The Charlie Kirk Show - Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos with Sohrab Ahmari

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00:01:11.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:01:43.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:43.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:46.000 I'm really excited for this conversation.

00:01:48.000 With us is Sohrab Armari.

00:01:50.000 And Saurab, thank you for joining the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:52.000 You are the author of a new book called The Unbroken Thread.

00:01:56.000 Super thrilled to have you.

00:01:58.000 Welcome.

00:01:59.000 Thanks for having me, John.

00:02:01.000 So let's start with your biography.

00:02:02.000 It's a very interesting story.

00:02:05.000 And I think that it just lays a very important foundation for why you wrote this book.

00:02:11.000 Tell us about yourself.

00:02:13.000 Sure.

00:02:13.000 I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran after the Iranian Revolution.

00:02:17.000 I was born to a very typical middle-class urban secular family of the type you meet a lot if you know Iranians.

00:02:27.000 My parents had supported the Iranian Revolution because they were, like many other young Iranians, they thought they would get something like Western democracy. 0.92

00:02:37.000 They had very fuzzy notions of what would happen and then instantaneously had come to regret it as the Islamist regime took over. 0.78

00:02:46.000 So I grew up in this milieu where we would, you know, I was surrounded by Western books and movies, music, ideas. 0.95

00:02:53.000 But in the world outside, obviously, you had to pretend to adhere to the public cult of the Islamic Republic, Shiism enforced with the sharp end of judicial floggings and amputations and so forth. 0.73

00:03:07.000 And so, you know, when I was a teenager still living in Iran, I became an atheist. 0.89

00:03:13.000 And then we were lucky enough to be able to get a green card.

00:03:16.000 Just my mother and I, my father never left Iran.

00:03:18.000 And we immigrated to Utah, of all places.

00:03:21.000 I had this idea of like, you know, America as this decadent 1980s Manhattan that I had seen in the movies.

00:03:28.000 It shocked me when I showed up in Utah and it's, you know, very religious, very communitarian in various ways.

00:03:35.000 And so I kind of carried on the same revolution that I had launched in my old country against God, against traditional authority.

00:03:42.000 I carried it on here as well.

00:03:45.000 And, you know, I mean, I told my kind of personal story in a different book, in a memoir called From Fire by Water.

00:03:52.000 It's a longer story of how, over the course of 20 years, you know, I came to not only come to believe in God, but to believe in a personal God and ultimately become a Roman Catholic and a political conservative as a result of reading,

00:04:10.000 educating myself, Pope Benedict's books, reading the Bible, and also some life experiences that made it clear to me that there is an objective moral order, and you have a choice of whether or not you bring your own life into conformity with it or not.

00:04:27.000 So, yeah, that's my basic background.

00:04:30.000 What's fascinating, and I think not everyone has the same experience of growing up in Iran and then coming to America, but I think there is this movement, myself being part of that, where there is kind of this desire to go to things that are eternal and more permanent, not changing things for the sake of changing them.

00:04:52.000 I found myself reading more Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke than ever before.

00:04:56.000 And I know that you comment on that a lot.

00:05:00.000 And so, just the book, again, is very important.

00:05:03.000 It's the unbroken thread.

00:05:05.000 And just some of the chapter titles are really interesting.

00:05:08.000 I want to explore this with you.

00:05:10.000 Starts on how do you justify your life?

00:05:12.000 Is God reasonable?

00:05:14.000 Why would God want you to take a day off?

00:05:16.000 Obviously, defending the Sabbath. 0.82

00:05:18.000 Can you be spiritual without being religious? 0.94

00:05:21.000 Does God respect you? 0.96

00:05:23.000 Does God need politics?

00:05:25.000 Then you say, How must you serve your parents?

00:05:27.000 Should you think for yourself?

00:05:29.000 What is freedom for?

00:05:30.000 I want to talk to you about that one in particular.

00:05:33.000 Is sex a private matter?

00:05:35.000 And what do you owe your body? 0.92

00:05:36.000 And what's good about death?

00:05:38.000 And so, very provocative questions.

00:05:41.000 I'm actually really excited to be able to read all of this.

00:05:45.000 But the overarching theme is praising and making an argument for things that should not change.

00:05:52.000 In kind of this cult of progress that we're in, both politically, economically, and culturally, you're making an articulate and reasonable defense that no, we need some things that your great-grandkids are going to enjoy the same way you do.

00:06:07.000 That's exactly right.

00:06:08.000 And I put it all under the rubric of tradition.

00:06:10.000 I mean, the book's subtitle is Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.

00:06:15.000 I'll tell you a little bit about the impetus for writing it.

00:06:18.000 When I wrote it, I started writing it, my son Max, for whom the book, in a way, is written, was two years old.

00:06:26.000 He's now four.

00:06:27.000 And what drove me to write it is, frankly, my anxiety about what kind of a man our civilization would chisel out of Max.

00:06:36.000 And it's not like, you know, I worry that he'll become, God forbid, I don't know, an opioid addict.

00:06:41.000 The way our society works, chances are, you know, he'll inherit my upper middle class status, but that he'll grow up with a very impoverished account of what it means to be free.

00:06:53.000 You know, we're immigrants to this country.

