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Speaker 6: All right, guys, got another Bagbie compilation coming out. Just
to answer some questions on the front end. No, he's fine,
there's nothing wrong with him. It's just we've had a
lot of recordings, a lot of which are in the
early part of my backlog. And also the audio is
not very good. Now I can fix it, or at
least make it better. This one is two parts, same
as last time. Two honestly my favorite discussions. The first
is a review of All the Kings Met by Robert Penmore.
This is the book where I got my pseudonym, from
where it came from. So if you're wondering the importance
of that book to me, why I'm constantly referencing it.
Check that out the second part. And this is relevant
in kind of the series that I've been doing on
the war in Iran. It's all about American evangelicalism, the
problems with that movement, good things about it, because there
are good things, you know in that world, and so
that episode I think is more relevant than ever. As
regards how many of these I'm doing normally, I like
to keep it to sort of one a month. This
is unusually close together for these kind of compilations, but
I'm traveling. I'm on the road right now, and so
in lieu of not giving you anything, figured, i'd, you know,
provide some value by putting something out many of you
haven't seen, but also making it sound better. Sure you
can go back and find the old recordings, but my
audio editing skills have gotten better, so in the old
ones things would be unbalanced or hard to hear. This
should fix that. So anyway, guys, we will be back
to regularly scheduled programming. Got a lot of very exciting
guests coming up, and so I appreciate you guys sticking around.
Thank you and we'll be back soon. All right, George Bagby,
welcome back to the show. How are you doing.
Speaker 5: Hey, it's good to be back.
Speaker 6: And I'm glad to have you. So tonight we're here
to discuss a book that's been incredibly influential to bohem
and I in real life and also is the source
of my pseudonym. So we're here tonight to discuss All
the King's Men by Robert Penwarren. So if you could,
can you give us kind of a basic thumbnail sketch
of the plot.
Speaker 5: Definitely. This book gets pegged often as the fictionalization of
the reign of Huey P. Long in Louisiana, and that's
not a bad characterization. Robert Pinwarren like to push back
against that characterization.
Speaker 6: He liked to say that.
Speaker 5: His characters stand alone, but he admit that he was
directly inspired by the Long administration, and especially by Huey
Long's mystery this assassin the Nation, which ended his law life.
It's a national down here in Louisiana that don't accept
the official story of that assassination. But the real hero
of the piece is Jack Burden, who is the main character.
He's the protagonist and Jack Burton is a newspaper reporter
educated at LSU. He was previously a history graduate student,
and he starts out and skeptic a jaded sort of
cure for himself by reporting on the campaign of an
upstart country politician named Willie Stark, a man who gets
his start by exposing corruption at the low governor. Jack
Burden covers his campaign and sees him into the governor's
mansion and then is invited to join the Stark organization
as a researcher. In that role, he's sent out to
dig up dirt on the governor's opponents. So at this point,
I'm gonna reveal the big twist in the plot and
give the big boilers. Turns out that the governor's main
opponents are Jack Burton's unknown father. Jack Burton thinks that
he knows who his father is. It ends out the
man that he thinks is his father is not actually
his father, and he ends up blackmailing his own father
and causing his own father to commit suicide, all at
the behest of Governor Stark to destroy the credibility of
the governor's opponents. In the process of this, Burden goes
through a transformation in a really amazing way. This is
the redemptive arc of the novel. Burden goes from a
thorough going materialist skeptic to a believer in God once again,
and this transformation is made through the suffering of Burden
and also the characters that he most cares about. So
the novel is particularly modern, but it is also refreshingly
ancient in its in its plot and its devices to
work out this spiritual suffering and redemption finally in the end.
And it's for that reason also the fact that it's
the novel of my hometown, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where it
is set in large part, it's it's a great novel,
novel of my native state. It's it's a novel full
of Louisiana characters. It's a novel that draws on Louisiana history.
It's a particularly a regional novel, one of the great
Southern novels. It won the Politzer Prize in the forties.
And it's it's one that has always spoken to me
in a powerful way. I've always appreciated this book. We
were talking just before the stream started, neither of for sure,
just how many times we've read this novel at this point.
This is one that's very close to me, so.
Speaker 6: Obviously i'll echo everything you've said on it for a
little bit of I guess personal background on when I
read the book. If I'm not mistaken, I think I
started reading it the summer after I graduated from high school,
and then I believe I finished it my freshman year
of college. And Warren's prose is great. You have a
few segments on your YouTube channel where you describe or
where you read passages from all the kings men, and
his prose is beyond masterful. And there's one section which
I believe you have on your channel where it's essentially
the opener to the book where describes, you know, our
main characters kind of whizzing along the Louisiana back or
the Louisiana highways in a you know, in a fastcar.
And that's one of those things where it's it always
just you know, sends shivers down my spine every time
I listen to it, and I get it. Look, that's
an emotional reaction to it, but it's a it's a
powerfully written book, and it's not only just a beautiful
read in the sense that the you know, the actual
construction of it is is well done. You know, he's
he's a he's a master, but also, at least personally,
I I feel a certain amount of resonance to the
character of you know, Jack Burden that much like you said,
he starts off this book as an incredibly cynical, kind
of jaded character. You know, he's had this career as
kind of a political hatchet man, you know, kind of
doing a lot of you know, dirty work, you know,
opposition research for you know, this kind of like charismatic
louis a politician, and over the course of it, and
not necessarily kind of smoothly either, you know, we see
this character essentially make make peace with his his roots. Obviously,
this is a you know, both a spoiler and and
you know not a spoiler because it's not necessarily the
most dramatic event in the book, but the ending of
it essentially involves you know, our main character, you know,
making peace with his father, making peace with his home,
you know, returning to his ancestral home, and marrying essentially
his his you know, high school sweetheart who he kind
of walked out on an earlier date and life and
that that kind of like returning home, even within kind
of like the broader tragic narrative of Willie Stark. I
find it incredibly, I guess, intoxicating. Do you see what
I'm getting at there?
Speaker 5: Absolutely? This is one of the aspects of it that
makes it particularly Southern. It seems to me it's the
relationship to home, and it's a characteristic American responses to heritage,
to ancestry, to the baggage that our people left us.
At the beginning of the novel, Burden is trying to
escape it, and ironically, in trying to escape it, he
is always overwhelmed by it. He's always dwelling on it.
He's not at peace with his mother. For instance, his
mother is kind of domineering. His mother is overly involved
in his life and not adult level, and kind of
disappointed in him that he's he's doing something as as
a single man, you know, in his late twenties or something.
He's not really interested in marrying and settling down or
having a steady job, and his mother is always suggesting
things to him, but he is. He is always trying
to avoid his mother, but he's always thinking about her.
She she pops up all the time, just in his
stream of consciousness, and he's he is dominated by her
in this unhealthy way because he dislikes her strongly. He
does not understand her. Similarly, he is he's always drawn
back to his boyhood home, but he doesn't like it.
He's he's trying to escape it by going to the
big city and seeks seeking after fame by getting his
name in print, and yet he cannot escape his home.
He cannot get past it. He's always drawn back to it,
kind of outside of his inclinations and intentions. But it's
later in the novel when he's actually able to make
peace with his home and make peace with his family,
even after he's done his family tremendous harm, that he
finds peace for the first time for himself.
Speaker 6: And he is not.
Speaker 5: I guess he's not dragged down by those connections. Those
connections at home are constructive for him. Finally, in the
end he finds a healthy attitude towards them. And that's
one of the aspects of the novel that I am
always coming back to. The novel is very interested in
our connection to our ancestors, our connection to our home
place is and that's an aspect of it that is
particularly Southern. Those themes come up in Southern literature very consistently.
What is the healthy attitude?
Speaker 6: And there's a there's a long section in this book
that in my mind kind of divides it into two parts,
in which it we kind of hear recounting of our
I if I remember this correctly, of our our main
character at at college, correct, yes, And then in this
he kind of describes the one the people he meets
at college, which I think that you and I have
both met people who fit the description of his roommates
to a t absolutely, but also that he essentially is
kind of floundering for a thesis, you know, something to
kind of complete his degree with. And so he finds
a kind of an account of a I guess of
a an ancestor of his Correct, they are related, I
believe distantly, that's right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's he's a direct descendant of a Civil War officer,
a Southerner, of course.
Speaker 6: And when he digs into this man's life, he essentially
finds this this tale of exhorted scandal, and it's I
could almost be read, you know, in and up itself.
But through this kind of this we see this pattern
of you know what would be called it in kind
of the theological sense of like generational sin, you know,
the idea that kind of not only is our actions
harmful you know, to ourselves right there, they are morally
incorrect actions, but they are you know, are are progeny
because there's a you know, a theme throughout of you
know of kind of of parentage and of you know, lineage.
It's probably a better way to say it, multiple characters
in the way that they relate to their fathers, the
way that they relate to their family, and the way
that someone's lineage kind of continues or fails to continue,
you know, through their you know, through their children. Right
And there's there's a really i guess complicated understanding of
that in this book that I think is is almost
kind of like unparallel. Do you see what I'm kind
of stumbling around?
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Speaker 5: And astrol connections connections to one's own male ancestors. And
you're quite right. Warren is playing up this theme that
weaknesses are communicated from generation to generation. But there's another
aspect to it that comes out I think towards the end,
after the Cathartic suffering of jack burden, where he sees
some of the strengths of his ancestors, where previously he
only saw their weaknesses. We see that especially, I think
in the character of Anne Stanton, which is Jack's love
interest of the girl that he first loved and the
girl that he is finally with in the end. He's
restored to her. In the end, she is also obsessed
with her ancestors, but in another unhealthy way. This is
something really great about the book because Robert pin Warren
is not just going to browbeat us with characters that
dislike their own ancestors. He gives us an example of
someone with an unhealthy regard for her own anceset true
and Stanton is portrayed as worshiping her dead father, holding
him in an unhealthy regard, and in the course of
the novel, her regard for her father is destroyed by
information about a scandal. She and her brother both face
a serious moral crisis when their picture of that they
had of their father is destroyed in their in their
imagination or in their fantasy, I should say, when when
they get knowledge that their father was involved in a
scandal and was morally culpable, even though it is understandable.
Their father did not himself do something wrong. Instead, he
covered for his friend who had done something wrong and
did not allow he did not sacrifice his friend in
a misplaced sense of loyalty, perhaps of being that being
that Ann Stanton's father was the governor of Louisiana, he
covered for his friend who had done something wrong, who
had done something evil. His friend was Jack Burden's father,
Judge Irwin. That was the fault, that was the scandal.
He hid his friend's wrongdoing. And when Ann Stanton and
Adam Stanton find out about that, they rethink the standards
of their lives, and they they themselves compromise on high
moral standards themselves. Ann Stanton starts an affair with Governor Stark.
Adam Stanton compromises with Governor Stark and agrees to lead
the new hospital program that Governor Stark is founding. Previously,
he had refused to have anything to do with it
out of a sense of moral purity.
Speaker 6: Let's say.
Speaker 5: So, Anne and Adam have this inflated notion about their ancestors,
and when that notion is for first challenged, they lose
their own sense of identity. It destroys them both in
some way, it damages Ann and it ends up destroying
Adam entirely. He ends up dying kind of as a
result of that. So worshiping our ancestors and hating our
ancestors are are both faults. We should not do either
of those things. And that is one of one of
the stories in the novel. That's that's one of the
myths in the novel.
Speaker 6: To me, it it almost feels like it was kind
of written to us and our friends, because we're very
much surrounded by a you know, a culture that despises
our ancestors. Right. You see this very cleanly in the
modern German. So I've been reading, you know, more Polkottfrete
books about anti fascism, you know, as I've said a
few times in the last couple episodes, but both in
that book and also in my dealings with you know,
kind of like modern Germans, you see the true pathology
of kind of like hating and feeling this need to
consistently like denigrate and erase your ancestors. As obviously we
see that as you know, being kind of like I guess,
destructive in evil. But I think that you know, much
like the Stantons there is this kind of risk to
be had in you know, over idealizing your your forefathers.
