Extra: Dinner In Jerusalem & The Middle East Conflict
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- Well, Jordan, it's been amazing to be here in Jerusalem with you. So we were, this got started when you and I were talking about doing some informational kind of series and talks about Western civilization and the roots of Western civilization. I said, well, I'm going to Israel anyway later this year. You want to come to Jerusalem? And well, here we are.

in Jerusalem. You've got the kind of center point of all of Western religion and one of the twin poles of what most people consider to be Western civilization, Jerusalem and Athens, those two poles coming together. I've argued before, and I know you've argued in a similar way but differently, about whether Jerusalem or Athens is more fundamental or whether they're sort of co-equal. But for me, because Jerusalem precedes Athens, both

time-wise and sort of spirituality-wise, I do wonder if in order to even get to the idea of human reason, you have to first take on faith that human beings are capable of understanding the universe, that there's been a touch, a handoff between man and God, where God hands man something of worth. Well, you'd think that would be the case if you thought about it historically or biologically, because it's pretty clear that

human beings acting out religious presuppositions predates human beings acting out presuppositions that are rational by an immense margin and for hundreds of thousands of years in some real sense. And so the narrative vision precedes the objective vision, that's for sure. And maybe you can't say that the Athenian vision is only the objective, but it's

But insofar as it's the basis of the scientific endeavor, which is really in some sense, and the enlightenment endeavor, which is in some sense how it's regarded, then it's objective. And it's very interesting how difficult it is for people to think objectively. It's very difficult for people to think scientifically. Even most scientists don't think scientifically. They still think in terms of consensus. You have to be an outstanding scientist before you actually let

The data modified the theory. The fundamental basis of science, too, I think, this is an argument that I make in Rights Out of History, the fundamental basis of science is predicated on certain root assumptions. Assumptions like the possibility of an objective...

truth that's out there, one that the human mind is capable of grasping and that's worth investigating. And all of that starts with monotheistic faith. And, you know, obviously, if you look at the surroundings and if you hear the surroundings, because I assume that during dinner, we're going to hear the Muezzin call. We'll hear some Jewish prayers and songs over here. And then you'll hear the bells of some of the churches going off. That sort of

that monotheistic faith is the root of those faith propositions? Well, you might ask, you know, to what degree would you have to determine monotheistic? And I would say you have to believe, if you're a scientist, in something transcendent. And you have to believe in something transcendent that transcends your theoretical domain. It's outside of the map that you lay on the territory. You have to believe that encountering that is for the good, for you,

That it's a form of truth, that you could understand it, and that it would be beneficial to people if you did that. And those are all pre-scientific axioms of approach. You know, Thomas Kuhn, when he wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he was one of the first people who delved into what you might describe as the anthropology of science, which was science as something practiced as a habit or as a set of investigative practices.

practices, rather than as a body of descriptive language. And when you train to be a scientist, you train as an apprentice in a laboratory. And partly what you're trained to do is regard the pattern that the data reveals if you're seeking for truth as something superordinate to the presuppositions that you bring to bear on the

situation initially. So you have to believe in this transcendent reality. Now, is it unitary necessarily? Well, you certainly believe if you're a scientist that it coheres and that it has a logos because otherwise you wouldn't regard it as comprehensible. And then you also make a moral judgment, which is that countering that is a good and that good will come out of it. And that's a statement of faith. You know, in the Frankenstein story is sort of the

to that in some sense, right? Is that how do we know that if we continue to make contact with the transcendent object and update our knowledge that we won't just create an endless array of Frankenstein monsters because that's in some sense equally probable. But the scientist has faith that that's not the case. And I think it isn't the case if when you're conducting your science you do it ethically. And that's an interesting thing too that to be a good scientist you have to act ethically. Right. Science would not...

provide limits around itself. And you've seen times in history where science certainly did not provide limits around itself. One of the first places that we stopped today was we stopped by the Shrine of the Book, which was the text of the Qumrun sect, which it's unclear whether it was sort of a mainstream Jewish sect or whether it was sort of a carve-off Jewish sect, but the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in these caves that are in the middle of the Judean desert near sort of the Dead Sea. These things go back

2,200 years. And what's amazing about them, for people who haven't seen them, is that they're immaculately preserved and that the text in them, when it's biblical text, is either very close to or identical with the biblical text that we have today. And one of the points you were making to me when we were discussing there is really kind of amazing, just that the

We find it astonishing that texts are preserved for this long or that ideas are preserved for this long. But that's sort of the natural state of things. When something is important, it gets preserved. Well, and generally, the natural state of things, the farther you go back in time, the natural state of things is that they stay the same. So, Mercurio, Eliade, for example, when he talked about, let's say, prehistoric people, preliterate people, we might say, that no matter what they did, so, for example, when they're fishing,

if they're fishing people, they act out the fishing activities of the exemplary fishing hero. And then that's just replicated across the centuries because

We think that creative innovation is the standard mode of human being in some sense, and that's just not true. First of all, this expansive global technological society that we live in now is only a few thousand years old. At the most, it's 10,000 years old. That's not very old. We've been identical to what we are genetically, at least in principle, about 350,000 years. And for most of that 350,000 year span,

Everything stayed the same. And so the rule is continuity. The exception is change. Now you might say, well, people forget. It's like, do they? Preliterate people have quite the memories in ways that exceed our memory in any manner of ways that you can imagine. And because that's their primary, in some sense, their primary cognitive activity is remembering. You don't write anything down. How else are you going to?

Learn to act and preserve. Yeah, absolutely. And so the shaman in prehistoric societies, they often have a vocabulary that's four or five times as broad as the typical vocabulary of the typical person in that society. Not unlike someone who's extremely educated today in some real sense. And they're the storehouse of the stories of the tribe, of the people. And they pass that down generation to generation. And

The only way there would be an exception to that is if you imagine that in one generation, a stellar genius storyteller emerged who could somehow update the representations. Maybe that happens rarely, but most of the time.

I mean, how many original stories does the typical person think up? It's like, none. How many books does the typical person write? Fiction, none. Zero, right? So, nope. Stasis. Stasis is the name of the game. And that stasis is the predicate to the change. I think we tend to see these things as in opposition, but without the foundation of the stasis, there can't be any change, and that's sort of the story of...

the biblical corpus and the biblical text, right? I mean, the kind of idea that this stuff was preserved over a serious period of time because it was important. And so you better take change incredibly gradually, that that change has to happen with no revolutions, rather sort of gradual evolutions over time because you're playing with fire every time you decide to change something radically. Well, that's the thing is, so you can imagine, here's a way of imagining the structure of the human psyche, right?

is that you have a hierarchy of assumptions. Now, you have a hierarchy of cognitive modules. That's not even the right way. You have a hierarchy of perceptions and actions. That's a better way of thinking about it. And...

