Episode Summary
The shocking murder of Renee Good at the hands of federal immigration shock troops in Minnesota earlier this month was part of a larger outrage, the Trump regime’s fascistic deployment of tens of thousands of violent and poorly trained, but very well-armed paramilitary troops against people across several major American cities, arresting people who look or sound Hispanic.
Since Good’s murder, the Trump administration and numerous right-wing media figures have attacked Good and her wife as “domestic terrorists,” who were engaging in illegal speech—and thus she supposedly deserved to be killed for temporarily impeding ICE officials before trying to drive away.
Of course, this is rhetoric is wildly hypocritical given that Trump and his supporters have claimed for years to be so very concerned about protecting girls and women from trans people in sports and public restrooms. Aside from that, however, the right-wing attempt to “other” Renee Good is in support of the larger reactionary campaign to deny the legal rights and humanity of immigrants living in America.
But the belief that immigrants (and Hispanic-appearing people in general) deserve to be treated as less-than-human is itself part of a larger dilemma that philosophy has dealt with for centuries, the problem of other minds. Since no one has direct access to any other person’s experience, other people’s moral rights can, unfortunately, be difficult things for many of us to understand. Far too much of politics is about whether some people are real and whether they should have rights.
Liberalism used to talk about things like this more, and so in this live collaboration between Flux and Magic + Loss, we decided to explore the topic from several different angles.
Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
13:03 — Can alternative scripture interpretations save religion from fundamentalism?
17:22 — Creating a list of books for deconstructing former fundamentalist Christians
20:47 — Conservatism is not reactionism
23:54 — Jeffrey Epstein and misogynist libertarianism
37:04 — Theory of mind and empathy
46:18 — Rene Girard and Nietzschean Christianity
57:54 — Why reactionary Catholicism is becoming more popular in the U.S. far right
01:06:31 — Somatic experience and a politics of determined love
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Hello everyone. Well, I guess this is your live, Virginia, so maybe you can introduce it and then we can go from there. You want to do that?
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN: So this is a co-hosting and I’m on the back foot when it comes to a good introduction here, but, Matthew Sheffield and I are-- Matthew is a cherished interlocutor of mine. He’s a philosopher, and I am me and, just a random Gen Xer, trying to pick my feet up day after day. And, and I, think we want to talk among other things about Rene Gerard and empathy and and, trivia like that.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. and there is just so much to talk about, but I guess I think maybe we can start with a news hook, which is the recent Texas A&M decision to tell a philosophy professor there that he could not teach Plato’s Symposium in a class about ethics and moral controversy.
HEFFERNAN: Right.
SHEFFIELD: And to me, like, not only is this the inevitable product, of course, of, this, right wing censorship, that we’ve had in this year, but it’s also that it shows just how completely incoherent they’re, because on the one hand they say, well, we are here for western, western values and that we value the, traditional ideas and morality and all that.
And it’s like, well, you clearly haven’t read the Symposium of Plato.
HEFFERNAN: Well, is Greece really the West though, Matthew? I mean come on!
SHEFFIELD: I know, that Plato guy.
HEFFERNAN: I think it’s, I think it’s Colorado, maybe the [00:02:00] California,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, hah. Well, and just to summarize it just a little bit though, for anybody who hasn’t read it, Plato’s Symposium, it’s a work that is one of his most famous ones within philosophy, but it’s not one that I would say the general public is probably very familiar with. And that’s because, well, the whole book is about sex and gender and love and philosophy, which, philosophy as a discipline of course has no problem, has always discussed these things.
But in the right wing movement of today, they don’t read the books. Like they don’t even read the Bible like these people, that was one thing—I used to, I was, born and raised as a fundamentalist Mormon, and one of the things that I discovered about Christian fundamentalists is that almost none of them have read even one book of the Bible in its entirety. They don’t, they just literally show up to church and they listen to whatever the pastor tells them, and they might read, like five or six verses, or a chapter 10. That’s it.
HEFFERNAN: So why take the trouble to ban something?
SHEFFIELD: Well, and that’s the thing, like Plato as a philosopher, and of course, so many ancient authors like Aristophanes and, all, and, I mean just, like you could go down the line, you could pick almost any ancient classical author or the Bible itself, and there’s all kinds of stuff in there that would be considered inappropriate, for, by right-wing Christians. My, my favorite Bible story is the story of, Jephthah, who was a judge in the book of Judges, a prophet who, decided, well, I’m afraid I’m not going to win this battle that you’re telling me to fight God, so you gotta do something. You gotta promise me that you’ll do it. And if you, and if, you will, if I win this battle, [00:04:00] I will kill the first thing that I see when I come home.
And lo and behold, the first thing that he sees is his daughter. And so, in the same text in which, Isaac, the human sacrifice of Isaac is, said, oh, isn’t it great that we didn’t have to, he didn’t have to kill Isaac.
Well, here you have another text. Whoever was like, yeah, it was a good thing to kill your child for God. And like, right. But, most, of course, most Christians and most, super Orthodox Jews have never heard that story or have any idea.
HEFFERNAN: Matthew, and one of, one of the things I think that makes you such an interesting philosopher is that you have done something that very few of us have done, which is grown up in a totalizing episteme, and questioned it, and pulled out the threads of it and done what evangelicals called deconstruction, right.
Parenthetically, I love that deconstruction is now. I think if you put it into Google, into Gemini, it will explain deconstruction, not as an invention of Jacque Deida, but as a practice of evangelicals, not destroying their faith, but dividing it, separating it into its component parts and evaluating them-- and, and kind of coming to terms with how this thing was built around them, which is. Exact. I mean, I can’t imagine a better application of deconstruction as I understand it from Derrida. It’s, it’s, just beautiful. And I wish he’d lived to see it, in fact, because for Christianity to use the tools of literary criticism, it’s exactly right to find a way to understand what, anyway, you did this yourself.
It with, with a, like a very esoteric system. The books of the testimony of the angel Moroni, the, oddities of the Book of Mormon, the, weird readings of a kind of weird 19th century, brought together theology. But that is [00:06:00] binding for so many people and interesting for so many people and literal for so many people.
And just one by one, I mean, it’s. You must consider it one of the great philosophical achievements of your life that you were able to pull the wires out of your head. So dexterously, that you now, have managed to expose yourself to, so many other philosophies. You were your own gly. I mean, if to get back to the greats, you were Socrates to yourself.
Why do I believe this? why would I possibly believe this? and I think that puts you in a, uniquely good spot to think about these things. But, and I also think that if you believe in literal truth of the Bible, and I’m, I, don’t know I, that I know what that means exactly. Like, it--
SHEFFIELD: Well, they don’t know either.
HEFFERNAN: Right? But I don’t even know what believing. I don’t think any of us knows exactly what it is to believe something. In some ways that means you don’t read it, right? Like I believe in, a geocentric, I accept on faith or I believe in that the, I’m sorry, the heliocentric. I believe that the sun’s at the center of the universe, but, so I don’t read it.
I just don’t read a lot of astronomy because it’s there. It’s sat down. Why do I have to look at it? Right? And if you believe in little truth of the Bible, then interpretation doesn’t matter. Then why does your reading matter?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that is, I mean, that is functionally I think how they, get away with it.
But it’s also the, it’s different from what you just said in, in your thought process, process about centrism, because. They don’t care about proof. Like that’s the thing that I think a lot of people who are,
HEFFERNAN: But I don’t care about, but I don’t care about proof for other things that I just think are true like that.
