Peter Thiel on Political Theology (Ep. 210) | Conversations with Tyler

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April 17, 2024<br>Peter Thiel on Political Theology (Ep. 210)

Unveiling the dangers of just trying to muddle through

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In this conversation recorded live in Miami, Tyler and Peter Thiel dive deep into the complexities of political theology, including why it’s a concept we still need today, why Peter’s against Calvinism (and rationalism), whether the Old Testament should lead us to be woke, why Carl Schmitt is enjoying a resurgence, whether we’re entering a new age of millenarian thought, the one existential risk Peter thinks we’re overlooking, why everyone just muddling through leads to disaster, the role of the katechon, the political vision in Shakespeare, how AI will affect the influence of wordcels, Straussian messages in the Bible, what worries Peter about Miami, and more.

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Recorded February 21st, 2024

Read the full transcript

Thanks to a listener who sponsored this transcript “in the memory of Eileen Thompson, my deceased aunt who, I believe, would have liked Mercatus and your mission very much.”

TYLER COWEN: Hello, Peter. Thank you for doing this.

PETER THIEL: Hello, Tyler.

COWEN: Now, the title of this conversation is “Political Theology.” That was a phrase, I think, first used by the Russian anarchist Bakunin to mock the Italian nationalist Mazzini. German legal theorist Carl Schmitt then picked it up and said it’s something that everyone needs. They all need a political theology. What does the term mean to you?

THIEL: Well, it’s a bit of a fuzzy, broad concept. But maybe to motivate it as a contrast, I think that in late modernity, we’re often living in this world of hyper-specialization where you can’t think about the big picture, and I don’t know, it’s like Adam Smith’s pin factory on steroids.

It’s our world, and I think there is some way that we have to try to integrate all these different facets of our life to try to make progress, and that’s what political philosophy does. That’s what political theology does. The reasons these sorts of things were abandoned, I think maybe it already was the Enlightenment abandoned it from — one type of reason it was abandoned was because it’s too hard to figure this stuff out, or it’s just a fool’s errand. I’m inclined to think the other reason was, it was often deemed as too dangerous, too divisive. You’re not supposed to have debates about religion. We settled that in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. We’re just going to forget about it and not talk about these things.

I think that might have been a reasonable compromise in the 18th century. It’s my view that when you fast-forward to the 21st century, it’s maybe more dangerous not to think about things, and it’s again more dangerous for us to become ever smaller cogs in an ever bigger machine, all of Adam Smith’s pin factory.

The political dimension on it — just to say one thing on that is, there’s always a question, if we’re trying to figure out something about the whole, about our whole world, do you start on a human scale? Or do you start on a microscopic, telescopic, atomic, or cosmic scale? There’s probably some way these things are related, but the political theology, political philosophy debate, our frame — I think this was also a Socratic idea — we start with a turn to common sense, human, the world around us, questions about politics, economics, society, culture, and that’s actually this important way to get access.

There’s some deep link between the university and the universe. There’s some deep link between the failing multiversity and the crazed multiverse. The political orientation I have is, you’re never going to solve these things. You have to start with the university or whatever that’s gone wrong if you’re ever going to make sense of the universe, and there’s some analog to that that motivates all of these things.

On the political theology of Peter Thiel

COWEN: Let’s say I’m trying to make sense of your political theology. I recall you saying in a recent talk, you consider yourself religious but not spiritual. That strikes me as quite a Calvinist point. If you put aside predestination and think of Calvinism as insisting we know nothing about heaven, so it’s an arrogation of man’s power to claim to know about heaven, that’s related to your critique of the left.

The notion that we don’t know anything about heaven — it also means you can’t really be spiritual. That’s also a kind of arrogation. Isn’t the consistent Peter Thiel really a Calvinist thinker? Calvinism is quite concrete. It’s quite serious. It takes governance and authority very literally. Why aren’t you just a Calvinist?

THIEL: I’m still mostly a libertarian, Tyler, and —

COWEN: [laughs] But you can be both.

THIEL: I think there are probably...