Conversations: Featuring Peter Hitchens I

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so Peter thank you very much for giving us some time can I begin by saying that in my country and I think it's probably pretty much the same right across the West now the research and the data shows what the the sort of seat-of-the-pants assessment will tell you people are very distrustful of the system politics the institutions of our society the church and they're badly fractured as well they're fragmenting into groups that seem very hostile to each other how has it come to this but it's come to this because ultimately things have an effect long after they've happened when I was a small child I lived near the Great Sea ports of Portsmouth and Southampton and would go down to the beach and watch the great ocean liners which still then went backwards and forwards across the Atlantic and there's game you could play you could watch say the Queen Elizabeth enormous ship passed by about two miles out and you then wait for the bow wave to come sometimes you wait so long he's forgotten it was coming and that would you turn your back on it will whack you in the back so hard it would knock you over there was a huge distance in time between the event and its effect and I think we see now the effect of the collapse of particularly of European Christianity which I think began and then followed on from the first world war where the church is made the grave mistake of supporting a war which turned out quite patently not to be a Christian act or to be the great wharf civilization that is being portrayed as being and so associated themselves with wickedness on such a scale that they could never really recover their moral authority and it began to drain away from them from that point but of course people continue to acts you don't suddenly get an audible click and people suddenly stop behaving in a Christian fashion because the churches to collapse in the cultural Christianity the general understanding of Christian rules the general knowledge of the Scriptures the seminal and persisted in the population and still persists people of a certain age but has pretty much vanished I was reading the other day that our thanks to various films and children's fiction many English children now know the Greek myths far better than they know the Gospels they simply are not taught the Gospels for instance or not they don't know the parables which have been a huge influence on my life I know them you can't expect this kind of cultural earthquake to happen and for it not tell in effect the amazing thing is that it's taken so long but the wave has finally struck the beach and people are seeing it under the to great consequences the two great material consequences of Christianity for the societies in which has been proven our trust on which almost all serious activities must be based and the rule of law over power how can anyone accept that laws should be more should be more authoritative than temporal power unless they believe that it has some sort of divine origin and once that goes it goes so these things are departing from among us while we continue to live and highly-advanced physically and technically advanced as well civilizations where those advances are also to be based on trust in the rule of law in the end as they depart those societies will cease to operate as they as they're done and I think it is an electable process which we're lucky only to be seen the beginning of so to draw something out of that when trust breaks down in a democracy people flee for security they well democracy is another question and I I'm not really a Democrat I don't think that the universal suffrage democracy has been a success I'm I believe that Lucy under the laws there's a great possession of the the Anglosphere countries and that universal suffrage democracy is tended to be inimical to indeed it is inimical to freedom as well as we've recently seen in Turkey where universal suffrage democracy has been used to destroy the rule of law to destroy freedom of speech the thought and assembly freedom of the press and to create a very dangerous autocracy there's another example of that but under Godwin's law I can almost never mention the Nazis but there is that have it's not the only example where where democracy is destroyed freedom but I don't I don't rely particularly on democracy as a defense and the things that I love it's the thing you just had to put up with I think the point I was saying seeking to draw out though is that given that you have a democracy if people become if you like afraid they flee for security if they think people and institutions are not going to do what they ought to do voluntarily they flee for the rule book and that starts to erode freedom was they also do is they flee towards populist and the Trump phenomena love this and so said there are many many reasons for the Trump flow in some ways he behaves much as the left do which is why they don't like him and in terms of semi-literate intolerance and opponents both the politics and in cells and all the rest of it but the other thing is because the social liberals in Western societies for many many years imagine their opponents were all like Donald Trump and so they ignore them and paid no attention to them eventually they've got a real Donald Trump and now they're angry but at the if they listen to people like me twenty years ago then they would never have got people that don't run they do but populism is is a grave danger I mean we have the structures of universal suffrage democracy and out of it all kinds of monsters can be more and I fear the consequences