-We've fallen in love with the feelings of doom very much.

And I think it's -- it's -- it's not the best way forward.

We need to find resources to push back against the pressure of reality and to use the power of imagination to try to think of something else, some other situation.

♪♪ -We're all seekers searching for answers to life's biggest questions.

There are people who have made it their life's work to explore and uncover the wisdom we all seek.

In this episode, I speak with philosopher Simon Critchley about mysticism and belief in the modern era.

♪♪ This is "Wisdom Keepers."

♪♪ Simon Critchley, welcome to "Wisdom Keepers."

-Thank you very much, Ray.

-We've just come through a string of years where people left, right, and center are feeling pretty bad.

There's -- There's a sense that something's wrong.

What's wrong?

-[ Laughs ] Where do you want me to start?

-[ Laughs ] Well... -What's right?

Um...well... What's wrong?

I think, um... You know, there's a pervasive mood of... melancholy, resignation.

People feel... ...for the most part, defeated.

Some of them feel enervated.

And we'll see what we're going to do next.

I don't know.

-You know, even a lot of the elevated people sound defeated.

Even the people who you might have thought would be happy don't seem very happy.

-Oh, 'cause they're so angry.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

Mhm.

Well, maybe people need to calm down a bit and, uh, look at the big -- the bigger picture and try and... you know, take a breath.

That might be a -- That might be a start.

I don't -- You know, the woes of the world...

It seems to me that the, you know -- We've been through a time of... pandemic, of plague, and that has had various effects.

One of the effects it's had is to connect us with previous times in human history when there's been plague and pestilence.

And -- And it also reminds us that there's something really archaic about us.

We think of ourselves as modern and up-to-date and always standing at some, you know, inflection point of history.

Um, I think we're older than that.

And the pandemic reminded us of the fact that we are -- Yes, people have lived through awful times, and actually those times which were a lot worse than ours -- I'm thinking particularly, say, something like the Black Death, the bubonic plague were also times of enormous faith and -- and hope and... and practice, good practice.

So I think it's -- I think we tend to kind of overemphasize the misery and enjoy it maybe too much.

How about that?

-Well, in the Black Death, more than a third of everybody between Dublin and Moscow died by some estimates.

-That's right.

-But then after that, there was a tremendous flowering, a resurgence.

-Mm-hmm.

-Wealth, learning, traveling.

All kinds of things going on.

Boy, if that comes out of this one, great, but it doesn't feel that way.

-Well, okay.

But let me -- As a counterexample.

One of my great heroes is the English female mystic Julian of Norwich.

And Julian of Norwich... ...writes a book.

We have it in two forms.

It's called "The Showings," Revelations."

And it's -- We know very little about her.

We don't know her name.

She's named after the Church of Saint Julian.

One of the few facts she gives us is that on the 13th of May 1373 -- so in full, you know -- full Black Death mode.

And she was living in the second-most populous city in England at the time.

Norwich was a big city comparatively.

People would have been dying around her.

She experiences these revelations, and at the end of those revelations, her conclusion is that all shall be well.

She knew death.

She knew misery.

She knew woe.

And still she insisted on the possibility of, you know, will.

And that was given to her through her faith and her practice and her devotion.

And, um, so I think we get -- There's a tendency for us to get buffeted, you know, constantly buffeted by events.

And it throws us back on ourselves.

And we need to find resources to push back, push back against the pressure of reality.

Yeah, and to use the power of imagination to push back against the pressure of reality and try to think of something else, some other situation.

I think we tend to -- Yeah, we tend to -- We've fallen in love with our -- with the feelings of doom, uh, very much, and I think it's -- it's -- it's not the best way forward.

-In a 24/7 news cycle... -Mm-hmm.

-...it's easy to catastrophize.

The next bad news is coming in 22 minutes.

-Yeah.

-On WYNS.

-[ Laughs ] Yeah.

Right, right, right.

-And, you know, you pick up your phone, there's more catastrophe on the phone.

It's easy.

And to fast-forward a little bit from Julian of Norwich, the world is too much with us.

-Yeah.

-It's with us every second in a way that it wasn't in the 14th century.

And it's hard to shut it off, isn't it?

-Yeah.

Yeah.

And maybe we should.

