Douglas Murray | We're Moving From One Belief System To Another | Facing The God-Shaped Hole | RESET

and there are an awful lot of things that you can point to in society at present that have a god-shaped hull reset is about going back to the beginning back to our ancient origin story of genesis to see whether that text still speaks to us today we're talking to christians and non-christians to biblical commentators as well as cultural commentators to figure out what that ancient text means in this series we'll be talking to people like douglas murray like tom holland like professor john lennox professor rupert sheldrake professor miroslav volf we're talking to many different people both inside the faith and outside the faith and we want to learn whether we can hit reset whether there's anything to be learnt by going back to the beginning today on reset it is our great pleasure to be speaking to douglas murray douglas is the author of many books including the strange death of europe and the madness of crowns and he joins me on the line now douglas murray thank you so much for joining us it's a huge pleasure to be with you thank you well um your book madness for crowds i read it back in 2019 and i found it uh blistering and hilarious and sobering um and the book seems to orbit around or at least it describes movements that orbit around some fairly sacred values things like equality diversity inclusion um let's let's steal man that position and let's to begin with um talk about the glory of equality diversity inclusion and and where do you think those ideas have come from uh well my own view is that they consist of among other things a spillage from christianity we might say an afterglow from christianity um it hardly needs to be said although perhaps it does these days that most civilizations and theories and moralities throughout history do not consist of any particular respect for the individual any particular respect for differences between individuals let alone that the celebration of that difference being actually the guiding light of such a principle um so i yes i in the spirit of what t.e hulma famously described romanticism as being i i alter his famous saying and say that the social justice movements searching for equalities and all this is a form of spilt christianity um i mean i'm not the first person to have made this point obviously quite a lot of others have including a number of radical theologians and some see that as being um a good thing i i mean i'm particularly struck by a theologian who made a lot of impact in the 80s i think rather less so in the decades since but don cupit the radical theologian from cambridge actually by the the 90s was saying that actually is the precise purpose of christianity to become this um so so that is it it seems i mean we could go into more depth it seems to be clearly the origin uh philosophy from which uh these movements come it's it's got other things added in but that's the main one uh essentially uh uh all of the all of the all of the the easier nicer aspects of christianity without any of the hard pits and um and i think that what is fascinating about this moment that we're living through is that it seems to me that it is one of those periods historically where you are moving from one metaphysical system to another right and not very many people seem to be aware that that is what is going on right uh and it seems to me just just a further thought on that which is that it seems to me that the handover from a christian metaphysic to a human rights uh based sort of metaphysic is is rather similar and actually happens around the same time as the handover of the anglosphere uh or the the uh the the british uh um dominance in the world to american dominance what i mean by that is in strategic times it's quite quite often said that the remarkable thing about the 20th century is that britain effectively hands over to america and it's the most seamless seamless such mass movement in strategic history uh almost never does it does one great power get replaced by another great power without an even greater conflagration and i see the handover of a factory a christian metaphysic to this metaphysics of human rights as being that like that a lot of people didn't realize it was going on as it was going on there were people left around regretting it there are people left around fighting for it not to be the case um but it feels like that is that is in historical terms what what we are living through at the moment so you talk about one metaphysical system to another i mean interestingly the very first quote uh that you begin the book with is by gk chesterton catholic uh author he says that the special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical but that it is dogmatic without knowing it um isn't it extraordinary by the way that he said that about the modern world in the early 20th century but he could exactly could have said it in 2020 100 years ago right right and so many of his quotes are exactly the same so remark a remarkable prose writer apart from being a remarkable thinker really really i i he would have nailed twitter he definitely would have nailed twitter i think he might have been booted off quite a bit you wouldn't be the first so in what ways do you do you think the the modern era shows its dogmatism and what in what ways do you think it shows its ignorance of its metaphysical truth claims are you sure you've got time for all um the i i think it start the first one is this is that the human rights-based world order has a terrible chasm underneath it which everybody can see and which i do think is an explanation an explanation for a lot of personal as well as wider traumas going on in the modern era which is that you hear of a metaphysical system which is a human rights based system which is all the time described as though it is what it says it is and claims to be that is um it claims that human rights are inviolable but they're violated all the time it says that they are absolutely fundamental but they are attacked all time uh they can be attacked around the world of impunity there are countries after countries areas after eras in the in the modern human rights era which um you know yes you you it's claimed you have the following rights but somebody comes and takes them all and nothing happens uh that's quite different from a christian idea of justice of course which says well that may happen in this world but there is justice in a um in another place and in another sense uh so i think that the whole claim i i've often said that the human rights-based order suffers among other things from the form of zimbabwe and inflation that that everything becomes a human right and yet actually the bits that were in the post-war period set up as a fundamental charter in order to try to address it even those are in many countries around the world highly contingent on circumstance on birth on origin and and so clearly they are not exactly what they say they are now you could say in that case we should reframe them we should say that they're not human rights but for instance human aspirations um that would seem to me to be to put them in is not perfect but it would put them in a more reasonable um it would establish them in a more reasonable way um or