TRIGGERnometry - Dr James Orr： The Barbarians Aren't at the Gates... They're Inside!

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00:00:30.660 Trouble is that once the liberalism hits its sunlit uplands, the liberal doesn't become a

00:00:37.340 conservative. That, the kind of emancipatory dynamism of liberalism is still there.

00:00:43.840 What you're saying is progressives value change in and of itself, and they will keep pursuing it,

00:00:49.300 even if they've got to a really good place. Sure. Where do we stop? When do we stop liberating?

00:00:54.140 When do we stop progressing and say, actually, we've done pretty well. Let's just try and

00:00:57.620 settle down and conserve these gains. You can never reason a person out of position that they

00:01:02.660 would never reason into. And I think it's high time for some decolonization, but not the kind

00:01:10.160 of decolonization that most people, most administrators these days have in mind.

00:01:13.700 You need to recognize that ideas age in reverse. We get weaker as we get older. Ideas get stronger

00:01:22.360 as they get older. Barbarians are not at the gates. They've been in the city, they're manning

00:01:27.840 the Citadel, and they've been there for quite a while. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:42.440 I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest

00:01:47.060 conversations with fascinating people. Can't tell you how excited we are for our guest today. He's an

00:01:52.840 associate professor at Cambridge University. We've had plenty of opportunity to speak with him in

00:01:57.420 private. He doesn't do many interviews, and it is a big waste that he doesn't, because he's here.

00:02:01.780 Dr. James, welcome to Trigonometry. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:02:05.660 It's an absolute pleasure. We've had so many conversations with you just privately over

00:02:09.880 dinner or whatever in the past, various events. And I've always just thought to myself, why are

00:02:14.340 there no cameras here? Because it's always really interesting. As people watching can tell,

00:02:20.440 I'm super excited to have you. Before we get into the conversation itself, who are you?

00:02:25.020 What's been your journey through life? How did you make it here, James?

00:02:28.560 My journey through life? Well, born and brought up in Brussels, Brussels, Belgium, where I lived

00:02:33.140 my early years, and then was packed off to boarding school to learn some manners. I was a pretty

00:02:37.720 unruly kid, about age nine, I think. And so boarding school all the way through to 18, and then went to

00:02:43.300 university, ended up in London. I was a corporate lawyer for some years and worked in corporate finance.

00:02:49.380 Pretty soul-sapping work, but character building. And about, let's have a think about,

00:02:58.040 in 2009, I walked away, thanks to a very supportive and understanding wife. I left the law and became

00:03:05.320 a student again, age 30. Went up to Cambridge and started studying religion and theology and did some

00:03:13.300 graduate work there, a diploma, a master's, and then a PhD. It was a kind of gateway drug to the

00:03:19.780 life of the mind, graduate studies in religion, and then increasingly in philosophy and questions of

00:03:26.340 meaning and metaphysics and morality. And I did that up until, let's have a think, gosh, about 2014

00:03:34.380 when I got the PhD. Then moved across to Oxford to work with one of your previous guests, I think,

00:03:41.020 Professor Nigel Bigger at a place called the MacDonald Centre at Christchurch, Oxford, which had

00:03:45.200 four fabulous years. Went through, had a ringside seat for the Empire Wars that Nigel went through in

00:03:53.240 late 2017, 2018. And that was a, something of a wake-up call. I think I was sort of politically,

00:03:59.940 well, not naive, but politically sort of disinterested, I'd say, until the rumblings of

00:04:07.280 these sort of new kind of cultural revolutions started to emerge on campus, which must have been,

00:04:13.040 I suppose, about 10 years ago. And then, after four years there, I moved back to Cambridge. And I've

00:04:21.120 now taken up a position there as an associate professor in philosophy of religion. And so I lecture

00:04:25.600 in research and philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and those sorts of areas. I'm also,

00:04:33.320 as of just a few months ago, chairman of something called the Edmund Burke Foundation, the Edmund Burke

00:04:38.040 Foundation UK. And we put on big conferences. We've got a big one coming up on national conservatism

00:04:43.260 in the middle of May in Westminster in London. And that's been a terrific sort of complement to my main

00:04:51.260 job, and something I love to do in my spare time, just to help to kind of catalyze coalitions of

00:04:58.140 people, many of whom I think will have appeared on your show before, talking about the urgent issues

00:05:03.440 of our time from all sorts of different political perspectives, and observing this unusual new

00:05:09.760 coalition emerging. I'm not sure quite what to call it. It's not really conservative. It's not really

00:05:15.580 liberal. I suppose it's stitched together by a sense that there is an emerging worldview that is

00:05:27.800 very hostile to some of the kind of foundational assumptions that liberals, conservatives, and

00:05:33.000 indeed, I think, old school socialists share. Anyway, that's probably more than you wanted to

00:05:37.460 bargain for. It isn't. But you know, the reason I am so excited to have you on is I just love

00:05:43.680 like throwing big questions at you and just seeing what comes up. And you've already opened one of

00:05:48.600 them, which is the thing that I've been thinking about. We've been talking on the show about it

00:05:53.120 quite a bit, which is essentially what you've identified is there is a threat to the founding

00:05:59.500 principles of what I would describe Western civilization, right? That is, there is a worldview that seeks to

00:06:05.380 undermine and destroy and challenge all of that. And people sort of have coalesced around opposition

00:06:11.720 to that. But now I think the next step is to go, well, what is the positive alternative, right? And that's

00:06:18.500 something we've all, I think, been wrestling, you know, the Jordan Peterson Ark project, and Peter Thiel's

00:06:23.540 talked about this, and you are talking about it. So how does that happen? Because you talk about how these ideas

00:06:31.340 are antithetical to the founding principles of conservatism and liberalism and perhaps old school

00:06:37.060 socialism. But those people are really not going to get on very well outside of opposing something

00:06:43.660 that's a threat. Yeah. So how do we have a positive view of the future that we can all get behind?

00:06:49.200 Well, we all share probably ultimately quite distinct understandings of human flourishing and the good

00:06:54.780 and virtue and virtue and so on. And one of the tragedies of an increasingly polarized sort of

00:07:01.500 marketplace of ideas is that we can't really have those conversations about the sort of differences

00:07:06.420 and how we understand those kinds of questions. So, I mean, I think, you know, one's got to try to

00:07:12.760 put oneself in the place of these, let's call them just radical progressives, and recognize that

00:07:20.300 by their own lights, they are doing the right thing. By their own lights, they've got a very clear

00:07:27.860 conception of what it is to flourish as a human being. They've got a clear conception of what sin

00:07:35.380 looks like, what moral error looks like. Looks like you, yeah, very, very close to me. And one of the

00:07:43.000 problems, obviously, is that a lot of that kind of the moral coding rests in often contingent morally

00:07:51.340 inert physiological characteristics, skin color or anatomy or what you want to do between the sheets,

00:07:57.940 which historically have just not been understood to have any proper bearing on what it is to flourish

00:08:05.460 as a human being. And again, I think one should recognize that it's not coming from an evil place,

00:08:12.520 a lot of, you know, the early champions of academic freedom and freedom of speech were from the left

00:08:18.460 and championed the rights of minorities and wanted to expand the franchise and so on and so forth. But

00:08:24.780 as things have developed, and I think this is where I would probably depart from maybe you,

00:08:30.740 both of you, and let's find out, is that, you know, this is part of the liturgy of liberalism,

00:08:37.180 that this is a feature of liberalism, not a bug. Now, my sort of liberal friends will say,

00:08:43.280 and to me as a conservative, no, this is absolutely, this is not a feature, it's a bug.

00:08:49.900 It's a strange aberration. It's a metastasis of liberalism. It's sort of freedom that's just kind

00:08:54.840 of, you know, intoxicated freedom. It's not liberty, it's license. My suspicion, and it's just a

00:09:00.880 suspicion. I mean, my position at the moment is that, you know, liberalism was always going to unravel

00:09:05.820 this way. That there's something within liberalism that is intrinsically transgressive, that is

00:09:12.280 intrinsically restless, and is always chafing at the bonds of conventions, whether it's social

00:09:17.840 conventions or legal conventions and so on. And so, you know, you imagine, you know, the liberal has

00:09:24.820 sort of his sunlit uplands, right? That's the horizon towards which the moral arc of the universe,

00:09:31.900 as Obama quotes Martin Luther King, is always tending. And the trouble is that once the liberalism

00:09:39.480 hits its sunlit uplands, the liberal doesn't become a conservative. You know, the liberal doesn't say,

00:09:46.620 right, we've now got to conserve the sunlit uplands. That, the kind of emancipatory dynamism

00:09:53.960 of liberalism is still there. And so they might ask, well, what about the 1.2% of the population of

00:10:01.560 the sunlit uplands that would prefer the moonlit uplands? What about them, eh? What about their rights?

00:10:08.540 Okay, well, right. Well, their rights are paramount. And we must now reorganize the sunlit uplands

00:10:15.000 to create a space that respects the moonlit uplanders. And that means we can't call the uplands

00:10:23.760 sunlit or moonlit anymore. They're just lit. Lit uplands. So you get my point.

00:10:30.520 Now, what you're saying is progressives value change in and of itself, and they will keep

00:10:35.620 pursuing it even if they've got to a really good place. That's what you're arguing.

00:10:39.060 That's what I'm arguing. And I don't think, you know, that I think is a plausible take on the

00:10:44.860 dynamic of liberalism. I should say, by the way, that conservatives have the opposite problem.

