TRIGGERnometry - DEBATE： Liberalism Vs Conservatism

00:00:00.680 The liberal aim to try and achieve civic peace is a good aim.

00:00:05.760 I would challenge you, particularly given the last few weekends we've seen since October

00:00:10.160 the 7th, to say that we have civic peace.

00:00:13.600 But my response to that from within the liberal tent is to say that liberalism needs to be

00:00:17.760 muscular.

00:00:19.040 So what we then have to say is the healthy form of conservatism, the healthy form of

00:00:23.240 liberalism, we face a common enemy.

00:00:26.520 Sometimes in order to preserve and conserve, change is necessary.

00:00:30.920 And that's the big challenge that conservatism faces.

00:00:33.160 Just as the liberal faces the challenge, when do you stop liberating and start becoming a conservative?

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00:02:00.920 Hello everybody and welcome to the first of what will be many debates here on Trigonometry.

00:02:06.280 I'll be hosting some. Francis will be hosting others.

00:02:09.160 I cannot tell you how delighted I am to be joined by two of our favorite ever guests on the show,

00:02:14.600 Dr. James Orr and Professor Stephen Hicks. Welcome both.

00:02:16.840 Thanks.

00:02:17.800 We're going to have a debate about conservatism versus liberalism.

00:02:21.640 You've both written a couple of pieces for my sub-stack and there'll be more coming.

00:02:25.080 I want, Stephen, you had to go second in the written debate, so I'll go to you first.

00:02:31.240 One of the, I thought, more persuasive criticisms of liberalism, and we heard it,

00:02:36.440 a lot of it at ARC where we all were a few days ago, was that limits are liberating and the pursuit

00:02:43.240 of unending freedom is actually destructive to society. What do you say to those people?

00:02:47.720 Well, I think you have to start with a moral conception of what society is.

00:02:52.520 We start with individuals who are both the agents. Individuals have agency. You don't see them

00:03:01.240 as pawns pushed around by forces beyond their control. So there is a conception of human nature

00:03:06.600 at work, and that's a philosophical starting point. Not only of agents, but of moral worth.

00:03:13.400 That whatever we're doing in society, that we're forming various kinds of social institutions,

00:03:18.120 organizations, businesses, religions, families, governments, and so forth. It is with respect to

00:03:24.280 the value of the individuals involved. So we come together to do business as individuals. We form

00:03:30.600 families. It's two individuals who come together, making a voluntary choice, and they then bring into

00:03:36.600 the world another individual, right, that needs to develop his capacities for agency and moral

00:03:42.600 self-responsibility. So it's not that freedom and individualism is corrosive of the social. It's

00:03:51.880 rather that the social exists to preserve the individuals and enable individuals better

00:04:00.680 by division of labor being coordinated, achieve the values of the individual. When those social

00:04:07.240 institutions are no longer serving that function, they should properly be dissolved, and new ones

00:04:13.480 created. And this is partly why we're going to have an evolving, and in some case, revolving society.

00:04:20.280 So it is making clear what your ultimate moral standard is. Some social institutions should be

00:04:26.680 dissolved. But that requires that you've made clear what your moral standard is,

00:04:34.520 and you should have no problem with some social institutions going by the by. And you should

00:04:40.200 be actively preserving other social institutions because they've proved their worth at protecting

00:04:46.920 the rights and values of the individuals involved.

00:04:49.080 But I suppose what people mean is, when we look at the real world out there right now,

00:04:53.640 is the dissolution of certain institutions has led to increasing atomization of people,

00:04:59.640 people feeling disconnected from each other, from society. And that's why I think a lot of people

00:05:05.080 are now starting to talk about... But then I would say it's not freedom that is causing the atomism,

00:05:11.320 right, that people are worrying about. So then we have to get to say, what do we mean by an atomized

00:05:16.840 individual, or an isolated individual, or an individual who has come to be in an adversarial

00:05:21.480 relationship to what we think of as a healthy social institution. And I think when you drill down and

00:05:27.480 start looking at cases, it's not going to be too much freedom that's the problem.

00:05:31.080 What is the problem?

00:05:32.120 Well, it depends on when you drill down which kind of atomism you are worried about. So if you

00:05:39.480 wanted to say, for example, you have individuals on social media who are feeling isolated

00:05:47.320 from the world, and it's teenagers who are considering suicide. Now, you might then say,

00:05:53.000 well, we shouldn't have given these powerful liberating devices to them in the first place,

00:05:56.520 because they don't know how to do it. But I think what's actually happening in that particular

00:06:02.680 subcase is you've got young people who are trying to develop a self. And they're going into,

00:06:08.920 in most cases, what are echo chambers. And instead of developing a self, what they're doing is just

00:06:15.560 echoing and reflecting what's going on there. And you have a certain amount of mob action with respect

00:06:21.640 to those individuals. The mob action is not anything that is respectful of the individual. So you have

00:06:28.200 a social environment, right, which is not conducive to healthy development of individuals.

00:06:36.040 Instead, you've got a kind of, I would say, collective mob psychology that's destructive that's

00:06:40.440 going on there. So you do end up with isolated individuals, but it's not too much freedom. It's mob

00:06:45.800 psychology. Very interesting. And James, I want to put some of the Stephen's critiques of

00:06:51.240 conservatism to you in a second. But did you pick up anything that you wanted to come back on?

00:06:55.480 Yeah, thanks. Well, and thanks for putting this together. It's a great honor to be

00:06:59.080 part of the first trigonometry debate. And it's been great to exchange views in writing with Stephen.

00:07:05.000 And thanks for orchestrating it. Wittgenstein says at one point that a picture held us captive. And I

00:07:11.640 think a picture holds the liberal mind captive. I think it's a myth. It's a very attractive myth,

00:07:16.600 but it's a false myth. And you might call that myth something like a kind of secular creationism.

00:07:21.640 A secular creationist believes that freedom and equality kind of pop into being from nothing

00:07:27.880 around about 1776, Sunday afternoon in April, about tea time. I think this is false. I do not

00:07:36.680 think that the natural resting state of human beings is to be free, to exist without any unchosen

00:07:42.600 obligations, to be simply primarily an individual, and to take it as self-evident that every individual

00:07:49.640 has an equal moral worth, that there is some readily available moral standard that all individuals

00:07:54.760 left to their own devices will, exercising their rationality, discern, track, and live out.

00:08:00.360 I think there's a reason that liberalism emerges in the 18th century. It's not because it starts

00:08:05.240 ex nihilo from nothing, but because it is the fruit of long centuries when accumulated wisdom and

00:08:11.000 tradition, beginning with the Hellenic tradition, fusing with the Hebraic tradition, and resulting in the

00:08:16.680 end, yes, through fits and starts. It's a process of evolution. There's some revolution too. And when

00:08:23.480 there is revolution, that's when things get ugly. So there's a big difference between, I think,

00:08:27.320 the American Revolution and the French Revolution. So that was just to sort of, you know, set the scene

00:08:31.640 for my position. I don't think it's true that we are born into the world as individuals freely just

00:08:40.360 deciding what obligations to undertake. We're literally born attached to a cord to our mum.

00:08:47.080 That, I think, is the more plausible account of how we start as human beings.