00:06:55.000 We're obviously grateful for its legal kind of rights and the dignity that you get from our constitutional order.

00:07:03.000 But what do you actually use those rights for?

00:07:07.000 And I fear that not just elites, but ordinary people are just told that being free means to just be unhindered by tradition, unhindered by authority.

00:07:17.000 You just keep your options open, seek to get ahead in life.

00:07:20.000 And of course, that's in tension with all the great traditions of the world, not just the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also our Greco-Roman or classical heritage.

00:07:31.000 And even some of the Eastern traditions, they all say that actually to be free means to be able to govern yourself so that the term self-government doesn't begin to mean how do I govern myself against a sort of external tyrant, although that's important too.

00:07:48.000 But to begin with, how do I govern the tyrant within me, my appetites, and how do I detach myself from my baser side?

00:07:57.000 That's the older account of freedom.

00:07:58.000 And the whole quest of the book is my attempt to tether my max to this older account of freedom and what it means to be truly human, truly free.

00:08:09.000 And the way I do it, because I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a theologian, I'm just a journalist and a storyteller, is I pose those questions that you read off, each of which kind of posts holes in one of our contemporary progressive certainties.

00:08:24.000 And then I explore each of them through the life of one great thinker.

00:08:27.000 So, for example, the question on the Sabbath is explored through the life of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great Hasidic mystic of the last century.

00:08:35.000 The question about how do you serve your parents, which is basically filial piety, couldn't go to anyone but Confucius.

00:08:42.000 The question about how do you relate God and politics?

00:08:45.000 Obviously, St. Augustine and so forth.

00:08:47.000 So it kind of created, I think, an interesting genre where you have the questions, and then each one is, you don't get philosophy really thick.

00:08:59.000 You're just reading the life story, the drama of a person's life.

00:09:03.000 And as it happens, then the ideas are blended into the kind of biographical.

00:09:08.000 So only you could have possibly wove together the confessions and the analects into one book.

00:09:15.000 So I'm very impressed.

00:09:17.000 So there's a lot of places I want to go with that.

00:09:20.000 I want to start with one thing that you talked about, which will apply to our listeners as much as I'd love to explore the city of God and the city of man with you, which I'm sure you write about extensively.

00:09:31.000 And knowing you, you probably have a fair amount of Aquinas in here too, is this idea of freedom.

00:09:37.000 So when I ask young people, this is how I would have answered in 2013, by the way, because I grew up in a conservative movement that was dominated by libertarianism.

00:09:47.000 And all the excesses around that.

00:09:51.000 I'm sure you hear this quite a lot, but it's just the way it was, right?

00:09:55.000 It was Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and maybe Friedman and a little bit of soul.

00:10:00.000 That was the worldview, right?

00:10:02.000 Which was kind of a disregard for anything that any society or culture or country.

00:10:06.000 What really matters is what, you know, your personal capacity to do things.

00:10:10.000 So I was always told that liberty was being able to do whatever you want to do, however you want to do it, whenever you want to do it, as long as someone doesn't get in the way.

00:10:19.000 And I was never taught that liberty was the pursuit of virtue.

00:10:24.000 Can you talk about that difference and how we need to better define what liberty and freedom actually is?

00:10:30.000 And is there a difference between liberty and freedom, or is that too much of a semantic difference?

00:10:36.000 Yeah, Charlie, actually, I was the same.

00:10:38.000 In other words, it's not like I came to my current views sort of sui generous out of nothing.

00:10:44.000 I was also typically formed conservative, as you just described yourself in my 20s.

00:10:51.000 And then, like I said, fatherhood and faith changed everything.

00:10:57.000 And I began to, I think, came to my mature views now.

00:11:01.000 I explore the question of what it means to be free through Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great question of this.

00:11:09.000 The Gulag Archipelago, yeah, sure.

00:11:11.000 But in the book, I focus on the one day in the life of Ivan Denisevich.

00:11:15.000 And as you know, Solzhenitsyn obviously had been a severe critic of the communist regime and ultimately was forced into exile and made his way to the West.

00:11:27.000 And for the first four years when he was in the West, he just lived quietly here and tried to keep his nose in his writing.

00:11:33.000 But then in 1978, he was asked to give a commencement speech at Harvard.

00:11:37.000 And this text is kind of one of the definitive texts for me and might be for you as well.

00:11:42.000 And what shocked his audience, his American audience, was that he devoted most of the speech not to criticizing the communist regime, although he absolutely detested it to the end of his days, but to critiquing the West, where he saw that somehow the Western idea of freedom had become tyrannical in itself.

00:12:00.000 This focus on rights, me, me, me, me, had actually created a society in which a certain kind of low, base, self-maximizing type thrived, and that that deeper account of freedom was lost.

00:12:18.000 Of course, at the time, you know, every commentator, but with the exception of George Will, attacked him, you know, called him a theocrat, a gook, a mystic, an authoritarian.

00:12:29.000 But in retrospect, the speech is quite prophetic.

00:12:33.000 And so, how did someone who had lived in a gulag for about a decade of his life, what could he teach us?

00:12:43.000 That was the question that was posed to him. 0.76

00:12:45.000 You come from a society that has labor camps.

