00:00:17.000That is your portal to help support us.
00:00:20.000Our team, our researchers, our editors, the travel costs.
00:00:24.000Everything around the production of the Charlie Kirk show.
00:00:27.000You know, with all the cancellation and all the bad guys coming after people that are trying to tell the truth, when you support us at charliekirk.com slash support, you are saying no to cancel culture.
00:00:37.000You are saying no to the digital assassins.
00:01:24.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:32.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:13.000I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran after the Iranian Revolution.
00:02:17.000I was born to a very typical middle-class urban secular family of the type you meet a lot if you know Iranians.
00:02:27.000My parents had supported the Iranian Revolution because they were, like many other young Iranians, they thought they would get something like Western democracy.
00:02:37.000They had very fuzzy notions of what would happen and then instantaneously had come to regret it as the Islamist regime took over.
00:02:46.000So I grew up in this milieu where we would, you know, I was surrounded by Western books and movies, music, ideas.
00:02:53.000But 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.
00:03:07.000And so, you know, when I was a teenager still living in Iran, I became an atheist.
00:03:13.000And then we were lucky enough to be able to get a green card.
00:03:16.000Just my mother and I, my father never left Iran.
00:03:18.000And we immigrated to Utah, of all places.
00:03:21.000I had this idea of like, you know, America as this decadent 1980s Manhattan that I had seen in the movies.
00:03:28.000It shocked me when I showed up in Utah and it's, you know, very religious, very communitarian in various ways.
00:03:35.000And so I kind of carried on the same revolution that I had launched in my old country against God, against traditional authority.
00:03:45.000And, you know, I mean, I told my kind of personal story in a different book, in a memoir called From Fire by Water.
00:03:52.000It'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,
00:04:10.000educating 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.
00:04:30.000What'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.
00:04:52.000I found myself reading more Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke than ever before.
00:04:56.000And I know that you comment on that a lot.
00:05:00.000And so, just the book, again, is very important.
00:05:41.000I'm actually really excited to be able to read all of this.
00:05:45.000But the overarching theme is praising and making an argument for things that should not change.
00:05:52.000In 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.
00:06:27.000And what drove me to write it is, frankly, my anxiety about what kind of a man our civilization would chisel out of Max.
00:06:36.000And it's not like, you know, I worry that he'll become, God forbid, I don't know, an opioid addict.
00:06:41.000The 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.
00:06:53.000You know, we're immigrants to this country.
00:06:55.000We're obviously grateful for its legal kind of rights and the dignity that you get from our constitutional order.
00:07:03.000But what do you actually use those rights for?
00:07:07.000And 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.
00:07:17.000You just keep your options open, seek to get ahead in life.
00:07:20.000And 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.
00:07:31.000And 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.
00:07:48.000But to begin with, how do I govern the tyrant within me, my appetites, and how do I detach myself from my baser side?
00:07:58.000And 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.
00:08:09.000And 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.
00:08:24.000And then I explore each of them through the life of one great thinker.
00:08:27.000So, 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.
00:08:35.000The question about how do you serve your parents, which is basically filial piety, couldn't go to anyone but Confucius.
00:08:42.000The question about how do you relate God and politics?
00:08:45.000Obviously, St. Augustine and so forth.
00:08:47.000So 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.
00:08:59.000You're just reading the life story, the drama of a person's life.
00:09:03.000And as it happens, then the ideas are blended into the kind of biographical.
00:09:08.000So only you could have possibly wove together the confessions and the analects into one book.
00:09:17.000So there's a lot of places I want to go with that.
00:09:20.000I 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.
00:09:31.000And knowing you, you probably have a fair amount of Aquinas in here too, is this idea of freedom.
00:09:37.000So 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.
00:10:02.000Which was kind of a disregard for anything that any society or culture or country.
00:10:06.000What really matters is what, you know, your personal capacity to do things.
00:10:10.000So 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.
00:10:19.000And I was never taught that liberty was the pursuit of virtue.
00:10:24.000Can you talk about that difference and how we need to better define what liberty and freedom actually is?
00:10:30.000And is there a difference between liberty and freedom, or is that too much of a semantic difference?
00:10:36.000Yeah, Charlie, actually, I was the same.
00:10:38.000In other words, it's not like I came to my current views sort of sui generous out of nothing.
00:10:44.000I was also typically formed conservative, as you just described yourself in my 20s.
00:10:51.000And then, like I said, fatherhood and faith changed everything.
00:10:57.000And I began to, I think, came to my mature views now.
00:11:01.000I explore the question of what it means to be free through Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great question of this.
00:11:11.000But in the book, I focus on the one day in the life of Ivan Denisevich.
