DEBATE： Liberalism Vs Conservatism
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1 hour and 6 minutes
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172.21397
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Summary
In the first episode of Trigonometry, Francis and Stephen join Dr James Orr and Professor Stephen Hicks in a debate on the difference between conservatism and liberalism, and how to deal with the threat to our society posed by it.
Transcript
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The liberal aim to try and achieve civic peace is a good aim.
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I would challenge you, particularly given the last few weekends we've seen since October
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But my response to that from within the liberal tent is to say that liberalism needs to be
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So what we then have to say is the healthy form of conservatism, the healthy form of
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Sometimes in order to preserve and conserve, change is necessary.
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And that's the big challenge that conservatism faces.
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Just as the liberal faces the challenge, when do you stop liberating and start becoming a conservative?
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Hello everybody and welcome to the first of what will be many debates here on Trigonometry.
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I'll be hosting some. Francis will be hosting others.
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I cannot tell you how delighted I am to be joined by two of our favorite ever guests on the show,
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Dr. James Orr and Professor Stephen Hicks. Welcome both.
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We're going to have a debate about conservatism versus liberalism.
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You've both written a couple of pieces for my sub-stack and there'll be more coming.
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I want, Stephen, you had to go second in the written debate, so I'll go to you first.
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One of the, I thought, more persuasive criticisms of liberalism, and we heard it,
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a lot of it at ARC where we all were a few days ago, was that limits are liberating and the pursuit
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of unending freedom is actually destructive to society. What do you say to those people?
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Well, I think you have to start with a moral conception of what society is.
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We start with individuals who are both the agents. Individuals have agency. You don't see them
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as pawns pushed around by forces beyond their control. So there is a conception of human nature
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at work, and that's a philosophical starting point. Not only of agents, but of moral worth.
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That whatever we're doing in society, that we're forming various kinds of social institutions,
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organizations, businesses, religions, families, governments, and so forth. It is with respect to
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the value of the individuals involved. So we come together to do business as individuals. We form
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families. It's two individuals who come together, making a voluntary choice, and they then bring into
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the world another individual, right, that needs to develop his capacities for agency and moral
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self-responsibility. So it's not that freedom and individualism is corrosive of the social. It's
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rather that the social exists to preserve the individuals and enable individuals better
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by division of labor being coordinated, achieve the values of the individual. When those social
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institutions are no longer serving that function, they should properly be dissolved, and new ones
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created. And this is partly why we're going to have an evolving, and in some case, revolving society.
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So it is making clear what your ultimate moral standard is. Some social institutions should be
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dissolved. But that requires that you've made clear what your moral standard is,
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and you should have no problem with some social institutions going by the by. And you should
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be actively preserving other social institutions because they've proved their worth at protecting
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the rights and values of the individuals involved.
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But I suppose what people mean is, when we look at the real world out there right now,
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is the dissolution of certain institutions has led to increasing atomization of people,
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people feeling disconnected from each other, from society. And that's why I think a lot of people
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are now starting to talk about... But then I would say it's not freedom that is causing the atomism,
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right, that people are worrying about. So then we have to get to say, what do we mean by an atomized
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individual, or an isolated individual, or an individual who has come to be in an adversarial
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relationship to what we think of as a healthy social institution. And I think when you drill down and
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start looking at cases, it's not going to be too much freedom that's the problem.
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Well, it depends on when you drill down which kind of atomism you are worried about. So if you
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wanted to say, for example, you have individuals on social media who are feeling isolated
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from the world, and it's teenagers who are considering suicide. Now, you might then say,
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well, we shouldn't have given these powerful liberating devices to them in the first place,
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because they don't know how to do it. But I think what's actually happening in that particular
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subcase is you've got young people who are trying to develop a self. And they're going into,
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in most cases, what are echo chambers. And instead of developing a self, what they're doing is just
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echoing and reflecting what's going on there. And you have a certain amount of mob action with respect
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to those individuals. The mob action is not anything that is respectful of the individual. So you have
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a social environment, right, which is not conducive to healthy development of individuals.
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Instead, you've got a kind of, I would say, collective mob psychology that's destructive that's
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going on there. So you do end up with isolated individuals, but it's not too much freedom. It's mob
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psychology. Very interesting. And James, I want to put some of the Stephen's critiques of
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conservatism to you in a second. But did you pick up anything that you wanted to come back on?
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Yeah, thanks. Well, and thanks for putting this together. It's a great honor to be
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part of the first trigonometry debate. And it's been great to exchange views in writing with Stephen.
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And thanks for orchestrating it. Wittgenstein says at one point that a picture held us captive. And I
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think a picture holds the liberal mind captive. I think it's a myth. It's a very attractive myth,
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but it's a false myth. And you might call that myth something like a kind of secular creationism.
