Do Miracles Really Happen?

Carlos Eire arrived in Miami at age 11 in 1962, a refugee from Castro’s Cuba. Three years passed before his mother could join him, and he never saw his father again. This experience of dislocation profoundly shaped Eire’s work as a religious historian. In his latest book, They Flew, Eire looks at early modern reports of miracles. Drawing on his own experience of moving between cultures and worldviews, he tries to imagine himself into the minds of those who claimed to have witnessed levitations, bilocations, and other impossible occurrences, and he asks what we can learn by taking these reports seriously. David Brooks talks with Eire about magic, empathy, and the past as a foreign country. - - - Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19David Brooks?

  This is a conversation about radical empathy. We live in a polarized age, often with people whose modes of consciousness are utterly alien to our own. We hear someone spew a conspiracy theory or utter an opinion that seems monstrous, and we think, how on earth can they think that way? But being a good citizen in this sort of pluralistic society requires that kind of radical empathy. It means approaching those who are different with a willingness and an ability to stand in their standpoint, to enter into, at least a little, how they see the world. My guest is Carlos Ayer, who has been trained by life to excel at this. When he was a boy, he was airlifted out of Cuba by parents who wanted to get him away from Castro's revolution.

• 1:02David Brooks?

  He worked his way through college, got a PhD here at Yale, where he is now a professor of history and religious studies, and began a double-barreled career. On the one hand, he entered into the minds of people living in the late Middle Ages, describing how they thought about death and demons. But alongside his academic work, Carlos also wrote two popular memoirs about his childhood: Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won a National Book Award, and Learning to Die in Miami. We're going to talk about his travels across worldviews. We're going to spend the bulk of his time on Carlos's recent book, They Flew. We're going to look at the testimonies of 16th and 17th century religious figures who claimed they could levitate into the air. When I started reading the book, these claims seemed totally bonkers to me.

• 1:47David Brooks?

  But take the time to get inside their heads, learn to see the world through alien eyes. I think you'll find Carlos generously curious and gently wise. You may not leave this podcast thinking that humans can float under the ceiling, but I bet you'll learn a few things about how to enter other people's minds. I'm David Brooks, and this is The Permanent Questions. Carlos Ayer, welcome to The Permanent Questions. Thanks so much for crossing New Haven to get here from your teaching job here at Yale.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Thanks very much. Thank you very much for inviting me.

• 2:19David Brooks?

  Let me try to lay out what I was hoping to accomplish. I sort of see this as about empathy, about encountering people who are completely unlike yourself, and trying to see the world from their point of view. And this strikes me as a pretty necessary skill to have in a pluralistic society like ours. I think for most of the time, we'll talk about this book, They Flew, which is a history of the impossible, and possibly the most audacious book I've ever read. We'll get to that.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:52David Brooks?

  So, let's start with the leaving of Cuba. And the simplest way to introduce your story is tell me about Operation Peter Pan.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yes, it received that unfortunate name. It didn't have a name for us who went through it. But yes, between basically New Year's Day 1961 and mid-October 1962, 14,000, over, slightly over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children came to the US. The plan, of course, was always to reunite with our parents, either there if the dictatorship ended, or here. And it was well-organized chaos. There's no other way to describe it.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  And the 14,000 of us were sent to 48 different states eventually.

• 3:50David Brooks?

  And you were 11 at this time?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  I was 11 when I left, and I left with my brother, who was 14. And went through a series of foster homes in Miami at first, because we didn't have family, not yet. And my first foster family, beautiful family, I consider them saints, Norma and Lou Tate, were Jewish. And I thought I had it made. Now, because at that age, I didn't like going to church. I thought, oh, well, now, I've got it made. But no, they forced me. They forced me to go to church.

• 4:25David Brooks?

  To church.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  And gave me money to put into the collection basket. And that was wonderful. That's why I learned English really fast, because, of course, they had zero Spanish. So I ended up learning English and a few Yiddish words that I thought were English, which I later discovered when I moved to Bloomington, Illinois, and people didn't understand what I was saying. Long story with many ins and outs. My brother and I also ended up spending nine months in a home for juvenile delinquents, because there was no other place for us. It was supposed to be temporary, but they kind of forgot about us. They forgot we were there.

• 5:00David Brooks?

  The regime was sending kids to the Soviet Union.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Yes. And it had happened before in Spain during the Civil War. And there were so many Spanish immigrants in Cuba, including my grandparents, who had a vivid memory of these kids that never returned. So panic set in. And also for any male over 18, military service. And of course, none of these parents, my own included, it wouldn't cross their minds that this would go on forever, that the regime would not collapse. So it was a big surprise to everyone. There's no fixed statistic on how many children were left, their parents were unable to leave.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Mine were among them. And my mom, it took her three and a half years to finally come to the US. And my father never made it out. I never harbored ill feelings of any sort. Ever since day one, I have thanked my parents for making that choice. And I know there are a few who couldn't understand. But for me, it's always been a sacrifice they made.

• 6:15David Brooks?

