What does it mean to have a system that administers excellence in a given domain? What does that mean to be meritocratic? What is it means to be fair, equal, and fairhanded? In this episode, we have a fireside discussion with Douglas Murray, a professor of political philosophy at the Berklee College of Political Science, on the topic of merit. We discuss the role of merit in American society, and how it can be applied across political and other divides in America. We also discuss why equity is not a bad thing, and why it is better than equity in any other sphere of society, whether it's in sports, politics, or economics, and whether or not it should be applied in the workplace, schools, or other areas of society. And, of course, we finish up with some thoughts on why the idea of merit is a good thing in the first place, and what we should be fighting for it in the rest of our society, in particular in sports and other areas where there isn t much equity. We're on the road for this episode of the podcast, but I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to have Douglas Murray on the show to talk about it, so I thought it would be a good idea to have him on the podcast! Tweet me and let me know what you thought of it! Timestamps: 5:00 - What does merit mean to you? 6:30 - What is merit? 7:00 8: What does it really mean? 9:15 - Is it a meritocratic society? 10:30 11: Should we be fair? 13:40 - How does it matter? 15: What is equality in sports? 16:20 - Should there be equity in sport? 17:40 18:10 - Is there any such thing as a meritocracy? 19:50 - What are we need to be a free board? 21:10 22:00 | What is a free company? 26:30 | What s the difference between equity? 27: Is there a problem? 29:50 | What does the left want? 30:00 Is it possible? 32:00 + 33:00? 35:00 Do you have a problem with equality? 36:00 // 35:40 | What are you looking for? 37:00 Does it matter what you don t have?
Transcript
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00:00:02.000We're on the road for this edition of the podcast, but I just finished a speech this morning and then a fireside discussion.
00:00:29.000There wasn't really a fire there, but we call it a fireside discussion with Douglas Murray.
00:00:34.000And the topic of the morning was merit.
00:00:38.000An idea we've feels like forgotten in America.
00:00:42.000As I often say, we need to put the merit back into America.
00:00:50.000It's almost like the right or the right is challenged by the left often these days to define woke.
00:00:58.000I rise to that challenge as best I can.
00:01:00.000I define wokeness as a worldview that calls upon us to wake up to the invisible societal injustices created by the invisible power structures rooted in genetic identity, like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and to act upon it to correct that.
00:01:23.000The challenge that I give to my friends on the left is define merit, actually, because they've turned merit into effectively the same word on the left.
00:01:33.000Functionally, in the concept that wokeness has become on the right, it's an assault on merit.
00:01:41.000What does it mean to have a system that administers excellence in a given domain?
00:01:46.000It's a pretty deep, philosophically rich discussion that my guest today, Douglas, who I spoke with on stage earlier today, began, I think, a deep conversation on it.
00:01:57.000And, you know, in some ways, there is no beginning or end to this conversation, Douglas.
00:02:00.000And so, you know, we're in Washington, D.C. today.
00:02:02.000Normally, we do this in Columbus, but I wanted to take advantage of this to have you here.
00:02:06.000Let's just pick up where we left off and start right in the middle.
00:02:09.000The definition you gave on stage, right?
00:02:15.000I thought it was a very useful starting point.
00:02:17.000It made me think, you know, since, you know, we're doing this on the podcast again, we'll pick up where we left off, but can we just start with that definition of merit that you gave and we'll take it from there?
00:02:27.000Yeah, I said the opposite of a straw man, a steel man.
00:02:31.000If you steel man the question of merit, what we might agree on across political and other divides in America, I suggest maybe we could agree that most of us, the vast majority, let's say 98%, there's always a percentage who don't want something,
00:02:47.000but most people in this society, most people in most Western democracies would agree to the following proposition, that nobody should be held back from achieving something in their life that they can achieve by dint of some characteristic over which they have no say.
00:03:02.000So if you have the competency to do something and the desire to do it, you shouldn't be held back.
00:03:23.000When you think about the societal actual progress we've had in these regards in recent decades, it's extraordinary.
00:03:32.000However, there is a disagreement today, clearly, where the left, broadly speaking, believes that you must get this sort of equality by getting equity.
00:03:43.000You've got to get the equality of the outcome.
00:03:45.000Now, the right has its own answer, and the right's answer has criticisms that can be made of it.
00:03:51.000That is basically the gradualist approach.
00:03:54.000Set up the conditions and, you know, like...
