there's an incoherence that lies at the bottom of it and it is simply this how can you make human life better without
making better human
[Music] beings decided to bring back my good
friend Ralph Hancock professor of political science at BYU he is uh one of the smartest people
that I know and I love these discussions with him because he really digs deep into the DNA and and the foundational
levels of these political issues that we're dealing with that have so much to do with our personality and our and
human nature and moving too far into compassion sometimes and helping that to
having that cloud our Judgment of Truth and he really gets into it from a
different perspective and and uh for those of you that have listened to him before you know that there's a lot of a
lot of depth here a lot of Truth and and and brain work that is being placed into
these things uh this episode is brought to you by fathom the good fathom the good is the H School curriculum for high
school students it is the question of the good and it is pulling the
principles from the American Revolution and from philosophy that ask that
question that should be at the heart really of all of Education what about the good and Ralph
here is Ralph Hancock is the primary source for a lot of this uh content love
what you'll see here this is like nothing else out there for homeschooling go to Fathom theeg good.com that's
fathom theeg good.com to learn more about this the link is in the description box here we
go welcome to Quick show my name is Greg Matson and I am your host in this episode we bring back my friend Ralph
Hancock uh professor of political philosophy at Brigham Young University Ralph welcome back to the show thanks
it's very good to be here I'm very excited about our topic here today we're going to talk about some real philosophical underpinnings of what
might be going on here culturally tying back to several philosophers in the founding of America and we're going to
talk a little bit about love here today so very excited about this you're working on a book right now that uh is
so far from what I've seen of it's something that I'm very very in line with what's the name of the book uh uh
the the working title I think it will be the final title of the book is um virtues Pride I against the secular
subversion of Christian love it takes a little pondering but uh I I it's maybe a
mix of provocative and enigmatic in a way so thought-provoking I hope we got
the mix right but virtues Pride simply is meant to suggest that uh you don't
have virtue without a degree of of pride of standing up for something of
confidence in the good or in what's best in the right way to live and then the
subtitle names the enemy if you will or that against which I'm arguing and it's
a topic that you've uh that I've heard you address uh more than once uh against
the secular subversion of Christian love against uh love divorced from uh virtue
and from God essentially against uh a teddy bear Jesus against love as reduced
to humanitarian comp passion or the liberation of self-expression and those
two kind of go together so that's that's the title and they is a little synopsis
in uh explaining the title of of what the book is about well there's a lot in this that we could come you know I don't
know exactly where to actually approach this or to start this but I'm going to go with this yeah I want to St talk
firstly about uh the alliance here you talk about virtue and it's NE the the
necessity of Pride with it what is the alliance you speak of
with religion and virtue and why is that so important yeah I'm I insist on I
actually coin a kind of a term a virtue religion a virtue hyphen religion which
uh and I do it again provocatively because I know it's almost an invitation
to ridicule which is a telling Point actually it it's telling that we would
that we are many sophisticated intellectuals or
academics many refined souls in general uh might be
inclined to uh be suspicious of any uh Too Close association between religion
and virtue that would signify self-righteousness that would tend to uh
contaminate religion with uh the pride of a particular
culture or the uh confidence in a certain um understanding of virtue or
something like that this and uh I I'm leaning right into these objections and
uh to this possible ridicule I mean to provoke them and and answer them uh in a
few hundred Pages by the way I we should mention uh the book is actually finished
in the sense that I just finished the revisions for the publisher University of Notre Dame press and uh was writing
the acknowledgements page my the last thing to write today so it's finished
but it's an academic press and I'm I'm kind of backed up behind a a line of other books in this series so it's won't
be for a few month months at the very least but it's good of you to give give me a chance to talk about it so I'll uh
I'll ring you again to uh to pitch the book when when we can actually you know link to the uh sales point of it yeah
absolutely in the meantime I really do want to talk about this yeah it's kind of interesting that you bring up
that religion and virtue that coupling would be ridiculed does that make sense to you to you know it makes perfect
sense to me but it shouldn't right it shouldn't make sense I mean why why would where else would you build virtue
you know beyond what your your individual self your family or how else
do you build virtue exactly well and of course I intend virtue in a capacious
sense that runs through the whole Christian tradition and back to to Aristotle uh in particular so not
narrowly associated with sexual Purity for example but virtue actually mostly
associated with uh with action with uh with the
active production of the good you might say that's that's what uh interest me
most but uh the reason um I mean it's a historical story
in itself to explain uh why the term already sounds faintly
ridiculous here would be a short explanation because um we've learned
to especially the most uh the the intellectuals and the most refined Souls
Among Us have learned to understand uh religious truth or let's say our
relationship with Christ to be specifically Christian as somehow um so
far above uh the realm of practical virtues so Transcendent and so dependent upon uh
Grace as opposed to Nature or as opposed to anything within our own control we
we've learned to see uh to situate religious meaning in so Transcendent a realm
that to be reminded of the Practical bearing of religion and the
indispensability of morality as you know part and parcel of any how shall I say it any effective any
really practically meaningful religious Viewpoint that now seems foreign to our
sensibilities does does that make sense to you yeah yeah it does I think especially in an academic world yeah I
would say yes that that's definitely true um you talk about you you borrow a
little bit from from your friend Daniel Mahoney he's is this a book or a paper the idol of our age this is a book uh it
was uh new when I started writing my book so it's a few years old now but
it's it's quite new uh the idol of our age is the title of Daniel J Mahoney's
book you won't have trouble finding it finding references to it and by the way my friend Dan is uh all over the what
shall I say the edit editorial pages and the opinion magazines uh with some very eloquent and learned uh
contributions to contemporary debates and so forth so Google Daniel J Mahoney
you you will be rewarded but in a way my book is a u a sequel to his a compliment
to his here's what I've done I have um sort of tracked his argument that lays
out uh the problem of the idol of our age and this Idol is precisely this idea
of love as divorced from virtue or from
the let's say the the concrete uh uh acts and character traits that build a
good life um the idol is U the secularized