And I think really you see this in kind of
like the On one hand, there's kind of like the
race worship, the ancestor worship that you see on some
so you know, some parts of our movement. But also
I think in the you know, in the kind of
baby boomer constitution worship, you know, where essentially the founding
fathers were, you know, modern day saints, you know, kind
of the the aging civic religion of our of our grandparents.
And obviously you need a healthy respect for your ancestors,
and you know very much that we you know, in
the end of this book, we see you know, our
main characters kind of come to peace with the with
their with their forefathers as as men, you know, kind
of both both evil and good aspects of their of
their personalities. And to me, I feel like there's kind
of a cautionary tale, especially in the way that the
stands relate to their father, you know, because being more
traditionally minded and being more patriotically minded, we are kind
of pre disposed towards you know, kind of the idolatry
of our.
Speaker 5: Ancestors certainly, so I certainly feel that I want to
counteract the mindless hate that I here constantly directed towards
anyone with old fashioned views, you know, any old person,
anyone involved in certain things in my own country's history,
or anyone pasted a certain point of history, and I
want to give their side of things. That's that's part
of what I do as a history teacher. I'm there
to explain what people believed and to make them relatable.
But I know that I'm I'm always tempted to overcompensate
and to practice hagiography instead of giving nuanced views, and
I am always aware of that. I want to give
complete pictures and point out that none of them in
these conflicts have up to date opinions by our standards.
You know, none of them believe what people now believe
about controversial topics. They're coming from their own place, and
we have to we have to appreciate them for the
standards of their time, rather than some anachronistic standard, as
modern people are so tempted to do these days. But
I agree with you that's one of the cautionary tales
of the novel that we can't worship our ancestors. Worshiping
our ancestors destroys them and destroys us. The healthy alter
native it's not to not to hate, not to flee,
not to reject in in hating our parents, for instance,
we're constantly thinking about our parents. We those that hate
their parents, those that hate their their ancestors, by by extension,
are consumed with thinking of them all the time. In
some ways, they are more captives of their past than
someone with a healthy attitude. But the novel it shows us,
you know, hate, the hatred is a kind of captivity
and an unhealthiness, and the worship is also a captivity,
an unhealthiness, and both of them lead to destruction. Neither
of them sets us free to be individuals. And at
the end of the novel we see through through tragedy,
through a Greek sinse of tragedy, the suffering that results
from those hubristic beliefs. All the King's Men is a
tragedy in a classical sense, in a Greek sense. Warren
certainly wanted us to know that about the book. It
even had a previous form, a form that I don't
know if any of it actually survives. But Warren does
mention it several times. He originally composed it as a
Greek style drama, even with a chorus that speaks in
verse from time to time. It started out as a
play and then turned into a novel. There is a
curious aspect.
Speaker 6: To it, no that is, and it is like many
of like many Southern writers in particular, like I mean
Faulkner's dripping in this in plannario or strip again this
there is kind of that sense of I guess, deep
attachment to I guess, the kind of like Western canon,
you know throughout I I during the discussion on which
we have at this point beaten to death, and so
I only mean to mention it in passing kind of
the American question, you know, the dialogue a month or
so back to me at least that the contention that
there was, you know, such thing as American culture is
perhaps most absurd when you look at you know, the
literary you know, the literary field. Obviously, I would make
the argument that film is the definitive American you know media.
But you know, Americans have, especially in kind of the
modern era, have a you know, a whole crop of incredibly,
incredibly prolific I guess, like writers and poets, and there's
there's a lot to be to be mined from that.
So if you could, could you offer some type of
I guess like inter duction In summary to the man
Robert Penmoren.
Speaker 5: Yes, he's a literary giant of his time. He started
out as a group of a member of a group
of poets in Nashville, Tennessee. He himself was from Kentucky
and he came down to Nashville for college and he
joined a group of poets that styled themselves as the
Fugitive Poets, and that's where he began writing poetry. The
Fugitive Poets had a publication that was called The Fugitive
and among them were people like Alan Tate and Donald Davidson,
other great Southern writers and poets. Among them were several
men that became academics. I suppose Warren taught at the
university for most of his life, but he is best
known as a novelist and poet. The Fugitives ended up
writing a famous book of essays called I'll Take My
Stand in the thirties during the depression. I'll Take My
Stand is a very interesting volume in that it is
a Southern agrarian perspective on federal reforms that are meant
to industrialize the country, and it is a rejection of
the industrial consumerist way of life. The agrarians, of which
Warren was one of them, that they all ascribed to
an introductory statement in the volume and said that they
prefer the agrarian way of life over the industrial way
of life. And they held up the American South not
as a cultural backwater, not as a blighted region that's
outside of the mainstream, but as a region that is
producing a great amount of high quality art and is
culturally rich. They speak of the South's virtues and they
say they want to preserve those things. They even go
as far as to make the argument that the South
is culturally rich and artistically productive because it has not
been industrialized, the people in it have not been alienated.
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Speaker 5: Now, that's a really great theme. When we jump ahead
twenty years and Warren is writing All the King's Men
and winning the Politzer Prize for it. It was the
first Pulitzer.
Speaker 6: Prize he won.
Speaker 5: He went on to win a Pulitzer for poetry and
was named the Poet Laureate of the United States. I'm
not sure who names those people. It's some governmental organization,
but Warren was the first man to hold that title.
These days, I don't think that his poetry. I'm no
specialist on modernist American poetry. I don't know very much
about Warren's poetry. I've mostly read his novel and his essays.
He wrote several works of nonfiction, and that's where I
know him best. He won the Politzer for I believe
it was his second novel, All the King's Men. He
wrote a number of novels, and he went on to
found a magazine while he taught at LSU. He founded
the Southern Review. While he taught at LSU, he became
good friends with Clianth Brooks and Robert Penwarren. He was
at least an acquaintance of Richard M. Weaver during his
time at LSU. He personally observed Huey Long while he
was at LSU, and was even accused of being in
cahoots somehow with Huey Long. People speculated that he was
somehow in Long's pay, or was being corrupted with money
from Long or something. The truth is that long just
put some competent people in charge. That was one of
his talents. He found good people for LSU and then
gave them as many resources as he could possibly spare,
and they did wonderful things with the resources. Hence, Clanth
Brooks and Robert Pinwarren. Robert Pinwarren and Clanth Brooks also
founded a school of literary criticism at LSU, which is
called the New Criticism. They wrote text books for English instructors,
wonderful books if you can find them. They're very difficult
to find. I'm down here in Baton Rouge, so I
have an easier time finding these things. But they wrote
a book called Understanding Poetry, and they wrote another book
called Understanding Literature, and in both of them they outline
the New critical school. They're basically saying their position is
actually very mild. It's not a radical position. They're saying,
too many English teachers think they're teaching Shakespeare by giving
a brief outline of Shakespeare's life and opinions and the
dates in which he lived, when in fact they ought
to be reading Shakespeare, they ought to just focus on
what the man wrote. So that's that's Robert Penwarren's new
criticism in a nutshell, it's not at all a radical position.
New critics today might say, ignore the biography, the author
has nothing to do with the text. That's a very
radical position, and that's not the position Robert pin Warren
and Clant Brooks took. But Robert Pinwarren was also very
interested in the civil rights movement and segregation in the South.
Speaker 6: Some say this is.
Speaker 5: A leftover or a guilty feeling that he had after
his essay And I'll take My Stand. He wrote an
essay and I'll take My Stand entitled The Briar Patch,
in which he offered a defense of Southern racial segregation
in the nineteen thirties. They say his biographers say that
he spent most of the rest of his career back
cracking on that. That I think that is correct. I
think he did backtrack on that. But along the way
he offered us a really incredible book. And this would
be the other major work by Robert Penwarren I would recommend,
and that is a wonderful book called Who Speaks for
the Negro. In that book, Robert Penwarren went around in
the early sixties and interviewed the who's who of black
political leaders, rabble rousers, literary figures, and asked them all
the same questions and recorded his Injews, so you can
actually listen to him interviewing Malcolm X and Martin Luther
King Jr. And he asked them all the same questions
and they produce very interesting answers. And it's all about
civil rights and segregation.
Speaker 6: And things like that.
Speaker 5: And the point of the book is that no single
black leader in the sixties is speaking for the whole race,
and they all have radically different ideas about just what
they think is desirable. So that's one thing that you
can just take away from that book by Pyn Warren,
and it makes it a very stimulating read. I highly
recommend it.
Speaker 6: One of the things that I I've always kind of
admired about, I guess like Warren and you know, his
his circle. It's just that there's there's something about what
it is to be American that is inherently contradictory. You know,
there's and I was even speaking to Thomas about this yesterday.
There's actually a lot of that in this book. You know,
this kind of tension between you know, the poll Americans have,
you know, to the open road to wander to find
our own kind of like patch of no undiscovered country.
And then also this this tie to you know, our ancestors,
our home, where we're from. And one of the other
kind of splendid contradictions in America is that, you know,
kind of the most backwater, the lowest GDP, you know,
the lowest you know, standard of living. You know, if
if you consider those things to be, you know, the
proper metrics by which to judge a culture, sections of
our of our country produces by far our best writers.
And to me, that's always been kind of one of
those I guess, kind of quirks of America. And I've
always enjoyed, you know that, the fact that, and don't
get me wrong, there are a great many writers from
the Northeast, you know, a great many you know, writers
from California as well, but so many of our you know,
our best and brightest, they're from the rural South. And
I've always I've always really enjoyed that. One of the
other things that I think is interesting in an area
that you can really glean some wisdom from this book
is this is a political novel, not in the sense
that he's trying to prove some grand political point, but
the drama is a direct result of politics. So if
you could, I guess, kind of describe some of the
political lessons that can be pulled from this book. Do
you have anything on the top of your head.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we could. We could just start at the beginning
of it. We see at the start of the novel
the framing of the characters.
Speaker 6: O begbe you dropped out for a little bit. Well,
if he doesn't come back for a little bit, I
can hand or handle at least the point where he's going. So,
like I said, the cold not the cold open, the
open opening of this book starts with our characters essentially
traveling along the highway, you know, in an expensive car,
you know, the whole the whole you know, party is
essentially going to Willy Stark's hometown. Willy Stark is the
governor of an unnamed state that is essentially Louisiana, and
he's going back to the you know, the low rent,
you know, rural town where he's from. And it opens
but essentially him just wandering into town and he's we
know that this man is a celebrity, is an absolute
star of the political scene, because we know that he
has you know, has posters everywhere in town. You know,
there's one that's described as six times life size. And
from this we we kind of learned a lesson that
I guess we could have learned from watching Hillary Clinton,
the which you dropped out up until just now, so
I caught people up to the moment in which uh,
Willie is back at his hometown kind of preparing to
give a speech to the people he grew up with.
So sorry you dropped out for about ninety seconds though,
are you still there? Bagbe well? Uh until he comes back?
Speaker 10: Uh?
Speaker 6: Oh, dear, this is quite awkward now. Uh anyway, I
hope that you know, the Bagbee comes back because you know,
this would be better as a discussion, you know, it
would be as a u as a monologue. But from
that we see that this man is kind of a
I don't want to say manipulator, but sort of a
mass a master manipulator. And then his his political persona
is essentially a different part of him. So the way
that Burden describes, you know, in kind of his behind
his you know, behind his eyes, the way that he
sees WILLI is that his almost a new person takes
over him, you know, gone is kind of this, you know,
kind of like flabby you know obviously you know, well
fed politician, and he becomes again this kind of like
honest hometown, I guess, farm boy. And so we see
very much that even in the way he transforms himself
into the situation, he's fundamentally a you know, political survivor
and a political animal. So I guess that that's that's
kind of what the opener tells us. I Bagby may
be getting in a wider point, but if so, I
I can't hear it to me. If you guys want
to hear a kind of a summary of it, I
would describe All the Kings Men Is as a novelization
of the populist delusion. Oh you're back. Okay, you dropped
out for a little bit and I had kind of
damped to make back up. Do you want to do
you want to address the point that he brought up initially,
because we I lost almost the whole thing.