00:10:49.500 Right. So if the central question for liberals and progressives is liberals metastasizing

00:10:55.200 into progressive, as I say, organically and naturally, is where do we stop? When do we

00:11:00.320 stop liberating? When do we stop progressing and say, actually, we've done pretty well.

00:11:04.520 Let's just try and settle down and conserve these gains. The conservators are saying, well,

00:11:09.440 why change? Change? What do you mean change? We've got to conserve this stuff. No, absolutely

00:11:14.420 not. And so there's a sort of flip side sort of dilemma for the conservative, which the

00:11:18.880 conservatives have always had, which is, well, you know, the world changes, our environment

00:11:23.800 changes, culture changes, wars happen. What's got to adapt? But it's not in the conservative

00:11:28.240 DNA to sort of accommodate change. And so both sides have these sort of, you know, reverse

00:11:34.480 and structurally kind of complicit problems. And so that's a big challenge at the moment.

00:11:42.500 And so there are some who would say, look, we can recover liberalism. We've got to see

00:11:48.140 this as a strange offshoot. And I don't want to say that, you know, progressivism is just

00:11:53.100 issues directly, is just wholly the creature of liberalism. There are clearly other strands.

00:11:58.980 I mean, there is a Marxist strand. There are certain hallmarks of the Marxist frame of

00:12:04.380 mind in progressivism. The tendency to really see the world as split in two tiers between

00:12:11.720 oppressor and oppressed. The idea that there is some revolution behind just behind the corner

00:12:19.280 that is going to set everything to rights. The idea that there has to be, you know, that

00:12:24.860 there is a kind of, that victory looks like control of the ownership and means of cultural

00:12:31.500 production and distribution, and distribution of ideas in particular. That's true. There's

00:12:37.060 also a therapeutic element, I think, in the progressive worldview that I don't know if

00:12:44.060 that comes quite from liberalism. But what you're seeing clearly is that old school John Stuart

00:12:48.960 Mill type liberalism, you know, that rests on things like the no harm principle, you know,

00:12:54.060 I'm free to do whatever I want, provided, you know, my freedom to act stops, you know, my fist's

00:13:00.640 freedom stops at your nose, and so on and so forth. I mean, what's happened there is, I

00:13:07.020 think, quite an interesting phenomenon. And it's described by a chap called, what's his

00:13:10.620 name, Nicholas Haslam, he's an Australian psychologist. It's called concept creep. And

00:13:14.260 we're familiar with it. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. But particularly the concept

00:13:18.260 creep around language of harm, violence, care, kindness, and so on. And it's sort of the

00:13:24.840 positive side as well. And effectively, what's happened is that Mill's principle, I think,

00:13:30.900 as harm has become increasingly psychologized, and as you've come to the view that, you know,

00:13:36.080 hurty words damage you, and disagreement is just tantamount to personal assault, then Mill's

00:13:43.820 sort of principle, liberalism can get weaponized, and say, well, that means we now have appropriate

00:13:48.980 restrictions on not just everything you say, but really on everything you think, because

00:13:53.120 restrictions on what you say will affect the way you think. And this is something we're

00:13:57.520 seeing, obviously, in the academy right across the English-speaking world, and to some extent

00:14:01.960 in continental Europe. Though perhaps it's less aggressive over that. So, yes, I mean,

00:14:09.380 that, it's very, very tempting, particularly when you work, like I do, in sort of history of

00:14:14.760 ideas, to say, well, this particular social phenomenon is obviously rooted to, you know,

00:14:19.720 obviously emerges from that philosopher's study. Things are just not as simple as that. And I think

00:14:26.580 we sometimes overstate, or rather ignore, the contingent in human affairs and in history. So,

00:14:36.080 you know, there is always, you know, there's talk on the internet about being white-pilled or

00:14:40.380 black-pilled, you know, have you got a positive thing about the view of the future, which you seem

00:14:43.800 to, you envisage a post-woke world, or do you have a negative sort of view of the future? And I think

00:14:49.260 that's, you know, that simply underplays just how random history, randomly history unfolds. I mean,

00:14:56.900 imagine yourself at a dinner party in Berlin in January 1989, or a spam party or whatever they

00:15:05.760 had for dinner in Berlin in 1989. And imagine someone turning to you and saying, in 10 months,

00:15:14.080 all this will be over. It'll all be gone. And I think people would have thought you were completely

00:15:21.700 mad. I mean, there were certainly signs that the Soviet regime was creaking, and he was seeing some

00:15:27.260 insurrection movements here, and solidarity in Poland, Havel in Czechoslovakia, and so on.

00:15:32.300 But the idea that suddenly it would just be, it would just go, was almost unthinkable. And I think

00:15:38.100 similarly today, I mean, just this is probably grist to your milk, Constantine, with your remark,

00:15:42.140 you know, what are we going to do? How do we think constructively? One of the things we need to start

00:15:46.360 thinking constructively is hope. You know, the sense that it will come to an end, and let's get started

00:15:51.860 on building the alternative that's going to take its place. And that's a very hard thing to do when

00:15:56.960 things look grim, particularly when they look kind of structurally grim. When laws and the whole

00:16:04.580 institutional landscape of the West, or much of it, seems sort of hypnotized, sort of mesmerized

00:16:12.300 by the identitarian agenda. So yeah, that's...

00:16:17.640 Take the gray pill. James, you spoke, and that was a forensically brilliant analysis of where we find

00:16:25.520 ourselves. You omitted one thing that, considering your background and your area of study, I found a

00:16:31.400 little bit surprising, in that you didn't mention the religious element to this.

00:16:35.740 Yeah. I didn't mention the religious element, because I think the comparison between progressivism

00:16:41.440 and the new forms of, sort of, pathological forms of progressivism and religion can be wildly overstated.

00:16:48.680 I mean, religion itself is a notoriously indeterminate concept that...

00:16:54.640 And, you know, colleagues who work in religion say this often, that there's certain sort of

00:17:00.860 definitional criteria for religion that will just encompass virtually everything, including things

00:17:06.500 that we wouldn't normally associate, identify as a religion. Loving the Chelsea football club has all

00:17:13.360 the trappings of a kind of cult.

00:17:16.020 A belief based entirely on faith.

00:17:18.120 There we go. There we go. That's right. That's right.

00:17:21.380 Yeah, and they get a bit angry when you contravene.

00:17:25.000 And conversely, you can restrict the definition of religion to so, you know, in such a narrow way that

00:17:31.740 you cease to have any sense of, you know, that there's things that you would want to include as a religion.

00:17:36.380 Say, for example, Mahayana Buddhism, that you'd want to include as a religion that, you know, you can't

00:17:41.400 if you define religion by orientation to a god, for example.

00:17:45.540 Nevertheless, as I said, you know, I think there are certain hallmarks...

00:17:49.380 Well, there's certain sort of trappings of progressivism that you probably could identify as religious.

00:17:58.680 And I do think that once a kind of common inheritance leaves a society, and particularly

00:18:07.420 dissolves relatively quickly, as we've seen, particularly in the West, certainly in the UK

00:18:11.540 over the last 30, 40, 50 years, that does create a vacuum.

00:18:16.120 Nature abhors... The natural world abhors a vacuum.

00:18:19.100 The spiritual world abhors a vacuum, as it is.

00:18:21.380 And by spiritual, I don't mean sort of woo-woo spiritual.

00:18:24.380 You may just be a card-carrying atheist, but you still will recognize that religion is a real phenomenon in human history.

00:18:31.320 And you'll recognize that actually, modernity is engaged in a kind of very large, uncontrolled experiment

00:18:41.580 in seeing how we can get on.

00:18:44.640 Large, large societies can function without the one thing that all human societies, up until, in the scheme of human history,

00:18:54.080 five minutes ago, had as central, was the sort of glue that tied a society together.

00:19:01.420 And it ties a society together not through laws, but by commanding, as it were, a source of moral authority

00:19:08.860 that is basically pre-political.

00:19:12.420 I mean, that's the fundamental advantage of religion.

00:19:15.720 I mean, I think it was Taleb, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, who drew the analogy of saying, you know,

00:19:21.640 just, you know, restaurants charge you, you know, get you in with the food and get your money with the booze.

00:19:27.480 And he says, well, religion's a little bit like that, you know.

00:19:30.900 It gets you in with all of these beliefs, but really it's giving you the rules, you know.

00:19:35.380 And it's giving you these sort of unspoken, often inarticulated, extra-legal conventions, guardrails,

00:19:44.700 a sort of social fabric that's very, very difficult, almost impossible,

00:19:48.740 for any government or any central authority to legislate.

00:19:52.640 And it certainly kind of inculcates, I think particularly in the Abrahamic traditions,

00:19:59.820 particularly in the Hebraic and then the Christian traditions,

00:20:03.080 it's got, there are certain sorts of, you know, codes that operate on the basis of very clear prohibitions

00:20:11.740 and commands to do certain things.

00:20:14.980 I mean, compare the Greek tradition, you know.

00:20:17.920 The Greek tradition, you know, Aristotle, it's like nothing in excess,

00:20:20.920 just, you know, don't overreach yourself, you know, the gods will strike you down,

00:20:25.460 but, you know, love your friends, hate your enemies, and so on.

00:20:27.680 But it's all sort of moderation.

00:20:29.460 Whereas the sort of, you know, the Decalogue is, thou shalt not.

