Andrew Klavan | Can We Keep Silent in a World Gone Mad?

my name is Abbie leaving and I am a junior from Cincinnati Ohio studying history and journalism here at Hillsdale it is my pleasure to introduce the speaker for this evening Andrew Klavan is an author screenwriter and host of the podcast the Andrew Clavin show he is also a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute city journal for which he travelled as an embedded reporter with American troops in Afghanistan a five-time nominee and two-time winner of the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award and a recipient of the thumping good read award mr. Clavin has written for numerous publications including The Wall Street Journal the Washington Post and The New York Times he is an author of numerous novels including nightmare city the homeland er series the min the mind war trilogy don't say a word true crime which was made into a film by Clint Eastwood and most recently another Kingdom his non-fiction writings include a memoir of his religious journey the great good thing a secular Jew comes to faith in Christ and a book of satire the left use dictionary he has written a number of screenplays including a shock to the system which starred Michael Caine and Gosnell the trial of America's biggest serial killer starring Dean Cain I have had the privilege of learning from mr. Clavin this past week in his course titled covering the culture in which we have discussed topics such as the effects of art sex feminism and storytelling on today's culture he is a gifted and very wise teacher and it is an honor to have him here at Hillsdale please join me in welcoming mr. Andrew Clavin [Applause] thank you very much I really appreciate it I so appreciate being invited to your by Hillsdale and the Pulliam fellowship although as I was listening to Matt describe the characteristics of a podium fellow I almost snuck out of the room before you realize that I didn't fit the bill thank you to John Miller for inviting me as well and I have to say a special thank you to Scott Bertram who has kept my show on the air despite a series of unfortunate technical events that have belaboured us but he keeps patching me together and I somehow get on one of the questions oh no you know what I also want to thank Abby and all my students the students here are it's an amazing place I mean I don't have to tell you that everybody seems to know it's an amazing place the students have really given me this kind of wonderful illusion that Western civilization is not collapsing I plan to cling to that illusion until the moment I get back to Los Angeles I'm gonna one of the questions I'm most often asked is what's so damn funny why do I keep laughing and making jokes and writing these silly satires when it clearly the world is going to hell in a handbasket and we should all be very grim and this talk tonight is really my attempt to answer that question there's something about human corruption that has always struck me as comical this is not as my wife has reminded me more than once my most attractive personality trait and I can even see where there might be something a little disturbing about it to laugh at a politician who peddles his influence or a policeman who's on the payroll of the mob is the sort of behavior one expects to find only in Hell or Chicago and it's possible one day I'll end up in one of the other but in my defense corruption almost always contains an element of the absurd it is as if the human mind transforms itself into the age-old parody of a dishonest philosopher who makes the worst the worse appear the better cause wherever human corruption occurs there always seems to have been a moment when the perpetrator decided that wreaking havoc on his neighbor or his country or his own soul or all three was really a pretty fine idea Edgar Allen Poe called this preposterous human tendency toward mayhem the IMP of the perverse as an example consider the recent scandal in which more than 30 wealthy elites were indicted for bribing lying and cheating to win their children acceptance into top-notch universities they had their perfectly healthy offspring diagnosed with learning disabilities so they could gain the entry exams they photoshopped their kids faces onto the bodies of athletes and then paid off college athletic directors to recommend them for acceptance the ancient rationale for the existence of an aristocracy was that the privileged classes freed from the necessity of labour and trade had the leisure to refine their moral and aesthetic senses and yet these members of our American aristocracy who should have moral sense coming out of their ears instead must have thoughts of themselves here's a fine idea I will model for my children the art of clownish dishonesty I will train them to wallow in the personal degradation of mindless ambition and humiliating deception I will ensure that their academic achievements will be devoid of pride their reputations will be based on lies and their consciousness will be blackened with shame or depraved with rationalization and this will make me a good parent it shouldn't strike me as funny but it does because it is in fact it's the oldest joke in the world it's the joke about the guy in a tuxedo who falls in a mud puddle or the snooty society Diane who gets a custard pie smack and the kisser it's funny because they're supposed to be one thing a high and admirable thing and instead to our surprise they become another thing low and ridiculous and when I say that's the oldest joke in the world I'm not exaggerating even a little because it's the joke of the human condition itself you may have heard the one about the man and woman in the garden of paradise everything perfect nothing to do but make love to one another and walk with God only one rule only one and yet somewhere along the line the IMP of the perverse whispered in their ears the worse appear the better cause and the thought occurred to them here's a fine idea they we were created to be one thing a high and admirable thing and instead to our surprise we are another low and ridiculous what makes us uncomfortable about laughing at this is the extent of the catastrophe there is an echo of the fall of man in every act of evil once corruption turns to violence and it very often does all the comedy goes out of it and yet the absurdity remains whether it's a lone gunman who slaughters people at their prayers or an entire civilization that emulates itself in mass murder and world war there's always a moment when someone indeed maybe everyone thinks to himself this is a fine idea to do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good or else that it's a well-considered act in for MIDI with natural law so wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago his Magisterial description of Soviet Communism terrors and tortures and prisons Sultan dissing was taking issue with the Shakespearean notion of evildoers who know themselves for the bad guys they are Richard the third for instance who declared he was determined to prove a villain or Aaron the more who wanted to have his soul black like his face Sultanate sin notes that Shakespeare's