humanitarian understanding of Charity as well
compassion uh ity as focused only on
the uh material side of human well-being which of course is not a negligible site
but but it's just a what we think of when we think of humanitarian right yeah it you probably
find it odd that I would use uh the term humanitarian with the slightest negative
connotation but there you go I do I do in the sense that uh when the
humanitarian when the idea of of humanity or the let's say the uh the
needs of humanity is severed from any
um higher orientation from any understanding of the intrinsic Goods of
character and of our necessary relation to a higher being to God it's it's quite
the the question of um you know the the two great Commandments
and their relation which uh Elder Christopherson especially and others have addressed uh in general conference
and uh at BYU uh more than once uh of
late so you could say that what I'm uh objecting to is the divorce of the
second commandment from the fir first or the divorce of um here I it's only been
a few minutes but I'm going to fall into my spatial imagery or spatial scheme uh
the um let's say the reduction of love
to a purely horizontal plane uh which would correspond to the second commandment of
loving our neighbor loving other human beings as divorced from a a vertical
plane our or our orientation towards God and so just to complete this little
schema I suppose I have to plead guilty to um proposing
that that virtue that an understanding of
uh good character and capacity for active production of the good is
essential to our orientation towards God it's essential to forming the the
vertical access which aligns us with the with the first commandment why is it essential as an
example say let's say that you're you're just specifically speaking of a secular humanitarianism
material only yeah um I mean isn't that good why why what what what is the
necessity there of that vertical for other than the obvious as Latter-Day
Saints as an example we're talking about a A Plan of Salvation that we want to follow but as as Christianity as a whole
or religion as a whole uh um why not just horizontal why not just
horizontal well that's a good blunt question uh and the answer goes I mean we could trace the answer all the way
back through the uh philosophical and Theological history of the West I won't put my I won't put my professor sat Al
together on and uh attempt anything like that but you could begin with uh with Plato and the argument that uh
the that bodily desires are inherent ly unlimited and tyrannical and cannot
finally satisfy us uh so that uh
to um to seek the human good in the form of a a
purely materialistic understanding of human nature is to condemn oneself to um
like an infinite project and one that we have learned in the 20th century has
totalitarian implications let's see if uh if um the meaning of Human
Action uh has nothing to do with the soul or with the intrinsic good of
virtue but only to do let's say it's only defined horizontally therefore uh in a materialist or
utilitarian fashion then uh then what follows if if if human
beings cannot be satisfied on this level and cannot
um organize their practical lives with reference to bread
alone uh that means that the the project is an infinite and and a violent project
uh which would justify the attempt to
uh to remake human nature to create a new human being which you know is the
explicit projects project of of of Carl Marx and Vladimir lenon and of the
Soviet Union and not not only of course of this version of the materialist uh
communist project so how am I doing so far it's been tried the the horizontal
only has been tried several times yeah yeah it doesn't usually work out very well and and there's a there's an
incoherence um that lies at the bottom of it bottom of it and it is simply this
how can you make um human life better without making better human beings
that's what it all comes down to and maybe that doesn't even sound paradoxical to some moderns or to some
uh of your viewers but it should uh because that is
to say if you believe in not only as a matter of scripture but in a way of natural experience that you have to be a
good human being in some way to be a happy human being then the project of
making human beings happy or satisfied or liberated or whatever term
you use without making them better is a Fool's errand and one that
turns by a necessary logic to violence so it seems then that as you speak about
this the horizontal let's call it uh well actually I'm not going to do that uh but there's a uh there is a love that
is purely to Mankind and and if it is untethered from a love of
God then then it falls apart right if if there if there is if
there is no tied to a love of God and virtue yeah in this other than you I I
use this example of it's kind of like uh some people will say you know have
you are you going to be on the right side of History you need to do this because otherwise you're going to be on the wrong side of history and I think I
I think back to October of 1917 in Russia and someone saying don't you care
about the poor right right don't you care about the poor because this is what we're trying to do we're trying to help all of
the poor and and all the suffering and we're going to get rid of all of it and don't you care about this I mean that's
love right that that would be therefore on that revolutionary materialist point
of view any by by any means necessary follows I mean if you're going to create
a heaven on Earth if you're going to transform The Human Condition then um all is permitted but
then you have to think and uh CS Lewis is very strong on this point as is soier
nson unsurprisingly you have to consider
who are the actual agents the activists who are supposed to be doing this and what makes them uh saintly or even
trustworthy uh what to whom do you propose to give this absolute power to
remake The Human Condition and to use Limitless violence to create heaven on Earth or you end up giving power to uh
to to characters like Stalin for example and
you know he's he's uh there are too many uh other examples but that that
contradiction is is is baked into the cake of a purely horizontal and
therefore a materialist and re revolutionary idea of of Justice or of
the human good so I want to get back to the love here in a minute but because I
it's a very important thing and if if you this is the Crux of your book really I mean when you look at how how love is
used how it's thought of how it is framed uh um ideologies are framed
around this you know the type of love that you're talking about now what is it tethered to I talk a lot about the
untethered compassion and the malevolent comp or or the uh untethered empathy and and malevolent compassion it's the same
idea there's no what is it tied to but you go back and you talk about Alan bloom a little bit and about his
openness right he explains this as an openness in democracy which is something that it's going to obviously happen
because when you open up a democracy you kind of open up a can of worms right
there are opportunities there are options there are choices there are uh
the ability to create and and that includes ideas more than you would find
in other societies as they're not you know uh there's not a lid put down on you typically um will you talk about
that a little bit about this openness because we live in a very open societ iy that seems
to it's almost like it uh it births openness and then that openness almost
ferments closure yes yeah well openness
and closure well I do U I kind of use Alan Bloom's the closing of the American
mind and Alan Bloom was a great historian of uh political philosophy and
a translator of Plato who taught at the University of Chicago a student of the great Leo Strauss but he he he published
