Religious freedom and academic freedom are under threat
Episode Stats
Words per minute
176.42545
Harmful content
Hate speech
7
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show, host Andrew Lawton is joined by Pastor Jacob Rayom of Trinity Bible Chapel in Toronto to discuss the growing trend of Christians getting involved in politics, academic freedom, and religious freedom.
Transcript
00:00:05.480
This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:12.880
Hello everyone, welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.
00:00:16.820
This is the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North on Friday, June 9th, 2023.
00:00:22.860
We are coming to the weekend, so we always try to have discussions
00:00:26.160
that are a little bit more substantive, a little bit more in-depth,
00:00:29.080
not subject to the really nitty-gritty, horse-race-y news of the day or all that stuff,
00:00:34.060
but today I wanted to tackle two big freedoms, academic freedom and religious freedom,
00:00:39.500
the latter of which we'll start off with because I saw on CBC the other day
00:00:44.220
an article talking about the fundamentalist Christian movement
00:00:51.100
Now, if you get by the scary language in the sub-headline that talks about
00:00:55.580
an ambitious anti-LGBTQ group that's part of a populist movement,
00:01:01.700
the article itself is actually fairly substantive in nature.
00:01:05.200
It talks about some figures that we've had on this very show,
00:01:08.500
people like Pastor Aaron Rock and Pastor Jacob Rayom,
00:01:11.940
who are religious leaders that have decided to go full steam ahead
00:01:15.220
into the political world, which is not a particularly holy place,
00:01:19.440
but nonetheless, it's one that I think a lot of Christians and Canadians realize
00:01:23.540
is an important space to be in, because if you're not there,
00:01:29.640
And I think in the last three years, the church in Canada
00:01:32.500
and houses of worship in general have seen that in ways
00:01:36.400
that were probably pretty unprecedented to those who have only been around
00:01:42.240
Despite the fact that worship is so safeguarded in law
00:01:46.600
that it's actually a criminal offense to disrupt worship,
00:01:49.900
we saw governments literally locking churches out of their buildings
00:01:53.680
because they dared to assemble when the public health edicts told them not to.
00:01:58.240
So, is the solution to this in the political realm?
00:02:01.780
Well, court cases have not been going well for people in general
00:02:05.580
that have been filing COVID challenges against the government,
00:02:07.840
and public opinion is often stacked against those who were critical
00:02:14.580
Now, being the minority does not mean you're wrong,
00:02:17.500
but it does mean you have an uphill battle ahead of you.
00:02:20.380
So, I want to talk about that a little bit with Pastor Jacob Rayom,
00:02:23.440
who hails not far from me in southwestern Ontario
00:02:27.980
He's been on the show a couple of times, at least, and joins us again now.
00:02:31.620
Pastor, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:02:35.940
Now, the story that I was just mentioning before I brought you in from CBC,
00:02:43.660
It gave ample opportunity for a lot of people within the Christian community
00:02:47.660
to comment on this, but I think that the premise of the story
00:02:51.860
is where I have some issues here, because it's clear that there are a lot of people,
00:02:56.160
and I think probably CBC journalists are among them largely,
00:02:59.440
that are very uncomfortable with the idea of Christians mobilizing
00:03:05.940
Well, I guess that came out pretty clearly in the article,
00:03:09.000
and it came out in some of the response that we've received to the article.
00:03:13.280
And like you, I thought the article represented me fairly well.
00:03:16.900
They did say that there was only 200 people at church the day that he was there,
00:03:20.100
but we've consistently had about 1,200 people at church on Sunday.
00:03:25.400
There might be a few other little things here and there.
00:03:27.280
But, yeah, I mean, I was happy with how my views were presented.
00:03:30.380
So, let's talk about the politicization of the church, if you will.
00:03:35.300
And I don't mean that in a negative way, because one of my frustrations has always been,
00:03:39.400
as a Christian, that oftentimes people in my church communities have been very oblivious
00:03:47.600
And I think churches themselves have often been.
00:03:50.380
And I've talked to pastors about this that have said they don't want to alienate people
00:03:53.740
that have different political views in their congregation,
00:03:56.740
which I think is generally a very fair way of putting it.
00:03:59.600
But I don't know if any of those arguments hold when churches are targeted by politics
00:04:07.160
And I think we've seen that, especially in the last few years.