You can think about those as descriptions of the world. And that's how a modern person would think that we think. But that isn't the way that we represent the world. We represent the world in some sense as patterns of perception and action.

And those are hierarchically structured. And so what I want to do, what I need to know is how to see the world and act in it. And then there's a limited number of patterns of seeing the world and acting in it that are going to work for me now and me across time. At the same time, they work for you now and you across time and all the other people that have to interact. That's a tight system of constraints. And

There are patterns that can make themselves manifest across that tight system of constraints that are then stable across time, logically, because they're trying to deal with expanses of time. And those are incorporated in stories. They're presented as the characters and deep characters in stories. And we're adapted to the pattern, too, in some real sense, because if a story captures the pattern, then it captures our imagination, right? It's because we've already adapted to...

the pattern that would guide us through social space in the real world. It's like an unmanifest platonic form, and then a story will come along and hit that. You think, oh, that story makes sense. Well, that's a very strange thing that a story will make sense, right? So that means it has to find an echo, right? Because it wouldn't make sense otherwise. And then you might think, well, it's the stories that really capture our imagination, right?

that we remember. Well, obviously, we listen to them because they grip us, and the things that grip us, we remember. So the stories that are remembered for very long periods of time are adapted, like the Dawkins meme, in some real sense, they're adapted to the contours of our imagination. And that imagination is a manifestation of our even more embodied being.

And so the stories have a concordance. Otherwise, why would you remember them? Exactly. This is the point that Sowell makes when he's talking about types of knowledge. In modern society, we're very focused on scientific knowledge because it can be theoretically replicated or because you can test it and you can falsify it. Although I would say that half of science now is not about replication or falsification. It's about acts of faith. But the idea that Sowell says is that if you have a piece of data that's been tried and tested across various periods and across various periods,

and that it works and that it's adaptive, well then what you found is something that obviously is a valuable form of data that dispensing with would be... That's cross-situational generality. Exactly, and would be a huge mistake to simply dump it. And then people wonder, I think, in the modern West why people cling to these stories. And

Maybe the question is better, why are you discarding these stories? What's so threatening about the stories that you feel the necessity to dump them? Why not say that a profound piece of fiction is a story that has cross-situational generality? I mean, how could that not be the case? Because if it didn't have a striking cross-situational importance, significance, utility...

You wouldn't find it relevant. If you didn't find it relevant, you wouldn't find it interesting, you wouldn't attend to it, you certainly wouldn't remember it. And so we have this idea, we juxtapose fiction against fact, let's say, or we juxtapose narrative against fact, and we think of them as antithesis. Well, that's just fiction. It's like, no, no, you don't understand is that if the fiction's gripping, it's because it lays out a pattern of perception and action.

that's cross-situationally valid. And so that's in some sense what makes the story deep. It's not the only thing, but it's definitely part of what makes the story deep. Well, I think that's also why the stories of the Bible are so durable over time is because one of the things we were talking about is we went to the city of David here and it's uncovered incredible ruins, archaeology that goes back

3,000 years in some cases, and they think that they may have uncovered the palace of David. And we were talking specifically about the David and Bathsheba story. And so you may have been standing like right where David looked out and saw Bathsheba bathing on a rooftop. And this idea that that story captures the imagination because it's saying something that's absolutely true about what human beings are and how human beings act. And the Bible doesn't sugarcoat things. It's a temptation of the king. So what happens in that story is the king looks out on the expanse that

presents itself to him and he sees a beautiful woman and he's the king and he thinks, well, I'm the king, why can't I just have her? Which is, and that's sort of mystery. Which is the way it used to work, yeah, exactly. Well, the thing is, the issue there is if you were a king, why wouldn't you think that?

Because obviously you're seeing something that, well, anyone would want, let's say, but certainly you'd want if you were king. And it turns out inconveniently that she's married, but he's the king. So who cares about the damn marriage? And so he sends, what's the general's name? Uriah. Right. To the middle of the worst war around and just has him killed. And you think, well, how reprehensible. But the only reason you think how reprehensible is because you believe...

You have faith in the idea that the king is actually beholden to a transcendent authority. Because otherwise, if the king is the last word, because there's no transcendent authority, then whatever the king does is right by definition. And one of the things that's very interesting about the biblical narratives, and it's something that almost every Western person abides by, even if they don't realize it, is that the biblical narrative is at least part predicated on the idea that

The prophet who speaks the truth has the right to chastise the king. You think, well, where does that idea come from? That's such a preposterous idea. How do you make sense of that idea outside of a religious framework? Or outside of a framework that at least accepts the notion of a transcendental ethic? Right. Because the king cannot sin unless there's a pattern of ethics that transcends human kingship. Well, what would that pattern be? People say, well, I don't believe in God. It's like, well...

But you believe in that, right? What do you mean? Yeah. Well, what do you mean by that exactly? Do you not believe that the king should have a conscience? Is it all a power game, right? Well, you might say, well, that's just... Well, that's right, because then it just devolves into a power game. And then there's no ethics in the power game. The power game is... Sure, the king can take Bathsheba. What's the problem? Of course. That's the whole point of the power. Right? And that's the story of paganism, too. You know, when it talks in the Bible about...

man being made in the image of God. I think that what's really interesting is to compare that to texts of

of the contemporaneous period where if you read Babylonian texts or if you read Egyptian texts, the description of the king is that the king is made in the image of God. The king is a God in many cases, but the common people are nothing. The common people are just the chattel, they're whatever, they're not part of the history. And the Bible says, no, every person is made in the image of God. And that's really a sea change in how we're supposed to see ethics because if every person is made in the image of God, then you're supposed to see the face of the other and recognize that that person is reflective of your face, which is

why, you know, David... It's utterly revolutionary, that idea. It's an amazing idea. It really is. And we take it for granted because we live in the product of it. And so we tend to forget, you know, what we're rooted in. But it is an amazing idea. Well, I ask people in my audience often if they believe that. It's like, do you believe that human beings are made in the image of God? Well, let's take that apart. So the first part is, well, do you believe that human beings can transform potential into habitable order? Well, do you believe people have free will? Well...

