 I just can't quit. Yeah. So come here handsome. Let's get back to our book. The other guard that failed, Hans Freyja and the deradicalization of German conservatism. Can you think of any topic that's more exciting? Okay, I feel like we need to be even closer. Okay. Okay. How are you love? All right. Chapter one. Is sitting comfortably? Science as a vocation. Why a bright boy from a pious Protestant family was led toward radical conservatism and a career as a social theorist. Had he not become disaffected from the major institutions of his society, Hans Freyja might have become a conservative, but not a radical conservative and Nazi. His estrangement was not an individual peculiarity, but was widely shared and even institutionalized in the youth movement, which attracted a high percentage of the generation of German intellectuals who came of age in the decade before the First World War. It explains why so many of them were drawn toward political radicalism. So like many other builders of systems of social theory, the young Freyja was destined for a theological career. So when I was growing up, I thought I was going to become a Christian missionary. I used to practice by sleeping on the floor or I'd sleep outside to harden myself to become a Christian missionary. Then Joseph Stalin, he studied to become an Orthodox Christian priest. He went to seminary, but he found himself cut off from his theological moorings by forces within the institutions of secular culture, not least the school and the university. So I grew up living in God, living in Christianity, but then after eighth grade, my family got a TV and I was absolutely captivated by TV and my family tried to limit how much I watched it. That seemed like the ideal world, what was on TV. It was, most of all, it was sexy. It was heart, it was exciting and thrilling and I wanted to be on TV. I wanted to have sex with people on TV. And so TV became a dominant force in my life and as we moved out of St. Théâtre's Church after 1980, I started going to a secular high school for the first time and though I remained nominally a Christian until I was 18, then I left home, went back to Australia and live with my brother who was an atheist and actually I got a job that required working on the Sabbath, so I quit going to church and became an atheist for a few years. Then about a year and a half, two years into my atheism, I discovered a presentation of Marxism which is just incredibly exciting. Like he was a substitute for religion, like he was a transcendent purpose to life that would make a better world. So I really got into Marxism for about three years. Then I moved to Southern California, went to UCLA and then when I discovered the Jewish talk show host Dennis Prager and I was thrilled by his presentation of Judaism as a step-by-step system for making a better world. That led me on my conversion to Orthodox Judaism. Okay, following an already established and off-repeated pattern, Hans Freyer saw a more secular guys in which he might maintain his appointed destiny as a spiritual guide. Wow, that sounds like me. Yeah, I was a Marxist. It was just it was more of a pose. I didn't go to any meetings. I didn't do anything. It was just something that I tell people that I was an atheistic communist from about age 19 to 19 to 22. It just seems so thrilling and transgressive and I like to do a bit of play acting. I like, I don't know, I like indulging in dangerous things, a little bit dangerous. I don't know, I read like 60 books on Marxism during those three years. Yeah, his appointed destiny as a spiritual guide. I kind of resonate with that. I understand that. So you seek a secular guys to meet your destiny as a spiritual guide. And Hans Freyer and others caught up in the same experience, looked to their teachers for a secular substitute for the Christian faith they had lost. They found that these purported guides had themselves become seekers after a new key to the riddle of history. Have you ever watched this show? Heard me talk about the search for the magic key. Okay, that's what we're talking about here. So these people, they lost their Christian faith so they looked to their teachers for guidance and these teachers themselves will seek us after a new key to the riddle of history. Guess what? There is no magic key that unlocks history. That's the, that's the major flaw in Hitler's thinking as revealed by Mein Kampf, his idea that he could find a magic key to unlock how history works, how the world works. He thought he found it in the perfidy of the Jews, but this is childish. There is no magic key to unlocking how the world works or how history works. Religious people believe they found their magic key so to speak in their religion. That secular people, particularly those who once had religion, who had this overarching purpose to their lives, who once believed that they had the magic key in their faith in the practice of their religion. Now they're seeking secular substitutes. So for these seekers, theories of the middle range, theories of the middle road were not sufficient. They wanted some overarching, exciting, comprehensive guide to life. So Friar emerged not just as a radical and as a social theorist, but as a radical conservative social theorist who built upon the historicist