self-aware villains are amateurs at the art of murder they stopped short at a dozen corpses he said because they had no ideology ideology he writes that is what gives evildoing its long sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination that is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others eyes I believe even by his own logic Sultanate skun is only half right or at least only States half the case and he sells my old friend Shakespeare short he's right about this an ideology a bad idea G is the vehicle by which the fine idea of corruption can spread over an entire society like a fog in the impenetrable murk of a bad idea G the corruption becomes all but invisible until even the best and the brightest can engage in the most appalling behavior completely unawares take for example the case of George Washington how else but in the fog of a bad idea G could so great and virtuous a champion of Liberty not only hold Shadle slaves but find their desire for freedom incomprehensible here was the man who with a victorious army at his command and the support of the people at his back refused a continental Kingdom for love of Liberty for love of Liberty he handed his sword and his commission over to the civilian authorities without one action for love of Liberty he gave Liberty itself a local habitation and a name the United States of America and yet writes his biographer Ron chernow Washington suffered from a conceptual blind spot about slavery tending to regard it as a fair economic exchange until time and experience gave the great man greater wisdom to the of his life Washington literally could not understand why his slaves wouldn't work his land as diligently as he would or why they would try to escape when he had treated them so well he of all men could not see that they acted for love of Liberty he was lost in the fog of the bad ideology of chattel slavery into which he'd been born the same phenomenon occurs today when otherwise true hearted and moral women commit abortion the child's individual and irreplaceable DNA proves the fetus is not their body and that therefore whether it lives or dies is not their choice our amazing new ability to see life within the womb reveals the baby's obvious humanity and capacity to suffer and yet in the fog of a bad idea even sophisticated educated ethically conscious women with the means to provide the child some path to certain survival feel justified in doing the thing they do when the fog of corruption is widespread and thick enough it's blinding effects appear in the smallest everyday actions not long ago I took a burs to and from a restaurant in LA in both cars the drivers a young man in one direction and a young woman in the other were playing rap music at full volume rather than ask them to turn it off I decided to take the opportunity to listen and by chance or Providence I heard the same song in both directions using the foul aspossible language the rapper referred to women and disgusting and dehumanizing terms and laughed and bragged about how he had abused and humiliated one woman through forced sex and violence it occurred to me as I rode along that these uber drivers were probably very nice young people maybe they remembered to call their mothers on Sunday maybe their friends could count on them in times of trouble and so on and yet not only that they seemed to feel no compunction about grooving to violent pornography while on the job they seemed to think the elderly gentleman in the backseat the customer who would determine the degrees of their star ratings and the size of their tips might also enjoy a bit of musical rape and human degradation or at least finding it no cause to complain until I arrived at my destinations I was fully immersed in an atmosphere of moral madness the existence of this atmosphere changes our sense individual responsibility despite the fact he participated in the evil of chattel slavery we honor George Washington is a great man and rightly so we may be appalled by the act of abortion but were shocked if even an anti-abortion Crusader suggests that the decent women who kill their unborn babies should be in prison and if I had dragged one of my uber drivers out from behind the wheel and given him or her a stern talking-to about what a decent song lyric sounds like I would have earned the description of me that appeared recently in the magazine Vanity Fair when they called me an old crank truer words to live in a state of moral madness is to live in a kind of ignorance ignorance in the Platonic Aristotelian sense is when Aristotle says every wicked person acts in ignorance of the things he ought to do and avoid in this widespread atmosphere of ethical insanity even those who dissent often can no longer fully experience the absurdity and horror of what's happening around them it wasn't villains or gangsters who called for the crucifixion of Christ it was the good people the religious leaders the guardians of morality and the decent ordinary men and women on the street you and me even those who had recognized Jesus as the Messiah days before at best stood by and watched as the wretched thing was done we have it on good authority that they knew not what they did but just how deep does this ignorance go how complete isn't the slave holder or the aborting mother where the youngster tapping his tones to toes to tunes of rape and savagery are they really wholly unaware that they are acting wrongly that they have at least temporarily lost their moral Minds to be sure a person can become so depraved his conscience dies but can everyone everywhere forever sin in blissful ignorance I don't believe they can that's not what the evidence suggests this is what I meant when I said that Sultanate sans statement is only half true by his own logic he says that to do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good but this implies that humans instinctively know there are such things as good and evil and have an inborn sense of what it takes to create a moral justification that transforms one into the other after all no one ever had to devise an ideology to justify kindness or charity or love this is the place where I should point out that science confirms to some degree that we're inherently moral beings experiments at the Yale infant cognition Center show that even six-month-old babies prefer helpful actions to hindering actions were born with a moral sense or at least developed one very early on but to be honest and as I'll explain later and not very impressed with these experiments it may be a sort of blasphemy to say this in the 21st century but I am virtually certain that Jesus Aristotle and Shakespeare had a more accurate and holistic mental image of humanity than our current psychologists so let's go back to Shakespeare assaults Anacin points out many of his villains don't take the trouble to convince themselves they're doing good they act in the words of st. Augustine with no inducement to evil but evil itself some like Aaron the moor and Iago are irredeemably beyond remorse but many of the bars most prolific murderers are brought low by a moral force that seems to come from both within them and