No. Well, do you treat them as if they have free will? Well, try treating your wife like she doesn't have free will and see how that works. Try treating your children or yourself that way. So I don't care what you say about whether or not you believe in free will. If you don't predicate your social interactions on that presumption, you're going to be a tyrant or a slave. Right. Right. Now, if you accept that assumption, well, then you can have reciprocal relationships between people.

in some sense, between what would you call self-determining visionaries, something like that. And if you do that, then you'll have people around you that love you and you'll have friends. And if you don't do that, you won't. So the belief comes in the acting that out. And so...

And do you believe people are of essential intrinsic value? Well, the same thing applies in your social relations. You either do or you don't. And if you don't, well, then you're a narcissistic Machiavellian psychopath. And so you can get somewhere with that. It might be better than hiding under your mother's bed, you know, to go out and exploit people. But it's not an optimized solution. And so a lot of what's happening in the biblical narratives is an attempt to

place a characterization around these underlying ethical patterns and to make them more clearly, consciously apprehensible. This is one of the things that I think is so beautiful about the juxtaposition of the Saul narrative and the David narrative, right? When I read that section of the Bible and you have Saul, who appears to be a pretty good guy, generally speaking, and he's

the kingship is taken away from him because he refuses to kill the king of Amalek and he refuses to kill the cattle and all of this stuff. And you have David who commits what appears to be a much worse sin, right? Taking somebody else's wife and sending the husband off to die at the battlefront appears to be a significantly worse sin than not killing the king of the opposing nation and the cattle. But the kingship is taken away from Saul. It's ripped away from him. And the reason it's ripped away from him in the biblical text is because...

is because Saul's immediate appeal is, but the people wanted me not to kill the king and wanted me not to kill the cattle. In other words, his appeal is not a moral appeal about, well, the commandment that I was given, like Abraham would make. It's instrumental. It's the people, right? I care what the people think. He's a populist. He's a populist. What the people think is what really matters. David, when he's told, you violated God's law, his immediate response is to atone and recognize that he's violated God's law, and that's why he's seemingly a man who commits a lot of sins, but is beloved of God. Well, you might ask, too, what's wrong with being a populist? Because you could say...

well, you're supposed to attend to the will of the people. It's like, well, yes, but attending to the will of the people, or let's say attending to the good of the people, is not exactly the same as attending to the easily manipulable whim of the people. And, you know, one of the things you see in the modern political system, it's got worse and worse as far as I can tell, is that politicians govern by opinion poll. Now, when I look at that as a psychologist, I think, you know,

It's really, really difficult to measure what people think. And you might think that you've crafted up a few questions about an issue and that what you get as an answer to those questions is a reliable and valid indicator of what people think. But you have no evidence for that at all. So if a psychologist wants to make a diagnostic questionnaire, the first thing you do is imagine I wanted to know what you think about Israel. So the first thing I would have to do is I would have to

generate maybe a thousand questions about the political situation in Israel. Then I would have to give them to a thousand people to answer the questions. Then I would have to do a statistical analysis to see how the questions clumped. Because then I'd have some sense of what the underlying opinion structure of opinions about Israel is. Then I would have to take the questions that sampled that best

Then I would have to ask you those questions, and then I might have to do it repeatedly, right? Nobody does that. No one does that. No, and so what happens is it's garbage in and garbage out. And so what happens is...

The politicians pay the consultants to craft questions that deliver to the politicians exactly what they want to hear. And then they say, well, you know, that's what public opinion wanted. That's what the people put in. Right, exactly, exactly. This is one of the... It's unbelievably useless. The Bible looks very askance at people acting in direct opposition to a higher code of morality. I mean, people aren't just as capable of violating a higher code of morality as a king is.

I mean, the idea of the tyranny of the majority has fallen out of fashion now because we worship at the altar of democracy. Democracy with a small d, obviously, the idea just being if the people want it, then it must be good. But that obviously is not true. Yeah, you just look at Twitter and you see how true that is. I mean, you can look all over the world at elections that have resulted in the election of actual terrorist groups. And the reality is that there's a lot of acculturation that has to be

created before democracy begins to actually channel the best values of the people rather than the worst mob rule of the people. And everybody agrees with this when certain iterations are given, right? You can find the most ardent Democrat in the United States who would recognize that a state-level piece of legislation in 1955 that barred black people from going to restaurants, that was a populist piece of legislation that presumably was passed by a democratically elected body and

and it was bad and it was wrong and it should be struck down. But it seems to me that democracy has almost become the all-purpose club right now. It's an unthinking person's response to policy disagreements unless somebody's actually undermining the ability of human beings to vote. Yeah, well, it's funny because you do see people...

making a case for transcendent ethics pretty often, even if they're democratic in that whim governed sense. So, I mean, it's an axiom of faith on the left and on the right. But let's say on the left to begin with that slavery is wrong. And I'm not saying slavery isn't wrong. The issue is, why is it wrong?

And the answer is, well... Is it wrong to vote people voted it so? Well, right. No, it's exactly that. It's not that at all. And we know that. I think virtually no one disputes the claim that despite the fact that in the southern U.S., the fact that slavery existed was in part a popular expression of people's will, didn't

mean that it wasn't wrong in any sense. Right. It didn't help at all. It didn't mitigate the wrong in any sense. It's like, okay, well then you're saying that it's wrong in some transcendental sense. Okay, well then it must violate some transcendental principles. Okay, and that means there must be some transcendental principles. And so, well, what are they exactly? Well, there's something like

the autonomy of the individual in relationship to the pursuit of their own ends, something like that. Well, that's still not deep enough. It's like, well, why should each individual be granted that right to sovereignty? Well, because each individual is part of, what would you say, that...

Possessed by a divine spark. It's something like that. Associated with the transcendental in some fundamental... Made in the image of God, you might say. That's exactly it. Yes, exactly that. And I do not see... I do not see...

how you can make an argument against slavery except by walking down that road. Well, I mean, the abolitionists certainly didn't. I mean, that was literally the road that they took in order to convince everybody that slavery was wrong when it had been a common feature of nearly every civilization in all of human history. Right. I mean, that is a radical shift and it's a better understanding of the biblical text, which is...

