Gavin Ashenden | The Nature and Importance of Freedom

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Oh Kevin thank you very much for joining me with a conversation and I thought we'd focus on freedom you've done some very deep thinking about freedom I'm one of those people who fears that we may be allowing our hard-won freedoms to slip away your observations on where Britain and the West are going are I think extraordinarily interesting we're in Oxford there have been a lot of thought and a lot of blood spilt in this place as people have sought freedom how we were the ears where are we what's happening John the first thing anyone would want to do would be to define freedom because my freedom to do something usually involves constraining somebody else but but but let's just take freedom for the moment to mean freedoms our talk and to think and to act within the law as we've enjoyed doing in our culture for a while there's a crisis coming and and many of us think that we're about to lose those freedoms in a drastic way I thought for a while that my mental health might be impaired I thought I wonder if I become a bit neurotic and paranoid why am I so anxious why there's there's no doubt at all there's a correlation between between the future doom and and and poor mental illness so I probably hoped almost I might I might be suffering from poor mental illness but as the years have gone by the good news to me is that I'm quite well insane the bad news for society is that we're in very real trouble and what's worse is that those of us who are standing up and saying we're in real trouble are being shouted down or ignored and people do or just people can't hear so that's a cause of really a real concern so the people who are winning the war so there's no war absolutely the fact that people are winning the war and more care than that they say that if people like Arthur or me are listened to they'll be a war so it's almost as if you're being so slowly ambushed and then if you don't lie down and give up they say well there'll be a fight and you say yes but if I but if I don't stand up and fight I'll be overcome never mind that they say you're gonna be a become anyway and the trouble is we are going to be overcome anyway we've got to the point in Europe in my judgement now where the battle for freedom as easy is lost just imagine for a moment that all the people who have been calling out warnings about public censorship about the diminution of choices about the whole censorship through legislation with hate crime and so on but the whole ludicrous seriously mentally and intellectually flawed phobia pressures account people imagine we're all listened to for a moment and we said we'd like our country in our culture back well we might get it back through a civil war which would be a dreadful dreadful thing to happen but but that would be the only way we get it back and if there's not going to be a civil war then we certainly weren't getting back because we're involved in a power struggle and the people who have are taking away our freedom taking away the opportunity for discourse who are changing the meaning of words under our noses they're not going to give us our power back without a fight and and quite clearly at the moment there's no sign that's going to be a fight apart from those of us were standing up trying to tell the truth in the public space I'm being both shouted down and actually even being being threatened with the law let's explore this idea then a little of the foundational freedoms some people say that in many ways that's very relevant here in Oxford because blood was shared by people who held a minority view and that perhaps freedom is best defined by saying that we don't discriminate against people who hold a minority view apart from anything else it's not very sensible because one day they might be in the majority so that freedom of conscience the right to hold through a minority view and not face sanction for it mob sanction or government sanction and I suppose government usually follows the mob in a democracy is that the essence of our essential freedom that right to disagree to hold a minority view and to speak to it it is in part but I would say that's a symptom of our freedom rather than the freedom itself so the risk of being simplistic I'd like to draw a picture it'll be it'll be a very blunt picture and people will jump up and down and say well for goodness sake that that's much too shallow but we have to start somewhere so let's draw the picture and then we can redefine it to my mind there's a triangulated conflict taking place at the moment between three major ideological forces there Islam there cultural Marxism or secularism they're merging into the same thing and the judeo-christian tradition now the first to deal in power so is Islam deals empowered about submission here is the will of God and you please God and you and you please the Caliphate by doing as you're told and the Quran is imposed and Sharia law is imposed the interesting thing about the secularism or cultural Marxism is it's it's a cousin of the Judah judeo-christian tradition it's the it's the vision of people who like what the Bible promises at the end but don't want to go through God to get there so they like the utopianism they like the perfect society they like they like the end result where where the poor will be fed where they're naked clothes where people have tears wipe from their eyes and there'll be peace but but they want to do it we're all like that we all go well we do we do but they don't want to go through God to get there so I'm starting with the French Revolution this utopian movement said well we can do this on our own terms we don't have to listen to the Bible we don't have to pay attention to Jesus or to any other follower we can do so use our common sense because apartment else Humanity has the potential to pull the goods the rabbit out of the other hat and what we've seen since since 1779 is actually the original story the Christian Judeo Christian story the humanity's flawed appears to be true because every time the secular left the progressives try and build utopia they do it at the cost of unimaginable murder so the French Revolution itself was immensely bloody Act it was followed of course by the Russian Revolution Mao Zedong killed something like 90 million people Stalin's purges killed 40 million people the blood strain the blood strewn trail of progressive socialism is deep in blood and and it never succeeded I mean they say well give us more time or give us better conditions or more people need to be part of the project but it so the theory sound it's just that we got the practice wrong and that's right and so then they're still saying that that's reason we need to bring it up again and and and the problem with the garret arianism or this utopianism is you have to impose it it's got to be done by force so we have Islam using force we have the progressive utopianism using force and then we have Christianity the Christianity divides into two heart two kinds to my mind real Christianity which is about love and humility and and the life that the countercultural life that Christ lived and invited us to follow and corrupt Christianity because and corrupt Christianity happens wherever Christian did the Christians decide they want to piggyback on somebody else's values and so in