a book which uh surprised the whole world of political
philosophy and I think uh uh Professor broom himself because it became a a besteller you know which is unusual for
a quite a a dense and subtle uh philosophical book well he was a
brilliant writer and u a perhaps the most brilliant part of his book is this
uh introduction as I recall which is entitled our virtue and The Virtue is
openness so you see there's already a provocative joke there because he's saying that uh that uh we we pride
ourselves on our openness but actually we take it to be a virtue so it can't be
there's already a kind of closure that there's already a kind of an exclusion a
a determination but Bloom points out that U well he he's um he's
mocking the uh Democratic Pride that uh
we hold in our uh in this virtue of openness really a a a
relativistic openness which um because it's relativistic because it uh pretends
to be to to be without limit and is not oriented towards a higher Truth uh for
these reasons it uh necessarily becomes uh uh conformist and how shall I say um
uh stultifying uh complacent um as if um the only role of
the life of learning let's say or or the only uh objective of the professor is to
is to tear down the beliefs that his students uh may come with and have
nothing to put in their place uh in any case uh the main point of this brilliant
uh introduction our virtue to blooms the closing of the American mind is to show
the complacency and the in internal contradiction of our taking pride in our
openness it is so far we from H so far are we secular relativists let's say so
far are we from having no virtue that uh that this pride and openness um takes
the place uh of virtue for us which cannot really cannot be a consistent and
coherent position but actually I'm using this in my book to um to take the
argument to another level because I argue that since uh uh let's see it would be the late 80s I think when U Mr
Bloom published his book since that time and especially uh in the era we
know as woke uh we've moved from the pretention
of openness it was always a pretention but in a but there was a degree of
u a degree of intellectual Health there in the sense that we still at least pretended to be open whereas now in the
age of woke Liberation ISM and humanitarianism I would say in the age
of the complete um uh prevalence the complete ascendency of this
horizontal understanding of love that I've uh pointed
to in our age uh you'll notice that even this uh the last residual pretension to
openness is gone and so in a certain way the the very uh space between um
religious Orthodoxy and commitment on the one hand and uh intellectual freedom
and philosophical rigor on the other which was still um at least um putatively alive
you know in the in the academic world s after it sought after in the world that Alan Bloom was addressing uh with the
complete uh collapse of the idea of Truth into this
um ideological commitment to let's just name them woke
values for now in this complete collapse there's a collapse between
um uh between religion and the ambition of the intellect or or the desire to
know there's the production of what I uh in my you know and you at least a rare
attempt of mine to come up with an evocative metaphor I talk about uh our
uh living under the mirrored dome which we have erected over ourselves any any U
aspirations any longings um any orientations that seem
to be vertical until lead to questions of God and the higher good are reflected
immediately back down on this horizontal plane and cashed out in the language of
U secular humanitarianism yeah I like that
metaphor and I also like the way you talk about it because you said you look up at the at God at this uh this
mirrored Dome and she I think you said she smiles back down at you OB immediately giving you the idea okay
well this is not God this is you right there or just kind of a a distinction there of of uh what is
looking back down at you here but yeah in a word and this expresses U very well
my um my concern about the utter leveling of the idea of Love
in This secular materialist humanitarianism U and
everything every idea we might have about the the Divine or about higher
possibilities is immediately uh is immediately Tethered to the surf surface
of uh a purely materialistic view of humanity or we we bounce off the
mirrored Dome before we have a chance to conceive of any higher
possibilities um and it's you know this is the the rest of
the title actually of Daniel Mahoney's book is the idol of our age how the religion of Humanity subverts
Christianity and and so it's it's interesting because you're again you're
using this also in a way that is very provocative the term humanity and actually saying humanity is
what will subvert Christianity right the materialistic portion of this is going to subvert
Christianity or is subverting Christianity right and of course yeah it is uh again this may
be may seem counter intuitive to many of your viewers or listeners but because
obviously uh love for other human beings uh is part of Christianity uh Christ
sacrificed uh for the love of humanity you might say but um I think we've
reached a point now where we can't afford uh not to address the question of
how shall I say the the content or the substance of this love and my
proposition is you can't get right on the on the content or the substance of
this Christian love without thinking through how shall I say the substance of
virtue virtue has to be part of the answer to that content now if I can say
just to to clarify for a moment the relation of my book to my friend uh Daniel Mahoney's book the idol of our
age what I do um and especially in the introduction that you're uh referring to
Now Greg what I do is I uh because I admire and embrace the book I I
summarize it first with a view to uh laying out uh the problem of this purely
horizontal and therefore therefore idolatrous secular humanitarianism
materialism and then I I collect um uh a number of or let's say a handful
of um suggestions that moneyi makes from his various chapters because he he deals
with great authors such as solit and notably uh Pierre manant who's a very
the French the Contemporary French political philosopher who a very important reference point in my book but
but Dan uh sort of collects uh or I collect from Dan and try to
distill uh what's implied in his discussion in terms of the what's an
alternative to the idol just what would be the key features of an alternative to
this idolatrous leveling materialistic understanding of humanity and that's
where my book takes off uh I'm not sure there's a word in Mahoney's uh argument that I disagree
with but I assume the task of uh supplementing this book by
pressing uh to the Limit I'm able at least by pressing to the Limit the
question of just what would we need to give a rigorous and coherent response to this
interpretation of love we can I mean I think uh many friends of traditional
Christianity and traditional virtue uh will probably readily agree
with Mahoney that something is missing something even is is perverse in this kind of secularized Christianity but it
it turns out that it's not uh a simple matter to to answer it with
great uh with great rigor and to sort of dot all the eyes and cross all the tees
and so that's kind of the assignment I took upon myself be it's it's an
important um Enterprise I think precisely
because uh the argument um on Christian grounds for
the the argument that Christian love cashes out as a a concern for Humanity
as concerned for uh the humblest as concerned for the lowest uh you know has
a lot of traction and to to show just where it goes wrong and needs to be
corrected and supplemented by something grounded in virtue well that I think is a
challenging argument and that's what I undertake in my book it seems that uh if
