Original subtitles

Welcome back to Close Reading Poetry, everyone.

We're doing something a little different in this video.

It's been almost a year since I first began publishing about the possibility

of a new renaissance, despite the dark age conditions of our current culture.

Now, in our current culture of post-digital, post-modernity, it seems

unlikely that a renaissance could occur.

Literacy rates are still declining, schools are getting worse, technology

advances unchecked. Political discourse is becoming increasingly polarized and

incoherent, and the universities are still defunding the humanities.

Yet history suggests that it is exactly in moments like these when Renaissance

moments begin.

Some will say that AI will bring about the new Renaissance.

I think there's no illusions about that anymore, at least among the sane. Some

say that writing more is going to statistically improve our chances of

producing the next literary...

revival, but it's actually going to take a lot more to bring about cultural

renewal. I've studied the literature of what I've called in previous videos

Renaissance Moments, times in history when the life of a culture is

fundamentally renewed by art and literature, whether it's the European

Renaissance, the Romantic Revival, the American Renaissance, or the Modernist

Movement. They all evinced the same signs before they started and before

they changed culture forever.

And when you look back, every great Renaissance and cultural revival follows

a very recognizable pattern. Based on my research, four domains of knowledge,

philosophy, art, ecology, and religion, are in a transitional period right now

that anticipate a new Renaissance.

So in this video, I'll survey those domains of knowledge in the context of

this possibility.

So let's begin by looking at postmodernism and how philosophy may be

at a moment

of transition right now. For the past several decades, the prominent outlook

of Western philosophy has been characterized by postmodernism, and this

is becoming true for even non-Western societies that are living downstream of

predominant Western culture.

Postmodern philosophy is very difficult to define because it's not a monolith,

and it is very, very complex, and it contains many diverging streams, the

fount of which is not easily traced.

Scholars place the origin of postmodernism sometime after the Second

World War.

The term postmodernism was first studied from a philosophical perspective in the

1979 work of Jean-Francois Lyotard called The Postmodern Condition.

Now, according to Lyotard, postmodernism is, simply put, incredulity toward

metanarratives.

That is, it involves a skepticism toward or disbelief in any grand theory that

puts forward a comprehensive meaning of human life in the universe.

A metanarrative might include an origin story or a religion more broadly, but

really it's more than that. A religious reading of the book of Genesis, for

example, is a metanarrative, not simply because it... It explains why everything

exists or how everything exists, but because it is also a value system by

which the relationships between those things created exist.

It structures the symbols, the relationships, the hierarchies between

the things in creative tension.

So it's worth mentioning that many authors that we consider postmodern are

actually deeply spiritual and religious and have attachments to metanarratives.

So when the philosopher Lyotard defines postmodernism as an incredulity toward

metanarrative, he means it is the condition of disbelief toward any

epistemology that purports to render an accurate and comprehensive narrative of

the universe, whether

That's a system of religion, or of mythology, or of psychology, or of

science, or physics, or whatever.

For Lyotard, the postmodern, quote, designates the state of our culture

following the transformations which, since the end of the 19th century, have

altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts.

Now the philosopher Mary Midgley theorized that postmodernist philosophy

arose from the realization that a complete theory of everything was

impossible.

She writes, The strong unifying tendency that is natural to our thought keeps

making us hope that we have found the single pattern which is a theory of

everything, a key to all mysteries, the secret of the universe.

A long series of failures has shown that this can't work.

That realization seems to be the sensible element at the core of the

conceptual muddle now known as postmodernism. Now this condition

emerged most strongly after 1946, and this strikes, this philosophy, strikes

many people as a strange thing, because the strange thing about postmodernism is

that it's no positive philosophy at all. It's merely, in a way, an attitude.

In its simplest expression, it denotes a disposition, a certain posture or

attitude toward any metanarrative. It is the posture of skepticism and the

activity of criticism.

Given the violence of the competing metanarratives of the 20th century,

postmodernism is very, very sensible.

You must at least concede that.

And it should be understood, I think, as a philosophical survival instinct, or to

use a popular term in psychology right now, a trauma response.

After centuries of iconoclasm, religious wars, mass torture, and genocide

committed at the service of a metanarrative, the postmodernist

attitude has really functioned as an emergency brake in the development of

human consciousness.

It can be seen partly as a punctuating impulse, a station for reflection and

hesitancy. I mean, think about it. If we...

had witnessed firsthand the 19th and early 20th centuries aspirations for a

utopian society, its belief in eugenics, and its quests for a pure race and

empirical control over other countries and peoples. We had witnessed the mass

genocides and persecutions under governments, whether capitalistic,

monarchical, or fascist, or communist.

And if we had witnessed the two global wars which introduced new ways of

killing other human beings that were previously unimaginable, and if we had

been spectators to how both science and religious nationalism in the name of

human good aided these atrocities, I think we would come near to adopting an

incredulity towards metanarratives. And we would also begin to understand why

the digital world is such an allure to young people right now.

and why it's being used as a form of escapism, reality actually offers very

little viable alternatives for a very good future for young people today.

And the digital market, the digital oikos, the ecology, AI,

and the consumerism is really preying upon the nihilistic tendencies that

postmodernism has produced in our failure of producing any other kind of

positive philosophy.

And I should say, As I hinted before, that there is a difference between

postmodernism as a philosophy and postmodern art and literature.

Right, so postmodern art is oftentimes not linked to this attitude of

postmodernity. Too many postmodernist critical videos on YouTube talk about

the suspicion without actually looking at the texts.

And I think the beat poets are a great example of this.

i've even seen some people on youtube discrediting deriding t.s eliot's the

wasteland because it's participating in the iconoclastic destruction of

metanarratives and that's actually not what's happening at all as anyone who

knows who has read the wasteland what you see is a person human consciousness

pulling out of the rubble of modernity fragments and ruins

and reconstructing them into something coherent so many of the Famous

postmodern American books about World War II are satire. Now, satire is the

use of irony or exaggeration to criticize the foolishness of a society.

This was, I think, the predominant characteristic of postmodernist

literature. Gravity's Rainbow, Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22.

It's all about being above the myth. And what better tool for that than irony?

That self-protecting, intrusive mythlessness.

The movement was afraid of grand narratives, and yet it was a time of

individual flourishing in spite of everything that postmodernism asserted.

The civil rights movement, advancements in equality for women, and the issue is

that whatever engine was behind these changes, postmodern culture...

or just irony becoming the main vehicle of literary expression, made it

impossible to lay out as a system because all systems seemed naive when

faced with what we might call the trauma-response irony.