the last 300 years the piggybacking that's happened is is on the back of nationalism so many people look at the history of Christianity and they say Gavin Unni you can't be serious look at the Inquisition look at the Wars of Religion in Europe look at colonial oppression you know you can't be serious that Christianity is as good as you say it is twich my reply is well look at son Francis there are moments when if you practice a thing properly it was GK Chesterton who said the trouble with Christianity is not that it's been tried and failed but has been tried and find - rather hard when it works properly it's astonishing it gave us the Hospice's it gave us schools that gave us education it gave us the freedom of slaves when a piggybacks on another culture which is what it's happening at the moment in particular nationalism then it goes bad so we have to distinguish between two kinds of Christianity and once again the real hope for our judeo-christian culture into my mind is a renewal of Christianity but in our culture many Christians have been seduced by the progressive utopia and they say well you know people don't want to go by God perhaps they shouldn't have to if they if they want to develop their own potential and be proud of their own achievements you know perhaps they can because they haven't read history and they haven't fought very clearly so in this trying in the triangulated fight the problem for us is that the Islam and the progressive left have joined forces over the last 30 years to wipe out Christianity and that's in Europe they're succeeding all too well partly because Christians have been seduced by a a connoisseur and call of relativism and multiculturalism and don't see the trap that the whole of our culture is being ushered into and and the danger is that we've just reached a point where to talk about Christianity in the public space is to be accused of hate crime and to breaking the law so our public evangelists are the swallows are the Canaries at the bottom of the mine when the evangelists on the street corners can no longer what they do what they've been doing for 1,500 years which is telling the good news of Christ in the public space then you know that freedom is at an end because once that freedom goes all the others will go it's judeo-christian freedom that has allowed the minorities their place when Christian Xion working well get rid of Christianity and you have the gulags instead well hardly know where to start but let me come to two of those issues the first one is perhaps sometimes as Joseph said you made it for evil but God meant it for good so I would surely would all agree was a very ugly distorted view of Christianity that allowed people to burn one another at the stake has happened here their memorials in this town the people who were burned at the stake appalling ly bad I would have thought in terms of a proper understanding of Christian faith yet it gave rise to the recognition that it was appalling and I think our culture resolved in its earlier forms as it was working these things through that we ought to allow people to have freedom of conscience which surely is right so to the examples you've given in Oxford are very good ones of Christians siding with the state killing Christians who didn't side with the state the reason that terrifyingly clear is because for a while you had you had Protestant martyrs as as Mary came in and re instituted Catholicism in the country and then when Mary died you had Elizabeth and then you had Catholic martyrs because the state was now Protestant rather than Catholic the issue is that if you allow the state to define Christianity then Christians will act as instruments of the state and and and have always always have done another example I think more prescient frost would be Germany in the 1930s there you had the same issues you have Bonhoeffer seeing the same things as we're talking about today saying the state appears to be offering to cut you a deal it's quite a good deal we need employment we need social order though some people would like to get rid of too we-we-we like a strong hand with some some Nietzschean and Vulgarian undertones to that the whole germanic project and Bonhoeffer said this is very dangerous christians need to step right away from this and so again christians is invited into to those who stepped away from the state and those who were swallowed up by the state and did the state's will now the germany german example is a is an example closer to home that God can bring good out of bad if the six million Jews had not died in the Holocaust there would be no State of Israel for the rest of worldwide URI to have some kind of sanctuary this is not to say that means justify the end it is to make make your point that to the casual observer casuals are wrong work to the to the observer on a sideline asking questions about good and evil how do they relate and the answer seems to be that they're in constant conflict if good is not constantly wary will be overcome and polluted by evil if it if good fails is at the end of the story and this was your point no um somehow good resurrects itself all good or rather more more properly could gets resurrected so you just as a story about the resurrection of goodness in in in England it's true though that we stop burning each other but persecutions didn't stop the next religious revival revival was Wesley and the Church of England simply closed its doors on it and kicked him out there was another one with Newman and the same thing happened but you're right for those of us who believe in absolute goodness and the triumph of goodness every time evil overcomes goodness goodness gets resurrected now what that should do is not make us complacent it just saves us from despair well you mentioned there to change gears again briefly for a moment destroying on what do your comments you made a few moments ago three revolutions which were bloody and cruel and awful and we should teach us a very great deal about what not to do if we understood our history there was another revelation which is generally seen as a high point of establishing a framework of freedom the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence 1776 whilst America we look at it now it seems to be a community at war with itself we wonder where there got to with apologies to my American friends but it's hard to avoid that conclusion as you look at well the debate there nonetheless they haven't been very committed to freedom I talked about it a lot was obviously deeply flawed because they kept slaves for a long time after they declared independence but nonetheless they have been champions of freedom they've been prepared to seek to advance it around the rest of the world what was different about the American Declaration of Independence and that revolution I think I'd like to answer that by with the observation that generals are always fighting the last battle of the last war and so for the American Revolution the last war it was fighting was was English monarchic or oppression and taxes especially taxes and so the American Revolution set out to make sure they could build a society free of the of the the state interference that the the English monarch achill set up offered it wasn't appalling oppression but it was it was accent yeah it was costly but I'd say they've been five revolutions I'd want to add