@Jordan Peterson : 我认为近50年来，我们的发展速度放缓了，并且我们正处于一个似乎是世界末日的时代。 @Peter Thiel : 西方世界在科学技术进步方面经历了一个快速发展时期，但在过去50年左右的时间里，这种进步速度有所放缓。近年来，在“比特世界”（计算机、软件等）取得了进展，但在“原子世界”（物理物质世界）的进展却少得多。现代社会的高度专业化使得我们很难对整体的科学技术进步进行评估。过去50年，我们在物理速度上的进步已经停止，这从经济层面和直觉层面都可以看出停滞的迹象。如果一个观点一旦提出就遭到压制，那么这个观点可能就值得认真对待，科学领域的停滞就是一个例子。我认为阿波罗登月计划是最后一个伟大的科技项目，之后，我们从探索外部世界转向了探索内部世界。从阿波罗登月到伍德斯托克音乐节，标志着人们从关注外部世界转向关注内部世界，这与科学技术进步的放缓相吻合。科学技术的危险性（例如核武器的双重用途）导致了对科学技术进步的担忧和风险规避。核武器的出现标志着培根式的科学项目在某种程度上达到了顶峰并终结。与100年前相比，我们现在的进步速度正在放缓，尽管在某些领域仍然存在进步。我们正处于一个世界末日的时代，科学技术具有黑暗的一面，人类可能正在为自己设置陷阱。我们对环境和生物武器的潜在影响以及人工智能的潜在危险性感到担忧，这导致了对科学技术进步的担忧。 Jordan Peterson: 早期科学研究主要在修道院和大学进行，这表明基督教对科学革命的推动作用。科学的进步需要一些非科学的假设，这些假设是基于信仰的公理。一旦科学脱离了其背后的伦理基础，科学事业中具有破坏性的因素就会变得非常突出。基督教的人类学，而非仅仅是形而上学，推动了科学革命。基督教通过逐渐揭示真相，促使人们放弃替罪羊式的解释，进而寻求科学解释。人们对巫术审判的终结有两种解释：一种是科学证明了巫术是不存在的；另一种是人们认识到集体寻找替罪羊是错误的。基督教的兴起摧毁了异教世界，导致人们不再相信普遍存在的各种神灵，这为科学的兴起创造了条件。所有社会批判都始于对宗教的批判，而耶稣基督是第一个真正进行这种批判的人。人类具有很强的模仿能力，这既是文化传播的基础，也是社会冲突的根源。在现代社会，由于制度的瓦解，模仿行为变得更加不受控制，这可能导致社会冲突和灾难。十诫中最重要的两条是第一诫（敬畏上帝）和第十诫（不可贪婪），这表明向上看（敬畏上帝）和向外看（避免贪婪）的重要性。现代社会缺乏对超自然力量的信仰，导致人们过度关注周围的环境，引发不健康的竞争。模仿是人类的天性，我们无法避免模仿，但可以选择模仿的对象。吉拉德认为，解决模仿带来的问题的方法是去教堂。皮亚杰和吉拉德都强调模仿的重要性，但皮亚杰更关注模仿的积极方面，而吉拉德更关注模仿的消极方面。皮亚杰认为，人们通过模仿来组织社会群体和心理结构。宗教框架，特别是基督教框架，通过更高的原则来组织各种模仿游戏，避免其走向混乱。基督教的元游戏是自愿的自我牺牲，这与权力和享乐主义的元游戏形成对比。吉拉德认为，人们低估了模仿的负面影响，正常情况下的模仿远不如极端情况下的模仿重要。启蒙理性主义和圣经启示在看待群体方面存在差异：启蒙理性主义认为群体是智慧的，而圣经启示认为群体往往是疯狂的。吉拉德认为基督教是反牺牲的，基督的牺牲是为了避免人们继续牺牲他人。基督教的核心在于拒绝牺牲他人，而不是强调自我牺牲的价值。成熟意味着能够将短期满足感推迟到未来，这是一种牺牲行为。仅仅依靠理性不足以控制短期的冲动，需要更深层次的因素来引导人们做出牺牲。在学术界，一些保守派学者被开除，这是一种非理性的牺牲。我离开多伦多大学，是因为我拒绝做出那些非理性的牺牲。我拒绝做出那些被要求的牺牲，因为它们是非理性的。如果牺牲的结果是完全无法就业，那么这可能是一种非理性的行为。由于吉拉德的观点，我更倾向于关注牺牲过程中的病态方面。基督教强调要像孩子一样有信心，而以撒的信心是值得效仿的。亚伯拉罕的信心是一种成年人的妄想，而以撒的信心才是真正的基督教信仰。基督教的信徒应该效仿以撒的信心，而不是亚伯拉罕的信心。相信基督的复活既是历史事件，也是对永恒生命的承诺，这是一种理性的选择。我想和你讨论一下“孩子的信心”以及你为什么更倾向于关注事情的黑暗面。
我最近与彼得·蒂尔进行了一次深刻的对话，探讨了西方世界进步的停滞问题。蒂尔认为，人类最后一次真正具有突破性的成就可能是登月，此后，我们的进步速度明显放缓。他认为，恐惧、繁文缛节和过度专业化使我们变得更加谨慎，也降低了我们的雄心壮志。
我们深入探讨了社会如何从建设和发明转向数字分心和无休止的争论。我们还探讨了随着信仰和意义从公共生活中消失，我们失去了什么。从破败的大学到地位驱动的文化战争，这是一次对西方面临的挑战以及我们可能采取的应对措施的深刻而发人深省的审视。
蒂尔认为，西方世界在科学技术进步方面经历了一个快速发展时期，但在过去50年左右的时间里，这种进步速度有所放缓。他将这种现象总结为：在“比特世界”（计算机、软件、互联网等）取得了进展，但在“原子世界”（物理物质世界）的进展却少得多。
这种停滞并非完全没有迹象。经济层面，千禧一代的物质福祉可能不如他们的婴儿潮一代父母；直觉层面，我们物理速度上的进步在过去50年里已经停止，从更快的帆船到更快的火车、汽车和飞机，这种加速的趋势消失了。
高度专业化使得对整体科学技术进步的评估变得异常困难。各个领域的专家只关注自身狭窄的领域，难以形成对整体的认知。 更令人担忧的是，一些具有挑战性的观点，例如质疑科学领域的停滞，往往会遭到压制，这本身就值得我们深思。
蒂尔将阿波罗登月计划视为最后一个伟大的科技项目。此后，社会似乎从探索外部世界转向了探索内部世界，从关注宇宙转向关注自我。这种转变与科学技术进步的放缓相吻合，也体现在从阿波罗登月到伍德斯托克音乐节的文化转变中。
科学技术的危险性，特别是核武器的双重用途，也导致了对科学技术进步的担忧和风险规避。核武器的出现，在某种程度上标志着培根式的科学项目达到了顶峰并终结。 人们开始寻求逃避，无论是通过心理上的内省，还是通过数字世界的虚拟现实。
然而，这种逃避并非完全成功。人工智能等技术虽然看似只涉及“比特”，但一旦与无人机等物理载体结合，其影响又回到了“原子世界”，带来了新的伦理和安全挑战。
我们还探讨了基督教与科学革命之间的关系。早期科学研究主要在修道院和大学进行，这表明基督教对科学革命的推动作用。然而，科学的进步需要一些非科学的假设，这些假设是基于信仰的公理。一旦科学脱离了其背后的伦理基础，科学事业中具有破坏性的因素就会变得非常突出。
蒂尔认为，基督教的人类学，而非仅仅是形而上学，推动了科学革命。基督教通过逐渐揭示真相，促使人们放弃替罪羊式的解释，进而寻求科学解释。 巫术审判的终结就是一个例子，人们逐渐认识到集体寻找替罪羊的错误。
基督教的兴起摧毁了异教世界，导致人们不再相信普遍存在的各种神灵，这为科学的兴起创造了条件。所有社会批判都始于对宗教的批判，而耶稣基督是第一个真正进行这种批判的人。
人类具有很强的模仿能力，这既是文化传播的基础，也是社会冲突的根源。在现代社会，由于制度的瓦解，模仿行为变得更加不受控制，这可能导致社会冲突和灾难。十诫中最重要的两条是第一诫（敬畏上帝）和第十诫（不可贪婪），这表明向上看（敬畏上帝）和向外看（避免贪婪）的重要性。现代社会缺乏对超自然力量的信仰，导致人们过度关注周围的环境，引发不健康的竞争。
我们还讨论了牺牲的概念。成熟意味着能够将短期满足感推迟到未来，这是一种牺牲行为。然而，仅仅依靠理性不足以控制短期的冲动，需要更深层次的因素来引导人们做出牺牲。在学术界，一些保守派学者被开除，这是一种非理性的牺牲。我离开多伦多大学，是因为我拒绝做出那些非理性的牺牲。
蒂尔认为，基督教是反牺牲的，基督的牺牲是为了避免人们继续牺牲他人。基督教的核心在于拒绝牺牲他人，而不是强调自我牺牲的价值。 我们还探讨了模仿与牺牲之间的关系，以及如何通过信仰来引导人们做出正确的选择。
总而言之，这场对话揭示了西方文明进步停滞的复杂性，以及信仰、伦理和社会结构在其中的作用。 我们面临的挑战不仅仅是技术层面的，更是文化和精神层面的。 我们需要重新思考我们的价值观和目标，才能找到应对这些挑战的有效途径。
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00:15 我认为近50年来，我们的发展速度放缓了，并且我们正处于一个似乎是世界末日的时代。
◉
04:13 西方世界在科学技术进步方面经历了一个快速发展时期，但在过去50年左右的时间里，这种进步速度有所放缓。
◉
05:17 近年来，在“比特世界”（计算机、软件等）取得了进展，但在“原子世界”（物理物质世界）的进展却少得多。
◉
08:32 现代社会的高度专业化使得我们很难对整体的科学技术进步进行评估。
◉
09:28 过去50年，我们在物理速度上的进步已经停止，这从经济层面和直觉层面都可以看出停滞的迹象。
◉
11:33 如果一个观点一旦提出就遭到压制，那么这个观点可能就值得认真对待，科学领域的停滞就是一个例子。
◉
12:24 我认为阿波罗登月计划是最后一个伟大的科技项目，之后，我们从探索外部世界转向了探索内部世界。
◉
13:54 从阿波罗登月到伍德斯托克音乐节，标志着人们从关注外部世界转向关注内部世界，这与科学技术进步的放缓相吻合。
◉
16:49 科学技术的危险性（例如核武器的双重用途）导致了对科学技术进步的担忧和风险规避。
◉
17:50 核武器的出现标志着培根式的科学项目在某种程度上达到了顶峰并终结。
◉
20:57 与100年前相比，我们现在的进步速度正在放缓，尽管在某些领域仍然存在进步。
◉
21:26 我们正处于一个世界末日的时代，科学技术具有黑暗的一面，人类可能正在为自己设置陷阱。
◉
21:55 我们对环境和生物武器的潜在影响以及人工智能的潜在危险性感到担忧，这导致了对科学技术进步的担忧。
◉
32:44 早期科学研究主要在修道院和大学进行，这表明基督教对科学革命的推动作用。
◉
33:10 科学的进步需要一些非科学的假设，这些假设是基于信仰的公理。
◉
34:30 一旦科学脱离了其背后的伦理基础，科学事业中具有破坏性的因素就会变得非常突出。
◉
36:01 基督教的人类学，而非仅仅是形而上学，推动了科学革命。
◉
36:52 基督教通过逐渐揭示真相，促使人们放弃替罪羊式的解释，进而寻求科学解释。
◉
37:21 人们对巫术审判的终结有两种解释：一种是科学证明了巫术是不存在的；另一种是人们认识到集体寻找替罪羊是错误的。
◉
40:47 基督教的兴起摧毁了异教世界，导致人们不再相信普遍存在的各种神灵，这为科学的兴起创造了条件。
◉
42:47 所有社会批判都始于对宗教的批判，而耶稣基督是第一个真正进行这种批判的人。
◉
44:13 人类具有很强的模仿能力，这既是文化传播的基础，也是社会冲突的根源。
◉
45:23 在现代社会，由于制度的瓦解，模仿行为变得更加不受控制，这可能导致社会冲突和灾难。
◉
48:44 十诫中最重要的两条是第一诫（敬畏上帝）和第十诫（不可贪婪），这表明向上看（敬畏上帝）和向外看（避免贪婪）的重要性。
◉
49:36 现代社会缺乏对超自然力量的信仰，导致人们过度关注周围的环境，引发不健康的竞争。
◉
50:41 模仿是人类的天性，我们无法避免模仿，但可以选择模仿的对象。
◉
52:28 吉拉德认为，解决模仿带来的问题的方法是去教堂。
◉
52:48 皮亚杰和吉拉德都强调模仿的重要性，但皮亚杰更关注模仿的积极方面，而吉拉德更关注模仿的消极方面。
◉
53:57 皮亚杰认为，人们通过模仿来组织社会群体和心理结构。
◉
55:25 宗教框架，特别是基督教框架，通过更高的原则来组织各种模仿游戏，避免其走向混乱。
◉
55:46 基督教的元游戏是自愿的自我牺牲，这与权力和享乐主义的元游戏形成对比。
◉
57:14 吉拉德认为，人们低估了模仿的负面影响，正常情况下的模仿远不如极端情况下的模仿重要。
◉
58:14 启蒙理性主义和圣经启示在看待群体方面存在差异：启蒙理性主义认为群体是智慧的，而圣经启示认为群体往往是疯狂的。
◉
59:30 吉拉德认为基督教是反牺牲的，基督的牺牲是为了避免人们继续牺牲他人。
◉
01:00:41 基督教的核心在于拒绝牺牲他人，而不是强调自我牺牲的价值。
◉
01:02:58 成熟意味着能够将短期满足感推迟到未来，这是一种牺牲行为。
◉
01:05:56 仅仅依靠理性不足以控制短期的冲动，需要更深层次的因素来引导人们做出牺牲。
◉
01:08:17 在学术界，一些保守派学者被开除，这是一种非理性的牺牲。
◉
01:09:32 我离开多伦多大学，是因为我拒绝做出那些非理性的牺牲。
◉
01:10:31 我拒绝做出那些被要求的牺牲，因为它们是非理性的。
◉
01:12:13 如果牺牲的结果是完全无法就业，那么这可能是一种非理性的行为。
◉
01:13:48 由于吉拉德的观点，我更倾向于关注牺牲过程中的病态方面。
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01:15:32 基督教强调要像孩子一样有信心，而以撒的信心是值得效仿的。
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01:16:31 亚伯拉罕的信心是一种成年人的妄想，而以撒的信心才是真正的基督教信仰。
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01:18:15 基督教的信徒应该效仿以撒的信心，而不是亚伯拉罕的信心。
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01:18:36 相信基督的复活既是历史事件，也是对永恒生命的承诺，这是一种理性的选择。
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01:19:50 我想和你讨论一下“孩子的信心”以及你为什么更倾向于关注事情的黑暗面。
00:00
So this question of, you know, is there really progress? We used to move faster. We stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years. We feel like we are in an apocalyptic age. There is a dimension of science and technology. It has a dark dimension and it's, you know, it's a trap that humanity 语法解析
00:15
may be setting for itself. Much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities. You can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity. But I think there's something deeper there. It wasn't just the theological metaphysics that drove it, but something like the Christian anthropology. Okay, so let's delve into this a little bit. 语法解析
00:41
Thank you. 语法解析
00:54
So I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Thiel today, and Mr. Thiel is probably most famous for the role that he played in establishing PayPal, but he's been a canny investor for a very long period of time. And we didn't actually talk much about practicalities on the business side. We mostly talked about the nature of cultural transformation, because his thought tends in that direction. He's a philosophically inclined person. And 语法解析
01:22
Our discussion really walks through one of Peter's fundamental propositions, is that progress in the material world and not the digital world, let's say, has slowed substantively since maybe the 1960s, and that there are deep reasons for that. Some of it is apocalyptic fear of the scientific endeavor. Some of it is this hippie-like desire to look inside. Some of it is escape into a world of abstraction. And so, 语法解析
01:51
He outlined his theory of social transformation, which is also deeply influenced by a skepticism about what low-level mimetic envy predicated status games, which I think is a very wise target of skepticism. We walked through his thoughts on skepticism. 语法解析
02:15
social and technological transformation over a couple of hundred years, concentrating more on the last 60, and also began to flesh out a metaphysics that might ameliorate some of that nihilistic pathology and malaise. And that enabled us to at least begin a discussion about what metaphysical presuppositions are necessary for a society and a psyche to remain 语法解析
02:44
Well, not only healthy, but non-totalitarian and catastrophic. So, join us for that. So, the last time we spoke was by distance at ARC, and you said a number of things there that were provocative, and one in particular that I wanted to follow up on. It surprised me, although I think I understand why you said it. 语法解析
03:08
You're dubious about the rate of progress, so to speak, that we're making now. You feel, you seem to feel, I don't want to put words in your mouth that 语法解析
03:16
the most innovative times are perhaps behind us, or at least temporarily so. And so I'm curious about, we've seen these revolutionary steps forward in principle on the large language model front in the last year, and our gadgetry is becoming much more sophisticated. There's tremendous advancements in robotics. And so how do you conceptualize quantifying progress, scientific and technological? And why are you skeptical about the benefits or the rate? Well, 语法解析
03:45
