But let me add to that story just in one way which I think the polarization had already happened

[01:33:24,268]: And that’s actually part of what that period represented

[01:33:28,228]: One of the things Democrats didn’t have during that period was actually enough skepticism of the institutions of official knowledge

[01:33:35,608]: I think you would agree that the people pushing a lot of the ideas that you see as destructive from them and some of them I probably also feel were ultimately destructive were doing so wrapped in the garb of official knowledge you know wrapped in credentials coming out of universities et cetera that it was in part actually sort of an institutional monoculture on the Democratic side that created a loss of some of you know some antibodies that might have created some friction between that and going way too far

[01:34:08,728]: And then now you have the other side in power also without any antibodies

[01:34:13,188]: Yes and I think one of my disappointments about the Trump administration in the first three months is just how pure and uncut its sort of outsiderism seems to be right

[01:34:29,148]: And you know I think it was an open question when Trump was reelected

[01:34:32,928]: You know would RFK Jr

[01:34:33,968]: be running HHS or would he be running the president’s council on making America healthy again right

[01:34:39,768]: And we got the timeline where he’s running HHS and you can multiply examples

[01:34:45,708]: And I think in many of those examples you can see a version of the problem that I identified to you just now right

[01:34:54,288]: Which is that you can see it in the trade and tariffs debate this assumption that the experts got something big wrong and therefore Peter Navarro should make trade policy

[01:35:06,268]: And the second does not follow from the first

[01:35:09,448]: And the huge challenge for conservatism right now is to figure out how you generate some kind of stability of actual expertise in a party that is now sort of temperamentally completely you know anti establishment populist and so on

[01:35:30,008]: And I think there was a hope that the sort of Silicon Valley faction right that migrated into the Republican camp in part in reaction to some of the failures of expertise that you just acknowledged would sort of play a version of that role

[01:35:46,448]: And I think definitely Elon Musk has not played a version of that role to date

[01:35:52,008]: So the Republican Party is a party in search of a kind of stable system of official knowledge generation besides whatever Donald Trump decides right

[01:36:01,868]: And it doesn’t have one at the moment

[01:36:04,148]: For the foreseeable future

[01:36:06,108]: Always our final question what are three books you’d recommend to the audience

[01:36:09,008]: So I’m going to give three books on religion that connect to my attempt to sort of shift what official knowledge or the official knowledge of New York Times podcasters podcast listeners think about religion

[01:36:21,088]: The first one is a book called from about 20 years ago by a physicist named Stephen Barr called Ancient Physics and Modern Faith that is I think despite being a little bit dated is still really the best overall survey of sort of where arguments in modern physics that relate to religion stand and how a reasonable person might think about it

[01:36:42,788]: It’s not a dogmatic book

[01:36:44,088]: It’s a very open minded and interesting book

[01:36:46,578]: So that’s book one

[01:36:48,588]: Since we were talking about near death experiences there’s a million books about near death experiences many of them bad

[01:36:55,528]: I think people who are interested in this subject interested in the conversation one recommendation would be a book called After by Bruce Grayson who is a I think psychiatrist or neuroscientist from the University of Virginia who just has a good overview I would say from a perspective of a practicing physician of why people take these strange stories seriously and why it might unsettle a materialist worldview

[01:37:26,908]: And the third book I mean honestly Ezra maybe this is unnecessary since you conceded so much ground to the mysterians but I think a final book that’s useful to people who listen to this show and are like what are these two guys smoking talking about consciousness like this is a book that you know was very controversial in the philosophical community when it came out but a book called Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel who’s a famous philosopher not religious but arguing for the fundamental limits and problems with a materialist framework on the world

[01:38:02,468]: And it is a very short book which is why I don’t hesitate to recommend it

[01:38:07,608]: A lot of books about consciousness are not short but this one I think you can read and get a sense of why intelligent people might at least be inclined towards an Ezra Klein style mysterianism if not quite towards the militant Catholicism of Ross Douthat

[01:38:22,908]: Ross I enjoyed it a ton

[01:38:24,208]: Thank you very much

[01:38:24,728]: I enjoyed it as well Ezra

[01:38:26,088]: Thank you so much

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