"The Great Instauration" by Francis Bacon w/Brian Bagley & Jesan Sorrells

0:00 Foreign hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 177 and reading from our Book Today the Preface from Our Book Today the Introduction form for our Book Today it seems that men do not rightly understand either their store or their strength, but overrate the one and underrate the other. Hence it follows that either from an extravagant estimate of the value of the arts which they possess, they seek no further, or else from too mean an estimate of their own powers, they spend their strength in small matters, and never put it fairly to the trial in those which go to the main these are as the pillars of fate set in the path of knowledge, for men have neither desire nor hope to encourage them to penetrate further and since opinion of store is one of the chief causes of want and satisfaction with the present induces neglect of provision for the future, it becomes a thing not only useful, but absolutely necessary, that the excess of honor and admiration with which our existing stock of inventions is regarded be in the very entrance and threshold of the work, and that frankly and without circumcision stripped off and men be duly warned not to exaggerate or make too much of them.

1:25 For let a man look carefully into all that variety of books with which the arts and sciences abound, he will find everywhere endless repetitions of the same thing, varying in the method of treatment, but not new in substance in so much of the whole stock, numerous as it appears at first view, proves on examination to be but scanty.

1:56 Now Christians have known something for about the last 2,000 or so years roughly, that apparently must be rediscovered once every generation in the west, without fail, at least by the more secular and pagan oriented believers among us. This knowledge isn't Gnostic, and this knowledge isn't secret. It's recognizable to anyone who has lived long enough and been surrounded by frustration, particularly with unmet goals, unquenched desires, and suppressed appetites. And what's worse is that Christians, if any of the secular oriented folks around them were paying attention, or maybe even giving them their due, have been providing the solution to all the problems this knowledge creates, or this lack of knowledge creates for at least the last 2000 years as well.

2:50 But as John Wayne once infamously said, I think my kids might have bought me a shirt with this on it. Some people just can't be helped.

3:02 The knowledge that Christians grasp loosely is now in our own time being rediscovered by very secular people, such as it was at the start of the Enlightenment project back at the 17th century last episode which I would encourage you to go back and listen to episode number 176. We read from Candide by Voltaire and the author today would have been, would have influenced Voltaire's writing and approach to the narrative restructuring via human reason and human skepticism that our author today absolutely championed.

3:35 Of course, he championed it only after knowing the thing that all Christians in his time, particularly Puritan Christians, knew in his time by heart today on the show. Today, on this episode of the podcast, we are reading and examining the themes for Leaders from an essay by the great grandfather of empirical skepticism, a man who laid the foundation for the scientific method that created the technology that brings you this podcast today. But it's the same empirical skepticism that can't tell you what bringing this podcast to you actually means.

4:23 We are reading from a very long essay certain select parts of the great installation by Francis Bacon.

4:36 I'm going to hold it up here. That way you can see my copy of this today.

4:43 Leaders, there is no secret to restoring the world and there is nothing new to be quote, unquote discovered. In order to fix things for the future, in order to restore things for the future, I would assert we've got to go backwards, disciplining ourselves and doing the same hard work that those in the past committed to doing that got us here in the first place.

5:09 And of course, anytime I talk about theological based works or works that touch on theology or place where works maybe should have a theological bent, I have to invite my good friend and theological backstop, Brian Bagley to the show. How you doing, Brian? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Brian, how is your new year going? It's going, it's going well. You know, we're staying busy with work and kiddos. I've got older, older kids. They're still in the house. And so as they are active in school and, and kind of becoming adults, things, you know, activities, just, you know, you don't get fewer things to do, I'll put it to you that way.

6:06 So. No, but we're enjoying, enjoying that season of life and, and staying busy with work. So, yeah, doing, doing well. How about yourself? I am. I'm doing just as well as I could possibly be doing. You know, we've got a lot of work. We started off with a bang, you know, because I still got my, still got young kids, you know, living in my house, so. Larger age ranges than your children, but fewer children have a larger age ranges. So it's. A buddy of mine was joking with me about it the other day and he Said, you know, it's like you're, you're, you're going from one developmental challenge to the next developmental challenge and you have to like shift gears really quickly because the 20 year old and the 9 year old, while it looks like on the surface they have the same developmental challenges, they really don't they things going on in a bunch of different, a bunch of different places.

6:54 And so you're just, you're constantly shifting and downshifting and it's true. You are. Yes. Yeah. That is so true. So true.

7:03 So let's, let's dive in a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about, let's talk a little bit about Francis Bacon. And we covered a lot of him and we talked a little bit about his background on our shorts episode, which you should listen to before you listen to this episode shorts number, I believe it's 208. The great inspiration in Francis Bacon. We got to do a little bit about his, about who he was as a philosopher, as a writer and of course, and this is going to be where the main focus of our episode here today is going to be about as a political and philosophical actor, really coming to his conclusions around scientific empiricism and natural philosophy that have laid the foundations for a lot of the things that we find ourselves in now in the United States of America overall and in the west in general over the last, you know, 300 and some odd years of the Enlightenment.

8:03 And so we've covered a lot of that already. We cover a lot of that ground. But for the benefit of Brian, who I'm sure has not listened to that episode and perhaps knew very little about Francis Bacon before I sort of accosted him vigorously about the head and shoulders with this book.

8:21 Let me just, let me just, let me just cover a couple of things here on old, on old Francis that we could sort of jump into this. So as I said before, Francis Bacon was a writer, a scientist, a philosopher, a politician, and as a human being, he presents an enigma to the postmodern, of the postmodern mind, as do a lot of Enlightenment authors, like even Voltaire. We even had a vibrant conversation about Voltaire. Bacon believed fervently that the world could be remade through empiricism and observation.

8:51 But he also recognized, weirdly enough, the barriers that idolatry presented. And we're going to talk a little bit about that today. Raised in England during a time of religious conflict and tutored under the precepts of Puritanism, Bacon was the original postmodern secular man. Before that was actually a thing. And he stated that the point of his life was, quote, to uncover truth, to serve his country and to serve his church. But then if you go back and look at his biography, look at how he actually lived, he proceeded in the course of his life to behave just about as nakedly and grasping as any social climber in the 21st century would in the 17th century.

9:35 Elizabethan court and of course, the Parliament. And. And Bacon was sandwiched. His career, his entire career and his entire life in Parliament and in politics was sandwiched between Queen Elizabeth the First and King James the First, during a time when Catholicism and Catholics were being run to ground in England. And he even advocated for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in. In Scotland, who was the cousin of Queen Elizabeth. And he was also there during the rise of Puritanism, which much later on in America would become a dirty word.

10:12 But he was there at the beginning of that, the beginning of the Protestant Revolution, and was educated in the principles of the Protestant Revolution, just as later on, Voltaire would be educated in France by the Jesuits. And just like Voltaire wound up biting the Jesuits in the butt with his particular brand of writing and satire, Bacon wound up. Well, I would assert Bacon wound up taking Puritanism, or at least Protestant thought, to his logical conclusion once it was divorced from, in his mind, God.

