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tyler.com [Music] Ross is the youngest person ever to have been an oped columnist for the New York Times you had to start there he is one of our best and most important thinkers and in March he has a new book coming out called to change the church Pope Fran and the future of Catholicism and just to make this clear this is the
conversation with Ross I want to have not the one you want to have Ross welcome thank you thank you Tyler it's good to be here I'd like to start with something quite esoteric now to prepare for you I was reading the calvinist Theologian runi and he argues the Council of chelidon in 451 ad yeah actually enabled
Liberty through its christology the notion that you embed in Christianity salvation through Grace rather than through self-deification and this ends up meaning the state is not the Savior and the church and state thus eventually end up as opposing principles and this is a kind of foundation for later individual liberty now with someone
who's both Catholic and who has an interest in conservative and Liberty related ideas what is your take on that account sometimes I'm persuaded by a version of it and sometimes I'm not I think that there's a very natural story to tell about western civilization in which particular Christian ideas about the
individual the individual's relationship to God Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and so on that these sort of embedded ideas eventually develop into the constituent forms of modern liberal democracy and in that story you could argue either that liberal democracy is a kind of happy development out of sort of
sort of original Christian ideas and Christian thoughts or that it is a kind of rebellious stepchild who has you know sort of taken over the house and banished the parent to the attic and I guess those are sort of those are sort of views that I toggle back and forth between depending on what seems like the state of Western liberalism at any
particular moment as a Catholic you have a kind of intermediate view on how important works are for Grace so you would reject the views of Calvin and Luther that it's strictly determined by God but the pelagian heresy that there is no original sin right that also is unacceptable to you that would lead you to Mormonism or something else what
makes that intermediate position so compelling to you and is it in some way an underlying feature of how you think about politics I've never been asked that question I mean I I suppose that I'm drawn to the idea that the truth about human existence lies in what can seem like paradoxical formulations and this
is of course a very Catholic in certain ways certainly GK chestertonian idea so I'm just stealing it from other people but the idea that various heresies of Christianity Calvinism included with apologies to my my calvinist friends tend to take one particular element of a view that's supposed to be in synthesis
and possibly intention and run with it and therefore the sort of the truth about things lies in a place that may seem slightly contradictory and I think this is you know this is sort of borne out in many ways an everyday experience this kind of both and experience of human existence the you know the idea that that that you can't sort of split
up grace and works in any kind of meaningful way I think is sort of it's connected to larger facts about the nature of human existence the fact that you know the sort of the tension between determinism and Free Will that persists in any philosophical system right you can you can get rid of God and stop having these sort of jansenist Jesuit
arguments about predestination and so on but you're still stuck with the sort of Free Will determinism debate that debate doesn't go away so yeah I I think that there's a sort of point at the intersection of different ideas that is as close to the truth as our limited mind can get and in Christian thought we
call that point Orthodoxy now how that is connected to my political views is a really good question I I mean I I think that a lot of the time in politics I suppose I am in certain areas of our politics I'm looking for that point I guess you could say but that's but that's mostly true in no I guess it's
true in a lot of places like I I think that there is for instance I think that the solution to and may maybe now we're into sort of more hegelian territory rather than Christian territory but there's a solution to a lot of problems in some as yet uncertain synthesis so I write a lot about sort of social conservatism and abortion and feminism
and these kind of issues and I do think that somewhere out there in that zone of argument there is a synthesis of the best social conservative ideas and the best feminist insights that I personally haven't been able to grasp yet and probably I'm not necessarily equipped to do so but and also that our society as a
whole hasn't but that that is sort of where the actual truth lies and you can sort of distill it in certain slogan ready ways like saying well you know you need a sort of a more feminist pro-life movement or something like that and those slogans only get you partway there but I yeah I I do think that that sort of idea of synthesis is somewhat
important to the somewhat speculative political writing that I do but as you know there's a tendency within Catholicism to try to use healan arguments to push a very liberal version of Catholicism well this thing is going to keep on evolving there's no end to the process so we can get away from your idea of Catholicism as spanning the
generations as something continuous and unified are you worried you'll become too hegelian or are you not yet hegelian enough I mean I think the hegelian Insight can be true in the development of political forms and sort of responses to problems that social changes create problems that technological changes
create and you can sort of hold that view while also holding the view that the heelan dialectic can't be usefully applied to certain ideas and certain truths and you know you can sort of take extreme examples and say well there isn't a synthesis to be had to violate Godwin's law sort of early in our conversation there isn't a synthesis to
be had with Nazi Germany right there are certain ideas about racial hierarchies and so on that are not part of some synthesis that you need to sort of work through and grasp and then be a Catholic I think is to believe that there is sort of a larger body of revealed truths that have to remain as as a grounding for
civilization Christian civilization and so on even as you sort of grope forward towards programmatic practical Solutions and sociological solutions to sort of new problems that emerge we all know the marcionite heresy the view from early Christianity that the Old Testament should be abandoned at times even Paul
seems to ascribe to what later was called the marcionite heresy why is it a heresy why is it wrong it's wrong because it takes the form well I mean it's wrong for any number of reasons but in in the context of the conversation we're having it's wrong because it tries to basically take one of the things that Christianity is trying to hold in
synthesis and run with it to the exclusion of everything else and to sort of essentially to sort of solve problems by sort of cutting things away so the you know the marcionite thesis is basically well if you read the New Testament Jesus offers you a portrait of God that seems different from the portrait of God offer in Deuteronomy
therefore these things are in contradiction therefore if you believe that Jesus's portrait of God is correct then the deuteronomic portrait of God must be false therefore the god of the Old Testament must be a wicked demiurge etc etc and you know the next thing you know you're ascribing to again a kind of
what is the Aryan Christianity of the Nazis if not the marcionite heresy given form in the 1930s and 1940s and so the Orthodox Christian says no that sort of any seeming tension between the Old Testament and the new any seeming contradiction is actually suggesting that we need to look for a kind of synthesis between them and for a
kind of a sense in which there is not contradiction but fulfillment in some way which bringing us back to hegelian death yes yes now to prepare no no there's a I mean no and you're absolutely right there is a kind of in order to get to the Orthodoxy of nah and chaldon there is a sense in which there's a kind of heelan fulfillment the
issue there though is just that the Orthodox Christian believes that at a certain point the Revelation is actually final that God essentially doesn't play tricks on you and this is sort of an I think an important idea that too much hegelianism leads you to the point where you're saying well what God is saying in
one era just doesn't hold true in another and that gets you to a point where it's a kind of dishonesty I think necessarily imputed to God in that scenario that he's sort of he's sort of withholding giving you a revelation but he's constantly withholding for you know for for the future and I think the God that I would prefer to believe in does
give when he says he's giving final answers he actually means it to prepare for this conversation I read some more Catholic theology so I read hanour Von basur Carl roner Heath conard Hans Kung Ed you're way ahead of me then others but let me give you my impression and I hope this doesn't offend anyone it
mostly really bored me but when I went back and reread parts of the Bible the New Testament it didn't bore me at all it was absolutely fascinating gripping I wanted to go back and read it yet again now given that theology comes through the church is this not in some way evidence for a version of protestantism being correct
or do you have a different reaction to these texts is it all right to say that I have a similar reaction to many of them or will that I mean I I it's that's a dangerous thing to say because in my position as a sort of hack journalist who writes about Catholic controversies I'm often getting criticized for by
professional theologians for lacking adequate theological training and so forth so if I admit that I find many theologians dense and boring that will be used against me when my book comes out in a few months um but I guess it's too late so having said that no I I think I think that the heart the heart of Catholicism is found in the link
