#85 — Is this the End of Europe？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
157.3949
Summary
In this episode, I speak with Douglas Murray about his new book, The Strange Death of Europe: The Decline of Western Civilization, Identity, Islam, and the Future of the Middle East. Douglas is an associate editor at The Spectator, and he writes for many other publications, including The Sunday Times, The Weekly Standard, and The Wall Street Journal. He s also given talks at both the British and European Parliaments, and at the White House. And if you don t know him, you ll want to check out more or less anything you can find from him on YouTube, where he's a great debater, and you ll get a chance to listen to some of the things he's said about the current state of the world, including the Trump administration, the refugee crisis in Europe, and Islamic extremism in the Muslim community. And, of course, there's a lot of Trump. If you think one has to be a fan of Trump in order to worry about this, well, then you haven t been paying attention to this podcast, and if you think you don't want to be worried about this then you're not paying attention enough to this, you haven't been paying enough attention to what's going on in the world. And that's a good thing, because we're going to talk about it on this episode of The Making Sense Podcast. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, so consider yourself a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. You'll get full access to the full-time, ad-free version of the show. Making Sense wherever you get your ad choices, and we'll get 10% off the price of the service, plus a discount on the ad discount, plus free shipping, plus 20% off your first month, plus an additional $5 or more when you become a patron gets you an ad discount when you sign up for the service starts in the next month, and they get the ad is free, they'll get 20% discount, too! and you'll get access to all the best listening to the podcast. the whole thing for free for two months, plus all the ad choices they're getting you get a discount, for as little as $99 a month, for a maximum of $99 gets you get, they say, "Making Sense and they also get an ad free version of Making Sense makes sense of the entire podcast.
Transcript
00:00:10.880
Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
00:00:14.680
feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
00:00:18.420
In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
00:00:24.060
There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
00:00:30.520
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
00:00:35.880
So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:49.280
Douglas is an associate editor at The Spectator, and he writes for many other publications,
00:00:54.200
including the Sunday Times, Standpoint, and the Wall Street Journal.
00:00:59.380
He's also given talks at both the British and European parliaments, and at the White House.
00:01:04.560
And he's most recently the author of a wonderful book titled The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration,
00:01:14.660
And if you don't know him, Douglas is a truly wonderful debater.
00:01:18.060
I recommend you check out more or less anything you can find from him on YouTube.
00:01:24.900
Douglas and I spend a lot of time in this podcast, certainly most of the time, talking
00:01:29.900
about the situation in Europe with respect to immigration and Islam, and the social attitudes
00:01:37.420
in the Muslim community that are at odds with values that really should be, really must
00:01:43.840
be non-negotiable, like free speech, and women's rights, and gay rights.
00:01:52.640
And what I'd like to point out is that neither of us are against immigration, and you might
00:01:58.260
not notice that in the first hour or so, and we're not against Muslim immigration.
00:02:05.180
In fact, both of us count among our friends, Muslims and former Muslims, who are precisely the
00:02:12.280
sorts of people we are most concerned to protect.
00:02:16.200
And in particular, we're worried about protecting them from many of the illiberal people who have
00:02:24.000
I know there are some things that Douglas and I disagree about.
00:02:27.220
I think we have a different sense of the place of Christianity as a foundation of Western values.
00:02:33.580
I don't give it much of a place at all, certainly not a contemporary one, and Douglas does.
00:02:42.800
In this one, we more or less fully agree on what we're against.
00:02:48.300
And what we're against is Western civilization committing suicide.
00:02:54.100
And if you think that puts the matter too strongly, you haven't read Douglas's book, and you probably
00:03:01.240
haven't been paying much attention to what's been happening in Europe.
00:03:04.200
And if you think one has to be a fan of Trump in order to worry about this, well, then you
00:03:12.240
But on the topic of Trump, Trump just gave a speech in Poland where he said, and I quote,
00:03:18.360
And while I find abundant fault with the messenger, as you know, I can't find that the
00:03:48.340
fact that liberals can't seem to see what's at stake here, the fact that they're embarrassed
00:03:59.300
to defend, quote, Western values, as though that were synonymous with racism, or the legacy
00:04:08.500
of colonialism, or xenophobia, or a lack of compassion, that is making liberalism politically defunct
00:04:22.280
And happily, in the United States, we are in a better situation demographically and with
00:04:28.100
respect to immigration and just geographically.