00:12:49.000 What do you know about freedom?

00:12:50.000 And actually, I mean, in the life of One Day in the Life of Ivan Dinisevich, Solzhenitsyn paints a very kind of cursed picture of what it really means to be free, even under conditions in which your choices are obviously very narrow.

00:13:04.000 Because in a gulag, the regime controls every minute of your day.

00:13:08.000 You maybe have five minutes in the morning, five minutes in the evening, and every other kind of moment of your life is dominated by fact-breaking labor and torture and whatever.

00:13:18.000 Nevertheless, he observes in One Day in the Life of Donisevich that some people use, even in that context in which your choices are so narrow, they act in service of others.

00:13:33.000 They do what they're supposed to do, not because they love the regime, but because they want to help their comrades.

00:13:38.000 They maintain their dignity, even under kind of this kind of pressure.

00:13:43.000 But some other human types kind of just let go. 0.99

00:13:45.000 They give vent to their worst side and just become kind of pathetic. 0.98

00:13:49.000 And there are these character contrasts. 0.71

00:13:52.000 And so what Solzhenitsyn was saying was that although everyone had lots and lots of choice in this new society in which he found himself in the West, the way that people were formed was to be that kind of base, self-maximizing type.

00:14:08.000 And he saw this in the West's economic life, where large companies tried to take advantage of him as a writer.

00:14:16.000 He saw it in the press, where even though the press have legal freedoms, they're actually paradoxically very conformist.

00:14:23.000 And I'll say this, they all seem to sing from the same song sheet, which now obviously see very much as well.

00:14:29.000 He saw it in these student movements that basically desecrated all the streets with ugly slogans.

00:14:37.000 Is that freedom?

00:14:38.000 Is that what we fought for to try to be free from communism?

00:14:41.000 It's to get this.

00:14:42.000 And so very shockingly, he famously said, if I were asked if I would propose your society, meaning the West, such as it is today, as a model for the transformation of mind, meaning the nations trapped behind the Iron Curtain, I would have to say no, I would decline your society as a model.

00:15:00.000 And so, yeah, I mean, that was a digressive answer, but I think it gets at something that mere legal rights don't amount to true freedom.

00:15:10.000 And often an abusive account of rights, that you're just me, can make people less free.

00:15:19.000 I'll give one more example.

00:15:21.000 On a very kind of narrow libertarian sense, what Facebook and Twitter do to censor publications like mine, I work at the New York Post for my day job.

00:15:33.000 Some libertarians would say, well, it's a private actor acting privately.

00:15:37.000 So be it.

00:15:37.000 Whatever.

00:15:39.000 Go build your own Facebook.

00:15:40.000 If you take a kind of holistic view of what's good for society and what actually vindicates those rights that we cherish in their most noble sense, for example, investigating powerful people like Hunter Biden and his father, who's now the most powerful man in the world, if you leave that up to kind of large corporate actors, actually you could lose those freedoms.

00:16:02.000 And so you become subject to private tyrannies, even if you don't have public tyrannies like government tyranny.

00:16:10.000 I love that.

00:16:11.000 And so the overemphasis on rights and not on duty or duties has been very destructive for our country.

00:16:19.000 So in the conservative movement, I grew up in, it was all rights-centric.

00:16:23.000 And I actually have a lot of agreement with that.

00:16:27.000 I think it's very important to understand what is a right and where does it come from.

00:16:30.000 But a right without a duty tends to just wither on the vine.

00:16:34.000 It just tends to be somewhat of a self-indulgent exercise.

00:16:37.000 There's not the wise restraints to actually keep you free, which is actually in the stairwell of the Harvard law school.

00:16:45.000 I'm sure they'll remove it very soon because it's far too wise for Harvard.

00:16:49.000 Where what you don't do, the restraints you have, is actually what keeps you actually free, which is, like you said, this idea of being able to defeat the demon within you, and that's actually what's going to be able to make you free.

00:17:03.000 So I first became aware of you when you were debating David French.

00:17:08.000 I'm sure you've heard this a couple million times in the last few years.

00:17:12.000 It was really interesting and fascinating because it was two very thoughtful people that it was a topic I never really actually thought about, which was whether or not we should regulate drag queen story hour.

00:17:27.000 So I actually think the brilliance of the conversation was how kind of off the wall it was, but it's also just kind of so in some ways bizarre, to be perfectly honest, right?

00:17:38.000 And going into it, I thought to myself, kind of from this kind of rights-based, more libertarian sympathy, oh, why not?

00:17:45.000 I mean, I guess I don't like it.

00:17:47.000 I'm a Christian. 0.96

00:17:47.000 I think it's disgusting. 0.96

00:17:49.000 I thought you did a really good job.

00:17:51.000 Very articulate.

00:17:52.000 And I'm totally with you, by the way.

00:17:54.000 I think that it should be illegal.

00:17:55.000 We should use the power of the state.

00:17:57.000 It's disgusting. 0.92

00:17:58.000 It's gross. 0.95

00:17:58.000 We should be able to call right and wrong. 0.95

00:18:00.000 That wasn't a thing that happened overnight.

