Juno News - Are Canada's best years ahead or behind？

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.420 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:10.640 Hello and welcome to you all.

00:00:13.380 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, the Andrew Lawton Show on True North.

00:00:18.360 And happy Boxing Day to you.

00:00:20.220 And it's not really a holiday.

00:00:21.400 In fact, maybe you are out beating away the crowds at Best Buy to get that like $20 off the big screen TV.

00:00:28.260 But if you are perhaps wanting to calm your nerves as you deal with the chaos or really hang up yourself with the sugar coma you are undoubtedly experiencing by staying home.

00:00:41.120 Whatever you choose, we are here for you.

00:00:43.560 As we are coming to the end of the year, I wanted to do a bit of a look back at the last year.

00:00:50.560 Not just a regurgitation of the headlines.

00:00:53.240 We'll do that to some extent later in the week.

00:00:54.980 But kind of take stock on a big question here.

00:00:58.000 And that is the state of the Dominion, the state of Canada.

00:01:01.760 You may have recalled a few months back, we interviewed several of the contributors to a book called The 1867 Project.

00:01:09.260 Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.

00:01:11.940 We spoke about the value of honoring and knowing Canadian history.

00:01:15.920 We spoke about wokeism and identity politics.

00:01:18.500 It was a phenomenal read.

00:01:19.980 We also did a lengthy interview with the editor of that book, Mark Mielke, who is the founder of the Aristotle Foundation.

00:01:26.260 So I would encourage you to go and look up those, which are very much timely today, as much as they were back in the summer and fall.

00:01:34.000 But I thought we'd bring Mark back and have a bit of a different discussion and talk about the state of Canada as we wind down 2023 and start 2024.

00:01:42.840 And also some of these ideas that we believe are so central to the Canadian existence.

00:01:48.420 So joining me from the Aristotle Foundation is Mark Mielke.

00:01:51.840 Mark, always a pleasure to talk to you.

00:01:53.380 Thanks for coming on today.

00:01:54.700 And Merry Christmas to you.

00:01:56.720 Merry Christmas to you.

00:01:57.800 Happy Boxing Day and all of that.

00:01:59.340 So it's good to be here.

00:02:00.300 Thank you, Andrew.

00:02:00.840 So let's talk about this big question here as succinctly as we can to get things rolling, which is, do you believe Canada's best years are ahead or do you think they are behind?

00:02:15.280 Well, fundamentally, I'm an optimist and I think people can choose the future for the most part, right?

00:02:21.140 So I think our best years are possibly ahead and that's what I and others like to work on.

00:02:26.420 And, look, I think last year has been one of chaos and unexpected surprises.

00:02:32.260 And not every year is like that.

00:02:33.840 Look, when I grew up in the 80s, I mean, it was a tough time, say, economy-wise in the early 1980s or, you know, if you were a millennial, you know, you were probably born, right, well, around the year 2000.

00:02:45.500 And you may vaguely recall the Great Recession or, of course, you recall, everyone recalls the pandemic.

00:02:50.700 So, but not every year is necessarily as chaotic as I think we've been seeing in the past year around the world or past years, whether it's Russia's invasion of Ukraine or what just happened, the Hamas attack in Israel in October.

00:03:03.160 But I just have the sense that the world is in a bit of a chaotic state and we haven't quite sorted it out yet.

00:03:07.420 And who knows where that goes?

00:03:09.160 You know, you need a crystal ball to figure those things out.

00:03:11.300 But, look, fundamentally, I think, at least in Western liberal democracies, where you can choose the future, you know, and we have a fair amount of freedom and no place is perfect.

00:03:22.520 I think we have the potential to make the right choices.

00:03:26.880 And, look, I think we better.

00:03:28.040 I mean, I think we owe it to ourselves.

00:03:29.800 I think we owe it to those who came here before us.

00:03:31.820 When we look at past crisis, whether it's economic or otherwise, and perhaps I'm putting on some rose-colored glasses here when I say this, but I would generally say these crises that we've experienced in the past have tended to unite societies and unite civilizations.

00:03:49.340 I mean, 9-11 is a relatively recent example.

00:03:51.540 I think it was hard to find a country that was more united than the United States of America was on September 12th.

00:03:57.340 And a lot of that really bled into Canada.

00:03:59.620 That doesn't mean there weren't fractures.

00:04:01.120 And certainly with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, that caused some of those.

00:04:05.120 COVID was a very different situation.

00:04:07.460 I'd say the country came out of COVID far more divided than united.

00:04:11.500 There had been that little glimmer of the Team Canada approach early on.

