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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So if we fast forward again to middle of the 20th century ideological tyrannies, and this includes fascism, obviously, you... This is like, there's nothing new under the sun.
Right, but so the notion that, like, that might also be part of this resistance. It is. You want to sustain the illusion.
Oh, yes. And in fact, as you were speaking, it occurred to me, I mean, so here are a couple of examples of communism. First of all, we have book five of Plato's Republic. where the women and men are shared in common, etc. It turns out to be a highly stratified society where everyone is miserable, essentially, unless you're sort of the top dog.
But more important is Aristophanes' play Assembly Women, in which the women take over and establish a communist society. Now, this is very interesting for reasons that you may already have gleaned. That is, the evidence shows that women, far more than men, in the United States and in Europe, are left.
Far left, right?
So I would suggest that anyone listening to our discussion who's interested in this might go back and look at Aristophanes' Assembly Women, where the men are essentially infantilized. The women run everything, the men are infantilized. And it's a communist society. So you have all these earlier things.
But one thing I wanted to say here, and I want to mention before I forget it, is that... So why... Sorry, go ahead with that.
Yes, indeed.
Yeah, so let me make another suggestion here. So you mentioned Marx, and what we see in Marx is an overestimation, a serious overestimation of the power of reason. And now reason understood as a productive and political principle. And, I mean, obviously there's a religious background because it's a secularization of the Christian story. Yeah. I think there are several elements here.
And by the way, this goes back to Plato's Republic as well. We can talk about that. But the idea is that, okay, we're going to have a heaven on earth. We're going to have a paradisical society where all men are brothers and so on.
But here's the problem. It is going to be realized by human political productive action. And the difficulty there is, so first of all, it's not emerging organically, okay? It's a political constructivism. So the best society will not emerge organically, but it's to be brought into being by man. Now, it's to be brought into being by man in a particular time and in a particular place.
Right, by a particular man. And when you put those constraints on it, you drastically limit the possibilities within that society. Because it's got to be producible. It's got to be sustainable. It's got to fit the particular parameters, all these kinds of things. Add on to that the delusion that human beings are not, in fact...
let's say, radically local beings who form the most meaningful bonds in particular ways.
But we're universal, right? Yeah, right. And finally, you have this kind of divinization of man, because after all, you know, well, we're going to realize heaven on earth.
And... Where I want to go with this is that that kind of hubris about reason is, I think, well, first of all, it's a characteristic of the modern era. Because you have Descartes saying we're going to be masters and possessors of nature.
Right, right. But that's sort of the end of the whole kind of decay. But if we go back to the early moderns, Um, he even suggests in the discourse on method that maybe medicine will, will make all the infirmities of old age sort of disappear, which means we're not going to die. In which case, by the way, the religious question, uh, is gone.
Like from the, I mean, Descartes writing, he doesn't want his books to be placed on the index, which they were nonetheless, you know, um, and so they're read and they have to be, you know, the Roman Catholic church has to, has to, has to look at them. Um, But the fact is that Roman Catholicism is irrelevant if we're not going to die, right? I mean, in some fundamental sense. But, okay.
Right. But now I want to go back to Leo Strauss, who talks about the permanent questions. And what I've come to understand is the following, that the permanence of the questions arises from the necessity that Athens, so to speak, and now let's just take that to mean reason, like unaided reason, okay?
can't be separated from the biblical alternative, which is the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Well, Strauss writes about this stuff. He writes about, this is not my ideas. He writes about Athens and Jerusalem. But what I'm claiming is this. In order for reason to function in a healthy way, it must conduct itself in the light of the alternative of religion, which is like you can't understand everything on your own. There are massive mysteries, right?
Showing 81–100 of 188 · page 5 of 10
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