00:04:32.900
But one cannot be cheerful about what's been happening in Europe.
00:04:38.780
And in his book and in this conversation, Douglas finds a path through this wilderness of competing
00:04:44.440
concerns that is deeply ethical and also deeply pragmatic.
00:04:51.560
And I don't think Trump comes up, or if he does, it's just in passing.
00:04:57.980
But Douglas and I get into the fairly gloomy thesis of his very witty book, which is that
00:05:04.780
what's happening in Europe is something that not even the most paranoid people would have
00:05:27.260
Douglas, thanks for coming back on the podcast.
00:05:32.740
Yeah, I have actually, I haven't checked, but it was we last spoke when the refugee crisis in Europe was
00:05:42.980
I know it had been going on for years before that, unremarked, more or less here.
00:05:47.740
But we spoke about immigration and all of its attendant problems, and we will cover some of
00:05:54.380
the same ground again, because you've written this great and harrowing book on the topic.
00:06:00.980
It seems well-launched, and it's a fantastic book.
00:06:12.580
There's not a lot of hope in the book, but it's very funny.
00:06:16.320
Your style of approaching this is, rather than be hectoring and communicating a sustained
00:06:27.120
sense of emergency, you become quite ironic, and I recommend people pick it up simply to
00:06:42.440
Now, you've painted a picture of certainly the possible destruction of Europe, and I
00:06:48.820
would say even the likely destruction of Europe.
00:06:51.460
You can walk me back from the cliff's edge if you think I'm being too pessimistic over
00:06:57.440
But it's hard to feel hopeful that this will turn out well.
00:07:01.840
And at the center of this, you paint a picture of a morally exhausted civilization, and one
00:07:11.860
that is certain of absolutely nothing, apart from the fact that it has no right to think
00:07:21.380
So I guess we could just start with the nihilism and self-doubt at the core of this problem.
00:07:28.220
No, I mean, the book is called The Strange Death of Europe, with the subtitle Immigration,
00:07:36.760
And I mean, I've been thinking about and writing about these areas and researching them for
00:07:42.940
And it was during the 2015 crisis, the migrant crisis, refugee crisis, that I sort of realized
00:07:51.240
this was just, this was the epitome of everything that had been going on.
00:07:59.600
One was the mass movements of people into Europe in a sped up form of something that had been
00:08:05.760
And the second was the, the fact that this would be happening at the time that, in my view,
00:08:11.220
Europe has lost any faith in itself or its own right to continue, particularly in a recognizable
00:08:18.660
And I think the combination of these two factors is, it's pretty hard to see how this ends
00:08:25.880
But, you know, I constantly throughout the book, try to show that it's not, it's not the case
00:08:32.420
that, it's not the case that there's no argument for, for instance, Angela Merkel opening the
00:08:39.720
It's, it's, it's not as if there's no, no understandable reason or no justification for Europeans feeling
00:08:46.460
the way they do about their history or the way in which we feel towards our past and the
00:08:53.860
And I, you know, I'm trying to, to explain this because it's something we all feel to my
00:08:59.460
mind at any rate, something like this crisis goes down the middle of all of us.
00:09:05.140
I mean, it's, you know, there are people on the left who say, let everyone in, there are
00:09:08.600
some people on the right who say, you know, very few, but some people say, you know, let
00:09:12.880
I think these are, these are people who are, are peddling fantasies, albeit very dark and
00:09:19.020
grim fantasies, but they are, they're not, they're not things you can, you know, they're
00:09:24.160
not things that most of us could possibly think.
00:09:26.160
And so therefore what I'm trying to do is to lay out what is what we're really facing
00:09:37.340
I think you find that the middle line there wonderfully, as you point out in the book,
00:09:42.820
this really, for the most part, isn't a contest between good and evil.
00:09:50.900
And I think you put it in terms of justice and mercy.