the American a fifth one and that's the Cultural Revolution over the nineteen sixties because if we don't understand that then we first we don't understand why the American revolutions in trouble but the the fifth revolution has come a surprise to many people so the the in Marxist revolution set out to produce equality on on the back of the French Revolution and and Marx wasn't a very good economist he wasn't a very good socialist he thought that the quality he could produce would be the quality of the proletariat bringing down the moneyed landed in ruling classes and he thought there'd be enough energy and self-interest to make that happen so the Russian Revolution was a forced experiment to kick-start a proletarian revolution which he expected them to follow elsewhere and they never followed so the end of the experiment in the 1980's the the Russian egalitarian revolution failed it failed because it misread politics and it missed retic economics fail for other reasons too but those are the just two reasons the moment however there were a group of intellectuals committed to Marx's Galit aryan project they're there they're the utopians again they're there they've morphed away from the French Revolution and they're they're still looking to bring and they've looked at the Russian Revolution and they think it may not work so they call the Frankfurt School and they sit down in Germany and there many of them moved to America and they say if we can't produce a state driven egalitarian society it's fair and just by Marxism 1.0 let's invent Marxism 2.0 and instead of coming at it by the economy and by by Harriett will come at it by culture and we our major enemy is the family the judeo-christian family because because the state can't become the parent for as long as there are real parents around the state can't become your family for long as there's a real family you belong to so the the whether whether it was designed by by intuitive accident or or or on purpose and whether it's being driven now by by people behind the scenes or it's simply evolved under its own steam I don't know but it came as four stages and the first stage was feminism and and feminism of course breaks down into at least three ways the first wave is about women having the vote everyone was on board for that very quickly and it really took off very early in Australia the first place women were given the vote was in an Australian state absolutely because this goes hand in hand with with a developing technology and a medical system that soon produced his birth control and birth control changes everything because now women don't have to stay at home and as soon as as medicine and technology changes the rules then we have women at work second wave feminism and everyone says well this is a good thing everyone except the children who may not be being brought up by their mothers but then people said themselves well it's about human choice maybe they'll manage just as well who knows yet we'll see so this this experiment a second wave feminism and then you have newspapers saying can can women have it all can they reach the top of the the work tree and produce healthy children and we've been arguing about that for 50 years and then third wave feminism comes with with a real sting in the tail because feminism is predicated first of all on equality with men but but then also an anger with men and on and on a need to displacement to get out from under men's feet to produce a society where women are not controlled by men and and get some degree of reparation for past wrong so third wave feminism says well let's treat gender as a construct of the imagination basically there's biology you can't change your genitals but you can change you change your gender what you dress in how you how you act how you expect how you handle things how you interrelate that's all in the head so now utopianism goes into the head that's where your true freedom lies in your head and if enough people have freedom in their head then these shackles of oppression that the judeo-christian tradition above all has imposed on us will begin to dissolve so the downside of this is that there's always been a gender war because because power has always been part of the human experience and on the whole men and women have to try to manage their that their gender struggles they move from falling in love to struggling to getting cross with each other back to falling in love and it's a bit of messy but but on the whole there are stages of mutuality and mutual need but but third wave feminism intends to end that mutual need along with the health of science and and it arches in gay marriage for a while for about 10 or 15 years I was a passionate LGBT activist because I bought into the the oppressive narrative I like my my I'm a failed opera singer I like theatres I like musicals I actually have a kind of I have a kind of cultural persona that makes me look like I might be gay I had a lot of gay friends and I felt very strongly for them and I wanted to protect them so for a while I too was very much in favor of gay marriage until until I began to discover that the gay marriage project wasn't WYSIWYG it wasn't based on what you saw it turned out that the lesbian relationships were the most violent and unstable of all relationships we have this from Scandinavian research to people who think this is just a piece of I've slipped in homophobia it turns out that that the my my gay friends in my university town who came to talk over their words with me said well you know I mean I'm in a stable faithful monogamous gay relationship but I wish he wouldn't sleep away eight times a month the maximum is four and so I would say wait a moment you're in a stable exclusive relationship and you both get to sleep away four times a month yes that's that's where men we're men unrestrained by women it's only women who strain men who if they could would sleep around as much as they can get away with because that's how men are built so women women cut a deal and they say if you want the comforts of home life you stop that but in the gay male community that's not the case until people get older it a bit more sedate and so what we discover is that both the male gay community and they were female gay lesbian community are not in fact these these foundationally healthy solid safe places where you can build family life on that's the narrative but it isn't true the the place where it becomes most true for children to best flourish is in with their biological parents but but here's the thing this was a plea for justice and equality and the whole gay narrative and gay marriage narrative now uses children as a commodity to legitimize gay marriages and gay relationships well that's the most terrible abuse of the human rights of children who ought to start off by having at least a possibility of access to their biological parents and then it turns out that we discover in America that there are a number of children brought up in gay marriages and gay relationships who are now suing the state by saying look this was a profoundly unhealthy destabilizing and damaging experience for us you had no right to experiment almost like this and the outcome has been very poor now we're still arguing about this because we're it's a recent experiment but one of the problems about discussing it is if you if you raise it in these terms