I think something fundamentally conservative, not in the American conservative sense, but just in the general attitudinal sense, which is that very often the good evolution is not an idea that came fresh out of somebody's mind. It's a reinterpretation of an older idea that had been limited up till now and now is being more broadly universalized, right? The whole idea of man is made in God's image, except

except for those people. And then there's a reinterpretation. No, no, no. Man is made in God's image for everyone. And therefore, that applies to... Well, that's one of the things, too, that annoys me so much about this narrative that the U.S. is fundamentally predicated on the idea of slavery. It's like, no, human society, in some real sense, is fundamentally predicated on the temptation of slavery. But there's a strain of human thought that's

at a higher level, you might say, or on a higher plane that fights against that. And fundamentally, the United States is predicated on that strain. And I think I can't see how that's not self-evident, partly because it came out of the English common law tradition. It's not like the English didn't fight against slavery. Now, people say, well, the English involved themselves in the slave trade, too. It's like, fair enough.

But so did everyone else. And so, I mean, it's alive today, this slave trade. There are 20 million people in bondage in different places around the world. So, yeah, I mean, the question is what made these places different? What made their ideas different? What transformed those? And the only answer is whatever the culture was that developed along these lines that in consonance with eternal ideas moved forward. Well, that's what it looks like to me. I mean, as far as I can tell, that...

that insistence that's essentially a manifestation of Jerusalem, let's say, in this philosophic or theological sense, that is the source of that idea, that radical idea of true individual sovereignty and worth that's inalienable. It's also, as far as I can tell,

You either accept that as the origin point of the idea that you have rights or you make it part of the social contract, which is a very, very risky thing to do. The social contract is dicey in far too many ways and also is not historically accurate. There's no point at which people got together and decided we are forming a social contract now. It was an evolution from smaller social units

in conjunction with others. It wasn't like people actually got down and sat together. And everybody recognizes this. It's a wild misread of Locke to think that when he talks about social contractivity... Yeah, it's a metaphor at best. Exactly. It's an understanding that there's mutual gain to be had, that people...

are part of society as a matter of their continuing involvement in society because, again, contract means mutual gain. There cannot be a contract without mutual gain. But to read it literally the way that people do, or Rousseau does, that essentially you have to create a new contract where every single person signs on the dotted line and you have to do this generation after generation, that's not right. I mean, as Burke talked about, right, and this is, I think, particularly true when you talk about... That's way too propositional, first of all. Yeah, for sure. And as Burke talked about, the reality is that we live

You talk a lot about human beings living embedded in their bodies, that we are not separate from our bodies, but we're also embedded in time, meaning that we are, as Burke suggested, we are part of a contract not between the people who are alive today, but between the past and the future, right? We're a link in a chain. And so every time you suggest that consent is the only value that matters, you're forgetting about what you're standing on and what you have yet to build and what your children are going to be born into. Kids aren't born into a desert island. They're born into a social situation that already exists for them.

And that requires a certain level of gratitude depending on what kind of social situation they're born into because it's what shields them from the darkness outside. It's also suboptimal to give consent to yourself to engage in an activity that doesn't iterate well for yourself. And this is, I think, it's easier to become aware consciously of why you would enslave someone than it is to become conscious of why you would allow them to be free.

And I think the reason for that is that the advantage to defeating someone in a one-off contest is obvious. And the advantage is every child knows this because every child wants to win the game, that game, and might be annoyed if they don't win that game. And the parent has to come along and say, well, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose the game. It matters how you play. It matters whether you're a good sport. And the child doesn't know

What to make of that, because obviously it matters whether you win or lose the game, because you're playing to win and winning is a good thing. And the parent then is out of things to say, because they have to degenerate, parents have to degenerate into kind of a hand-waving men. But the truth of the matter is, is that a game is a subset, any given game is a subset of a set of games.

And the rules that govern a set of games aren't the same rules that govern a game. And you have to play the game so that you're most likely to be victorious in the set of games. And so then you can say, well, if you're a good sport and you don't have a tantrum when you lose and you don't get too triumphant when you win and you distribute credit where it's due and you try to develop your teammates as you develop yourself, then people are going to invite you to play all the time and then you can play forever and then you win.

But that's way harder to think up than, well, I want to win the game. Well, this goes back to something we were talking about earlier today, just because we're looking at an archaeological site that goes back layer upon layer upon layer. And we were talking about the fact that Israel, for example, has a very high rate of childbirth. It's the only Western nation that has an above replacement rate childbirth in, I think it's like three over here.

And we were talking about why that is. And when you feel a burden of the past and when you understand that that burden is oriented toward the future, the iterations that you're talking about are repeated across time. And in the West, because we don't have kids, because we are essentially the last generation, because of that,

winning and losing is the only thing that matters. You don't have to iterate the game over and over, and if you don't have to create a series of rules... Look, the shorter the term, the more winning in that moment is the only thing there is. Right. This iterated issue, too, is very... This is another place where Athens and Jerusalem meet, at least in principle, right? Because...

It is possible that the narrative ethic of love your neighbor is a reflection of the necessity for playing iterated games. And so you could... And it's interesting because Sam Harris, for example, has been trying to draw a universal ethic from the set of objective facts. And there is something about the constraints that are placed on how you act by the necessity of cross-temporal iteration for you, but also...

you're the center of a concentric set of circles. And the iteration has to be able to propagate itself across all those concentric circles. And so that's a very tight set of bounds. You could say, well, you could extract out an ethic from that, and maybe that ethic would look something like the narrative of reciprocity. And that would be a place where the objective and the transcendent would meet.

And I think there's some evidence for that, you know. I mean, Franz de Waal's work with chimps shows pretty clearly that the dominant chimp, which is a misnomer, and maybe a Marxist misnomer at that, is the most reciprocal person

male in the group and often the most reciprocal individual in the group and also the best peacemaker. And that makes for a stable polity among chimpanzees. And they have a male-dominated society. They can be pretty damn aggressive. But power, even among chimpanzees, is not a stable basis for either individual survival or for political stability. And it's not a good reproductive strategy. So the thing is, is that the tyrant chimp

will have sporadic mating opportunities, whereas the completely dependent chimp that is crushed and defeated won't even have that. Right. So...