without Richard the third may be determined to prove a villain but the ghosts of his victims returned to him on Bosworth Field and demand that he remember his atrocities despair and die Lady Macbeth prays to the spirits to fill her heart with the diarist cruelty but she then executes herself because she can't watch the visionary blood off her hands perhaps most profoundly Macbeth himself having slaughtered his way to the throne of Scotland comes to understand that in doing so he is stepped out of the meaning of life into a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing in other words some of Shakespeare's worst villains not only fall afoul of conscience but conscience is conceived of as an organ of perception that sees a moral reality that actually exists if only in the interplay between man's mind and the mysterious world as it is to put that more simply Shakespeare's villains feel guilty because they're guilty they know right from wrong because there is right and wrong and mankind's is created in such a way that we can tell the difference and we can't stop knowing even when our fallen humanity is moved to do evil I believe the evidence for the truth of shakespeare's vision is found not just on stage but everywhere around us again and again we see unmistakable signs that people who do evil even after convincing themselves that evil is good are tormented by the two-headed fury of conscience and moral reality even in a world gone mad where everyone around them is convinced that the worse is the better cause they know the truth and suffer from the knowledge look at the way they behave people who defend evil ideologies justify themselves with constant expectations of catastrophe as if we were in an endless state of war like emergency that required the suspension of moral order people who defend idle uh evil ideologies stifle dissent as if even a mention of their error will force them to face the truth of it and they reliably stumble from smaller sins into greater and greater atrocities as if they hope to escape to some level of complete depravity at which their wickedness will finally seem sanctified to them read the diaries of the American slaveholders they were obsessively afraid that their slaves would rise up and murder them in their beds the phrase murdered in our beds is almost a constant refrain from them does that suggest a quiet conscience or return to the Soviets and their gulags if they were fully convinced that the Communist Party was the source of all goodness why were they so desperate to crush any disagreement why did they see dissent everywhere even when there was none they imprisoned tortured and executed people not just for the slightest aberration from communist ideology but for the possibility that aberration might one day occur do men who are certain of their moral position behave that way or is it only those whose sense of virtue depends on a shared delusion so fragile that even the possibility of clarity will shatter it finally consider a vote in the American Senate just last February a bill that would have strengthened the penalties for denying care to babies born alive after an attempted abortion was scuttled by 44 senators who support abortion less than a quarter century after such supporters told us abortion should be safe legal and rare they're activists are encouraging women to shout there are abortions with pride and their lawmakers cast votes that deny protections to fully born babies if a baby fully born is not a human being with a right to life who the hell is but of course if you have taken a step down the road to evil you're forced to run farther and farther down that road lest you stop and turn and see yourself as you are whether they act with no inducement to evil but evil itself or justify their acts with ideology those who do wrong feel guilty because they are guilty and they act that way they see catastrophe looming everywhere they stifle dissent they escape from smaller sins into greater and greater atrocities they've distorted the moral universe and their own souls they are living in a world gone mad Christians believe that this madness is to some degree intrinsic to our situation that could almost serve as a definition of original sin if nothing else that theory acts as a corrective to nostalgia the temptation to believe that life was far better and more moral in the good old days recently I was discussing a platonic dialogue with my son Spencer a brilliant classical scholar trained at Yale in Oxford reflecting on the convulsions of outrage and dialectical savagery on social media I told Spencer I yearned for that more civilized world of ancient Athens where a great philosopher like Socrates could spend his days discussing ideas with his pals in the Agora after a brief embarrassed silence my son said quietly dad they killed Socrates so much for the good old days indeed before these times of rampant abortion and rap music there were days when people were set on by police dogs and lynch mobs for the crime of having brown skin there were Holocaust and slavery and war there always are the fog of insanity thins and gathers hangs offshore and comes rolling in but there is always moral madness somewhere and there is always someone who will call it justice still as the great philosopher Gandalf the wizard told Frodo we have to decide what to do with the time that has given us have to determine how to behave when our era when our corner of the world goes insane to reach as I have the age of Gandalf is to see them is to see the world as from a height you lose touch with life on the ground a little but you gain perspective I look around at the United States and I see a nation full of wonders longer life in better health than ever before running water everywhere plentiful and inexpensive food all information literature and art available at the touch of a pocket-sized phone most of the crises we face are crises of the imagination if when reading the news you edit out all the stories about the disasters some gloomy experts think might happen you'll be amazed at just how terrific things are here to paraphrase the immortal lyrics of Johnny Mercer in the only lousy song he ever wrote for Americans everything truly is tickety-boo I attribute this astounding liberation from humankind's long history of poverty plague and violence to three developments science capitalism and liberalism by which last I mean the commitment to self-government and individual human rights it's my personal theory that these three innovations spring from one idea the idea that all creation is made to work in freedom without intrusive overseers that's the thought that links Isaac Newton to Adam Smith to the American Founding Fathers science capitalism and liberalism all assumed that the proper machinery is in place and does not need to be micromanaged God does not need to tinker with the Stars he made them to do the starry stuff they do governments don't need to control the economy if we trade with each other under a few reasonable rules of fairness our ambition and creativity will cause everyone to rise and thrive and individuals don't require monarchs to dictate their actions