00:09:54.140
And that's not often remarked on because each side is so busy painting the other as
00:10:03.180
This is, this is one of the things I felt so strongly in recent years and which, you know,
00:10:08.560
we've all come across some symptoms of demonstrations of, but I, to my mind, this is, this is what
00:10:16.000
we should do with all these sort of complex issues.
00:10:17.640
I, I had strong feelings that we were doing something suicidal in Europe.
00:10:22.900
Um, but I knew also that I had to go and look this in the face.
00:10:30.240
I had to go as I did to the reception ports of Southern Europe of the Italian and Greek
00:10:35.420
islands and, and speak to the people who literally just got off the boats to see the boats coming
00:10:39.660
in to, to hear the stories of the people coming from all over Africa, North Africa, Sub-Saharan
00:10:45.680
Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, people from as far away as Bangladesh, Afghanistan,
00:10:50.540
And I had to hear their stories as well as hearing from the, uh, you know, the, the speaking
00:10:56.720
to people in the chancelries of Europe and so on.
00:10:59.020
And, and the reason for this was, as you mentioned, is this thing that, you know, we are very used
00:11:03.500
sadly in all of our political discussion to discussions that basically, you know, I'm,
00:11:09.380
uh, I'm Churchill, you're Hitler, you know, or I'm Churchill, you're Chamberlain.
00:11:17.380
And, uh, it's, it's my view that on something like the migration crisis, it's, it's, it's
00:11:23.460
only possible to see it in these terms of competing virtues.
00:11:26.580
I take it from Aristotle that there are, there are sometimes things that are two goods, uh,
00:11:35.080
And this was such a time when, when, as I say, I mean, the, the, the desire to be generous
00:11:41.960
to the world ends up, in my view, overriding what should be a sense of justice for the people
00:11:51.280
Well, I want to talk about the ethics of immigration in a few minutes, because I think this is,
00:11:56.980
it is a non-trivial ethical and, and even psychological problem to figure out what one
00:12:05.060
thinks about this and how one can be justified in, in having a position here that isn't a suicide
00:12:12.520
But I, I want to, I want us to illustrate the suicide pact because the details are surprising.
00:12:19.980
Some of what you describe is fairly predictable.
00:12:22.620
It's, it's of a piece with the masochism and self-doubt that, that post-modernism has spread
00:12:33.020
So people will be familiar with, with some of the details, but there's some things that
00:12:42.520
And, and to even speak about these events, I feel like I'm trafficking in lies and conspiracy
00:12:53.620
I mean, this is one of those topics where we have to measure more or less every sentence
00:12:58.820
against our listeners capacity to wonder whether or not we have our facts wrong or, or we've
00:13:05.640
And so I want to start the conversation with one of these extreme cases known as the, the
00:13:10.500
Rotherham scandal, because I mean, because first of all, this is not, as far as I can tell,
00:13:15.840
well known at all in the U S I think one of the reasons why it has been underreported is
00:13:22.880
And, and the lack of credibility seems to rub off on anyone who would talk about it.
00:13:27.520
So I just want our listeners to be prepared who haven't heard this story that in a few
00:13:32.420
moments, you're going to wonder whether I'm talking to an Alex Jones character or some
00:13:41.280
So Douglas, just take a couple of minutes to describe what happened in Rotherham.
00:13:47.260
I mean, the context of this is that I, I try to explain that absolutely everything that
00:13:52.580
happened in the post-war period in Europe, in terms of migration was not expected by
00:14:00.700
And particularly not anybody in charge politically.
00:14:04.320
And I say that because, uh, in 2010, Angela Merkel gave a famous at the time speech in Potsdam
00:14:11.040
in which she famously said that multiculturalism had failed and went on to say that it failed
00:14:17.600
And that particularly she said the people who came after the war, in case of Germany, the
00:14:22.640
guest workers, mainly from Turkey, she said, we expected them to go home and, uh, they
00:14:29.940
I mean, I mean, you know, looking back, why would you, if you were leaving a poor developing
00:14:34.780
country and had landed in a developed country and, you know, why would you not then bring
00:14:40.000
your wife and why would you, if you were with your wife, not have children and why would
00:14:43.820
your children not go to the local school and so on and so forth?