So we can't dismiss postmodernism like the kind of Petersonian boogeyman that

it has become in American pseudo-intellectual pop culture.

It's a very complex movement.

They weren't all nihilists.

What does Tommen Pynchon say in his novel V?

Love with your mouth shut.

Help without breaking your ass or publicizing it. Keep cool, but care. And

that's a very good postmodernist ethos, I think. I mean, read Ginsberg's

visionary poem Howl, which is very prophetic and connected to the

metanarrative lineage in the Hebrew prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah,

Ezekiel. Or study Jack Kerouac's breakdown in 1960 when he had this

visionary experience in Bin Sur.

The plurality of beat spirituality

which is of the postmodern era, will complicate any popular prejudices on

YouTube against postmodern literature as being merely representative of

postmodernist attitudes.

Now, the incredulity toward metanarratives is so foreign to the way

the human mind works that it cannot last for very long. I don't think a record of

human history exists in which humans did not believe in some form of

metanarrative. The person without a metanarrative is somewhat of an anomaly.

which has led some materialist scientists and philosophers to speculate

whether the godless or metanarrative-less human being is the

next chapter in the story of human evolution. The story of human evolution

being, of course, a larger metanarrative.

Modernity may have succeeded in freeing itself from the feudalism of what is

sometimes called the Dark Ages, the medieval period, or just before the

medieval period, the servile existence under monarchs and oppressive religious

structures. But actually, if you look around at the broader culture emerging

now, you find that these larger institutional forces have been replaced

by the predatory substitutions of consumerism, technology, authoritarian

governments living with increasing dependence upon engines of comfort. We

are doped up on mindless entertainment under the growing eye of authoritarian

surveillance. Whatever meta-narratives we used to have, have been replaced by

consumption, pleasure, the opioids of digital entertainment provided by those

now in control.

It seems to me that right now, the new meta-narrative is the story of

technological advancement.

It's very much like, if you're familiar with American evangelicalism, it's very

much like the eschatological expectation of Christ's imminent return, which isn't

just American, it goes...

You know, this idea of the perfect paradise established on Earth animated

Western consciousness for millennia. But this narrative of paradise on Earth, of

Christ coming back, is being transposed onto a new narrative of technological

advancements in modern drugs that will bring about the paradise our ancestors

had hoped for.

This is why the discourse around AI adopts the premillennial

dispensationalist rhetoric of American evangelicalism.

Accept AI as your personal lord and savior, or you will get left behind and

barred out of the future paradise.

The point is that even in our postmodern incredulity toward metanarratives, the

desire for one is so pervasive that we are easily duped into believing the next

version of it, especially if it requires no work and only faith in someone or

something that will do the work for us on our behalf.

Now, I want to address the postmodernist effect upon the academy, because I think

it's been really detrimental.

The postmodernist disposition affected the academy in different ways.

Postmodern science had become a search for instabilities rather than

certainties, and education became performative.

Its criterion for relevance has moved from the acquisition of wisdom and

knowledge to credentialization.

What matters in education, especially American higher education, is not how

much knowledge you have learned, but rather Things like grades and university

rankings and affiliation, all of which were once markers of value but are

increasingly becoming less valuable as the performativity of higher education

increases in its adoption of the business model through which

universities begin to look more like companies run by CEOs than monastic

centers of learning that they were in their original form.

Now the postmodern incredulity has eclipsed the vital powers of the

creative imagination, and I'm going to talk about this when we get to the field

of art.

But the creative imagination has been substituted by a critical and nagging

intellect. I should say that these particular criticisms of academia are

currently more relevant in places like the United States, where at some

institutions, if you don't receive a scholarship, tuition for two years of

college costs more than a single family home.

The humanities, the study of culture, of literature, art, history, is, under this

growing model, deemed useless.

The system of values predominant in every realm of American life right now

is money.

Under such a system of values, the humanities remain neglected, if not

outright spurned. I mean, in 2015, when Senator Marco Rubio criticized

universities for not teaching 21st century skills and said, we need more

welders and less philosophers although what he really meant to say was more

welders and fewer philosophers but anyway he was making a value judgment

from within a largely utilitarian and financial system of economic values why

welders couldn't be philosophers and philosophers welders is still a problem

for the american imagination to figure out it says more about the regard for

higher education in america than it does of rubio now the u.s secretary of state

the american university system has been the target of far-left critics as being

symptomatic of late-stage capitalism as it has been more recently the target of

social authoritarianism of the far right in its critique of universities as

educators of irrelevant knowledge or of bastions of marxism

That both sides have complained of the university would suggest, I think

rightly so, that systematic reform within the American higher education

system is needed. The thing is that at both extreme ends of the American

political spectrum, we find the effects of postmodernity. The right

cannot escape it and the left cannot escape it. Where the far left has...

sought to suppress conservative views, now the new far-right is adopting the

same authoritarian technique.

The assumptions of both the new far-right and the far-left often lead

them both to respond with the same tactics of complacent criticism and

uncritical dismissal of anyone who uses terminology outside of their ideological

lexicon. Both have the tendency to assume that if their perspective would

be allowed to reign uncontested, the world would be a better place.

But progress has always been achieved through the testing of alternative

perspectives and ideas, not through the suppression, knee-jerk dismissals, or

censorship of those ideas.

I hear a lot of conservative spaces right now complaining that American

universities are full of Marxists. I've only met one.

Marxist across the four university institutions I've been a part of since

community college, but I haven't really seen many books Competing with this idea

are challenging this idea. I mean, this is what we need an ecology of checks and

balances of intellectual

sparring and debate and not through censorship.

And by the way, this is straight up John Milton's Areopagitica and John Stuart

Mill's On Liberty.

But in regards to academic reform, I do not believe it will come until some kind

of new cultural renaissance takes place.

And it will take place outside of the academy.

A renaissance very seldom begins inside an academy.

And this leads me to the renaissance parallels because there are some

interesting similarities between our moment right now

and the situation in Europe right before the European Renaissance.

And this is where the concept of a Renaissance is particularly intriguing

to me.

For a Renaissance moment, almost always is born from the need to escape the

absurd and oppressive way of life, and philosophy has always played a role in

that escape.

Just before the European Renaissance, for example, the universities and

colleges in Europe were...

interested in bickering over logical puzzles and moral dilemmas instead of

solving real-world problems.

This was due to late scholasticism. The 15th century Dutch humanist scholar

Rudolf Agricola complained that the universities in his day prized obscure

and irrelevant sophistries over the most petty and superfluous questions.