Speaker 5: I'm very sorry about that. Yeah, you were saying that
that it concerns populism, and I think that that is
very much the theme the governor character. Willie Stark is
the character's name is obviously modeled after Huey Long, and
people frequently take the novel as the fictionalized version of
the Huey Long story. Now, there are many differences involved,
and Warren always wanted to stress he was kind of
he was kind of amused that people bought his novel
and and read and enjoyed his novel when they were
actually looking for something about Huey Long. And he he
wanted them to know that this was not the place
to go. If you wanted to find out about Huey Long,
you needed to read biography. But Huey Long is this
great American populist character, and he may be one of
the best examples of a success in populism. He certainly
is that in the historical memory of people here in Louisiana.
He remains a very controversial figure, but Louisianians cannot deny
that the man did an awful lot by disregarding the
rules of the system. Willie Stark is doing that very frankly.
In this novel. Willie Stark gets his start in politics
by exposing corruption at a local level that results in
the schoolhouse being built with substandard bricks. What happened is
a fire escape collapses and several children are maimed and
killed as a result, and this catapults Willie Stark, the
character in the novel, to prominence statewide. In the process
of this, Stark is tempted by a big city politico
to run for governor and has offered funding to do so.
So Stark begins his political career by running for governor,
kind of jumping from a minor functionary in local government
to a race for the governor, and realizes along the
way that he was set up to split the opposition
to the big city candidate. So he was running to
split the rural vote. And Stark is made wise to
political realities, and rather than bow out out of a
sense of idealism, he decides to become a machiavellian, and
in doing so he he is ruthless with his enemies
and seeses power and is not in the least concerned
about the rules of the game. In doing so, kind
of disregards the rules of the game and becomes an
authoritarian figure with a populist mandate. So you could say
it's a story of populism.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: He is catapulted into power by promising the masses all
sorts of all sorts of handouts, you might say, but
he gets the power and uses is the power for
particular ends and gets valuable things done in along the way.
So I think it's a mixture of political realities. It's
certainly a realistic political novel about backroom deals, about blackmail
to get one's way in politics. All of these things
were actually done during the long administration, and that is
one of the things that that keeps him in our
minds and still inspires us or horrifies us about the
man today.
Speaker 6: One of the other themes that I find in this
and your description of Stark's career, you know, is one
version of this, but we see it multiple times, is
this idea that you can't change the system.
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Speaker 6: So obviously, in the first instance, we see, you know,
will we transform from kind of this this kind of
like wide eyed, you know, naive you know, young men
who essentially believes that he can fix the corruption, you know,
and by writing a better speech, you know, and by
campaigning extra hard and going to the people that he
can he can do it and we can really succeed
at it. And then there's a there's another major character
who you know is present throughout it. There's kind of
this eternal, you know, cockroach like character of Tiny Duffy,
who has described as this kind of like corpulently disgusting,
you know, sweaty banker. And essentially this character is a
you know, political survivor. He's there before Willy, you know,
he offers Willy kind of his first hand up after
his defeat. You know, he's there through the entire book,
and then after, you know, when when Stark is you know,
eventually killed. He's still there. And and not only does
will he kind of make this initial sacrifice of his
kind of like naive morals. We see that he knows
that he's made these sacrifices, but he he thinks it's
all going to be, you know, redeemed by the fact
that he's building this hospital. You know we mentioned before,
there's kind of like big beautiful hospital that will you know,
essentially serve as as a public service to to to
reward the people who propelled him into.
Speaker 5: And it will outlast him. Yes, it will be a legacy,
his legacy. It's it's going to be his clayos right,
his glory.
Speaker 6: And you know, being that it's a it's a tragedy
and that you know, it is very much a you know,
I guess the rebuke of the populist delusion. We see
that this dream, you know, all of the sacrifices he
made in order to secure his glory essentially removed any
possibility of him actually having it. Not only do we
see this happen in our you know, in Willie Stark's case,
but also you know Adam Stanton and you know, essentially
extremely moralistic, a very kind of principled brother who is
a you know, a world class doctor, and understandably because
of the disgrace brought on his family, he hates Willie
Stark and refuses to work with him until essentially, again,
like as you've said, through this kind of disillusion, he
agrees to. He agrees to essentially, you know, make a
deal to work within the system. You know, the idea
that like, well, you know what if I just you know,
stick to my principles within the system, you know, it
will all work out. And in all of these cases
we see that whatever the system is, the house always went,
you know, to muse a cliche, And I think that
there is very much a kind of a literary rebuke
of populism in this book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because the system corrupts everyone who is absorbed by it.
I'm thinking of of all the major characters, and they
and they are the winners, right, Sadie Burke, Adam Stanton,
Willie Stark, all of them that seek after the power court,
the levers of power. They do get various things that
they want, but it takes more out of them than
they get in return. It ends up destroying most of
these characters.
Speaker 6: And I think that there's a there's a truth in that.
And look, I understand I've personally gotten a lot from
you know, the elite theorists and I have. You know,
I am fully convinced by many of their arguments. But
the idea that you know, kind of the power and
you know, creating an exception is a something that doesn't
damage you, I think is really naive obviously, kind of
like the libertarian and the liberal conception of power is
a limited one. You know, it's not a it's one
that's designed to make you lose. But on the other end,
this kind of like converse position that I'm not really
sure anyone holds. But you know, people do seem to
kind of a spouse that, you know, like, well, if
we just just grab power, you know, I am going
to be the one who wields it for good and
fair enough, like someone needs to do it. But it
is a it is a corrosive thing, especially on kind
of the you know, at the individual level. And I
don't mean to come off as you know, an overly
softer idealistic person in this, but I think that there
is also a kind of a cautionary tale both against
the kind of naive populism of oh, we'll just vote
in the guy and he'll fix it all. But also
the idea that you can you can hold power without
fundamentally changing who you are.
Speaker 5: Well, it's It's one of the great things about the
novel is that you can read it in several ways,
so you could read it with Willie Stark as the
main character. And that that, incidentally is my problem with
the movie versions of the novel. Is they sideline Jack
Burden in some way or the other when Jack Burden
is obviously the main character. I'm I will contend to
the point I know the novel well, I mean it
is from Burden's perspective, and his character arc is the
meaningful one in the novel, or the predominant one. But
you could read it as a tragic story about Willie
Stark and and in the end Stark himself is destroyed.
I think the novel does tell a tragic story about
Willy Stark, kind of like Julius Caesar tells a tragic
story about Caesar, and it tells a tragic story about Brutus.
But which of the two should you pay attention to.
Brutus is around for the final act, Caesar is gone
very early. Similarly, I would I would argue that that
all the King's men, let's let's pay attention to Jack
Burden primarily. But what does Willy Stark sacrifice in order
to get things done in Louisiana? He sacrifices being a husband,
He sacrifices being a father. His religious convictions, such as
they are, they're reduced to rhetoric in his speeches. It's
not something that he actually embodies in his life anymore.
He does actually do things, and I think he trades
the other goods of life. I think he trades being
a husband, being a father, being a man with real
convictions and something beyond him, beyond himself. Convictions and truth,
convictions in God, convictions of integrity, traditional ideas about character.
He sacrifices those things. And that is one of the
magnificent things about the novel is you see those points
on which Willie Stark sacrificed the values that he formally
held for the sake of power, for the sake of
getting things done. In politics, he starts an affair with
a fixer named Sadie Burke, and her expertise makes him governor.
He maintains a relationship with his wife. For the sake
of appearances, he moves her out into the country. He
spoils and indulges his son rather than discipline him. He
wants his son to be a star football player, and
his son does become a star football player, but his
son is spoiled and destroys himself. In the end, his
son does die, and of course Willie Stark does have
a long list of accomplishments by the end of his life,
but he is also.
Speaker 6: Murdered through.
Speaker 5: The evil choice is that he made. The choices that
he made come back and haunt him and inspire his
enemy to kill him in the end. So it's it
makes me think of Homer, and it's kind of coincidental.
I was reading this part of the Iliad today to
my students. At the end of the Iliad, Hector realizes
that he's alone to face Achilles in their final duel together.
Hector thought that his brother was standing beside him, but
Pallas Athena tricked him, and rather than turn and run
at the last Hector resolves that he will he will stand,
he will receive Achilles blow. Hector has just shot his
javelin and missed, and he says, now, I will I
will do something great that future generations will remember me by,
and if necessary, I will die. And of course that's
exactly what happens. Achilles throws another spear and mortally wounds Hector,
and Hector does die there. But Hector in that scene
shows us that Greek value of claos of glory, immortal
fame that survives death, people will remember, and strangely, that
is a real legacy of these political actors that go
in and unscrupulously sees power, manipulating their enemies, doing things
that couldn't otherwise be done without Without this very high
handed and authoritarian.
Speaker 6: Tactic.
Speaker 5: Say what you want about Huey Long, people still care
about him. What what other politician from re evokes such
passionate opinion, loyalty and conversation. Now, granted, you probably need
to be in Louisiana for that, but I still would
would uh would claim Huey Long is unique among American
politicians for that reason. People care about him down here,
Down here in Louisiana, people still talk about Huey Long.
Go to a Louisiana diner and mention something related to Long,
you'll find everyone has an opinion, and people are happy
to talk about him. He's still inspiring. Strangely enough, h
I know, uh, just just looking from the perspective of
dead politicians, how many politicians would crave that sort of fame.
You know, generations after they have gone to rest, people
still cross the bridges that Huey Long built today. Thousands
of people cross them every day. And no one in
Louisiana could imagine living in Louisiana without those things that
Huey Long built that we're still using today, we're still
getting mileage out of so long after his death. That's
a really incredible legacy. And he was an unscrupulous guy.
He was a ruthless guy. He was an immoral man.
He was gross, he was vulgar, he was all of
those things. He was very colorful, he's he's really very amusing,
lots of fun, and he's well portrayed in All the
King's Men, fictionalized if you will, in All the King's Men.
But he I don't know, does he gain the world
and he loses his soul? It looks like that kind
of story. Maybe politics, effective politics isn't possible without that.
No saint could Long remain a politician. I'm reminded of
Edward the Confessor. Saint Edward the Confessor, who was said
to be indifferent to a man who was robbing him.
A thief was caught in the king's chambers with a
bag of gold, and Edward the Confessor let him go. Now,
that's the action of a saint to forgive your enemies,
but it's not the action of an effective politician. You
may remember, the kingdom fell apart after Edward the Confessor.
He was a sainted king. He is a saint, but
maybe he wasn't the best ruler. And I I agree
with everything you said there. Now we're we're coming up
on time, and uh, I don't mean to completely ambush you,
but I have a little bit more to say. But
while I'm doing that, do you think there's a passage
you could find to you know, read out from the
book to kind of offer people a taste of the pros?
Speaker 6: Absolutely? Yes, all right, and I can you know, talk
for a minute or two kind of my concluding thoughts
on it. I think for me, there there's multiple ways
of you know, absorbing a lesson, and obviously the you know,
reading a nonfiction book is one way you know, having
a discussion about it is another if you kind of
look like course it into your own I guess like
way of understanding. But to me, absorbing something narratively is
is really like if I can, if I can name
kind of the important turning points in the way I
thought of things. Many of them were concepts that I
didn't necessarily get from nonfiction. I got it in a
narrative form. And to me, so much of how I
think about the world, of how I think about the
way we relate to you know, our past and our
our descendants is tied up in this book. In addition
to that, it's also just very good heart and I
think that if you know, either you are American or
you want to understand Americans more, this book is a
great way to do it. It's it's not an obscure
book by any means, but it's definitely not one that's
read well enough. And I think that if you're interested
in you know, anything I guess like vaguely political or
anything to do with American culture, I really can't recommend
it enough. So I guess that's my final, uh final
description of the book.