Yeah, there are variations of this that I've talked about for close to two decades at this point. And, you know, the big—and it's, of course, there are all sorts of very complicated measurement problems. So how do we compare progress in AI with, let's say, lack of progress in dementia research, curing Alzheimer's? And so, you know, all these different complicated ways of how you weight all these different things. 语法解析
04:13
But there was a sense that the West, the Western world was in this fast era of scientific technological progress where it was advancing on many, many different fronts. And in some ways, it started picking up in the Renaissance, early Enlightenment, 语法解析
04:33
17th, 18th centuries, and then probably in important ways accelerated in the 19th, first half of the 20th. And then in some ways, I believe it's slowed down over the last 50 or so years, maybe 1970 or so is an inflection point one could cite. It doesn't mean it's stopped altogether. 语法解析
04:57
One way I've often summarized it is that we've continued to have progress in the world of bits. You know, computers, software, internet, mobile internet, maybe crypto, now AI. But there's been much less progress in the world of atoms. 语法解析
05:17
And if you think about a university setting, most of the engineering and scientific subjects had to do more with this physical material world in which we're embedded. And I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, class of '89. 语法解析
05:38
you know it wasn't quite obvious at the time but in retrospect almost anything that was in the world of atoms would have been a bad feel to go into physics chemistry um mechanical engineering certainly aero astro engineering nuclear engineering people already knew was was kind of outlawed and over by by the 1980s uh you you could um you could you could still maybe do electrical engineering which was sort of the atoms that were used for you know semiconductors 语法解析
06:06
But basically, the only STEM field that was going to be a really successful field for people to go into was computer science, which was kind of this marginal, almost fake field. Because I always have this riff where when you have… 语法解析
06:24
I'm in favor of science, but I'm skeptical when people use the word “science.” So social science, political science, climate science are called “science” by people who have an inferiority complex and say, “Deep down, no, they're not really rigorous scientific fields.” And something like this was true of computer science in the original day. 语法解析
06:45
It was people who were too dumb at math to be in mathematics or physics or electrical engineering, and they sort of flunked out into computer science. And weirdly, this was a field that worked and it had a decent amount of impact 语法解析
06:58
I don't think it was, and then it worked on the scale of people building some fantastic companies. There were certainly some important cultural and social transformations that we had as we moved from sort of the industrial age to the information age. I don't know if it's worked that well on, let's say, a broad economic level of well-being. So even if you measure it in terms of 语法解析
07:23
material well-being for people. The millennial generation, the U.S., is probably in a lot of ways not even doing as well as their baby boomer parents. It's the first time we've had this sort of economic stagnation or even outright decline. And again, the naive view would be that 语法解析
07:44
all this progress somehow translates into a more successful economy. It's not the only way to measure things, but it's sort of a straightforward way to measure things. And then when it doesn't translate, my conclusion is maybe it hasn't added up to as much. One of the reasons it's very hard, by the way, to 语法解析
08:05
to have this debate and even figure out what's going on is because one of the features of late modernity, unlike early modernity, is hyper-specialization. And we have ever narrower group of experts who are experts in their field. So the cancer specialists tell us they will cure cancer in five years. They've been telling us that for the last 50. And then the string theorists tell us they're the smartest people in the world. And it's very hard to evaluate these fields on their own terms, which is 语法解析
08:32
It's like Adam Smith had this concept of the pin factory, where you had 100 different people working in a pin factory. And you think of late modernity as the pin factory on steroids. We're so hyper-specialized, it's extremely hard to have a picture of the whole. And so this question of, is there really progress? Is there not? It's kind of a hard one to get at. But I think if you measure it in economic terms, 语法解析
09:00
There's a slowed sense. If you measure it in this sort of intuitive thing where, okay, we'll just look at a bunch of different fields, like cancer, supersonic aviation, you know, just all these different ways. You used to move faster. You move faster every decade from, you know, 1500 on. It was faster sailing boats and faster railroads, faster cars, faster planes. We've stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years. So, you know, that's one dimension. And so there sort of is a common sense way that we have stagnation. There is a… 语法解析
09:28
There's an economic way to measure it. And then there's probably always a political intuition I have on this too, which is that perhaps if you have ideas that are taboo, that you're not allowed to discuss, my shortcut is to suspect they're simply correct. And so the example I always give is Professor Bob Laughlin is a Stanford physics professor. 语法解析
09:54
I think around 1998, he gets a Nobel Prize in physics. And he suffers from the extreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel Prize, he finally has academic freedom and can talk about whatever he would like to talk about. There are all sorts of areas that are very taboo in the sciences. I mean, question Darwinism or question stem cell research or… 语法解析
10:16
question, you know, climate change. These are very dangerous areas. But he picked one that's even more dangerous than any of those three. He believed that most of the scientists, so-called scientists, were basically stealing money from the government, engaging in borderline fraudulent science, or it was incrementalist, not worth much. You know, his area of special interest 语法解析
10:36
His area of focus was high temperature superconductivity. And he told me at one point there were maybe 50,000 papers written in that area and maybe 25 out of 50,000 had actually advanced the science at all. And I don't even need to tell you how the, and then he started by, yeah, it was not just the abstract replication crisis. He started by talking about naming people. And this person has stole money and this person is a fraud. 语法解析
11:05
And I mean, I don't even need to tell you how that movie ended. He promptly got defunded. His students couldn't get PhDs anymore. And so, and then my hermeneutic of suspicion is if you have an idea like stagnation in science, which immediately gets you deplatformed, that's an idea we should take very seriously. So that's a political intuition I have on this. So I have a few of these different ideas that we've been a lot more stuck. It doesn't mean… 语法解析
11:33
um it doesn't mean that there's been zero progress it doesn't mean that um the progress we've had has been uniformly good um it doesn't mean that people's fears about the limited progress we have are are unjustified either maybe all these things um are actually part of the explanation for you know for why why the stagnation has happened um now now there's a much harder question um 语法解析
11:59
And then there's sort of our cultural transformations that one can describe that at least coincided with us and were correlated. How causal they were is always hard to say. But if we sort of think of the Apollo space program as this last great technological scientific project, there's some sense where… 语法解析
12:24
July of 1969, where we landed on the moon. And Woodstock started three weeks later. And, you know, with benefit of hindsight, 语法解析
12:35
In some sense, that's when progress, scientific technological progress stopped and the hippies took over the country. And you can describe it in many ways, but in some ways you can describe it as a shift from outer space, from exploring the world outside of us to inner space. And there were sort of all these different transformations. There was a 语法解析
13:02
There was a, you know, and I would describe, you know, yoga, meditation. I would describe, you know, psychedelic drugs. I would describe, you know, I don't know, incels playing video games in basements. You know, there was all this incredible, maybe continued atomization, the navel-gazing, 语法解析
13:26
of identity politics in a way. You could say that people often lump, for example, they often lump Marxism and cultural Marxism together. In my telling, these are opposites because Marxism at least was primarily concerned about the outside objective material economic realities. And then cultural Marxism was like the shift from Apollo to Woodstock. 语法解析
13:54
where you just went into the sort of interior world. You no longer were thinking about this outside world. And in some ways, 语法解析
14:06
