The One Aristotle Argument Professor Owen Anderson Uses to Break Open Freshman Philosophy | The Furrows

Professor Owen Anderson teaches philosophy and religious studies at Arizona State University, where starts every intro philosophy class with "where did your life go so wrong?"  In this conversation, Ryan and Alex trace his journey from a curious teenager in Arizona public schools to a philosophy professor working to recover what education has lost.

What's in This Episode:

• How discovering the Great Books in a school library set Owen on the path to philosophy and why students today still hunger for that kind of intellectual engagement
• The farming analogy for education: why cultivating students requires patience, and what teacher narcissism costs a classroom over time
• Aristotle's proof for the highest good and the eternal—and how Owen uses these arguments in introductory philosophy at ASU
• John Dewey's vision for democratizing education, how it went wrong, and why Mortimer Adler's answer offers a better way
• Owen's book The Twelve Arguments and how natural theology connects to the American founding and the Declaration of Independence

Chapters:

• 00:00: Welcome and a Note on Audio Quality
• 00:47: Introducing Professor Owen Anderson
• 02:30: Discovering the Great Books in High School
• 08:49: Early Questions About Faith, Truth, and Certainty
• 13:22: The Farming Analogy: Why Education Takes Time
• 17:00: What Students Lose in the Industrial University
• 26:14: Aristotle on the Good and the Eternal
• 41:09: John Dewey, Mortimer Adler, and the Democratization of Education
• 51:29: Charlie Kirk as the Campus Socrates
• 58:56: The Twelve Arguments, Natural Law, and the American Founding

Resources Mentioned:

• The Twelve Arguments by Owen Anderson
• After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
• Classical Learning Test
• Arcadia Education

Hosted by Ryan Klopak (Arcadia Education) and Alex Julian (CLT). The Furrows podcast features leaders in classical education who have been transformed by classical education. 

Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, Furrowfans. This is Ryan Klopak, and I am here to tell you that our relationship with technology is much like that of the relationship between the US of A and the Soviet Union during World War II. At best, we're an uneasy alliance. At worst, there's outright subterfuge and undermining of each other's well-being. You will see that such is the case in this episode. There are a couple times where the audio will cut in and out. But hopefully the conversation is interesting enough that you'll be able to forgive our ongoing Cold War with technology, and you'll be able to lean into the conversation at hand. So thank you for your patience as we work this out. Welcome to the Furrows Podcast. My name is Ryan Klopak, and I'm joined by Alex Julian and a very special guest we'll introduce in just a second. But the Furrows Podcast is a podcast about the transformation that comes from entering into a classical education, the sorts of people who have been transformed by that entrance, and then the good work that they're doing to transform others. I am the director of search over at Arcadia Education. And then Alex is running the baccalaureate program for CLT. And Alex is going to talk a little bit about who we have on today and the direction we're going.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

The intro is getting better and better every time this work. Teaches ethics and intro to philosophy, and then research on his end is in uh natural philosophy.

SPEAKER_05 1:49

Is that right? Natural theology, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Natural theology. So uh we're really excited to have you on today and talk about uh you know your journey through education and what you're doing, and we'd love to end by hearing a little bit about the most recent book that you've written. Um, because uh yeah, well we'll get there, but it's it's really exciting.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Yeah, it's refreshing to me also to be here. So thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Thank you. So let's start, let's start at the beginning. Yeah. Uh so who was Owen Anderson, the kid?

SPEAKER_05 2:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Uh you know, did you go through an education, a great books education? Did you discover it? Uh fill us in.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

So I think I was a high school kid, early 90s. And so I think I was just before classical education became a more common phrase. And so I went to a public high school, and it's it's really interesting to me because when I look back, I actually think I got a really good education at the time, kind of complain, you're in high school, but especially my English teacher, my art teacher, a couple of my science teachers, they they brought the great books to us. So they didn't tell us that though. It was just kind of the curriculum, it's just what you did. And I think that's part of what Great Books wants to do, right? Is restore things that we had and they got taken out. And we need to be conscious of bringing them back. But there's a specific story that I tell people about how I got into classical education. I think it was 11th grade, and we were in the library, school library, and my friend and I discovered the great book series that you guys have here. I think people can see it just at the top of their screen. And it is that exact same one. It's in the library, because there's different editions of it. Uh, in the library, and we're looking at it, we know a couple of these names, and it was just really interesting to see this and think, wow, these are this is like the collection of all the great thoughts. And I want to know more about that myself. So I remember I don't know why, but I picked out Aristotle and Freud. Check those out.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

What an interesting combo. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

Yeah, I checked those out and looked them over as best I could, and uh my friend picked out Aquinas, and we talked about it, and it kind of started me towards a on a journey of being interested in philosophy. At the time, I didn't know there was a a thing called philosophy, and that you could major in it, and that you could maybe even get a job teaching it. So when I found those things out my senior year of high school, I said, okay, that's what I want to do. Wow. I want to be a philosophy major against all the best advice of well-intending adults in my life who said, you can study philosophy all you want, but do something that will get you a job. And I said, Oh, I'll I'll get a job. And um, so I yeah, I just kind of went went into philosophy with the great books idea behind me. Now I went to uh ASU. I actually went to ASU for my all my degrees, and I got a tenure track job there. And that's not the normal course, but it just kind of kept opening up either tuition waivers, scholarships, whatnot. I kept going. And then once you have a PhD in philosophy and you apply for a tenure track job and get the offer, you don't say, well, no, I've been in Tempe too long, right? So yeah, absolutely. So, but uh, but I the programs I was in weren't great books programs. For example, philosophy at ASU back then was a very well-respected analytic philosophy program. And then I did a degree in uh actually I did one BA in history because I they had a good um Chinese intellectual program, which was like a Chinese great books program, but it was in the history department. Interesting. And then I did a master's degree in religious studies because I wanted to be well-rounded in in you know both philosophy and religious thought. We we used to call ASU's probably still, I was still called ASU's MA in religious studies is the seminary for atheists. So they learn all about religion from the atheist perspective.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Interesting.

SPEAKER_02 5:27

And so, but but in my back of my mind and out of my own interest, I've been reading the great books, thinking, you know, I want to apply these to it. And so I, in one way, was already ahead of a lot of other students because they didn't have any of that. They might have they might know like Burton Russell to the present is all they know about philosophy. And that gave me a depth to pull on when I went to school. And the other big secret, which is behind you, your audience will be able to see it, but is the great courses. And when I discovered those, it was like, whoa, I can learn about any topic I want from award-winning professors. Your your audience will think this is a sale, this is a commercial, right? For them, but I still really enjoy them. And so yeah, I I could could identify places where I had a hole in my education. Like I never had a class on, you know, Russian history or something. So I would try to bring myself up to speed with something like that in order to know, yeah, what happened in that part of the world.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Interesting. So before you had this discovery moment in high school, senior year, which it's, you know, I I want to talk about that a little bit more. Uh, because it's crazy that the small thing that you notice that kind of changes the course of your life. But but before that, what were you interested in? What did you did you kind of think like, I don't even know if I want to do college or what I want to do in college? Yeah, what sort of student were you?

