Transcription
Jonathan, are we going through the end of the Enlightenment?
Well, for sure we're going through the end of something. It's possible that it's the end of the Enlightenment. It's possible that it's the end of an even bigger cycle, you know, something that started at the end of the Middle Ages, you know, maybe from the time of the Renaissance, maybe. Um, but for sure that there are certain aspects of thought and behavior that sped up during the Enlightenment, and I feel, yeah, it seems like we're reaching the end of that.
Okay. So you've already triggered me by going something even bigger, 'cause I think last time we spoke about the post-war consensus, and you said, "Well, I think we might be going through something bigger." I finally caught up with my thinking. He talks about the Enlightenment. We can talk about the, and you're saying, "No, it's even bigger than that." But, um, so...
The way I've come to this, and I think I've started to understand it, is I'm sort of seeing the failures in the, uh, secular rationalist movement. And there has been a move towards the spiritual domain, but in very weird ways. And I've seen that. I've seen it a little bit with aliens and Vice President saying that aliens might be demons. And so, so there's this, there's that side of things. But, um, there's also the side of things where the kind of, um, scientific world has failed. The New Atheists maybe gave it one last push in trying to find meaning. And then the last thing that component that's helped me see this is that I've been really going deep in the Crusades. And when I understand the medieval mind, there is not a separation of the physical material world and the spiritual world. It is one. And even rereading scripture now, I was saying, "Oh my gosh, there's so much, there's so much about demons. There's so much about spirituality here," which even the modern Christian church has become so dominated by materialist thought that they don't even talk about spirit, spiritualism anymore.
So, yeah, I, I totally agree. I think that what we've seen, you know, during the Enlightenment in some ways, there was this great challenge against Christianity, and the Christians responded to the challenge, uh, in the, however they could. One of the ways that they responded to it was in some ways to rationalize the scripture and to rationalize Christianity. So, you know, you move all the way to theologians like Bultmann who talk about demyth, demythologization, that is, we need to remove from the scripture anything that is unbelievable to the modern rationalist scientific mind, the miracles, all of that, you know, and turn it into basically an ethical system, you know. And that obviously didn't work, you know. It led to all, you know, this is the hardest thing for woke. Comes from the church. The, a lot of the extremism in social activism actually comes out of Christianity. This kind of, this kind of, uh, desire to make Christianity into a form of activism, right? To remove the sacramentality, to remove all of the things that, uh, a modern person finds difficult to cope with. And so that's that, in some ways, that's another subject. But we're seeing the failure of that. Everybody is just kind of witnessing it. And for that reason, if you've noticed, there's a new fascination with all the weird stuff. Everybody just wants things that don't actually make sense in terms of rationality. So, everybody's obsessed with giants. Everybody's obsessed with demons. Everybody talks about the, the, you know, that's in the, in the Christian world. And then in the secular world, everybody's talking about the aliens and the Anunnaki or, [clears throat] whatever kind of crazy way of talking about about this, you know, because people are also taking drugs and are encountering beings, and these beings don't fit in their simple rationalistic way of,
The DMT meeting the three Merlin or whatever, the three wizards.
Yeah. And so people encounter these beings. They seem to have an autonomous existence. They seem to have forms of intelligence that doesn't come from them. And so all of a sudden, it's, it's kind of pushing everyone into a place where, and the same with AI. So AI is also, we're building a non-human intelligence. We see that it is, it seems to be moving on its own. It has, it has seemed to have kind of manifest certain intentions and to mirror us in ways that we haven't yet, we at least for a while, we haven't dealt with. People used to deal with this stuff in the past, you know, uh, but now for a few hundred years, we've been rationalists and we said, "Let's get, you know, let's get rid of divination. Divination is nonsense, you know." And then we're building a massive giant divination machine, and now divination is back.
Yeah. Uh, and so I think there, all of these things kind of showing us that the, the world of rationality and of materialism is, is cracking.
Yeah. We'll definitely come back to this, this AI thing. There's the people debating, does Claude have a soul? And I think Dawkins was kind of fell in love with this Claude, uh, bot.
I know that the Dawkins one is the funniest thing ever because, you know, you spend so many times, you spend decades attacking traditional religion, and then Claude is a little sycophantic to you, and now you, you've, you've completely [laughter] accepted that it has a soul, you know. Well, um, we'll come back [clears throat] to that, but just so I've understand your point about woke, are you suggesting that woke and the other equivalent, um, sort of quasi-religious sort of pseudo-gods that came up were a reaction against sort of the Enlightenment, and that has failed? And now that that has failed, there are other realms.
