Juno News - Liberalism’s Blind Spot

00:00:00.000 There's a strange idea circulating in the modern West that nations can be stripped of their history,

00:00:06.100 flooded with strangers, governed by technocrats, and somehow remain cohesive.

00:00:11.860 The Canadian political class has embraced this idea with an almost religious conviction.

00:00:17.060 Normally we just call it DEI. But are we really testing whether the country can survive without

00:00:22.040 a shared understanding of itself? Only consumers, service providers, and a managerial elite to

00:00:28.760 shuffle them around like interchangeable parts. The philosophical foundations of this experiment

00:00:34.140 is universalism, the belief that human beings are indistinctive, interchangeable units,

00:00:41.540 that they can be uprooted, relocated, and dropped into anywhere in time or place without friction

00:00:49.020 or consequence. My guest today has been thinking about this for a long time. Patrick Keeney is a

00:00:54.700 philosopher-turned-essayist who critiques modern academia with the precision of a seasoned skeptic.

00:01:00.320 He's a regular contributor to C2C Journal, and he blends classical liberal ideas with cultural

00:01:06.500 commentary, challenging the intellectual drift of our academic institutions. In today's episode,

00:01:13.120 we talk about his recent article about mass immigration, the civic consequences of it,

00:01:18.260 and the underpinning assumptions of multiculturalism, and whether diversity is in fact

00:01:24.680 our strength. I'm Melanie Bennett. This is Disrupted.

00:01:37.380 Hi, Patrick. Thank you so much for joining me today.

00:01:40.600 Well, nice to be invited. Thank you.

00:01:42.880 So your article, I believe it's National Sovereignty in the Age of Mass Migration,

00:01:48.940 touches on some things that I've been thinking about a lot recently, so I'm really pleased that

00:01:54.260 you were able to come onto my show and discuss these topics with me. Now, the article that you

00:01:58.740 wrote for the C2C Journal is about mass migration, but mass migration in and of itself didn't really

00:02:05.280 appear out of a vacuum. So the policy was adopted based on some fundamental assumptions from progressive

00:02:13.620 liberalism. And those assumptions are what I want to talk about today. The first one I want to talk

00:02:21.680 about is the idea of universal man, which I guess could be summed up as interchangeable units of human

00:02:31.380 beings. So I think so. I think that's a fair kind of summary of it. And it's a particular view of the

00:02:42.020 individual that grows out of the Enlightenment. And this ideal of the human as kind of detached from

00:02:49.460 any particularities. The idea is that we are this autonomous, rational creature, fundamentally defined by

00:03:02.540 choice, we make choices in the world. It's a very peculiar understanding of the human condition. I mean, it goes

00:03:10.640 back to a debate, I suppose, between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Are we simply rational creatures who think about

00:03:19.160 our self-interest and calculate accordingly? Or is there something more to our condition? That is to

00:03:25.720 say, are we, you know, embedded in communities? Do we grow out of a particular family, a particular nation, a

00:03:31.800 particular time? That's certainly what Edmund Burke thought, and that he thought the kind of understanding

00:03:37.800 of the human as this abstract disembodied creature was a philosophical mistake of the first order.

00:03:44.680 And, you know, that same kind of universal man, I guess, was given its most recent articulation

00:03:53.240 in the theory of justice by the American philosopher John Rawls, this great magisterial book, which was

00:04:00.920 published in 1971. And Rawls goes so far as to suggest that justice in the liberal state has to be articulated

00:04:10.840 from behind a veil of ignorance, that we, none of us know what our situations would be in this world. And I mean,

00:04:18.040 it's a powerful thought experiment, and nobody could deny it. But I think it's, it proceeds from a fundamental flaw that

00:04:26.200 human psychology is not, you can't account for rationality from behind a veil of ignorance, or from these abstract, you know,

00:04:34.840 understandings of the human condition. In that sense, I think Burke was right, you know, to be very blunt about it.

00:04:42.520 So one of the examples of this, I guess you could say this cosmopolitan or elite idea that strangers and

00:04:49.480 neighbors are exactly the same in universalism, you gave the example that, well, you wrote about the example

00:04:57.560 where parents shouldn't really prioritize their own children, but all children, like, so that came up

00:05:02.680 in your article. Can you, and you touched on just now about how this maybe is a fallacy, maybe humans

00:05:10.440 don't really think that way. Can you elaborate a little bit on how you think this might fail to

00:05:15.160 consider things like how human psychology actually works in real life, or maybe some of the consequences

00:05:20.840 that we're seeing now, stemming from this mindset currently in Canada?

