Freedom, Faith & Forgiveness | Os Guinness

forgiveness can really make a decisive political and social difference not purely spiritual the trouble is a lot of truths the Jews and Christians have allowed to become very personal or very spiritual and not much to do with the whole of life and forgiveness is one that is absolutely fundamental to addressing some of these big issues like racism and slavery [Music] my guest today is Oz Guinness who I count as a very dear personal friend he was born in China educated in Oxford has become a prolific writer over 30 books and is sought as a speaker around the world currently lives in America with his wife Jenny and some who's also in uh a great lover of America and chooses to live here but I particularly wanted to talk to ours today about his latest book Magna Carta of humanity Oz has played a major role more so than any of the other guests I've had because as a young man I read his first book dust of death and for me it helped me understand the extraordinary freedoms I enjoyed as a citizen of Australia and of that Western tradition of democratic freedoms and how fragile they are and how we need to defend them the lightest book I sincerely believe is the best encapsulation I found of how the modern world was developed how it came about the great ideas behind it why we're now floundering and in fact in grave danger and what we need to address if we're to turn it around let me add another little teaser one of the great privileges in my life was to suggest to Jordan Peterson that he meet Oz and Jordan has told me that he is enjoying unpacking with us and others much of Oz's thinking because of his concern which I think so many of us share that we need to stabilize the ship so to speak if we're to secure for our children and our grandchildren and the freedoms and opportunities that we so passionately cling to us it's terrific to see you again here in Washington thanks so much for giving us your time a great pleasure John thank you now in this troubled world that we're living in where so much seems to be up for grabs there's one thing I think we can all agree on we are hopelessly divided it's David Brooks writes of the Great cultural difficulty that we now have because we're polarized divided and untrusting and you see all of this and you've written about it powerfully division how did we get here well I argue if you look at America that it's as deeply divided today as at any moment since just before the Civil War but the difference has come why I mean David Brooks talks about the crisis of Civility and character far deeper than that some people blame the social media or the so-called coastals California New York against the heartlanders in the midwest or others say it's the nationalists America First over against the borderless globalists and they argue all of those play a part but the deepest division is between those who understand the American Republic and freedom from the perspective of the American Revolution which if you go back is rooted in the Hebrew Torah the Old Testament books and those who understand American freedom from the perspective of ideas coming down from the French Revolution because if you look at postmodernism or political correctness or the sexual Revolution or identity politics or cancel culture all of those come from The Heirs of the French Revolution 1789 and they have nothing to do with the American Revolution 1776. so there's a Great Divide and it's like a cataclysm at the heart of the Republic so in part you're saying that all of these things these individual areas of difference that we focus on are really simply the if you like the byproducts the downstream products of the essential uh division that's happening over these two great streams of thought as to how we order or or to order our societies exactly the French Revolution of course only lasted 10 years in France and then came Napoleon the revolution is over but as the librarian of Congress great James Billington and others have pointed out the French Revolution was like a gigantic volcanic explosion in European history and out of it have flown these great lava flows ever since the first ones not often looked at revolutionary nationalism very powerful in the 19th century in France and Greece and Italy and so on and the thinkers behind that you think of Carl Schmidt in Germany he's one of the leading thinkers today behind Xi Jinping in China the main lava flows the well-known one revolutionary socialism in other words communism designed in the 19th century by Karl Marx and Friedrich angles but bursting out in the Russian Revolution and then of course in the Chinese Revolution but the third one this is what a lot of people don't understand not classical Marxism but cultural Marxism it goes back to a gentleman called Antonio gremshi and Italian Marxist who sat in jail under Mussolini figuring out why Marx didn't exactly have it right and he shifted from industrial strikes and all that sort of stuff to cultural Gatekeepers and who had the dominance of a culture what he called the hegemony and his ideas were picked up by the Frankfurt School 1930s 40s 50s 60s and in the 60s Faithfully in America the leader of the Frankfurt School was Herbert Marcus at the University of San Diego who was one of the Godfathers of the so-called new left and much of a counterculture and at the end of the 60s he and a German radical called for a Long March through the institutions Mao Style in other words they wouldn't went in the streets so they had to incrementally slowly gradually when the colleges and universities