00:20:32.920 And it can seem, particularly in a sort of liberal context,

00:20:35.560 as rather sort of intimidating and terrifying and absolutist.

00:20:38.960 But, as you know, looking at religion as an evolutionary phenomenon,

00:20:42.280 interdicts, prohibitions, blanket prohibitions, blanket sort of commands like that,

00:20:47.500 are much cleaner and clearer.

00:20:48.820 They're easier to pass on, they're easier to inherit,

00:20:51.800 they are much easier to apply in large sort of complex, across large complex populations.

00:20:58.300 So religion does have a bearing, absolutely.

00:21:00.460 And I think that, you know, if we are going to try and find some constructive vision of the way forward,

00:21:05.620 there does need to be some, maybe it doesn't need to be a religious one.

00:21:09.480 I mean, maybe there is something we've missed.

00:21:10.980 Maybe there is a kind of dewy-eyed, Dawkinsian humanism that we can sort of all kind of share

00:21:19.460 and just agree to live by and sort of get on.

00:21:25.200 But I think the last 50, 60 years has shown that in the absence of these very, very sort of complex belief systems,

00:21:34.420 others, other sort of, you know, cruder systems of moral accountability and so on begin to creep in.

00:21:43.140 So, I mean, and I think there's a difference, you know, a society that is, let's say, broadly speaking shares,

00:21:51.880 exists in the same moral universe with roughly speaking the same assumptions about what counts as right and wrong,

00:21:58.020 roughly what counts as a flourishing human being and a human being that is suffering.

00:22:03.840 I mean, that doesn't mean that you need to be a theocracy.

00:22:08.100 I mean, it doesn't mean that you need, you know, even more than, you know, half the population believing any of the stuff.

00:22:16.140 You can still, as it were, as I know, you know, many atheists who were much more aggressive 15 years ago

00:22:21.500 during the sort of the new atheist revolution.

00:22:24.440 I mean, a lot of atheist friends I have, which actually one of the things that got me interested in religion in the first place,

00:22:29.280 I'm very grateful to that lot.

00:22:30.280 But, I mean, a lot of my atheist friends were much more aggressive back in those days.

00:22:34.360 Now, I mean, they're still atheists, a lot of them.

00:22:36.840 Some of them are not, actually.

00:22:37.660 Some of them have moved over to the other side.

00:22:39.780 But a lot of them say, gosh, yeah, I can see what the effects are of leaving this stuff behind.

00:22:45.720 I think Ross Dautet has a line somewhere in the American context, you know,

00:22:49.280 if you didn't like the religious right, just wait till you see the post-religious right.

00:22:54.460 And actually, you know, and I think you can say that on the left, too.

00:22:57.220 If you didn't like the kind of, you know, religiously settled Christian socialist left or whatever,

00:23:03.560 you know, just wait till you see the hard kind of, you know, Fabian Marxist left.

00:23:08.300 Do you think we've become, and particularly I'm glad you brought up the new atheist movement,

00:23:12.640 because one of sort of their central tenets was we don't really need religion.

00:23:17.200 It served its purpose.

00:23:18.960 It's, you know, it was awful.

00:23:21.500 It did all these unspeakably vile things.

00:23:24.020 People suffered as a result.

00:23:26.600 We've moved beyond that.

00:23:27.960 Yeah, yeah.

00:23:28.760 And that was always a pretty naive argument.

00:23:30.800 I mean, not that there were, I mean, there weren't a lot of naive arguments put forward by the new atheists,

00:23:36.380 in my view.

00:23:36.760 But that was just, you know, anyone with a passing familiarity of the history of the 20th century

00:23:43.100 just couldn't, you know, say, oh, yeah, well, thank goodness, once we've passed religion, we'll be fine.

00:23:50.440 Look how well the atheists behave.

00:23:53.480 That's right.

00:23:54.000 And then what would happen is things would descend.

00:23:55.940 This is particularly when you're arguing about Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great.

00:24:00.100 You get into this awful situation where, you know, you're sort of trading genocides.

00:24:04.720 Oh, well, you know, think of what sort of proportion of the population of the Americas

00:24:11.280 was slaughtered as a result of, you know, sort of Catholic imperialism or whatever it might be.

00:24:18.820 And look at how many did Stalin kill.

00:24:21.320 I mean, and it just all got very unseemly.

00:24:23.100 And both sides missed the point there, which is a very, as clear a data point as human history offers up.

00:24:33.160 Namely, that what is Solzhenitsyn's line?

00:24:36.260 The line between good and evil does not fall between nation states, but goes right through the human heart.

00:24:41.880 And so the question is, what is the correct analysis of the human condition?

00:24:46.860 How is it that we produce a Hitler and a Mother Teresa?

00:24:50.900 And now that's a philosophical question.

00:24:54.160 The secular humanist answer to that is, well, evil is just a kind of some sort of aberration.

00:25:00.720 You know, basically human beings are all, you know, cuddly teddy bears,

00:25:04.860 provided they are unshackled from the chains of whatever oppressor liberalism is chafing against.

00:25:15.340 Sometimes that was good.

00:25:17.100 There were genuine liberal victories and important ones.

00:25:22.100 But as I said earlier, now we're getting to the point where a lot of those just,

00:25:26.600 it is almost unthinkable for a certain liberal-minded progressive to accept that limits can be liberating.

00:25:36.840 I mean, this is a key conservative insight that we all know deep down.

00:25:41.000 I mean, I drove here today.

00:25:43.440 I couldn't have got here had it not been for the fact that there's a dense web of conventions and rules and laws

00:25:51.100 that are limits that are, at one level, seen from one point of view, constraints on my agency.

00:25:58.180 Now, but there are constraints.

00:25:59.260 I mean, there are constraints on my agency, but they're constraints that enabled me to get here without really worrying about it or thinking about it.

00:26:06.160 And that is something that it's quite difficult to accept when we have a view of the self as basically autonomous.

00:26:14.500 This is the sort of liberal enlightenment view.

00:26:16.860 We're free.

00:26:17.900 We're autonomous.

00:26:18.480 We pop into the world.

00:26:20.320 Yeah, we may love our mums and that sort of thing.

00:26:22.480 But basically, you know, we're on our own.

00:26:24.280 We're autonomous.

00:26:25.300 And any obligations that we might find ourselves sort of caught up in need to be freely entered into.

00:26:31.660 We must give our consent to obligations.

00:26:34.280 Obligations can really only arise if we choose them.

00:26:38.240 Now, that seems to be plainly false.

00:26:39.900 And sort of the conservative critique of that is, I mean, of course not.

00:26:42.820 Yeah, I mean, not only do you love your mum.

00:26:45.320 What is conquest's first law?

00:26:47.020 I mean, he's got three laws.

00:26:47.720 The first one is everyone is conservative about what they know best.

00:26:52.480 You're going to be conservative about your kids.

00:26:54.600 There are certain things that you're going to let, you know, you'll be happy.

00:26:58.300 You know, this is Rob, my friend Rob Edson's beliefs.

00:27:00.280 I think you've had his luxury beliefs idea.

00:27:02.760 You know, you can be conservative about what you know best.

00:27:06.480 And then, you know, you don't care about how your sort of other beliefs might trickle through into wider society.

00:27:12.480 So that idea that limits can be liberating, that freedom, that true freedom should be not just raw freedom, not just raw license, but somehow ordered and downstream of basically non-liberal, I wouldn't say illiberal, but non-liberal forms of human life.

00:27:34.480 I mean, what are the three F's?

00:27:36.300 Three F's, faith, family, flag.

00:27:38.620 I mean, that's a sort of convenient way of putting it.

00:27:40.720 That's the orders.

00:27:41.560 The conservative says faith first, family second, flag, the moral community, the nation state.

00:27:46.740 Could be a city state.

00:27:48.800 Could be, you could be in the United States.

00:27:51.240 It could be in a sort of federated, a federal state.

00:27:53.820 But once those three are in place, then freedom, freedom flows well.

00:27:58.720 Freedom functions.

00:28:00.340 Freedom is ordered.

00:28:01.760 It's a little bit like you see this argument in the free markets with, you know, Hayek and others.

00:28:06.880 You know, you, there's, you can't just have complete anarchy.

00:28:10.780 There've got to be constraints.

00:28:12.380 And in fact, you want the constraints in order for the freedom to be conducive to flourishing.

00:28:17.780 I suppose the, not that I want to delve too deeply into this, but the immediate pop-up in my head was the obvious counter to that is if faith, flag, and family is what produces freedom, the progressive counter argument to that is, but not for the moonlit uplanders, right?

00:28:37.920 That version of freedom that you're talking about, the progressive argument is, is freedom for someone who looks like you.

00:28:44.020 Yeah.

00:28:44.280 But it's not freedom for someone who looks like me.

00:28:46.300 It's not freedom for someone who's gay or trans or whatever.

00:28:49.860 And it's freedom for the majority to the exclusion of the minority.

00:28:53.480 Yeah, absolutely right.

00:28:54.560 That's the, that's the standard, that's the standard critique.

00:28:57.360 And, and it's true.

00:28:59.540 Sometimes it's a well-founded critique that certain expressions of religion, you know, Hitchens isn't wrong about some of the examples he uses.

00:29:06.500 And some of the expressions of nationalism in the past and patriotism in the past have indeed led to, you know, nasty forms of oppression.