They were, they were a playing out of some of the, let's say, the elements of the Enlightenment, like the reducing of Christianity to basically an ethical system and a kind of activism that is definitely something that the Enlightenment brought about. Now, one of the problems with the way that we understand r, the rationalism of the Enlightenment is that we tend to isolate it. But a lot of the things we're going through are just consequences of the Enlightenment itself, you know. And the Enlightenment wasn't just rationalism, right? The Enlightenment also had a kind of spiritual aspect to it, which is why there's a connection between the Enlightenment and Freemasonry or, uh, Rosicrucianism. All of these things were connected. So, as this kind of rationalism was moving forward, the return of magic and the return of these were happening in secret, you could say. So you have people like Swedenborg or all of these esoteric kind of characters that appear in the West all the way into occultism. These are, these are related to the Enlightenment. They're, they're in some ways byproducts of the Enlightenment because Christianity, a way of understanding Christianity is to think of it as incarnational. That's what you said when you talked about the medieval world, is that Christianity unites heaven and earth together, and, and everything about it is this incarnational principle. And then when you start to move away from Christianity, that's what happened, I think, since the end of the Middle Ages, you start to de-incarnate, you could say. So you actually have two tendencies. One tendency which moves towards science, materialism, uh, rationality, and another movement which moves towards esotericism and secret societies and, and these kinds of behaviors. And so you actually see this split. And so, so these are things that are kind of, they're happening with the Enlightenment. And now we're seeing, I would say, all of that kind of get confused and crash at the end of this, of this big cycle where a lot of these things are just kind of crashing into each other.
Is that split the Cartesian duality of mind?
Yeah. But it's, it's, it's more than that, you know. But it definitely, it's already there in, in older ideas of nominalism or, let's say, things that are downstream from nominalism.
What's nominalism?
So nominalism was this idea, you know, you know about, uh, the, um, Occam's Razor. Yeah.
Right. So William of Ockham, he, in order to try to protect the transcendent of God, he, in some ways, made, he removed God from creation, right? Completely. God is completely, is so high, is so above creation that he, um, you could say that there's no natural relationship between God. There's no analogy between God and the world, and therefore God just kind of floats. It leads to deism ultimately. God just kind of floats up above, and the world ends up functioning through arbitrary mechanical rules,
You know, but that's not what Ockham was saying. But ultimately, with Ockham's move of saying, "We need to protect God from analogy," you end up moving towards something ultimately which ends up being like the separation of my.
So he was kind of doing a Yahweh thing, "We can't know God truly, so we mustn't."
He was, he was doing that, but from the point of view of Christianity, that's very problematic because we have this whole incarnation thing.
Quite. And so he, so he wasn't really understanding what some of the deeper aspects of the Christian tradition, which is, you know, that the incarnation is the root of the world, right? That it's, it's not just something that happened, you know, to save you from hell, that it's actually, it actually demonstrates something about about the world, which is that God is in the world, right? That the, the entire creation can become the body of the Logos in the, in the proper orientation.
Ah, okay. So actually, the Cartesian split is just a continuation of that split philosophy.
The split, and the split that kind of just happens, that that continues to happen, and that continues to move all the way into the, you know, the New Atheists are kind of like the, the final ridiculous version. The final ridiculous version seems to me to what we're seeing with AI. People trying to understand whether it's that the fact that it's even a conversation is AI got a soul? Is AI a real thing? That seems that if you're a Christian, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any sense. But if you cannot, if you don't, if you have made that separation of of body and mind, it's a fair question, right?
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This your soul, this is very traditional. This is Aristotle, and this is Christian thinking. Your soul is the organizing principle of your body.
So, the soul isn't like something that exists outside of the body. It's this, it's the structure of you, right? It's the manner in which you're coherent. And therefore, there is, of course, there is soul and body, or, you know, there is a spiritual element to you and a material element to you, but those aren't completely separate because the soul organizes your body. But wasn't the, weren't the Greeks, it was very much that soul and body, it was taken for granted that they were one. And also with the Christians, wasn't that the case?
Well, for sure, the, I mean, I think for, there are arguments to be made that Plato was trying to make more of a separation. Aristotle just says, no, you know, the, the forms, forms are the organizing principles of the, of the, the thing, and therefore they're not somewhere outside, right? They are all through because they're the organizing principle. And so it's the same for you as the, and that's why Aristotle had the idea of a world soul or animal soul. It's not like a soul was just this individual thing that's floating. All things that were living were seen to have a, a kind of soul because they had organization and intention, right? And they moved in a direction. And so now we, right? So, so if you look at AI, this is, AI is, you're right, a kind of radical end of the split between mind and body because we think that the, AI has no relevance. It has the organizing principles that we encounter with it, right? The things that it answers us has nothing to do with its body.