when the press and the media win what they called the culture industry Hollywood entertainment and then do an end run and win the whole culture now we're obviously 50 years beyond that and you can see the incredible inroads so that today to everyone's surprise even woke business and work finance and now increasingly the woke military in other words areas read doubts that you would have considered impossibly conservative never to be overcome and then now have a run so this division is running all the way through American Life can we go back to a couple of terms for a moment Revolution and you're really saying our modern world has been shaped by a series of revolutions but there are essentially two types plus a new one now emerging how do we understand Revolution if it's not something we've thought about I mean I think most citizens living comfortably are very confused by what's happening any number of books describing this movement or that movement and how ugly it is and how we're being silenced and everything's free speech is under attack but just Pat us out a little bit on what you mean by Revolution now that's important because terms like Revolution or Progressive they're relative who says so and what do they mean so you take say the American Revolution the high point was Yorktown when the British and the Hessian troops surrendered to George Washington and famously Legend has it that they marched out and played The Ballad the world turned upside down now that came from the 17th century and the English Revolution and it was actually a Christian and a theological term and the idea then was very simply God creates order humans create disorders so God works in the disordered World Revolution is turning the world the right way up and that idea was actually behind both the English Revolution which failed historians call it the Lost Cause and the American Revolution which seceded but of course if you move on Beyond those the French and the Russian and the Chinese Revolution are quite different they were anti-christian anti-biblical secular and have a very different definition of revolution so people shouldn't just use the term but be able to say what they mean by it because that's so significant there's a choice in essence between two revolutions would it be fair to say then that I think you call the English and the American Revolution the Sinai pattern of Revolution and I'll ask you to unpack that in a moment but they they were in essence they were designed to try and create societies which focused on what was right I don't mean by that rights I mean by what is right the others even even well-intentioned as as many people behind the French Revolution must have been overthrowing tyranny looking for a better way of life but unfortunately they were focused on power would that be a fair thing to say no absolutely when I call it the Sinai Revolution a lot of people think today Freedom tolerance where do these ideas come from the enlightenment that's actually a myth the wars of religion gave a revulsion against many expressions of religion in Europe but the 17th century was called by historians the biblical century because through the 16th century Reformation there'd been a rediscovery of the Bible so if you go back to 380 when the emperor theodosius declared Rome officially Christian the church was hierarchical it copied Roman structures Roman structures you had the emperor and the consuls and the Senators and in the church you had the pope and the Cardinals and the Bishops and it was a Catholic Layman Lord Acton who made the famous remark that all power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely hierarchical governments are corruptable think of the Inquisition or the terrible notion error has no rights the Reformation said no that was Rome the church should have been biblical what is the biblical way of government not hierarchical covenantal and the Covenant is actually behind the American Constitution and so the 17th century ransacked the Torah the first five books of the Bible especially Exodus and Deuteronomy the main two to see how you should think politically so even say Thomas Hobbs who is an atheist he refers hundreds of times to the Bible not to other atheists or to the classics because the passion of the 17th century was new forms of freedom and the Bible had the strongest blueprints in Exodus that's why I call it the Sinai Revolution can they contrast then a little by looking at the other side the French Revolution and I hadn't realized this until uh you alerted me to it that that Karl Marx himself was an admirer of the French Revolution so the French Revolution turns into something very ugly uh but the other two revolutions that followed Karl Marx's teachings in Moscow in in Russia and in China were very bloody and horrible Affairs that did not produce freedom so there's a contrast to be had there what was the thinking behind those revolutions that what you call the Paris revolutions well you can see a whole raft of contrasts so the sources are different one is the Bible the other the enlightenment or again the understanding of humanity is different the biblical revolutions have a very realistic view of humanity we all go wrong you have to stand against the abuse of power so the famous American Constitution built on the separation of powers separation of powers comes from Montesquieu the French philosopher but it goes back to the Bible you have the monarchy the priesthood and the prophets the three crowns of Authority for the Jews now the realism you have say James Madison's well known for his federalist 