10:52 Now, where Bacon actually proved to be influential was not in the pursuit of empiricism in and of itself and in observation in service of the scientific method. Other folks would eventually take on that, take on that ground. Where he proves to be influential, though, for leaders, particularly in our time, almost exactly 400 years later, is in that he recognized precisely what the spiritual problems were that would prevent humans from attaining greater heights materially. And this is the kind of dichotomy that existed inside of Francis Bacon.

11:25 If you look at his life from how he, like I said, was a grasping social climber in the court and in the Parliament. How he drifted from one position, I'm not really drifted. He moved vigorously and I would say intentionally from one position to another and really played the court like it tried to play the court and tried to play the Parliament like a chess game. And sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn't, all the way to his alleged homosexuality, which is also something very interesting about him during a time when you could actually get killed for that in the West.

12:03 He was an enigma of a man, and he's forgotten or confused with the writer or, I'm sorry, not the writer, the painter, Francis Bacon. And we forget that in spite of all of his dichotomies, and this is something I think, that we're going to talk about today with Brian, with his theological background, the theology still mattered. And this is the thing I think, one of the major things I think, that we have to revisit if we are going to engage in any kind of restoration project for the west in general and for America in particular, moving forward into our next, dare I say, golden age.

12:47 So that lays the foundation for Francis Bacon and I, I. Brian, I sent you a bunch of links, and I hope you had a chance to look at some of those, but what do you know about Bacon? What are your thoughts on this man? And I know I don't think you'd read the Great Inspiration before I brought it up or even heard of it, but I. I hope you had a chance to take a look at it sometimes. It's published, by the way, underneath the title of Novum Organum, because he wrote a bunch of different essays and he sort of cobbled them all together, and then they've been reordered and put together over the last 400 years.

13:15 So my order, or your order, may not match. But, um. But what did you think of Bacon? What did you think of his essays? What did you think of his writing? You're a deep. You're a deep thinker in these theological areas. And of course, the history. Lay out the history of Puritanism for us, for those of us who don't. Who don't know. Yeah. So I would just say that I, I hadn't delved too much into Bacon before you and I talked about it originally. The, the one thing that is interesting about his lifespan is that, you know, he was born in kind of the early.

13:49 I believe it's the early 1500s. I thought something like that. And. And then, you know, was lived into the. Into the 16. Maybe it was the mid-1500s or something. I don't know. But yes. January. January 1561. So he was born 61. And he died in. And he died in 1626. Yeah. And I think. I think the Protestant Reformation didn't quite end until. Or, or run its course fully until after he had passed away. So he, he was born after Martin Luther nailed the, the 95 theses to the church door in Fintenberg, Germany, and then he passed away.

14:28 So you could even say before. Before it was all over or had run its course. So he really. His whole life was spent in that development of, Of. Of Protestantism. And so it was not even fully developed by the Time he had passed away, it wasn't, it wasn't done developing. And so, so what, what I find very interesting about this essay, the great inspiration is. And, and again, not knowing much about him personally, of course. I, I mean, I understand kind of a surface level about all the complexities and everything, but what struck me was the, the humility with which he wrote.

15:13 You know, like he, he's, he's talking about, hey, I want to propose this new way, but here are the limitations. And, and, and he talks about. At one point, I think he said, you know, human reason. He didn't say it this way, but he said human reason has its limits. There are limitations on what we can actually know and what reason can do. And anyway, he, he made a, and he made another point in there about the, the, you know, we, the senses, the a person's ability to sense, you know, it's limited in a couple of different ways.

15:49 It, it can just be flat out wrong and, and then it, and then it can't sense every single thing like, you know, it. And so I was just really struck by his willingness to pursue something difficult, which is a renewal. Okay, renewals are always difficult, but they're always necessary. A renewal of, you know, how, how do we think through empiric empirical information in the, the collection and organization of, of knowledge of our universe. But he did so with a warning and saying, hey, look, these pursuits have their limitations and I think with, to kind of tie it all together for you.

16:32 The, the Puritans, I think, were largely misunderstood in, in many ways by the modern mind. I think they were an attempt to try to ground the Enlightenment that was kind of, in a lot of ways a loose cannon in, in some, some sense it, it did some great things, but it, it took some excesses. I think the Puritans were in a sense trying to sort of ground the reground the reality in, in, in Christian thought, in, in what is true, with working from the assumption that Christian thought is true. And, and, and I was just struck by Bacon's humility.

17:15 And I, I was one. You know, I, I haven't studied it thoroughly enough, but I wonder if there's not a connection there, you know, with, with Bacon trying to, to trying to just say, hey, look, I want to start something new, but also want to just from the outset just say, hey, we face real limitations and we face pitfalls in this, in this endeavor. Well, he seemed to be a person who, as I, as I've said before, he seemed to be a person that was full of Contradictions. Right, so. And it's interesting that you sort of grounded him at a particular historical moment because he was writing about renewal during a time of chaos, during a time where.

18:06 And of course we don't have, I mean, we don't have writings like we do on. Well, no, I'll frame it this way. The, the, the average English person, English peasant, okay. Was not, for lack of a better term, tick tocking out to their objections to the Queen or to the King. And even if that technology had existed, they would not have been allowed to, allowed to tick tock out their objections. Okay. We live in such a time. And I, I've said this in the previous episode too. We're talking about Voltaire and, and Candide and the Enlight.

18:47 I fundamentally believe that America is the final argument on the Enlightenment. We're the place, we're the shores where, just as a philosophy, if you could take America as a philosophy, which, okay, but if you're going to take America as a philosophy, the United States of America is a philosophy. We're the philosophical end of the Enlightenment. Everything that comes afterward, either we are going to be philosophically the seed for the next thing, or it grinds out here and it's just done, it's over.

19:18 And then whoever picks up that, that, that baton, whether it be the Chinese or the Russians or the Brazilians or the Saudi Arabians or pick your poison here, they're not going to do it the way we did it because they're going to start from a completely different set of historical assumptions that are not Enlightenment based. And so that will be a completely different thing. And I think, I think there's some, there's some in my brain, there's some truth to that argument. Now, with that being said, if you go back and look at Bacon and it's interesting that you brought up this idea.

19:59 So Bacon looked at scientific experimentation as a way of glorifying God and fulfilling Scripture. He didn't think or he didn't believe as we do now as post the post modern folks or post postmodern. How many posts were past, and I have no idea how many posts we are past modernity. But he would have been, I think, shocked to. Just as I think Voltaire would have been shocked, but for different reasons. He would have been shocked in that we have to explain the assumption of Christian, of a Christian grounding to people.

20:39 Yes, he would have been shocked by this. He assumed a Christian grounding even before he got to the Scripture, in spite of all of his personal failings by the way or his personal predilections, which is of course what we moderns focus on because we think that that then allows us to deconstruct Bacon and then we can just throw them out with the bath water like we've thrown out everything else. Right.

21:06 When writing in a chaotic time, like the time between, you know, I mean, like he was the Lord High Chancellor of England between 1617 and 1621. He was the Attorney General of England and Wales from 1613 to 1617. You know, he served underneath James the First, by the way, James I was the person who authorized the King James Bible, you know. So, you know, I'm not, I presume he was somewhere floating around the edges of that project as well. I guess the question is, talk with us a little bit because you said the modern mind doesn't understand Puritanism ground.