between the New Testament and the form and structure and ordinary life of the church and what theologians are doing is very important but it is far from the most interesting and essential part of the Catholic project so the to the extent that there's sort of an aha moment for someone sort of thinking
intellectually about the connection between the New Testament and the Catholic Church it should come in the experience of looking at you know looking at the Eucharist looking at what goes on in Catholic churches every day around the world and connecting that to the startling and shocking and scandalous things that Jesus says about
his you know about his body and blood in the New Testament connecting it to the form of the Last Supper connecting it to that story and the theological commentary on all this can be fascinating and Theological controversies can be very interesting but that I mean to me the sort of in the you know the really yeah the the sort of
the heart of the connection between Catholicism as a religion and the startling striking world of the New Testament lies more in lurgical life the lives of the the Saints the sort of everyday stuff of the Catholic Church rather than the abstract arguments also say that the post 60s Catholic theologians are also maybe a little a
little more dense in certain ways I mean there there's a good piece by Rusty Reno who's the editor of first things that he wrote a little while ago about sort of arguing that a lot of those Catholic theologians the ones that you read it sounds like are working they're working as sort of critics of a sort of existing
tomisic sort of Thomas aquinus rooted foundation in Catholic theology that they felt had gotten very stale and very boring and they were right I think in certain ways but the problem is they're also writing on the assumption that their reader sort of understands this Foundation that they're sort of operating in a landscape of critique and
commentary and so on that assumes a kind of 1880s or 1940s Catholic Education in their readers and so the sort of collapse which they hastened in certain ways of that Tom mistic cons sensus means that in certain ways their Works don't make that much sense they're that they're sort of driving forward but
there's a there's a missing synthesis that you need to sort of understand what they're driving at sometimes but again that's a more theologically learned take than my own which sometimes matches yours let me ask you my number one question about you and maybe it's too big a question for you to answer but it's what I've been thinking about for
the last few weeks the apparent I wouldn't say lack of interest in theology but you don't write about theology much in its theological aspects it may be part of a sociological narrative but what strikes me rereading everything you've written as a whole is how interested you are in Aesthetics and narrative film
television and novels that this is elevated so if you read St Augustine as you know in the the confessions he's very skeptical about theater it's potentially a form of idolatry it distracts people from God and theology is weaker in your approach and narrative and Aesthetics are stronger and this strikes me ultimately as a kind of
theological decision so in the Catholicism of you what's the theological basis of narrative and aesthetic themselves being elevated over theology that's what's been bugging me okay and maybe if you could address that I would be happy I'll I'll Venture a theory again about something that I haven't thought about before you raised
it 30 seconds ago so so please take this with a grain of salt but I I think that you could make the argument that narrativity is the way in which God has revealed himself in the world that and from from a Christian perspective from a judeo-christian perspective you know the the Old and New Testaments contain a lot
of theologizing but they are above all narratives they are stories of a chosen people there are travails and betrayals and wars and miseries and judgments and all the rest and then there's a story in the New Testament that's you know as the cliche Goes The Greatest Story Ever Told and I I mean I think you're right about
me when I read the New Testament I want to read the gospels much more than I want to read St Paul and I find the gospels much more interesting than St Paul and that's obviously not true of of everybody or we wouldn't have been having Wars about you know what Paul meant in Christianity for the last 2,000 years but I think to the extent that I
would defend my own instincts and my own approach it's in you know that I meantime sometimes I say this to my children when I'm sort of clumsily trying to indoctrinate in my faith I say you know you were living inside a story and God is the Storyteller and again this is not a thought original to me at all but God is
the Storyteller and you are an actor within that story and the difference is that in this story God you know Christians would say God himself enters the story he becomes a character in the play which is a very difficult thing for playright to normally do but that that story the fact that God is a Storyteller tells us something reasonable about how
best to approach him and that it is not just okay but completely plausible to approach him through narrative through poetry through ART through stories and so on and there is a sense I think this idea I'm stealing from Alan Jacobs who wrote a biography of CS Lewis but I think there's a real sense in which and
maybe this speaks to the failure of Western theology over the last 50 years but Christians in the west in the United States sort of well-educated wouldbe intellectual Christians tend to be heavily influenced by storytellers heavily influenced by Lewis heavily influenced by Jr tolken heavily influenced even by like Dorothy seers
and her detective stories heavily influenced by chesterton's Father Brown stories I think it's probably fair to say that that chesterton's Father Brown stories had as much influence on my worldview as his more sort of pical and argumentative writings and again I think therein lies some important Insight that
I haven't thought through but I think you're correctly gesturing at about sort of a particular way of thinking about God and theology that isn't unique to Christianity but that is strongly suggested by just the structure of the Revelation that we have but Marilyn Robinson has a line I think in Gilead about you know he's one of the
characters is imagining that you know this life is like the Epic of Heaven that we're living in The Iliad or the Odyssey of Heaven this this is the story that will be told in the streets and I think that's a very powerful and resonant and interesting way thinking about our lives but thinking about sort
of the Christian view of history that we're living inside of a very interesting story that people will be you know talking about in heaven for a long time now you've been very critical of hamer's decision to take in so many Syrian refugees into Germany the heart of Europe and of course many of those refugees are Muslims so when I I read
some of what you write I I sense a kind of tension between Catholicism which is universal in some important ways but also a kind of eurocentrism and a fear that the long-standing historical connection between Catholicism Christianity and Europe will be broken by migration patterns By changes in the European Union at the margin how much
tension do you see between a kind of eurocentrism that's in in in most of our our thinking in the west and Catholicism itself there's some substantial tension I think um I think the the situation in Europe is a very challenging one for anyone to think through but particularly for a Catholic because you have this
sort of it's the ancestral homeland of my faith and you know we're talking about Stories the story of Catholicism is a European story for much of its history much of the great dramas the great debates and so on take place in that continent and when I sort of think you know figure when I think of figures
that I identify with when I think of sort of the writers and artists and so on that I relate to they are primarily European just because of that synchronicity because the the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith historically but now we're in an era when that's not really true Europe is sort of a museum of Catholicism in this
weird way you know with with some exceptions but particularly in Western Europe it's a museum and the culture of Europe is in certain ways hostile and becoming increasingly hostile to traditional religious faith and at the same time you have this sort of alternative of Islam that whose potential power and potential ability to
reshape Europe is sort of ambiguous I'm not it's not at all clear to me how powerful or how substantial that influence would be and so the Catholic is sort of given at least in at the moment this sort of strange choice would you rather have this Museum of your faith be preserved in its existing form in a sort of post Catholic maybe still
residually Catholic situation or would you have it be changed dramatically by the entrance into Europe of you know the faith that you're you know that Catholicism contended with for World Mastery for hundreds and thousands of years and I I that's that's a strange choice to be placed to someone I think
and it's further Complicated by the fact that sort of overshadowing that particular tension is the reality that a large share of the potential long-term migration to Europe could be from Catholic and Evangelical portions Africa which is sort of you know it sort of adds a further layer layer of dilemma um and so my my reaction to merkel's move
is not it sort of it sits at like one remove from that debate my reaction to merkel's move was very much as sort of a political analyst who thinks to myself you know stability is better than chaos as flawed as the liberal order is in various ways I want it to hold up therefore I don't want leaders to make