SPEAKER_02 6:47

Yeah, I think when I was saying middle school, I loved, I think we've got Narnia behind me, so I loved C.S. Lewis. And because of that, I was aware of his apologetic and philosophical work. Um, and although it was a little bit, you know, for middle school or it's a little bit out of reach. So I also started reading that in high school. And that got me interested in, you know, philosophy of religion, apologetics types, topics. And that was really what my my interest was. I didn't realize, as I said, that there's a something called a philosophy major. And so I think, you know, I I I really didn't like high school in one sense. I mean, no one in my peer group, no one loved high school, and so and so I I got decent grades, not perfect grades, but I wasn't probably someone you'd say is going to be a professor if you met me, especially ninth, tenth, eleventh, you'd be like, I don't know about that guy. I mean, he's a fine guy, but I don't know if he's gonna be a professor or anything like that. So I think um you can't always predict, you know, where people will turn out, where your life will turn out. And uh but I was always kind of an argumentative kid, just kind of um analytic and dialectic in my approach to things. So I think my parents thought that, hey, a great job for you would be a lawyer. You know, you get paid to argue with people. And that is the kind of a joke that I make in philosophy is there's two paths. The successful philosophy majors who become lawyers, and then the the academic philosophy majors who become professors. Right. And so that was always one of the options. But I think you know, in a humorous way, my parents are glad, hey, good, you still found a career that you like where you can argue with people. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Not us. Yeah. Uh Socrates would probably say there's the sell-outs, the lawyers, you know.

SPEAKER_02 8:21

I always phrase it as a joke to see, because I'm joking, I'm gonna see if my students catch the successful ones, the lawyers, although I mean my money. And then the unsuccessful ones, the the wise ones.

SPEAKER_05 8:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

So it sounds like you were always a philosopher. Maybe you didn't have the vocabulary for that. Do you remember some of the first uh questions you were asking as a kid? Uh paradigms you were trying to test out and saying, Yeah, you told me this, but I don't think this fits.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Yeah, you mean raised in uh Christian church, going to church, and also youth group. So questions initially just about the Christian message of salvation. How do we know if that's true? How would I know if I'm saved? Like if I'm really a Christian or not.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

How old were you asking that question?

SPEAKER_02 9:04

That was that that started probably around fourth and fifth grade because of the youth group stuff we did. You know, because you're getting talks every week at youth group boss seven. So I just kind of was starting to wonder about that. But then especially once I got into high school and there was some amount of religious diversity, I mean, this wasn't like the world's religions, but it's more than just Christians. And so I started realizing, well, they believe what they believe because their parents told them, and I believe what I believe because my parents told me. And we could both be wrong, can't both be right. And so I started wondering, well, how do I know? And like I said, we had I have some great teachers. My favorite class in high school was our art class, and it was divided up. We did mostly we did art, which I love doing, but then we also had each semester a whole month on art history. And our art our art uh teacher, again, another person where you wouldn't predict it, he was our uh freshman football coach and kind of a cowboy guy. And he was he'd won my freshman year, he won the world championship of muzzle loading competition. So I was like, what?

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Wait, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. Art teacher, yeah, world champion muzzle loader, uh, cowboy and football coach. Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness. So but it was great.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

I mean, the art history classes, they stick with me today. They were we turned the lights out, we had an old slide projector, yeah, and we go over these, and I loved it. And then English English teacher that you know, she's putting us through the great books, not officially, but we're reading good stuff. Yeah. And so those things really caught my attention. I like them a lot. And then um, one time I remember in biology class, our our teacher, also a football coach, let us um did have a debate about origins. And so that was just kind of a for me really engaging thing. Like, yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun. Like, what's what's the limits of science on these materials and how much can we know and not know? So those kinds of things from high school teachers, I bet if you would ask them back then, they would say, Oh, Owen doesn't care at all about this stuff, you know, in terms of teenage boy body language. But that's what's good for teachers to know is to hear you know from students later in life. Yeah, because working with people is different than other jobs, right? Like if you if you're uh into roof construction, you finish it up and you can point to it when you drive by and say, I made that.

SPEAKER_05 11:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:15

With humans, it's a lot different, right? Sometimes they start to do good, then they fail, then they do good later. And and so I I look back and I think, yeah, I really appreciate that that those teachers took the time to infuse what I'd call great books education into a public school.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Yeah. Okay, we we have to stay there for a second. How um I just I want to kind of meditate on this, the teenager who is learning despite all outward appearances of learning, right? Um, you know, because uh I taught sixth through twelfth grade, uh, you taught fourth through twelfth grade. Fourth through twelfth grade, yeah. And uh, and we've definitely had a lot of these experiences where they graduate um or move on to another school, and you're like, did did I make any mark you know at all? What what's your experience been in college? Um, have you seen kids kind of shift later in life? Because we just kind of that's where we hand them off. And yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

Oh, for sure. I think I think we've I've seen, you know, maybe across the spectrum of students who initially love it and tell me they love it first day of school. I can't believe we get to study this stuff. And then students who come around in the semester, and then students I hear from, you know, years later, hey, you may not remember me, but I was in this class. And uh, and sometimes like like ASU, it kind of is on a cyclical, it uh is is standard bureaucracy humor where there's like cyclical changes. So it'll go from hey, we want people, students want in-person teaching. We're not gonna do online, to hey, you all need to be online. Why don't you teach online? Well, you just told me not. I didn't tell you anything, be online. So now we're back to no, we want to be in person. Right. But so what's interesting to me coming out of the online cycle is meeting students I never met in person. I just knew their name. And then saying, Oh, I had your class, and it, and here's the things I learned from it. So I think, yeah, I think in any kind of a human enterprise dealing with humans, there's that delay of time sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Yeah, do you think do you guys think we expect too much too quickly now because of just the speed of technology?

SPEAKER_02 13:22

I think I think so. I think that's another good way to put it, right? Thinking of it like a uh analogy to farming, yeah. Which we don't do, we want bread, we go to the store.

SPEAKER_05 13:29

Right.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

And I just saw a study of a guy who who tried to make everything from scratch for a ham sandwich. And it took him six months, like grow the wheat to make the bread. It took him six months and fifteen hundred dollars to make one sandwich. And we don't think about those terms, we just think, no, I just go to the store and I buy a ham sandwich. So yeah, I think you're right that you know, thinking of it as paidea or drawing out or farming is a much more helpful analogy.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Yeah, Wendell Berry would be a fan of that for sure. What do you think, Ryan? Because you you've seen you know four through twelve.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

I I mean I remember that my worst years of teaching was when I was self-obsessed and worried like these kids are a reflection of me. Yeah. So I better better get the image to fix uh the way it needs to fix. So when classroom observations happen, my headmaster wanders in, I'm seeing uh at least artificial fruits of my labor right in front of me. Uh, and so is this obsession of like self-absorption, I think. Um and I I think I've I find that with a lot of teachers where they don't realize there is a narcissistic impulse. That's a good point. Uh and there's something going on where this kid isn't tracking with what I'm putting in front of him, and that they just they struggle to know what to do about that. And they lose sight of what the whole mission is, which is cultivating the soul over time rather than that's a good making a product.