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A secular creationist believes that freedom and equality kind of pop into being from nothing
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around about 1776, Sunday afternoon in April, about tea time. I think this is false. I do not
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think that the natural resting state of human beings is to be free, to exist without any unchosen
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obligations, to be simply primarily an individual, and to take it as self-evident that every individual
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has an equal moral worth, that there is some readily available moral standard that all individuals
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left to their own devices will, exercising their rationality, discern, track, and live out.
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I think there's a reason that liberalism emerges in the 18th century. It's not because it starts
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ex nihilo from nothing, but because it is the fruit of long centuries when accumulated wisdom and
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tradition, beginning with the Hellenic tradition, fusing with the Hebraic tradition, and resulting in the
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end, yes, through fits and starts. It's a process of evolution. There's some revolution too. And when
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there is revolution, that's when things get ugly. So there's a big difference between, I think,
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the American Revolution and the French Revolution. So that was just to sort of, you know, set the scene
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for my position. I don't think it's true that we are born into the world as individuals freely just
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deciding what obligations to undertake. We're literally born attached to a cord to our mum.
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That, I think, is the more plausible account of how we start as human beings.
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Aristotle makes this point in the opening of the politics. We are, before we are creatures of the
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polis, before we are political animals, politikon, so on, we are paired animals. That is to say, we pair
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ourselves male and female. We then naturally express ourselves through new human beings, new life. That
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itself is an unstable setup. We need to form ourselves into a village. Villages are vulnerable,
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as we learnt. Kibbutzes are vulnerable. We need to expand, and we need to form together. And now,
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for Aristotle, the best unit for a moral community, a stable social moral order, was the polis. That may
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vary from era to era. It may be a city-state. It may be a nation-state. It may be a relatively stable
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empire. So that, I think, is a much more empirically aligned and accurate account of what it is to be
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human. Now, of course, it's not to say that freedom doesn't matter, and it's not to say that we don't
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freely take on obligations further down the line. We choose our spouses. We may not choose our parents
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or our siblings. We may not easily choose our nation. You've chosen Britain, but not everyone,
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and most people rest with the moral community in which they find themselves. We might say,
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well, we freely enter into a marriage. Now, historically, that's been seen as a covenant,
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a lifelong promise. Liberalism changes that, turns it into a contract. Why? It has to be a contract.
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James, just explain the difference for people. What is the difference between a covenant and a contract?
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There's a lot of literature on this, but let's say, roughly, that a covenant is a unilateral
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promise and commitment that expects reciprocity but doesn't require it. A contract has some sort of
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public features. It's something that you make before others that is known about, is publicly known.
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It's not a kind of private arrangement. I think that's an important element, too. It's not a contract.
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The contract is the sort of dominant metaphor for the whole, for the liberal universe. Social contract
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could be a vertical contract with the state, as Hobbes stresses in Leviathan. Or, I think
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more plausibly, it's a Lockean contract that we enter into. So, the language of consent, individual
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rights. I'm free to enter the contract, and I'm free to breach it. If I do breach it, then there are
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certain, maybe, obligations I might have to make up for, and so on and so forth. Now, again, I think that
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abstracts and it sort of legalizes and removes human arrangements away from our natural state.
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Very quickly, just the final point, this question of moral worth, that the sort of the liberal
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mind assumes that moral worth and objective moral standards are not only available but universally
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available. The liberal project is a universal project. Conservative projects tend not to be,
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though, when we come to talk about conservatism, I'll say a little bit more about that, because I
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think there's some criticism that can be made of the conservative position on that front.
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So, the liberal paradigm is a universalizing paradigm. That is to say, human rights is
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universally applicable. That is the sort of standard yarn stick. That's the standard manifesto
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for liberal morality. And yet, when we press the liberal on, well, what is this moral standard?
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And the liberal says, well, we all agree on this. We all have to agree on this. You realize
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that it's impossible without surrendering freedom of thought, without surrendering the freedom to
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choose what will always be rival and conflicting conceptions of the good. John Rawls, by far and
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away the most influential political liberal of the last 50 years, devises this thought experiment.
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Liberals are always devising thought experiments because, precisely because, they want to abstract
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away from particular contingent concrete circumstances to imagine this kind of universal,
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timeless utopia that's applicable to all times and to all places. And in this thought experiment,
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he says, well, in order to pull this off, in order to imagine a maximally just society,
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we have to bracket, quote, our comprehensive metaphysical commitments. Now, what lies within that phrase?
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Everything, not just the God stuff, what we are as human beings, conceptions of human nature,
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what makes us free, what our worth consists in, these are inevitably contentious moral, contentious
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philosophical questions that are never going to command universal agreement. The only reason there's an
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illusion of agreement that emerges in the 18th century is precisely because there's been a settled
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intellectual, social and cultural pattern from Plato and Aristotle all the way through late antiquity,
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the high Middle Ages, and emerging into fruition. Yes, with big political breaks like the Reformation
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in the 16th century and the French Revolution in the 18th century, but those are kind of optical
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illusions. Those revolutions lead us to believe, and especially the way history is taught in the
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textbooks, you've got the Enlightenment. Well, what comes before the Enlightenment?