thoughts and speech we've been given the moral wherewithal to run our own homes communities and countries ourselves in this three and one Trinity of ideas we have become uniquely blessed but in defense of those blessings it's worthwhile to note the patches of fog of bad ideology that seemed to be gathering in the intellectual centers where the culture of the future is often made to remind you the three symptoms I look for are inordinate fear of catastrophe the silencing of dissent and the steady progress from moral error to atrocity I find these symptoms beginning to appear to various degrees of severity in elite thinking about the economy race and sex in the realm of the economy capitalism and improved property rights have cut extreme poverty in half worldwide over the last 30 years and in America the poor now live at the level of the middle class of the 1980s yet a presidential candidate who praised the mass murdering communists of Cuba and unapologetically honeymooned in the slave state of the Soviet Union preaches socialism to a nodding press and cheering crowds of young people in the matter of race relations surely there is one and only one correct approach to love your neighbor who's made in God's image and to judge each person by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin yet after my father's generation fought to end the wickedness of segregation and Jim Crow I see my children's generation attending universities with segregated dorms where they have taught the viciously racist philosophy of intersectionality as if it were the cure to bigotry rather than a new strain of the old disease as for human sexuality is always a disordered business where the most urgent desires of our material bodies and the deepest longings of our fallen souls can join but that there is such a thing as human sexuality that it is centered on the differences between the two sexes male and female that those differences are written into our very cells and are among the chief joys and consolations of experience and indeed are the very archetype and inspiration of all earthly love and creation these are human universals known from the jungle up and essential to the formation of every single science aasaiya tea that has ever existed on earth the idea that these yin-yang bedrock facts of life are merely cultural constructs and can therefore be completely erased by wishing very hard and dressing in one another's clothes is simple lunacy in each of these cases I see exaggerated fear of catastrophe in the form of climate panic overblown anxiety about fascism and white supremacism and the anguished hysterical cowering from debate in so called safe spaces I see the silencing of dissent where voices of fact and logic science and experience are punished in the workplace edited out of search engines de platformed from social media and barred from campus or met with heckling and violence and I see the progress from error toward atrocity from government interference and cronyism in the economy to the certain economic ruin of socialism from supposedly corrective racial preferences to resurrected segregation and the bigotry of intersectionality and from the disparagement of femininity and motherhood to infanticide and the sexual butchery of children in the name of gender reassignment like the good ideas that have brought us so far these bad ideas to my mind are all one idea it is the idea that man is matter and that therefore the moral world can only be a fictional creation of his brain which can be changed by changing the stories he's told and is allowed to tell I mentioned earlier that I don't entirely trust the modern psychological studies of human morality detailed in books by psychologists like Jonathan Haight Paul bloom and Steven Pinker the reason is this they're based on the idea that human morality is entirely a creation of evolution and nothing more consider the logic that of that for a minute surely the human sense of sight evolved to see light because in reality there is a phenomenon that can be seen as light the sense of hearing evolved because in reality there are such phenomena that can be apprehended as sound likewise the human sense of morality evolved does it then follow that morality is entirely our creation entirely subject to our changing opinions our light and sound our creations no now the human experience of things that are there so it is with morality conscience is our human sense of a truth about the universe the psychologists should have read their Shakespeare let me finish up with an example of how this faulty logic can lead into bad feed into bad ideology in studies of evolved morality psychologists tell their subjects little stories and ask them to make moral judgments about them in one of these stories a loving brother and sister commit an act of incest they have sex they're careful the sister doesn't get doesn't get pregnant they never repeat the act and their relationship continues as before people hear this story and instinctively sense that incest is wrong but they can't explain why it's wrong in this particular case from this some psychologists conclude that the incest taboo is an outmoded evolutionary remnant from the days when the resulting dangerous pregnancies could not be prevented but the story itself is based on the false premise that human beings are mere physical objects that the spiritual relationship between brother and sister has no real being no inherent nature and that therefore brother and sister can have sex without violating the core truth of that relationship in fact in the story they have sex without changing their relationship at all which has never happened to anyone ever no matter who they were since the world began what the psychologists have really discovered is that the human moral sense evolved to perceive reality not stupid stories that falsely describe reality in fact the subjects instinctively understand the moral universe better than the clever shrinks who wrote the stories if you've ever wondered why intellectuals seem so incredibly stupid sometimes that's why now carry this logic over to a more pressing issue like abortion the moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson wrote a famous paper called the defense of abortion which includes this now very popular argument Thompson describes a situation in which you wake up and find yourself next to a famous violinist the violinist has a fatal kidney condition and your kidneys are now hooked up to his to keep him alive in nine months the violinist will recover and then you'll be free Thompson argues that you have the right to unhook yourself from the violinist because he should not be allowed to force you to use your body for his survival therefore you have the right to have an abortion on the same grounds now Thompson is a famous moral philosopher and I'm just a barefoot of tales but that's nuts for one thing it sounds like Thompson missed the day and health class when they explained that you don't just wake up one day and find yourself pregnant that's not how that works but more importantly she conceives of a world in which there's no such thing as motherhood in which it's not a unique