of it especially if we get as I think your country has different you can like problems from mine but if we get the economic crisis which seems to me can't be indefinitely postponed given the level of particularly a personal debt that we have in this country then then the structures go then I think the tenancy saw was some kind of pretty savage populism will be strong it's hard to avoid that conclusion I think actually and they will be another recession they're always II use most Western countries have used the remaining shots in their lockers they won't the other and we're out this game we know that that were the same things are being done as were being done before the 2008 crash and with knobs on and I remember some years ago quite a clever but failed film called contagion and I sought an airplane because it probably the cinema is about two minutes before it failed which was about a sort of swine flu outbreak of bird flu outbreak suddenly spreading throughout the civilized countries and I think the reason it failed was because it was such a believable portrayal of what happens to an advanced country when there is a general breakdown of authority and where things cease to exist and if you get a situation which I very much fear where money dies then things of that kind might happen I'm genuinely worried about then about the near future I don't think it's good and particularly from my own country where we have especially strong problems one a ridiculous over estimate of our own importance and wealth and our own abilities trade and secondly a tremendous inbuilt economic crisis based upon an unsustainable day so given the nature of these intractable problems and given that the evidence is quite overwhelming that they are real they're not imaginary they're not going to go away why is it then that we're unable to pull together enough for long enough to have a reasoned debate about any of this at some point I'm an expose and this does two things for me one it means that I have a lot to be guilty about and secondly it gives me insights into the politics of the nature of the modern left which most people don't have I one of the things that I did when I was still a revolutionary socialist was who was trying to prevent people from exercising freedom and came naturally to me we came naturally assuming because I believe that what I thought and desired was so good that anybody who disagreed with me must by their nature be evil and be deserving of being silence and this is the problem the the general left-wing belief which is held by the elites of most Western countries now is is also belief in their invert to you and if you believe very strongly you are in virtue and your virtue is based it's an it's also caricature of justification by faith alone you are a good person because you hold certain opinions therefore if you hold other opinions you're a bad person and I think that makes dialogue pretty much impossible if you think your opponent is bad I'll just wrong but bad why should you listen to word he says well they don't well why is it then that we can't learn the lessons of history it's not as if it's so very you lived in Soviet Russia for a long time you saw the outcomes of that sort of the latest mayhew that the left have learned the lessons of history it's to this extent they understand that the Bolshevik attempt failed that the Soviet experiment was a disaster that doesn't there hasn't cured them wanting to create paradise on earth they've just thought how should we do it another way which is how we come to Antonia Graham's feet one of the first and most intelligent communists to understand that the Soviet experiment failed as long ago as the 1920s he realized that the the civilized working classes of Western Europe would never go too small at this sort of thing that the had should be a huge cultural revolution before they ever would and his ideas took root particularly in the big southern European communist parties his own in Italy in the final years of the Soviet empire and began to spread out beyond the communist parties themselves into the left in general the ideas of cultural moral and social revolution not by violent overthrow not through dictator from the proletariat not through not even through seizure or sequestration of industries and banks but through the the capture by the long march to the institutions of the television studio and the versity in the newspaper office in the publishing house in the school so that after 30 or 40 years of that you would control pretty much the public mind and you would be able to get pretty much what you wanted and it it's clever and you have to you have to concede to these people some admiration for their endless determination their deep belief in what they want and they're the subtle and and in my case is a very clever organization to achieve it it's been very very well exercised revolution and they have learned from history what the one thing they haven't learned which I wish they would learn is that they're wrong but they have learnt how to be wrong better and that is why we have to fear them so much so two questions immediately arise for me given that the great bulk of people are surprisingly sensible when it comes to not being misled by and potentia I would completely disagree with that I think the great bother that people are incredibly easily misled I find it over and over again people I like people with who might rights me one we can say I really like what you wrote the next week will be sprouting some drivel about about the Russian Menace or whatever fashionable nonsense happens to been fed to them by the media that they trust it's