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Darkness. What comes before Renaissance? Death. And so there's this sort of, as I said, there's a kind
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of myth, there's a mythology to liberalism that thinks that it all starts with a break. And I say it's not,
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it's the fruits of the very order that conservatives seek to preserve.
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Thank you. I want to come back to conservatives in a second, but Stephen, the flurry of punches there,
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so we'll come back on this. Particularly the idea that liberalism is interfering in things like
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marriage and changing the way that we do things. So, beautifully said, but three huge topics put out
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there, and I'm going to take just the first one. You started it. Well, yes. I started it. Yeah,
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that's right. Okay, so let's take this first one about the liberal mythos, right, that somehow in the
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Enlightenment, there's this radical break with the past and suddenly liberalism, we're all free,
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autonomous self, right. That is a conservative myth about liberalism. There are no liberals. Now,
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John Rawls is a disaster. We'll come back to him in a moment. He's your guy. He is not. He is the
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opposite of my guy. Anyway, that's the third topic that you are putting out there. Every single
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important liberal in the tradition, right, and liberalism does have its tradition. We'll say,
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look, by the time we get to the Enlightenment, you are exactly right. The founding fathers of
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the United States are saying, no, we have to go back to Greece. We have to go back to Rome. There are
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certain long political traditions. At the same time, they are very well aware if we are interested in
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religious freedom, for example. The First Amendment, I know we're in Britain, but I'm going to use
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use this American example. In the Bill of Rights, in the First Amendment, the very first thing is
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freedom of religion. And it's very clear that this comes out of already two centuries of battles over
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religious freedom, religious toleration, and so forth. The more broad-ranging intellectual freedoms
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in the sciences, for example, it's already two to three centuries of debates over whether we should
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be intellectually free in the sciences or not, to extend to artistic freedom. Are we going to
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censor the theaters? Are we going to allow literary people to do whatever? Already going back to the
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Renaissance, we have now more than two centuries, we have three to four centuries of debates and
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hard-fought battles. So what we have then is a multi-front battle with respect to the arts,
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with respect to the sciences, with respect to religion, with respect to all of the civil freedoms.
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And so, yes, absolutely, the Enlightenment is a capstone. And then there is a kind of
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aha moment that many intellectuals are reaching in the 1700s. After we fought all of these particular
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battles, now we are in a position to generalize and say, it's not just artistic freedom, or religious
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freedom, or scientific freedom, or freedom to go into whatever kind of business you want. Yes,
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we are going to generalize to these universal principles. So the myth is, and this is often a conservative
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reading that somehow we're springing de novo into existence, I don't think that's a proper reading
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of liberals. The liberals are proud of their history. Now, to turn the tables a little bit,
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if we then say the liberals want to say in the social order, there are going to be lots of values
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that are contested on and on, and there's going to be a great deal of evolution that goes on. Where the
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liberals are insisting that liberty comes first is in one area and one area only. That is in the
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political area. When we are talking about families, when we're talking about other institutions, people
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might have different orders of what their values are. And we might have contending values in those
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social. But when we are talking about politics, specifically, when we are talking about government,
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government, we have to be very, very clear. Because government is, in every single society,
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an instrument of compulsion. It makes its rules. All other social institutions, of course, have rules,
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but those are rules that are flexible. You can opt in and out of business, opt in and out of a church,
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opt in and out of playing this or that sport. So they all have their rules. But those are particular
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rules for those institutions and people voluntarily sign on to them. When we're talking about governments,
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we are talking about a different kind of animal. And it's an 800-pound gorilla animal that says,
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our rules are going to apply to everybody in the society. And our rules, if you break one of these
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rules, the police are going to come to you. We will put you in jail if we find that you are wrong.
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And we have these rules with respect to foreign people protecting our people. You come here,
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we will use our military. So when we are talking about the moral order, the liberals are insistent,
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the purpose of government, all of the universal rules and the willingness to use force against
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anybody, it has to be only with reference to the protection of individual liberties. That's where
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the insistence comes in. That's where the enforcement comes in. Now, against that,
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what I read from Professor Orr and other conservatives. Now, conservatism, of course,
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is a big tent. So I'm going to try to tailor it as much as possible to yours is to say, well,
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we can't do that because we have to have a prior kind of order within which individuals come into
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existence. And that order has hierarchical elements and it has traditions. And so we have order, tradition,
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hierarchy. And those are going to be values that trump liberty in many cases, including in political
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cases. And that's where the liberal gets worried. Because then we want to say, well, there are good
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orders and there are bad orders. There are good hierarchies and there are bad hierarchies. How are
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we going to sort those out? You do need a principle before you, a moral principle to sort out all of those
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values. You can't just start with all of those. And if we then go back to the history, and this is why
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I think the myth, the conservative myth about the liberal history is important. We say in, you know,
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over the course of the centuries, when all of these hot, hard fought battles are being won,
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they are being won by the liberals. They are not being won by the conservatives. And every single
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generation, we go to the late 1400s and we say, we need, you know, this is the generation of
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Michelangelo, Leonardo a little earlier and so on. The artists are saying, we need artistic freedom.
