247. The War On The West ｜ Douglas Murray
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson speaks to one of the world s foremost political writers, Douglas Murray, about Great Paintings, Oppression, and The War on the West, which happens to be the title of Murray s latest book. He believes we re facing an all-out assault from within, where anything s praised so long as it wasn t produced by the west, where history is reappraised as driven by slavery, and where unreason is one of many weapons mobilized against democracy, science, and progress. Also mentioned in this episode: bullies with a victim complex, white supremacist mathematics, and the power of truth. Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients with Depression and Anxious Disorder (D.I.Y.D.) in his new series on his new podcast, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first pack! Tim s Classic Breakfast Sandwiches are just $3 when you buy any size coffee, your mornings will never be the same. Plus Tax Canada only, limited time only, offer, only, terms apply. See app for details. Tims Classic Breakfast sandwiches are Just $3, $3? I want to talk to you about something serious and important, I ve been going through a bit by the war on the west. Well, I ll do that next for sure, I mean a bit on the Western culture, a bit of a war on Westernism, I ve come to do that in the past, I m in the history of the past by the past? I d like to help you do that, I d come to talk about that in a bit, so I hope you re not alone, so let me do that for me in the other sorts of anti-Westernism, I think I think that s good, I do that... - DOUG MEYER, - THE WORD ON THE WEST? - SONGS OF THE WATER ON THE WHORE ON THE SWORE?
Transcript
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In this episode, Dad spoke to one of the world's foremost political writers,
00:01:20.800
Douglas Murray, about great paintings, oppression,
00:01:26.700
which happens to be the title of Murray's latest book.
00:01:30.320
He believes we're facing an all-out assault from within,
00:01:33.720
where anything's praised so long as it wasn't produced by the West,
00:01:38.180
where history is reappraised as driven by slavery,
00:01:41.320
and where unreason is one of many weapons mobilized against democracy, science, and progress.
00:01:55.120
Before we start, I wanted to quickly remind you that Dad's now on Parler,
00:02:03.620
like pictures with Roger Penrose or Kermit the Frog.
00:02:33.620
I'm pleased to be talking today to Mr. Douglas Murray,
00:02:50.140
and book of the year for the Times and the Sunday Times.
00:02:54.820
The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam,
00:03:02.140
It spent almost 20 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list,
00:03:05.760
and was the number one bestseller in nonfiction.
00:03:08.260
Douglas and I have spoken several times before publicly on my podcast and for Unheard,
00:03:16.240
and he also moderated a discussion I had with Sam Harris.
00:03:21.080
I've just finished his latest book, which is not out yet,
00:03:35.700
So that's what we're going to talk about today,
00:03:44.140
and I thought I might start with something technical in some sense,
00:03:52.220
It might be regarded as a pretty inflammatory title,
00:04:04.880
I thought you were going to start with the West,
00:04:21.400
on everything to do with the foundations of the West,
00:04:45.900
This is a position that I argue that we've come to in the present age,
00:04:55.880
And everything is good so long as it hasn't come from us.
00:05:00.340
that what I'm describing here is Western anti-Westernism.
00:05:04.360
There are plenty of other forms of anti-Westernism.
00:05:20.540
Why we in the West have arrived at this strange place
00:05:24.180
where we venerate everything so long as it's not our own.
00:05:28.340
We respect things so long as it hasn't been produced
00:34:58.140
do you propose as an alternative and why do you
00:35:03.120
I mean, does the alternative only exist outside of
00:35:39.220
So that, for instance, it's also interesting that
00:36:30.720
the West, they're struck to the heart, generally
00:36:54.920
And so that in itself seems to indicate that the
00:37:04.080
book, as you know, on what everyone else in the
00:37:13.640
quote a lay colleague of mine's work on this, is
00:37:16.720
racism within China and racism from China about
00:37:22.140
Well, there's a term that the Chinese use of white
00:37:36.300
And the idea is, of course, is that white people
00:37:42.960
Like the simulacrum of a human being, but not the
00:38:05.640
So it looks to me, for example, I've tried to make
00:38:09.480
this case that the central animating spirit of the
00:38:19.700
association, the spirit of voluntary cooperation,
00:38:24.460
uncompelled choice, recognition of universal human
00:38:28.380
Now, we all fall short of acting that out and instilling
00:38:33.440
But and I see that as a reflection of a deeper that
00:38:37.420
deeper theological claim that we discussed earlier, that
00:38:40.540
each individual is in some sense of divine worth
00:38:52.240
And and that out of that, as far as I'm concerned, emerges
00:39:00.800
And there are a delineation of the notion of that intrinsic
00:39:07.900
That's not the expression of the will to power.
00:39:13.760
Why are we so loath to give ourselves credit for the
00:39:21.620
emergence of that idea and our attempts to abide by
00:39:28.960
Firstly, because firstly, we would go about that thing that
00:39:31.800
it's regarded as being somewhat somewhat gauche and
00:39:35.580
backward and unsophisticated to take such an attitude.
00:39:39.520
And the second is that we is a second and there are many
00:39:44.620
other reasons, but a second is the completely misinformed
00:39:48.840
And this comes from America in particular, I'm afraid.
00:39:51.200
It's what America has been pumping around the world in
00:39:54.860
The idea that what is what is bad in the West is uniquely bad.
00:39:59.480
And that comes from a complete and wholesale ignorance, not
00:40:03.380
just of history in the rest of the world, but the rest of the
00:40:11.580
I mean, if anything ever suffered from context collapse in
00:40:18.840
So that so that it is seen as there's another element that
00:40:22.840
there's another element that seems to be me to be worthy of
00:40:29.440
We're tortured for our moral insufficiency because of the
00:40:38.100
And the call for equity is part of the clarion call for the people who
00:40:43.540
are conducting, let's call it the war on the West.
00:40:46.260
And the proposition there is essentially Marxist, that wealth tends to
00:40:52.180
accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, which happens to be true.
00:40:56.200
Although those people differ, the proportion is small, but the people change.
00:41:01.240
But what's so faulty about that, in my estimation, isn't the claim that that
00:41:07.820
inequality exists or even the claim that there are negative aspects of that that
00:41:15.040
But the notion that that is somehow unique to the social institutions and the
00:41:22.920
I hate that most particularly because I think it underestimates the problem.
00:41:33.280
I mean, let's take the other options on the table.
00:41:36.480
The remaining flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War.
00:41:40.340
Let's say you can say maybe you can say Putin's Russia.
00:41:43.500
You can certainly say Cuba and a few other places.
00:41:48.140
What do we reckon is the inequality of wealth in these countries?
00:41:52.920
Between, let's say, the oligarchs and the average Russian.
00:41:58.840
There was a documentary Alexander Navalny bravely made before going back to Russia and
00:42:05.060
And he had it released after he got back to Russia the other month and was
00:42:10.560
He had the release of this documentary called Putin's Palace.
00:42:13.600
And one of the extraordinary things which did a lot of harm for Putin at home, because
00:42:17.140
people were genuinely shocked and upset about this, was that Putin's Palace on the Black
00:42:21.980
Sea, which he's been building for years at the cost of hundreds and hundreds of millions
00:42:25.980
of dollars, has, among other things, a vineyard attached to it.
00:42:29.720
And there's a guest area, a guest room near the vineyard.
00:42:33.060
And there's a guest lavatory in the guest room, the vineyard.
