#123 - Carl Trueman - The West Killed God. Then It Killed Man. Now Something Darker Is Coming.

Dr. Carl R. Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania and currently a visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His most recent books are The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Expressive Individualism, Cultural Amnesia, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, (with Bruce Gordon) The Oxford Handbook to Calvin and, and To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse (B and H). His writing has appeared in Deseret Journal, Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, American Mind, Claremont Review of Books and Public Discourse. 

The question "what is a woman?" is only confusing, Carl Trueman argues, because the prior question — what does it mean to be a human being — has already been answered wrongly, or abandoned entirely. His new book The Desecration of Man traces how that happened: a long arc from Luther through Rousseau and Nietzsche, through the sexual revolution and the death of serious art, to transgenderism, artificial intelligence, and the hollowed-out Church of England hosting iftars in its cathedrals.

This is the third time Trueman has joined Thinking Class, and in this conversation we think out loud about: 

• the Faustian bargain the West made with its own tradition
• why radical secularism is defenceless against Islam, and 
• what a genuine recovery of human dignity would require — not at the macro-political level, but in a person's own life and community.

Follow Carl Trueman

• Carl Trueman's new book The Desecration of Man is available from Amazon Books: https://amzn.to/3OkKwsL
• Buy Carl Trueman's books here: https://amzn.to/4cP0nJm
• Follow Carl at First Things: https://firstthings.com/
• Carl will be speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London in June — details at: https://www.arc-conference.com/

About Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, legal scholars, economists, theologians, and public intellectuals — concerned with long-term patterns over headlines and hot-takes.

If you value serious conversations about Britain, the West, and the forces shaping our future, why not subscribe: 

▶️ Subscribe on YouTube
🎧 Follow on Spotify
📰 Read on Substack
🐦 Follow on X

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillerman. In this episode, I am joined by Professor Carl Truman, theologian, historian, and author of several books, including The Desecration of Man and The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In this conversation, Carl and I think out loud about how the question, what is a woman, is only confusing because the prior question has already been lost, and that is, what does it mean to be a human being? How the move inward, identifying ourselves with our feelings and desires, remains stable as long as belief in human nature remains stable, technology collapsed it and made us able to override the body entirely. Why the sexual revolution was not only about sexual freedom, it was actually about a fundamental shift in anthropology. How modern art went from transmitting values to declaring that there are no values, why radical secularism is defenseless against Islam, which retains a settled account of human nature, and is not embarrassed by it, and what Karl actually recommends, not at some macro-political level, but actually for a person trying to live well in this moment that we find ourselves in. This is a conversation about one of the deepest questions, I think, in Western life, and that this isn't about policy fixes, but something much deeper, and that getting it wrong has severe consequences. If you value serious long-form conversations like this, subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack. Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Professor Carl Truman. A civilization that killed God, decided the self was sovereign, and is now discovering that it has no answer to the question of what a human being actually is. And your new book of the same title, The Desecration of Man, arrives at exactly the moment when institutions across the West, as I see it, have enforced a new anthropology that most people never voted for and perhaps can't quite name, even if they tried to. So that's the task ahead of us today. Let's name it and ask how we got here and whether there's a way back. So your book, Desecretation of Man, that's a stark title, and I suppose most people in public life are still arguing about gender pronouns or pride flags, the surface symptoms. And you're arguing that something much deeper has happened. So what's the prior question that everyone's missing?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Yeah, I think you're you're absolutely correct, John, that most people's imaginations are gripped by the questions of the hour. You know, two or three years ago the question was, what is a woman? And I was intrigued by that myself. I I wrote a book sort of wrestling with that issue. And as I wrote that book, I became convinced that the question, for example, what is a woman, is only confusing because the prior question, what does it mean to be a human being, has become so contested in our world? C.S. Lewis is one of those who sort of puts his finger on this in the 1940s. Cheslov Milosz, the Polish thinker and poet, also does so. But what we see emerging in the 1940s has has continued a pace to this day, and that is the big question is what does it mean to be a human being? What are we for? Why do we get out of bed in the morning? What does a normative, healthy, human life look like? And that's the question that uh I think is the big challenge of our day.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Well, not just in this book, but previous work of yours, including The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, you you trace a long intellectual lineage up until this point. You you bring in Martin Luther, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nietzsche, the Romantics, uh, much to um uh much to my disappointment because I've got a soft spot for them, but I see the point you're making, and we'll get on.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

I can see Caspar David Friedrich on the wall behind you a wander above the sea of clouds. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Guilty. Guilty. Um and right through to the sexual revolution. Uh uh at what point do you think the trajectory became irreversible, if it if it is? And and was there a moment when the West made a choice it cannot easily unmake?