00:04:15.760 Is COVID an aberration in that sense?

00:04:18.320 And in general, are we finding that as countries and as societies, crises are dividing us more than they have in the past?

00:04:28.180 Yes, I think that's actually true, at least in the Western world.

00:04:30.700 I'm not familiar with the non-Anglosphere, you could say. 0.57

00:04:33.600 So in the English-speaking world, I do think we're not as united as we once were.

00:04:37.840 And the 9-11 example you just mentioned is a good example of that.

00:04:42.240 There were some critics of the 9-11.

00:04:43.900 I remember someone at the University of British Columbia, I forget her name.

00:04:47.680 I think she was a former head of a feminist organization, I'm trying to remember which one, or the status of women. 0.97

00:04:54.180 And in 2001, came out and basically said, well, the Americans deserved it. 0.93

00:04:58.640 And that was roundly condemned by most people in most places after 9-11, not universally.

00:05:04.160 But you didn't have the same sort of rot within the universities, even then, even though there were problems after 9-11 that you saw after October the 7th.

00:05:12.940 And the pro-Hamas crowd is the best way to put it. 0.99

00:05:16.560 So, yeah, I do think there have been divisions.

00:05:20.760 There are greater divisions now than I think in my lifetime.

00:05:24.300 I mean, again, going back to the 1980s, which is, you know, my formative period, I grew up in the era of, you know, Brian Mulroney in this country, Ronald Reagan and others, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain.

00:05:34.220 There was a divide between those sympathetic to socialism or even Marxism worldwide and those sympathetic to free markets.

00:05:40.780 And those of us on the latter won.

00:05:43.340 We said, this is the way you get a more prosperous world.

00:05:45.940 And we were right.

00:05:46.520 You know, and before we came along, Andrew, you know, the Milton Friedmans of the world have been arguing that for decades.

00:05:52.060 So there were divisions then, but somehow there's a sharper division.

00:05:55.660 And you know what I think it is, at least in Canada.

00:05:58.400 I think the same is true, maybe worse than the United States.

00:06:01.160 If you go back 30 or 40 years, there was some interference by government in your life, of course, some of it necessary.

00:06:07.740 You know, you have to have jails if you do something wrong.

00:06:10.620 But taxes have always been there.

00:06:13.420 Some of them are useful, some of them not so much.

00:06:15.680 But what I think actually is exacerbating the tensions, the raw edges in the past couple of years, is not only governments now, but courts, private organizations are interfering in everyone's lives almost all the time.

00:06:31.980 And what I mean by that is if you go back 40 years, the Law Society of British Columbia wouldn't have cared if you were a Christian, an atheist, a Muslim, you know, wanted to practice meditation in the middle of your office in the middle of the day.

00:06:41.580 They didn't care.

00:06:42.280 You know, these self-regulating organizations from the Psychologists Association of Ontario, if I get the name wrong, the one that, you know, manages Jordan Peterson that he belongs to, the law societies around the country.

00:06:54.940 They are actively, is persecuting too strong, certainly harassing members that don't see things their way, micromanaging them.

00:07:04.080 The courts, remember the case a couple of years ago, a gentleman in British Columbia couldn't talk to his 16-year-old daughter about a planned transition.

00:07:11.000 Court said, no, don't talk to her. 1.00

00:07:12.320 He talked to her.

00:07:12.860 He was thrown in jail, even though his position would have been do no harm, sweetheart.

00:07:16.820 Maybe wait till you're 18 to think about this or do something physically.

00:07:19.680 40 years ago, 30 years ago, even 20 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, this would have been unimaginable for a court to interfere in the right of a parent to talk to their children about changing their body.

00:07:30.020 And you see this all over the place.

00:07:33.480 COVID probably exacerbated that.

00:07:35.140 I mean, you and I have discussed COVID before in the response.

00:07:37.840 We may not be on the exact same page, but there was certainly some overreach there, to put it mildly.

00:07:42.340 So I do think a lot of things have been, there's a lot of things that have contributed to the sharp edges in the past several years.

00:07:50.440 And I'm not completely sure how do we get out of it.

00:07:53.260 I think one of the ways we get out of it, in Canada at least, is to tell professional organizations and government to, with respect or not, butt out.

00:08:02.300 You don't have the right to tell parents what to talk to their kids about.

00:08:05.220 You know, as long as you're not abusing them physically, you can say, again, maybe on a transition, maybe wait, wait, sweetheart.

00:08:11.480 That's not the business of the state.

00:08:14.380 But a lot of people think it is.