  There was a famous book written in the 80s by a guy named David Lowenthal called The Past as a Foreign Country. And his argument is, we have to understand these people are different than us. But his second point was that it's not only the past as a foreign country, but our relationship to the past has changed. That we think of it as a line, and it's moving forward, it's not moving back. But in previous eras, you know, you go to any art museum, they're dressing Jesus in 16th century garb. They're like mingling the eras. Time is going backwards and forwards. They have a different attitude. So does that concept, the past as a foreign country, is that something that resonates with you, humbles you, different views of the past?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, I have the experience of getting off the plane at the Miami airport back in 1962, experiencing all this. Definitely another country. I'm in another country. The past is a lot like that. There are things that are difficult to understand about the past, you know, especially cultural dimensions that no longer exist. What people could say, what people did and could do. And not only that, the worldview, the worldview above everything else, because that's what I have focused on.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  In all of my work as a historian, is a cultural religious dimension called the worldview that changed in the 16th century. So I did have, however, I thought, an advantage over my American colleagues when it came to studying the Protestant Reformation, which was a revolution. I understood it as a revolution. And I saw many things happening in the early years of the Protestant Reformation that, to me, seemed only slightly different from the present. So it's almost like I was a time traveler, right? And it was not a foreign country to me.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  For instance, to learn about the consistorium Calvin's Geneva, which policed everyone's behavior. I know what that's like. And then when I went on to study the Spanish Inquisition, same thing, right? I've lived through this. I've lived through this. And, you know, people being ostracized for thinking incorrectly about some minor point. I've lived through that. That was not a foreign country to me. But, you know, when it comes to big items like belief in miracles, belief in witches,

• 9:06Speaker 02

  belief in demonic possession, all the supernatural stuff, of course, it's changed tremendously. But not entirely. The paradoxical challenge every historian faces is that something might look very similar to you, but it ends up not being all that similar. For instance, I spent a long time reading last wills and testaments from 16th century Madrid, right? And I found one that I said, oh, they're just like us. This woman was bequeathing her little precious dog to so-and-so.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  But everyone was requesting hundreds of masses for their soul, sometimes thousands of masses. And I even had a few last wills and testaments where the individual was listing as their only heir, their soul.

• 10:02David Brooks?

  Oh, really?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Yes. It sounds funny in English, the soul was the sole heir. But honestly, yes, including one, I said, this is totally a different world. One priest who put it into his will, he says, I know my family's going to object. But they never did anything for me. I did this all on my own. This is my money. And then I thought, well, now I'm back in this world. So you get these mixed messages. And it is very, very gratifying to find traces of human emotion like that lady willing her dog to her friend. It was a friend that she trusted.

• 10:45David Brooks?

  I have read that in the Middle Ages, and your period is sort of late, later Middle Ages, is they were, the emotions were more on the surface. I don't know if this is measurable, but like when they were in joy, they were in ecstasy. When they were in despair, they were, the emotional register was just much more vivacious than ours is.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  It could be, I would say, you know, of course, it depends on time and place and everything else that's going around people. But yes, I think that's true. And there was a lot of violence. A student of mine ended up doing his dissertation on violence in 16th century Spain in a very small town, because where all the records survived. And people were fighting, like physically fighting all the time. And then I understood why I had so many wills from people who were on their deathbed with head injuries. These emotions in the past, in one way, had to be dulled much more than with us. For instance, executions were public. And it wasn't a nice execution. It was usually people being beheaded or hung or tortured.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  And people lived through this. We would think immediately, well, everyone there watching this is going to be severely traumatized. And perhaps they were, right?

• 12:01David Brooks?

  They seemed pretty happy in the council.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, people are cheering and clapping and another world, another country, absolutely.

• 12:10David Brooks?

  This is one I've always wondered about. You've written about death, as you said. There's an argument that you occasionally hear that so many, parents lost so many children that the loss of a child was not as emotionally crushing as it is for moderns. I sort of find that hard to believe.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do too. I do too. I think that there is, let's say it's somebody in the present saying, it must have been that way. They had to. But no, I don't think so. We have plenty of evidence, you know, from diaries, people's diaries. There's one diary, this, a tanner in Barcelona, 17th century, who lived through a plague in Barcelona. All his children died. And you can tell in the diary, yes, it really hit him. And also, you know, the, bringing it to the present,

• 13:06Speaker 02

  he actually wrote in his diary that the one child who survived was his least favorite. And why did it have to be that way?

• 13:15David Brooks?

  There's an argument that you raise in the book, though I don't think you endorse it, that all these beliefs, whether in miracles, demonic possession, all that kind of stuff, it was functional for the period and that it served some function. And you quote a historian, Keith Thomas. Belief in magic and miracles was an absolute necessity in pre-modern times due to, quote, "a preoccupation with the explanation and relief of human misfortune." Life was so hazardous that they, believing in all this stuff was part of the way they handled the hazardousness of their lives.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  And I think there's truth in that, but I don't think that's, that's all that's going on. I mean, I was trained to be a functionalist. If there's anything weird happening, anything supernatural happening, you just don't go there, you know, you bracket that. You don't ask the question, well, was this person really floating in the air or not? No, you don't ask that. You analyze what function that belief served in that culture. But I have rebelled against my functionalist training.