00:04:11.060
Well, I think one of the problems that we've had over the last few generations
00:04:14.260
is that people were comfortable living in, I guess, the fumes of a Christian culture.
1.00
00:04:18.860
So, Os Guinness called it, we're a flower pot, or a cut flower generation.
00:04:24.820
So, the flowers will only flower or blossom so long as there's water.
00:04:29.960
But when they're cut from the ground, they're going to die and wither eventually.
00:04:33.740
And we've lost our Christian roots as a society.
00:04:36.900
And one of the things that the churches have neglected to do is teach how Scripture itself
00:04:42.120
interacts with public policy, which is one of the roles of the pastor in discipling the people.
00:04:47.400
And so, that's something that I've been trying to work on with my congregation over the last several years.
00:04:52.600
And I know a few other pastors have awakened to the fact that this might have been a deficiency.
00:04:57.080
Has this always been something that you've been somewhat more alert to than some of your colleagues?
00:05:02.400
Or has this been a more recent revelation for you?
00:05:06.620
I actually thought my colleagues were more alert to it than they were.
00:05:11.060
So, consistently, I mean, I've had people in my church come back and say they've listened to my sermons from 10 years ago.
00:05:16.320
And they say, yeah, we can understand why you've taken some of the stands that you have.
00:05:20.100
Because you were saying the same things 10 years ago.
00:05:22.720
But I have been, I guess I've been broadsided by the deficiency that is there within a lot of churches.
00:05:32.120
And one of the things I think I felt generally in society,
00:05:35.600
and I take this not just looking at churches or places of worship, but even businesses,
00:05:40.060
is that when liberty was taken away as swiftly as it was, going back to March 2020,
00:05:46.360
people started to be very content to settle for small things.
00:05:50.760
So, you know, for example, when people were allowed to eat on patios,
00:05:54.340
when restaurants were still shut down, they were all grateful because, well, at least we could do something.
00:05:58.980
And I feel that places of worship were very similar as well.
00:06:02.320
It's like, ooh, whoop-dee-doo, you get to gather in your parking lot.
00:06:07.100
But things were so bad that these small things were seen as legitimate compromises, I think.
00:06:13.560
Yeah, I didn't think that was a win at all back then.
00:06:16.700
And so when we were going through the first lockdown,
00:06:18.880
I was in the process of uniting our church around the idea that worship,
00:06:25.820
is something that is to be directed and controlled by the revelation of God and Scripture.
00:06:29.820
And so it's not the government's prerogative to decide how, when we get to worship.
00:06:35.960
It's really up to the Lord Jesus, and he's made clear what his expectations are in Scripture,
00:06:40.540
which includes a free gathering of his people together.
00:06:48.340
Did you find that there was a level of camaraderie with leaders from different faith groups?
00:06:55.880
Did you find that the emams and the rabbis and the pastors and the priests were generally united on this, or no?
00:07:03.380
I've had very little interaction with people outside, if any,
00:07:08.000
of our own kind of theological, I guess, grid or confessional statement.
00:07:14.440
So some of the men that were named in the article that is in question, I know them quite well.
00:07:20.380
But outside of that, the interaction has been minimal.
00:07:23.740
And I think that right there may be part of the problem.
00:07:26.340
I mean, ideally, people would have all been gathering together in the same way that I think a lot of atheist libertarians
00:07:32.160
may have gotten together with Christian social conservatives to resist lockdowns.
00:07:36.440
But I think that there should have been more of a push from people of all faith groups and people, I think, not even faith groups.
00:07:42.800
I mean, people of all groups in society to understand the importance of religion to people who are adherents to religion.
00:07:49.420
And that was, I think, the big problem is that you have a culture that, as you mentioned,
0.93
00:07:53.480
has been drifting away from any sort of spiritual grounding.
00:07:57.400
And it becomes very easy to just use COVID as justification, to just give it that final kick.
00:08:04.760
Well, the reality is, is our civil rights and liberties that we have inherited and that have been ours since time immemorial,
00:08:13.200
they haven't come to us from a smorgasbord of faith groups, as we might call them.
00:08:19.220
But they've come to us and they're deeply rooted within the fertile soil of biblical Christianity.
00:08:24.380
And so these have been passed down to us from, you know, our Christian forebears.
