[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com hello and welcome to conversations with Tyler I'm here once again with Ross stett and Ross has a new book out which I'm a big big fan of called the decadent
Society how we became the victims of our own success Ross welcome thank you for having me back Tyler it's an honor a very simple question about decadence I read in the New York Times this morning which is late February quote in the past several years Kan West
has announced so many plans that he wants to start a church that he plans to run for president that he will invent a method for autocorrecting emoticons that he aims to redesign the standard American home that he might legally
change his name to quote Christian genius billionaire Kanye West for a year is Kanye decadent no why not Kanye is not decadent because decadence involves drift repetition and stalemate and Kanye's public Persona is defined by
creativity conversion and invention now that's not to say that Kanye might not participate in decadence one of the implicit or explicit arguments of my book is that even when you're a rebel against decadence it's very hard to
escape these fundamental forces in our society dragging us towards stalemates and repetition so maybe all of Kanye's reinventions and plans to reinvent the question mark come to nothing in the end but the fact of his Ambitions and the
fact that he has actually you know invented he has invented a church right I mean Kanye has a cult he has a um Sunday services that are a sort of unique phenomenon among celebrities so even if there are limits on what he can
achieve he is a force for anti- decadence in a decadent Society so does the popularity of Kanye suggest we're moving away from decadence or is that a kind of placebo we used to insulate ourselves from dynamism oh I like Kanye
and then we go about being decadent that's probably a little bit of both I mean I think I think you can see this in politics right where when I started writing the book kind of a long time ago now the populist moment hadn't really
arrived in the western world and so one of the questions hanging over the argument is does the populist moment prove that decadence is coming to an end right does it is does it end with populism and nationalism and the return
of history and I think that's an open question the answer that I lean towards in the book is that it doesn't that these rebellions are sort of more performative and virtual than real but their appeal suggests that people people
aren't content with decadence and that is a sign that maybe at some point it will come to an end right support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump partakes of decadence but also represents a desire for something else and as long as
that desire is there there has to be some possibility of of Escape our mutual acquaintance Roger scrutin who died recently he seemed to love fox hunting and the operas of Rickard Vagner was that decadence or was that Innovation I think there are forms of
antiquarianism that are sufficiently antiquarian to cease to be decadent and to become almost Innovative so I think you could argue that we've reached a point of sort of we've reached a point where our culture
our mass culture but also our Elite culture is sort of sufficiently dominated by just repetitions of cultural forms and products from the baby boomer era that to be an antiquarian to reach back towards traditions and forms and aesthetic forms
that were popular 150 years ago is also an escape from decadence so I'm already so there we go Kanye isn't decadent Roger scrutin isn't decadent were whittling away at my thesis One Celebrity or late celebrity at a time are you decadent so you wrote a column about architecture and in that column you say making American architecture a little more traditional dot dot dot certainly wouldn't hurt yes American architecture be more like on that is
decadent no AB absolutely I I would say that basically both the place that modern architecture has ended up and the traditionalist alternative are both sort of decadent and I prefer the traditionalist forms on aesthetic grounds but I recognize that they are
not Dynamic and Innovative that you're sort of accepting that we've reached some sort of dead end in architectural style making and choosing the beauties of traditional forms over some of I think I mean frankly the less the
ugliness and more the mediocrity that I think a lot of post 1960s architectural forms have ended up with so like under my definition the the Golden Age of brutalism is not decadent it's bad right I don't like brutalist architecture I do
of course but it is right but it is but it is well we can find common ground at least in that it is trying to it was trying to create a distinctive style for a disenchanted age and sort of a Express something about modernity and sort of
the forms um whereas I think that and I I say this I'm not a professional architecture critic so take this with a grain of salt but I think the last 25 years of public architecture has been less spectacularly ugly and more just
sort of mediocre imitations of more striking modernist forms but you probably have stronger opinions on this than I do ultimately I more of an OP IST about architecture I think than you are and Interiors of homes it seems to me
have become much better it's hard to see them precisely because they're Interiors but when I was a kid it was very rare you'd see a nice interior of any home even of a wealthy person and now even an upper middle class person you might
think my goodness that looks amazing I was in someone's house in Leck it was gorgeous that's Leck Texas right yes no HGTV the the interior suggest a a certain kind of aesthetic progress although in other ways HGTV is decadent
so it's it's complicated there's a famous quotation with the source actually being contested or unknown and it goes as follows quote America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between true or false was that not clemento is it uh people don't agree people people don't probably it was someone before him version of that yeah I I mean I I enjoy that quote without agreeing with it I think that America in
many respects really did represent a sort of particular peak of civilizational progress in the years of its Ascent from somewhere in the 19th century up till the moon landing and so I would defend the civilization of the Americans it's you know it's particular it's not there are certain forms High cultural forms that America has not specialized in but America's produced a lot of great Mass art and a certain amount of good Elite art and a lot of
impressive technological progress and I think that adds up to civilization and not barbarism was the moon landing in some sense a mistake that after we did that we patted ourselves on the back too much and we weren't sure what to do for
an encore however glorious it may have been no it wasn't it wasn't a mistake it was you you had to do it it was it was the thing to be done it was the thing it was the the furthest step we could take into space that was dramatic and a sort
of embodiment of human beings going beyond the planet Earth but why did we basically stop a little bit after that I mean I think the what I want to say right as a Critic of decadence is that there was some sort of failure of will