extraordinary how gullible people are I find that a very challenging thought as as somebody in from a country where we pride ourselves on our pragmatism and our ability to see through bulldust we think we do now you've been one of the great things about thinking that youth see through it is that people who think that and who pride themselves are often the most fantastic legal people well it's an interesting take some nerve not to run with the crowd I mean I'm not given particularly to self praise I know my faults better than most people then thanks to an awful lot of YouTube I also know what I looked like I know that Verity is difficult to madness one thing I will say is that I have maybe it's an instinct I've had since childhood probably a gift not given to me not a thing that I can claim any credit for but I will not with crowds but most people will and they do and they're happier that way now as that point Jordan Peterson makes to his classes in Canada they know he points out to people it's statistically speaking they they they might say that they would not have joined the Hitler Youth but statistically they would have yeah we would have I would have probably but it does still concern me particularly my own country now you look at the work people who didn't I mean a very few I confessed I think spoke up not me but about it may anybody's father say I'm having this but it was extremely hard not to do most people did it and just as most people wouldn't have been in the French Resistance of the hippie in in France in 1942 they just wouldn't have done it well that was part one as a sort of plea on behalf of people in the street they need to be more conscious of what's happening but the second part that I wanted to drill into there is you know very very bright people at least we think we have we taxpayers in universities why they're not more academics you know if if if wisdom is the ability to understand consequences and courage is the ability to point them out why are they not more academics pushing back against some of these ideas which I've proven not just disastrous in practice but as you point out in theory as well they don't work in theory communism doesn't work in theory either however we move on to communism in a minute if I may but you said that one of the quasi early for his ability to understand consequences you mustn't assume that academics are so selfless that the ultimate consequences of society perhaps after they're dead are more important to them than the immediate consequences for their careers but if I were an academic I think I would know indeed if I were in broadcasting I think I would know pretty quickly that if I didn't fit in with the general conformist view of these matters then I couldn't expect to get tenure or to rise in my profession and these things are ultimately possibly more important to people than the total coherence or indeed the ultimate consequences of the points of view they espouse any way any but he can fool himself into believing that his own position is going to lead to paradise people do that all the time so perhaps GK Chesterton was right about about what in this case Chesterton and the others who have said some of the things then perhaps were right stop believing in God and you'll believe in anything well that's also true but it's but some people in fact many people it seems to me are repelled by the consequences of believing in God they they examine it and the implications of living in a created universe with a purpose are frightening and often don't suit people's desire flesh as I point out in my book the rage against God lengthy quotation from Somerset norms autobiographical novel of Human Bondage worth it Carey describes with extraordinary frankness than they under which he decides not to believe in God anymore and the personal liberation which he associates with this is very strong he's free from all kinds of obligations and fears which he previously had if it was simply a matter of choosing one or the other and there were no that are no other implications I think a lot of people would choose it it's not surprising to me actually if people weren't brought up as they are not now if people aren't brought up to believe in the rather complicated the concepts of the Christian religion they're much more likely to fall into the far more convenient and more easily understood religion of self ISM as I describe it doing pretty much what suits you and being sovereign over your own body which is what a lot of people now desire why wouldn't they you use the term of self ISM and I think back to your time in Australia on Q&A when a couple of times you put your views only to be sneered at and it struck me at that time that there's a remarkable capacity on the part of some people now to be unbelievably censorious at the same time as they want to say don't tell us what to do they want to tell everybody else to do that right for themselves but they'll get an instant cheer as one of your fellow panel members did that night when he insists that you can't tell us what to do with our bodies yes well I think that's you you wouldn't seek necessarily consistency and most people's thought and most people it's totally inconsistent anyway and there certainly isn't an obvious consistency the the causes which they adopt and the things which for which they demand protection from criticism or have a specific characteristics that they're hostile to the former particularly form of Protestant Christian societies I think that's the the the every cause which they espouse is one which isn't really compatible with one of those and they then very cunningly it's a sort of it's