I don’t, I mean, you don’t have to. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone convince me, I’ve never looked up in a book why, what the actual proof is for the center of the universe. and that’s just an obvious one. Forget about everything else. I mean, a television working [00:08:00] or whatever else. the things that I believe in, the literal truth of, or a proposition that’s just been handed to me are the things I don’t read.
Once you read, you’ve opened up the possibility of interpretation, exegesis, even if you’re simply committing to memory. I interviewed a, several months ago, a Chinese dissident who, grew up in China and the two things they had to do with the writings of Chairman Mao were memorize them and then memorized a reading of them, an interpretation of them.
So they had to shield out any possibility that they, in any meaningful way, were reading. in addition to what they were. So lest you open up a slight possibility that you have a hermit, bring some hermeneutics to the occasion of reading, you now have something else to step in your brain in that place.
And I guess to close the loop, you did this with the text you grew up on, and you did essentially what Nietzsche says, we have, again, Nietzche is someone you’ve written about. We, God’s dead. We’ve killed him, you and I, we killed him because we read and studied the universe with science and came to the conclusion that our, that this God didn’t exist.
And you did the same, I think with the texts, I imagine with the texts of Mormonism, and the teachings of Mormonism. You read them closely and like lots of evangelicals, you probably came to elders and said, I don’t understand. Why would God have someone kill his daughter? And, and then you thought, well, I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, right?
Read the books, ask the questions, and then the whole thing falls apart. I mean, is that how it went for you? Actually, I don’t want to, I don’t want to guess.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. that is how it went. And this is why I would say also that, when people have questions about, let’s say vaccines or something, or that they shouldn’t be told, oh, you can’t ask that.
It’s fine to ask these questions. It’s fine to, [00:10:00] to, ask why. Like, that’s, that is the most fundamental idea. Like it basically all cognition devolves to “what is this?” And “what do I do with this?” And so if you can’t, if you forbid people from answering those, asking those questions, then you’re not going to be, you’re not going to be a viable political movement, I would say.
But independent of that, yeah, like, so with Mormonism, I, I was, told, well, don’t worry about that. God will answer that in heaven. You don’t have to think about it. And there were some people that, so Brigham Young University used to have this academic pseudoscience department called the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormonism Studies. And basically it was like an apologetic organization. and I read some of their material and it was just so virulent and, nasty, and, just, saying, well, how anyone that would question these ideas, it’s just stupid and malignant and vicious and satanic and, et cetera, et cetera.
And it had no, effect on me because, I was like, well, you’re telling me that you don’t have the answer, when you act like that. And then once I opened myself to the idea of, well, what if this isn’t true? And all of these doubts that I had clicked through in my mind, perfectly because then I realized, oh, if, it’s not true, then all of these things make sense.
And that’s, that is the, dilemma that people who value science and value reason in our, time, we have to induce that kind of thought process for people. Because I, I had to do all this by myself, like there wasn’t anyone in my personal life that was helping me along the way or, [00:12:00] teaching me about introducing me to ideas.
I was just following things on my own. And that’s, most people don’t have the time for that, or the inclination or whatever, whatever reason they’re not going to do it. And so we, so people who believe in sound thinking, we have to, be out there and then, and join the fray everywhere as much as we can.
HEFFERNAN: Can, I ask you a question? What might, when you went to your parents or your, elders and, asked these questions, what might they have said? When you ask these questions, what might, some, wise person have said to you that would’ve kept you in the fold? In other words, could Mormonism have, sort of invented its own secularism, had it been able to accommodate, accommodate your answers instead of kind of killing off Socrates, the you person?
right. So.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
Can alternative scripture interpretations save religion from fundamentalism?
HEFFERNAN: Yeah. could they have said, oh, let’s, I’ve, that one is, that’s a real, incongruity in the text. And what could that possibly mean, and why would that be included? Well, maybe let’s consider the possibility that the Bible’s a set of metaphors, or let’s consider the possibility that God is erratic, or let’s consider the possibility that there are a lot of texts, other texts, or as Sarah just said, that Mormonism is Satanism.
there, if someone had said something like that to you, would there be a way that you would still be a, philosophical Mormon and you might’ve expanded the department at Brigham Young to include real science?
SHEFFIELD: Well, I, there are people that are doing, trying to do that actually.
. and so, and in fact the, for, there’s a, magazine that’s had a conference for decades, called Sunstone, in Mormonism, that, that has tried to do that. And, and I think [00:14:00] that they, have kind of also. because Mormonism, like many, high, demand religious traditions, places a lot of, they, they tell members to be afraid of, former members or people who question.
. and so, and Sunstone has basically kind of been kind of the seed of, this idea that, well, these people who are former Mormons are not going to hurt you. They’re not evil, they’re not satanic. and so, yeah, if I, had been exposed to that a little bit earlier, perhaps I would’ve cha, been able to toughen out or figure some way.
But, on the other hand, on the other hand, I just don’t know that would’ve been satisfying for me because, like in Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation,” she’s right about that. That when you do start getting into metaphorical interpretation of text, you are doing violence to it, epistemic violence to the text because you are imposing your reading of it over the author’s reading. And I don’t know that I could have really done that, in the, well
HEFFERNAN: I,
SHEFFIELD: that would’ve satisfied.
HEFFERNAN: I mean, I just, I don’t want to go it to go unsaid that I, starkly disagree with Sontag on that point. I mean, I
SHEFFIELD: Oh, you do? Okay.
HEFFERNAN: Well, I don’t know who the author is in the equation and the author seems as dead to me as God.
I mean, when you’re talking about you’re superseding and by interpreting the Bible, say you’re superseding what the authorial intention is that God’s intention. That would seem to be a, the case for the literal truth of the Bible or the maybe not meaning of the Bible. yeah. and, Also the words belong to all of us.
There are no private languages. And so we are always making meaning of words that we, [00:16:00] that we share. But I guess, the reason I ask that is I don’t, I’m not sure there would be a Mormonism that allowed that kind of open inquiry. and one of the reasons I’m thinking about
SHEFFIELD: it’s of hard for people.
Yeah. Because like actually they get kicked out. Some people get kicked out for,
HEFFERNAN: yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It’s like Mormonism, for instance, has an idea, has a doctrine. They don’t talk about it very often, and most of the non-MS don’t know it is that Mor in Mormonism, God is married and is a post-human.
HEFFERNAN: Oh. ah.
SHEFFIELD: And so, and God is a polygamous.
HEFFERNAN: oh yeah. Interesting.
SHEFFIELD: And so, actually, so even though they, currently do not practice multiple, marriages in, to living people. They actually still believe in it. And in fact, the guy who is the current president of the Mormon church, so they, they believe in eternal marriage as they call it.
He’s actually married to two women. but one of them, one of them is deceased. so he has two wives.
HEFFERNAN: But one of them is deceased. Yeah. but Right. Oh, I see. Eternal marriage. yeah.
SHEFFIELD: So he’ll have two when, they’re all dead.
Creating a list of books for deconstructing former fundamentalist Christians
HEFFERNAN: Yeah, so probably I’m thinking about this because I’ve run into some deconstructing Christians, on tick on social media who are looking for just actively in search of tutors to, because they’ve been homeschooled, they’ve, their education’s gone awry in many ways or is non-existent. I think they started questioning the existence of hell.