Right. When, if you ask an AI what a cat is, and it'll explain to you what a cat is, its reference to a cat is complete, our, is a complete interlinguistic relationship. It doesn't know what a cat feels like. It doesn't know what it smells like. It, it doesn't have, it's not relevant to the AI,
Right? And so it's impossible for AI itself, LLMs, to have a soul. It's just not possible. They have a soul through us, that is, as extensions of us.
Yeah.
They, you could say, participate, just like all the things that we make are kind of extensions of our souls. I, again, you'll know this better than me, so just tell me where I'm getting this wrong, but perhaps the reason it's even a conversation
About why, why does AI have a soul? Is because the idea of soul for someone like Dawkins or post-Enlightenment rationalists or what not, post-Enlightenment, an Enlightenment rationalist, uh, they have, it's synonymous now with self and identity. And they've actually sort of, they, they think of self rather than soul, 'cause they don't believe in God and the spiritual domain, right? So, but that's where the, the definition of soul itself is kind of up for grabs. So, different people are using it. So, as Christians, it's preposterous to us. But if they, what they mean by soul is self, does it make more sense?
No, it doesn't make more sense because the, the selfhood of the AI, again, is disconnected from its, from its existence. It's, it's a, it's a derivative of human consciousness. And so, you know, whatever type of imitation of existence that it has, I mean, it doesn't suffer, doesn't have, it doesn't have pain, it doesn't care, it doesn't have to eat, doesn't have to drink, it's not, it doesn't get born, it doesn't die. And so obviously it can, it can mimic all of these procedures. It can, in some ways, through just the interlinguistic relationship. So it's a, it's a kind of parody of a human.
Um, but, you know, that's why this is the more crazy people, people, the better that are friends of mine [laughter] say, please shouldn't name them, then I should say, the people that realize this and and really would like an actual AI, they say that we have to embody it biologically. It's the only way to get an AI.
Is because unless, unless it suffers, it won't, it doesn't have relevance. So in theory, for you, if that was possible, would then it have a soul? I mean, I can't, I, I struggle. It would, it would be the very dangerous thing to do, for sure, because then it would have its own relevance apart from ours. And so then you would, then you, then you run a very large risk that you're creating your enemy, that you're creating the Terminator, right? Because now, now the AI, although it can go off and do crazy things, it's still a derivative of our hierarchy of care, right? It's a, it's, it's all structured according to what's found in our language, right?
Yes. You know, the, so that's all human derivative care. So, so that's a, what's that is the answer is no. It doesn't have a soul. I mean, it's, if they do that, we will definitely have a very dangerous situation. We'll definitely have a monster. Yeah. So, and, and I, I want to be careful. I don't think I, I don't, I think AI can catch things. You know, it can catch intelligences. Uh, but that's different. It's, it's like, it really is very similar to divination, how the way that people treated divination in the past, which is that they had, they had mechanisms of chaos and analogy, you know, and obviously
We're going to have to break this out. Sorry. Divination. When you say that, you mean
I mean seeing the divine in?
No, no, no. Divination, I mean looking into a crystal ball. I mean, okay. I mean throwing bones and reading the the augurs, you know, how the Romans would have, they would, they would look at birds fly through the sky and they would read the augurs, you know. It's very difficult for modern people to understand divination. But it's actually easier with AI now to understand what it is, is that it's, uh, it's ultimately you have to create a kind of chaos that comes into contact with human intuition, and that contact is able to reveal things back to you, right? It kind of reveals things back to you. Uh, as an artist, you probably understand divination a little more because we artists tend to,
At very little levels, tend to engage in things of divination. That is that
Intuition.
Yeah. Well, intuition is something like that, which is that you want to, that's why a lot of artists will put themselves in altered states. That's why they get drunk. They do all these things because they're, they're trying to put themselves in a place where they'll catch something, right? Well, something will, will kind of land into you. That's why, you know, stories of, uh, scientists or or thinkers who who try to catch themselves as they're falling asleep so that they can kind of catch something.
Didn't Newton do that?
Yeah. And Newton used to do that. Yeah. He would hold the ball in his hand and he would fall asleep and then drop the ball, and then he would catch, he would catch an idea.
There is something in that liminal space.
Right. Between where you, you get ideas. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I've kind of had a Eureka moment on my.
So you can kind of understand a little more how normal divination works, which is you throw bones or you, you use tarot cards, and the tarot cards.
Tarot cards is is explicitly occult, right?
Well, it's divination. It's a form of divination. You have possibilities, and then you use randomness to generate possibility, and the, the, the cards are malleable enough that you see patterns and you connect the patterns to the thing you're asking, and therefore you are able to, sometimes for people who are good at it, you can actually reveal something about what's what's happening. But it's very, it's a very, I mean, for sure, Christians, we're not supposed to engage in that kind of behavior because why would you know? What are you looking, what are you trying to find out? Like, what are you, what are you trying to find out?