00:14:46.500
But it's just a, at a peace with everything that wasn't expected.
00:14:50.240
And one of the things I say in the book when charting out the sort of brief history of this
00:14:55.460
period in post-war European migration is that we, we got to a stage, the so-called multicultural
00:15:02.480
era where we were, where we became good at talking about the good sides of it.
00:15:08.240
I mean, at the lowest, most sort of frivolous end, but actually very common talking about
00:15:13.380
cuisine, for instance, the benefits we had in cuisine terms.
00:15:16.880
And I mean, you know, it's understandable who would want to go back to the British food
00:15:20.080
of the 1950s, you know, but, but it was also that the, the, the, the negatives, anything
00:15:25.280
bad at all started to become impossible to say, because it was as if that might speak
00:15:31.780
Now, the most visceral and terrible example of this inability to talk to the bad things
00:15:39.080
that happened emerged in different countries at different times.
00:15:43.920
And in my telling, it emerged really first in the UK.
00:15:47.960
And that was the scandal that subsequently became known as the Rotherham scandal.
00:15:53.600
I became aware of it, and other journalists did, because two groups of people really started
00:16:01.240
One were Sikh groups and others in the north of England who complained that their, as it
00:16:06.920
were, girls from their community were being trafficked by Muslim men.
00:16:10.940
And the other was that it started to become a focal point for some far right elements in
00:16:17.540
That is, particularly, and this was at a time when the British National Party, which is, you
00:16:27.580
It's now, thank goodness, pretty much moribund.
00:16:30.720
But for a moment, they got almost a million votes in the UK.
00:16:33.880
And there were two, to our shame, there were two members of the European Parliament for the
00:16:38.760
And they made enormous headway with this, or tried to.
00:16:47.820
And at the time, there was actually a Channel 4 documentary that was meant to, because some,
00:16:54.600
you know, finally, some journalists took a real interest in this.
00:16:58.180
And Channel 4 was meant to broadcast a documentary about this, what became known as the grooming
00:17:04.560
And it was actually stopped from broadcasting at the request of local police, among others,
00:17:10.800
who feared that it would be a recruiting sergeant for the British National Party at forthcoming
00:17:20.620
It was subsequently shown after elections, and at a time that was deemed to be less volatile.
00:17:25.900
But that episode spoke to a sort of general issue, which was that people really didn't
00:17:36.980
These were, largely, it was thought these were events that were happening in northern towns,
00:17:42.760
you know, outside the sort of metropolitan London bubble.
00:17:46.300
And so they were easier to ignore for a lot of people.
00:17:49.120
But within the last decade, it became increasingly hard to ignore it.
00:17:55.660
And eventually, the government set up an official inquiry into what went wrong.
00:18:01.420
And it turned out that in the town of Rotherham alone, up to 1400 young girls had been systematically
00:18:08.680
groomed and raped, often gang raped, by gangs of Muslim men, largely of Pakistani origin.
00:18:17.640
And it was indeed the official inquiry into this government inquiry found that the fear of
00:18:25.580
accusations of racism, as it were, penetrated and prevented the police and local authorities
00:18:31.760
acting on this, even when the local outcry was really very, very strong indeed.
00:18:39.240
And it gets worse, because unfortunately, as we all know, like the Catholic Church rape scandals
00:18:44.500
and with all sorts of other similar cases, sadly, what happens is the first story breaks,
00:18:50.580
and then you learn the depth of width of the problem.
00:18:54.620
And this in the last few years, it's turned out that there were similar cases in towns across
00:19:01.280
the north of England, and in places that people thought to be more leafy and green in Oxfordshire.
00:19:07.820
Most people think Oxford dreaming spires, etc, etc.
00:19:10.640
In Oxfordshire, there was a case five years ago now that came to trial, the Operation Bullfinch
00:19:16.720
case, where numerous young white girls, again, often underage, have been trafficked for sex
00:19:26.100
And I mean, the details that came out of that trial at the Old Bailey in London included,
00:19:30.540
for instance, that one of the men branded one of the girls on her backside, I think, with
00:19:36.020
an M for Mohammed, which was his name, he branded her as his property.