tradition of the counter enlightenment. So remember, historicist means you have to understand everything in its historical context. And the counter enlightenment means that you're opposed to the enlightenment. The enlightenment was universalist and rationalist. And the counter enlightenment held that which was most precious was non-rational and particularist. So my love for you is non-rational. Don't even know who you are. My love for my people, non-rational, nationalism, non-rational, particularist. The dominant assumptions in his academic milieu predisposed those who studied the humanities and the social sciences toward that tradition, meaning the historicist tradition of the counter enlightenment. So most academics in Germany after World War I until the Second World War were on the right politically. Then after World War II, most academics in Germany were on the left. In the disabused aftermath of the Third Reich and after spending three years in Soviet-occupied Germany, Hans Friar escaped to the West. He describes the sort of intellectual, most susceptible to the creation of totalitarian ideologies. He was a man whose structure of thought preserved a good deal of the theological orientation of his ancestors, but who had become an apostate. So a lot of these intellectuals, they're seeking a substitute for the religious faith that they had abandoned. Thus his religious organs are highly developed but have lost their function. So they have these pulsating, throbbing, guard rods, but they don't know what to do with them. Okay, their religious organs, their guard rods are highly developed but have lost their function. This can drive a man wild. So this is probably autobiography here. He had religious organs, a guard rod that was highly developed but had lost its function. Hans Friar came from deeply religious Protestant home. He lost his faith in his youth, probably from studying Darwin's theory of evolution, and he spent the rest of his life searching for a sociological equivalent of traditional religion. Yeah, so that's kind of where I was at when I abandoned Christianity at age 18. I started searching for some kind of social or political equivalent of traditional religion. So he was raised in a household permeated by Protestant religiosity. It was a faith he was expected to carry on. It was his mother's wish that he become a theologian. So my mother, she used to pat her stomach when she was carrying me and she'd tell my father, this one's going to do something great for God one day. So that's the story I was raised with. So I was in the faculty of theology that Hans Friar first enrolled as a university student, replicated one of the most significant patterns in the history of modern European intellectuals and of German intellectuals in particular. For over a century the German literary and humanistic intelligentsia were drawn disproportionately from men of devout origins. Men with throbbing guard rods began their higher education with the intention of pursuing a pastoral vocation and who themselves were often sons of clergymen and lead to lose their traditional belief and embark upon a secular academic career. So in the 19th century German scholars in particular pioneered the field of the higher criticism, biblical criticism which asked three main questions of a text in this case of the Bible. When was it written? For whom was it written? Who wrote it? When was it? Oh, who wrote it? When was it written? For whom was it written? Those are three basic questions of critical analysis. Who wrote this document? When was it written? For whom was it written? So rather than coming to see the Pentateuch, the Torah, as a unitary document given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, they came to see it as a post-mosaic composition of various authors edited together and put into final form around 444 before the common era under Ezra the scribe. So he's the redactor, that's the fancy academic term for editor. For over a century German literary, okay, we mentioned that. A good deal of attention has been devoted to secularization as a gradual historical trend of generations denoting a general decline in the influence of traditional religion in modern European intellectual life. Now this is particularly pronounced in Protestant countries. Protestant countries are far more vulnerable to these trends of secularization than Catholic countries. More feminized countries are more vulnerable to secularization than masculine countries. So when you start appointing women as religious leaders as clergy, men drop out because unless you ensure unique roles just for men, men will drop out of religion. So yeah, men need a specific role, their own role, their own space, their own safe space in a religion or they're just going to drop out. So once you start appointing women to roles that were previously only held by men, men will start dropping out of religion. So you see this with mainstream Protestantism, mainstream Judaism, that men have largely dropped out. These religions are now dominated by women. It's mainly women who go to services. Men instead go to Orthodox religion, where there are special roles just for men. And in the Roman Catholic Church, for example, only men can become priests, Orthodox Judaism, only men can become rabbis