you stopped asking these questions about economic growth and basic economic prosperity. And then that coincided with, also with this lack of progress in these things. So I think there were all these kinds of cultural transformations that coincided with this shift. You know, I think the people often ask why this stagnation happened. My standard 语法解析
14:35
or you know if you agree with us and of course people can disagree you know how much had happened but if you agree with me that there's been you know a slowing down of progress that you know in some sense the singularity was maybe more in the past than in the future um uh and you always have these questions why why did it happen and 语法解析
14:54
My cop-out answer is always that why questions are over-determined. And it could be, you know, it could be sort of our society became risk-averse or too feminine. There's something deeply satisfying about a good spring refresh. And while decluttering and storing away winter items makes a difference, refreshing your bed might be the most rewarding change of them all. 语法解析
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15:30
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15:49
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16:14
Exclusions do apply. See site for details. Or you could say that, uh, 语法解析
16:19
You could say that there was too much regulation and bureaucracy, which is sort of a libertarian intuition I have. But I've come to think that one of the bigger factors was the sense that a lot of the science and technology was quite dangerous. It had, at least in a military context, had a dual-use character. And, you know, this was… 语法解析
16:49
I mean, there was already some relentless acceleration of this stuff in the late 18th, 19th centuries, you know, Napoleonic Wars. 语法解析
17:01
colonel cult with the revolver alfred nobel inventing dynamite um you know world war one you know was sort of a break point where you know the sort of naive progressive narrative really got undercut and um and then somehow you can you can say that the sort of baconian science project in some sense 语法解析
17:24
ended, were ended in the Hegelian senses, both culminated and terminated at Los Alamos with the building of nuclear weapons. And then, again, it doesn't work perfectly, but my telling would be that it took maybe a quarter century for nuclear weapons to really get internalized by society. And then by the 1970s, you know, the energy… 语法解析
17:50
The energy was, “We don't want to be doing this outside world where we're going to build ever more thermonuclear bombs. We want to be peacing out at Burning Man with psychedelic drugs. We want to…” Or you escape back to nature through environmentalism. 语法解析
18:12
We want to be in a world not of change, but of stasis, because a world of change has this apocalyptic dimension. Change is change for the worse. That's the sense that gets encapsulated in the 1970s. There's a way that the sort of progressive version of science, we try to put the pause button on it. 语法解析
18:35
the places where it's still allowed, you can say, are the most inert. So in a way, the world of bits was seen as incredibly inert because you're not building bombs, you're not building weapons with it. 语法解析
18:49
And then, of course, even there, there's some sort of way in which the ideas on the internet, maybe they do translate into reality every now and then. What happens on Twitter or X doesn't always stay there. Most of the time it stays there, so it feels like it's this extremely angry, intense conversation, but every now and then it still translates to the real world. So the internet, you could say, was allowed because it was sort of a safe space. It was a place where the 语法解析
19:17
the sort of violence could be contained. And then even there, probably not totally, and even there people felt it was like maybe too much. But yes, the sort of apocalyptic background of late modernity where, you know, 语法解析
19:33
you know, every microaggression has the potential to escalate to Armageddon, is in the background. And again, I don't like the stagnation and the risk aversion and all these responses, but there's a part of it that I think is understandable. So it sounds to me, now that you've clarified that, it sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that what you're grappling with is… 语法解析
20:02
more of an attempt to account for where we are now and how it's different from, let's say, the post-war period or maybe even the Enlightenment to the post-war period. Like, things have shifted radically. And it sounds to me like what you're outlining is a, what, it's an attempt to characterize the nature of that shift, perhaps even more than an attempt to 语法解析
20:26
deny the idea that there's any progress. You said yourself when you were laying out your argument that it's very difficult to measure progress, but it's also undeniable that many, many things have shifted and we're not where we were, let's say, well, 10 years ago probably, and certainly not 30 years ago. Well, I would say we are… 语法解析
20:45
broadly progressing more slowly than we were 100 years ago. We are still progressing in some dimensions. There may be still too fast and too scary for people, but the big thing that has shifted 语法解析
20:57
vis-a-vis let's say the world of 1913 pre-world war one is that uh we feel like we are in an apocalyptic age that there is that you know there is a there is a dimension of science and technology that um you know has it has a dark dimension and it's you know it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself and you know i don't like greta and i don't like the full precautionary principle but uh you know 语法解析
21:26
her argument that we have just one planet isn't entirely wrong. So you see this shift in part as… 语法解析
21:33
a shift from the ethos of progress, the prior assumption of progress. I don't want to abstract it too much. It is actually, it's the specific nature of the progress that happened. It is, we got thermonuclear weapons. We are powerful enough to affect the environment. I'm not sure whether carbon dioxide is the most important dimension, but the 语法解析
21:55
There are probably a lot of dimensions where the environment can be impacted in very radical ways. We can probably build very dangerous bioweapons. Maybe that's even what was going on in the Wuhan lab. There are dimensions of AI that are potentially violent and very dangerous. And you don't have to necessarily believe the… 语法解析
22:20
all these sort of weird pictures where it's this super intelligence that's somehow completely disembodied and is going to kill every last human being on the planet. But there are natural ways to combine it with weapons technology 语法解析
22:33
that feel um unsettling unsettling and just you know a simple example is that uh you know we have we have these this this drone technology that's that's again a new form of technologists that's come to the fore in the uh in the conflict between uh Russia and the Ukraine and uh and 语法解析
22:54
And you have a human in the loop, but the human can get jammed. And so the natural fix is to put AI on the drones and turn these into more autonomous weapon systems. And that's, you know, that's… Seems inevitable. That seems like the natural, logical thing to do. And then… 语法解析
23:14
Even I, as a pro-tech person, have to say I find that somewhat unsettling. Okay, so let me lay these ideas out again and summarize. So one of the threads that you were developing was, we'll do two at the same time. One was that the scientific process in terms of physical reality, maybe in your view, peaked in the 1960s. 语法解析
23:45
And then you could imagine that there are… You kind of outlined two maybe reasons for that. One was fear of the apocalyptic consequences of that technology and an escape into various forms of abstraction. So some of those abstractions were psychological abstractions, inner journeys, but some of it also was escape into digital abstraction. And then you also made a case that the avenue for exploration in the digital realm was still open. And so maybe we could understand this. So… 语法解析
24:15
And then in the digital realm, and then in some ways, even these escape, weren't full escape. So AI, yeah, that's a, it seems to be just about bits, not atoms. But then if you combine it with a drone, you know, the AI comes back to the physical. Yeah, well, we can, we'll get back to that, back to the overlap. But so you could imagine that, okay, so the scientific… 语法解析
24:38
approach, the method, produced an explosion of technological consequences. Many of them were dramatic in the physical world. There was kickbacks against that. One of the kickbacks was the apocalyptic element. The other was the 语法解析
24:53
turn away from spirituality, you might say, but then there was also the counter position that always develops in any… after any revolution is that things get tangled up in red tape in weird ways. Like the scientific… I was just in Uzbekistan, you know, and they developed a pretty sophisticated industrial economy in the last five years. And part of the reason that they could do that was because 语法解析
25:18
There was nothing in the way, right? Because Uzbekistan was kind of devoid of impediments to radical entrepreneurship in the aftermath of the communist default. Now, you could imagine that for a good time, the scientific method was so powerful that it was producing revolutions nonstop. And the legal and bureaucratic frameworks were lagging it. 语法解析