00:08:30.060
And if anyone should have stood up, and this was the greatest disappointment to me during the lockdowns,
00:08:35.380
if anyone should have stood up, it would have been, it should have been those Christians who believe the Bible.
00:08:39.120
But I'm afraid that perhaps our history has been lost and perhaps some very important teachings from Scripture have been lost.
00:08:46.220
And it's my, it's one of my missions to help recover that.
00:08:49.220
Well, and beyond that, you actually had Christians that were not just declaring neutrality on this,
00:08:54.960
but some that were going out of their way to look at churches like yours or Henry Hildebrandt's fellowship in Elmer, Ontario,
00:09:02.900
the Church of God, and saying, well, they don't represent us.
00:09:09.140
And I think you compound that with a media that wants to put a very, very decidedly pointed view of what a good Christian is forward.
00:09:18.720
And you have that very dynamic that led us here.
00:09:23.280
And that's, there's always people that will do that and they'll try to distance themselves from you.
00:09:27.840
If you're finding yourself in hot water and you become a little bit of a hot potato, I guess.
00:09:34.960
And there were people who I thought were on our team before we went into these lockdowns of the last few years,
00:09:41.300
starting in 2020, that we didn't, we haven't come out.
00:09:44.400
And, you know, let's just say I haven't gotten some Christmas cards in the last few years.
00:09:48.700
Let me talk to you about the road forward, because, you know, obviously in your case,
00:09:53.180
which we've covered at True North and I've talked about it on my show,
00:09:55.480
that the courts have not been kind to you and they have not been kind to a lot of these legal challenges
00:10:00.220
that have come up against COVID regulations in general, not just from, from churches,
00:10:05.640
the political class, you know, liberal, conservative, NDP, Bloc Québécois,
00:10:10.160
generally speaking, all united in support of at least some form of this.
00:10:15.000
Now, whether that changes now with a new conservative leader is something that I think people have debated
00:10:21.340
But the point is that generally speaking, it was very isolating being you, I suspect,
00:10:26.160
if you were looking around at the world, not your faith community.
00:10:30.060
And I'm wondering why on earth you would still have a level of hope or confidence
00:10:35.440
that you can make changes in that world, that you can actually get politically involved.
00:10:39.380
Because I think a logical outcome to what you've gone through would be that
00:10:42.580
we need to just retreat and be even more insular.
00:10:45.860
Right. I heard someone say this morning, I was listening to, I think it was a sermon from another pastor,
00:10:50.380
and he made the point in his sermon that throughout the 2,000 years of the church's history,
00:10:55.040
the church has died several times, but we serve a God who raises the dead.
00:10:59.360
And so my hope is ultimately grounded in a God who has the power to raise Christ from the dead.
00:11:04.360
And this wouldn't be the first time it looks like the church is down for the count.
00:11:08.660
And perhaps what's gone on in the last three years is a real gift from God,
00:11:13.380
because what it's forced us to do is it's forced us to purify as a church,
00:11:18.020
and it's forced us to reevaluate the way we think on a number of things,
00:11:21.220
and it's bringing forward what the Bible actually has to say about matters that intersect with public policy,
00:11:29.180
which are really our foundational rights is Canadians.
00:11:35.780
They're grounded in the very scriptures and in the actual Ten Commandments.
00:11:40.220
So whether we're going to have a conservative party replace the liberal party in Ottawa,
00:11:46.000
that might slow some of the rot that we've seen in the last little while.
00:11:49.940
But my sense has been over the last decade or a decade and a half that we're either going over the cliff
00:11:56.380
at 100 miles an hour with the liberals or 75 miles an hour with the conservatives.
00:12:01.000
And what we really need is a grassroots reformation that grounds the country again in scripture
00:12:11.180
Let me ask you then, Pastor, do you think that the Bible is politically prescriptive?
00:12:16.060
Do you think that a Christian who adheres to the Bible has to, along with that,
00:12:20.640
have a particular set of political views beyond, you know, views of, you know, the scripture themselves?
00:12:31.700
You render unto God what is God's, and you render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
0.79
00:12:37.900
because all of a sudden Jesus is declaring that he is the one that decides what belongs to Caesar,
00:12:43.300
and he is the one that decides what belongs to God.
00:12:46.360
And so Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, has delegated to Caesar a certain role.