00:08:55.960 Aristotle makes this point in the opening of the politics. We are, before we are creatures of the

00:09:00.520 polis, before we are political animals, politikon, so on, we are paired animals. That is to say, we pair

00:09:08.280 ourselves male and female. We then naturally express ourselves through new human beings, new life. That

00:09:15.960 itself is an unstable setup. We need to form ourselves into a village. Villages are vulnerable,

00:09:21.800 as we learnt. Kibbutzes are vulnerable. We need to expand, and we need to form together. And now,

00:09:26.840 for Aristotle, the best unit for a moral community, a stable social moral order, was the polis. That may

00:09:33.720 vary from era to era. It may be a city-state. It may be a nation-state. It may be a relatively stable

00:09:39.400 empire. So that, I think, is a much more empirically aligned and accurate account of what it is to be

00:09:48.360 human. Now, of course, it's not to say that freedom doesn't matter, and it's not to say that we don't

00:09:52.440 freely take on obligations further down the line. We choose our spouses. We may not choose our parents

00:09:57.800 or our siblings. We may not easily choose our nation. You've chosen Britain, but not everyone,

00:10:04.920 and most people rest with the moral community in which they find themselves. We might say,

00:10:10.520 well, we freely enter into a marriage. Now, historically, that's been seen as a covenant,

00:10:17.160 a lifelong promise. Liberalism changes that, turns it into a contract. Why? It has to be a contract.

00:10:23.880 James, just explain the difference for people. What is the difference between a covenant and a contract?

00:10:27.240 There's a lot of literature on this, but let's say, roughly, that a covenant is a unilateral

00:10:31.800 promise and commitment that expects reciprocity but doesn't require it. A contract has some sort of

00:10:40.360 public features. It's something that you make before others that is known about, is publicly known.

00:10:46.440 It's not a kind of private arrangement. I think that's an important element, too. It's not a contract.

00:10:50.680 The contract is the sort of dominant metaphor for the whole, for the liberal universe. Social contract

00:10:56.440 could be a vertical contract with the state, as Hobbes stresses in Leviathan. Or, I think

00:11:01.000 more plausibly, it's a Lockean contract that we enter into. So, the language of consent, individual

00:11:07.880 rights. I'm free to enter the contract, and I'm free to breach it. If I do breach it, then there are

00:11:12.840 certain, maybe, obligations I might have to make up for, and so on and so forth. Now, again, I think that

00:11:18.840 abstracts and it sort of legalizes and removes human arrangements away from our natural state.

00:11:30.040 Very quickly, just the final point, this question of moral worth, that the sort of the liberal

00:11:35.640 mind assumes that moral worth and objective moral standards are not only available but universally

00:11:42.040 available. The liberal project is a universal project. Conservative projects tend not to be,

00:11:46.360 though, when we come to talk about conservatism, I'll say a little bit more about that, because I

00:11:51.720 think there's some criticism that can be made of the conservative position on that front.

00:11:55.160 So, the liberal paradigm is a universalizing paradigm. That is to say, human rights is

00:12:01.640 universally applicable. That is the sort of standard yarn stick. That's the standard manifesto

00:12:06.840 for liberal morality. And yet, when we press the liberal on, well, what is this moral standard?

00:12:13.240 And the liberal says, well, we all agree on this. We all have to agree on this. You realize

00:12:18.600 that it's impossible without surrendering freedom of thought, without surrendering the freedom to

00:12:24.360 choose what will always be rival and conflicting conceptions of the good. John Rawls, by far and

00:12:31.560 away the most influential political liberal of the last 50 years, devises this thought experiment.

00:12:37.160 Liberals are always devising thought experiments because, precisely because, they want to abstract

00:12:41.400 away from particular contingent concrete circumstances to imagine this kind of universal,

00:12:47.480 timeless utopia that's applicable to all times and to all places. And in this thought experiment,

00:12:52.760 he says, well, in order to pull this off, in order to imagine a maximally just society,

00:12:57.880 we have to bracket, quote, our comprehensive metaphysical commitments. Now, what lies within that phrase?

00:13:04.600 Everything, not just the God stuff, what we are as human beings, conceptions of human nature,

00:13:12.200 what makes us free, what our worth consists in, these are inevitably contentious moral, contentious

00:13:18.680 philosophical questions that are never going to command universal agreement. The only reason there's an

00:13:23.320 illusion of agreement that emerges in the 18th century is precisely because there's been a settled

00:13:28.440 intellectual, social and cultural pattern from Plato and Aristotle all the way through late antiquity,

00:13:34.520 the high Middle Ages, and emerging into fruition. Yes, with big political breaks like the Reformation

00:13:40.920 in the 16th century and the French Revolution in the 18th century, but those are kind of optical

00:13:45.640 illusions. Those revolutions lead us to believe, and especially the way history is taught in the

00:13:51.160 textbooks, you've got the Enlightenment. Well, what comes before the Enlightenment?

00:13:56.040 Darkness. What comes before Renaissance? Death. And so there's this sort of, as I said, there's a kind

00:14:02.040 of myth, there's a mythology to liberalism that thinks that it all starts with a break. And I say it's not,

00:14:09.080 it's the fruits of the very order that conservatives seek to preserve.

00:14:12.920 Thank you. I want to come back to conservatives in a second, but Stephen, the flurry of punches there,

00:14:17.640 so we'll come back on this. Particularly the idea that liberalism is interfering in things like

00:14:23.960 marriage and changing the way that we do things. So, beautifully said, but three huge topics put out

00:14:31.480 there, and I'm going to take just the first one. You started it. Well, yes. I started it. Yeah,

00:14:35.640 that's right. Okay, so let's take this first one about the liberal mythos, right, that somehow in the

00:14:42.120 Enlightenment, there's this radical break with the past and suddenly liberalism, we're all free,

00:14:46.040 autonomous self, right. That is a conservative myth about liberalism. There are no liberals. Now,

00:14:54.520 John Rawls is a disaster. We'll come back to him in a moment. He's your guy. He is not. He is the

00:15:00.520 opposite of my guy. Anyway, that's the third topic that you are putting out there. Every single

00:15:08.760 important liberal in the tradition, right, and liberalism does have its tradition. We'll say,

00:15:13.160 look, by the time we get to the Enlightenment, you are exactly right. The founding fathers of

00:15:18.200 the United States are saying, no, we have to go back to Greece. We have to go back to Rome. There are

00:15:22.840 certain long political traditions. At the same time, they are very well aware if we are interested in

00:15:29.560 religious freedom, for example. The First Amendment, I know we're in Britain, but I'm going to use

00:15:35.160 use this American example. In the Bill of Rights, in the First Amendment, the very first thing is

00:15:40.520 freedom of religion. And it's very clear that this comes out of already two centuries of battles over

00:15:48.440 religious freedom, religious toleration, and so forth. The more broad-ranging intellectual freedoms

00:15:55.160 in the sciences, for example, it's already two to three centuries of debates over whether we should

00:16:00.600 be intellectually free in the sciences or not, to extend to artistic freedom. Are we going to

00:16:05.480 censor the theaters? Are we going to allow literary people to do whatever? Already going back to the

00:16:11.160 Renaissance, we have now more than two centuries, we have three to four centuries of debates and

00:16:17.640 hard-fought battles. So what we have then is a multi-front battle with respect to the arts,

00:16:22.760 with respect to the sciences, with respect to religion, with respect to all of the civil freedoms.

00:16:27.800 And so, yes, absolutely, the Enlightenment is a capstone. And then there is a kind of

00:16:33.080 aha moment that many intellectuals are reaching in the 1700s. After we fought all of these particular

00:16:38.840 battles, now we are in a position to generalize and say, it's not just artistic freedom, or religious

00:16:44.440 freedom, or scientific freedom, or freedom to go into whatever kind of business you want. Yes,

00:16:49.560 we are going to generalize to these universal principles. So the myth is, and this is often a conservative

00:16:56.360 reading that somehow we're springing de novo into existence, I don't think that's a proper reading

00:17:01.880 of liberals. The liberals are proud of their history. Now, to turn the tables a little bit,

00:17:07.560 if we then say the liberals want to say in the social order, there are going to be lots of values

00:17:12.760 that are contested on and on, and there's going to be a great deal of evolution that goes on. Where the

00:17:18.120 liberals are insisting that liberty comes first is in one area and one area only. That is in the

00:17:26.280 political area. When we are talking about families, when we're talking about other institutions, people

00:17:31.640 might have different orders of what their values are. And we might have contending values in those

00:17:37.080 social. But when we are talking about politics, specifically, when we are talking about government,

00:17:41.560 government, we have to be very, very clear. Because government is, in every single society,

00:17:49.480 an instrument of compulsion. It makes its rules. All other social institutions, of course, have rules,

00:17:54.920 but those are rules that are flexible. You can opt in and out of business, opt in and out of a church,

00:18:01.880 opt in and out of playing this or that sport. So they all have their rules. But those are particular

00:18:06.440 rules for those institutions and people voluntarily sign on to them. When we're talking about governments,

00:18:11.800 we are talking about a different kind of animal. And it's an 800-pound gorilla animal that says,

00:18:18.120 our rules are going to apply to everybody in the society. And our rules, if you break one of these

00:18:23.480 rules, the police are going to come to you. We will put you in jail if we find that you are wrong.