more reasonable expectations should we say uh but as i see it the the unwillingness to contend with the christian origins of the human rights theory is very specific and it's based in a number of things one is an unwillingness to recognize the particular inheritance and truth claims of the christian religion for all sorts of reasons but one of which in the modern era has become the um claim that basically all religions are the same that they all teach the same thing and they all have the same virtues and then you may you may choose christianity i may choose islam someone else might do yoga and there's no real difference between any of these things i think that's that's a modern wish but i mean there's very little uh evidence to it it's quite a christian wish actually yeah christianized west has kind of forwarded that view really yeah i'd say the post-christianized west has forwarded that view uh it doesn't matter how you get there you know as long as you sort of you know aspire to climb this sort of ladder to god you will and you could do it through as i say through yoga or through communion it doesn't matter much which that's a sort of post-christian ideal wateries built over christian um and another reason of course is um our suspicion in the modern era of exclusivist truth claims uh and and obviously that as you know is is something tied up with a lot of confusion that's always been there within the christian tradition which is is it for us or is it for everybody and of course there's a shortcut to the it's for everybody which is um to pretend it already is and everybody's already got it um so there's a lot going on in our ear and a lot of denial and i think that the denial is is what i've just said and and an unwilling basically let me also still it's an unwillingness to concede where the rights might come from in terms of historical tradition because non-believers fear that if they make the concession that the rights have their basis in a christian world view what you will do is give great fuel to a christian revival and uh i think that is that may be tactically correct it may be tactically wise but it's not true to to make that claim and and i think unwise in some other ways yes what do you see as i mean you've expressed many times a a hope that we could somehow de-politicize ourselves i mean everything is so fraught everything is is everything is heightened to the level of of a kind of a religious truth claim at the moment and i i think in the in the absence in you know after the death of god there is a power vacuum and suddenly politics is taking that place and then entertainment has to take the place and sport has to take the place of politics yeah everything gets promoted and you've many times said you know can we call our jets a bit can we step back how how can we do that without having something else properly in that sort of highest place of our ideals and imagination it may not be possible and i should put that out there because it's an argument against self-interest in certain ways but it may not be possible i mean there are an awful lot of things that you can point to in society at present uh that have a god-shaped hull um so maybe it's not possible um and maybe when i describe the change in the metaphysical systems we're currently going through it may be that that change is um is a boomerang of some kind uh it may be that we become something totally different or maybe we would go back to something that we would recognize um but but it may be the case and just stresses because it it might not be possible to cover over the god-shaped hole i do think that the various um attempts to make other things fill that gap are almost uniformly difficult i mean i almost use the word problematic hashtag problematic yeah not not a word i'm fond of it but well i become unfond of because of the people who who wield it but yes uh um there is something um there is something highly problematic about people replacing god with politics because you end up with a fervency that might well we recognize it when it's used in religious terms you might end up with that same feverishness in political terms and they may actually make the business of politics impossible among much else precisely because you need the saved and the unsaved you need the elect and the elect must have the thing to which to be against and it's a sort of disappointment about politics in some ways that you learn as you are growing up but it's probably quite a good thing to learn that that it cannot achieve the utopian dream i mean it's you know people quite often moan about the managerialism of politics and there is lots to moan about but the managerialist stance is much better than the one when you know that you're in history and are suffering for it right um but yes i think that it imbues politics with with attributes that it cannot sustain um of course there have been other efforts to to fill the god shaped whole i wrote about one of them in the strange death of europe which is the obvious one is the attempt particularly in the 19th century most most persuasively performed by wagner in his compositions and his operas to fill the the god-shaped hole with art and that that that has its own problems um and uh its own risks and i'm not only thinking of the ones that wagner personally went through so let's let's dive down into the madness of crowds and um you you use the analogy of you know you're going to clear the the landmines by tripping tripping over as many of them as you can yeah um which you then um proceed uh to do with with some glia and abandoned i'm sure that's you go through is it uh gay women race trans is that the order yeah that's it i was i was fascinated by by beginning with a story of uh some conservative christians who were putting on a documentary about conversion therapy which i'm sure both you and i have have questions about perhaps for different reasons um but you know i've got a friend who she's actually part of this series called resets i'm interviewing her she um went to yale she was an atheist and gay and stole a copy of mere christianity and was converted and and found herself after many twists and turns married to a man called andrew happily married have it they have a child and what i find difficult is if she had asked me to pray for her at any stage of her developing romance with andrew and and said can you pray that my heart would you know turn towards andrew um that could be criminalized if that's considered to be conversion therapy and yet if she asked me um can you pray that i would become andrew um that that could almost be celebrated you know there's there seems to be the idea of an interchangeability of gender and the absolute fixity of sexuality yes yeah yeah well i think instinctively people would not most people think it's the other way around what you touch on is is very very interesting as you know i'm all over this subject because um i'm interested in the things that the age waves through without question and i say in the gay chapter of madness for crowds well starting off with this uh uh group who who made this film about so-called gay conversion therapy um that uh i i'm much more i'm much more willing to listen to their arguments than many people particularly most gay people um partly because i'm