00:12:54.180
According to Romans chapter 13, Caesar's job, the government's job,
00:13:00.900
And then you, well, who defines what is good and who defines what is wicked?
00:13:04.600
And that's where you get back to, as Paul teaches in the book of Romans,
00:13:08.300
right where that passage is found, it's defined by the Ten Commandments.
00:13:15.800
and there's not one square inch of this world that doesn't belong to Jesus Christ.
00:13:19.700
And I think for too long, Christians have thought,
00:13:22.880
Well, my Christianity is relegated to my heart.
00:13:25.720
It's relegated to me in a relationship with Jesus.
00:13:28.160
It's relegated maybe to the church if we're not in a lockdown.
00:13:30.820
But at the end of the day, either Christ is Lord of all, or he's not Lord of at all.
00:13:37.320
And so I believe that Christ is not one God among a pantheon of gods.
00:13:44.420
And that absolutely intersects with all spheres of life, especially political life.
00:13:51.400
I mean, even the statement, Jesus Christ is Lord,
00:13:54.580
that was a political statement when that statement was made in the first century.
00:13:58.320
Because by that point in time, as you know, Rome had become essentially a dictatorship.
00:14:04.580
They didn't call it that, but Caesar was the de facto God of the Roman Empire
00:14:12.560
And so when Christ was born, he was born under the nose of a dictator.
00:14:16.500
And essentially declaring his lordship was a political threat to the Roman system of governance,
00:14:22.000
which, by the way, was absolutely fine if you practiced your religion in your little sphere of Roman life,
00:14:28.260
so long as your religion folded under the orders of Caesar.
00:14:32.960
He gets final say in what goes on in your church or your whatever, your synagogue.
00:14:37.760
And so the early Roman Empire in the first century had a hard time with Christians for that very reason.
0.89
00:14:42.600
And we need to recover that heritage, I think, as believers.
00:14:44.940
Well, to approach my question a different way, I mean, one of the challenges of politics
00:14:49.700
is that so much of what comes up and so much of what's debated is really irrelevant to most people.
00:14:56.820
And even things that are relevant to some are irrelevant to others.
00:15:00.220
So, you know, there are debates on what percentage the corporate tax rate should be
00:15:03.940
and what salaries members of parliament should take home.
00:15:06.680
And I don't think that the Bible is prescriptive on the very intricacies of, you know,
00:15:13.660
So I guess the question I'd ask is how much political latitude is there
00:15:17.540
for a Christian, in your view, within our political system?
00:15:21.840
Because on the stuff that does matter, on the stuff where the Bible and other religious texts do speak out,
00:15:28.140
those are often the issues that our political system doesn't want to go near.
00:15:35.420
So I think you're in reference to gay marriage or abortion or something like that.
00:15:39.800
Those are issues that are almost perceived as third rail issues.
00:15:42.700
But I also do think that the Bible does have something to say about economic policy.
00:15:47.240
But it does provide an arena in which to operate in.
00:15:51.120
So it provides a fence and then there's freedom within the fence.
00:15:53.960
It provides a fenced yard and there's freedom within the fenced yard.
00:15:57.220
But if you look at the commandment, you shall not steal.
00:16:00.760
Well, that commandment applies to the government.
00:16:06.920
You have to understand that the Ten Commandments were given to a people who had just been released from slavery in Egypt.
00:16:13.720
And the pharaoh was claiming ownership, not just over all private property, but over all persons.
00:16:20.040
And so the whole concept of you shall not steal is that means that just as the commandment, you shall not commit adultery means, you know, a man's not to share his wife with another woman.
00:16:31.840
The commandment, you shall not steal means my property is my property.
00:16:35.380
I can't, you know, you can't come and say, well, my name's Caesar and or my name's Doug Ford or Justin Trudeau.
00:16:41.120
And I get to take your property and do what I want with it.
00:16:43.340
This like free enterprise is wrapped up within that commandment.
00:16:46.780
So this this modern kind of secular socialism that we're living under is a concept that is completely foreign to economic policy that is rooted and founded in Scripture and the economic policy that we've inherited as English speakers.
00:17:01.260
Because our history is so deeply rooted in Scripture itself.
00:17:04.440
But but to jump on that, I mean, one of the things that I found so because you are correct about that.
00:17:08.200
And I say touche on on on that because of your answer.