00:08:15.820 And they think it's the job of their professional organization, you know, as you know, Andrew, police your opinions, my opinions, et cetera, et cetera.

00:08:23.620 So it's not only the government these days, which, you know, was a problem in some aspects 40 years ago when you and I were younger.

00:08:29.860 It's a problem of all organizations from the top down thinking they should regulate our lives.

00:08:35.020 No thanks.

00:08:35.500 Well, and I think when you bring up the gender example there, it probably reveals to what I would posit as being one of the big sources of these divides we've been talking about, which is the obliteration of any sort of real consensus on first principles. 0.76

00:08:50.840 I mean, you know, it used to be a liberal and a conservative, capital L, liberal, capital L conservative could agree on probably most things.

00:09:00.060 You take free speech, for example.

00:09:01.700 I mean, it was very uncontroversial 25 years ago to say, well, you know, free speech is an ironclad principle in Canada.

00:09:08.340 We must protect at all costs.

00:09:10.060 And if there was a proposal that was seen as antithetical to free speech, people would roundly condemn it.

00:09:15.200 And you look at, you know, patriotism following 9-11, to go back to that example.

00:09:20.800 If at its core you can say, listen, this is an attack on America.

00:09:24.120 America is a good value.

00:09:25.680 It's a good system.

00:09:26.460 It's a good place.

00:09:27.640 Well, you fast forward 22 years, and that is not going to be a consensus you get in the United States that the United States or indeed any national identity is positive.

00:09:38.040 Free speech, there is no consensus behind the idea that it is a value that is universal, that is good.

00:09:44.800 We can't get on board as a society and have a consensus about whether a male and a female are fundamentally different things.

00:09:51.660 And, you know, when I think about it, I don't know what first principle we have left that you could say there is a consensus around.

00:09:59.100 And I really am not sure there is one in Canada today.

00:10:02.260 Well, there's been a great departure from reality, hasn't there?

00:10:04.840 So in the 20th century, the departure from reality was Marxism, right?

00:10:09.180 We know how to organize things in the top down, and all of you have to fall in line because that's how utopia, economic utopia and paradise will come about.

00:10:16.500 Marxists were wrong.

00:10:17.720 You can't manage people in that manner from the top down.

00:10:20.000 They have choices, interests, aptitudes.

00:10:22.040 People have different skill sets.

00:10:23.200 We found that out, or at least I thought most of us did, and most of us were convinced of that before we had to have the debate in the 20th century.

00:10:28.620 But now we've got anti-reality all over the place, the notion that you should look at history as perfect, otherwise we're going to cancel you, i.e. John A. MacDonald, we're talking to you, which is an anti-reality position.

00:10:44.180 The notion that there is no difference between men and women, and this is just a social construct, to use the language of the deconstructionists and others, really?

00:10:55.060 No fundamental difference, no physical difference between men and women, no biological difference, that feelings should trump physical realities.

00:11:04.380 That's anti-reality.

00:11:05.660 So, yeah, we've had a breakdown of reality and not much of an attachment to it.

00:11:11.600 And frankly, that's been a problem in human history, but I thought we got through that courtesy of a number of things, developments in the last 500 years, at least in the West.

00:11:19.680 Well, and just to interject there for a moment, we have access to more knowledge, and more people have access to a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge, and this has still happened in spite of that, or perhaps because of that.

00:11:30.360 And maybe, you know, here's something to think about.

00:11:32.860 You remember, well, first of all, Alan Borovoi on your notion of civil liberties, right, this notion that free speech was important.

00:11:40.100 Alan Borovoi, now deceased, wrote a book about 15 years ago or 20 years ago, and he was a civil rights fellow.

00:11:46.240 I can't remember the organization he was with here in Canada.

00:11:48.540 Wrote a great book, Defending Free Speech.

00:11:50.400 He was Jewish and, you know, would defend the right of others to, you know, I guess, you know, even like the ACLU would defend the right of the KKK to march in Alabama.

00:11:58.740 They weren't thrilled about it, but they would defend the right of free speech.

00:12:02.560 You know, these days it seems like people are fairly tribal and don't want others to speak up, and it's a problem of the left and sometimes on the right as well.

00:12:11.320 But, yeah, the other thing here that's going on is, look, I think you've got not only a flight from reality, but you've got, you're right, we don't agree on the basics.

00:12:22.480 So let's take, you know, some of the pro-Hamas, as I call them, demonstrations in Canada over the last two months that we've seen.

00:12:29.460 There used to be an understanding.

00:12:30.820 I don't even think the KKK would necessarily show up to a Jewish business in cities and try and shut them down.