00:29:18.700 But I think that the issue is, you know, do you have, not, not just do you inherit the moral norms and moral reflexes of your faith or your family or, or your flag, but what is, what is the best way of structuring a society so that everyone, you can, that can be maximal flourishing for all.

00:29:41.920 And so that means that at the level of the state, or the level of the sort of central authorities, there has to be, as it were, a degree of procedural neutrality.

00:29:51.380 And liberalism is right about this, particularly if you're organizing large, large, complex societies, there have to be certain principles that are principles which are blind to nationality in certain contexts, that are blind to your family structure, that are, that don't take your religion into account.

00:30:12.820 I think the trouble with a lot of those critiques is that they assume precisely what they think they're criticizing, namely that those features do matter, that the rule of law should not be, should not apply to all.

00:30:26.120 Well, of course. That's why I oppose workness so much, because it's obvious that it's a reversal of that very liberal principle.

00:30:32.280 The liberal principle that everyone should be treated as an individual who is worthy and has value is being reversed by the idea that some people's skin color makes them less worthy or more worthy than others.

00:30:43.540 It's absurd. But I want to come back to a couple of the things you said, James, because you used the word that I've heard used before, but the way you used a bunch of light bulbs, I mean, you talked about pre-political.

00:30:56.320 And I think that therein lies the answer to all of this, which is we have to have something that we all agree on, basically.

00:31:05.460 Now, let's put God to one side, because we don't all agree about that. It's just a fact, whether you'd like that or to be different or I'd like that, whatever.

00:31:14.600 What do we have left that is pre-politically agreed on in our society?

00:31:20.280 Because for some time I thought that maybe it's, you know, Western values or British values, but you walk up to the random person on the street asking what British values are, they're going to run away from you, right?

00:31:31.140 So what do we have left that is pre-political?

00:31:34.040 Well, I would say increasingly little, or at least the sort of engines that drove our kind of, that produced the glue that stitched us together in a way that transcended the sort of mechanisms of state and law and so on, are under attack.

00:31:56.380 And I think this is basically because there's been a shift to thinking of all pre-political domains as intrinsically political.

00:32:08.240 Like family, sorry to interrupt, but this is such a good example, because for me, a new father, the idea that having a family and children and blah, blah, blah, it's like a self-evident truth that that is something a society is inevitably built around.

00:32:21.200 And if you observe a society, you can't, you can't deny that that's not true, but there are people to whom the very notion of even advocating for the idea of family being central to society is a political statement that they find abhorrent because it excludes the moonlit uplander, right?

00:32:39.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely right. So there can be no, there is no kind of non-political dimension to human life.

00:32:49.100 And this is something which, you know, again, I think it is, you know, it's a broadly religious idea.

00:32:55.880 This is a thesis not about the state, not about public policy, but about the way the world is.

00:33:02.260 And so there's nothing within the world that escapes the system, the system of oppression, the system of kind of a sort of structural captivity.

00:33:13.420 And, you know, now at one level, it's not wrong.

00:33:18.500 I mean, Aristotle has a famous line in politics that man is a politic on so on, is a political animal, right?

00:33:25.500 By which he means he's an animal that belongs to the polis, that is the animal that is not designed to be, to exist alone.

00:33:33.240 We are, to that extent, all political. We're all part of a moral community, but we've got to negotiate our participation in that in all sorts of different ways.

00:33:43.480 But yes, that's right. I mean, I think you've now got a situation where there can be no pre-political.

00:33:50.600 Everything, even configurations of family, the understanding of family life, faith is now seen as freighted with, you know, ideologically problematic assumptions.

00:34:04.180 Or often faith is seen as an opportunity to sort of, you know, drive a kind of truck right through our sort of established conventions that the faith historically had built up.

00:34:18.800 So, you know, it is, it's, it's a real struggle.

00:34:24.400 And I think probably one of the reasons that conservatives tend to do so badly in a lot of these struggles is that politics isn't everything.

00:34:34.700 Politics is not something that you're going to do at the weekends.

00:34:39.200 That it's, that it's, whereas, hopefully, or as I see on the other side, there is a kind of, actually sometimes, you know, morally remarkable investment in the political.

00:34:52.500 So it just dominates every, every, every aspect of, of that, those, those activists' lives.

00:34:58.660 It's, it's, it's, it's that, it's that important.

00:35:00.720 And there, there can be no weekends in the, in the struggle to, to, to, to liberate ourselves from tyranny.

00:35:06.480 But Jess, you haven't run off and, you know, joined a convent or jumped off a cliff or whatever, from which I deduce that you do believe something can be done about this.

00:35:17.720 Yes.

00:35:18.160 Because you're still doing stuff in the world.

00:35:19.740 I'm still, I'm still doing stuff and a lot, and, and loving it.

00:35:22.740 And I'm, you know, happy and free and, and I'm doing, you know, work, work that I love with, with people I, I love spending time with.

00:35:30.780 I, I think I'm fortunate.

00:35:32.220 I'm in a remarkable university that has been through some spasms and here and there.

00:35:40.320 But broadly speaking, when you look across the landscape, certainly of higher education across the West, certainly over the other side of the Atlantic,

00:35:47.060 a place like Cambridge is, is still very much a place where you can speak freely.

00:35:55.520 Not, not many people maybe share the views that I share, but, and there can be some, some resistance to it sometimes.

00:36:02.460 But broadly speaking, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a function more than a functioning institution.

00:36:07.060 And it's an institution in which one can, one can live an intellectually and professionally flourishing life.

00:36:14.300 Um, but, yeah, I mean, there is, you know, I think there are broad, sometimes I think that, you know, people who are, you know, pessimistic about the consequences of this revolution,

00:36:27.460 sometimes think you're sort of in like, a little bit, like you're in the 1520s, just sort of right after the Reformation.

00:36:33.300 You broadly had three strands.

00:36:34.800 You had the sort of Lutherans, or early Lutherans anyway, who thought, well, we can reform this.

00:36:40.740 You know, the institution is bad, but we can reform it from within.

00:36:44.620 Just, you know, give us a bit more time, a bit of diplomacy, a bit of organizing.

00:36:49.100 We'll, you know, we'll regain the university, we'll regain the university, we'll regain this institution.

00:36:54.840 And then I think there's a more radical strand that says, no, it's over.

00:36:59.500 You know, we're done here.

00:37:00.940 We need to build parallel institutions.

00:37:03.000 I think you're seeing this in the United States.

00:37:04.520 You're seeing sort of some, to some degree, a kind of sorting mechanism, a sorting pattern in the sort of bit into the red states and the blue states.

00:37:12.480 And that's the kind of Calvinist option, you know.

00:37:14.420 We need a Geneva.

00:37:15.620 So we're fed up with Rome.

00:37:16.640 We need Geneva.

00:37:17.180 We'll start again.

00:37:18.400 And I sometimes think there's a third strand.

00:37:21.160 And I think of these as what I call the digital Anabaptists.

00:37:23.960 So the Anabaptists said, you know, now the problem is institutions, full stop.

00:37:29.160 And we need networks and we need to operate, and we can only flourish and operate outside the institutions.

00:37:35.460 And I actually see what you guys are doing to be not, to sort of fall into that third strand.

00:37:40.280 You are, you know, you've got enormous influence and reach and you talk, you're engaged in a lot of these discussions and matters,

00:37:47.420 but in a completely non-institutional mode.

00:37:50.440 And that's actually been very, very effective, particularly in this new digital public square,

00:37:56.300 which opens up all sorts of, you know, interesting kind of opportunities and dynamics.

00:38:01.320 So I'm, you know, I'm in the first camp because I think in Cambridge, you know, all is not lost by any means.

00:38:08.200 And I think the same is true of Oxford.

00:38:10.700 If I were in some other universities in this country, and certainly if I were at many universities in the United States,

00:38:18.060 I think I probably would say Barry Wise and Neil Ferguson are spot on.

00:38:24.240 They need to, we need to, you know, start something new.

00:38:27.020 Or my friend Stephen Blackwood, who started Ralston College.

00:38:30.140 Or we need separate institutions.

00:38:32.440 I just got back from Hillsdale College.

00:38:34.060 It was hosted by the great Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College.

00:38:37.620 It's just a small classical liberal arts Christian college, but it's a remarkable place.

00:38:43.520 And just sticking to, you know, the Western canon is pretty ecumenical, not denominational.

00:38:50.800 And is doing fantastic work.

00:38:53.060 And then, you know, and I admire and support people who want to build their new Genevas.

00:39:00.840 And admire and support those who are operating outside the institutions in what you might call networks.

00:39:07.660 I mean, this is Neil's square and the tower distinction, which I find very helpful.

00:39:12.100 I mean, a lot of people are thinking, you know, the idea is that, you know, the tower is the way we tend to look at history.

00:39:17.940 You know, big institutions, popes, kings, great men, etc.

00:39:21.600 Whereas, in fact, a lot of the drivers of historical change and cultural change, economic change,

00:39:28.440 are operating in the square down below, in the marketplace, through networks that are largely invisible to the naked eye of the historian.

00:39:36.340 They're just harder to see.

00:39:38.340 You know, you can't, you can trace the history of institution much more easily than you can trace the development of a sort of network of, you know,

00:39:45.680 friends and, you know, patterns of correspondence and so on and so forth.

00:39:50.180 But I think increasingly, you know, the good that is to come, I do believe is around the corner,

00:39:55.520 will be those sort of networks in the square, as it were, or perhaps networks that end up in the tower.