or of nerve and so on but you know you but that's indous but you have to you have right you have to acknowledge that the problem with space is that there's under current technological conditions the moon landing was what we could do
and there wasn't that much else that we could do certainly that had the kind of presumable financial Rewards or opportunities for people starting new lives all the things that drove ages of Discovery in earlier periods in human
history just weren't available and still aren't available and that's you know whatever the sort of psychological civilizational factors at work that's the dominant reality that people like me who really want to go into space have to
acknowledge but we did settle Nevada afterwards right is that not the greater achievement they're both dry both distant the settlement of Nevada is in a sense yes maybe the last great blow against decadence struck but the way we
settled it was I mean not universally but I think you can see Las Vegas Las Vegas is decadent under the standard definition of decadence right which involves no but I think it's decadent under mine too in the sense that it
represents a kind of a sort of simulated Sublimity where you are creating models of all the great achievements of the human species and the modern world and practicing various forms of entertainment around them so in that sense it is I think under my definition
too not just the you know chocolates and bondage Den's definition I think it is decadent it it ends I I borrow this concept of the the technological Sublime from David NY and before him Perry Miller a couple of Great American
historians this idea that American history is sort of punctuated by these moments of some technological breakthrough that's also a kind of one of the world uh and that is distinctively American in a way that I think is
not in spite of sort of the Eiffel Tower and other things as European examples does sometimes seem to the more sophisticated European mind maybe mildly barbaric our Delight in our steam engines and transcontinental Railways but I think it's been a
distinctive part of the American experience that has sort of run out since the moon landing and Las Vegas and the iPhone and um you know in different ways are sort of imitations of that but that are more focused on simulation and
entertainment than the steamship and the railway and the space shuttle were of all the Western Nations given your notion of decadence which is the least decadent are we counting Israel as Western not for the purposes of this
question then probably the United States of America and what would be number two I have a impulse to say France which is sort of strange right why France because I feel like France is a place I would put it this way I think
France is in certain ways very advanced in decadence but it's also a place where a lot of forces of post decadence whatever that may be are sort of in play in really interesting ways it's a place that has you know some of the most
interesting political and intellectual debates about liberalism and post- liberalism even though it hasn't actually seen a far right or farle party take power it's a place that's at that sort of a particular example of the
uneasy confrontation between a decadent Europe and Islam and Islamic immigration right I don't think it's a coincidence that the great chronicler of decadence Michelle Welbeck comes from France and so if there's a point at which yeah in
that sense I think France is both further advanced in its decadence but also sort of therefore more interested in and open to whatever strange things lie Beyond but that's that's speculative are you long or short France I am long
France in the sense that I think that it is a the most likely Crucible for whatever forces are going to reshape Europe over the next 100 years I am short France in the sense that that means it is the place most likely to the
have a civil war maybe in the next hundred years so long in terms of drama short maybe in terms of stability I think that means short what if I were to argue only if you're an investor not if not if you're a journalist what if I
were to argue Canada is in fact highly Innovative they seem to have completely sane governance which is now all of a sudden a novelty and several of their major cities have foreign born populations of more than half the total
uh it works very well yes also a lot of those populations are non-western different religions yes uh in world history this is quite astonishing sane governance and so many foreigners and their cities are wonderful why isn't
that this phenomenal Innovation and Canada is the least decadent I I think that's a reasonable argument and and the careful reader of my book will notice that I don't talk a great deal about Canada in part because it doesn't display as fully a lot of the
manifestations of decadence that I'm talking about sort of political gridlock and sclerosis which I think fits much of Western Europe fits the United States in certain ways fits the Pacific Rim um it has some of the same issues of
demographic decline as other countries but it's not as steep as East Asia and as you say it has managed a certain kind of immigrant assimilation in ways that I think other Western countries are struggling with so in that
sense I think Canada if it is decadent it has decadence without some of the more extreme difficulties associated with it I guess my question for you as an observer of Canada is at what point does this sort Canadian exceptionalism start
to dramatically influence the world fundamentally should we think of Canada as a large country which it is or as a small country it also is right in some ways like the nordics I'm not sure Canadian exceptionalism will last but I
find striking the question why don't more Americans actually want to move to Canada so they would take either of us right that's very flattering to us but we're still sitting here this I need to read my wife is descended from Canadians
on one side from uh New Finland and Ontario and when you know things get particularly hot on Twitter she will sometimes suggest that she needs to reclaim her Canadian citizenship but I think I actually think that is how
certain Americans think of Canada not as a land of opportunity but as sort of a stable and lower risk version of the US to which they can abscond and to the extent that's true then that suggests that there is this kind kind of
resilient dynamism in the US that comes with risks but doesn't seem to be on offer in Canada but do you think that's out ofd I mean do do you think the sort of do you think Canada how Dynamic do you think Canada is right now I think
Market Size Matters greatly so talented Canadians come to the US in great numbers but not so much vice versa so it could just be that people care about Market size much more than they care about the kinds of issues you and I talk
about and that always gives me pause just size of the country seems to be a more important variable uh relative to the amount of print space it gets from public intellectuals and that's why we we don't want to go to Canada plus it's
cold it is cold and they all all Canadians live in a very narrow strip of Canada the population distribution is sort of as you would expect extraordinarily compressed so in effect geographically it functions like a very