Speaker 5: Well, I happened across the passage where Willie Stark is
talking to Jack about his legacy, what he wants his
legacy to be. Strangely enough, the reference here what Pyn
Warren was thinking of was Huey Long's foundation of the
charity Hostilespital, which is still an institution in Louisiana today,
and it's something that people still care very much about.
But this is the Willy Stark medical Center that he's
talking about. So in this scene of Jack and Willy
are talking together at the Governor's mansion and Willy has
had several drinks. So Willy is saying that he does
not want his cronies to fix up a corrupt deal
with a construction company for the hospital. He wants it
all to be He wants the whole thing to be
clean and straightforward. He does not want any corruption involved.
So what do you expect, I asked, there's six million
dollars involved. Did you ever see the flies stay away
from the churn at churning time? He'd better stay away
from this churn. Well, he's just being logical. Obviously. Larson
is ready to sell out McMurphy for a contract. He
is a competent builder. He lunged up from his sitting position,
he stared at me and demanded, are you in on this? Oh,
it's nothing to me, I said, and shrugged. You can
build it with your bare hands for all of me.
I merely said that, given his premises, Tiny is logical.
Can't you understand, he demanded, searching my face. Damn it,
Can't you understand either? I understand what I understand. Can't
you understand? He demanded, and heaved up from the couch,
and the instant he was on his feet. From the
slight sway of his posture, I knew he had been drinking.
He stepped to me and seized my lapel and shook
me a little, fixing his eyes upon my face. Now
close to him, I could see that they were bloodshot,
and saying, can't you understand either, I'm building that place,
the best in the country, the best in the world,
and a bugger like Tiny is not gonna mess with it,
and I'm not gonna and I'm going to call it
the Willie Stark Hospital, and it will be there a
long time after I'm dead and gone, and you were
dead and gone, and all those sons of bitches are
dead and gone, and anybody, no matter if he hasn't
got a dime, can go there and will vote for you.
I said, I'll be dead. He said, and you'll be dead.
And I don't care whether he votes for me in
or not. He can go in there and bless your name,
I said, damn it. He shook me hard, crumpling my
lapel in his big hand. You stand there grinning like that.
Get that grin off your face, get it off or
all listen. I said, I'm not any of your scum,
and I'm still grinning when I please Jack, Hell, Jack,
you don't know.
Speaker 6: I'd you know.
Speaker 5: I don't mean that. It's just you stand there in grin.
Damn it. Can't you understand, can't you? He held the
lapel and thrust his big face at me, his eyes
gouging in the mind, saying, can't you Can't you see
I'm not gonna let those bastards muck with it the
Willie Stark Hospital, can't you see? And I'm going to
get me the best damn man there is to run it, Yes, sir,
the best there is, Yes, sir. Up in New York.
They told me to get him.
Speaker 6: He was the man.
Speaker 5: And Jack, you, yeah, I asked, you're gonna get him.
I disengaged from his grasp on my lapel, straightened it
and dropped into a chair. Get who, I asked, doctor Stanton?
He said, doctor Adam Stanton. I almost bounced right out
of my chair. The ash off my cigarette fell down
my shirt front. How long have you been having these symptoms?
I asked, you've been seeing any pink elephants? You get Stanton?
He said, you were hearing voices. I said, you get him,
he repeated dourly. Boss, I said, Adam is an old
pal of mine. I know him like a brother, and
I know he hates your guts. I'm not asking him
to love me. I'm asking him to run my hospital.
I'm not asking anybody to love me, not even you.
So this is a fateful choice made in the novel,
both for Jack and for Willie. Jack ends up revealing
to Adam that his father was involved in a scandal.
He reveals that to Adam, and Adam agrees to work
for the governor, and Adam eventually murders the governor.
Speaker 6: Again, if we haven't convinced you yet, you guys have
to check out this book. It's old enough that you
can find good old hardcover copies for just a few
dollars and if you're really an absolute, you know, illiterate fool.
I'm sure there's a good enough audiobook somewhere around. But anyway,
I don't know how much more I have to add,
especially after such a powerful reading. But uh thatg Bee,
Before we wrap this up, do you have anything you
wanna you wanna plug of yours?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm I'm working on my latest audio book. When
that drops, I'll be sure to make it public so
that everyone knows where to get it. It's a book
on John C. Calhoun, so another Southerner. I'm gradually adding
content to the YouTube page. I'm probably going to try
to record something else before I turn in tonight, so
there may be a new recording on there soon. I've
got something all picked out, but not much else. I
do have a telegram channel, I don't know. Did you
post a link to that?
Speaker 6: If you give me just a few seconds, I can I.
Speaker 5: Oh, that would be awesome.
Speaker 6: I am oh sorry, carry on, Bagbie.
Speaker 5: I'm still learning how to do these things.
Speaker 6: Now. I will admit I'm also not exactly the most
I'm sure as everyone who is who's watched one of
my streams knows by now, I'm not exactly the most
I guess the most technologically advanced. It'll take me a
little bit. I will add the link to Bagby's telegram
in the description. I don't have it off the top
of my head. One thing I will say, I don't
know if this is a faux pas to say it,
but this year, independently, both Bagbee and I will be
appearing on you know, at Millennial Woes, you know, end
of the year Millennial Streams. I don't know what either
of us are going to talk about yet, but you'll
be able to hear both of us there. So if
you want more content from us, be sure to check
those out. I'm sure it'll be you know, at least
one good discussion between the two of us. This show
will obviously be available on YouTube, will also be up
as a podcast on Apple and Spotify. And the way
that this works is that the most recent ten episodes
are always available on Apple, Spotify, anywhere you listen to podcasts,
but after they fall out of that top ten, they
do go behind to paywall at my substack, and I
realize it. It's not a huge thing, but it's a
little bit of way for me to subsidize the cost
of the show. I do enjoy it, but as we
get into more, As we get into more, I guess,
like esoteric topics, Susan gets less and less happy with me,
and so it's a good way for me to kind
of insulate myself from that. But again, like I said,
if I haven't convinced you yet, read this book, it's good.
It'll make you a better man or woman, I guess
because there are women who listen to the show. And anyway, guys,
keep your head up. The life can't last forever. Good night,
all right. Before I welcome on our guest, I want
to provide a little bit of background to this. So
I try to avoid, you know, Twitter drama on these
because you know, Twitter's largely a waste of time. But
I feel like this was an interesting interaction. So there's
this documentary coming out produced by a you know, a
sexually ambiguous evangelical pastor megachurch pastor from Austin, Texas called
nineteen forty six, and he produced this video kind of
shot in the in the style of a you know,
TikTok clock, you know, talking to the camera about this
this documentary he's creating called nineteen forty six, and the
thesis of this documentary is that the word homosexuality didn't
appear in the Bible until nineteen forty six, and he
argues that it's a mistranslation, the conclusion obviously being therefore,
that there's nothing wrong with, you know, homosexual activity. And
so I made some snarky comment, you know, kind of
dunking on this guy, because well, that's really what's Twitter
it's for. And I don't take it particularly seriously, but
a major influence of min you know, someone I've been
in talks to eventually record an episode with Dave or
the distributist responded in a really insightful way. And I'll
read through the thread after I welcome on, my guest.
But it struck me not only because it was incredibly insightful,
but because it mirrored a conversation that what George Bagbye
and I had a few months ago. And so with
that thread running through my mind and kind of thinking
back to a conversation that we had, George, I really
wanted to discuss essentially why evangelicals become progressives, you know,
why these you know, children who are in many ways
raised in the most conservative households in America, you know,
become foot soldiers of the regime because and I don't
want to just suck up all the year in the room.
But one of the things that we see is that
despite people like us having an amazing advantage when it
comes to birth rate, you know, this this machine, these progressives,
they reproduce not biologically but essentially by stealing other people's children.
And so we wanted to and well where does that
come from? You know, why does that happen? Is this
a new phenomena? So, George, indeed, do you want to
before we get into this, just introduce yourself for the
people who aren't familiar with your work.
Speaker 5: Yes, I'm George Bagbee. I am a teacher. I'm something
of an amateur historian. I teach high school, and I
have a telegram channel called Bagbe's Corner. I'm slowly producing
content there, but my major work is in audio books.
I'm recording audiobooks right now actually, and hope to have
more to say on the subject in the near future.
Speaker 6: What can think were coming on? And sorry I accidentally
had myself muted. I've been informed that my clicking and
typing the background is a little bit disruptive, so I
trying to get better about muting myself. But anyway, so
if you could, could you, I guess, summarize the conversation
you and I had because this is something that we'd
brought up, And obviously I'm not asking you for a
blow by blow, but I guess if you could just
describe to you know, the people listening, you know, like
what we brought up and why it was something we
were thinking about.
Speaker 5: Indeed, it's it's a major concern, especially for an educator
like myself. I'm in private Christian schools. I've been working
there for almost ten years, and one of the key
mission aspects of a school like mine is to preserve
the faith of the students that are sent to us.
And that's obviously an ecumenical project for most everybody. I
suppose even even a Catholic school is going to have
Protestant students these days, especially especially down in Louisiana where
we have a big Protestant population. The Catholic schools don't
turn them away, so it's a it's kind of an
ecumenical prom But something you and I have in common
is we've both been to private Christian schools. Both of
us have graduated from such schools, and both of us
have seen a lot of our classmates fall away entirely
from the faith and join up in instead of the faith,
with a progressive religion in its place. So I've seen
a lot of my classmates go woke and even had
even had like professional problems with like continuing to be
in contact with some of them, because they're the sorts
of people that could denounce you publicly. They're the kinds
of people who adocs you and think that they were
doing God a service, right, So it's a serious problem.
Speaker 8: I know.
Speaker 5: I've seen a lot of my students fall away from
the faith, and it's ultimately against my goals for every
class that I teach, Like I really want to encourage
the faith of my students. That's something that I'm deeply
interested in. I couldn't imagine what it's like to teach
for a secular school because I'm always trying to encourage
the faith of my students.
Speaker 6: Well, and to me, they're kind of a multitude of different,
shall we say, negative results. You know, either there is
the you know, the de rascimization di ration. Yeah, that's
a hard word to say, but essentially the the you know,
kind of becoming just a non entity, you know, someone
who is non religious, you're not really interested in the
great discussion, just kind of fades into kind of a
background consumer. Obviously that's negative, but that's not particularly what
we're discussing. But there are two things that are equivalently
bad but different in result. I think. So one there
is kind of the full conversion, you know, I have
fully left Christianity and now I am a you know, materialist, atheist,
social justice warrior, you know. And then that said, obviously
that's a negative result. But the other one, and maybe
at least in my mind, this might be a newer phenomenon.
It corrects me if I'm wrong, but it's this odd
blending kind of creating this new syncratic religion of you know,
all the trappings of you know, American evangelicalism. You know,
we meet in a big aluminum building. You know, we
listen to praising worship music. You know, the language of
that culture, you know, which you've grown up about it,
you know, you know the words, you know, you know
the lingo, but mixed with social justice talking points. So
for instance, right and and I know many of these
people because I you know, I live near a large
evangelical university, and the people that I'm close with are
kind of what would be in another context like art kids.
You know, people who you know are very you know
interested in the you know, the newest music, the newest fashion,
you know, dressing well, being creative, and obviously that comes
with a certain you know, set of social belieds. And well,
certainly some of them have fully rejected Christianity. There's another,
I guess significant section of them that is essentially just
mixed it fifty to fifty. You know. So I had
a conversation in a bachelor party with a guy who admittedly,
like I like quite a bit, but he basically told
me he was a out and out universalist. You know,
he believed that, you know, anyone could achieve salvation as
long as they were you know, a good enough person.