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Yeah, it's it's it's difficult to pinpoint a single thing on those questions, but I think two important shifts uh take place, or two important phenomena occur. One, uh the the psychological move that we've seen in Western civilization over the last five or six hundred years, that that move inward to identifying ourselves in terms of our feelings and desires, that's uh that's critical. That's critical to how we think about what it means to be a human today. Think of the transgender question, feelings prioritized over bodily reality. So that's important. The second move, I think, is the loss of any sense of human nature being an authoritative given. You alluded to my my comments on the romantics a few moments ago. One of the things I would say the romantics, I love the romantics too. Uh one of the things they do well is they really explore that inner space. They capture the nature of human feelings and the importance of human emotions uh extremely well in their artwork. What stops them from descending into a total fragmented subjectivity, however, is this belief that there is such a thing as human nature, that if we move inward and we find the authentic me, actually I'll have a similar moral structure to the authentic John or the authentic Steve or the authentic Julie, whoever you happen to bring into the picture. In the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche really calls the bluff on that. He says, Hang on a minute, uh, all this talk about human nature is really grounded in the idea that human beings are made in the image of God. And if you've got rid of God, you can no longer move to arguments from human nature in a in an easy, straightforward manner. In fact, uh human nature is being used by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant as a way of manipulating us, of stopping us being free, of making us inauthentic. Well, Nietzsche makes that point in the 19th century, but even he acknowledges he's making it too early. It doesn't have any credibility at that point. And that's because I think the second uh set of conditions uh weren't yet in place. And the second set of conditions is the highly developed technology we now have. That has made the idea that there is no such thing as human nature, at least as human nature is an authoritative given. Uh it's made the idea that that doesn't exist much more plausible. Again, think of transgenderism. Uh to claim that you're a woman trapped in a man's body. 150 years ago, you may have felt that, but your doctor would certainly have said to you, Well, that's a problem with your mind. We we need to work on your mind to bring it into conformity with your body. Today, your doctor may very well say the exact opposite. Oh, it's a problem with your body, and we need to manipulate the body to bring it into line with your inner feelings. What's made the difference? Well, it's the technology that the doctor has available has transformed the way we imagine the authority of the body to be. So there's no single moment when everything sort of falls into place and leads to the chaos we now have, but I think the two important things are the move inward, which remains stable for as long as the idea of human nature remains stable, and then the development of technology that allows us to think that human nature itself can be overcome or manipulated.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Well when you uh brought up Nietzsche there as um the um the the the prophet, I suppose, who'd who'd called the bluff of those around them and said, hang on, we can't talk about human nature unless you understand where it's come from. We've killed gods, you got this from the Christian tradition. Thus, where do you go now? It's your move, is uh it it it struck me uh of uh Alistair McIntyre's argument of of that we're living among the fragments of a destroyed moral tradition. And uh whether we use words like dignity, whether we use words like authenticity or freedom, even without the framework that gave the immediate meaning, and that isn't just the Christian framework, but the classical tradition too, and the the melding of them. Is that what you're describing, a civilization uh that that killed God but then lacked the courage to actually get rid of everything that but belief in God had underwritten?

SPEAKER_00 9:11

Yeah, well it certainly lacked the courage to do it, but I think it also lacked the resources to do it as well, in that it's one thing to kill God, but to live as if God does not exist, that's that's harder to do in a uh a non-technological world. Again, take sexual morality, for example. You can believe that sex is mere recreation in the nineteenth century, but it's almost impossible for you to live in accordance with that because, hey, you're gonna get that girl pregnant, or you're gonna pick up a nasty disease that can't be cured, or her family are gonna come after you and hold your feet to the fire for the consequences of your action. It's only really with the arrival of antibiotics and widespread contraception that one can begin to imagine sex as recreation. And I think that tracks back, you you mentioned Alistair McIntyre. I think McIntyre is absolutely spot on when he sees us uh as fundamental to the problem we now face, or the problems he now face, is the the loss of any sense of teleology. We don't agree where we're heading, we don't see life as having a given point to which we are to m uh towards which we are to move, and that really does reshape how we think about uh the world uh in general.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

You uh quoted um uh Hamlet within your book actually to uh elucidate this rise of selfism, I suppose. And the the line is to thine own self be true, and you you've said this is actually the seed of what you term expressive individualism, but Shakespeare uh makes the character he says at Polonius be the fool, and it's effectively to draw it, um draw attention for the reader, for the person in the theatre to realise this is the fool and you you don't listen to the fool, but we've ended up in a position where we have a council of foolishness becoming our governing philosophy of the of the modern West. Um and and and you've you've touched on some of the reasons behind this, and and uh and you know for want of throwing around philosophers' names, left, right, and centre here, uh Oswald Spengler had said, well, when civilizations are in decline, there are all sorts of reasons, but there are various things you must take into account, and one of those things is technology. You can't end up looking at the body politic and what you call the social imaginary, the ideas that swill around as that that create people's worldviews without knowing the technology of the age. So I suppose with that in mind, knowing that the technology typically allows us to live much more um uh boundaried lives from one another, whilst also having the mirror turned back on us constantly, is in my mind I go, well, if we're trying to get back to previous understandings of anthropology being part of something much larger, and I I recognise that we have uh the the likes of you and I and the countries we're from, we have this Anglo-Saxon inheritance of uh the this individual um uh style of living, but that wasn't the same as being individualist. So I I just wonder how how do we uh how how do we steer away from that um without doing a Samuel Butler switch off all of the technology um and you know go full hard with um the uh with the um the education system, but even then that feels like uh you're on to to fighting a losing battle. So yeah, how do we get away from this?