00:40:03.880 And there's something, there's a huge advantage to networks, I think.

00:40:07.660 And, you know, they're much more flexible.

00:40:10.200 They can adapt much more rapidly to changing circumstances.

00:40:14.800 Networks accommodate disagreement very well.

00:40:17.100 You know, if you sort of, a couple of people fall out, or two important people fall out, that can be a disaster for an institution.

00:40:23.460 An institution splits, there's schisms and so on and so forth.

00:40:26.280 In a network, you just sort of, you know, rearrange the nodes a bit, maybe cut a couple off.

00:40:30.700 But, you know, it's very, very sort of adaptable, it changes.

00:40:34.140 The trouble is, I mean, institutions, you know, have this legacy that can go way beyond, you know, the lifetimes of its members.

00:40:43.720 Whereas networks are much more dependent on its people, on the people who make it up, which is not a bad thing.

00:40:51.020 I mean, you know, it's, the good thing about networks is that they're easier to trust.

00:40:56.840 I mean, you know, I think it's more likely that the British Museum is going to go woke, probably has gone woke.

00:41:04.340 No, it is very woke.

00:41:05.700 I was there a couple of months ago, and I was staggered by what I saw.

00:41:08.860 Right, so more likely for the British Museum to go, very likely for the British Museum to go woke, than you, Francis, will go woke.

00:41:15.040 That is to say, you know, people are much harder to capture in that way, whereas institutions remarkably are.

00:41:21.980 And we've seen this with astonishing speed.

00:41:24.560 And that puts conservatives in a funny, you know, paradoxical situation, because the instinct is to conserve.

00:41:31.740 But why would we want to conserve capture?

00:41:34.520 You know, we don't, you know, don't like burning things down.

00:41:38.500 But what happens when maybe, you know, you do need to go off and do something else?

00:41:42.860 You need to just say, look, this has got to the point where, you know, this is an institution that is hostile to me,

00:41:49.480 and hostile to all the values I hold dear, and I think hostile to the founding vision of the people who set it up

00:41:54.920 and have been stewarding it over time.

00:41:56.640 But, you know, I'm not going to spend my money and my time trying to keep it going and change it from within.

00:42:02.360 And that puts conservatives in a very difficult position, or at least people with small-c conservative instincts.

00:42:07.100 And they're not natural reactionaries.

00:42:08.600 You know, they don't like the barricades.

00:42:10.900 So, yeah, that's the sort of spread of options as I see them.

00:42:19.960 And different people are sort of tuning themselves into different ones.

00:42:25.240 And James, what would you say to those people who go, look, everything that happens in America, we ingest,

00:42:31.880 we take, and then we just apply it, and we've seen it.

00:42:35.760 Look how bad things are over there.

00:42:37.240 Look how bad things are, for instance, at Columbia University, which are talking about getting rid of the SATs

00:42:41.960 as a way of assessing a student's academic ability.

00:42:47.080 I mean, this is inevitably what's going to happen here, isn't it?

00:42:49.740 So, I agree.

00:42:53.460 I mean, I agree that we are largely operating within our institutions and within our culture and within, to some extent,

00:43:00.460 our policymaking with a, dare I say it, a colonized mindset.

00:43:05.300 And I think it's high time for some decolonization, but not the kind of decolonization that most people,

00:43:15.740 most administrators these days have in mind in the UK.

00:43:17.960 That is to say, we've lost our sense of what it is to be, I say to be British,

00:43:26.180 but at least to emerge from this particular moral community, with this particular history,

00:43:31.300 this particular makeup of people, these particular traditions.

00:43:34.980 Yes, demographically we're very different, but we're very different mainly because a lot of people have come over to live here

00:43:40.360 since the Second World War because they love this rainy little island for some reason.

00:43:44.420 And it's not because it's not the rain and it's not the food.

00:43:47.400 You know, there's some reason that something's attracted to them over here.

00:43:50.320 And it's not because it's America, it's something different.

00:43:54.080 And so, we've lost that.

00:43:56.440 I mean, I think there is a sense that, you know, it is quite extraordinary that,

00:44:01.440 I was talking to an academic about this the other day,

00:44:04.540 it is quite extraordinary that the death of a man, tragic death of a man in a foreign city 5,000 miles away,

00:44:11.960 can lead within 48 hours to that academic being asked about the skin color of the authors on his undergraduate reading list.

00:44:22.120 I mean, that is an ideology working at such speed and in such lockstep

00:44:28.360 But it's very, very hard to know how to respond to it, or let alone, you know, resist it.

00:44:36.820 And again, I think people with conservative instincts are at a structural disadvantage here.

00:44:42.180 Why? Because conservatives are conserving, this is a familiar point,

00:44:47.140 that conservatives are conserving their own particular traditions,

00:44:50.540 their own particular laws and language and literature and religious expressions and so on.

00:44:55.500 And so, you know, the communists, the Soviets used to have a Comintan,

00:45:00.540 short for Communist International, was founded in 1919,

00:45:03.400 as a movement that tried to implement this idea of workers of the world unite.

00:45:10.380 It was an intrinsically cross-border, universalizing movement.

00:45:15.180 And similarly today, you could say, you know, wokesters of the world unite.

00:45:20.640 I mean, there's just, it has got a sort of transnational appeal.

00:45:26.040 Well, let's add some nuance to that, James,

00:45:28.120 because I don't think that's actually entirely true compared to the Comintan,

00:45:32.240 because the Comintan idea was, for communism to work, everybody gets it, right?

00:45:37.100 Like, otherwise, you're going to have places that are better and then it's not going to work.

00:45:40.900 But with wokeness, it is a uniquely Anglosphere phenomenon.

00:45:47.300 Now, it is leaking out, you know, I did an interview for a German newspaper today.

00:45:51.400 Like, people are such, but generally it's an Anglosphere phenomenon.

00:45:54.780 Why are we so vulnerable to this mind virus in the Anglosphere?

00:45:58.840 Well, I mean, going back to what I suggested earlier, that, you know,

00:46:02.760 if I'm right that this is a feature of liberalism, not a bug,

00:46:06.560 then you would expect the feature to emerge in that part of the world where liberalism has been dominant.

00:46:18.600 So, I think that's got a lot to do with it.

00:46:22.780 And if you then marry that to the culture of the therapeutic,

00:46:29.280 which we haven't really talked that much about,

00:46:31.200 but, you know, the emergence of homo psychologicus, you know,

00:46:34.960 the idea that human beings are primarily to be understood

00:46:38.580 in terms of their sort of psychological balance and so on.

00:46:44.900 If you throw that into the mix,

00:46:46.520 if you throw in some of the sort of Protestant evangelical impulses

00:46:51.620 that, again, are quite sort of, you know, broadly particular,

00:46:54.780 historically at least, distinctive to the English-speaking world,

00:46:57.980 then you've got a kind of heady mix that I think explains quite naturally

00:47:02.980 why wokery, this kind of metastasized progressivism,

00:47:06.840 has emerged in the English-speaking world rather than anywhere else.

00:47:11.580 But as with the other kind of institutions and ideas that we exported,

00:47:17.840 you know, rule of law and habeas corpus, et cetera, et cetera,

00:47:22.380 it seems that this one also has export potential,

00:47:30.480 the potential, exactly right.

00:47:31.740 But why does it, why is this idea so powerful?

00:47:34.500 Because you're a philosopher, you deal in the world of ideas.

00:47:37.260 Why is this idea so, I mean, people compare it to a virus.

00:47:42.980 To me, it's almost a cliche now.

00:47:44.380 But when I was working in the comedy industry,

00:47:47.220 I was in it pre-woke, we both were.

00:47:50.080 And then all of a sudden we just saw it spread

00:47:53.560 and not just infect the industry or the comedians,

00:47:57.440 but also audiences as well.

00:47:59.480 So why are the ideas so powerful?

00:48:00.920 I mean, partly perhaps because we've shifted,

00:48:03.820 these ideas have shifted from the kind of normal sort of sphere of the political

00:48:09.960 to what you might call the biopolitical.

00:48:13.560 That is to say, these issues now affect what it is to be me.

00:48:19.780 Now, you could imagine, you know, back in the 1970s,

00:48:21.640 you always had this big ding-dong between left and right

00:48:24.040 over, say, you know, the intervention by the state

00:48:28.180 or the degree of ownership for means of production

00:48:31.160 and economic distribution and so on and so forth.

00:48:34.640 Now debates have shifted to issues that at least one side thinks

00:48:40.380 pertain to the constitutive elements in a person's identity.

00:48:46.300 That one's sexual orientation, for example,

00:48:48.200 one's skin color or one's anatomy or whatever it might be,

00:48:51.700 it actually belongs to, you know, is what I am.

00:48:55.700 And therefore, any disagreement with it isn't just disagreement

00:49:00.780 with a lifestyle or a set of political ideas,

00:49:03.420 but it's somehow an objection to me.

00:49:07.880 And so this is why you get these sort of strange language you hear on campus

00:49:11.100 of, you know, erasure, you're erasing my existence,

00:49:14.300 or my, you know, and talk of bodies.

00:49:17.480 You know, bodies are sort of sites of moral focus.

00:49:23.180 And it's a language that can, you know, sound very strange to our ears,

00:49:28.600 but that's what's going on.

00:49:29.960 This is the biopolitical.

00:49:32.040 And this makes disagreement almost always turn into,

00:49:36.660 or be seen as, a kind of assault, a kind of an attack.