just curious about curious arguments and partly because as i say there i think there are questions that were left behind and and that's consistent in all of the issues i address in the manners of crowds it's consistent in the women's chapter say what are the questions that we that feminism left behind as too difficult to address the obvious one i say like camille paglia the obvious one is motherhood feminism jumped along on a whole range of things to do with you know equal representation on boards and so on and uh and and really never worked out what what to do about motherhood and as i say in the mountains i said that's a biggie that's a biggie to jump over um and and in the gay chapter yes i i say something along the lines of what you've just said which is um we put we we haven't we have a set of odd ideas about this one is that gay is a one-way street which um it may be and there's a lot of evidence to demonstrate that it is that there is however considerable diversity and the largest form of diversity in that is between men and women this is a conversation i've had in the past i think people can find on youtube with brett weinstein the biologist about why it may be that uh women are more sexually um fluid in this way than men i mean the shorthand example i give is you can quite often find somebody who's a lesbian who's had bad examples with men and that may not be the only reason she's become a lesbian but it's quite a strong one that she seeks to be with another woman you never meet a man who's had bad experiences with women and as a result becomes gay i mean i mean who wouldn't have been had they not met the wrong woman sort of thing now all this is incredibly dangerous and contested terrain perhaps but i say look why have we why have we said it's so straightforwardly in one way three are we absolutely sure about the nature of how sexuality is formed and the answer is no we're not really uh i think the evidence increasingly points the fact that it is biological or at least determined from uh uh the womb from say from very very early age um but there are also possibly some societal factors that might might be at play and i don't see why we shouldn't be able to discuss them other than that uh they um tread on some what have become sacred values and i'd add one other thing which of course the the obvious reason is again is this fear that if you do address them then you'll go back to you know the horrible times that have existed in the past and some places exist still where young gay people are effectively sort of tortured by uh alleged professionals in order to become something they just cannot become but yes the example you give also exists in the trans one uh you're and i've written about this a lot because the era now says um if you're i don't know a young slightly feminine boy you know likelihood is you're really a girl and should be given medical help to become a girl and vice versa a tomboyish girl is really a boy and that's of course not only against a lot of issues to do with women's rights but a lot of things to do with gay rights and this is very offensive to a lot of gay people and um and so but the point of saying all this is to say this whole thing's a great big blooming mess you know it's it's very messy terrain and i think that it's unwise it's wise to try to be as kindly to people as possible and to listen to their concerns it seems unwise to me to dig in and embed narratives that have not actually been proven right and um i worry about any shutting down that's total like that so as you say the the conversion therapy example is tricky because um you may make it illegal for somebody to suggest that somebody might be happier being straight and as i say like in the case of your friend that's more common among women but at the same time as you make that illegal you make it illegal not to approve of a child being in the wrong sex and therefore medically transitioning to a later stage that seems to me to be a very demented set of things to have going on the same time so i'm just interested in in opening that up i think we need all we need to know a lot more until as we until we're as certain as we're currently pretending to be about these issues right right so you move from the gay chapter to the the women chapter um and and again here is um a prime example of equality and diversity and and how how it is that we um can we have a space for the particularity of women can we can we still name what the feminine is can we name what the masculine is um without having a hierarchy to say one's higher than the other can we blend them can we bring a unity it's it's a real struggle where do you think we go wrong as we try to um get this unity and diversity over the sexes the the the the relations between sexes one is is absolutely central because it throws up it throws a light on the problems we're having in the other areas as well to steal man i think that the aim of good people of the social justice movement is something like the following it is nobody should ever be held back from achieving their life what they can achieve i didn't have some character trait over which they have no say [Music] now i absolutely agree with that aim and i think the polling would show that very significant majorities in countries like ours have the same view it's a long time now since you had a majorities thinking that like a smart woman shouldn't go to university or shouldn't if they're capable of a high-flying job perform that high-flying job uh and i think it's some time since uh people claimed that people who were gay for instance couldn't perform certain tasks that they could perform and the people who were black shouldn't perform tasks they could perform there are people uh i don't deny that there are always you know residual you know pockets of unpleasantness and and prejudice but i i i think you we have honestly in countries like britain america we've got majorities on our sides to say that's really the aim that the aim is that nobody should be held back from doing anything they have a competency at but then we get into the real problem uh the left says uh broadly speaking that any remaining inequities that is um if there aren't enough women in a particular position in a particular industry there is only ever one explanation that is male sexism um uh if there aren't it's the same thing if there isn't enough gay representation in a particular field then it's because of homophobia and if there isn't enough racial diversity then it must be to do with racism and broadly speaking uh the right hasn't particularly known what to do with these claims because the right tends to be scattered by fear that the accusations coming its way the accusations of homophobia sexism misogyny racism um and i submit that that one of the reasons we're in the confusion we're in is because we have not allowed ourselves i think the left is responsible for this because of its amazing ability and excommunication and heresy finding it has not allowed us to have the conversations we need to have about this and specifically that these are clearly not and there's a you know one could go at this from almost any direction but these are clearly not totalistic explanations in the way that they are holding themselves out as for instance it is not just