25:39
And so they caught up quite remarkably by the 1970s, and that left the digital space still open. And it is kind of a free-for-all space, right? Yeah, but the way you're telling the story, it has too much of this timeless and eternal character. This is just what always happens. Yeah, right. Well, that is what I'm wondering. Whereas the story I want to tell has more of a one-time and world-historical character to it, where it is… 语法解析
26:05
You know, there were lots of inventions where people figure out cures for diseases. That didn't say, “Okay, now we have to take a step back and cure fewer diseases.” That actually encourages you to double down on that and do even more. Or, you know, we have 语法解析
26:20
You know, we have all these machines that replace humans in factories. And yeah, there's some downsides to it, and there are labor problems with the Industrial Revolution, and there's a lot of pollution. But on the whole, the good way outweighs the bad. And there was no big regulatory counter-movement in Victoria. Okay, let me make a counter-example. But then we get to something like thermonuclear weapons. 语法解析
26:45
And that specifically has a very different character. It has a really different character. And probably, I don't know, by the 1950s and 1960s, you know, baby boomers get, you know, you're a kid, you get brought up on Dr. Seuss and not on adventure stories. 语法解析
27:02
And it probably changes childhood education, it changes the way we form and develop human beings. And so it leads to a society where science and technology no longer have quite of this former valence. 语法解析
27:24
There's always sort of an interesting big picture history question of how much science and technology, you know, were they, how they were entangled with Christianity in the West and were they sort of, they were somehow entangled, but was it meant as a compliment where, you know, you're sort of encouraged to understand God's creation and this is sort of a way that it's, you know, it's a, 语法解析
27:53
It's a fulfillment of a furtherance of this? Or was it meant to be a substitute where it was an alternate way to build heaven on earth without requiring God? Radical life extension was sort of an important part of the early modern project. Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet, all these people thought that you could perhaps indefinitely prolong human life. And then, you know, and… 语法解析
28:23
And so I think early modernity, you know, it wasn't the only thing, there were a lot of complicated things going on, but a lot of it had sort of an anti-biblical valence. And you could say that 17th and 18th century scientists, you know, and again, this is where I think someone like Francis Bacon, 语法解析
28:47
needs to be interpreted as a hardcore materialist atheist and it is we need to we need to stop religion because it's slowing down this wonderful scientific progress and then i've had this bacon discussion with a number of people lately and they all think no no that can't be right bacon was just the somewhat heterodox christian and um because in late modernity where we find ourselves again it's complicated to describe what's going on culturally but in late modernity um 语法解析
29:17
It's the atheist liberals that are anti-science at this point. And so if you think about Hollywood… Richard Dawkins' despair. Yeah, you have to think of Richard Dawkins as a representative of early modernity. He is like a fossil from before 1789. He's the last of the Enlightenment. He's a fossil from before 1789. And… 语法解析
29:40
And Greta is more representative. Or, you know, if you think about the Hollywood atheist liberals, the movies are all about technology that doesn't work, it's scary. 语法解析
29:48
And so to the extent, the way the anti-Christian argument gets made in late modernity is that it's, yeah, it's God's fault, but this time it's God's fault for putting us on this whole dangerous project in the first place. And it's like, yeah, it's like the lines in Genesis, you shall have dominion over the earth. And so in the 17th and 18th century, you know, the Christian God was blamed for, 语法解析
30:15
for slowing down the scientific technological project. In the 20th and 21st century, the Christian God gets blamed for starting it up, starting it, speeding up, keeping it going. So the invariant is the Christian God always gets blamed. But the fact that it's the exact opposite tells us something different. 语法解析
30:36
Very interesting about how, yeah, how this is transformed. Now that's interesting because you're making the point that two opposite arguments are making that are both directed towards furthering Nietzsche's death of God, let's say. Missions to Mars, driverless cars, AI chatbots, feels like we're already living in the future. Well, Robinhood is built for the future of trading. Robinhood's intuitive design makes trading seamless so you can spot opportunities to take control of your trades. 语法解析
31:02
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31:23
So then that begs the question, what's the actual motivation? The only point I'll make is that we're, again, in a very… 语法解析
31:33
different place with science and technology than we were in the 17th, 18th century. 17th, 18th century, I don't think people would have said, yeah, we're going to make all this progress and there's going to be a lot of pushback and it'll get regulated. I know the thought was we'll make a lot of progress and it'll be so good that it will actually then accelerate and it will, you know, it'll smash religion even more and then we can go even faster and it'll go even better. And it's going to have this sort of unraveling, accelerating effect. And then, and 语法解析
32:01
And then in the 20th, 21st century, we make the opposite argument as there are some things in this project that have gone somewhat haywire. Okay, so let's pick up on the religious thread for a moment. I've been trying to understand the relationship between 语法解析
32:23
Christian Europe, let's say, and the dawn of the scientific age for a long time. And so let me outline something for you, and then I'll turn back to exactly what you said. So it seems to me, I mean, much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities. And so there's certainly a trail of 语法解析
32:44
from Christianity through the monasteries to the universities. And so you can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity. But I think there's something deeper there. And so I've tried to make this case with Dawkins, for example, not least after he called himself a cultural Christian. So it seems to me that for science to get going as a motivational project, 语法解析
33:10
There are some assumptions you have to make that aren't scientific. So they're axioms before the game gets going. And I think they're faith-based axioms. 语法解析
33:19
One is that the cosmos is intelligible, that it's intelligible to the human mind, and that diligent investigation of that intelligibility produces an increment in knowledge, both practical, both conceptual and practical, and that that increment in knowledge is good. But then there's maybe a deeper presumption, which is that increment in knowledge can be good if the 语法解析
33:44
point of the knowledge pursuit remains encapsulated in something like the underlying Christian ethos. And then I would say that fractures in a way, perhaps Bacon's a turning point, where the reliance of the scientific endeavor on these 语法解析
34:06
metaphysical presuppositions is questioned or like when I presented Dawkins with that argument He just waved his hands over and he said he doesn't have any metaphysical and sub assumptions underlying his brand of science But but and I think that that is what the more radical enlightenment French Revolution types thought is that no We've escaped from the underlying religious ethos. Okay, the problem with that is that 语法解析
34:30
it seems to me, and I think this might have to do with this apocalyptic kickback, is that once you unmoor yourself from the underlying ethos, which is even the ethos that defines what constitutes knowledge and progress itself, then the Luciferian element of the scientific endeavor can begin to loom extremely large. Well, again, let's start with the early modern history, and 语法解析
34:54
I'm always a sort of hardcore Girardian, this great thinker, intellectual, sort of in some ways Christian polymath that I studied under Stanford in the late '80s, '90s, and influenced me tremendously. 语法解析
35:18
You know, these things are, again, very complicated intellectual history questions, but certainly one intuition that's odd about your telling would be that you would say that, you know, we had sort of a law-centered… 语法解析
35:36
monotheistic tradition also in Islam, also in Judaism. And if we say there was something about Christianity where this really came, and it was not in the Islamic world that you got the scientific revolution, for example, it's just that maybe it wasn't just the metaphysics, not just the theological metaphysics that drove it, but 语法解析
36:01