51. why he was taught by John Witherspoon at Princeton who is a Scottish Presbyterian Pastor who knew the realism of the abuse of power why because of sin the American Revolution is very realistic whereas the French Revolution and the radical left today are utopian Jean-Jacques Rousseau man is Born Free but everywhere in Chains remove a chain or two so you have thinkers like say Wilhelm Reich of the sexual Revolution if we're all unrepressed we'll be happy free and fulfilled no you might produce male monsters who tyrannize women and so on in other words the biblical revolutions were very realistic the radical left was very utopian So Gone Down the Line they have different views of freedom but here in America today the real contrast is justice now both sides tackle Injustice that's true but they have very very different ways of doing it so the radical if you analyze the speech of a culture or Community whatever it is and you're looking for the majority minority looking for the oppressor and the victim and when you found the victim you weaponize them and then you set up a conflict of powers but of course the radical left being post-modern has no truth as you said it might not right so if you set up a conflict of powers which is all there can be there's only one possible outcome the Romans called it the Peace of despotism in other words you have a power so unrivaled it can put down any other pirate faces and that's another word for authoritarianism the state Leviathan in modern terms totalitarianism so we've got to be absolutely clear the Revolutions of the left never succeed and the oppressions of the left never end now you compare that with the biblical approach it's quite different to tease this out a little bit a lot of people if they've stopped to think about the founding of the Great American experiment will say it wasn't Christian at all it was Enlightenment and anyway the major Figures were deists but you plainly believe that they were the founding fathers were deeply informed by Exodus can you tease out a little of where's the evidence firstly that they were that they were thinking that way and and what was it about Exodus because I've noticed that Jordan Peterson's talking about this quite a bit now on his shows as well he's saying this is a very valuable starting point if we're to understand our freedoms what was unique is the master Narrative of Western Freedom obviously the great cry let my people go or in the Negro spirituals go down Moses on Liberation movements in Latin America clearly but far far deeper than that what was it about the Exodus Covenant well you take the three essential things you have freely chosen consent the Lord puts out the Covenant to his people and three times in Exodus says says all that the Lord says we will do Michael waltzer of Princeton calls this an almost democracy the freely chosen consent that's where it comes from or again you have the idea of a morally binding pledge a covenant is more than a contract the contract is purely legal and you want to be abound as narrowly as you can be so that this is the point of the contract not the whole of life whereas the Covenant no it's much wider and longer lasting and it has that promise keeping moral pleasure to it which is why in the American case the Pledge of Allegiance used to be so important but the third thing is very distinctive a covenant is the reciprocal responsibility of everyone for everyone you love your neighbor as yourself you treat the sojuna well a stranger world because you were strangers earlier and so on you have that reciprocal responsibility you know the French The Three Musketeers all for one and one for all but the Jews had it centuries thousands of years before the Three Musketeers so the ideas now I'm not saying this influenced many of the founders directly but it was the early American so the Mayflower Compact is a covenant when John Winthrop on the rolling decks of the Arbella preaches his famous a model of Christian charity he's talking about a covenant oh when John Adams who was a Founder writes the first written constitution in America Massachusetts Commonwealth of Massachusetts he calls it a covenant and actually the Constitution is a kind of nationalized somewhat secularized form of the Hebrew Covenant and the tragedy today is Americans have flattened it and leveled it to just law and now on the radical left they want to throw it out altogether now if you look at the framers though I'm not saying they were all god-carrying Christians far from it but historians would say that 90 of Americans at the time of the revolution came out of a Reformation background in other words atheists or a tiny group Jews were a tiny group and even the Roman Catholics were relatively tiny group most of them were out of that background so it was natural to them to think in terms of things like Covenants but if you look at the framers themselves this incredible variety so Patrick Henry Give me liberty or give me death here's what you call today an Evangelical George Mason Virginia Declaration of Rights and so on he was a fully Orthodox Anglican Christian believer George Washington a little vague about Jesus invisible hands and that sort of thing but he was definitely a Christian and not a deist move across to Thomas Jefferson and you have a deist and you move further to you know Benjamin Franklin and people like Tom Payne who was an atheist so there's tremendous variety but they all believed in what I've called elsewhere but Golden Triangle of freedom which put very simply as this Freedom requires virtue virtue requires