It's not, maybe the use of power does not doom you to abject 100% certain failure, but it's a suboptimal strategy at best. And, you know, I think that, you know, when we talk about these iterated strategies and how you create social buy-in, one of the things that we were talking about as we walked through Jerusalem, we happened to be here during the festival booths, and we were talking about what the value of ritual is and how my suggestion is that what Judaism and Christianity

Christianity and Islam, too, to a certain extent, are an attempt to concretize the spiritual, that it's an attempt to take moral values and then

if Burke said that you can't teach morals and ethics, you can only teach manners, then it's an attempt to create a system of manners that are iteratable across this entire group of people and create skin in the game buy-in. And that allows you an enormous amount of freedom of thought, because if you all agree that you're going to say, keep Sabbath together and keep kosher together, or if you're in the United States and you're Christian, you're all going to go to church together on Sundays and that you're going, there's going to be a, you're not going to go out to party. Um,

You've established a minimum, an acceptable minimum of shared practice. Right, and when you do that, that allows for the possibility of freedom because I trust you enough to know that you're not trying to destroy my in-group. You're part of my in-group by putting this sort of skin in the game, and so much of religion is about that. It's about those shared rituals that allow you to be part of the in-group. Then the question becomes whether that in-group is so exclusive as to bar outsiders. But ideally...

Your in-group should bind everybody together without being so exclusive that it creates an othering effect where everybody else becomes the enemy. Yeah, well, we tend not to think of belief as that which underlies practice. Because we're so Athenian now, I would say, in some sense in our worldview, that we tend to think of belief as only practice.

Descriptive practice, right? Description, per se. Like, here's the set of facts about the world that I believe are true. That's truth, and that's... But there's predicates of belief that are objects of faith, I suppose, but also they're part of what you presume to be true.

Almost by definition, because you wouldn't act them out. And so one of the things that those who criticize the religious enterprise don't understand is that there are immense elements of it, perhaps the most important elements, that aren't the least bit propositional. So some of it is practice. What do you do? So how do you ritualize your practice?

activity along with other people. Right. And then there's a whole emotional dimension of it. Well, they've called a prayer as part of that. For sure. Right? There's a musical element to that, and there's the attempt to instill awe that's certainly characteristic of, let's say, great church architecture. That's particularly true of what the Europeans managed with their church architecture. And to reduce it to a propositional description, you make religion...

You can argue it out of existence as soon as you do that. Exactly. And I think that once you do that, people... Again, the word embeddedness comes to mind, but religion is an embedded way of living. And I think it's why the West has failed to come to grips with the strength of religion and the continuing strength of religion. So in the West, religion has been largely undermined in favor of a sort of secular materialism. And then everybody wonders, why are all these weird ancient people clinging to their faiths? And it's like, well...

You've created a set of new faiths that seem not particularly wonderful. And maybe it is just the fact that man is a faith creature who's always going to seek this sort of embedding. And the question is whether you accept...

methods of the past for embedding and then gradually change them to adapt to current circumstances, or whether you're creating out of your own head systems of embedding to combine people in these forces. And the systems you're creating out of your head, like most systems created from pure human thought, are really bad. It's not the way that most thought happens. We also think that in the West, that the way we act is a consequence of the way we describe the world. But the way we act is actually a consequence of

how you're brought up and your culture. It's also 400 years of enlightenment manifestations since the dawn of the scientific revolution modifying the ways we act. We think that we act because of a set of propositions. We think if we just tell other people those propositions, then they'll act that way because we think that's how we act. Right. That isn't how we act. Exactly. I mean, and this is why, you know, when George W. Bush was saying there's a desire for freedom in every human heart, it's like, well, maybe...

maybe yes, but not freedom as you define it. Meaning that George W. Bush's definition of freedom wasn't necessarily the definition of freedom of people living in Iraq or people living in Israel or people living in China. Like not everybody has the same definition of these words. They have ways of life that they wish to preserve. Some better, some worse. I'm not a moral relativist on this sort of stuff. But this sort of idea that there's a universal language of freedom that every human heart speaks runs in direct opposition to the fact that there are a bunch of

conflicting values in the human heart. And they are organized in particular hierarchies, and those hierarchies are not always the same. It was pretty cool to walk up the pilgrimage road with you. So this is something that they've discovered over at the City of David. Their sewage pipe burst down in the middle of Silwan, which is an Arab area, and they didn't tear down any of the Arab housing. They instead decided to dig, and they've uncovered this entire pilgrimage road that runs about half a mile from the bottom of the hill all the way up to the Temple Mount. Actually walking through history is...

is kind of an amazing thing. And it does lead you to the literalism and spirituality of the Bible, the idea that you're on a physical ascent to the axis mundi, and that that's a spiritual ascent as well, that the physical is supposed to mirror the spiritual is perfectly evident in that road. And that you're going up and up, of course, metaphorically is towards the good.

And so that's laid out on the geography. Then you have that metaphoric idea made manifest in the road. And then people can walk that. And they're walking a spiritual path and a physical path at the same time. And that is, in some sense, the union of Jerusalem and Athens, right? The physical. We talked about that today, too, with the

with the discovery of the archaeological artefacts. And so the archaeologists who are digging here are using scientific archaeological principles, but they dig up artefacts that are objects that are reflective of the biblical narrative because they've demonstrated that many of the people named in the biblical narrative actually existed. And so now they're nailing the...

the narrative which was starting to float off in space back down to the object and revitalizing the narrative as a consequence. I thought you made a beautiful point about this. We were talking about one of those seals, and one of those seals had an ancient name on it that's described in the Book of Kings. And you were pointing out that even the smallest things that we kind of discard in our daily life may have ripple effects and resonances

2,000 years into the future or 3,000 years into the future in this particular case. And I thought it was a really kind of great lesson for a lot of people. Yeah, well, that's another example of that sort of infinite iteration. You don't know how each of your...

or even your utterances echo. You don't know what you're doing when you launch them forward into the world because there's a spirit embodied in them in some real sense. That's certainly true of every sentence that you utter. And God only knows how that shifts and changes the structure of reality. So it's a daunting idea.

I did get a kick out of you on the speaker's platform over there. They've uncovered the speaker's platform, which was essentially, I guess, the free speech zone of ancient Jerusalem. Yeah, I mean, the idea that people were constantly bickering and fighting and trying to remind each other of the biblical values, even at that time, it gives, number one, the lie to the idea that there was sort of this...

where everybody acted well, because obviously that wasn't true. People were being chided throughout the Bible. But it also reminds you that dissent within the biblical context, dissent to the good, was a vital component of biblical thought. So everybody thinks that the Bible is particularly doctrinaire. There's the Old Testament, and then there's a bunch of prophets, and the prophets come along, and all they're doing for hundreds of pages is just chiding people to act better and reminding them of their obligations. And that's a pretty strong form of dissent to a sort of doctrinaire ideal, supposedly.