00:19:40.900
And again, these cases, when they came to trial, they just, for the reasons that you
00:19:49.260
and I feel awkward talking about it, the British state, the British people felt awkward and wanted
00:19:58.120
But this was just the same story in a way that then later emerged after, I mean, much
00:20:04.020
faster between being covered up and coming out, but of similar events that, for instance,
00:20:09.220
music festivals in Sweden in recent years, where it wasn't till Cologne on New Year's
00:20:14.540
Eve 2015 that when the large scale assaults happened, famously in front of the cathedral
00:20:20.080
on New Year's Eve, that then the Swedes, sort of having reported that, turned around and
00:20:26.820
some of the press said, oh, yeah, didn't that happen at our music festivals in recent years?
00:20:32.480
So it's a real scandal and it's an ongoing scandal.
00:20:41.300
But it is just a symbol, a symptomatic example of this deep, deep discomfort of this whole
00:20:48.320
discussion, because if you or I had been asked to invent a sort of gross, you know, racist
00:20:55.560
sort of favourite trope, it would be, you know, well, they'd complain about people coming
00:21:03.980
And I think that's one of the reasons that it's been so little covered.
00:21:09.280
I have a friend who's a journalist who mentioned to me just a few days ago that he went to interview
00:21:14.040
some of the victims in Rotherham, actually, and he said he thought by now, as it were,
00:21:17.900
their stories, they'd be talked out about their stories.
00:21:23.220
These women now, even now, have basically not had a chance to tell their story to the press
00:21:30.040
or anyone else, because people just really don't want to know this stuff.
00:21:34.000
And one of the points in my book is that, you know, everyone knows the benefits of some
00:21:39.640
migration, but the downside bits are we're still not really willing to face up to.
00:21:46.620
And I know that is it at its absolute most base and worst.
00:21:51.500
I mean, again, this story just puts me at the absolute limit of what I find believable.
00:21:57.060
The fact that this happened, I'm thinking now specifically about Rotherham.
00:22:02.140
I mean, the numbers of people in this small town and the parents having to, you know, appeal
00:22:08.520
to the police for years and nothing comes of it, right?
00:22:12.460
The fact that the authorities stood by and let this happen year after year.
00:22:19.380
I mean, I detest your listeners' patience if I gave too many examples.
00:22:23.900
But I mean, let me give you an example from the Oxfordshire case I mentioned, which is
00:22:29.660
it's sort of in the UK, it's less well known than Rotherham, which has become really well
00:22:33.960
But in the Oxfordshire case, there was a girl who, because quite often the young girls were
00:22:41.760
bribed with drugs and things or plied with drugs and alcohol and so on.
00:22:45.780
There's one case of a girl who was actually in a care home in Oxford and she was being
00:22:54.500
And she got back to the children's home she was in, meant to be being looked after by local
00:22:59.500
authorities and she didn't have the money for the taxi that she had managed to hail to
00:23:05.780
And the care home staff thought that she was just playing up, as it were.
00:23:10.360
She the taxi driver took her back and she was gang raped again.
00:23:15.940
I mean, it's sort of wholesale failure of, you know, I think this is what it why it particularly
00:23:23.300
Some people really speak to a greater failing because we'd like to think, I think, that young
00:23:29.580
people, particularly young people in trouble in care homes and things are actually the people
00:23:34.660
the state should most look after and and care for.
00:23:38.580
And that that at that stage, there's such a total lack of care that you could end up basically
00:23:47.740
Well, yeah, and facilitating it at a certain point knowingly.
00:23:52.360
I mean, so the thing that the situation you just described is a horrible misunderstanding
00:23:58.320
But when you have the police knowing what's happening, but being unwilling to investigate
00:24:09.260
By the way, that the interesting thing is some of your listeners may not know the background
00:24:12.880
to this, but this this also speaks to a fascinating thing again, which doesn't come from
00:24:16.780
The police didn't have that fear for no reason.
00:24:20.760
In the 1990s, there was a famous racist murder in Britain of a black teenager called Stephen
00:24:28.260
Lawrence, who was who was murdered on the streets.
00:24:31.380
And he his killers weren't brought to trial for a very long time.