Maybe we get too excited by the 24/7 news cycle and the kind of pressure that that puts on us.

And at certain points in the last years, I've really -- You know, I'm a news junkie.

I follow the news.

And in particular, I, you know -- I'm a radiohead.

Love to listen to the radio.

But I found particularly during the early stages of, um, the Russia/Ukraine conflict that this was just too much, you know?

There I was brushing my teeth at midnight, and, um, the nuclear facility at Zaporizhzhia was on fire, and I thought, "And now I'm going to go to bed?"

[ Laughs ] And, you know, just, you know -- you know, think about breakfast.

And so I think there are -- there's a sense in which we have to kind of find ways of shaping that.

And we used to have, you know, the form of the, you know, news show.

"NewsHour."

I was brought up in Britain.

So the BBC.

The 6:00 news.

The 9:00 news.

And that was it.

You took that in.

Or the form of the newspaper.

And we've lost proportion.

And we're overstimulated, that's for sure.

And that overstimulation, I think, is -- presents a real danger for us.

And then we can only imagine what danger it presents for those people who are -- who are much younger.

-You use the word "buffeted," and I think that's a good word because it gives you this feeling of just constantly being -- not dealt this devastating blow, but constantly being hit in little ways, in a never-ending way, which is exhausting.

-Yeah.

-And I wonder if that modern tempo left us susceptible to catastrophe, to catastrophizing in a way that maybe people who have suffered blows in earlier eras weren't constantly buffeted, weren't already predisposed toward thinking the worst of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

-Yeah, I think that's right.

We've engineered a kind of prison house for ourselves with technology.

And, um -- And it -- You know, it suffocates us.

It's hard to find a space to breathe and press back.

And it's hugely important that we do that.

It's very important that we pay attention to, you know, the affairs of the day and of the week and of the year and of -- and all of that.

But it's crucially important that we find times to slow down, to pause, to reflect.

And, um, so I think that the -- There's always been a pressure of reality, but the intensity of that, the relentlessness of that at this point is, um -- is, you know -- is disastrous for -- for human flourishing, I think.

And if you add to that, you know, climate change and the idea that the whole thing is just running down anyway, it's, uh -- it's hard to find resources for courage, you know, and determination to go on.

But we have to do that.

-You said especially affecting young people.

You're with young people a lot... -Yeah.

-...as a college instructor.

Um... are they a gloomy bunch right now?

-No.

This is what's interesting.

I mean, I think the, um -- I mean, I've read a lot of the research on the effects of, uh, smartphones on the behavior of young people and, you know, the work that everybody else has read -- Jonathan Haidt and people like that.

And, um, you know -- And it would appear that everything from mood disorders to anxiety to suicidal ideation to suicide, those metrics have shifted.

You know, there seems to be a change around 2012, and the figures have risen, particularly amongst, uh, teenage girls.

Young women seem to be particularly affected by what's been happening.

And what has changed behavior?

Well, 2012 is the time when there's really smartphone market saturation.

So it's around that point that we can begin to plot a shift in how people are feeling and how people are acting on what they're feeling.

There were these cases that had appeared in Britain of young women who had been found dead in their bedrooms.

Two, three, four cases.

And the parents had absolutely no idea that there was anything wrong until they were able to get into their cellphones and discovered that, um, perhaps they'd posted a photograph at some point, and then, uh, there was a whole sort of spate of bullying.

And this had tipped that, you know, young woman over into a desperate act.

So something has shifted, and something needs to be done about that.

There needs to be legislation.

There needs to be some way of really controlling the power of big tech because it is going to take down young people.

And it's, um -- it's already done that on the one hand.

On the other hand -- On the other hand, this is the -- this is the good side of the story.

I'm teaching a class on Shakespeare's "Hamlet," and I give them in the first week of class physical copies of the book.

I put it in their hands and I say, "The deal with the class is that you come to class with this book and we read it together."

They're very excited by this.

They're just reading a book.

Now, those students who are, let's say, around 20, uh, they've grown up with social media.

They're completely fluent in all of those forms.

They're completely underwhelmed by that.

They're not impressed in the slightest.

And I have students that have gone back to flip phones in order -- in order to just, you know -- They're not -- They don't want a smartphone.

What they want to do -- and this is the really great thing -- is they want to read Read actual books.

