 That idea of hierarchy and the divine spark of consciousness and its relationship to ultimate reality and to metaphysical reality, that's fundamentally what's under assault at the universities. It's far deeper than the political. To me, I think this has happened, this is mostly characteristic of the humanities and to a lesser degree of the social sciences. But increasingly will become characteristic of the STEM fields because they're under assault, I would say, by the same agents who undermine the humanities and the social sciences. I would say of all the dangers that the current situation in the university presents, that's probably the one that's primary because so far the STEM fields have remained relatively, let's say, unviolated by the intellectual corruption that characterizes the other disciplines. And they're of crucial importance, obviously practically speaking, but also as a bulwark against the ideological pathology that currently passes for academic knowledge in the institutes of higher education. What's wrong exactly? I see it, I really see it as a continuation of a process that was identified by both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky at the end of the 19th century. That it's a continuation of the collapse of the idea of God, or collapse in the belief in God, or maybe if you thought about it psychologically as a collapse in the archetype of divine masculinity. That's another way of thinking about it. I mean Nietzsche warned that if we lost our fundamental foundation block, which was the notion of a transcendent divinity, that we would degenerate in two directions. One direction being nihilism, and the other direction being it's twin, it's malformed twin, totalitarianism. And that was his diagnosis for the 20th century, and I think that's exactly what happened during the 20th century. It's a diagnosis of stunning accuracy, especially given how relatively early in the 19th century it was made. And Dostoevsky for his part made exactly the same case, particularly in the Devils, the possessed, the books variously titled. Which is a study of the corrosive effects of really, of an ideology very, very similar to the one that reigns today in the university campuses. The Devils is a literary work that describes the intellectual and moral genesis of exactly the type of thinker who caused the catastrophes of the Russian Revolution. It would be 30 years later, I guess. So it's another work of incredibly prescient insight, almost incomprehensible with the loss of that. See, the problem with the loss of that idea, and I'm speaking psychologically, I would say, which is what I try to do as much as possible, is that regardless of your religious belief, you cannot exist outside a hierarchy of value. It's not technically possible. You need a hierarchy of value to organize your perceptions. And I mean this literally, I mean this neurophysiologically, in that even when you're observing the world, which as far as you're concerned, merely manifests itself for your observation, you're focusing, your eyes are engaged in a series of complex movements that are controlled by unbelievably complicated neurophysiological circuits. And you focus on something and not on everything else. And that means that you pick something out of the almost infinitely complex realm of potential phenomena as of signal importance. And that orients your very capacity to observe the world. And that hierarchical structure that guides your perceptions is of unbelievable depth and complexity. Because you tend to attend to those things that let's say you regard as important. They're going to further you in life. So you need a philosophy of what constitutes furtherance in life, which implies a gradient between what's undesirable and what's desirable. And that structure, that gradient of undesirable to desirable is in fact the philosophical manifestation of the neurophysiological hierarchy that enables you to parse the world up so that it's comprehensible. And something has to be at the top of that. Well, it doesn't because you can be a war, you can be an internal war of conflicting values. That's the alternative. But that's not psychologically acceptable. That would manifest itself in uncertainty and anxiety and directionlessness and hopelessness and nihilism to be a house that's divided amongst itself. All of that needs to be oriented into a hierarchy that's a unity and something has to be at the pinnacle of the hierarchy. Because otherwise it's not a hierarchy. And the question is, well, what is it that might be at the pinnacle? And that is the question. It's the question, right? Because what's at the pinnacle is that to which all of your resources should be fundamentally devoted. And what we decided in the West over thousands of years, and I would say beginning far before Christianity, was that there was an ideal mode of being that's expressed in the idea that human beings have a spark of divinity within them. And that manifesting the personality that would be the most genuine embodiment of that spark of divinity constitutes the highest of possible goals. And, you know, you can simplify that idea. You can say, well, you know, you have an ethical responsibility to manifest what's best in you. To manifest your potential. People speak in those terms. And to become more than you are. To become who you could be. But lurking underneath that is this idea of the ideal, the embodied ideal, or even the incarnate ideal. Because this is something that's not merely an abstraction. It's something that's expressed in flesh. That's the idea of the word made flesh, let's say. That's part of the same set of ideas. And that ethical proposition is that, I think it's expressed well in the earliest chapters of Genesis. The ethical proposition is something like there's an action in the world. There's an action in being that's characterized in Christianity as logos. And it's the operation of truth and courage nested in love on potential. So the idea in Genesis is the world springs into being in some sense as a consequence of the action of these logos. And that if the logos is operative on potential, then what emerges as a consequence is good by definition. So that's an ethical, it's an ethical axiom. It's a daring ethical axiom. It's one of the most daring ideas I've ever come across. Because it's a very daring idea to state, to pause it. Because in the absence of proof except that which you would gather as a consequence of enacting the proposition. That if you act courageously and you tell the truth, then what you bring into being is by definition good. Because it often doesn't look that way. You can get into a lot of trouble by telling the truth. And so it's very easy to take the easy way out in the short term. That's the characteristic of God himself. And the logos is the definition for the process that undertakes that extraction from potential and its transformation into reality. And then there's the secondary proposition that human beings are made in the image of God. And I believe and I also believe this as a scientist that there isn't a more accurate way of describing what we do as conscious beings. You hear that if you're an adequately informed scientific materialist that it's incumbent on you to note that human beings are fundamentally deterministic in their behavior. But the evidence for that I would say is not strong. The conceptual evidence is strong because you can make a coherent argument. The conceptual evidence is rather weak because it isn't obvious at all that we can act deterministically except when we've done things that we've practiced intensely. But that isn't the way that the world manifests itself to us in many ways. What seems to be the case instead is that we wake up every morning and what faces us is the unformed future. And that's the reality that we confront. It's not the present and it's not the past. It's what could be that day. And we see that as a field of possibility all of which could conceivably be manifested but none of which has yet been manifested. And then we feel called upon as the action of our life to chart a course through that multitude of potential paths. To select from among all those possibilities the realities that we choose to bring into being and then to work to bring them into being. And we also recognize and we treat each other like this that the quality of what it is that's brought into being as a consequence of those choices is directly dependent on the ethical integrity with which we conducted ourselves while making those choices. Which is why we can wake up at three in the morning and berate ourselves for having made a mess of the week or the day or the month or our lives. Because we understand that we deviated from the appropriate path and we call ourselves out on it like we call out the people we love and the people that we have relationships with. And that idea of hierarchy and the divine spark of consciousness and its relationship to ultimate reality and to metaphysical reality that's fundamentally what's under assault at the universities. It's far deeper than the political.