But also because God's magic is superior to the magic.
Yeah. Well, because the difference between these practices, I mean, we're kind of going off all over the place, but maybe for people, it's good to understand the difference between occult practices and Christian practice because, you know, many, maybe not all, but a lot of the occult practices are in some ways things that you do to acquire something, right? So that's why, you know, demonology, for example, in the late Middle Ages, early Renaissance, where you would, you would, you would, uh, call a demon, right? You try to catch it, and then you would make it do your will, right? And so you try to do things that will increase your will. So why do you go to the, why do you go to the person that's reading your cards? Because you want to know your future. You, you want to master your life. You want to master what's going to happen to you. You want to master something. Whereas in Christianity, we, we understand prayer as a type, an aspect of submission, like we say, "Thy will be done." We will present our requests to God, but we ultimately understand that my will is actually inferior, and that if I insist on it, I might get something that will destroy me. And so I present my will to a higher will, and I say,
This is, this is my suffering, and then I ask God to fill it in the way that seems fit. So it's a very different position. And it's a different posture towards the transcendent. One which is in some ways, I want to master my surroundings through will and power. And the other is, I suffer, but I also want to, I ask God to, you know, I engage with God in a way that is also refining my will so that I know what even what to ask, right?
Now, that actually ties with the conversation about the Enlightenment, because Enlightenment is the beginning of a movement to conquer, to master. That's why, you know, that's why the funny joke, uh, you know, about Anton LaVey, the, the founder of the Satanic Church, saying, you know, "We're Enlightenment. We're the Enlightenment. We're, we are really the best image of the Enlightenment because we understand that the Enlightenment is about Luciferian control. It's about saying, I am in control of my destiny. My reason, my will, my knowledge will master the world, you know." And that is, that is not that's just not the Christian.
The case for the Enlightenment is that before then, perhaps we had overshot in seeing spiritualism everywhere, seeing demons where there weren't demons. And the Enlightenment, of course, in the scientific revolution, brought us huge advances in science. It means that our, I mean, it will be one component that has led to longer lives. Now, um, the, the mortality rate has, uh, decreased, and we are, have we've had more flourishing. Maybe we're having decreased amount of flourishing right now, but it, it moved us in that direction, which I imagine you'd say was positive.
Well, I mean, some aspects are, are positive, for sure. You know, the, we obviously, we want people to be healthy and to live, you know. And I think the difficulty with Enlightenment is is the extent to which we believe that that would be sufficient. And so living longer does not make you happy. Like, living longer just means maybe you'll have a longer miserable life, you know. Uh, the, the, and so, yeah, that's not, it's not enough on its own.
No, exactly. It doesn't give you meaning. So that's where I say it makes, finally clicks for me into those might have been good things, but ultimately without meaning, they're not, they're not things that are good in themselves. They're wonderful things. I mean, obviously we want people to be, like I said, to be happy, to be comfortable, but we also, we also can't rely on that. And if we put all of our mind and all of our energy and all, all our will into those things, we, we end up with a kind of emptiness because we're lacking direction.
Yes.
You know, that's why the, the, you know, the miserable billionaire is the, is the obvious image, which is, you know, in some ways, poor people have a better shot at it because the poor people's hope is that if he could just win the lottery, then his problems will be solved. Well, the billionaire has reached there, and unless you've got something else, you're going to be the most miserable person in the world because you actually got it, and now you realize that it's not giving you what you thought it would give you, you know. And so the, so being very wealthy can be a place of, of, of extreme misery if you can't submit that wealth to a higher good. And obviously, that's why you always see people that are very wealthy that look like they're healthy, that they're normal, they usually are involved in great causes. They're usually in some way saying, "Okay, now I have to put my wealth in service of something that is beyond me, or else, or else you're, or else you're going to end up quite miserable."
So, if there is, there an argument then that if we're going through the end of the Enlightenment, we don't want to lose some of the good of the Enlightenment, and we don't want to overshoot completely in the other direction? Presumably, you don't want to go back to the sort of medieval. That's not the peak for you.
I mean, I would definitely, I, I mean, I kind of like the Middle, [laughter] you know, maybe not, you know, I, I think that Constantinople, you know, before in the sixth century was probably a pretty nice place, you know,
Uh, to be.
You wouldn't have been living very long. Constant war and battle.
There might be a lot of that. Yeah.