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Yeah, I I think that that's a very good question. And there's a sense in which you know uh a sort of radical Ludditism is not an option. We're all implicated in the technological world. You know, I I have to have a cell phone. I've just discovered uh yesterday that Grove City College, where I work, is moving uh uh moving away from having ID cards that allow me access to buildings. It's got to be on my cell phone from now on. I don't I don't have any choice on that. We we we're embedded in a technological world, and some of it is tremendously advantageous. Uh I'm much happier uh being able to check my bank balance online than having to go into a bank, you know, all the hassle of going to a bank to get my my bank balance. So technology has made life a lot easier in in many ways. I think the key is we need to be critically aware of how technology reshapes us. And we need to ask ourselves constantly, does this use of technology here does that enhance, strengthen me as a human being, or does it dissolve my humanity in some way? And I'd give a very simple example would be I think uh cell phones are great. It's great to be able to communicate. Uh I don't like being in a restaurant and seeing families staring at their cell phones rather than talking to each other when they're eating. It seems to me the cell phone has its place, but it shouldn't be allowed to substitute for real human interaction in important social contexts. So I would say we need to think critically. I like uh I I reviewed Paul Kingsnorth's book uh Against the Machine. I remember when I picked it up, I thought I I'm not gonna like this because I bet Paul is gonna be some guy who you know wants us just to retreat into the woods, and that's just not realistic. I was very struck at the end of that that book where really he he offers paths of resistance and he also concedes that some people can resist more than others. Um He's made enough money from his various exploits that that he can live in this far on this farm in in the west of Ireland and enjoy a life very connected to the soil. But he accepts that that's not a practical option for most people. Then he raises the question, but there are ways of resisting in any context in which we happen to find ourselves. There can be big resistors, like poor, and there can be little resistors. Now I put myself in somewhere in between the two, I think. Um but yeah, we we just have to be aware that you know the myth is that technology allows us to do the same stuff only faster and more efficiently. No. We need to be aware that technology fundamentally reshapes how we think about the world, how we think about ourselves, and we need to be critically assessing that when we're uh approaching uh the technological aids that we have in our society.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Paul Kingsnorth is a he's a very he's a very interesting figure and uh uh countercultural, and like you say, I think if anyone was to read a summary of his gist, they would think that he was ultimately just putting the barriers up. But actually he um he he he finds a a balance between bringing people along for the journey whilst leaving the agency ultimately with other other people, which is if you if you feel like this is uh dissolving your humanity as you've termed it in any way, then you must step away. And he makes the passionate argument that actually it does. And as you mentioned, this technology can get in between families. And before we started to record, I was telling you about a road trip I'd done around um your ancestral homelands, my my my homelands, England, to survey the state of the realm. Uh, and I I was doing so with this hundred-year-old book in my hand from someone who'd written down what they saw when they travelled around the country, and I was wondering how different it was going to be retracing their steps. And clearly one thing that wasn't round 100 years ago were the preponderance of motor cars, though they did exist, but much smaller scale. But uh phones. And I mean, I almost every large conurbation that I went through, um, people had their necks craned downwards. If I were looking in the windows of cars, I mean a shocking number of people on very busy roads, both with people around and 30 mile-an-hour zones or on the dual carriageways, had their phones out and were looking at them. And it it made me realize just how sucked it. Not not made me realise, I knew this already, but the fact that you actually once you look at it, you can't unsee it. I was sitting in the hospital earlier waiting for an appointment. I was the only one sitting there staring at the wall, just with my own thoughts. Everyone else, and every now and then the the silence would be pierced with someone's TikTok reel, which they've forgotten to put on silent. And um, I suppose uh let's start thinking then about some of the points that you you make, but founding errors of modernity. You've you've you've placed some of that blame, I would say, on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Uh he argued that man was born free but but chained by the conventions of polite society. And um this is what set this relentless pursuit of authenticity on the way. Uh so is Rousseau the villain of this story, or as you were saying before, is it just more complicated than that?

SPEAKER_00 18:42

There's not just one thing. Yeah, it's it's more complicated that I think Rousseau is representative, and and I used him in my early books as a very good representative of things that are developing in the late 18th century. But the the thing about history is whenever you start writing a history, something always happened the day before. And you know, one could go to Descartes, for example, and say, well, Descartes is the guy who really separates the mind from matter, that he creates almost a sort of adversarial situation between uh the knowing subject and the material world. Or you could go to the Reformation, as many conservative Catholics do, and say, you know, with Luther you get the rise of well, you get the shattering of external authority at the Reformation. Um a less theological but more material historian might say with the rise of the printing press, that you with the rise of literacy you get the possibility of individuals sitting and reading silently by themselves. There's that uh I think it's in Augustine's Confessions when he's he comments with with surprise. I think it's on Ambrose, you know, noticing that Ambrose sits and reads silently, because that was not how it was done in the ancient world. Or you could go to late medieval Catholicism and say, you know, the the whole issue of teleology is coming under huge pressure there. I think there's a you know a whole series of streams in Western culture that that have helped create contemporary Western humanity. And it's very difficult to to pin the blame on a single one. I I happen to use Rousseau because he writes beautifully, he writes clearly, and I think he's very representative of of significant trends that are taking place. But certainly he's not the only one up to you know uh I was gonna say up to no good. That's he's not the only one. You could look at uh the essayist Montaigne. Uh he's the first writer, I think, in the West, where suddenly the first person singular becomes the dominant way of of expressing himself. So there's a whole heap of of uh uh of influences at work here.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