They started questioning some of MAGA policies and, and that was the thread they pulled and things started to unravel from there. but now they find themselves not knowing what the Federalist papers are [00:18:00] or, what their constitutional commitments are, if any, even really the difference between the private and public sectors.
so you know why? A OC and Jeff Bezos are in different positions vis-a-vis the rest of us, right? Like how people get elected is versus how they get rich. and and it occurred to me maybe like in this fanciful way, but an overly optimistic way that we should do what, we did, like when I was a kid, which is, write letters to our counterpart Soviet school children and say like, we all have the same human heart.
We can learn from each other, but maybe put together, people that create a syllabus about secularism, a short syllabus, essays, even if they’re, if no one’s going to read books, and do these kind of zoom. Conversations with people leaving and wanting to embrace because they’re so excited about socialism.
they’ve shifted like, 180 degrees and are now, have decided that they are all in for the, left and, but they don’t quite know what capitalism is.
So, and it, like that hunger to learn, that. Some religious kids have, ‘cause they want their big questions answered and, familiarity at least with the idea that they’ve gotta go back and study and what just seems like something that would make a, for a great student.
But also, I mean, I would even ask listeners and readers to think about this. What would you do if you were going to give someone five essays, or documentary fragment of film, whatever, to, to try to move someone from, reactionary, evangelical Christianity and maga to, something closer to secular and liberal humanism, .
Democracy. I think it’s a really interesting question. Like, [00:20:00] if you could build a little enlightenment, in, in the soul of someone and do it for yourself at the same time, because why don’t we believe those things, right? Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Like, yeah. yeah, That’s a, it’s a great idea. I mean. We, I, think that has been kind of the biggest failing of the broader non-conservative, or we’ll say non-reaction rate because, ‘cause like an actual conservative supports the enlightenment at this point now, right? And, you look at even people, in the beginning, like, like, Edmund Berger, he was, he supported reason and ideas. He was not a religious fundamental.
Conservatism is not reactionism
HEFFERNAN: I feel somewhat sad for conservatives because you, it always has to return to, the very first conservative you only have like hundreds of years ago. Well, if you go past William Buckley,
SHEFFIELD: Well, Buckley was horrible. I mean, he wasn’t a conservative, I would say. he was a reactionary. I mean, that, that’s the difference. like when you, so in the 20th century, there were basically two figures in, in, in Britain and the us, that the right had to choose between effectively.
And, one was, was Michael Oakeshott, who was, British, and he advocated for a processual view of everything. So, the cognition is a process. State craft is a process. There is no destination. There is only the responsible stewardship of the public trust.
And so, he supported things like national healthcare. He, was, against, reli. He was not religious at all, in fact. And then you had, this other guy who was German [00:22:00] emigre into the United States named Eric Voegelin. And, have you ever heard of him? I don’t.
I don’t. I, he’s,
HEFFERNAN: no,
SHEFFIELD: Basically the Americans chose him. Buckley chose him, and Buckley, in fact basically stole, Vogel’s, one of his signature phrases, “don’t immanentize the eschaton.” That was a, catchphrase that Buckley used a lot and they had on bumper stickers even, to try to make him seem like he was smart, but he actually stole it from, and so
HEFFERNAN: the Escha that’s, that is the, afterlife?
Yes. No. What does it mean?
SHEFFIELD: No, it wasn’t so in Oh, okay. In the sense that Gellin meant it, what he meant was that he was an anti utopian. and, so the point of politics as he saw it was to well basically support, Christian dualism effectively. . and to make it be anti utopian. So make people think, well, things can’t get better, so you should just keep, give up about trying to improve things because they can’t ever be good. Humanity’s fallen, we’re stupid, we’re lazy, we’re worthless. And just accept that and get over it.
And, like that, and that was basically the, idea of Voegelin. But, he dressed it up in, he was just, I mean, he was a horrible guy, frankly, and, just as one example, his, core thesis was, he was railing against what he called Gnosticism. Except Eric Voegelin couldn’t read classical, Hebrew. And then, he also had not even read any Gnostic texts because they hadn’t been discovered when he started doing his research. So,
HEFFERNAN: I mean, I feel
SHEFFIELD: it’s insane.
Jeffrey Epstein and libertarian conservatism
HEFFERNAN: It makes me, it’s sort of, it sort of feels like we shouldn’t give quarters of our brain [00:24:00] left to lately in going through the Epstein files, as they’re turned out, I think of all the intellectuals who I took seriously, who were in Epstein circle and and whose names will be forgotten, including God willing, John Searle and other people that we, that were in the group that I was in with Epstein Edge,
SHEFFIELD: Oh, you were in on that, I did not realize that.
HEFFERNAN: I was in edge.
Yeah. and and. the fact that they, that we’re like fast finding out that for five decades, the American ruling class was depraved in the extreme and extracting everything from, women, children, and had a eugenics plan. I mean, you, it’s, like sort of more polished Q anon.
I mean, it’s just, bizarre. What, or, it’s, and it’s so overwhelming to read the files. I don’t blame anyone for not looking at them, but the victims who are parsing them, especially quickly, especially keenly are finding, just example upon example of how of.
All the kind of domains and spaces and idioms that were captured. And, and that includes bullshit Ry departments, like evolutionary psychology, like, like all kinds of neuroscience. The new atheists, the, certain kinds of Christians that, Peter Thiel Christianity, which we, we’ve talked about Rene Gerard, some of Steve Bannon was obviously School of Epstein, right around Epstein.
Journalists like Michael Wolf. and, and then, if you take the whole, just like, I think I said this in a recent piece in the New Republic, but you take the Victoria’s Secret aesthetic, right? So it’s like affecting people, whether they know it or not, a whole. Sort of way of knowing and understanding the world [00:26:00] paradigm that affects you.
If you step into a mall, into a bath and body works certain sense, the way that the images of girls look, the, very, very useful girls, on the one hand, the evolutionary, that’s all Leslie Wexner program. He is Jeffrey Epstein’s biggest client, benefactor. There’d be no Jeffrey Epstein without the owner of, the, of L brands.
And then at the high level, you have Harvard students in the evolutionary psychology department, much of which sponsor Pinker by Epstein, Steven Pinker. learning that, that rape is a male prerogative because something to do with wolf packs and our ancestors and lions or whatever. And so you, I just, I saw some historian, some just like white historian at, Princeton or something saying we should have listened to critical race theory and gender studies. I mean, they were really calling it, and, I mean, in some ways it’s, so vivid that we now have an actual stories and communication between and among people who were pulling the strings for conferences that introduced, David Brooks and, and Sergey Brinn and, all these masters of the universe and Uber mentioned who really did style themselves and how could you not beaded with your power in the world and see yourself as, as, opposed to slave morality as the nietzche.
Perfect. Nietzsche and Overman. If you were, if you had Ehud Barack in your inbox and Leslie Wexner and Deepak Chopra and no Chomsky and Steve Bannon, and you were. You, must have felt, and any girl you ever wanted, more than a sultan, and, Hamms bin Almon. and and on and if, you were Jeffrey Epstein, you looked at your dumb Yahoo inbox and you saw one name after another like that. Some of them are asking for advice on girls. The former [00:28:00] secretary, treasury secretary, some of them are former presidents like Bill Clinton. You’re making plans to go to your special Lolita Island, pedophile island on the Lolita Express.