00:03:57.000At the moment, there might not be enough representation of certain people in certain places, but if you give it time, you'll get there.
00:04:05.000The critique of that is that it's sort of complacent.
00:04:08.000Okay, well, how many years do you think we have?
00:04:12.000But I would suggest that the left's view has its own problems, which is simply that equity, equality of outcome, is not possible in this life.
00:04:22.000I don't think it's desirable either, by the way.
00:04:26.000I'm very fond of a quote of the late Irving Kristol who once said, I don't like equality in sports.
00:04:49.000Any of us can have everything the same just because we want it to be so.
00:04:54.000But this is something that is tearing underneath our societies at the moment because many people have been persuaded that, as it were, no one will be free until every company board precisely replicates the makeup of the society.
00:05:13.000And as I mentioned when we were talking earlier today, it's very striking that this is only the case with high-status jobs.
00:05:28.000are not lucky enough to sit on company boards.
00:05:31.000Most people do not have high status jobs.
00:05:36.000And there's something very telling about the fact that we sort of have this obsessive discussion about, you know, Harvard admissions, like absolutely the elite of the elite institutions.
00:05:47.000But we don't think the same thing should be applied in lower status jobs.
00:05:52.000You You know, nobody's actually concerned about whether or not we have absolutely representative workers in the postal service or in garbage pickup or coal mining or road laying or anything.
00:06:09.000Nobody says we need more women to apply to be laying roads and highways across America.
00:06:16.000So there's something off about the whole discussion.
00:06:18.000But as I say, the question in a way is this thing of how would you as a society, how would we unleash talent in an optimal way?
00:06:30.000I think that's a much more useful place to have the discussion than why does everything not absolutely replicate the makeup of society.
00:06:43.000I'd like the discussion to be shifted from that to how can we just make sure that all the talent we have in society is as widely utilized as possible.
00:06:55.000As I'm hearing you talk about it, maybe we didn't get to this and we didn't go in this direction this morning.
00:07:01.000But on the philosophy of this, you could… Imagine that our goal in fostering meritocracy, which I sort of define as the system that administers excellence in any sphere of life, okay?
00:07:53.000Because any other system would be necessarily unjust, that equity is inherently unjust if it is requiring us to take actions that Past determinations on people that's constrained them from achieving their truest potential, that there's something fundamentally just about letting a free bird roam free and fly wherever it may.
00:08:19.000Well, the first thing is that it's unwise economically and morally to, for instance, demoralize anyone in the population by saying you can't achieve something because of who you are.
00:08:33.000I mean, one of the most striking things about how any economy thrives is women being allowed into the workplace.
00:08:43.000Well, you know, 50% of the population, you're going to get an awful lot of benefits from that.
00:08:49.000And societies that don't allow women to work historically and in the current day suffer as a result.
00:08:56.000But there's also just this question, yes, of what I regard as demoralization.
00:09:02.000We have had periods in the past in America, as in all countries, we've had periods where certain groups have been demoralized from the idea of, for instance, going to higher education.
00:09:14.000My own parents' generation, it was still thought by many people to be a waste to send a daughter to university.
00:09:21.000You know, that somehow, well, she's just going to marry and have children and, you know, what's the point?
00:09:32.000So if we could regard the fact that that was the case with education and with certain jobs with women, It was certainly the case in certain walks of life with ethnic minorities, who were expected more, where I'm from perhaps, than in America, were expected to stay in certain professions, you know.
00:09:51.000It was certainly the case of sexual minorities, you know, until the 1990s or so, you know, if you're openly gay, you're expected to either go onto Broadway or be an interior designer, you know.
00:11:12.000Why is there so much discussion about that?
00:11:15.000It demoralizes men hugely, as it would demoralize women if we talked endlessly about toxic femininity.
00:11:22.000So the attacks on masculinity, being a man and much more, is very demoralizing to men, who make up half the population.
00:11:32.000And then you have this new thing, in that it's happened in our own lifetimes and in recent memory, Where you also tell the majority population who are white, or you've got special problems of your own.
00:11:45.000And you should, for instance, hold back.
00:12:32.000But if you were to try to make up for past unfairness, you don't do it by exercising unfairness in the present day against people who look like the people who you think were the unfair people in the past.
00:12:46.000So one of the things I'm worried about in America today is we have this endless absorbing discussion about representation, about equity, and all of these sorts of things.