and cantors. So along with this process of secularization, you have a secularization of the religious vocation. So Hans Freier wanted to become a theologian and a pastor, but instead he took that religious energy and transmutated it, transformed it, directed it towards sociology. Each generation has included those who traverse the path not only from traditional religious belief, but from a prospective career as a theologian or clergyman to the secular vocations of philosopher or sociologist. So secularization does not just mean the weakening of traditional religion, but it means that objects outside the sphere of traditional religion are now endowed with the emotional significance previously accorded to the divine. For those raised with the expectation of pursuing a pastoral vocation, the experience of secularization tended to a particular pattern. Expectation of providing spiritual leadership is transferred from a religious vocation to the secular vocation of being a professor or a politician. So previous religious beliefs came to be seen as antiquated, but there was this need in people the traditional religion had provided. This need remained undiminished, so the new secularized professor would try to meet this need. That's why these intellectuals who came from a religious background and expected to pursue a religious vocation were particularly predisposed to theories that were all-encompassing and so departed from rational explanation. Okay, so this pattern is particularly pronounced among Protestants, German Protestants such as Hegel, Hordelin, Schelling, Nietzsche, Dilti, Paul Delagarde, Martin Heidegger, a German Catholic began his higher education at a Jesuit college. He studied theology before turning entirely to philosophy. Hermann Cohen was a son of a canter. He began his studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau for embarking on a philosophical career. Franz Miel Durkheim was a rabbi's son. He turned to philosophy and laid a sociology in an attempt to discover an integrative faith for the Third Republic. Isaac Deutsche, the descendant of a Hasidic court in Poland, became a leading communist theoretician, a Trotskyist. Remarkable number of British, New Liberal and Socialist intellectuals, including Hobbs House and Hobson, with the offspring of evangelical parents, his exposure to Darwin's theory of evolution disabused them of their Protestantism. The New World's foremost sociological system builder, Talcott Parsons, was a descendant of generations of Congregationalist ministers. So the outcome of the secularization of the religious vocation is often at this search for all-encompassing answers that go way beyond rational or empirical inquiry. And Germans and French in particular, particularly susceptible to reasoning from the top down, to deductive reasoning from the general to the specific. The Anglo mode of reasoning is generally inductive from the specific to the general. So when you read academic papers submitted by the French and the Germans, they often filled with all sorts of grand theories and lack substantiation. Papers submitted by people from academics from Anglo lands tend to be filled with specifics and tend to be quite reluctant to develop grand theories. So developing grand theories is much more of a French and German thing. So the first major institution that competes with the family is a source of influence, is the school. So you got a humanistic education, study of the classics of classical Greece and Rome, and the German classical authors of Kant, Goethe, Humboldt. Since the age of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schiller, German high culture has been increasingly divorced from Christianity. So over the course of the 19th century, German culture became increasingly divorced from Christianity. German orientation toward pagan Greece and Rome as models of thought and action permeated the educated classes in Germany where it existed uneasily alongside irresidual and retiring Christianity. So this classical pagan orientation affected Hans Freyre deeply. His education made the culture of Athens, ancient Athens second nature to him. The controlling metaphors of many of his works were drawn from Greek mythology. He initially enrolled in the theological faculty at university to pursue a vocation as a Lutheran theologian. But after about a year, he ended his theological studies, which led to a bitter confrontation with his mom. So going to university with its physical, spiritual distance from home and family, predisposes many people to all sorts of experimentation, including experimenting with leaving the religion they were raised in. Perhaps you'll start dating people of a different race, try all sorts of new things. So up until about the age of 18, you think that all the little ways that your family do things are right and good. So I remember one one home, not my own, that I spend a lot of time in, my friend in that home thought it weird if you brush your teeth three times a day. Thought now you only brush your teeth morning and evening, but you don't brush your teeth after lunch. So you take these things for granted your first 18 years of life and then you go after university and you may feel compelled to chuck everything that you were raised with, try to do everything