00:18:29.080 And we have these rules with respect to foreign people protecting our people. You come here,

00:18:33.080 we will use our military. So when we are talking about the moral order, the liberals are insistent,

00:18:42.840 the purpose of government, all of the universal rules and the willingness to use force against

00:18:48.280 anybody, it has to be only with reference to the protection of individual liberties. That's where

00:18:54.360 the insistence comes in. That's where the enforcement comes in. Now, against that,

00:19:00.360 what I read from Professor Orr and other conservatives. Now, conservatism, of course,

00:19:06.200 is a big tent. So I'm going to try to tailor it as much as possible to yours is to say, well,

00:19:10.840 we can't do that because we have to have a prior kind of order within which individuals come into

00:19:16.360 existence. And that order has hierarchical elements and it has traditions. And so we have order, tradition,

00:19:23.400 hierarchy. And those are going to be values that trump liberty in many cases, including in political

00:19:31.080 cases. And that's where the liberal gets worried. Because then we want to say, well, there are good

00:19:36.920 orders and there are bad orders. There are good hierarchies and there are bad hierarchies. How are

00:19:40.840 we going to sort those out? You do need a principle before you, a moral principle to sort out all of those

00:19:47.480 values. You can't just start with all of those. And if we then go back to the history, and this is why

00:19:52.840 I think the myth, the conservative myth about the liberal history is important. We say in, you know,

00:19:58.360 over the course of the centuries, when all of these hot, hard fought battles are being won,

00:20:04.120 they are being won by the liberals. They are not being won by the conservatives. And every single

00:20:10.280 generation, we go to the late 1400s and we say, we need, you know, this is the generation of

00:20:14.600 Michelangelo, Leonardo a little earlier and so on. The artists are saying, we need artistic freedom.

00:20:21.080 And it is precisely conservatives, right, of that era that are saying, no, order and tradition that is

00:20:27.320 stifling the liberal developments there. In the next century, when we're talking about religious

00:20:33.560 freedom, it's the liberals of that generation saying, no, individuals need to take charge of their

00:20:40.280 own conscience, get the state out of it, and so forth. And it is precisely the people of order,

00:20:46.120 tradition, and hierarchy who are stifling that development of individual liberty. In the case

00:20:52.200 of science, when the scientists like Galileo are saying, you know, stop torturing scientists,

00:20:57.000 start using intimidation. We need to be free thinking and liberal in this intellectual zone is

00:21:03.560 precisely the conservatives of that era saying, no, order and tradition and hierarchy and so forth.

00:21:11.320 So what I think the right way to read this history is that what has happened is that liberals are in

00:21:16.200 all of these areas, the ones who are fighting the battle, making the progress. It's the conservatives who

00:21:21.960 are reactionary in varying degrees. Some of them are just saying no and using force,

00:21:27.720 compulsion to stop the advance of those ones. But then the more reasonable conservatives,

00:21:34.040 typically, once the battle has been won by the liberals, they accommodate. And they say, okay,

00:21:39.160 now we will fold this into the tradition. But it is now a liberal conservatism, right,

00:21:46.600 where the liberals won, did all the work, the conservatives accommodate that after. And then

00:21:52.520 you get to what I think of as more reasonable conservatives in the later modern world.

00:21:57.880 Yes, of course. I'm conscious that we're, we're sort of, we're firing a lot of rounds at each

00:22:01.960 other. We should really take them one by one. That's just the first issue that you put on the

00:22:05.880 table. Let me just, let's try and, and I'll try and impose. We only have like an hour and a half

00:22:09.720 total. Maybe we'll, maybe all that is do a sequel, but so let me just, let me take it, respond to,

00:22:15.240 to your responses. So there's the first question of the, the narrating of the history and, and,

00:22:20.040 and the conservative myth that liberalism pops into being out of nothing, the kind of the secular

00:22:23.480 creationism line that I started off with. There's also this question about government

00:22:27.880 and the state that is only in the political arena that the liberalism values freedom.

00:22:33.080 And then questions about artistic freedom and science. Let's just, let's just go with those

00:22:38.520 four. There are, I know there are lots of other points that you, um, that you made that I'm sorry

00:22:43.000 if I don't address them. Look, the historic, the sort of periodization question that, you know,

00:22:48.280 it is the enlightenment. I, you know, that is how it's taught that I think, you know, I'm, I'm,

00:22:53.320 I think there's a lot to your reading or your re-narration, but I think it is a re-narration.

00:22:57.880 I think it is a sort of heter, heterodox take. I wish there were more liberals who were running

00:23:01.640 this. I think it, I think when conservatives say that there is this enlightenment moment,

00:23:07.320 uh, that is talked about, that's the metaphor that's used, that we've, we talk about the dark

00:23:11.560 ages, the middle ages. Why are there the middle ages? Between what? Between the high noon

00:23:17.640 of classical antiquity and the rebirth of, uh, of humanism leading to enlightenment. I just think

00:23:24.680 that is the way things are told. Just look at the labels. They don't, they don't lie. I mean,

00:23:29.320 I don't, I think they do lie. I think, and I'm glad that you agree with me that they lie,

00:23:32.440 but that I think is the standard school university textbook story. And I don't think it's, I think it

00:23:38.260 is a myth, but I don't think it's a myth. The conservatives think that it's a myth, if you see what I mean.

00:23:42.840 We can keep talking about that. And I mean, but I think it takes us onto a point that is,

00:23:46.800 will be helpful for our discussion, which is that we, we're probably, the way that this is set up,

00:23:52.220 we're probably being a little bit too binary. Uh, we've been constantly, you know, be very upset

00:23:57.360 with us. This is, we've got to seek to be a little bit non-binary. The, there's a sort of pendulum

00:24:01.540 swing. So the idea is that, you know, the liberal is, doesn't care at all about the sort of order that

00:24:06.500 might constrain us and, and provide the enabling conditions of freedom for virtue as opposed to raw

00:24:10.840 anarchic freedom. And conversely, the conservative can, can ignore the fact that freedom

00:24:16.380 actually has been, you know, part of our history as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a,

00:24:21.800 in Western civilization, way, way, way back to democratic Athens. Paresi, I think of the

00:24:26.140 importance of freedom of speech within the Athenian assembly or isonomia, I think of equality

00:24:30.220 before the law. These are clearly liberal ideas. I completely accept that. What I say is that there's

00:24:34.740 a kind of crystallization of a kind of constellated themes around freedom, the two engine rooms of

00:24:39.820 liberalism from the early modern period onward, freedom and equality. That's the French

00:24:44.500 revolution. That's the American revolution. That's what gets going in, in, in, in the late

00:24:49.240 18th century. Okay. So that's the first point. This second point about how liberalism is only

00:24:54.180 worried about freedom in the political space. Now, I think if that's true, it actually confirms

00:25:04.260 my worries that the liberal has this, another myth that there is a kind of secular neutral public

00:25:12.680 square in which we're all free because we've bracketed any contentious commitments that

00:25:17.420 might lead to more nasty religious wars or civil wars or whatever that might be. Now, I think that's,

00:25:22.140 that's true that it's, and it's, and it's praiseworthy. The liberal aim to try and achieve

00:25:27.760 civic peace is a good aim. We all want civic peace. I deny if we look around the cities of the West right

00:25:36.360 now, if we look at the fruits of the liberal project as it, as they currently exist, I would

00:25:42.760 challenge you, particularly given the last few weekends we've seen since October the 7th, to say

00:25:47.880 that we have civic peace. James, I know you have so much more to say, but I feel like on that

00:25:53.080 particular issue, that is a very good one to hone in on. Right. Do you mind if we do? Let's do.