• 14:18David Brooks?

  Yeah, I'll say it big time. You know, we get now to they flew. And I started this book, it's really a story of testimonies about levitation and bilocation, which is a person saying they were in two places at once. And I started this book with, I'm sure, the normal attitude you have encountered everywhere. One, people don't levitate. It's all a myth. And two, I'm not that interested. Like, I just don't, why should I care about something that didn't happen? And then I start reading the book and I'm reading the testimonies and entering that other world. I'm like, I'm, my mind is blown

• 15:00David Brooks?

  that I have, I, somehow, if I were talking to somebody and reading testimonies like this in a current US court of law, I think, pretty compelling. So describe to us what those testimonies were like and what the circumstances were.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  And, you know, as a historian, I would have felt immensely uncomfortable arguing in any way that these things really happened if I didn't have the right kind of testimonies. It's all based on testimonies. And actually, for this time period that I work in, the early modern period, we have an advantage over the medieval period in that, especially in the Catholic world, the part of the world that remained Catholic. The process for identifying saints was made more rigorous in this time period.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  So the canonization process, which involves several sets of inquests, interviewing the people who knew this person. They include a section on miracles. But every answer that anyone gives in that inquest is sworn testimony. And the penalty is not just a fine or some time behind bars. It's hell for lying. And most of the testimonies, not most, in some cases, just many,

• 16:38Speaker 02

  come from very, very religious people, even clerics and nuns. So are these people going to perjure themselves? If they believe in hell, they stand up.

• 16:51David Brooks?

  These were like, not just unlettered people, these were like from, some of these testimonies are from the educated, intellectual elite. And they're saying, oh, so and so levitated, or they're describing their own experiences. And there are tons of witnesses. And I still don't believe they're levitated, but the testimony is like.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Well, that's the set. It's the, we're faced with a conundrum, right? Which can, can be explained away in various ways. I've read one, one analysis of Joseph of Cupertino, this flying friar, the guy who spent more time in the air than anyone else in, in, in history, I think. Oh, he, he, he was an acrobat. You know, he, he had trained his muscles so well, like a gymnast, that he could make these great leaps and people thought he was, but no, he was suspended in the air, for heaven's sakes. So that, and there are fakes.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I have a whole section in the book about frauds, people who were caught faking all of this, because it's, it's always been a case that people can fake these. Magicians fake it all the time on stage. But, you know, faking it outdoors in the 16th or 17th century, that's a little harder to do without ropes and pulleys, wires or anything. So we're left with these testimonies. And what we do with these testimonies, they are part of the past. But there's a phenomenon that, of course, almost every time I've spoken about this book in public, the question comes up. I've had other historians bring it up

• 18:34Speaker 02

  and other historians who, you know, share my point of view that we should take these testimonies very seriously. Say that there is, there is definitely a correlation throughout history, including the present. The correlation between the matrix of belief that a culture has and the frequency with which these anomalous phenomena occur.

• 19:01David Brooks?

  What do you mean by that, the matrix of belief?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  If, believe, let's say, belief in levitation specifically is prevalent in a culture, you're going to get more levitations.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  If belief and levitations is laughed at, as it is in our culture, well, you're gonna have fewer. So, and the same goes for any miraculous event.

• 19:26David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Right?

• 19:27David Brooks?

  I found the most compelling set of testimonies came from Teresa of Avila. So could you tell us who she was and how she levitated?

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Teresa of Avila, 16th century, was a Carmelite nun, who had, from her 40s on, continuous ecstatic religious experiences, ecstasies, mystical ecstasies. Some of them involved levitation. And she is one of the few levitators who has given us first-person accounts of what it feels like and what's going on. So we have great detail on that, from her end, from the personal end. Plus, we have all these eyewitnesses, which were the nuns that she lived with and people who visited the convent,

• 20:23Speaker 02

  who testify to these incredible levitations. And she actually resisted these levitations. That's another curious twist in her story, is that she begged God to stop it. And she, you know, she came right out and said to God, "Why are you doing this? What purpose does this serve?" And they stopped. She tells us in her autobiography, "Yeah, they stopped. They have stopped." But she wrote that part of her autobiography, she ended in 1562. The levitations came back again, with less frequency, but they came back again. But she doesn't write about it. She didn't complain about these. She's complaining about the early.

• 21:03David Brooks?

  I think her testimony is not like, "Look at me, what I did." Her testimony is just like, it sort of felt like, like, "I'm gonna read a few, just so people get a sense." "At the highest point of rapture, one will neither see nor hear nor perceive. None of the soul's faculties are able to perceive or know what is taking place." So she's describing that something goes blank. And then the resisting. "When I tried to resist these raptures, it seemed to me that I was being lifted up by a force beneath my feet so powerful that I know nothing to which I can compare it, for it came with much greater intensity than any other spiritual experience. I felt I was being torn to shreds, for it is a mighty struggle." So these are physically

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:41David Brooks?

  demanding, arduous things. And then, and then she's bothered, because she's turning into a little celebrity for floating around the rooms. And this is the last thing she wants. And so she said, "There was no way of avoiding them, even in public. And then the persecutions and the murmurings follow. Even though the soul wants to be free from fears, she is never free of them, because so many people force them on her." And then one day, she's frying eggs. She's got a frying pan, she's frying eggs, and suddenly she's up in the ceiling. And, and this, of course, is dangerous for her, because the church could decide she's demonically possessed, because levitation can either be a sign of your holiness or demonic possession. And so this is a maximally perilous thing, and she does not want to be talking about it.