00:11:15.000And 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.
00:11:27.000And 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.
00:11:33.000But then in 1978, he was asked to give a commencement speech at Harvard.
00:11:37.000And this text is kind of one of the definitive texts for me and might be for you as well.
00:11:42.000And 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.
00:12:00.000This 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.
00:12:18.000Of 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.
00:12:29.000But in retrospect, the speech is quite prophetic.
00:12:33.000And so, how did someone who had lived in a gulag for about a decade of his life, what could he teach us?
00:12:43.000That was the question that was posed to him.
00:12:45.000You come from a society that has labor camps.
00:12:50.000And 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.
00:13:04.000Because in a gulag, the regime controls every minute of your day.
00:13:08.000You 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.
00:13:18.000Nevertheless, 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.
00:13:33.000They do what they're supposed to do, not because they love the regime, but because they want to help their comrades.
00:13:38.000They maintain their dignity, even under kind of this kind of pressure.
00:13:43.000But some other human types kind of just let go.
00:13:45.000They give vent to their worst side and just become kind of pathetic.
00:13:49.000And there are these character contrasts.
00:13:52.000And 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.
00:14:08.000And he saw this in the West's economic life, where large companies tried to take advantage of him as a writer.
00:14:16.000He saw it in the press, where even though the press have legal freedoms, they're actually paradoxically very conformist.
00:14:23.000And I'll say this, they all seem to sing from the same song sheet, which now obviously see very much as well.
00:14:29.000He saw it in these student movements that basically desecrated all the streets with ugly slogans.
00:14:42.000And 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.
00:15:00.000And 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.
00:15:10.000And often an abusive account of rights, that you're just me, can make people less free.
00:15:21.000On 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.
00:15:33.000Some libertarians would say, well, it's a private actor acting privately.
00:15:40.000If 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.
00:16:02.000And so you become subject to private tyrannies, even if you don't have public tyrannies like government tyranny.
00:16:11.000And so the overemphasis on rights and not on duty or duties has been very destructive for our country.
00:16:19.000So in the conservative movement, I grew up in, it was all rights-centric.
00:16:23.000And I actually have a lot of agreement with that.
00:16:27.000I think it's very important to understand what is a right and where does it come from.
00:16:30.000But a right without a duty tends to just wither on the vine.
00:16:34.000It just tends to be somewhat of a self-indulgent exercise.
00:16:37.000There's not the wise restraints to actually keep you free, which is actually in the stairwell of the Harvard law school.
00:16:45.000I'm sure they'll remove it very soon because it's far too wise for Harvard.
00:16:49.000Where 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.
00:17:03.000So I first became aware of you when you were debating David French.
00:17:08.000I'm sure you've heard this a couple million times in the last few years.
00:17:12.000It 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.
00:17:27.000So 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?
00:17:38.000And going into it, I thought to myself, kind of from this kind of rights-based, more libertarian sympathy, oh, why not?
00:17:58.000We should be able to call right and wrong.
00:18:00.000That wasn't a thing that happened overnight.
00:18:02.000Can you talk about that just from how the impact was from people getting to know you?
00:18:11.000I know that from my perspective, it was a hot debate item for at least in circles I was in for quite some time.
00:18:19.000Yes, 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.
00:18:27.000And I wrote a piece called Against David Frenchism, which has been called the essay that launched a thousand op-eds or a thousand hotcakes.
00:19:14.000But 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.
00:19:22.000And 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.
00:19:30.000And I think conservatives should have been and should be alarmed about developments like that.
00:19:36.000And it never stops with public libraries.
00:19:39.000Then becomes a kind of curricular program as it's beginning to become that way, whereas storytelling hour in schools.
00:19:47.000I 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.
00:20:06.000So, 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.
00:20:24.000And we got to let a drag queen happen as well in order to have that.
00:20:27.000Now, you know, I had a debate, I had two debates in person with David French.
00:20:33.000And 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?
00:20:40.000You know, the Supreme Court precedents are against you.
00:20:45.000But 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.
00:21:04.000And 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.
00:21:18.000So, you know, what are you going to do about it?
00:21:20.000I think I can't accept that as a bother.
00:21:58.000Like 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?
00:22:17.000Because how do you know what's better than somebody else?
00:22:21.000I mean, first of all, if you don't want to wield political power, you shouldn't be in the business of politics.
00:22:28.000And 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.
00:22:46.000And look, you know, so that's one question I think easily settled away.
00:22:52.000If you're in politics, you want to wield power toward some end.
00:22:56.000And so then the question becomes, you know, how can you tell the difference between good things and bad things as the two of them.