these big dramatic moves that I think you know could have obviously destabilizing an obviously destabilizing impact so I've been skeptical for a long time of the sort of extreme sort of you know marstein or Beyond markstein analysis that Europe is inevitably going to go Muslim and so on but having Merkel make a decision like she did sort of
pushes me slightly in a steinan direction probably it makes me think you know Europe's Elites are not sort of Reckoning with how big you know how fast demographic transformation can change societies divide societies create space for all kinds of extremisms to flourish uh that's sort of my columnists pundits answer but I don't know exactly I don't
know exactly how to connect it to this deeper question of what what kind of future of Europe given the available option should a Catholic desire because you know to some extent if you're asking me would I rather be Europe be atheistic and sort of effectively anti- Catholic for the next thousand years or rather or
rather have it be Muslim perhaps I'd rather have it be Muslim right I mean from from a Catholic perspective a sincere Islamic faith is is preferable to a sort of truly post Catholic landscape but at the same time we're not there we're not being fully presented with that choice either so anyway I I'm
I'm just suggesting various uncertainties I guess your forthcoming book gives an estimate that perhaps by 2040 there will be 460 million African Catholics twice as many as in Europe arguably they go to mass much more often so a you imagine a future Catholicism where the letter of James is more Central to the Bible there's more
exorcism more fasting holy water is more important there's a more magical view of the Eucharist arguably a kind of supernaturalism is more primary would your reaction just be well my loyalty is to the church so I'm just going to go with that flow or do you feel there's some more eurocentric view of Catholicism that's being lost in a way
we would want to fight for both I I mean I I I would think that you know the future of an African Catholicism of a sort of Africanized Catholicism is better than many many Futures that I can imagine but I would still be sorrowful if sort of particularly European distinctives that I within the church are are lost in that
transformation I mean I think if you want if I were playing The Optimist I would say that there is a you know a sort of Euro African a Euro African future for the church where sort of African forces African migration African ideas African leaders sort of help en renew and enrich and sort of return European Catholics to their faith and
you can find sort of small strange examples of this right like Robert Sarah who's this Ganan Cardinal who's sort of seen as kind of a partial antagonist to Pope Francis in certain intert Catholic debates he went to the Von in France for the anniversary of the V and sort of you know and gave a speech there sort of
hailing the resistance of Catholics to the revolution Ary regime in France in the 18th century which is kind of this extraordinary moment not anything you would have imagined 150 or 200 years ago and a kind of moment that yeah lets you briefly imagine that kind of you know that there could be a Catholicism that
sort of revived certain European elements in the process of becoming more African but that's a very from a Catholic perspective optimistic View and the likelihood is that things will be more chaotic and Messier and so on but yeah I mean but ultimately my first Loy is or tries to be to the church rather than to European culture so I would
certainly take an African Catholicism over again the M the museum that we have in Europe today when you see how much Behavior Islam or some forms of Islam motivate I mean do you envy it do you think well gee what is it that they have that we don't what what do we need to learn from them or I mean what's Your
Gut emotional reaction I I think that that Western Civilization is decadent and that decadent has virtues among them you know the absence of the kind of massive bloody Civil Wars currently roing the Middle East but at the same time there is a sense in which yeah I mean there's parts of Islam that are sort of closer to asking the most
important questions about existence than a lot of people are in the west and you know asking important questions carries major risks and incites levels of extremism that we've sort of tamped down and put away that desire for the extreme and the absolute and the truth about things that animates some of the best
and some of the worst parts of Islam I think that's it's it's better for human beings to have that desire than not there was once a Long blog post you wrote really in response to me yes and in that subject to various conditions too complicated to explain but I'll mention them so you're not misquoted you at least mentioned the possibility of a
10% chance that there's some truth to a synthesis of judaic Christian and Muslim ideas is in that synthesis highly conditional within your your discourse what's the element from Islam that appeals to you I guess when I think about the synthesis in that case and I I gave it I gave it quite a low probability because it seems to me that
Judaism and Christianity make and again this comes back to sort of the storytelling issue maybe but I think there's sort of an there's a more organic and obvious unity in that story than there is in the combined story I don't think I have a certain answer I can tell you things as as I just I suppose started to that
you know that I that I admire within the Muslim world but I can't tell you sort of definitively and this is I guess what you know why I am a Christian and not a Muslim I can't tell you what I think how I think that story would fit together if God's revelation to Muhammad were a you know as sort of as definitive a
revelation is the revelations of Christianity and Jud Judaism I can't I can't make that story work so the story then has to be sort of bigger I guess that's that for for there to be a sort of judeo-christian Islamic synthesis then it does await some further Revelation that would make make more sense of the Islamic story to me as you
know I come all of this is very much an outsider so let me ask a very naive question if I look at the Catholic Church there's a movement as you know called opest day the priests of that movement they seem to be less caught up in sex scandals parts of the movement seem to have some understanding of what you might broadly call conservative
economics in Spanish politics in the 30s 40s and 50s they were actually considered a liberalizing force so they don't have to be seen as reactionary per se so why aren't they simply the good guys they don't come up much in your writings I'm I'm reading you and I think where's Opus day I mean I'm Pro Opus day
overall um I think that I guess that there it seems to me sometimes that Opus day is a particular it's a particular apostolate right and the and the particular idea of Opus day is that you are you know that it's it's not primarily supposed to be a Priestly order even though there are of course Priests of Opus day that the the central
idea and with apologies to Opus day members if I'm getting this at all wrong this but the central idea is that it's a it's a Ministry it's an apostolate for Lay people who are at work in the business world the journalism world the corporate world the communications world and so on and as such I think it you
know it has it has an admirable and important vocation in the life of the world and the life of the church but it it doesn't it it seems to me that in part that there is a sort of set aart not set apartness exactly but there there's there's an element of well I think a big part of the crisis in Catholicism in the last 60 or 70 years
is can simply be distilled to a collapse in the sense of the importance of Rel religious life of consecrated life of you know the priesthood religious orders sisters and brothers and so on and it's as easy for me to say because I've you know I did not become a priest and so on it's always always easier once you
haven't become a priest to say oh well you need more people to become priest but to to the extent that that's true Opus day seems like it's very well tailored in certain ways to sort of secular society as it exists right now but I think the ultimate Revival of the church is much is likely to come from a slightly more radical view of the proper
relation to the world that essentially what the church needs now is the equivalent of the franciscans the Dominicans the Jesuits these kind of orders from previous eras that are sort of they they aren't you know I mean Opus day sort of asks it asks lay people to take vows and various kinds you know sort of celibate lay people are part of
part of the Opus day structure and I think that there is essentially there's just a sort of a straightforward need for a more old-fashioned model of just sort of priests and nuns like the church needs more priests and nuns Catholicism can't function without priests and nuns which doesn't take anything away from
what opest day is doing and of course they have many vocations and many priests but when I yeah I mean to the extent that it doesn't get the do maybe that it deserves in my writings that's probably maybe the root of it again you're teasing out things I haven't even begun to think about before there's no particular reason why yeah I mean you
know the the church the sacramental life of the church depends on a strong priesthood depends on men becoming priests it depends on religious orders and so on and so full Revival in the church I think would need a kind of Priestly Center to it in a way and not just to focus on apostolates and evangelization within the world like
Catholicism has been caught up in the idea that this is the age of the Le for the last 50 or 60 years I think the age of the Le has you know kind of been a disaster for the church in certain ways here's a question from a reader and I'm stringing together a few different sentences something like is conservatism
always particularist and local can there ever be a Universalist conservative position is the phrase Christian conservative an oxymoron because Christianity like Islam is a Universalist faith that seeks to convert Every Soul on Earth isn't the word conservative better suited for a more Alo inegalitarian less