we go back and look at Alan bloom again and open would openness be synonymous
with tolerance uh or at least quite coextensive with it yeah certainly they
they cover a lot of the same uh human phenomena but
um sure um the reason I say that by the way is because is is if in in in
attitude of complete tolerance you're and I've talked about this a bit
you know it when you define something you you also Define what it's not right if I'm
going to put a circle around this is what this is yeah I I'm I'm there's also
what's outside of the circle necessarily exactly you're saying what's out there so if I'm constantly moving the circle
out yeah being more inclusive being more inclusive right with but not just
constantly moving out so that the circle is now further out but the complete attitude of always widening the circle
that becomes the substance of activity in a way that becomes the substance of activity but it also
says it's all there therefore what is virtuous about it yeah I've now I've
included everything How can there be something that is virtuous and something that is not virtuous yeah well when we
when you refer to these the U the widening Circle or the imperative of of
inclusiveness again we're we're talking about the horizontal Dimension which is a obviously a true dimension of
Christianity I'm just arguing yeah we can't forget the other dimension it's a true Dimension a lower law in a sense uh
to some degree a lower law well well if we're looking at materialistic anyway C
if it's interpreted in a materialistic fashion uh it's certainly lower it's but
the uh the imperative in of inclusiveness is part of Christianity
but you know you you name the problem precisely when you point out that we have to be
including those we love in something and so in a way the question of my book what
is that something what is the what is a in a way the
minimal content of uh the something in which we would want want to
include uh those we love but another way of putting this is that is just to say
that um truly to love someone is uh to love them as a certain
kind of being uh whose um proper Destiny is to
achieve a certain kind of good and then then we're now we're
talking about substance we're talking about the substantive view of the good
into which we would uh strive to include more and more of those that we are
commanded to love which would which would give a very different connotation to
humanity when you're dealing in that in that realm yeah right it's almost like I
mean in in in latterday Saint terms in in restored gospel terms to some degree you're kind of talking about
you're talking about exaltation right it's not just making
things hold or getting things fixed to a certain degree it is going to a higher realm going to a
higher realm it's going to The Virtuous and um the
tendency the it's like it's like the the invitation is always there to emphasize
the more in a way more readily available or actionable
horizontal imperative let's include more and more people and and this very soon tends to
be done um in opposition to any specific
uh content any specific idea of the good or of exaltation uh as you
say almost a watering down of the good a watering down uh in until yeah until
there's hardly anything left well what what's you know what's left we can
actually probably name in a way the ground zero of this leveling process and these
are well I'd say it this way provocatively these are freedom and
equality radically understood without reference to anything higher the freedom
and equality of the of the individual the equal Freedom or free equality of
the individual now we're talking about U about values dear to
um us good modern liberals with a small L Americans who believe in Liberty and
equality uh but what I'm saying is that when you divorce Liberty and equality from virtue from any idea of exaltation
or of a higher good for example then then what's left over what's left over
is only the individuals claim uh to have it my way to do my own thing to invent
myself to create my own understanding of the meaning of life on the one hand uh
but you see how that implicate that implicates the value of equality immediately because it it says that um
one individual's claim to invent the meaning of life for
himself or to uh to to to construct his
or her own identity is as good as any other so freedom and
equality uh unored from any let's
say cultural or religious inheritance of substantive virtue
uh tend to uh become part of the same horizontal
I almost said the horizontal mush or this contentless uh assertion of the
self against anything higher see that that's the common reference point of radical freedom and radical
equality we are there is no natural or Divine Law
there's nothing higher than us that must be honored or that we must aspire to we
we are the only standard of what is right or good but that just generates a
um a kind of leveling process that uh that is bottomless in a certain way
or the bottom you know becomes clear in the sort of desperate um desperate claim
to uh invent oneself and to deserve equal recognition for whatever I decide
that I am that sort of defines the the woke attitude the woke attitude
is sort of the in a way The Logical upshot of this horizontalization process
well I was going to ask it's you're talking about a very postmodern approach where where this is you know within the
last 50 years this kind of a thing is really developed especially in Academia but
it's is it is the Natural end of democracy though this same thing that
you're talking about about the self because I mean you you go back all the way obviously and you go all the way you
know you're looking at Aristotle and Plato and then you're coming all the way up through the founding of the of the America and Beyond and is Carl Marx said
that that democracy was the beginning of something and that the final end of it was communism he always thought there was an evolution that was going to
happen with us is there an evolution of of collectivism well what Mark said
wasn't stupid stupid uh there is a uh there's a there is a logical through
line that can be traced in that direction but uh toille also already saw
this in a way more clearly than Marx and without all the ideological baggage and
the uh sort of Messianic uh dreams Alexi dville who wrote Democracy in America
published in uh two volumes 1835 and 1840 to
um understood that uh toille was a friend of democracy especially in its
American version as opposed to the French Revolutionary
um version of democracy let's say tville was a friend of democracy but he
understood that uh that democracy could only be solid and sane and finally only
survive uh with the um the survival of certain let's say
broadly aristocratic residues what he means by aristocratic is not that we need uh like um a ruling class A A A
hereditary class of nobles or something like that what he means is that we need some uh some vertical ballast in our
society and our culture and uh don't get me started on tville I I teach whole
semester on toille I've written many chapters on toille but uh but you know we could sort of break down what tville
thinks are these uh like I'm calling them now vertical stabilizing elements
or this ballast uh without which uh democracy goes off course or finally
sort of collapses into the U horizontalization
um horizontalization power of radical freedom and radical
equality teville very obviously one thing that toille notices as plainly as
can be is that uh the a certain residual American consensus on religious
morality is fundamental he finds that American republicanism would be
Unthinkable without Christian morality and more precisely the idea of
the family the man woman thing sexual morality yeah these are things he talks about and that
without these uh sort of firm uh uh
limits uh democracy would uh lose its way and tend to tend to this