00:25:57.500 Yeah. Let's focus on that. What do you say to that? Because I think a lot of people will feel like,

00:26:01.340 you know, the paradox of tolerance, the fact that we have allowed people into this country

00:26:07.200 who don't share our values because we are so welcoming and tolerant and liberal has created

00:26:12.540 a society where, because of the freedom we provide to people, it is the most intolerant people who are

00:26:18.800 now in the public square shouting things. What say you to that? Well, I think then we need to bring in

00:26:23.740 a, at least one more player onto the social intellectual scene, aside from liberalism and conservatism.

00:26:31.340 And that third or fourth player is going to be the problem case. So we're talking about a

00:26:37.600 hopefully sophisticated version of liberalism, a sophisticated version of conservatism, but there

00:26:42.720 are lots of unsophisticated philosophies, ideologies, and worldviews out there. How conservatism will

00:26:50.860 handle them, how liberalism will handle them, that of course is a, is a big project. But I think it

00:26:56.960 would be faulty to say that somehow conservatism is responsible for that. And I'm not going to make

00:27:03.660 that argument. But I think it also doesn't work the other way that to say that liberalism-

00:27:07.920 Well, I am going to make that argument.

00:27:08.840 Right. No, no, no. But I understand. Right. I understand. So there is then another, and there

00:27:15.500 is of course a grain of truth to this, that, you know, liberalism again is a big tent, just

00:27:19.620 like there's, you know, very hidebound versions of conservatism. And then there are more flexible,

00:27:24.600 evolving versions of conservatism as well. There are versions of liberalism that start to sound

00:27:30.840 very namby-pamby. And these are going to be the more free-floating, rationalistic versions of

00:27:36.760 liberalism that you are worried about. And I also worry about. And, you know, they are so concerned

00:27:42.720 with saying, we need to respect other people's freedoms that I can never even criticize other

00:27:49.540 people. And so from that intellectual context, then you're going to get into a paradox of tolerance.

00:27:56.240 But my response to that from within the liberal tent is to say that liberalism needs to be muscular,

00:28:01.440 if I can use that metaphor. Once you have said individuals matter, individuals have rights,

00:28:08.520 and we do have to come back to this universalism versus particulars and the localism issue for sure.

00:28:15.400 And that even if you want to elevate that and to say we are certain about that and that these rights

00:28:21.000 are absolute, then you empower government to protect those rights. Then that government needs to be

00:28:28.100 muscular in the protection of those rights. So just as we say, for example, you know,

00:28:34.160 any sort of murdering is wrong. It violates the right to life. Kidnapping and enslaving are wrong.

00:28:42.080 Theft is wrong. So life, liberty, and property. The government should be empowered to whatever

00:28:48.380 degree necessary to use force effectively in the service of those three rights. So the point of

00:28:58.080 the so-called paradox of tolerance is to say pretty much anything that is voluntary and peaceful is

00:29:04.560 going to be tolerated. And so it is going to be a largely contentious, messy society, and there's

00:29:10.140 going to be a lot of value conflicts and so on. And we're going to try to resolve those as much as we

00:29:14.580 possibly can through voluntary mechanisms. But when we are clearly dealing with someone who is not

00:29:20.980 interested in doing that, they are inserting force into the equation. Then the police come down hard on

00:29:27.860 But that's not what's happening. So that's the second part of it. Why is that not happening?

00:29:33.620 And it's not because liberalism is not saying we shouldn't protect people's liberty rights or we

00:29:39.120 should allow assassination and killing and kidnapping and so forth. It's the third contenders who are both

00:29:45.180 anti-liberal in their core, in their origin. And they're significantly now part of the society.

00:29:53.240 And we have let a lot of them in. And a significant number of the more intellectually sophisticated have

00:29:59.960 captured certain institutions. So what we then have to say is the healthy form of conservatism,

00:30:05.780 the healthy form of liberalism, we face a common enemy, which is the illiberal versions of various

00:30:12.440 others. You're most welcome to let me just get into a slightly more nuanced edge case. Because

00:30:19.760 let's say that the you are for muscular liberalism, and you will crack down on anybody who commits acts

00:30:27.040 of violence. I think that's a minimum standard for a healthy society. Absolutely. What about the fact

00:30:31.700 that, for example, we all have freedom of speech in the liberal conception. And yet, I don't think the

00:30:37.860 conservative would support, and I, not necessarily being conservative, would support the idea that

00:30:42.940 someone should be able to walk into the public square and publicly chant, gas the Jews, for example,

00:30:48.740 as people did in Australia, or shout pro-Hamas slogans. But the liberal conception taken to its logical

00:30:54.740 conclusion is, well, they're not hurting anybody physically. They have freedom of speech. Why should

00:31:01.560 they not be allowed to do that? Well, my first answer would be what should sound like a good

00:31:06.180 conservative answer, which is to say, on all of these edge cases, we have now many centuries of

00:31:12.800 common law discussions about precisely those. And in the North American tradition, we have a shorter

00:31:19.880 tradition of exactly those sorts of things. And so, to get as nuancy as possible, then you have to go

00:31:26.020 into all of those common law cases and say, what has law worked out when they are attending to all of

00:31:32.260 the variables there? So, no, and then I would say, who is responsible for that public space? And if it's

00:31:38.480 a public space, then the way we have worked things out right now is the government is responsible for

00:31:43.580 it. And they are responsible for the administration of that public space, including if it's like a

00:31:49.740 Hyde's Corner kind of place, in a place where, at a minimum, still, people's lives, liberty, and

00:31:54.940 property is going to be respected. Any speech that goes in the direction of incitement, and where the

00:32:03.780 line is drawn between speech that should be tolerated and when it becomes incitement, that has

00:32:09.320 to be very nuanced. But once that line is crossed, then I would say, yeah, muscular liberalism, you shut

00:32:15.040 that speaker down. All right, all right. Well, I can see you're raring to go against it. So, just a few

00:32:19.480 things to say. I mean, this idea that conservatism and liberalism have got these sort of mutant

00:32:24.380 siblings, and that we're both in a position where we need to deal with the problem that this third

00:32:29.740 challenger presents us with. I think that what we're seeing, the chaos, the tyranny, the atomization,

00:32:39.040 go back to your early point, Constantine, we can talk about this later, I think the atomization

00:32:43.760 and the tyranny are structurally complicit features of liberalism. I'll explain why later

00:32:49.980 on if we've got a moment. But if you start with a view of human nature, of human beings

00:32:58.040 as basically free, rational, autonomous, self-legislating agents who freely enter into

00:33:04.580 obligations and ties, you just do think of human beings as basically fungible. It's hard

00:33:11.360 to think of, therefore, it's impossible to come up with a moral objection to large numbers

00:33:17.280 of people coming into your country, entering your moral community, not on terms that you

00:33:23.100 set for them beyond barely minimal ones of, you know, don't celebrate terror and don't

00:33:27.560 kill people, right? There's no sort of ethic there. There's nothing within those abstract

00:33:33.500 universal liberal principles that's actually going to command the concrete loyalties of flesh

00:33:38.300 and blood human beings. What commands the loyalty of flesh and blood human beings is family,

00:33:43.480 neighborhood, corporation, religious communities, guilds, maybe secular communities, and I think

00:33:50.260 nations. I mean, I think nation states is the outermost limit of those concentric circles of political

00:33:56.080 affections and loyalties beyond which they become abstract. Nobody's going to sort of get up and

00:34:02.620 nobody's going to die for the European Union. Nobody's going to get up and put their hands on

00:34:06.720 their hearts and sing Ode to Joy with the EU flag. I mean, maybe some will in Brussels, but, you know,

00:34:11.700 it's not. So the conservative paradigm is to say, look, we are what we are. It would be wonderful,

00:34:18.960 maybe, if we were these perfect liberal, rational, autonomous beings, but that's just not what we are.