And we have this going on right now.

There are some real interesting parallels between scholasticism

and postmodernism today.

Scholasticism was largely based on Aristotle's inquiry in the nature of the

world, and it prioritized a method of inquiry that involved understanding the

world through categorization and hierarchical relations and logic.

Now, Scholasticism is a wonderful movement. When it first started out, it

was enormously complicated and sophisticated.

It was a great approach to theology and science.

But by the 15th century, it had grown stale and stagnant. As it spread, it

left little room for any other kind of approach to knowledge beyond Aristotle,

Aquinas, and his successors.

Late scholasticism had become an unquestioned ideology by the 15th

century. Just as postmodernism really has today we swim in it without really

knowing that our gills are taking in the nutrients strange metaphor but you know

hats off to david foster wallace there the introduction of a new kind of

philosophy helped initiate the renaissance which began in italy and it

spread throughout europe into other countries and it was broadly known as

the european renaissance

Partly happened because when the Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, the works

of Plato and others were carried by refugees into Europe.

Many of these texts the West had never yet seen.

Among them were Plato's Republic and several Neoplatonic texts of Plotinus

and the Corpus Hermeticum.

The translation of these works, largely by Ficino introduced a new form of

understanding human life and reinvigorated European philosophy which

had for so long been bogged down by academic bickering. Specifically,

Platonic thought.

opposed to scholasticism, celebrated human imagination and reason.

It centered the soul as the locus of creativity.

It championed the notion of sacred mysteries as elevated ideas beyond the

reach of human analysis and taxonomy.

But it could be encountered through contemplation or theoria.

Platonic theology conceived of art as beautiful, as divine helpers, leading us

back to the divine source.

Platonism celebrated human creativity and the soul's divine origin by aligning

with this humanist focus on human potential and dignity.

And it was this vision, this recovery of spirit, that inspired Pico della

Mirandola, John Collet, Cornelius Agrippa, and Bruno, and many others who

brought about the Renaissance in Europe. Like scholasticism before the European

Renaissance, Post-modernism could be a stepping stone to a more positive

attitude, and many philosophers nowadays have been speculating about that.

Right now, a version of our world is collapsing, and a new world is or will

soon be born, and in the early stages of this transitional phase, post-modernist

philosophy is really just a stepping stone, or as Zizek wrote, a transitional

phase into something else.

And there is also the view that the category of modernity is really a false

one. This is something that Bruno Latour argues.

Other philosophers are proposing a kind of meta-modernism as a stage beyond post

-modernism. You know, I'm not a philosopher, and I remain agnostic about

the validity of some of those perspectives, but already I think what's

important to acknowledge is that philosophy is breaking down and

beginning to rework itself.

Post-modernity for Jürgens Habermas, for example, is a digression from the

Enlightenment project of the 18th century.

The Enlightenment project pushed forward three ideals, objective science,

universal morality, and autonomous art that operates according to its own inner

logic. And you can see how such a definition might be considered an anti

-definition of post-modernity, which is partly why Habermas regards post

-modernity as anti-modernity.

In his essay, Modernity, an Incomplete Project, translated by Seyla bin Habib,

Habermas writes, The project of modernity formulated in the 18th century

by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop

objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to

their own logic.

At the same time, this project intended to release the cognitive potentials of

each of these domains from their esoteric origins.

The Enlightenment philosophers wanted to utilize this specialized culture for the

enrichment of everyday life, that is to say, for the rational organization of

everyday social life. I think we're already seeing the end of postmodernist

philosophy, which has for decades shaped culture and regulated the way our

academic institutions have functioned.

And I believe it's running its course now.

Emergency break in human consciousness is no longer so much needed, and now we

can start accelerating towards a positive direction.

Zizek actually views postmodernity as a phase of modernity.

Postmodernism, under his view, is not really considered an ism unto its own,

which is just to show how much of a complex topic postmodernism is.

The problem with American mainstream politics is that the right and left are

both locked into a post...

modern dialectic.

And this may sound like a bland centrist take, but take it very seriously,

because I think it's more likely that the classical liberals and humanists are

going to be the ones who rebuild the world. They're the ones who are already

transcending the idiotic polarities of American politics, for example. As

Christopher Butler writes in his very short introduction to postmodernism

published by Oxford University, the best that one can say here

And I am saying it.

It's that postmodernists are good critical deconstructors and terrible

constructors. They tend to leave that job to those patient liberals in their

society who are still willing to attempt to sort out at least some of those

differences between truth and fantasy, which postmodernists blur in a whirlwind

of pessimistic assumptions about the inevitability of class or psychological

conflict. And isn't that exactly what we see from both the left and the right, at

least in the American political spectrum?

I think it highly unlikely that proper philosophical and institutional reform

can come either from exclusively the far left or the far right. It is one that

must be based upon tolerance, which is an Enlightenment ideal, to go back to

Habermas, and the subscription to a higher law, or at least a shared ideal.

I'll return to the problem of objective truth in a moment, but for now, I

think... I think we have established enough of an understanding of the

postmodern condition in order to get a sense as to what another renaissance is

up against.

If we want to imagine a new way forward in art, literature, philosophy,

politics, we cannot just criticize the criticizers.

We have to build something.

If materialist deconstruction and Marxist deconstruction is expert at

critique, the antidote is not more conservative critique or liberal

critique, but a positive reinforcement of what has always been valuable, and

that is the discovery of meaning and beauty in human life. That discovery may

take place under the framework of a metanarrative, or it may not.

But we are beginning to see a new philosophy trying to develop.

Just as the Aristotelian scholastic approach gave way to the Renaissance

platonic approach, there is a trend throughout the major Renaissance

moments. You can see the replacement of materialist trends with idealistic

trends again and again in the Renaissance moment of the European

Renaissance, in the Renaissance moment of the Romantic revival, in the American

Renaissance of the 19th century, and in the modernist movement, which appears

between the Irish and the Harlem Renaissance movements in the 20th

century. The materialist, categorical, critical, analytical, philosophical

methods

give way to the transcendental, ideal, constructive, and intuitive

philosophies. And we see this happen over and over in history.

Now I want to talk about art, which is the second domain of knowledge or

culture that I think is ripe for a new renaissance.

The postmodern suspicion against metanarratives has affected art, both

visual and literary.

One of the ways we can see this change over the past few years is that Art and

entertainment has shifted from creating new stories to recycling old ideas.

In popular entertainment, you can see this happening with so many of the

remakes and sequels by movie industries.

