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
But I think this is really, really important because if you don't start with the notion that there is a reality and the reality is good, that it has some kind of intelligibility, et cetera. Oh, but actually now I'm interrupting myself. Let me just say this. Niels Bohr, here's the humility. Niels Bohr was like the man, incredible physicist.
He never spoke of the laws of nature, never spoke of them because he was humble. And people use the word laws of nature, but the fact is there's no proof that these are laws. I mean, first of all, our horizon is tiny. Are the same laws 10 billion light years away? You know, whatever. Okay. But second, he spoke about regularities of phenomena, right?
So here we have someone who's genuinely understanding laws. you know, nuclear physics, which, I mean, we're talking about, you know, 10 to the minus 23rd or something, just like stuff that you, I mean, you can't see these things. You can see the effects of them and so forth. And so he's making advances, but he has this humility.
And now we're getting down to some really fundamental questions. And so I'm going to take a little shift here. Douglas Murray's book, The War on the West, he's got this wonderful passage where he says, you can stand in front of a painting and you can look at it and you can say, hmm, this peculiar blue pigment, was that sourced from some country that was in poverty?
Was the apprentice who stretched the canvas paid money? Are the fibers, did they get, so you can, in other words, you can, you can, to use a, this isn't quite the right word, like deconstruct. In other words. Close enough. Yeah, you can, and what I realized in reading that passage is there's no end to it. I mean, I can look and say, no, you know, you're wearing this suit, Dr. Peterson.
You know, where, it doesn't, anything can be taken apart this way. Or.
Yes.
You'll find a problem. Yeah. Or, Douglas Murray says, you can rejoice in the picture that Raphael has painted of the Virgin ascending to heaven. And what I realized in thinking about that is, here's the really fundamental premise. Like, what distinguishes these two approaches? And I think it is the view that the world is good or not.
In other words, if you start from that and say, there's goodness here. then you're going to look for the goodness. And there's beauty and there's truth. You're going to look for that.
And you may find it. And if you don't, then everything follows from that. And I've been thinking about this a lot.
Well, yes, indeed. And if you're not looking for it, you're not going to find it. But to me, then this becomes, maybe it's a psychological question. Because if that's the fundamental question, right? You've got these folks over here who want to burn down and destroy and wreck and repudiate. And these folks over here who want to build and want to solve and want to progress and want to repair.
And if the difference between them is that fundamental premise, the world is good, the world is bad.
Right. That's very interesting. I did not know that. Yes.
Well, and look, I mean, now we're in the age of AI. And this is an incredibly powerful technological force. And imagine, you don't have to imagine, unfortunately, what would it mean for experts and technicians with comprehensive capabilities to use AI and implement it and make it stronger? had no philosophical anthropology, had no understanding of the human mind.
They invent devices that cause serious depression and mental illness in teenage girls.
Exactly, exactly.
Exactly. Yeah. And you know my image for this. I started thinking about the Inferno as a kind of political text.
And the fact is that, you know, you get to the Ninth Circle and Dante's beautiful... creation, invention is that it's ice. Everyone's frozen in the ice. Isn't this like today where, or at least, I mean, now the ice is melting and maybe we've gone through that center of the earth and come out the other side, but
You have Lucifer, who towers up like a thousand feet because he's come from the other side of the world and jammed into the middle. And he's compared to like this mechanical, like a windmill, and he's chewing on Brutus and Gaius and Cassius, these traitors. And all these people are frozen in the ice, and they're completely isolated. No one can speak, not even Lucifer. His mouth is full.
No speech, no connection with each other, an eternity of atomization. This is the effect of the social media. And by the way, Lucifer has three faces, right? And he's way up high. He can look down, he can spy, he can survey the kingdom. It's just this incredible political image.
Showing 161–180 of 188 · page 9 of 10
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