faith Faith requires freedom and like the recycling triangle it goes round and round and round Freedom requires virtue which requires Faith which requires Freedom which requires virtue add infinitum and so on so there's no question they weren't all believers but they all had a strong respect for the importance of religion and faith in terms of freedom would it be fair to say one way of looking at it would be to say that um they were actually very wary of government and of power they're actually quite wary of the corrupting influence of how you mentioned Acton um and so in a sense it might be one way of looking at it to say that their fundamental beliefs about the nature of humanity and so forth shaped their values and beliefs and culture and that shaped government government was to be if you like a function of the people that's one model one way of looking at the sort of Sinai Revolution whereas the other is to say that somehow government is Upstream it becomes a guarantor of our or if you like the shaper of the way we will live no Freedom at its heart as it was best understood was a form of self-government but the question is how do you continue that so Americans when they think of democracy and John as you know I'm not American I'm a great admirer of this country at its best but I'm not American but ask Americans about democracy they almost all quote Abraham Lincoln government of the People by the people for the people the classic statement they don't realize he was quoting a pastor who'd used it just three or four months earlier and the pastor was quoting John Wycliffe in Oxford in the 14th century and wycliffe's idea was very simple you had to put the Bible in the hands of everyone and then they would know the way of living which would make self-government possible so if you took the Bible out of the hands of the church and the priests and so on gave it to Ordinary People you could have Wycliffe said government of the People by the people for the people in other words you need to know what self-government is or inevitably you're going to have bigger and bigger central government and less and less Freedom personally and locally there's a sense in which what I'd like to say at this point in time is that you said we're losing that understanding it's a at risk because we're not understanding we're not defending it we've got a new more dangerous uh sort of cultural revolution coming our way threatening those things those freedoms and you have a personal perspective on it because of your own early life you've seen the brutality of of authoritarianism of of totalitarianism because as a seven-year-old in China will you take the two big 20th century revolutions the Russian 1917 and the Chinese 1949 I was in the Chinese Revolution we lived in Nanjing my parents had seen World War II and violence through plague and all sorts of things we'd seen death all around us but I'll never forget the day in January 49 my dad said to me son we're in trouble Chiang Kai-shek has just abandoned the city and the red armies on the way and sure enough they crossed the river Yangtze and then began the reign of terror and many of my father's friends and they were either imprisoned or executed by the score at that time so the rain we met people in the streets we knew well they wouldn't acknowledge us it was more than their lives were worth so I remember very vividly the experience but importantly many years later when I was a graduate student at Oxford I had dinner I used to go to All Souls where my tutor was um and one of the great people there was Isaiah Berlin and the first time we had dinner together it turned out he'd been a seven-year-old in the Russian Revolution two seven-year-olds the most brutal revolutions that produced Untold human misery and we both agreed thank God the English-speaking people stood against dictatorships but if Berlin were alive today a great philosopher of Freedom he wouldn't have believed the things that Americans are seeing and sadly much of the worst because while America is the lead Society in being so free so open it's gone woke at an incredible speed these ideas are sweeping much of the English-speaking world and much of Europe too and they are a cataclysm in terms of Western Civilization um you mentioned workism earlier and now again uh just then argues that freely in Australia only to discover that a bit of research has turned up but almost no one knows what it means and many people think well I must be woke and that's a good thing because it means I embrace anti-racism and what have you what do you mean by the term workism it's important I think it's part of the radical left's term to tone down their fearsomeness so communism used to be industrial strikes and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in lots of terms you had to accept to become a party membranes and and all that's gone and woke is a part of that so the old term in the 60s was conscientization a very long and ugly term conscientization in other words making people aware of the Injustice of situations and so on so they changed it to awakened and now awokened and woke so it's just an attempt to make it all much more user-friendly but the end result is still revolution in radical left terms and no one should be fooled it's not just a friendly folk term that's come from the African-Americans or whatever it is freighted now with revolutionary ideas and we should examine it very carefully revolutionary ideas I think you would argue and I would certainly agree that our hardly friendly to Freedom so let's go back to Freedom can we