00:42:36.400
And there's a lavatory brush there made of gold that costs the same as the average Russian
00:42:42.220
So, there's just one example of inequality in Russia.
00:42:58.460
I've seen myself in a country, which I visited many years ago, but in a country where the
00:43:04.280
general population starved by the millions in the 1990s, and the military elites were
00:43:10.540
able to get hold on the black market of blue-label Johnny Walker, one of the most expensive
00:43:18.860
Because everyone talks about the post-colonial...
00:43:20.860
I mean, of course, there's post-colonial societies that haven't gone well.
00:43:23.840
There have been post-colonial societies that have gone very well, like Singapore, in terms
00:43:29.240
You could say that Hong Kong, until very recently, the same thing.
00:43:32.740
But let's talk about the post-colonial societies that didn't go well.
00:43:37.720
What was the wealth inequality in Zimbabwe between the wealth of Mrs. Mugabe, say, and the average
00:43:46.400
The average life expectancy in Zimbabwe during Robert Mugabe's reign halved.
00:43:54.300
He's one of the very few leaders in the world where life expectancy actually declined faster
00:44:03.580
People were on a treadmill that was getting shorter and shorter with every step.
00:44:11.080
What's wealth inequality like in Angola these days?
00:44:15.560
It is so obscene to present this as, as you say, as some kind of phenomenon of Western
00:44:22.520
capitalism, and as though any other system around could be better.
00:44:29.120
And to present it as some sort of rigorous theory.
00:44:32.220
So, all economic systems produce inequality, it seems to be the reflection of a deep underlying
00:44:39.740
law that we don't understand that well about how advantage tends to accrue as you accrue
00:44:51.180
And disadvantage tends to accrue as you accrue disadvantage.
00:44:57.480
All economic systems result in inequality and different societies have evolved different
00:45:05.680
But the only system that we know of that's also produced inequality, but also produced the
00:45:13.700
cessation of absolute privation are free market systems.
00:45:18.300
And China didn't manage that till they instituted instituted free market systems and free market
00:45:24.260
systems work because sovereign individuals exercise choice over not only purchase, but also
00:45:30.900
And so people in the West are guilty about inequality and liable to rape themselves over the coals when
00:45:41.520
But it's partly because they don't understand how pernicious the problem really is.
00:45:45.220
And they don't take credit for the fact that free markets have stopped people from starving.
00:45:49.840
You know, it's only 8% of people now live below the UN line for absolute poverty compared to 40% in
00:46:01.100
And you go back to that phenomenon that, again, I don't think there's any evidence that in modern
00:46:07.340
China, the people involved with the Politburo and the people who've done terribly well out of the
00:46:13.020
last 20 years, particularly since China entered the WTO, I don't think there's any evidence of
00:46:19.180
significant fears about inequality between the Chinese elite and the average person.
00:46:24.940
There is something very specific about the Western worry about inequality, which again,
00:46:30.460
like the worry about slavery, like the worry about guilt and historical guilt,
00:46:35.060
is a product of a thing that ought to be recognized as being a good part of the machine.
00:46:41.920
If the machine was so pernicious, we wouldn't care about inequality.
00:46:49.700
Or we'd celebrate it even more, which is a perfectly easy thing to do, which is,
00:46:56.300
And the evidence that I'm better is clearly that I have more.
00:47:01.220
And what's your evidence for the contrary claim?
00:47:07.100
And you go to another of the world's biggest economies, India.
00:47:13.380
It's an extraordinary culture, very, very rich, a wonderful culture, just the most extraordinary
00:47:18.540
place to visit, but it also has a form of inequality, which is grotesque to any Western visitor.
00:47:27.360
I'm talking, of course, about the caste system, which exists to this day, which is a form of
00:47:32.480
slavery as well, and which regards people, if they're born into the wrong class, as being
00:47:38.760
The untouchable class in India is something you're born into, and you will be in for your
00:47:55.900
People take a sort of view that, well, there's an old joke about Princess Margaret once being
00:48:01.480
asked, once hearing somebody refer to an extraordinarily grand English country house, and the person
00:48:07.200
says, imagine this coming as just an accident of birth, and Princess Margaret saying, birth is no accident.
00:48:16.080
Now, but actually, that view, whether it was correctly attributed or not, is regarded by us as being
00:48:24.220
It's not being regarded as being laughable or at all risible in one of the most important societies in the
00:48:30.900
And historically, that certainly wasn't regarded as laughable in any sense.
00:48:35.980
The notion that you didn't have divine value in some sense, or ultimate value as a consequence
00:48:43.520
of your birth, that was an extraordinarily difficult idea to supplant, uproot, and transform, because
00:48:51.280
that also seemed, in some real sense, self-evident.
00:48:58.360
And I'm afraid, here, we also get to what I regard as being one of the hardest to discuss,
00:49:05.400
but most necessary to identify aspects of what I'm trying to tackle in this book, which is
00:49:09.720
what I go straight on to in the first chapter, which is what I regard as being, and describe
00:49:17.540
Now, of course, this is very difficult to talk about, because people say, first of all, you're
00:49:21.120
guilty of self-pity of some kind, or, you know, boo-hoo, poor you.
00:49:27.700
But as I show, I think in some remorseless detail in that chapter, if you wanted for some
00:49:34.700
reason to attack Africa, or everyone from North Africa downwards, you would at some point,
00:49:45.960
if you were to be driven by such an animus, you would be attacking black people.
00:49:52.300
If you decided to turn on everything to do with Chinese culture, at some point, you would
00:50:01.220
And so it is in the case of the West, that since historically, the West has been predominantly
00:50:06.400
populated, not entirely, but predominantly populated by white people.
00:50:10.280
The assault on the West has to include, and now does include, an extraordinarily ugly and
00:50:16.080
increasingly ugly assault on white people, whereby in societies which quite rightly abhor
00:50:23.260
racism, the only group of people against whom racism is completely acceptable has become white
00:50:30.160
And this is, to my mind, one of the great unsayables, but necessary to address issues of our time,
00:50:36.280
because it seems to me that this can't go on much longer.
00:50:40.760
It's an extraordinarily dangerous game that's being played, and one with such negative consequences,
00:50:50.280
not least the consequences of likely backlash, that it has to be had out in the open.
00:50:55.460
At the point at which you are deciding people's futures in the workplace based on whether they're
00:51:02.060
white or not, and that being white means you're marked down, that application to schools and
00:51:09.040
universities involves you being marked down if you're white, that access to medical care,
00:51:16.580
as I give examples of in the book, that you will be deprived of it if you happen to be white
00:51:23.240
And this, and very much more, is absolute poison in our societies, and I think is one of the
00:51:35.080
If we really don't like racism, we have to tackle the rise of this new racism, which has become
00:51:45.020
Well, to also to identify Western ideas, let's say, as somehow white means that you, to the
00:51:56.240
degree that those ideas have a universal value, which might even be the universal value, say,
00:52:03.580
of making the case that slavery is wrong, you have to deny them to other people who aren't
00:52:12.600
You, you, you, you, you, you contaminate them irretrievably.
00:52:17.740
I've seen attempts, for example, to make the case that the emphasis on logic and excellence
00:52:23.780
is somehow white, and that to accept those values as paramount means that you've just fallen
00:52:40.400
To the degree that that's faulty in its essence, I mean, if the thing is worth doing, then by
00:52:49.060
And if nothing is worth doing, then we don't do anything, and there's nothing to talk about.