21:46 Bring the modern mind or the postmodern mind or post postmodern mind, bring us back to the grounding in Puritanism. I'm going to ask you how that is going to help leaders, but bring us back to that grounding. Well, Puritanism was a project of the believers in Christianity in England at the time to try to reestablish, reassert

22:15 the primacy of Scripture. Right. And so there were, there was so much tumult and so much like you, you're talking about, you know, that Francis Bacon's life was a dichotomy or, you know, there's so many different. On one hand he was, you know, he spoke in this pious way, but on the other he was conniving and he, you know, he might have indulged himself in, you know, affairs and things like that. And I think that was not abnormal in that day. I think there were, there since there was a lot of moral tumult that the, the Puritans said, hey, we need to re ground the, the Church of England.

23:02 And the Puritans were hated for that in a lot of ways. They were not. They were in the way they were constantly trying to pull, pull England back towards a, a much stronger grounding in the Bible and, and, and towards a more firm understanding of the Christian tradition. And as a result they were persecuted. And so that's why you have a lot of Puritans that fled on the Mayflower to other places. They, they, they first they went back to the European mainland. They were in Holland because they were allowed to be safe there.

23:43 Then they were, many a group of them took off to the New World and settled New England. And so you have a, a very heavily Puritan influence in New England. But anyway, all that to say, you know, Francis was in was part of the, part of that, that cultural landscape. He was breathing that same air that the Puritans were breathing and not just, you know, and from a, from a cultural perspective is what I mean by that. But, but anyway, so, so I, I can't help but think that he, not only was he aware, he may have, I mean, and I don't know, I'm totally conjecture he may have agreed with them on some points.

24:32 He seems to be a fair, open minded person. He, you know, I'm sure he probably didn't agree with him on everything, but, but anyway, I, I did appreciate his humility and his willing to, his willingness to, like I said earlier, acknowledge limits, which is something that I think the modern mind has, has a hard time doing. But anyway, does that, I don't know if that answers your question or if there's more you want to say. Yeah, no, no, I mean, so if you go and look at his, you know, you scroll through his Wikipedia article, I'll, you know, again, where fact checking ourselves on the podcast this year.

25:07 So if you go and look at the Francis Bacon Wikipedia entry, you scroll down to where it says his personal beliefs, says underneath religious beliefs, it says. Bacon was a devout Anglican. He believed that philosophy in the natural world must be studied inductively, but argued that we can only study arguments for the existence of God. Information about God's attributes, such as nature, action and purposes can only come from special revelation. Bacon also held that knowledge was cumulative. That study encompassed more than just a simple preservation of the past.

25:41 Bacon's well, we'll talk about that in a minute. I'm going to skip. Bacon was against the splintering within Christianity, believing that it would ultimately lead to the creation of atheism as a dominant worldview, as indicated with his quote that quote. The causes of atheism are divisions in religion, if they be many, for any one main division addeth zeal to both sides. But many divisions introduce atheism. Another is scandal of the priests when it is come that to that which Saint Bernard saith, one cannot now say that the priest is as the people, for the truth is that the people are not so bad as the priest.

26:17 A third is custom of profane scoffing in holy matters, which doth by little and little deface the reverence of religion. And lastly learn in times, especially with peace and prosperity, for troubles and adversities do more bow men's minds to religion. Close quote.

26:42 I think he was right.

26:48 And I'm not asking our heroes or our villains to be morally, to, to match my moral framework of the, of the world. I think we can learn both from, from those who have matched the moral framework and those who have not. It just depends upon what you want to keep and what you want to throw away. Right.

27:08 He. Well, okay, so let's, I want to ask you a question here to sort of. And then we're going to, going to kind of maybe take a turn and talk about his, his perception around idols, because I want to talk about that. I think that's a good framing for our time. When you think about Bacon, you mentioned humility, you mentioned regrounding reality during a time of chaos. We are in a. Well, depending upon who you, who you talk to, Right. If you're among the people who are perpetually online, we are in an endless cycle of chaos, and we're going to be in a civil war, shooting each other in the face in 10 minutes.

27:43 Okay. And maybe not even 10 minutes or down. Maybe we're already doing that. If you talk to people who are not perpetually online, who is everybody else or for whom, what is happening online is for them a sideshow and irrelevance and an irrelevancy to their real life. We're not, we're close to a civil war, and there's just some wackadoos that just need to come along, and we'll eventually get the wackadoos to come along because there's always been wackadoos and it's not going to be any different.

28:13 Okay. I think both of those perspectives would agree that we are in a chaotic time. If we could transpose the spirit of Francis Bacon to here and now, which I think we can, via the great inspiration, what would Bacon tell us tell both of those folks right now? What would he tell leaders? Because he'd be looking at leaders because he, he had a, he had a, he had a. What do you call it, a strain. He had a sense. He had an instinct for politics. Right. So he would probably try to get involved in Trump's White House and he would probably try to get involved in the Congress because that's where he would understand that spirit, understands the spirit of Francis Bacon, understands that that's where things happen.

29:00 What would that spirit, grounded in Puritanism, say to us now around regrounding reality for our chaotic times? Yeah, well, I think you hit the nail on the head earlier when you said that they would have a difficult. That, that he would have a difficult Time understanding that we, that we're so far removed from a Christian understanding of the world. I think so. I think first he would, he would want us to try to reclaim that and understand what that. What that means. Exactly. So we've. Have you ever seen the movie?

29:41 It's an old movie. Sa. Old movie that's not super old, but Gods and Generals. Have you seen that movie? Yeah. Okay. So in that movie, what is so fascinating to me is the way that the characters talk to one another. They use very direct biblical language as just part of everyday speech. And, and I believe that, that that movie was produced by Mr. Turner. I forget is his first name that used to own cnn. Do you know I'm talking about. Yes. Jane Fonda's husband. I can't remember who his name was, but yes, but, but he, and he was not a Christian at all.

30:24 But it was very important to him that the dialogue capture accurately the, the. The Christian understanding of the world. And that was just what, 160 years ago? It wasn't that long ago. And so in a relatively short amount of time, matter of fact, I believe it was in 1892, the, the late 1800s, there was a very famous court case, the United States versus the Holy Trinity. And it was a. It was a Supreme Court case and the United States declared in a landmar that the United States is a Christian nation.

31:04 And then it went and cited pages and pages and pages of evidence to support that finding. And so I think by the time you get to, you know, I don't know, 100 years later, the American culture is largely secularized, divorced itself from that Christian understanding and, and imposed sort of this neutral. All religions are the same. Not. And freedom. Freedom from. Freedom of religion became known as freedom from religion. In other words, we don't have to have any religion at all. I think for Francis and for a lot of men of that age who had such a firm Christian understanding of the world, I think they would ask us.

31:55 And it seemed like Francis said this in his writing that when. And, and maybe this gets to the, the point of idolatry that you're talking about earlier is that every single person is religious. Like we are hopelessly religious. Nobody can not worship something. So. So in other words, everyone is. Is going to elevate some, some type of God to, to the point of. Of worship and to. And we've kind of lost our way in. And when we, when we said, when we sort of declared this religiously neutral landscape academically, everything else we said, okay, hey, you know, Islam Christianity, Buddhism, atheism.

