 So, if you think about western civilization, or if you think about any civilization, what is a civilization? Civilization is the cumulative impact of the achievements in a particular geographic area of particular peoples. So when we think about what is western civilization, and I think you have to start with its roots, its foundation in ancient Greece. In ancient Greece, they start asking the first real philosophical questions about where are we, why are we here, what is the nature of the world out there. And not only do they ask the important questions, the foundational questions, but I think ultimately any civilization, they get pretty good answers. And to the extent that those answers have been taken seriously, have been thought through, you get civilizations. When the Arabs adopted, studied certain Greek ideas and Greek foundational knowledge, the Muslim empires of the 9th, 10th, 11th centuries, they flourished. They did very, very well. If we look at western civilization, the world in which we live today, we're very much grounded in those Greek ideas as rediscovered by Thomas Aquinas and then primarily during the Renaissance and through the Enlightenment to this day. And I think at the heart of the achievements of the last 250 years that we associate with the world in which we live, the economic achievement, the technological achievement, the political achievements of liberty and freedom, at the heart of those I think are two fundamental ideas that were captured during the Enlightenment that are based on those Greek principles. And the two fundamental ideas are one, the idea that reason is our means of knowledge. The efficacy of reason that is really manifest itself in the scientific revolution during the 17th century and the 18th century, that the world is knowable primarily through our senses and through our mind by understanding the world out there and the world is real. Again, these ideas are a resurrection of Aristotelian ideas going back to Aristotle in ancient Greece. The second idea that really I think comes out of that first, which I think is the more fundamental, is the idea that individuals matter. The primacy of the individual and that the individual happiness matters. That the purpose of life in the end is the achievement of happiness for individuals. Call it individualism, the idea that both morally and politically, the individual is primary. Think about the Declaration of Independence. Each one of us has an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. So for me, the Western civilization is these two ideas manifest in art, manifest in our culture, manifest in our politics, manifest in our economics. And overall, while there are lots of problems, overall the achievements are amazing. I think the greatest art ever produced by human beings have been produced under the umbrella of these ideas. The greatest political achievements, freedom, liberty, the United States of America preeminently, are the great achievements of Western civilization. And the economic success of the last 250 years is stunning. If you told people 200 years ago that we would be living the way we live today, they would have not believed you. It would have been complete science fiction to them. Our standard of living is so magnificent, so advanced, so fantastic that it's hard to really put into numbers and put into really even into words. Think about the value of running water, the value of electricity or the value of an iPhone. And I know we like to make fun of iPhones, but iPhones are amazing, amazing instruments. So to me, Western civilization is that. It is the achievements over the last primarily 250 years with their roots in ancient Greece and in the Renaissance, the rediscovery of those ancient ideas, manifest philosophically and politically in the Enlightenment, manifest economically, scientifically, technologically in the industrial revolution and life and life today. Thanks. Andrew. Well, that was pretty impressive. How do I up that? I would say the following. I don't disagree with a lot of that. The difficulty for me is that the last 250 years represents such a massive shift in the West towards obviously the industrial revolution and the full global effects of capitalism. I would root Western civilization. I would like to see something more that encompasses all of it. And what I would go back to is the marriage of Jewish theology with Greek reason. And that really occurred through the extraordinary shift in human consciousness that happened when Jesus of Nazareth arrived and spoke a language and behaved in such a way that implied that there were no hierarchies and there were no boundaries and that we were all humans and they were all fundamentally equal. And this was an incredibly radical idea, still is a radical idea when you look at today's tribalisms, when you look at today's nations, when you look at today's social hierarchies, racial hierarchies. It was this radicalization. I mean, you don't see it in the Greeks. You don't see Aristotle talking about the fundamental equality of human beings. Here I'm talking about the fundamental inequality of human beings and the defense even of slavery in certain contexts and also the relegation of women also to a separate sphere. Whereas early Christianity, at least the Christianity of Jesus that we see is radically feminist, radically treats women and men independently, interdependently. So, and it was the marriage of that way of being, that expansion of human compassion to the notion of reason as inherited from the Greeks. So that in the Gospel of John, the first words are in the beginning was God. In other words, the word rather, in the beginning was Logos. And Logos means reason, but it also means God in this sense and God is represented in a human being as Jesus Christ. So you have this fusion of a faith that is inexplicable at some level, that demands equality of all people, but that is also essentially something we can subject to reason. So it can be developed, examined, thought about. And that that reason occurs within the human mind and the human soul doesn't occur necessarily collectively. It occurs inside the actual spirit of the human being. Now, that's a remarkable thing and we're so used to it. But there are so many cultures in which that individual and that individual's spiritual as well as political independence is totally invisible. Cast systems, tribal systems. The number of years in human history which have sustained what we would call western civilization or liberal democratic order is tiny. It is an incredibly fragile and rare event in human history and let alone prehistory. Humans have walked the earth for 200,000 years. Only a fraction of that has been under these influences of reason and faith. And only maybe 200 or 300 years of that have managed to evolve that into a system of liberal democracy in which we can live together democratically with toleration and mutual understanding. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. Using the super chat and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to uranbrookshow.com slash support or go to subscribestar.com uranbrookshow and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going.