00:49:41.940 I mean, evangelical Christians, they have this motto,

00:49:46.520 what was it?

00:49:46.940 Hate the sin, love the sinner.

00:49:48.920 This is the idea.

00:49:49.800 You heard this in the same-sex marriage debates in the United States,

00:49:52.740 whenever it was ten years ago.

00:49:54.200 You know, we love all people.

00:49:56.140 We love all people.

00:49:56.880 But there's certain activities that we find to be morally objectionable

00:50:01.320 and are not conducive to him and flourishing.

00:50:02.980 This was a sort of, for many years,

00:50:04.520 this was just a sort of normal distinction to draw.

00:50:07.820 The arrival of identity politics meant that it was impossible

00:50:12.360 to hate the sinner and love the sinner.

00:50:14.420 Hating the sinner meant hating the sinner.

00:50:15.960 Because the sin was just, as it were, what was understood as the sin

00:50:19.480 was just intrinsic to what a person was.

00:50:23.600 So that really ramps up the, you know, ramps up the sort of decibel levels

00:50:30.260 of public debate.

00:50:31.360 And if you then add to the mix this sort of therapeutic shift from sin to syndrome,

00:50:40.820 where, you know, what were previously seen as forms of life or activities or acts

00:50:47.400 that were invaluable in moral terms and negatively or sort of condemned in moral terms,

00:50:55.420 but are now somehow, you know, where they're not welcome, are not actually, you know,

00:51:02.120 not actually my fault, but due to the sort of certain forms of psychological oppression

00:51:06.760 that I've been subjected to.

00:51:10.260 You there got a sort of a recipe for kind of the deep kind of tectonic disagreement

00:51:15.660 that is almost just impossible to bridge.

00:51:18.980 And this is why we see the dialogue of the deaf that you've seen so much of,

00:51:23.900 you that you guys picked up on almost, you know, earlier than almost anyone in on the comedy circuit.

00:51:31.860 And James, I suppose the one thing we haven't talked about, and you mentioned the Reformation.

00:51:39.200 I mean, the Reformation is a product to some extent of the changing nature of the media environment,

00:51:44.820 to put it, you know, very fancifully for what it was, you know,

00:51:48.080 the ability for people to read more and for the fact that not only the church could print information

00:51:54.440 for people to read, that changed the entire landscape.

00:51:57.620 You get centuries of religious war, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:52:00.480 And it seems to me, at least, like we've just lived through another revolution

00:52:03.520 and we are still living through another revolution of exactly the same kind.

00:52:07.040 And I would argue, and I'm interested to hear your opinion,

00:52:09.400 that the fact that we live online as much as we do now means that ideas that sound good

00:52:18.600 but are practically not true will reliably outperform ideas that sound bad

00:52:26.000 but are practically more true.

00:52:27.660 And I would argue that a large reason why this spread of this ideology has coincided

00:52:34.060 with the spread of social media and online communication

00:52:38.060 is that, you know, woke ideas sound great.

00:52:42.020 Yeah, yeah.

00:52:43.500 There's a lot to that and that they've got a kind of self-sustaining energy and appeal

00:52:50.660 and that the emergence of the digital public square

00:52:54.640 and digital means of communication has just sort of, you know,

00:52:59.220 made the, you know, it just accelerated the kind of transmission of these different ideas

00:53:06.840 and accelerated to the dissolution of all of those bonds that would hold a society together.

00:53:16.600 And, you know, and you see, and there's a kind of capitalist dimension to this too,

00:53:20.720 you know, as markets become more liquid,

00:53:23.140 then that's going to have, you know, subversive effects on a settled moral community

00:53:28.880 that is broadly tradition-based.

00:53:31.380 That's not always a bad thing.

00:53:32.620 I mean, you know, and it has, you know, ownership and capital

00:53:38.000 and employment can have subversive effects, which are not necessarily bad effects.

00:53:43.140 I mean, I think of, you know, maybe traditional African communities

00:53:45.540 and, you know, it's hard to be patriarchal when your daughter's earning more than you,

00:53:50.920 you know, for example.

00:53:53.960 So, yes, I mean, but I think you're right to compare it to the Reformation.

00:53:58.200 I mean, I think it's, what we're seeing at the moment,

00:54:01.880 I think what we're living through is of that order of magnitude.

00:54:05.440 I think it's that sort of epochal shift, both in terms of technology

00:54:10.220 and in the reconfiguration of public space and the marketplace of ideas

00:54:16.480 that it's bringing about, partly because it's, I mean, it's dissolving the marketplace.

00:54:21.480 I mean, this is something that is very, very difficult for conservatives to cope with

00:54:26.920 because, you know, the sort of conservatives had basically worked out how to conserve

00:54:37.140 what they wanted to conserve, but these acids are just far more powerful

00:54:42.060 than they're able to deal with.

00:54:45.800 And so that's why you're seeing, as it were, the sort of phenomena that have held people together,

00:54:54.980 whether it's faith or whether it's ordinary, you know, normal sort of ordinary family structures

00:55:00.680 or allegiance to a common nation state or just allegiance to, you know, your local town,

00:55:05.900 your local village, all of that has now sort of gone out the window.

00:55:08.800 And so there's a kind of, you know, there's an asymmetry, as it were.

00:55:15.520 The technology has sort of accelerated the asymmetry between those who value what's near and dear,

00:55:22.720 who want to devote their affections to basically to the local or to the land

00:55:30.060 or to this country rather than the world.

00:55:33.100 It makes it very, very hard to kind of sustain that, to make that idea appealing.

00:55:38.800 And so this is, yeah, I mean, that's no doubt at all that technology is driven,

00:55:46.860 you know, has made these ideas sort of a lot more attractive and has sort of accelerated their spread.

00:55:54.080 Isn't also part of the problem as well that conservatism simply isn't cool, James?

00:55:59.120 And I'll give you an example of this.

00:56:01.540 If you think of any of the great artists, we'll take music, for example,

00:56:04.960 particularly the last 50 or 60 years, the great artists, David Bowie, were transgressive.

00:56:10.800 They were progressive.

00:56:12.280 They subverted societal norms.

00:56:16.220 They played with what we know to be, you know, the norms, as I said before.

00:56:23.300 Conservatives are never going to do that because they're intent on keeping things as they are.

00:56:29.280 And isn't that the problem as well?

00:56:32.660 People ask me, we're a conservative comedian.

00:56:34.760 Of course, there are some comedians who are conservative.

00:56:37.600 But the vast majority and the people who are attracted to the arts are themselves liberal by nature

00:56:43.160 because they have open-mindedness, they're progressive, they want things to change.

00:56:47.120 And by the way, even in this country, the comedians who you would say are conservative,

00:56:51.520 Jeff Norcock, really isn't a conservative.

00:56:54.460 Leo Kirst, really isn't a, Simon Evans.

00:56:56.900 You know, like these are people who are, they're not on the left,

00:57:01.540 but they're not sitting there saying, we must conserve what we have.

00:57:05.700 Like, they still have a kind of counter-cultural or at least, you know, unorthodox views about the world.

00:57:13.540 They're not trying to preserve everything exactly rigidly as it is.

00:57:17.240 There's a wonderful line by a Scottish poet whose name escapes me for the time being.

00:57:21.060 You know, he says, let me write the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws.

00:57:27.340 And there's no doubt that culture, whether artistic creation, has a kind of binding effect,

00:57:37.600 is able to elicit the desires and the loyalties and the feelings of people far, far better than the kind of,

00:57:46.820 you know, the alternative, far, far better than the kind of, you know, rules and traditions

00:57:51.780 and going to church or whatever it might be.

00:57:55.060 So you're right, there is a problem there.

00:57:58.740 Feelings don't care about your facts, you know.

00:58:02.180 And the people who are best able to excite and quicken your feelings are the ones who have got an advantage.

00:58:09.600 I suppose what I'd say is that there has been a sort of boomeraming effect

00:58:12.920 that you guys have lived through and you've witnessed and Jeff and others and Simon have witnessed.

00:58:18.360 Yes, you're right that the Conservatives weren't able, you know, sort of, well, at least recently,

00:58:23.420 I'm not going to say it's always been true, but, you know, in the last 50, 60 years

00:58:26.340 when artistic freedom has been associated with political freedom,

00:58:30.200 often in very effective and powerful ways.

00:58:33.140 But since the dawn of that kind of fusion,

00:58:37.540 it's absolutely true that Conservatives have been on the back phone.

00:58:40.860 But what are we witnessing now?

00:58:42.260 What we're witnessing now is just as much, I'd say, far more sterility and sameness

00:58:50.760 in artistic production and in comedy and music and TV dramas and film.

00:58:56.620 I mean, I was just looking, you know, looking down the Oscars list the other day

00:58:59.820 and I realised that the last time I'd seen a film, actually seen a film at all,

00:59:04.340 that had won Best Oscar was, I think, 2014 or 2013, 2014, 12 years of slavery, I think it was.

00:59:08.920 And so it's not as if, you know, a kind of broadly liberal kind of transgressive momentum

00:59:17.420 is, doesn't itself have negative, you know, blowback effects.

00:59:23.920 And so we're now in this strange position where, you know, artistic genius has been sort of desiccated,

00:59:31.780 partly because novelty is discouraged and, you know, the ideological lockstep demands innovation only in the ornamental.

00:59:43.920 There's a new orthodoxy.