00:05:24.280 Yeah, yeah, you know, the cosmopolitan ideal is that we ought to treat all people everywhere equally

00:05:31.160 with the same moral concern. And again, that's, I think, it comes from the enlightenment ideals.

00:05:40.200 And in theory, it's a noble aspiration that, you know, our moral concerns ought to extend

00:05:46.760 universally. But I think it overlooks something fundamental about human beings, and that is,

00:05:54.280 we love our own, we love our own children, we love our own spouses, we love our neighbors, we love our countrymen.

00:06:01.320 And that's not because we think that they are perfect, or because we think they are superior,

00:06:07.720 but because they are our own. And this notion that we can extend this kind of love universally,

00:06:15.880 I think strikes most of us as a very peculiar kind of idea. I mean, that my own kith and kin have no more

00:06:25.560 claim on my moral deliberations than somebody on the other side of the world whom I'll never meet,

00:06:31.560 is a very peculiar thing to say. The late British philosopher Bernard Williams addresses this kind of

00:06:37.800 dilemma. And, you know, he says quite clearly that this partiality about our moral concerns is not a

00:06:44.760 defect, but it's a necessity. It grounds our obligations. And it makes possible, I think, the very

00:06:51.000 idea of loyalty, responsibility, and care. So when we try to structure a nation or a political order on

00:06:59.720 a cosmopolitan model, when we pretend that loyalty to one's own, to our fellow Canadians is some kind of

00:07:07.640 vice rather than a virtue, then I think we drain political life of its affective core. You know,

00:07:14.360 nations, I don't think any nation can simply, you know, function as a delivery system for abstract

00:07:24.360 rights. Nations require solidarity, and they require some sense of a common story, a shared sense of

00:07:31.640 us, of who we are. And when we dissolve that in the cosmopolitan understanding, so too do we dissolve,

00:07:38.920 I think, the basis for the transmission of civic culture. So we end up with a citizenry that no longer

00:07:46.840 sees itself as, you know, a moral community, but as perhaps a marketplace of entitlements of the

00:07:54.920 assertion of rights, something like that. Yeah, so it seems to me when you describe it that way,

00:08:02.440 it's very, very similar to Richard Dawkins' selfish gene idea where evolution requires closer kin, so genes

00:08:10.520 that are more closely related to protect each other more or look after each other more, to actually

00:08:16.440 perpetuate the species, right? So that would be reflected then back into our own psychology,

00:08:21.960 which would be saying that you sort of protect your own kin, because that's how you perpetuate

00:08:27.320 the culture in other ways. So it seems very similar to me that this biological and cultural arguments

00:08:32.840 may actually go together. Yeah, well, I've never thought of that. But yeah, I guess there is,

00:08:38.520 there are similarities between the idea of the selfish gene and this idea of cultural continuity.

00:08:47.320 Yeah, I haven't read Dawkins for a long time, but perhaps I should.

00:08:53.320 It just seems really similar to me, because then we, I just want to turn our attention a little bit to

00:08:58.360 the idea of multiculturalism, because that's another fundamental assumption that's made when we talk about

00:09:03.480 mass immigration. So it's a fundamental idea that that supports this idea of mass immigration. So my

00:09:08.440 idea of multiculturalism is that it rests on the ideas that many different cultures can coexist

00:09:15.000 peacefully under a shared political framework. So those particular cultures don't necessarily have to

00:09:21.560 embed themselves within one another, and they might not share the same moral frameworks, and they might

00:09:27.400 not share the same act justice, right, this sense of justice. But that would all be managed under this,

00:09:34.760 I guess you could say this Leviathan, this all seeing eye of the managerial state, which then manages

00:09:40.200 all of these different cultures. And it feels like this idea of universalism is a kind of moral neutrality

00:09:45.960 that doesn't really exist. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think multiculturalism is premised on this idea

00:09:54.120 that the state can be morally neutral among competing visions of what is good or the good life. And so it

00:10:01.720 envisions the public square, you know, less as something of an empty stage, right, where any number of

00:10:09.480 actors can live out on the public square, what it is they think is the good life. But I don't think any society,

00:10:17.080 no matter how well governed or how well favored, can survive without some vision of the good life.