spiritual relationship with a unique set of moral responsibilities she conceives of the womb is something like a dialysis machine rather than as a material part of a whole human who exists in a moral universe with which her humanity is interwoven and to which it is bound the same materialist illogic applies to socialism which seeks to solve all human ills with money and thus Rob's the individual of his work his ambition and his charity of which money is only a symbol the same illogic applies to intersectionality which ignores the individual's wisdom accomplishments and abilities in order to apportion privileges according to the same racialist principles held by bigots and the same logic applies to the attempts to override the yin-yang complementarity of women and men in the name of equality as if by changing a pronoun or even reshaping a body you could change the nature of the human person that pronoun or body only represents the battle for a better world is ultimately not a battle against individuals but against bad ideas like these that Express the absurdly fallen human heart and the IMP of the perverse we don't have to tear down George Washington's statue statue to condemn chattel slavery we don't have to imprison women to renounce the killing of babies we don't have to defend immoral capitalists to defend capitalism itself we wrestle not against flesh and blood says st. Paul but against principalities against powers against the rulers of the darkness of this world against spiritual wickedness in high places we are in a war of ideas in which we must defend the idea of the human soul and the moral world in which it has its being and its rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness we need to mount this defense with logic with science with patience with you and with courage we need to do it yes even if they ban us from Twitter and Facebook we need to do it even when they riot on campus at our speeches we need to do it even if our professor marks us down and our boss sends us to HR and our sponsor drops our show and god prevent it should ever come to this but if it lasts the truth itself is outlawed than outlaws we must become outlaws like Socrates and Jesus and the believers who face the Roman lions and the Patriots who face the British guns I don't mean to be melodramatic but we have to at least embrace the principle that telling the truth about the human condition is worth great sacrifice so we'll be ready to face the lesser sacrifices that even here even now the truth sometimes demands we have to be ready to make those sacrifices for truth because the wages of Lies are corruption slavery and death this country has been so free so safe so powerful so long that it's easy to forget how quickly freedom can be lost in the fog of bad ideas wandering in that fog the world goes mad and in a world gone mad we cannot be silent thank you thank you very much Thank You mr. Clavin we now have time for a few questions please raise your hand and wait for a microphone to be brought to you thank you sir Oh what would you have us do what would you what I have you do well I think everywhere everywhere speech is under threat you have to speak up and fight back I mean that's that is the main thing and everybody has the power to do that because everybody has the power to speak you have the power to speak at dinner tables you have the power to speak in your public squares we have the power to speak everywhere and if you look around it is intolerable I mean this is this is the first wave of the way you lose a country it's intolerable how people suffer for the things they say that are true for the things they say that they shouldn't have said even for gaffes they make an anger it is absolutely absurd that people should lose their jobs over comments they made 10 years ago or or unfortunate lapses even of politeness and so what I would have everybody do I mean every one of us carries a piece of the culture in our hands you know the culture doesn't just belong to Hollywood it doesn't just belong to the news business or the Academy it belongs to everybody so the way you treat each other is the way you treat people and it's what you're ready to say and I just believe that with ultimate politeness with ultimate kindness with ultimate compassion for people who are truly suffering you should speak the truth hi thank you so much for coming so my question is do you think that Young Conservatives better serve society by going to big liberal universities and speaking out about our values to our peers or by coming to conservative or religious schools and focusing on receiving a good education you know I think I think that since no it's it's a great question because I mean we have this question that the Hollywood version of this question is do I pretend to be something I'm not so I can worm my way into Hollywood or do I speak out boldly and get blacklisted you know I mean it's the same thing do you go where into enemy territory or do you stay among friends but in the in this case of this particular question you're talking about a time of preparation you're talking about a time before your your career begins and to have the education that you have in a place like this to know why you think the things you think is just invaluable I around I speak to colleges a lot and I'm just shocked I mean I've considered almost a form of child abuse I'm just shocked at how young people have been stripped of their of their of the basic knowledge of why we do the things we do you know it's not like you can't have revolution and change and evolution it's that you ought to know you know the the patterns of your traditions and why they're there before moving on to the next stage I would I would I wish I mean I went to the University of California at Berkeley so I know what I'm talking about I wish I had come to a place like this I wish I had come out knowing why I thought the things I thought and I did I didn't have to build the wheel from the ground up you know that's my my dancer you know my wife tells me that it's my mission in life to alienate every single human being alive and that's why I hope some I've added some of you too [Laughter] thank you so much for coming my question is how do we start a dialogue and a conversation in defense of truth when we don't have a shared vocabulary in other words you know in your speech you reference for example Shakespeare's Richard the third platonic dialogues Socrates and thankfully we're at a place where most of us understand those references but when we have a culture that's lost sight of the Western tradition how do we begin to defend ideas of Liberty that are inherently based on that tradition right it's you it's not just a shared vocabulary shared premises sometimes I think a lot of the arguments that are taking place in America today is because we don't even share basic premises you know one of the kind of tricks that they have that the right has that I don't particularly like is when they send us out to speak what they really want is they want us to say something that gets the left upset and then some lefty student will yell at you and you'll put him down and then they'll put