00:12:54.000And my question at the end is, are you sure that in the process of doing this, You're actually going to make our society better, more successful, more thriving.
00:13:06.000I don't think the evidence is there yet.
00:13:11.000I think that this expectation that playing these games would inevitably improve matters hasn't been demonstrated even in one company.
00:13:23.000So why try to roll it out across the whole of society, every government department, and so on?
00:13:31.000I mean, isn't it strange to be carrying out a nationwide experiment when you haven't even done one successful control test?
00:13:41.000So I think the case for – the easy case for us to make, and of course, you and I I agree on this, but nonetheless, the easy case for us to make is that not only does it not make society overall better off,
00:13:59.000but even if you apply a sort of John Rawlsian difference principle or whatever, roughly speaking, that we should organize a society's affairs based on what helps those who are worst off.
00:14:13.000It would fail on even that standard today.
00:14:16.000You come up to the topic that's – one of the topics that's near and dear to my heart to address and dismantle is race-based affirmative action in America, an experiment that began as part of that great society in the mid-1960s.
00:14:30.000Black Americans are palpably worse off economically and on other metrics, family formation, two-parent households that children are born into, drastically worse off today than they were in the 1960s directly as a consequence of sort of becoming addicted to this form of and being sort of duped and shackled, dare I say, by these modalities that were designed to help them.
00:14:54.000So it fails that even more stringent test But because we agree with each other, I feel some sense of obligation to air what someone who disagreed with us might say if they were here.
00:15:05.000Okay, so that's not the right way to correct for that historical injustice.
00:15:15.000And that was what you also posed as the question that we're asked of the right, but I think if we're getting to the meat of the matter, let's get real here about what our actual preferences are.
00:15:26.000Suppose we live in a world where we never can actually correct for that injustice.
00:15:31.000What if the answer to that question – part of the reason the right hasn't come up, the conservative movement or whatever, have come up with an answer to that question is that there is no such thing as an answer to that question.
00:15:43.000There are many injustices depending on how long you look or through what prism.
00:15:47.000And that the question of correcting for injustice itself on a false premise, I think it's not – It's not intellectual laziness or dullness or coldness that causes many conservatives to lack an answer to that question.
00:16:03.000It may be the fact that that is an unanswerable question itself and somehow in some philosophical sense, forward is the only way to go.
00:16:12.000And there is no beyond a reasonable look-back period, a period behind which you ought to look.
00:16:41.000But the man of the crowds, I addressed this question of historic restitution, because at this stage, for instance, in a country like America, we're not in the position where somebody who has done a wrong Can ask forgiveness even, let alone make up for things to a person who was wronged.
00:17:05.000We're in a situation of somebody who looks like a person who did a wrong historically, making restitution to somebody who looks like a person to whom a wrong was done.
00:17:16.000Who's not, I like the way friends, because they're not even the descendant of.
00:17:18.000They're not even necessarily the descendant of.
00:17:21.000You may have seen, it was quite amusing to me the other day, the former Black Panther, Angela Davis, discovering on television, genealogy show, discovering that she was descended from one of the...
00:17:35.000People who came over on the Mayflower.
00:17:39.000I mean, you couldn't have upset her more if you'd tried.
00:17:44.000Because here is a woman who has made...
00:17:48.000Her hustle of demanding reparations and much more turns out she's, I don't know, maybe she should take money out of her left pocket and put it in her right pocket.
00:18:24.000But anyway, the point is that that whole terrain of who gets the right to apologize and who gets the right to accept the apology is in moral philosophy pretty much agreed you cannot do it on anyone else's behalf.
00:18:40.000And there's a great book by Simon Wiesenthal on that, which I recommend to anyone interested, called The Sunflower.
00:18:47.000But so that's the sort of the problem with that.
00:18:52.000In a way, of course, it's the wrong question to be asking because you don't want to blithely pass by historic injustice, but nor do you want to get caught up on it, particularly if, as I say, it's effectively unsolvable.
00:19:08.000And I say unsolvable because everybody could play the game.
00:19:12.000And it is a kind of game at this stage.
00:19:14.000I mean, you know, I was saying recently somewhere that if you want to get into the slavery thing, you've got to address the fact that one million white Europeans were taken from Britain and Southern Europe by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery in Africa.