They want to be educated as people like me were educated many decades ago.

And they'd like to be assessed in a way that's meaningful, and they'd like to be assessed in a way that their work actually is something that they do for themselves and that they have it as their possession at the end of the class.

So I find with students that there's a -- there's an almost, uh -- I wouldn't say reactionary tendency, but there's a -- there's been a shift in the last years.

And they want -- they want, you know, rather old-fashioned things, which I find rather good.

-Well, that sounds like a yearning for engagement.

-Yeah.

-There's something very sensual about reading to be heard... -Mm-hmm.

-...with the person next to you reading to be heard... -Yes, yes.

-...and in a small group... -Yeah.

-...that is different from scrolling.

-Yeah.

Yeah.

-Maybe that's the genius in it.

-To be in a class, you know, is to be with others, to associate with them and to be physically there with them and to take the time with each other to, um, let the thoughts -- um, let the thoughts -- let the thoughts have their effect.

And that's, um -- and that's precious.

And to that extent, I remain, you know, stubbornly hopeful about the prospects for young human beings.

I think they're, you know -- They want -- They want very similar things to what I wanted and what the people that taught me wanted.

And, um, so I think adults in many ways miss that and think, "Well, these kids have no attention span.

They're not able to read books."

No, I think on the contrary.

They're totally able to do that, and they want to do that.

And they should be treated in that way.

Um, yeah.

-Professor, you've been thinking about, writing about mysticism.

-Yes.

-Now, most people aren't going to go to a high place and don a long robe and think about what it all means.

But in every society, in every age, a certain subset of us do.

-Mm-hmm.

-Have you come to some conclusions about the attraction of trying to touch the transcendent, even if you're not sure about it yourself?

-Mysticism is the, you know -- the beating heart and the fiery core of religious life.

And it's, um -- it's kind of dynamite.

It is, um, powerful, powerful stuff.

And, um -- And one way of defining it is to say that it's -- mysticism is experience in its most intense form.

It's the possibility of being taken outside oneself, so transcendent in the sense in which you get to step outside yourself, um, push yourself aside and be open to that which is -- the divine, the cosmos -- however that might be understood.

Mysticism is not a religion.

It's a tendency within religion and a tendency within every form of religion that I'm aware of.

And you could maybe take that even further and say that for as long as there have been human beings living in social groups, there's been some kind of gathering, some kind of activity, often connected with funerary practices, often connected with certain times of the year.

Um...

Midwinter.

Midsummer.

And, um...

There's never been a society without religion in that sense.

And at the heart of that religion is usually something special, something sacral, something which contains a mystery.

And then there might be someone who is given the... the honor or the task -- or actually it can also be a kind of punishment -- to be the mediator to that sacral space.

When we're thinking about what are loosely called shamans in indigenous groups, something like that has happened.

Something like that has continued to happen.

Human beings... have a deep, uh, metaphysical need.

A deep metaphysical need, um, which finds expression in religion.

So there's a sense in which, you know, we have to understand the role that religion plays in human life and even, you know, how it makes sense of things that are senseless.

So I take very seriously, you know, things like ritual and devotion.

For me, religion isn't -- isn't an issue of, um, whether there is or is not -- whether a transcendent entity exists or does not exist or whether you believe in it or you don't believe in it.

That seems to me to be a kind of philosophical issue.

What interests me a lot more is how religion is done, in particular what, let's say, devotional practice is and what needs are being met by that.

-Well, if you're modern... -Yeah.

-...and you're rigorous and you're wide awake, you can sometimes be dismissive of all of that.

-Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's very much the modern attitude that we have come to think of as... ...the right way to look at things.

The, um -- You know, and in philosophy, the duty of the philosopher is critique, critique, critique, critique.

And the philosopher is the kind of, um -- the lawyer in the tribunal of reason, right?

And what the philosopher has to keep out at all costs is fanaticism, superstition, enthusiasm.

So then we end up with this modern idea of philosophy or intellectual life as a critical, rational activity that has to be dismissive of all of this dangerous stuff.

And I think that leads to a mis-recognition of most of the history of thought.

You know?

It makes no sense of what human beings have been thinking for thousands of years.

And it makes no sense of how human beings actually experience what they care for and their hopes and their dreams.