but something like the Christian anthropology. Girard was fond of always saying that when people focus too much in the Bible on what it tells us about God, there must also be something it tells us about– - Man. - About man. - Yeah, okay. - And certainly the Girardian intuition is that one of the things is always that there's this really big problem of violence and scapegoating, and that in some ways, 语法解析
36:31
some sense of Judaism and then Christianity, it's the same story. It's the same story of, you know, sacrifice, but it's told not from the point of view of the violent community. It's told from the point of view of the innocent victim. And there's a certain way where it sets in process this gradual process 语法解析
36:52
this dynamic revelation that has, that leads to a sort of gradual unraveling. And there are, and as you stop believing in scapegoats, you're forced to come up with other explanations, and that includes science. So, for example, you can ask, why did the witchcraft trials come to an end? And the atheist scientific explanation is, we got science to prove that witchcraft is impossible. 语法解析
37:21
And I don't think that's even been proven in 2025 because we don't know everything. Maybe it's a lost art that's been lost. Maybe you can go to a, 语法解析
37:35
You know, you can go to a bookstore in Berkeley, buy a book on how to be a witch. There's not a lot of difference between placebo effect and magic. But then the Girardian alternate story of why the witchcraft trials ended were that at some point people realized that this sort of collective scapegoating in some ways was like a version of the… 语法解析
37:58
death of christ you know the witches were not absolutely innocent like christ but they were relatively innocent it was a community that that that went crazy and then you you know and then once you know that the witches are innocent or are relatively innocent then um then you steal yourself and force yourself to find natural explanations you know if you don't think that it was you know i don't know the jews that poisoned the wells in the middle ages 语法解析
38:23
Or some devils or… Eventually, or, you know, this was during the Salem witch trials, there were these, you know, you had these competing sermons on Sundays and, you know, the initial ones were sort of that, yeah, these women had made a pact with the devil, but then the way it got reconstructed, because it was right afterwards that the witchcraft trials ended and people sort of realized pretty fast they'd kind of collectively lost their minds. 语法解析
38:49
And the alternate one was, you know, the devil had entered the whole community and had possessed all of Salem. And those were the sermons you gave in the aftermath of the witchcraft trials. And then in that sort of a context, you know, maybe science was also a way to find, you know, you can steal yourself to find natural explanations. When you were in an archaic, you know, 语法解析
39:16
scapegoating is always an explanation. It's a, you know, this person did this, that person did this, it's that person's fault. And when you say those explanations won't do, maybe you're forced to do a scientific explanation. So there are all these different threads one can stress. I think you have to always ask this question again. 语法解析
39:38
what was specific about the Christian message that really enabled this? I think there was a way the Jewish context was extremely learned and people, I don't know, if you compare the Talmudic 语法解析
39:59
abilities already in the middle ages to understand the Bible, to read it. It was as good or better than anything that the Christian scholastics were doing. But somehow it never really got a part of society to orient in this other way. 语法解析
40:21
But again, it's obviously a complicated history. Well, so one of the things you pointed out there that's very interesting is that Christianity, the rise of Christianity destroyed the pagan world. And that's a great mystery. But one of the epistemological consequences of that was the notion that deities weren't widespread anymore. 语法解析
40:47
That idea had to disappear, you know, the Romans had gods for their archways, right? So there was an idea that there were invisible spirits, so to speak, that were operating behind the scenes that could easily be interpreted as causal mechanisms. But you can imagine then, I'm also trying to integrate this with what I learned from Jung, you can imagine that as the world's desacralized at the pagan level, 语法解析
41:09
And the kinds of interpretations that you just described are no longer tenable, right? There are these invisible agencies, some of them personalities that are operating. That isn't working anymore. That gets all aggregated into a monotheistic deity and the magic gets pulled out of the world. See, Jung also pointed out that as the Christian people, 语法解析
41:33
revolution transpired, the alchemical mythology started to become widespread and that there was an idea that developed that there were 语法解析
41:43
mysteries lurking in the material world that had redemptive capacity. And so you could imagine that as the spirits are taken out of the world, the suspicion, you already said this, the suspicion that there are other causal forces at work starts to make itself manifest in at least the imaginations of people who are on the cutting edge. And so I wonder if that's a, is that an inevitable consequence of the victory of Christianity over the pagan world? Because it gets desacralized 语法解析
42:12
merely because everything that's divine gets united into a single figure, 语法解析
42:19
I think it was somewhere in Karl Marx where he says that, you know, all social criticism starts with the criticism of religion. And then the Christian addendum, I would always say, was that Jesus Christ was the first person to actually do that, really, and started that whole process where, you know, you can think so much of it was, you know, calling into question the social institutions, the religious institutions, you know, in a way deconstructing them, you know, what, you know, 语法解析
42:47
And there's something about this that is, you know, I think is true. 语法解析
42:58
I think there is something about it that has an unraveling character. And I don't think you can go back. We can't go back to these pagan institutions once they have been deconstructed. And, you know, maybe the gods get recharacterized as demons or psychosocial phenomena. Or, yeah, unconscious manifestations. But, you know, that doesn't sound like, you know, the way you really bring Zeus back to life. 语法解析
43:25
into the way it would have been understood by the average person in ancient Greece or something like that. But yeah, I think, you know, there's a, one of the other dimensions that, I mean, it was sort of this combination of literature and anthropology 语法解析
43:48
But also, there was always a psychological dimension to Girard. And the psychological intuition in Girard is that there's something about human beings being imitative that's very deep, very important, very underexplored. And it is that, you know, you have… 语法解析
44:13
You have something like, it's something like, I believe it's in Aristotle. Man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation. Yeah, it's a huge difference between us and other animals. And then you could say this is, and of course Darwinism says our closest relatives are the apes. And the apes, 语法解析
44:35
They ape, they imitate. And so we differ from the apes in being more ape-like than the apes. If you sort of combine the Aristotelian and the Darwinian one, that's kind of a very, very strange thing in a way. And then the problem, the good thing about imitation is this is how culture gets transmitted. This is how you learn language. Without imitation, nothing like the sort of cultural… 语法解析
45:02
that we have would work. And then the thing that's dangerous is it's not just on a representational level, it's not just on the level of ideas that people imitate, it's also on the level of desires, of things they want. And when everybody wants the same thing, this becomes this incredibly, incredibly 语法解析
45:23
violent thing. And then, in Gervard's understanding, the point of, you know, a major point of a lot of the laws, divine laws in these archaic societies was to, in some sense, stop imitation, to prevent imitation, to, you know, the job you do will be the same job that your father did. 语法解析
45:46
if your father's a baker, you'll be a baker. And this creates a guild system where you don't have this sort of free market competition between everybody and it all goes, everybody's at everybody else's throats. And then somehow, what's happened in late modernity in Girard is that as these institutions have unraveled, there has again been this freedom to imitate like we did 语法解析
46:15
before we had anything cultural at all, before we had invented, you know, when the apes hadn't yet invented religion or, you know, these sacred structures that somehow channeled the violence. And so in late modernity, it's again, the mimesis is… 语法解析
46:33
is, you know, it's what makes our society dynamic, but there are no natural barriers, and that's also, you know, what can give it an apocalyptic dimension or, you know, this, and again, there are ways it doesn't fully spiral into thermonuclear war all the time, or hasn't yet, but, you know, it has this super open-ended dimension where it can go in all these different ways, you know, and 语法解析
46:59