explore Berlin's ideas as to what Freedom actually is and then go back to your Golden Triangle a triangle just just extrapolate a little bit more out of your thinking well Lord Acton is a very historian of Freedom before Isaiah Berlin and his basic idea was freedom is not the permission to do what you like it's not license no it's the power to do what you ought so that's one difference but Isaiah Berlin added another dimension to that you have two sides of freedom freedom is negative freedom from so anyone on the controller any outside influence might be drugs or alcohol or a bully or a dictator they're not free to be free you have to be set free from and Christians begin there to be free you have to be set free it's not a natural condition but the other side of freedom is positive freedom freedom for freedom to be now of course that assumes the question who am I are we am I are you a machine an animal depending on who we are in other words the truth of who we are then we know what we're free to be now you can see immediately Freedom requires truth and that's where post-modernism goes wrong the whole post-modern movement says we're post-truths and they've ruled it out well the danger of that is there's no truth there's only Power but you can see the Jewish and Christian the biblical view is very distinctive as Jesus said famously you will know the truth and the truth will set you free think of Alexander solzhenutsin one word of Truth outweighs the entire world in other words if the postmoderns are right and everything's powered the majority wins you've got to have the votes you've got to have the missiles or whatever no if you have truth one man one woman can stand against a majority so truth is incredibly important and to go back to your virtuous triangle and the importance of freedom and the right framework for freedom to prosper the challenge that the frame is tackled you think of establishing a free Society the English-speaking world or wherever there are three tasks first you have to win freedom from anything that controls you that for the Americans is the revolution winning freedom the second task is ordering freedom that for the Americans was the constitution for the Hebrews the Covenant they were set free from Pharaoh Egypt that's negative Freedom they had to have the Covenant the Jews the Constitution the Americans that's the ordering of Freedom a way of living freely together but the third task is the one most people forget you win it you order it you've got to sustain it famously when Ben Franklin came out of the Philadelphia Convention a woman asked him Mr Frankton what have they pulled off achieved and he said famously a republic Madam if you can keep it in other words sustaining it and that isn't a few years that's decades and centuries that's where Americans are not doing well today and that's where the Golden Triangle comes in so Freedom requires virtue now the vote the word Virtue is the sort of goody goody word today and thrown out but for the framers it would include honesty and loyalty and patriotism and character you know and very very important Freedom requires virtue virtue of any sort requires faith of some sort they were very Cherry of atheists because there wasn't any grounding of why people should be good or speak truthfully or whatever and then of course faith of any sort required freedom and the first Liberty for Americans was freedom of conscience and religion now if you look at America to that you can find in almost every one of the framers somewhere what I call a Golden Triangle they didn't call it that every one of those legs is assaulted today who's interested in virtue Faith throw it out freedom of conscience pitch it out in other words Americans have assaulted the very foundation so what they need to sustain freedom and if you look at history free societies never ever lost for a simple reason that freedom is the greatest enemy of freedom it quickly goes wrong unless you live free the way that freedom requires with truth and so on so America is today losing its freedom rapidly and so is so much of the western world well now oz in this uh this book the Magna Carta of humanity that I've found so compelling chapter 7 setting up what's gone wrong and I should know I don't know that's a figure than the senior editor of The Economist I couldn't have put this better myself Rob Gifford he said this this book should be read by anyone who's concerned about the future of America and of Western Civilization uh here here but you paint a very clear picture as I understand it but particularly since the World War II we've been so comfortable it's all been so good we won out over tyranny and I suppose that was reinforced by the collapse of the Berlin Wall we've assumed it'll go on forever but we don't have to stop and think deeply about the things you've just been talking about they're just here they're ours so while we've been comfortable the other factors that you started to talk about if you like the cultural marxists who were worried that the Western workers were not rising up I came to the view that it must be the strength of Western institutions so we've got to attack them the March through the left um can you trace us through your thinking there on how we got to where we are the way I said if you look at Western Civilization where it was called a civilizational moment if you look at all the great civilizations 10 or so from the Sumerians and the Egyptians Chinese the Babylonians down through the Greeks and Romans and so on every one of them is not here today there's always a civilizational