And obviously that's not a new idea, but this idea
that you know, that kind of like the greatest evil
as a you know, as a Christian, as a religious
person is to be you mean, or racist or inconsiderate
in any way. And that the real kind of mission
of the church, which is again not a particularly new idea.
In other forms is to kind of champion social causes,
but all still cashed in the you know, the cultural
imagery of like the Negachurch, which is just an odd
mix for me and so well. I do think that
each of these are problems, they are subtly different ones.
Speaker 5: Yes, I agree, you know, I really do have much
more respect for the the student, the college graduate, whoever
he is, who openly embraces communism, who reads his marks
and says this is the message, finally, this is the
doctrine that will save the world, and advocates for revolution
and says, yes, we must suffer and buy the suffering.
We shall purge away the evil that afflicts our society,
and this sacrifice is worth it. Right, That's a manly doctrine.
It's wrong, it's murderous, right, but at least it's manly.
And I feel I feel contempt ultimately for the soft
bourgeois who just wants to be respectable, who thinks that
being mean is the worst thing. These people deserve to
have their houses burned by angry mobs with no policeman
to save them. They really do, and it's and it's insufferable.
I'm I'm sick of the softness that corrupts religion. It
really is very contemptible.
Speaker 6: Well, and I think the other thing is there's a
part of it that is incredibly incredibly feminized. Say what
you will about Cromwell, you know, like he might have
been a monster, but he was by no means feminine.
You know, he was incredibly masculine figure. You know, say
what you will about Calvin, he wasn't exactly a coward,
that's right. Aside all theological differences which I am, you know,
neither trained nor inclined to get into, but there's this thing,
and it's this inversion where they impose female social dynamics
into male spaces. So so I remember, you know, there's
this this kind of obsession with crying, you know, so
you saw this very early in the political context with
figures like Bill Clinton, right, like Bill Clinton could cry
on command, you know, crocodile tears? Did he kind of?
Oh yeah, it was. I know this so cited because
I've been listening to hours and hours of Bowden lectures
while working my dead end factory job, which I guess
is the productive use of my time. But so that's
obviously in a political context, but in a specific like
social context. I meet you know, guys who are young,
and they're kind of you know, mid to early twenties.
And there was even a thing where it's like people
people say phrases like, oh, like men don't cry or
you should just cry, you know, saying that men don't cry, Well,
that's toxic. You know, that's that's repressive. And this idea
that kind of like, well, as a man, what you
should do is kind of ate these female social dynamics.
You know, that's very you know, emotional, very relational. It's
very much kind of like touch and feely, and it's
incredibly alienating if you've never interact with it. It's very
very odd. And so my point is to not to
just you know, endlessly complain about people. I know, is
that I fully agree with you that there is something
kind of defiant and honest about saying, well, you know what, like,
screw you, dad, I'm a communist now I've read Marx,
you know whatever, you think, I'm the opposite of that.
But there's this weird kind of redirection of you know,
rebellion that I can't stand, which is like, well, screw you, dad,
And it very much. Is the it's like a gen
X version of rebellion, you know, where it's like, well,
you you were a sellout. You know, you didn't see
the true message of the gospel. The true message of
the gospel is well social justice, you know. And I
think part of it is just you know, basic rebellion.
And I think there's another part of it, which is
that and I want to read Dave's you know, threat
on this because it's quite good. Is part of it
is just that, you know, these people who are so
addicted to respectability. The reason they dislike their parents in
many cases is because their parents aren't respectable anymore. You know,
their parents are, if not in literal terms and kind
of you know, functional terms, are baby boomers. You know,
they're Republicans, and that's not cool, that's not respectable. And
so they have this deep, I guess religious yearning. You know,
they were raised in these conservative religious communities, and so
it's like, on one hand, I feel sympathy for that,
but they're so desperate to be kind of liked by
the broader culture that they're willing to sacrifice all of it,
but the trappings, in order to retain that respectability.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, there is a real ritual of submission to power
that's involved with all of this. I saw a friend
of mine this evening and he saw a toy in
my house that happened to have the blue and yellow
that looked like the Ukrainian flag, And he said, oh,
that's Is this toy somehow connected? And I said no, no,
I would never want to be mistaken for a homosexual,
of course. And we talked about people signaling their support
for various social causes when it does not demonstrate any knowledge,
it does not demonstrate any kind of sacrifice, any real
form of commitment. You know, the virtue signaling that we
see in social media is the perfect example of that.
You know, you post an emoji or something that fits
with a certain occasion, you know, a symbol or something,
and that puts you on the side of what is fashionable.
And we see an incredible amount of posturing these days
that does not involve any real sacrifice, any real action,
and it is it is a passive posturing that earns
credibility or it I think I think it was Jarvin
that said people are signaling to show that they love power,
they worship power wherever the power lies. They are in
allegiance to it. And we certainly see a lot of
that when people mouth the slogans, even if it is
anesthetical to their Christian belief even if it is contrary
to what all Christians have professed up until now.
Speaker 6: And I think the thing and I want to read,
you know, Dave's comments on that, because it's a good
framing device. But there's something to me incredibly irritating. And
I have an episode coming out, it will probably come
out on Thanksgiving Day that I recorded just recently with
Raging Mandrel about this that one of my least favorite
things about progressives and progressive Christians have adopted this. It
is this eternal need to see yourself as being out
of power, as being downtrodden, as being rebellious. And you
see this in media very clearly, like the fact that
you know, you know Ukrainian Flag, you know libs, you
know the people you know essentially you know, the odd
amalgamation of you know, social issues and neocons that essentially
control the entire apparatus of the most powerful empire in
the world. You know, are obsessed with these symbols of
themselves as the rebellion, as the resistance as the underground
and despite the fact that by any objective measures they want.
And you see this in kind of like progressive Christianity.
So there's this book and this woman and I can't
remember her name, but I despise her. It's called Jesus
and John Wayne, and it's this idea that well, and
it's a very Protestant idea in a negative sense. We're
this idea that well, the Jesus of the original Christians,
well it was always the kind of like touchy feely,
you know, feminized Jesus, the one that you see in
the third part of Canticle for Leebo Whits, you know,
the kind of like horrifyingly you know, ef feminine, you know,
corporate Jesus. You know that, the one that in the
book at least is you know, placed over the eugenics camp. Well,
well that's the real one. And really what happened is
the original sin of America, you know, the original sin
of kind of like white you know, founding stock Americans. Well,
they were just mean people, you know, and they decided
that well, well, Jesus was a cowboy, you know, Jesus
liked guns and Republicans and before that everything was fine,
and really, if we just if we just de republicanized
Jesus will be fine. You know, we could keep our
religion in our social justice too. And to me that
that just drives me up the wall because it's such
an obvious mystery of history. So I want to read
Dave's thread because he does a good job of kind of,
you know, countering my less productive inclinations in this thread.
And I realized it's difficult to translate, you know, a
Twitter thread into you know, the spoken word, but I'll
give it my best bet. And so for reference again,
this is me responding to a progressive evangelical, you know,
hyping his upcoming documentary about how the idea that Christians
didn't agree or didn't or the idea that Christians condemn
homosexuality is an innovation, something that happened in the year
nineteen forty six, hence the name nineteen forty six. So
he replies to me, I am less interested in the
BS arguments here. They don't even hold up when this
guy argues it gets internet anons. I am more interested
in where people like this come from. My impressions is
that they are one former red state evangelicals with rascinated,
winsome Christianity. Two went to university when it was still
minimally capable of making an argument, got bts vote, or
three spent the rest of their life trying to derive
some syncratic heresy with progressivism. So I think those are three,
you know, I guess particularly you know, like accurate diagnoses.
So if you could kind of describe, you know, your
experience in Christian private schools and kind of like where
you saw people get kind of sucked into, you know,
this belief system.
Speaker 5: Indeed, I came out of a kind of traditionalist Southern
Baptist upbringing where our most formative church, the church that
we most fit in with, was a very hymn centered
Baptist church. So we we sang lots of hymns there
were there were very good musicians, and we we knew
all the old songs and we would sing them corporately.
It was it was still this, uh, this wonderful hold
over of an older kind of civilization where people knew
how to sing and we had that in place of creeds.
But it had one of the one of the upsides
of that Baptists not traditionally saying things like the Nicene
Creed or the Apostles Creed. And it's possible Baptists have
some catechism somewhere, but it's not something certainly not well
known from my circles where I came from. The hymns
gave us our statement of faith. The hymns gave us
our doctrines. I went to a Baptist college, and I'd
already gathered by this point in my life that I
came from a very very special hold over of an
older kind of expression of Baptist faith and worship. But
at the college, they wanted things to be upbeat, they
wanted things to be moized, and so there were no hymns.
It was all the praise and worship music. So this
corresponds with what you were talking about, the winsome Christianity,
the Christianity that's actually designed to appeal primarily to those
who are not Christians. So it's a special kind of
window dressing, if you will. It doesn't even cultivate the insiders.
It does not even cultivate and reassure and strengthen those
who are already initiated. It's designed to look like a
rock concert, look like it's people having fun to those
who have no idea what's going on. So the praise
and worship music is like bad nineties rock or I
don't know, would it be bad two thousands rock? I
don't know.
Speaker 6: Well to quote my favorite ever, you know, King of
the Hill quote, you know, you didn't make rock and
roll better, or you didn't make Christianity cooler, you made
rock and roll warse Yes, you know, And that's very
much what it is, you know. And I like that
show because it in addition to just being amusing, you know,
there's a lot of kind of deep insights in it.
And there's this this term from I want to say,
it's it's not.
Speaker 12: Just that the next storm could destroy everything a Wamahoo
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Speaker 6: For a just world. I want to say it's Neil Postman,
but I might be you're wrong on that who He
basically describes the false trap of relevance. You know, this
idea that well, if you just appeal to people, you know,
you'll win them over, you know, you'll get the fifty
plus one magical percent and everything will be fine. And
obviously look like there is a if you come to
the average person, you know, with this kind of like
Ivory Tower, incredibly in depth theology just off to that.
You know, people and I include myself in this number,
will look at you and basically ask you, well, one,
what does that mean? And too why do I care?
So I'm not saying that we you know, essentially front
load you know, the most complicated pieces of doctrine. But
on the other end, it's like, well, and this is
very much what you see with this, you know, kind
of desperate move to integrate you know, progressive talking points
into Christianity. It's like, well, if you're trying to be progressive, like,
why don't I just go with the people who are
really progressive? You know, why don't I go with the
uncut stuff? You know? Why do I have to like
kind of faugh around with all the other stuff you've
kind of kept in the back. And look like if
this experiment worked, surely we would have seen it work,
you know. But we've been doing this. I mean, I
don't know when you would say the earliest moment is,
but I mean everyone's been hit by this. You know
what the possible exception you know of the Orthodox and
I mean, if it's working, you'd be you'd be hard
pressed to convince me. But anyway, carry on.
Speaker 5: Well, I think that there there was some kind of
connection with Protestant tradition in America, and in particular the
Revivalist tradition. A second grade awakening evangelist. I believe he
was Presbyterian. Charles Spurgeon was Spurgeon Presbyteria.
Speaker 6: I'm not sure on that. I can look it up
in a minute, but I don't know if it topped
my head. Well, he was.
Speaker 5: He was deeply involved with the founding of Uberlin College
in Ohio. Yeah, and that's been the center of all
kinds of progressive weirdness for a long time. But Charles
Spurgeon was a Revivalist preacher.
Speaker 6: I should say it just as a note before you
get along.
Speaker 1: He was.
Speaker 6: He was a particularist Baptist, which I don't know that way,
just to say.
