Show notes
This episode was a particular joy for me. I had the honor to talk with Jacob Howland. We start with LSD—talking about it, that is — go back to the steam engine in ancient Greece to return to the 20th century’s nuclear bomb and today’s artificial intelligence. What is the interplay of the human condition with ever more potent technology?
What constitutes progress, education, and how can we deal with the challenges of our time?
Jacob Howland served as Provost and Dean of the Intellectual Foundations Program at the University of Austin from 2022 to 2025, and before that, as McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of five books on Plato, Kierkegaard, and the Talmud, and over sixty articles on literature, politics, and the academy for general readers. He will be a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas during the academic year 2026-27.
I was intrigued by a conversation Jacob had with Jordan Peterson talking about the CIA gets its hands on LSD. Jacob described the situation as
“This is potent stuff, what can we do with it?”
Was this a special case or is this our general approach to innovation? Is innovation thus simply reasoning backwards?
What is technology? Since when do we speak of technology?
“The marshalling or harnessing of significant social resources for the explicit purpose of advancing and applying science.”
Mastering and possession of nature, as Descartes put it, is a core aspect of that. During that process, is the focus put too much on the means, while the ends might get lost?
“The means justify the end? […] We can do this, therefore we should do it.”
Innovation and the mindset of the time — do people even understand what was just invented? Example: the steam engine in antiquity.
How does the world appear to people in antiquity, in the Christian tradition, and later in the modern age? Or in other words: when did transforming the world become an objective? Descartes already understands that:
“Desire is implicitly infinite.”
This shifts the relationship between man and world. In what way specifically?
“When we take away the limits of desire, we open up an infinite and unlimited desire for wealth, an unlimited desire for new devices, conveniences and so forth.”
Descartes already expresses that if we become the masters of nature, we might be able to find a way to limit the infirmities of old age and to extend life.
What was the role of Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis? What role did he play for science?
Contemplating the history of technology and science, it appears we are treating new inventions and innovations like children — even those with extraordinary potential. How could we have survived this attitude?
“Technology contains its own fatality.”
What changed between the nuclear bomb and the advent of artificial intelligence?
“We are going to have to trust AI more and more, but we don’t actually know if it is trustworthy.”
What can we learn from Greek mythology about these complexities of technology? What is Pandora’s box?
“We exchange one kind of fatality for another.”
Technology can be transgressive and totalising. How?
“If the idea is to remove all limits, which would be a way of being like God, then, because we are human beings, we will just descend into chaos. […] You can take human beings out of chaos, but you cannot take the chaos out of human beings.”
Is it true that interesting things happen at the edge of chaos, as Stuart Kauffman expressed it?
“When you just have order without the vitality that comes from transgression, you have decay, you have fossilised formalism.”
Henry Adams stated, about 100 years ago: Can the speed of change become too fast for human societies and thus fundamentally destabilising?
“We have a hard time holding two opposing thoughts in our mind.”
But this seems to be increasingly important — a fundamental human skill, in fact. How is this important to assess progress? What changed in the attitude towards progress, especially with young people?
“Moderns and late moderns (us) believe that we can solve problems.”
The way we address complex problems was discussed in other episodes. Noteworthy seems a quotation by Thomas Sowell:
“There are no solutions, only trade-offs”
Can we actually solve a problem in a complex “wicked” environment? How does this help us to understand how technology works? Why is maintenance at the centre of a complex techno-social society? What does that mean specifically? How does politics work, and why will we never arrive at morally perfect situations?
Why is impatience rising and creating unreasonable expectations? Why is humility of huge importance in dealing with complex problems, for instance in science? On the other hand, why is it a bad idea to be afraid of your own shadow?
“I am more concerned by what the bomb is doing already to young people,” C. S. Lewis.
So, how do we go along, surrounded by radical uncertainty? What does this mean for science?
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” Richard Feynman.
“You are dealing with a real scientist when that scientist says: here is what we don’t know.”
In contrast to this, remember Anthony Fauci: “I am Science.”
What is the role of generalists versus specialists to resolve or manage some of these issues? What about different perspectives of time?
“The emphasis in our lives today is on the present. What is happening right now.”
Where is expertise, what is the interplay between specialist knowledge and generalist “connecting tissue”?
“I have never let my ignorance interfere with anything I wanted to study.”
How is this relevant to living a decent and flourishing human life?
But to make it even bolder: Do we have such stagnation in science and society because we have so few generalists?
As a closing question: If the mission is to save (American) education, what are we supposed to do, and do we even have a chance still?
“Harvard College taught little, and that little, ill. But it left the mind open, supple, and ready to receive knowledge,” Henry Adams.
Could we at least get back to this situation again?
“How many universities can we say that about? We have not succeeded in that. […] At the end of the day, we are suffering from a crisis of meaning. Any way we give people more meaning is significant.”
How can we do that? In company with other people, ideally.
There is hope, as Jacob states at the end of the conversation. We are at the start of a reconstruction, as Douglas Murray put it:
“We should be the reconstructionists. The deconstructionists knew something about how to take things apart but, like children with bicycles, had no idea how to put them back together. […] We have the choice either to live in the wastelands or to rebuild them.”
Other Episodes
Episode 148: Künstliche Vernunft? Ein Gespräch mit Jan Juhani Steinmann
Episode 145: Reflexion und Rekonstruktion!
Episode 137: Alles Leben ist Problemlösen
Episode 134: Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt? Transzendent oder Transient
Episode 129: Rules, A Conversation with Prof. Lorraine Daston
Episode 125: Ist Fortschritt möglich? Ideen als Widergänger über Generationen
Episode 118: Science and Decision Making under Uncertainty, A Conversation with Prof. John Ioannidis
Episode 116: Science and Politics, A Conversation with Prof. Jessica Weinkle
Episode 110: The Shock of the Old, a conversation with David Edgerton
Episode 107: How to Organise Complex Societies? A Conversation with Johan Norberg
Episode 74: Apocalype Always
References
Homepage of Jacob Howland
Jordan Peterson & Jacob Howland, Ancient Stories That Bridge The Heavens & The Earth (2025)
René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637)
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627, posthum)
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity(Oxford University Press, 1995)
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (1987)
F. A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)
Horst Rittel, Melvin Webber, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Policy Sciences 4 (1973)
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (ca. 350 BC)
C. S. Lewis, “Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” (Essay, 1958)
Richard Feynman, “What is Science?” (presentation 1966, published inThe Physics Teacher, 1969)
Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge University Press, 1944)
Plato, Timaeus (ca. 360 BC)
H. J. Paton, The Good Will: A Study in the Coherence Theory of Goodness (1927)
Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press, 2018)
Douglas Murray - "The Age of Reconstruction Has Begun!" | ARC 2025