terrible sexism that explains why there are not as many female firefighters as male firefighters it is not that every year thousands of young women in britain fling themselves at the fire brigade union begging to be allowed to climb up ladders and go into burning buildings and pull out cats and people and much more it is that there must be other things at play as well in the same way uh um if you said why are there not enough male kindergarten teachers right that's the example would it would it be helpful in any way to pretend that the problem was just like hordes of male kindergarten teachers every year fling themselves at closed kindergarten doors and just aren't allowed in by bigoted women who want just to keep the train to themselves it's it's obviously not now i i select their two extreme examples but forms of this if we agree that that there are certain things that people have aptitudes for then then then then one must recognize that that exists in other realms as well the problem is most realms are a little bit more complicated than the kindergarten teacher or fire brigade examples and um i fear that we've made all this terrain um much uglier much nastier than we needed to make it because we've only got this one explanation still and that's for lots of reasons but one of them is our era's deep and understandable fear of what you might call biological determinism um we have a deep fear of it which is not only uh reasonable but i think legitimate um and so we we trample down everything that looks like it might be a biologically deterministic argument and we do that uh with the sexes we do it very very vociferously with everything to do with race for reasons that you hardly need to go into but it's that that's the darkest corner and the worst uh but i think you could say the same thing about um gays in certain industries you know and and really what what what it always shows is this is what we what you can come back to because i'm keen that one finds a way that people can unify around common aspirations if we do have this common aspiration how can we get there and i would say that it is by recognizing that if we create the conditions that allow people to do whatever it is they have the competence competency to do and to to attain that goal we must almost as as payback for that must accept that certain um other factors will mean that there is not equity in the distribution of roles right and i'm you know i think again i think we're grown up enough to have this i think we've grown up enough to say we would dislike it if a woman competent to be a firefighter wasn't able to do the job it wasn't given the job and we would dislike it if a man able to be a good kindergarten teacher didn't get allowed him because that but that does not mean that we should be aiming for 50 50 sexual representation in these industries or any other right right right i see a problem here in that what we've done in secularizing the image of god or what whatever we've done in in terms of having a concept of human rights inequality is that in the absence of a god who values us the value must somehow be seen inherently it must be seen materially so that then it becomes about do you have the same amount of stuff and in exactly the same regard yes yes yes yes so we've traveled quite a distance from you know genesis 1 verse 26 you know and god made man in his image male and female he created them and he blessed them and he said be fruitful and increase in number and and instantly the first thing god says in genesis 1 is there is a unity between the sexes um that involves complementarity that involves distinction and particularity yes and and romance and therefore difference and equality and what what worries me is that when you take that element out of it equality just becomes do i have the same amount of stuff as that group and and if i don't i go to war yes it becomes a zero-sum game at that point you know it can do i mean there's a lot in what you've just said um i mean the first is obviously the uh the secularized version of mankind as being in the image of god is that mankind becomes a kind of god-like being on its own terms without a guard and uh there's been a lot written about that um and it's a dangerous position to be in um not least because there's no there's no break on a lack of humility um the specific idea of the image of god of course is the origin of this very idea that there is something sacred about us as beings that we are different from the and and different from the antelope and every other creature on earth that that that we are um born in the image of god is uh now you could say of course that this is only an inheritance of christianity i i think that christianity has this inheritance because as other traditions do because it does say something um to ourselves about ourselves which we intuit and that is that's to do with consciousness and the specific nature of human consciousness which is you know the thing the thing observing the thing um and this this this leaves us with this this uh irreconcilable human dilemma always which is what is this thing that we are capable of observing about ourselves um god is uh obviously the the image of god idea in christianity uh explains that it gives you the origin for that um either say i don't think it is something that is exclusive in the in the christian tradition the christian tradition of it the judeo-christian tradition of it is a very very profound one i think it answers this deep deep question uh within ourselves and and the chris judeo-christian tradition has has an extraordinary amount to claim for itself in answering it in this fashion whether it's true or not and obviously a believer believes it's true and non-believer doesn't believe it is but i i i think that it it does it does speak to and reveal a very very deep truth perhaps the deepest um as for the complementarity i've written about that before it's it's yes and it's something which we again don't want to recognize because again we fear what will happen our whole age is is replete with these things we won't do because we fear what will happen if we allow people to do them yes ideas we cannot explore because we fear that the implication if we allow the exploration to commence the obvious one of that one is if you say that men and women complement each other you will be doing a number of things and i mean i can rattle a number off of my head you might be being homophobic you might be being transphobic you might be uh but more more significantly you in in numbers terms what you might be doing is saying to women the ideal uh for a woman is to be at home be a mother and so on and so for these reasons among others yeah we don't want to have the complementarity uh discussion right and yet it's one of the ones that everybody knows that it may not suit everybody it certainly doesn't suit everybody it visibly doesn't suit everybody but a very large number of people it will do and it shouldn't it seems to me therefore be cut off as an option by an age that believes it's doing so in the name of tolerance right right right and you you you lose the crunchiness of an equality that can include distinctions and that can include the gift of the feminine to the masculine and the masculine to the feminine yes and instead