you're accusing phobic so the reason I mentioned that I was a an LGBT activist ten minutes ago is to try and get myself a free pass from that well he's just humble phobic you know there's nothing wrong with him he he doesn't understand he doesn't love he doesn't like and and that that isn't true the interesting thing then was to say well now look at what's happening in society first of all we got feminism bringing in the new you as a vanguard of utopia equality and it had some good effects and some bad effects and then we have gay marriage and this is very recent we're not quite sure if we can judge the effects yet so people like me are saying actually guys this is this is built on very thin ice and and the outcomes we can see are not looking promising and the rest of society says cool it let's let's let's give people some slack and see what happens and as we're doing that the next the next stage in cultural Marxism develops and it's transsexualism so it's this is this fluid identities gender identity and this looks like freedom but actually gender dysphoria also looks like mental illness now how do we tell the difference between freedom and mental illness well William James was very good on this he was a one of the early professors of both psychology and philosophy in America and he said just look to the outcomes the outcomes will tell you whether Jesus said something similar Stickle William James William James said let's look to the outcomes now the outcomes are that the mental health of our children hasn't been very good in the last 30 or 40 years it's really quite a serious problem it's been quite us everywhere in the way absolutely and whether it's get kids smoking skunk which which which causes real problems with with with paranoia or whether it's it's the uncertainty of sexual freedom and responsibilities and the damage that go with it and the ghastly abortion rate seven million eight million in England 60 million in America the cost of our new libertarian experiment have not been good but suddenly with the rise of transsexualism we've moved from 1.0 7% of society experiencing a discomfort between the biology of the body and and the the psycho gendered geography of the brain to to to an exponential increase and actually if the one thing you might give an adolescent to cling onto for some kind of mental stability is their gender when everything else is up in in in the air and now we've taken that that stability away from them and the and the explosion of gender dysphoria is quite extraordinary for kids didn't have enough mental confusion and and trouble this new element in cultural Marxism is causing the most dreadful pain and then you get a number of we wouldn't just just pulled it up they wouldn't they be those who would say well that was because it wasn't polite to talk about before we suppress it we've now given people freedom to that's all they yeah there's an element of truth in that of course there is there have always been a small tiny proportion of people who suffered some kind of aberrational either had a biological it's a tiny tiny proportion or mental yes we've we've human beings we come in in the widest variations but the more you bring into question our frailties our our odd nurses our eccentricities particularly few alright the end of the scale the greater uncertainty of there is and people don't manage very well with uncertainty but if you compare the two things side by side as you quite rightly do then then the number of people who who functioned perfectly adequately even if they were at that end of the spectrum i compared to now is enormously different now we people are given the freedom to explore they're given the freedom to be told they're nain about this him and their functionality is is really very badly flawed and and the terrifying thing is that a number of us who've looked at cultural Marxism say well okay first of all feminism and then gay marriage and then transsexualism and the next thing coming down the road seems to be pedophilia so if you if for example you look at a very recent piece of toronto of government propaganda in ontario where you have a very nice teacher telling children eight nine and ten that they are to be allies of gay pride what you can't escape is is the is the fact that that the gay pride movement defines itself by sexual attraction by sexual appetite i mean that's what it's all about there's a bit of romance thrown in but but if you look at the gay pride marches it's it's it's rampant sexual activity dressed up in the most lurid way so now you say to eight or nine year old children children you need to you need to approve of this we're going to be allies of Gay Pride allies of the gay movement and bright intelligent children say well this is about sexual ization so you're introducing adult sexual ization to children eight or nine or ten in order to get them to support a political program and then what you discover is in fact we're finding out now that that the covert pedophiles have immediately jumping on to the LGBTQ bandwagon saying hey when we two are suffering from a form of disability don't criminalize us because we're attracted to children it's it's a form of gender disability we get to jump on the bandwagon and and the terrifying thing that we're about to find and is it's beginning to stir now is that this whole assault on judeo-christian values where you have within the family of a man and a woman bringing up their own children as the basic template producing the greatest the best stability the best performing children the most stable outcomes to social glue that is being washed away in a tide of alternative ideology and actually even began being treated as somehow limited or bad so where does all this about - well if it was just a new expression of of cultural exploration we might be able to say okay let's see what happens that's treated as an experiment the sleeping around in the 60s it didn't do a lot of good the the drug taking in the seventies and eighties it didn't do a lot of good we now have the evidence to say some of these freedoms were actually quite damaging the danger now is that if you stand up and say I don't think marriage gay marriage does our children a lot of good I don't think it even does necessarily the people who engage in it a lot of good I'm strongly for civil partnerships by the way because their civil rights but the hijacked marriage is to move it away from their heteronormative into a different category then you get accused of homophobia and if you say I I don't think that introducing transsexualism into the public place is necessarily good for people like for example a a postgraduate researcher in bath whose job was to help people transition so the holiest life is professional job as being helping people in this movement and then he discovered as he was doing a postgraduate term a degree of Bath University that the outcomes for people transitioning were really very poor the level of regret was unacceptably high so the thing he'd been trying to help people do as a matter of of a human dignity of personal freedom of gender integrity turns out to be damaging people so he began to say my research suggests that the level of regret that we are discovering in transgendered people is too high to be acceptable so they threw him off the program they threw him out of the university he's not a welcome voice