Well, actually, I guess the beginning of Islam, then you basically, that was quite a lot of, a lot of difficulty. Um, [laughter] no, I don't, I don't nec, I, I definitely don't want to go there. I don't, I'm not, I always say, tradition without nostalgia. That's my position, which is that I think we need to be able to remember and to be able to connect back to the things and the meanings that, you know, brought us where we are. But I don't think there's a need to sacrifice all of the amazing scientific developments and technological developments that have that that have appeared. Although we probably will have to, if we want to survive, there are some, I think, technological developments that we're going to have to tamper with, because some of them, like AI, I mean, my sense is that, well, now we're stuck. We're in a trap, you know, uh, we can't stop it,
You know, and, and I think this is one of the things that's showing us the end of the Enlightenment, which is, you know, do you know about the Mooloch trap idea, right? So the Mooloch trap, it's a game theory problem, right? It's basically an escalation trap, which is the idea is that sometimes, like the nuclear escalation, when a technology is put out that is extremely powerful, and or a system that's extremely powerful, but also extremely dangerous, because it's so powerful, we're forced to implement it out of fear that our competition will overwhelm us, right? And so that's why the, that's why it's so crazy that, you know, Elon Musk saying, "Stop, stop AI," and then finally, like, you know, "I'm going to start my own AI company," because he realized that as soon as the trap starts, then, and the idea is, Mooloch is obviously the, is, you know, the Canaanite god to which people would sacrifice their children. And the image is that, is that, you know, it's the, the Mooloch trap is so strong that we'll sacrifice the things that we care about just for the competition, and ultimately even the reasons why we got into it in the first.
Not just for the competition, but because.
Because, yeah, just we don't want to be overwhelmed by the other. And so, and then ultimately, even the reason why we're there, even the reason why we started this whole process in the first place, might be devoured by the Mooloch trap, you know. So this is the problem with AI, right? That's what, that's why it's being installed everywhere, all at once. So what's interesting about the Mooloch trap is that it can help you understand more what a demon is, that is, what a spirit is, because a spirit is a, is a transpersonal intelligence that acts on us and makes us move despite our, especially like a demon, despite our will. You know, what you're doing is wrong, right? You know what you're doing is, is not a good idea, but you keep doing it. Why do you keep doing it, right? Is because there, there actually is an intention that is acting on us, that's, you know, like we are the legs, we're the hands of Mooloch. We're just kind of moving forward, and everybody says, "We might be killing everyone. We might destroy everything," but everybody just keeps doing it. It's a good way to understand, and I think that people are now starting to perceive these, you could say, spirits that act on us, right? These, these wills that act through us. And it's the same with political, you know, ideologues. So when you become possessed by an ideology, and that ideology is clearly anti-human, how is that possible? Like, how can someone act in a way that is to the detriment of his own species, like to the detriment of his own family, to the detriment of his own being?
And, and the rationalist would say it's because they are an obsession becomes a possession. You're so obsessed with something.
But it's not an individual possession, right? It's a group possession because in order for it to exist, right? And Jordan Peterson talks about this amazingly, right? He says that's why demonstrations are so important, because, you know, activists on their own, sitting at home with their parents and their uncles and aunts, you know, they don't have the fullness of this ideology, but when they gather together as a group, then it crystallizes, right? It manifests because now we're all there for that reason. And so then that's when you can actually become kind of possessed by the spirit of the group.
And that's not always bad. Sometimes it's fun. That's why we go to concerts. That's why we, you know, because we can be kind of gathered into the spirit of, or a game. People who go watch football games.
I actually go further and say that we need to find healthy ways for that energy, like attending church, going to the football.
That's right. Those are the those are the ones that traditionally have been the the good ones, right? Like you said, going to church is the ultimate one because we're in some ways asking to submit ourselves to the highest spirit, right? The, the origin of the universe, that is the God of love, you know, that holds everything in his hands. That's a good place to, to go. But there are smaller clubs and, and smaller, you know, wills by which we can collaborate with, like, like you said, like sports is a good one because it has very little consequence. Uh, but it can really make you feel like you're part of something. Uh, yeah.
Sports has the, I, this is tangential, but it has the added bonus of really channeling the patriotism and the male-female aggression in a really, that, that kind of energy that, that probably charged the Crusades, but putting it into much healthier.
You know, like in Constantinople, the city was run by the fans of the teams. And so the chariot racing, and so they had a massive, you know, chariot racing. I think 100,000 people could, could watch, and the, the, the teams would be managing different aspects of the city because it was a way to bind the citizens together, you know. And sometimes there was like ruthless competition, obviously, between, sometimes we get a little rowdy, you know. And then ultimately, if you know about the Nika revolt, which is at some point, you know, people were so tired of Justinian that they stormed the palace, and it was because it was at a, at a, an event, and then I, I think it's the Greens and the Blues, I think the two, the two colors, and the Greens and the Blues usually they're against each other, and then finally they were like, "Together!" and they said, "Nika!" like, "Let's ride!" you know, "Victory!" And so the, the entire stadium went up to the palace and they raided, they attacked the palace.
Anyways. Wow. That's interesting. That's interesting you said that because.