you have uniformity yes which but i mean you know myself intrinsically opposed to i don't like human uniformity i like difference a lot of people say they like difference really just want everyone to be the same but like them but i mean i do actually think that it's it's fascinating seeing the way that different people think and there are certain trends that we do correctly attribute to one sex over another um and there's nothing there's nothing wrong with that it seems to me unless it was then used to limit what somebody was capable of doing in their lives but you know why do we know that if a two-year-old falls over a birthday party it will be the women who will run over and seek to comfort the child most swiftly and and best i would submit this isn't to say that men can't do it and again um if uh the building's on fire um this is something gets you into trouble but you don't grab the nearest woman and say get in there yeah i'm not saying they won't yeah if i there's a burglar downstairs i don't nudge my wife and say emma i went last time it's your turn exactly exactly very good example um and and as i say i think that might be just in the same way that there might be a risk from having admitted such things there could be a risk from admitting such things we should admit that there might be a risk from not admitting such things yes and that that just as we could thwart lives by being overly deterministic we could also thwart lives by trying to ignore this and by the way i can give a very good example of this which is once on everyone's mind uh women get to a certain age in their late 30s and early 40s and if they haven't had children they have a different call from that which exists in men now you may say that's because of a roughly 20 or more year biological clock difference between the sexes but uh there seems to me to be a considerable uh argument considerable force to say actually the cost of not having these discussions is seen in things like women in their early 40s who've devoted their whole life to their career and they've done really well and climbed ladder realizing that they are not going to have children or are going to find it very hard to have children and that that seems also to me that that's that's quite something to have on your conscience as a society or a group to say actually we we misled we misled some people it doesn't matter how many in a way we misled some people uh about what the how this ran yes yes one of the great constellations of of life not the only but one one of the great ones yes so we want we want equality with diversity to include the particularity but but somehow to to get to a unity and i i often think interestingly the way that certainly the judeo-christian tradition it gets developed it doesn't just get left in genesis 1 but perhaps the great verse in the new testament about but that's often brought up when it comes to equality even though the word equal is not there it's paul in galatians saying there is no male no female no juno gentile no slave no free for we're all one yes in christ jesus and i think what's fascinating about that is you get you get actually a community in which the the oneness happens and of course you you don't ignore the fact that someone's from a jewish background it's almost gentile you don't ignore the fact that there's a man and a woman it's the it's the fact that you've actually been brought around the same table in in this christian idea to share in the same meal to be welcome at the same banquet which again is something that i just don't get when i hear modern secular demands for equality because it's just i need the same stuff uh it's it's ideas of stuff it's also i could only understand people who have the same traits as me one of the one of the enormously impressive things of christian civilization is exactly what you just pointed to there and by the way i mean i should say it does have copies but in other traditions the muslim concept of the umma is is a very good approximation of the same thing and and is moving uh for precisely the same reason which is that anybody be they rich or poor wherever they're from are brothers in in this faith and it it's it's it's a powerful thing whichever tradition you take it from because it is of course one of the only answers of how the self can be as if as effectively not dissolved in the into the community but to become a part of a community on lines other than the only other available ones and the only other available ones are nation tribe which are different things usually but um they have a crossover tribal nation uh and uh then uh otherwise with a modern obsession which is you are a member of the identity groupings you have to be a part of which is uh although in the modern case only if the grouping in question is the approved kind so it's good to be identifying yourself as black but we would not look kindly on people who said their primary identity was they were white in the same way we don't have much sympathy in our society for people people who say that they feel straight pride but we do feel sympathy for people who say they feel gay pride and again uh it's quite common people say i'm so proud to be a woman it's strange if not unusual in our societies to say i'm proud to be a man uh and uh so in our own era yes the identity grouping is most commonly that as long as it's not centered around a majority trade other than womanhood yeah um and and yes these are um well yes as they say this is obviously paul's great insight about the uh and his ability to universalize the faith is obviously what transforms the christian religion and i think there's a there's a kind of a doctrine of of god going on in the background too colin gunton um was a philosopher at king's college and he wrote a book the one the three and the many which was kind of a survey of western philosophy talking about it as the tug of war between the one and the many um you've got a you know plato with this this unifying force and the aristotle being the particularizing force and um how do we mediate um between these in all sorts of areas metaphysics and ethics and ontology and and political uh philosophy um there is this great tug of war between the one and the many how do i how do i find a brotherhood or a community in which i can be myself and be one with the other and i think that the doctrine of the trinity um gives a gives a fascinating um unity in diversity kind of here's the archetype let's say he is the highest value for a christian society um the the the particularity of the son of god is not dissolved into the father or dissolved into the spirit and yet the sun can never be without the father and the father can never be without the son there is something about a unity and diversity that i think christian civilization has has taught us which again i think without that you get the tug of war between either uniformity or hierarchy and war um but let me let me move on to the the race issue because um obviously since the hardback came back it came out in 2019 um i i i was about to say is is race one of the areas that you you've seen sort of most development in over the past year but it's it's quite a competition between all four isn't it uh yes but i mean race is definitely the winner in you know being the one that's