00:12:36.040 They would just protest in some small southern town where, you know, they could gather a crowd, I guess.

00:12:40.020 These days we have people that think it's okay and they think it's a virtue or they think it's part of free speech to be able to physically intimidate other people and or shut down their businesses, you know, by blocking the sidewalk.

00:12:52.840 That used to be off the radar.

00:12:55.400 But now we have people defending this as a manner of free speech.

00:12:58.120 So I think actually part of the problem, Andrew, is people no longer make distinctions.

00:13:01.920 They live in the moment.

00:13:04.020 There was a fellow in the 1980s who wrote a book, Neil Postman, a couple of books on TV.

00:13:08.620 And he was critical of TV because he said, you know, we've gone from Plato's cave where he had images on the wall, right?

00:13:14.240 And this was much of human history before literacy, back to the age of the image.

00:13:17.880 And he blamed TV.

00:13:19.040 And I always wondered, would social media, would the rise of the Internet make us more literate or less literate?

00:13:23.780 My conclusion is pretty much that people have become even worse than they were with TV in that they look at an image,

00:13:30.440 they look at something today on the Internet or even actually from 150 years ago, and they become immediately angry, immediately perturbed, and they're emotional about it.

00:13:40.020 OK, that's what images do.

00:13:41.180 They provoke emotion.

00:13:42.260 They don't provoke reason.

00:13:43.820 And so I think Neil Postman was right.

00:13:45.840 TV, you know, in that sense, had the temptation away from literacy and reason.

00:13:49.640 And I think in a way that I didn't think would happen, but I think the Internet would make us more able to reason.

00:13:56.540 I think it's even tougher because, again, people can just click on something for a second and see an image.

00:14:01.320 And that's why people can't figure out where they should be on Gaza or you've got people that look at Gaza and only think, well, isn't that a tragedy in Gaza?

00:14:08.100 Yes, it is.

00:14:09.440 Do you understand why Israel has to attack Hamas and Gaza and why tragically civilians die?

00:14:13.920 Because they've got no peace partner on the other side, because Hamas has been doing this for 18 years. 0.94

00:14:19.820 So I think there's something about the Internet that produces an immediate effect, just like television did with images.

00:14:25.440 And you get all the images you want on the net and people have lost the ability to reason properly.

00:14:31.480 Yeah, and there's also been and this has been discussed elsewhere, but there's been a bit of a reorientation around very weird battle lines.

00:14:38.880 I mean, we've seen academia taken over by postmodernism, postcolonialism.

00:14:42.980 And when you take that colonialism or anti-colonialism framework and apply it to everything, it makes, I mean, politics makes for strange bedfellows, as they say.

00:14:51.800 So if you decide Hamas is the oppressed and Israel is the oppressor, then all of a sudden you have to view anything Hamas is doing as being this virtuous and noble postcolonial struggle.

00:15:02.640 And you say, well, you know, you've raped women, you've kidnapped people, you've killed babies, but all of that is your struggle for colonialism.

00:15:09.680 And it gets cast in this narrative. 0.95

00:15:11.580 And people, I mean, again, the punchline on this has always been queers against Israeli apartheid. 0.98

00:15:16.360 This longstanding group of people that would have no place in Gaza would not be accepted by Hamas. 0.78

00:15:22.720 That view that Hamas and Gaza are the virtuous ones and Israel is the bad guy here. 1.00

00:15:27.980 But there's not really a critical reevaluation of these contradictions.

00:15:32.660 Yeah, you're right.

00:15:34.760 And so, again, we're back to sort of simplistic reasoning or no reasoning at all.

00:15:39.000 And people are being tribal, which is always a temptation. 0.91

00:15:41.720 But we used to be able to reason our way away from that and say, what kind of society do we want?

00:15:46.880 And that seems to be that's not the question that's being asked.

00:15:49.820 It's simply yes.

00:15:50.520 You know, as you mentioned at the start of that question, the indigenous versus colonial narrative is one of those.

00:15:57.080 I'm going to have a column in the New Year talking about this, why it's a mistake to look at society and others through that lens.

00:16:02.880 Because, again, it's very simplistic.

00:16:04.440 What do you mean indigenous?

00:16:05.300 We're all indigenous to Africa.

00:16:08.420 The first, you know, people who we now call indigenous, their ancestors came over to North America 20,000 years ago.

00:16:13.620 That's a blip in the history of human existence.

00:16:16.300 French fur traders 500 years ago, everyone built what we now know as Canada.

00:16:20.860 And so to have this indigenous versus colonialist divide is absurd.