• 22:26David Brooks?

  I think they force her.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Right. And she was walking a tightrope. And every time she went up, yes. And, you know, it's very common. I have found some common threads linking all the levitators from this period, who are eventually declared to be the genuine thing. You know, this is divine, this is not demonic. And one of them is what Teresa describes, this cataleptic seizure, where you lose, your senses just vanish, and you don't sense anything that's going on around you. And then your body stiffens in whatever position you're... Sometimes these levitators go up,

• 23:12Speaker 02

  they're praying on their knees, and they go up, and their knees are bent. And people actually try to unbend them, and they report that they can't. I had a conversation here at the Yale Divinity School some months ago, with a neurologist, about all this stuff. It's a very interesting conversation, because he pointed to this spot on his head. And he says, "I can tell you exactly where these nuns are having these experiences."

• 23:38David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  And yes, you can pathologize as much as you want. The thing is that you have... If it were just a person telling you, "I felt this," then it would be entirely, you know?

• 23:51David Brooks?

  Right.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  No more questions asked.

• 23:53David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  But to have people say, "We saw this happen." And to have it under oath, not just once, but multiple times, multiple times. Then I think the, you need some other angle. You need to take another, view this from another angle or another perspective, and say, "Something is going on here that we, in our culture, none of us have been prepared to accept this as a real possibility."

• 24:26David Brooks?

  And one of the beauties of the book is, "Your first job as a historian is not to judge, it's just to witness. Just look, what are they talking about? How are they thinking about this?" And that part is very admirable, but I'm trying to picture you working on this book, taking these testimonies seriously of levitation. And I have found that the biggest bias in media, say, maybe in the academy too, is not a left or right bias. It's what do people at dinner parties that people like me go to talk about? And if you have a category outside what people like me talk about, you are rejected. So as you're writing this book, taking this stuff seriously, you must have been aware, like, a lot of people are gonna think you're crazy.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Yes, but I'm used to that. And actually, back to the, kind of the first, first part of our talk, I'm used to it, because being in academia for decades, if I could do it, I would hide the fact that I was Cuban from my colleagues. Because every time I said I was Cuban, I would get a little speech about how wonderful the revolution was. And if I said anything that was negative, all of a sudden,

• 25:36David Brooks?

  Really?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  "You're not okay. You're not okay." So I was used to that. And also, I mean, any, any person who has a religious life of any kind, yeah, the dominant culture, it does not accept your way of living as normal, with a capital N. So you get used to that after a while. But having people dislike what I have to say is something that I'm used to.

• 26:16Speaker 00

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• 26:50Speaker 03

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science, and tech, alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future. I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Rappman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 27:22David Brooks?

  You write, "At one point, and they flew, ask any historian why they write the kind of history they do. And if they are honest, they will tell you that when all is said and done, the history they write has everything to do with their life story, their yearnings and their obsessions. This author is no different." What does that mean? How do I interpret your decision to go into late medieval history?

• 27:44Speaker 02

  All my work as a historian has focused in different ways on the same subject, which is my obsession, which is, you know, at bottom, the marrow of religion. As far as belief is concerned. There is some other dimension that is, for lack of a better term, more real than this, from which this dimension is derived.

• 28:17David Brooks?

  Right.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Right?

• 28:18David Brooks?

  And are you testing that proposition? Or are you convinced by primordial faith that this proposition is true, and you're trying to see how it works out?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Not when I, when I started out. And even now, I've had my ups and downs about that visceral kind of affirmation, that it's not rational or purely intellectual. So that's been constant, but it's gone up and down. But the older I've become, the more that that has seemed very real to me. But the fact is, yes, belief is different from knowledge that you acquire through normal cognitive processes. Which is another reason that, you know, I've also been obsessed

• 29:10Speaker 02

  looking at the phenomenon of mysticism. And it actually, it's the ecstasies that, you know, drew me to this subject first. It's when I found out, "Oh, look at all these other goodies that come with them." It's the claim, the existential claim people make, to have experienced something other, with a capital O.

• 29:35David Brooks?

  You can argue about whether people are flying up in the air, but there really are mystics. Like, we do, we all know people who have a mystical tongue or a mystical sense that I will never experience, but I know them, and I see them, and they are, I watch them.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Well, it's the same with, let's say, a musical virtuoso or an athletic virtuoso. That's what I've, you know, at this advanced age of mine, I've come to realize that gifts are unevenly spread, and religion is one of these. There are people who just are spiritually gifted. And there are some who are spiritually blind and deaf, who just can't even conceive. I've often used this in my mysticism class. You know, the believability of any mystic's...