aggressive religions such as Hinduism which are less insistent on natural right how would you respond to that I think conservatism is particularist sort of by definition yes and I think that every every form of conservatism is going to be different depending on the cultural context I think you know conservatism in America at its best is
trying to preserve a kind of you know a kind of American exceptionalism that doesn't sort of have applications really when you're thinking about what a German conservatism would be or a Russian conservatism and so on and in that sense you know a Christianity can only be conservative in sort of pro sort of provisional and
context bound ways right like in a culture that was universally Christian and is in the process of ceasing to be so then cons then Christianity then then the phrase Conservative Christian makes a lot of sense in the sense that you're trying to you have a universal faith that has sort of taken over a particular
piece of the world and you're trying to sort of preserve its influence and power over that peace but that's always contingent and temporary and yes Christianity is at its root a more radical religion now we have two porcelain bunnies here on the table with us and those are to refer to a novel waterers ship down that you once called
quote the best modern novel about politics why is this the cas case that was maybe an overstatement but but I think Waters ship down you know we live in we live in an age of intense attention paid to children's books and young adults books by people who are adults and there's a lot of I think reasonable controversy over whether
that's a good thing necessarily but I I've been sort of always disappointed that there hasn't been a kind of sustained Waters ship down Revival um because it's such a great book and it's a book about a a founding right it's a book about it's you know connected in in a sense to the kind of things that you know the straussians are always arguing
about and so on you know what what does the founding mean and so on but you have you know you have a group of rabbits who go forth and encounter different models of political order different ways of relating to humankind this sort of Shadow over rabbit kind at all at any point you have a you know you have a
Warren that has essentially surrendered itself to humanity and exists as a kind of breeding farm and you have a Warren that's run as a fascist dictatorship essentially and then and then you have sort of this attempt to form a political community that you know is somewhere in between the two getting back to our you
know this sort of healan synthesis and so on and you have sort of these you know this very Primal narrative where the problem is of course that they don't have any females and so there's sort of this competition for Reproductive power that's carried out between these different Warren where the rabbits from
the good Warren have to literally not kidnap because the do's come willingly but sort of Ste women from the fascist dictatorship which maintains a ruthless control over reproduction so there's just there's just a lot of fascinating stuff there and then it's all interspersed with storytelling there's this you know these sort of rabbit
folktales Adam narrative again that Richard Adams came up with um that are just brilliant about elera the great the great rabbit you know sort of folk hero and his relationship you know there there is actually sort of the rudiments of a rabbit theology in in waters ship down like how how would rabbit right how would rabbits
think about God right how would rabbits think about their proper relationship to God what kind of myths would they develop to explain their position in the world as opposed to every other creature and it's all yeah it's all it's all quite brilliant it's a great novel and I I in fact I reread it last year and it was still it was still quite great and
then there's even right and then there's even sort of a mystical element the book begins with a rabbit this rabbit Fiverr who is sort of a runt who has visions and the whole found is sort of based on various prophecies and visions that he has throughout the beginnings of this rabbits Warren that these Rabbits go out
and and found um so he has a vision of Apocalypse so you know there's an anid element right clearly where it's probably he uses quotes from the anid he has quotes before every chapter but where it's you know the city Falls and you have to go found a new city and and there sort of religious Visions along the way that relate to the legitimacy of
the founding and there's a tension between sorry I'm rambling but got me going there's this tension there's this great tension between Hazel and bigwig who are the two sort of leaders of of the new of the city that's being founded and bigwig is he was a member of the AA which is the sort of rabbit Marshal
order and everyone assumes when they sort of meet this group of rabbits that he's the leader but in fact the leader is Hazel who is this rabbit who is you know neither the Visionary nor the military leader but just sort of he's the politician and he's good at it and the success of the Warren is based on
ultimately the subordination of bigwig and the Marshall and the religious to sort of the politician so you know the next time you have Peter teal here for one of these conversations you can add you can really press him on the sort of you know the if there's a girardian element and Watership Down I mean there's a lot further to go with this
but I've probably gone far enough your wife Abigail Tucker has published a famous book about cats what's the biggest disagreement you have with her about cats I mean I I think well I know I need to be I need to be a little careful here because it's it's I mean Abby Abby when when we met and got married loved cats
and I always sort of admired cats um from it no I I I liked I I was a cat person who admired their sort of singular standoffishness and so on and I think in certain ways writing the book about cats brought her around to something closer to my view so she she started the book shortly after we started having children and one of the
interesting things that she sort of realized was how much of her reaction to cats was a sort of displaced child reaction that cats have these faces that you know look like infants faces and have the eyes and the you know the sort of wide faces and they Meow in this way that approximates an infant cry and they
essentially hijack the maternal Instinct so she had sort of maternal feelings towards cats but in the process of having actual children and writing the book I think she came to a to a you know an appreciation of them more as the sort of fascinating apex predators that have that's sort of the theme of the book which you should all read um it's much
more interesting than late 20th century Catholic theology um but it's the theme of the book is this idea that you know the sort of cuddle fur baby in your room is an apex predator who has taken over taken over the world through its relationship to human beings and I think that was my view all along so really
we've ended up on we've sort of smoothed out our fundamental disagreement by the proc proc of having her learn more about cats than anyone could ever possibly imagine knowing as you may know we often in the middle have a segment overrated versus underrated been dreading it yes and of course feel free to pass let's start with the TV show The Sopranos
overrated or underrated very slightly underrated why I think that the sort of the proliferation of Soprano's imitators and there were a lot of people who wanted to like the wire More Than The Sopranos because the wire was sort of so iological and political in a way that Sopranos wasn't and so there was a
certain number of people who should have known better who convinced themselves that the wire was a better show than The Sopranos is more theological right branos is more it's yeah it's Nar and it's and it's more personal and psychological I mean it is the characters on The Wire are fascinating but they are when you meet them you know
you sort of know who they are they're like I mean it is deenan in that sense the sort of endless jokes about the dzian element on the wire are right and and Dickens is a great no IST and the wire is a great show but there there is a depth to much of The Sopranos that I think is not equaled by the wire and
hasn't quite been equaled in any show since so but only very I mean you know people love the wire so it can only be very slightly underrated I mean people love the sanos Evelyn W bride said Revisited overrated why there's a little too much sentimentality in the in the Catholicism and the sort of Honor Trilogy is a little more cold-eyed
and therefore slightly better a side question if you think about a lot of the Catholic authors Walker Percy Gran green flanner o Conor Jee wolf Louise erdrich do you feel as a whole Catholicism is sufficiently well represented in literature or in a sense are you a bit let down by the aggregate weight of the
better known Catholic novels no I think it's I think it's well represented and I think that the decline in sort of catholicism's importance in literature since that W green Golden Age um has happened in parallel with the decline of literature's cultural importance in certain ways some of it depends on whether you claim Shakespeare for the
Catholics or not which is a do a lively it's been a while since it's been a live but I want to yeah but it's been it's it's been a while since I really dug into that debate but i' I'd like to and I think that actually does in a weird way tip things you know in certain ways when you're talking about the scale of
things but no I mean I'm that the period that produced W and green and a lot of those writers is in certain ways one of my favorite periods in in modern literature and even the even the writers in that era who are not practicing Catholics seem to me to be influenced in different ways but like I mean Hemingway and Fitzgerald in different ways for
instance Hemingway is writing in a Catholic cultural context in a lot of his stories and vce Gerald is of course a lapsed Catholic of a certain kind so I think Catholicism hangs in an interesting way over that whole first half of the 20th century period of literature and I think that's the best recent period of literature so I'll I'll