00:19:43.000How many slaves came from Africa to the U.S.? I think the transatlantic slave trade is thought to be up to 11 million, maybe 12. And a much larger number, perhaps 18 million, were taken east from Africa in the Arab slave trade, which ran much longer.
00:20:01.000And the interesting thing about that is… The Arab slave trade had more traffic.
00:20:28.000They didn't want them to have children.
00:20:29.000And they thought they were inferior anyway.
00:20:31.000In fact, it's one of the reasons why in the Middle East today, the word in Arabic for black is the same as the word for slave, abid or abid in the plural.
00:21:00.000But my point is that whenever you go back in history, there's this presumption today that for certain types of people of certain skin colors, history was great.
00:21:12.000And actually, history was pretty awful for everybody.
00:21:17.000You know, in the country I'm from the UK, if you worked in the mill towns in the north of England, your average life expectancy in the 19th century was 37%.
00:21:31.000And there are degrees of not greatness, for sure.
00:21:34.000But do you want to spend your time raking that over, reopening wounds, and crying about your hurt?
00:21:44.000Or do you want to try to solve something in the current day?
00:21:48.000I would, and it's not because I want to cover anything over or anything like that, I just would rather that we focus on this question of how can we try to make it work better today?
00:21:57.000And this is a bit of a long-winded answer, but let me just very quickly answer the second part of that, which is this issue of the situation not improving in the way we hoped it might have done in American recent decades for certain minority groups.
00:22:10.000Heather MacDonald has a very interesting observation on this.
00:22:13.000She says that she thinks that much of the Current angst on the left in America comes from a recognition that The situation for American blacks since the 1960s has not improved to the extent they expected it to.
00:22:29.000Well, it's actually gotten much worse.
00:22:31.000And so there's a whole hell of questions underneath that.
00:22:39.000And again, I mean, it's not obvious to me that in order to try to make up for that, you should be prejudiced against Asian students, for instance.
00:23:08.000I'm all about suppressing – you know, smoking out suppressed premises on the left.
00:23:13.000Let's smoke out our own is that – It's not just that we think that, well, the right way to correct for historical inequity is not certainly by replicating the patterns of discrimination or demoralization, as you put it.
00:23:28.000I think demoralization is a better word because discrimination is too narrow to describe what's actually happening.
00:23:34.000So that's a better word you've, I think, found.
00:23:42.000But it is that the project itself can't be done.
00:23:46.000And it's almost a stoic view or something like this applied societally that The path is through.
00:23:57.000And we kind of go forward together because that's just what we can do, right?
00:24:02.000There's not much else we can do, but we can move forward.
00:24:05.000And I think that that will be a deeply unsatisfying answer to, you know, it's not all of the left, but those on the left who subscribe to this restorative equity agenda.
00:24:19.000But I wonder, just as a matter of persuasion or galvanization, national unity on the project of moving forward, I suppose it's the seat I sit in right now, whether that isn't just the right way to do it, to go through the reckoning, to not offer this false carrot of a promise that we sort of falsely promise that there's to not offer this false carrot of a promise that we sort of falsely promise that there's some other way we can go about addressing that historical inequity, but more just the open admission of the fact that we recognize Yeah.
00:24:48.000So that we, in ways, don't make the same mistakes in the present.
00:24:53.000But that we're just not – we're not even attempting to actually take on that historical project and to sort of be honest about it.
00:25:00.000That'll make people mad in the short run, but might actually galvanize some sense of Of honesty, of how we agree we're moving forward.
00:25:07.000Well, it's definitely not a healthy thing for any group or individual in society to feel that at some point they'll get a great payday for doing nothing.
00:25:16.000I mean, that seems to me to be very sort of laziness-inducing, among other things.
00:25:26.000I mean, there are so many other things we could and I think should be addressing instead.
00:25:30.000I mean, you know, in our own lifetimes, we've seen the whole way in which people accrue capital has madly changed.
00:25:43.000When I was young, if you had savings in the bank, you know, you could sort of sit on them and you would earn money from them.
00:26:18.000I mean, I've said to you before, but it's not inevitable that you create a generation of capitalists if you have a generation who cannot accrue capital.
00:26:27.000What do you do with the inability of young people to get onto the housing ladder in many democracies at the moment?
00:26:37.000These are real-world issues which will have the biggest effects on people's lives.
00:26:42.000Because if you can't accrue capital and you can't get a house, you're not going to start a family.
00:26:47.000All sorts of other things are in the air.