nice Northern province of the US with an immense and entertaining they will get mad at you for saying that to me it feels more like a series of independent city states on our margins but I think I would find it problematic to live in a
city state even in the US when I go to Texas I feel comfortable it's like I'm in a big country when I go to Rhode Island I feel claustrophobic well but also the citystate model historically the most Dynam I mean if you think of
obviously Venice as a city state but even sort of Quasi city states like you know you can see the low countries in the 17th century right as quasi City States functioning with in a landscape of Empire but they have tended to be
influential in part because of their Geographic placement and maybe that matters less globally than it once did but it still feels like Toronto is a terrific City but it's not if Toronto were dropped down in a different part of
the world it might be a more influential city is decadent cyclical or it just keeps on getting worse and worse I think that it can be cyclical I mean I think one one way to look at it is that you know under my definition it's a very
normal thing for human societies to enter into perhaps much more normal than the kind of dynamism that we have taken for granted in the US and to the extent that it reflects patterns of sort of prosperity leading to torpor and stagnation you
would expect a kind of cyclical phenomenon right so to take the demographic example right so you you have real substantial demographic decline in the Western World some of that just reflects the fact that we had this huge
influential generation the baby boom generation that didn't have nearly as many kids as their parents did and has sort of bestrid our world for a long time and it's possible I think it's sort of a sub theme of the book that as the
baby boom generation passes to their reward that decadence ease a little bit and there'll be more room for young people to do creative things and attain positions of power and all these kind of things and the demographic landscape of
Western societies will change a little bit so in that sense I think you can tell a cyclical story and certainly can see cyclical stories in history I do think though that if you just push existing trend lines in the Western World forward you would say the decadence is likely to to deepen at least over the next 25 to 40 years that I mean just to stay with fertility right there does seem to be a kind of low fertility trap that countries get into
where you have small families growth and vigor slow down and in that landscape there's less support for having children and so fertility rates stay low and that drives economic growth rates lower and you and that sort of those things feed on one another and so that's why I spend a certain amount of the later parts of the book talking about you know scenarios that are more disjunctive right where you need you need something unexpected and dramatic
to happen to shift things and maybe that's a particular invention that we're on the cusp of reaching or maybe it's a religious revival that we don't expect but I think I think the decadence we have now requires some sort of disjunctive
event to shift us out of it which could which could could very well happen but it's not if you just plot the course of the United States forward to 2050 I would say that we stay decadent maybe the problem with the low birth rate it's
not that kids aren't fun but men are not fun so once women have some wealth or employment opportunities at all they don't need men as much uh those men don't compete as much to marry to those women and you have families forming
later or not at all or there's High rate of single motherhood of course but you'll just have fewer kids what would possibly reverse the problem of men simply not being that much fun I think it's it's a hard question right your
kids are a lot of fun right but right no but you're right that that's if you track right so if you track fertility declines in not just the us but to take a strong case Finland right which has had in spite of all its social supports
for child rearing um that are you know the Envy of family policy experts the world over their fertility rate keeps falling and it seems to be just a consequence of all the trends you said delayed marriage delayed family
formation and men in particular not seeming to have a clearly defined role and I I go back and forth on this because on the one hand like you know we have three kids we're about to have a fourth oh congratulations um thank you
and it seems to me as an observer of marriages and child rearing that men are very important right even in our post feminist Industrial Age right the the good ones but that should create an incentive for cultures and societies to form good ones
and to figure out how do you form good men in this landscape and we haven't I you know it's pretty clear that we aren't figuring out exactly how to do that and instead you have these selection effects where you increasingly have sort of male spaces and female spaces that aren't single sex spaces right they aren't spaces where women go to be women and men go to be men and then they meet in the dating Market there are spaces that are heavily female
but have a certain percentage of males or heavily male but have a certain percentage of females have their own sort of self-contained dating markets where because of the imbalance there ends up being hostility between the
Sexes and you know thus on the you you have the farri incels online complaining about how women are terrible because in their world there aren't very many women right and so all the incentives are you know sort of for you know women to
behave like normal human beings and take advantage of their position and then on the other side on in sort of left-wing academic environments you have fewer men and so the men don't behave as well and the women feel like the men are terrible
um and that's that seems like a hard cycle to break and it does seem like you would need some sort of effective cultural campaign around rebuilding male education and manhood and right now sort of the models for that are polarized between conservative
religious models that you know as a conservative religious person I'm in favor of but they obviously have a limited purchase in the culture as a whole and then more feminist models that are trying to sort of remake men along
the lines of female virtues that I don't think actually work that don't sort of don't effectively identify core ways of making men sort of successful as men I do think to be the social conservative for a minute I do think pornography
plays a really nasty role in all of this and that a society that stigmatized and limited pornography would have at least slightly better men I think I think readily available constantly available pornography pushes men away from women
pushes men away from the cultivation of masculine virtues makes them less marriageable makes them literally more impotent in certain ways and is a sort of underappreciated aspect in the decline of men and the Theology of
original sin what percentage of men are the good ones no zero zero well you know I mean setting setting aside Jesus but the line I mean look the line the the famous phrase right the line between good and evil runs through every human