moment in other words when what made the civilization the civilization loses touch with it then the civilization faces a kind of choice will its inspiration be renewed or replaced or will it simply decline we're there so if you look at the West the West is the most powerful civilization the world has ever seen now that's not a moral comment simply we've taken to the world things like the Agricultural Revolution the Industrial Revolution science technology market capitalism which are now shaping the entire world not just a region of the world and yet the West is clearly a Christian civilization in its roots so the first attack was in the enlightenment an Enlightenment secularism in the 18th century sought to replace the Christian faith as the engine of the West now we can argue where that Clash is today but today there are a whole number of movements which are not only opposed to the Christian faith they're opposed to the West so you have what I've been describing the Red Wave classical Marxism or cultural Marxism well you have the rainbow wave because if you look at the origins of the sexual Revolution they go back to the very same place in Paris the Palais Royal that the French Revolution came from and politically and then you have the Black Wave radical islamism and people think of that against the little Satan Israel but of course their ultimate Target is the big Satan the U.S and the West so you've got forces now in the world which are not only against the Christian faith quite openly but they're against the whole idea of the western civilization itself and that's why this is quite an extraordinary moment and you trace through you've touched on it already um the the thinkers the Frankfurt School what happened in the radical days of the 60s and the 70s and now we've arrived at the civilizational moment that you talk about what it just seems to me there are Battlegrounds everywhere not least of them if you like a cynical Theory uh or critical theory rather people call it cynical Theory but critical theory and that Finds Its high water mark in critical race Theory critical gender Theory it's related to grievance studies where it seems the game is to go out and find minority groups real or perceived to who have something to be aggrieved about and then to weaponize those to find genuine victims or perceived victims and look for opportunities to weaponize those the drift is the same it's two ords not only overturning the institutions of Freedom as we've known them but to obtain power in the end it's about obtaining power is that the way you see it absolutely and that's partly as I said earlier because of postmodernism you know coming from nature in the 1880s and picked up the economists had a famous cover about our post-truth world post-modernism has undermined truth truth is undecidable and all that's left is power and you think is like Michelle Foucault who've analyzed everything in terms of that but that's extremely dangerous there's no right to overcome might might now makes right and that's the dangerous World in which we're living power predominates and of course we're back to Lord Acton all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely but there's no alternative unless there's a Revival of a strong view of truth and reality we've seen what economic Marxism looks like the revolutions that that came out of economic Marxism in Russia and in China we're talking about a different Marxism here and I think in your book you would say it cultural Marxism is still Marxism but what is a successful implementation of cultural Marxism in your view end up looking like well at the moment the way it's working out is in all sorts of areas so I live close to where the CIA is headquartered in Virginia our present Governor came in because of a huge controversy in the schools there about critical race Theory many people had no idea what the term meant and then when they began to learn what it meant they thought it went only back to the Harvard Law School in the 1970s when as we said earlier it goes all the way back to the 1920s and Antonio gramshi but people forget it's not only critical race Theory it's critical women's studies critical queer studies critical fat studies in other words Occupy Wall Street is part of the expression of it just as antifa and black lives matter in other words with the super funding of people like George Soros you've got a movement now that's ever morphing ever spreading with pop-up protest movements with cleverly chosen names no peace without Justice and so on they all sound good but you've got to look and see where they go to and many conservatives and many Christians have been fooled they've actually drunk the Kool-Aid you know they hear the word justice justice of course they stand to their feet and salute not realizing they've taken on board ideas that are radically left not Western biblical Jewish and Christian and so on so we've got to get people to understand history my first prime minister was Winston Churchill you know listening to him in the cars I came in today incredible sense of History a speech I was listening to this morning he was mocking Hitler Hitler didn't know what a fool he was to invade Russia and forget the Russian winter of course Churchill knew that because of Napoleon who was defeated by General winter and the snow but many people today have no interest in history all they have is facts and dates you can Google and quickly check but no appreciation of history history is fundamental to Freedom so we've got to get people to think deeper more broadly and understand what