00:59:46.280 Sorry?

00:59:46.660 There's a new orthodoxy.

00:59:47.480 There is a new orthodoxy and it's an orthodoxy that has to be conserved at all costs.

00:59:51.020 And so there is a kind of, you know, and that conservation involves excluding any sort of dangerous ideas

01:00:02.640 or any new ways of expressing things that might go against or cut against the grain of the ideology that's being conserved.

01:00:10.940 And you might say that, you know, one talks about conservatism and liberalism.

01:00:15.820 I mean, really, these are, you know, they're parasitic terms.

01:00:19.940 I mean, liberalism just, you know, there's always the second question that needs to come.

01:00:24.140 Well, freedom for what?

01:00:25.540 You know, what kind of freedom?

01:00:26.900 Freedom to do what?

01:00:28.280 Just any kind of freedom?

01:00:29.600 Is that what you're sort of basing your whole worldview on?

01:00:32.180 And so with the conservatives, conserving what?

01:00:34.100 I mean, it's an intrinsically kind of parasitic idea.

01:00:36.500 Well, you're conserving.

01:00:37.220 Well, do you want to be a conservative in Berlin in 1943?

01:00:41.120 You want to conserve that?

01:00:42.520 No, obviously not.

01:00:44.660 So this is where you have, you know, this interesting and quite interesting, but often quite anemic debate

01:00:52.320 in academic departments, political departments, political philosophy departments,

01:00:56.800 and also among politicians between conservatives and liberals.

01:01:01.700 Because, you know, the thought is that conservatism is basically, you know, conserving the fruits

01:01:08.160 of the previous revolution, you know, and that conservatism is a kind of, you know, hesitation

01:01:14.840 within liberalism.

01:01:15.940 It's sort of liberalism at the speed limit, you know, that there isn't something prior and deeper

01:01:22.160 that's being conserved that comes before the Enlightenment, actually.

01:01:26.160 And, you know, I think that's true.

01:01:30.080 And I think that a lot of, you know, conservatives, people who think that they're conservatives,

01:01:33.800 coming after the Enlightenment, see themselves as basically, you know, conserving liberalism

01:01:40.700 from, you know, a couple of centuries ago.

01:01:42.680 I mean, Roger Scruton is a great, of whom I am an enormous admirer, and was fortunate enough

01:01:49.320 to know him towards the end of his life.

01:01:51.480 I mean, he is like this.

01:01:52.920 I mean, he says that, you know, he's basically a Kantian.

01:01:55.540 Everything before Kant is just, you know, confusion and delay and all this, you know, strange

01:02:00.940 God stuff and all these sort of medievals, et cetera, et cetera.

01:02:04.740 Really, it all begins there.

01:02:06.340 But let's just, you know, let's go slow.

01:02:08.960 Drive at the speed limit.

01:02:10.000 So, yeah, I mean, this back and forth is helpful.

01:02:17.060 But I think what we're seeing now is the emergence of something very, very different.

01:02:22.560 And in a funny way, you might have seen this kind of coalition between liberals and conservatives

01:02:29.380 from the sort of post-war or during the war and beyond the war, where effectively you can

01:02:35.060 really tell the difference between these two broad constituencies, broad sort of ideological

01:02:40.060 families, because there was a common enemy uniting them in Marxism, Marxist-Leninism.

01:02:45.200 And then you have this sort of strange sort of unravelling period between the sort of,

01:02:49.640 you know, early 90s and let's say 2010, this sort of golden era, which, you know, I went

01:02:53.960 through school and university and this, you know, what we all thought, you know, end of

01:02:58.100 history and the sort of, and the kind of, the dusk of all kind of political conflict

01:03:04.220 and all of that.

01:03:05.320 But in fact, that was just a, you know, it was a pause.

01:03:08.540 And there's a new religion, a new outlook that is emerging now, which is creating once

01:03:16.580 again a kind of very strong alignment between old school liberals and conservatives, old

01:03:22.580 school lefties as well, old school Marxists who want to talk about class and not identity

01:03:27.160 and so on.

01:03:28.540 And it's a, it's a great, you know, it's a great coalition to be in.

01:03:33.040 It's, it's, there's a lot of fun.

01:03:34.440 I mean, a lot of my, you know, if you, if you told me that, you know, five, six years

01:03:38.900 ago, I'd be cheering on gender critical, lesbian, Marxist, feminists, you know, and they go

01:03:46.400 for it, you know, you're doing, you're fighting a tremendous battle and, and seeing myself as

01:03:50.560 broadly, you know, broadly aligned with their vision of, of, of freedom.

01:03:55.640 And, and reason and, and, and the pursuit of truth and so on.

01:04:01.440 I mean, I, I, I don't, I'd have thought you were mad if I'd be, you know, if you told me

01:04:05.280 I'd be, you know, part, part of an alliance with them, but, but, but what we are where

01:04:09.240 we are.

01:04:09.480 And I think that's a, it's, it's, it's, it's an exciting time.

01:04:12.700 It's an exciting time to be alive.

01:04:14.000 And imagine kind of coming of age in the late eighties.

01:04:16.180 I mean, just how boring that would have been, you know, sort of.

01:04:18.700 The ability to pry property.

01:04:20.400 There we go.

01:04:21.060 All of that stuff.

01:04:22.120 Yeah.

01:04:22.440 Well, I'm glad you enjoy yourself, James.

01:04:25.060 But I'm curious.

01:04:26.120 I mean, we, we've obviously talked about a lot of this in the past and with you today.

01:04:32.400 What color is your pill is the question.

01:04:35.740 What do you see coming?

01:04:38.000 What is the future look like according to Dr. James Orr?

01:04:40.700 Well, look, I mean, I, I probably don't share your kind of proximate optimism.

01:04:48.440 I mean, I think that this is what can I, sorry to interrupt you so early, but can I just adjust

01:04:54.180 that because I am not saying I have looked into the future and what I see is this beautiful

01:05:02.220 post-woke utopia in which we all hold hands and hold, you know, sing Kumbaya and live happily

01:05:09.180 ever after.

01:05:10.700 I'm saying either it's that or it's the end of Western civilization as we've come to conceive

01:05:17.700 of it.

01:05:18.060 So let's at least try and do that.

01:05:19.680 That's all I'm saying.

01:05:20.580 I'm not saying I am an optimist.

01:05:22.600 I'm saying it's like, well, you know, this is the fight we got to fight because this is

01:05:26.640 what's happening.

01:05:27.380 And my worry is if the fight is fought solely from the perspective of woke people or idiots,

01:05:32.760 we can all agree on that, but there's not much we can agree on beyond that.

01:05:36.280 Yeah.

01:05:36.560 And that is not a recipe for, you know, from a sales point of view, that's not a great

01:05:42.240 sales technique.

01:05:43.280 The other guy's shit is not a great sales technique.

01:05:46.080 That's all I'm saying.

01:05:47.040 I apologize.

01:05:47.800 Very, very helpful, very helpful distinction.

01:05:50.560 And, you know, I agree with you.

01:05:52.060 There's nothing to disagree with there.

01:05:53.280 Look, I mean, I did classics at universities.

01:05:58.900 So, I mean, I, you know, I love studying civilizations that I thought were amazing, but that faded and

01:06:05.840 vanished and disappeared.

01:06:08.280 The Roman civilization lasted an unbelievably long time, I mean, in relative terms.

01:06:15.380 So civilizations, you know, Spengler's right.

01:06:18.000 Civilizations have a certain sort of life cycle and empires have a life cycle.

01:06:25.780 I think some people have calculated it to roughly 250 years, which would give America another three years.

01:06:35.260 2026 midterms.

01:06:37.120 It wasn't quite an empire when it started.

01:06:39.240 So maybe we can give them a bit more time.

01:06:40.980 Maybe.

01:06:42.160 And it would have certainly emerged from an empire, maybe.

01:06:45.160 But, yeah, so I, you know, it's, I think talk of white pills and black pills and this sort of talk is not helpful,

01:06:55.080 partly because, you know, I think there's an element of contingency in how things, as I said earlier,

01:07:00.500 in how things unfold that we should always factor in.

01:07:03.140 I'm a Christian, so I, and I take the view that biological death is not death and that the human

01:07:12.440 individual has a transcendent, infinite value that, you know, it is of a kind that reduces the

01:07:21.140 lifetime of civilizations to nothing.

01:07:24.700 That's all very well for you.

01:07:26.120 That's all very well.

01:07:26.580 But there's a lot of us that are going to become bodies that rot in the ground.

01:07:29.860 And before we do, I want to, I mean, you mentioned the lifetime of civilizations.

01:07:36.500 Do you think this is, we're kind of on the downslope?

01:07:42.480 I think it's hard to avoid that conclusion for the time being.

01:07:47.060 I mean, I do think, you know, it may take a very long time.

01:07:51.060 But if the question is, you know, have we passed our peak?

01:07:56.580 I'd say, yeah, we probably have.

01:07:58.960 And we may have passed it some time ago.

01:08:04.660 And, you know, part of me thinks, you know, barbarians are not at the gates.

01:08:10.380 They've been in, they've been in the city, they're manning the citadel, and they've been

01:08:14.580 there for quite a while.

01:08:15.980 Which is what happened in Rome, to a large extent.

01:08:17.620 They started to incorporate barbarian tribes into the military.

01:08:20.500 I mean, this is an interesting, you know, in whatever it was, August 410 AD, the barbarians

01:08:25.720 didn't, you know, besiege Rome.