in the public media he's been closed down you could never accuse him of being transphobic he's actually an expert but anyone who's qu who criticizes whether it's gay marriage or trans rights is closed down as being homophobic and and then the same thing is also true when you if you move over to the whole Islamic thing if you criticize Islam in a public space you are the Metropolitan Police now I've got a guideline saying if you make a connection between Islam and violence you are guilty so if I was to stand up on a street and say hey guys listen to me I've been thrown off the social media I've broken the conditions of YouTube and Facebook and Twitter as I would do if I see if I hold these views and I say listen to me on a street corner Islam is quite dangerous it's very quite violent and and trans rights is dangerous to people to our children we're pumping with hormones and cutting bits off them don't do these things I'd be arrested within minutes so so we go back to the beginning of your conversation where what's happening to our freedoms and the answer is we are being overwhelmed by a tsunami of for change this untested appears to be potentially very dangerous and as we stand up to have a public conversation about it we've been shut up already there's an aspect of this which which there's no other way to put it makes me very angry I actually think we're using our children now or making them victims in our culture wars and it's not so long ago that would have been seen as abhorrent parents would have said it's our responsibility and it's our right or the other way around it's our right and our responsibility to raise our children it strikes me that there's not much pushback in many Western cultures against this creeping statism where parental authority and obligations in are pushed to one side where children sometimes are encouraged to do things at school on the basis that their parents need not and even must not know about well and and and one of the reasons why that's exactly right and one of the reasons why that happens is because one of the other ambushes we fall into is this false dichotomy between the right and the left on my Twitter feed I say I'm anti-fascist I am I'm anti state control whether it's um whether it's the control of a race one race of another or of of culture or class which is of the left so the left and the right are in fact have a certain symmetry about them but what the Left have done is to say if you criticize us we're going to call you a fascist we're going to place you on the far right of the political spectrum even though you hate fascism and even though you completely and utterly a bore state control in the name of race so the the middle ground which is where most people lie in fact and where the argument ought to be coming from has been taken from under our feet and therefore if you if you make the point you've made and say to the left look you're being hypocritical you who once got so exercised by by the Dickensian practice of sending children up up chimneys to clean them you who once got exercised by child prostitution and and child forced labor you have no problem with with taking the rights of the of the preborn away from them you're happy to kill children in the womb and you're also happy to to to farm children out as a social experiment and remove them from at least one and maybe both of their biological parents in order to support somebody else's venture of gender identity how has this got to anything to do with children's rights and at that point well you're called a fascist you mustn't question the progressive values of the left because this is about a particular kind of equality and and that's the problem with YouTube with with progressive utopianism it's always about one particular kind of equality and and and in the same way that I began by saying I'm hesitant to claim freedom because I recognized my freedom my freedom to drive fast may result in my killing other people killing taking away the pedestrian freedoms and so so too how do you deal with inequality where the progressive left has always done it is by is by taking other people's freedoms away from them and by exercising a level of debilitating control so and we don't get to have this conversation because to take the left on is to be labeled as fascist or phobic to complete fictions which are which are untrue and unchallenged two things to unpack there let's come to them in reverse order we'll talk about equality and what it really is because it seems to me that pursued in the wrong way it ends up mitigating against freedom but before we do that one of the things that strikes me you have talked freely and we're seeing it in Australia too the way that that about the trend towards trying to if you like clamp down on make a league who ensure that people do not engage in hate speech but what absolutely amazes me is the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of this because it seems to me that the radical elites if I can put them that way who control so much to the public debate say nothing about the vicious hatred that is peddled on social media it is staggering stuff and I think it is very intimidating for people who hold a moderate or a conservative view I remember I remember when hate speech was involved or hate crime was was first put on the statute books in this country I initially thought I was going to be a lawyer so said two stages in answer to your question first of all when Tony Blair introduced the notion of hate crime here I looked round to see why aren't people jumping up and down at this astonishing shift from if you like the collective objective I know that's part a contract in terms philosophically this is difficult territory why we moved from the collective objective to the subjective so the collective objective was the man on the Clapham omnibus that was a test in the British courts if you asked the irregular person man woman on a bus travelling you pick them up by random and said use your common sense what do you think this would be the the the perspective that undergirded the rule of law in this country what Tony Blair did as an architect of this Cultural Revolution and I think a much more canny architect than we give him credit for is he interiorized crime so he he he put it into the person's head so the only put that the way what have well then happened was the the a you you you you tell whether a crime is being committed by whether someone feels a crime has been committed and and there is no collective objectivity well now the first thing you ought to say is how sane is a person upon his judgement you're relying but but to give over the autonomy to decide what is a crime to the so called victim whose sanity you can't judge was was the door that opened all of this and again there's been no kick back no fight back the first thing we need to do in our country is to repeal the equalities act and get rid of this appalling ludicrous insane legislation that defines hate in this way and then of course as you quite rightly say any kick back from the center to say look the hate actually isn't with us at all it's with you the hate is on the left there's there's an old kind of psychological maxim to do with projection that you know when people start shouting and making a great noise they they may be reflecting what in them more than the object of their of their analysis