00:18:02.000 Can you talk about that just from how the impact was from people getting to know you?

00:18:11.000 I know that from my perspective, it was a hot debate item for at least in circles I was in for quite some time.

00:18:19.000 Yes, it was, as Ross Dow said of the New York Times, put it, it was a full employment bill for the conservative commentariat, you know, in fact.

00:18:27.000 And I wrote a piece called Against David Frenchism, which has been called the essay that launched a thousand op-eds or a thousand hotcakes.

00:18:37.000 I can't remember.

00:18:39.000 But yeah, I mean, look, I'll take what start about it from a personal point of view.

00:18:43.000 I think that the end goal of a society is to help ordinary people live ordinary lives of decency and virtue.

00:18:55.000 This is as old as Aristotle Ethics, you know, book one.

00:19:00.000 It's as old as Thomas Aquinas, The Treatise.

00:19:02.000 All people, all action aims at some good.

00:19:05.000 Good luck figuring out what that means.

00:19:09.000 You got to get to contemplation to figure that out.

00:19:11.000 Sorry, go ahead.

00:19:12.000 No, you're right.

00:19:12.000 You're right.

00:19:14.000 But to bring it down to the level of Drag Queen Story Hour, look, as a father, look, I'm not going to take my kids to Drag Queen Story Hour.

00:19:22.000 And I know that you could say, well, that's the end of the discussion, but it's bizarre that in a society in which that's becoming normalized.

00:19:30.000 And I think conservatives should have been and should be alarmed about developments like that.

00:19:36.000 And it never stops with public libraries.

00:19:39.000 Then becomes a kind of curricular program as it's beginning to become that way, whereas storytelling hour in schools.

00:19:47.000 I mean, it always, you know, this kind of liberalism that wants to smash every limit, every taboo, every restriction won't stop with what begins as a voluntary thing almost immediately becomes eventually becomes a requirement, as we've seen with gender ideology.

00:20:06.000 So, you know, I had this critique where I summed up the response of certain conservatives as David Frenchism, which is to say that, say, you know, the best we can do is to carve out a private space for people of faith to leave their lives at least unmolested by government.

00:20:24.000 And we got to let a drag queen happen as well in order to have that.

00:20:27.000 Now, you know, I had a debate, I had two debates in person with David French.

00:20:33.000 And I mean, because he's a litigator, he's very good at always bringing it back to kind of the practical question of, well, what are you going to do about it?

00:20:40.000 You know, the Supreme Court precedents are against you.

00:20:44.000 And he's right. 0.93

00:20:45.000 But there's a kind of tyranny of the practical there where you have, I think, when we've gotten to the point where drag queens interact with children, they're like dressed like looking like demons, we have to step back and say, okay, we have to go back to the speculative questions. 0.96

00:21:01.000 What do we want as a society? 0.96

00:21:03.000 Is this what we want?

00:21:04.000 And if it's not what we want, then we have to throw everything we have at it, legally, politically, what have you, to stop this, rather than say, well, since the 1950s, the Supreme Court's jurisprudence has grown in X direction and can't change it.

00:21:18.000 So, you know, what are you going to do about it?

00:21:20.000 I think I can't accept that as a bother.

00:21:24.000 So let's dive into this deeper.

00:21:26.000 And I want to, of course, go back to the book, but I'm super interested in this.

00:21:29.000 What do you have to say for the critique that the David French type people would throw at you and they throw at me?

00:21:36.000 And I really don't care because my opinion is very similar.

00:21:39.000 You have to defeat evil early and decisively.

00:21:42.000 And if the courts rule against me, then so what?

00:21:44.000 Then I'm going to do it again.

00:21:45.000 Because we were given political power by voters.

00:21:48.000 We didn't go stage a coup.

00:21:49.000 They voted for us to defend their values.

00:21:52.000 And I've just become a lot less interested in being able to define it perfectly.

00:21:57.000 I don't know if that makes sense.

00:21:58.000 Like one of the problems of libertarianism is it's so ideological that the only way you could beat an ideologue is with an ideologue, right?

00:22:05.000 That's the only way.

00:22:06.000 And it's just very practical.

00:22:07.000 It's like, okay, this is bad, and I want to stop it.

00:22:10.000 I'll let the lawyers figure out the rest of it.

00:22:12.000 What do you have to say, though, about this kind of idea?

00:22:15.000 How dare you use political power?

00:22:17.000 Because how do you know what's better than somebody else?

00:22:21.000 I mean, first of all, if you don't want to wield political power, you shouldn't be in the business of politics.

00:22:28.000 And this is the bizarre thing about the case as a whole, that we're here to win elections and win Supreme Court seats and win lower court seats, but not actually use that power to do anything conservative ends.

00:22:46.000 And look, you know, so that's one question I think easily settled away.

00:22:52.000 If you're in politics, you want to wield power toward some end.

00:22:56.000 And so then the question becomes, you know, how can you tell the difference between good things and bad things as the two of them.

00:23:02.000 That's the actual conversation, though.

00:23:04.000 Yeah, it's, I mean, I, you know, all of Western tradition tells me that there is an objective morality and there is a true anthropology about what makes people happy.