00:17:11.060
And I will say that it's been infuriating to see so many people try to recast Christianity as inherently socialist.
00:17:17.700
And there's been this this weird wave emanating from sort of the United Church, Anglican Church of Canada orthodoxy that Christianity inherently necessitates state control because, you know, of all the things that Jesus commands us to do as individuals, people think, well, the government should do that.
00:17:34.020
Right. Well, we have to understand that the United Church abandoned biblical Christianity a long time ago.
00:17:39.940
And if you want to look at, you know, one of the reasons our country is in a sorry state that it is right now, it's largely because of the United Church of Canada and their rejection of biblical orthodoxy.
00:17:48.660
Because if you go back 120 years, the turn of the 20th century, 95 percent of non-Catholic Ontarians were in a were in a Protestant evangelical church.
00:17:58.520
And a lot of those churches were were England or were United churches.
00:18:02.120
And so but there was a shift in the 60s and the 50s where they went from being clearly and definitively evangelical to something that is completely foreign to biblical Christianity.
00:18:11.900
So and in every age that you live in, in the history of the church, there is always people who are trying to synthesize the spirit of the age.
00:18:21.680
So the culture of the age with Christianity and call it Christianity.
0.93
00:18:26.240
So you're getting some type of hybrid or some type of mutant between it's it's a mixture of the two.
00:18:32.820
But but that but that is you look at scripture is always considered a compromise.
00:18:38.760
And you even look at the kings in the Old Testament.
00:18:40.680
He said, well, he did this good, but he kept the high places to the the worship of Baal or the Ashtar of Poles.
0.99
00:18:48.320
And that's exactly what these people are doing, whereas the job of the faithful pastor is to put biblical Christianity in antithesis to the spirit of the age, the prevailing sins of the time.
00:19:01.080
And that's really something that I'm I've been trying to do.
00:19:03.640
And there's a number of other pastors who you who you know and are aware of who are trying to do the same thing.
00:19:10.180
As I was even thinking about what I was going to talk to you about today, I was like, you know, I think there's a much bigger conversation we need to have.
00:19:16.940
So let me know in the comments if you want to have this, because one idea I had would be to bring back some of the folks in this story we were talking about, to bring back Jacob and Pastor Aaron Rock and Pastor Michael Thiessen and have it out on this on a much larger frame.
00:19:31.500
I hope we can get you back for that as well, Jacob.
00:19:51.520
Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.
00:19:56.100
We started off talking about religious freedom, and now we are going to move into academic freedom, which you may recall reared its ugly head.
00:20:07.140
A few weeks back in my own city, when the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, of which I'm a member, was trying to bring Joanna Williams in for a lecture, and the local library would not rent them a space.
00:20:18.960
They said she would violate every policy they had, their workplace harassment, sexual harassment, their policy on damage to the venue, all this sort of nonsense.
00:20:27.460
And I did file a freedom of information request with the library when that happened.
00:20:32.100
I've not yet gotten that back, but I will certainly have a full report and publish those documents when I do.
00:20:38.860
But I do want to delve into the idea of academic freedom a little bit more, and also talk about the idea of rights.
00:20:44.440
Because this has been one of the most complicated and sometimes annoying trends in our modern political discourse, where someone will say,
00:20:57.200
But there are also things that are very important rights that I would argue are non-negotiable.
00:21:02.300
The right to life, the right to freedom of expression, academic freedom, press freedom, all comes along in that.
00:21:09.300
So at that very event that I was talking about, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship meeting,
00:21:15.780
I had the chance to hear Patrick Keeney, who is a visiting professor at Chiang Mai University, but he is Canadian,
00:21:21.320
speak about this idea of what he called rights talk, of this idea, as it sounds, just talking about rights.
00:21:28.440
And he'll explain it a little bit more eloquently than me.
00:21:31.500
But I wanted to interview him about that and delve into that idea a little bit further and also talk about some of the broader issues with academic freedom.
00:21:39.080
And Patrick Keeney actually wrote about academic freedom in an interview he did with the C2C Journal,
00:21:45.400
a great publication that is a very good friend of True North and a very good example of independent media.
00:21:51.140
And he actually talked about it with SAF's president, Mark Mercer, on his way out about the broader themes of academic freedom and what's going on in the world.