32:50 It's, you know, it's, it's anything goes. And, and you just pick what's best for you. Well, that, that in itself is a religious belief. And so to adhere to that is to adhere to a new religion. And so I think France, I think one of the things that, that Francis and, and those, those philosophers who had such a strong Christian understanding of the world would. Would want us to kind of reclaim that, get back to that understanding of. Of the world in a. In a Christian way. So I just looked up Gods and Generals.

33:28 That was a 2003 movie, so 23 years ago, starring. It was directed by Ronald F. Maxwell. And yes, it was. It was. It was personally financed by Ted Turner. Ted Turner, that's his name? Yep. Personally Financed by Ted Turner, ran over budget, and interestingly enough, here's the numbers, because I'm a movie guy about the numbers. It had a budget of $56 million and the box office was 12.8 million. So that was back in the day, which you would call a disaster of epic proportions. And apparently both the director and one of the.

34:11 Or not the director. Yes, the director and the author of the novel, Jeff Shara, both expressed displeasure at the theatrical edition of the film. And the Poor Returns, this is, according to Wikipedia, forced Ted Turner to cancel Maxwell's planned adaptation of Sharer's final Civil War novel because apparently this guy wrote three of them, including Gettysburg. The. The Last Full Measure. The Last Full Measure did not get made. So. Yeah, anyway. And apparently Shara wrote Gods and Generals, which.

34:48 Killer angels. Yeah, killer angels. That's right. And then the. And then the last. The last Full Measure. So, yeah, you know, I. Well, it's interesting because we have to. On the one hand, we want. We want people with. With power and authority and money to lead the charge on these things, on these areas. But when people with power and authority and money are corrupted, as is in our era, I wonder how we get there right from. From here. And maybe one of the ways we get there is by confronting some of those idols.

35:33 So let's pick up with. With Francis Bacon's essay. We're going to. We're going to move away from the preface and we're going to go into the sections called the Idols of the Mind. So the way that this is divided up, at least in. In my. My. The way that my copy of the Great Inspiration is divided up, the Idols of the Mind is separated out and it has the various. The various headings. And so it starts with, let's see. 38. Ryan goes 38, 39. The different headings go down. And so we're going to start off here with.

36:11 Well, with 38. Well, we're going to read a few of these just to kind of get a flavor of what Bacon is talking about here. And I quote the idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding and have taken deep root therein. Not only so beset men's minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance obtained, they will gain in the very installation of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men, being forewarned of the danger, fortify themselves as far as may be against their assaults.

36:44 There are four classes of idols which beset men's minds. To these, for distinction's sake, I have assigned names, calling the first class idols of the tribe, the second idols of the cave, the third idols of the marketplace, the fourth idols of the theater. The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use. For the doctrine of idols is to the interpretation of nature, but the doctrine of the refutation of sophisms is to common logic.

37:23 The idols of the tribe have their foundation in human nature itself and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions, as well as of the sense of the mind, sense as of the mind, are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror which receiving rays irregularly distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

37:59 By the way, pause for just a second. I absolutely agree with. That

38:05 is a stellar examination of the idols of the tribe. I'm going to ask Brian. Actually, I did not put in our notes here for today, but I'm going to ask Brian. So I'm going to tee this up right now. The challenges that we are currently having in Christianity that I'm seeing rising on the Christian right around ethnos in particular coming out of anti Semitism, which I suspected this is where this was going to go, but it's not something this weekend that I want to get your commentary on. Back to the book.

38:34 The idols of the cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone, besides the errors common to human nature in general, has a cave or den of his own which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature, or to his education and conversation with others, or to the reading of books and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires, or to the differences of impressions accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed, or in a mind indifferent and settled, or the like.

39:09 So that the spirit of man, according as it is meted out to different individuals, is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation and governed, as it were, by chance, whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world. So I'm going to tee up those two right there first, because I want to talk about some of the idols of our secular age. So Bacon lists those four idols, right? Those idols of the mind, which in our time we might call secular beliefs, right?

39:49 The, the idols of the tribe, the idols of cave, the idols of the marketplace, the idols of the theater. And in our time, I think, and I wrote this in notes in my book, these idols manifest themselves as personal and social identity. That's idols of the tribe. Individual hedonistic freedom. That's idols of the cave. Vagueness and sheer incompetence in our language. That's idols of the marketplace. And of course, propaganda and entertainment in media, social and otherwise. That's idols of the theater.

40:24 And in the 21st century, we have become, 26 years now into the 21st century, we've become increasingly weary of these idols because the worship that they demand has judged us and has found us wanting because ultimately we are judging ourselves and our judgments are always harsh. Now, we're recording this right around the time of civic social strife in Minneapolis. And you can go Google that if you want to find out more about that. I'm not going to address that specifically only because it is only because it serves as a current flashpoint in our cultural moment of chaos that reflects the power of these idols.

41:09 And so let's start off with this. How does the worship of our modern idols, Brian, manifest now in the culture of the United States? Are you seeing the same things that I'm seeing, or am I way the far off? Yeah, no, I, I would say, if anything, that the, you know, and I, I, I find this fascinating that Francis Bacon, what he the, the four idols, the four main idols categories. I guess maybe I would say it might even be, well, not might. I would say it's exploded well beyond that at this day and age.

41:41 I think our idols Are many, many idols. And I was reminded, as I was reading this, I was reminded of. It's in Acts. I believe It's Acts, chapter 17, where Paul confronts the Athenians in the Areopagus. And in that place,

42:03 the Athenians are just inundated with, I mean, there's gods, there's statue to all kinds of gods, and there's idols all over the place. And hey, you go here and you find the God that you want to worship and you worship that God. And, and if there's no God here that suits your fancy, we have one over here called the Unknown God. And you can just go over here and just, and that way we, we got you covered. We got, you know, Heinz 57 sauce of religious preferences. And, and I think, you know, what's interesting about our day is we have a, a cascade of religious preferences, right?

42:43 I mean, it's, it's. And that itself kind of becomes, in a way that becomes the dominant religion of the day is the cascade of religious preferences. And so I think to establish, like, what is, like getting back to, okay, what is truth, what is actually true? And it's, it's not. The, the, the, the freedom to have a religion is important, but I think what we're starting to discover is that what's more important than the freedom to have a religion is actually having the correct religion. And that not all of your religious preferences are equal.

43:33 Right. And in fact, some are true and some are false. And, and so getting back to what I think all of the Christian writers, or these, what I'm going to call them, Christian thinkers, even though they may or may not have been Christian, who knows? But like Sir Francis Bacon was clearly operating from a Christian worldview. Like he understood the medieval structure of the world. Like all of those things, those were profoundly Christian and that gave them the framework from which they could

44:08 reintroduce the idea of dominion. You know, when you think about, like in the, in the Old Testament, what it, what did God tell human beings to do in the Old Testament? Genesis chapter one, he said do two things. He said, God creates the world and he puts man in the garden. He says, multiply and fill the earth. And then the second thing is have dominion over it. In other words, I've given you the tools. I've given you this creation. You're my stewards. Rule it and make something beautiful out of it.