horizontalization uh radicalization tend towards well some of the uh the forms he
gives to this uh Spectre of uh what of the threats the Dark Side of democracy
that is always a possibility uh some of our viewers will be familiar with the
last chapters of volume two of Democracy in America where tville talks about a new kind of despotism the soft despotism
in which um people willingly accept to lose their freedoms in order
to be taken care of by uh by a nanny what we now call a nanny State and he
practic uses that language uh that's one outcome he also talks about uh a sort of
uh darker you might say more metaphysical term he uses his pantheism and you'll recall that I talk about this
in in my chapter as well but just the uh pantheism is just really a name for this
complete loss of human orientation when everything vertical is
sacrificed to this um to um a kind of um
uh a kind of Whirlpool you might say of the the purely
horizontal motivation everyone demanding more freedom more equality uh
everyone demanding more recognition in the eyes of others without having any
Common Ground upon which to judge that recognition on which to uh like evaluate
the actual ual characters of human beings some kind of objective truth
that's uh right right an objective truth but um maybe here's where I need to
introduce uh a challenging point because uh it's hard to hard to Define it
without uh courting controversy I do believe in objective truth in natural and Divine Law but uh
one of the factors that uh for for example that that Mahoney and uh Pier manant whom I've mentioned that's m n n
t by the way from whom uh a friend from whom uh Daniel and I have both learned a
lot but one of the great themes uh of theirs and it's also a theme of teville
is the need for mediation uh the need for mediating
institutions now concretely this would mean uh in tville for example that uh to
to resist the sort of leveling tendency of democracy we need families we need
churches we need associations we need local governments therefore he
celebrates the decentralization of of American democracy we need practical experience
in local governments we need all these uh all these
um sites you might say of of mediation
what Edmund Burke um I suppose a generation before toille or a little
more Ed and Burke referred to as little platoon you know that beautiful prae
that uh in in Burke's critique of the French Revolution and their
abstract let's say very horizontal rationalism Burke insisted no uh a free
Society cannot exist without uh little platoon of families churches uh uh
associations guilds he would have had in mind like Merchant guilds and so forth
and word uh traditional tradition supported uh human associations well
that's what I'm talking about when I use the term mediation the reason I bring it up in response to your appeal to
objective truth with which I couldn't sympathize more but I think it's important to
recognize and to um and really to be not
to only to tolerate in a way to embrace the necessity of mediation mediation
by um inherited social structures mediation by
politics by being part of a country you could say patriotic uh country centered
uh mediation um
we would like to think that all of our uh vertical uh orientations are completely
pure and objective but I think Burke and tville for example and for that matter
Aristotle and Thomas aquinus we could throw them in too uh or we could um talk
about more recent authors as well but the astute students of morality and
Society have always recognized that morality is always going to be
mediated by the particular uh forms institutions inherited uh ways Norms
customs of a particular society so that
um those who wish to purify our uh
moral religious you might even say familial Norms of any mediation are actually wishing for their uh
destruction uh I'm going on rather long on this but it's it's an important point that isn't easy to explain in a few
words but but for example we can just take that this happens with respect to the idea of the
family and and its uh and its critics uh because uh um of course the family is
very Central to LDS belief to the LDS idea of Eternity but uh the critics of
um this great theological weight that we put upon the idea of the family will say
you know not without some justice and insight wait a minute what do you mean by family family has been variously
defined uh throughout history and when you're talking about the
family uh I've heard it said more than once for example the the Latter-Day Saint idea of the family is really
asking us to accept a kind of um to to stop history like say in the
1950s with uh with Leave it to Beaver or something like that but this is just one
um how should historically relative a culturally
specific form of the family and there is no uh absolute family as such
but there is an order correct I mean there is a man and a woman and a child
right that's the core of it questions arise as to obviously first of all how
the uh the authority of the man and the woman or the the the various roles or occupations of the man and the woman all
these questions arise or is this family uh is this family does this family
operate within a uh a larger ancestral and aristocratic family
this is a great theme of tville and it goes back to Jean jaac rouso actually who was one of tov's main sources but
you know tville is very aware that uh the American family is very different from the aristocratic family uh that uh
of his uh countrymen and his own you know ancestors and indeed uh parents
it's it's uh a much more uh much more nuclear family and uh he Praises it as
uh it lacks some of the uh austerity and how should I say patriarchal authority
of the aristocratic family and some of the great sense of continuity and honor
uh but it's sweet and it it's it's closer to Nature in a way uh parents and
children uh the affection between parents and their children is greater in the American family than in the
aristocratic family of tov's earlier experience okay well we're talking about
this because there there are some look there are some
natural and we would say god-given elements upon which uh the family and
its order is based but nowhere there is there a family that is a pure version
not inflected in any way by one set of cultural and economic sure circumstances
and so forth so that that uh you know uh by the way just between you and me and
anybody who may be listening you could do a lot worse than to leave it to be her family you know it's it it's subject
to ridicule but I was there it turns out I I'd have to check
let's check this but I think Jerry Mathers who played the beaver and I may be very close to the same age okay so in
that sense I was there and it wasn't perfect and you there are all kinds of critics of America critiques of America
in the 1950s that you could site but actually I think we're kind of whistling past the graveyard a lot of the time
when we make fun of that ideal of the family because it really was not rare of
course the the family is not represented in all its profundity in the Leave it to Beaver
series it's not without profundity at times do you know the series by the way Greg you know what I'm talking about I
seen little Snippets of it that's about can get it on uh some some of the stations that play oldtime TV I I use it
as an example because lots of people at least used to know about this example of
it's basically the the American Family of the 60s with a mom and dad the dad
going off to work at the office and the mom uh very nicely dressed and doing the
domestic work and uh and two nice kids boys in this case U yeah uh Wally and
Theodore but but the point is the critic itics aren't wrong when they say that any idea of the family is going to be
culturally inflicted culturally contaminated that's what I mean by mediation and but the proposition which