00:23:02.000That's the actual conversation, though.
00:23:04.000Yeah, 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.
00:23:15.000And 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.
00:23:24.000And so, yeah, politics is about using power, is about using, I would say, more important than using power is using authority.
00:23:33.000Because power can just be this sort of raw exercise of I have power over you, Charlie, do that.
00:23:38.000You know, of course, yeah, I don't want no one.
00:23:40.000But 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.
00:23:57.000And that's, you know, that's perfectly in line with the conscience.
00:24:05.000In other words, there's no, we shouldn't think of conscience and true authority as opponents of each other.
00:24:11.000This 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.
00:24:28.000If 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.
00:24:44.000That's actually an attack on the idea of conscience.
00:24:46.000Conscience is only conscience if it's in line with the dictates of the moral law, of the natural law, of the divine law.
00:24:53.000And 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?
00:25:03.000Yeah, 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.
00:25:09.000So 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.
00:25:20.000I 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.
00:25:28.000So 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?
00:25:37.000So 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.
00:26:52.000I think the fact is that one way or another, some orthodoxy is going to be enshrined in society.
00:27:00.000Some account of the ultimate ends of human life is going to be sort of enshrined and imposed on us.
00:27:09.000And the question is whether it's a good one or a bad one.
00:27:11.000And 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.
00:27:28.000We have instead is other views being, other orthodoxies being imposed on us that are far worse than Judeo-Christian orthodoxy.
00:27:38.000Whether it's gender ideology or critical race theory or what have you.
00:27:42.000I mean, these are extremely coercive, often using private power, as I've mentioned, because it's not necessarily always government that's doing it.
00:27:50.000It's also corporations and universities and so forth.
00:27:53.000But nevertheless, there's no escaping the decision to say, what is an orthodoxy in our society?
00:29:00.000It 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.
00:29:11.000What do you mean the law is a teacher?
00:29:13.000Because 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.
00:29:43.000You 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.
00:29:53.000So, but look, again, the idea that law is a teacher and helps shape form people is very obvious.
00:30:04.000And 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.
00:30:16.000Gay marriage was unthinkable 10 years ago or whatever it was.
00:30:20.000And now it's become, you know, it's become a norm and a lot of people have learned to accept it.
00:30:25.000So you see when power shifts, when authority shifts, people change their minds.
00:30:30.000And the idea that you should only have kind of voluntary private exhortations to virtue.
00:30:40.000You know, I have to go to the treatise on law.
00:30:42.000St. Thomas Aquinas says in the treatise on law, that referring to Aristotle, that private exhortations to virtue are good and we should do that.
00:30:52.000Churches 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.
00:31:08.000I'm really interested in your thought of the greatest, most prolific writers ever.
00:31:13.000No, but this is a really interesting point, which is what is the good?
00:31:18.000And that really is basically what we're talking about here.
00:31:21.000And you just kind of connected a bunch of dots.
00:31:23.000I can't wait to go talk to some libertarians at some point about this.
00:31:26.000It's like, wait, so you do believe that contract enforcement is important.
00:31:30.000So, 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.
00:31:41.000And so, if that's right, what else might be right?
00:31:44.000And so, this idea that you can't legislate morality has been around for quite some time.
00:31:49.000And I think it's declining in popularity on the conservative side around the center.
00:31:56.000I mean, like, people actually think that no, our leaders and our laws should be a reflection of our values.
00:32:02.000And so, what do you have to say to the criticism?
00:32:05.000And 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.
00:32:37.000First 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.
00:32:49.000So they change the sort of stories of the earlier episodes.
00:32:51.000That it's a kind of retconning, that America was never as classically liberal as our libertarian friends describe it.
00:32:59.000I mean, we've had obscenity laws since before there was a republic.
00:33:27.000But the point is that it was never as the United States was never as classically liberal, libertarian as people imagine.
00:33:37.000You 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.
00:33:53.000So 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.
00:34:07.000In other words, they have to take this kind of bizarre view of the past as just a land of oppression.
00:34:15.000But insofar as there were, for example, religious laws that applied equally to all people, there were.
00:34:22.000There were laws that were based on kind of religious concepts of right and wrong.
00:34:26.000So we're going to treat all of American history as piece, peace, smelly, wrong.
00:34:32.000I don't want to have anything to do with it.
00:34:34.000And then you see today how impossible neutrality is, right?
00:34:38.000And now that conservatives have relinquished enforcing morality, it's not like the enforcement of morality has gone away.
00:34:45.000As 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.
00:34:58.000You're being coerced to say that there are 135 genders, right?
00:35:02.000Or 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.