SPEAKER_02 15:05

Cultivating the soul. I want to put a mark on that to come back to. But I think that's a great point because the you know, I'm a teacher, so when when you're in the profession, you can make fun of the profession. When you're not in it, we'll get a little sensitive like, hey, wet shit. But immediately what kind of people would be attracted to a profession where your job is to tell people things? Like, how how egotistical do you have to be to think, hey, I could teach people? And so there is that kind of uh narcissism or ego that goes into the self-selection process. Whereas someone who goes into like private law might be a little more realistic about human nature, they're defending criminals, maybe, and more realistic about themselves. Yeah, I want just want to make a lot of money, right? So teachers, I think, have some of their own barriers to overcome, which I think that's one reason it's always so good to have mentorship from older teachers to younger teachers just starting out. But it follows the same trajectory we're talking about because as a mentor to a younger teacher, you might say, Okay, I've taught this to you for six months. Do you get it yet? Versus, no, this is a human, it might have taken you six months, it takes someone else three years. Um, and I think that's is one of the reasons when you think about burnout rates for teachers. Is I I would I have never done this study, I'm not an empirical scientist, so I'm not sure it would work. But to see if the burnout has a correlation to teachers who didn't overcome that egotism.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

I think so. Or just like losing hope uh eventually because they're not changing actually.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

I mean, yeah, I'm wonderful. My sound, my voice is music, music to the ears of everybody, and it's not working. Yeah, I hate the world now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Yeah, it's funny. Uh Ryan and I both worked in a a six twelve, uh uh sixth grade through twelfth grade environment. So you had middle school and high school, and I think that increased longevity for our middle school teachers because if you're only seeing the eighth grade uh archetype or seventh grade archetype year after year, you know, and you don't get to see what they're becoming.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

You only get to see the dark night of the soul. You think that's all there is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:01

Yeah, that'd be really hard, yeah, in human development. And that's part of, I mean, in I I I've done everything from 101s up to dissertations, but mostly I deal with 100, 200 level students. Right. And so, you know, that's a it's a new phase of life. So they're not just the year after senior in high school. They're they're moved out, most likely. They're got you know their first time living apart from parents, or even if they're at home, you know, the parents recognize it's a different situation now. And so there's a a lot of optimism in those times, and you're trying to learn who you are, which is why I think it's another chance to do philosophy. Uh, and what I mean by that is I'm always sad that we miss our first chance to do philosophy, which is I would put it in the kind of elementary years, I don't mean that they're they're sitting around of th third grade or sitting around philosophizing, but that they leave fifth grade knowing there are these questions and knowing there's something called logic, and then they're gonna learn about it. Whereas a lot of times when I get students that are 18, 19, they didn't even know that. And and they got through K through 12 and no one ever said to them, hey, there's something called the good. We should talk about it.

SPEAKER_05 18:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:03

And so that's really sad in one sense, and I you know that I get to be the first professor or teacher in our life who brings that up. But I I I've heard a lot of them say that, like, man, why didn't someone tell me about this earlier? This is this is central to education, and I never heard about it. And so I think I think you know, kids in K through 12 realize that our our K through 12 universe our our campuses generally look like prisons and they're all locked in.

SPEAKER_05 18:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:28

And and we make it as bleak as possible, and then we're supposed to tell them, hey, but don't be depressed about life. And on top of that, we turn the education just into here's some facts, and hey, it turns out America's horrible, and so is the West. Right. And you're part of that. And it's like the most depressing. Yeah, it's annihilating. Yeah, there's no hope of any kind. You're you're the bad guy in the story, you're sitting in a place that looks like prison, and then we expect them to be hopeful.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

Yeah. So kind of coming back to that that piece of the the teenager or you know, the teenage boy, what do you think breaks through, or at least what broke through to you? Like you've you've mentioned a couple of those vignettes, but but it's I I'm always curious like what stands out in people's memory.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Yeah. Well, it's so funny. I mean, I feel like you guys did this on purpose because it within my eyesight, there's Victor Frankel. And it wasn't that I'd read Victor Frankel, but the problem of meaning is what stood out to me as a as a young man. I senior high school going into college. Yeah, what gives life any meaning? But because we read some great books, I could reference characters, like like we read through uh Once a Future King, and so I could think about Arthur and Lancelot and how they were different. We read through lots of Shakespeare, so I could reference Mark Anthony and think about how he approached things. So I think that that gave me more than just my experience to draw from or my immediate family or my TV characters.

SPEAKER_05 19:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

But I could say, no, here's some people that are, you know, classics of literature, and some of them are real people, and how do they answer the question about the meaning of life?

SPEAKER_01 19:55

Yeah. You know, part of what you talked about was um this idea that uh that it's the books you see, it's the books you read, you connect those characters. That's so important in classical education. But I also I know a lot of kids feel today like no one takes an interest in them as people as a human, as individuals. You know, so you referencing this kind of industrial complex of education. Yeah, um, I felt that too. Like, uh man, I you know, I'm not I'm not really showing up as my best self this year and and do my teachers even notice. Um have you did you kind of have that experience in public school? Was there were there any teachers who actually really did say, Oh, Owen, I see who you are. I see Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

A couple of them I mentioned just now already.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:48

Were the ones that did, and not limited to that. I mean, but that's where I was I was surprised looking back on them. I think, oh, actually, you got a a good education. I think it was just standard Arizona public school education back then. So it's not as if uh I'm I don't want I'm I don't mean to imply my to limit or put down my teachers, because I think they did great, but just that imagine that. Yeah, like back then uh you had a schedule of what you read in Shakespeare. So I could say so. I used to be able to tell my students when they came in, I knew they went to Arizona Public High Schools. Oh, okay, so you you went to local high school, okay. So senior year you read Hamlet, freshman year Julie. No, not anymore. Right. Wow. So that that was you know, those teachers, but then you're right, that personal touch of this is a human being. Like I remember our in English we would we would be asked for the spend the first 15 minutes journaling and it could be anything, doesn't there's no real parameters, like it doesn't have to be like your personal thoughts on you know Freudian stuff, but whatever you want. And then then we'd hand them in once a month and the j and the instructor would read them and write notes to you about your thoughts. And so it was kind of personal, you know, in that sense. Like you could make it impersonal or impersonal as much as you want, but the teacher cared about your personal thoughts at this age in the first ten to fifteen minutes of life of your class. Yeah. And so, yeah, that kind of thing, I think. Is necessary, but the way we I mean the way that schools are now, K through 12, but especially universities like where I'm at, it's not limited to ASU, but ASU is the largest state university in the country now with 190,000 students. Oh my goodness. So we just got two years ago, our administrator of my school said, hey, going forward, every 100 and 200 level class will have 60 students. And that's how they solved a budget problem. And so I understand the problem they're trying to solve, and that's what makes sense to them. And this person's a humanist also. So it's not like they don't get it. But on the other side, they just said, as long as that policy is in place, they just said that entire block of students will not get a humanities education. They'll get an education of here's some facts and memorize them for an online test or something. Right. But in a room of 60 kids, you're not going to be able to know them personally like that or know about their interests and have Socratic conversations that last through the whole semester. So we we really, this is one of the things I write about publicly is the loss of education at the very time when we're at the peak of the industrial educational complex, we don't have it. And that's a really interesting juxtaposition.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Yeah. It is because it is because um there, you know, as much as I talk about, hey, that that human connection, there's so many ways to get it wrong. It's like uh social emotional learning has become the new buzzword, but then that's all about the individual, but then it's not really about the individual and the individual. Yeah, it's about like the commodification of emotions or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Or where the individual fits into the whole of reality is all of reality.

SPEAKER_02 23:43

And you're told how to feel. So if you feel right this this lifestyle is it seems immoral to me, well, no, that you can't feel that way. And so that's the only problem, too. Is yeah, it's not really learning about like exploring yourself. Right. I'll put that underneath the umbrella of know thyself. It's not know thyself, right? Not know thyself, or I'll put it under the umbrella of existentialist literature where you're you, the particular individual, are trying to come to terms with the impersonal reality of say industrial life or something. There's no exploration of that kind of thing, which I think you know that's exactly what high schoolers are going through, but we don't really let them explore that.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

Interesting.

SPEAKER_02 24:17

I think that I think the you know, part of the problem, obviously, is especially in high school, but also in my setting, is you're not really supposed to get to know them personally, because what are you open yourself up to now? I mean, yeah, that's a lot different than the 1990s when I was there, but now you start to show any interest in a student, you know, who knows a lawsuit you're open. Yeah, and ASU's got really strict rules as well. I mean, it's a little bit lighter than at K through 12, but the whole atmosphere is very tense in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Yeah, so that's so interesting in that we've we're saying, hey, education needs to be so much more personal so that we can solve this mental health crisis, but then we deep we depersonalize it at the same time. The f the the point you just made about uh just naming the thing that they're in, I think that's so powerful for teenagers.