you on YouTube with that thing that says Andrew Clavin destroys a left is always pleasant big capital letters and I'm a terrible failure at doing this because first of all I actually like people and I have a hard time destroying anybody and I think what but the funny thing is is I don't get yelled at a lot I mean I say the things that I you've just heard me say in places where if you say them they will beat you to death and nobody does and the reason is I try to start with a premise that we can all get behind so I frequently start by saying all I want is for you to be free I don't care what you do I don't care if you take drugs I don't care who you sleep with that's none of my business I'm older and wiser than you so I can tell you that some of the things you do we're going to ruin your life but still they're not going to ruin my life so you know be be at peace starting with that premise there is nobody beneath the age of 20 you're in that age who doesn't want to be free they all want to be free and so they stop and they start to listen and then I can explain why from the ground up the founding fathers thought this is the best way to make you free and and then you suddenly have a shared premise to talk with and that really works for me I have been heckled a couple of times but I've never been attacked and I've never nobody swung at me or anything like that and so I think that that's what you have to do you have to find the place the basic place where you agree and then start to build up your argument from there [Laughter] okay my question is your uber rides if you sat through it you condone it if you hear young people using the type of language that you can hear and you find it offensive I believe we as seasoned citizens have the right to say to them you are disturbing me what would you remark be I think I completely agree with you the only thing about it is as I almost always I don't like to listen to music and uber so I almost always get in and say could you turn that off but I thought this was an educational experience because I don't listen to rap music and I hear people grouse about it but I wanted to hear what was in it and I thought it was worth doing I you can bet I'll say something next time but I didn't want to speak in ignorance so I didn't want to just go off I went home and looked up the lyrics to make sure I was hearing the right thing you know you know and I and I think that to just go off to just go off on people is ineffective I guess is what I would say to you that I want next time I'll know what I want to say and I'll do it but I thought this time I was a learning experience for me it took me it yeah it took me two times to actually believe I was hearing what I heard and then and then as I said I I thought to myself that I'm just an old you know I gotta look it up and I looked it up and I thought no that's actually what he was saying you know and and it was it was really it took me a while I have to think about it I have to think it through you know I thought like these were obviously nice kids they were making a living probably in Hollywood every driver is trying to be an actor you know and and I thought you know pumping something that like that into your brain I mean you might as well just have a nail then you're shoving it nail in your ear it's a terrible thing to do to yourself you know but it I'm a slow thinker and it took me a while to kind of meditate on it and work with my way through it and I you know I basically agree with you though you know I would not sit and listen to that again so long walk shoulda brought a horse yeah you need your tennis shoes rather than the heel sweetie I was when to ask thank you for a fabulous presentation I wanted to ask you about Jordan Peterson who seems to be catching young catching fire with a lot of younger people who were brought up in in the leftist a khadeem and are thirsty for truth and he's defending Western civilization now he's doing it from a more humanist perspective from what I understand but I just wanted to get your opinion on what he's been saying and so yeah well III like I like him I like Jordan and I read his book and thought it had a lot of smart wise advice in it Michael Knowles and I might my colleague at the Daily wire we have a cruel sport that we play with them whenever we see Jordan we ask him write up if he believes in God and I it's like shooting at a man's feet to watch him dance you know it and the problem he has which I really respect of all I respect anybody I'd rather hear somebody honestly tell me what he thinks but you know he goes into these the last time I asked him seriously he ended up talking about thathe many I Diamond and I was like you know I'm sorry it's hilarious but but anyway the thing is Jordan Jordan is a union and and young believe that we don't know whether God is an outward manifestation or whether he is simply what happens when the human consciousness connects with everything so basically his God is kind of a metaphor and I think it's a weak link in Jordan's thinking and whenever he's asked about it he refuses to answer and he says I don't want to be pinned down I don't want to be put in a binary box where I have to say yes or no and I disagree with that I think that every truth is a binary box if the earth is round it's not flat you know if there's a god then there is not not a god you know and I think it I think it is a flaw in his thinking and I think he sometimes covers it up with verbiage however however he gives good advice I know many people who have been led to God by listening to Jordan and I think he's doing the good work you know that we all do he's not responsible to me for what he believes that's just my my personal take on it you know but basically I think he's doing good work you know thank you for your comments tonight um in your podcast you've talked about you think a great spiritual or religious awakening may be coming and I wanted to see if you could elaborate on that and also talk about how that that might happen when the numbers of religious people in this country seem to be going down yeah especially among young people you know now nuns know religion seems to be increasing a lot you know first of all I think that that's true well we're losing our religion I consider that I'm optimistic about this and I'll explain why in a minute I considered it a calling of the herd I think the people who are not were falling away are not people they're not believers they're practicers they're people who maybe their parents told them to go nobody ever explained to him I mean I I left I became an agnostic and then an atheist because you know my parents sent me to Hebrew school but they didn't believe in God and I thought listen make any sense you know this makes absolutely no sense at all I think a lot of kids are growing up in that environment I am a great believer that ideas collapse when they make no sense that they follow that people will hold on to ideas as they play themselves out to their furthest extent and then they'll say oh that makes no sense the principles of the last 40 years or so which have been called post-modernism or deconstructionism are the idea