You know, the obsession with critique loses sight of the importance of understanding.

We've given ourselves over to a kind of cult of smartness.

The most important thing is to be a smart person.

And when we're making judgments about people, particularly young people, we'll say, you know, "Is that person smart or not smart?"

And I've seen a lot of this in academia over the years.

It's good to be smart.

Um, it's fine.

But it doesn't mean you're going to be a good person, a decent person, a generous person, a tolerant person, a person with character, a person in 30 years' time might have done something worthy and interesting with their lives.

So that obsession with smartness, I think, can burn itself out, and we end up with a kind of, um... you know, just an obsession with -- with that particular -- that particular facet of education.

And I think what we should be doing is, you know, cultivating other virtues.

Maybe at this point in history, kind-hearted understanding is more important than relentless criticism.

So the idea that when we -- when, you know, young people go to school or college, that we teach them critical thinking, critical reasoning, nothing wrong with that.

But that's not the only thing we should be teaching them because it tends to make them into little islands, you know, well-fortified islands, and they can be quite dismissive of what doesn't line up with that.

-When I occasionally am jolted out of my rational, rigorous, "eyes front" kind of way of dealing with the world, it's a a welcome departure.

I was in the largest mosque in Asia for Friday prayers.

-Ah.

-And the chanting rose in the rough unison of 20,000 people saying the same thing.

-Yeah.

-And then every head went down in perfect synchrony.

The very unison of all of us doing the same thing together.

And it was just magnificent.

-Yeah, and I think that we have a tendency -- You know, we have a tendency to have a kind of rather decaffeinated, kind of low-fat understanding of religion.

Religion is all about, you know, that collective act of devotion and submission.

Another way of thinking about what I was saying before is that the... A thing that interests me in particular are, uh, experiences of surrender.

Um, these are very important.

This can be, uh -- Obviously religion is about surrender.

So in the case of the mosque, there are 20,000 people submitting.

Islam is submission to God.

But it can be surrender as, uh, what happens when you are particularly moved by, uh... ...a piece of art.

Um, I think in particular of music.

The way music can make you submit to it, and you go with it.

One thing I like to say is that it's, you know -- It's impossible to be an atheist when you're listening to the music that you love.

Whatever that music is.

That could be Dylan or Bach or whatever it might be.

But when you're listening to that music, um, and you submit to it because you love it, you are held there.

There's no -- There's not a scintilla of doubt in your being.

You are -- And you're transported.

It transcends you.

So those experiences of submission and surrender, I think, are hugely important to recognize because there's also a kind of humility in that, I think, um, which I think is essential.

I think we've moved from a time of what I used to like to call evangelical atheism, um, to a situation where we... we have a little bit more interest and toleration in the role that religion has played in shaping human life.

And if we want to understand human history, political forms, we have to understand how they are always articulated around the question of the sacred and make sense of them in those terms.

-It's a secular age.

In an increasingly secular age, is there a kind of civic faith that's lost potency along with religious faith?

Faith in the academy.

Faith in the criminal justice system, in what journalism tells you.

Have we been on a roller-coaster ride, heading down, that one institution or another can't say, "Woe is me"?

-Yeah.

-"Just me."

But should we be paying a lot of attention to the fact that more and more people don't believe anybody?

-Yes, we should.

It is dangerous, potentially catastrophic.

Um... A thinker that I'm very fond of, uh, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

And Rousseau talks about a catechism of the citizen.

A catechism of the citizen.

So to be a citizen is to profess, you know, a civic faith, and to be bound by that profession.

And that means a faith in the practices, the customs, and the institutions of the place in which you find yourself.

And I think that's essential.

And I think the United States has been an extraordinary example of a civil religion.

Right?

Uh...

Which is a strange mixture of a kind of republicanism in the broad sense of a republic and a kind of Puritanism on the other hand.

And it's knitted those things together in a way that has survived the last centuries.

And I think at this point, right here in the United States, I think, um... there's a real danger of that not surviving, um, because of the amounts of doubt, uh, hostility, skepticism that people have towards each other.

And in order to live in a society, you have to give people the benefit of the doubt and you have to accept that we're on a shared -- There's a shared project here and we have a faith in common.

And in that faith, I can disagree with you.

I can disagree with you heartily.

But we're in this together.