44:40 And so, and so I think, and, and he, even Bacon, he actually references the creation story in here. I believe it's in the preface somewhere. And, and he, he assumes that mantle, okay, of, of dominion. It's almost like he's saying, I'm assuming that role of dominion by introducing or reintroducing maybe even. I guess we can talk about that. But, but, but this concept of, hey, let's, let's ask questions and begin to explore and take dominion, take the dominion that was, that was charged to us by our Creator, by the One who made us.

45:24 And, and I don't think if, if you don't have a Christian understanding of the world, you're not gonna, you're not going to be able to receive that dominion mandate because, you know, I mean, in so much of our secular minds, human beings aren't the solution, they're the problem. I mean, think about, you know, if it's, if, especially if you're, I mean, think about all the climate hysteria. I mean, the human beings are the scourge of the earth. You know, if we weren't here, this place would be, you know, just a hunky dory.

45:53 But that's not true in any stretch of the imagination. There's a, there's actually a, an old story, kind of a humorous anecdote that. So there was a. Charles Wesley was a, a Methodist preacher in, in England. And he was going around, he was an itinerant preacher and he would travel around and visit different estates and he would preach at different places while he was riding around on his itinerant journeys. And he, the, the story goes that he drove up on this or he wrote up on this estate. And, and there's this farmer working hard in the, in the pasture.

46:34 And, and he said, he, he went up to the guy and said, and it was this beautiful farm. I mean, the guy just, you know, it made this, this beautiful estate. And he approached the, the, the farmer and said, he said, hey, God has really blessed you with a wonderful, with a wonderful property. And the farmer looked back at Charles Wesley and said, well, yeah, that's great and all, but you should have seen it when he had the place to himself. And Eddie, he's getting at the, the fact that, you know. Yeah, that's right.

47:06 It is beautiful, but it's beautiful because I put in the work. Yeah, God gave it to me, but he gave me the talents and the abilities, but, but I employed those and, and, and we turned it into something beautiful. And I think that's kind of what Bacon is getting at. He's like, hey, grounded in Christianity ground grounded in, in, in the Christian understanding. Let's explore some things. Let's try to renew and, and recapture this dominion mandate. So in recapturing the demand, the dominion mandate, I want to pull up the reference to Acts that you made.

47:39 So that was Acts 17, Acts 17 16.

47:44 And I'll read from that because I think it's worthwhile. We're also going to read from another piece of scripture in the, in this podcast as well, because I want to talk about Nehemiah here because I think that that's, that's an important point to get to when we talk about what to do, how to get to restoration. But, but Acts 17, 16, 22. While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace.

48:15 Day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, what is this babbler trying to say? Others remarked, he seems to be advocating foreign gods. They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a beating of the Aropagius, where they said to him, may we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears and we would like to know what they mean.

48:44 All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas. Verse 22. Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagius and said, quote, people of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked about and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription to an unknown God. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship. And this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

49:18 Close quote. By the way, that is from BibleGateway.com that is the New International Version. Acts 17, 16, 22. Less rolling language in the King James Version, but I guess it'll have to do for our show today. Gets across the point.

49:40 Can I just add one thing to that? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So what's, what's interesting to me is I've been doing some reading and you know, there's, it's, it talks about the rise of. I've been doing reading. I'm sorry, I've been doing reading about the rise of spirituality and religion in America recently, in the last, you know, 10 years or so. And I think it's worth pointing out that just because you're religious does not mean that you're right. And so in other words, the type of religion matters.

50:18 And just like in the areopagus, you know, there were many types of religion, but only one of them was true. And so I think what could happen that would sort of maybe derail our renewal would be this multiplicity or, you know, these, these cornucopia, the smorgasbord of religious renewal. But it's not Christian, it's, you know, it's pagan or it's, you know, Islam or whatever. Like in other words, that the, the recipe for success has to be and must be explicitly Christian in order for this project to actually work.

51:02 Now it's interesting that you bring this up because one of the challenges that we have as a, as a nation state polity being at the, again, the logical end of the Enlightenment, one of the challenges we have as a nation state polity is that we have taken to its logical end multi ethnos and multi religios practice within a sprawling country that goes across a third of a continent.

51:37 And even in Christianity itself, okay, the splits, the conflicts, the challenges, forget in our own era, just five minutes after the Puritans showed up, because the people who started off in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were not the same people as those who started off in Jamestown. Those were two fundamental different strands that then moved out over, over the continent over the course of 150 to 200 years. And the interdenominational strife because of a full throated, I would almost say idolatry, but let me not be harsh.

52:27 A full throated commitment to freedom of religion then creates a dynamic where the pagan secularist person looks at Christianity and says, okay, well, you got Methodists, you got Baptists, you got Congregationalists, you got Mormons, you got Seventh Day Adventists, you've got Church of Christ, you've got Christ Church, you've got the Branch Davidians, you know, you've got the Scientologists. And I'm not saying all these are correct. We know what the differences are in inside of the game, we know what the differences are.

53:03 But to the person looking at it from outside the game, they don't understand the difference, nor are they interested, quite frankly, in the difference between the Lutherans and the Baptists. At a doctrinal level, they're not interested in it. And it doesn't help when, and this is something that I was going to bring up again, something that occurred to me this weekend, something that I saw. It doesn't help when the intervarsity arguments between Christians are about things that, quite frankly. And look, I have a lot of problems with post World War II American Christianity, don't get me wrong.

53:41 But one of the things that Post World War II, particularly big evangelical Christianity did correctly was

53:52 put a kibosh on the intramural fights around, quite frankly, ethnos, race. And because of the deconstruction and the collapse of the big evangelical church post Covid, we are now seeing the intramural sniping, starting first with anti Semitism and whether you support the Jewish nation state and what they did after October 17th or not. You know, all that now devolves into a religious argument between the dispensationalists and the end time folks and then the folks who are not right, who are not dispensationalists and the newer, the newer.

54:30 More, more, you know, the dispensationalist folks who say more radical. But, but again, the newer folks who have a different, different philosophy based on a different reading of the theology that then devolves into what I've been seeing recently from like, Joel Webin, who's getting turned inside out around interracial marriage. Oh, you knew I was going to bring this up. And so,

54:56 and, and me, for me, I look at, I look at the work, I look at, I look at neither Jew nor Greek. I look at the history of ethnos, I look at the history of ethnicity in the Middle east and, you know, I look at the arguments that not just Weybond but other folks are making, and I see where they come out of and I go, shut up, number one. Number two, you're out of your lane. Like, you clearly haven't, haven't understood the right thing. But yet again, this is one of those intramural fights that causes division within the body and in a society that claims freedom of worship and freedom of religion and by the way, freedom of association.

55:38 I shall not be coerced into associating with somebody I don't want to be coerced with, into being associated with. Okay, fine. You have freedom of the association. Okay, that's fine. Now we've got a stew inside of the Christian body that I don't think can successfully. No, not I don't think. I wonder if it could successfully mount an eschatological framework that can restore them. Not necessarily restore, but bring back the modern secular mind. And I'm not saying that everybody needs to get on the same page.