00:26:52.000Why don't we spend as much time talking about that as we do on the other things?
00:26:55.000I would argue because we've effectively been distracted by this unwinnable game.
00:27:01.000You know, Marie Antoinette was famously alleged to have said, let them eat cake of the crowd.
00:27:08.000I think many of our politicians in the current age of left and right have effectively said, let them eat identity politics.
00:27:17.000Because it's something that will keep them preoccupied.
00:27:26.000Let's give them a totally unsolvable game to play so that they don't notice all of these other things that are going on.
00:27:34.000I mean, think of the airtime that has been taken up in recent years by arguments which frankly show our society as becoming stupider and stupider.
00:27:46.000If you'd have said 20 years ago to me, What do you think, Douglas, we're going to be discussing in America in 2023?
00:27:55.000If I had said, well, one of them is we're not going to know what a woman is.
00:28:01.000And another will be that we don't know when America was founded.
00:29:17.000I mean, one of my favorite awakening moments was my friend Joe Rogan some years ago realized the gender thing was a problem because there was a trans...
00:30:03.000And, you know, and so people, you know, again, I mean, even on the less harmful ones comparatively, you know, some young woman spends her life training to be a swimmer and then a big dude with shoulders jumps into the pool and says he feels kind of feminine whenever he gets into a pool.
00:30:38.000And if you're even interested in it, we'll kind of cast aspersions on you and suggest that there's something bigoted going on.
00:30:44.000So no, I mean, people who start culture wars, in order to completely destroy our collective mind, which is what they're doing, as I say, 20 years ago, it was not hard to say what a woman is.
00:30:56.000Today, you can't even get a nominee for the Supreme Court to say what a woman is.
00:31:00.000Everyone has their thing to say about somebody being non-binary or transgender.
00:31:11.000So these are primarily not actually things that the right started.
00:31:16.000But of course, people are going to respond to them.
00:31:19.000But again, what if this is all coming about in part because there are much bigger and deeper problems in our society that we don't have an answer to?
00:31:29.000And I include myself on some of those.
00:31:38.000I've got some view of how you solve it.
00:31:42.000But For all of us, it's kind of easier to get distracted by the other stuff, because underneath us are these big problems.
00:31:51.000You know, I have an economist friend who said to me years ago that the only job of politicians is to make sure the economy doesn't go wrong.
00:32:01.000And I remember saying to him, well, you would say that because you're an economist, you know.
00:32:08.000In the years since, I thought, actually, that's- It's a big job.
00:32:59.000I want to go back to this intuition, though, that you're supposed to stand by and watch.
00:33:05.000Because I think that's the base expectation.
00:33:07.000You just sort of put your finger of what's going on in the ether.
00:33:10.000It's that – forget – we got the deflection theory, but let's just go to the essence of what's going on anyway, even if that's a big part of the cynical force behind it.
00:33:23.000I think the base expectations – so I sort of feel this sometimes when I'll get friends who agree with me.
00:33:28.000I think I post on Twitter or whatever the other day, if it's about race or somebody else, especially someone like Ibram Kendi making a particular comment.
00:33:36.000If I'm quoting him, I get some criticism for that.
00:33:58.000Why are you bothering with this when you yourself, speaking to me, could be engaged with the more important problems themselves?
00:34:08.000And I'm not criticizing the people who are offering this criticism.
00:34:09.000I'm actually airing it in a fair way, which is to say that, kind of to pick up where you left off, why should a guy like me, and maybe your answer will be, maybe I shouldn't be, but why should a guy like me even be paying heed to To engaging in that debate when I could just be focusing on solving inflation and addressing economic growth, which, by the way, I am in a sphere of my agenda.
00:34:33.000But there's a part of me that says it's wrong to just...
00:34:37.000Ignore this without engaging on the merits of the debate about meritocracy itself.
00:34:42.000And yes, I could be just focused on an economic agenda to deliver GDP growth and embrace nuclear energy and, you know, let's put people back to work in a way that fights, you know, the unemployment crisis that creates inflation actually in the supply chain issues.
00:34:56.000Maybe we could just focus only on that and just turn our eyes away.
00:34:59.000But I feel like that wouldn't fully be what being a leader in our time actually means, though there are some Republicans who I don't criticize them are drawn to take that approach.
00:35:11.000Why shouldn't we just take that approach of solving the problems that you say need to be solved without, well, pretty much pretending this debate doesn't exist?