a sort of verbal judo where they used the strength of their opponents against them they provoke and this has been particularly important in the issue of homosexuality same-sex marriage and all the rest they provoked conservatives into attacking that idea so that they can then portray those conservatives as bigots who wish to make other people miserable and that's one of the reasons why conservatives have lost that fight over and over again why looking back on it I wish I hadn't taken part in it because it was it was and remains a very trivial side issue whether what ten twenty thousand homosexuals Carol cannot get married really isn't particularly important given the almost total collapse of tens of millions of heterosexual marriages encouraged by state policy which has being the real issue the really important moral issue of Western societies over the past fifty years can we get back to your time in Russia in your rage against God what was it if you could sort of encapsulate it about seeing enforced state atheism that impacted on that society where I don't think by the time I went to live in Moss in the summer of 1990 the the Soviet system was dead a night dead in silos slumped on its horse the these things were were over as actively pursued policies though there was still a passive survival of quite a lot of it the thing that I'd expected to find which I found was a fair amount of secret police surveillance a collapsing economy a general grayness and drabness which which followed from that a hideous architecture with all the things we're trying to learn to associate with with Soviet Communism what I hadn't realized because I'd concentrated upon these things was how much more important in some ways was the the state's attack particularly on the married family which had been taking place there was and perhaps above all on private life and the parents freedom to bring up their children as they wished to do in the state take you know and there was a huge amount of physical evidence of this children had to go to nursery their parents could not afford to stay at home and look after them but the economy was so arranged that you needed two incomes to live therefore it was it was a kind of blackmail and also there was this continued vestigial by then but it was there was a very piece of evidence so it continued worship of a semi-mythical figures in Soviets mythology called public Nora's off and probably Morozov there's been quite a little scholarship on this since the collapse the Soviet Union was alleged by the authorities to have been murdered I think by his grandfather after he had denounced his parents to the authorities and so he was made a sort of saint by the Young Pioneers and it was in Moscow in a park a statue of this horrible child to which the young pioneers were led in procession and they would sing songs about how wonderfully was they were taught to revere somebody who betrayed his parents that stayed and that seemed to me the more I thought about it to be you could sits look at parts of the so do you think well okay if if parts of the West became very unlucky in various economic or political ways they might look like this but the thing which really differentiated Soviet society from the West was the worship of public morals and that remains with me as the thing which I'd learned while I was there which I hadn't expected to learn and which I now know profoundly in a way which most people do and that statues vanished now whether I had know where it is this guy went to try and find it soon after the collapse of communism in 1991 had just gone most of the removed sculptures ended up in a sort of sculpture park where people could look at them and the murres off I know where he is so your rage against God the subtitle is how a theism yeah I don't like it the subtype you don't like it I was sort of cajoled into the subtitle publishers loved subtitles and they caused far more trouble and by titles too and they go on I'm not really sure that subtitle is true but of course the major rethink you were you know a young man you were balls for it well not when I was in Moscow I wasn't a Bolshevik no I'd given that long before what I I was I was already a moral and social conservative before I went to live in the Soviet Union and they did before I ever went travelling in the Soviet empire which I began doing in the in the late 1970s I'd given up both but returned to Christianity till about the middle eighties but no it was it was a detailed understanding of something in practice of something that I'd thought I'd understood in theory but has been adequately understood in theory and another characteristic of the worship of public office was of course the the contempt for the Christian religion and I found this in in the the Russian friends that I made often highly educated by the standards of Russia or any country very civilized people probably knew more English literature than I did and certainly a lot more Russian literature cultured where they do gated attempting to be Europeans in the great tradition of of European culture but imbued from their earliest years with a a store for the Christian religion which they could still express these people I liked but it was there it had been inculcated in them and they the so Union was much more successful it seems to me the most people think and stamping a Christianity you know the revival of more that was Christianity since the collapse of the Soviet Union is of course a joy but it really isn't by any means Universal don't say it doesn't tell a story that they failed to stamp it out but well I that's the question of how the how you would measure