Read on Twitter
Yeah 4 hours is a bit nuts, but we'll push the limits with this one. I did put in time-stamps. I'll outline some of the points here in a thread.
I begin with @TheCriticalDri2 who as you would expect finds the reason for the collapse of Oscar ratings in the betrayal of story telling He correctly notes that people don't like hypocrites preaching at them but I think needs to go deeper.
The ratings collapse and canon controversies express the cultural crisis in storytelling. It isn't that Hollywood isn't just failing to dish up cheap escapism. TV is a reliable pusher for that. The crisis goes deeper.
A sign of that is in the @michaelshermer convo with @jordanbpeterson . Shermer gives the standard argument against the physical resurrection of Jesus which in the modernist frame just makes it a test of "the supernatural"
He then pivots to sort of try to defend the Biblical authors and condemn the wrong kind of contemporary readers by suggesting the authors didn't intend for anyone to assume a physical resurrection, just a symbolic one.
This makes zero sense to the ancient world or even contemporary story telling. Would The Matrix movie have worked if Neo was only resurrected mythologically in the hearts of the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar?
@jordanbpeterson again displays the turning of the page from modernity in how he answers. He answers this question like he always does and normally confuses and frustrates everyone.
JBP deals with at the story level and leaves open the question of how far righteousness could change the world, but in his case directly through changing people, which is really more Pentecost than Easter.
Part of what makes JBP's answer so strange to many is that he is in fact a completely committed "depth psychologist" following Freud and especially Jung as he regularly notes. He's seriously down on two level theories.
What's a two-level theory? Truth is we're awash in them in modernity. My go-to YT vids on this are from Prof. Daniel Bonevac's lectures at U of T in Austin.
Trouble is, modernity doesn't invent two-level theories. It rejects ancient ones that worked via relationality (religion) and substitutes modern ones which have caused the meaning crisis. Oedipus Rex's plague was a 2 level theory
One way to think about the anti-woke New Atheists is to keep everything on one level as this Marxist notes. It destroys not only new Atheists but the viability of crunch religion as well. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-became-of-atheism-part-one-wearing
But ascending religion of the West today, it's completely a two level theory. Just one wrought of the crisis of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Yet lest we trigger Onward Christian Culture Warrior soldiers to defeat the godless Marxists we should see that all of this is really about pruning branches on the Christian vine @TheRestHistory https://pca.st/fq2377i0
We're really sandwiched between two two-level theories, one from above where the human posture is that of the inferior (the plague of Thebes) and the other down when we try to control but can't because we ourselves are eaten by it.
In the modern two-level theories we lose our agency, personhood to psychology, biology, economics, and nearly everything else. There is nothing to worship. We are at the mercy of our appetites.
This is in fact the real crisis in storytelling. We're not needing distraction; we're needing redemption and this needs to be a real two-level theory praying up not losing the manifest image from below.
So why 4 hours? I subconsciously needed to get all the pieces on the table to see the playing board. I needed a 4 hour conversation with myself. Why anyone else likes to listen in to my mental meandering still amazes me.
Why long twitter threads? Same reason. Youtube is the HUGE canvas. Twitter forces me to summarize. Each tool has its glory. You playing makes it all the better. Thanks.
The biggest misunderstanding in my social media journey is that I'm putting sharing process not putting out product. I didn't see the ancient/modern two-level theory contrast until I was making the video.
Conscious thinking is talking to myself, but without lips and feedback. 4 hours of YT is inviting anyone who cares to watch and listen into my headspace. It's sort of like writing without editing.
Good faith commenters then enter into my consciousness congress and we achieve a sort of distributed cognition. We do this normally with journals or in the academy, but it is democratized and sped up with social media.