differently. So one thing that's virtually universal is that teenagers want to do things differently from their parents. So the intellectual currents to which Freyja was exposed in his studies. So in his last semester as a student of theology, he studied Isaiah chapter 139 and letter to the Galatians course in the Department of Philosophy entitled, Explication of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Therese Thustra. So he had an influential teacher at University Raoul Richter, who's known for making students question their existing beliefs and presuppositions and insisted on a relentless critique of existing theological and philosophical positions. So when I went off to UCLA at age 21, I thought of my father as a great man. And then after nine months at UCLA, I came to see my father as an emotional cripple. I haven't really shifted from that perspective. So my father didn't change in those nine months, but I changed just from nine months at UCLA. So this professor Raoul Richter made a powerful impression on the young Hans Freyja. So the next semester Freyja switched his major to philosophy, took more of Richter's courses, including a critical history of ethics and another one, the philosophy of religion. He won a prize for an essay. He wrote the Ethics of JM Guya, French Contemporary of Nietzsche. Freyja was unsatisfied by the stark choice between egoism and altruism in Guya's work. Guya's affirmation of altruism seemed to Freyja superficial and limited as the British utilitarianism which they both opposed. So the Anglo-Saxon tradition tends to be pragmatic and utilitarian. Whether or not Freyja heard the tidings that God was dead before he entered university, it is clear from his subsequent writings that he took the news very much to heart. So in Europe and Australia, it's pretty much taken for granted that all smart people do not believe in God. Another contention that Freyja accepted from Nietzsche was that all previous attempts to construct a universally valid content of ethics had failed. So Freyja wanted to start a whole new ethical system. He needed some kind of overarching social system to fill the hole in his soul from the loss of traditional religion. Ethical philosophy in itself Freyja learned was incapable of discovering universally valid concrete norms. So as a member of the counter-enlightenment, this orientation would have become particularist, nationalist, historicist. So the impact of Freyja's experience at the University of Leipzig was one of cultural disinheritance of alienation from the transcendental Protestant values of his parental home. Like the pradachanist of Shor's Too True to Be Good, he might have said I am by nature and destiny a preacher, but I have no Bible and I have no creed. I like that. I am by nature and destiny a preacher, but I have no Bible and I have no creed. So Freyja gets to university and decides he needs to provide cultural leadership. And he found a group that was into this. It was a group dedicated to cultural renewal. It was a youth movement, a new nationalism, a cluster of organizations of cultural renovation, known as the Movement of Cultural Reform, centered upon the Pulbisher Jürgen Diedrichs. It was mainly composed of university students, mainly former Protestants. It was a way to revolt against the bourgeoisie, reflecting the anxiety among the educated bourgeoisie in the coming of technological society and the increasing political mobilization of the German working class through the Social Democratic Party. The educated bourgeoisie had long defined itself in distinction to the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie. So the educated bourgeoisie had an education and background in the humanities. So they were dissatisfied with the perceived ascendancy of materialist values and the ever-growing prestige accorded to wealth in the culture of imperial Germany. So this new movement was into vegetarianism. I just read today the vegetarians far more predisposed to depression. Something like one out of three vegetarians suffers from depression or some type of mental illness. It's an article linked on The Drudge Report. Unfortunately, I've been a lifelong vegetarian. I'm unable to give up that habit, but I wish I wasn't. So the new movement also believed in abstinence from alcohol and tobacco. Wow, vegetarian, no alcohol, no tobacco. It sounds like Seventh-day Adventism. Had a fascination with folklore. That's not Seventh-day Adventism. Fascination with nature. And we're dissatisfied with the urban, the industrial, and the technological transformation of the German Reich. So it was a movement of the educated bourgeoisie against the commercial property bourgeoisie. It was also a generational revolt. Traditional Protestant faith was replaced first by idealist philosophy and later by a faith in science. They saw their residual Protestant observance as hollow, spiritually unsatisfying. Yeah, this turned into this. I guess you could see this as a subsection of the volkish movement. So they're looking for new authentic forms of spirituality and one expression which was the attempt to develop a Germanic faith. So the rote learning and stress on philology that dominated the German secondary schools were condemned as inimical bore to self-development, Bildung. Then