00:23:15.000 And there are false anthropologies that hold up things for people that look like happiness, but in fact, at the end of it, they find degradation, shame, and unhappiness.

00:23:24.000 And so, yeah, politics is about using power, is about using, I would say, more important than using power is using authority.

00:23:33.000 Because power can just be this sort of raw exercise of I have power over you, Charlie, do that.

00:23:38.000 You know, of course, yeah, I don't want no one.

00:23:40.000 But authority is legitimate authority is authority that it might be coercive, but it's aimed at ultimately the good of a society and good of family.

00:23:57.000 And that's, you know, that's perfectly in line with the conscience.

00:24:05.000 In other words, there's no, we shouldn't think of conscience and true authority as opponents of each other.

00:24:11.000 This is a very kind of liberal mentality where it says if you coerce someone's conscience, you must be sort of doing something wrong, when in fact, the conscience means nothing if it's not the reflection of some universal moral law.

00:24:28.000 If the notion of conscience becomes so privatized, so you say, well, my conscience says it's wrong to kill babies, and someone else's conscience says it's right to kill babies, and no one can be sure which of the two consciences is in the right.

00:24:44.000 That's actually an attack on the idea of conscience.

00:24:46.000 Conscience is only conscience if it's in line with the dictates of the moral law, of the natural law, of the divine law.

00:24:53.000 And so I just have, I know that I gave a very long answer, but the bottom line is I just have no patience for people to say, well, how can you be sure what's good and bad?

00:25:03.000 Yeah, so what I think it is, Saurabh, is that, and I get it, because I used to be here and I've tried to actually get to the root of it.

00:25:09.000 So if you kind of peel back the layers of David French, I think there's actually something that I could agree with, which is this fear of totalitarianism.

00:25:20.000 I actually think that I'm going to try to give him the benefit of good intentions, that if we dare use power, we're going to have gulags everywhere.

00:25:27.000 And I hate that.

00:25:28.000 So I'd rather just be indifferent, allow things to fall apart and actually live under a different form of tyranny, but at least we don't have that form of tyranny, right?

00:25:37.000 So that's kind of the way the conservative movement was trained to think about this, which was the rogue to serfdom, which is that if we were to ever give power to the state in any way, shape, or form, by the way, if the state's good for anything, it should be against, I don't know, chemical castration of children and getting, you know, having pedophiles and not being able to read books to young kids.

00:25:58.000 Bizarre how that leads to gulags.

00:26:00.000 But that's kind of the thought process, right?

00:26:02.000 Which is that we're not allowed to use political power no matter what, even if it results in things we don't like.

00:26:07.000 Because I don't think David French likes drag screen to.

00:26:11.000 I think he made that very clear.

00:26:13.000 But I also think he's afraid of what might actually happen after it instead of what is.

00:26:17.000 Is that too much of kind of an abstraction conservatism instead of like an empirical conservatism?

00:26:22.000 No, I mean, you're right that that's, I think that's always the anxiety.

00:26:25.000 And it's very bizarre.

00:26:26.000 I had a debate with a very perfectly nice, intelligent libertarian, but I posed my views.

00:26:32.000 And again, my views rest on the authority of Aristotle and St. Thomas that the role of a ruler is to help people achieve happiness.

00:26:43.000 How radical of you.

00:26:45.000 Yeah.

00:26:46.000 But it immediately goes to the gulag.

00:26:48.000 And I really don't understand it.

00:26:52.000 I think the fact is that one way or another, some orthodoxy is going to be enshrined in society.

00:27:00.000 Some account of the ultimate ends of human life is going to be sort of enshrined and imposed on us.

00:27:09.000 And the question is whether it's a good one or a bad one.

00:27:11.000 And so you notice the conservative abandonment of the public square, their unwillingness to enforce what's good and bad and to help people tell the difference between the two and have helped society discern the difference between the two has not led to a kind of libertarian utopia.

00:27:28.000 We have instead is other views being, other orthodoxies being imposed on us that are far worse than Judeo-Christian orthodoxy.

00:27:36.000 Totally.

00:27:38.000 Whether it's gender ideology or critical race theory or what have you.

00:27:42.000 I mean, these are extremely coercive, often using private power, as I've mentioned, because it's not necessarily always government that's doing it.

00:27:50.000 It's also corporations and universities and so forth.

00:27:53.000 But nevertheless, there's no escaping the decision to say, what is an orthodoxy in our society?

00:28:02.000 What do we support?

00:28:04.000 And the law is a teacher.

00:28:06.000 If the law permits something, it signals to the people that that thing is good or acceptable at the very least.

00:28:14.000 And so that's how you change the morality of a society.

00:28:17.000 And it just has no bottom.

00:28:18.000 It would just go down to the pits.

00:28:20.000 So I love that.

00:28:21.000 The law is a teacher.

00:28:23.000 If you would have said that to me five years ago, I would have been like, no, of course not.

00:28:26.000 You can't legislate with morality.

00:28:28.000 Same here.

00:28:29.000 Yeah.

00:28:29.000 So I want you to explain that to our listeners that tend to be more kind of classical liberal.

00:28:34.000 And I have a lot of patience with them.

00:28:35.000 I really do a lot of grace.