and in this case the the hate is almost all on the left and we've had for the last five or ten years examples of of the libertarian Center being hounded by the progressive usually gyre either either simply politically progressive or LGBT politically progressive mob who haven't had them thrown out of work thrown off Twitter turn of the puppet social media the hate in my judgment is almost all on the left it is quite extraordinary it's all the level I think now where you'd have to say wouldn't take much to to make it break out into actual violence and it does seem to me that there was if part of the genius of Western society was to establish ways by which we accommodate differences so we stopped hanging at burning people's sake we stopped hanging them we gave up the guillotine we saw the horrors of the Gulag Archipelago and the salt mines and what-have-you for people that held a minority view in places like Russia but now we've invented our own guillotine we can kill people socially and mentally it seems by social media we have and behind what you've just described lies the issue of whether or not there is progress so you you you you implied there was progress so begin it look look what we've done look what we've achieved look where we've got but in actual fact the moments where minorities have been safe the moment where the minority has been able to speak out there pretty precious and few and far between it's not been the normal human experience it absolutely hasn't and we had it for a while in Europe it came and went and there were always exceptions to it the Jews were the exceptions in Hitler the gays were the exceptions and the gypsies have been the exceptions easily in the categories we who who fared least well when it was being practiced best we never even managed it very well but we managed it for a few moments of an of genuine enlightenment but but as a Christian I would say look I don't believe in progress I believe in technological progress I'm very fond of anesthetics I'm fond of antibiotics so it looks like we're screwing that one up I like plastic until we we put in micro balls and shove it into the oceans but that she had on the whole I don't believe that human beings are capable of moral progress what we're capable of is this is reason I'm a Christian we're capable of being saved and as we understand the terms by which we are saved we share them with other people so the terms on which we're shaved is we're saved we we see something going wrong we change direction we get forgiven and we offer it to other people so we we then invite other people to share in this largesse hey do you want to change direction let's let's give you space to do that rather than hang you let's let's see if we can give you a better in a new life through education I've been forgiven and I can forgive you Society can forgive you week this is the life of second chances but it's absolutely predicated on judeo-christianity it does not exist in Islam where they cut your hands off for various things where they stone you for various other thing it is not a Sharia principle this forgiveness and the second chance nor is it a secular progressive principle it was not to be found in Mao's China it wasn't to be found in Stalin's Russia it's a very precious attribute of judeo-christian society and one of the things I want to say to people are listening we're not Christians is that although Christianity has had its bad patches when as I suggested it's piggybacked on other value systems at the heart of a the heart of a over an ideology which sanctifies human beings and says they are not for disposal human beings are not disposable they they have the mark of God upon them and however they behave they must be treated with respect and generosity an ideology that says you can be forgiven endlessly an ideology that says we you can come good in the end and we'll do all we can to give you the space to do that that's an ideology that provides freedom of speech and freedom of behavior and there isn't another one looking back in world history there isn't another culture that does that and we're about but by attacking judeo-christianity in the way we've done on the grounds that people are lazily preferring this sloppy non-existent in Galit Aryan fascism of the left they will lose their freedom of speech and even if they don't like but even if they don't want to be saved even if they don't want to go to heaven and they don't want God and they don't want that the life of Christ in them they ought to want their freedom of speech and they're going to lose it it's a great irony in that isn't there because properly understood Christianity says that all have Worth and dignity in fact that no one is more valuable or worthy than another at the same time as it denies the modern idea that were we should insist on equal outcomes so there is a retiree there because in reality the modern left is creating whole new hierarchies of worthiness and unworthiness absolutely and at that very time as they accuse Christians and people of traditional belief of being in persuading in support of inequality so you're absolutely right Christians believe in equality we believe we've ever equally flawed and and the key I think the dealing with with equality is actually to come at it by by inequality one of the reasons I wanted to be a lawyer was I wanted to deal with inequality and particularly those who didn't have access to justice so I mean in Christian theological terms there's something called the katha fatty in the a pathetic way via negativa there positiva for those who lack the technical language what I want to suggest is if you give you try and goaded by like creating equality you fail yeah if you go do it by dealing with inequality you can have some partial success and that again is the difference between the right and the left politically I don't associate myself with the right I disassociate myself with the left I lit eclis I want a bit of both III I want to cherry pick where the best the best of both but personally to be honest I'm not certain that any of the old labels work anymore I don't think because ambivalence in language has been the postmodernist best friend so I'm not sure what words mean anymore well you're quite right and what we're using is we're using an image from the French Court where where the progress is sat on the left of the king and people who wanted the status quo sat on the right and we've taken that image and we're applying it so bluntly - ever - to our present situation you're right we ought you'll be better if we didn't use right my left but the other thing you quite rightly and so importantly touch on is the meaning of words so equality doesn't mean equality anymore and if we were going to deal with equality we will be doing a vie in equality diversity doesn't mean diversity what diversity means is let's get rid of the old cultural norms and welcoming anything that isn't judeo-christian tolerance doesn't mean tolerance anymore it means let's get rid of the old cultural agreements and welcoming anything that isn't judeo-christian and you can test it by standing up and saying hey I'm a Christian and I have these views see how much diversity law and planning helps you then not at all some wonderful YouTube skits of Christians going in for jobs in front of diversity and equality officers and I'm oh they discovered that