we can look at further and discuss more if you wish but the proposition is that uh if you don't tolerate this kind of
mediation or cultural inflection you're actually promoting uh a a leveling
because you are you you're really taking a critical position with respect to any conceivable
uh representation of instantiation of the family for example okay now you and
Mahoney then are are here he he speaks of the religion of humanity subverting
Christianity you speak of an alliance of religion and virtue okay yeah when the
what he calls the religion of humanity begins to subvert uh uh
Christianity and religion loses its virtue from your phrase what
happens well you just have the um the weakening to the point of Extinction of
what we've called the vertical and the the um uh the ascendency of the completely
horizontal and materialist or relativistic
uh uh understanding of human of of morality or of human purpose
we we come to the idea that human beings have no purpose except to uh meet the
Limitless uh needs and demands of individual
selves uh cut off from all you know uh higher reference points so uh again my
it is indeed my argument that uh uh the vertical realm or the one the realm the
the orientation rather that we would immediately identify with uh with an orientation towards the
Divine towards God my proposition is that um without experience in and
articulation of substantive Virtues Of the Soul
without therefore a certain pride and confidence in what makes a human character and a human existence better
then uh then the vertical orientation to God loses all its stability and then we
start defining God in terms of um service to the material dimension of
humanity alone and then we lapse into this
uh this completely horizontal of pantheism or we we find ourselves
inhabiting this uh mirrored Dome that I speak of
so we we see this right now in Christianity this is happening now you you have the Devolution of several of
the denominations they are splitting apart you have those that seem to retain this idea of some level of virtue some
that say no we're going to go horizontal and we're going to it's almost like an equitable position of of the horizontal
right it's almost an it almost becomes an equitable Collective position and
that's where they're moving toward and so you get these breaking of parts of the denominations you get a secularized
uh uh well talk about the United States because we are losing we're getting more
of the nuns as they call them when they have no denomination they're not going to church Christianity is is dropping in
the numbers for the most part not everywhere but for the most part is dropping in the numbers is that due to
the lack lack of virtue is that is that due to the religion of humanity is that
just a matter of the self wanting and distraction that that's pulling away
from that or or I just what I see lacking sometimes
is the idea of a standard and I mean something lifted up yeah that that you
can rally around right that you want to Rally around that you are inspired by
that seems to be lowered that standard seems to be lowered and so it's like
it's harder to see absolutely and yeah I don't uh I mean it to sort out the
causality is a difficult thing because there's there's going to be a circular relationship between uh the um the
movement towards none the movement towards U if not atheism then complete
sort of religious complacency or indifference which is hard to
distinguish from sort this vague spirituality that makes no demands on us
and which uh Elder Holland I recall some years ago now has uh lampooned rather
effectively this idea of a of a spirituality that finally has made its
peace with uh with relativism and materialism um yeah this is what I'm
talking about but so I think the causality works in both directions
because we don't know how to stand up for anything uh religion loses its uh its
Savor and it really U has less and less to offer as an alternative
to um a kind of a secular Viewpoint and in the
end the the uh the flattening or the horizontalization of religion and
alas we we see it even in our congregations as you have often
noticed uh in the end this uh leveling uh leads
to um the desperate gestures of identity politics that we
call wokeness like this you know this U uh recognize me uh I I like to quote
the uh the desperate cry uh you may have read this in my
preface of the young female student at Yale University a few years ago this had to
do with some controversy surrounding Halloween costumes and whether students
need needed to be warned about their offensive character but in the in the
midst of this uh debate or debate rather a very sort of um hostile exchange
between a a number of students and uh and a faculty member who had
suggested some moderation on the Halloween costume question this was on
video I remember this yeah yeah you can look up a video of this at at Yale when
uh the professor just tried to stake some some vertical ground saying what we're this is a university this is about
the pursuit of Truth this is about uh intellectual standards and this female student
unabashedly I mean I I think she spoke for hopefully nothing close to a
majority but too many young people today and not only young people when she cried
out um how did she say it I'm trying this is
not education this is not this is not about what you this is
not about the academic and endeav you say it's about this is about making a home for me this is about
me being at home this is about me being recognized this is about everyone loving
me and nobody loving me in the sense of recognizing in the sense of um
assenting to me the in the sense of not being an obstacle to my assertion of my
own desires and my own identity and that that's what our community even a
university uh is about uh this is about a home how did I get off on this
question Greg because this this this does Express in a way the core of this horizontalization
process oh when when there's nothing left but this uh incoherent and
practically formless demand to be recognized and therefore to be at home
this demand in a way way to never leave uh the womb but to be completely uh safe
and protected think of safe spaces this this desperate sort of uh quasi
religious yearning expressed in the most uh
formless and really vulgar way that's kind of that's the ground
zero of of the horizontalization process that I'm talking about so then there's going to be a gap right because if
you've got a a Devolution where you're moving from a vertical to a horizontal
um there's a there's a loss of virtue I think there's a loss of Truth
along with that um this brings us to that Gap that you
and I have talked about of waiting through a
uh a a storm of discrepancy and a a
pulling apart of The Virtuous or the vertical and the
horizontal what is our involvement then at that point right because we can look at our church we can look at
Christianity as a whole we can look at you know our country and and all of them
go along these same literally lines as you're saying right so where is our
involvement with this what is virtuous for us as individuals
What then shall we do in other words shall we do yeah well let me take a stab at
addressing that you know from a couple of different angles it it's it's like the question that I often get at the end
of classes um I remember getting it first of all when I I used to teach very large American Heritage sections when my
my my hair was still dark and and curly at that point but uh but you know
teaching multiple classes of um hundreds even 800 students at a time and uh at
the end of a semester it was actually quite gratifying to hear students with the quite know plaintive
question uh okay I think I see what you're saying I think there's a lot of truth in your in what you're