that there is no essential truth that everything is relative to your perception that man's mind everything takes place in man's but that doesn't make any sense I mean you know I won't go on forever about it but it's simply an idea you know whenever somebody tells me there's no truth I always asked was that true and and I think and I think that kids are I know this I know this because I hang out with sometimes you know my son goes to very elite universities I know some of these kids and and they're starting to say this doesn't make any sense it just doesn't hold water and they're starting to meet together and talk about the Gospels they're trying to reinvent the Gospels for a new age which I don't think is a bad thing some people you know I don't think the Gospels were meant to freeze us into first century morality that's not the way they read to me at all but I do think they're meant to freeze us into a moral world that is not up to us and not responsible to us and I see it happening alright young people you know I live in LA there's a church there for young people where they play rock music and all this stuff I've attended it several times when you walk toward it I mean there are people pouring in it's held in this huge auditorium it is packed and everybody there I mean I'm older than like three people put together there you know I mean it is it is a young young crowd it's happening now and the way I expect it to happen is I expect it to happen at the intellectual level many of our revivals in this country have happened at the street level they've happened in tents they've happened on street corners I think what's going to happen now is the thinkers are going to say you know I cannot make sense of this anymore I'm going to go a different way and I think a generation is coming up where that's going to happen at the Academy level and once it happens at the Academy level the atheists are done because you cannot win that argument you simply cannot win the argument I mean I don't mean to be rude to anyone who's not a believer I'm just telling you like it does I I was an atheist and an agnostic for most of my life I was baptized at the age of 49 I have been down every wrong road as it's possible to go down and it's only it's only logic that led me where I was to where I finally ended up it's only reason that did it you know as I always say Jesus didn't reach down into the gutter and pull me up when I was lying there drunk not that I can remember but but it was simple it was simple logic and I do believe I really do have faith that at some point bad ideas collapse and they either collapsed as they don't work or they collapse because somebody says you know a doesn't equal a anymore and I think that that's what's happened I think we are moving away from post-modernism at the level of these young people here and at the level of young people in in all kinds of at all kinds of levels of of universities we'll see you know yeah and ER I just wanted to ask you about the time you spent with the military as an embedded reporter I'm currently serving and the national guard I'm from Indiana and I wondered what you thought about and I don't I don't know what your exposure to the UCMJ and speaking against the secular culture in the military and the repercussions potentially for that are and maybe how to speak truth in that environment maybe some tips for somebody in that yeah I mean when I was there I went to a chapel there were two guys there you know so I I was I was pretty surprised I didn't know the cultures of the people I was with obviously and I'm not sure maybe many of them believe but just didn't like going to that particular Chapel or whatever you know the the people the reason I went to Afghanistan was because I was working in the movie business and I was writing screenplays and Hollywood started to make these movies against the war wars on terror and I felt I didn't feel it was wrong to oppose the war if that was your opinion that was fine but I felt it was very wrong to make movies propaganda instruments against the war while our soldiers were in harm's way that didn't happen in Vietnam that you know didn't happen in World War two the first time that ever happened where they were making gigantic propaganda tools for the enemy while our guys were in the field and so I started to write about that this is how I entered my Hollywood career I started to write about that and and I wanted to write with some authority so I managed to wangle my way into an embed for a few days in in Afghanistan and I found the soldiers incredibly decent human beings I mean I found that it to be a culture of true courage and self what's the word I'm looking for you know that they were they didn't take themselves seriously but they took their work seriously and they were really quite magnificent people I found what they believed in terms of spirituality I just don't know and what I'm not really clear to be honest with you what the policy of the military is are they shutting people up are they forcing people not to to speak faith and to worship I mean I hear that on right-wing venues all the time but I find it hard to believe you know I don't think I can hear you without the mic I'm sorry all right so as far as military policy and such there are mandated classes such as the sharp program which is a more or less a forced program to tell people not to rate people I suppose and it's it's really just a lot of secular humanist feminist propaganda more or less and a lot of finger wagging and down speaking to military members assuming that people are just essentially cattle in a sense and it's it's very frightening when you see things happen to people that kind of stand up to that culture more or less just disappear and it I blanking on the name of the guy at the moment I had drilled us last weekend worked about 55 hours in three days and have just been going nonstop but I can't get out of fights I work in claims in the insurance dealing with angry contractors and things of that nature but sorry I'm going off on a tangent there anyways the the culture in the military is just one that is in my opinion secular humanist experiment and it is a forced culture that forces you to embrace that culture and kowtow to it and so yeah speaking truth there is is rather difficult and I wondered if you had any tips on that well yeah I mean I get this question all the time the question is always how do I speak truth to my professor how do I speak and really that's only half the question the question is really how do I speak truth to my professor without suffering the consequences and the fact is you can't I mean we are under we're under fire from the left they their ideas don't make sense and so their only thing they can do is silence us that's the that's the only weapon they have knock us off Twitter call us fascists call you know they I mean you know I work with ben shapiro they call him a nazi you know i keep saying you know you oughta wear the yarmulke with the swastika on it you know you know i mean they'll do they'll do anything anything to silence us and that means you got to pay the price I mean I paid the price of my Hollywood career