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Accounts of what it's like to experience the divine. They all tell you the same thing, at least in the Christian tradition, but also in other religious traditions. I can't explain it to you. It's like explaining color to a blind person. How do you go about explaining color? No, it's just another perception, another way of perceiving. What I find, and still find fascinating, is when those experiences, which go beyond normal cognition, have some physical impact on the person having it.

• 31:14David Brooks?

  I've seen friends who are, they're moving, they're kneeling, they're not even thinking about it, they don't know you were looking at them, they're just speaking sort of in tongues or some sort of other language. It's whether, I don't know, I don't think it proves the belief in God, but it proves the existence of some sort of spiritual faculty that people have. Now, I wanted to get to, to talk about the context in which Teresa's living and a lot of the people in your, this 16th, 17th century period. This is a moment when science is beginning to take off. And you got Descartes, and I suppose go a little later, you got Newton.

• 31:55David Brooks?

  And so this is like reason and science taking off, technology's beginning to move up, and it's exactly this moment, as you make the point in the book, that these mystical experiences and these levitations begin to kick back. And it could be that there's just intense pressure. They've hit a civilizational fork in the road, and they're either gonna go off in the rationalist direction, or they're gonna stay the way they were. And the crass way to put it, which I don't want to reduce it just to this, is like, if you're a Carmelite nun, you think, okay, you guys got calculus, that's impressive, but we fly around the room.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yes. And again, I can't argue against this way of looking at things, that makes sense, yes. I think it's highly probable that you have this heightened sensibility towards the miraculous as a response, not just to emerging science, but more immediately at first, the Protestant Reformation, which is denying that all of these things are divine. But then along comes the scientific revolution.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  And yes, it is a natural response that people focus more intensely on these things. And as I said before, there seems to be this very common linkage between the matrix of belief and the frequency of these things happening. I say, yes, that's a very solid, very rational argument, but it doesn't explain everything. It just doesn't. If, in fact, these things are happening, and continue to happen, you know, albeit with less frequency afterwards, you're still dealing with a phenomenon.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  And as I have discovered lately, there's one word now being used to describe human beings who claim to have encountered non-human intelligence. And that word is experiencer. That's also used for mystics. So in essence, a mystic telling you, oh, you know, I understood the Trinity perfectly, but I can't tell you, has the same trouble being believed as somebody who said, well, you know, this gray alien walked into my hotel room last night.

• 34:31David Brooks?

  There's a famous episode, which is sort of this clash, like Rene Descartes, he's early, well, I guess, early 17th century, and he's, he is actually a believer, so he's not like, but he decides he's gonna sweep away all this tradition and knowledge that's built up, and he's gonna start from scratch, and he's gonna use pure reason, just logical, follow one step after another, and he makes sure he's shielded from emotion, God forbid he should love somebody, and he's trying to build up the whole edifice of human knowledge. And at exactly the same time, this other guy in France, Blaise Pascal, takes a look at what Descartes is doing, and immediately

• 35:13Speaker 02

  He hates him.

• 35:14David Brooks?

  Hates him. And Blaise Pascal is no, like, random humanist. He was one of the greatest mathematicians that ever lived.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:21David Brooks?

  He was a technologist, he built a sort of early calculating machine, he was a scientist, he studied vacuums. So he had scientific rigor on his side. And he was saying, I'm not against Descartes' reason, but I have many other forms of knowledge that I use to understand the world, what he called the spirit of genius and the spirit of finesse, I think he called it. And he famously said, "The heart has reasons that reason knows not of." And so he's saying to Descartes, "You're taking away other ways of knowing." And I think the clinching argument, it's so amazing, he did this, understood this right away, we're at this civilizational fork in the road, he says, "The problem with rationalism is not its admiration for reason, but its failure to recognize any other kind of knowledge."

• 36:06David Brooks?

  He's saying, "You're amputating me." And that, he's having, he's talking out of his own experience of how he has studied the world.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Yes. Plus, he had a mystical experience.

• 36:16David Brooks?

  Famously, the night of fire.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Sewn into the lining of his coat, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers, right? This distinction being made between these two forms of cognition. I'm so glad you brought up Pascal, because he's, you know, he's a contemporary. But, you know, there's so many, when you're dealing, again, the past is a different country. You find anomalous synchronicities all the time in the past, as well as in the present. One of the witnesses to Saint Joseph of Cupertino's levitations was a Saxon prince, Johann Friedrich of Saxony. And not just any Saxony, the Saxony that Luther had been part of.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  For some reason, he's in Italy, and nobody has figured out what he was doing there, but he sees Joseph of Cupertino up in the air, and he converts to Catholicism. Johann Friedrich. Oh my God. This is the same man who hired Leibniz as his librarian.

• 37:20David Brooks?

  Right.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Did he and Leibniz ever meet in the hallway, so to speak?

• 37:24David Brooks?

  Talk about this, yes.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Talk about these things?

• 37:26David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  And as I, you know, little thought experiment that I engage in my book, yes, Newton and Joseph Cupertino walked the earth at the same time. What if Newton had taken time off and done the grand tour and run into Joseph Cupertino? They could have, yes, well, but they didn't. They just didn't. And Newton spent much of his later life trying to figure out the law of prophecy.