00:34:25.740 And one of, I mean, if you look, for example, at the doctrine of multiculturalism,

00:34:29.820 that is a paradigm liberal doctrine. What it says is we are not going to make any demands on you,

00:34:36.820 even when you enter into our moral community, as to how you understand the fundamental moral

00:34:42.760 questions. We're going to say we're not one culture, we're many cultures. So we can have as

00:34:47.260 many silos as we want. And because of the sort of doctrinaire, a priori commitment to the idea that

00:34:53.580 it doesn't matter because whoever's in the silos, they're all liberal, rational, self-legislating

00:34:58.840 selves, who will, left to their own devices, just see that equality, goodness, and the United

00:35:06.900 Nations Declaration of Human Rights is the only moral code worth living by. And more primary,

00:35:14.440 superseding political loyalties to one's origin country will just magically fall away as you

00:35:19.860 pass through the passport gates at Heathrow. It's just a sort of magic wand, and you just forget all of

00:35:24.180 those loyalties, forget all those concrete attachments to kin and to family, to ethnicity,

00:35:28.620 to tribe, to religion, to origin country, and we'll just become a British citizen. And I just think

00:35:33.440 that's another myth. I think it's plainly false. And I think it's why what we're seeing on the streets

00:35:39.080 of our liberal Western capital cities all over at the moment is a fruit of liberalism. And those fruits,

00:35:47.500 those effects, those consequences would not have arisen in a truly conservative polity. That is to

00:35:54.220 say, a polity that says, this is not just any random collection of individual agents. These are a

00:36:01.580 people. They are French. They are from Papua New Guinea. They are from Australia. They've got this story

00:36:07.640 and not any other. These are the people we've, over the years, as you say, the common law, that is

00:36:13.340 something, this is the moral code that has slowly evolved and over the long history of our people, that is

00:36:18.140 the settled wisdom of our people. The paradigm for liberals is not the common law. It's rights-based

00:36:24.600 regimes. It's rights documents. It's the Declaration of Rights. It's the European Human, it's the European

00:36:29.320 Court of Human Rights. It's the very conventions and documents that is making, that is paralyzing

00:36:33.740 today's conservative government in the UK from deporting these people who are celebrating the terrorist

00:36:38.920 attacks on October the 7th. Stephen, come back quickly because we've spent almost all the entire

00:36:44.860 time interrogating the liberal position. I want to come to interrogating the conservative position,

00:36:49.140 but come back on this. Okay, so very good. Then I think we're in, if we take that line and say there

00:36:54.820 is this myth of the free, rational, autonomous, atomized individual, and we want to put the blame

00:36:59.880 on liberalism for where we are, then I think the argument is there going to be liberalism has not been

00:37:05.960 tough enough on people who are not going to adopt that position. And then you add to that

00:37:11.500 an understanding of human nature, what commands our loyalties and so forth, that you think

00:37:15.920 liberalism is not in keeping with. And so it's just, it's going to be a failed project.

00:37:22.240 We don't die for documents.

00:37:24.440 Well, sometimes we do. But then to go to the other side of what I think would be a false dichotomy here,

00:37:31.240 then would be to say, what conservatism then is to say is we start in a particular context,

00:37:36.580 and we are bound to a particular religion, a particular family, a particular language,

00:37:42.200 and a whole bunch of particular things. And if you then, that's not just a metaphor,

00:37:47.120 if we are bound and constituted, and our identities and our value structure comes to be formed

00:37:53.660 in that particular context, then you are going to be very close to a kind of relativism,

00:38:01.420 because then you're going to point out that obviously, people are born into all sorts of

00:38:06.040 different local contexts all over the world, and they're going to be very different in various ways.

00:38:12.700 And if you deny the capacity of us as rational people to abstract from those differences to see

00:38:17.900 a common humanity, excuse me, a common humanity, then you're going to say all we have is contentious

00:38:23.680 groups. But from this conservative position, you're going to see no way out of it, because

00:38:28.260 what really binds us, what commands us, and notice how strong that language is, is these particular

00:38:33.720 tribal loyalties. And if you are then worried about the people who are doing terrible things

00:38:39.180 out on the streets of London and various other places, it's precisely those people.

00:38:43.740 Those are the people the conservatives are describing and valorizing, because those

00:38:47.880 people are tribalists, who were born into a certain tradition, a certain language, a certain

00:38:52.980 family structure, and they are bound and commanded by it.

00:38:56.640 But the conservative argument presumably would be we don't let people from a different

00:39:00.460 conservative culture into us.

00:39:01.240 That's right. That's right. So then you want to balkanize the world into the different tribes.

00:39:05.780 Well, that's been balkanizing your own society.

00:39:07.680 Okay.

00:39:08.160 Quite.

00:39:08.840 Okay, so, but notice what I said, that I think is a false alternative.

00:39:13.180 Okay.

00:39:13.620 Okay.

00:39:14.260 So, somehow, what we need to do with the healthy conservative and the healthy liberalism

00:39:18.700 is to say, we are not culture-bound relativists, and all the best that we can do is relativize,

00:39:24.880 versus we are some sort of free-floating individual, right, rational agents, and just anything

00:39:31.040 goes, right?

00:39:32.660 That's the false alternative we need to get past to get to the next stage of the discussion.

00:39:36.460 And how do we? I'm very keen to understand, but I don't yet, Stephen.

00:39:41.580 Right. So, this is, I think, where the epistemological issues come in. Is it possible for individuals

00:39:48.020 to, whatever their particular circumstances they are born into, to rise above them? Say,

00:39:54.900 I was born into this religion, but I'm not bound to this religion. I am going to think it through

00:39:59.760 as an adult, do some comparative religions, and as a rational individual with good education

00:40:05.140 and free exploration, I can make my own decision. I was born into this family, but I don't just

00:40:11.440 uncritically accept this family, because some families are dysfunctional, some families are

00:40:15.200 functional, and I am going to learn the lessons of my family structure, and I'm probably going to do

00:40:21.380 better in the next time. So, we have the cognitive power to rise above our circumstances.

00:40:26.900 No denying that. No denying that.

00:40:28.240 Well, let me come back to this. Yeah. Well, Constance, you take it. There's a lot of directions

00:40:33.880 we could go. I'm just wary that I don't want it to be all one way.

00:40:38.160 Can I just say, I think this pivots very neatly to a criticism of conservatism that I think is

00:40:43.380 very powerful, if not the most powerful. This is the relativism charge. So, maybe we can,

00:40:47.960 maybe this is a good point to which we can sort of turn to criticise my position.

00:40:53.340 But just as we're going, the relativism problem, I think, is baked in even more so, I don't think

00:41:02.960 it is baked into conservatism, and I'll explain why, but I think it is structurally baked into

00:41:07.600 liberalism. Remember, liberalism is the view that we are free to choose our conceptions of the good.

00:41:16.160 We are free. Nobody's going to tell us what our metaphysical conception of human nature is.

00:41:22.460 And that just is going to lead to conflict. We're going to just have rival conceptions of the good.

00:41:29.000 That's why the adjective plural is often attached to liberal plural democracies.

00:41:34.200 The liberal, in attaching the word plural, basically concedes that the Kantian project,

00:41:39.600 the Kantian idea that left to our own devices, we're all going to come up with a singular

00:41:42.980 conception of what a flourishing society looks like, was never going to work at all.