Yeah, well, it was very interesting to see

the archaeological dig of the road. And to imagine that now being laid back out so that that entire pathway up to the Temple Mount can be, well, it'll be underground, but people will be able to walk on it again. That's really something. And to think that that was discovered because of a leak in the sewer pipe and that was all buried underneath there and ready to be re-excavated and restored, that was really something to see. That's Jerusalem. Your toilet breaks and you find a piece of 3,000-year-old

that bespeaks the Book of Kings or something. So that's amazing. And then we were able to go to the culmination of that, and that, of course, is when we went up onto the Temple Mount, the hottest piece of property on planet Earth, definitely the flashpoint for an enormous amount of...

but also spirituality. Well, that was the tensest part of the day. Very tense. Do you want to explain why that is a bit? Yeah, I mean, so just geopolitically speaking, Israel in 1967 conquers the rest of the old city of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount compound. The Muslims call it the Al-Aqsa compound. You can hear the muezzin call going out right now from the Al-Aqsa compound.

And Israel immediately hands the keys to the Temple Mount compound to the Islamic Waqf, which is handled by Jordan. So Jordan is in control of many of the sort of laws and regulations on the Temple Mount site. Well, the Jewish state is in control of the territory, but that actual part is controlled by Islamic authorities. Islamic authorities dictate the Jews and Christians are not allowed to

I'm not allowed to pray openly on the Temple Mount. You're not allowed to carry any open symbols of Christianity or Judaism up onto the Temple Mount. Your wife had to put her cross away while we were walking up there. If I wanted to walk in certain areas, I had to put on a baseball cap. You took a photo next to your wife, and they were telling you that you had to separate from your wife, presumably.

presumably because, as with the old Protestant dancing jokes, dancing may lead to, you know... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you standing next to your wife was a threat. So, you know, it's very heavily regulated. There are people who are essentially following you around, watching you to watch for violations. If you violate those rules, you could theoretically be arrested. And so it's very tense. Yeah, well, you can see up there the...

the battle between maps being played out on a territory itself. So the Dome of the Rock had been built over the... The foundation stone, the Holy of Holies. Right, right, right. And so it's the replacement of one center of the world by another center of the world. And that center point in this city is the Temple Mount. And so a huge part of the dispute that still exists here is what...

map is going to predominate on that territory or what assemblage of maps and even though that's a psychological battle, the battle is actually fought over actual territory by actual people and so in that sense I suppose it's actual as well as psychological. It's very interesting to be in a place where the map meets multiple maps or

are juxtaposed with the territory in such a self-evident way, in such a troublesome way. Yeah, it is an amazing thing, especially when you're in Jerusalem and you can just look around the city and you see the proximity. I think for people on just a political level to understand the Middle East conflict, it's almost impossible to do without actually being in an area where you see just how close things are to one another. I mean, we walked out...

the Cotton Gate, which is in the Arab Quarter, and you walk from there into the Jewish Quarter, back toward the Western Wall, and these things are cheek by jowl with one another. I mean, there is no separation. You're talking about areas, I mean, literally right behind us is Silwan on this area, and this is a largely Arab area, a largely Muslim area,

And back here, up there, is a largely Jewish area, and they are right next to each other. I mean, they're in the same camera shot. And that has significant ramifications when people say, "Well, why don't they just figure out a way to live together in peace? Why don't they just find a way to separate from one another? Why don't you split Jerusalem?" Yeah, people always say that. It's, "Why don't they just find a way to live together in peace?" And the whole problem with that sentence is the "just" part. It's like, "Well, that's the simplest thing in the world, to live in peace." It's like, "Is there peace in your family?"

You think that's so simple? Is there peace in your heart? And then you're trying to get all... You can make a statement like that, well, if people just, you know, grew up or if they just got their act together, they'd live in peace. It's like, I don't think there's anything more difficult to attain than peace. For sure. I mean, I don't even know if you can attain peace in your own heart in some sense, unless peace also reigns all around you. And so that might mean the peace that you have in your own heart can't even come about until peace is established everywhere.

Well, in Hebrew, the word for shalom or for peace is shalom, which also is the word for complete, right? Shalem means to be full or complete. And so the idea of peace requiring fullness, that it can't be divided, is, you know, we tend to think of peace as the thing you make between opposites. It's the thing you make between warring fashions. But you can't really make...

Peace can't be made as a compromise. There has to at least be a fundamental agreement on the principle underlying it, or peace is just not going to last. Oh yeah, there has to be a unity and a higher principle. You know, if you're trying to make peace with your wife, she wants something and you want something, the best way to make peace is for both of you to put your heads together and think about how you can both have more than you could have separately, together.

And then you have peace because people think, oh, that's a good deal. I have more than I needed and wanted as a consequence of that arrangement. And that's a peaceful negotiation. And that's a very difficult thing to do. Yeah, especially in this region,

of the world is definitely a very rough thing to do. I mean, I think that the Abraham Accords are a great way of coming to some of those agreements. It's people recognizing that they have priorities other than sort of the religious conflict. We'll put that aside and we'll agree to the things that we can agree to and work on those things together. Well, on the Temple Mount, you can see, in some sense, people of the three Abrahamic faiths are trying to fight out and somewhat peacefully, thank God, somewhat peacefully, how that site can be

holy

across three different traditions. It is important to recognize here that that only happens under Israeli auspices. From 48 to 67, when Jordan ruled this area, it was completely banned to Jews. They wrecked synagogues and churches. It's an unfortunate reality that it's going to take reformers in... Well, it seems like they're making progress on that front in the United Arab Emirates, right? They're building that tri-faith facility there, and there is some real attempt there, as far as I can tell, and this is part of the spirit of the Abraham Accords,

to think that maybe there's enough commonality between the Abrahamic people to unite them, especially maybe in the face of all the threats to that entire Abrahamic tradition that are making themselves manifest in the world. Well, that's the thing that I've been discussing with Muslim friends of mine, people who wildly disagree with me about

things like Israel or Middle East peace. We've been talking about the fact that maybe the true threat to religious practice is not the people who practice the other Abrahamic faith. The true threat is an ideology that seeks to... It'll just dissolve the religious enterprise entirely. I'm ready to add. And it doesn't even, because what it does is... The thing is, is that what happens when you dissolve a functional religious tradition, which would be one that was at least capable of uniting people over some span of time, just speaking...

in the least religious sense possible, you tear that apart, you replace it with some idiot ideology that can't propagate itself across time for even a couple of generations. You think, well, that's not true. It's like, yeah, this is one of the things that always bothered me about the new atheists. Like, well, what about the fascists?