Well, whilst we have mentioned theological differences there between Protestants and Catholics and where fingers might be pointed, is th regardless of what goes on there, there's there's no doubt that the influence of established churches has certainly waned over the last uh couple of centuries, and you've argued that uh w when religion lost this prestige, the the institutional and intellectual authority, that a new priesthood had arisen, and that was typically filled by the artists, whether it was Schiller, the romantics, Arnold Ruskin. And um what I suppose you're arguing is that those who were absorbed by this work were trying to find from culture the meaning that was once provided by faith. But further on from all of those chaps, I suppose, who were formed in a social imaginary that was almost still Whilst in the dying embers of the Christian world, it was still extraordinarily present, and in many ways their own cultural um artifacts were influenced by and carried over those ideas, albeit with new expressions. Whereas if you look at modern works, like Piss Christ, for example, a work you describe as a death work, uh what what what does that tell us about what happens when art tries to do not only what uh only a religion can do, but when it has no moorings at all? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

Well, I I think um when you look at uh you could go to DeMarcel Duchamp, uh take a sort of less offensive in some ways uh uh approach than than uh Pischrist. Uh when Duchamp uh puts up his uh urinal in the early 20th century and declares it to be art, he's making uh on one level he's making a facetious comment. On another level, he's making a serious point. He's raising the question of what is it that that defines art? Why can't this be art? And pointing to the lack of any sort of objective framework that would allow one to say this is good and and and this is bad. So uh I think art requires uh it requires a metaphysics behind it. It requires a set of established stable values in order to communicate them. What happens in the 20th century is that art ceases, I think, to communicate values and becomes a declaration that there are no values. Uh my wife and I were in Chicago uh a couple of weeks ago, and we went to the Art Institute on the the Saturday morning and we we wandered around uh the galleries and I was struck at the by the contrast between the classical Renaissance, uh Baroque, uh right down to the Impressionists of the of the 19th century, and then the 20th century. And and my thought was, you know, when I look at 20th century art, I get the impression that the artist feels he has no values worth communicating or transmitting. And then when you come to somebody like Serrano, uh Andre Serrano and Pischrist, not only does he have no values worth communicating, uh his sole contribution is to undermine and destroy those values that people once thought were worth communicating. To use the language of Philip Reefer, it's a death work. He he takes that which was considered sacramental and turns it into something excremental. In this case, quite literally, he takes an image of Christ and he drowns it in his own urine. And and I think that's yeah, it it shows that art over a period of time has exhausted itself. It's I would say it's operated on the basis of capital from a Christian uh from Christianity, but that capital has run out uh and it has nothing left to say anymore.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

It strikes me uh just as a an end note on that, that i as we were throwing out Shakespeare lines earlier, to thine own self be true, to put to put another one to it based on these modern artists who have severed themselves from the long thread of Western civilization and they have no moorings. And you can, as you've just said, you you can see that. Well, the Shakespeare line that jumps out to me is the you can't get nothing, you get you get nothing from nothing. Um and uh you you see it, you see it everywhere, you see it within the architectural creations uh in our cities all over the world, identicate cities, glass and steel buildings, slightly different, jagged edges, but no formative worldview there at all, other than efficiency and utility. That that seems to be what drives people. But other than that, let's just have them really big and really shiny and looking like they don't belong, because then I can put my name to it. It becomes about this um uh um architect's name rather than this is my contribution to the city, which has its own identity. It's uh again, it's striking out that expressive individualism um whilst at the same time being utterly devoid of anything. Um and let's let's take the expressive individualism further, let's do a gear shift over to the sexual revolution. Uh, because I think you you do make a claim that I think a lot of people don't fully absorb, which is a sexual revolution wasn't just a political or a social change. It wasn't just now you all get to have sex casually. Here's some um some uh some condoms and pills, but it's also an anthropological revolution, uh, because how a society thinks about sex connects directly to what the society thinks it means to be human. So unpack that for me. Why is sex the site where the battle is being fought?