heart we just had we just had this horrifying thing in my own Catholic world where Jean venier the um founder of large this set of communities where people care for the disabled but really they're communities where people live
together it's not sort of hospitals for disabled people it's communities of people living together who was you know had died recently was considered a living Saint and and had done incredibly good things and I personally know people
young men whose lives were transformed by working in these communities are just writing about these communities and it came out that he had you know a not a Harvey Weinstein problem but a sort of the milder religious version where he
had pressured women including nuns into sexual relationships um and to their credit the community put out a you know a report about this but you know men Catholic men that I know or observe on the internet were particularly devastated by this because he was this model of sort of saintly Catholic masculinity for them and so it's a terrible thing but it's also I mean it's it's I'm circling around back to your original question right because it
doesn't eliminate the good things he did he did tremendously good things he had saintly aspects but he wasn't a saint he was you know he had that line running right down the the middle of his heart do the arguments of your new book lead
you to admire Mormonism more I mean I admired Mormonism a great deal I before I wrote the book but yes in the sense that you know you asked about non- decadent spaces and in the western world and Israel is one and you could argue
reasonably I think that Utah is another I I think there is a difficulty for Mormons in that the founding of their faith and some of the pretty obvious controversies associated with it um have pushed them a little bit away from certain forms of intellectual and Theological work that you would want a really successful religious community bent on evangelizing the United States to be able to do so that is sort of my non-mormon Christian caveat about
Mormonism but in general you know I went out to Salt Lake City when Mitt Romney was running for president they were trying to introduce journalists to mormom right so we you know we didn't get to see their holies of holy but we
got tours of you know the missionary centers and the supermarket slf food banks that they run um for lowincome people and you know speaking as a member of a Christian Church Catholicism that had sort of entered into its own obvious
form of decadence uh in the US over the last 50 years it's it's it's a shaming experience in certain ways to see what the Mormons can do in the more most basic forms of Christianity you know feed the hungry clothe the naked help
drug addicts help people get their lives together while also serving God it's it's it's a remarkable and admirable thing that basically every other Christian Church in the US should be envious of and they combine this I think in a way that does fit with
some of my speculations in the book with this strong interest in Economic Development and technological progress right I don't think there's there isn't High Mormon Theology and high Mormon Aesthetics but there's certainly a sort
of the technical side of americanness is very much on display in Mormon culture if you see Israel as relatively non- decadent do you then infer that being under a military Threat all of the time is what keeps decadence away certainly
that it's one thing yeah I mean Israel there seems to be some sort of existential issue involved in how people think about the future and part of the book is suggesting that there's a loss of optimism in the Western World a sense
that Frontiers are closed we're not going to go to the Stars we're stuck here with ourselves we're bored what are we we do now but there's also a sense in which extreme pessimism or extreme concern about the future can be a Spur
against decadence and what's so striking about Israel's in demographic terms right is that Israel is the one country at its level of income that has a birth rate not just at replacement but way above replacement it's dipped a little
in the last couple years and people hear that statistic and say well it's just the ultra Orthodox right having big families but in fact secular Israelis have much larger than American average families as well again in a landscape
where their children are in more sort of geopolitical peril than children in the US in a country that is built out of a desert on a narrow strip of land up against the Mediterranean now politically you know I mean we're
recording this in the midst of the internum between Israeli elections of which we're on track to have 17 in the next year or so I think that you can see elements of the same political decadence on display in other countries on display
in Israel too and so I don't want to suggest that they're exempt from the trends I'm describing but they are like the Mormons exceptional relative to the rich Society Norm to get back to the theme of your own decadence so you've
written column skeptical of the internet you mentioned pornography a moment ago which is usually now consumed over the Internet presumably when it comes to for babies and transhumanism and genetic engineering you're at least partly
skeptical maybe very skeptical but if you think those are the areas right now where we're seeing the major advances isn't it the case that to overcome decadence you have to actually embrace the innovations that you yourself are not comfortable with the
printing press in its early days led to religious wars certainly certainly been against the printing press yes and I think I well I think there is there is definitely there are place is where there is a tension between
my Catholic or Christian moral commitments and my desire to escape decadence and certainly I think elements of transhumanism are one of them and I I I say as much in the book that there is sort of a you could imagine a real
transhuman Revolution that would not be decadent that would Mark the end of decadence as I'm describing it but that I that I would not welcome right and I think that's sort of decadence isn't it isn't necessarily a moral judgment I'm sort of stealing my
definition from jacqu Baron who said it's not a slur the term it's a technical label and in that sense to the extent that it's a technical label you have to be able to say things could happen that ended decadence and didn't
lead to collapse or catastrophe that led to development change dynamism that from a moral perspective I might find repellent and it's also I think why I'm drawn much more to the older Frontier you know the idea of the space program
and space as a frontier because that's a case that I think the idea of human beings as they are going exploring seems to me much more fundamentally appealing than the idea of human beings staying put and changing who we are and I can imagine
someone with a different worldview having the opposite reaction although Silicon Valley seems to have both reactions right you have both investment in space and investment in transhumanism so they're playing both sides of the