claim some chauvinistic Pride elor oratorio dream of Janus pass what music then best expresses God in musical terms I'm a bit of a Philistine uh I like you know a lot of well this is again you're going to get me on narrative every time I I like a certain I like a lot of sort of folk country kind of music I
don't I don't know I don't know that I would make any special theological claims for it generally um but that's sort of my my musical tastes run to I don't even know how to say this without being embarrassing but like Natalie Merchant that kind of thing and I and I don't I haven't thought through the
theological Dimension except I do like some of the stories the storytelling in country music the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical Jesus Christ Superstar uh it's been a while but I'll say slightly underrated Just for kicks what should we infer from the narrative superiority of Dante's Inferno within the Divine Comedy but of course feel
free to challenge the premise no I won't challenge the premise I think that there there is a sort of sincere limit to human human imagination when it comes to contemplating the idea of the beatific vision and so on and that that comes across like we we don't know how to tell stories about the story outside our
story in quite the same way and you know The Inferno is telling a story about the world that we're all familiar with and that's easier which American demographic will start the next Great Awakening let's say let's say Asians just to be provocative okay good answer in your book you ask me which Asians I really no in your book with our
common friend Ryan Salam you develop a philosophy sometimes called the reform cons and you make the point that Republicans ought to try harder to address what are sometimes called Sam's Club Republicans lower income groups who have been hurting in some ways due to economic trends when you look at the last year to year and a half or two
years of our politics does part of you want to turn back and have politics more focused on Elites once again and does any part of you feel that trying to address Sam's Club Republicans Democrats Independence that there's a danger there that we hadn't seen before or no no I think that you can't you can't escape in
a in a Democratic Society you can't escape the deos and so attempts to sort of maintain Elite control over politics that don't address deep profound systemic social problems are doomed to eventually produce things like the Trump phenomenon and so you know it might it didn't of course in sort of a narrow
Moment by moment way during the campaign if you followed my mostly wrong commentary during Trump's March to the nomination I was I was all for sort of elite energy being expended in that moment to sort of to to block Trump and you know the point the point of Elites is to prevent manifestly unfit people from becoming president but if there's a
larger systemic Elite failure then you know then things like that will happen and so the way to avoid that situation is for Elites to focus again to sort of care about what's going on with with the deos with the actual actual people out in actual America and that's something I don't think Republicans were very good
at before Trump and I don't think it's something they're particularly good at under Trump but and I think had they been better at it the Trump phenomenon would at least have been different than it was crisper is a new technology that has made significant progress lately maybe it will never allow us to deliberately engineer you know the
entire human or the entire human baby but it seems plausible to believe it lead to some kind of slow genetic drift in a way that would be in some manner planned or programmed by human beings for you is this a kind of nightmare or does this possibly have an upside or even a utopian side I'm skeptical of its
utopian side I don't think it has to be a nightmare um but I think that there has to be I think that there is a deep aversion particularly in in the United States but elsewhere as well to exercising political control over Technologies and I think the challenge of the next 100 to 500 years of human history is getting better at exerting
political control over Technologies and sort of preventing preventing actual nightmare scenarios and I I mean I I feel this in certain ways with computers the Internet virtual reality and so on I think that we're that that to me is a more immediate sort of an source of anxiety than genetic engineering I I think that we're we're going to wake up
in 20 or 30 years and be um well we may not wake up but I would like to think that we'll wake up in 20 or 30 years and say why were we putting all of our children in front of these screens for so much of their childhood and shouldn't this be something that we had exerted actual control over instead of just sort
of leaving it to some combination of experiment and Market forces and sort of governments wanting to be hip and cool and buying a lot of Chromebooks that Microsoft wanted to unload and so on you know so I could see something similar happen happening with genetic technology but I think I think bringing bringing
technology under control so that sort of the more radical genetic experiments are limited and happening sort of in happening at the margins basically is that should actually be that should be the goal I think it you know doesn't mean that we could actually succeed but I think it's a reasonable goal to set what do you think we'll see as the main
cost 30 years from now from letting our children sit behind screens for so many hours a day I think it's bad for for human imagination for normal relationships for appreciating reality as it actually exists I think I I think the reason we may not see costs is that it has a sort of numbing effect in
certain ways on human behavior that it doesn't necessarily lead to sort of egregious acting out of the kind that leads to you know crime waves or political tumult or anything like that so the costs I think the costs are likely to be felt in as I think they're already to some some extent being felt in and sort of increased mental
disturbance on the margins difficulty forming marriages families normal human relationships sort of and and more sort of more cultural despair I think as you know euthanasia is now relatively easy in both the Netherlands and Switzerland what do you feel is the intellectual Andor moral error behind this reality
and I take it you do view this as an error yes I do I I think that you know it's it is a it's an example I suppose of to go back to the very beginning of our conversation of where this sort of liberal view of Rights has so far escaped its Christian Origins as to become you know a kind of a vision of self- ownership that uh I I think is not
is not actually true to human existence true to Human Experience and yeah I mean I I don't I think that the case against suicide is quite similar to the case against murder and and I think our our drift away from recognizing that is sort of a case study in the working out of certain liberal ideas that have gotten
far enough from the truth as to just be false religion aside learning to tie your shoelaces aside what did you learn from your mother I suppose I learned the this this and this folds in religion so I apologize it's cheating a little bit but we spend a l lot of time my my mother had health issues when I was young and we spent and we ended up as
religious as we were in part because of you know sort of healing services that she went to because she was Ill or because she had friends who recommended them um but there was a sort of wider orbit to that where we ate you know Health Food long before health food was cool we ate tofu when you could only get tofu by going to the back of a sort of
weird health food store and it would be in these sort of Vats of water and you'd pick up these huge blocks of tofu with tongs like people pulling icebergs out of 19th century ponds in Vermont so I I I would say that between the religious element and the sort of strange world of Health Food you know you'd go to a
health food store and you'd have the health food restaurant here and you'd have the new age bookstore next to it they'd always be attached and you know you would you would always have the same sort of books you'd have the utne reader and um all those kinds of magazines but at the same time I was having a sort of
in certain ways conventional upper middle class Southern Connecticut background and I I think I had that sort of weird combination of you know sort of normaly in certain ways religious experiments over here sort of dietary experiments that blended into weird cultural experiments over there it gave me you know generally an appreciation
for sort of the weird diversity of America that I think I wouldn't have gotten if my mother hadn't been ill and sought out strange cures and so on and it also gave me an appreciation for the fact that you know there there can be things that are true about the universe that are not available through the
experience of sort of expert consensus and so on and these we were very much outside the mainstream during my childhood and the fact that you know there was a lot of lies and nonsense and Bs out inside the mainstream but there were also things that I've held on to and think are true that you know that that's had a fairly powerful effect on
my thinking not always you know I mean I for instance like I have a like with the antivaccine debates for instance right I mean the the antivaccine side seems to me to be you know pretty much just wrong and obviously dangerous in certain ways and so on but there is always a small part of my mind and experience that
is not you know is not entirely that wants to stick up for the antivaccine side which I don't do in the pages of the New York Times because there isn't no because there isn't there isn't that I can see a compelling argument and there isn't you know and it it does a disservice to millions of children to make an argument that people shouldn't