thrown to the foremost clearly most visibly yes um i think the weaponization of all of the identity traits i'm talking about has gone on with considerable abandon in the last year and i refer to this in the updated paperback edition um but obviously the one that that has now become most dominant domineering you might say is the question of race and it's one that i um i tackle i address carefully i think it requires care um but i'm very very deeply worried about where we're going on this and i'm worried about it because i think that we are in the process of re-racializing our societies in the name of anti-racism and uh you know the most obvious example of that is that going back to your question about your point you make about community you can either dissolve yourself in a civic community or you strip that back dissolve that and go back to some other form of belonging and it seems to me almost impossible for a society to encourage some groups to do that on racial terms and not on others so it seems to me that if you you i mean unless you you take the view that quite a lot of people do and i i identify as being the the issue of um over correction that is in the same way that gays have been uh repressed historically let's give the gays a you know better run of it now uh let's let them be sort of more for a bit uh um in the same way that you could argue that because women have been you know in some ways discriminated certainly kept from certain um roles in life in the past let's let's let them get away with some stuff for a bit that men can't and in the same way the most obvious example is since there has been racism historically and certainly in white predominantly white societies like britain and america uh you know certainly famous in the case of america um american blacks have had a uh have certainly not had the opportunities available to american whites which isn't to say that american whites have had an easy time throughout american history either but because of that why don't we allow black pride to run for a bit just as we allow gay pride to run for a bit just as that we allow feminism in its perhaps worst forms to run on for a bit and the problem of that is that you just see there's an almighty car crash coming down the road which is you just you you don't know when the over compensation has gone on for long enough uh no one will tell you and you wouldn't know who to listen to and who you believe but i believe for instance it is just not possible to argue that some people should feel deep pride in their racial origin and other people should feel deep shame and i don't think that's possible in any direction i stress this in any direction and it's also even if it was desirable and it never is it's highly undesirable to say that one racial group of people carry historic guilt and another another do not highly undesirable to say that one group is better than another or morally better than another or in any other way but this is this is another this goes back to the very fundamental questions of our time this is again because we don't trust ourselves we don't trust ourselves with racial difference and we try to say that it the only ways in which it exists is when it exists in a positive light that is x minority racial group have a particular ability to do y we trust ourselves with that because it's a positive we don't trust ourselves with and x racial minority groups seem to do more of b uh which leads to c then we won't do that if it's negative and uh for understandable reasons but it means that we are running several programs simultaneously and it doesn't take a genius to notice it um you're running racial total similarity and racial betterness in specific cases and i think that for instance in a country like america where black americans only constitute 13 of the population or so i i don't see that you can persuade a majority population for a very long time that they should put up with being told that they are for instance demons which uh i watched a video of one uh a white uh anti-white uh oh yes i saw that diversity officer i confirmed telling telling the employees yes i just don't think i wouldn't sit in a room and be told that by dent of my skin car i was a demon i would certainly stand up for any of my black friends brothers and sisters who were told that by somebody else i would expect every other good person to as well i wouldn't want it to happen in any direction i wouldn't don't want to hear it i don't hear it said about any racial group of people by dint of their race and i think it's highly unwise to allow such overreach to continue when you are still talking about the majority yeah and again again there's the particularity of of the tribe and the nation that we take pride in we actually you know i'm i'm australian i take pride in being australian there's um all sorts of national pride and and the unity points and and how do you you know in in the new testament you know the apostle paul looks back to to genesis and he says from one man god made every race of men um bringing back a great unity to to adam yes i think that there's that very interesting you know many people to say you know in the bible there's one race the human race um and there are very many tribes and peoples and this of course as you know i mean and your list as i'm sure will know well is um the foundation on which will be forced and the anti-slave campaigners were christians based on their moral argument which was that it was an um it was it was an immoral and unchristian thing to regard your brother in this light and again that that is that is a moral insight that is is not common throughout history [Music] there is a particular reason why christian countries like britain managed to britain in particular managed to lead the way out of slavery a um a horrible human evil that it existed in every civilization since the beginning of time right but there is a reason why it is able to be thrown off and indeed campaigned against by the royal navy which is the will force and others have the moral case based in a christian idea of the similarity the sameness it's not just somebody the the identical nature in the eyes of god apart from anything else of the people who were being enslaved and that's what led led to the incredibly rich tradition of uh the black churches in america it's what led to the rich tradition from which dr martin luther king emerges and it's the thing that gives him the central most important moral insight of the late 20th century right right which is in danger of being reversed yes um yeah yeah we are we are judging people by the color of their skin and not the content of the character something that the great fraud uh new york times bestseller robin d'angelo actually tells people to do she actually says to people that it is immoral not to judge people by the color of their skin yeah yeah and sells millions um let's let's move on to trends and i and i guess you probably tackled trans last because in in so many ways it's it's one of the thornier issues and i'm sure that the research you had to well all of them are kind of thorny i mean yeah you gave yourself an easy pass to erase douglas yeah i know absolutely yeah talking about men and women is a doodle yeah yeah but then yeah but of all the trip if you