00:52:53.020
And so the notion that excellence is somehow associated with a given race or a racial view
00:53:01.360
And also something that's greatly detrimental, at least in principle, to the very people that
00:53:14.460
Well, yes, it's possible that the assault on white people, as it were, has become tied up
00:53:24.880
as part of the assault on the Western, let's say, the Western legacy.
00:53:30.640
And that what is happening is a desire to enact that revenge I referred to earlier, and a desire
00:53:40.240
to take apart what some of us thought was actually an ideal, which is the ideal that the Western
00:53:48.080
tradition is not actually the preserve of white people, but is a universal inheritance.
00:53:54.000
And I say this repeatedly in the book, this is one way of looking at it, is to say, one
00:53:59.580
of the interesting things about so-called, a phrase I don't like to use, but let's say
00:54:04.760
white culture, Western culture, one of the remarkable things about it has been, yes, in
00:54:11.020
its negative forms, it has attempted to force itself upon people.
00:54:16.340
In its positive forms, it invites anyone who wants to be part of it to share in it, which
00:54:25.060
There is no way, even in, let's say, in the political systems of any other country, outside
00:54:30.120
of the West, if you were to migrate there from a Western country, you would not be able to
00:54:35.400
work your way up to the prime ministership, presidency, or even the cabinet of most other
00:54:41.700
countries in the world, if you were an outsider.
00:54:44.320
The West is, specifically in our era, exceptionally open and believes that its own inheritance, its own
00:54:51.340
traditions, its own political order, its institutions, not just should be open, but have to be open
00:55:00.080
So that's, and that ideal is one of the ones that in the name of anti-racism is being taken
00:55:08.360
She's saying, no, no, no, these things only belong to the white people.
00:55:12.680
And as I say, toward the end of the war on the West, wow are the conclusions that you get
00:55:21.580
I mean, wow are the consequences of that down the road negative, because, and as I lay out,
00:55:28.320
as you know, in quite a lengthy passage, there is a response to that just waiting to be said.
00:55:34.980
So, do you think, do you think that the core values of the West are tenable and maintainable
00:55:47.440
in the absence of the underlying religious substrate?
00:55:51.940
So I'm thinking about Chuck Derrida, for example, and Derek, Derrida criticized what he called
00:55:58.900
the logocentrism of the West, and its emphasis, for example, on binary oppositions.
00:56:06.540
And binary oppositions are the foundation of computation.
00:56:11.080
So maybe criticizing that too deeply is unwise.
00:56:15.480
But in any case, it seems to me that the notion of individual sovereignty is, in some sense,
00:56:22.820
a religious claim, and this gets, you can think about the West, one stream of Western
00:56:29.580
thought is the Enlightenment, and there's a secular element to that, but it emerged out
00:56:33.600
of a deeper religious tradition that has this universalizing tendency, and this universalizing
00:56:42.400
Is it possible for the, then I would say, to what degree is the assault on values that you
00:56:48.920
see and diagnose an assault on religious values, and is it possible to formulate a defense without
00:56:57.320
simultaneously defending some of these underlying religious presumptions?
00:57:02.220
No, this is the German jurist Bockenforder's dilemma, isn't it?
00:57:06.180
The, can you sustain a system that isn't willing to nurture the roots that gave birth to the
00:57:14.380
And it's probably the biggest underlying question of our era.
00:57:25.320
And I think that that, yes, of course, has been coming under significant strain in recent
00:57:31.640
As I said, I mean, it's not clear that the sanctity of the individual is something that
00:57:36.900
is enforceable purely through human rights doctrine and the court and the international
00:57:43.540
Yeah, well, it's not self-evident that it's fundamentally a rational claim.
00:57:48.680
It might be instead something more like the precondition for all claims that we regard as rational,
00:57:55.600
which is a whole, an axiom rather than a conclusion.
00:57:59.580
And axioms have to be accepted on faith by definition, right?
00:58:06.820
If you define faith as operation within the system that the axioms give rise to.
00:58:13.640
And I've been trying to puzzle this out deeply.
00:58:16.900
There's the idea of the divine individual in the West is associated with the idea of logos.
00:58:23.980
And it's associated with the notion as well that there's something about speech, in particular,
00:58:30.320
truthful speech, that is fundamentally redemptive.
00:58:34.880
And it's recognition of that, I think, that gives rise to our notion that freedom of speech
00:58:39.720
is a cardinal value, not because it gives you the freedom to speak exactly, but because
00:58:50.120
And we can't get to truth, that it isn't a merely theoretical exercise.
00:58:58.680
The point of freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, and all these things, was to get to
00:59:08.260
It was a belief that there was something to uncover at the end of that process that was
00:59:15.660
Well, when I talked to Richard Dawkins recently about such things, and of course, he's arguably
00:59:22.140
the world's most famous atheist, but I like talking to him.
00:59:26.880
And I think Dawkins is possessed by the spirit of the truth to a marked degree.
00:59:32.920
And so then one of the things I wonder is, is science itself possible in the absence of
00:59:39.740
the proposition that the truth will set you free?
00:59:45.740
I think it's a philosophical or a theological proposition.
00:59:50.120
I mean, this comes to one of the great jokes against conservatives in recent years.
00:59:58.480
I think I've said this to you in private before, Jordan, but not publicly.
01:00:01.360
But one of the great jokes against conservatives was that they tended to think that the deconstructionists,
01:00:08.800
for instance, would inevitably stop at the borders of STEM.
01:00:12.660
Remember, for years, people sort of had risks on the fact that, well, you know, your degree
01:00:18.280
in lesbian dance theory, you know, you just wait till you have to go out into the market
01:00:27.200
But these people, actually, the joke was on the conservatives saying that they did all
01:00:32.260
They found them in HR departments and they told everyone else how to behave for the next
01:00:37.420
So, and then there was the sort of joke that the conservatives again had of sort of, you
01:00:42.580
know, it'll stop at the borders of STEM because at some point the bridges need to stay up.
01:00:48.780
Turns out that if you've got a more overriding theory and claim and ambition and drive in
01:00:56.080
your era, if the bridges do fall down, it'll be because of institutional racism and constructional
01:01:03.040
And it'll be because you didn't do it hard enough.
01:01:05.600
It'll be just like the nonsense that everyone said in communism.
01:01:09.300
Look at the stuff of different ways of knowing.
01:01:11.740
I mean, this goes back, you know, I have a deep, deep contempt for Derrida, as I do for
01:01:18.020
all of the deconstructionists, not just because it's so easy to deconstruct and so hard to
01:01:22.700
construct, but because, of course, the deconstructionists always try to deconstruct everything apart from
01:01:28.000
their own university positions and Derrida and Co definitely started some of this.
01:01:34.800
And it's led to this thing we now have, one of the things I describe in the book, of the equitable
01:01:39.840
maths nonsense, where we come once again to the anti-white, anti, I would say also anti-black, actually,
01:01:48.640
but certainly anti-Western idea that mathematics is a Western construct and that there are other
01:01:57.660
ways of knowing that exist and which must be brought forth.
01:02:04.240
And by the way, I mean, as I, again, as I lay out in remorseless detail in the book, this is
01:02:10.400
This is being rolled out in school district after school district in the US.
01:02:16.460
The idea that in maths, in STEM in general, there are other ways of knowing other than the
01:02:23.160
scientific method, accurate mathematics, things like showing your workings is an example of
01:02:33.320
And this is completely mainstream today to an extent that I think will shock many readers.