00:16:24.240 In addition, it simplifies other things.

00:16:26.120 Was it a good thing or bad thing the British banned sooty, you know, bride burning or widow burning in India?

00:16:32.940 Or, you know, was it a bad thing the British colonialists tried to outlaw slavery in northwestern British Columbia in their empire when it had been outlawed everywhere else much earlier when they were fighting indigenous folks in B.C.?

00:16:44.520 And I'm not picking on indigenous folks.

00:16:46.560 But my point is every ethnicity or ancestry or citizenship has some black marks on it.

00:16:53.280 And, you know, we need to grab some more modesty on that.

00:16:57.220 My background is German.

00:16:58.260 But, you know, there's not much in the last two centuries I'd take from Germany, whether it's recent energy policy or their 19th century, you know, illiberal thinking and their 20th century fascination with pseudoscience and anti-science, you know, race theories.

00:17:12.520 So one does not have to take one's ethnicity or race or even nationality when it's wrong and support it, you know, my country right or wrong.

00:17:21.880 But again, this requires reason.

00:17:24.160 And I think the combination of identity politics, the simplification of that, indigenous versus colonial and, you know, the normal tribal impulse, but this time directed towards identities instead of good ideas, is part of this whole package of creating this, these sharp edges that are, you know, ratcheting up things out there, if I can put it that way, or, you know, are making relationships difficult between human beings.

00:17:51.020 We have a prime minister who wants, you know, unironically, and I would say uncontroversially, it wasn't really condemned by that many people, called Canada a post-national country, which is to say Canada does not have a unique Canadian national identity.

00:18:06.380 And he was saying this as really an extreme manifestation of what multiculturalism is, which is that we have so many things and so many people here that Canada really ceases to exist.

00:18:17.280 I mean, Mark Stein once said Canada is basically like Terminal 1 at Pearson Airport, where its composition is just whoever's walking through at that particular moment.

00:18:25.560 And I'd say in retrospect, that was a better position than the one that came about in the last couple of years, where Canada did mean something, and it meant something very negative.

00:18:35.860 It meant something very unholy. 0.86

00:18:37.480 Canada was a country of genocide. 0.98

00:18:39.400 Canada was a country of oppression. 0.98

00:18:41.400 Canada was all of these things.

00:18:43.700 And, you know, just in December, we saw young Dundas Square as getting a new name in Toronto, because Dundas, even though he was an abolitionist, was deemed too close to that, you know, naughty era that we've decided to condemn.

00:18:56.800 And I feel like the new Trudeopian position here is becoming more commonplace, which is that Canada as a country is something to be reviled. 0.81

00:19:05.940 And I go back to the subtitle of your book, Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.

00:19:10.120 I mean, you flip those around and you have pretty much the progressive view of this country.

00:19:14.620 We should cancel and not cherish.

00:19:15.980 Both Trudeau opinions were in error and are in error, right?

00:19:21.460 So the notion that Canada is a genocidal nation state is word inflation, and it does a great disservice to those who have suffered through actual physical genocides.

00:19:29.100 I'm not a big fan of the, you know, the notion that there's cultural genocide.

00:19:32.920 Yes, you know, part of your culture can slip away intentionally or unintentionally or be repressed.

00:19:37.300 That's not the same thing as physical genocide.

00:19:39.920 And we should never equate the two.

00:19:41.260 It's word inflation.

00:19:42.040 And it's very damaging because when everything is genocide, then nothing is.

00:19:46.660 Rwanda had a genocide. 0.92

00:19:48.580 Nazis murdered Jews in a genocidal campaign over six years during World War II.

00:19:53.740 Let's be clear about words.

00:19:55.860 George Orwell always worried about gutting words and meaning making them into something they're not or something different or avoiding the real issue by using words that are far too cute or clever.

00:20:07.600 So that's a wrong position.

00:20:10.020 I mean, the late Trudeau position.

00:20:12.840 But the earlier one is just as an error that we're sort of as post-national nation state.

00:20:17.520 And look, I'm pro-immigrant.

00:20:19.040 I like the fact everyone from around the world can be here.

00:20:21.540 That only works, though, if you anchor around a few core ideas, the rights of the individual.

00:20:27.460 You know, if you understand the rights of women. 1.00

00:20:30.040 You know, and part of the fault of this, again, is this moral relativism that every idea is created equal.

00:20:34.660 People love equality.

00:20:35.660 It's not always a good thing.

00:20:36.720 Not every idea is created equal.

00:20:38.800 If you think Jews should die because you're a Nazi or you belong to Hamas, your ideas are not equal to the Western traditional concept that individuals have the right to survive and thrive.