Christians being ushered out of the room so it's olive tolerance diversity equality these are all magic words that mean one thing to the cultural left and mean and another entirely when they're tested in the robust heat of the light of social intercourse interesting quote from our longest-serving Prime Minister in Australia he said democracy is not so much a machine as a spirit in which we knowledge that people have different capabilities they end up in different stations reflecting different abilities and indeed different interests and pursuits I'm paraphrasing yeah but we recognize that under heaven all cells are equal and that lies at the basis of our freedom yeah I think that I think it's making mistake I would say so we welcome this incredible they said we celebrate this great difference and then what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that those who are differently strong don't get to practice inequality on those who are differently weak we're not going to we can't produce equality but we can spot inequality and inevitably in any society where there's freedom the people who are more competent I mean Jordan Peterson is very good on on the whole business of governing competence the people are more competent I'm going to gather together resources that make sure they're okay and people are less competent I can have few resources and reasons I'm not on the right or the left is because I think there is a role for a state to offer some for the community through the state to offer some kind of arbitration I don't think he was in conflict with that at all no but what I'm saying was so I don't think he was either but but I was taking the language you used and saying trying to sharpen it up I was because he slipped in the word equality of souls and I just think the moment you use the word equality it is so dangerous so difficult to tie down well let's take that out none of us would be against equality of opportunity right or recognizing in the end that all have dignity and Worth absolutely so we start at that point yeah we then move to surely an understanding right and we have to do things to a facilitate equality of opportunity absolutely we have to build steps oh absolutely absolutely yeah surely then we move on to a situation where in practice a great deal was achieved whilst equality of opportunity has been pursued but what is really interesting is that after a while it seems to morph into increasingly if you like authoritarian approaches to try and ensure equality and what you end up with then and this is the great irony surely of the Soviet and other communist experiments is you end up with massive inequality and so I think it might have been your greatest prime minister in the last century Churchill who said something like if you pursue freedom as your in goal you'll end up with a reasonable degree of equality but if you pursue equality of outcome as your Ingo you'll end up losing a lot of freedom that's exactly right and so few people have made a distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome and has gone wrong it's because the people who've been whose job is calling whose energy is has been - to do the equality stuff have been so hooked on equality of outcome they've wrecked it they've completely wrecked it there were there have been some extraordinary experiments in equality of opportunity within up within English society over the last 100 years or so but the moment it got into the hands of the progressive left they were not prepared to to stop with equality of opportunity they wanted to force equality of outcome and by what they then did was they removed equality of opportunity and they didn't deliver equality of outcome which is why it ends up as you said in the gulag so the very people whose vision and job it was did it worse because if you like there were two stages to it the second stage is is duff and doesn't work and they weren't prepared to admit that the first stage was worth it on its own well by its own this is all quite relatively recent history yeah and here we are nearly it's not so long ago that we saw people in their minions dying in the pursuit of some of these fine-sounding objectives why have we scrubbed it so quickly out of our history how have people got away with that well that's such an interesting question so then we have to decide are we talking are we talking politics are we talking it's worth remembering that Marx you self said that are people deprived of their history are easily persuaded absolutely yes it's the first thing it's the first thing you need to do and what do they stop doing this top teaching history to our kids so they have no idea where they are in our educational system anyway they stopped teaching linear history they teach Smorgasburg history which is not the same thing at all I wish I knew the answers your question and I keep on looking for a language will describe this in the end the language has satisfies me most or I think tells the most truth is is the language I use as a Christian and I'm sorry this makes it accessible to some people but actually my my best atheist friends understand me very well John John Gray is one of our greatest intellectuals in England at the moment he's a professor of philosophy just written the book called seven types of atheism and he's very rude about about Dawkins in fact he said Dawkins isn't really an atheist he's a parasite on on deism he defines himself completely by the God he doesn't believe it so that that makes him a sort of inverted Christian rather than a real atheist but in his book John Gray says that that he has no difficulty at all understanding Christian values he just doesn't share with the cosmological epistemological metaphysical assumptions that lie behind it but we find ourselves describing the same kind of reality so I have a number of very good atheist friends of my time at University and we like to discuss together to pull each other's ideas around but I don't hear from within atheism or even from within politics a proper metal narrative of what's going on in our society instead what I see is a conflict between good and evil and whether is expressing itself in this tribe try tripartite fight between Islam Christianity and and men from progressive politics or whether it's doing it between nationalism and the individual conscience or whether it's it's it's doing it in terms of the civilizing missionaries in Europe trying to stop the pagans doing child sacrifice or celebrating celebrating the shedding of blood for its own sake or whether it's doing trying to save the preborn from from the Holocaust of the abortion industry good and evil is what is what most easily describes what we're going on happening here and and human beings are a bit to my mind the metaphysical struggle is a bit like the biological struggle as a human being I'm surrounded by germs by viruses bye bye bye a dangerous phenomena that will attack my vital Medicare ecosystem and if I if I eat and drink the right things and I get enough sleep on the whole I can see them off but but if I compromise my natural biological and vulnerability or if I sit in an aeroplane in an air conditioning system with five people who have the most terrible viruses I'm likely to get sick and hint of it and I see the judeo-christian experience as providing a degree of not invulnerability but-but-but good good health