How in the world do you not think that you are a God among men? And this is like, you’re the, yeah. And by the way, in terms of real world power, you had a lot of, they had a lot of power over us. extractive power take, like if you, just for men who wonder, can’t imagine identifying with Virginia Giuffre, just think about all the jobs you didn’t get at Harvard and MIT.
think about like the books you didn’t publish while Edge was publishing every year. it’s big Question book and even publishing the works of Jeffrey Epstein in some cases. or, if you’re not intellectual, think about, any number of domains about private equity, about, about politics.
I mean, geopolitics were being discussed in the same breath as Lolita.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, I think, yeah, the thing about the Epstein crimes that, yeah, it did really reveal that I think probably more than anything else is that, there was this class of people who were doctrinated, libertarian, right?
Wingers, and they had been burrowed inside of liberalism. That’s essentially what we’re talking about. . and, you know, so that, and you just go and you go down the line like that. I mean, one of the things about Trumpism that’s been good in a sense is that he’s taken the mask off and encouraged, these people to let their freak flag fly and they are .
you know, and then these Epstein emails, that’s, that is where they’re doing it the most. So, like Larry Summers is not a progressive. Larry Summers is not, he’s a conservative. and and like, and, that’s why I do think it’s, it is very important to [00:30:00] delineate between conservatism and reaction, but they’re not the same.
A conservative and then centrist are actually, most of them are just conservative. That’s what they’re,
Jeffrey Epstein’s crass statements as illustrative of right-wing epistemology
HEFFERNAN: Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I think about with Edge and, and by the way, the reason that I brought that up-- through my own fault didn’t finish that thought. The reason I don’t want to talk about those like European philosophers like Voegelin, whose names will disappear, is that I fear that they are like the cadre of people at Edge who were considered these great thinkers and that, and now that we know that they were at tables, Jeffrey Epstein would ask when philosophy came up, what has this got to do with pussy?
That, that was the what passed for conversation among them. I really have started to think that there are a lot of Ted talk Davos sophistry that we genuflected before in the form of airport books and even Harvard lectures and then forget about, financial policy, at the Treasury Department or foreign policy.
Anyway, I could go on and on, but that we thought were important thinkers and that we’re actually in this circle. Buckley, it seems kind of quaint, it seems like this cocktail party and, in fact included sometimes people like James Baldwin. but the Epstein one is like, when they really get to be on their own, and, they don’t even have to sort of cheat out for the cameras and make it look like they’ve invite, they, they have, they invite women.
so. I guess that’s the way, that’s like how, influential are these philosophers as philosophers? Like they had, this bordia power, they had power to like, make things seem obscurity wrong when you were places and you saw, as I did recently at or not long ago, at a conference, John Searle was there with someone 65 years, his junior, who didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak her language Korean.[00:32:00]
And and then was quickly fired, at, quickly fired after for showing porn to students, at the Sterl department or whatever it’s called. This his own particular department. for showing porn. Yeah, showing porn to students. that guy was at the conference I met him at, with the woman that he was with.
maybe, I think she was more than a teenager, but I. But not much. at that conference, he was the keynote. He had managed to get, first class E for him and for his traveling companion. and yeah, that’s five decades, he’s in his eighties. yeah. And so I, that makes me wonder, what do you do with something that the, what do you do with the Chinese room theory or whatever his legacy is?
I just don’t even want to parse it anymore.
SHEFFIELD: Well, we don’t, I mean, we don’t need his particular formulation of that question, to, to discuss, the, problems of ai, in our large language models as currently constituted.
HEFFERNAN: But maybe we’re asking the wrong question.
If the question that that, Jeffrey Epstein wanted to thought everything came down to is what has this got to do with pussy? I think it’s fair to say like, maybe he’s maybe Epstein’s gloss on their philosophical questions is pretty much the right one. And that, like even s’s question, and I don’t want to go into AI ‘cause obviously it’s not our focus today, but that maybe even URL’s way of looking at things, which incidentally, I heard him give the same talk he gave in 1980 in 2016 and .
It hasn’t aged well. But but maybe he was just asking the wrong questions. Maybe the pe critical race theory people were right, but, dicing up the world of ideas into these tiny, It restricting the domain from which you can speak. And you and I have really [00:34:00] bonded over economics doing this.
Parel saying there’s only one trumping vocabulary in that vocabulary . Is economics. and, the 20th century is filled with people trying to close the argument by, just pointing to something to do with the circulation of money and laws that they keep violating and changing on us, and saying, there has to be structural unemployment and this and that.
Like, why did we even learn those things? They just seem out the window now. Yeah. and, and, that was a per perfect one economics as my, my, co-host at, what Rafi says that, econ, they introduce a Nobel Prize in economics. I’m not sure if Epstein’s Circle ever got that, prize, but they got a, so there’s a physicist who got a Nobel Prize in his circle in 1969.
And from then on. Economists have physics envy and finance bros have economics envy. And anyone who just wants to make a dollar has, finance envy. And so everyone just like economics is just another name for Garage quick. Like it’s just people just who want to make money, who then think the most important thing to do is study economics.
And I think people who want to get laid think that the most important thing to do is study surl. Actually, I can, connect that loop even more if you like to touch on your libertarian point.
This might entrust you. Okay. Sort of came to prominence in the free speech, free love movement in Berkeley.
And he did that. The free speech, free love, movement crystallized over panty raids, which were, a response to co-education. So you have women on campus and, men are amazed and delighted and delirious, or everyone is delighted and delirious and, and they go and start stealing brass and underwear from women’s drawers.
And most women feel somewhat violated by this, but some of them feel like it’s all game, [00:36:00] all fair game. And then is this like a, is this a expellable offense and suddenly it’s a politics around? No, it’s just like expressive high spirits and hijinks and wonderful. And the, some of the girls say like, well, we’re modern women and we think that’s free speech, and we think it’s fine.
Some of them say, no, I should be protected. And that seems prudish and and anyway, we’re off and running on free speech and free love, right. But it’s like this weird violation that in retrospect, you don’t have to be a prude to think someone shouldn’t come and steal your property. And then also has an element of what we’d call revenge porn now, where they’re like wearing the underwear and showing that they, taking it as a trophy and it’s not inconsistent with what has that got to do with pussy?
The whole like reduction of philosophy of a certain kind to that. and you’re right, that libertarianism, right? It’s like personal freedoms comes down often to the freedom to dominate women and children.
Theory of mind and empathy
SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. and that’s why, so yeah, I mean your recent series that you’ve been writing about, the, problem of other minds,
HEFFERNAN: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Like that ultimately is actually. All politics is about it, is about what are other people and do they have the same rights as me? That’s basically what politics is about. And of course the reason why it’s such a perpetual disputation is that we do not have direct proof of anyone else’s mind.
And, so, and so because of that then the moral conclusions then follow that are always, can never be objective. They are always inherently subjective. And so with libertarianism and the 1960s and 1970s, that movement was born [00:38:00] at that same time as kind of a alternative conservatism. That’s really what it’s, and. It is, I like generally speaking, it’s, I would much rather have people be a libertarian than be a reactionary. But, like I would, I probably, if you, some people, some people seem to be either genetically or, socially prone to these types of, beliefs, because they, come from cognition, and they come from, deep seated psychological impulses, like fear of death or fear of change, or, unfamiliarity.
So these are things that, that, are beyond politics, beyond religion, that they, the religion and, politics come from them. yeah.