• 37:55David Brooks?

  So we're talking about this crucial time in Western history, at least, where science is moving and faith is moving in a different way. And it seems to me, you could look over periods of scientific advance, faith rises to respond. And so the one, that period I know best is the late 19th century, the Industrial Revolution. And you've got these machines, and in the late 19th century, Henry Adams, who was the same family as John Quincy Adams and John Adams, he goes to a bunch of world fairs. And he sees what they were obsessed with in, like, the Chicago World's Fair, and so he writes a chapter in the book, which is more famous than the rest of the, well, the book's pretty famous too, called "The Education of Henry Adams," but the chapter is called

• 38:39David Brooks?

  "The Virgin and the Dynamo." And the virgin, he says, at different eras in time have different power sources. And in the 13th century, the virgin was a tremendous power source in Europe, and we get all these cathedrals that they were wanting to buy because the virgin was their power source. And he says, "That's going away." And he writes in that chapter, "Humans have a tendency to worship power sources, and people are gonna start worshiping machines." It's not clear what he thinks about it, but at the exact same moment, there are a lot of other people, or roughly in that industrial period, who really mined it. And then the part I hadn't clued in until reading your book, because you mentioned this,

• 39:19David Brooks?

  exactly this moment, late 19th century, a lot of the world goes gaga over séances. And you got, like, people you wouldn't expect, like Arthur Conan Doyle, like the founder of Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Rational. You mentioned Abraham Lincoln's wife, but a lot of, like, serious people are sitting around doing séances and Ouija boards and stuff like that.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  And that's kind of the tip of the iceberg, because this is the same period that gives us the Latter Day Saints, the Millerites, and eventually the Jehovah's Witnesses, theosophy, which becomes immensely popular.

• 39:57David Brooks?

  Explain what that is.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Theosophy is a blend of Western occult mysticism with, basically, Hinduism and Buddhism. And it was enormously popular here in the United States, but also throughout the world. The American Theosophical Society, which for a while was based in Philadelphia, sent missionaries all around the world. I learned this from a dissertation I read back when I was at the University of Virginia. Otherwise, I would not have found this fact, which I find fascinating. The two most successful missions that the American Theosophical Society had were Brazil and Cuba.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  But they're also immensely popular throughout Europe, and anyway, the list could be longer of all these other things. And Arthur Conan Doyle came here to New Haven during his American tour and spoke at Woolsey Hall.

• 40:55David Brooks?

  Which is the big hall here on campus.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Yes. The big auditorium on spirit photography. And it was packed, it was packed, standing room only. And this spiritualism only intensifies during, and right after the First World War.

• 41:12David Brooks?

  That makes sense, because there's so many dead people.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  And especially all the dead, dead young people, and parents desperate to come to terms with this. So yes, and the Society for Psychic Studies is established in London in the late 19th century, and it's all, and there's such a long list of other things that emerged at this very same time, the occultism and everything else. And this is because, as I see it, Pascal's complaint, which is personal, you can have a social and cultural dimension to it. When you take away Belief in something that has ultimate meaning in another dimension, other than this. Because everybody's body will give out on them and they will die.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  When you take that away, for lack of a better term, and I hate this term disenchantment.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  You disenchant the world, the world will try to re enchant itself.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  And it always does so, or often does so in very weird ways. And sometimes in very, very bad ways. French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Third Reich. If you look at those three, they are aggressive attempts to re enchant the world differently. They have religious symbols, they have feasts, they have holidays, they have rituals, you name it. But the ultimate thing is the revolution.

• 42:50David Brooks?

  The Marxist revolutions also laid claim to science, too. They were clearly secular religions.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  But they still have the trappings of religion and require belief in an orthodoxy. And in some kind of apocalyptic future.

• 43:07David Brooks?

  You know, this brings me to the day I can't help. So we're in the world of AI now and tech and Elon Musk. And if you go to the Silicon Valley, they also have a kind of religion. They worship God, which is intelligence. They believe in sin, which is inefficiency. They believe in moral progress, which is optimization. They believe in eternal life, which is transhumanism. You can download your brain on a computer, live forever. And so they've got it all going on, even though they would deny that they are religious. But it looks very much like a religion serving assertive of existential longings.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  And given the human instinct that seems to be part of human history, that whenever something or someone comes along, it seems to have immense power. Or combination immense intelligence and immense power. People will venerate this.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  So that's one of the threats of AI that doesn't get much attention. But what I think is a real possibility is that if in fact we get artificial intelligence, which by the way, can also be called non-human intelligence.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Got one that's super intelligent enough, of course you're going to have

• 44:36Speaker 02

  people who will not only use it, but have their whole lives directed by it.

• 44:48Speaker 00

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• 45:21Speaker 03

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• 45:53David Brooks?

