Low and welcome to Mythic Mind, where we pursue wisdom in the past between
primary secondary worlds. I'm your host, Andrew Snyder, and I am sincerely
glad for your company. Okay, so I'm obviously off schedule again, and
that just is what it is. I'm currently teaching more classes with more students
than I ever had before, and I'm also just about to add a third
university to the mix. And so with that being said, I'm going to
get things out as I'm able to, with no clear scheduling promises. If
you would like for me to get to a place where I can consistently produce
content, I welcome your support on Patreon at patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind.
As public support hits higher level, I'll be able to decrease my institutional
teaching load accordingly. And if you already support me, I'm really appreciative and
I hope that you'll see value in sticking with me for a long time to
come. One more thing before I hit the main point of this episode.
As many of you know by now, I'm leading a summer study starting in
May on the fiction and philosophy of C. S. Lewis as a community.
We're going to be working through the Ransom trilogy, screw Tape Letters till
we have Faces, the Great Divorce, and Narnia. Each week we'll have
one or two asynchronous videos related to the reading recommended secondary reading, suggested prompts
for producing content that can be published through the Mythic Mind channels, live meetings
which will be recorded and available if you can't attend, and a discord channel
for ongoing conversation. We already have forty two people signed up, so this
is going to be a really dynamic community dealing with some really dynamic material.
And you can find a link to the class in the show notes. Oh
and because this is February, the month of Venus, I'm currently running a
special promo. If you sign up this month, which is nearly over this
point, you can use the code Parlandra at checkout to receive twenty five percent
off tuition. Additionally, if you send me a message after you enroll this
month in February, I will send you one course text that you did not
already have, and if you already have them already, I will send you
something else. You can find the link to the course and that promo code
in the show notes and for the book. You can reach out to me
on Twitter or email me at Mythicmindpodcast at gmail dot com. I was recently
invited onto the Classical Life podcast to discuss Tolkien, Lewis and related topics.
I'm including a snippet of that conversation, but encourage you to head over to
the Classical Life podcast to listen to the entire thing. And so here is
that snippet. But there's been no author like Georgia Lwell the Brave New World.
None of them have been as prescient as Tokien and Lewis with their belief
in the technocracy. And I think that's true in the aspect of the Ransom
trilogy, but I think it's also true in a different you know, the
men without Chest that he talks about in the Abolition of Man, he kind
of puts in his vision of the last days of Narnia, especially with the
Dwarves and these people that would get so wrapped up in a reality that's also
simultaneously in unreality at the same time. It's like these half truths and the
dwarves that get stuck in their own imaginations. And I just see that everywhere
all the time with these people who are just like the Dwarves are. For
the Dwarves, we won't get taken in. But you got so worried about
not getting taken in that now you can't be taken out when the actual Because
the hardest thing to grapple with is the Dwarves were right when it came to
the stable. What was said is in the stable isn't what was in the
stable. But the problem is at some point the stable got removed, and
like the stable's not even there anymore. You're you're on the other side.
But you were so enraptured that you were right about this one thing that you
couldn't see all of the other things that are happening at the same time.
And I just see that everywhere with people who are just enraptured and enthralled with
these conspiracy theories that are half truths. You know, parts of them are
real, parts of them aren't real. But if you get so obsessed with
these certain things that you can't see anything, then you you will you'll be
so taken into yourself, you'll get so reclused into or you'll get so enraptured
in trying not to be deceived, that you'll end up deceiving yourself essentially,
and you won't be able to see the truth when it comes. Yeah,
I think that's true. I mean the dwarves are for the dwarfs, they
were not going to get taken in. They have this idea that you know,
unlike everybody else, they could just see the world for what it was.
Yeah, and that really gets to that. But Tolkien andlew Has had
that the modern myth is that they don't live according to a myth, right
that the Yeah exactly, you know, I, like I said, I
teach intro to philosophy at a public university and one thing that I'm one thing
that I'm doing on a regular basis is just helping them understand that they have
an understanding of the world already. Meaning nobody is the you know, totally
neutral or even that the you know, total relativist that they claim to be.
That everybody has a worldview that they're imposing upon the world. And so
even if we go the naturalistic scientific approach, which is still pretty popular into
post postmodernity despite some contradictions there, but you know, they say that we
just see the world as it is through science. The problem is the presuppositions
it takes to get to that point are not themselves scientific. Right, There's
no scientific experiment you can run that's going to demonstrate that knowledge is only to
be found in science. And so, you know, what that shows us
is that there are other non scientific, even metaphysical forces that are driving the
modern worldview despite its claims. And so what that means is that you know,
even the naturalists, the scientist is not seeing the world as it is.
They're being led by metaphysical reality. The only problem is they're not willing
to look at what they are and so they're essentially being led by the voices
of race that are not going to lead them where they want to go at
the very least not where everybody else wants them to go. Yeah. Yeah,
there's two things that are really interesting. I. C. S.
Lewis has a lot to say about science and what science can and can't do.
One of the examples I really enjoyed when he was talking about the concept
of miracles is you know, if you're hitting a pool ball and you're trying
and you can figure all the geometry to get it there, but you can't
figure out if somebody else is going to come and grab the cue before it
even hits the ball. So that's one thing. The other thing is,
yeah, I mean, I know, I go to a public university,
and it's just astounding the levels of relativism that that you see there that people
and people think they're they're trapped by this materialism, that they think that there
is nothing out there. But at the same time they're the materialist magicians that
Lewis once again talks about in screwtape letters, who believe in You know,
I can't tell you how many times I've been called foolish for believing in God.
And then they tell me like, oh, what, you were born
in April, you're a this star or that star, all this astrology stuff.
It's like you don't see any kind of similarities there at all. You
don't see anything like the stars determined that like my attitude, like really,
and I think that it's crazy that people, well, it's actually not crazy.
And I think one of the reasons it's not crazy. And this is
something that I was hoping we would get to because you teach medieval philosophy and
one of the things that we're all taught as younger individuals. Is that everybody
like before nineteen sixty seven when we invented air conditioning, that everybody before then
was just foolish and silly and they were idiots. Can you speak to that
a little bit, about that misconception that people before the modern age were just
foolish. Yeah. In Lewis's book The Discarded Image, he makes the point
that the difference between the modern man and the medieval man is not that one
was ignorant and the other was it, but it was that the medieval man
knew that he was ignorant. Again. For the full conversation, check out
the Classical Life podcast. I'm a little late posting this, but it looks
like the main episode is published about a month ago on January twenty seventh,
and so go take a look for that. And that's it for now.
If you'd like to support me on Patreon, you can go to patreon dot
com sch Mythic Mind, and don't forget to sign up for the Lewis Study.
And until next time, I wish you many meaningful roads ahead.