00:35:11.000So one way or another, some morality will be imposed.
00:35:15.000Of course, Christian is whether it's a humane one, a reasonable one, or Ibrahim Kindle's morality.
00:35:24.000Is liberalism sustainable or will it always end in a form of authoritarianism?
00:35:29.000I'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.
00:35:42.000Sorry to interrupt, but go back what you mean by OG.
00:36:09.000Ultimately, although their own philosophy didn't, in the 18th and 19th century, you couldn't see this coming necessarily, although some did.
00:36:20.000This, the kind of ever-expanding horizon of liberation is somehow the impulse of all liberalism.
00:36:28.000And so it chips away at the moral substrate that's required to sustain true freedom.
00:36:35.000And it constantly looks for some new group to liberate, right?
00:36:38.000So it's like, you know, as soon as you had like abortion rights, then gay marriage.
00:36:43.000As soon as you have gay marriage, transgender rights.
00:36:45.000As soon as you have transgender rights, then polyamory and so on and so forth.
00:36:48.000There's something in the ideology itself that can't live with any traditional restraints.
00:36:54.000And 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.
00:37:07.000There's this drive in liberalism that I think is very hard to think.
00:37:11.000So 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.
00:38:01.000But no, so I mean, I don't pine for the 13th century and St. Louis' reign, although I appreciate it.
00:38:12.000I would say that certainly, I mean, and I'm not opposed to scientific inquiry, for example.
00:38:18.000We should benefit from the advance of science and technology and improved lives for billions of people.
00:38:27.000Though 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.
00:38:44.000But the traditions that I sort of include in the book are all based on the idea that some limits are worth preserving.
00:38:58.000But there are plenty of traditions that are also kind of bad traditions.
00:39:03.000You know, racism was a bad tradition, but it has some traditional pedigree in this country.
00:39:09.000But how did we ultimately overcome racism?
00:39:12.000How did we change what was legitimate, not wrong?
00:39:16.000The 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?
00:39:27.000Martin 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.
00:39:43.000So there's no doubt in my mind that there are bad traditions.
00:39:49.000Not everything that's old necessarily deserves to be preserved or in amber.
00:39:56.000Yeah, 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.
00:40:06.000If you look through the top science at the top 52 scientists in the scientific revolution, 50 out of 52 were self-described Christians.
00:40:14.000And Sir Isaac Newton wrote more about biblical prophecy than physics.
00:40:27.000From a public policy standpoint, from a political standpoint, Aristotle, you've mentioned Aristotle a lot.
00:40:33.000He said that politics is the highest form of community because it brings morality and sociability together, that we are all political animals.
00:40:41.000So let's talk politics, the unbroken thread.
00:40:43.000What are we supposed to do about this?
00:40:46.000So, I mean, the book is at a kind of more intellectual plane, and I don't make kind of policy claims.
00:40:51.000I, you know, will do that elsewhere in my kind of output.
00:40:56.000But in sort of practical terms, I suggest we should bring back, for example, blue laws.
00:41:03.000The idea that there should be a one-day a week that we set aside.
00:41:07.000And obviously, there's a kind of religious component to that.
00:41:10.000It's set aside as a family or a community for worship and for scripture.
00:41:15.000But also, there's a kind of temporal secular element to it, which is that a day of rest gives workers a break.
00:41:24.000And we're all very harried by our phones.
00:41:28.000Whether if you're a white-collar professional, you're constantly getting alerts on your phone in a way that's distracting, drives you mad.
00:41:34.000If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, you're much less likely to get time in a regular way to spend children.
00:41:41.000So working-class people especially need it kind of break.
00:41:45.000I mean, I think in one of the book's chapters, What Do You Owe Your Body?
00:41:49.000That 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.
00:42:02.000That's a very Eastern thought, too, though.
00:42:04.000It's an ancient heresy, you know, of the kind of late antique Middle East in North Africa.
00:42:10.000But it has found resurgence, I would argue, in the coronavirus restrictions, right?
00:42:18.000So 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?
00:42:27.000Now, 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.
00:42:37.000The idea that, you know, let's mask forever.
00:42:40.000That'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.
00:42:51.000So 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.
00:43:08.000So that chapter, I would argue, is, without ever saying so, is a kind of total critique of the permanent lockdown mentality.
00:43:19.000And I think that's an immediate goal where classical liberals and conservatives like me can find common cause.
00:43:25.000We might come at it from different reasons.
00:43:26.000They just think it's a violation of rights.
00:43:28.000I think it harms our ability to be fully human.
00:43:33.000But bottom line, we should all oppose this idea that we should just live our lives remotely.