And in, in essence, most of human history, we have, to think back that again, all cognition is about what is this and what do I do with it?
That is literally what microbes are doing. Also, like your cells and your body. before they can do anything, they have to say, well, this is here, Whatever this is, and that cognition is built on that question, what is this? And, do what with this? And so, with regard to philosophy, this is just all, everything comes from that.
So, like in the, original history of humanity, all questions were philosophy. They literally were like, that’s what, pla Plato’s Academy, that’s what, the, the Lyceum of Aristotle was doing. and they were studying all of, they were studying science, biology, they were studying physics, they were studying, ethics.
They were studying, all of these history. It was all there. It was all one thing. and they were studying religion as well. And so, and so, over time as [00:40:00] religion became more institutionalized. It started to say, well, some things are inappropriate, supernatural, so that’s magic. And we’re going to be against magic.
And magic is bad. And so, so you had, so then everything began to be separated into, religion, magic, and science. and essentially science and religion kind of teamed up to get rid of magic. But magic isn’t inherently wrong. It is a belief in a personal contact with, with physical phenomenon. In other words like that famous phrase of Arthur C. Clark, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So, the two dilemmas that we have right now are “what is the role of magic,” and “what are other minds?” That’s really what our two big questions in society are.
HEFFERNAN: Yeah. I mean, so one of the, in this, so I, I say in this very short series about, about empathy and ultimately about religious tolerance. that, and, other minds. So empathy, so tolerance, That I talk a little bit about, and I don’t know very much, but about, William Penn who, founded the state of the Holy Experiment, the state of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as a place where there would be religious tolerance and freedom of conscience.
And he did this in a partnership with Tom and the affable. I think actually Tom and end, his name Chief Dom, Tom End meant the affable one. and somewhere in that [00:42:00] conversation, untranslated, right, like somewhere in, in the, somehow in the way that they communicated, they made a decision to do something, I think was very, I think maybe very radical not to debate, persuade each other, come to terms, discover that they had the same human heart, find things they had in common.
And maybe, and because. Penn did not want to be proselytized to. And I think one thing when we think about education in the US is that we think about two, two, what I’m realizing about Christians doing deconstruction is that they believe that the only model for education is conversion so that someone is, that it’s sort of violence by another name.
So it’s like some kind of imperialism. When you take a class at an elite university, they’re trying to indoctrinate you to sort of capture you and own your mind. And there’s not a spirit of, Socratic inquiry or other forms of dialectic or dialogue or other kinds of inquiry that where, just out of curiosity, as a curious kid, you get to say as you did, what is it with this Bible passage?
Right? And then the other person can say. Damn if I know, I’ve never noticed that before. Let’s look at it in another translation. Let’s do Right. There is only, and Erika Kirk talks often about how much she loves dialogue. I know exactly what she means. She means I am totally, and Charlie Kirk was completely open to talking to the unenlightened savages and just hearing what they had to say, namely, please save me because I know nothing and then you can come and bless and save and convert me.
Anyway, Penn and Tamin and agreed that they held completely, they had spoke in different idioms, they had completely different cultures. They were practically all but illegible to each other. But the one thing in common is they just wanted to be left alone to speak their language and have their lives.
And so they made this wonderful agreement in retrospect, we don’t have that much of the [00:44:00] documents and pens. Sam Penn’s children actually betrayed the contract they signed, but the contract was live and let live and it was a little bit.
The religious tolerance seems like such a low bar. Liberals especially want to make it something other than that, like ble, a blending of souls or great empathy, or we’re somehow all the same or that, everyone needs to learn every language so they can participate without appropriation, without exoticizing in every other culture somehow. But I think it was both more and less ambitious when Pen and Tamin said, what about you do your thing even if you believe I’m going to hell.
Even if you believe your God is the true God, even if you believe you know that you know by rights, the world belongs to you. And only temporarily am I inhabiting this part of it, and I will likewise believe that mine is the utopia. Mine’s the true God. You’re going to hell, you’re a barbarian. But it doesn’t matter.
We’re never going to try to persuade each other. We’re not going to try to have a circular argument about this. If we haven’t get along or trade this or that with each other, fine. But in general, we’re going to do the thing of knowing that you believe. Things that could be abhorrent to me. I eat knowing you have your own mind and anything could be going on in there.
And it’s a universe. My mind is galactic to me. Your mind’s galactic to you, but, and guess what? I am just not going to come and punch you in the face because of it. That’s it. Yeah. The only restraint today is just that you are, you can sit in your house and think, God, I can’t believe how much those maga people just hate liberals.
They’re just sitting there thinking, wishing Virginia Heffernan goes to hell. I think, I think Tucker Carlson has actually said that with my name, but Tucker Carlson has his mind. It is a whole universe. And just today I’m going to let Tucker Crosson have all his beliefs, and I’m going to tolerate the fact that other people believe something other than mine because how else can we oppose the violence they [00:46:00] do, except by accepting that they have other minds and then.
It doesn’t matter what Jonathan Ross thought. He doesn’t get a full subjectivity that, that Renee Goode doesn’t have that. I don’t have that. You don’t have, we it, he, but we object to the violence that he did.
Rene Girard and Nietzschean Christianity
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. yeah, no, and that’s, and I think that is the right framework. And this is where I think Rene Gerard comes into the picture because
HEFFERNAN: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: He essentially rebuilt Christianity on Nietzsche. That is essentially what has happened. So, that, basically even to, sorry
HEFFERNAN: Matthew, do you want to just tell our pals, why, we’re talking about Rene Gerard?
SHEFFIELD: Oh, sure. Yeah, so, Rene Gerard, he was a French literary critic. Most people haven’t really heard of him. because he didn’t have a lot of prominence while he was alive. But he’s much more influential now. His star pupil was Peter Thiel. And basically Thiel has dedicated his life to, sort of forcing the ideas of Gerard onto the entire world.
So, so Gerard, he was a con, a convert to Catholicism. he started off as a, non-religious postmodern French intellectual, so very steep in the, the French Nietzche tradition, which I think is very badly misreading Nietzche and his project. And so, but basically he took his Nietzschean inclinations, and merged them with his new Christian faith.
and then essentially kind of rewrote Nietzche, but for a Christian audience. So, one of Nietzsche’s, [00:48:00] core ideas being that all, all of society is organized around resentment or using, he, I mean, he borrowed the French word ressentiment, and that he re he recoded that to be saying it’s mimetic desire.
And so all of Girard is basically kind of our rebadged Nietzsche. And of course, I’m sure anybody who’s a ARD fan will be absolutely aghast in me saying that. but nonetheless, it’s true. And, and so, so basically they’ve taken the, core idea of Nietzsche, which is, there are everything is perspective and then moved it to, so therefore we can believe any false objectively, non-scientific belief. Everything is, so basically truth is a function of power rather than a function of, a, of, proof. And, and that is, I mean, essentially what post-structuralism argues, but they are trying to do it from a point of liberating people from that. Whereas this postmodernism that we have today is essentially saying, yes, truth is power and we’re going to take it and we’re going to make you believe our power. And you really see that in this second Trump administration. I mean, basically, Stephen Miller had said, recently, yes, we live in a world of power and that everything is, it comes down to that.
And, it, essentially kind of restating with Thucydides said about foreign policy, that it’s all about the strong do what they will and, the weak suffer what they must.