01:02:38.900
These things are effectively in the realm of voodoo, because nobody ever explains what the
01:02:52.980
If you don't believe in the mathematical method that actually happens to have been refined in
01:02:57.740
the West, but owes some of its ancestry to a considerable, indeed bewildering array of cultures
01:03:06.600
The West may have refined it, but it's got its heritage elsewhere.
01:03:12.600
Why instead of that, you have to say, no, this is a white supremacist thing.
01:03:16.480
So we're going to come up with other ways of knowing instead of addition and subtraction
01:03:30.040
Other than you get this little hint sometimes that it has something to do with better intuitiveness
01:03:44.020
And basically, you could also argue it's a sort of feminization of certain things, of
01:03:48.580
certain realms of study, but essentially that the white supremacist male patriarchal thing
01:03:55.500
is all about the answers and about accuracy and about being on time, even.
01:04:00.620
I mean, all of these, to say that they're racist, hardly needs saying.
01:04:07.180
And therefore, we need to look at these other ways of knowing, which are never explained,
01:04:10.740
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01:04:15.980
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Yeah, well, I think the STEM types are completely defenseless against all of this.
01:07:38.980
They tend to be apolitical in their machinations.
01:07:43.260
If they're credible scientists and credible researchers, almost by definition,
01:07:48.360
because they're busy obsessively detailing out their specialized concerns and not paying attention
01:07:58.180
to the broader context, which works fine if the broader context is one in which their narrow
01:08:04.800
and specialized productive pursuits are valued, but fatal when that isn't the case.
01:08:11.920
And so one of the questions that we're facing now is, what are the invisible ethical preconditions
01:08:23.700
And weirdly enough, that's kind of a postmodern question, you know, because the postmodernists
01:08:28.860
did insist to some degree that we exist within stories, although they don't believe in grand
01:08:36.820
unifying narratives, which begs the question for me, then what unites us internally, psychologically
01:08:44.660
or socially, if there's no unifying narrative, if narrative is the fundamental answer.
01:08:51.560
The narrative in which science operates is something like, well, the pursuit of truth is valuable
01:08:59.460
in and of itself, and it's valuable because it's a benefit to people at the individual level.
01:09:08.720
And as long as that's in place, it can all be ignored, and science can act as if it's something
01:09:17.960
And I know that's a tricky argument, because it does veer in somewhat into the postmodern direction.
01:09:25.320
But we wouldn't pursue science if we didn't think the pursuit was valuable and redemptive.
01:09:43.220
Can you say the same thing about the humanities?
01:09:50.360
Can you say the same thing about politics or economics or anything else?
01:09:56.520
And I think the answer on all of these things is that the priority of the era is representation,
01:10:03.880
not attainment of a goal that is worth attaining other than representation.
01:10:08.760
And this is where we get to this, what I say in the War on the West is one of the deep underlying
01:10:17.140
just questions we have to address, which is, is the game that our societies have decided
01:10:27.500
And does it mean that we effectively win out in the end or not?
01:10:31.620
And let me flesh that out by saying, what I mean is, let's say that across America and
01:10:39.080
all other Western societies, we managed to completely nix the representation game and the diversity,
01:10:51.340
And that every board in America and every other Western country, Canada, Britain, you
01:10:58.380
name it, every board had exactly the right representation or over-representation of minority
01:11:05.080
groups so that there was more trans people on every board, more black people, more minority
01:11:11.600
ethnic people on every board, or exactly the percentage that replicated the percentage in
01:11:16.700
the country, and that every board and every workforce across every imaginable discipline
01:11:22.420
and every industry exactly replicated, of course, as I don't need to tell you the absurdity of
01:11:28.700
this, but that, you know, you had exactly 50% female firefighters and exactly 50% of the
01:11:37.100
And if in America, 13% of the population are black, then 13% of the police are black and
01:11:43.860
And the same with engineers and the same with electricians and the same with absolutely everybody,
01:12:06.380
My own suspicion is actually it's a game that we're playing for politeness reasons and for
01:12:11.280
some justifiable reasons in certain areas, and I give the example in the book saying actually
01:12:16.800
it makes sense to have a, for instance, a police force that represents the community pretty
01:12:25.680
But do you actually need your, for instance, your basketball teams or your computer programmers
01:12:35.020
all to also completely accurately represent the population and to have complete representation?
01:12:41.700
It doesn't seem to me that you win any particular game from doing so other than satisfying the
01:12:47.920
game that the West has decided to play for the time being.
01:12:50.740
But at the end of that game, well, you win if you win, if you, you win, if you regard holding
01:12:57.160
those positions as a reward that's equivalent to privilege rather than as the opportunity
01:13:10.860
And so because that seems to be part of the conceptualization is while your job is a reward
01:13:16.260
to be doled out rather than something that's productive in relationship to valuable ends.
01:13:25.260
I don't think there is humanities outside of the canon.
01:13:29.460
So science is nested inside an underlying ethic that presumes that, let's say, the universe is
01:13:35.440
understandable, that there's some association between that and logic, that pursuing the
01:13:40.060
truth in relationship to knowledge of the world has this redemptive quality and that there
01:13:47.140
But the humanities is also nested, but even in some sense, more self-evidently inside the
01:13:58.420
And if you throw out the traditional canon, I think by definition, you throw out the humanities.
01:14:04.240
And well, as you know, in the chapter on culture, I go into this.
01:14:09.200
Because I think by this stage, it is clear that there is not an aspect of Western culture
01:14:16.020
that has not been assaulted at such a fundamental and dishonest level that if you were to continue
01:14:25.820
The British Library in 2020 announced that they were going to create a list of authors whose work was in the
01:14:38.480
British Library, including manuscripts and important documents by these authors who had some connection to the
01:14:47.720
And they produced this sort of blacklist of authors, including the late poet laureate Ted Hughes, who died in 1998, who was born in considerable
01:14:59.680
poverty in Yorkshire in the 1930s, who had nothing to do with the British Empire.
01:15:04.200
And the British Library claimed that one of his ancestors in the 17th century had benefited from the slave trade.
01:15:11.020
I mean, this isn't even the sins of the father debate anymore.
01:15:13.900
This is the sins of the ancestor four centuries earlier debate.
01:15:18.820
And by the way, it turned out, among other things, that the British Library can't even get researchers these days,
01:15:23.240
because the researchers turned out to have selected a person called Nicholas Ferrer, who actually was opposed to the slave trade and wasn't an ancestor of Ted Hughes.
01:15:33.500
So they they weirdly just decided to posthumously defame somebody.
01:15:44.000
I give an example, one that I might come on to is particularly painful to me.
01:15:48.020
But there's an example of one of the masterpieces they have in there.
01:15:51.560
I don't know if you know the work, but it's a beautiful painting called The Resurrection Cookham by Stanley Spencer,
01:16:00.120
And it's a huge, vast canvas, which the Tate is exceptionally lucky to have.
01:16:07.460
And it is a depiction of the of the physical resurrection of the dead at the Day of Judgment.
01:16:13.500
And they're all coming out of their tombs in the graveyard of his local church in the village of Cookham.
01:16:23.200
I've always been I used to occasionally my lunchtime just go to sit in front of this canvas.
01:16:28.980
Some of the dead coming out of the tombs are recognizably, apparently, neighbors of Spencer's from his village.