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Well, when you think of uh how sex has historically been dealt with in religious traditions, it's it's typically been surrounded with sacred ritual, and a number of reasons for that. Uh uh one, it's marked a passage from childhood to adulthood. Uh in in the Bible here, you know, for this reason a man will leave his his father and mother and be joined to another. There, the Bible itself. There's a social dimension uh to the first sexual experience, if you like, the sexual union of man and woman. So it's it was not never a private thing from that perspective. It was always social, surrounded with sacred ritual because it was seen to be something uh of profound significance, both for society and for the individuals concerned. And that's why sex is treated with special sacred care in Christianity, in Judaism, and in Islam. And in many cultures, think of the Kama Sutra, for example, you know, that's a cheap term for a sex manual in the West, but the actual original Kama Sutra was a sacred Hindu text dealing with uh sexual activity. So when something that's deemed sa and the other reason why, of course, it's considered sacred is it was intimately connected to the creation of life. Uh what more, you know, to to talk in religious terms, what more godlike act is there that human beings can perform than the mysterious creation of new life? Uh move to the sexual revolution. Well, we've we've we've stripped it of its sacred significance. We've stripped it of its social significance. Uh no longer is it a passage from childhood to adulthood. No longer is it seen as being anybody's business but my own. No longer is it surrounded with sacred taboos. Anything goes as far as uh as long as people are all consenting to what's going on, anything goes. Well I would say you can't move from something deemed incredibly sacred to considering it being mundane recreation without a fundamental shift in what you think it means to be human. There's an anthropological shift that goes on there. And we even in the permissive West, there's still a folk memory of sex as sacred and important because we treat sex crimes qualitatively different to other crimes. John, if we were in the same room and you punch me on the nose, gosh, it would be painful. But six months from now, I'd be laughing at the dinner table with my kids saying, Can you remember when I was on that podcast with that crazy guy who punched me on the nose? Somebody who's sexually assaulted, I would suggest, never jokes about that assault. Because we know that the sexual nature of the body and the violation, the sexual violation of the body is qualitatively different. And here I would borrow from the the late great Sir Roger Scruton, uh making the com who made the comment that, you know rape, for example, involves taking something from you that only you can give. It can't really be taken. And what is that thing? We say it is your very self. It's the very heart of who you are. So even in uh uh sexually permissive days, there are still hints in our culture that we know the idea that sex is recreation just recreation is complete nonsense. Playing ping pong is just recreation. And cheating at ping pong does not carry the judicial penalties that sexual crimes carry. We we still know it's important. We just choose to try to live in denial of that fact as much as we possibly can.

SPEAKER_01 31:30

The the notion uh that sexual transgressions in this respect, uh aggressive transgressions carried out and acted on someone else uh is a violation of that person's very self and and indeed is the the language we would use, their their soul, their very being, uh is something that I think perhaps lends itself to sexual identity, um though in a confused way. So for example, as we've just talked about there, that transgression really does violate someone. Whereas the conversation we broadly have in public discourse is typically around sexual identity, which has become married to the notion of personal individual legitimacy. And uh for the sake of argument, if I don't recognise someone's sexual identity, I'm not merely being impolite. I I'm denying that person's existence, their own personhood. It's not even just a uh a matter of different opinions. So, how how do you think we arrived at a place where identity has become uh fragile to the point that dissent would feel like violence?

SPEAKER_00 32:45

Yeah, it's a very, very interesting question. And again, I don't think there's a single answer. We know we need both a sort of philosophical dimension and a sociological dimension to this. I think philosophically that inward move, when we start, you know, in the last four or five hundred years, as we've increasingly come to identify ourselves with our feelings and desires, anything that interferes with those things, anything that prevents us from expressing them outwardly and being affirmed in that expression, starts to to feel like, you know, to use the trendy word, violence. Thomas Jefferson has a wonderful statement uh in his, I think it's his notes on the state of Virginia, where he's talking about, you know, what does it matter if my neighbor believes in twenty gods or no god at all? And in typical Jefferson fashion he says, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. And I use that in class with the students, and I say, when you look at that, you can tell what Jefferson thinks constitutes his genuine authentic humanity. It's the ownership of property and the integrity of his body. Feelings don't really come into it. As you know the psychologized notion of humanity has come to grip our imagination as accelerated through people like Freud, then violence has expanded from the physical realm to the psychological realm. Sociologically, I think we're also in the West now increasingly find ourselves in a society that by and large is is risk intolerant. I I think it's too early to say, but I'm very intrigued by Mary Harrington's argument that she made a couple of years ago, where she argued that the rise of young people who couldn't tolerate differences of opinion in the university classroom correlated with the rise of a generation whose parents put them into daycare because they were both out at work. And her argument was, you know, if your kids are grow up at home, you know, my boys were always falling out of trees and getting into scrapes and this, that, and the other. They lived in a what I would describe as a routine but risky environment. Send your child to daycare, they're not going to allow your child to climb a tree in case he falls out. They're not going to allow him to play uh cricket with a hard ball in case he gets hit on the head. They are risk-free environments. And I think that's a sort of microcosm for our culture now, where we've increasingly intolerant of any kind of risk. And combining that with the psychologized self makes words seem much more damaging to the rising generation than they do to me. I don't care what people think about me, it's not the way I think about the world. But for the rising generation, highly psychologized and risk intolerant, words can be very, very damaging.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

We've talked a little bit about spengler already, and we've also talked about, in the context of modern art, this idea of negating what's been there already. Uh and uh that that's very spengerian, and you you describe his Faustian diagnosis, which is that the West has a spirit uh that always negates, uh and th that this spirit also unleashes the energy of the Industrial Revolution as it seeks uh more and more uh the sexual revolution, perhaps the technological revolution, and always destroying what came before in the name of freedom. Is is the desecration of man the logical end point of the Faustian bargain? Is i is this something the West has has done to itself?