00:28:37.000 And one of the reasons, I'm evangelical, but I'm a very pro-Catholic evangelical.

00:28:41.000 I just love how the Catholic Church doesn't change.

00:28:44.000 It's like, oh, that's actually the one thing I know that's not going to change.

00:28:47.000 I really respect that.

00:28:49.000 Don't change.

00:28:50.000 Because I actually think that, just from a human psychological perspective, when things are constantly changing, there's no permanence.

00:28:56.000 There's just chaos.

00:28:57.000 There's just uncertainty.

00:28:59.000 It drives people mad.

00:29:00.000 It really does, which is why I think we're seeing all this other chemical addiction and suicide is kind of, I think, an extension of the lack of permanency.

00:29:08.000 And I want to explore that with you.

00:29:09.000 But can you talk about this?

00:29:11.000 What do you mean the law is a teacher?

00:29:13.000 Because I was taught by Austrian economics that you can't legislate morality and people have to come at their way in their own voluntary exchanges.

00:29:24.000 Help unpack that.

00:29:26.000 First of all, even in a libertarian society, you do legislate morality in some sense, right?

00:29:31.000 So libertarians accept, for example, contract enforcement.

00:29:35.000 Yes.

00:29:35.000 Contract enforcement relies on the idea that honesty is good or that people should fulfill the policy.

00:29:41.000 I totally agree.

00:29:43.000 You know, insofar as we ban murder, again, we've, like you said, we've assert that there's value in human life and that it's wrong to take it unjustly.

00:29:53.000 So, but look, again, the idea that law is a teacher and helps shape form people is very obvious.

00:30:04.000 And you see it in the sense that all of the culture war transformation that we've had since the 1960s began with legal and political changes and then they filtered to the culture.

00:30:16.000 Gay marriage was unthinkable 10 years ago or whatever it was. 0.70

00:30:20.000 And now it's become, you know, it's become a norm and a lot of people have learned to accept it.

00:30:25.000 So you see when power shifts, when authority shifts, people change their minds.

00:30:30.000 And the idea that you should only have kind of voluntary private exhortations to virtue.

00:30:40.000 You know, I have to go to the treatise on law.

00:30:42.000 St. Thomas Aquinas says in the treatise on law, that referring to Aristotle, that private exhortations to virtue are good and we should do that.

00:30:52.000 Churches should do their thing, synagogues should do their thing, but that they're not efficacious because they have no power to discipline when people don't act virtuously, which the law requires.

00:31:03.000 So you mentioned Thomas Aquinas. 1.00

00:31:06.000 We can do the Suma Theological later.

00:31:08.000 I'm really interested in your thought of the greatest, most prolific writers ever.

00:31:13.000 No, but this is a really interesting point, which is what is the good?

00:31:18.000 And that really is basically what we're talking about here.

00:31:21.000 And you just kind of connected a bunch of dots.

00:31:23.000 I can't wait to go talk to some libertarians at some point about this.

00:31:26.000 It's like, wait, so you do believe that contract enforcement is important.

00:31:30.000 So, there is some form of objective integrity that you think should be upheld because it's not wrong to be able, it's not right to be able just to default on a deal.

00:31:41.000 And so, if that's right, what else might be right?

00:31:44.000 And so, this idea that you can't legislate morality has been around for quite some time.

00:31:49.000 And I think it's declining in popularity on the conservative side around the center.

00:31:56.000 I mean, like, people actually think that no, our leaders and our laws should be a reflection of our values.

00:32:02.000 And so, what do you have to say to the criticism?

00:32:05.000 And I get this all the time, I just really don't care because I'm not running for political office, is, oh, this is your own myopic view of the world.

00:32:12.000 You know, most of us are secular.

00:32:14.000 We don't subscribe to this.

00:32:16.000 Why are you, you know, talking about Aristotle and Aquinas and Augustine and the church fathers?

00:32:22.000 I'm an Enlightenment guy.

00:32:24.000 Let each do their own.

00:32:25.000 I mean, come on.

00:32:26.000 Why would you want to tell me how to live my life?

00:32:28.000 I won't tell you how to live yours.

00:32:30.000 We're all classical liberals.

00:32:32.000 That's what makes America so special and great.

00:32:33.000 What do you have to say about that?

00:32:34.000 That's a fantastical view of America.

00:32:37.000 First of all, I think there's a lot of retconning, you know, and movies where they go back and change the story to make the sort of sequels work.

00:32:49.000 So they change the sort of stories of the earlier episodes.

00:32:51.000 That it's a kind of retconning, that America was never as classically liberal as our libertarian friends describe it.

00:32:59.000 I mean, we've had obscenity laws since before there was a republic.

00:33:04.000 There were common law obscenity laws. 0.83

00:33:06.000 We had the idea that, you know, frankly, that Christianity is part of the common law after the Republic as well.

00:33:14.000 In other words, in the 19th century, after the First Amendment, you still had blasphemy convictions in the United States.

00:33:21.000 I'm not saying we should bring back blasphemy laws in that way, per se, today. 0.96

00:33:25.000 Maybe.

00:33:27.000 But the point is that it was never as the United States was never as classically liberal, libertarian as people imagine.