00:35:16.000Well, because if somebody sets up a whole pile of booby traps in your path, you do have to remove them, get around them.
00:35:27.000If somebody minds the path in front of you, You can't just say, well, I'm still going to get to the end of this minefield.
00:36:01.000It's just that, you know, it's in my path.
00:36:05.000And I'm afraid that, you know, all of us have to make our own decisions on the way in which we use our energies.
00:36:15.000My own belief is that you just have to clear some of this stuff out of the way for other people or for yourself.
00:36:23.000But the end of the path has to be remembered as well and kept in sight.
00:36:27.000And the end of the path has to be, and something I brought up toward the end of our discussion this morning, but the end of the path to my mind is to pose the following question.
00:36:37.000If all of these minds were taken away, and you didn't have to concentrate on all of the booby traps set down by Kendi and others, if they were all taken away, what would you be doing with your life?
00:36:51.000How would you be using your time best?
00:36:55.000What would be the dream you would be pursuing?
00:37:02.000And those are the questions which we need to keep in mind and we definitely need to address more.
00:37:11.000But we have to somehow find a way of doing it that says, that frees people of this terrible set of traps we've put in their way.
00:37:19.000As I say, there have been times in the past, most of the past, in most places, and in many places in the current day, where the situation you're born in would be the single defining factor in your life.
00:37:38.000You know, I often think that there's a great line in the fifth season of The Wire when one of the boys says to the boxing coach, you know, how do you get, he says, there's a whole world out there.
00:37:50.000And the boy says to the coach, how do you get there?
00:37:59.000But you want people not to be limited by whatever it is they've been born into if they have the aptitude to pursue whatever the thing is that they're good at.
00:38:14.000You know, people often say you should pursue your dreams.
00:38:19.000But another way of doing it is you should pursue what you've discovered you're good at.
00:38:23.000And you should work really hard at that.
00:38:25.000Now, that's good life advice for people.
00:38:28.000But say to them, there's no point because the whole system's rigged and you won't get anywhere.
00:38:36.000Well, that's the view of a very bitter cynic or somebody living in a society which is genuinely unpleasant to live in.
00:39:18.000I mean, take another one from that which always strikes me.
00:39:22.000Wherever you go in the world now, If you meet a really smart young person, it doesn't matter which country they're in, they can be at the forefront of the discoveries of their time.
00:40:00.000And we have a lot of problems to solve.
00:40:02.000You know, that account you just gave It does put some pressure on your earlier diagnosis that – and maybe there's not one diagnosis, right?
00:40:13.000There's no such thing as a single source for a complex cultural phenomenon.
00:40:18.000But it suggests to me that there's more than just the deflection game going on.
00:40:24.000Because on this version of it, it's a different paradox where – It is precisely at a moment in human history, certainly in American history, when we have made so much progress, when we have solved the problems that allowed us to change life expectancy from 37 to 73, that we discover these booby traps, as you call them.
00:40:51.000And it suggests to me that it's not so much in this view of the world, That we're deflecting against all of these great problems that we face.
00:41:02.000I mean, inflation in America, as bad as it is, let's be honest, is different than the bubonic plague or whatever, right?
00:41:06.000We've been through World War II. We've been through wars.
00:41:10.000It's that actually it makes me think about the root cause and this is closer to where some of my descriptions have been but it's closer to the root cause being not in spite of the fact that we achieved close to the pinnacle of what we had but precisely because we almost achieved the pinnacle of what we could have ever wanted that makes us want to apologize for that in some way that it's some more native instinct in our In our psyche that makes us have the
00:41:40.000need almost to have something to apologize for.
00:41:45.000Might that be closer to the flame than even the deflection?
00:41:52.000Some people think that historically speaking, the point we're at is...
00:41:56.000Is particular because we're at that point where instead of focusing on making, creating wealth, we're talking about distributing it.
00:42:06.000And that is a very big shift in a society's priorities.
00:42:12.000I mean, there are all sorts of, we've talked about some of the opportunities of the world, and there's also the flip side of that.
00:42:18.000There's also the cruelties of the world.
00:42:21.000For instance, and this is one that in politics is very difficult to address, but nevertheless, it's there, is that some people fail and some people don't want to bother.
00:42:33.000And some people just have terrible suboptimal situations and some people fall into just terrible situations and make bad choice after bad choice.