SPEAKER_03 25:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

That if you say, hey, you know, just so you know, you know, I'm a teacher, you're a student, but we're going through this mode of education that um that can be kind of depressing because there's so many of you, like how can we make the best of it? Like the second you break the fourth wall there with teenagers, I I feel like they come alive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:31

With teenagers, I mean.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

I mean, there's a million ways we can go on this one. I'm trying to think, do we get to the epiphany moment for you now? We've talked a little bit about who you were. Uh I think maybe we should briefly talk about this and then move into more of what you're seeing at ASU. Uh, but you you pick up some of the great books off of the wall. Yeah. Um tell me about some of those uh lightning bolt moments where you start to see the pieces slide into place. What were the pieces that needed to move and what were maybe some of the works or the stories that you read that uh rightly ordered them?

SPEAKER_02 26:14

Yeah, so for me, if I had to give like a one-sentence description of what changed, it was learning about the power of the mind and reason to know things. So suddenly, you know, you go from education is just sort of things you memorize, to you're dealing with the biggest problems humans can deal with, and they're knowable. I don't mean that you'll know them within five minutes, but that you can go forward thinking these are things that can be known, which is what gives you the energy for the journey, since it's gonna take longer than five minutes. And and for me, that was really just mind-blowing.

unknown 26:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

Did you have an implicit assumption that it just can't be known? Like we're all just subject to what the world is and we I think so.

SPEAKER_02 26:57

I think at least let's say unspoken skepticism and then teenage skepticism, we're just kind of like, eh. And then that brought to my attention, do you really want to defend that philosophically though? And so when certain things were shown to me, like you can know what is good, you can know what is eternal, and demonstrating how to know things. That was the that was the proof in the pudding, so to speak. Say, wow, you're right. I mean, Aristotle gives a really simple proof, but I think it's a sound proof that something's existed from eternity. And the ability to prove that and know that for me opened up a whole nother world to say, wow, this is amazing. That's what education's about. And that's what I love to share with with philosophy students, because you can kind of it is something you can see in many cases, not all, as a teacher, you kind of see them, you know, get a spark in the eye, like, oh, this just something just clicked in my mind. And so in a number of classes, if you were to say to them, hey, you break that fourth wall and say, hey, we're gonna talk about this, you're losing your subject's time. Like we also got to do calculus at some point. Sure. Whereas from day one, I that's what I do, right? So uh I always go on day one, you're in class, you're in philosophy 101. Where'd your life go so badly wrong? How did you get here? And they're kind of laughing because none of them are philosophy majors. Yeah, how'd you end up here? But then we go through and pretty quickly show none of them know why they're here. Because the first answer, of course, is to get a grade, to pass a class, right, to get my degree, to get a job. And we keep going, maybe some money. And that's about as far as they thought it out. Like, wow, that's kind of depressing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_06 28:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

And so I use that because it pulls them in existentially. It's not just uh uh we're gonna learn about Aristotle and then about Aquinas. It's yeah, what am I doing? What's my chief end or my good that I'm pursuing? Yeah. So that's what I love about philosophy is that that breaking that fourth wall is built into it.

SPEAKER_01 28:50

So was Aristotle one of those authors that when you read that was that the author that helped you understand, like, oh, there is a good that can be pursued, there is an eternal good, or was it somewhere else?

SPEAKER_02 29:04

Yeah, Aristotle definitely, especially for logic and just the way he lays out thinking about that there is a highest good, there's not an infinite regress of things you're pursuing, or there is something eternal for very similar reasoning. But then, of course, the Platonic dialogues are a little more engaging. Uh, and I tell students, be nice to Aristotle because you're reading his students' notes. And I would hate to be judged by your notes. But with Plato, we because we know Aristotle dialogues too, we just don't have them. But with Plato, we've got them, and so those are always a little more engaging. You see him, see Socrates doing those things. So I think uh but then I love Shakespeare, I love literature. I was very close to just being a literature major, and you know, burn through Dosievsky, Tolstoy, I especially love because Kierkegaard because of that existential term, uh, Kafka, anything that was kind of dealing with the meaning of life stuff.

SPEAKER_05 29:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:51

And um, and so yeah, all of those just gave me the ability to see how others who have thought about it much more than I have have thought about it, and then I get to kind of enter into that same thought process. And so, yeah, for me, that's just where I just saw the whole world kind of turn on. Like, what can't you study? That's kind of what I said earlier about the great courses is yeah, what don't I know about? Oh, uh pearl harvesting. Yeah, how does that work? How do you do that? Because you could know about anything, like your mind can never stop.

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Do you think you always had that um that uh orientation of being a learner?

SPEAKER_02 30:27

I think there must be some things that I, you know, I can't take credit for, or my immediate uh circumstances don't take credit for. Personality things, because some people may just not enjoy sitting around arguing about free will, you know. Right. They they'd rather do other things. So there's definitely those personality things. And I think that's one thing we have to be careful about in education is recognizing we're not it's not a cookie-cutter thing, even with, let's say, Socrates, like we don't want to just think everyone will turn out to be unemployed philosophers in the markets, you know. Uh, and so yeah, we want to respect that difference. But there are some things I look back on. Like my dad and my mom had both gone to college, and my dad went on to get a master's degree in botany. And so he was an empirical scientist, actually working out in the field, doing science. And but then he also did a degree just out of pure interest in theology. Didn't didn't advance his job or anything, just wanted to do that. So my my house always kind of looked like this when I was growing up. And I would always like to look and see what books does my dad have. I still go there and see uh what books he has and see if I can borrow some. And so there's something about being you know surrounded by adults who also believe you can know things and use their mind to do that without them even telling you that. Yeah, you're surrounded.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

I was I was reading an an article that pointed to a study that said your kids' reading level will increase just if you have uh a bookcase filled with books, even if they don't read any of the books on the bookcase. That's crazy. Yeah. Because I think it's what you just said that as an adult, you're showing that you care about those things. And we're gonna pause for a second because we lost video.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Um where were we? Bookshelves, reading levels. Yeah, I think that's another thing.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

Having the books there is also the it kind of, I don't know what the right word is, demythologizes them, or what I'm seeing is uh, oh, I can read these. Like I oh, I can read Shakespeare. You know what I mean? Oh, I can read the great books of the world. Um I I I may not be good at it yet, I might need to read it a few times. But rather than thinking, well, no, those are for really smart people, that's out of my area. And so I think that's another helpful thing with having books around kids is no, these are yours. This is the the the treasury of humanity, and it's yours, it's your inheritance from humanity. You you should enjoy it and use it and benefit from it.

SPEAKER_00 32:47

I think there's also something just about the beauty of the thing. I mean, you come in here because you just want to be in it.

SPEAKER_02 32:54

I know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:56

Uh and there's something like I would just imagine growing up in a house like this, I just walk by and it's just like, wow. It's just the wonder is infused in you, is all of a sudden deeply compelling and a privilege to be able to pick something up like this. Whereas I could see you being given a paragraph uh in the SAT, or not the SAT, what's what's the standardized test uh in Arizona, whatever that is.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Oh, the ASA?

SPEAKER_00 33:27

Yeah. There's there's no beauty or wonder in that paragraph about why we should paint murals on cinder block buildings. Like there's just there's no mystery uh to keep you connected uh to the deeper understanding of what a book is.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

We know there's a handful of movies about teachers teaching difficult classes, and they seem to have the same recipe. I I think it rings true. What was the one in East LA? Was it Stan to Stan and Deliver from the 80s? Math Teacher, but but they all have kind of the same idea, which is going from, hey, you should know this so you go to college and get a good job, to you're a human who can know things. And the the students become inspired by the fact that teacher, kind of what you're saying, takes time to get to know them. Yeah, but I think what that's saying to them is you matter, and also you're you're a human, you're not an animal. You can you can use your mind for all kinds of amazing things.