SPEAKER_00 36:32

Yes, I think so. And and one of the burdens of the book is to argue that, for example, the disenchantment thesis, this idea that the world has just lost its magic and become routine, or we've all become numbers, we've lost our individual agency due to a historical process that doesn't quite capture what's going on in the world. If you have a notion of human beings as free and autonomous, then transgression becomes, if you like, the ethic. Because to demonstrate your freedom, you have to constantly be breaking with the boundaries that other people, particularly the past, place upon you. So the transgressor rises to the top of the pile in terms of culturally iconic figures. We've seen that really in Hollywood since the 1950s. You know, Marlon Brando, the wild one, was really just the precursor of the great anti-heroes of our day. You see it in 19th century literature. Uh I know Dostoyevsky didn't particularly approve of Raskolnikov, but gosh, Roskolnikov is certainly the most interesting character in crime and punishment. Um and Ivan, too, in the Brothers Karamazov. Yes, we're meant to sympathize with Al-Yosha, but Ivan gets all the best lines, you know, that kind of thing. So I think expressive individualism lends itself towards transgression and iconoclasm. And that's exhilarating. And Nietzsche nails this in the 19th century when he says, you know, we've killed God. So we must rise to be gods ourselves. We have to create our own values. We have to smash that which God, the idea of God imposed upon us in order to be truly human. And that's why I say, you know, desecration becomes you know uh becomes the default. It's it's exhilarating. The odd thing is, of course, it it kind of reduces us. Uh as we desecrate the limits, we find that our exceptional ability to do so makes us really rather unexceptional. Uh uh we've made ourselves into to nothing. Can you see this most dramatically with the the language surrounding transhumanism and artificial intelligence now, that we are going to make ourselves redundant, not by vaporizing ourselves in a nuclear holocaust, but by creating machines and computers that can simply be better than us. And we hurtle headlong towards that goal because it makes us feel powerful even as it reduces us in our own eyes.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

It's a very fascinating point you you made about uh AI and our fixation on it. I I've certainly seen in the workplace uh a real ramping up of not only interest but engagement with and an outsourcing of almost everything to it as this uh as this um as this height of perfection, this zenith of our creation that will in the end make life just better for everyone. It's a a blind faith, actually. Um at the same token you can actually find people starting to wonder for those who are still in the jobs that hadn't started to be affected, whether it's going to prove to be a particularly fulfilling existence if all you're doing is outsourcing all of your mental faculties to it. But in the same breath, these institutions uh of every strike, public and private, that are pushing us down that technological path, they're also the ones who've been behind a lot of the ideological crusades in this um uh this desecrated world that you you've painted the picture of. Uh and uh this this transgression, this creating new values, for most of them, they're not creating new values, they've gotten them from those who've done it, and they think they are the right uh progressive ways to live, and they astroturf them to everyone. So even if you don't believe it, you you get it in some way, it finds its way into bureaucracy and whatever. And people think they're doing good, they actually think they're recognising a truth rather than imposing an ideology, a truth that was uncover uh covered up for years and years and years, and it's only in this new just world that we can undo the injustices of the past. So, a practical question uh for those who end up engaged with with those who believe that they're on the right side of history is they'd say, How would you explain to someone who sincerely holds the beliefs that they are participating in something destructive?

SPEAKER_00 41:15

Yeah, well, first of all, I would point to the fact that that kind of rhetoric has been used about technology in the past. Uh I I'm old enough to remember when email arrived and being told, you know, email will be great because you'll be able to do your correspondence by 9 a.m. in the morning and it will leave the rest of the day free to do other stuff. No, uh email has has expanded and is morphed into texts. It now completely controls everyone's conscious life. It it's invaded every area. So I would say, first of all, you know, be skeptical of the of the rhetoric. And that works on the other side as well. I mean, again, we've seen numerous times in human history, not least the Industrial Revolution, when we've heard that, well, these uh technological developments will will make human beings redundant. That hasn't happened either. So I think the hype rhetoric, the hype positive rhetoric and the hype negative rhetoric is is to be handled with a degree of skepticism. That's what history teaches us at this point. I would though want to raise the question of uh human agency. What does this do to human agency? If this technology that's being developed allows me to exert my agency in new and creative ways, that's a good thing. It enhances my humanity. If it replaces human agency, or if it makes me just a passive presser of a button, that degrades my humanity to some extent. And there's a sense in which I think we've never you know we we've never really come to terms with the Industrial Revolution on that front. The Industrial Revolution took away for many people the intrinsic satisfaction of of the work and replaced it with the satisfaction of the paycheck. And it shifted man from being uh a creature who makes things to being a creature who buys and consumes things. And and I fear that uh AI could be an ex you know an extreme acceleration of that process and lead to yet further pointlessness uh in in existence. How you navigate that, I think these are early days, we don't know where AI is is going to land in each of our individual worlds. But I think the question to be constantly asking oneself is how can I use this and still retain a degree of my human agency in the way I live my life?