00:10:24.040 And so beneath every law, between every institution, there is, I think, a set of moral assumptions

00:10:32.200 at work. So these moral assumptions, I suppose, one can think of as kind of a, you know, moral grammar

00:10:38.680 that guides every society. So when governments pretend to be morally neutral, I don't think they're anything

00:10:44.680 of the sort. What they're doing is asserting or perhaps, you know, giving some kind of code of

00:10:55.080 credence to a particular view of what is right, what is worth protecting, what kinds of ideas ought to

00:11:01.800 be suppressed, and what ought to be cultivated. So the question to me has always been whether the

00:11:09.320 government of the day is willing to admit and articulate what it is they see as, you know,

00:11:16.520 what is to be promoted. So in practice, though, I think multiculturalism ends up avoiding, you know,

00:11:23.960 the hard work of moral judgment. Clearly, not all views of the world can be assimilated into any civic

00:11:31.880 society. We rightly, I think, look askance at societies that keep slaves, for example. And so

00:11:40.120 the question before every government is which values are necessary to sustain freedom?

00:11:46.120 Which values are compatible with our civic ideals? These are tough questions, clearly,

00:11:51.400 and one understands why politicians mostly want to avoid them. But without confronting these kinds of,

00:11:58.120 what we might call first order moral questions, I think, our democracy weakens. Liberalism can't survive

00:12:06.120 simply on procedures alone, there has to be a substance to it. And that substance, of course,

00:12:11.320 is worked out in policies and politics, which is why, you know, just parenthetically, I think freedom

00:12:18.600 of speech is so absolutely essential in any democracy, we have to be able to articulate and make clear

00:12:25.880 what the governing ideas, if you will, of our society are. And it's impossible to do that

00:12:32.280 without any sort of freedom to express ourselves. I've done a little bit of work in Myanmar after the,

00:12:42.280 you know, the generals took over. And the generals imposed a preposterous set of, you know, just horrific

00:12:48.680 ideas. And I forgot what the statute is. But basically, any kind of criticism of the generals,

00:12:57.240 you're called a terrorist, and you're thrown in jail. And, you know, so I think that Canadians are 1.00

00:13:03.720 right to be on guard against, you know, intrusions into free speech by the government.

00:13:11.240 I do think there is, well, I agree, I don't think the state here in Canada is morally neutral,

00:13:19.480 I think it's taken on a secular religion, which we call diversity, equity, and inclusion.

00:13:23.720 I think it's definitely taken that stance as their moral orthodoxy. And, you know, we talk a lot about

00:13:30.920 DEI, and whether or not this is undermining society, we hear things like diversity is our strength. And this

00:13:38.360 is rooted in, in my opinion, this idea of multiculturalism, the universal man, the

00:13:42.600 individual, the interchangeable unit of human being that can be transposed in time and place,

00:13:47.400 and so on and so forth. And so, does this lead to tribalism or nativism, if we reject a shared identity,

00:13:55.560 if we don't integrate? Oh, I don't think it necessarily does. But, you know, diversity is our

00:14:03.160 strength has been, you know, kind of the rhetoric for, oh, I don't know, 10 or 15 years at least. And,

00:14:09.720 you know, diversity itself isn't inherently corrosive. Canada, after all, has long been a diverse nature.

00:14:16.600 But I think the challenge arises when diversity is elevated to this kind of quasi-religion, as you

00:14:24.040 mentioned, diversity, equity, and inclusion. When we look at what that has done to some of our

00:14:29.080 institutions, for example, I don't think it's a very helpful, you know, public policy. But when we

00:14:35.800 elevate diversity to this, you know, defining moral principle, and the highest good a nation can

00:14:43.480 aspire to, more so even than justice or good order or liberty, then I think it's an unfortunate kind of

00:14:52.360 turn of events. And so we no longer speak, you know, of, in Canada at least, the public language,

00:14:58.920 at least to my ear, we no longer speak of a shared inheritance, of common purpose, of what binds us

00:15:04.680 together as a nation. Instead, you know, the language we hear in the public square tends to be that of

00:15:11.800 inclusion, of equity, of representativeness, terms that signal a moral virtue, but which are curiously

00:15:20.680 vague about what they mean. And I'm curiously vague about what, if anything, sort of unites the whole.