SPEAKER_05 34:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:24

And I that's one thing. I mean, how do you you can't necessarily build that into K through 12 public school in the same way you can a classical education school?

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Yeah. I I'd love to hear, especially for some of the people who are listening, and you know, you you say Aristotle does this great job of telling us that there are these eternal truths. Um, you know, what for them, like what does he say? What what do you talk about in your one-on-one classes with Aristotle?

SPEAKER_02 34:51

Yeah, so let me let me use the two examples I've spoken of so far. So the good.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 34:55

And Aristotle, the very beginning of his work on ethics, says that when we choose something, we choose it for a goal, an end. And that itself, the end we are choosing it for, might be the means to another end. So for example, we work to get money, but we don't want just money. We want money to purchase things or to save it up for security. And so there must be some final thing that all things aim at, which is called the good. Definite article. We don't really speak that way when we use the word good. Normally it's it's not the definite article, it's more of just a description, especially about what pleases me, like, oh, that that was good ice cream or something. And so here he's introducing this idea that no, what why do you do what you do? And so I think that's a really fascinating question. What what do your actions tell the rest of us that you think is good? And that also means that you may not know the good, or you may not even know what your actions tell the rest of us that you think is good. And then you can kind of, I know I know maybe sometimes pop culture's off limits, but I kind of take away its glimmer by raising a question like, what do you think Andrew Tate believes is good? Some TikTok star. What is he was his final good? And if there was any interest in them at all, it kind of wanes because it's like, yeah, that guy is doesn't know what his own highest good is.

SPEAKER_05 36:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:15

So just that first paragraph in Aristotle introducing that idea, and he does something similar to all what's eternal in his metaphysics, that something must have existed from eternity. Because the alternative possibility that there was once only nothing, then you would still just have nothing. And then you get into the discussion, okay, and so what is it? So the real question is not, did something exist from eternity, but what? And that's really a gr a really quick way to categorize the different world philosophies and religions because they disagree about that. And that gives you a really good way to think about them and begin to uh you know go through them in your mind, to contrast Aristotle, who says the material world existed from eternity, with Moses and Genesis, who says no, God existed from eternity and he created the heavens and the earth. And so you get you get as a young student, you realize, wow, I'm starting to understand the debate that's going on. Now I know why early Christian philosophers wrote against Aristotle and the eternity of the world, because they were defending Moses. So it just introduces all those kind of things.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

That's so great because so much of our education is concerned with utility. You know, if I teach you something, then you'll be able to use that thing. Um, and it's funny how much that like falls flat for students. Um I remember you know doing a coffee with the headmaster with parents, and they're we're talking about math instruction, and the mom is like, you know, I I just I'm trying to motivate my kid to do to do math. And I'm like, well, what you know, what do you what do you tell them in terms of like why math is important? And it was the old kind of like stereotype of like, well, you know, if you're at the grocery store and you need to know how much this costs, and I said, like, that is so irrelevant. Like, first of all, it's just not even true. That's not why a kid's and that just lands so flat for kids.

SPEAKER_02 38:07

Um well, and those of us growing up in the 80s that were you know the answer was you won't have a calculator with you everywhere you go because they're this big.

SPEAKER_01 38:16

Right. Keeps happening, Ryan.

SPEAKER_05 38:20

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 38:24

Yeah, I was just saying that the the math example, especially, is always a company with you won't always have a calculator. In the 80s, that could be true because they're they're quite large. But now if you have an Apple watch, not only like one plus one, yeah, you can do differential equations on your Apple watch, right? So it took away that utilitarian answer. But yeah, sometimes I take a moment to explain calculus to students in in 101, just what it is. And it's like, isn't it amazing the human mind can do that? Yeah, like wouldn't you want to know how to do that?

SPEAKER_01 38:54

What do you say to them in one about calculus? Yeah, I'm really curious.

SPEAKER_02 38:58

Thinking how to graph and chart motion. Like when you think of math, I bet you think of something static, even in algebra or geometry. We're we're we're we're a uh X and Y axis, you know. But now, what if you wanted to understand why things move the way they do, and then even be able to predictively do that yourself if you wanted to send something from point A to point B. So you're starting to do a math that interacts with four dimensions and gets you off the page of just, and I'm not putting down arithmetic or algebra, but just that seems like, okay, that's just is what it is, and then I go on with the rest of my life. And it took either, whether you're German or English, you say either Newton or Leibniz had to invent this so that we can now watch Elon Musk try to send something to Mars using differential equations and calculus, right?

SPEAKER_05 39:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:52

And so even if you don't go into those, you never take those classes because your major doesn't require you to go past college algebra, at least knowing you could learn those things, you have the ability to, is just like, wow, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 40:03

Well, and that's what I find so powerful, you know, that that was kind of where I was going with this utility aspect is the utility in a rightly ordered education is massive. Because what you were just saying the real utility, yeah. Yeah, the real utility, right? What what you just described about Aristotle and this idea of are you what what good are you pursuing for what end? And does that does that end actually serve another end? Um, like that is that's highly practical.

SPEAKER_02 40:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:36

Like what adult shouldn't be exactly shouldn't know that.

SPEAKER_02 40:39

And it'll it'll help you avoid wasting your life. Right. Like you thought ahead of time. Instead of getting to the midlife prices at 45 and thinking, man, I didn't plan this out right, and then losing everything because you whatever you did, whatever, uh, you think ahead and say, well, you know what, I don't want to be there because that guy was pursuing money or prestige or something, and it didn't make him happy. I know that ahead of time. Yeah. And so, yeah, you can do all kinds of things to understand reality and the world and just that power of the mind. So, yeah, one you know, one thing that it's making mention the utility of education because, of course, if you're spending government money, you can you naturally have tasks where we're getting out of it, and parents are spending their own money, they want to know what they're getting out of it. So the the kind of quick overview story about classical education is that the big bad guy's John Dewey, uh, working at University of Chicago, although it's interesting, that's also who gave us the great book series. Yeah. And his his he was reacting to a certain kind of great books education, which you might call it like the aristocratic great books education, where you you come from a moneyed family, you're not going to really work, maybe in investments or politics, but not work-a-day person. And so you'll read Plato and you basically live your life in the Platonic forms of the rich people. And so he's trying to democratize education in a way that I think we can relate with and say, well, how can everybody get an education? And I don't think inherently in that question is the kind of you know commodification that we're ending up with. I think you can ask an everybody democracy question and end up with the kind of things I've been talking about. Like, yeah, everybody should have this wonder, no matter what job you end up in. I sometimes joke that one of the best jobs you can ever get is a factory worker and you're just putting a thing on the cog on each widget that goes down. Because the whole time you're doing that, it doesn't take your mental attention. You're listening to the great courses and you can study whatever. Whereas this poor CEO upstairs, he's in meetings all day, he gets paid to have his attention on the business all day. He doesn't get to study anything. So I kind of reverse this, right? He gets money, but I get wisdom.

SPEAKER_05 42:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

And it takes away this thing like, oh, the factory worker, that's the lowest job, rather than no, the lowest job would be one that doesn't let you pursue wisdom.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

So was the answer to how do we democratize education uh for Dewey? Well, let's just turn it into a machine.

SPEAKER_02 43:06

No, I think I mean I I don't think that that was his intention, although his intention wasn't guided by great books either. It wasn't as if he was misunderstood great books, a proto-gray books guy. But I think his idea was we want to make an education that's available to everybody and lets them live in the 21st century. Well, that's only going to be as good as far as he understood into the 21st century.

unknown 43:28

Right.