This is partly because the postmodern consumer exists in a plethora of new

content always vying for audience attention.

And the best representation of the postmodern digital wasteland of terrible

art and artificial intelligence, I think, is C.S. Lewis's depiction of hell

and the Great Divorce.

which is one great gray city in which the inhabitants can have anything they

want by simply thinking about it. They live alienated in an endless,

frictionless, ever-expanding environment, and so do many in this new

world of post-digital, post-modernity.

But I suppose that's a different essay.

For our purposes of art,

We have to realize that we're in a world of ever-expanding iterations of old

content. What is old and recognizable within the plethora of new content is

always going to be more catchy.

And that's why, instead of adapting a different story from the fairy tales of

Hans Christian Andersen, Disney would prefer to remake the same princess movie

again. And we see a similar thing happening in art.

Artists recycle.

borrow or recontextualize already existing material and historical styles

instead of inventing new forms from scratch.

And the pressure to invent new forms has led to some eccentric and unsuccessful

experiments. And unfortunately, the Academy has not really helped much.

Abraham H. Maslow has argued that the majority of humanist scholars and

authors and artists

who were supposed to help sustain the true, the good, the beautiful, have at

this point in history succumbed to the postmodernist malaise.

He writes, But in recent years, and to this day, most humanistic scholars and

artists have shared in the general collapse of all traditional values, and

when these values collapsed, there were no others readily available as

replacements. And so today, a very large portion of our artists, novelists,

dramatists, and critics, literary and historical scholars, are disheartened or

pessimistic or despairing, and a fair portion are nihilistic or cynical, in

the sense of believing that no good life is possible, and that the so-called

higher values are all fake and a swindle. Now, the good humanist scholars

who do remain in the academy, and there are many,

perform their most sacred work within the four walls of a classroom, which is

seldom seen by the many critics of the academy.

I believe that the problem of art in post-modernity is caused by our lack of

access to the world of imagination.

I really don't... So this is where I would differ with Maslow. I don't think

it's so much the loss of traditional values. I don't think we need to bring

traditional values back. Tradition is very important in the lineage of the

creation of art.

But...

What I know to be true is that right now artists are divorced from the world of

the imagination, which Henry Corbin called the mundus imaginalis.

Corbin understood this place as a real place existing, accessible to all.

It is comparable to Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, if you're

familiar with that, but it's not quite the same.

Jung located his concepts within the human mind. Corbin argued that the

imaginal realm is outer or objective.

And it's something like the medieval poets when they speak of allegory or the

folklore tradition or the dream vision tradition or the other world tradition

in Celtic literature.

But regardless as to whether you agree more with Jung's conception of the

collective unconscious or Corbin's idea of the mundus imaginalis, we're talking

about the same place, the wellspring from whence the greatest works of art

have come, out of the imagination.

Artists have brought forth material from the best of what human art and endeavor

has ever known.

Nothing is lost.

The burning of all the libraries around the world would constitute a material

and historical loss, a real loss in the material world.

But the place from whence all beauty and ideas have issued still exists.

But the path to that world, to the artist, has been blocked. It has become

a dumping ground.

Between that world and us in the post-digital, post-modern age, there lay

piles of detritus resembling something like late-summer junkyards full of

rusted old machinery entangled with weeds where the dogs howl and scratch

their fleas.

But instead of carving a path into the imaginal worlds to engage with the ideal

forms and to fly with the wings of fancy, we would prefer to sit in the

junkyard and fashion the likeness of a wagon out of old bicycle parts.

Contemporary art and entertainment is largely helplessly derivative.

Not all of it is. And I wouldn't even say completely helpless.

Seek out the old paths, as an ancient poet once said, and you will find the

path to the imagination.

One recent philosopher has put our dilemma another way, as a death of

poetic logic.

That was really, I believe, a metaphor of the path to this world is the path of

poetic logic, which is a kind of logic that's much higher than the reductive

logic employed by most philosophers today.

Paul Colilli, in his book The Angel's Corpse, uses a metaphor of the angel's

corpse as a figure for the poetic logic that was killed by the ratio-logical

discourse of the West.

It was killed by the rational, over-analytical mind.

As he says in his preface to the book, the figure of the angel and the mode of

thinking called poetic logic share the same fate.

And that's essentially death.

He goes on to write, The fragile, then, is a sign that brings or holds together

the things that awaken in the aftermath of the angel's death.

The purpose of the icon, like the angel, is to permit humans to come into contact

with the visible transcendent.

And that's exactly what happens at the end of this path.

The paths to the invisible transcendent are being crowded and concealed by

digital media that you consume, by constant online shopping, by the

hypnotic captivity of the endless scroll, and your AI use, if you use it,

which is actively harming the planet and everyone on it.

The thing about postmodernism is that whatever else it might be, it is not

only a reaction against modernism.

like the movement in the 20th century.

It's postmodern in the sense that it's postmodernity. That is to say,

modernity, the period known as modernity right after the Renaissance. It began

sometime with the Renaissance, otherwise called the early modern period, then

came into the modern period.

So understanding postmodernism will require us to see it more expansively as

a new era of humanity that hasn't quite found a name of its own yet.

postmodernism has yet to really disclose what it means, and we don't really know

what it means, because we don't really know where we're going.

And this is partly why no one can adequately define postmodernity.

As Frederick Jameson said in his Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of

Late Capitalism, this is then the deeper paradox rehearsed by the attempt to

grasp postmodernism in the form of periodizing or totalizing abstraction.

It lies in this seeming contradiction between the attempt to unify a field and

to posit the hidden identities that course through it and the logic of the

very impulses of this field, which postmodernist theory itself openly

characterizes as a logic of difference or differentiation.

The effort at conceptual unification is, to say the least, strikingly

inconsistent with the spirit of postmodernism itself.

So it's impossible to understand post-digital post-modernity without

first coming to terms with its anthropology, that is, its theory of

what it means to be a human being.

And you have to take the long view to see how recent technologies and weapons,

shaped by Silicon Valley, are constructed to radically redefine, for

us all, what it means to be human.

And think of all the rich anthropologies of ancient literature.

I mean, the Upanishads, for one.

superlative, considered the true human being as essentially an Atman or a soul.

The Hebrew scriptures called the human being the image of God.

Renaissance humanism regarded the human being as a mediator between worlds. This

is largely the Neoplatonic sense of the human being.

Post-digital, well, I should say post-modernity, really, considers the

human being as a consumer. How poor we are to be living in a time when that's

the highest view of humanity.