  You mentioned something that's stuck in my head from a few minutes ago, that you don't like the word disenchantment. Why is that?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Oh, it's sprinkled with fairy dust. Enchantment, the word, the word English enchantment is, has too much of an emotional baggage attached to it. It's got an emotional dimension to it. But what happens when you take religion away is not disenchantment, not in that sense. It doesn't, it's something much, much more aggressive.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  And what you lose is not emotion. What you lose is precisely, as Pascal complained, this other dimension. So that's why I don't like it. And especially too, I mean, I have reasons, personal reasons to complain because the subject I've been working on throughout my entire career falls into the category of disenchantment of the world. But all the definitions of enchantment or disenchantment that had been thrown at me. Some of them ridiculous, you know, like for instance, there was, may he rest in peace, Robert Scribner, historian of the same time period, who said, you know, Protestants really didn't disenchant the world because they still had rituals.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  What do you mean? Is that your sole criterion for enchantment or disenchantment? That some, of course, people are going to have rituals, government have rituals, right? So it's a, it's a very weak word. I wish there were a better word that people agreed on. I mean, this fuzzy word started to be used in 1930 when Talketh Parsons translated Max Weber and his phrase, Entzahlung der Welt. With the word zauber right in the middle, which means magic in German. And he was very clear throughout several of his texts, he meant magic.

• 47:54David Brooks?

  So you mentioned Max Weber. I mean, he wrote this process of rationalization, which led, I think in one translation to the, what we call the iron cage, which is where we humans are stuck in this iron cage. And as a result, people's spiritual lives shrivel. And in his words, they become, I think it was specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart. And I think that's real. I live in Washington, I'm surrounded by specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  His word for that was entzahlung, not disenchantment.

• 48:26David Brooks?

  Okay. And what, how would you translate?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Entzahlung is magic. Which he also said in one sentence that, you know, entzahlung means taking away magie, M A G I E, which was the learned German word for magic.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  What he meant was that there's no transcendent other dimension. And he also spoke of prophets.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Right? The only way that the world can be enchanted again is through prophets. And by prophets, he meant something like mystics who actually have a real existential connection to something larger that can then convince other people that there's more to life than this table and this microphone. So he also spoke of the choices that people are left in this, let's stay with disenchantment. The choices that people are left with, it's basically kind of a polytheism. We have to choose between different gods.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Again, it goes back to this, this insight that is a constant throughout the Christian tradition. This realization that human beings

• 49:49Speaker 02

  have an innate need for meaning.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  And that meaning has to be ultimate, not just proximate, it has to be ultimate. So we do our damnedest to make it up, or as Pascal said,

• 50:08Speaker 02

  we do our damnedest to keep ourselves distracted

• 50:12Speaker 02

  so that we don't look at the abyss that lies in just a few feet away.

• 50:16David Brooks?

  I think that distraction is a key point. We just, you can go through life not thinking about this stuff. There are two things that seem to be going on. One is, I have a friend and former New York Times colleague, Ross Douthat, who argued that as society secularizes, you don't get atheism, you got the strangest religions you can think of. And there's a book by a woman named Tara Isabel Burton called Strange Rites, where she details all these new religions that are popping up as people try to find some meaning somewhere. And this reminds me, I hadn't made the connection to the 19th century upstate New York, when new religions were popping up all over the place. And, but then I think there's other things going on, which is, there really is a dissent.

• 50:59David Brooks?

  Well, I don't want to use that word, you'll reach across the table and punch me. But there is a materialism, a materialistic mentality that is definitely more prevalent today than, well, in the 17th century. And I, I think that's sad. And so I guess my question for you is, when you're writing all this stuff, are you partly motivated by a disquiet with the present?

• 51:27Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely, most definitely, yes. I'm very disquieted. And I've been disquieted for quite some time.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Since childhood. But my present baggage, let's put it that way, has to do with the way in which one can be so easily silenced or ridiculed for merely suggesting

• 51:56David Brooks?

  Right.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  that something else should be taken seriously. That's enough to put you in the category of an alien abductee.

• 52:06David Brooks?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Basically.

• 52:08David Brooks?

  The book came out, I think, in 23. So

• 52:11Speaker 02

  This one, yeah.

• 52:11David Brooks?

  And so how has the reaction response been, both from the professional historical community and from the wider public?

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Well, the professional historical community is so slow. Book reviews sometimes take two to three years. So I have yet to see very many reviews in professional journals. But in other venues, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. There've been a couple of nasty book reviews. I expected them, one of them with a beautiful sentence. This is a deeply unserious book.

• 52:47David Brooks?

  To compliment where I come from.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Another review. The reviewer found it necessary, for whatever reason, to bring up the fact that I was Cuban. And therefore, I'm credulous and very fond of magical realism.

• 53:09David Brooks?

  You're Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Yes, I am, like all Latin Americans. You know, we're all a little

• 53:15David Brooks?