freedom is and the challenge of sustaining a free Society is not easy to pick up on this idea that that many of these movements sound attractive on the first glance I was struck by a young man I know from Australia who was living in America defending the black lives movement because he said he doesn't think blacks are well treated in America it turns out though that the organizers themselves admitted to being a valid marxists and marxists have never actually been interested in addressing Grievances and victims in a way that's designed to set them free and better their lot it's always been about power so at its heart what looks and sounds like a noble movement that people should support turns out to be something quite different and this is a pattern that seems replicated right across many of these movements but Americans have to come to terms with the evil and the hypocrisy and the contradiction of their Savory yeah it was very obvious to Europeans at the time so and to be fair to many Americans working within the system yeah sadly not enough of them well they ended up with a civil war didn't they I mean my family close friends and supporters of William Wilberforce and you know Wilberforce pleaded with Thomas Jefferson first and then later with President James Monroe to Institute what he called the concert of benevolence to tackle slavery and they wouldn't and you remember the famous remark by Samuel Johnson the creator of the first dictionary quote him why is it that those who are yelping about Freedom the American Revolution whereas he put it the drivers of negroes in other words the contradiction between the Declaration and the Constitution was obvious in the beginning so slavery is America's Original Sin but they made huge strides in the Civil Rights Movement particularly Martin Luther King and the notion of the content of character rather than the color of skin but you can see that there was in Switzerland calls it when you have unaddressed injustices they're like unexploded minefields an unexploded bomb left over from a war and then someone can accidentally stand on them or an enemy can detonate them so the radical left in that long march has detonated the residue of these unaddressed problems of slavery and racism and made hay with them and now the color of your skin matters more than the content your character and in the bid to be anti-racist America is becoming thoroughly racist and you can see the irony of this as people have fallen for the ideas of the radical left they have repudiated sadly Martin Luther King and the best of their own Revolution so if you go back in history say the great African-American reformers like Frederick Douglass and Booker T Washington and Harriet Tubman and sojuna Smith they all believed in the biblical way of tackling things if you look in the Hebrew Prophets you have truth addressed to power and you call for repentance a radical about turn and confession going on record or what you've done wrong and then forgiveness is possible and then reconciliation is possible and as Lincoln put it that is how you transform an enemy into a friend and that biblical that Jewish and Christian way of dealing with Injustice is night and day's difference from the radical left and that's why I said earlier the Revolutions of the radical left never succeed as you said they're power-based and the oppressions of the radical left never end and Americans and I think Western is a large now you and Australia have done better than most countries sadly Britain has fallen for the movement much more than Australia has but right across the West people need to wake up and see the fundamental principles of freedom justice Humanity that are at stake today you mentioned my country I would think it's fair to say that there are many many Australians who are pretty alarmed by the direction things are taking but cancel culture goes to the heart of feeling that they can't tackle this it's so cruel it's so without mercy and forgiveness and I wonder I made an observation the other day to a school group I don't think a family can work if there's no forgiveness I don't believe a community can work with that forgiveness and I'm not sure Society or a country can work without it it seems to be something that's dismissed the judgments are made they're Brutal by the modern uh progressives or lefties or whatever you want to call them this movement it's it's very harsh in its condemnation and there doesn't seem to be much of a route back if you've once been discarded well the two main features of the problem of the radical left are the one we mentioned already power no truth power but the other is the lack of Mercy so the cancer culture is a part of that and of course that goes right back to the French Revolution if you're accused you're guilty bring on the tumbrals let the guillotine fall and the cancel culture is the same and I think people like Douglas Murray have pointed that that out wonderfully the total pitiless lack of mercy so all power no truth and lack of Mercy in the way they deal with people that's the radical lift now you take forgiveness you can have cheap forgiveness which is no good either the soft forgiveness but real forgiveness is costly but it does two things it forgives the past whatever the guilt the burden of the past gone but it opens up the future you have a future of a second chance rather than the ball and chain around you forever so forgiveness is crucially related to Freedom interesting illustration from history in my own country it was a convict settlement and one of our early Governors who broke the