00:41:47.420 So, liberal plural societies, how do we then cope with that? Well, what happens is,

00:41:52.540 we have plural conceptions of the good. How do we police and navigate and manage and integrate these?

00:41:57.800 How do we hold a multicultural society together? Stephen, you're absolutely right. You need

00:42:02.140 an 800-pound gorilla. The conservative says, you don't need the gorilla, or at least you can keep

00:42:07.660 the gorilla in the cage and bring him out only in exceptional circumstances. If you have a moral

00:42:13.540 community that has a clear self-understanding of itself, it has a clear pride in itself, a pride that

00:42:20.440 it can confer as it welcomes new guests to join its moral community on the terms that it sets for

00:42:25.440 themselves, both with the gifts that it offers, but also the duties that it expects. And because

00:42:30.440 this is us, this is distinctive, this is the kind of community we are. So, I think, you know,

00:42:38.280 the relativism problem does emerge naturally from the liberal tradition. But let's turn to

00:42:43.200 conservatism. You're absolutely right, Stephen, to say this is not a problem that conservatism is

00:42:49.740 free from. If we're all conserving our own particular traditions, isn't that itself a recipe

00:42:55.040 of relativism? I mean, how are we going to cope with that? Well, my first response, preliminary response,

00:42:59.900 would be to say, so what? Better to be a Balkanized world than a Balkanized society. We can at least

00:43:09.780 navigate international relations. Not easy, there are wars, but much better to have divisions conducted

00:43:17.880 along through diplomacy and war. It's better to be tribal among nation states than within a nation.

00:43:23.460 Exactly right. I get it. Let me put a different criticism, the most persuasive one that I thought

00:43:27.800 you put in the written part of this debate, which is that if conservatism is about the preservation of

00:43:33.580 order and traditions, without the universal vision of what human beings are supposed to be able to do

00:43:39.360 and how they're supposed to be able to live, we would still have slavery, women would still be

00:43:44.620 second-class citizens and so on and so forth. What say you to that?

00:43:48.560 Good. Well, I mean, I think it's, I mean, notice what happens when, let's just take the

00:43:55.260 abolitionist movement in this country, the first abolitionist movement leads to the abolition

00:44:00.380 of slavery in 1807 and the slave trade in 1833. How does it start? It starts with a criticism that

00:44:08.540 comes from evangelicals. Thomas Clarkson, St. John's College, Cambridge, William Wilberforce,

00:44:14.700 St. John's College, Cambridge, they start making theological arguments about that, say,

00:44:21.260 there can be no debate, there can be no rival conceptions of the view that human beings are

00:44:27.160 not Kantian selves, but divine beings made in the image of God with an irreducible dignity

00:44:33.980 and preciousness. And for that reason, this is Clarkson's, it was an undergraduate essay,

00:44:38.420 the essay on the commerce of the human species, which became the manifesto for the abolitionist

00:44:43.700 movement. I think conservatism preserves and inherits traditions that carry within it the

00:44:50.380 seeds of its own reform. We see this with the abolitionist movement. We see it too with the

00:44:56.100 logic of extending the franchise to women. Which tradition is the first to lift up women?

00:45:05.680 I say it's Christianity. Look at the way in which women feature in the Gospels. Now, look,

00:45:10.740 I don't want to get into a theological argument. And by the way, is Christianity really a conservative

00:45:13.860 religion? I mean, I don't know. Well, that's a whole other debate. But let's simply say that

00:45:18.240 Christendom and the inherited moral traditions of Christendom are what, broadly speaking,

00:45:24.500 conservatives in the West are seeking to preserve. And I think what we're tiptoeing around here,

00:45:30.180 I don't want to get down into the religion, sort of down a religion rabbit hole, but I do just want

00:45:33.920 to say that this is my deeper answer to your worries about relativism. There are many conservatives

00:45:39.440 who are secular. I think that part of what the conservative is preserving is a set of transcendent

00:45:48.060 metaphysical commitments and obligations. And what that means is that it's not just relativism. It's not

00:45:57.260 just everything's up for grabs. There is a settled way of understanding what human beings are.

00:46:03.920 It's not the conception of human nature that emerges very rapidly in the 18th century.

00:46:08.680 Who are the big thinkers of the French Revolution? De la maitrie. He writes l'homme machine in the

00:46:14.440 1760s, I think. That is to say, man is mechanism. Look at Darwin, the sort of great developments and

00:46:21.360 reductive conceptions of human nature in the 19th century. We're basically just animals. We're out

00:46:26.280 for ourselves. And look at how that gets allied liberal doctrines of capitalism in the 20th century.

00:46:31.600 So I think you've got a very clear transcendent sort of theological undercurrent that I think the

00:46:38.520 best conservatism does, it does in fact preserve. That's why it's not ultimately relativist.

00:46:44.580 There are timeless, eternal, transcendent truths that, yes, have particular expressions,

00:46:49.940 and that will vary from time to place. Human beings evolve over time. Human culture evolves over time.

00:46:55.560 But there is a kind of anchor, if you like, in a set of basic traditions that are both revealed and

00:47:03.960 rational. Stephen, make some of your arguments, because I thought that was one of the strongest

00:47:08.160 among others. Yes. No, I think James is absolutely right. Ultimately, we are going to have to get back

00:47:12.600 to metaphysics. Everything's downstream of metaphysics. No, no. Metaphysics and the epistemological issues

00:47:18.020 about abstraction. There are people watching this. I want them to stay watching. So simplify this for us.

00:47:22.460 We're not going to do it. But I will make the history point, just to start with the abolition of

00:47:26.920 slavery. You are exactly right that by the time we get to the 1700s, it's evangelicals who are

00:47:32.940 front and center and a significant member. But I think that's the wrong reading of the abolition story,

00:47:40.060 and it's not going to be something internal to Christianity that is getting the credit for

00:47:47.180 the abolitionist movement and its successes. And the point is going to be that Christianity was the

00:47:53.560 dominant intellectual framework from 300s. And it had a monopoly, basically, for 700, 800, 900 years.

00:48:03.980 Not a whisper against anything being wrong with slavery or, well, maybe a whisper, maybe some

00:48:12.340 whispers. But the institution of slavery, the institution of the subordination of women

00:48:18.320 for well over a millennium. When you get to the 1700s and you have some evangelicals and others,

00:48:26.000 this is already three centuries after the Renaissance. The first people to start significantly

00:48:30.460 saying there's something wrong with slavery are in the 1500s, and they are Renaissance humanist

00:48:37.740 educated individuals who are starting to say there is something wrong here with this as an

00:48:43.720 institution. And that picks up in the 1600s. As we go through the religious battles over religious

00:48:50.740 toleration, separation of church and state, what you find then is a new form of Christianity. I would say

00:48:56.800 John Locke's is probably the best version here, where you have a combination, early Enlightenment

00:49:03.360 philosophy combined with trying to make Christianity as reasonable as possible with its certain

00:49:11.240 understanding of individuals, toleration, freedom, and so forth. Once that is put in place, and this is

00:49:16.840 by the end of the 1600s, then in the 1700s, you've got a whole bunch of people who are now

00:49:22.020 Renaissance humanist types, including, you know, Benjamin Franklin and the Thomas Jeffersons and so

00:49:27.840 forth, and a whole bunch of evangelicals who are now coming out of this new form of modernized

00:49:34.240 Christianity. Then and only then does slavery go on the defensive and go on. And then the same story

00:49:41.040 would be told with respect to women. Now, that's just the first half of the history story.

00:49:44.960 Well, look, we can have a sort of history war here. And I just think that I just think it's a

00:49:50.020 mistaken way of understanding the history. The evangelicals are not reading Locke's reasonableness

00:49:55.600 of Christianity. They're reading the New Testament.

00:49:59.000 But they're reading it through a Locke's English lens.