00:24:35.500
And one of the failings, undoubtedly, in the Lawrence case was the presumption by the police that
00:24:47.220
And this was encouraged by various people, this perception.
00:24:52.080
And when there was a report in the late 90s into this, the Macpherson report, it was called,
00:24:58.220
it found that it found that the local police were and the police in the UK in general were,
00:25:04.840
And this label was certainly, I would have said, accurate in some cases.
00:25:13.040
I think it was far too broad a claim to make about the British police as a whole.
00:25:16.360
But it meant that in the years immediately afterwards, the police in Britain would have
00:25:20.540
been even more adamant than they would have been for not to tread onto things that, you
00:25:26.960
know, would would embed that or take them back to having that reputational problem again.
00:25:32.000
So all these things are, you know, problems built on problems.
00:25:37.460
What is illustrative and perhaps even diagnostic about this case for me is that, and again,
00:25:44.940
it really strains credulity on every level, is that the fact that it's possible, the fact
00:25:52.120
that you have really a whole society being willing to just eat this horror year after year and
00:26:00.400
do nothing about it, that suggests to me that other things are possible.
00:26:04.300
And this kind of great unraveling that you sound like a scaremonger to worry about is possible.
00:26:11.740
I mean, what freedom wouldn't you be willing to forfeit if you're willing to let your daughters
00:26:17.660
and your neighbor's daughters by the thousands get gang raped for years?
00:26:24.380
I mean, another example was that during the same period that the Rotherham scandal was
00:26:28.620
starting to break was when the British police admitted that there had been certainly some
00:26:34.420
scores of murders in the UK, which had almost certainly been so-called honor murders, honor
00:26:41.160
crimes, which the police hadn't really bothered to investigate because they were community matters.
00:26:47.620
I mean, it's all a part of a stumbling through a period which, as I say in the book, I mean,
00:26:59.220
And the interesting wrinkle here that we'll get to, and this will be quite familiar to our
00:27:05.840
listeners, but the hypocrisy here on the left is fairly breathtaking because you have the same
00:27:13.820
people who are most concerned about women's rights and gay rights, and even, as you describe,
00:27:20.460
even more niche concerns, you know, now transgender rights and getting your pronouns straight.
00:27:26.060
I mean, these are the kind of the highest moral priorities at this moment.
00:27:29.700
These are the very people who seem quite happy to import millions of people into their society
00:27:37.980
for whom the very notion of women's rights and gay rights and, to say nothing, of transgender rights
00:27:46.480
There's a double-think here that everyone is paying a massive penalty for, even the—and this is a point
00:27:54.580
you also make in the book—when you look at the most vulnerable people in these immigrant communities,
00:28:00.000
I mean, so the liberal Muslims and the gay Muslims and the apostates and the Muslim reformers,
00:28:05.600
the people who threaten their lives, right, who make their lives an actual safety concern from one
00:28:12.500
moment to the next, are not, by and large, the fascists and the neo-Nazis and the bigots and the
00:28:18.300
xenophobes. It's the intolerant Muslims who are being brought into the same community.
00:28:25.240
It's a subject that's incredibly disheartening because it suggests that there are many other
00:28:32.000
things going on, doesn't it? I mean, it suggests, for instance, that there are people who are
00:28:38.260
perfectly willing to cover up atrocity, really, in order that their own community doesn't have any
00:28:46.640
negative publicity. By the way, I mean, that's normal in most communities, I think, that you don't
00:28:52.460
want your dirty linen, as it were, washed in public. But there's obviously a greater tolerance of
00:28:59.200
that going on. I mean, you might think that, you know, a small amount of embarrassment might be
00:29:04.260
not worth airing in public, but, you know, considerable numbers of gang rapes might be
00:29:09.600
serious enough to actually think it's worth having it out. And then there is the, to my mind,
00:29:15.560
supplemental problem, in a way, of the people who basically think that this is a story about
00:29:23.380
white, working class girls, and they don't find much sympathy for them, to put it at its strongest.