HEFFERNAN: Yeah, I mean, there’s no, I think, Rorty, Richard Rorty, so my mentors as Rene Gerard was Peter Thiel’s, said that [00:50:00] a liberal, and Rorty was the liberal who uniquely took his own side or say in an argument, right? He believed in actual just liberalism, which has religious tolerance as a key component. But anyway, he said a liberal is a person who thinks just this, the cruelty is the worst thing you can do.
So any, anything that ends in cruelty is something that liberals must oppose. So, whatever immigration policy ends in the shooting of a innocent woman in the face the other night is a policy to oppose whatever your theory of immigration or state boundary state borders or nationalism. it doesn’t matter that po there’s something inhumane about that policy and that’s it.
We just take it from there. But as you point out, Stephen Miller and, and, and Nietzsche, actually believed that the aversion to cruelty was the worst thing you could do. I think you quote in that, the essay you showed me about Gerard, and we should link it ‘cause it’s really was really interesting, great passages from Nietzsche that you pulled out.
But one of them that said, God, I can’t even, he’s just such a terrific diabolically good writer. but something about these men that. Can’t re but respond to suffering in this feminine way by wanting to alleviate it. something like that. I don’t have it. which is like, yeah, there’s something, the terrible weakness in you, if you, if you, shy away from doing cruelty or if you, or, if you want, leave morale to under or soothe suffering.
Right, right. I think I, I saw something by a, I saw an interview with a former, border guard, ice border guard, and, she was talking about all the ways that you [00:52:00] license cruelty in yourself. And mostly it’s, I mean on a mass scale, she’s repenting right now, but, they called, I guess the people, coming over the border.
She was on the sa at the southern border that she called. They call them tonks ‘cause it’s the sound. Flashlight makes when you hit the person on the head to knock them out, but also call them bodies. So only bodies. And she said she was able with some conditioning to see them as not human. And without being able to see them as not human, she never would’ve been able to, gotten over her impulse to care for them, that she felt like was there.
And, we could argue, and I’m not sure it’s worth arguing whether there is a natural instinct to oppose cruelty, but what I like about Rorty is he says, A liberal is a person who thinks the cruelty is the worst thing you can do. So if you, for whatever reason, you do not need to believe in God or Marx or Mao or anything, but if just out in your kind of.
I don’t know, just it like in your infinite possibilities of how you can look at the world like the, microorganism that you just brought up, who like sees a thing and thinks, what should you do with it? If you see an act of cruelty like in Minneapolis the other night and you think that’s the worst thing a human can do, then you sort of know what you’re supposed to do politically.
You don’t then need to derive any of your beliefs from philosophers of the Enlightenment or anywhere else in your private life. You can believe in all the superstitions you want. You’re totally allowed to think that, or actually find that praying for a parking place gets to your parking place.
But it’s not a good basis for policy. In the, public sphere, your beliefs in magic or the Bible or revelation or the fact that we all need to get to Israel for the second coming, that’s not how you [00:54:00] design policy, foreign or otherwise. what you use that your beliefs for are to make your private life beautiful.
And what you use your commitments to ending cruelty for is to make your public life humane. and that’s the best I think I can do to summarize Rty. when you get to Gerard and Nietzsche, you get to kind of. Crazy metaphysics that is essentially science fiction, right? Like at the end of Girard’s life.
a and Teal at times has talked about, really lunatic, end time stuff. They believe in all kinds of sin and they just believe in well, and
SHEFFIELD: They say that liberals are the antichrist. Literally they say,
HEFFERNAN: That’s right.
SHEFFIELD: It’s what they say.
HEFFERNAN: That’s right. Liberals are the antichrist. So they believe that’s right.
Yeah, right. So Thiel has been lecturing on the antichrist. So that’s the kind of world building that they ultimately are doing. And one of the things that comes with their world is a willingness, as in many video games and other sci-fi worlds, a willingness to do countenance, cruelty, to do cruelty, to encourage cruelty.
and and then you see that in Steven Miller. So just a whole world designed to inverting. Not just the principles of, kind of Christlike Christianity or something that seems a little more jesusy than some of this other weird stuff. And, or, but the enlightenment too, but just standard liberalism.
Don’t hit your kids, don’t hit your kids.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
HEFFERNAN: There.
SHEFFIELD: Exactly. yeah. And, the, and that’s why it does go back to the, problem of other minds that, other people have the right to their beliefs and they have the right to their thoughts and they have the right to different thoughts than you do.
HEFFERNAN: Yes.
yes.
SHEFFIELD: And that’s, and, that, and going into [00:56:00] psychology, I mean, developmental psychology, there’s just this enormous corpus of literature about both, developmental psychology in terms of, people have to progress through different cognitive abilities.
And because everybody in our original earliest states, we’re entirely egocentric. And we, we are not able to perceive, the world and pay attention to it and understand it. And you see that just as simply as that, little, Susie doesn’t want to share her toys with her baby brother, because he doesn’t have a right to toys. Only she does.
And that problem unfortunately scales up because a lot of parents don’t impart proper theory of mind into their kids. And then you see it also, this kind of-- so what starts from an egocentric frame of mind also eventually devolves into a fear of other minds.
and I think that’s. That is kind of the core of the appeal of a lot of these reactionary, conservatism in that, because it’s like ostensibly they are Christians and supposedly they care about, society having more Christians in it. But so, so if you’re getting immigrants from illegal or otherwise from Latin America or whatever, these people are Christians and in fact, they’re probably more devout, and more Bible reading and believing than most of their American haters are.
But it doesn’t matter because they’re not full people, because they’re not, they’re not American, they’re not white, or whatever.
HEFFERNAN: Let, okay, first it’s 2 0 4, so I don’t know if we are supposed to meant to keep it to a certain.
SHEFFIELD: We don’t have to, but
Why reactionary Catholicism is becoming more popular in the U.S. far right
HEFFERNAN: Okay. If we can, go on for, 10 more minutes or so.
I, I [00:58:00] hope this doesn’t bring us too far field, although what field are we in to start with? I, when you talk about the Christianity of many of the people, especially, coming over from South America, it, I think one thing we’ve seen since Trump took office a year ago is, a split among Christians.
And that is into see if you agree with me, but I think we’re starting to see a split between Protestants and Catholics assert itself or reassert itself that’s been papered over for a long time and so much that, Martin Luther Kings, I think. Even before he said he imagined had a dream of a world where white and black children would be together.
He thought a world where Protestants and Catholics would be together. now we have, I don’t, I still don’t quite understand where Mormons now fit into the scheme. I know they’re not Catholics. but there’s a different word, right. For Mormon church.
SHEFFIELD: I mean, people would classify them as generically speaking.
HEFFERNAN: Right. Okay. So, but Know it’s Catholics coming over the border. Nick Fuentes is a Catholic, Catholic, Candace Owens is a recent Catholic convert. JD Vance is a Catholic convert. Peter Thiel is, I don’t know if he’s a cradle Catholic, but he certainly became more ardent about it. Like Rene Gerard, who isn’t, was a con, was a, convert.
they have, they’re like in Opus Day there are people who think the current pope and the Pope that preceded him are too far to the left. and, so more Catholic than the Pope put it that way. and they, Tucker Carlson is Catholic Curious. He’s an Episcopalian, but he is talked a lot about how he maybe should be a Catholic and they have a very different relationship to Christian Zionism.[01:00:00]
And this comes to theology than do Protestants who grew up with it. especially evangelicals who grew up with Christian Zionism. And are not quite sure that there is a Judeo-Christian world, right? They think that the church superseded, the people of Israel or Israel, instead of fulfilled a prophecy or that the Jews have still a chosen place, or that the state of Israel under Netanyahu, fulfills some particular thing.