failure i SPECT that the an empty secularism is still very much they've been in the minds of the most precious to this day and may well be for generations to come I don't think we were telling you can re-establish Christian Russia as it was before 1917 so you paint the picture in the book of you posed the question do we have to learn it all again towards the end you know having scrubbed God out of the public square mocked him ridiculed him removed any influence we then saw the move on the major institution if you like for the well-being of the community the family yeah that's what you saw yeah so why would we want to risk that well we don't believe that that's what we don't believe that's what we're doing do we think we're moving into an era of joy and liberation where people will not be confined by and repressed and restricted by foolish and outdated rules and behavior and this suits us Paul because in May cases these rules of behavior are ones which get in the way of personal self-indulgence and immediate pleasure so we don't think that and we say well we've been we've had divorce and we've had single-parent families and we've had a increasing state intervention in the lives of children now for half a century civilization hasn't collapsed what's your complaint well I got back to where I started papers no you wants us and they said do you really believe that the 1950s were a golden age switch masters no and I know it said say do you want us to go back to those days of grey misery uh no I don't I don't want to go you can't you can go back anywhere anywhere if you wanted to but that they will portray any suggestion that these processional posters have been a mistake in that way as a City childish nostalgia mixed with a with a desire to to reimpose a dreary repressive life on everybody in your side that's what that's how they portray it to themselves that's how they think of people like me well they to some extent I'm almost looking for some hope or a bright light in it what did i hear for it I you won't hope you've come to the wrong shop I don't do temporal hope I think I think the the Christian civilization of the Anglosphere particularly in my own country is finished I don't see any particular reason to believe it's it's any more likely to survive anywhere else either but certainly in my own country the one which I can claim some there better than others it is done for gives you no reason to hope at all the thing that I'm driving at a little bit here or seeking to unearth a bit is that you do meet a lot of people who are very concerned you do you do and I don't but but there that you meet them because you're you're like that and because you're looking for them because they're looking for you if you just set out into the into the world in general you wouldn't find them there they're not there despite the fact that the figures share this enormous level of distrust of disengages the trust but it doesn't lead people to say well let's let's in that case revive the principles the Christian religion as opposed to vote for Donald Trump or you know or marine lepen doesn't cause them to ask questions again that doesn't cause them to reflect perhaps we are if they do ask questions they're in Austin Boston of me and if they if if I answered them they wouldn't like the answers and what I do know from experience is when I attempt to answer these questions in people's minds they reject the answers that's why I've given up because I it seems to me quite clear absolutely essential for the for the for the reconstruction of civilization in the Anglosphere countries that in all cases actually the the ostensibly conservative political parties and all should be destroyed and replaced with genuinely conservative parts of no other arrangement could create any conceivable political hope and when I put this forwards for several years before the 2010 general election when it if the Conservative Party had lost properly it would have been destroyed and we could have replaced it the response I got was tribal people preferred to stick to their tribal arrangements and to continue to vote for a party which despised them than to take any kind of radical action when I was told in 2010 over and over against we've got to get Gordon Brown out and I said well what does it matter where the Gordon Brown is in around David Cameron will be no different how realistically in any major policy from Gordon Brown indeed Gordon Brown might be a better bet Gordon Brown is probably more hostile to European integration and David Cameron if you're worried about that sort of thing so it's it's just tribal thing what would it matter to have five more years of a Labour government when if you had a Conservative government the the actions of the government would be identical whereas if you got rid of the Conservative Party we could build something which was genuinely conservative as I said you can't in Britain today you can't sack the government however you vote you'll get the same government but you can sack the opposition and the response to this was either in comprehension or hostility or or just blankness was for certain as it didn't make any difference that's the point man I gave up politics I said there's no room for reason in universal suffrage mass politics always trans reason look at the people who get elected they just look at what happened look at what they swallow it's interesting really added that I suspect many of today secularists would say they are more rational than people who believed in a Christian God in the past I suspect actually the truth is we're becoming less rational well I don't know I think the problem with