escape from decadence scenario you've argued at times that popes should never step down would you feel the same way if life extension meant that popes would live to the age of 140 or 150 I think in that scenario we're now
we're into totally speculative terrain I think that you would expect popes to be elected later and I think a 50-year pontificate is generally an unwise thing for the Catholic church in the same way that you know a 50-year span of governance by any
really powerful figure often ends up in bad places in the end but in that in the scenario you're describing I would imagine that you would elect popes at the ripe late middle age of a 100 colum 12 well that would be be 117 and you'd finally get a column I think in that case yeah you would maybe 93 maybe there I think the perfect zone for the columnist would be age 80 to 100 and then you would then you would step down I mean my assumption is I've
been a columnist for 10 years and my assumption is that I will run out of things to say at some point may I just turned 40 so maybe 50 is the point at which I want to have fully transitioned to writing fantasy novels instead I've
argued that Peter teal is the most influential public intellectual on the right today agree or disagree mostly agree why well first I should say it's I I have to agree because Anyone who reads the book will find a number of
quotations from Peter teal throughout and I have with some amends mostly accepted his analysis of the technological and economic component of our stagnation so I am indebted to him I think that he in his own Evolution I think has sort
of followed has followed but in certain ways blazed a trail for other evolutions of younger conservative intellectuals who are I think in certain ways in search of a new fusionism one way to put it right so modern conservatism begins
with the fusionism of social conservatism and mid mid century hayekian hyek toand that wide spectrum of libertarianism and I think there's a general sense that that kind of fusion has broken down and you have people I
think who imagine a new conservatism that's just social conservatism right and then you have Libertarians who sort of Imagine a libertarianism that leaves conservatism behind but I think there are a lot of people who want to sort of put things
back together again but in a slight different way and to make an argument that's maybe kind of like the argument that I end up with in the book that there is some sort of interesting Alchemy between a society that looks a little further back and a little further ahead right so what I was saying earlier about scrutin right the idea that looking back to the 19th century or the 17th century isn't necessarily decadent because it also lets you maybe
look a little further ahead and I think that's in certain ways there in at least some of Teal's stuff where he sort of simultaneously sympathetic to you know he's sort of an eccentric Christian of some sort maybe he's at the very least
sympathetic to religious conservatives in a way that other Silicon Valley figures are not at the same time he is a dynamist in a way that sort of the Buran version the most Buran version of social conservatism isn't I mean you've written
about you know the idea of State capacity libertarianism right um I think that's that's one example of ways in which people who are skeptical of wherever liberalism is right now are trying to forge something else so it's a
sense of you know some combination of a strong State some kind of small SE conservative social renewal and some sort of futurism offers some kind of alchemy and I I don't think there's a I you know teal has not written he wrote 0o to one
which has sort of an implicit political teaching but there isn't a sort of teelan Manifesto at the moment right so I think his influence is in the iness of his combination of ideas sort of speaking to the iness of other people's combination
of ideas and I he he wrote an essay there was a a piece very critical of him of course um I think in New York Magazine but that looked at this essay he wrote for First Things um a little while ago that was had this sort of
very particular Point sort of aimed at Christian readers where he said look the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city right and I'd read that essay when he wrote it and I think it actually did have some sort of sub conscious or
conscious influence on me where I you know I think there's a strong religious conservative draw towards pastoralism right towards the idea you know my friend rodri's book The Benedict option sort of has this idea of like the
retreat into the monastery The Retreat into sort of the wberry farming community and so on and I think that has to be for Christianity to be a plausible faith for our civilization that has to be balanced with a certain kind of the futurist optimism that has always been part of Christian cultures um and I think that always not I mean you know 2,000 years of History offers probably offers a lot of counter examples but I think the I think the
Christian World in general has been hospitable to dynamism I think that's a I think that's a fair characterization of the history of Christianity yeah do you think there could be a Peter teal Manifesto whether written by him or someone else or does
the very existence of the Bible or possibly the church render that impossible and thus much of it has to exist on the straussian plane and is th what do you mean by the existence of the Bible or the church that the Bible sets
out a very definite world view or World Views of course depending on how you read it or even what you consider to be the Bible but if you write a Manifesto you then have to out well what in the Bible are you agreeing with or not and
the manifesto then becomes quite subordinate or overly rebellious and maybe the ideas are most powerful in the straussian realm where Notions are hinted at and you have to put the pieces together for yourself uh there's a
certain power to all of the ideas not being fully spelled out and they also can evolve more freely in a dynamic way which reflects the dynamism I think that's I think that's possible I think it's particularly possible for someone
like teal who clearly you know has a very heterodox relationship whatever it may be to Christian faith so yeah I I think you're right that that any Manifesto he put out would highlight more clearly his points of tension with both the
religious Traditions that he's in dialogue with and the different sort of broken factions of conservatism that he's in dialogue with and I think the teelan you know the teelan ethos to me well it's a venture capitalist ethos
in the sense that he you know he he in certain ways he's invested in Christianity and invested in transhumanism so you know eternal life he's got an investment in eternal life and investment in physical immortality and he's invested in disaster
preparedness but also willing to invest which I as a pundit was not in the candidacy of Donald Trump right so I think in that sense yeah a a specific Manifesto would limit his capacity to be sort of poking at a lot of different
points of our decadence and seeing where you could push your finger through maybe that's not the right metaphor other than just mentioning the pope do you think that most young people today could answer with any kind of specificity what