00:29:33.240
By the way, I mean, just, I mean, it's a very, very slightly analogous, but example, but I was
00:29:37.940
following with great interest the case of this American student who died last week, who was
00:29:45.660
brutalized in North Korea after trying to take down a post-Otto Warmbier. The bit of this whole
00:29:51.400
horrible story that, in a way, was most striking was that, I mean, it's not as if the North Korean
00:29:58.580
authorities behaved differently from one would expect, but that there was this glee on parts of
00:30:04.280
the left, on Huffington Post and Salon and so on, when he got arrested and detained and then
00:30:11.100
brutalized and tortured and beaten, as it turned out, to death, because he was a sort of beneficiary
00:30:17.820
of white privilege and, ha-ha, it was both Huffington Post and Salon, you know, ha-ha,
00:30:23.140
he's just learned the limits of white privilege. And you just think, how much sickness do you have
00:30:28.480
to have as a human being to respond to these stories with this kind of political reflex that
00:30:37.140
actually, I mean, overrides all humanity? And that's really, I think, one of the less spoken
00:30:45.520
about things in this whole Rotherham sort of thing, was this kind of, these are white working class
00:30:51.500
trash, you know, not people I know sort of thing, and therefore not deserving of your pity or concern,
00:31:01.260
even. Yeah, and it's especially odious when you reflect on the fact that some of these girls were
00:31:09.240
as young as 11, right? It is mind-boggling. I saw that piece, and I think it was the Huffington Post
00:31:15.700
on the North Korea incident, and it is, yeah, the idea that his white privilege caused him to think
00:31:23.260
that he could tear down a propaganda poster with impunity and that he got his just desserts for
00:31:28.740
that sort of arrogance. It is wrecking of one's hopes for humanity to see that sentiment even
00:31:36.520
articulated. I want to talk a minute about the ethics of immigration because, I mean, this is,
00:31:43.080
so this is the other side of the equation. This is, they felt moral imperative, which I certainly feel,
00:31:48.980
to respond generously to the unluckiest people on earth. This really comes to the moral
00:31:58.180
indefensibility of good luck, right? I mean, so, like, when I search my mind, I can't find any way
00:32:05.800
to argue that I deserve my good luck. I'm extraordinarily lucky, and among the many reasons
00:32:14.460
I could list, you know, one that comes to mind is I'm extraordinarily lucky not to have been born a
00:32:19.860
woman in Afghanistan. Now, to what can I ascribe that good luck? Well, it's just pure good luck. I didn't
00:32:26.340
earn it. There's nothing I imagine I did in my past life or in utero to earn that good luck, and so
00:32:33.160
when I think of the unlucky people who happen to be women in Afghanistan or in really anyone in Syria
00:32:41.540
at the moment, I can't justify this ethical disparity, and so this is the, just the sheer fact of the matter
00:32:49.880
that I seem to have emerged in part of the world where I was simply given citizenship and where good
00:32:56.620
luck and opportunity just more or less grows on trees, and you have millions of people born elsewhere
00:33:03.700
into circumstances that are about as pointlessly wretched as any in human history. So the question is,
00:33:11.340
how does one live a moral life in light of this kind of disparity, and how do we build societies
00:33:19.960
in light of this fact that good luck has not been spread equally over the surface of the earth,
00:33:27.000
and societies that are organized around a moral vision that we can defend? And I'm happy to have
00:33:34.000
you give your answer to that question, but it clearly can't be. I mean, this is the answer that I think
00:33:39.660
we want to close the door to, and this is an answer that some people have tried to defend. It can't be
00:33:46.720
that we have a moral obligation to let as many people as possible move into our society, I mean,
00:33:55.060
in such numbers that it becomes scarcely better than the societies they're leaving, right? It can't be
00:34:01.860
some kind of principle of osmosis, which just creates the lowest common denominator of all possible
00:34:09.500
fates on earth. And that's something that is defended by essentially someone like Mariam Namazi,
00:34:14.720
who I had on the podcast, to the absolute frustration of every listener. The problem of
00:34:21.180
open borders, perhaps you want to touch it, but it seems to me that can't be a solution.
00:34:25.960
At some point, you are regulating the flow at a minimum.