vaccinate their kids that's all true and well and good but something like the antivaccine Crusade will be proven correct like there will there are weird ideas out there right now that are actually true and I think the strangeness of my childhood sort of that's that's something that I that I carry with me as as an assumption three
more quick questions before I turn it over to all of your questions how people pronounce your last name what does it tell you about their class backgrounds or otherwise um there are two main ways to mispronounce dou it the first is to say do that and the second one is to say d t and essentially as you climb the
pretention ladder in America the duah mispronunciation becomes more prevalent whereas when I was in Middle School in fourth grade the do that mispronunciation was more pre prevalent but you can always tell whether someone's gone to graduate school or Not by whether they try and mispronounce it as a French last name you wrote a New
York Times column yesterday on sterility and you cite three different individuals as wondering that maybe sex will be too much pushed out of American life one was Masha gesson who of course is from former Soviet Union Kathy young who grew up in Moscow and Geraldo Rivera who actually is half Jewish Russian so all
three of the people you cited whether you're aware of it or not that yeah no are Russian and they're the ones worrying what do you infer from this that Russia is a very cold country and no I I do think there's I mean there's absolutely no question that people who have lived experience of totalitarianism which I do not
thankfully tend to tend to fear anything that smacks of totalitarian impulses and so to the extent that there's I'm not sure about the Heraldo case but to the because his life well um but his seemed more like a self-justification for a life badly lived but but to the to the extent that there is actually something
there then yeah I mean I think it's sort of a normal a normal reaction to being sort of traumatized by authoritarianism last question and this is also a perennial you became famous at a very young age you've published four books youngest New York Times oped columnist ever the last two years you've even had health problems you've continued to be
as far as I can tell as productive as ever what is the Ross do that production function what is your productivity secret that maybe is undervalued by other people there's plenty that goes into what you produce but what would be an Insight you would share with us as to how you get this all done undertaking family obligations
certainly helps as a motivating force I think I I think that I mean I I think that male productivity is you know I don't want to say this isn't true of female productivity too but I only have the male experience to go by I think male productivity is often it's you know it's it's often closely linked to being
bound to and link to other people and sort of having a sort of you know having having kids and a family and so on I I think that that's that's a not uncommon root of Greater productivity and I'm certain it's true in my own case I wasn't married that young but I was married younger than many people in my cohort I don't know you know you also
like journalism know you you you go to events and you know with wonderful hosts and audiences and so on and people sometimes in introduce you as a public intellectual sometimes they even say thought leader and that's that's the worst when I run my totalitarian state but journalism is a trade right I mean there's there's obviously a sort of
intellectual component and you know we wouldn't have been able to sit here and have this conversation with me babbling at you if I didn't have intellectual pretentions but the work of Journalism is this is less true in the age of the internet but it is linked to a very physical thing that comes out every week
or every month every day and it comes out and it has to be filled there is a place on the New York Times on the printed New York Times that would be blank or have an ad you know um stuck on it if I didn't write my column and so you write the column you know you write the column and that I think it's it's
useful for journalists to think about it this way it's useful for anyone inclined to sort of over romanticize or over admire journalists to think about this way but there is a sense in which writing a column is you know it's like you're a plumber you you know the toilet has to be fixed so you fix the toilet the column has to be written so you
write the column and getting lost I mean there there's another version of myself that was going to write novels you know and was fantasy novels but you know that was going to sort of follow these aesthetic and narrative Ambitions that you know you rightly I think discern lurking below the surface of my analysis
of the Republican tax plan or whatever and maybe that version of myself would have produced you know the Great American novel you know this some some great some great work and certainly I like to imagine that or at least something that sold as well as George ARA Martin but it's also might be the case that if I had spent my life sort of
sitting around with my unfinished novels I never would have produced anything interesting and so it's better to be a kind of Tradesman and that's at least part of how I think about my job we'll get to your questions in a moment but Ross thank you very much these are the rules for the questions and they are enforced line up at the two
microphones you are not allowed to make statements these are questions for Ross to answer I will cut you off if you start making a statement we will start on this side the first question please I was wondering how you thought the development of artificial wounds will change the politics of the abortion debate a
softball well it'll be interesting if we do actually develop artificial wombs which I'm not 100% sure that we will but supposing that we do I I my my expectation would be that it would be a sort of it would be it would create a sort of weird cultural crisis for the kind of people Who currently are pro-life while also creating substantial
political pressure in favor of the pro-life cause and I'm not entirely sure how those two things would interact with one another but you would clearly have you know a sort of deep religious resistance to the technology to the practice to that sort of severing and you would have strong cultural resistance to it I think independent of
religion I think there would be a sort of strong anti- artificial womb kind of like as in the sort of crunchy bookstores of my childhood there would be a sort of left-wing hippie-ish resistance to it as well and so the question would be how would that yeah how would that resistance to it interact with this sort of possibility that here
you have a technocratic solution to the abortion debate but I I I'll say I'm a little skeptical that I mean if you imagine I mean again it depends you know how do you get to the artificial womb point right is it something where are you imagining a world where a woman gets pregnant and somehow the embryo is
removed from her body and placed into the womb that seems sort of you know requiring a sort of level of technological intervention that would you know raise a host of the same sort of privacy concerns and so on that motivate the more you know the more certain portions of the pro-choice side or are you envisioning a world where you
have artificial WBS and everyone is sort of provisionally sterilized at age 14 you know this Bec the state policy and so on so you you could imagine a sort of pro-life totalitarianism that emerged out of some combination of Technologies all of which is to say I don't have a brilliant answer for answer for your question but
I think there would be a lot of very strange and different crosscurrents that the people most inclined to make the pro-life argument right now would be disinclined to sort of run with immediately run with whatever political possibilities have presented but also that the nature of the technology its
level of invasiveness and what sort of Mak it work would mean would in turn determine sort of where liberalism went and so on next question is uh Mormonism anti-American or quintessentially American quintessentially American surely I mean I I think that it's interesting in that Mormon sexual ethics have sort of repeatedly brought them
into conflict with the dominant American culture um that you know that that fact and that reality is you know is is a sign that there there exists some interesting tension between Mormonism and and America as a whole but nonetheless Mormonism is a both in its in sort of its actual lived experience and its theology is unimaginable without
you know it has an American Essence there's no more American figure in certain ways than Joseph Smith the entire Mormon theology is built around an attempt you know we were talking earlier about about you know how do you how how could you integrate Islam Judaism and Christianity into one story and I was failing to give Tyler a good
answer um Mormonism is sort of an attempt to do that not with three religious Traditions but with the Americas how do you integrate the Americas into what seems like the sort of Old World dominated story of Judaism and Christianity and that that is sort of to the extent that Mormonism is sort of out to solve a problem it's to solve
the problem of what about you know what about the Americas what about all this all this world over here so in that way and and various others that I could go on listing it's I think I think the tensions between Mormonism and the dominant American culture still make it quintessentially it still leaves it
quintessentially American just as like you know I mean let's say the drug culture of the late 1960s was intention with sort of boura American society at that point but Woodstock there's nothing more American than Woodstock right and in the same way even when it's intentioned with whatever else is going
on in the culture there's nothing more American than the Latter-Day Saints next question one thing that I've been seeing a lot of recently is your Tweet storm on fertility and child tax credit one of the criticisms that keeps coming up is that there's no reason to think that the child tax credit would actually be an effective movement of