is the difference between Catholics and Protestants in the United States no does that concern you do you care yes of course I mean what's the difference focus on that they're not grasping In fairness you don't want to overestimate
the capacities of normal human beings in times past right I mean it's not it is not the case that there was some golden age of Christian history where you know farmers and peasants in rural Germany could recite the anathemas of the
Council of Trent right I mean this is but they would read pamphlets about the anathemus of the council I think well or they would have I think an intuitive grasp I mean I think if you asked a lot of people prior to Vatican 2 what are
the differences between Catholicism and protestantism they wouldn't cite the Council of Trent they would say if they were Protestant that Catholics have a weird superstitious you know weird superstitious rituals and spooky nuns
and Priests and if they were catholic they would say you know well Protestants don't really believe in the Virgin Mary like to you know to be to be crude and I think the I think it's sort of a signal failure of Catholicism since the' 60s is not it's
not defined necessarily in the inability of people to you know recite the catechism chapter and verse but it's more in that sort of cultural and lurgical distinctive area right so if you go into a CA a typical Suburban
Catholic church and I've been to mass and a lot of them and then you it can feel like a Mainline church with a tiny bit more formality and and a statue of Mary and that I think is a you know it's a sort of a a mark of catholicism's attempt to assimilate to what was in the 60s still a sort of protestant mainstream but now that that Protestant mainstream is gone it just leaves Catholicism as this sort of extra Mainline denomination and I think that
will I I I do since we're talking about ways out of decadence I do expect that to change over the next 50 years because I think Catholicism more than evangelicalism is likely to go into steeper decline in the next over the
next generation institutionally and what will be left behind will be a weirder and more distinctive Catholic faith that will have some clearer differences from its Protestant neighbors and exist right now but but that's a case of sort of
shrinking in order to become distinctive and Dynamic again if you're worried about some aspects of the relative decline of Catholicism why make marriage of the priesthood such a central issue for the church as you well know the Orthodox
Church in the East has a very different attitude toward marriage of priests and they are broadly a Catholic Church historically uh why not side with them and they are still distinctive right no one would confuse them with modern
American protestantism they are still dis I mean there are some wrinkles there a lot of the Orthodox Churches don't let married men become Bishops and you know it's it's a little bit more complex but I think in general it's a case of just on
just to analyze it in cultural terms leaving theology out of it I think it's another case of sort of giving up a distinctive giving up something that separates you and distinguishes you from other churches and S suggest to people
that there's something interesting and particularist going on here and I mean then there are sort of structural hurdles too the Catholic church is not actually set up to provide for married pastors and their families but I think in I mean but that would be self financing right if they chose to do it well they'd have I mean they could try and you mean Finance themselves yeah that is what but more people would become priests if they could marry see
I'm not completely sure I think you would see it temporary bump in the number of people becoming priests but in general I think problems of you know there's a problem of talent recruitment for Mainline Protestant denominations
too and also I mean this is this is the more Catholic argument but I think there's a dynamic relationship in a healthy Christianity between a church having strong models of celibate life and strong model models of married life
and I think when that goes away in fact married life gets harder too because there's this sense you know that everyone is supposed to get married and if you're not married you're defective and marriage is the highest form of life
so if your marriage isn't particularly happy then you should get out of it and find a better marriage and in fact I think having a commitment to celibacy at the heart of your religion is better for the diversity of human types and experiences
than just making marriage the summit of all things and it's also this is more the argument of my last book than this one but they relate to one another I suppose what part of what I find attractive and persuasive about
Catholicism is that not always and everywhere but in particular ways it has preserved commitments to the radical side of the New Testament the non bourgeois side and I think that's true in the church's resistance to divorce which has
crumbled a bit under this pontificate but I I think it's true in issues of celibacy as well if you read the New Testament especially if you read um the gospels but Paul's letters too you would not come away convinced that this is a
religion that's all about Ross dood and his wife and four kids as like the model Christian right the model Christian is somebody doing something much more radical and if you drop that or downgrade it from its position in the
church then a piece of New Testament radicalism goes away and you know that New Testament radicalism is literally what I think God has given us in his most direct and intimate Revelation so I think it would be a bad idea to jettison
it here's a reader question quote I believe 95% of Catholic universities are Catholic in name only does he agree in what dire direction does he hope for the future of Catholic universities should the church withdraw its sanction I don't
know about 95% but I think generally Catholic universities have followed the same path of imitation and assimilation that I was describing earlier but say Georgetown right that's nominally Catholic but if you went there it would in no way shape your time as a student or no I mean I I don't want to be particularly harsh on Georgetown but I do think among it's the Catholic University that's most assimilated to the secular model of Elite Education I
think if you went to a school like Notre Dame it's possible to go through Notre Dame without having I should say Notre Dame not Notre Dame I sound pretentious it's possible to go to Notre Dame and have a very mild exposure to Catholicism
but there is a intense Catholic subculture there there's a beautiful Basilica at the heart of of campus there's still a real Catholic culture and that's a very successful top tier University and I think what you see when
I talk to Catholic academics at those kind of schools they will often say that the thing that the university supplies in many cases it's not a Catholic identity for every student but it's a preservation of a Catholic option and a
sort of potential encounter with religion that is not available at a secular University so this is what a professor at Boston college right which would be cited as another example of a sort of somewhat secularized Jesuit university said to me he said look you