And I think what's happened in the last 10, 15 years, in particular through the mechanism of big tech really threatens that.

-Loosens social bonds?

-Absolutely.

Loosens social bonds.

Turns people against each other.

Turns everybody into a potential enemy or, uh, have relations of hostility towards them.

And it, you know -- And then it draws the bonds of solidarity tightly around, um, issues that do not unify but divide.

-I love that phrase "the catechism of the citizen" in part because when you first learn your catechism, it's a rote exercise.

-Yeah.

-You are asked to memorize it.

Who made you?

Who made me?

God made me.

The supposition being that after a while you will internalize that and it won't be just something that comes out of your mouth because you've memorized it.

Do we have a reliable transmission of that civic catechism?

Are the young people that you're working with at The New School inculcated?

Have they been marinated in those shared civic values so that it did move from rote learning to something deeper and more profoundly held?

-Don't know.

I have my doubts.

I do believe in the fundamental decency of human beings and, um, a decency that they can show towards each other.

And I also think that the -- the terrible thing about the digital age and technology is that, uh, it introduces a distance between us.

And that distance accelerates the hostility and the enmity, which if you met that person face-to-face, you wouldn't feel the same way.

You'd give someone a pass or you'd shake their hand or you go for a drink or something like that.

So to that extent, although it almost pains me to say this, I mean, I am optimist about human nature.

I think that, you know -- I don't think that we're awful creatures, rapacious animals, and that life is nasty, brutish, and short.

I think that we have capacities for kindness and benevolence and fellow feeling.

Um, we find ourselves in a situation where it's not very fashionable to express that.

Then the other question would be -- which for me is a really important question -- is that people think about politics, let's say, in terms of, um... ...policies, um, parties and so on and so forth and the business of government.

For me, the core to any politics has to be custom, has to be, uh, ways of life, forms of life, you know, what Rousseau called les moeurs.

Mores.

Habits.

You know, things which are catechistically ingrained in people, things that you can count on.

And, um... And I think that any society is as good as the customs that it passes on.

And out of those customs, you can then fashion institutions, forms of life, and so on and so forth.

And that's what we should be thinking about.

What are the -- What customs do we have that we can develop, that we can inculcate that would allow this kind of civic profession of faith, this catechism.

-To open, I asked you for a diagnosis.

To close, let me ask you for a prescription, then, Doc.

-Okay.

-What should we be doing now to start -- at least start the work of addressing our various predicaments?

-The easiest way of saying it would be to attend.

To attend.

There's a lot of, um, interest in, you know, attention, attention deficit, and so on and so forth.

I think we have to cultivate practices of radical attention.

And these are very simple.

This is what reading is.

-Mhm.

-This is what listening is.

So the prescription is to read and to listen... and to do that in a way that enables you to push yourself aside.

So, for me, what's very important is this pushing yourself aside that we've become, partly through things like psychoanalysis and the culture of therapy -- We've become used to the idea that the truth about who we are is somehow in here, you know, and in the story that we tell about ourselves based on some claim about identity.

And I think that's, um -- That's far too little.

There has to be a lot more than that.

I don't -- I don't believe the stories that people tell about themselves because I know the stories I tell about myself are not true!

And I think that people get locked up in kind of, um, delusions of their identity.

And the point is not to look inwards.

The point is to look outwards.

Right?

And to attend to that.

So the -- This could take us back to questions of mysticism.

Really, what the, uh -- what mysticism is is the cultivation of practices of attention.

And if you can do that and you can push yourself aside for a while and hold yourself out there, then you can begin to see things in a different way.

And that would be my -- So that would be my prescription.

And to -- And to let go, um, of the... ...the things that separate us as much as possible.

And what I like about Christianity at its most radical is that we all get to be saved.

We all get to be saved.

Hell is in here.

We walk in hell every day.

Hell is just what's running through my head, the nonsense that I -- that I'm thinking of at 5:00 in the morning.

You know, the resentments, the petty hostilities, the stuff that I have.

That's hell.

I can...

I can step outside from that.

I can...

I can teach myself to attend to something outside myself and then get to the really radical position of, well, all may be well, all shall be well, and maybe all can be saved.

-Simon Critchley, thanks for joining us.

It was great.

-Thank you very much, Ray.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