00:33:37.000 You know, up until the 1970s, 80s, and well into the 2010s, you had blue laws that uphold the Sabbath, the idea that it's good for workers to be able to get one day to spend with family, and let alone with God.

00:33:53.000 So our libertarian friends have to say that all American history up until the very recent past was this horrible totalitarian authoritarian place in order to justify their views.

00:34:07.000 In other words, they have to take this kind of bizarre view of the past as just a land of oppression. 0.99

00:34:12.000 Now, it was for African Americans. 1.00

00:34:14.000 I don't deny that.

00:34:15.000 But insofar as there were, for example, religious laws that applied equally to all people, there were.

00:34:22.000 There were laws that were based on kind of religious concepts of right and wrong.

00:34:26.000 So we're going to treat all of American history as piece, peace, smelly, wrong.

00:34:32.000 I don't want to have anything to do with it.

00:34:34.000 And then you see today how impossible neutrality is, right?

00:34:38.000 And now that conservatives have relinquished enforcing morality, it's not like the enforcement of morality has gone away.

00:34:45.000 As we just said, you're coerced in every dimension of life, and you're being coerced to say things that are so much more sort of bizarre than anything, any Judeo-Christian doctrine.

00:34:58.000 You're being coerced to say that there are 135 genders, right? 0.54

00:35:02.000 Or you're being coerced to say that people born with white skin have carried this racial sin that they can't wash the stain of racial sin. 0.59

00:35:11.000 So one way or another, some morality will be imposed. 0.51

00:35:15.000 Of course, Christian is whether it's a humane one, a reasonable one, or Ibrahim Kindle's morality.

00:35:21.000 So here's a question for you.

00:35:24.000 Is liberalism sustainable or will it always end in a form of authoritarianism?

00:35:29.000 I'm of the view that there's something in OG liberalism itself embedded in it that ultimately leads us to where we are now, to progressive liberalism.

00:35:42.000 Sorry to interrupt, but go back what you mean by OG.

00:35:44.000 Do you mean like Rene Descartes?

00:35:47.000 Yeah, well, classical liberalism, Enlightenment philosophy, I would say.

00:35:51.000 Okay.

00:35:52.000 The idea that man should be tried to become the absolute master of his own destiny.

00:36:00.000 So David Hume, Immanuel Kant, that's who you're talking about.

00:36:04.000 Okay.

00:36:06.000 Yeah, all those guys.

00:36:09.000 Ultimately, although their own philosophy didn't, in the 18th and 19th century, you couldn't see this coming necessarily, although some did.

00:36:20.000 This, the kind of ever-expanding horizon of liberation is somehow the impulse of all liberalism.

00:36:28.000 And so it chips away at the moral substrate that's required to sustain true freedom.

00:36:35.000 And it constantly looks for some new group to liberate, right? 0.56

00:36:38.000 So it's like, you know, as soon as you had like abortion rights, then gay marriage.

00:36:43.000 As soon as you have gay marriage, transgender rights.

00:36:45.000 As soon as you have transgender rights, then polyamory and so on and so forth.

00:36:48.000 There's something in the ideology itself that can't live with any traditional restraints. 0.95

00:36:54.000 And in that sense, it's real acidic to the kind of moral substrate that you need force for, like you said, a society where everything doesn't change all the time.

00:37:05.000 There has to be something permanent.

00:37:07.000 There's this drive in liberalism that I think is very hard to think.

00:37:11.000 So Russell Kirk said one of the six canons of conservatism should be that if you're going to change something, you must do so in accordance to your laws, your customs, and your traditions.

00:37:23.000 What should ever change?

00:37:24.000 And if we are going to change something, what should that be?

00:37:27.000 Because in your book, Unbroken Thread, you talk about that we should appreciate things that should not change.

00:37:34.000 Should anything ever change?

00:37:36.000 Is there a wisdom towards the proper way of improvement?

00:37:39.000 Or are you in a belief where you're like, you know what?

00:37:41.000 I want to go live in the 1300s.

00:37:43.000 No, no, no, not at all.

00:37:44.000 And I'm not any kind of a kind of romantic or pining for a union of throne and altar.

00:37:52.000 What would that even mean in the United States?

00:37:56.000 We don't have a throne to which we would marry our altar anyway.

00:37:59.000 And which altar?

00:38:01.000 But no, so I mean, I don't pine for the 13th century and St. Louis' reign, although I appreciate it.

00:38:12.000 I would say that certainly, I mean, and I'm not opposed to scientific inquiry, for example.

00:38:18.000 We should benefit from the advance of science and technology and improved lives for billions of people.

00:38:27.000 Though I oppose what I would call scientism, which is the tendency to apply a scientific outlook to the whole of human life and so forth, but to apply the scientific outlook to the whole of human life.

00:38:44.000 But the traditions that I sort of include in the book are all based on the idea that some limits are worth preserving.

00:38:58.000 But there are plenty of traditions that are also kind of bad traditions.

00:39:03.000 You know, racism was a bad tradition, but it has some traditional pedigree in this country.

00:39:08.000 And it was terrible, right?

00:39:09.000 But how did we ultimately overcome racism?