The old fairy stories about the royal child who was raised in poverty and in

ignorance of his or her true identity will take on a new allegorical

significance as a picture of post-digital, post-modern humanity.

We really don't know who we are and how great humanity is.

It might seem like the solution is to create another artistic movement, like,

oh, let's have another ism or maybe a counter movement that really solidifies

a response to this and puts us in the right direction.

What you see online is the rediscovery and renovation of old art forms being

applied to new contexts.

And I do think that it's going to take something else besides a new ism or a

new movement.

Because if you look online, you do see old things coming back. You have people

making illuminated manuscripts.

You have a lot of people reviving folk music and oral traditions of

storytelling. And I think everywhere you look, the instinct to go back to old

standards and to renovate old art forms and principles is perhaps a step in the

right direction. But it is insufficient.

The impulse to go back to old art comes from an intuitive realization of the

insufficiency of current evaluations of art and an instinctive understanding

that the artists of the past were in contact with something bigger than any

individual artist or movement right now. And if we are only copying from what

already exists, we are no better than the artificial intelligence which

mechanically does the same by synthesizing existing art forms and

making them worse.

The world of the imagination is perhaps the one place where the so-called AI art

cannot go.

And it is where every artist must now go.

I said recently in a different video that the Romantic period of the late

18th century constituted the most productive era for the imagination.

In modern history, at least.

And I meant that. I got a lot of pushback. People were saying, oh, what

about the Renaissance?

And it's like...

No, study the Romantic movement, the theorists of the imagination there. The

Romantic movement was a greater flourishing of the imagination than the

Renaissance had been.

In the Renaissance, the imagination broke from the barren ground of winter

and budded new life. But in the Romantic movement, the imagination flowered.

I stand by this, even though the Renaissance had its foundational

thinkers like Ficino, Paracelsus, and Mirandola, from which the Romantic

theory of the imagination grew.

But the theory of the Romantics William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Goethe,

Fichte, Novalis. There he is back here.

Herder, Wordsworth, Shelley, Hazlitt, Keats.

They're incomparable.

The best intellectual history of the imagination is James Ingle's The

Creative Imagination. It tells the story of how this whole theory or concept of

the imagination developed.

Now, the cultural conditions in the 18th century, right before the Romantic

movement,

are also very much like our own.

The 18th century saw the prevalence of literary satire, and it was also an age

of radical rationalism and science centrism. And in that sense, Romanticism

was partly a reaction against Enlightenment empiricism, that is, the

dogma insisting that knowledge can only be known through the material world and

through our five senses.

Although... The materialism of Enlightenment empiricism is nowhere near

as bad as the commercial materialism of our own day.

The dominant intellectual culture at the universities and among the major

philosophers was predominantly of this kind before the Romantics.

Then came the Romantics, like William Blake. And whether you are an artist, as

some of you I know are, or a reader who seeks to enrich your life with the

treasures of literature, as I know many of you are, There are several important

lessons to learn from the life and works of William Blake, of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge. I will say, Blake, start with him because he has a way of seeing

through the literal form into the emotional and energetic spiritual life

of objects in higher realities.

This is also his criterion for great authors of the canon.

What makes a poet great, asks William Blake. He answers, the faculty of

spiritual perception.

The imagination is a power of this kind.

The imagination is a form of seeing for him, fourfold vision.

Expressed in many of his writings is the idea that an eye may be corrupted by

conventions. That is your way of seeing.

He is referring to what is sometimes called taste, the memory of pleasure

that we derive from works of art and shape our judgment.

But the pleasure of art is enhanced by this memory, and we come to expect

certain qualities of of goodness in literature and to eschew poorer

qualities in literature.

And for Blake and all great poets, Homer, Virgil, Milton, they had

spiritual vision. And just as an eye may be corrupted, it can also recover.

We may fall back in with the spiritual world, as Blake says.

The visionary art requires you all to train what Blake calls the symbolic

eye. And that you can do through reading and engagement of art. And the more you

look at art, and the more you look deeply with art, and the more you

commune with art, the more you develop that spiritual perception.

And you exercise that faculty of the imagination.

There's an excellent book by George Russell Moore who published under the

name A.

And it's called A Candle of Vision.

Those of you who have taken the...

W.B. Yeats' course on verse, remember me mentioning, A.

This passage really expresses what I believe to be true even now about

artistic genius.

He writes, Gifts?

There are no gifts.

For all that is ours, we have paid the price.

There is nothing we aspire to for which we cannot barter some spiritual

merchandise of our own.

Genius?

There is no stinting of this by the keeper of the treasure house.

It is not bestowed, but won.

As we sink deeper into the Iron Age, we are met by the mighty devils of state

and empire lurking in the abyss, claiming the soul for their own, molding

it to their image, to be verily their own creature and not heaven's.

We need a power in ourselves that can confront these mighty powers.

And we have it.

It's the imagination and recovering the paths to that power and exercising it

through creative play and poesis is the only thing that will, the only thing

that has ever brought about a renaissance moment and cultural and

intellectual revival.

And I'd recommend that book, A Candle of Vision, to anyone wondering how to

recover their own personal path to the imagination.

Because it is a different path for each person.

The old artists knew how to access the world of the imagination through

silence, through contemplation, and through imaginal journeys inward to the

personal and collective unconscious realms.

To regain access to the imagination, the new generation, us now, living in the

age of AI, must learn, again, to see ourselves as participants in a larger

imaginative order.

When we cease to regard the imagination as this theoretical or abstract faculty,

or as something childish belonging to the domain of childhood, and we need to

see it as a living participatory power that authorizes present creation.

Right now we're too poor. We keep looking up to the greats and wondering

if we're doing it right. We need to go out.

Stop wearing the old clothes of our grandparents and go out, go forth into

the fields, take flax and make our own clothes, to borrow a metaphor for

Emerson's first essay on nature in 1836.

That's the method. And actually, all of these quotations I'm using and all of

these authors I'm mentioning could be put into a reading list or a syllabus

that you can design to chart your own path to the imaginal world.

Another field of knowledge that suggests the need for a cultural revival is

perhaps the unlikely field of ecology due to the ecological crisis.

And I say ecological crisis here and not the environmental crisis because it more

accurately gets at the issue.

Eco comes from the Greek word oikos, which usually refers to the house or

household. And ecology, the study of our household, of our home, has been

insisting for decades that the earth is incapable of sustaining our current...

model of economic and sociological lifestyles and attitudes.