56:15 I'm not even saying that big evangelical same page is the way to go. I'm not stating any solutions to this problem. I'm merely pointing out that these are the fractures. And my challenge question to you is if I'm on the outside looking at this and I don't even understand the thing from the beginning, all of this just seems like more of the same from what I'm already coming out of. So why would I jump over to that? I'm already comfortable with the thing I got. Oh, and I don't have to get up on Sunday.

56:43 I can have mimosis. Yeah. Well, to that I would just say. And there's a lot in there. I threw a lot in there. Now there's several layers, there's several layers of things there. But, but the, you know, back to the original point of, you know, somebody on the outside looking in and they're like, there's so many differences. You know what, you know, you, you may not be interested in the differences, but the differences are interested in you. And, and so, and you will be impacted by those differences.

57:16 And so I think I, I think for someone who's on the outside, I think you should make a, I, I, Francis Bacon. Okay. For all his faults, at least he seems like he's making a good faith effort to exercise humility and to try to figure this thing out. Okay. And, and not a prideful way. And so here, here would be my challenge. Here, here would be my ask to unbelievers out there to say, hey, yeah, the, the, there is truth that is out there there. And you owe it to yourself and to your society to do your best to come to a, A, an honest and thoughtful and nuanced understanding of, of, of reality as it exists and not to bring your own, you know, we're all going to, we all have our own biases, we all have our own presuppositions.

58:16 That's, I got that. That's part of it. But, but we have to also come at it with the humility that maybe I don't have it right? Maybe there's something I'm missing and what is it. And I think Christians to, to our credit, you know, and to having lived in negative world for so long where, you know, you go to a university and you say you're a Christian and, and you, oh, God forbid, believe that the Genesis account of creation laughed out of science class, right? Like having had to endure that level of scrutiny, mockery, all of that.

58:54 You know, we, we had to spend a lot of time understanding the secular mind and understanding the atheist arguments and understanding evolution and, and why the evolutionists believe what they believe. And so I would say out of necessity, I think the secularists have to do the same thing. They have to apply this. And they, for. And they haven't had to. They haven't had to. Yeah. And, and now they have to. And you should. And, and what I would say is approach it with humility, with understanding. Maybe I'm not right about everything.

59:28 And, and that's something that, that I've had to say about many, many things to the point about the, the ethnos. I think what's interesting, when you, you brought that up, I, I would say

59:41 that we, of course, you know, you're familiar with the, the concept. You and I have talked a lot at length about the fourth turning and the, you know, the four turns. And so, you know, in a period of unraveling, there's, there's going to be chaos. And, and so what I would say about the, the, the, what's important to understand from a Christian perspective about the ethnos, okay, is that, you know, a lot of people want to attribute culture to race. And, and I would say that's not true. Now that's not to say that ethnicities don't take on particular, you know, cultures or, you know, tendencies or something like that.

1:00:32 But, but culture is way, it's not tied to the, to the melanin, the color of your melanin or your facial structure. That has nothing to do with culture. Culture has everything to do with religion. Everything to do with religion. So you're so, so culture is downstream from religion. Religion is the headwaters, okay? Whatever your religious beliefs are, that forms the headwaters of your existence. And from, from your religion flows your culture, and from your culture flows your politics, forms your family formation forms everything else.

1:01:10 And so if you want to critique someone's some ethnicities, ethnicities, culture, it's, it's not to just, it's not to critique their skin color or their facial structures or the, the geography of where they came from or where they, they're found. What you're critiquing is their religion. I mean, everybody says Christianity is a white man's religion. It's only the white man's religion because it took root in Europe. Europe was profoundly pagan. Europe was just as godless as any other place on the face of the earth.

1:01:47 And so the fact that Christian society took root in Europe has nothing to do with skin color. It just has to do with the providence of God. And oh, by the way, the providence of God is that all nations would come to know him. That's not to say that all, all nations would become European. That's not what that says at all. It just says that all nations would become Christian. And so there should be some similarities. We would think that, that, that if everyone has a Christian understanding of, of the world, of creation, of their own human anthropology, that, that certain things would follow.

1:02:28 That would be kind of basic to every society. And, but would there be variations within those cultures? Of course, of course there would be. But, but the basic, the, the, the, the basic bones would be the same, right? Christ died for, for sinners, right? We, we need, we, we are all sinners in need of a savior, right? I mean all of these, all of these basic presuppositions would be the same. Now how would they play out in certain instances? You know, like you mentioned Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, all these things, okay, There, there may be some differences in understanding the more nuanced portions of, of our faith, but we can all agree on the Apostles Creed, okay?

1:03:18 That's what defines a Christian church. Can you accept the Apostles Creed? Can you accept the Nicene Creed? Those have been the historic standards by which Christian churches have been marked. And then from there people can make, they can read about the ordinance of baptism in a different way, right? Is it, are infants baptized or are believers baptized? But there are certain non essentials, okay, that, that would mark every Christian culture, regardless of skin color. Ethnos. And if you think about where did the ethnicities come from?

1:03:56 Ethnicities came about at the Tower of Babel. And the reasons that the ethnicities came about was because when mankind was joined together in defiance against God, when, when man raised his fist and said, I'm going to build a tower to heaven, I'm going to reach out to God on my terms. The, the human race was on the verge of destruction. They were on the verge of destroying themselves. And God in his mercy struck them with language and confusion, struck them so that they could, they couldn't understand one another, they couldn't conspire anymore to bring about their own annihilation.

1:04:41 In other words, God saved them by creating the nations. And then in the, in the Gospels, right at the end, he says, go into all the nations, baptizing them, making them, you know, making them basically Christians who would, who would follow me. And if you look at, in Acts, I believe it's Acts chapter two, where the, the Bible talks about the day of Pentecost. That is a reversal of the Tower of Babel. So now all of a sudden people are hearing the Gospel in their own tongue and they're asking Themselves.

1:05:17 How is it that we're able to communicate with one another? How is it that all of a sudden we understand this story in our own language, in this place, the temple? And it's the spirit of God enabling the nations to understand the message of Christ and the message of which ultimately brings about peace amongst the nations. So, so I would just say to, to anyone on the outside who maybe hasn't taken an interest, maybe because you haven't had to, maybe because just lack of interest. I don't know, maybe you just don't see the point.

1:05:54 I would say that the. You may not be interested in the differences. The differences are interested in you. And those differences will have you, they will. And if you don't take the time to understand them correctly, you could very easily end up either missing out or in the wrong place. And I say that with a lot of humility, like I don't even know. I pray to God that I'm in the right place. I pray to God that we're all in the right place. And so I think we just have to approach this with humility.

1:06:25 Understanding there are non essential or there are non negotiables. And then there are things that we can negotiate on. We can have our differences and still have a unified base from which a, a healthy culture, a healthy nation can emerge. Does that make sense? That was a lot. Yeah, no, that was, that was good. That, that again, that, that rolls us back into the book, back into the great installation by Francis Bacon. This allows us to, to pick up. Because I want to pick up something else that, that, that Brian has, has brought up.