00:20:49.240 And increasingly over the, you know, the centuries, we got to treating everyone as an individual and not part of their group. 0.58

00:20:55.340 That was the Martin Luther King vision, which I thought we had almost achieved until we went into reverse.

00:20:59.860 So, yeah, we've got problems with that sort of post-national concept.

00:21:05.200 But ultimately, this notion behind it that every idea is equal.

00:21:08.520 Really?

00:21:09.100 Okay.

00:21:09.660 So if you're in Toronto, as I once wrote in a Globe and Mail column probably six years ago, and I'm not sure if they'd reprint it these days.

00:21:15.160 If you really believe all ideas are equal in Toronto, invite up 10 million Texans with, you know, believing the right to bear arms. 1.00

00:21:22.000 You like that idea?

00:21:23.080 I'm going to guess a lot of Toronto progressives don't.

00:21:25.880 But I also don't like ideas of, say, you know, maybe a fundamentalist Mormon breakaway sect that thinks women are property and that it's okay to have 12 or 20 wives.

00:21:33.720 But I don't care if it's Mormons or a more fundamentalist, you know, strain of Islam that might believe the same thing.

00:21:40.660 I think women have the right to be individuals and not to be treated as cattle. 0.94

00:21:45.520 So these things, ideas are not created equal.

00:21:48.720 But we live in this age where nobody wants to say that some ideas are better than others.

00:21:52.640 I prefer monogamy to polygamy because I think ultimately it's a bad deal for women. 1.00

00:21:56.740 You know, we've had this problem even in like southwestern British Columbia.

00:22:00.800 I don't know if that, you know, breakaway Mormon sect is still there, you know, bountiful BC. 1.00

00:22:05.460 But I remember interviewing someone about 10 or 15 years ago on her book, and she was an escapee from that.

00:22:10.080 And you can tell quite clearly that not all ideas are created equal because that particular one oppressed women.

00:22:16.060 So maybe that's the core problem, Andrew, is we live in such a morally relativistic age and people don't know how to make distinctions.

00:22:23.440 And therefore, they also don't know how to make necessary moral distinctions.

00:22:26.900 And now it's showing up in a time of war where people can't think back five seconds to October the 7th and why Hamas is at fault for all the deaths in the Gaza Strip, including those of innocent Gazans. 0.59

00:22:38.740 Let's blame them.

00:22:40.080 Let's not blame Israel, which has no choice, because if it lies down, they're all dead.

00:22:44.120 Yeah, and I'll quote Mark Stein again, because I think you've raised an important point here.

00:22:49.500 He once said something along the lines of, you could have five middle-aged white women sitting around a table. 0.99

00:22:55.660 And to use a contemporary example, you add to the mix, you know, Hamas's leading cleric that wants to kill the Jews. 0.73

00:23:02.580 You've made it more diverse, but you haven't made it better.

00:23:05.560 So this idea that diversity is an inherent moral good is incredibly flawed, but it's also, I'd say, an inevitable consequence of the prioritization of group identity and identity politics, which you were talking about earlier.

00:23:19.460 And how do we break that?

00:23:21.320 And is that consistent with how a lot of real people are viewing the world around them?

00:23:26.140 Or is it purely an academia, elite establishment creation?

00:23:32.120 No, I think it's seeped into popular culture, though I think most people, you know, I get a sense most people think there's something wrong with what's going on now.

00:23:39.520 They just don't know how to push back.

00:23:41.060 I mean, look, some of us started a think tank to push back on this, right?

00:23:43.480 That's why we started the Aristotle Foundation, you know, to make people think is the short, you know, maybe motto we should use at the Aristotle Foundation.

00:23:50.780 We've got another slogan, champion reason, democracy, and civilization.

00:23:54.220 But in essence, you can shorten it to, you know, we try to make people think.

00:23:58.820 And right, diversity, this is the problem of living on buzzwords or living on the surface.

00:24:02.580 Diversity means nothing or everything.

00:24:05.200 Look, the United States was very diverse in 1860.

00:24:08.140 It had pro-slave holding states and anti-slave holding states, but that's not the kind of diversity you want. 0.52

00:24:13.760 You know, you want the kind of diversity where, yeah, your skin color doesn't matter and the rest of it.

00:24:18.440 That's a good kind of diversity, but it means it doesn't matter. 0.66

00:24:21.420 So stop paying attention to groups and re-adopt the Martin Luther King preference for, you know, the content of your character and look at that.

00:24:30.260 So how do we get back there?