SPEAKER_01 43:52

I think we've we're doing a very natural build up here as well to final questions. So I'm very glad in the way this this this is good, this is how. But before we get there, um you suggest, and and I I I agree, and many have written about it that radical secularism has no answer. You know, in France you have Pierre Manon who talks about it. You've written about it here in the Anglosphere, and it doesn't have an answer because it doesn't give us any basis of a moral life. It doesn't help us with character formation if everything is in play and everything's kind of the same, and it doesn't really matter what we do, provided that we're doing it for ourselves, for our own self-expression, for our own self-aggrandizement, for our own self um pleasure, I suppose, um, then it's not going to help us live together, cooperate, have shared goals. The teleological point you you've argued do we even recognise what it means to be human anymore, and what do we place value on? But also it doesn't have an answer to other religions. Islam's a great example. That does have a settled account of human nature, and it's not embarrassed by it. So the desecration of man seems ultimately self-defeating. Uh it's it's left us defenseless. Would you would you agree?

SPEAKER_00 45:18

Absolutely. I I think that you know to to use, you know, he's not a Christian thinker, but Victor Frankel uh identified man as a meaning-seeking being. We all want to find meaning. And if life in the West is meaningless, uh if there is a vacuum of meaning there, then I think human beings will seek meaning somewhere else. And you know, radical Islam is one of the options out there at the moment. And this is where, you know, obviously as a Christian, I want to say I this is where I think the church needs to step in. We need as as churches to demonstrate both intellectually and practically what it means to be human, what it means to have purpose, what it means to have destiny. The idea of you know, life is about acquiring more stuff, buying more stuff. Well, that's bankrupt now, partly because the rising generation are finding buying stuff a whole lot harder than my generation did because of the economic realities of the world we now live in. We need to be aware that uh you know, to to quote that old cliche, the emptiest minds are the most easily filled, the emptiest philosophies are the most easily replaced, and they can be replaced by some very bad philosophies indeed.

SPEAKER_01 46:43

Bringing up the church doubt is something worth lingering on, because here in the United Kingdom, one of the uh core churches, the the biggest of the established churches, the Church of England, appears to not only have decided it is not going to engage in theological argument or even stake its claim for its own universality, uh the Christian faith, but is effectively affording that same universality to long rival religions, civilizational rivals like Islam. And in this road trip I did around the country, if uh even if I didn't look on Twitter and see the iftars taking place in churches and cathedrals, I could find them being advertised. I could see that um on these information boards put up as though we were in a tourist exit uh tourist um attraction on a museum rather than the place of worship, which is probably more like reality today given the numbers of people who don't go in there to worship but do go in there to pay admission fees. But on these information boards, every reference to other religions was of course, you afford the followers with dignity and all the rest of it, but it was almost placing them on the same pedestal, as though actually there's nothing particularly special about the place that you're standing, or uh the the worldview of the people who built this thing and all of the people who've worn the stone um over the years with their knees, their penitent knees. Uh there it's just there's there's almost nothing unique about it, and on top of that is what I find, and this isn't just in the Church of England, I find it in the Catholic churches I frequent as well, is that the homilies seem to have become so denuded of any any depth that there's a there's almost a promotion of the radical secularism, and there's a almost a shying away from all of these really terrible issues. Um, and whether it's the terrible issues or whether it's the um the internal divisions or or whatever, they go for the safe things. So they go for the wars in the Middle East, the wars in Ukraine, but they never ever seem to talk about the state of the soul of the country, the state of the people that they see shuffling around them. The all of the things that, whether you're looking at data sets or just using your eyes, uh that they just avoid it all and they water their messages down where you find that homilies just go start off with a bit of a here's what I've noticed on my day-to-day, and then Jesus loves you. And there's almost nothing there. They've they've even given up on the 2,000 years worth of tradition that you could go and draw upon to deliver a really meaningful message, and not in a really abstract, deeply theological way that academics can only understand. But you can deliver really wonderful messages, drawing on that tradition in a way that's accessible, but not in that boring, let's make it relevant and strip it of all meaning. And yet I I see I think all of all of the leaders seem to have just vacated that ground and they're quite literally handing over their territory to other religions, which seems crazy.