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And it is precisely conservatives, right, of that era that are saying, no, order and tradition that is
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stifling the liberal developments there. In the next century, when we're talking about religious
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freedom, it's the liberals of that generation saying, no, individuals need to take charge of their
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own conscience, get the state out of it, and so forth. And it is precisely the people of order,
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tradition, and hierarchy who are stifling that development of individual liberty. In the case
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of science, when the scientists like Galileo are saying, you know, stop torturing scientists,
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start using intimidation. We need to be free thinking and liberal in this intellectual zone is
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precisely the conservatives of that era saying, no, order and tradition and hierarchy and so forth.
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So what I think the right way to read this history is that what has happened is that liberals are in
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all of these areas, the ones who are fighting the battle, making the progress. It's the conservatives who
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are reactionary in varying degrees. Some of them are just saying no and using force,
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compulsion to stop the advance of those ones. But then the more reasonable conservatives,
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typically, once the battle has been won by the liberals, they accommodate. And they say, okay,
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now we will fold this into the tradition. But it is now a liberal conservatism, right,
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where the liberals won, did all the work, the conservatives accommodate that after. And then
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you get to what I think of as more reasonable conservatives in the later modern world.
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Yes, of course. I'm conscious that we're, we're sort of, we're firing a lot of rounds at each
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other. We should really take them one by one. That's just the first issue that you put on the
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table. Let me just, let's try and, and I'll try and impose. We only have like an hour and a half
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total. Maybe we'll, maybe all that is do a sequel, but so let me just, let me take it, respond to,
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to your responses. So there's the first question of the, the narrating of the history and, and,
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and the conservative myth that liberalism pops into being out of nothing, the kind of the secular
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creationism line that I started off with. There's also this question about government
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and the state that is only in the political arena that the liberalism values freedom.
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And then questions about artistic freedom and science. Let's just, let's just go with those
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four. There are, I know there are lots of other points that you, um, that you made that I'm sorry
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if I don't address them. Look, the historic, the sort of periodization question that, you know,
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it is the enlightenment. I, you know, that is how it's taught that I think, you know, I'm, I'm,
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I think there's a lot to your reading or your re-narration, but I think it is a re-narration.
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I think it is a sort of heter, heterodox take. I wish there were more liberals who were running
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this. I think it, I think when conservatives say that there is this enlightenment moment,
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uh, that is talked about, that's the metaphor that's used, that we've, we talk about the dark
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ages, the middle ages. Why are there the middle ages? Between what? Between the high noon
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of classical antiquity and the rebirth of, uh, of humanism leading to enlightenment. I just think
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that is the way things are told. Just look at the labels. They don't, they don't lie. I mean,
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I don't, I think they do lie. I think, and I'm glad that you agree with me that they lie,
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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.
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We can keep talking about that. And I mean, but I think it takes us onto a point that is,
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will be helpful for our discussion, which is that we, we're probably, the way that this is set up,
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we're probably being a little bit too binary. Uh, we've been constantly, you know, be very upset
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with us. This is, we've got to seek to be a little bit non-binary. The, there's a sort of pendulum
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swing. So the idea is that, you know, the liberal is, doesn't care at all about the sort of order that
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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
1.00
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
1.00
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-
00:27:08.840
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,
1.00
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
1.00
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.
00:37:24.440
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
1.00
00:39:01.240
That's right. That's right. So then you want to balkanize the world into the different tribes.
0.76
00:39:05.780
Well, that's been balkanizing your own society.
00:39:08.840
Okay, so, but notice what I said, that I think is a false alternative.
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
00:39:32.660
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.
00:40:28.240
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
1.00
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
1.00
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,
1.00
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
0.95
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
0.98
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
0.95
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
0.78
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
00:50:19.760
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?
00:52:48.260
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.
00:53:03.920
Yeah, what we have accomplished. And the liberal is forward looking. How can we improve?
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,
0.62
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
00:58:16.820
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
1.00
00:58:29.220
so progressive, but actually it happens because we finally have the technology for it to be
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
0.87
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
0.99
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.
01:02:06.240
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,
01:04:08.640
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
01:05:22.760
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
01:06:10.400
Gentlemen, thank you for being here, and thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you soon
01:06:15.040
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