Every Renaissance moment, of modern history at least, has introduced a new

relationship to the earth and other people, the human oikos.

One of the best examples is the American Renaissance of the 19th century.

Inspired by the Romantic Revival's revolt against Enlightenment empiricism,

thinkers like Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau set

the American Renaissance in motion.

Like the European Renaissance and the Romantic revival before it, the American

Renaissance introduced Platonic philosophy into an increasingly

materialistic and derivative intellectual culture.

To them, nature was a living web, a network of divinity, a portal for the

human imagination, and the artist's first teacher.

In his essay, The American Scholar, Emerson wrote,

And the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of

nature. Every day the sun, and after sunset, night and her stars.

Ever the winds blow, ever the grass grows.

Every day men and women conversing, beholding, and beholden.

The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before the great spectacle.

He must settle its value in his mind.

What is nature to him?

There is never a beginning. There is never an end to the inexplicable

continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into

itself. When Emerson published this lecture in 1837, the United States was

experiencing its own industrial revolution and expansion toward the

West. And ever since the revolution, the American ethos was becoming increasingly

commercial and consumeristic.

Under this ethos, nature is nothing but a resource from which to extract and

fashion commodities.

Yet every Renaissance moment introduces permanent changes to our ecological

mindsets, our mode of living in the world, and it was the work of the

American Renaissance that helped redeem the human connection between nature and

our understanding of nature as part and parcel of divinity.

a living network or oikos of symbiosis.

Human life and human culture depends upon that relationship, which has always

existed and always will, no matter how much digital postmodernity sustains the

illusion to the contrary.

And it's working very hard to sustain that illusion.

I think we're also seeing a revival of Platonism.

A platonic conception of ecology is being restored to human creativity and

human flourishing just as it was in the American Renaissance.

I think of David Feidler's book, Restoring the World's Soul, which

reminds us that nature itself must be regarded as alive, which is how the

Neoplatonists regarded it, it's how the early Renaissance thinkers regarded it,

and how the Romantic poets were interacting with nature.

As Feidler writes, Under the spell of materialism and the quest for

efficiency, the world grows increasingly heavy and opaque.

We are surrounded by the beauty of nature on every side, but when we become

anesthetized to the beauty of the world, the world itself becomes exploitable,

just a natural resource for human consumption.

If we could consistently see the world with unclouded vision and appreciation,

we would treat it with reverence.

and realize that beauty reveals a deep and essential aspect of the cosmic

pattern.

We would all do well to return to the writings of the American

Transcendentalists that sparked the American Renaissance.

Read Emerson's essays.

Read Thoreau's Walden and his excellent essay on walking, which is so

underrated. It's, I think, his best piece of writing.

The world cannot sustain our current way of life. What comes next will have to

carry forward something of an older and wiser system.

Now, this leads me to the fourth domain of knowledge, the religious and

spiritual. The problem for philosophy art and ecology is also a problem for

religion. And this brings me to this field of knowledge that I'm going to

call Western religion, because it's really Western religion I'm talking

about. Most of my comments that follow are really pertinent to that kind of

religion. So over the past decade, religion in the English-speaking world,

at least, has shown symptoms of a growing change and a need for change.

The dominant religious systems of the West are largely Christian, and there

are symptoms of change within the religious character of English-speaking

Christianity and its relationship to the greater political powers of state.

The field of religion and spirituality is a branch of cultural knowledge that

is hemorrhaging from the need of a renaissance, and I believe many within

these circles are intuitively picking up on this. The religious character of

Western Christianity was forever changed by the European Renaissance.

The spiritual character of Europe was forever changed by the French, English,

and German Romantics.

And American spirituality was forever changed by the American Renaissance.

The same is true for Irish spirituality during the Irish Renaissance and Black

American spirituality during the Harlem Renaissance, all of which impacted the

literary scene from you know whitman and dickinson to the beats and mary oliver

just as the modernist movement forever changed the attitudes of spirituality

and esotericism in the context of rapid globalization in the 20th century but to

see how the religious character of the present moment of right now is primed

for another such revitalization we have to come to terms with the conception of

religion in the 21st century We in the West, and especially in the English

-speaking West, have come to understand religion in opposition to secularism,

these two opposing concepts by which religion is often defined by a largely

Protestant concept of Christianity, and secularism defined as anything that is

not Christianity.

This way of looking at religious and non-religious culture was bequeathed to

us by Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Löwit, and Rudolf Bultmann, the German

historians.

Through their theories, we have come to understand Christianity as the point of

origin and departure for everything else.

And I think that's wrong.

Many cultural historians now see the modern world as functioning on stolen

Christian concepts unmoored from their theological contexts, and many

philosophers up to the present day understand religion in these terms.

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, for example, relies in part upon this theory

of these German thinkers, Louvet and Bultmann, even though he will often

complicate that.

You can still overhear this theory in the enchantment discourse among a lot of

Christians. There's enchantment, disenchantment. Recent books are

reclaiming wonder with titles like Living in Wonder are re-enchanting this

or that, re-enchanting nature, re-enchanting modern life.

And they tend to favor a concept that there's religion, that's Christianity,

and there's secularism, which is everything else.

And I think that's a false binary.

There are other books that I think are really good on this, the outside of the

Christian publishing market. There's Martin Hegelung's This Life and Dacher

Keltner's Awe.

Hegelung, I believe, is atheist.

Keltner is agnostic, at least, I believe. And these perspectives, I

think, are more accommodating to approaches that are not necessarily

Christian.

offer an alternative stream outside of the books coming out of the Christian

spaces at the moment. I'm critical of this trend in Western Christianity as a

Christian myself, albeit perhaps a very strange one, but I intend to analyze

this problem objectively.

I want to take the concept of re-enchantment. seriously, as I have in

my previous videos.

But it will require us to separate it from what I consider the grift of

Christian authors in their wholesale adoption of the secularization narrative

put forth by Carl Louvet, Bultmann, and, to some respect, Charles Taylor.

The rise of enchantment theory is partly inspired by Taylor's A Secular Age.

I believe that was published in 2007 by Harvard Press.

We're hearing the reinforcement of this enchantment disenchantment.

narrative in various religious circles, and I think this tells us something new

may be emerging.

Again, I'm looking at this as perhaps an environmentalist might be studying a

particular microecology within a forest. Like, what do these symptoms really tell

us about whatever this domain of knowledge is indicating at the moment?

And the difficulty in moving past the very Christian and Western-centric

secularization theory.

is that many trade audience books have found this thesis so compelling that

it's difficult to eradicate, complicate, or add any nuance in the popular

discourse today.