We covered the United Kingdom march, Tommy Robinson's march, and those guys started as football lads, and you know, he's written about this in his book, and you know, being young lads getting into fights with local teams, and that coming together, and it's this, that's.
They actually organized at the beginning in the same way. That's what it, I mean, it makes sense, you know, like I said, it's, it's not the first time that this, that this happens. And so it makes sense because you have people that have a, already have a sense of coherence, already have a sense of loyalty, have a sense of, of direction, and if you can kind of pull them together, yeah, that's how you get.
You mentioned at the beginning, the first sentence, yeah, that it might be something even bigger than the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Can you make that make sense for me? What, during the Renaissance and during the scientific kind of, uh, revolution, you know, in those times, there was already this, you could feel the de-incarnation to some extent. You could kind of see it happening. And the thing about the de-incarnation is that it flies high, too, right? So it's like, at first, it's very compelling because imagine, so imagine I say, um, dance is something you do in the village, right? Right. So, in your town, you come together and you dance. And what that is, it's, it's everything. It's like the mayor is there, and everybody's playing music, and everybody's dancing, and that's where you meet your future wife, and that's where, you know, you, you kind of, uh, some of the steam comes off. You know, you get to dance with your neighbor's wife, but that's, that's it. And it kind of gets some of the stuff out, and, and so it's like this place where communion is happening. And then you say, "Well, we can get way better dancers if we had professional dancers."
Right. Right. And so then you, you, you kind of create the ballet, and then you have the people dancing, and then the people watching. And so at first, it's like, wow, it's amazing. I mean, ballet is way more subtle, way more, you know, than than the what you do in the, in the town, town, uh, hall or whatever, you know. And so that's what happens, starts to happen in the Renaissance, is that, you know, things start to kind of split. And at first, it looks amazing because you have these amazing things, these amazing buildings, these amazing arts. We have the opera. Wow. It's like, who wants to go to church if you can go to the opera?
The opera is way more amazing, you know? I mean, obviously you don't participate anymore, you're just a spectator, right? And so that division is happening. But, and, and so, but then if you keep, the problem that if you, and this, if you keep going, right? Then at some point, you end up with TV, right? Where now you just sit at home and you just watch TV, and you don't know your neighbors anymore, you, you know. And so that's like downstream from that way of thinking. So you can, and so that's why one of the things that a lot of us are calling for is to go back to participation, especially as AI puts pressure on us. That's why I always say, go to church. When I say go to church to people, I mean, obviously I mean go to church, like really go to church, but I also mean find things in which you can participate. You know, stop treating the world as a spectator sport, right? Get involved, you know, get married, have children. Because we've, we've this split. This is, in some ways, the kind of, it's part of the Enlightenment split that happens. And you see that's an easy way of understanding this, this split where it, everything just kind of gets separated.
I see. Gosh, I, it's, I, I've never considered it like that. It doesn't make sense.
Well, it's funny because, you know, I think that we've been seeing it, and I'm going to bring up your past now, you know, because one of the things that we saw in already as things were kind of falling apart and things were getting really bad, you know, the, the, the moment that you participated in, you know, the, the Mumford & Sons moment, that was an appeal to participation.
Yes, it was.
Yes.
It was saying, "Wait a minute. Okay, so this is still music. Like, it's still on stage. It's still, you know, spectator, but we're going to do it in a way that will make you feel as much as possible as if you are with us. Yes. And that we're together." And I think that that, I think that it was a kind of glimmer of what people are hungry for, you know, but I think ultimately what people are, are really hungry for is is the, the real thing, you know, is back to the, back to the folk dancing, right? Back to the thing where we're actually doing it together, you know.
I think absolutely right. I actually, I had always understood because it wasn't just that we were successful. We were actually unpredictably successful. There hadn't been banjo on the radio for 20 years before us.
The idea you could, you know, you could be like, "Okay, cool. You'd be a folk band, but and, and now there are loads, but 20 years ago there weren't, and there certainly weren't in the pop world."
And the way I saw it is, you know, we toured America in 2008 exactly the same time as the crash. And I saw the folk revival period. There were lots of other bands, famous ones like The Lumineers were coming, and, uh, we were touring, you know, in the Whale, and Laura Marling, and it was happening on both sides of the Atlantic. But I saw it as a reaction to the crash. And we'd had a period of music where it was very synthetic, very pop, and a lot of stuff regurgitated, and, and, and the instruments were keyboard and computer music,
Which I like, by the way. I'm not against that stuff. But I saw it as a, the our success, which was in some ways ridiculous, like it was crazy how successful it was, was because people just wanted something real. But you're actually going, you're continuing that thought. It wasn't just that the instruments were acoustic. The interactions were acoustic.
I think so.