fertility rates yeah so two-part question do you think the importance of the child tax credit is mostly symbolic or actually effective and second if you were put on a committee uh in tasked with offering one piece of policy that would raise the American fertility rate in a sustainable way M what would that
policy be those of us who are involved in the selling of the child tax credit to Republican politicians um tended to make an argument that wasn't per se about the fertility rate there was an argument that this was a you know this was a matter of sort of distributional justice that um the tax code was penalizing parents in various ways
because of their kids contributions to Social Security and so on through a rather elaborate schema that I think was true and correct I I I don't I mean that argument had some flaws but I think by and large it was a reasonable argument but it was also an argument sort of geared to satisfy the slightly sclerotic
ideological preconceptions of the Republican party and you know sitting before here before you find people tonight I'll just say you know the the goal of the child tax credit is to you know help people have more babies like that that should be the actual goal inp and when the Wall Street Journal accuses it of being social engineering it is
social engineering and I'm happy to admit it and maybe there'll be a Wall Street Journal editorial about this tomorrow but but I think that you know in the same way that the Wall Street journals preferred economic policies which they hope will spur entrepreneurship and new hiring and business formation and all these things
are also social engineering in a certain way I don't I don't think that you can sort of I don't believe in some pristine separation of the economic sphere which isn't social engineering and your tax policies aren't social engineering from the family so the Baseline is I'm in favor of giving people money to help
them have the babies that they want to have now uh would the child tax credit have accomplished that Pro to the extent that it would have much effect I would say it was you know a bare and very minimal effect I think if you you know if you look at the literature you need something much much larger to to have
any hope of moving the needle so but I wouldn't say it's symbolic I think you know you're it's a step in the direction that I would like American society to take which would take us towards something that wasn't a 2,000 per child tax credit but a $5,000 per child tax credit and so on even upward from there so those are sort of my maximalist
ambitions now it is also true that fun you know that that cultural forms and assumptions and so on play a much more important shaping role in all this and it might be the case that even if you got to my ideal number that it wouldn't move the dial that much but in that case I would still favor it in part as a
means of sort of I think there's value in building the building the foundations in political economy for the cultural changes that you wish to see even if those changes haven't arrived yet um so it might be that the child tax credits effect would be counteracted by the deranging influence of screens on people's romantic lives or something
that might be the case but then the child tax credit would still be there waiting for the butlerian Jihad of the future the the people who laughed are Dune readers and everyone else is not it's good I it's important at some point in every public event to separate the Dune readers from the non-d readers but
until the moment arrives when we sort of get a handle on our technological problems and achieve some sort of cultural shift but anyway yes the long story short I'm I at least on the at least on the roster of plausible policies that's a that would be the policy that I would offer and I think the goal is to it probably wouldn't have
that much influence in its existing form but the goal would be to get to a form where it did have a chance of having influence next question in relation to your upcoming book obviously there's been many Christian denominations like the Eastern Orthodox certain conservative Protestant groups that have a less strict line on the divorce
question without entirely succumbing to kind of the cultural liberalism that's undermined a lot of Christianity in the west so in light of that my question too is is your objection to the post the Pope's potential shift so much due to to his actual proposals or more the therapeutic language itself and making
the case that you find problematic no I think it's the proposal itself I you know there's a sort of there's a sort of Sociology of religion argument that conservative Christians tend to get into that you're referencing on these questions where you say you know stricter stricter churches do better at sort of weathering the storms of
modernity than more LAX churches and and sort of you know there's value in having a church that is sort of explicitly push pushing back against cultural Trends and so on and I think all all of those arguments are are in in some cases plausible I think they would be plausible in this case I think a sort of therapeutic shift on divorce would have
you know negative practical effects on the everyday lives of Catholics but the reason the issue is particularly important to me I guess and the reason I've written about it so much is that I think it's the church is risking betraying its connection to to you know Jesus and that's the sociological stuff is
important but it's secondary I mean to me the you know one of we were I sort of referenced the radicalism of the essential radicalism of Christianity and obviously Catholicism has not been in sort of political practice a radical Force um at every moment in human history but one of the one of the great things about the Catholic church and one
of the things that sort of makes me think in the kind of you know the probabilistic game that Tyler somehow induced me to play online one one reason I give it a high probability of being the one true church is that there are these these core sort of very strange and radical things that Jesus says and
does that are sustained in the life of the church in ways that they haven't been in other Christian denominations and churches and one of those is the Eucharist the idea of transubstantiation the idea that you are literally consuming the body and blood of Christ another of them is this sort of another thing I referenced earlier sort of
Persistence of Priestly religious monastic vocations this sort of idea of Christianity as a counterculture to the point where it is sort of you know actively turning its back on family life in certain ways and sort of retaining this kind of this kind of space for a radical a radical core a radical witness
and another of them is the teaching on marriage and divorce which in the context of the New Testament is clearly presented as a kind of radicalization of of Jewish law on marriage and divorce and the church has maintained that radical perspective and I think it's it's done so in Fidelity to the man that we think was the son of God and I would
prefer that it continue to maintain that Fidelity rather than sort of softly give it up next question so I was actually going to ask you about the necessity of a butleran Jihad good good good since you're already on board I'll skip straight to practicality uh what form do you think it should take how extreme do you think it should be and would you be
willing to lead it so the butlerian Jihad is an event that takes place in the universe of Dune the science fiction novels by Frank Herbert and it takes place in the distant past although his son wrote some other novels that sort of try and lay out how it happened but they don't count they don't count thank you no I I
actually I I'm a big I mean yeah Dune itself I'm a huge fan of I could never actually finish all of Herbert's novels which makes me a do non-comp completist which means I might be the wrong person to lead the butan Jihad but the butan Jihad is this sort of re Rebellion against I think it is maybe you can correct me but it's AI more that it's a
rebellion against rather than computers per se or is it I would have to read you would have to well anyway it's some sort of rebellion against the use of yeah of sort of computational replacements for human beings and so you have this far distant space fairing culture that relies on mentats these sort of these
humans who have developed their intellect to sort of somewhat superhuman levels perhaps through the use of crisper thereby I'm trying to unite all the themes of tonight Tyler but they don't use certain you know certain forms of computing power that we would assume people in the far future would anyway that's the necessary background my view
for a short term but but laring Jihad uh is much more limited and boring I think that that people should limit or reduce or eliminate the use of computers and screens and digital devices for children and in schools up to a certain age and I'm flexible and could argue about what that age should be but I think that
young childhood certainly should not be a place I I think that I think that young human being should be given a sustained encounter with actual physical and social reality before being placed in front of a screen and I think that that should be educational common sense and that we've gone in the opposite direction is is an unfortunate thing so
be I I I think you start with that and then we can talk about future steps we we can talk we I I don't want to I don't want to suggest any in case I'm quoted out of context but you can imagine next steps we'll just stick with that educational step first I have a question from my iPad screen right here I can't
take it Tyler the the Jihad is happening even as we speak the wires are being cut the cloud is being dismantled if when artificial intelligence comes along how will this change our understanding of religion I think that if human beings could actually create Consciousness it would sort of actual an
actual conscious AI it would tell us something about Consciousness that we don't currently know that would have some yeah some unknowable influence on theological debates I mean I think you know if you look at like where some of the smartest non Christian non-theistic critics of eliminative materialism end up someone like Thomas