saying then what shall we do how can we change the world or what is what are the action
points that follow from these uh political philosophical as well I
suppose as the olical insights and the beginning of the answer and maybe the
most essential part is to and this is what I always told them if you understanding this is already a great
accomplishment and not only an intellectual one it is it's a practical
Foundation okay hone in on what understanding what um understanding everything we've
said so far understanding the vacuity and the uh ultimate U
exhaustion of ideals of freedom and equality without any virtue without any
vertical reference point without without virtue or God understanding that
uh secular ideology whether in in the form of a purely secular liberalism or
in the more um immediately noxious forms of uh revolutionary materialism what
have you that modern modern ideology of uh
horizontal Salvation let's say uh is bankrupt and there is
no uh there's no worthy or satisfying human existence without virtue without
standing up for something substantive that that's what I mean and this this was already a theme in my you know in my
American Heritage courses uh 35 years ago and more um and when so the students
I what I would tell them is you understand this you are already practically you are situated differently
you see you are already you have a freedom to act now uh that you didn't understand before
because you you understand the Tendencies of the secular ocean in
which you are swimming in which we are all swimming you've got now you've got your head above water and that means
means you can act with virtue and Independence and you can build a family presumably on those
same premises so it's not a ma a matter of like idle Ivory Tower theoretical
knowledge to understand these things from the moment you understand them you are you as an agent address the world
from a different standpoint and that that's job 1- a now beyond that that uh
involvement in church uh and Community I do think um we you know we have
opportunities and obligations will vary according to circumstances and and uh
and talents but uh how can we not um if we see the world from this point of
view how can we not engage the world from this point of view um and I I suppose as as soon as we
as soon as I uh Advance a proposition such as this
then uh maybe we're talking about things I know that you've talked about a lot
such as the question of of a cultural War a culture war and it's bearing on on
latterday Saints which is I think a vitally uh important question but I
would say you you have won the war in a very important sense as concerns your
own soul your your own character your own vision of human life and that of any
family that you can bind to yourself and instruct uh you you're you're already
standing in a different position but that of course is just like the beginning of the challenge and not the
end of it but that's a very big First Step okay so so your
your your thought on that stormy area there in between is is not one of
retreat but one of involvement not not one a you talked about virtuous as being
in action right is you know there's different levels of
this you've got you've got your individual level and what you're trying to do you've got an organizational level like you think about the church and
where does the church stand on these things what do they get involved with what do they stay away from and and then
you've got community beyond that which is you know what what do I I find people
of like-minded uh points of view and I get involved with them right and I tried to
shrink the Gap what I from what I see as The Virtuous and The non- Virtuous
right well let's talk a bit about this troubled subject of a culture War uh
it's all too obvious now that the term is mostly used uh derisively by those
who want to uh dismiss it or ridicule as if you know those anyone who
would be engaging the culture in order to try to contribute to a
more a Sounder culture and society and political order as if any such person is
motivated by some like silly PR preoccupation with these
uh um ostensibly meaningless uh Wars or conflicts and
maybe conflict that people get involved in because they just uh they're just nasty people or they like conflicts or
they're just uh uh Swept Away by uh emotions and battles that finally
aren't important well that's that dismissiveness is cheap
actually it's you you have to begin uh you know I'm not culture war is maybe not my favorite term but it at least uh
presents us with the question are there decisive stakes in what's going on in
our uh society today do uh War suggests the category of
enemies do we have enemies are there are there not
enemies notably in powerful places of everything that is dear to us and which
forms the basis of the way of life we want to pursue now of course we are
commanded to love our enemies but you know I'm fond of uh
reminding myself and others that to say that we ought to love our enemies is not to say that we don't have any in fact
it's to recognize that we do and so uh to imagine that uh that Christian love
absolves us from the how shall I say the duty of realism and recognizing uh that
we have enemies I think uh uh is foolish
now what can we realistically hope for in in addressing the general culture is
you know is a is a valid and uh and complicated question and um it's
certainly worth considering the point of view of your of our mutual friend and your recent guest
Paul Maro is worth considering when Paul says uh essentially this the cultural war was lost
uh when does he dated the 90s in the '90s yeah well not a not a stupid
proposition and Paul was there so he can give as direct a testimony as
anyone but I would say a couple of things first of all you can still keep
losing you know there's still more to lose a much of substance uh maybe a
maybe a critical threshold has been passed and maybe in a sense we've lost
um the main battles of a war but actually we can lose more and we can
even lose the opportunity to Define uh livable terms of surrender for for
example um but the other point is we can always
lose more oh the other point I would make is yeah and here I I salute Paul
for adopting this language because it's important to rec recognize
that we've lost and that that's a disaster okay because that means we
understand something to say well we've lost there actually that didn't really matter or it was all silly in the first
place or why would you want to be on the wrong side of History that's just uh burying our heads in the
sand um I remember in what year was the obergfell decision
2015 um I I happened to be uh in France when we got that news
that wouldn't have surprised anyone who had followed the Supreme Court and knew which way the wind was blowing at that
time uh but I remember getting that news and um uh again I wasn't surprised but I
I I sort of I did regard it as a threshold and I was tempted to say I'm a I'm a professor of politics and
political philosophy but that that kind that game is up or uh you know the the
room for for maneuver in terms of substantive like
moral foundations of a of a sane and stable political order the room for
maneuver is uh has just been drastically diminished maybe we've we've lost uh on
the most uh decisive question and so I I I totally
understand the dis disposition of those who say
L's withdraw there are better ways to use our time and maybe it's not actually not good for our uh peace of mind and
character to be engaged in these uh in these conflicts at the same time I think
it's important to recognize that we've lost and it's a
disaster well here's what I start thinking I think I I get to this point and I'm like okay I I understand the
idea of well you're not going to there is an art of
progressivism which is on the March and it's always on the March and it's not going to stop and and and maybe there is