00:42:44.000And whilst being compassionate towards those people, You can't pretend that the well-being of all of society has to be predicated on that not happening.
00:43:21.000As long as they know that that's the result of their choices.
00:43:26.000Part of the whole problem we've had in recent decades, perhaps since the war, has been that there's always this option that you can say, well, you know yourself, you didn't really work that hard and you weren't really that motivated, but you can always blame someone else.
00:43:44.000You know, there's a lot of awkwardness about the whole issue of success because it's likely, I mean, you know about the Pareto distribution and all that, it's likely that a certain number of people in society are going to be more driving and thrusting and more of the success of the world will accrue to them.
00:44:04.000My question would be how could you make sure that the people who want to achieve stuff get to achieve it?
00:44:18.000Years ago, I had a very moving conversation with a sociologist friend who I said, what's the biggest change that's happened in your lifetime?
00:44:28.000What's the biggest thing that's happened in your lifetime that's changed in relation to jobs in America?
00:44:34.000And he said, it's this, that he said, when I was growing up, a man who provided, who did a job, whatever the job was, it could be refuse collecting, it could be street sweeping, it could be whatever.
00:44:50.000But a man who did a job and provided for his dependents was a man of great worth and value and was admired.
00:45:12.000And if it's changed, it means it can change back as well.
00:45:16.000And one way to change that back, I'm pretty passionate about this one, is we should rely on people actually achieving things before we admire them.
00:45:27.000I mean, we have a very strange popular culture in America where You know, there are people who are massively rich, who are massively admired, who have done massively nothing.
00:45:46.000I mean, I said to you earlier, isn't it interesting in our own lifetimes, again, that America has turned from a society that admired heroism to one that admires victimhood?
00:45:56.000I mean, again, you've written about this, but that's a massive shift.
00:46:02.000Think of the moral change that occurs in a society between And small, sometimes large acts of valor for which you do not expect to be congratulated versus doing nothing and auditioning for pity.
00:46:28.000And I think that part of our way out – I mean, I'm interested in solutions to this cultural quagmire we're in.
00:46:34.000It feels to me less like a terrain with a bunch of booby traps and mines, but just a quagmire is really – visually the way I see it is – anyway, our way through this quagmire is – Mm-hmm.
00:46:53.000So I actually think this is, it's sort of coming at this from a completely different angle here.
00:46:58.000But if we're allowed to, if we create a society where people can achieve as much as they're going to achieve and accept that some people aren't going to achieve as much, recognize that achievement ought not be the sole form of respect.
00:47:25.000Live in a society where you can both use your talents to the maximum extent, but the reality is money or other currencies or fame or whatever do get certain people more that everyone would wish to have if they could have it, but certain people are only going to get so far that that becomes okay against the backdrop of a society where we know with a rock-solid foundation that you're still co-equal citizens in some way that matters.
00:47:47.000Well, that's been something which actually has been...
00:47:51.000Ever since the founding of America, this has been a very live question because effectively what you see in the Declaration of Independence and the extraordinary men who wrote it is an attempt to incarnate a religious idea in a non-religious framework.
00:50:02.000But I think that one of the things which people have not realized has gone on underneath our feet in more recent times has been the loss of that foundational or the fear that that foundational virtue is being lost.
00:50:18.000That somehow inequality affects that sanctity of the individual.
00:50:23.000It's hard to do it without religious language, but something like that.
00:50:27.000You don't have to be allergic to the religious language, that's okay.
00:50:29.000No, I know, but- You're trying to be true to the founding framers project, which is why they didn't abandon it totally.
00:50:47.000But the central insight, of course, was simply something which...
00:50:52.000Again, as you know, that's not a common belief everywhere in the world.
00:50:59.000There are so many wonderful things about traveling in India, but one of the things that is disturbing to many Western people is people not being equal in the eyes of God.
00:51:28.000But I think there's a nervousness about this that's going on.
00:51:32.000And it's because, it's undoubtedly because, and again, I mean, I make it as an observation, either decrying it nor praising it, but it's a result of coming apart from part of our roots.
00:51:44.000Or not even being humble enough to admit that these are our roots.
00:52:39.000Do you think that if there was real teeth, if we gave real teeth to that civic equality here, not monetary equality, not the equity agenda through the materialist redistribution or through the allocation of rewards on the axis of genetically inherited characteristics, none of that stuff, none of that stuff, but actually say required military service of every American?