So this is really loud on the right, right now it’s sort of Charlie Kirk, the way that Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes used to show down before Charlie Kirk died. was along some of these lines. and the Catholics in this equation, the reactionary Catholics are much more anti-Semitic. they, they tilt me a Nazi.
They’re isolationist, they’re anti-Israel. they are pro-Palestine in ways that like ominously means that some on the left approve periodically of the things they say. a lot of them. So, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was victim of priest abuse, or at least witnessed pre priest abuse when she was a young Catholic.
And that influenced her obsession with the Epstein case and Q Anon. the sort of idea of a cabal of pedophiles was, actually something she was familiar with. and and I think all that is informing the conversation even around policy issues like Israel. Oh yeah, like support for Israel, and, yeah, and also how to accept immigrants, because Catholics have a giant empire and they have Catholics everywhere, and they, and Nick Fuentes has a Mexican, mother, a grandmother, and, and so a grandfather.
And so, I think there’s a like a little [01:02:00] more hospitality to, to Catholic immigrants also. anyway.
SHEFFIELD: Well, and yeah, and actually, yeah, as far as, and even like with regard to race, I think that’s true as well, that, generally speaking. I mean, if you look at the people who show up to Nick Fuentes events, a lot of them are black, a lot of them are
HEFFERNAN: Hispanic.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah,
HEFFERNAN: That’s right. That’s right. It’s, he’s, can be less of a white nationalist. He’s a Christian nationalist, but, he, yeah. And objects to Trump now, just as Candace Owens does along the lines that he’s like a globalist who’s aligned with Jews. I mean, who knows? Although they do believe that there’s some philosophical reason for this, and Catholics and Protestants haven’t always, you paper over those differences long enough and, yeah.
. And I think the difference between traditional Zionists and Christian Zionists has also been papered over and is splintering, yeah. Right now in interesting ways. This is all just to talk, get more to talk about the right and also talk about Stephen Miller as I think quite a secular figure.
I mean, he, his wife will say any criticism of him is antisemitism, but I think as you point out, it’s straight, it’s doctrinaire, might mix right. Sort of I don’t
SHEFFIELD: Nietzschean.
HEFFERNAN: Very Nietzschean. Yeah. I guess Nietzschean. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. well, so there, yeah, the Catholic point is one that I, think doesn’t get covered in the media as much as it should because within Catholicism, there has, from its very beginning, been an anti-democratic elitist, tradition and that was something that was regnant within the church up until, roughly Vatican two, just a little bit before that. Probably one of the most influential reactionary documents, that has ever been published is the Syllabus of [01:04:00] Errors. and that was, published, by, Pius, 12th, I think. I’m sorry, I might not get the number wrong, so don’t, crucify me guys.
This idea that modernity, is evil and it’s satanic and it has to be stopped. . you know, it, it’s, that is something that they have in common with, far right Protestants, but the far right protestants just do not have any sort of intellectualism, and they don’t have a history.
So, so like, one of the fascinating things about, besides the fact that all that science, magic and, religion, were all together. That’s also the case within the artistic, world as well, that, all political traditions were kind of mixing up, for, centuries.
And you just really saw that, in a lot of the Christian art and literary traditions that existed. like Michelangelo, you obviously was, anyway, that’s it. That bit far afield.
So, but essentially, they right wing anti-modern people have figured out, that Catholicism does have this rich well of monarchists or fascists beliefs that they can draw upon. And so that’s why people like JD Vance have kind of gravitated toward that. I mean, JD Vance is someone, who has always craved stability and obeying authority. that’s what he is done his whole life. He’s not a guy that, wants to think for himself.
He wants the thinking to be done for him more powerful people. And so that Catholic tradition does, it has a lot of appeal and that’s why you are seeing a lot of people, go into it. But that trend existed even before the recent influencer trend. Like when you look at the Federalist Society, [01:06:00] or right-wing judges overwhelmingly historically, they came from, they were either Catholics or Jews.
They were not evangelical. Because evangelicals, their tradition is against intellectualism. It’s against trying to figure things out and use your . . whereas, at least with reactionary Judaism or Catholicism, they, don’t, they’re not against using your mind and just want it for intolerant purposes.
Somatic experience and a politics of determined love
HEFFERNAN: Yeah, I mean, it also should be pointed out that, just as white supremacy and anti-racism or civil rights c grow together, there is also the pope himself, the first American pope who is quite progressive. And, and then the re new interest in liberation theology. It’s really my domain. But, the fact that I’m in New York, we have a democratic socialist, mayor at Democratic socialism was founded in part by Michael Harrington, the great liberation theologian.
and, and the, sort of activist wing of it, I think John Fugelsang, whose parents are a former monk and a former nun who fell in love. When both of them had just taken vows of celibacy, and left and married and had John, and now he’s written separate separation of church and hate about the, the fundamentals of ju of Jesus’s radicalism.
which is something I think of interest to some Catholics. and, and, and, South America has been a, a, site of kind of some liberatory practices. And so with Venezuela and the news and so on, who knows what will happen. But, and obvi and o OBAs day, he has been like really shunted out of the Vatican and, and, JD Vance is, I mean, it seems like the current pope.
Has no trouble [01:08:00] trolling him and subtweeting JD Vance and, otherwise dunking on him. you, he’s pretty explicitly, critical in a, good Chicago, black Hawks way, I dunno. Yeah, Of JD Vance and that, and that, that’s been interesting to see too. But there, there’s life yet in these ancient religions.
and, and, I think one of the things I once again get from Rorty is that there is no real strain of Christianity that points you to policy decisions in the present moment. I mean, I don’t know if you saw this, but a Tucker Carlson interview with Ted Cruz and, he, and, this is before.
I’m not sure if it was before October 7th or not. It must not have been. But Tucker was asking him with his usual antisemitism, but, so I’ll caveat to that, but asking Ted Cruz why he is such a strong supporter of Israel. And Ted Cruz said, well, somewhere in the Bible it says, he who blesses Israel be blessed and he curses Israel be cursed.
And Tucker Crosson says, well, where is that? and Ted Cruz is embarrassed and shuffles around and doesn’t know. And then, tuck Tucker, kind of zings him and tells him where it is, and then, says, well, but is this the Israel in Genesis that’s mentioned in Genesis? Is that the Israel that’s like run by Netanyahu?
and it’s Tucker’s show, but you know, Ted Cruz is in the hot seat the whole time and can’t keep it together and can’t make any point. But the kind of overarching, like, why are we down here in the nuts and bolts of what God said to do about Israel? And someone’s point about some one passage in somewhere in some translation of the Bible that no one can remember, and they’re talking about it.
And these two are debating, like they’re really important theologians and Ted Cruz has a real education, but we’re not seeing any of it because a passage about being blessed and cursed, which are, what are those things? They have no like correlates in the physical world that is determining Israel [01:10:00] policy, that kind of thing is determining Israel policy.
This is a US senator making decisions about whether to further arm, a nation involved in genocide. And what is your grounding for doing that, sir? A passage in the Bible that has unfalsifiable claims about blessing and cursing to do with the word, can’t even remember Israel, that has something to do with something and he can’t even remember it.