00:15:28.200 So I think this rhetorical term matters. It's when we invoke diversity not as one value amongst others,

00:15:36.600 but as the supreme value to which, you know, a country, a nation ought to aspire to, we risk out,

00:15:44.760 we risk hollowing out, you know, the deeper cultural and historical foundations, on which,

00:15:51.000 I would argue, genuine pluralism depends. Diversity becomes detached, as it were, from any defining

00:15:57.160 narrative, and it ceases to unite it and begins to fragment us. So I think, you know, a healthy society

00:16:05.320 welcomes newcomers, but welcomes newcomers into a shared civic project. And diversity can be enriching

00:16:13.080 when it's framed within a confident national identity. But when that identity has been denigrated

00:16:20.040 or denied, as we witness in this country, then I think diversity becomes something that pulls us apart. 1.00

00:16:28.520 It transforms the public square into, you know, a battleground of group grievances, rather than

00:16:34.440 a meeting place of citizens.

00:16:36.040 Yeah, it seems that you can't really have a core identity under universalism, or at least that's

00:16:44.040 sort of how I'm looking at it a little bit more these days. Speaking again of universalism, one of

00:16:50.200 the areas that you don't talk about in your article is the concept or the frameworks of the human rights.

00:16:56.600 So in Canada here, we have universal human rights. It is based in universalism, as far as I can,

00:17:01.800 I understand. And in many respects, it's also another kind of secular religion that brought on

00:17:08.760 this DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, no core identity vision for Canada. But again,

00:17:15.800 if I bring you back to the justice system, not all cultures have the same justice system. And I'll call

00:17:21.080 one out specifically, Islam within the religion in itself, has Sharia. Sharia is its own justice system 0.71

00:17:27.560 integral to the religion in and of itself, which is very, very different from the principles of

00:17:34.280 equality under liberalism, right? So multiculturalism assumes that they can all live side by side under

00:17:39.480 the guidance and the management of the Leviathan. But here's a curious question. I'd be curious to know

00:17:45.560 what you think about this. Isn't that, in some respects, another form of colonialism to assume that

00:17:51.080 everyone across the world, everyone in Canada, all this multicultural society of different individual

00:17:55.800 cultures, all should exist under this universalist human rights framework?

00:18:01.480 Yeah, I think it is. I think it is a form of moral colonialism, to coin a phrase, something like

00:18:07.800 that. And the idea that, you know, rights are universal is itself problematic. And again, I mean,

00:18:14.760 it's old news in many ways, you know, Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher famously called rights,

00:18:20.840 human rights, human rights nonsense upon stilts, by which he meant that rights needed to be tethered

00:18:26.680 to a sense of the good to a civic understanding, if they were to have, you know, some sort of purchase

00:18:33.800 in the political arena. He lost that debate, by the way, if we see, we seem to be living in an era of

00:18:42.680 rights. And what one soon discovers, if you delve a little bit into human rights, which I have done

00:18:50.760 a little bit, and you discover that they are promoting a very specific vision of the good,

00:18:56.520 which might be, I guess, sort of summarized as Western, secular, individualist, that sort of thing.

00:19:03.960 And those understandings of the human good, of human flourishing, have been exported, as it were,

00:19:11.720 to all corners in the globe, of the globe. So human rights, you know, sort of proceed from the

00:19:20.120 assumption that all societies must conform to a particular ethical impulse or ethical template,

00:19:28.280 regardless of their traditions, their religions, you mentioned Islam, regardless of their political

00:19:34.840 cultures. And, I mean, it's tricky work to distinguish what are, you know, genuine moral

00:19:42.520 rights from, you know, I have the right to talk to you on YouTube, something like that. I mean,

00:19:48.280 one of the problems inherent in the language of rights is just their ability to spread to every

00:19:54.920 aspect of discourse, whether it's moral or non-moral. The Harvard philosopher, Mary Ann Glendon,

00:20:01.240 is very good on this point. And she says in her book, Rights Talk, which is quite old by now, but,

00:20:07.480 you know, she points out that what rights discourse has done is eroded a serious political chat,

00:20:15.720 political conversation. So when we import these idea of human rights, I think what we do is

00:20:23.640 we are imposing on various parts of the world, you know, under the idea of human rights, a certain kind

00:20:33.880 of conformity to a particular understanding of human flourishing, which of course is what rights are when

00:20:41.560 you strip it all away. How do humans best flourish? And again, you know, it's tricky because we can't

00:20:47.640 really deny that there are, you know, moral intuitions that are universal. You know, the prohibition

00:20:54.600 against torture, against tyranny, against injustice, et cetera, can all be consumed under human rights.