But instead of seeing spiritual culture through the lens of Christian secular

binaries, where you're either Christian or you're secular, there's another

concept I think that's more appropriate to the moment, and it allows us to

really see what's going on in the broader spiritual movement of the 21st

century. of 2026 where we are right now and that is hans blumenberg's theory of

reoccupation blumenberg another he was a contemporary of karl lewitt it doesn't

really matter he's a german historian but he contested this idea very early on

this idea of the secular by arguing that what is actually secular is

really just a long process of ideas reoccupying different places A long

process of adopting and assimilating ideas across centuries of philosophical

and religious thought.

Like, for example, before Christianity, there was Neoplatonism. And maybe before

Neoplatonism, there was Gnosticism.

Gnosticism was replaced with Neoplatonism. Christianity replaced

Neoplatonism. And so you see new movements reoccupying older spaces.

And Christianity did this with the so-called pagan mythologies and

traditions all across Europe too. So instead of seeing as everything that's

not Christian as a departure from Christianity, we should really see how

ideas and spiritualities reoccupy the same places.

Now... This theory of Blumenberg's didn't conveniently fit the Christian

narrative, and it is for this reason I suspect that it was largely forgotten by

English-speaking writers on the subject and not taken up. But Blumenberg's is a

much more accurate portrait of the history of intellectual ideas and

cultural exchange.

Seeing things through the religion-secular binary can lead us in

the mistake of assuming that re-enchantment involves a return or a

recovery of an older form of institutional religion.

And again, this impulse to, like, go back to the original, go back to the

sources, the Ad Fontes, you know, Christian Renaissance humanist approach,

which is valuable but limited, this impulse to return to older institutional

religion is, I think, partly behind many of the recent conversions we've been

seeing to Roman Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy, or confessional Protestantism

that's usually Calvinistic.

Just as the contemporary artists are seeing something insufficient in the art

scene around them and are inspired to rehabilitate older forms of art, a lot

of people are adopting old religious traditions as a way to regulate their

spiritual impulses.

And there's no harm in that. Like, again, from an objective standpoint, I'm

just trying to understand what this means.

Institutional religion, I want to say, can be a very positive external

regulator of the human impulse.

Institutional religion can awaken the spirit and exercise it, and it can

direct and help facilitate spiritual growth. But it can also anesthetize the

spirit. It can also suppress spiritual growth and curiosity.

The danger happens when one substitutes religious practice for actual spiritual

experience and personal communion with the divine.

Like, and that's where I see the danger in institutional religion, although I

see much worth in it as well.

Carl Jung said in his Psychology and Alchemy that people will do anything no

matter how absurd in order to avoid facing their own souls, all because they

cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything

useful could ever come out of their own souls.

Thus the soul has gradually been turned into a Nazareth from which nothing good

can come.

Therefore, let us fetch it from the four corners of the earth. The more far

-fetched and bizarre it is, the better. And that's why I'm not advocating for a

particular religion, even my own, as a forward path towards religious

renaissance. The true recovery is going to promote agency and freedom, no matter

what the institutional structure looks like. What leads to freedom and truth,

and what leads to enslavement? This should be our questions.

The answer may look different to different people.

The prescription to return to a more ancient form of Christianity isn't

necessarily the answer for everyone, and can't ignore how Christianity can be a

good force of enchantment in the iron materialistic age in which we live, but

it can also be a force of disenchantment. as it has been in the

past, as it's participated in the disenchantment of other spiritual

technologies and systems, such as theurgy, neoplatonism, so-called pagan

practices and mythologies and other religions, etc.

Christianity, as many dominant religions are, has a homogenizing control over

enchantment sometimes that looks restrictive.

And this concept of religion and spirituality really needs to resist

these very strict binaries.

The fact that no single religion or practice has a monopoly on enchantment

or spiritual power will help us resist the darker forms of religion,

such as fundamentalism in all of its kinds.

I want to talk about fundamentalism, but before I do, I want to insist that we

should learn to distinguish spirituality from religion when appropriate.

Spirituality is an innate human impulse. Every human being has an impulse to

exercise spirituality.

Religion is the channeling of that impulse through ritual, through forms,

through practice, etc.

This distinction will help us see how spiritual insight and spiritual practice

is something that can fall prey to these darker forms of enchantment in the same

way that consumerism is really harnessing the spiritual impulse of

Americans in a new form of religious practice.

I mean, if you go to a mall, They look like Greek temples with faceless

mannequins that have replaced the statues of devotion, which become

surrogates for the consumer.

Music concerts look very much like cult festivals, etc.

A lot of people have written on this. In this sense, everything we do can be done

out of spiritual impulse to grow.

And freedom is found in taking control of that impulse and directing it

consciously, which of course, for some, can sometimes look like converting to

another religion.

And that's fine.

As C.S. Lewis said, enchantments were made for breaking spells as well as

casting them. And I think we should remember that.

There's a dark side of religion and there's a very bright side of religion.

And this leads me to fundamentalism, which is a dark side of religion.

I believe that fundamentalism is the danger of the present in America right

now. and abroad in some respects, I really appreciate the definition of

fundamentalism that Habermas gives.

He writes, or he said in an interview, We call fundamentalist those religious

movements which, given the cognitive limits of modern life, nevertheless

persist in practicing or promoting a return to the exclusivity of pre-modern

religious attitudes.

Fundamentalism lacks the epistemic innocence of those long-ago realms in

which the world religions first flourished, in which could somehow still

be experienced, limitless.

So you go to some fundamentalist circles and it looks like people are cosplaying,

you know, Life on the Prairie, or cosplaying Covenanters or Puritans from

England, or very traditional Catholics, for example, will often be dressing like

it's the 1800s. There's this like cosplay element to fundamentalism that I

think is one of the most distinctive markers of it and it's not just in the

religious world you know you see this in the in the literary world as well where

you have i don't know people cosplaying the the inklings with cs lewis or

something you know and that's fine there can be good style and like i don't know

wearing tweed and smoking pipes um i i do both but you know i i do think that

there's a difference between like trying to recreate and to actually believe

You're cosplaying the Puritans are like pre-Trent Catholicism

or pre-Vatican II Catholicism. Now, I do think that this definition of

fundamentalism does explain why conservative Christianity loves AI so

much.

Think about it. I mean, especially if you're familiar with Protestant

evangelicalism. AI is the contemporary recreation of a seemingly infallible

text which actually speaks back to its readers.