00:50:01.100 James, would it not be fair to say, though, that the people who are most opposed to the emancipation

00:50:05.140 of women and the lifting of the enslavement of Africans are also conservatives and Christians?

00:50:13.220 I think it's an anachronism to apply the binary to the 18th century when the word conservatism

00:50:18.420 doesn't even emerge into the 18th century.

00:50:19.760 People who believe in the preservation of the existing order.

00:50:22.060 So, yes, you're absolutely right. The conservatives do put a primacy. They think that the default

00:50:28.860 presumption when faced with any kind of radical change should be stay with what you've got.

00:50:37.260 Now, if you like, that's the converse problem that the liberal has. The liberal doesn't know

00:50:42.080 when to stop liberating and has to stop at some point before, if the liberal doesn't

00:50:46.400 stop liberating, you end up with a tyranny. You just have individual conceptions of the

00:50:50.020 good, an atomized society that can only be held together by a tyranny. And that, I think,

00:50:54.720 is where we're getting now. But just to say, the conservative position suffers from a similar

00:51:02.420 kind of problem. What you've got in the late 18th century is the emergent, is the idea that

00:51:14.240 we've got a settled, a sort of settled hierarchy. We've got a hierarchy that works. Hierarchies

00:51:20.160 are functional. Flat sort of societies with no sort of distinctions of sort of office and

00:51:27.020 function are dysfunctional societies. And so, and we recognize this. And I think conservatives

00:51:33.400 have often been guilty, and no doubt they were guilty in the 18th century, of conflating value

00:51:38.720 and dignity with function. That is to say, if you have high office, that somehow you're invested

00:51:44.680 with greater moral worth. I think that does emerge in the 18th and 19th century, but only because

00:51:50.060 the theological conceptions of a full-blooded metaphysical human equality before God,

00:51:57.020 priest and pauper kneel together at the altar rail, that starts to dissipate. And as that starts

00:52:03.440 to dissipate, it becomes very difficult for hierarchies to seem morally okay. Because there,

00:52:09.880 it just seems random. The only way you can understand equality is really in material terms.

00:52:15.000 The allocation of offices and also increasingly salary and wealth. That is what human worth consists

00:52:22.800 in. It's a kind of secularizing and a materializing of human worth. So yes, I mean, the conservatives

00:52:28.420 have to understand that sometimes in order to preserve and conserve, change is necessary. And

00:52:36.500 that's the big challenge that conservatism faces, just as the liberal faces the challenge, when do you

00:52:41.500 stop liberating and start becoming a conservative?

00:52:43.920 Stephen, anything you want to say on that?

00:52:48.260 Well, again, we have a number of issues here. In part, I think this comes down to partly a temperamental

00:52:55.880 issue, where the conservatives is a little more backwards looking, not under any pejorative sense.

00:53:02.520 We look backwards to look forwards.

00:53:03.920 Yeah, what we have accomplished. And the liberal is forward looking. How can we improve?

00:53:09.220 From ground zero.

00:53:10.240 The conservative wants to change slowly. The liberal is more willing to say,

00:53:15.260 we've got this great new idea and let's go for it. And that, in part, for the intellectuals,

00:53:22.740 I think does turn on the epistemological issues. This is about knowledge. When do we know?

00:53:27.900 And the thing that I think most liberals will find temperamentally objectionable is this

00:53:34.900 conservative resistance to the idea that we can, in fact, discover truths, moral truths that are

00:53:43.700 universalizable and act on them quickly. Now, this is partly then an epistemological confidence in the

00:53:50.880 power of the human mind. And I think that one requires another discussion of its own. So, I would

00:53:58.020 then, you know, in history of philosophy terms, my sense is you are much more Burke conservative and I'm

00:54:02.560 going to be much more Locke liberal. But this is where I think it becomes morally important that if

00:54:09.820 you are in these 1800s and you find someone who's saying, given everything that we have discovered

00:54:15.100 right now, are you not certain with moral certainty that slavery is an abomination? It is disgusting,

00:54:23.740 right? And that we know this, that slaves are human beings with full dignity, capacity for freedom.

00:54:32.920 And I am ready to generalize on that. And if someone temperamentally says, well, I'm not sure,

00:54:40.240 right? You know, my tradition, blah, blah, blah. That's going to be the moral objection to

00:54:45.440 conservatism. That it builds, of course, but it's going to build into itself a resistance to something

00:54:51.380 that is. And then to say, well, we should change slowly. We say, no, this is wrong. We should

00:54:56.020 change quickly on this. And then the same thing, if there's any sort of resistance, once we recognize

00:55:01.560 that women are capable of self-governance, rationality, running their own lives, free agency,

00:55:08.400 that, well, you know, our tradition, we're not so sure about the generalization, all women,

00:55:13.460 are you sure? Right? And so forth. No, that is morally objectionable. So, I think that it's going to be

00:55:19.360 an epistemological issue that is partly a temperamental issue, but it's going to come

00:55:23.180 into a moral conflict about... Okay. I think it's very helpful, actually, Stephen, to frame it that

00:55:29.480 way. I think you're right. It's an epistemological question. And I think you're also right that it

00:55:33.700 bleeds very quickly into a moral question. And I think the conservative comeback would be to say,

00:55:39.160 yes, we are indeed very nervous when a set of traditions that have been running for centuries

00:55:44.880 and centuries are being challenged and completely subverted and started again from ground... We're

00:55:49.540 starting again from ground zero by a small gaggle of people who just have read lots of books and

00:55:55.680 written lots of sort of furious tracts about how we must change everything right now. Yes,

00:56:01.360 there's a nervousness there. Why? Because the conservative puts... takes very seriously the

00:56:07.080 idea that the tradition is the democracy of the dead, that there is an accumulated wisdom in

00:56:11.760 tradition. And even if we don't fully understand, that is to say, even if we don't have epistemological

00:56:16.040 clarity of why it is that that fence is up in the field, we know that somebody at some point put it

00:56:23.060 up there. We don't know if there's an angry bull somewhere hiding behind a tree about to attack us,

00:56:28.720 but we're not going to put it down. That is to say, we're going to understand that rationality is not

00:56:34.100 always, does not, is not always contained within a single head or a single sort of little group of

00:56:40.740 heads. That is to say, rationality is the point that Hayek makes, even though he doesn't say it,

00:56:44.780 he denies he's a conservative. Rationality is dispersed. It's dispersed in all sorts of ways.

00:56:49.720 It's dispersed in the price mechanism. It's also dispersed in the common law, as you said earlier.

00:56:53.600 That is to say, what is the common law? The common law represents a tradition of epistemological

00:56:59.280 humility. The rights-based documents, declarations de novo, represent the liberal epistemology. That

00:57:06.600 is to say, we've got it right. We've got the universal application. We're going to write this

00:57:10.600 document, and it's going to be applicable from here on in, at all times and all places. We might

00:57:14.940 put in a few amendments, if you're lucky. The conservative approach is, no, we must respect

00:57:21.660 the accumulated, the sedimentation of moral wisdom over the past. Yes, that's going to mean

00:57:26.760 we're going to have to creak and change as new technologies emerge, as new wars and conflicts

00:57:32.740 emerge. It's not a recipe for stasis and paralysis, but it's an adaptive method, and it recognizes

00:57:39.860 that we don't have some sort of omniscient clarity just because we happen to be the ones walking

00:57:46.200 around alive at the moment. James and Stephen, we have a few minutes left, and there's one thing

00:57:50.900 I want to bring up that you mentioned there briefly that I think actually doesn't get talked

00:57:56.400 about enough because people who think for a living, like the two of you and to a lesser

00:58:01.300 extent me, we sometimes want to believe that changes in society and progress, whatever we

00:58:08.180 call that, is primarily driven by ideas and by culture, whereas I think it's fair to say

00:58:14.780 to a large extent it's driven by technology.

00:58:16.820 I think that's such a great point. If I could just follow it, then I'd just...