00:21:59.000
So I wanted to delve into that and lots more with Patrick Keeney.
00:22:04.440
I actually did this interview a couple of days ago, so it's a bit disjointed.
00:22:08.000
Normally on the big film sets, they have a continuity director who makes sure that everyone's wearing the same shirts and the windows are shut to the same way.
00:22:15.140
But we don't have a continuity director on The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:22:17.740
So I just point out that I'm wearing a different shirt and you're going to have to live with it.
00:22:21.780
But this was my interview with Patrick Keeney of Chiang Mai University.
00:22:25.660
And joining me now is the professor himself, Patrick Keeney, who wrote that fantastic piece in C2C Journal,
00:22:33.340
is also a visiting professor at Chiang Mai University.
00:22:36.640
I've been to Chiang Mai. I've not been to the university.
00:22:41.520
Patrick, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:22:43.780
Well, thank you, Andrew. It was delightful meeting you at the SAF's meeting.
00:22:47.340
That was already, what, a week ago, 10 days ago, something like that?
00:22:52.880
And it was interesting because I want to talk about SAF's itself.
00:22:57.180
You wrote this great piece in C2C Journal in which you talked to Mark Mercer,
00:23:02.500
who's been on this program very recently, about SAF's and about the broader landscape of academic freedom.
00:23:08.920
And I was wondering for you how that's been, because obviously every academic has their own path on this issue, it seems like.
00:23:16.780
And academic freedom increasingly means different things to different people,
00:23:21.260
especially when you decide it has to be balanced against things like diversity or equity or, you know, oppression and whatever.
00:23:28.820
So what's been your relationship with the academic freedom discourse?
00:23:33.080
Well, I've had a mixed relationship, shall I say.
00:23:36.620
I mean, I wound up in Chiang Mai, probably because of situations here at UBC Okanagan.
00:23:46.240
I mean, I think Mark has been absolutely a national leader in all of this, and I'm happy to say that I followed in his path.
00:23:55.080
But there's always been a little bit of tension in the academy about how we ought to proceed, shall we say.
00:24:03.080
So, yeah, I think I've had, as I say, a mixed bag with academic freedom.
00:24:12.280
Yeah, and obviously in your interview with Mark, here's a guy who's a very mild-mannered, even-keeled, I don't like the word moderate,
00:24:21.380
because it implies a level of political classification that I don't think is necessarily appropriate.
00:24:28.480
He doesn't court controversy for the sake of it.
00:24:31.020
But he's also been in the thick of this himself.
00:24:33.280
And I think that's one of the most cautionary tales when you hear these stories,
00:24:37.260
is that even people that think they're safe from going through what many professors have gone through often aren't.
00:24:45.020
And Mark is, to me at least, the epitome of civil discourse.
00:24:50.240
I mean, he exudes the kind of tolerance and capacity to entertain opposing ideas that I think all of us professors should take on board.
00:25:04.740
I know we all have strong views about a lot of things.
00:25:08.260
And when we hear people who have opposing views, who are equally passionate about those views,
00:25:15.580
it's difficult sometimes to maintain your composure, shall we say.
00:25:20.600
I think Mark has been exemplary in showing us how to do that.
00:25:28.380
I'd like to plug it right now in praise of dangerous universities.
00:25:35.020
I think Dr. Mercer has brought into the public domain the kinds of ideas that weren't all that radical even a few years ago.
00:25:45.880
I mean, my first professorship, my first appointment was in 1991.
00:25:49.680
And in the space from 1991 to today, the institution, the academy, has changed fairly radically.
00:25:56.400
The kind of ideas that Mark espouses are, to my way of thinking, should be just sort of uncontroversial, shall we say.
00:26:09.920
I was thinking today, you know, my dissertation supervisor was sort of an unapologetic, unreformed utilitarian.
00:26:20.660
And so my dissertation was basically an attack on utilitarian ethical theory, shall we say.
00:26:26.720
And my supervisor was just brilliant at showing me how to construct my argument,
00:26:33.640
to bring it out as forcibly, as rigorously as I could,
00:26:39.160
despite the fact that he was, in his essence, if you will, opposed to what I was writing about.
00:26:46.060
And, I mean, I think that kind of ability to sit back, listen to your interlocutors and say,
00:26:56.320
yeah, I disagree with you, but you are entitled to that kind of idea.