simply the idea that we're going to push back here and there and create a little bit of good and Order and virtue at
times uh but I I come to the practicality of this and that is things like okay well your kids are in school
and and there are certain things that are happening in school do you just allow that now there's two options yeah
you can go out well I guess there's three you can allow it uh two you can go out and fight it right and and and try
to create some influence in your community in the public schools in the public schools right or three you can Retreat yeah right so as as as Babylon
uh encroaches on all of our institutions do do you just Retreat and say we're going to pull out of this
because now it's all Babylon and and we need to create our own safe space and
and uh and and and pull those circles back and and and Retreat or do you say
well it's not just about me and my family and maybe it's not just about the church even it's about all human beings
and my neighbor and everybody else yeah and do I have any responsibility for them that's where I always have a
problem with this argument is I feel I know people that aren't my family I know people that aren't members of the church
that are friends do I simply Retreat on this or or do I have
some type of a responsibility to help yeah their lives and their communities
and their families well obviously I more than respect I admire the choices of
those like Paul uh who Retreat uh to a homeschooling strategy
you know in the case of Education absolutely for example and and prioritize their family as the the
number one uh little platoon in which it it still must be Poss possible to cultivate some virtue if I may put it
that way uh at the same time a couple of yeah a couple of problems or
reservations the one that you just mentioned is that uh yeah do we
really are we really utterly indifferent to the
um to our fellow citizens and the world in which they live are we do we are we
willing to write them off to that degree I think youve already mentioned the example of
um I'm forgetting it was Mormon not Moroni wasn't the Mormon who who just
couldn't take any more of this people he was leading and uh and had to step back
but then the Lord commanded him to get to to take the Reigns once again and
even in this ill- fated uh military military struggle so that's a pretty
Stark and uh challenging uh example isn't it uh we're you know I would say
uh we're not quite there I would say that our uh our
um well I'm going to paint with broad brush strokes but we need to to achieve some clarity on these matters I would
say that our our Elites uh academic media
entertainment legal in very large part are uh are quite corrupt and maybe in
many in certain cases Beyond Redemption and what that means uh alas
is not that the people the non- elites the
uh the uh the base of the populace you might say it doesn't at all mean that they're not touched because uh the
elites are those who Define our language and our basic categories uh part of the like the
wrenching I say turmoil in our Society right now is that we are dissatisfied
with our Elites but they formed our vocabulary our educational system uh the
very uh channels in which our thought almost inevitably follows and uh and we
we know that we sense that we must uh resist uh those Tendencies but uh we've
been mostly deprived of the language the concepts uh in which to do it we well
how do you untangle yourself from all that that that's how do you unless you're going to move away into some
secluded area how do you I I that's where I don't get it you know it's like how do you how do you detangle untangle
yourself from all the elites and all the institutions and here's where I have a uh a vested interest as a political
philosopher and uh it's it's I sincerely see see things this way in a sense
political philosophy broadly understood is just really the the coming to terms with uh I said earlier like the the uh
the content the constitution of the moral and cultural ocean in which we're
swimming um and to do that you have to get your head above water enough to to
see the Alternatives or maybe uh what are you doing testing the chemical composition of the wall of the water or
or something like that um but I think what you're pointing to something very important here and that is that uh we
don't we can't really Retreat unless we engage do you see what I mean by this we can't be unless we know that from which
we are extracting ourselves we're really taking it with us whether we know it or not uh the reason I say this is a a kind
of plea for the usefulness of political philosophy broadly understood what let's
say moral political philosophy and theology uh unless you actually engage
AG uh the vocabulary the concepts the the systems uh the conceptual
systems of the of the enemy of the purely
horizontalization in sort of woke identity politics desperation unless
you unless you have engaged and uh sort of uh uh sorted out
dissected what's going on in those worldviews as we're starting to do here
today then you haven't really extracted yourself from it you're you're taking uh
you're you're still that uh that saltwater is still all over you
from that ocean you know and maybe it's filthy in some in some cases um so that and this you you've
talked a lot about this with uh with our with uh eloquent guests uh on various of
your programs but that's why uh the culture War matters
more to the church internally finally than it does uh with respect to whatever
prospects we may have for actually changing the world yes the culture war is in our congregations MH and um I
salute those like Paul and sister Maro who retreat in into their family with a
very um how shall I say I almost said conservative let's say a very uh solid
and non nonsense understanding of the gospel and they raised their family in that way but I think the very the very
language we use has been so uh compromised
by uh the ocean in which were're the secular ocean in which we're all swimming that we we don't know that
we're out out of it and we haven't really showered until we actually uh
have engaged and thought through and deliberately uh deliberately
articulately uh separated ourselves and you see we're we're back to the very
question of uh love and its meaning which is uh the nub of my book
because within our own congregations uh there's difficulty distinguishing
between love according to the gospel and love according to a purely secular
horizontal vision of uh tolerance or or Limitless inclusiveness or respect for
the whatever identity a person asserts or or what have you the the um the the
language the the world's language the the language of the secularization of Love is an alternative religion which uh
becomes very hard from which it becomes very hard to disentangle our authentic
religion yeah yeah it it it's like a virus it's it's uh it becomes something
very different I think that's right you know it's interesting because you talk about engaging before you can de
disengage or Retreat it's it's kind of like well you have to read the book of Mormon and see what actually is going on
there to really understand what's yeah you're you're almost engaging in what we're going through by reading the book
right also and understanding what's going on there in order to have an awareness and yeah see you know how do I
detangle what what's going on here uh Professor hanok really appreciate your time I'm looking forward in a few months
then you'll let us know when the book comes out we'll give this a more thorough uh uh uh go at at love
especially uh but always appreciate your insights and and what you talk about is
always relevant to the current currents of culture thanks well I love talking
with you and wish you the best in carrying on your good work appreciate it