00:58:20.920 Well, and you know, our good friend Louis Perry, for example, makes this point about the

00:58:25.200 sexual revolution. We can talk all we want about the emancipation of women because we're

00:58:29.220 so progressive, but actually it happens because we finally have the technology for it to be

00:58:32.620 possible.

00:58:33.340 If I could just pick up on that point and marry it to Louise's wonderful work and the work

00:58:37.140 of the other British feminists, the new reactionary feminists. You know, if it's true that the

00:58:45.500 sort of liberal impulse has been a recipe for moral progress, I don't want to deny that, but

00:58:51.560 there's a big difference when it comes to thinking about what is it that, what's the

00:58:55.300 sort of understanding of human beings that's motivating that moral progress. Stephen and

00:58:59.120 I differed on what motivated the abolitionist movement. I say it was evangelicals. What are

00:59:04.060 evangelicals? They're the ones who go back to the, they're always banging on about the

00:59:06.580 Bible. They're not reading John Locke. They're reading Paul. And they're seeing that what

00:59:11.940 unfolds there is the sort of the logic of all human beings being equal in the eyes of God.

00:59:16.680 Now, that's different from the liberal conception, which sees human beings as fungible,

00:59:22.840 that there's no ultimate difference between human, between men and women, that we're just

00:59:26.960 units. And I think that is why transgenderism emerges, that ideology, for example, emerges,

00:59:33.620 that confusion between men and women emerges within, from naturally downstream of the liberal

00:59:39.200 conception of human nature as a kind of basically blank slate, empty vessel. So, but back to your

00:59:44.480 point, Constantine, you're right, that what catalyzes these changes is not just ideas. And

00:59:49.720 Stephen and I, you know, we've been talking about ideas and the history of ideas and so

00:59:52.840 on. It is true that we academics often, you know, think that ideas put a lot more, attribute

01:00:01.380 a lot more to ideas as factors of historical change than we ought to. Technology matters.

01:00:07.500 As Louise argues, the pill in the 1960s has a massively transformative effect. The invention

01:00:14.200 of the washing machine, as Mary Harington points out, has a radical transformation, etc. Not just

01:00:19.160 technology, though, law. Many have argued, Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hernania recently in the

01:00:26.460 origins of wokeness, the Civil Rights Act 1964 has an enormous change in how we understand on

01:00:33.640 the sort of the moral universe of society. I'd say in the UK context, I would add human right,

01:00:37.900 the equivalent would be the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010. This has become our new

01:00:42.840 liberal constitution and it's been a disaster because it cuts absolutely against the accumulated

01:00:47.740 wisdom of previous centuries. Stephen, probably what will be a final word to address that. And also,

01:00:53.600 I think, yes, the liberals' relationship with technology and also just that point that James made,

01:01:00.680 which I think a lot of people will find persuasive, which is if human beings are free to blah, blah,

01:01:06.340 blah, now that we have the technology for people to change their sex easily, quote, unquote.

01:01:11.660 I'm free to be whatever I want. Why can't, you know, isn't that what liberalism is created?

01:01:16.580 Well, I think we are at the gates of an equivocation here. How we use the word free. So when we are

01:01:23.100 talking about liberalism, we are talking about a political doctrine. It's in a social context.

01:01:28.240 What things are we going to do with compulsion and what things are we going to do voluntarily?

01:01:35.240 And then the liberal has a way of dividing what is done voluntarily and what is done in compulsion.

01:01:41.680 Now, when we say that people should be free politically and socially, we don't generalize

01:01:47.680 that to all of reality to say, therefore, you are free to make up your own physics or to have

01:01:53.280 your own version of the law of gravity, right? Or to, to make up your own biology and so forth.

01:01:59.500 All of those metaphysically given features of reality.

01:02:03.700 They're not political features.

01:02:04.520 Exactly.

01:02:05.080 Why can't, right.

01:02:06.240 That's right. No, but the point is that the freedom, the concept of freedom is a social and

01:02:11.220 political concept. It's not a physics concept. It's not a biology concept. So again, if we are

01:02:19.100 talking about people who are in the transgender movement, this is another complicated territory

01:02:25.440 issue that we're putting out here, but the clearly disturbed, right, individuals there

01:02:30.980 who say, I can be free from biology. I can be free from physics. Well, then we are talking

01:02:37.300 about people who are not rational, right, in any liberal sense. And so they have become unhinged

01:02:43.100 for whatever reason. But that's not the debate that we are having between liberals.

01:02:47.220 I think that's a very sensible point. And there's not much I have to disagree with there. So I think

01:02:50.980 we could probably end on a note of consensus. And I just qualify to say, if you've got freedom

01:02:57.160 as the highest value, and just and let's just assume you can sequester it within a political

01:03:02.420 domain. That's only going to work if you've got outside the political domain, a sense of what

01:03:11.100 makes life meaningful that is shared, at least to some degree. And I think that the stress on

01:03:16.680 liberal neutrality, the programmatic neutrality that liberalism, I think, for all sorts of good

01:03:23.300 reasons, wants us to have in order to bring about civic peace, turns very quickly into a programmatic

01:03:28.860 neutrality, which forces deep convictions about who we are, deep metaphysical, religious convictions

01:03:36.320 about who we are, what we ought to be and what we ought to do, pushes them into the private

01:03:41.440 sphere. So those are questions simply to be settled behind closed doors between consenting

01:03:47.020 adults. And so it's hardly surprising if those questions are then bracketed, that the sequestered

01:03:52.540 political freedom becomes the dominant, the only kind of freedom, at least the only kind of

01:03:57.760 freedom that has any currency in the public square. And so it's no surprise that the liberalism

01:04:02.580 then mutates into progressivism with its great doctrine, that the personal is political,

01:04:07.260 everything becomes political.

01:04:08.640 All right, gentlemen. Well, first of all, thank you so much. I thank our friends here at UnHerd.

01:04:12.980 And before we started this, actually, we were talking about the fact that modelling good

01:04:17.080 conversation is what we are trying to do. So in the spirit of that, I'm going to add a little

01:04:22.140 flourish at the end there and ask you, what did you think was Stephen's strongest argument?

01:04:27.160 I think Stephen had a number of strong arguments, so it's difficult to choose. I think by far

01:04:34.300 the strongest one, though, was this worry, which I think conservatives do not take seriously

01:04:40.240 enough, that by prizing the particular, conservatives don't have a story to tell, conservatives don't

01:04:49.840 have a story to tell about human nature and its broader conceptions of human significance

01:04:55.680 and morality. That's why I happen to think that that particularity must be an exemplification

01:05:02.380 and instantiation of some broader set of transcendent commitments. This is why I think

01:05:08.340 the religious impulse is a feature of conservatism, not a bug, and that's what rescues it from

01:05:14.580 relativism. But Stephen is right to call out, to object, because many conservatives wouldn't

01:05:20.000 disagree with me on that.

01:05:21.020 Stephen, same question to you.

01:05:22.760 I would say that within liberalism, there is, again, as a big tent that you're quite

01:05:28.600 right to say, there is the Kant version and, in our generation, the Rawls version. And I

01:05:34.920 think both of those are disaster versions of liberalism. So there is a tendency in liberalism

01:05:40.280 to want to generalize, to want to go to the abstract. And if that is not anchored, then that is going

01:05:46.800 to be a disaster. Now, this does come to another philosophical issue, the distinction between the

01:05:51.840 empiricists and the rationalists. My version of liberalism is going to be much more empirically

01:05:58.180 rooted. So I think you're exactly right, though, to say that the more free-floating rationalistic

01:06:02.960 versions need to be reined in or need to be put on a better philosophical foundation, and they are

01:06:09.360 problematic.

01:06:10.400 Gentlemen, thank you for being here, and thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you soon

01:06:13.880 with another brilliant episode.

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TRIGGERnometry - November 11, 2023

DEBATE： Liberalism Vs Conservatism

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