00:27:04.600
And as we discussed at the conference, I mean, I think all of us were scratching our heads as to what happened.
00:27:10.660
How did we lose what was, I think, at bottom, the essence of the university,
00:27:16.200
this ability to sit and disagree with each other civilly, have conversations.
00:27:22.160
And Mark and I both share an interest in the political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott.
00:27:27.160
And, of course, for Oakeshott, education is the conversation.
00:27:31.660
That's how we learn about our world is through entering into different kinds of conversations.
00:27:37.400
And part of learning those conversations is learning as well the virtues and the nuances of having a conversation,
00:27:45.460
which means, in essence, as you're doing now, I'm just going to sit and nod and listen
00:27:49.980
and take on board what others are saying without having to demonize them
00:27:56.840
and understand that they, too, have passions and they, too, have differing ideas
00:28:02.100
and that they, too, have good reasons for holding the views that they do do.
00:28:06.620
What was it Churchill, I think, said, what was his line about a heretic as somebody who,
00:28:16.940
or dogmatist as somebody who can't change the subject and won't change his mind, I think, was the quote.
00:28:24.400
So, yeah, so I think my experience in the academy has been sort of mixed, as I say.
00:28:30.420
I had the great privilege of having a dissertation supervisor who was, as I say, the essence of Millian liberalism.
00:28:40.300
And then, of course, as my career progressed, one stumbles on certain individuals who don't take that view, shall we say.
00:28:50.360
You briefly mentioned a few moments ago the path that led you to where you are now, Chiang Mai University.
00:28:57.080
And I guess that sparks the question of these phenomena we've been discussing,
00:29:01.220
the issue of institutional wokeness in the academy, the issue of academic freedom in peril,
00:29:06.880
of not being able to sit down and have the conversations.
00:29:13.180
I mean, how, in your experience working for an Asian university, has that issue manifested, if at all, there?
00:29:19.720
Because I think on a lot of things, political correctness has tended to be a Western creation,
00:29:24.360
but I don't know if in the academic setting that's held as well.
00:29:28.480
You know, the language of instruction in Chiang Mai is, understandably, it's Thai.
00:29:36.700
And I was hired primarily to help with English language instruction.
00:29:41.780
So I'm not really in a good position to talk about it, except to say that I haven't particularly noticed any sort of wokeness,
00:29:50.280
except to say that all of the kind of trends that we see in North America do eventually sort of filter out into Asia at some point.
00:29:58.780
But I'm a little insulated from, as it were, the hurly-burly of the daily discourse.
00:30:05.140
My job in Chiang Mai is basically to assist PhD students in writing their dissertations in English.
00:30:13.380
The Thai government, some years ago, in order to improve the English fluency scores in the country,
00:30:19.340
demanded that all dissertations in every discipline be submitted both in the Thai language as well as in English.
00:30:25.480
And, of course, this is a huge stumbling block for most PhD students.
00:30:30.500
And my task is to help them with their English dissertation.
00:30:36.220
One of the things I really wanted to talk to you about was what you were actually speaking about at that SAFSS meeting you mentioned,
00:30:42.200
which was this idea of rights talk and the perils thereof.
00:30:46.360
But just to give people in the audience a bit of a primer here, what is rights talk?
00:30:50.500
Well, rights talk is a form of political discourse.
00:30:55.740
It's a form of ethical discourse that has, I think, seeped out into the political realm.
00:31:03.940
Rights talk has evolved into a kind of fundamentalist language, shall I say.
00:31:13.960
I think if we look at the history of rights talk, it goes really right back to the 13th century canonical law.
00:31:21.140
But subsequent to World War II, and in particular the 1948 Declaration of the Universal Rights of Man,
00:31:27.480
and I think we've seen over the past, what shall we say, 50 years, the evolution of a highly individualistic,
00:31:39.120
legalistic, adversarial understanding of rights that sees the world in terms of a black and white,
00:31:49.540
your rights versus my rights, which I think is enormously unhelpful for so many issues, political issues, certainly.
00:31:58.340
But just in terms of speaking of ethical, moral concerns that all of us have,
00:32:05.100
I'm not sure it's entirely helpful to couch every ethical concern in terms of rights.