00:21:00.520 But I think it is a peculiar kind of understanding to think that rights ought to be the same in

00:21:06.600 Paris or Ottawa or Washington or Phnom Penh or Bangkok. I mean, it just strikes me as a peculiar

00:21:14.280 kind of assertion. Yeah. You, you talk about a few times in this conversation, the good,

00:21:19.800 the true and the beautiful, which is a very Western way of looking at the world. And that made me think

00:21:27.320 of also you, you brought up Roger Scruton when he talks about the oikophilia or the love of one's own.

00:21:34.840 And I loved that you brought this up in this article, but how do I defend the principles of loving one's

00:21:42.040 own? Because it doesn't mean hating the other. Loving one's own doesn't mean hating the other. It's

00:21:45.720 another thing that you brought up in there. But how do we defend that principle without falling into

00:21:51.240 tribalism or nativism? Because ultimately in a multicultural society where all cultures are equal

00:21:59.000 under this Leviathan, who is one's own culture in a multicultural society?

00:22:04.280 Well, yeah, oikophilia is a term that was coined by the late Roger Scruton, but it was coined as a term

00:22:13.960 of affection, not as a term of exclusion. And it's the idea that there is moral significance in the

00:22:21.000 familiar. That is, there is moral significance in the world around us, in our neighbors, in our country,

00:22:26.280 in our family. And you're quite right. I think every virtue has the potential to be

00:22:36.760 corrupted in some sense. You know, Aristotle famously talks about deficiency and excess. So

00:22:42.840 if you look at oikophilia, I think it can certainly be turned into some kind of chauvinism,

00:22:49.240 just as courage can become recklessness. So I think with the love of one's own, it's like every other

00:22:55.720 virtue, we have to find that, you know, Aristotelian golden mean, somewhere between excess and deficiency.

00:23:02.680 But what has been true, I think, over certainly the course of my lifetime, we have had very few

00:23:11.880 ideas, shall we say, that want to ground us and tell us that, you know, what we have surrounding us

00:23:19.320 ought to be the root of our love. And I think Scruton, you know, did us a great service by

00:23:26.360 pointing that term and reminding us that we are to find, you know, hospitality in the common,

00:23:32.920 so to speak. So yeah, again, the other thing to say is that oikophilia is the basis of hospitality. 0.76

00:23:39.880 It invites the stranger in, but it does not tear down the house to do so. It offers a place at the

00:23:45.480 table, but it anticipates that our dinner guests, if you will carry on the metaphor, will be sociable

00:23:52.520 and convivial, and will respect the manners at the table. That's a rather strained metaphor,

00:23:57.640 but we'll go with that. Yeah, I guess, I guess we'll have to find that out over time. Hopefully,

00:24:02.520 we'll have more conversations in the public sphere about what it means to integrate, what it means to

00:24:09.320 have a Canadian culture, and even what Canadian identity means. Listen, we've run out of time,

00:24:13.800 but I loved our conversation. I'm so glad that you're able to unpack some of that with me today.

00:24:18.760 Thank you, Patrick. Well, thank you, Melanie. Today's conversation was a bit more philosophical

00:24:24.280 than usual, but I hope that it left you curious about the ideas that shape our country. Mass migration,

00:24:30.200 multiculturalism, and identity politics are more than just policy debates for managerial overlords.

00:24:36.120 They're questions about who we are, what holds us together, and what happens when that glue starts

00:24:42.200 to dissolve. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider hitting like and subscribe, and maybe

00:24:47.800 share it with someone you think might enjoy challenging the current thing. Join me next week

00:24:51.880 for another episode of Disrupted. I'm Melanie Bennett, and thanks for watching.

Juno News - July 10, 2025

Liberalism’s Blind Spot

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