1:07:11 Because the question now becomes, what do we do in order to get there? How do we. How do we. Which way Western man like that, that meme shows up occasionally, sometimes. So back to the book, back to the great inspiration. I'm gonna pick up with. I believe it is 53. We're gonna read. 33, 54, 55. Little, little snippets. I think he would have really liked Twitter, by the way. Or maybe substack. Actually, GRI strikes me as more of a substack guy than a Twitter guy. Yep. All right. Speaking of idols, and I quote, there are also idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call the idols of the marketplace on account of the commerce and consort of men there.

1:08:01 For it is by discourse that men associate and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar, and therefore the ill and unfit choices of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations, wherewith in some things learned in men are wont to guard and defend themselves by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw into all confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies.

1:08:33 53. That's 53. 54. Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies and and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call idols of the theater, because, in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it only of the systems now in vogue, or only of the ancient sects and philosophies that I speak for many more plays of the same kind may yet be composed, and in like artificial manner set forth, seeing that errors the most widely different have nevertheless causes for the most part alike.

1:09:13 Neither again do I mean this only of entire systems, but also of many principles and axioms in science, which by tradition credulity and negligence have come to be received. But of these several kinds of idols I must speak more largely and exactly, that the understanding may be duly cautioned.

1:09:34 55. The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds and though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates in relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being accepted name utterly rejected. Hence too the element of fire, with its orb is brought in to make up the square with the other three which the sense perceives.

1:10:06 Hence also is the ratio of density of the so called elements is arbitrarily fixed to 10 to 1, and so on of other dreams and these fancies affect non dogmas only, but simple notions also. And then this from 56. The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion, either as being the received opinion, or as being agreeable to itself, draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

1:10:49 And therefore it was a good answer that was made by one who they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods. Ay. Asked he again, but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows? And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like, wherein men, having delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled.

1:11:20 But where they fail, though this happen much oftener neglect and pass them by, but with far more subtlety does this mischief insinuate itself into philosophy and the sciences.

1:11:34 Francis Bacon talking about cognitive dissonance and cognitive biases long before 20th century psychology got a hold of it, proving, of course, that there is no new thing under the sun. Yep, I want to take a turn here. I want to talk about a little bit about what we're going to do as we sort of round a corner towards the end of our project here today, the end of our book today, talking about restoration.

1:12:02 There's an idea from 2nd Chronicles 34. 7 so Israel had a king, several kings, and they all fell into idolatry. And eventually they had a good king named Josiah. And in 2 Chronicles 34. 7, the good king Josiah was noted as having taken the. Taken this action which I'm about to describe upon becoming an adult and ruling over the folks in Judah. And I quote and when he had broken down the altars in the groves and had beaten the graven images into powder and cut down all the idols throughout all the land of Israel, he returned to Jerusalem.

1:12:42 That's second Chronicles 34. 7 KJV.

1:12:50 There is not yet a quote unquote good King Josiah on the political horizon of America. But the groundwork, and I think this is what we were just talking about in that last section, the groundwork is being laid for that person's coming. I believe a tidal wave of idol breaking with youth and vigor will accomplish what old age and weariness cannot. But waiting for the appearance of a savior before doing the work yourself is a foolhardy waste of time. And leaders owe to their followers to gird their loins for the upcoming work.

1:13:22 By the way, doing the work without the benefit of the Holy Spirit. Brian referenced acts. That's Acts 2:1, 13, which I believe fundamentally, if you read the Bible, is, is fundamentally the third entry of the Spirit of God into the world. And we'll just leave that at that. I think the first entry came in with creation. The second entry comes in, in the, in the. In the manifest body of Jesus and his life, death and resurrection. And then the third entry comes in with the Holy Spirit coming in at Pentecost, by the way, if you don't believe me, if you go back and look historically at what happened after Pentecost, the Roman Empire fell, took a little while, but this was, this was the start of something interesting happening that has wound up with all of us here.

1:14:19 At a practical level. So let's move this out of, out of theory and theology. Let's move this to practicality and more pragmatism, right, Brian? So at a practical level, if I'm a leader in my home or I'm a leader in the civic world, or I'm a leader at work, right? And I, I, I, I, I've read a little Francis Bacon. Maybe I've, I've taken the time to actually treat Christianity seriously. Maybe I don't necessarily believe it, but I've decided to treat it, treat it seriously. And I'm being moved to something about the idols I see around me, either in my home, my community, or in my, in my work.

1:15:05 Now, the idols that we worship in our time are not physical and material, although you could say the phones is probably the material essence of the, of the, of the temple the Greeks were worshiping at, that Paul showed up at. You can maybe make that parallel. But how do we begin to tear down, how do we begin to tear down the idols in the groves, the psychological idols in the groves? And by the way, I think people like Jordan Peterson are doing some of this work. I think people who are questioning the shibboleths of a modern society, like Doug Wilson are doing some of this work.

1:15:42 I think the tearing down process, or at least the beginnings of the tearing down of the idols process has started. But there's so many idols, it's like whack a mole. And I'm not, I'm phrasing this question from the perspective of a person who's not Jordan Peterson. I don't have a platform. I'm not Doug Wilson. I didn't spend 50 years, you know, building a church. I'm not that guy. I just am the precinct chair of my local political party in my community. I'm just the, I'm just the small business owner who has like, you know, two gas stations.

1:16:17 I'm just the person who's trying to show up and be a good coach at my, my kids soccer game. And I'm surrounded by all these wackadoo parents. Or maybe not wackadoo, maybe they're fine parents, but I See, because I'm coaching their kids, I see the effect of the idols, the psychological, spiritual and philosophical idols in their lives. This is very much a pastoral question. So how do you advise a leader who wants to begin to sort of cut down the sun statues that are the spiritual groves in our time?

1:16:49 Yeah, I think. I think it begins in our own hearts. And we have to realize that we are blind to our own idols, that we all, like I said earlier, we're all prone to worship something and, and even the most pious hearts. Okay. Out there, that and that. And, and I mean that in a generous, you know, kind way. What I'm saying is even. Even the. The best of us can be. Can be prone to mistakes and to believe or say things that are not true or we can be misled. Even good people. I say. And I say good people.

1:17:32 And I. Again, I'm saying that as if, you know, in reality, what I'm trying to say is none of us are good. Okay? Even, you know, regardless of what we might think is that our hearts. The Scripture tells us that our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked just in nature. And so in order to. We're not even capable of truly recognizing the own idolatry that we have in our own hearts. And so I think the Psalms are instructive in how to begin. Where do we start? And I believe it's Psalm. I believe it's Psalm 139.

1:18:14 It's either Psalm 139 or 137. The Psalmist, he's. He. David is calling out to God and he's saying a. He's saying, lord, search my heart and try me and see if there's any unclean way in me and, and. And lead me in the way everlasting. In other words, there's a. There's a humility involved in, in David. And David was, you know, was one of Israel's godly kings. You mentioned Josiah earlier. David was. Was one of the. The godly kings as well. And, and he was actually referred to by God as a man after my own heart.