the problem with Christian belief or indeed theists believe versus atheism which is the fundamental question is the reason count actually decided for you you make you make a moral choice which sort of universe do you wish to live in do you want to live in a a cosmic car crash in which none of your actions have any significance beyond their immediate effect or do you want to live in a design universe which has a discoverable purpose in which your actions have consequences well beyond that only its effects and you you choose which you prefer but you can't I you can't reasonably say one is right and the other is wrong because there is no there is no way of proving it it's a moral choice so to advance reason as your ally on either side seems to me to be dishonest you have to say no it's the moral choice but what's interesting to me and what's never discussed because the atheists will never discuss it is why someone wants to live in a purposeless accidental universe without any purpose or justice there why would they want that the answer seems to me to be blazingly obvious as to why they want it but they will never discuss it or admit to it well if then one accepts the sort of verdict that the West is in decline it's not the first time civilizations have risen like decline that's really replace the decline is seldom enjoyable well that's particularly civilized the barbarians have quite a good time but the civilized I don't think it's not much fun so sack of Rome you don't want to be that kind of thing I take the point but there is a surprising level of despair I think I do think that in in the community certainly in our country about where things are heading there is a there a sort of an awareness that perhaps we're headed into very dangerous waters and it still surprises me even if it doesn't surprise you that there's not more pushback more demand that consequences be spelled out policy options be properly explored that real issues of grappled with and solutions found it's a wonderful passage in 1984 my favorite actually where the witness myth goes into a prole Parman tries to engage an old man in conversation about the past and he's it's he's trying to find out what life was like for the revolution of course the old man is used to this cuz he remembers nothing of any political significance at all and drones on you may remember it about about top hats and boat race night and eventually mr. Smith gives up and he thinks maybe we're we're like the ant which can only see small things but not a big thing most people simply cannot see the size of the crisis which faces us or or in any way measure themselves in such a way that they think that they could influence it so they just turn away from it then where do you see the West in 10 to 15 years time I could predict with great confidence decline and possibly collapse in general but the exact timetable of it is beyond me I don't know if it could survive it could survive for 50 years it could be over in 3 I I have no idea how quickly these things will happen because they're subject to events which come often out of nowhere and suddenly destabilize or not events things ceasing to happen which you might expect to happen to some years and super spurning things I don't know 10 or 15 years could be the same as it is now we could be living in caves I just where do you see other societies going the rise of China well I think that this is that the China is alas the future because outside China will be different if you been to Istanbul yes I have it goes on and on and on and on concrete plastic concrete plastic traffic fumes concrete plastic traffic fumes everybody working very hard for not very much reward buying the the consumer goods which they're supposed to buy I'm to say human leisure pursuits they're supposed to undertake on the computer living this life of in which they are neither poor nor rich not particularly free and without any real cultural artistic or any other release I see that as the future of the whole world turning into the suburbs of Istanbul and the the nature of the society which is being created which is grown up most spectacularly in China and the most spectacularly everyone Shanghai which when I went there for the first time in its modern incarnation terrified wit sir Babylon is this what I call the bastard child of mullet Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping where the loins of the why it's free and the mind is imprisoned people could be consumers they can why they can they can play computer games and go to the movies and watch Netflix but they can't think think and they can't they can't speak freely and that's the way it's all tender the the ignominy of China which is coming is going to be horrible for the world but I can't see anything to stop it well you'd certainly have to wonder whether than Vidya was there to face the problem in the West anymore certainly better vigor in China yes that's the point it's it's we feel the muscles nodes those rippling as you getting upset stupid to think well things tomato always made me laugh in this era when we're all supposed to be so worried about global warming is if you go out towards out of Mongolia on the train you since I sound looking out of the train window trains full of coal two miles long roaring fast a fuel new coal-fired power station systems get this this huge force a fiery energy building this new economy and civilization that's just not very nice so I paid a hope we all made hope I was hoping the turn see that's where you have to look for it it's a nice temporal hope seems to me to be in short supply at the moment and I would not try to pave it say