if you had to if you had to name we did um here a um a google survey anonymous survey of unsavable opinions and we collected two and a half thousand unsavable opinions half of them had to do with trends um so so yeah half of you know so well well over a thousand um unsaled opinions were about trans in in terms that's 10 years ago would have been incomprehensible to any of us so it does stand out in some senses doesn't it yeah of course stands out in a lot of senses i did it last actually because for several reasons one is that it's the most minority of a minority issue and the second reason is you actually have to know all of the other things that have happened in the other areas to understand how the hell trans has come to be what it currently is in terms of the galvanizing issue i mean an issue that affects um something less than 0.05 percent of the population is is not by 57th population is very very hard to get everyone interested in unless it treads across everything else and i do trans last because it treads across everything else and people haven't been wanting to admit this it clearly runs it doesn't the intersection intersectionalists to use the dreaded ugliest word of the era the intersection is pretend that all of these things uh all all rights claims interlock and to address one you address them all and if you solve one you can solve them all and one of the things that demonstrates that intersectionality is a total croc is that even on his own terms it doesn't work can i explain the amount of crowds i expose how that is the case that intersectionalists claim that if you unlock women's rights you unlock trans rights that ain't the case quite the opposite quite the opposite they seem to run very very much against each other um there are big fears among a lot of feminists quite rightly about what trans is doing in terms of setting back women's rights um there are a lot of gay people increasing number of gay people who are very worried that trans is and we touched on this earlier fundamentally against gay rights that is that the lg and b are totally separate from the t not least because again a young tomboyish girl may all of the small amount of evidence we have so far this suggests is very much more likely if she is diagnosed with so-called gender dysphoria to grow up to be a perfectly happy healthy lesbian or happy healthy heterosexual she does not need to be surgically transformed into an approximation of a male uh and uh of course the idea that she she would be is something that terrifies a lot of lesbians for instance who think gosh this if this was going on when i was growing up and the opposite case vice versa with gay men so trans is unwittingly running against all these things but it's it's more interesting because of what we're not well several things one is what we're not talking about in the trans thing and what we're not talking about is sex and that didn't used to be the case as i say in the trans chapter trans used to be in intimately uh tied up with sex i'm trying to choose my terms carefully here no no anyhow trans used to be intimately tied up with sex and today actually trans actress totally divorced their activities and sex they say it has nothing to do with sex couldn't be more boring nothing we want less and and and that's just uh what again what what brave academics have been making commit willing to make studies about that show that's just not the case um a portion at least of people we call trans are interested in attracting uh their own sex in a different body for instance and a portion are people who just get a kick out of um that is the factors of sexual kink um autogynophilia as it's um memorably called these are really complex but actually very very interesting terrains about the nature of human sexuality i find them interesting for that reason among others i think it's very very interesting that we have in our era of tolerance and diversity and all that sort of thing actually ended up making people's sexual uh preferences much much more streamlined and straightforward than at any previous time almost we are we are pretending that you know if if if if you're born a man and you like men well we can make you into a woman and then you can like men as a woman for instance yeah that that that that's that that's um that's got a lot of problems in it the other thing is that uh um and i wrote this recently in the times in london one of the interesting things i noticed about the transit thing which is why it caught on so much was that i noticed it among my scientist friends first who often rather you know always very cerebral often rather you know shy creatures who spend the time in the laboratory um i noticed that these vole-like creatures i'm almost portraying them as but um when they emerge with something that deserves them you know it's always worth listening i mean you know us humanities know nothings uh you know lots of things that disturb us but but when a scientist when a scientist says this is a problem um you know you particularly should listen and i noticed the number of scientists i knew who was saying i can't do it i can't do it and it was that they were being increasingly asked by their institutions to agree that for instance there's no such thing as gametes or chromosomes and they just couldn't do it because um it was and i mean it's not just to do with people who are dealing with diseases which actually knowing this the chromosomes of the person is very helpful and i mean you know even a man who becomes a woman is not going to get ovarian cancer and a woman who tries you know to transition to a man is not going to get testicular cancer and i mean these are maybe obvious examples but um there are many many others of uh illnesses that that are to do with your your sex and um so it wasn't just to do with that it was it was an even deeper thing than that the deep thing was scientists who i started to notice were saying it's the first time in my life or my career that i've been told the scientific method does not reign supreme right right that the era has dogmas that science must bow to right and that is that is the thing that made me most concerned makes me most concerned too and that's why i won't do it it's why i went shut up on this issue or any other because i think it's profoundly dangerous to give over your most useful tools for analyzing very specific things and just one other thing which is the reason why i think that your thousand people had questions on this is because of the other thing the the people are now quite comfortable to talk about the overlap with feminism and trends the it's got easier it's got easier thanks to small number of people to speak about overlapped between gay and trans and the way in which they run against each other the one that is unpopular still but needs far more attention would i bet be the one you've heard from people which is parents and parents are not getting enough of a say in this and they are being intimidated and i think it's outrageous and part of the point of the trans chapter is to give voice to the parents who have been put in a terrible position and i don't think that that position is because they've discovered they've got a trans child there are all sorts of i say i'm open-minded on all of this i'm open-minded