the university, the temple of the educated, he is not bisexual, France. Where on earth did you get that? Put your guard rod down, mate. Okay, the free student movement. I remember once Dennis Prager said to me, so we went to the same temple for a few years. Stephen S. Wise Temple, 1994 until about 1998. And Dennis has a pretty good sense of humor. And so we were sitting around one day at temple and he said to me, oh, I heard you were bi. Said, Oi, no way, not bi, mate. Oi. But I did go to him. So in 1994, I was going on all these acting auditions. And there's one audition that called for me to kiss a guy. I mean, but only on the cheek. But it made me really uncomfortable. So I went and talked to Dennis Prager about it. He says, I shouldn't go to any auditions that call for me to kiss blokes. So thank you for that clarity, Mr. Prager. Okay, so this new free student movement objected to the anti-intellectual and hedonistic tone that the established German fraternities imparted to university life. So there was a publisher that was largely behind this movement. He published a journal, Detat. He was a promoter of many of the trends that constituted the movement of cultural renewal. One of his conferences, Max Weber referred to as a department store of worldviews. Isn't that awesome? Have a German conference for cultural renewal that turns into a department store of worldviews. So this publisher, Jürgen Dietrichs became Fryer's extra academic mentor and the publisher of two of his early books. And he was responsible for Fryer's first contribution to a major periodical, which was a review of Oswald Spangler's decline of the West. So Jürgen Dietrichs published authors like Martin Buber, Herman Hesse, Hugo Preuss, and he was developing young authors who shared a broad dissatisfaction with bourgeois Germany, such as George Lucas and Walter Benjamin. Some of these people went on to communism. Some of them went on to Nazism. Martin Buber became a kind of Zionist, socialist Zionist. They all shared a yearning for an intense emotional commitment to some larger community of purpose that they found lacking in contemporary Germany. So I think this is what motivates much of traction to the alt-right. People yearn to be part of an intense emotional commitment to some larger community of purpose. If you already have that by belonging to an organized religion, then you don't need it so desperately, define it in society or in politics. It's chat with Ruben is kind of us. Dennis Prager is pure hetero, bro. Pure hetero. Hetero in thought, hetero indeed. Just because you talk to a homosexual doesn't make you gay. It's not gay to talk to a homosexuals, bro. It's savvy. Okay. We've got movements of cultural renewal in Wilhelm, Germany. Got the reform movement, youth movement, the free student movement. Romantic anti-capitalism, the search for synthesis, the hunger for whore-ness. So yeah, I think this motivates much of political radicalism in our day. So this is a butte book by Jerry Z. Mueller. Paid over 30 bucks for this, mate. So Martin Heidegger is a part of this. So Jürgen Diedrich's The Publishers means your concerns with the lack of beauty and of a unified style in German cultural life and seeking an incoate religiosity. So they're all seeking an intense, unified, cohesive, social movement that would bring the people together. He sought solutions in a restoration of pre-modern and non-Christian cultural forms, some of which survived among the peasants, the least modernized group in the population. They tried to revive the celebration of the solstice. They had valkish dances and valkish songs, peasant costumes, garlands reminiscent of ancient Greeks. Yeah, the things people would do to try to fill the hole in their soul that they used to have filled through organized religion. So they'd have group singing. That's what I get at sure, mate. They're dancing. I get that at sure, mate. They're theater and music making at a common lifestyle that is skewed alcohol, tobacco. They practice equality of the sexes. They went for long hikes in the countryside. They developed a mineshaft, a community marked by devotion to individual self-education. Sounds like what we've got going on here. They searched for authentic culture and for emotional warmth generated by common purpose of like-minded young men and women. So they were committed to companionship and to rounded self-development. So when compared with the immediacy and emotional intensity of the mineshaft and its freedom from social conventions, the bourgeois world outside seemed artificial, constraining, and fragmented. So Hans Fryer at university, he is estranged from his Christian faith. He feels distant from bourgeois cultural conventions. So he looks to his professors to provide a conceptual compass and a substitute for the faith he had lost. In addition to philosophy, he studied history, economics, psychology, and literature. He studied Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Lessing, Hebel, and Goethe. A disproportionate focus on German history, German philosophy, and German literature was typical of the offerings at all German universities in his day. The intensive concern with modern history, modern society, and modern philosophy reflected his own interests. Alright, be back later.