There's probably, again, we're throwing out a lot of different ideas here. There probably is something about the loss of the transcendent. 语法解析
47:15
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47:44
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48:10
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48:32
And so one of the intuitions Girard always had on the Ten Commandments is that the most important were the first and last on the list. The first commandment, you know, 语法解析
48:44
Only worship one God. There's one God above you. That's who you worship. The 10th commandment is one about, you know, not coveting the things that belong to your neighbor, not being too your neighbor's ox or wife or, you know, this whole set of things. And it's basically when you, you know, when you stop looking up, you start looking around. And when you look around too much, 语法解析
49:09
It's not a wisdom of crowds. It's a madness of crowds. And then that is… That's the envy issue. And then that is sort of where, again, you know, we're not even talking about what to do about this, but this is just sort of a… Well, kind of. Looking up is partly what to do about it. As a description, I would say there is something about late modernity, a society that's not dominated by a supernatural being that's sort of, you know, 语法解析
49:36
The liberal atheist society we live in is one where people look around a great deal. It's a lot of very unhealthy status competition games that end up driving it. And that would be sort of a Girardian description of this world where mimesis is far more out of control than ever before. Don't think we can go back. 语法解析
50:04
But there are all these ways it's frustrating, unsatisfactory, it may be apocalyptic, but that's a way to, again, understand this history. And it's in some ways downstream of Christianity, it's downstream of these things being revealed. In some ways it's the opposite to it. 语法解析
50:28
because one of the questions you know gerard if you ask gerard you know you have this theory about mimesis and they're all these bad forms of mimesis we have the wrong role models and you you know you and and then 语法解析
50:41
isn't it just, okay, you should be less mimetic? Yeah, no. And then, of course, Girard was, no, this is just the nature. You can maybe choose your role model, you can choose Christ, but you can't choose not to be mimetic. By the way, that's the Ayn Rand answer, wherein, you know, Atlas shrugged. 语法解析
51:00
The bad people are all the people who imitate. They're the second handers. They're the people who don't know what they want and just copy everybody else. And then the really great people are the unmoved movers. They're like Aristotelian gods. They're not influenced by anybody. And it's all from within. But they're united by the same ethos across the entrepreneurs. But the Girardian critique of Ayn Rand would be people like that don't exist. We all exist. 语法解析
51:29
grow up deeply in a social context. There's a developmental part to human biology. You know, Ayn Rand doesn't like to talk about children because children are, you know, incredibly imitated and both good and bad. This is just the way we are. But, um… 语法解析
51:45
But so, yes, Girard's answer was never that you could get rid of mimesis or anything like this. Yeah, no, that's not going to happen. Or even that some kind of psychological approach would be, you know, that you talk about your memetic stuff with your therapist. 语法解析
51:59
that might make it worse, right? Because you'd focus on it even more and then you'd conclude, as in so much therapy, it gets marketed as self-transformation and it crashes out as self-acceptance. And then you'd probably just conclude, I'm just a really mimetic person, I can't help it. - Degenerates into self-worship. - Into self-acceptance, let's say. - Yeah, I wish it would stop there, but it doesn't. - And then I think Gerard's answer would still be something like, you should just go to church. 语法解析
52:28
Okay, so let me pull apart. I'd like to talk to you about sacrifice and then again about imitation. I'm going to start with imitation. So the psychologist that I know best who is most conversant with the ideas that you put forward is Jean Piaget. 语法解析
52:48
And Piaget prioritized imitation as much as Girard. But Piaget's view didn't concentrate so much on the violent aspect of it. He didn't concentrate so much on how imitation can go wrong. The way I believe it was sort of this somewhat optimistic, you know, just positive societies progressing through imitation. Yeah, well, he wasn't concerned precisely, I would say, with notions of 语法解析
53:16
progress from an economic perspective. Like Piaget's notion was that it's very much like Gerard's, you know, is that the way that we organize ourselves socially… 语法解析
53:32
and psychologically, is through imitation. And so Piaget concentrated, for example, on games. And so his counter to Girard, but without invalidating Girard's point, by the way, is that… But he was before Girard, right? Yes, he was. Yes, definitely. And so Piaget's point was that we actually organize ourselves into social groups 语法解析
53:57
hierarchies with imitation. Yes. We, when children, for example, when they're three or four, so for example, you can't do this till you're three. Yes. This is how it works developmentally. If a little boy asks a little girl to play house, she has to agree. And then what they do is they reciprocally imitate one another in relationship to a goal. Okay. Yes. So the goal in that situation is to abstract and model 语法解析
54:27
the domestic environment. But then there's a higher order principle that regulates that, which is that in order for it to be play, both of them have to be voluntarily in accordance with the aim, and they have to be learning dynamically. Yes. Okay, so now your point, I think, was that… So now imagine a world where there's an indefinite number of these imitation predicated games, because there is an indefinite number of them. Now, 语法解析
54:56
what I think happened in the religious framework, particularly in the Christian framework, that that multitude of games, each of which is potentially a little Tower of Babel, is organized underneath a higher order principle. Now, you said that Gerard's answer was, you implied aim up, but you also implied go back to church. Now, see, let me just finish one thought. So imagine that there are metagames under which 语法解析
55:25
Imitative games could be organized. One metagame would be power. Another metagame might be hedonistic self-gratification. The Christian metagame is voluntary self-sacrifice. That's a radical reshifting of the metagame territory. And I think it is… 语法解析
55:46
irreplaceable and and I think it has to be embodied and not Propositionalized so the the pagan world the Roman world the Greek world there They were essentially predicated on power and hedonism right if I could then I had a right to and if I could impose force on you then I 语法解析
56:08
I was the better man. And that was inverted in Christianity, but it was inverted in a way I think that matches maturation. I mean, your point seemed to be that the imitative capacity can go dreadfully wrong if the games degenerate into envious status competitions. And the other point, I think, was that they will degenerate into envious status competitions unless they're oriented towards something transcendent. So then the question would be, what would that transcendent orientation be? 语法解析
56:37
Well, let me see. There's many different threads here, but I would say Girard's 语法解析
56:45
Yeah, Girard would reference people like Piaget and said that, you know, they underestimated imitation massively. They whitewash it. It's, you know, if you ignore this all-important runaway violence dimension and things like this… Yeah, well, Piaget was not a psychopathologist, right? He was a study of normative development. Yeah, yeah. And then I think Girard's intuition was much more that, in some sense… 语法解析
57:14
the so-called normal case is the less important one. It's the extreme case. It's where, you know, it's the madness of crowds. 语法解析
57:24
You know, that's an extremely important case. Hey, fair enough. It's not, you know, and Piaget would have been like Malcolm Gladwell in the wisdom of crowds. The crowds are wise because they imitate each other and this is how a lot of stuff works. Right, but he did bind it by the necessity of voluntary play, right? That's an important distinction. Sure, all these ways were still within some structure, but… 语法解析
57:49
But you could always say this is a basic difference between Enlightenment rationalism and biblical revelation is, you know, in the Bible, the crowd is always wrong. The crowd is always crazy. It is mad. It's, you know, the Tower of Babel. It's in part, it's the unanimity. The Israelites. It's the unanimity. It's, and… 语法解析
58:14
And enlightenment rationality, it's always, you know, democracy is good. The more people vote for something, the more rational it is. Although, you know, at some point, you get 99.99% of the people who vote for something and you're in North Korea. 语法解析
58:28