know the BC is not going to you know become as Catholic as it was 50 years ago overnight but it's a place where the administration and the president want to preserve some Catholicism within the school and to the extent that schools
are trying to do that I don't think the church should withdraw its sanction that said I do think there's a certain range of schools that are now very much quasi secularized and it wouldn't be a bad thing if the church just sort of
recognized that and and they came to a effective parting of the ways but I have more hope for the Notre Dame model than maybe the your correspondent does does the Vatican have too few employees so there's a slate article it claimed in
2012 the Roman curia has fewer than 3,000 employees Walmart headquarters at the time had 12,000 if the church is a quite significant Global operation can it be argued in fact that it's not bureaucratic enough they don't actually
have state capacity in the sense that state capacity libertarianism might approve of right State capacity libertarianism would disapprove of the Vatican model and it reflects the reality that I think media coverage of the Catholic Church doesn't always
reflect which is that in Catholic ecclesiology and sort of the theory of the institution Bishops are really supposed to be pretty autonomous in governance and the purpose of Rome is sort of the promotion of missionary work
and the protection of Doctrine and it's not supposed to be micromanaging the governance of the World Church now I think what we've seen over the last 30 years and I think it's been thrown into sharp Relief by the sex abuse crisis is
that the modern world may not allow that model to exist right that if you have this Global institution that has a celebrity figure at the center of it who's the focus of endless media attention you can't in effect get away
with saying well the pope is the pope but sex abuse is an American problem and to that extent I think yeah there is a case that the church needs more employees and a more efficient and centralized bureaucracy but then that also coexists with the problem of you know the the model of Catholicism is still a model that was Modern in the 16th century it's still much more of a court model than a bureaucratic model and Pope after Pope has sort of
theoretically tried to change this and has not succeeded and part of the reality is as you well know as a world traveler the Italians are very good at running courts that exclude Outsiders and prevent them from changing the way
things are done and so time and again some Anglo-Saxon or German blunderer gets put in charge of some Vatican dicastery and discovers that in fact the reforms he intends are just not quite possible and you know in certain ways
that's that's a side of decadence that you can bemoan but in certain ways you have to respect back to abortion presumably is an important issue for you given that why not just outright support president Trump that's a good question I
think the the basic answer that I have that I've had is twofold one I've had throughout Trump's ascent and well into his presidency an expectation that the gap between his skill level and competence and the challenges of being president was large
enough that over a long enough time Horizon he would lead the us into some sort of catastrophe that would have a dramatically negative effect on the political causes that I care about even but it would have to kill many millions
of people to outweigh the expected value of the change in abortion policy but I guess my assumption is that you don't get a substantial and long- Lasting change in abortion policy without a pro-life political Coalition that's
capable of governing the country for a long long period of time and in that sense maybe I was maybe I'm read too much into this experience but I came of age with George W Bush's presidency right who was a pro-life president who
put conservative justices on the Supreme Court and then you know his his foreign policy mistakes and other other issues led to his presidency ending in total catastrophe and this is unprovable but I think there is some connection
between the sub quent decline of religious affiliation and sort of you know the the the total route of social conservatives on issues of same-sex marriage and this sense that people had in the mid 2000s that religious
conservatism was associated with a totally incompetent president an a botched war and then a financial crisis and so I've sort of imagined something similar as the likely endgame for Trump that something like to pick an example from the news this
winter and likely this spring the Corona virus that the incapacities of his White House are more likely to lead to some catastrophic failure that dramatically discredits his party and you know destroys his presidency now that being
said you know the generally the Trump era has been more stable more sustainably decadent if you will than I expected and in that sense I can certainly see why a certain faction of never Trump says well you know we overestimated the tail
risks of this presidency and things are more stable than we thought and therefore we should welcome his judicial appointments and um Embrace him for a second term and it you know it could be that I sort of do too much cultural
analysis in a way right I spend too much time thinking about well what do you know younger people in churches think of the hypocrisy involved in Evangelical support for Trump and won't that you know lead to a further decline for
Christianity that outweighs any gains and maybe that kind of analysis is sort of maybe it's too much analysis just two wins might be what matters right right Bernie Sanders wins that helps one set of ideas and all the other complicated
second order effects exactly and and you don't know the pundit's mistake is sometimes to try and think 14 steps ahead and the sort of the partisan mind may have a certain advantage just says no we have to win this election and let
the future take care of itself but that still that still hasn't brought me around to supporting Trump but I think my arguments against supporting him are weaker than they were again pending the outcome of whatever happens with the Corona virus
we live in an America that supposedly respects religions yet if you were to try to argue in public that say a child were possessed by demons you would be mocked and called insane whether whether or not it were true where do you
personally draw the line that you respect religions but are there claims you hear that when you hear them you think that's so implausible it couldn't possibly be true you file it in the insane category the way most people when
they would hear talk of a child being possessed by demons would think that's insane and not required by their supposed respective religions do you see what I'm asking uh I do um I think it is quite possible for a child to become
possessed by demons uh and I I actually mildly disagree I think in the circles in which you and I move that claim would be just greeted with automatic mockery but I think in American culture RIT large there is plenty of space for at
least openness to ideas of the Supernatural and the Demonic that yeah I I think the mockery is a is still even in our more secularized age an elite phenomenon my general sense is the I've struggled to persuade my secular friends