00:32:10.260
One of the signal problems with rights that was first noticed by Edmund Burke back in the 18th century
00:32:19.460
was their abstract quality lends to them a kind of absolutism,
00:32:24.980
so that when one asserts one's rights, there is a kind of assertion that this is non-negotiable,
00:32:33.460
like rights are just what they are, rather than the kind of nuanced sort of political things that they ought to be.
00:32:43.840
But just to interject there, are certain rights not non-negotiable,
00:32:47.120
and do they not have to be viewed as such to have any relevance or any weight?
00:32:52.240
Well, certainly that's the way that our rights talk has evolved now.
00:32:55.660
But I think, yes, I think there are some rights that are non-negotiable.
00:32:59.920
For example, the right to freedom, the right to liberty, the right to freedom of expression.
00:33:04.960
But what quickly happens with the vernacular of rights talk, if I might put it that way,
00:33:10.280
is that the grammar, our English grammar, allows us to assert practically anything,
00:33:16.900
any desire, any whim, any sort of idea that pops into our head as a right.
00:33:23.060
And again, this was first noticed by Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham said the same thing,
00:33:29.940
that by opening up rights talk, we are really opening up a Pandora's box.
00:33:35.160
And famously, Bentham, the 18th century philosopher, said that rights are nonsense on stilts,
00:33:42.520
by which he meant that rights have to be tethered to an idea of the good.
00:33:48.120
That is to say, there has to be a tethering of rights to some understanding of the common good.
00:33:54.600
And again, I mean, what I said at the conference was hardly original and nothing new,
00:34:00.300
but it seems to me that we've lost sight of this idea that rights have to be tethered to a common good.
00:34:06.880
I live in Kelowna, and like a lot of communities these days, we have a lot of homeless in our community.
00:34:15.840
And the conversation around the homeless is almost exclusively framed in the context of their rights,
00:34:25.500
the rights of these individuals to be on the street.
00:34:27.600
And one understands that every individual, homeless or not, is entitled to dignity and should be respected.
00:34:38.840
But there's another part of the equation that rarely gets articulated,
00:34:42.960
and that's the idea of the commonality, the commonality of the citizens of this city or any other city
00:34:48.900
to enjoy their city without fear of interference.
00:34:53.740
And I think I use that only as a small example of the way that our rights talk seems to have evolved
00:35:00.460
over the last 50 years or so, that it's become highly individualistic and very legalistic,
00:35:07.300
so that now our problems, our political problems, are solved not through the legislature or through parliament,
00:35:19.120
So, embedded in rights talk, I think, is this adversarial notion.
00:35:24.060
It's your rights versus my rights, and we'll have the judge figure it out.
00:35:28.760
And that creates, I think, a very unhappy situation for society in the sense that one of us is going to prevail,
00:35:36.120
your rights or my rights, and you or I, one of us, is going to be the loser.
00:35:40.240
And unlike the sort of compromises that politicians are forced into,
00:35:45.500
the sort of black and white, win-lose nature of rights talk, I think, is unhelpful for the political, for our polity.
00:35:59.400
And indeed, I think it was Michael Ignatieff, years ago, who wrote a little book called The Needs of Strangers.
00:36:08.460
He said, one of the signal failures of rights talk is its inability to talk about virtues
00:36:15.900
that are important for the commonality, but which can't be captured in rights talk.
00:36:22.980
Things like love, compassion, honour, friendship, all of those are important ideas in the political sphere,
00:36:30.300
but yet rights talk precludes us talking about them, at least in any meaningful way.
00:36:35.680
Those are the kinds of old-fashioned virtues that seem to me to have been sort of thrown back into the private sphere.
00:36:42.660
I mean, you and I, and I think all of us, want to have love and friends and all the rest of it in our private life,
00:36:49.940
but where in our political conversations do we find time to talk about those very important ideas, I think?
00:36:57.880
Yeah, they're harder to quantify, I think, which is why the more difficult work of holding those things up
00:37:07.320
I think people should hopefully have the opportunity to see it.
00:37:10.980
But in the meantime, definitely check out Patrick Keeney's great piece in C2C about academic freedom
00:37:16.460
and the Society for Academic Freedom, that interview with Mark Mercer.
00:37:24.180
That was Professor Patrick Keeney here on The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:37:29.860
We will be back next week with more full strength of Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North.
00:37:39.200
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:37:42.200
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.