What about the communists? I mean, those ideas sprang out of, I would say, something approximating a secular humanism. It's like, oh no, that had nothing to do with secular humanism. Yeah, the French Revolution. I mean, this has been... Okay, fair enough, guys. But what you had was the demise of one religious system and the instant emergence of a religious system that was so unbelievably pathological that it made the previous pathological religion look like a complete paradise. You want to...

You want to have, what do you want? You want the czars or you want Stalin? It's like, read your history and you'll figure out that real fast. Exactly. And again, I think that goes back to the idea that if there is a higher ethic to be discovered and if it is out there, if it's objective, and if that ethic has been revealed and if it was revealed in Jerusalem, let's say, and that that's what Jerusalem represents, then...

that higher ethic can't come out of us. You know, I think that the lie of Marxism is that it was a discovery about the universe that was objectively true and therefore would instantiate itself over time naturally. And that, of course, was false. I mean, the predictions that Marx makes about economics and about what was going to happen in history were completely not true. Well, and even when they were true, they weren't true for the reasons he thought they were true. Like the idea that capital accrues in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people is sort of true in that

a minority of people always tend to have the majority of the control over any given creative product. That seems like a natural law in some sense. You see that manifested itself in all sorts of domains that aren't merely economic. But he was wrong in that that was...

the cause, the consequence of capitalism per se. He was wrong that other economic systems wouldn't produce the same end. He was wrong also in that there is a 1% that controls 90%, but the

the people who occupy that 1% churn a lot. Right. A lot. And he, I mean, most clearly he was wrong about the immiseration of the workers. I mean, the idea that the workers would be immiserated and so there would be a worldwide revolution was clearly false. So the faith was falsified. So the answer was to change the nature of the claim of the faith. That's for sure. Which was sort of Lenin's great discovery is if I just

sort of pretend that the historical projections never happened, or here's the reason why they didn't happen, and so they still might be fulfilled by a peasantry in Russia, which was precisely the opposite of what Marx claimed. He thought it was going to be a middle class or a lower class in Britain, an industrialized nation who had been immiserated by working the factories, and instead it turns out to be a bunch of serfs in Russia who are rebelling against the landlords. Yeah, it also turned out that people weren't comparatively immiserated by the factories. In fact, they were comparatively elevated by the factories. Right, exactly. And so even though those factories...

Well, you can see what happened when the factories got established in China. The Chinese decided pretty damn quickly that working on a farm or on a factory was a hell of a lot better than perishing while starving under Mao. The utopian creations of our own brains are significantly more dangerous, historically speaking, than a gradual evolution of a well-accepted system of ethics that results particularly in a series of commandments that can be

in daily life. And significantly less fulfilling also because again, all of the modern theory that's based on sort of the Hobbesian notion that what man seeks is pleasure and seeks to avoid is pain, that's just not correct. I mean, it's not correct in any fundamental sense. It may be true on a moment-to-moment sense, but people routinely seek out pain in pursuit of a higher pleasure, right? Well, it's also predicated on the idea that what constitutes pleasure and what constitutes pain is momentarily self-evident.

Which it isn't, because sometimes the most pleasurable things require a fair bit of pain to attain. And so, again, it's the problem of iteration. It's like, well, pleasure and pain computed over what time frame? Well, we're not going to address that. It's obvious. It's like, no, it's not. It's not obvious in the least. And so it's just specious. You see this with these arguments of that sort, that men pursue pleasure and avoid pain. It's like...

You are acting as if what pleasure and pain constitute are self-evident descriptions of the structure of underlying reality. You've crammed all of underlying reality into those two words then. It's like, well, here's what motivates us, pleasure and pain. You've divided the whole cosmos into those two things. And then you think, well, I'm just going to accept that axiomatic proposition. You know what pleasure is then, do you? Right.

It's like, well, that's not so simple. It's certainly not so simple psychologically. And, you know, when economists test out those predictions, say, made on that narrow utilitarianism, which is bound in the moment, they find people don't act like that at all. And the behavioral economists have demolished the conceptual pre-struct, preconceptions of classical economists

by playing relatively simple trading games and showing, well, no, people don't actually act like that at all if you actually look at how they act. So, yeah, I think that what being in a place like this really reminds you of is, again, the suppositions that we make in the West about human activity and human motivation are just plain wrong in many cases because, again, once... That's the flaw of rationalism rather than the flaw of empiricism. Right, exactly.

Yep. I mean, this is the sort of Michael Oakeshott or F.A. Hayek point, which is that you can rationalize your way into anything. And you believe, again, like you were saying, that what you're doing is for quote-unquote rational reasons. But the reality is that what you're doing, you're doing because it was most likely handed down to you over an extraordinary period of time and you were brought up in it to the point where you were acculturated to it. And to simply reject that heritage...

out of a fit of pique or in a search for individual identity. I mean, that's the real danger that I see right now is that

It used to be, at least you could make the case, and now I'm going to steal man-Marxism for a second, but at least you could make the case that it was a search for a better world, that it was the search for a better form of humanity, communally speaking, we were all going to live better together because if we transform our community, then we'll transform the individual. It's wrong, but at least you make the case. Yeah, well, you could make the case that before it was demonstrated to be wrong, it was at least arguably plausible. Right, and now, because that failed, the replacement for that was not, okay, maybe we ought to think

again about what it is that we lost, maybe what we're actually thinking about is something more. Maybe what we're actually thinking about is... Maybe what we actually are thinking about is...

should be just ourselves, free-floating individual souls that are wandering about in the chaos, and that's what we should be shooting for. Forget the community entirely. Forget transforming social conditions. None of that really matters. The only social condition that ought to be transformed is the one that hems me in on an individual level. Right, well, that's kind of a degenerate of liberal Protestantism, I would say, to some degree. So the only thing that's real is the ultimately atomized individual, and that's such a catastrophically...

self-defeating view. I mean, I see this practically too. I think part of the reason my lectures, I know part of the reason my lectures have been attractive to people is because I've been able to make the case that you're most likely to find the meaning that sustains you in life as a consequence of adopting responsibility in relationship to others. And then you can just explain to people how that works as well. Let's say you're really sick.