01:08:28.120 They strolled in.

01:08:29.920 They walked in.

01:08:31.260 Civilizations typically destroy themselves from within.

01:08:35.800 They become spent, exhausted.

01:08:38.240 They are crippled by burdens that they themselves have generated.

01:08:45.560 It's quite rare, apart from Genghis Khan, it's quite rare for, as it were, foreign foes,

01:08:51.560 external foes to come in and sweep and destroy everything, destroy civilization just like that.

01:08:56.600 They die from within.

01:08:58.820 And I think it's hard to avoid the sort of smell of civilizational death at times, and

01:09:06.680 very easy to get pessimistic.

01:09:10.300 But, you know, as glorious as Western civilization has been, it doesn't have, you know, an automatic

01:09:17.500 right to ascendancy.

01:09:19.800 It has to be fought for.

01:09:21.140 And we've forgotten how to fight for it, and we got nervous about fighting for it.

01:09:24.860 The other side, the side that thinks that really anything to do with Western civilization

01:09:30.400 just is to be repudiated completely, is well organized, knows what it thinks.

01:09:37.220 It may be statistically, numerically in a minority, but that, you know, doesn't really matter.

01:09:43.700 As we know, it tends to be minority elites that can achieve massive, massive social, cultural

01:09:50.800 and political change.

01:09:51.760 I mean, I can't remember what it is, but I mean, I don't want to compare them to the

01:09:55.280 Bolsheviks, but think back to, you know, 1917.

01:09:59.720 The Bolsheviks were a tiny, relatively small minority.

01:10:05.080 And I think we're seeing, you know, it doesn't really matter what large swathes of the population

01:10:10.080 actually believe.

01:10:11.360 And in fact, when you do a lot of the polling on, for example, I don't know, attitudes to

01:10:15.580 our imperial past and attitudes to our heritage or attitudes on, you know, sex and gender

01:10:21.240 and so on, there's actually a very mixed picture, or very often a clear majority that is against

01:10:26.120 the sort of dominant elite voices.

01:10:29.380 And we've recognized this pattern again and again.

01:10:32.180 But it doesn't seem to have any effect.

01:10:34.180 And certainly the ballot box doesn't seem to, you know, do much.

01:10:37.140 I mean, it doesn't seem to affect much change at all.

01:10:41.780 I mean, there are signs, I think, here and there, maybe in the Conservative Party at the

01:10:46.180 moment, glimmers.

01:10:49.100 There are signs in the United States and certain states in Florida and Texas and elsewhere.

01:10:54.580 There are signs of some sort of more organized attempt to offer an alternative vision and a reasoned

01:11:05.620 repudiation and critique of, you know, of the people who are kind of letting these acids drip

01:11:15.260 through and dissolving a sort of the settlement of Western civilization.

01:11:21.680 And, you know, there may be reasons to be hopeful that they will kind of staunch the, you know,

01:11:31.360 staunch the flow.

01:11:32.700 Who knows?

01:11:34.100 So, I mean, I'm broadly, you know, in the near term, pretty pessimistic.

01:11:38.600 In the long term, look, there's a line of Horace, this great Roman poet I did, a Latin poet I

01:11:45.780 studied at university, here's a line, that you can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but

01:11:52.780 it's always going to come rushing in through the back door.

01:11:57.040 So, you know, reality is a very good ally to have on your side.

01:12:01.120 In the end, you're going to, and the more detached an ideology becomes from underlying, from being,

01:12:14.640 the more it slips its moorings from the world, from human nature in particular, the less sustainable

01:12:22.680 it's going to become.

01:12:23.800 And just the less self-evident those ideological claims are going to be.

01:12:28.720 That's why there's been so much energy devoted to shutting down free speech, and why you've

01:12:35.600 had such sort of kind of corrosive attacks on academic freedom, because I think the more

01:12:42.400 radical an ideology gets, the less it can afford the open playing field, you know, the sort

01:12:48.600 of the crucible of scrutiny in a kind of open and free market place of ideas.

01:12:58.800 James, it's been an absolute pleasure.

01:13:01.500 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:13:03.500 We always end with our final question, which is always the same, which is, what's the one

01:13:06.700 thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

01:13:10.020 What's one thing that we're not talking about?

01:13:12.580 My gosh, that's a very good question.

01:13:16.800 Well, look, I mean, this is probably too bland and generic an answer, but one of the things

01:13:23.140 we're not talking about is what are the pre-political sources of meaning that we can share,

01:13:35.480 we can sort of draw on, that will help us stitch ourselves together into a flourishing community?

01:13:42.320 We know that, you know, culture has started to dissolve.

01:13:46.740 We know that politics is a no-go area.

01:13:48.880 Religion is complicated.

01:13:50.500 How do we find, you know, what are those?

01:13:54.180 What is the glue that could stitch us together?

01:13:57.760 And we're not asking that question because, you know, it's very difficult to ask it.

01:14:01.660 I mean, very few people have got the ideas.

01:14:04.540 Hopefully that will, you know, emerge over time.

01:14:09.420 So it's not as concrete an answer as back maybe you were expecting.

01:14:13.380 But it's exactly the right answer for the moment, I think.

01:14:15.940 That's why I asked you this question because if there is an answer, it is going to be produced

01:14:22.880 by asking the question.

01:14:23.920 And the difficulty we face, as I think you're right to say, is we don't have much in answer

01:14:31.520 to that at the moment.

01:14:32.680 But I think the reality is the solution is within that answer to a lot of this stuff.

01:14:40.740 And we're all, you know, those of us who are thinking about this stuff, we're all going

01:14:44.880 to have to agree on something beyond not liking the other people.

01:14:48.440 That's just going to have to happen.

01:14:49.580 And that may mean the problem for a lot of people particularly, the sort of more liberal

01:14:56.020 of us is we don't like telling other people what to do.

01:14:59.160 Yeah, absolutely.

01:15:00.360 And once you get into the realms of, you know, it's family, it's this and it's that, there's

01:15:05.900 a hesitation there that perhaps is a reflection of the fact that 30 or 40 years ago, there

01:15:16.380 were a lot of people going, you must have a family.

01:15:18.260 And none of us wanted to be told that because we wanted to make our own choices in life.

01:15:23.760 But maybe, maybe, maybe there is an opportunity to work out a more, and this is what Peterson

01:15:29.600 and I talked about when I was on his podcast is it has to be sort of invitational enrolling.

01:15:37.220 It has to be like, you don't have to have a family.

01:15:40.520 You don't have to do anything.

01:15:41.920 You're a free atomized individual, just like you believe.

01:15:45.300 However, if you want to have a good life, here's some of the things that people have

01:15:49.720 found in the past that do help you towards that.

01:15:52.080 Maybe that's what it looks like.

01:15:53.640 Couldn't agree more.

01:15:54.540 Read old books.

01:15:55.680 Trust old books.

01:15:56.780 Trust old books because you need to recognize that ideas age in reverse.

01:16:04.420 We get weaker as we get older.

01:16:06.640 Ideas get stronger as they get older.

01:16:08.340 And there's a deep truth to that.

01:16:11.140 When you're trying to implement a new ideology, you want historical ground zero.

01:16:16.760 You want everybody to forget the past.

01:16:18.640 It's Orwell's old line, whoever controls the past controls the present, whoever controls

01:16:22.620 the present controls the future and all of that.

01:16:24.920 So yeah, read old books, not on Kindle.

01:16:27.440 That would be, I think that would be wise advice.

01:16:33.180 And don't neglect the wisdom of the past.

01:16:40.140 Spoken like a true conservative.

01:16:41.920 Dr. James O, before we let you go, we're obviously going to ask you a few questions

01:16:45.660 from our local supporters that only they will get to see.

01:16:50.100 And I think a lot of it is actually on the subject we haven't talked too much about,

01:16:53.180 which is religion because that is one of the things, obviously, that you do professionally.

01:16:58.720 Before we let you go, where can people find your work online

01:17:01.200 and what would you like them to know about things coming up, etc.?

01:17:04.280 Thank you.

01:17:04.760 Well, look, I've just stepped into the bear pit.

01:17:07.300 I've just stepped onto Twitter.

01:17:10.340 My handle is JTWOR, O-double-R.

01:17:15.300 So you can follow me there.

01:17:17.060 I can't promise great wisdom.

01:17:19.400 But at the moment, I'm busy announcing speakers for this upcoming National Conservatism Conference,

01:17:25.900 middle of May, 15th, 16th, 17th of May, 2023, in Westminster.

01:17:30.600 Sign up, National Conservatism UK.

01:17:33.200 You'll find all the details on my Twitter profile.

01:17:38.460 And if you can bear it, you can inflict some of my academic work on yourselves

01:17:46.280 by going to my faculty webpage at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge.

01:17:51.700 Look for my name.

01:17:53.380 Dr. James Orr, thank you so much.

01:17:54.900 And thank you for watching and listening.

01:17:56.720 We'll see you on Locals very shortly.

01:17:58.500 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

01:18:00.880 it's also available as a podcast.

01:18:02.740 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:18:04.340 What evidence is there that the biblical character we now know as Jesus,

01:18:10.340 Yeshua, I think is the way you pronounce it,

01:18:13.060 ever actually existed?

TRIGGERnometry - April 30, 2023

Dr James Orr： The Barbarians Aren't at the Gates... They're Inside!

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