of this View but it's still the old chestertonian view that I find the improbable harder to swallow than the impossible right so we were talking about Mormonism earlier and my objection to Mormonism is not the idea of the Angel morani appearing to Joseph Smith it's the claim that there existed these large-scale civilizations in Central America for which we have no archaeological evidence so I'm much more skeptical of claims that are should be
amenable to real world scientific archaeological what have you testing and don't pan out than I am to Supernatural claims and again I recognize that's not that's a minority view in our peer group but I'm you know I'm I'm a pretty
convinced supernaturalist I think demonic possession I think the literature on demonic possession is I think it's unwise to spend too much time with it because uh it leads to dark places but I think it's quite convincing that there
is something going on there that is not adequately explained by existing theories of psychology and um the human mind what's your point estimate of the probability that what we now call UFOs are in fact something interesting and
mysterious and related to some kind of life from a distance right now my probability that they are something interesting and mysterious is very high um I would say 80% % 85% uh that they're related to life from a distant planet is a lot lower I would
say quite quite low maybe 15 10 15% that's very high that's actually High I I would probably I'm I'm going to lose all credibility so I should go a little lower but I mean I think there are two things going on with UFOs right one
there is a historical continuity that I find very persuasive between human stories of fairy encounters from Middle Ages and the premodern period and stories of alien abductions where you have similar depictions of the creatures
involved similar emphasis on trickery and people sort of playing games with human beings similar emphasis on sex and sort of Quasi medical experimentation all these kind of things and what that suggest to me is on the one hand that
you should assign some probability to the possibility that there are supernatural beings who like to mess with us who are neither Angelic nor demonic but leaving that aside that there is some some kind of human experience that we don't fully
understand that is not just made up that is maybe it's some sort of Union unconscious thing that gets interpreted as aliens in a one age and as fairies in another but is real and interesting even if the fairies themselves aren't real
that's one area then you have the UFOs that we pick up on video right that we now actually have you know published in my own newspaper um pretty compelling videographic evidence it could be that that's one more example of you know if
the fairies are real that's this is just one more way they mess with us I think I would assign a slightly higher probability to the weird Advanced military technology explanation for those that they seem a little different
from the UFO Abduction stories but I think there's clearly well put it this way there are unidentified flying objects that we can see on videos that Pilots have seen that are presumably not a hallucination and therefore must represent one the
supernatural two Advanced military technology or three visitors from another planet right yes three final questions but what what wait but I know it's not my interview but what is your what is your assigned probability of those options for the it's called conversations with Tyler right not by Tyler I said on marginal Revolution I thought it was maybe up to a five % chance it was aliens real beings and then I talked myself down to about 1%
but 1% is still quite high Y so we should be thinking and talking about it more what what probability do you assign to the supernatural when you think about when you think about these not not for this in particular but General like
if I came to you and I said you know Tyler I want you to read the literature on hauntings and ghosts going into reading that literature what probability do you assign that ghosts are in some sense real and yeah that's a difficult
question because I am so willing to entertain the notion that the true model of physics is so weird it could be weirder than religion that is fair so what you're calling Supernatural I could oh it's a slight univers I'll accept it
so I don't dismiss the weirdness but I don't know what should make me call it Supernatural for almost tautological reasons I think I I mean that the one of the sort of UFO obsessives who pivoted to this fairy interpretation had
basically that view he was arguing that it is a parallel a bizarre parallel Dimension being effect so I'll I'll allow I'll allow it so three last questions yes as technology advances won't we need to end most lives by euthanasia not people who fall off cliffs but you can always hook someone up and keep them going so won't euthanasia become say the case for 80% of deaths I mean I I understand why people are skeptical of it but I generally buy the
distinction that my own church makes between the withdrawal of care and the injection of lethal drugs I know that you know there are areas where that line gets blurry but I think yes over a long enough life expectancy Horizon human beings would
need to sort of create a culture of refusing and withdrawing care but I think that is still different from at least right now the means we have that where you're actually actively hastening death through interventions
designed to do so last two questions first is Connecticut good yes Connecticut I so I just did an interview with a very nice reporter for Connecticut magazine where I was trying to explain you know I was saying positive things about Connecticut but
then also saying that it was sort of an example of decadence right it's a very wealthy um American state that you know has a lot of old institutions Yale University in the city that I live in that is getting older and has trouble
attracting young people and is not a dynamic state or not as dynamic as it once was but I I grew up in Connecticut so I have that sort of partisanship but I like living there I like it sort of mix of um intimacy and history and the
New England landscape and I think that if you could Rescue Connecticut from decadent maybe you could rescue the whole world finally is Lyme disease good in the sense that God uses all things for good yes um but not in any sense
besides that and that's the the next book I'm actually under contract for is about Lyme disease and your own experience my own experience but I I do think of it in part as my own very small attempt to work against decadence
if I could convince readers that there are in fact better treatments for Lyme disease available and help people make progress against one particular disease then maybe that's a more effective anti- decadence effort than writing an entire
book bemoaning the state of civilization Ross thank you very much and again I'd like to recommend his book to you all the decadent Society how we became the victims of our own success thank you thank you Tyler thanks for listening to condra
ation with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show