mold was Lachlan Macquarie and his wife Elizabeth and they insisted that when a convict had served their time when they'd paid the price they would be set free and completely restored there was tremendous resistance from the non-convict community so bad that he was eventually recalled but he'd set the pattern they would invite former convicts to parties at government house to say you are now welcomed back restored atoned that sort of helped build a nation well Americans had a very dramatic example recently when a white supremacist 21 year old Dylan roof you know slaughtered nine African-Americans at a Bible study in Charleston and you can see from what he put out ahead he wanted to ignite a race wall but within 48 Hours the members of the family who were bereaved they were allowed to address their words to him and the very first one said I forgive you and one after another one produced the Bible they were stained with her son's blood and she too forgave in the light of the deeper forgiveness of Jesus on the cross and that dramatic event totally averted any question of a race war and the Governor Nikki Haley was a Christian the previous governor had stood against the Confederate flag and the two of them pulled down the Confederate flag which is not flown since then in South Carolina and it was a dramatic example of how forgiveness can really make a decisive political and social difference not purely spiritual the trouble is a lot of truths the Jews and Christians have allowed to become very personal or very spiritual and not much to do with the whole of life and forgiveness is one that is absolutely fundamental to addressing some of these big issues like racism and slavery as I'd like to round this out by coming back to this civilizational moment that you talked about there's a part of me that sees so many wonderful Australians who get that things are not where they ought to be but they're disengaged they feel disempowered they feel sidelined you've got to speak truth into the situation but you've got to turn up to do that and I suspect that you see this in the enormous disengagement from politics and people not turning out to votes in countries where it's voluntary it's compulsory in Australia but I think if it were not compulsory half of people might not turn up to vote at all probably more amongst young people um we need their engagement again because we are I think at a Tipping Point just reiterate again what do you think the chances are if I can put it that way that we will refresh rather than find an alternative which might be very ugly or fail you do see pushback in America the culture wars are horrible and ugly but there are people out there who seem to be gaining some traction with their argument that we need to rethink we need to ReDiscover our foundational truths in terms of the chances I would literally say John God knows right but in terms of what people need to do in other words the times of massive crisis like this at the end of it there are always two questions one what happened and two why didn't someone stand up and do something when there was time you think of Germany in the 1930s or whatever now today we should ask those two questions ahead of time and not wait for the events to unroll so here in America I can't speak more widely for Australia or Britain or elsewhere the missing thing is leadership in the 1850s where we started you had Lincoln who believed in the Declaration addressed the evil of slavery with a passionate conviction what he called the better Angel of the American nature and he called for a new birth of freedom things had gone off the rails there needed to be a new birth today you've got a lot of trench warfare push back you're right massive pushback but political short-term tackling what people are doing in schools on the next election there's no Lincoln there's no sense of history now of course leadership biblically is not just the person at the top or out in front it's anyone who takes responsibility for the situation right in front of them opportunity or a crisis a need or whatever that's the Christian Jewish view of leadership but leadership is a huge requirement today now my own conviction is that this crisis is such I don't know how it's going to work out but the future of humanity is at stake if you take the bookends of History you have Anarchy on one side all Freedom no order that's unlivable and you have authoritarianism the other side all order no Freedom represented Say by China North Korea Cuba and so on the West used to be a form of ordered freedom if that breaks down we're in trouble I hope there'll be leadership with people who understand the first principles of human dignity of truth of Justice the preciousness of words and so on down the line so that we can have a vision of freedom and living freely together that will lead Humanity forward and we need leaders for that particularly from the younger generation so maybe the challenge in a way could be seen as a lot of good people out there who feel disengaged will respond to a good leader but somewhere in that midst of those people out there who are disengaged we need a few people to say I might be that leader I'll give it a go at whatever level and sphere we're in absolutely this is an extraordinary moment in history crisis yes but opportunity to thank you Oz thank you [Music] thank you foreign

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 20,946

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations

Id: trmcvsIK_MI

Length: 55min 20sec (3320 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022