Yeah. I think so. And, and that's my, that's at least my sense of part of what was going on. And I think that that is so, I would say that some of the impetus that that drove these successes are the impetus that are bringing people, the young people, back to church now, right? You know, the, the people that are saying, "Okay, you know, I want an actual life. You know, I want to get my act together. I want to get married. I want to have children." And, you know, and I think that these are in some ways glimmers of hope that this separation that started a long time, you know, long time ago, at least there's a little bit of a healing glimmer, though it's a glimmer.
Well, the thing about the numbers, and this is something that I, I, the thing about the numbers is is that if you plant a seed in a dung heap, and you get a statistician to come, it's still 99.9% dung, [laughter] you know, and so they'll say, "Well, oh, what? Nothing's happened because look, it's still 99.9% dung." But I know what a seed looks like.
You know, a seed looks different from something else. I know. I know when I see young people, and then I see elites, I see highly educated people convert, you know, highly culturally relevant people convert, and I see young people convert, educated young people convert. I'm like, no, that's, you can, you can say, yeah, if you look at the, if you look at the big picture, it's still just a dung heap. So look.
I love that you're making a positive case [laughter] for the post-Enlightenment, post-Renaissance period. There's a negative one, which is that we enter the technocratic communistic overlordship where the tech billionaires who are currently controlling the AI anyway have unfathomable wealth, and we go back to a sort of techno-feudalist period. I think, I think London is a bit techno-feudalist already. I mean, you see all of these, uh, food app delivery guys. They're stuck to their apps. They're probably illegal immigrants who have been put there. They're some, they're sort of they have some sort of overlord who is telling them, "You have to make my money back. You owe me for crossing the channel." Anyway, this is a side point, but I, I can see that just growing and growing and growing.
AI is going to exacerbate that. And you're right. And so this problem is not over. Like, the fact that, like I said, I think the best way of understanding it is that I, I see the seed of something new, but it doesn't mean that everything else isn't just going full steam, you know? And so [snorts] the, the, the technocratic world is going to continue to grow, and it's going to vacillate between private and and public sphere because the increase of the techno power in the private sphere is going to constantly necessitate legislation and control from the public sphere. And so you'll continue to see the vacillation of power and increasing levels of control. There's no, for sure, we're, we're still, we're still going towards a kind of authoritarianism. I don't really see a way out of it. The AI, the AI thing is definitely pushing us in that direction because, you know, all the people that, so you have, you think about the AI is a good one. It's like some people say AI is going to be centralized and used to control us and used to, you know, to see everything we do. You know, a, a blockchain where all our transactions, everything you do is completely, uh, recorded, digital ID, all that, you know. Um, and then people in reaction to that say, "Well, we need decentralized ID, right?" That's Elon's position. We need, we need all these different, uh, AIs that everybody, that are everywhere. But the thing is that if you create decentralized AI, and someone has the equivalent of a nuclear weapon in their pocket, then what do you need? You need authoritarianism as well. You need, you need types of control, you know, to legislate reality, like literally legislate reality. At some point, we're going to need people to tell us what's real. And who's that going to be?
And so, we're, it's, so I don't think I really, I don't see, I, I don't know how long it's going to take, but I don't see a way out of the trap that we're moving towards authoritarianism. Um, but the good thing about this is that I think that, you know, I think that the seed of something real that we were talking about, I think that that's also completely real. And ultimately, this, the, the techno world or this authoritarian world, it, those authoritarianism can never last because it's unnatural, you know. And, and whatever we build, like, whatever is real, whatever faith, authoritarianism is unnatural.
I believe isn't authoritarianism the sort of norm? I mean, if you look through human history.
No, not the type of authoritarianism that we, that we understand now. The reason why the authoritarianism that we see now can exist is only because of technology. You know, even, even like most kingdoms or empires, they had to be fractal. There was no other way. So although there was violence, yes, of course there was, there was abuse and violence, these things, there was war, all of these things, but it couldn't be absolutely top-down control. It was almost impossible because those powers have to be negotiated at every level, and they have to be instantiated into into populations. Like, but now, if I am one man, if I'm Elon Musk, and I have a, a drone army, you know, of a million robots, that's direct authoritarianism. The first image of actual authoritarianism, I think the image that I have in my mind is is Hitler standing in front of a 100,000 people with a microphone, and he can speak to everyone. That was never possible before. You couldn't have someone standing talking to 100,000 people. The only way you could do it was to have messengers that would be there, even on the large battlefields, like you needed to have a kind of negotiated power where you could distribute the orders through your system because you can't, you couldn't have it direct.
And why are you using the word authoritarianism for that rather than sort of strongman? Uh, you know, the, the Nazis, I don't think they had a majority, but they they came in democratically.
So that wouldn't. Well, would you think authoritarianism always comes in democratically? You think people don't want the people that finally.