SPEAKER_02 43:29

Right. So as a pragmatist and a kind of empiricist, I don't think he understood much about the human soul. And he was pretty antithetical to Christianity. So he wanted, you know, lean more towards a materialistic approach to life. And I think those things did us a disservice once we begin to the Cold War because we're not the Soviets. So one of the main ways we'll defeat them is that we can study the humanity. They're just materialists. And it's very bleak and depressing to live underneath their system, whereas the American system lets you be yourself, be a human and pursue whatever goals you want without government interference. And so I think that's part of where the the you know United States began to distinguish itself from a purely materialist and pragmatist education. And yet like you go you go to K through twelve, is I think you you probably saw the story last week from the Harvard Crimson about the number of college students in Ivy Leagues are registered as disabled. No? And how it's just through the roof. Really? It's like 20% of Harvard students are registered as needing extra time for disability on tests. And that's pretty standard across all the universities. This I think today was only Ivy League, but it's pretty standard. And so the question, of course, on the one side is you'll be asking, okay, this is scamming the system, right? Um, but I don't think it is. I think they get notes, what they're what they're reporting, notes from the doctor. Yeah. What they're reporting is uh post-COVID skyrocks of depression, anxiety, um, etc. And so the uh proponents of it will say you can't put those days, you can't say, oh, that's just psychological. That's a real disability, too. But it also does have a cognitive element of, yeah, what are we telling our kids post, even during, you know, they live through COVID, maybe they're in middle school in COVID, and they come out on their side, and now they're going to college, and they're telling us life's depressing.

SPEAKER_03 45:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:13

And the doctor confirms this is a depressed person. So we can say all that's true, they're not gaming the system. What does that say about us then?

SPEAKER_00 45:19

That we mean our education is working. I mean, if that's what we're teaching them, they're learning it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

Well, and and you know, for again, you brought up Dewey, and for listeners kind of not in the classical education speech uh space, uh, where where we come from is that then Adler, Mortimer Adler was kind of an answer to Dewey, and he was saying, yes, this should be for everybody, but instead of this uh this kind of almost more socialist approach of remove the intelligentsia from education, it was everyone deserves the education that only the elite used to have.

SPEAKER_02 45:57

Yeah, maybe almost like say Dewey's answer, Dewey's asking, what will this, how will this help you do something in the 21st century? Like what will you be? Meaning what vocation? And you can ask the same question from a classical education question of well, what will you be? Well, I'll be a wise person. Right. And that's why I wanted to get back to the idea of cultivating a soul, which is you you should know how to do things and work with your hands. That's really good to know, too. Having a skill set, that also uh is a nobility that humanity has, but you can use your mind as well. And you have a soul, and there might be some good reasons why you should pay more attention to your soul than your body. You we Americans spend a ton of money on gyms, pills, uh, whatever fad diet comes along. Uh double that for your soul, right? Because that's you, and that's that's what you're gonna be with forever. And so that whole idea of cultivating a soul is not even there, or if it does come up, we've let it sneak in in one way, and this is what I live in. This is the ocean I swim in every day. Because we agreed in basically with in the 60s, Madeline Marie O'Hare, who went to court her or fifth grader, came home in a Baltimore school, I think it was, uh, and he said, Yeah, they my teacher makes us pray, and we have the Ten Commandments. And she she was a registered communist, she she eventually ran the communists of Texas, and she went to court, went to the Supreme Court, no more prayer in 10 commands of school. So we all agreed, and we said, We agree, we'll be neutral. We shouldn't do that in public school. Okay, so the only view that got to sneak in was a view that I believe is still a religion, and it teaches answers to all the religious questions, but it doesn't say it's a religion, it says it hates religion, religion is the opiate of the masses, the Marxists. And so we let them rule education because of the supposed truce we made in the 60s, and every professor can say, Oh, I'm keeping the truth, I'm not, I'm not teaching Christian, I'm just teaching the dialectic of the oppressed and the oppressor. And so now when you go to universities, they will say you need to do something more than your job. You need to give back, you need to make the world a better place. That's very common language on ASU's webpage. Okay, well, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 48:02

It's a very moral claim, right?

SPEAKER_02 48:04

It is. Well, you'll advocate for something. Well, oh okay, we'll advocate for it. Well, you should advocate for the marginalized and the oppressed. Yeah, well, that makes sense. I don't like people to be oppressed. Uh, who are those? Well, here's the approved list of oppressed people, and here's who oppresses them. And and so you're all all of a sudden you're in the Marxist dialectic of the world. And you've never been taught to see through that or to question it. And in fact, I'm always I'm always shocked that when I talk to professors who believe this, I realize very quickly in the conversation they don't think outside. They don't realize, they don't know themselves enough to know that's their view, where they could say, okay, there's the Marxist dialectic, but then there's the capitalist understanding of how it works. It's just there's only the Marxist dialectic, and then there's if you disagree with it, okay, then you're an oppressor. So you're only still with well, no wait, that's still your system. I'm saying there's another view, and maybe five or six others besides that. We'll just talk about Adam Smith first.

SPEAKER_01 48:57

Yeah. And I think, you know, there's this, there's this misconception that when you're doing the liberal arts, you're doing classical ed, and because there's uh a an honoring of tradition and the West, what we mean by the West is this very narrow definition. But actually, what we mean is this conversation of all sorts of different ideas and being able to uh seek truth in that conversation, but also to be able to represent like what someone else is saying. And so I think that's connected right to what you're it's like, okay, if you choose to be a Marxist because you understand all the things that you could be and that's what you choose, interesting, you know, interesting choice. At least that's at least that's a a place a free person in a in an educated society could end up. Uh, but that's not what's happening anymore. And so so so what's interesting is that people who are arguing uh that a classical education is actually too narrow, yeah, I think don't understand that no, we're we're trying to read so many different things so that you can deeply understand it. If you're not, you know, if you're not Catholic, you should be able to articulate a Catholic worldview. If you're if you're uh not Presbyterian, you should be able to articulate that worldview.

SPEAKER_02 50:22

In a way that I always tell my students, you have to articulate their view to them, and them at the end of that say, yes, that's what I think. They can do that. You've done a good job. That's like that's almost a victory. You could just stop there and say, Right. And it's so rare now.

SPEAKER_01 50:35

Exactly. One of the first books I read as a as a classical ed teacher was After Virtue by Alistair McIntyre, right? And his claim is we've lost a common moral language by which we could even argue.

SPEAKER_02 50:50

I think that's a good if I had to use one phrase to say what do we need to recapture is common ground.

unknown 50:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:56

And so the great books were, in one sense, a common ground where we would all talk about Mark Antony or whoever, right? Oh, we all okay, we've all read that. Now we'll give our opinions on Mark Antony, and we all know the references. So if I started off saying friends Romans, the students can answer what comes next. Now that's not true. Yeah. And so I think that common ground, but not just the great books, the term I mentioned earlier in our conversation was reason. Just being able to reason together. And now that's sometimes even dismissed as part of the dialectic. That's oppressor language, and you're not allowed to reason together.

SPEAKER_01 51:29

Okay, so I think this is the perfect time to talk about this. I don't want to stay in politics too long or get too political, but uh one of the times I saw you recently, and I really deeply appreciated your words, was at the Charlie Kirk Memorial at ASU.

SPEAKER_05 51:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:46

And uh and I'd just love to hear you know your thoughts on on that, given the conversation we're having about just being able to reason together.