Speaker 5: Well, how about that. Okay, I'm going to note that
away because I wasn't sure of that. Charles Spurgeon preached
revival meetings and traveled the country as as a big
tent evangelist. You know, he would have he would have
temporary moving buildings and he'd preach sermons and everyone come
out and hear Charles Spurgeon. And Spurgeon openly advocated for
emotional manipulation to increase commitments to convert at the ends
of his meetings because he said what ultimately mattered was
a emotional romantic commitment at the end of an experience
at a revival meeting, and it was not the life
that would follow it. So you wanted to get people
to commit, you wanted to baptize them, and then of
course the revival meeting would move on. Now he has
a lot of other ideas too, but what really struck
me about his thought was he said, emotionally manipulating people
in the heat of the moment was worthwhile because that
decision that you can ring out of them at that
moment of crisis is what ultimately matters. Not what they
do with their life from that point on. And so
he ushered in a number of traditions that I certainly
saw as a Baptist, and I was not his particular
variety of Baptists, but I saw it plenty in the
Baptist setting, where there would be a very emotional appeal
at the end of a service. Some some pastors try
to make it a point to do it at the
end of every single sermon that they preached. They would
make an emotional appeal and call for people to come
down to the altar and to commit themselves to Christ
or recommit themselves to Christ. And they would call these
things conversions and report them and you know, give anecdotes
about them. It was it was like a major career
achievement for them to have these things, and they were
they were promoted. So as as a result of that,
I I believe that the worship services themselves got debased,
and they invested more and more in emotional appeals and
less and less in enduring substance. So this is something
that I've noticed with my Protestant students for many years now,
and this is something you may you may also remember
in my literature class when I would teach Dante, I
would always emphasize that Christians believe in the resurrection of
the dead. We believe that after death are our bodies
are resurrected by God and we will be in our
flesh and blood once again. We will be raised from
the dead, just like Jesus was. And it never fails.
Every single year when I teach my h my students
in high school, I find a bunch of Protestant students
that are floored by that message because they have never
heard it before. I have a lot of Presidant students.
I have students invariably every single year when I teach
that lesson, they will be struck by it as something novel.
They aren't sure that Christians actually believe that. They will
argue with me. But it never fails every single year.
And there's something very shallow about what's going on in
those churches. So certainly part of the problem is the
worship's style, which is fundamentally an unseerious thing. To go
to church and to sing these what we called them,
happy clappy songs. I went to school chapel three mornings
a week for at least two years. Was I doing
it for three years. I forget, but I sang the
praise and worship service, or I at least heard those
songs for two years, three days a week during the
school year. And eventually I started taking tallies of how
many songs we sang and how many times we sang them,
and I had a list in my pocket, and I
would keep tallly marks on that list. And I found
out that we were singing from a list of fifteen
songs three days a week. My list was only fifteen
songs long. And then I started talllying them out, and
we would sing the same song, you know, fifteen times.
And these were very shallow songs like Jesus, I love you,
I love you, I love you, Jesus, I love you
all the time, all the time.
Speaker 6: I love you.
Speaker 5: Right, there's just no context. I mean as a as
a exclamation of commitment and piety. That works, right, that's
a prayer that's fit for my five year old daughter.
Speaker 6: She praised that.
Speaker 5: But that's not the prayer fit for a mind. Right,
that's not maturity, that's not sobriety. So unfortunately we have
we have an awful lot of people. For all I know,
it's it's coming from from Catholic backgrounds as well. I know,
I know there's kind of praise music that's that's current
with Catholic churches. But there there are an awful lot
of people in American Christianity I who do not have
depth in their faith. They are not informed about what
Christians actually believe about things. And when they go to college,
even when they go to Christian college, they encounter depth
in their subject matter that may trump everything they've ever
heard in church before. I mean, you mentioned your you're
a sophisticated coffee shop set. The creative people, the writers,
the artistic people, and they go into leftism, or they
grab leftist stuff and they bring it into a Christian context.
Speaker 6: I I.
Speaker 5: Must admit a real sympathy with them in that they
have found something that's some it's something that calls for
some kind of sacrifice. Maybe right the ideological ones, okay,
I have I have a genuine sympathy for the neopagans.
Neopagans that grow up in the debased, you know, unimaginative, uh,
happy clappy worship service, and then they find the Greek
tragedies or they find the poetic eda. Right, they find
something that's transcendently beautiful for the first time in their lives.
I mean, something outside of the Bible. But they they
have to imagine those texts. Those texts don't don't sit,
you know, uh comfortably for the Christian reader. He has
to put imagination into what the chorus is doing in
the in the Greek tragedy, so he sees, you know, uh,
a vital paganism, oh a uh, A way of belief
that fights back against the world. That's what I see
what I read Sophocles genuinely. I mean I am an
I am an Orthodox Christian, but I have a genuine
respect for the neo Pagans because it's a it's a
real reaction against the decadence, the idiocy of our times.
Speaker 6: And and others. You know, what do they have? Do
they do? They have the.
Speaker 5: Sunday's School flannel graph?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 5: Is that the extent of religious expression that they have
in their artistic tradition. It's impoverished, the whitewashed church.
Speaker 6: No, it's stripped away.
Speaker 5: Any Anyone that goes to Europe and sees the heritage
will feel alienated and ought to feel impoverished, ought to
feel that they've lost something They've lost something incredibly beautiful
and transcendent and valuable, and they ought to be reaching
out for it.
Speaker 6: And and where might they go.
Speaker 5: They might go to the art class, they might go
to the art department. Right, they might go into humanities,
which is overwhelmingly leftist, God help us. But there there,
there's there's still something alive in them, in that, in
that rebellion, that that I I still cherish in them.
I I wish that I could give them the real
thing instead of, you know, the the leftist resentment, which
is really all all that the left can offer. In
the humanities, it's just an overwhelming resentment. It's just a
deep or more profound kind of alienation. So they feel
melancholy and profound in that alienation, and they feel like
they've they've really grew abb something that's mature, They've really
grabbed something that's serious, and they're they're also mainstream now
now they're respectable. I think that American evangelicalism, I think
they really could raise their children in that environment. That
and by the way, what I'm referring to that's before
the praise music regimen, which is very new. Okay, it
wasn't so long ago. All Christian denominations had their hymn books.
Even the Unitarian Universalists.
Speaker 6: Have their ham books.
Speaker 5: They're hymn books. You know that they sang out of.
It's it's a new UH. It's a new phenomenon the
the UH praise and worship music, which which I think
is very important. I really do think that the UH
artistic aspect is extremely important, especially because it's so impoverished
and anti intellectual. But UH, those people they came out
of of something that really was lame in its expression,
if not in its actual content. I mean, if they
if they actually looked into what Baptists believe, they could
see that it was far more serious. But they came
to school and wanted to ally themselves with what was respectable.
There was a time when being a Baptist in America
is far more respectable than it is being a Baptist now.
Being a Baptist now is genuinely countercultural. You want a
real rebel, a college graduate who remains a Baptist. But
I'm telling you, there are very very few people that
can be so strong minded. It takes a real living
fish to go against the current of the time. And
that's a special elite anymore. It used to be easy.
It used to be that you could send your kids
to school. Used to be you could send your kids
to the Baptist school. Used to be you could send
your kids to the Baptist college and they would come
out the other side as Baptists. It didn't work for me,
and it didn't work for most of my classmates. I
lament that it ought to work. It's reasonable, but it doesn't.
Speaker 6: So there's something I want to get into, and that
was it was beautifully said. There was a lot in
there is that there's this kind of inherent pragmatism to
Americans in particular, and it's both a blessing and a curse.
You know. On one hand, it's incredibly useful obviously, you know,
being pragmatic is useful, you know, and any number of
like kind of you know, real world situation. But I
think that that kind of pragmatic Puritan tradition of like,
oh well, let's just strip it down to the things
that matter, you know, like we don't need all the extras,
you know, we'll just we'll take it to the core,
to the root of it. Absolutely has just demolished religious
worship because the problem with religious worship is that it's
not it's pre rational. You know, faith is pre rational.
You can't reason your right way into faith. And if
we're talking about you know, Protestants who really get this,
you've got care Caguard, like careker Guard understands this dramatically.
You know that the theology is kind of a limited
you know, in a certain context, is of limited use.
But nonetheless that everything in the kind of you know,
like a certain subset of American Protestantism is focused on
essentially min maxing, you know, so like cutting out everything
that isn't essential and maximizing for X variable. Well, we
want to get the most people in, you know, to
be the most X, the most y. And when it's left,
it's left. It's just incredibly like you said, it's like
weak cruel, you know, there's almost nothing left to it.
And I very much feel sympathy for the fact that,
you know, for a lot of people, they're kind of
brought up in this very like nebulous informal you know,
system of beliefs where everything is is kind of vague platitudes,
you know, like everything is just kind of vaguely expressed.
There's nothing explicitly stated, and then kind of the first
moment that they you know, they feel some resistance, you know,
the first time they get punched in the nose. Why
either it demolishes them, you know, it just completely you know,
knocks them back on their ass. And there's you know
again there's the different you know past we've outlined, or
there's this equally incorrect thing that we've seen. And this
is much this is less and less a you know,
a path, but was much more common in kind of
the era of the moral majority. But it's it's kind
of commitment to you know, closing your eyes and plugging
your ears. You know, it's like, no, it's not that's
not true. I don't believe it. You're like, you must
be X, you must be why you know this this
kind of just reflexive, you know, rejection of any of
any criticism. And the problem is, Okay, maybe that works
for one generation, you know, maybe that worked for the
Baby boomers, maybe that worked for Gen X, but it
doesn't work for your kids. You know, if you raise
your kids in that atmosphere, they.
Speaker 5: Will reminds me something of what you're saying there about.
Speaker 6: The ah bag Bay you dropped out for a little bit.
I should be back soon. He has buy you internet,
so occasionally it drops out. If I can vamp for
a little bit until he until he drops back in.
Speaker 4: To me.
Speaker 6: At least there's this there's this dynamic. And I used
an analogy when you were prepping for this show. Let
me know if you guys can hear me. By the way,
I just send something into chat so I know it's
not on my end where essentially, yeah, I should be good.
Where essentially it's if I can describe it, it's very
much like you know, medieval siege warfare, you know, where
you would instead of knocking down the walls, well maybe
you okay, good, Okay, I am good, So it's on
back these ends, all right? That makes me feel better.
So essentially what you would do is okay, I'll let
him back in when he pops, when he comes back up.
What what they would do or allegedly do is well,
there are two ways to take a castle in a siege.
Now you can either you can knock down the walls.
You know you can. You can throw fire bombs over
the walls and burn it out well, or you can
throw a dead cow over the walls. And fair enough,
when the dead cow hits the ground, it doesn't kill anyone,
but it starts to spread rot. And George, I'll let
you on a little bit. I just want to finish
this thought. But what it does is it spreads sickness,
bred disease, It spreads malaise, you know. And when there's
the people on the wall aren't paying attention, you know,
they're not cleaning up the mess. They're not making sure
that no one gets sick. These parents who had good
cultural instincts, you know, the instincts that wait a minute,
the elite, the people in control, they don't have our
best interest. Well, they reacted in a way that made sense.
They said, oh, I want to get away from that.
I don't want my kids interacting with it. And while
that's understandable, what it did is they their kids were
never prepared. So essentially they they let this rot, you know,
go behind their back lines. And so what we've seen
is obviously, whereas before a lot of times it didn't
hit till college, you know, it didn't hit till they
interaction with the real world, what now is happening, you know,
more and more over the kind of the era of
the Internet is the Internet has essentially allowed you know,
our enemies to seed their ideology behind enemy lines, so
to speak. And so this problem, you know, where these
people who are you know I have almost no firm beliefs,
They have almost no tradition to rely on. It's affecting
them at you know, a younger and younger age. You know,
sometimes even before you know, you as the teacher and
you as the parent can can get to them. And
so obviously, Dagbie, I want to let you get back
to what you were saying. But this problem is it's
getting worse in many ways. And obviously it affects the
you know, the mass market, you know, aluminum building, you know,
rock and roll, evangelicals, but it's also started to hit
the places you'd assume it wouldn't, you know. It's like
the Christian you know, classical movement. You know, these schools
where kids are taught, you know, they're kind of like
the rich Western tradition. You know. Okay, fair enough, you
have them in school for eight hours a day, but
if they're on TikTok for twelve hours, you know the
rest of the time. I realized the math doesn't add up,
but bear with me, you know, if they're on their
phone the entire time getting you know, essentially like like
the sissy hypno from TikTok or from you know, their
social media. It's it's debilitating. So anyway bagbe to get
back point.