  That's why we love you. Now, two final topics. One is, and I want to ask you about this. You say there's a supernatural mentality, and there's a material mentality. But you introduce this concept that there's also a third way of believing in the middle there, which you say is a vast polymorphous, variegated middle between these two extreme poles, bounding in myriad attitudes and convictions. That sounds, as a natural temperamental moderate, that sounds good to me.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  And I think that's basically my position. When you're faced with unknowns, what do you do? How do you make up your mind? And I find, all right. I just thought of this, and your question prompted this to appear, is that I take the same attitude to quantum entanglement and the Big Bang than I do to these phenomena. I can't. Until I see somebody up in the air and say, yes, I'm seeing this, I can't say I've experienced it. In the same way that you can say about any kind of religious experience, yes, I have experienced this.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I've been to many religious services where I have been so, so transported. I guess is a good way to put it. I'm not there in the room. I mean, I know I'm there, but I'm not there. And some of them have been very odd moments, too. In houses of worship other than Catholic, too. Right? It's happened. That's one thing. But seeing somebody up in the air. But quantum entanglement, what do you do with this? And what do you do with the latest images from the web telescope telling us that, you know, the Big Bang is maybe something else?

• 55:08David Brooks?

  Yeah. No, the scientists who I know and I admire, some of them are just arrogantly dismissive of all spiritual experience. I say, well, you explain how consciousness emerged from the brain. Then I'll take your arrogance as somewhat earned. Or you explain what happened before the Big Bang. You can't do that. You explain quantum entanglement. Like, you can't explain any of this stuff. The existence of the universe and consciousness, which is our primary way to understand the world. If you can't explain these two things, these are the two biggest things in our world.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  If I were younger, I think this is the area I would dive into next, is all this work that's being done on mind and consciousness. Right? And which is, in fact, a connecting point, a nexus. Very natural nexus, religion and science. But I have so much reading to do. Can't do it now.

• 56:09David Brooks?

  So many years have been wasted trying to solve the consciousness problem.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 56:12David Brooks?

  Okay, the final question. All of our conversation has been leading up to one question. So did they fly?

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Yes. And I don't mean to put any qualifiers on this. I'm willing to take that testimony as one would in a court of law, although there's no physical evidence.

• 56:34David Brooks?

  Right.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  That's the one difference. There's no murder weapon, let's say. But let me put it this way. I think it's highly, highly likely, especially since we have reports. What I find very annoying, though, extremely annoying, is that, you know, cameras and film have been in existence for well over a century.

• 56:55David Brooks?

  That's the obvious rejoinder to your belief. What's your answer?

• 56:58Speaker 02

  Boy, where is it? Where is it? Some television show tried to trick me. It said, we have film of somebody levitating, which watch it. And they were like, you know, doing this like live. And yeah, it was obvious this person was on a high wire, doing, spinning on a high wire. And I said, well, you're not showing what's at the other end here. Is there another tree or another pole? They said, yeah, we didn't want to tell you ahead of time. We just wanted your reaction.

• 57:27David Brooks?

  I must say, I still am not quite there where you are. But I'm struck by how much in our popular culture, how much flying there is. Like Superman is flying, Harry Potter's flying on his broom. Like, there's a lot of flying. Look, we accept this so easily when we think it's a superhero story or fiction.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we have maglev trains. It's not like, it's physically impossible. You can actually physically levitate small frogs with sound waves.

• 57:59David Brooks?

  Really?

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Yes, that's been done.

• 58:01David Brooks?

  Very unpleasant for the frogs.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Well, you know, coins, everybody has seen coins levitating. But no, you can take a little tiny frog and with the acoustic levitation can take place. So it's not physiologically or physically impossible. One of my early talks on the subject, long, long before the book came out, there was a doctor in the audience. I always love the first question because it's always the most troublesome. Do these people have a lot of iron in their diets, by the way? Maybe they were magnets.

• 58:35David Brooks?

  That's a lot of iron.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Said, no, I don't think so. I don't think so.

• 58:40David Brooks?

  Carlos, really appreciate you taking the time and really enjoyed our conversation. I'm hoping that people come away with their mind expanded, but also come away with when, in life, we encounter people whose political views, religious views, whatever views, seem crazy to us. We pause and we think, where are you coming from? Let me try to see the world from your eyes. And that strikes me as like the essence of democracy.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Well, it is. And it's essential for survival.

• 59:08David Brooks?

  Carlos Ayer, thank you so much.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 59:14David Brooks?

  I thought one of the most interesting moments in my conversation with Carlos is when I asked him right at the end, did they fly? And he flat out said, yes, they did. Think of the intellectual courage it takes to say that. A lot of people are going to think that's ridiculous. But he's a man of his convictions. He thinks supernatural realities are real. He's also a man who's done the work. He's spent the years in the archives reading all these testimonies. So he's got some substance behind what he's thinking. I personally, not quite convinced. I think if human beings had the capacity to levitate, then we'd find one video of it, or somebody would be doing it today. But I believe that the people who described their levitation sincerely believed they were flying,

• 59:58David Brooks?

  just the way I might sincerely believe I'm driving down the New Jersey Turnpike. And how did they believe this? I don't know. But I respect the fact that they did it. And when it comes to humans, variability is the rule. We've got a lot of different mindsets out there. And people hold sincere beliefs that seem bonkers to the rest of us, but who are probably worthy of our respect. Thanks so much for joining us for this week's conversation with Carlos Ayer. The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe on The Atlantic's YouTube page, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work

• 1:00:42David Brooks?

  and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. See you next week.