01:16:35.720
But he wanted to show the resurrection of all humanity.
01:16:38.700
So he also includes, you know, there are black men and women coming out of some of the graves as well.
01:16:42.600
He didn't have to do that, but he wanted to show the literal representation of the actual physical resurrection.
01:16:48.920
Well, the Tate now has a descriptor beside this sublime painting, saying that it is a racist painting.
01:16:56.700
Because whereas Stanley Spencer accurately depicts his neighbors from his village in England,
01:17:02.880
the black people in the painting are generic black people copied from National Geographic magazine of the time.
01:17:09.400
Well, Stanley Spencer didn't have any black neighbors, you know, so what?
01:17:17.640
There weren't any black people in his village in the 1930s in England.
01:17:34.580
But what concerns me is that they pull down a sublime thing into their banal, monotone, utterly monomaniacal view of the world,
01:17:48.900
which is that race is the only thing that matters.
01:17:50.800
Let me give you one other example, if I may, because it's particularly painful to me.
01:17:54.400
There's a wonderful painter, an artist I'm very fond of, called Rex Whistler, English artist from the early 20th century.
01:18:05.760
He was clearly an exceptionally lovable human being and an exceptionally talented artist.
01:18:10.780
And his first artwork was a mural for the Tate that he did in his early 20s.
01:18:15.200
And he worked all around the clock for months and months on end to complete this mural called In Pursuit of Rare Meats.
01:18:21.660
It's a fantasy, a beautiful fantasy landscape and an arcadian landscape that goes around all four walls of the gallery.
01:18:30.560
And a couple of years ago, a group whose name was White Pube, only consisting of a couple of people, decided that this mural was racist.
01:18:40.920
And they decided it because of two figures, one of whom was a Chinese figure they said was generic.
01:18:46.620
And the other was because in one corner of the forest, in one of the bits of the rest of a tiny figure, about two inches high,
01:18:54.100
is a young black boy, clearly in distress, being pulled on a chain by a woman in a white fully frock.
01:19:01.040
Now, clearly, Rex Whistler, he always included sort of ugly things like this.
01:19:06.060
There's a drowning child, a drowning white child elsewhere in it.
01:19:09.340
It's clearly Et in Arcadia Ego, you know, that's clearly what he's saying.
01:19:14.300
He was always saying this. All of his work always included this.
01:19:18.120
You know, there'd be a tomb or he even painted himself in things as a lowly street sweeper, you know.
01:19:23.860
And he had a wonderful sense of humor and a wonderful and dark sense of the macabre nature of all things, even in Arcadia.
01:19:32.100
This was decided two years ago by the Tate to be a racist painting.
01:19:37.220
And they have closed the room until further notice.
01:19:41.020
They looked into whether or not they could actually remove, after 100 years, actually remove this from the walls of the gallery.
01:19:48.200
And it seems that they can't because part of it's on plaster.
01:19:53.000
And the reason I mind this, among many other reasons, is because they have posthumously declared Rex Whistler to be a racist.
01:20:03.660
They said that he reflected the racist attitudes of his time.
01:20:08.580
Rex Whistler died on his first day in action in Normandy in 1944.
01:20:19.140
How dare they do it to everybody in our past, to all of our heroes, to all of our artistic heroes?
01:20:29.580
How dare they say that the story of the West is purely a story of racism and xenophobia and colonialism and slavery?
01:20:40.200
How dare they not even bother to weigh that up, as I say in one point in the book, weigh it up against just, let's name a few cities.
01:20:50.400
Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice, just for starters.
01:20:56.080
How dare they not be able to even weigh up the achievements that have come from this allegedly unremittingly terrible past?
01:21:03.240
But worse than that, and the point I really wanted to make, Jordan, is what they are driving us to, and I feel it very, very strongly myself, is how dare you do this to our ancestors?
01:21:22.940
If you have no respect for my ancestors, I see no reason why I should have respect for yours.
01:21:30.580
If you have no respect for my past and my culture, I don't see why I should continue to say that I have respect for yours.
01:21:43.460
If you have nothing good to say about me, why should I have anything good to say about you?
01:21:52.120
And what I suggest is that in the West at the moment, we are in a potentially short holding pattern.
01:22:03.540
Or, as Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark of Civilization, put it, that fundamental aspect of Western culture, courtesy.
01:22:12.020
We are in a period of courtesy where we have been willing to say,
01:22:16.980
Okay, you can keep rampaging through the past of the West and assaulting my ancestors and insulting my predecessors and saying all of these negative things about my past,
01:22:29.100
and I am pretending for the time being or saying out of courtesy that you can do this, and I will put up with it for a time.
01:22:38.040
And I will even say, and there are these other ways of knowing and so on.
01:22:44.140
But there is a moment there where that absolutely stops.
01:22:48.320
And as I say at the end of the book, as you know, Jordan, I say there is a very clear place where you can do that.
01:22:58.580
Well, this politeness seems not to be working for us.
01:23:05.220
And the impolite things that can be said are legion.
01:23:12.300
So these great cities that you point to and the great achievements that went along with them, to me, they're the consequence of the manifestation of the best of the human spirit, universally speaking,
01:23:29.020
that was made possible by societies that recognize the existence of such of the best.
01:23:38.200
And to and to associate them in some sense with Western culture, with white culture, and then to associate them with nothing but the spirit of oppression is to simultaneously deny that that spirit exists and can produce things of universal transcendent value.
01:24:01.060
And I can't see that that's going to be good for anyone except for people who can make moral hay of that in the short term to ratchet themselves up.
01:24:11.140
What to produce for themselves positions of authority that would not be available to them if they weren't able to weaponize guilt and claim the moral upper hand.
01:24:27.280
One of the accusations that's levied at me from fairly frequently is that my concern about such things, which I would say in many ways is similar to yours, is evidence of my...
01:24:54.100
And I think, well, I see it in the spread of such ideas in the universities and then downstream into culture.
01:24:59.840
But people aren't particularly awake to that fact.
01:25:03.900
I mean, in my home province in Ontario, there's a bill that purports to be anti-racists that's going to transform the entire education system by fiat into a system that is part of the war on the West, let's say.
01:25:23.000
And people who conduct that war will be rewarded for that.
01:25:30.060
Why do you believe that this is a serious concern?
01:25:34.780
Well, because, as I say, they've decided to come for absolutely everything.
01:25:40.320
Because it's not just a Judeo-Christian tradition of the West, but the Enlightenment tradition of the West, too.
01:25:45.860
It's the religious tradition and the secular tradition.
01:25:50.220
It's the American politicians and leaders and presidents who were on the side of the South in the Civil War and the ones who are on the side of the North.
01:26:04.220
It comes for people who owned slaves and those who were opposed to slavery.
01:26:10.020
It comes for people who were in favor of empire and those who were against empire.
01:26:15.860
It comes for those who lived in the era of empire and everyone who lived before it and everyone who lived after it.
01:26:22.640
The people who lived in the era of slavery and all of the people who live after it.
01:26:32.680
There's a highly pertinent example, which is that insane spate of church burning that went on in your native country a year ago.
01:26:45.080
So, just to remind people, there was a claim that graves of indigenous children were found beside what had been a school and it had been run by the Catholic Church.
01:26:59.160
And that these were graves of children, therefore murdered by the Catholic Church.
01:27:04.600
And in no time, prominent figures in Canada, I list some of them in the book and you know some of them as well, Jordan, start to tweet out things like burn it all down.