you're messy geez very much one that we need individually to if hope is that if hope is what you want don't look for it in politics politics is a false religion almost of heresy anyway it seems to me and you won't find much hope in it as as I see I don't think that's any reason to believe that it's out of politics anything good will come I'm much more like for you to see more Trump's than we are to see any kind of saviours of the moral universe well I don't know that any of us can operate without hope so I guess that amounts to a plea for people who think carefully about where they stand before their maker at a personal level yep sure sir do you think as a matter of interest that if sufficient people did return to their roots we could find our way out of our cultural malaise suppose it's possible i I can only say what I believe in and have observed that this seems to me to be unlikely even as I say it I have to confess yes I might be wrong and I also have to consider that possibly by saying it I might make it less likely but the fact is it is what I believe to be true I think we've had it I thought it was remarkable ending to the Q&A session on Dangerous Ideas as it was that your dangerous idea was that people would begin to believe again in the resurrection we're here and the crowd stunned the Q&A host said what do you mean well I know you would have thought it was obvious it was quite quite a radical thing to say well it's basically in the Sydney Opera House that night it was it was a dangerous idea it had it definitely had that quality about it a long extraordinary why do you believe that well but then he asks they give all they stand for the first time they're silent yeah and then you say well isn't that form before they'd always seen Chris yeah he's a dead religion that can find you near the center Church is run by people they imagined to be pedophiles they had never ever encountered the Christian religion portrayed as the revolutionary event that it is but you then went on to finish in the stunned silence when the host asked you what do you meant by that that Christians would then vigorously pursue justice and mercy whether you have to as if they exist then then then you must then you must you must find and identify them to sue them and the whole the universe changes but then that that's that is the Christian belief in did that that the universe also when Christ was born and all that even more when Christ rose from the dead that it was a transformation that it was the greatest event him in history philosophy literature I think you catch name they just revolutionized all of us but you don't believe any of that then it doesn't but the reason why it's revolution is because it its implications are so transformative here we have it God lived among us as as a man and said these things therefore we are bound to behave in certain ways that we cannot thereafter ever avoid so it is it is the grace it must be the greatest revolution in human thought which is why it had such and continues to have such a huge effect on another one so whilst the West rages against God it's knocked him out of the public square silenced him if you like sought to destroy the institutions that arise out of Christian for our good but the reality is that bad news for militant secularists they're a dying breed globally you've got an age of enormous ferment over beliefs and over religion for one of a better word what people will respond to and what they won't it was once a European religion so to speak it's now become a religion of the east and the south and is in many parts the world is exploding there have never been more Christians walking the surface of the earth and there are dying no but has sometimes been I think more Christianity right and numbers of Christians aren't necessarily the measure of how much Christianity so perhaps we conclude on the point that at a personal level there can be real hope and it's worth pursuing and as Jordan Peterson puts that only when you sort your self out can you really make a contribution to your fellow men anyway yeah but you know but the Shakers Americans interesting American sect run who were admirable in many ways though they wouldn't reproduce they could only expand by recruiting and they became immensely successful in that the the particularly the furniture they made was so beautiful that they could command huge commercial prices for it and they had a great of quite profound effect on American society but as the the society became more civilized under the influence of them and others that in which they were they vanished for a none left and the problem with Christianity is that it creates the possibility of trust the rule of law and therefore it creates the possibility of societies of immense wealth and comfort in which people believe they're wrong and needed him non-earth well perhaps not heaven on earth but it's certainly societies say in which the the amount of pleasure immediately available to us all and the postponement of death and discomfort and they're pushing disease and the very high level of peace and and security in a society gathered by trust is such that people forget the principles which led them to this point in the first place so plenty to think about thank you very soon [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 179,283

Keywords: Peter Hitchens, Peter Hitchens and John Anderson, Christianity, Civilisational collapse, Death of the west, conservatism, left-wing politics, Soviet Union, Trust, Western Civilisation, Hope, Decline and fall

Id: V7K1A8jgF1w

Length: 44min 38sec (2678 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 13 2019