00:53:05.000Billionaire or not, black or white, descendant of slave or descendant of aristocrat or unknown, which is actually what most – the category most people are in despite the fact they won't admit it.
00:53:14.000Whether you look like the descendant of a slave or look like the descendant of an aristocrat, it doesn't matter.
00:53:19.000That your kids, if they want to have full citizenship – maybe we won't put them in jail if they don't, but if they want to say vote, voting is not a – It's not a fundamental...
00:53:32.000There's no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.
00:53:35.000It doesn't show up in the constitution.
00:53:36.000For the longest time, actually, we imperfectly in this country said you had to be a landowner to do it, but to say something else.
00:54:11.000I don't know if it has to be military service, but yeah, I've always thought that, I mean, well, we actually have, by the way, a very good test case of how you can do this well, which is Israel.
00:54:26.000In the 1970s, even, the big discussion in Israel was the divide between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Israel, whether or not they would always be apart.
00:54:41.000You don't hear that discussion these days in Israel.
00:54:45.000One of the reasons is military service.
00:54:48.000And in fact, when people sometimes make Aliyah move to Israel, it's very hard to integrate into the country, really, unless you have been in the army, like everyone else.
00:55:03.000Because that's where the bond of the nation is actually formed.
00:55:08.000That's where you learn Some of the selflessness, some of the heroism, the virtues, and the recognition that first of all, this all relies on you.
00:55:22.000And secondly, that you are responsible for the other men, the other women in your battalion.
00:55:47.000I've always thought that in – certainly in my own country of birth, Great Britain, I always thought some form of service after school – Didn't matter whether you were pushing around hospital trolleys or, you know, training for the military.
00:56:04.000You should do something because a society needs to have people in it who know that it all relies on them and that it is not the other guy who's going to pick it up for you.
00:56:16.000And even further, Douglas, I love that's the real meat of it, but even further, a nice side benefit is it satisfies that native impulse that's about Equity, right?
00:56:28.000It's not about equity of result, but equality, the sense that we have discharged our duty of giving real substance, real stuff to the otherwise ethereal idea, especially in a non-religious society, then when God is even gone in the – I can't say equal in the eyes of God, made in the image of God, where it then becomes this abstract secular notion that you think exists in some founding documents somewhere – It's too ethereal.
00:56:56.000It's not real enough versus giving that real teeth.
00:56:58.000I got to think that, you know, for a certain percentage of people in this country, you're always going to be lost.
00:57:03.000But for most of us even, us even including those on the left that otherwise, you know, bend the knee to wokeism or whatever, but mostly because they're unsure, that this sort of goes a good part of the distance to say that the civic equality – Is foundational and then the rest is the details in the scheme of things.
00:57:25.000And then you can unapologetically sort of unshackle yourself from the psychological insecurities that stop you from Pursuing merit unabashedly.
00:57:33.000Well, so much comes down to that foundational thing of respect.
00:57:38.000One of the reasons why what I just described and what you just described certainly is appealing to me is because young people, and young men in particular, very often the insecurities are about respect.
00:57:51.000I have a friend who works with gang members in London, and she always says, very striking that these are people willing to stab other people or be stabbed themselves over ridiculous infringements of tiny bits of terrain that don't belong to them.
00:58:06.000And all of the infringements are always about respect.
00:58:22.000That's why they're willing to do terrible things, because they have no self-respect.
00:58:27.000The very thing that they demand is the thing they don't feel.
00:58:32.000So inculcating a sense of self-respect In a society is also incredibly important if you're going to be dynamic.
00:58:41.000And I think there's a deep relationship in both directions between actually having a foundational respect for the other and respecting yourself.
00:58:48.000Your self-respect, you can actually do that more easily.
00:59:11.000And by the way, I mean, that's one that worries me very much in America now is how few places there actually are in our society which are recognized as places where you earn respect.
00:59:23.000I mean, think of the field of politics itself.
00:59:29.000It's, you know, I mean, the sort of they're all in it for themselves, you know, that's sort of a very commonplace among the public to think that of politicians.
00:59:41.000The actual military still has the respect that it deserves.
01:01:15.000And as I say, you can learn almost everything about a society, about looking at who they actually respect.
01:01:23.000And there is some hope still in America.
01:01:26.000It's always worth having an optimistic note.
01:01:27.000There is some hope in America, because But most Americans I sense still do actually respect somebody who's worked hard and made a success of their life.