And so, you know, it's a very important question. When do you go from wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? And I think… Yeah, that's a very important question. And I think the Girardian, and I would say Christian, intuition is that it happens much sooner and in a much more representative way than you have to, than you think. And this is… 语法解析
58:54
And so that's sort of one dimension. I don't know if I would, 语法解析
59:02
I would anchor it as much on sacrifice though as the key feature. And again, this is one of the places where Girard argued that Christianity was, in Girard's telling, is anti-sacrificial. It is a move away from sacrifice. You know, all these theories about the substitutionary atonement of Christ's death. But even if we go further, 语法解析
59:30
with a sort of traditional theological– - Is it a movement away from the sacrifice of others? - Well, it is Christ's death is supposed to be the last one. Christ made the sacrifice so we do not have to make it. And then, yeah, you can say it is a sacrifice 语法解析
59:49
of others versus the sacrifice of self. You could say that, but you could say the way Girard would put the stress would be that you refused, it's not there was some virtue in Christ sacrificing himself. It's not like some, I don't know, some sort of silly, 语法解析
01:00:11
saying, you know, please let the lions come and eat me up or something like that, you know, giving some sort of dramatic announcement. It said, Christ at Gethsemane. 语法解析
01:00:20
You know, it's still praying, “Please let this cup be taken away from me.” It is, so it is, it's not, you know, this is, you know, a wonderful, necessary thing to do at all. It's quite the opposite. But you could say it is the refusal to sacrifice others. 语法解析
01:00:41
that characterizes Christ. Well, definitely that because he's- We're not willing to resort to violence. You're not willing to- Use power. You aren't willing to call down all the angels from heaven to stop the crucifixion. And so it's a refusal to sacrifice others. 语法解析
01:01:00
But, and then, yeah, maybe in some contexts you have to lay down your life, your friends, there are things like that that happen. But I think it's much more, you know, the anti-sacrificial intuition. And you have this already in, you know, a number of the Old Testament prophets. I think it's Hosea where it's, you know, God desires mercy and not sacrifice. You know, so it's, you know, and… 语法解析
01:01:26
And then these are sort of, in a way you can think of the Old Testament law as a sacrificial set of laws, as it's centered on the temple and we have this sort of elaborate set of sacrifices. And then in some sense, Christ replaces it with love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And then pay attention to the moment. And then we could say, 语法解析
01:01:56
We could say it's, and then he says he's not getting rid of the Old Testament law. Yeah. But if you do those two things, you don't need any of the Old Testament law anymore. Okay, so let's delve into that. You can even eat bacon and pork. Right, right, right. Which was a really, really bad thing to do under the Old Testament law. Okay, so let's delve into this a little bit. I want to make this psychological and sociological as well as theological. So it strikes me that 语法解析
01:02:28
one of the radical characteristics of human beings, we talked about imitation, that's certainly one. Another radical characteristic is the willingness and ability to make sacrifices. So let me define that for a minute, and then we can see how it goes astray as well. So the more immature you are, the more your attention and behavior is under the dominion of biological systems that have narrow short-term gratification as their focus. 语法解析
01:02:58
That could be rage, it could be hunger, it could be temperature regulation. A two-year-old is a collection of unruly, competing, short-term motivations. It takes 18 years for the cortex to develop. And you could think of the cortex as an inhibitory structure, so that's kind of a Freudian model, or you could think about it as an integrative structure, and that's a better model. Part of Piaget's model is useful in that regard because we integrate within the confines of imitative games. But there's more to it than that. So 语法解析
01:03:28
As you become more mature, this kind of a definition of maturity, you focus more on the tomorrow and next month and next year. So your temporal span of apprehension increases and you regulate your behavior in the present in relationship to the future. That's a sacrificial move because you're sacrificing immediate gratification for the stability of… 语法解析
01:03:52
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01:04:32
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01:05:25
It's rational once you can see the future, right? But it's sort of very, to the extent it's rational, 语法解析
01:05:36
It may not be that sacrificial. You save money in order to buy a house. Right, but I don't imagine, but I don't think you believe that people can regulate that with mere rationality. Like it has to be deeper. I would say part of that regulation of short-term impulse that's so limbically driven, mere rationality won't do the trick. 语法解析
01:05:56
And the rationality itself would have to be encapsulated within a concept of what actually constitutes rationality. So, because like I could ask you, what's worth sacrificing your short-term pleasure for? Now, the pleasure speaks for itself, right? There has to be something that you're giving that up for when you work, for example, that you regard as worthwhile. And it isn't also clear to me that that's a purely rational move. Now, there's one more sacrificial element. 语法解析
01:06:23
It's like as you mature, it becomes less and less about what the motivated sub-components of you want now, and more about how you find harmony and competition and cooperation in social groups. So for example, one of the things children have to learn between two and three to be social 语法解析
01:06:44
is to take turns. And that's also a sacrifice because the default is, it's always my turn. That's what it is like for non-social animals, for example. Man, I… This is where I want to push back a little bit. Push away, man. Where… 语法解析
01:07:00
I don't think you tell a two or three-year-old this in the language of sacrifice. No, you probably act it out for them. It's if you don't take turns, something bad happens. You won't have friends. And you won't have friends. Or the other kids tell the kids that. Yeah, there's some very… 语法解析
01:07:22
pretty fast immediate consequences to it. And again, you don't say it's rational, but it is, it's sort of, you learn pretty fast to do these things. And then the place where I'm uncomfortable with using the sort of language of sacrifice is that the… 语法解析
01:07:46
the evidence-based, non-rational part of it, if that's all we have left, you know, I wonder whether those are the sacrifices that we should make. For example, I'm going to give lots of examples, but, you know, there's always a question about, you know, what should be done about academia? They're not, you know, all the conservative academics are being expelled. It's so hard to do this. They're all sitting right here. And there's sort of a, there's a version of a debate I've had with a lot of 语法解析
01:08:17
right of center people over the last 20 years where it's well we just you know we we need to just train more people with phds and they we need and then they have to keep trying to sneak into the system and have to somehow break in yeah right and um and i there's sort of a lot of reasons to think that it's hard to do or might not work um but um 语法解析
01:08:42
But the way I push back on it is it strikes me as an irrational kind of sacrifice. And so from the point of view of a young person who is going to be a right-wing academic with a PhD and will be completely unemployable, that's not a rational sacrifice they made. It's a very foolish choice that perhaps this language of sacrifice 语法解析
01:09:07
confused things. And then the non-sacrificial move, you know, is roughly like what you yourself did with, you know, the University of Toronto, where you were, where it's at some point, I am not putting up with these silly sacrifices they're making me make in academia. I'm not sacrificing my mind or I'm not, you know, I'm not playing by all their silly rules. And, um, 语法解析
01:09:32
And I think that was the correct thing to do. But again, I would describe it as the anti-sacrificial move. The sacrificial move would be, you know, you have a tender position there and you might be unhappy about it, but, you know, for the greater good, you have to stay there. Okay, so I… 语法解析
01:09:50
There were things I wasn't willing to sacrifice to stay there. There's no doubt about that. But I would also say that… And I think those were irrational things that you should not have sacrificed. I'm fully on board with that. I think you made totally the right decision. But I would also say… I would describe it as… The way I would describe it, and maybe this just shows how the language of sacrifice is confusing, but I would describe it as… 语法解析
01:10:13
you refused to make the sacrifices that were demanded of you because they were silly, irrational, crazy. In relation to what? See, that's the issue, because I think that's true, but… In relation to things that, again, maybe can't be fully rationally defined, but in relation to some of the alternatives you could do, in relation to… 语法解析