01:27:13.140
And churches, including indigenous built churches in Canada, go up in flames across parts of the country.
01:27:21.280
Well, in what other situation would that have been regarded as being something you just shrug off?
01:27:29.280
And by the way, to date, no evidence has been produced of these alleged mass graves.
01:27:35.040
It happened on the basis of an investigation using ultrasound that turns out not to have yet produced one grave.
01:27:46.420
We are so primed at this idea that, for instance, the Catholic Church, of which I am not a defender to the death or anything,
01:27:55.460
but that institutions like that are so evil that they deliberately killed children in countries like Canada, hid them in mass graves,
01:28:06.820
and now you can burn down the churches if you want.
01:28:09.380
What other religious tradition in Canada would be allowed to be treated like that in the present?
01:28:14.400
Or would it be just sort of brushed off that it happened?
01:28:19.480
And it's not just in the academies, as you know.
01:28:25.680
And it now has this completely physical manifestation on the streets.
01:28:32.360
When the so-called 1619 riots kicked off, and just a reminder, this is the 1619 project,
01:28:38.780
which tries to completely reframe all of American history to say that the heroic story of America is not a story of heroism.
01:28:45.140
It's one of slavery and subjugation, which is why they started in 1619.
01:28:48.820
When the riots after the death of George Floyd began, the murder of George Floyd began in 2020,
01:28:54.440
somebody says they should be called the 1619 riots.
01:28:57.380
And the woman who fronted the 1619 project at the New York Times,
01:29:01.460
so we're not talking about some kooky, far-out, fringe publication,
01:29:10.120
And these are the riots where, sure, they start to pull down statues of General Lee.
01:29:26.960
And then it's absolutely every damn figure in American history who ends up getting assailed.
01:29:46.060
This is a manifestation of some of their thought, often by people who've never read them.
01:29:51.020
But this is long ago the spilling out even of their own thought,
01:29:55.020
simply into this thing where the era decides everything in our own past must be scoured.
01:30:03.580
They don't tell us any more than they tell us what the other ways of knowing might be.
01:30:15.340
What are you trying to accomplish with the book, Douglas, do you think,
01:30:26.360
One is to alert people to the scale of what is being attempted against.
01:30:30.660
Another is to point to the unfairness of it, the simple unfairness of it, the unjustness of it.
01:30:40.760
Another is to arm people with the, I think, reasonable and correct rebuttals to it.
01:30:46.840
To remind people of the context of history and the context of the rest of the world so that we get ourselves and our own past in a proper light.
01:30:58.520
And get the rest of the world in a proper light.
01:31:06.740
So there's four chapters, race, history, religion, and culture.
01:31:10.000
And there's three interludes, China, reparations.
01:31:13.240
And maybe the most interesting or one, the one that struck me most particularly was an interlude on gratitude.
01:31:26.120
And it's the antithesis, in some sense, of a resentment for history.
01:31:38.200
Well, as you know, it's one you've thought about a lot and spoken and written about a lot.
01:31:47.940
And I just, it's been one of the underlying things in my life.
01:31:52.200
And whenever I'm asked to sort of explain, as it were, why I come to some of the conclusions I come to on things,
01:32:01.120
Our late friend Roger Scruton, actually the last thing he wrote, I quote in the book,
01:32:08.480
was a diary for The Spectator where he reflected on the last year of his life.
01:32:12.500
And Roger said to approach death is to approach what life really means.
01:32:26.420
I quote Dostoevsky, as you know, from The Brothers Karamazov, where the devil,
01:32:31.220
the devil is incapable of gratitude, which I would think is deeply telling and brilliant.
01:32:42.340
Well, it's so interesting that that, right, exactly.
01:32:45.980
Well, that was also penned at about the same time that Nietzsche was pointing to resentment
01:32:50.740
as the driving force behind movements, for example, that later became revolutionary Marxism.
01:32:59.140
And outlining the moral hazard associated with that.
01:33:05.800
And Nietzsche and some other writers who come after him on resentment,
01:33:12.660
I think that resentment is, along with that desire for revenge in the name of justice,
01:33:20.000
one of the absolutely underlying drivers of our time.
01:33:29.100
And, again, as Nietzsche and others said, it's a terrific way to avoid any culpability.
01:33:40.000
Because the only way, as you well know, the only way to turn around resentment,
01:33:46.100
apart from gratitude, would be for the person of resentment to recognize that there is a reason
01:33:53.100
why they feel resentment, and that there is a person who is responsible for the things
01:33:57.860
that they are angry about, but that the person is themselves.
01:34:03.960
This is, of course, such a profoundly disturbing, life-disturbing thing to acknowledge
01:34:12.120
that almost nobody deeply embedded in resentment can.
01:34:21.320
It's so hard to take responsibility ourselves for what has not gone wrong in our own life.
01:34:26.300
So much harder compared to putting it on any other group of people or another individual,
01:34:32.760
a person we believe has done us wrong, or a group we believe have done us wrong.
01:34:37.060
It's so easy to manipulate our species against other groups of people.
01:34:42.040
My God, what's the history of the Jews, but a history of people pouring their resentments
01:34:46.500
onto this tiny group of people for daring to continue to exist and thrive across societies.
01:34:54.620
You know, the history of anti-Semitism is that, as it is in our own days,
01:34:58.420
the great explanation for where some people can pour their resentment.
01:35:03.100
But the main thing that you have to count, and I've long said this to conservatives in my own country
01:35:09.940
and elsewhere, is that you have to address things at an equally deep level.
01:35:16.240
And when people say, I can't remember if we've talked about this before,
01:35:20.060
but when people say, for instance, how will the right respond to the left on this issue?
01:35:27.500
You very often see things like, you know, well, we'll need to do more house building
01:35:31.300
on brownfield sites or something like this. And I say, you're mad. I mean, you're countering
01:35:38.540
resentment. You can't do that with a bit of bureaucraties. Now, how can you counter resentment?
01:35:47.920
It is only, I believe, by gratitude. It is only by completely inverting that sentiment. And I think
01:35:55.100
that in our own lives, as well as in societies, this is eminently possible. You and I both know
01:36:01.080
this. You can stand in front of a painting and you could endlessly work out the cost that that
01:36:11.560
painting had, what the cost of it had been. What the cost of it had been, for instance,
01:36:17.980
were the people who worked in the workshop of this master adequately paid? Where there were
01:36:25.160
paints that were sourced from specific minerals, were those minerals justly acquired? And were
01:36:32.920
people along every stage of the process justly rewarded for providing the material? You could
01:36:39.260
break that down endlessly, or you could stand back and marvel at the Madonna of the Rocks.
01:36:44.480
You know, you could stand in front of Michelangelo's Pieter and you could think about what the workmen
01:36:54.000
who got the piece of marble out of the quarry went through and whether they were adequately paid
01:37:01.420
and whether they had all of the life choices necessary for them to be able to decide whether
01:37:08.600
they wanted to be quarriers in marble. Or you can stand back and marvel at Michelangelo's Pieter.