Yeah. So like that’s where we are. And and that’s what happens when you take religious reasoning and turn it into guns and violence. so that’s why according to Rorty, you don’t purify your religious thinking so that it’s so great that it immediately leads to perfect policy and moral decisions and ethical decisions in your life.
‘cause you never will do that. You will not refine Bible stories such that you know exactly how to share your toys or not cheat on your wife. It’s just not going to happen. You do these things happen in different lanes. Politics, your political self is a much, well much simpler, but apparently harder thing that it can, you can be too smart for it.
You can’t be too dumb for trying to. Oppose cruelty and prevent cruelty. it’s why things like the video the other night or the images of Gaza, that, Hillary Clinton and what’s her name, Horowitz, would have us never watch because they could cloud our thinking to see videos of Gaza. But those are the things that drive political action.
The same thing happened with Vietnam, with images. Just, it’s very simple. When you’re making a good political decision, you just want to be on the side against cruelty. yeah. And, and then in your personal life, you can dream up as many lizard people and private life as you want. and, our tradition in America of religious tolerance of sort of respect and for other minds of, we don’t have a single religion, we don’t have a single language as much as Trump would have.
It otherwise [01:12:00] means that, within the confines of your brain and your person and maybe your community. You can have all those beliefs, but one thing does not have to inform the other. And listening to William Penn have a whole idea about how the world should be run, or tamin have a whole idea about how the, lenape, were to live their lives.
He was our, he was a leader, right? But just having no interest in telling Penn how to lead his life and vice versa. So what I don’t get is why like Ted Cruz can sit home with his kink about being blessed and cursed and blah, blah, blah, and Israel, and reread the Bible and look things up and pray on his knees and ask for forgiveness and do whatever is little, Christian heart desires, but please don’t go and, please don’t go and continue to vote for a genocide, and then cite the Bible as if that closes the case for anyone but you.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. well, that’s right. And, and, the. and that illustrates, this dichotomy with regard to, blessing Israel or whatnot. that does illustrate kind of the poverty of the evangelical tradition because
HEFFERNAN: Yeah,
SHEFFIELD: what they’ve done is essentially based a vast series of i policies and ideas based on one verse, that, they have taken outta context.
so the, context.
HEFFERNAN: But let’s say they took it, let’s say they took it in context because Nick Fuentes has talked about this too, and he says, well, no, because that is real, is the, as the sym Jews, and later they are the church, sorry, the church supersedes them or what it’s called, like replacement or something.
It’s got the same replacement, whatever.
SHEFFIELD: Supersessionism. Yeah,
HEFFERNAN: supersessionism and, yeah. Excuse me.
SHEFFIELD: I mean, yeah, I mean,
HEFFERNAN: yeah, I mean, all of this sounds, even if it was sounds like Lord of the Rings, like I, okay, the orcs took over. They’re no longer the thing of [01:14:00] the S and the whatever. I am fine to listen to them, I guess.
No, I’m not. I’m impatient listening to sci-fi. I just don’t care. I don’t care about Ted Cruz’s. I mean, Peter Thiel’s Antichrist or Nick Fuentes says thing. Yeah. They lead to neo-Nazis and they lead to whatever. And it’s toy thinking that way lays the rest of us. And like our good brains that could be like, to this exact point of we have ICE in the streets.
So if like you have good strategic ideas about opposing ICE, then that is a very good thing to bring to the table. If you want to talk angels dancing on heads of pins and ENTs and orcs, then you know, there are definitely Reddit boards for that. And I, so in other words, I don’t think that a good biblical scholar, maybe John Fugalsang, or you or, a better reader than all these people should come along and say, well, actually what Jesus wanted was this, and that’s why we should oppose cruelty. or, if you read this carefully, you’ll find out that Israel is or isn’t prophesied as the contemporary state of Israel.
all of that analysis is kind of nothing as opposed to, and again, I get this from Rorty, but, one or two photographs or one or two images of the, Renee Good being shot in the face, for making decisions about what to do.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, so I mean, ultimately, cognitive psychology, it does, basically, I’d say there’s a general consensus, not everybody buys it. The, cognition, there’s basically two types of partnership. There’s what I, call the somatic reasoning, which is the reasoning that comes from your body. It’s your instinct, it’s your intuition. And that’s good enough for most, most things in your life, but it is, [01:16:00] egocentric.
It’s based on your stuff. But, that’s the thing. It is actually the basis for abstract reason, the other kind, because abstract reasoning always has, and this is the problem with large language models, is that they don’t have a somatic core to, to pull from. and so, but the thing is, so, so your somatic intuition’s about your own experience, nobody can falsify that, like .
It’s objectively true that you’ve felt something when you experience something. And so like that’s, that’s the phenomenological basis of all truths. and, so, but the problem is that’s not. That cannot work as a basis for someone else. So in other words, I felt something is not a justification-- somatic experience is not a, it cannot be a source of truth for anyone else.
And so we have to be able to think outside of our own body, in order to, and that’s the basis of society is to say that, our personal experience, it is valid from a civil rights perspective. And it means we have civil rights.
But basically, what you’re describing, like that’s, that was the basis of the enlightenment also, but, and, Penn’s experience of, doing that fits within that larger project, but we just, we haven’t explained it.
So like a lot of people don’t know the history. They don’t, know why this stuff works and why we believe it, and that’s really what it comes down.
HEFFERNAN: Well, I mean if you count as somatic experience the evidence of your eyes and ears, right? I think So we’re now talking somatically about the body.
So the eyes and ears just take a look at the videos about, of the, of the murder the other night and the other day and, and. Whatever your intuition and sense of it [01:18:00] is probably pretty right. they’re definitely, and by the way, that intuition does not have to be whose fault it was, or, it just that gut feeling that you get from photographs and fiction and and works of art, where you know what to do.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
HEFFERNAN: And the thing to do is to make sure that never happens again.
SHEFFIELD: Exactly right.
HEFFERNAN: And
SHEFFIELD: yeah. So,
HEFFERNAN: and that’ss the
SHEFFIELD: truth. Yeah.
HEFFERNAN: And everyone who doesn’t want that to happen again, is on our side. They don’t, it doesn’t matter if they, it doesn’t, it truly doesn’t matter what they believe about immigration reform or if they’re socialists or Antifa or right wingers, or never Trumpers or maga.
If you look at that and think, that should never happen again, then then I want to be in solidarity.
SHEFFIELD: Exactly. And whatever your other beliefs are, we can work it out. That’s it. We believe it.
HEFFERNAN: Your other mind is, your mind is your own place. Yeah. Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: That’s right. Yeah. So like, ultimately the best way to defeat this fascistic, monarchist impulse is a politics of determined love. Like that’s really what we’re talking about here.
HEFFERNAN: Yeah. Rorty says, so told Jurgen Habermas, right before he died, and it’s this like rare, very sincere moment that he just wanted to live in a world where the only law was love.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And yeah. And and we have to do that in our own lives and, promote that as a way of life for everyone else. And we did.
HEFFERNAN: We have to end there. there’s no way. Matthew, thank you so much. I always love talking to you.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, this was great. now, do we know how to end the stream? I don’t know. Can you I see X button.
HEFFERNAN: I see it. I see an X. I’m going to push it. Thank you so much everyone for joining us.
SHEFFIELD: Thank you [01:20:00] everybody. Thank you Virginia!