SPEAKER_00 50:14

Is this happening in the US? To an extent. I mean I mean, I think um just some general comments and that. I think you know there's a general self-loathing in the West relative to our history and our culture that the churches have become part of. And I think particularly uh I'm looking at from a distance now, but certainly what I see coming out of the Church of England from its leaders is you know, it's it it uses the Christian vocabulary, but essentially to express the values of the therapeutic society and the self-loathing society. And that's tragic because it means that it's actually lost the very vocabulary that it could use to offer an alternative to something like Islam, uh, for example. So the church has, you know, suicide might be too strong a word, but maybe not, you know, not that too strong a word for what has gone on. Um what we see, what I've noticed in in the US, and I think uh I'm picking this up in the UK as well, among what I would describe as the more intellectually inclined young people, is that they are attracted towards Christianity, but attracted towards specific kinds of Christianity. Uh specifically over here, uh a more conservative form of Catholicism, not only with its strong doctrinal emphasis, but also with its rigorous liturgical disciplines and practices. I'm on loan to the University of Notre Dame this year, and Notre Dame I think you're seeing a record number of students either entering the Catholic Church for the first time or returning to the Catholic Church. And from something I was reading just this morning, I see that's not unique to Notre Dame. Across the country, Catholic parishes are seeing this, you know, maybe reviv revival is a very Protestant word, of course, a sort of revival, a Catholic revival among young people. And I think that goes to the fact that they crave meaning. And mainstream Protestantism well, what does mainstream Protestantism give you? It gives you the world view, the social imaginary of the secular world dressed up in Christian language. It's milk toast. Who wants that? If you if you want the world's worldview, go to the world. Yeah, it does it a whole lot better than this strange hybrid of sort of medieval dress sense and you know contemporary uh cultural politics. Uh it's interesting to see that that the spiritual hunger, certainly among well I would say, college students, not a cross-section of all society, but among college students, is for more serious doctrinal and liturgical Christian traditions.

SPEAKER_01 53:01

And it it does matter that it's in that cross-section of society because as we've seen with the arguments we've made today about the desecration of man and all the transgressive ideologies, they ultimately ended up being mainstreamed first by academics, then by the student body. And because we push so many people towards uh those institutions and they've come out of them, they have higher prestige, they get the jobs in the market, it filters into the marketplace, we all get impacted by it. And it's all through the past, uh elites matter and what they think matters, and you've made this point in much of your work. The social imaginary is formed by the influential people. So if we are seeing a return to or a thirst for these um uh more traditional ways of life which have uh a more um not only forgiving um but uh substantial anthropology, then well, hopefully we're only a few generations from a revolution in the the opposite direction, a counter-revolution. Um so given everything we've discussed, we've talked the long arc from Luther to the sexual revolution, the desecration of man, institutional capture, and we've we've even talked about the Faustian bargain. What what what does living well in this moment actually require? What would you tell someone who asked how to recover a genuine account of what it means to be human, not at some macro political level, but in their own life and community?

SPEAKER_00 54:32

I think you need to reorient to the local. Who are the people that you can really have a relationship, the people that you can treat as human beings and it can treat you as human in return? It's the people in the houses down your street, it's the people in your church, it's the people you're in classroom with. And I would say, yes, use use technology, use your apps, etc. etc. But prioritize real human contact. Prioritize sitting around a dinner table at night and having conversation. I was in Rome recently with my wife for a vacation, and we were struck that you go you go to a restaurant at seven o'clock at night, you can be there at ten, long after the food has been cleared away. Just having a conversation. Think about the way of reintegrating real people in real time and real space back into your life and make that the priority.

SPEAKER_01 55:33

Well, that is a fitting way to end, though I can't resist. You've mentioned being on loan to Notre Dame in the last conversation you talked about softening to Catholicism, and then you went on holidays to Rome with your wife.

SPEAKER_00 55:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 55:46

Yeah, a pattern is emerging. I won't I won't make the sales pitch. Uh Carl, as ever, it's been fascinating to talk to you again today. I'm delighted you've made this work, which seems to join on uh nicely to the thread that you've been um sewing uh for uh several years now. Uh on that note, where can people find it? What can people expect from you next?

SPEAKER_00 56:13

Um well, the book you can get it, I think you can get it from Amazon, or as they say, all good bookstores. Not sure that there is a specific UK distributor, but you should be able to get the the sentence you should be able to get sentinel books in the UK. Uh, I write every two weeks for First Things, uh, a primarily Catholic uh website, but I am uh a Presbyterian voice uh on that. And I'll actually be in the UK uh this summer to speak at the uh the Alliance Responsible Citizenship uh conference. So if anybody is in London in in June and at that conference, please come up and say hi. I would love to meet you.

SPEAKER_01 56:51

Well, I'll be one of those people. I will be there.

SPEAKER_00 56:53

Oh wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 56:54

So we get to meet in person finally.

SPEAKER_00 56:55

I was gonna say we can actually humanize ourselves in in real time and real space, John. Look forward to that.

SPEAKER_01 57:01

We we can have that um that very um common meeting where you go, oh, you're taller than I thought you were, you're shorter than I thought you were. It happens every time. Uh yeah, we'll be having a handshake grip competition. It just you get the measure of each of it. Carl, well I'll look I'll I shall look forward to that. I shall look forward to that. We'll we'll exchange details after this and make sure we get some time to meet up. But Carl, it's been an absolute pleasure. Good luck with the book launch, and uh as ever I will spam you when I see more coming out so you can come back on. Thanks very much, John. Always a pleasure. Keep fighting the good fight.