01:37:18.200
You can do this in every city in Europe. You can look at Venice and say this was a trading city where
01:37:25.400
not everyone was always adequately rewarded for their labor. Or you can marvel at Venice. You can
01:37:32.120
do this on absolutely everything. Everything can be deconstructed to this utmost point at which you
01:37:38.680
cannot see the value in anything because you claim to be looking for basically for the checks and the
01:37:47.560
bills, historically speaking, and in the present day. And it is such a reductive, mean-minded,
01:37:56.280
obsessive way that our era actually is looking at things. It actually is tearing everything apart in
01:38:03.240
this way. It actually is looking for racism everywhere. It is looking for colonialism and
01:38:09.080
slavery and blame and guilt. And I just say, how about turning that around and saying, just have some
01:38:16.600
damn gratitude for what you found yourself living among. And as I say, all I can suggest is that our
01:38:26.760
age in the West has gone through a vast context collapse. And I am very struck by the fact that
01:38:33.480
many, many people, if not a majority, who come to the West from outside of the West do not share this
01:38:41.080
ravenous hatred. I have a friend who's a school teacher in a school in London who has said before
01:38:49.800
that one of the best ways to make sure that a pupil who is misbehaving, as it were, playing up
01:38:58.600
in a very dominantly immigrant background school, one of the best ways to make sure that
01:39:06.840
they change their life attitude is if they are taken back to the country of origin at some
01:39:12.760
point in a school holiday by their parents. Because they may be told in their school in New
01:39:20.680
York or in London or Ontario that they are living in a patriarchal, racist society. But wow, when they
01:39:28.920
go back and see their first and second cousins in Bangladesh, they come back with a different view.
01:39:36.120
My view in general is that we in the West have undergone a massive context collapse about the
01:39:43.720
nature of our own past, our own societies. I think we have to turn it around. I don't think it's
01:39:50.120
sustainable to continue to war on ourselves and on every part of our own history, not least also because
01:39:57.800
we deserve the right to have heroes and heroic narratives and things of which we're proud. We absolutely
01:40:05.480
have that right as every other society in the world does. So I'm trying to do a more reasonable audit
01:40:15.080
on an era which I think has been deeply unreasonable to itself. As I say, this is a Western on Western
01:40:25.480
crime that is being committed. It is completely possible to mend it. And that's why this very,
01:40:31.880
very depressing subject matter in some ways. I try, as you know, by the end of the book to show people,
01:40:37.160
actually, this is positive. This is a way out. And these are the ways out. These are the ways in
01:40:42.680
which you can try to turn the era of resentment into a personal and wider appreciation of gratitude
01:40:51.720
and of getting things into a proper order and of getting things into a proper sense of themselves,
01:41:01.640
I've been trying to conceptualize gratitude as a form of courage.
01:41:05.480
No. Well, because there's, there's evidence for tragedy and atrocity, obviously, and
01:41:13.720
everywhere, and that can make you despair. That gratitude is also part of separating the wheat from
01:41:20.840
the chaff, right? Is that you want to, you want to appreciate the things that are of high value.
01:41:27.240
And so I wanted to ask, maybe close with one more question. It's a complicated question. Maybe I'll put
01:41:35.640
it in two parts. You know, in the biblical narrative, the first two human beings that emerge in any real
01:41:45.960
sense are Cain and Abel. They're the first who are born rather than directly created. And it's a rather
01:41:53.960
depressing beginning point because they're, they're fratricidal brothers. And Cain is bitter and resentful
01:42:05.160
and Abel makes the sacrifices that are acceptable to God and flourishes. And it's because of that
01:42:11.800
flourishing that Cain decides to destroy him. And the depth psychology that I've read and the literary
01:42:21.000
criticism tradition that's emerged from that suggests in some sense that those are the earliest
01:42:28.360
manifestations of two patterns of deeply rooted patterns of behavior. One you might regard as the
01:42:35.320
spirit of Abel and the other, the spirit of Cain. And our error is characterized by this tremendous
01:42:45.800
And it seems to me that that's produced an exaggeration of this battle. And it seems also
01:42:53.640
to me in some sense that it is a theological battle. It's, it's, it's the anti logos aspect of it is a
01:43:02.360
theological battle and that it has to be addressed in some sense at that level. And so I guess what I'm
01:43:10.040
asking you is, well, first of all, what you think of those ideas. And second, if this is how this may
01:43:16.760
have changed your views on what would you say the necessary truth of the religious suppositions that
01:43:26.040
underlie that notion of the sovereignty of the individual, I guess that's
01:43:30.280
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Yes, I mean, I, uh, I laid out in the strange death of Europe, what I think of as being not just
01:43:55.960
my own, but certainly modern Europe's current malaise in regards to the Christian tradition,
01:44:03.720
uh, the difficulty of it. I think as you've also said in the past, I've, I've often tried to live
01:44:11.800
with what Cardinal Ratzinger when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, uh, it said as the invitation
01:44:16.520
to live as though God exists, which I thought was a deeply brilliant, um, invitation and a very
01:44:23.000
generous invitation actually from a soon to be Pope. Um, and, uh, I, I think as I've, I've expressed a
01:44:33.160
number of times recently that, that in any case, uh, you, you need a tradition to come from in order
01:44:42.520
to know what the others are and that the, the, the modern idea that is where you can splash around
01:44:49.080
among all of the faith traditions of the world as a child and come out more roundly formed seems to me
01:44:57.720
to be doing everything exactly in reverse. And that, that really the way in which a child to be read
01:45:05.160
is in one tradition so that they can then go out having been versed in one tradition and know the
01:45:10.440
others, discover the others as they go along. But the, the complexity of that is something that only
01:45:15.960
an adult can go through, you know, you can, you can only understand the things that the traditions
01:45:21.400
have in common. If you know, the one that you've come from and you can only actually admire them,
01:45:26.680
other traditions on their own terms, really, if you know, and, and, and, and have some reverence
01:45:31.640
for the one that you've come from. Otherwise it's all just a sort of mishmash of yoga like banalities.
01:45:38.600
I, I'm not, so I'm, I'm, I certainly know how much I owe personally to this tradition and I know my
01:45:46.040
deeply, um, complex, conflicted and inadequate, uh, answers to it. I, um, it's, you know, I, I often have
01:46:00.120
to fall back on quotes, but, um, I, I was, uh, I'm not, I'm not Jewish. I'm, I'm Christian by upbringing,
01:46:07.400
but, um, I remember something I mentioned earlier, late friend, Rabbi Sachs, he once said to me, he
01:46:12.760
said that Isaiah Berlin friend was once asked, uh, what it meant to be a Jew. And he said to be a Jew
01:46:20.200
is to have a sense of, of history. And, uh, um, and Jonathan Sachs said Isaiah was almost right.
01:46:29.080
And he said, and I said, what do you mean? He said, I corrected him. He said to be Jewish
01:46:32.520
is to have a sense of memory. Um, it's a, it's a pretty good clarification. Um, I think one has a
01:46:42.480
role in society to have a sense of memory. And in that case, if you're from a society like
01:46:50.200
I am, like you are, that memory is absolutely God haunted and Christ haunted, biblically,
01:46:57.880
biblically haunted. And there's no way around that. I don't resist it. I don't, I said, and I,
01:47:03.000
I also, I long ago came to the same conclusion that Roger Scruton did. And he encouraged me to,
01:47:07.640
which was at least don't war on it, you know? Um, and there's many other things that are worth
01:47:15.400
worrying on, but unless, unless, and until the Christian religion was to return to the stage of
01:47:23.080
that, it was out in parts of Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, there's no, no need to, I don't
01:47:27.880
see the, the Episcopalian church in America, for instance, as particularly requiring my, um,
01:47:34.520
my, uh, critique. Um, so I do have a, um, uh, I have a complex attitude towards it, but I, um,
01:47:44.680
I try to remain, I try to remain in dialogue with the religion is the way I would, I would put it,
01:47:50.120
and not to close the door. I think that's, uh, uh, so one of the, I think I told you when we met
01:47:57.160
possibly that the, the word Israel means those who wrestle with God. Yes. Yes. And that's, that's
01:48:07.240
very interesting as far as I'm concerned. Yes. That's the nature of belief in some sense,
01:48:14.440
is to wrestle with the notion of what constitutes the highest virtues.
