153 — Potent Stuff, A Conversation with Prof. Jacob Howland

This episode was a particular joy for me. I had the honor to talk
with Jacob Howland. We start with LSD—talking about it, that is —
go back to the steam engine in ancient Greece to return to the
20th century’s nuclear bomb and today’s artificial intelligence.
What is the interplay of the human condition with ever more
potent technology?


What constitutes progress, education, and how can we deal with
the challenges of our time?


Jacob Howland served as Provost and Dean of the Intellectual
Foundations Program at the University of Austin from 2022 to
2025, and before that, as McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Tulsa. He is the author of five books on Plato,
Kierkegaard, and the Talmud, and over sixty articles on
literature, politics, and the academy for general readers. He
will be a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Civic
Leadership at the University of Texas during the academic year
2026-27.


I was intrigued by a conversation Jacob had with Jordan Peterson
talking about the CIA gets its hands on LSD. Jacob described the
situation as


“This is potent stuff, what can we do with it?”


Was this a special case or is this our general approach to
innovation? Is innovation thus simply reasoning backwards?


What is technology? Since when do we speak of technology?


“The marshalling or harnessing of significant social resources
for the explicit purpose of advancing and applying science.”


Mastering and possession of nature, as Descartes put it, is a
core aspect of that. During that process, is the focus put too
much on the means, while the ends might get lost?


“The means justify the end? […] We can do this, therefore we
should do it.”


Innovation and the mindset of the time — do people even
understand what was just invented? Example: the steam engine in
antiquity.


How does the world appear to people in antiquity, in the
Christian tradition, and later in the modern age? Or in other
words: when did transforming the world become an objective?
Descartes already understands that:


“Desire is implicitly infinite.”


This shifts the relationship between man and world. In what way
specifically?


“When we take away the limits of desire, we open up an infinite
and unlimited desire for wealth, an unlimited desire for new
devices, conveniences and so forth.”


Descartes already expresses that if we become the masters of
nature, we might be able to find a way to limit the infirmities
of old age and to extend life.


What was the role of Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis? What role
did he play for science?


Contemplating the history of technology and science, it appears
we are treating new inventions and innovations like children —
even those with extraordinary potential. How could we have
survived this attitude?


“Technology contains its own fatality.”


What changed between the nuclear bomb and the advent of
artificial intelligence?


“We are going to have to trust AI more and more, but we don’t
actually know if it is trustworthy.”


What can we learn from Greek mythology about these complexities
of technology? What is Pandora’s box?


“We exchange one kind of fatality for another.”


Technology can be transgressive and totalising. How?


“If the idea is to remove all limits, which would be a way of
being like God, then, because we are human beings, we will just
descend into chaos. […] You can take human beings out of chaos,
but you cannot take the chaos out of human beings.”


Is it true that interesting things happen at the edge of chaos,
as Stuart Kauffman expressed it?


“When you just have order without the vitality that comes from
transgression, you have decay, you have fossilised formalism.”


Henry Adams stated, about 100 years ago: Can the speed of change
become too fast for human societies and thus fundamentally
destabilising?


“We have a hard time holding two opposing thoughts in our mind.”


But this seems to be increasingly important — a fundamental human
skill, in fact. How is this important to assess progress? What
changed in the attitude towards progress, especially with young
people?


“Moderns and late moderns (us) believe that we can solve
problems.”


The way we address complex problems was discussed in other
episodes. Noteworthy seems a quotation by Thomas Sowell:


“There are no solutions, only trade-offs”


Can we actually solve a problem in a complex “wicked”
environment? How does this help us to understand how technology
works? Why is maintenance at the centre of a complex
techno-social society? What does that mean specifically? How does
politics work, and why will we never arrive at morally perfect
situations?


Why is impatience rising and creating unreasonable expectations?
Why is humility of huge importance in dealing with complex
problems, for instance in science? On the other hand, why is it a
bad idea to be afraid of your own shadow?


“I am more concerned by what the bomb is doing already to young
people,” C. S. Lewis.


So, how do we go along, surrounded by radical uncertainty? What
does this mean for science?


“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” Richard
Feynman.


“You are dealing with a real scientist when that scientist says:
here is what we don’t know.”


In contrast to this, remember Anthony Fauci: “I am Science.”


What is the role of generalists versus specialists to resolve or
manage some of these issues? What about different perspectives of
time?


“The emphasis in our lives today is on the present. What is
happening right now.”


Where is expertise, what is the interplay between specialist
knowledge and generalist “connecting tissue”?


“I have never let my ignorance interfere with anything I wanted
to study.”


How is this relevant to living a decent and flourishing human
life?


But to make it even bolder: Do we have such stagnation in science
and society because we have so few generalists?


As a closing question: If the mission is to save (American)
education, what are we supposed to do, and do we even have a
chance still?


“Harvard College taught little, and that little, ill. But it left
the mind open, supple, and ready to receive knowledge,” Henry
Adams.


Could we at least get back to this situation again?


“How many universities can we say that about? We have not
succeeded in that. […] At the end of the day, we are suffering
from a crisis of meaning. Any way we give people more meaning is
significant.”


How can we do that? In company with other people, ideally.


There is hope, as Jacob states at the end of the conversation. We
are at the start of a reconstruction, as Douglas Murray put it:


“We should be the reconstructionists. The deconstructionists knew
something about how to take things apart but, like children with
bicycles, had no idea how to put them back together. […] We have
the choice either to live in the wastelands or to rebuild them.”


Other Episodes


Episode 148: Künstliche Vernunft? Ein Gespräch mit Jan Juhani
Steinmann

Episode 145: Reflexion und Rekonstruktion!

Episode 137: Alles Leben ist Problemlösen

Episode 134: Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt?
Transzendent oder Transient

Episode 129: Rules, A Conversation with Prof. Lorraine Daston

Episode 125: Ist Fortschritt möglich? Ideen als Widergänger
über Generationen

Episode 118: Science and Decision Making under Uncertainty, A
Conversation with Prof. John Ioannidis

Episode 116: Science and Politics, A Conversation with Prof.
Jessica Weinkle

Episode 110: The Shock of the Old, a conversation with David
Edgerton

Episode 107: How to Organise Complex Societies? A
Conversation with Johan Norberg

Episode 74: Apocalype Always



References


Homepage of Jacob Howland

Jordan Peterson & Jacob Howland, Ancient Stories That
Bridge The Heavens & The Earth (2025)

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting
One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637)

Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627, posthum)

Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the
Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity(Oxford University Press,
1995)

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918)

Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of
Political Struggles (1987)

F. A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)

Horst Rittel, Melvin Webber, Dilemmas in a General Theory of
Planning, Policy Sciences 4 (1973)

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (ca. 350 BC)

C. S. Lewis, “Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the
Welfare State” (Essay, 1958)

Richard Feynman, “What is Science?” (presentation 1966,
published inThe Physics Teacher, 1969)

Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the
Living Cell (Cambridge University Press, 1944)

Plato, Timaeus (ca. 360 BC)

H. J. Paton, The Good Will: A Study in the Coherence Theory
of Goodness (1927)

Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education
System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press,
2018)

Douglas Murray - "The Age of Reconstruction Has Begun!" | ARC
2025