Speaker 5: Indeed, sorry for the interruption. One of the problems is
that a lot of people go to go to high school,
they go to the private high school, the Christian high school,
their college, and they are unlettered. They are it's not
to say that they can't read, but they are not
literate in any meaningful sense. They are unread. And something
that I saw repeatedly that really made an impression on me.
Speaker 4: I have.
Speaker 5: I have practically everything I need for a double major.
I took so many classes in English, and I took
more classes in English than I did in History when
all was said and done. But one of the classes
in English I never did take was critical theory or
literary criticism. It's it's practically the same thing. I knew
how to use critical theories to write papers because that's
what you do in English, and that's what English academic
journals are. There is the Freudian, there is the neo colonialist.
There's the new critic, there's the Marxist. You know, they're
all the different ideologies that you use to explain what
a piece of literature means. And then if you want
to be very clever, you will combine the feminist with
the Freudian, and you'll have like a combined hybrid ideology
to criticize your paper with, or to criticize your literature with.
But I saw so many of my classmates who and
these are these are better read people. They're English majors, right.
This was a four hundred level class. But I saw
so many of my classmates go into that class and
come out the other side disillusioned, broken, questioning their faith.
I saw several people go into that class and come
out the other side some form of social justice warrior.
And I attribute this strongly to the fact that we
don't know who our own writers are, and we are
not loyal to the ideas of the people who are
actually on our side, and we go into so many
of so many of our students go into classes like
this and they read Marks for the first time and
he's a good writer, and he has compelling ideas, and
he's talking about real problems, and they're like, Wow, that's persuasive.
They don't have anyone to compare them to. They go
and read you know, Simone de Beauvoir for the first time,
pardon me. They don't have anyone to compare them to.
They don't have anyone to reput with, and they're overwhelmed.
Speaker 6: What I think that the double problem with this is
not only does it, you know, does it take people
away from your camp so to speak, is that it
takes the best and brightest, you know, it takes the
people who are interested in ideas, who are interested in
wrestling with things, you know, the people who ideally would
be your intellectual class, you know, your ruling class. And
it's very much like the Probably one of the most
devious things about the system is that not only does
you know whatever you want to say, you know, g
n C, the GAE, not only does it you know,
hackets enemies. Not only does it you know, sabotage them,
but it steals their best and brightest and kind of
you know, sublimates them, you know, into itself. You know,
it brings you know, the the cream of the crop
out of you know, these potential opposition groups, you know,
and turns them into you know, foot soldiers of the regime,
you know, whether full throated ones you know in the
case you know of you know, the preacher's kids who
become commis or is these kind of you know, fellow
travelers who are you know, communists, you know gender communists
in all but nate, you know, like all right, fair enough.
You know, maybe you go to church and maybe you
know you sing some you know, incredibly vague music that's
at least, you know, tangentially related to Christianity. But you know,
the real meat of it, the real marrow of that is,
you know, progressive social points.
Speaker 5: Well, we we cannot get away from the fact that
we're going to get Catechism from someone and we will
have institutional loyalties. I think it doesn't it doesn't really
matter how isolated one claims to be, what kind of
a social outcast one one portends to be. We are
members of groups, We have loyalties, we have things that
we believe that correspond with those group beliefs. A big,
a big talking point in education is critical thinking. Parents
everywhere will say, oh, I want my I want my
kid to think for themselves. But we we thinks as
members of groups, and you want your people to know
what your group has to say. So if you don't
want your kid to become a third wave feminist or
whatever they are, now, you need to give them the
retorts of that catechism.
Speaker 6: What do you believe?
Speaker 5: Do you believe that there's such a thing as healthy masculinity?
Then tell your kid what it is, make sure they
know it, and give them good people to read on
the subjects so that they don't question at all the
very first challenge that they meet. You want your kid
to believe what your faith teaches, then find who gave
you that particular belief set get the catechism. You know,
if you're a Lutheran, you ought to know the Lutheran Catechism.
You ought to have it. Your kids ought to know it,
You ought to have them memorize it. Right now. That's
easier with confessions that actually do have catechisms and creeds
because that work has been done. But there is there's
something more insiduous going on that we that we need
to know about, we need to be aware of, and
that is the rot in the academy. We have seen
it because we've we've gone to school recently, and we
know what things are like even at a at a
very thoroughly Baptist. You know, they would have called themselves
a traditional Baptist school with pretty high standards for their faculty.
Like I want to be clearer, like, my faculty were great.
My faculty are why I'm doing what I'm doing now
and why I maintained my faith through the experience as well.
They were excellent teachers, and you and I both know professors.
Speaker 6: That that fit this description. Well.
Speaker 5: Even so, even in that kind of environment, people were
falling away, forced to read the woke stuff because there's
there's no other way to go through the academy these days,
they still fell away, And I am I'm convinced it's
because they did not have any loyalty to anything better.
They didn't have any loyalty to what their parents actually
wanted them to believe, and they didn't they didn't actually
have good writers that would explain that to him.
Speaker 6: So and I fully believe, I fully agree with you.
I just want to clarify one things. I'm seeing some
confusion in chat and I realized this is a specialized term,
is that a catechism is essentially a formalized statement of belief.
You know, a creed is we believe this, you know,
the most most popular, the most common ones to be
the Niceinge Creed, the Philippine Creed. You can read on
history of your own, but those are kind of litmus
tests for are you a Christian? Yes or no? You know,
like do you hold these beliefs? And what a catechism is?
And it's essentially a series of you know, questions and answers,
you know, very helpful for things like this, like, for instance,
the Westminster Catechism. I believe the first one is what
is Man's chief? At well, it's Man's chief and just
to glorify God, you know, so on and so forth
and so enjoy Him forever exactly. And so that's helpful
both as like a you know, an fa Q page
like well, okay, well what do I think? And you
know that you're religiously or can say like all right,
well we've written down a whole lot of those, you know,
and it doesn't doesn't really hold for every situation imaginable,
but it can get you a lot of the way there.
And the way it's it's set up is in a
way that's designed to be something you can memorize, you know,
it's designed to be something you can teach children and
look like is it dogmatic? Yes, by definition it is dogma,
you know. But the problem is, like if you're going
to you can't go through life without being indoctrinated, so
to speak. That's right, if you leave nothing there, it's
not like you will become you know, this kind of
like blank slate, you know, this fully realized human. You'll
become your own. That's that's false, that's a lie. You
will become someone else's man, you know. And so really
like either you have to fill it if it's empty
now or it's full of you know, like horrible bad
you know, culturally progressive ideas that are rotting you or
in the case of you know, the children you either
have or will have, like it's your job to fill it.
And one of the things that I I really do
feel a lot of sympathy for, you know, the silent
generation and a little bit older you know, I guess
there aren't many left of the Greatest Generation, but when
I talk to people of that, you know, that pre
Baby Boomer generation, many of their children became you know,
kind of like the godless hippies, you know, the you know,
the just urrascinated consumers that we, you know, kind of
associate with the baby boomer generation. But many of those
people are just a little bit older their parents, and
I've talked to a lot of them have this incredibly.
They feel very confused. It's like, well, where did it
go wrong? And I've talked to them, you know, like
I've you know, not my grandparents at little bit young,
but my friend's grandparents, and they say things like, well,
I never I was never taught this explicitly. You know,
everyone just did it. You know, no one ever had
to explain it to me, and fair enough, right, like
if you lived in a country that demographically, that religiously
that you know, economically, you know, there was a wide
degree of agreement and kind of the standard of the road,
you know, like middle of the standard, middle of the
road position was at least fairly conservative, fairly traditional. You
probably could, you know, when every cultural institution was mouthing
your platitude, was mouthing your opinions. You know you didn't
have to. But now, like, I mean, can you name
one institution our friend's control can maybe the meed this institute,
I mean maybe kind of Twitter. Even then that's that's
a question mark, and so like it. It very much
now more than ever, has to be an active choice.
You have to put something there, because if you don't,
someone will. And the person who will, what to quote
Sam Hyde, they want you dead, and they're going to
laugh about it.
Speaker 5: And and this is the treachery that that I was
I was intending to say something about. Previously, this, this
kind of academic institutional rot took root in seminaries like
earlier than it than it dominated the regular universities, like
the undergraduate institutions. It was easier to find conservative programs
in the humanities, say an older generation of traditional professors
that wanted to teach their kids the history of the
United States and didn't want their kids hating it at
the end of the lessons. It was easier to find
those than it was, you know, the the unwoke seminary
in the mainline Protestant churches. And there was there was
a war that was fought in these seminaries, a you know,
a kind of of of scholarly war, religious war, theological
conflict between the liberals and the conservatives, and very famously
the Baptists managed to take over a number of their
seminaries from left leaning professors. But that's that's one of
the reasons why the Baptists remain one of the more
populist Christian denominations today. It seems to me, I'm not
a Baptist anymore, but I'm inclined to think well of Baptists,
and I kind of like cheering for their side on things.
But my point is that people coming out of Christian
churches these days are likely trained by pastors and priests
with leftist leanings. So I have students come to me
in my classes all the time, and they will write
in their essays that diversity is our strength and the
real social problems inequality. We have to sacrifice to get
rid of inequality, you know. Or they will say that
racism is the supreme evil, and certainly they're getting some
of these things from church. This is just how people
talk these days. This is what I mean by catechism.
Everyone gets their catechism. Everyone knows what they should believe
about different things. They are given supreme values, they are
given slogans, they are given dogmas that they do not
dissent from. And that's what those terms are. Inequality, chauvinism,
you know, men that are that are putting women down
or something treating them as women, or something inequality. These
are these are the talking points. These are the social
values that that people frequently do get in church. But
at any rate, you know, the Christian college student is
going to take the critical theory class, as as all
English majors do, and they will encounter people who are
actually after those supreme values, because those are the people
that that gave the left those talking points. Those are
the people that proposed revolutionary solutions to bring about that
social order that they desired. And so when when these
students go and you know, read the feminists for the
first time, read the Marxists for the first time, they see, oh, well,
this is actually serious. This is more than than singing
the have be clappy praise music and and hoping that
that God's going to bring about the the ennobling of
the proletariat right, the liberation of women. The Simon de
Beauvoir knows knows what to do about these things, Marx
knows what to do about these things. Why not follow
them instead? This is actually serious stuff. Let's save the world,
let's be serious about it. And I know they're signaling
to power and I know this is a submissive and
disgusting thing for them to do. Yes, I do. But
I'm I'm thinking about my my old classmates, the people
that I know, and the people that I that I
still love and I still pray for them. I'm thinking
about the choices that they made, and there's something reasonable
there considering where they came from. There's something reasonable there there.
Their choice to join the enemy, you know, from our perspective,
to to uh surrender everything that they'd brought up, been
brought up to believe is a rational choice given those premises,
and they didn't know any better. No one ever gave
them someone to fight back against the world. This is
this is why I love that Flannery O'Connor quote so much.
She said, push against the world as hard as it
pushes against you.
Speaker 6: We have to do that.
Speaker 5: I mean, is it just me or or can't you
tell where the world is pushing you lately? If the
pressure has been on, especially in the last few years,
I know I felt it strongly.
Speaker 6: No, I I definitely agree. And I think that for
men especially, you know, and I brought up earlier that
a lot of this is of like poisonously feminized is
that there's a real desire for rigor, you know, there's
a desire to do something difficult. And I think that
almost a lot of not even almost, I think that
a lot of these things are too easy. You know.
It's like, well, what's the point of me doing this?
