Jacob Howland
speaker
188 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jacob Howland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, so let's go back to the... Yeah, so like the fruitfulness of the question. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, I think this is absolutely crucial, and... Let me say that there is a question that I know to be absolutely fundamental. And I know it to be fundamental because it shows up both in the Hebrew Bible and in Plato.
In Plato, it shows up in the very first sentence of Plato's Phaedrus. And in the Hebrew Bible, it shows up when Hagar runs away from Sarah for the first time. And the angel comes to her in the wilderness. And the question is, where have you been and where are you going? Okay.
There's a question. Now, for me, this is absolutely fundamental for individuals, for families, for tribes, for nations, for societies. And I view it as an urgent question today.
Well, I mean, first of all, it seems to me that Each part of that, and let's say, where are you now? Yeah. Okay, this is crucial. No part of it can be answered without the answers to the other two, okay?
Because, look, the future is trackless. Where are we going? Well, our only resource really is where are we now and where have we been? More fully, I would say that, and this is just my hypothesis, but I think there's a lot to it, that there are no really fruitful growths in the future that don't come out of the soil of the past. That is to say, a rich understanding of the past.
and I've shared this with a lot of colleagues and friends, I actually think that part of the hostility to studying the Western tradition on the part of those who are antagonistic to the West comes from the fact that studying the great books actually makes you not only intellectually conservative, but in some ways politically conservative.
Conservative enough, for example, to say that we need to study the Western tradition. They're all related.
Yeah. Look, I mean, here's another thing that, I mean, you mentioned Mao. Now, as you know, under Mao, the little Shinto shrines and things that people had in their homes were replaced by pictures of Mao. They worshipped Mao.
And at the same time, Mao, Stalin, whoever, these guys had this notion of a new man. We're going to have a new man. Yeah, new. New. But here's the thing. Actually, it's all very, very old. So we were talking about Exodus. And so let me just throw this out. I happen to have just taught a couple of classes on Exodus I filled in for one of our professors.
The way I look at that book, one main thing that's happening there is that book of the Bible is presenting you with the following alternative. Either... You enslave yourself to Pharaoh or you enslave yourself to God.
Well, okay.
Okay, right.
No, no, I mean, you're absolutely right. Let's just imagine that Moses had never returned and, you know, they got the calf, whatever. Now, that's not going to be a very long-lasting thing. But what I want to say here is, then the question is, well, what is Pharaoh? What does Pharaoh mean? What's Pharaoh? Pharaoh is a man-god. By the way...
Aside from the Jews who are trying to start a Hebrew republic, and the Greeks, which are these little islands of liberty in a sea of despotism, everyone else is man-gods. I mean, the Persian emperor, the Egyptians, etc.
Yeah, right, right. That's a very sophisticated view of... And, you know, I mean, in, for example, Aeschylus' Persians, which is about the defeat of Xerxes' army in the Second Persian War, Xerxes can't be held to account because he's divine. Yeah, right.
But what's interesting about Pharaoh is that, first of all, it is the most... not only the most technically advanced, I would even call it a technological civilization. If you've been to Egypt, as I have, you see the pyramids, right? And nobody even knows how these things were made. There are blocks that are much larger than this fairly large room we're sitting in.
You know, they made the most amazing jewelry ever produced. And we have a bunch of it just because a bunch of it was shoved in a tiny little room, the burial site of King Tutankhamen. Who knows what the Tomb of Ramses had in it? They had these massive granite obelisks and all this stuff.
The entire society was dedicated to the elevation and the monumentalization and the memorialization of the pharaoh. So it's the exaltation of the man-god. And so what pharaoh means today is the elevation of man to a god. Now, we do this, by the way, I mean, Freud has this phrase in civilization and its discontents about how modern man is a prosthetic God, right?
Like we equip ourselves with all these tools and things like this. So that's a huge temptation. But the suggestion of the Bible is if you go in that direction, you're going to have a kind of totalitarian society.
Yes, exactly. But there can be lots of slaves, right? So for example, in Persia, the emperor, whether it was Xerxes or Darius or Cyrus, everyone else was known as the king's slave, including the members of his family. So you have that. Now you can do that, but the alternative then is bowing down to God. And being a slave, or if you want to put it in a softer way, a servant to God.
Showing 61–80 of 188 · page 4 of 10
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