that that's that's millions of dollars and I never lost a night's sleep over it because other people were getting shot and I thought it was worth saying what I had to say I don't I tell this the young people all the time everything cost something and there's no shame in counting the cost but there is a shame and selling something priceless because you're afraid you know that that's that is a shame it's a shame to lose your ability to speak the truth because you're afraid you're gonna take a hit you know I think that you pick your battles you choose what you're willing to pay but you cannot surrender this you can't because they really want the whole culture I mean it is just amazing they don't want anybody working making movies who disagrees with them they don't want anybody writing books who disagrees with them I I got my latest book another Kingdom I'll tell you I wrote books for young adults for a Christian publisher and I told them I'm not going to preach to anybody but what I'll do is I'll make that you Khristian I'll make the hero you know that's it he'll just be a Christian and he'll do what Christians do and it'll be the hero and that's the only you know preaching that'll be involved and so I wrote these books they were sold very well in America called the homeland er series and I got a big sale for them in England and after a while they appeared on my the manuscript appeared on my desk and it was edited and that doesn't happen usually the foreign people don't edit your manuscript so I said I called up my agent I said what's this and they said well they want you to cut out all the references to the Bible no kidding I mean in there and there was nothing you know there was just stuff like instead of saying you know I know not to steal he would say well I know the Ten Commandments I know not to steal it wasn't like you know again it wasn't preaching it was just he was living in that biblical world and I said you know they wouldn't say that to a Muslim they probably wouldn't say it to a Jew you know I'm not gonna do it five times they came back to me with a manuscript five different times and they told me if you do not do this the biggest bookstore in England water stones will not carry the book and I wouldn't do it and they did not carry the book they cut their order in half you know the book never did well in England that's bad you know I gots a big hit but what was what it was really the alternative I mean really what was the alternative I'll cut stuff out of a book if it's gonna offend a certain audience you know I'm not against that but how could you possibly and nobody could understand why I kept saying over and over again you can't ask me to do this you know and they thought I was nuts that's the world we're going to be living in soon that's in England where things are much further advanced than they are here but that'll happen here too you know books have lost contracts because they said something about Islam or about Mohammed that Islamists didn't like you know I think that if we're not willing to take some hits that's what it they win that's all there is do it if we're if we are not willing to pay some price for the truth they win we have time for one more question mr. Clavin thank you for speaking this evening I'd like you to clarify by one point specifically what is the angle of these conversations to have with people of opposite views obviously people generally don't change their views after one conversation so what should be the end goal of them well you know I think that the end goal is first of all to convince them I mean one of the the biggest you know I was a liberal I grew up in a liberal family either one you know one thing liberals know is they don't know much but they know that conservatives are bad people and you know that's why you know my father thought every Republican was in Nazi you know he did you know he thought he thought of a Republican was elected dog catcher like we were one step away from the gas chambers you know that was like you know that was his that was his feeling about Republicans and conservatives and what happened to me is that the Berlin Wall came down and I thought that evil Reagan that idiot that war monger that fool that movie actor was right about everything how did that happen you know so I started to look I started to approach right-wing ideas and I thought well right away the one thing I can see is they're not Nazis you know so let's find out a little more so if you only get that far if you only get that far that's a big victory once they understand that no you know you you want them to be free you're not trying to hurt anybody you don't hate people with different colors skin which is absurd you know has never been a conservative principle that I didn't know in America you know you've made a big dent that's a big thing to do because it starts them thinking and means that they can start to listen and then who knows how long it'll take you know I I was very pro-abortion to my youth got in a all might argument with a very dear friend of mine probably my oldest friend devout Catholic and I went to bed that night and I thought I lost that argument I lost that argument it took me 20 years to change my mind but it haunted me man because I don't lose arguments you know so I thought like if I lost that argument there's got to be a reason and I looked for reasons and couldn't find one I thought maybe I was wrong you know I know it happened once before it was so so so you know these your plant seeds you know and I certainly the the see that you're not evil you're not racist you're not a Nazi all that stuff that they fill their heads with so they won't listen to you is really important I think that just that it's a victory yeah thank you thanks very much [Applause]

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 538,133

Rating: 4.6852903 out of 5

Keywords: hillsdale, college, andrew klavan, daily wire, mystery, novels, movies, politics, lecture, puliam fellow, journalism

Id: kMcmpd9R4QM

Length: 60min 0sec (3600 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/taboo__time]

"I don't entirely trust the modern psychological studies of human morality detailed in books by psychologists like Jonathan Haidt, Paul Bloom and Steven Pinker the reason is this they're based on the idea that human morality is entirely a creation of evolution and nothing more consider the logic that of that for a minute surely the human sense of sight evolved to see light because in reality there is a phenomenon that can be seen as light the sense of hearing evolved because in reality there are such phenomena that can be apprehended as sound likewise the human sense of morality evolved does it then follow that morality is entirely our creation entirely subject to our changing opinions our light and sound our creations no now the human experience of things that are there so it is with morality conscience is our human sense of a truth about the universe the psychologists should have read their Shakespeare."

I think morality is a natural phenomena bestowed to humans by evolution.

His arguments against that are unconvincing. He wants to pull the "god card."