1:18:55 A man after God's own heart is how the scripture refers to him. And so this idea that. And even the prophet Isaiah says, all we, like sheep, have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way. And our tendency is to reject God. Our tendency is to be blind, to be helpless. And so we have to be utterly dependent on God and realize that that's the starting point for. For identifying idols and, and tearing them down, which is part of the reason why I really appreciate Francis Bacon's humble approach to this whole project, saying, you know, hey, we, you know, we.

1:19:37 I want to start a a new a new renewal process, right? Let's renew the sciences. Let's, let's try to take dominion over the earth again and with with something new. But he approaches it with, with a lot of humility, with recognizing his past and trying to build on the shoulders of of the the spiritual giants before him. So I think that's where it starts.

1:20:08 All right, folks, so we actually just lost Brian there, and we'll be inviting him back in a future episode of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, but wanted to wrap up today's show by wrapping up with the Great Instauration by Francis Bacon. So I'm going to pick up here in the book and we're going to round the corner and close our show today. And I quote from the Great Instauration the Preface for my own part, at least, in obedience to the everlasting love of truth, I have committed myself to the unto uncertainties and difficulties, and solitudes of the ways, and, relying on the divine assistance, have upheld my mind both against the shocks and embattled ranks of opinion, and against my own private and inward hesitations and scruples, and against the fogs and clouds of nature, and the phantoms flitting about on every side, in the hope of providing at least, or at last, for the present and future generations, guidance more faithful and secure.

1:21:12 Wherein, if I have made any progress, the way has been opened to me by no other means than the true and legitimate humiliation of the human spirit. For all those who before me have applied themselves to the invention of the arts, have but cast a glance or two upon facts, and examples and experience, and straightway proceeded, as if invention were nothing more than an exercise of thought, to invoke their own spirits to give them oracles. I, on the contrary, dwelling purely and constantly among the facts of nature, withdraw my intellect from them no further than may suffice to let the images and rays of natural objects meet in a point, as they do in the sense of vision.

1:21:48 Once it follows that the strength and excellency of the wit has but little to do in the matter and at the same humility which I use in inventing, I employ likewise in teaching. For I do not endeavor, either by triumphs of confutation, or pleadings of antiquity, or assumptions of authority, authority, or even by the veil of obscurity, to invest these inventions of mine with any majesty which might easily be done by One who sought to give luster to his own name rather than light to other men's minds.

1:22:16 Then skipping down, wherefore, seeing that these things do not depend upon myself at the outset of the work, I most humbly and fervently pray to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, that remembering the sorrows of mankind and the pilgrimage of this life wherein we wear out our days, few and evil, they will vouchsafe through my hands to endow the human family with new mercies. This likewise I humbly pray that things human may not interfere with things divine, and that from the opening of the ways of sense and the increase of natural light, there may arise in our minds no incredulity or darkness with regard to the divine mysteries, but rather that the understanding be thereby purified and purged of fancies and vanity, and yet not the less subject and entirely submissive to the divine oracles, may give to faith that which is faith's.

1:23:04 Lastly, that knowledge being now discharged of that venom which the serpent infused into it, and which makes the mind of man to swell, we may not be wise above measure and sobriety, but cultivate truth in charity.

1:23:24 For my part, I agree at the close here of our episode today on the great installation, I agree with Brian Bagley. I agree with our guest today. We are blind to our own idols. We are blind to the things that grab hold of us and the things that we put the highest, the things that we worship. We are blind to those things. And Bacon. Bacon was more aware of this empirically probably, than any other, any other thinker or philosopher or even scientist who was working through the chaos of the transition from a world of medieval thought and medieval processes to a world of Renaissance, Reformation and through to a world that would be dominated by human reason, human skepticism, and above all, be driven by an endeavor towards human enlightenment.

1:24:23 We are on the other side of that endeavor. And the idols we worship as a Western culture have been tested in various ways over the last 80 years and they have all been found wanting to provide meaning. However, we cling to them because we don't have leadership that has any better ideas. We don't have any leadership that has any better ideas than rampant consumerism, more marketing and propaganda, more entertainment, more media driving behavior, and of course, more use of slovenly language. We don't have leadership that has any better ideas than putting CCTV cameras on every single street corner and AI inside of every single device that you have to monitor your clicks and of course, control your behavior before the husk of historical Christianity is completely sucked dry.

1:25:27 In the west, though, there needs to be a restoration project that begins by first pointing out the ideas, approaches and opinions, opinions that don't produce optimal outcomes, and then second rejects those ideas, approaches and opinions and proposes new solutions and new ideas. This is why while Christian nationalism might be scary sounding to people with a secular or culturally Christian mindset, at least it's a proposed solution. No more banging about about the problems. We do need solutions and we do need new ideas.

1:26:09 But we also need to appropriately position the people who have given us the ideas that have led to so much trouble. We talked about Voltaire and this time, this episode, we're talking about Francis Bacon. But we've covered Nietzsche on this podcast and we've talked about Derrida, Kant, we've talked about Rousseau, these men of the Enlightenment, these philosopher thinkers, Marx, Lenin. We've talked about these individuals, Freud, Young. And what we have noted is that all of these people, these people who were people who were well, believed in the primacy of ideas rather than products, believed in the primacy of thoughts rather than the primacy of actions, and whose words were taken by others and then led to the building out of utopian schemes that didn't work.

1:27:10 These men, we almost never look at their lives. We almost never look at how they actually lived, what they actually did. Rousseau fathered anywhere between five and seven children and abandoned them all to orphanages. Marx beat his servants and sat in the library all day and couldn't hold a job. Kant, well, Kant elevated his own personal ability to basically be slightly autistic to societal level. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but that's what he did. Diderot, if you'll look at him and the French Revolution, he hated women and could not make a relationship with them.

1:27:52 And Francis Bacon, well, Francis Bacon was a social climber, a schemer, a man who at the end of the day may or may not have had predilections that we would look on as ghastly.

1:28:09 I'm not saying that we should hold these men to be gods, but I am saying that if we're going to take on their ideas and look at the results of their ideas, and if we're going to go in a different direction, we need to pick different ideas. Because if you don't have the power to walk the idea out yourself that you're proposing for others, how good can that idea actually be?

1:28:38 I would also assert that we need to confront and repent of the idolatry deep in our own personal lives, away from work, away from civic leadership, away from community volunteering, away from social media, away from the show, away from our hobbies, away from our friends. We need to confront and repent of the idolatry in our own lives and hearts, and to paraphrase from Second Chronicles and break down the altars and groves and beat the graven images into powder that exist inside of ourselves and cut down all the idols throughout all of the land, the psychological land in particular, that exists inside each and every one of our minds.

1:29:21 That is the first work we have to do in order to begin the restoration project and abandon approaches that no longer, quote, unquote, quote work. This act will be in the beginning of the restoration of an individual narrative more lasting than the false individual narratives we've all been fed by those individuals who proclaim themselves to be leaders but have no better ideas than constant surveillance and scolding.

1:29:59 I want to thank Brian Bagley for coming on the podcast today. Always a pleasure to talk with him, and it's really too bad we weren't able to complete our conversation with him today. I want to thank you all for listening, as usual, to this episode of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books Podcast. And well, that's it for me.