01:10:31
You know, maybe even maybe even something as stupid as what you found hedonically enjoyable, right? It's using again. It did you find it enjoyable sitting on silly faculty committees as a tenured professor or did you find it boring and And it wasn't fun. The boredom wasn't fun and it's not the only reason to leave It's not maybe it's not a sufficient reason but but in 语法解析
01:10:59
from my perspective, it's a good partial reason. And there were probably a lot of things like this that added up. I was unwilling to sacrifice my tongue. And so what I sacrificed was my job and my clinical career so I could keep my tongue. But there's a Christian element to that too, because the Christian insistence is that the truth-oriented word establishes the order that's good. And so… 语法解析
01:11:26
But I don't think we can escape the sacrificial language because I had to give up my job, both of them. I had three because I had a private business. But again, I don't want to make this too aggrandizing to you, but I think what you're doing is fantastic. 语法解析
01:11:43
far better, far more important now. I'm certainly not unhappy about it. So if you had sacrificed your job and you were completely unemployable and had no economic prospects, you know, you could describe it as sacrificing your job so you could express yourself, but if nobody's listening to you, that might be a pretty irrational thing to do. Again, and so it was, I think it was a, yeah, it's rational for you to 语法解析
01:12:13
focus on reaching a much larger audience for you to do all these things. And I think those were good decisions. You didn't let, let's say, the moralizing left-wing people in academia 语法解析
01:12:32
get to you, you didn't let their value system control you. Their value system is that, you know, there's nothing more important than academia. This is the world that really matters. This is where you have to fight the battles. He said, no, you didn't let that morality control you. So I would, yeah, I would describe it as Christian or maybe Nietzschean, but anti-sacrificial, what you did in a very good way. 语法解析
01:12:58
Yeah, yeah, well, I understand what you're saying. But then the meta layer would be, this is where maybe just the language of sacrifice is often more confusing than helpful. Well, I think it also, to some degree, it stems, it likely stems from 语法解析
01:13:18
your saturation in the Girardian view, because you're, you can correct me again if I'm wrong, you're likely, and especially given what you said about Christ's sacrifice making further sacrifices in some ways unnecessary, your view is going to be to concentrate, it seems to me, on the more pathological end of the sacrificial process. And like, I think that the terminology can be confusing because I would say 语法解析
01:13:48
“What I gained was far greater than what I lost.” Now, that doesn't mean that what I lost was nothing, because it wasn't nothing and it took a fair bit of reconstruction to make things work. And so you could say, “Well, if you gain more than you lose, is that truly a sacrifice?” Now, the biblical stories are replete with paradoxes like that, because the most intense one, obviously, is what happens with Abraham and Isaac. 语法解析
01:14:12
because God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his son, and Abraham is willing to do so, but the consequence of that is that he gets his son back, right? And so… 语法解析
01:14:23
That points to the ambiguity of what constitutes a sacrifice. I want to push back on all of these things. Yes, I will confess to being an unreconstructed Girardian, and there were probably ways Girard modified his views more than I have. And so he probably, towards the end of his life, was more open to sacrifice. And I stick with the Girard of the 70s and 80s, who was more categorically skeptical of it. You know, 语法解析
01:14:53
I think, let me do an alternate cut on one story. And there's a… 语法解析
01:15:02
one of these Bible stories. And I always think one needs to interpret the Old Testament through the New Testament. This is sort of the, this is sort of, again, a Christian bias I have that it doesn't fully make sense on its own. You need to interpret it through, in the light of the new. And so there's a passage in the New Testament, I'm not gonna get the verse memorized, but it's basically where Christ says one must have faith like a child. Mm-hmm. 语法解析
01:15:32
And then, you can think it's like an abstract thing, but maybe it's, again, we should always think more concretely. And the concrete question I would have is, is there a faith of a child that's being highlighted as especially noteworthy and worthy of emulation? And I think there is, in fact. One child whose faith gets described 语法解析
01:16:01
in the Old Testament, and we never seem to talk about it. And it's Isaac, because as they're going up the mountain, Abraham tells Isaac this fictional story that maybe God will provide something else, and that's what might happen. And then Isaac just believes that. Abraham believes he has to make sacrifice. That's the delusional faith of an adult. 语法解析
01:16:31
who's read too much Kierkegaard or something. And Isaac's is the true Christian faith that God will figure out a way where the sacrifice doesn't need to happen. God is not a violent God. The violence doesn't come from God. He's a loving God. And there's a way to do this without sacrifice. And I'm always, what I find so odd about the Abraham story 语法解析
01:16:59
Isaac's story is that we've written endless amounts has been written on the faith of Abraham or Abraham is seen as the iconic person with faith. And it's again linked to a certain conception of sacrifice. And yet we have the line in the New Testament where Christ tells us to look at the faith of a child 语法解析
01:17:19
Maybe you can come up with a better example. I think the concrete one is Isaac. And it is interesting that it's not written from his perspective. We get enough of Isaac's perspective implicitly in the story. It's all the reviews. When we talk about, you know, whose faith should we emulate? Yeah, the theologians, the philosophers, they always tell us you need to emulate the faith of Abraham, Abraham. 语法解析
01:17:46
the way I understand Christ, I understand him to be telling me to emulate the faith of Isaac, which I think is very different and maybe also very different on this question of sacrifice. There always are questions how one interprets the Christian account. I believe in the physical resurrection of Christ, both as an event that happened historically, but also as a promise. And in some sense, 语法解析
01:18:15
you know, following Christ, there may be all sorts of bad things that happen to you, but it's a rational trade for saving your soul and for having eternal life. And so if you think of it in the context of saving your soul and eternal life, 语法解析
01:18:36
we can call that a sacrifice, but it has a very different character. Right, that's why he says his yoke is light, which is a weird thing to say when it's an invitation to the cross. But you have to, the non-sacrificial way I would say it is, yeah, if you believe in a literal eternal life, 语法解析
01:18:55
that's one sort of thing. If you think these are just some sort of Jungian archetype story, then you end up with much more of sacrifice qua sacrifice as a really high value. But that's why I would always interpret the Orthodox Christian message as very anti-sacrificial, very non-sacrificial. And maybe, I don't like the word rational, but… 语法解析
01:19:25
Just, you're making a good choice, a wise choice. Okay, okay, got it, got it. Okay, so I'm going to stop us here. So this is what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side. All you watching and listening know we do an extra half an hour. I want to continue our conversation about the faith of a child, but I also want to ask you why you think 语法解析
01:19:50
If you think it's true that you are temperamentally inclined to focus on the dark side, and I'd like to know what the consequence of that has been. Because that's something we actually share in common. You know, unlike Piaget, I'm a psychopathologist. He was a developmental psychologist. I've always been interested in the extreme case. And so I'd like to talk to you about that. 语法解析
01:20:12
this faith issue that you just described. I'd like to talk to you a bit more about Christianity, and I'd like to talk to you about what it is you think that it is about you that's focused you on that, on the more apocalyptic and dark edge of things. So, all right, so everybody who's watching and listening, well, this part of the conversation has come to a halt, and thank you for everybody here in Scottsdale for making this possible, and The Daily Wire. We're going to continue for another half an hour on The Daily Wire side with the topics that I just described. 语法解析
01:20:41
Thank you very much for coming to see me today and to talk. We obviously just barely got going. Just got started. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a good start. And we've got another half an hour and maybe some time in the future. So thanks very much, sir. Much appreciated. Thanks, everybody, for your time and attention. 语法解析
Edit:2025.04.28