SPEAKER_02 51:56

Because what I said there, and I wrote an article about it later, was that he was our Socrates. And what I meant by that, I don't mean he's the one and only one we get, and now we're done with Socrates, but that he, just like Socrates says, uh, he is the most wise who, like Socrates asked, we can say Charlie Kirk was the Socrates because, and you can be too if you do this. But he just went to our university campuses, set up a little tent, and said, I'll argue with you about anything. And since on university campuses, the the most rare thing you can find is conservative, that's probably what you want to argue about. So let's argue about conservative economics or conservative immigration policy. Right. And the students loved it. This is what I say to parents who who are questioning Charlie Kirk is the proof is in who showed up. He didn't make anyone show up and debate him. If I went, I don't think I'd get a very good audience. But it wasn't something per se about Charlie Kirk. It was because students knew about him. He did a good job of using social media, so they knew, oh, he's coming to campus. I'm gonna prove that guy wrong. And he would say, and there's videos of him saying this to the audience, be respectful, no booing. I know there's a lot of conservatives here, but let's bring up the people who disagree first, and we're gonna hear them out. And he would always do that. So when I hear you know, people saying, Oh, he was a this or that, no, he wasn't. Uh, look at his videos for yourself. If you see like a 10-minute clip they took out and he says something that seems a little bit well, watch the whole thing. And Matt Walsh made this point the week after Charlie was murdered, and he said, Look, you you guys on the left, you killed the nice one. Yeah, I'm actually the guy, Matt Walsh said himself, who says the stuff you thought Charlie said. I do say that. He didn't. Right. And so what I think Charlie Kirk was a good example is the starvation on our university campuses for the intellectual life. Because those students should already be getting that in class, so they're like, Oh, some guy wants to argue. Well, I do that in class already, but they're not. They're getting told the Marxist dialectic, oppressed or oppressed, one view only. If you question it, now you're you're gonna, you know, be shamed. And so it's just mentally refreshing for them. And they wanted to go and tab a selfie going to show their friends on social media, oh, I argued with Charlie Kruok, and I proved him wrong, you know, they'll brag about it. Yeah, but why is that why is that so rare now? It's really sad.

SPEAKER_01 54:02

Yeah, and I I think that's what hit me about your speech at the memorial was you said he was just doing the things all the professors on campus are supposed to be doing. And students were really starved for that.

SPEAKER_02 54:15

Yeah. Yeah, just give give the students that give all, like in other words, instead of by the end of my class, the professor wants all the students to be Marxists, by the end of the class, maybe they completely disagree with me, but they know how to think for themselves. And that's one emphasis I I talk to my students sometimes at the beginning of 101 class. What is it to have a liberal education? Especially in our day, that sounds like, oh, you're getting a liberal, not a conservative education. Right. But that's it now actually means the reverse. And a liberal education is is two things, both from the Latin that we're using for liberal, it's a book education. And what that means is we we kind of take that for granted, maybe with with our computers, although it's still the same truth, which is you're kind of in a time machine hearing from someone who died their thoughts. And they wrote it down in a book so it would live longer than they did. And humans have been doing this for a long time, so they've kind of narrowed it down to some really thought-provoking ones. And you get to read those two. It used to be you'd have to sign up to go to the Bodlian Library, and you'd have to sit in a little desk and they bring the book over, it's chained to the wall because it costs so much, and you could read it. But now, because of human industry, a little plug for capitalism, you can own them yourself for 10 bucks, probably, right? Or now we can get them on our phones almost for free. And so it gives you access to the best thoughts humans have thought. But that's the second definition of liberal here: freedom, liberty. You get to be a free human, then no one can ever take that away from you. And so then I sometimes, because you can think, no one can trick you, no one can force you to believe what they think. You can see through power arrangements. If you don't want to believe them, you don't have to. And so then I tell different stories to illustrate that. One is, of course, Socrates, but another one is Schultz and Eatson, who's one of my favorites. You can be in prison. You can write a book in your mind. He did different things to try to get his books preserved, but one of them is he just had to memorize it because they kept finding little pieces of paper he put in his mouth and they dig around in there. And so he just memorized the entire book of the first circle. So when he gets out of prison, he can write it down. And and we, if you were to ask him, hey, would you would you trade that? Would you rather be one of the commonest officers living a nice, comfortable life, or be you in the prison cell writing great literature? Of course he's gonna pick that. So it frees you from preconceptions. Because as a parent, you say to the kid, don't be that, don't be the prisoner, be the guard, right? Or as a young kid. But it frees you from other people's conceptions about who you should be. And that's a that's a liberal education, it liberates you.

SPEAKER_00 56:43

I'm sure it varied a little bit. Um, but I'm curious, what was the popular response from your students when that event happened?

SPEAKER_02 56:54

Oh, I about Charlie Current?

SPEAKER_00 56:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 56:56

Or when I talk about liberal education.

SPEAKER_00 57:00

Well, let's start with Charlie.

SPEAKER_02 57:02

Yeah, the thing about, I mean, I think the whole campus felt it one way or the other. I saw a number of interviews of students who would say, Yeah, I didn't really follow him myself. I'm not conservative, but he wasn't bothering anybody. Like, what's the big deal? Why they didn't deserve to be killed for that. And so ASU let us use their basketball stadium. Yeah. And it was filled up except for right behind us, which for optics on the news didn't look good. But anyone there knows it was filled up. Like there's no reason to sit behind us because we're talking this direction. And so that, you know, that's probably I would, I'm just guessing, a $200,000 one-night rental between security and facilities. And so ASU just let us let the student club is all student-led, uh, put that together. And and then our club, you know, TPSA Club just rocketed in terms of students that signed up. Really? And it's not, I mean, it's mostly conservative Republicans, but there's a few students who said, I'm actually a Democrat, I'm just here because I wanted to find somewhere to finally debate. You know, that's what you do at TPSA, so I'm here as well. And I think, yeah, that's the goal, is you can have open debate in college. I mean, all think about like something as simple as college humor. Like no one knows who Monty Python is now. But The Simpsons also was college humor in its inception, and this idea of being irreverent. And there's a time and place for that. I'm not saying you walk around being irreverent about everything all the time, but there's a time and place when you're forming your own personality and who you want to be, where you kind of make fun of mom and dad and the things you were raised with. And now there's this you can't have humor on college. You're not allowed to have any jokes. So the loss of debate, the loss of intellectual curiosity, the loss of humor, and it just becomes a job factory. Why are you here? Well, I'm here to get a job, or I'm here to uh do a studies degree to change the world through Marxist dialectic advocacy. That's all there is to it. Jeez.

SPEAKER_00 58:47

I think we should touch on your book a little bit. Uh can you tell us about it and how that connects to the conversation?

SPEAKER_02 58:56

I'm not trying, I'm not being I'm not trying to be uh arrogant. Which one?

SPEAKER_01 59:00

Because I've got a couple The most re recent one that just dropped on the proof of God's existence.