the fact that there is something in very very small numbers of people which we're nowhere near understanding but it's nothing like the numbers we're talking about there are clearly people being diagnosed as being gender dysphoric who are no such thing and the worst thing is is the the easy attempt by so-called medical experts to pretend they know things they just don't know and in the process i think wreck a lot of young lives and one other thing from that is the number of parents and i've heard from a lot of parents since the crowds came out who have said to me and occasionally when we were still able to have events would come up to me after events and say thank you because i have a lot of parents who said what i mentioned in the book that medical professionals are telling them you either agree to everything your child is saying and the alleged experts who i really don't think are expert in this field are saying or you will have a dead child um because they'll commit suicide because of bigotry these these alleged experts are actually blackmailing parents with the death of their children you know they're very very common you i've got familiar with all of the trans uh um cliches and one of them is you know do you want uh you know if you have a son do you want a happy daughter or a dead son well what a way to talk how dare they talk like that to parents yeah yeah and and think they're doing so in the name of being tolerant or understanding yeah so i tried to speak up for those parents and i spoke to a lot of parents when i was researching i've heard from a lot more since but i think it's that that is is most is most on people's minds because and parents should not shut up about this by the way if i can make a call for anything in this podcast it would like i'd like to do it for that please don't be quiet about these things please don't keep it unsavable it has to be said i wrote in the mail on sunday last weekend about what the former gay rights group stonewall which has now become a kind of anti-gay pro-trans lobbying organization is teaching what its teaching pacts say um it's totally delusional it's wrong deeply misleading is very confusing for children it should not be taught in schools and i think that it needs parents to say that and if more of us said it i think we would get a lot further so my real urge is please please please if you are a parent don't keep this as something you whisper or write in anonymously you know to a podcast make it something you raise with other parents with teachers with schools because we are in danger of embedding a very very bad narrative well that's a good uh that's a good word for all of us douglas has already gone across the the landmines he's tripped them all for you let's uh let's join him and by the way it's very pleasant tripping but i should stress that it's absolutely people stress all the time oh it's so dangerous you know you know you're always so risky it it it it may be for some people in certain situations broadly speaking i can't tell you it is much easier to tell the truth than many people in our era think it is yes and i also think that if we all share the burden in saying things that might be seeming to be unpopular it will become less of a burden and uh and and and easier in due course yes and there's always a risk in not telling the truth as well no much worse much much worse risk for your own conscience right right um douglas i must i must let you get on but but people would be um very they would think i'm very remiss if i don't ask you you know with your own you know christian journey and you know we've talked about christian civilization giving some sense of the unity going forwards you want to de-politicize us you want us to unite around something else would you like to see a revival of of christianity in the west and and how about in your own life i regard myself as being in an open-minded state on these things i genuinely i went through dogmatically atheist phases a lot of people do after they lose faith and i believe myself to the extent i can be to be open-minded and open-hearted i might even say um and that's the uh that's the advice i give other people um i think in you of anything else coming along i can't see what else could come along i i occasionally say to friends i i preferred the old gods to the new ones um and if you do come to a conclusion inevitably it means you you'd rather have a bit more of recognizable christian faith in your society than than the weird stampeding neo faith we have at the moment which is embedding itself and is confused and foundationless but my own my own belief is i wrote about this i think in the strange death of europe uh in some depth if i say so myself that the i take you colonel ratzinger as i always still think of him his advice pope benedict's advice to heart which is that one should live as though god exists and that one should the most important thing actually comes up in the ratzinger habermas dialogue on the dialectics of secularization one should make sure the philosophy and religion are in dialogue and that in my own life is the way i um i think about this is um uh i i believe they have to be in dialogue when there are things that philosophy can answer and there are things that religion can answer and they are overlapping magisteria they're not completely overlapping um but yes i also think by the way that um in the case of christianity the most important thing is living by example i don't put myself at because i can't profess to be a practicing christian these days uh i don't in that case only any other way put myself forward as an example to anyone but i do think it's very important that that christians live by example because that is in my own experience how people are most drawn to faith is to see see that other people um it's not about living their life in happiness or contentedness but that but that they live by example is the manifestation of the faith and and that is that is um beyond reason that seems to me to be the most the most likely way for for that to happen uh i say that personally as well as in a wider field i i do feel very disappointed when i see justin welby unable to defend his own faith and i have been in extraordinary situations and seen extraordinary christians in countries around the world including in very beleaguered places whose example has been uh among the most extraordinary things i've seen and one of the great privileges of my life to witness so i do think that it that you know in a way the called christian living is is also the answer to christian prophetization yes yes yeah and those communities of christian living uh they are the the salt and light that jesus spoke of uh yeah we shouldn't be looking for a top-down savior but this this kind of bottom-up movement of faith douglas murray you've been so generous with your time i'm so grateful it's been a great pleasure thank you i'm so pleased to have had this conversation and thank you for it yeah pleasure pleasure and everyone run out and get the madness of crowds it's out as a paperback now you

Channel: Speak Life

Views: 179,280

Keywords: glen scrivener, speaklife, uk, God, Reaching out, Douglas Murray

Id: B810MLbgj4E

Length: 68min 28sec (4108 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020