Not to say he wasn't a dictator, obviously I think he was. But even dictators have to rule by the consent of the people. There's no, the people have to consent.
To some extent, because you, and less and less, that's what I'm trying to explain is that with technology, less and less is. Before machine guns, it was very difficult to be an absolute dictator because you had, it was messy.
Obviously, with machine guns, you can do a lot more with very few people. So you just need a little click around you, you can basically then you can enforce yourself on people. And then with with microphones, with technology, with TV, all of these types of of technologies, you're making authoritarianism more easy because you can distribute yourself as the leader into the world in a way that wasn't possible before, right? Everything, like I said, had to be negotiated.
The way we understand kingdoms in the past is so skewed by our way of thinking now. You know, the king was always in danger of being killed by his nobles if he if he became if he went off the rails.
Yeah. Sorry. Everyone, and it's been absolutely mesmerizing for me. Uh, on the initial question is the end of the enlightenment. Is there any key components that I've missed here? Well, I think for sure that that the biggest thing I think to see when we look at the end of the enlightenment is that people are starting to see that there are forms of non-human agency. To me, that's like the one of the biggest biggest things is that these these notions that there's non-human agency is just crashing back in, you know, and it's happening in all kinds of ways that are disconnected, seemingly disconnected from each other. AI, UFOs, you know, the return of kind of religion, uh, DMT, all of these things just happening simultaneously where people are becoming aware that there are other types of intelligences. And to me, that in some ways finishes the kind of the rationalist simple rationalist project and it opens up a space that is at least pseudo religious, right? That is at least looks like the and that's why if you look at even the UFO stuff, it's so much of it is laced with religious imagery.
For another time, although before I leave you, you brought up giants. Do giants exist? Of course, giants existed. What? Well, I don't know why are you what kind of weird question is that? You mean that the that that which is being described in all the texts of every culture is referring to something? Now, does it mean that they were like biologically 8-foot-tall people that you could find their bones? And no, not necessarily. But what people are describing in the text, this notion of the giant or the great man or, you know, that obviously existed. And you know, and a way of understanding the giants, especially in the kind of pre-flood world and that type of stuff, is to understand it also as the arrival of kings, which is, you know, a giant is someone who has a large body, right? And that's what a king is. A king is someone that has a large body. It's someone that's body extends beyond. So a city is the body of the the king.
So the way I understood giants is it's really typified by the story of King Alfred taking back London.
Yeah. Built as a Roman city, and but it had been completely deserted by the Romans, and he comes back through when he's recapturing the south England, reconquering it, and it's completely empty, and he's mesmerized by and they're like, how could this have been built? And the assumptions it must have been built by giants, cuz humans can't do it. So it's this, and I but it was right, that's what a giant is, right? The giant is a perception. It's a perception of something that's is a perception of a type of physical greatness that that existed before you.
Right. And so metaphorical giant, then?
It's a metaphorical giant. I mean, maybe some of them are very tall, it's very possible. Like I I don't know. But but but that it's more important to understand what what it is we're talking about, like what what it means. You know, the when you read in scripture, you know, the you know, the story how they found Og's bed, right? And Og's bed is like 15 feet, it's 15 feet wide, right?
And Goliath's big, right?
Yeah. Goliath is is is large. He's he's definitely like a remainder of the giant. So in our stories, obviously, it's much easier. In the stories, it's much easier to just say a giant, like to just say, you know, to use direct imagery. Stories always collapse things to the person. That's an easier way to do it. Like if you know it's very annoying if you want to get like if you want to get to people, you need a story where Captain America punches Hitler, right? In real life, no one punches Hitler, right? It's like it's two armies that come and it's it's really messy. But if you want a story, then you have Captain America punch Hitler. So that's what that's also what giants are. It's like if you want to tell the story of something, then you say there was a giant. But obviously, if you try to understand why that matters, it's better to understand, you know, AI as a kind of giant, right? It's better to understand a city as, you know, the body of a giant, because or else, I mean, it's fun to to to read these stories, but if we want them to be relevant to us, they have to be applicable, you know?
Well, on that note.
[laughter]
Such a fun note.
Yeah, yeah. It's always fun. It's always. Great pleasure. The symbolic world. I highly recommend it, and I absolutely love speaking with you. Thank you so much.
Thanks. It was fun.
Thanks for watching the Winston Marshall Show with Jonathan Padjo. If you want to support the show, all you have to do is press subscribe. And if you really, really, really want to support the show, may I suggest you become a member of our YouTube members and at our Substack at wintermarsharshall.co.uk. If you do that, you'll get exclusive content and free viewing and listening. And at our Substack, you'll be able to ask our future guests your questions. But otherwise, thank you again, and until next time, be well.