00:24:32.500 Well, you know, I think part of it is what you and I do and try and discuss these issues openly.

00:24:37.360 I mean, I've told people sometimes when I talk about the Aristotle Foundation and what we're trying to do,

00:24:42.360 I think actually just telling the truth, you know, is a good defensive but also offensive strategy in this sense.

00:24:50.980 You know, people, I think, eventually get sick of propaganda.

00:24:54.380 They get sick of, you know, eating cotton candy.

00:24:57.860 I mean, I loved that as a kid.

00:24:58.780 It wasn't very nourishing.

00:24:59.960 Eventually people get sick of the saccharine or, you know, the excuses or, you know, the propaganda.

00:25:04.960 They sense something's wrong.

00:25:06.460 So when someone comes out and says, when everybody else is saying the emperor looks wonderful today, doesn't he?

00:25:12.440 Aren't his colorful clothes just, you know, superb and he must have a wonderful designer?

00:25:16.700 And you look around and you go, did I miss something?

00:25:19.420 I think he's buck naked.

00:25:20.880 And then people go, you can say that? 0.66

00:25:22.940 Yes, you can.

00:25:23.920 And maybe you should.

00:25:25.200 You know, because this is also what we're seeing as well as an attack on empiricism.

00:25:29.300 The anti-reality nature of our age is an attack on empiricism.

00:25:32.880 And if you force me to say the emperor is fully clothed when I think he's buck naked or if you, Andrew, tell me you're a woman and you haven't transitioned actually to being a woman physically, you know, I'd call you a woman then. 0.88

00:25:44.180 I won't call you that now because for you to demand that I call you that, Andrew, is anti-reality.

00:25:49.220 It's a denial of my empirical senses.

00:25:51.400 That's a recipe for madness.

00:25:52.720 But it also explains our age because people want you to go along, to get along, to say things that are not true or at least are suspect and should be debated.

00:26:01.380 And if you can't debate what should be obvious, the emperor has no clothes, then you're in a very different type of world and it's anti-reality.

00:26:09.460 And it is a recipe for insanity.

00:26:11.500 And insanity is also part of what we're dealing with these days, a willing insanity as opposed to truth telling.

00:26:18.520 And the left in particular used to think it spoke truth to power.

00:26:21.720 I always thought that was overdone.

00:26:22.860 You know, they spoke convenient Brahmides to, I don't know, Marxist historians and Marxist economists who agreed with them.

00:26:33.240 You know, but and anyway, not to digress, but I don't think that's the case anymore.

00:26:39.540 You know, this notion of truth to power.

00:26:40.940 I think it's something that actually the general population would like to see and like to hear, but they're not seeing it because a lot of our academics and some of our politicians are in la-la land and don't want to say the emperor is naked.

00:26:54.260 Anyone who's been familiar with the social psychological Milgram experiment, which just to give it a very crude summation, is one where people are effectively going along with administering pain up until the point of a potentially lethal dose of pain to someone simply because someone in a white lab coat tells them to.

00:27:13.260 And look up the experiment yourself.

00:27:14.860 I'm giving it a summary there.

00:27:16.100 But the takeaway from that is that people are remarkably deferential towards authority.

00:27:20.900 And as I reflect on that now, I think a new authority that really wasn't envisioned in that Milgram experiment is the masses and conformity, whereas people just look at the world around them.

00:27:31.780 And like you've said, they they're like those people in the emperor's clothes that just don't want to say what they're thinking.

00:27:38.740 And they deny that part of themselves.

00:27:40.700 They kill that part of themselves because they don't want to stand out.

00:27:43.800 My wife and I were on a streetcar in Vienna near the tail end of COVID and Austria had gotten rid of all mandates.

00:27:50.620 There were no mask requirements.

00:27:52.060 The only exception was public transit in Vienna, which we didn't know about.

00:27:56.500 So we get on this without masks.

00:27:58.340 Everyone else is wearing a mask.

00:27:59.660 We look, you know, people looking at us and we didn't have them because we thought they were all done.

00:28:04.100 And by the time we had been on this streetcar for five minutes, it was amazing how many masks had started to come off because we had inadvertently staged a bit of a mutiny where other people that didn't want to, but thought they had to were going against it.

00:28:16.840 And I mean, people can take from that whatever they want on the COVID stuff specifically, but on speech, it's so important.

00:28:22.160 If you deny what you know to be true, eventually you'll start believing the lie, or at least everyone in society will be going along with the lie that it doesn't matter if they believe it.

00:28:32.080 Well, and you may be wrong about something, so you can believe something sincerely, but it doesn't make it true.