It requires nothing of me, you know, I just go
into a big warehouse, you know, sit for an hour
and fifteen minutes and go home. You know, it's a
very passive experience. It doesn't need anything from me. And
I think, especially for young men, there is this desire
to be challenged, to be I guess, to have something
required of you, you know, and especially in a society
that is you know, widely bereft of hardship, bereft of challenge,
and bereft of vigor. Like it's it's no shock that,
you know, when we do see kind of growth in
the Christian community, you know, especially on the e right,
you know, it tends to be these it tends to
be these these much more like spiritually rigorous you know communities,
right Like there's no secret that the that the you know,
at least on the on the internet, right like the
community of like online you know, right wing orthow bros
Is you know, growing quickly, you know, And I think
a big part of that is that and I don't
mean to say this flippantly that uh, you know, if
you're if you're going to committed you know, conservative Orthodox parish,
like there's a lot to do. You know, it takes
a lot of your time. You know, you're you're not
just sitting there, you know, wandering off like you've got
to get up, you got to sit down, You've got
to you know, go through a lot. And even within
that right, like that's a small community that requires something
to do. And I think that this idea that oh
we'll grow by making it even easier, it's just so
completely backwards, you know, that's not what this time calls for.
And I think that much like about and talking about
you know, the miss that's grown up around you know,
the radical right, because it is it is truly disruptive,
it is truly rebellious. I think that we see the
same thing about these kind of like ultra traditionalist religious sects.
If you see what I'm getting.
Speaker 5: At, absolutely, well, you're you're talking about my crowd there.
That was that was certainly my path and I have
memories of rebelling against my school in a certain way.
I was talking about the praise and worship sessions in chapel.
After a while of doing that, I started taking the
Book of Common Prayer with me, and I had had
I'd been going to an Anglican group for a while,
and we were singing the liturgies from the old Book
of Common Prayer. And I would take that Book of
Common Prayer into the school chapel service, which was held
in the basketball stadium. So there's nothing, there's nothing intiment
or sacred about the space, you know. It was a
really ugly, utilitarian sort of space. But I would take
out the Book of Common Prayer and I would sing
the liturgies and I would sing the Creed while they
were singing the happy clappy praise music. And that was
kind of my way of pushing back against it, Like
this stuff is excellent, this stuff is beautiful. This tells
me what Christians believe, right, and obviously this other stuff doesn't.
So even even way back in school then I was
pushing back against it. But you're absolutely right, Like the
scene in our sphere is defined by a lot of
people going into something that makes some kind of demand
of them and the megachurches these days, the mainstream, so
many of them. They call themselves non denominational, now, which
I mean no offense to anyone there, but it seems
like it's a nonsensical sort of designation, Like what does
that mean? It means nothing. Every non denom could believe
something radically different than the other. There is no central organization,
no tradition. And I suppose it's designed to maximize appeal,
but doesn't it also increase the shallowness of it? I
don't really know what I'm talking about, admittedly, but these
other groups, Eastern Orthodoxy, which is which I am in
Roman Catholicism, has a story. You can identify them in history, right.
You can identify them with national groups, with kingdoms. There
are thousands of years to reference. They have a correspondence
with the ancient world. They actually identify philosophers in the
ancient world that they like, right, that have some influence
on the way that they see things. They've they've christianized them,
like like Thomas Aquinas christianized Aristotle. And that's that's a
compelling story. You were part of something so much bigger
than your own, you know, little American experience you know,
something that goes back into into ancient times, and that's
very meaningful, and also you're required to do something and
it's difficult, right. One of the things that really speaks
to me from that tradition is the parallelism of it.
In Orthodoxy, we have a religious calendar and that is
distinct from the secular calendar. We actually determine dates on
our religious calendar differently because it's so old. It's actually
Julian in origin, and so it has some practical problems, right,
because it doesn't have leap years and stuff, So it
gets a little confused that way. But we're always talking
about the designation on our religious calendar, which is distinct
from the secular calendar. The religious calendar is very important
to us and it changes the way that we live.
Like right now, we're an advent, which means we're eating
differently and we aren't doing it all by ourselves. We're
doing it with the people we go to church with.
Right now, we're all talking, we're all very excited because
the Patriarch of Moscow, Saint Ticon of Blessed Memory, he
designated American Thanksgiving as something Americans ought to keep in
feasting before he got martyred by the Bolsheviks. So we're
all very happy. This week we will take a break
from the advent fast and will feast like good, thankful Americans.
But it is it's something that really does change the
way that we live. It requires something of us. We
are required to be distinct from our age, were required
to be distinct from the secular because we're set aside
for sacred use.
Speaker 6: That's well said, and what I think that people are
looking for, even if not you know, explicitly stated, it
is this idea to return or to integrate themselves with
something larger. You know, this idea that you know, I
want to connect myself to a chain, to a historical
narrative that makes sense, like I know what is my place?
You know what is expected of me? Like what I
what ought I to do? And I think that one
of the most damaging lies about liberalism, you know, one
of the most damaging I guess truit of the Enlightenment
is this idea that well, the basic unit is you.
You know, if we can maximize your I guess, personal
scope when it comes to decisions, you know, that will
produce the best for you. And the problem with that
is that's not a it's not something you can turn
off and then turn back on again. You know, that
kind of chain of being required continual renewal. And the
problem is that now we're you know, depending on how
you count it, well maybe we're sixty, maybe we're one hundred,
maybe we're four hundred years down. It's from that decision
being made. You know, we can we can argue about
that somewhere else. But there's a certain part of that
it's like, well, we don't really have the option of
believing in God in the same way that someone in
the eleven hundreds believed in God. Not to say that
you don't believe, but it's a different thing now, and
it is to a certain degree, it does require you
to do things that don't on the surface level feel
natural anymore, you know, like they're at least for me right,
Like there's always a part of my brain that is
kind of like trying to claw me back into the
you know, the the materialist world. You know, that's I
realized that's a personal flaw of mind, but I think
it's something that a lot of people have. And look like,
if you're going to connect yourself to a chain of being,
you know, to this narrative going back into time, Well,
you not only have to to a certain degree make
peace with it, but you also have to to make sacrifice.
Is for that, you know, you have to do things
which are difficult and unnatural and countercultural in a way
that's not necessarily fun. Do you see them poking about there? Yeah?
Speaker 5: You you have to stop caring about respectability at some level.
There's a there's a wonderful essay by Nikolai Berdiev, who
I especially love. I actually try to republish this book
because it was very difficult to get and I was
not successful. Amazon would not let me republish it. But
it's called The Bourgeois Mind. And Berta Birdayev says that
the problem with moderns is they really want to be
socially acceptable, They want to fit in, and for that
they're willing to make most any spiritual sacrifice. And I
think that that melds well with our conversation here tonight.
It's a very sobering thought and it corresponds to what
I was saying.
Speaker 6: It was it was.
Speaker 5: Something that was a reasonable given not so long ago,
that you could send your kid to the public school.
You could take them to church, you could send them
to college, and they would grow up and believe in Jesus.
Because it was not so long ago respectable. Now it's
actually genuine rebellion against the ways of the world. And
it leads us to very disturbing questions. Like back in
the nineteen fifties, when it was all so very respectable
to you know, be an upstanding Methodist or something, you know,
and to be in politics or whatever, and we don't
have the culture wars that we have now. Well, were
those people actually believing Christians or were they just going
through what was socially acceptable. What is the more powerful
pull in our lives? I'm not sure. I would like
to think the best of every one of those you know,
from another time, but there's no question about it. You know,
it's a lot easier to just go through the motions
when that's just what everyone expects you to do, and
it's an awful lot harder to be purposeful about it
and to do it at social cost and to sacrifice
your place in some way.
Speaker 6: Well, it's incidentally, it's a point that it's a point
that Ted Kaczynski makes, you know, where he he says
he describes that as being over soized, you know, where
the primary concern in life is these kind of like
social slights. And I think that obviously there's no you know,
correlation between popularity and and you know, correctness. But I
think that if Burdev and Ted Kazinski are pointing out
the same thing, you know, as different as those two
men were, you know, maybe there's something there. Absolutely, so
I'm enjoying this conversation, but because of my uh my
new strenuous work schedule, we are going to have to
wrap things up. Is there anything you want to you know,
kind of lay to bed before we we you know,
bring this to a close.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I've got I've got one last thought in
in American history, just as an example of of something
that I've got a passion for. We we really want
our students here in America to know and love their
own history before they go out and explore the history
of China. Really, the next logical step for us is
to go and explore the history of England and maybe
France and maybe Mexico. Right, the ones that are that
are closest to us, they make the most sense for
the second step. But we have to start at home.
We must start with the familiar. We need to know
who we are first, and we need to have that down.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 5: I think other I think the other periods of time
really did have this so much easier. We live in
a time when everyone is pressured to send their kids
to college. And that's that's part of this problem, Like
how is it that so many young people are falling
away from their Christian faith that their parents really want
them to keep and have made investments, you know, to
that end. One of the reasons is far and more
of them are going to college than ever before, and
college is more or less designed to break that connection
these days, not to encourage those things, but so many
of these young people don't know where they're coming from.
This is part of an anti intellectual tradition in America
that does not value good reading. Where do we find
the bookstores? After all, we find them in the most
leftist areas that we know about, right or or it's
the local Barnes and Noble, that's the alternative, the local
Barnes and Noble, and they don't have the most discerning
book selection. Our students need to know who their people are,
and they need good selections to read We need, we
need readers who know their own, their own sides literature.
And that's one of the best things that we can
do for them is to to give them a writer
like Chesterton, for instance, and tell them this guy is
our guy. He's one of us. This guy has our
opinions about things. You know, he pushed back against his
world effectively and with with what's even more winsome, with
a good sense of humor, which is so wonderful about him.
Franz Kafka once once remarked something about Chesterton. He was
reading Chesterton in German translation, I understand, and he wrote
to his friend and he said, this man must have
found guy odd. He is so happy, which is the
best one of the best remarks I think ever made
about Chestertown. But we need people like that who have
a loyalty in our imagination. We need the Saints, We
need them to command a loyalty. We need to know
we aren't alone standing against the slings and arrows of
the world. And if we know we've got somebody at
our side, like Hector at Troy, he stood to fight
Achilles when he saw he had his brother at his side. Right,
if we if we know that we've got somebody who
can stand with us, then we're much more willing to
face our doom.
Speaker 6: Or to prevail.
Speaker 5: Sometimes we do win after all. Right, thanks a lot
for having me on. It's a real pleasure to be
with you tonight.
Speaker 6: Yeah, thank you so much. I believe I made the
same mistake where I forgot to unmute myself. I'll eventually
get better at that. But again, thank you for coming
out and thank you for discussing this. This is something
that's been bouncing around my head for a while. And
I think that you know the tweet exchange with Dave question, say,
Dave is live right now. You guys should go head
over to his stream after this.
Speaker 5: Oh Dave, I love you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, thank you so much on my work. And so
it was a good I guess prison through rich to
you know, kind of examine this, and you know, Bagbise
links to his telegram that'll be down in the description.
And obviously you guys know my stuff. It's on YouTube,
you know Jay Burden Show. I've got a whole bunch
of other episodes with with Bagbee and also from people
in our circles. And then in addition, I finally figured
out a system to get it. You know, my audio
only episode seamlessly put up on Apple, Spotify, you know,
anywhere you want to listen to the audio only episodes,
you don't have to be glowed to your computer. And
then I have a little bit of a gimmick with
that where essentially the most recent ten episodes are free.
And then after that, if you want access to the
audio files, you do have to pay you know, five
bucks a month on my substack. I realized it's not
a huge thing, but it helps me offset costs here,
which I appreciate. And obviously they'll always be, you know,
for free up on my YouTube so long as I
keep it, and you know, the links for those will
be down. Then description and thank you guys for coming out,
and remember, keep your head up. The life can't last forever.
Good night everyone.
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today