01:48:19.880
Well, the, the, the former Bishop of Edinburgh was a sort of secularist himself by the end of his
01:48:24.920
career, but a deeply distinguished and humanist figure, um, called Richard Holloway, who once
01:48:30.200
rather beautifully said that the, everyone assumes that the opposite of, um, of, of, uh, faith is,
01:48:36.920
is doubt, but the opposite of, no, sorry, but the opposite of doubt is faith, but it isn't, it's
01:48:41.640
certainty. Um, the, uh, certainty is, is the, um, is the problem in that, in that, in that mix of
01:48:51.240
perhaps, perhaps having conflicted views is inevitable if, if not necessary. Um, as for Cain
01:48:58.840
and Abel, um, is it, isn't one of the many things in that story, the fact that as so often in the,
01:49:05.400
the early books of the Bible, the Torah, that you're being reminded that you're both people. I mean,
01:49:11.640
that, that, that, that everyone has both of these things in their hearts and that just as we,
01:49:19.080
the, the, the, the path, both these, both these paths are always, both these paths are always open
01:49:25.480
to all of us. Isn't that what we're, one of the things that we're being told?
01:49:30.920
Well, we're, we're always tempted by the desire to get away with insufficient sacrifices,
01:49:39.640
you know, to cut corners and to not do things as well and at as much cost as we might. We're all
01:49:49.080
tempted by, what would you say, the spirit of revenge that we might allow to inhabit us if we
01:49:56.520
became sufficiently bitter. We're all tempted to tear down our ideals because they also
01:50:03.080
simultaneously judge us. We're all tempted to shake our fist at God. But if that spirit gets up,
01:50:11.080
gets the upper hand, well, the consequence for Cain is that his sin is so much that he cannot bear it.
01:50:18.120
And it, I believe that if we in the West tear down everything of value because we've given
01:50:25.320
too much sway to the spirit of resentment and revenge, the consequences us for us all will be
01:50:32.520
something so cataclysmic that we won't be able to bear it.
01:50:35.800
Well, I couldn't agree more. And we come back to this thing that we don't know what it would be
01:50:43.160
if the men of resentment had their way in what they're doing and pulled everything down as they
01:50:51.000
are trying, pulled down all of our stories, all of our heroes, all of our history, all of our culture,
01:50:55.800
read our culture as a story, not of admiration for the world and learning from the world, but actually
01:51:01.160
theft from the world. If they did this on everything and succeeded as they're doing at the moment,
01:51:05.960
what is it exactly at the end of this other than the, again, the other ways of knowing? What is it that
01:51:11.400
lies there? And the one answer you can get for people is essentially a version of that thing that
01:51:16.760
Tom Wolfe described in Radical Chic, you know, the essay on the party at the Bernstein's apartment
01:51:26.440
in New York in the early 70s that Leonard Bernstein and his wife threw for the Black
01:51:31.320
Panthers. And of course, Tom Wolfe fantastically destroys this obscene, obscene event where the
01:51:41.720
liberal elite of New York are having canapes listening to these revolutionaries describing
01:51:46.920
how they want to destroy and pull down the society they're in. And there's a wonderful moment in it
01:51:51.960
where I think Otto Preminger, one of Bernstein's friends, is sitting in his chair and he says to
01:51:57.400
one of the panthers, but what are you going to do once you have pulled down all of the existing
01:52:02.840
structures? But what are you going to do? And he keeps pushing this panther on it, on this, until this
01:52:09.000
Black Panther says, you can't put a blueprint on the future, man. And Leonard Bernstein leans forward
01:52:17.480
in his chair and says, you mean you're just going to wing it? And that's really what we're dealing
01:52:25.480
with. We're dealing with people who don't know what they're going to do. They're going to pull
01:52:29.720
everything down and then wing it. Well, if we undermine that which unites us,
01:52:39.000
right, and if we're united around something like recognition of the value of the individual,
01:52:44.600
the divine sovereignty of the individual, let's say, if we pull that down and destroy it, then it's the
01:52:51.720
group. It's the war of every conceivable group against every other conceivable group. That's the
01:52:58.920
only alternative that I can see because there's an infinite number of arbitrarily oppressed groups.
01:53:05.400
Absolutely. And I would just add a coda to that, which is, you know, I think people should be very
01:53:12.760
careful of what they wish for in this. You know, as you know, at the end of the war in the West, I say,
01:53:18.200
you know, of all of the unpalatable answers, the one coming the way of the people who want to make
01:53:23.720
this racial is worse than any. You know, it would consist of saying, this thing that you believe
01:53:31.800
is so appalling, right, we've been courteous enough. End of courtesy. Why don't we go to the
01:53:39.160
Aboriginal peoples or the First Nations peoples for any vaccines? Why don't we find other ways of knowing?
01:53:48.440
For cancer cures. Why are all of these things products of the thing that you say you hate
01:53:57.960
and the people that for politeness's sake everyone says can also contribute and do in certain ways,
01:54:04.440
but are not better than this? That the other ways of knowing are actually worse.
01:54:10.840
And then if you say, oh, and by the way, that's not universal after all, because you've told us it
01:54:16.040
isn't. It's just ours. Wow is the 21st century hell.
01:54:26.200
Well, as far as I can tell from delving into it, that the end goal of the spirit of Cain is hell.
01:54:33.960
Yes. Right. Yes. And we've been warned about that for a very long time.
01:54:40.040
And still have to learn that. In the background.
01:54:42.040
Yes. Well, you, the 20th century might not have been enough.
01:54:48.360
That's, that's a horrible, horrible thought, but I agree. I agree.
01:54:56.920
this book is coming out April, you said 26th. 26th.
01:55:04.760
So, it describes the battle of ideas that currently
01:55:12.360
is tearing our culture apart. And I would say, in some real sense, destabilizing the entire world.
01:55:18.200
And so, people can read it and they can draw their own conclusions and see their own way forward.
01:55:26.440
But it's an alarm bell and it should be ringing loud.
01:55:36.920
No, just, I just, just, I would just add, since you did say at the beginning that it was very depressing,
01:55:42.360
it's also quite amusing, if I say so myself. And I have to put in, I have to put in that plug.
01:55:51.400
I agree that what I describe is highly depressing, but it is, it is, as I say, I try to show a way out.
01:55:57.640
And I do actually try to give readers some fun along the way. And you can't not, because some of
01:56:02.840
what I'm attacking is so risible that once again, when I was doing the audio book, as I was for the
01:56:09.480
Mans of Crowds, there were points I had to say to the sound engineer, I'm sorry, I've just,
01:56:13.880
the reason I'm laughing so much, I promise, it's not my own jokes. It's the things I'm reading,
01:56:19.640
when you read them out loud, are so even more ridiculous than they are on the page.
01:56:25.800
But yeah, it may be gloomy in places, but there is fun along the way.
01:56:39.480
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