00:39:12.000 How did we change what was legitimate, not wrong?

00:39:16.000 The greatest kind of activists against slavery and then against Jim Crow spoke from a place of a higher tradition, namely a true account of Christianity, right?

00:39:27.000 Martin Luther King, William Wilberforce, the great abolitionist crusader, all these people use that higher plane of permanent truth to attack traditions that were bad traditions and deserve to be sort of left behind in the past.

00:39:43.000 So there's no doubt in my mind that there are bad traditions.

00:39:49.000 Not everything that's old necessarily deserves to be preserved or in amber.

00:39:56.000 Yeah, and to the science part, it was actually Christians who led the scientific revolution because they did it for the glory of God because they found the world worthy of natural inquiry.

00:40:06.000 If you look through the top science at the top 52 scientists in the scientific revolution, 50 out of 52 were self-described Christians.

00:40:14.000 And Sir Isaac Newton wrote more about biblical prophecy than physics. 0.82

00:40:18.000 It's a fun little side note.

00:40:20.000 So to kind of sum it all together, the unbroken thread, let's talk just for a couple minutes application.

00:40:26.000 What does this mean?

00:40:27.000 From a public policy standpoint, from a political standpoint, Aristotle, you've mentioned Aristotle a lot.

00:40:33.000 He said that politics is the highest form of community because it brings morality and sociability together, that we are all political animals.

00:40:41.000 So let's talk politics, the unbroken thread.

00:40:43.000 What are we supposed to do about this?

00:40:46.000 So, I mean, the book is at a kind of more intellectual plane, and I don't make kind of policy claims.

00:40:51.000 I, you know, will do that elsewhere in my kind of output.

00:40:56.000 But in sort of practical terms, I suggest we should bring back, for example, blue laws.

00:41:03.000 The idea that there should be a one-day a week that we set aside.

00:41:07.000 And obviously, there's a kind of religious component to that.

00:41:10.000 It's set aside as a family or a community for worship and for scripture.

00:41:15.000 But also, there's a kind of temporal secular element to it, which is that a day of rest gives workers a break.

00:41:24.000 And we're all very harried by our phones.

00:41:28.000 Whether if you're a white-collar professional, you're constantly getting alerts on your phone in a way that's distracting, drives you mad.

00:41:34.000 If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, you're much less likely to get time in a regular way to spend children.

00:41:41.000 So working-class people especially need it kind of break.

00:41:44.000 Other policy goals. 0.99

00:41:45.000 I mean, I think in one of the book's chapters, What Do You Owe Your Body?

00:41:49.000 That chapter is really a critique of Gnosticism, the ancient idea, which has come back, that human beings are just sort of mental spiritual beings that happen to be trapped in fleshly bodies.

00:42:02.000 That's a very Eastern thought, too, though.

00:42:04.000 It's an ancient heresy, you know, of the kind of late antique Middle East in North Africa.

00:42:10.000 But it has found resurgence, I would argue, in the coronavirus restrictions, right?

00:42:18.000 So many people you hear now who want to have kind of permanent lockdowns are like, well, why do kids need to actually go to school?

00:42:25.000 Let's learn from the screen.

00:42:27.000 Now, as a parent, I tell you that that's how nonsensical and bizarre it is to imagine the kids can learn from the screen, but there is a kind of Gnostic impulse to that.

00:42:37.000 The idea that, you know, let's mask forever.

00:42:40.000 That's deeply alienating because we're embodied beings and I recognize you and I can read your character, I can read your soul from your face.

00:42:47.000 I have no other way.

00:42:49.000 So permanent mass regimes.

00:42:51.000 So if the book has a bunch of an immediate public policy application, it's the chapter on the body, how important it is to have embodied relationships, embodied communities, to shake people's hands, you see them and you live in real community rather than just everything virtually.

00:43:08.000 So that chapter, I would argue, is, without ever saying so, is a kind of total critique of the permanent lockdown mentality.

00:43:19.000 And I think that's an immediate goal where classical liberals and conservatives like me can find common cause.

00:43:25.000 We might come at it from different reasons.

00:43:26.000 They just think it's a violation of rights.

00:43:28.000 I think it harms our ability to be fully human.

00:43:33.000 But bottom line, we should all oppose this idea that we should just live our lives remotely.

00:43:42.000 That's not human.

00:43:43.000 Well, I love it.

00:43:44.000 Wow, there's so much more I wanted to get to, but time is not unlimited.

00:43:49.000 So The Unbroken Thread, Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in the Age of Chaos.

00:43:53.000 Love your writing.

00:43:54.000 This was an honor.

00:43:55.000 So, Rob.

00:43:55.000 And anything else you wanted to mention?

00:43:57.000 No, that's it.

00:43:58.000 Thank you very much for having me.

00:43:59.000 The book is available on Amazon, Barnes ⁇ Noble, all the rest of the major shops.

00:44:04.000 Great.

00:44:04.000 All right.

00:44:04.000 Talk to you soon.

00:44:05.000 Thank you.

00:44:06.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:44:07.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:44:09.000 God bless you.

00:44:10.000 Speak to him.

The Charlie Kirk Show - May 30, 2021

Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos with Sohrab Ahmari

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