AI is usurping the role that the Bible plays within the evangelical imagination

as a book conceived of as an inerrant and living text that speaks to its

readers. Now, I'm not dismissing the fact that literature can do this, but

what's interesting is that You see, some of the people who are really adopting AI

in all kinds of forms are really the American evangelicals.

It's interesting how, at least in America, you can see the rise of both

fundamentalism and esoteric wisdom and practices.

Two very different things. And I think this indicates something very important

in our cultural moment.

It is a known fact among historians that periods preceding cultural collapse are

often characterized by a rise in superstitious practices.

However, the rise of esoteric interest indicates, I think, something very

important. Habermas, again, in the early 2000s, commented upon the renewed

interest in these branches of esoteric knowledge.

And here's what he said.

These sections of the bookshops appear as symptoms of ego weakness and

regression, the expression of a yearning for an impossible return to mythic forms

of thought.

But history teaches us that religious sects can be very innovative.

So maybe not everything on the market is California claptrap or neo-paganism.

Now, I think it's a good idea to remain rather critical of the New Ageism that's

going around right now and its various grifts.

The Instagram account healingfromhealing showcases some really interesting case

studies on its insanities.

What do you do for a living?

I'm a cancer healer. Look into my eyes.

We're doing it now.

But, but, I think something deep and genuine is indicated by the rise of

interest in esoteric knowledge.

For about a year, I've studied New Ageism.

and read some of the major books.

And I find it a little unnerving, but also like I have to admit there's

something going on here that's really important to the moment.

Something is happening in religious culture.

One has to merely look at the success of the YouTube channel Esoterica by Dr.

Justin Sledge, which is superb in informational and academic quality.

You have to see the spiritual interest, how this interest is not restricted to

institutional

or fundamentalist forms.

If you look right now, at least in the American scene, at the Christian

deconstruction movement, which is critically evaluating everything that

high-control religion and authoritarian fundamentalism has projected on American

young people in the 90s. Or consider the new Transcendentalist Initiative at

Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, led by Dr. Charles Stang,

professor of Neoplatonism.

this is an initiative that has gathered together platonists transcendentalists

ecologists and artists for the purpose of shaping the religious ethical and

political life today think also of dr john verbeke's work here on youtube and

his published scholarship around the concept of the advent of the sacred like

something is coming people are intuiting there's a need and something is coming

Rogue stars are beginning to consolidate into constellations of a broader

movement We're seeing the very beginnings of this and we're not able to

really recognize it I hope I'm mapping it out here in this video But it's very

difficult to articulate this early on now the concept of post secular which

Habermas popularized I think it's really important the post secular society to

refer to current times

as a time in which the idea of modernity is perceived as unsuccessful and at

times morally failed.

Like the postmodern project has failed and it's not really a stratification or

separation of the two.

There's a new peaceful dialogue and coexistence. What we need to be striving

for is this peaceful dialogue between faith and reason. We must learn to seek

this mutually.

And this brings me to the problem of objective truth, which is very important

in the cultural domain of religion.

There are two extremes.

There are two extreme attitudes toward objective truth.

The first is nihilistic.

That's the post-modernity, which says there is no objective truth, or you

can't find it if there is, and that's why we don't have a metanarrative. So

there's the loss of the metanarrative, which says there is no objective truth,

doesn't matter what you do.

Okay, so that's one extreme.

another extreme, which is to say that objective truth does exist, but the

religious fundamentalist is in sole possession of it. The authoritarian

religious and political structures assert their exclusive right to this

objective truth and that you can only find it through their way.

And this is presently on the rise in more conservative religious spaces in

the English-speaking world, found predominantly among the neo-Calvinist

movements, but also among the less intellectual Protestant evangelical

circles. I should say also a lot of English-speaking Roman Catholic

traditionalists and integralists are working in this as well. You see this

happening, and it's in the Eastern Orthodox Rite as well. So, like, you can

see this happening across the Western religious culture at the moment.

So those are the two. The one that says, nah, there is no objective truth, and

the one who says that there is and only we have it.

But the third approach.

to objective truth is the humanist approach.

And this affirms the existence of objective truth and respects the

individual and collective quest to understand it in their own terms.

And it values the quest as the quest.

A person's quest to finding truth is incredibly sacred.

And that's what's so beautiful about literature, because so much of

literature is about the human heart seeking

seeking truth of what it means to be an individual, of what it means to be a

member of society, what it means to go through loss and heartbreak of

devastating scale, and also to feel the triumph of human victory, the victory of

beauty in the intellect.

If the refreshing and revitalization of spiritual culture will be accomplished,

it's going to be through that more humanistic approach.

And again, my point is that even though religion is a political category, today

and has been for a very long time. What I'm trying to insist is that artistic

creativity is a form of spiritual practice and you need to exercise that

faculty of the imagination and spirituality in some way that respects

you and respects others.

The main thing is that you need to find your artistic and spiritual practice.

Your spiritual practice should be your own.

Stop trying to organize your spiritual experience within the confines of

religious categories.

This can be helpful.

However, I have found it both helpful and unhelpful.

Oftentimes, as I have found, these categories in religion are too narrow to

accommodate the actual experiences that one has.

They can help make sense of them, which is where the value is. They can also

limit them and interpret them for you.

which is sometimes good, sometimes not. It's mostly not.

Your experiences need to be interpreted by yourself.

Whatever you use to aid yourself in that interpretation is fine, but you need to

be the one interpreting meaning and beauty out of your own life.

Now, if you're still with me, if I were to summarize this whole video into a

single statement, it would be that a new renaissance is only going to happen if

the everyday artists readers, parents, students, and children decide

to take their education and experiences into their own hands, if they stop

looking to higher institutions like traditions or universities or

governments or companies or AI companies to make decisions for them and begin to

take action on their own behalf, if people put down the tools of digital

oppression and take up reading and study,

slow meditation, and put into regulation their own spiritual and creative energy

for the good of the future, it might happen. No institution is going to bring

a renaissance.

No higher power, no government, no academy is going to bring about the

renaissance. Every renaissance has been started by people outside of these

larger institutions and outside of governmental control.

It's always been you all, those who care about truth, beauty, and meaning.

and artists and readers outside of the academies and in the world creating art

as visionaries according to their own artistic visions.

This is the same statement that I've been making on this channel for years

through my work on Versed as well.

And I think it's ever more important today in October 2026 as it was last

year when I began talking about this.

So thanks for watching. Let me know your thoughts in the comments and then turn

off your devices and go create something.

Thanks for watching. Until next time.