from morale dis-ease the further you get away from that the more vulnerable you are to moral and spiritual disease and so I would chart an x and y chart and the the the less Christianity you have in a society the more you will have moral disease and the more Christianity you have the less you will have moral and psychological disease and I that that to me is a way of describing different parts of our history and so one of the reasons why this has happened at the moment is because the judeo-christian tradition got tired it's almost as if the Second World War completely exhausted our culture nationalism did a great deal of you know the competing nations that ended up in the the most you know the most stupid appalling and hard to defend the First World War it kind of that floored our culture and exhausted us and then people said well you know we've had a really bad time you know our brothers our fathers they're they've been killed and and then we Victorianism was a bit heavy-handed let's have a great time and savor the 20s and 30s they did they took their eye off the ball and and they hadn't won a piece they had just enjoyed a momentary oasis it's almost as if instead of traveling through the desert the devil the desert travels under you and the Oasis was carried away and suddenly we had these two appalling totalitarian regimes at attack Western culture again I'm Western culture by the skin of its teeth managed to draw itself together and fight them off and then in the 1950s collapsed it exhausted again and once again the siren call was well you deserve a good time have a nice time in the 1960s so with with a pill and with drugs and and I have to say without the rejuvenation of Christian spirituality at this point I look back and and I blame are some of our Christian forebears and you you mistook Christianity for for bourgeois morals you mistook of the triumph of the Kingdom of Heaven for the defeat of fascism you mistook social order for for spiritual rejuvenation and you sat back on your laurels and then and then you piggybacked on the back of relativism and rationalism and you gave up the the mist of the mysterious and the miraculous in your own faith and I'm afraid we're we've got to I see as as a result of the failure of people who should have been more Christian than they are and in one sense this encourages me when people look at them to me and say well you know you say you've got four degrees you should be a bit more of an intellectual you should stop all this belief in the transcendent and a mystical and transfer informative and miraculous and I say you know we got here because my Christian forebears had to lie to all this I'm not going to make the same mistake I'm going for 100% full blown high octane Christianity because frankly that's the only thing as I look back that saved people the Saints of safe society sanctity transformation conversion look at John Newton the slave trailer whether the author Amazing Grace is still the most commonly sung him in the world today and search should be because because it tells words and much more powerful I suspect than many of the seniors stop to think about I think they do so there we are that that's so so I blame Christians for the present situation Kevin thank you very much I just hope your society continues to allow you to say those things because there's no substitute for healthy debate trying to understand others it won't I'm already in breach of social media small print the things that I believe and want to say in public will cause me to be arrested for the breach of the peace if people say stop him to the police I'll then have to decide whether when I'm shut down on social media or in the public space whether I continue to make a fuss if I make a fuss I'll be penalized I'll have to decide as many people will whether or not these values are worth giving up our freedoms for and maybe our lives for because the people who want to close us down are not playing games they're not playing by the same rules they don't have the same goals and actually they'd be very keen to have us silenced and incarcerated we've seen the beginning as that already this isn't self-pity or paranoia or narcissism this is a social reading but I have to say for as long as I can find the courage and the support of my friends of my community I'll go on telling the truth I learned that as a teenager reading all wealth and Huxley I made the decision along ago well thank you I find those refreshing remarks very sobering I do note perhaps to finish on a note of hope then that there's been an enormous interest in the challenging of what has become the new orthodoxy by people like Jordan Peterson he's not alone but he's the one that people are talking about at the moment I saw him in Australia recently ironically I watched him with a meeting of people where there were two card-carrying members of the hard left in an audience that I was carefully watching if they hadn't recognized they've got a problem with overreach they're not reading the signs very well if we had a Jordan Peterson in every University we'd be okay but we've got one and and if and if Jordan pizzas and manages to wake up the slumbering conscience 'as of the non progressively bamboozled and propagandized we may have some hope but education is completely in the hands of the progressives the police are in the hands of the progressive a legal system and the laws we are passing are in the hands of the progresses even the medical system with the values that it's practicing both in terms of you are abortion now and euthanasia seem to come is in the hands of the progressives John where are our foot holes in sane polite civilized society from which we can marshal our supports and common sense we are so far on the backfoot it would be really foolish for us to imagine that one Jordan Peterson can change your whole culture the left to be now this now for 40 or 50 years working immensely hard with great sophistication my hope lies I think in Russia and China one of the things that appears to be happening is that in Russia where in 1989 there were no Christians it all been sent to prison or mental hospital killed there is now I think over 50% of Russian adult self identify as Christians I don't know what kind of Christians they are but the fact that any is a miracle in China at the moment where there shouldn't be any at all there are more Christians numerically in China than many other parts of the world they divide into state-sponsored an underground but the fact is human beings will where they have courage and hunger will respond to this - the good news has been implicit in much what we've been saying we have a choice however in Russia and China they're responding if in Europe they decide they want drugs and comfort and control more than they want their freedoms they'll get drugs comfort and control but we've been given choice and that's one most precious gifts we have and some were such determined to go on exercising it thank you [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 24,758

Keywords: Christianity, Elites, Equality, Feminism, Gavin Ashenden, Freedom of religion, left-wing politics, neo-marxism, religion, same-sex marriage, transgender, transgender revolution, western civilisation, LGBTQI, John Anderson

Id: lU6dArMCB5o

Length: 63min 25sec (3805 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 03 2019