00:34:29.840
Yes, of course. And I mean, I'm so glad you framed in those terms, because that's obviously how
00:34:35.580
most, you know, decent people in the West feel these days. I mean, we don't feel that we've
00:34:42.180
not only won the lottery of life, but deserve it. You know, we know that it's luck. We all have
00:34:48.920
friends who, or most of us have friends who have been born without some of that luck and have acquired
00:34:55.020
it. And so that also makes us feel more aware of the luck and more unable to explain, you know,
00:35:07.600
what we should do and why we should keep anyone else out from sharing it. And I think that one of
00:35:16.160
the bits that is least focused in on all this is the long-term point. And it's one you touched on there
00:35:23.180
about the open borders thing. For short-term reasons, one could understand why we have the
00:35:31.580
views we do. For long-term reasons, it's inexplicable that, for instance, you would think
00:35:38.200
that you could import, as Angela Merkel did in 2015 alone, an extra up to 2% of the population in a
00:35:46.300
single year, and for it not to have long-term effects. I recount towards the end of my book
00:35:53.160
a conversation with a great supporter of Angela Merkel's in the German Bundestag. And it made me
00:36:00.400
hit on one of the thoughts which I express in the book about this, which is that we seem to think at
00:36:07.420
this stage in our liberal democracies that our liberal democracies are so appealing and so strong
00:36:16.400
that basically, if you bring the world in, it comes up to speed with us almost immediately.
00:36:22.580
Or as I say in one point in the book, you know, that to just walk into Europe is to immediately
00:36:27.780
breathe the air of St. Paul and Voltaire. And it seems highly unlikely to me, to put it no stronger,
00:36:34.960
that everybody who walks into Europe arrives at the same point that we are at in regards to our
00:36:43.320
views on religion, our views on all sorts of rights questions and others. It's just very implausible
00:36:51.220
to me. But then the idea that changes, and to me at any rate, I say that we should understand our
00:37:00.220
societies to be more like a fragile ecosystem where you can't just endlessly tear things up and put new
00:37:08.940
things in and expect the whole thing to look the same. It's much more likely that it'll look very
00:37:15.360
different and that therefore you should take care with it and take care with the thing you've inherited
00:37:20.720
in order that you pass it on. At least you pass on something that isn't, you know, a grand version
00:37:26.400
of the Balkans. And that, I suppose, brings me to the other analogy, which I at one point hit on.
00:37:32.560
Some people would find it uncomfortable because, of course, so many of the people coming into Europe
00:37:36.800
come on boats, and so many of the boats, thanks to the smugglers, are very rickety vehicles indeed.
00:37:43.720
But I say, what if Europe is not this massive liner that can just keep taking people on,
00:37:50.600
but a boat itself, which has to decide how many people it can take on before it itself capsizes?
00:38:01.700
And I think that this is something we have not given sufficient thought to. And of course,
00:38:08.260
one of the reasons is that it isn't a science, is it? I mean, it's not as if there was a graph one
00:38:15.220
could produce to show the point at which people become uncomfortable about where their society is
00:38:20.280
going, the point at which the welfare stretch is too great, et cetera, et cetera. It's just something
00:38:25.940
you get feelings about. And that's why I have one chapter on what I call early warning sirens,
00:38:32.340
various people who went off across Europe in recent decades, different people, left-wing feminists
00:38:37.840
there, a gay activist there. And the people who just went off saying, hang on, I'm starting to get
00:38:44.820
nervous about the future. And again, I mean, we didn't really listen to those because we kept on
00:38:52.920
to this idea that it doesn't matter because when people get to here, they'll realize how great it
00:38:58.980
is and they'll become just like us. This intuition is also propped up by arguments in favor of immigration
00:39:09.700
that you dispatch fairly early in the book. And there's really a set of myths in, at least on
00:39:21.720
Yeah. Perhaps take a minute or two to talk to those because people have this sense that
00:39:27.640
this is not only in some sense inevitable, but necessary. There's no alternative for Europe.
00:39:35.960
If you have this senescent continent that needs workers, what else could be done?
00:39:46.840
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
00:39:52.640
samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense
00:39:57.300
podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations
00:40:04.040
I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely
00:40:09.340
on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.