00:28:37.380 I don't believe in your truth and my truth.

00:28:39.140 I actually believe in objective truth, you know, but the key point is, yes, you have to tell it as you see it, even if you're incorrect, then maybe you should get your eyes checked or.

00:28:47.080 Well, John Stuart Mill, it's that process that lets us learn what the real truth is because you're wrong.

00:28:51.800 I'm right.

00:28:52.240 I'm wrong.

00:28:52.700 You're right.

00:28:53.120 We'll, we'll find the truth if we air those.

00:28:55.400 Yes, exactly.

00:28:56.500 Because you don't know if you're mistaken until you say something out loud.

00:28:59.280 You know, somebody says, well, have you considered X?

00:29:01.740 So, yeah, that's, that's the actual way to, to obtain, you know, or possibly obtain truth or at least rule out the false stuff, right?

00:29:09.400 There's a lot of falsification.

00:29:10.660 That's the scientific method.

00:29:12.140 You know, you can't always prove something's true, but you can falsify stuff.

00:29:15.480 So to say, no, I don't think that's the explanation.

00:29:17.880 And here is why.

00:29:19.380 Look, I think most people are followers and it's always been true in human history.

00:29:22.380 And I don't mean that as a criticism.

00:29:23.480 I just mean, this is also, this shows the importance of leadership.

00:29:27.980 If you lack leaders that are willing to tell the truth, if you lack leaders that are willing to be brave, if leaders, you know, political leaders and others, or, you know, leaders in quotes in that case, if those who have some, you know, ability to amplify their voices, and there's a lot more of those these days than there used to be, aren't interested in telling the truth, but are interested in an agenda, an anti-reality agenda.

00:29:50.640 And again, this is not ideological.

00:29:52.040 I mean, I've seen this all over the place, then, then we're in a pretty pickle.

00:29:56.000 So I think maybe that's part of it as well.

00:30:00.560 But yeah, I mean, social media doesn't help here, I guess, because it amplifies all sorts of stuff.

00:30:04.780 And it's hard to sort through.

00:30:05.740 And people honestly sometimes don't know who to believe.

00:30:08.240 So, you know, I don't have any magic bullet solutions for this, other than, you know, a core value of freedom of expression, yes, does need to be there.

00:30:17.320 So you and I and everyone else on this, you know, planet with what are seven, eight billion of us can debate certain things to hopefully arrive at a less error prone position.

00:30:27.720 To bring it back full circle, Mark, to how we started here, as we wrap this up, and I asked you then, are Canada's best years ahead or behind?

00:30:36.760 And you said you're an optimist.

00:30:38.440 So what's necessary for us to make sure they are ahead?

00:30:42.980 Well, tell the truth.

00:30:44.940 Be clear that when it comes to free expression, that doesn't mean violence.

00:30:49.480 So you can't cross the line and shut down someone's shop or show up at their dorm and harass them because they're Jewish.

00:30:56.160 So we need to make distinctions.

00:30:57.940 So we need to be able to have free expression in our search for truth and make distinctions.

00:31:04.120 And I think if we start doing that, you know, saying things out loud that we think are true, and we may be mistaken, but say things that we think are true,

00:31:11.100 and ask people to start making distinctions, then I think we're on our way to a bit of a better world.

00:31:20.580 But, you know, I mean, the internet is, you know, like drinking from a fire hose, and it's only going to get more that way.

00:31:26.860 So, but I think on a personal level, you have to commit to those two things, like try and have a bit of an open mind.

00:31:33.380 We all have our biases and, you know, ask other people and yourself to make distinctions.

00:31:39.280 All right.

00:31:41.260 Well, lots of great food for thought there.

00:31:43.340 And as I said at the beginning, food for thought in the 1860s.

00:31:46.240 Oh, I got to move it over there.

00:31:47.540 The 1867 Project, Why Canada Should Be Cherished and Not Cancelled.

00:31:51.900 The editor is the founder of the Aristotle Foundation, Mark Mielke.

00:31:54.840 Always a pleasure, Mark.

00:31:55.720 Thanks so much for coming on today.

00:31:57.180 Thank you, Andrew, and Happy New Year.

00:31:58.860 And to you as well.

00:31:59.820 And to all of you tuning in, I hope you have a great rest of your Boxing Day and a Happy New Year.

00:32:04.440 But we'll talk to you a couple times between now and then.

00:32:06.540 This is Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North.

00:32:09.800 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:32:12.200 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:32:14.540 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - December 26, 2023

Are Canada's best years ahead or behind？

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