SPEAKER_02 59:06

Yeah, I've done okay. So I have one of the things I study when I did my dissertation on is Romans chapter one. Because in Romans chapter one, Paul says that the creation displays the eternal power and divine nature of God. So it's a very strong claim for natural theology. So I've done a lot of work on that over the years, but I have uh a recent book that I wrote really for kind of high school-aged uh people, humans and their families, called The Twelve Arguments, where I look at what are arguments that we can use from natural theology. Because in my own experience and and also in many of the uh kids I meet, if you were to say to them why you think God exists, it would be a question from the Bible, special revelation scripture. Sure. And they're just not introduced to natural theology or natural law at all. And so the next professional book I have coming up that I just signed a contract for with Cambridge University Press is going to be about the Ten Commandments and American law. And that's also, even though you say, Well, the Ten Commandments, that's in scripture, but they're treated a lot of times as deliverances of natural law. So they're summarized in the Ten Commandments, but the things that the American government and the American legal system does is usually traceable to natural law arguments, but they recognize, and that's just like the Ten Commandments. So those are two of the things I work on natural theology, natural law, as part of it in no way diminishes scripture. Uh, I think you need scripture, but you could also say you could do something I call solo scriptura, not sola, but solo, everything you know is only from the Bible, versus, well, no, the Bible itself says that's not true. The Bible itself says creation proves that God exists.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:49

And so, you know, how would how would Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krause do in a society that has actually been educated in natural theology, not too, not too good? Yeah. I mean, because I mentioned Lawrence Krauss because he was a colleague until he he was fired for um some ethical problems. But he wrote a book in the 20 teens about I think it's called The Universe from Nothing. And it's and he has a great clip of him on Stephen Colbert back when Stephen Colbert was still uh it was a kind of a comedy show about being a comedy show, a meta show. And and Stephen Colbert, I think, kind of makes him look like a fool because he asks him, you know, how can the universe come from nothing? And now, as a quantum physicist, what they mean is something called quantum foam. So they're really they're they're they're saying that to get you to buy the book. It's not nothing. But Stephen Colbert played that out, and it's basically like a you know, a scientist saying I don't believe in God because I'm a scientist. You can't see God, you can't prove God exists in a laboratory. Okay, so what do you think the universe came from? Oh, from nothing. Can you see nothing in a laboratory or run a scientific test on nothing? Like you're objecting to God and it's because you don't think God exists, and instead you're saying non-existence in the world. Yeah, so I show that clip sometimes because it's a little, it's just funny to see how it got twisted at the end. And he says, So your book really could be called A Universe from God because you think God is nothing. So just you know, natural theology, natural law, these are really central to understanding the American project, also. That was another one of my books is on, and we're coming up on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and that you know, the famous sentence most people should know uh from the Declaration of Independence cites the fact that we're created equal and we race ahead with the equal part. Well, hold on a minute. Created equal. Does that matter? No, it couldn't. They could have said evolved, well, but evolution doesn't give you equality because uh and it can't, because the whole theory of evolution is that you're fighting and you're not equal. And if you turn out all equal, it's kind of the end of the story for evolution. So they put that there on purpose, created equal. And so I think that's showing how we were founded on ideas from natural theology and natural law. Now, the Bible is the most quoted book by the founder. So again, I'm not saying you don't read that. Sure. But if we train our students up and they've never thought about how to do those subjects, that's not good.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:08

Yeah, and you know, this theme has been coming up over and over again. I think because it's central to this form of education, but just that all things that are true, uh you can have faith in them, they stand in common, they can be tested, and uh, and that's why the liberal arts is not just one art, it's not just one book because they reinforce each other. So, you know, uh part of the what we want people to see in this podcast is that a lot of folks who go through this sort of education deepen their faith by reading books other than the Bible.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:45

Um, and it actually deepens their understanding of scripture by reading things other than the Bible.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:50

That's a really good point. And also, someone a critic on the on the outside might say, well, classical education, that's a a conservative uh code for some kind of dog, myself. Yeah, yeah. And you you can there's a couple ways to respond that I'd use. One is, yeah, why is it that the intellectuals tend to end up as Christians in in the history of the great books? That's really interesting, isn't it? Marx uh uh, especially materialism, it's not a popular view. Like it's you know, among among the educated philosophers, it is easy to refute. It's not sophisticated, yeah, and it would be horrible if it's true, right? But you say, yes, we're just material objects that that will stop existing in a few years. So it's we almost take it for granted, or the population does, that an intellectual person will become a Richard Dawkins, rather than showing them no, that's that's very rare. And he makes the philosophical blunders he makes are just embarrassing. He's something called a naive common sense realist. He he can't even get past the like philosophy 101 in his materialism. So I think that's a good point to say that's at least stepping back for yourself. If you're if you're inclined to atheism and you're critiquing the great books or the classical education for that reason, what's going on then? Why are the books they're reading? The books on that list, why is there this emphasis? But then the other side of it is to say, I'm not driving towards a goal.

unknown 1:05:11

What were we talking about?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:12

I was kind of uh speaking, I think, highly about the purpose of natural theology, natural law, the ability to think through these problems ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:21

Oh, yeah. Uh you were talking about, you know, why why is it that um people in this tradition uh happen to be Christians uh or at least they start to understand a lot more about um Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:35

So in other words, it may not be that I say to myself, by the end of class, I want my students in a specific denomination or with a specific faith statement. Right. Not at all, no one starts out that way, but students start to put things together for themselves. Yeah. So just like I mean, people understand that in a math class, your students are gonna come out believing that two plus two is four. You don't tell the teach, say, oh, you're the teacher's biased. We start to go through the great books and they start to put together, oh, I'm not a just a material object, I'm a human. Human, oh, I have a soul, that's not material. Well, that's not the teacher like putting that on them. That yeah, people have noticed that over the centuries, right? And there's a reason why they notice that, and you can have knowledge about that. Yeah, so I think that it it lends itself to the cultivation of the mind that then lends itself to dealing with these big issues. Whereas I've got to think that one of the contributing factors to depression and anxiety is the materialist outlook.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:25

And by materialism I mean both philosophical materialism, but then it translates itself in life into consumerism. And so if you're like I mean your whole purpose of your life is to see the next clip drop from some singer and that's it, I mean, that's bleak and hopeless. But wait, and then it turns out you have a soul. Really? Tell me about that. Like so, in other words, if the if the Marxist says, Oh, look at you guys, you're just making them believe these Christian things, well, look at you. You're just teaching them how bleak and awful life is. And when they hear some difference, it's like their mind turns on and and they want to know more.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:00

Yeah, if if all if the place you get to by the end of liberal arts education or classical education is you have a soul, you're part of something bigger than yourself, and it's intentional that you're part of that, and you have some sort of mission in this.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:14

And you can know things. Yeah, and that you can know things and you can know what you you were made for. Yeah. Uh like that's a much happier place to start charting life.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:25

And I, but and I think the world, I think I really believe we're at a when the history books are written, this is one of the turning points for American education. Uh, there's a lot of things that led up to it, but I think this is a turning point, partly because of what the Trump administration is doing about funding DEI, you know, cutting all that funding that's affecting where where I'm at, I can tell you for sure. Yeah. Um, but also the ability to bring back Christian talk, so to speak, yeah, to K through 12. That the case with Madeline Marie O'Hare and other there's two cases uh change and and getting over that agreement to be neutral, which the other side didn't keep anyway, but the Christians did. Now, I don't mean by that that you're gonna go to K through 12 public school and it's gonna be Christian Sunday school class, but I mean, yeah, you should have read the Gospel of John in high school. Yeah, and you should know it more than just as a literate piece, it's making claims about who God is and what it means to be a sinner. Because the story and the problem of redemption is a big one that you won't hear in some of the other philosophers. Yeah, like like Socrates struggles with how do I teach kids, and it turns out you can't teach virtue. Yeah, but they don't the the Greeks don't really struggle with this idea of redemption. This is a more Hebrew idea that you need to understand as well. Now, you might at the end of the day say, I don't believe that's true. I don't need redemption, I just need progress. But uh, you need to know that there's such a thing that people debated. So I think we're at a stage where Christianity can be taught about in K through 12 and university in a new way. Maybe, maybe it'll be a new and better way because we lost it for a while and we treasure it more because of that.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

Well, Owen, thank you so much for the conversation. Uh thank you. It was fantastic having you, and uh, we hope to have you back on on the furrows at some point.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:59

I'd love to, because I this is refreshing. I'm not talking about the Marxist dialectic uh only, right? We get to talk about humanities. I love it. Good things. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:06

Well, there you have it, uh, from the mouth of Brian Klopak, uh, more good things on the Furos Podcast. Thank you for tuning in.