Nagel or something they end up in this sort of pantheist or pan psychist kind of vision where mind is a kind of emergent property of the Universe I might be getting that slightly wrong but that might be the idea I mean I I I think that you know there there are versions of AI that you could imagine emerging that could be claimed as well I
I don't know but they they might there's something about Consciousness that we don't understand obviously and and I I'm very skeptical of the idea that you know we're just going to get through some Moors law doubling you know we're going to get to a recognizable Consciousness sort of by accident that it's just going
to you know skynet's going to become self-aware or something I think that there would have to be some remarkable breakthrough and I don't know what the nature of the Breakthrough would be but I think it would it would at least contribute something to theological debates about the mind's place in the cosmos next question do you think that
social media is contributing to polarization and a breakdown of discourse more generally and especially could you comment on its effect on journalists and journalism sure I I I mean I don't want to having done my butlerian Jihad rant I don't want to oversell the horrors of social media because I think if you look at a lot of
the polarization in American life it's being driven by an older technology cable television and that sort of the effect of cable news on older Americans probably goes a longer way to explaining some of our some of our polarization right now than does social media so that that would be my caveat with that being
said I mean I think the main the effect of social media is Tyler had an interesting you had an interesting post about this today or yesterday right I mean I and and and you sort of worked out a kind of hegelian dialectic of different people on Twitter that I I I wish I could summarize but I I can't quite but at the least like in my own
experience Twitter and social media generally they you know it has a deranging effect it creates a sort of a a sense of permanent crisis and sort of permanent alarm and so on where you know people have their Facebook feeds where they and their friends are sort of sharing things that confirm their view
that the world is coming to an end and as a journalist I feel like I'm often called upon by people in my non-journalistic Social Circle to sort of tell them sort of reassure them and of course they're no longer reassured assured because during the last election I kept telling them that Trump wasn't going to be the Republican nominee and
that he probably wasn't going to be the president so they my level of reassurance but has has been limited by that but I I feel like I see a lot of people in my social orbit who aren't journalists who seem to be sort of they're they're sort of pushed to the edge of panic constantly by what they see in the news and on social media and
then they'll sort of write to me and ask me to sort of explain what's really going on which I may not always be able to do but so to the extent that there's sort of an obligation for journalists it's often I think that obligation to sort of walk people back from the edge the edge of panic in certain ways but in
terms of its effect on us you know it's I mean it's a little hard for me to say because I haven't I wasn't really a journalist before so I was a little bit you know I wasn't on Twitter probably till 2011 so I had some pre pre- Twitter understanding but you know it's I mean Twitter's it's a forum for like it's such a sort of
journalist specific Forum in certain ways like it's so geared towards journalistic culture and everyone's on there arguing with each other and sharing stories with each other and so on and and at its best I think it gives people sort of some a little more sense of the inner workings of Journalism in certain ways like to the extent that it
I don't want to be all doom and gloom like there is there is virtue in ort of being exposed to watching journalists sort of share stories and have those stories partially discredited and sort of walk back stories and argue over stories and so on like you know there's there's probably value in sort of demystifying some of the work some of
the work that we do but I I assume that it can't help but have a kind of you know it it furthers already existing group think among journalists and it has a deranging effect on us and one of the big one of the big challeng es and we were talking about this before the conversation is sort of figuring out
what you know what is real and what is just Twitter and at what point does just Twitter become become what's real right because like so much of what I do and what people in my profession do is you know we're we're watching a world that's happening online even as we're trying to describe a world that exists offline and
I'm often puzzled by the connection between the two like I can't tell like how real is the alt that is a question that is very hard for me to answer because the alt-right is very real on the internet it doesn't seem to be particularly real in reality but maybe social media is reality this is sort of or at some point it becomes
reality and then it doesn't even matter what's happening out in the real world I'm not I'm not sure but we're at the very least we're at a point where there seems to be some huge disproportion between the importance of a phenomenon on social media and its ability to get like any number of men like Richard
Spencer has like the same 60 people showing up for all his events and you know you can he can do something he and others can do something like Charlottesville but there isn't a mass movement of the alt-right and there are more profiles of alt-right leaders in Liberal Publications than there are you know sort of avowed alt riters who will
actually show up and carry a tiki torch and so the question is well but does nonetheless the alt-right phenomenon sort of you know allow us to see some buried psychological reality among white Americans maybe it does but it's just very hard to tell one minute last question back to the Catholic church if it is in need of
revitalization and there's a crisis in the clery why can we not open up ordination to anyone who feels that they have a a vocation and can comply with any other regulations such as women and married men I'll start with Mar married married men because that's easier you know there there is not you know in that case there is not any dogmatic
prohibition or claim of a dogmatic prohibition the church ordains men who have been married and has and has in the past at the same time I mean there are sort of some there are structural impediments you know the Catholic bureaucracy is not set up to support priests and their families and that kind of structural impediment is actually
incredibly important to thinking about how such a thing would work itself out but there I tend to take the sort of the sort of sociological argument that I gestured at in answering one of the earlier questions that for the church to sort of give up on the elevation of celibacy in a way that large scale
married priests inevitably would be seen as doing would not be a likely source of revitalization and Revival in the long run it would represent the church sort of surrendering on a point where it offers something that is the most contradictory to the dominant culture and giving up something that I think is in many ways one of its most valuable
countercultural teachings that a life can be lived well without having sex so in that sense while there isn't you know a sort of doctrinal and dogmatic barrier to it per se there are some people argue that there is but I think I think that it would be it would be trading sort of trading the promise of renewal for the
reality of sort of effective cultural surrender in certain ways which is something I think the church has done on a number of fronts on the question of female priests I think that the there it's a sort of it's a sort of simpler issue that you know the church the church and this you know probably probably could be read into my
view of Aesthetics and narratives as well as everything else but I I the the argument that Jesus ordain chose only men for the priesthood I I think is ultimately less powerful than the argument that God chose Jesus to be his son and he chose to be to sort of perform the central lurgical the lurgical predecessors of what became
Catholic Christianity in the form of a man with you know and and that therefore the sort of the enactment of the sacrifice of the mass depends on priests who are who can stand in the person of Jesus Christ and that it makes sense for them to be men that doesn't mean that the church could not this and here I'll
I'll I'll do the hegelian synthesis thing it doesn't mean that the church could not in its governing structures and in sort of the way the way that the church functions in Rome and elsewhere could not integrate women more fully into the actual governance of the church I think it can and it should but my preference would be for that integration
to happen through a Revival of female religious orders and nuns I would much rather have many more nuns in positions of power in Rome than lay men and lay women and again maybe that's some sort of strange sort of aesthetic preference as much as it is anything else but I think that that it would be it would be
a a more certain path to renewal for the church to find a way to yeah to to sort of to have a kind of a kind of female activism that comes through a Revival of the female religious tradition in the church rather than a sort of attempt to do what episcopalians and others have already attempted and sort of shift the
shift the understanding of the nature of what the priest is and trying to do at the mass itself Ross thank you very much thank you two announcements please subscribe to our podcast you can hear Russ again and others and in the spring our next events will be Martina aova and Russ's colleague Russ's colleague David Brooks
please watch for more information thank you all for coming thank you Tyler thanks for listening to conversations 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 show