Something's gone wrong in your life, which is going to happen. Well, hedonism isn't going to save you then, that's for sure, because that's gone. And then, well, what are you going to rely on to get you through that? Well, let's say you're alone and isolated, and you've never taken responsibility for anyone. It's like, oh, good, so now you're going to be sick and suffering alone. That's going to end well. Or alternatively, you know, you've put some time and effort into the people around you, and they're there to buoy you up when...

the catastrophe comes, and all that's accrued through responsibility. And maybe even there'll be something to you that's there to buoy you up through catastrophe because you've sacrificed your narrow, whim-based, atomistic, liberal, Protestant hedonism to something like service of your

service to your higher self, that iterated self across time, maybe across generations. So you have some character to rely on when the storms come too. People understand that very quickly if you explain it to them. It's like, oh, that's how it, that's why I should take responsibility. It's like, yeah, yeah, that's building an arc, man. That's for sure. It's also, because you're speaking intergenerationally, I think that what really gets lost in the sort of liberal ethic that you're talking about, because it's so individualist, there's this

peculiar version of what Marxists would call homo-economists, right? The Marxist critique of capitalism is that capitalism is largely about individuals who act in their own rational self-interest with regard to capital, and that's not true. That's not exactly how people work. Right, well, it's partly because what do you mean rational self-interest exactly? Right, and so this is the work of Kahneman and the behavioral economists you're talking about is to debunk a lot of that. And so the...

Corollary to that is this idea that human beings are always grown up. Children are grown ups. They're sort of in a rational...

And that individual is all that matters at the heart of you. And they're never a child. They don't need any boundaries. They don't need any rules. They don't need any structures. And so if we get rid of all that stuff, then you can be the true you. The true you, yeah. A four-year-old can't be the true you. But you start to see this ethic creep into that right now. All structures are barriers. Right. Now four-year-olds and five-year-olds can be the true you, right? The true you is identified by mommy and daddy, of course, who can identify your rule-breaking behavior immediately. But if you actually want to bring up a child... All rebellion against...

social order is the true you. Exactly. God, what a dismal view that is. And dangerous to kids because kids actually need these structures. I mean, what we're really talking about... Well, kids actually manifest those rebellious behaviors precisely to discover the structures because they're looking to be hemmed in in relationship to their anxiety. So they go, they push and they push and they think, well, I'm hoping I'm going to find a wall here because otherwise I'm in an infinite expanse.

And they'll keep pushing. And if the expanse gets big enough, then the child is, in some sense, just the child has no choice but to collapse into himself. That's what happens when a child has had enough. It's like, well, that's too much. There's too much choice. There's too much possibility. There's too much chaos. And that's a terrible thing to do to a child.

They want the domain of constrained choice they're capable of mastering at their developmental level. And that's what it's up to you to provide as a parent. No more challenge than...

than necessary. And this is why, you know, it's interesting. My parents became more religious when I was a kid. They'd always been interested in religion, but they hadn't become fully religious. They became Orthodox when I was maybe 9, 10, 11 years old. And one of the reasons for that is because my mom and dad basically decided there needs to be some system within which we raise our children. And that system has to both make sense to us, but also has to provide a grounding and a set of boundaries that are behaviorally good for our kids.

And as people abandon parenthood, the easiest thing for yourself, because you're a rational adult, of course, and you can pursue your own self-interest how you see fit, is to abandon religion because it allows you to pursue whatever pleasure you wish to pursue. But when you're raising it... Say, whatever whim. Right, exactly. But when it comes to your kids, this is where people start to get correctly defensive. And one of the great tragedies of the West is that, as we've had fewer kids, it's tied you less to the institutions that are necessary to actually preserve the society. Because what

What preserves a society is how you raise your kids. That's the most important thing that you do. You're not bound by the necessity of long-term iteration, which is the sustainability the leftists are always talking about. That's really that. That's a great, by the way, that is a great term, meaning, like, we're constantly talking about environmental sustainability. What about human sustainability? Well, those aren't even separable. Because if we destroy human sustainability, we'll absolutely destroy the planet. Clearly. Obviously.

you know, will degenerate into nuclear war or will demolish the environment in fits of starvation and catastrophe. So there's no saving the planet outside

the truly sustainable human enterprise. For better or worse, we're stewards of the garden. That's the nature of the cosmos. That's for sure. And I don't think, but I think we don't think often enough in terms of how do you sustain human civilization? How do you maintain? Or in your words, how do you cultivate? I think that we worry mostly about just walking around naked in the garden as much as humanly possible. And

That cultivation is a real thing. Like, that's an amazing thing in Genesis. Like, the notion that you're placed in paradise, but you have a job. That's not the way that people think now, right? If you're placed in paradise, the first thing you do is you vacation, right? You don't have a job. You don't have anything to do. Right, exactly. And the first thing God says is, you're in the garden. Here's a few things for you to do, right? You're going to name some animals. You're going to keep and cultivate...

the garden because the idea is even in paradise human beings have to have something to do and the thing to do is to continue to cultivate that garden and make sure that that garden is operational and safe a better and better garden and when you ignore that and when you just eat the fruit of the garden without continuing the cultivation when you neglect your duty then that's when the snake wins presumably so it's

These are all concepts that I think that the West has forgotten a little bit. Well, it's something to be able to think of responsibility as opportunity and not constraint. And that, I mean, I would say of all the things that I've been talking to people about, that's the one that strikes home most particularly, that responsibility is opportunity and not constraint. The narrative world and the objective world

It's the juxtaposition of the narrative world, and that would be Jerusalem in some real sense, and the objective world that defines Western civilization. And you see that narrative spirit attempting to revivify itself in the Jerusalem of today. And that's a good thing, because that narrative spirit, if that deep and meat narrative spirit doesn't rejuvenate itself, it will just be replaced by far inferior things.

variants, far inferior variants, dangerous, shallow, unsustainable, anxiety-provoking, hopeless, miserable, vengeful, murderous. Yeah. So a better vision than that is definitely something we need. And it's certainly the case that everyone here, I would say to some degree, is striving to produce that, stumbling uphill towards the temple on the Mount and the city of God.

If the city of peace can be created, it's going to be through the principles of the city of peace, which is why it's named that way. And the place where Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac, the place where Jacob had his dream of angels going up and down. My prayer at the end of the meal is that the angels that descend up and down in Jacob's dream continue to connect the higher realms.

to the lower and that we ought to learn from that and that we ought to strengthen that connection in ourselves and for our communities and for our civilization. That's right. We could add to that a prayer that we have enough sense as individuals to allow that ladder to move its information, its message up and down the different realms of being, right, within the confines of our own thought and our own life. So, yeah, that's a good prayer. That's for sure. Cheers. Cheers.