Idols, Identity Politics, and the Lies of Our Age | Panel Discussion, Part 4 of 4

welcome back to our fourth and final session of the day we're going to have a chance to hear from all three of our speakers those of you who are in uh joining us by a zoom uh please do send in your questions we're gonna have some interaction between our our panelists and then we will be taking questions the first question that i want to pose and really to to all of you and it strikes me as a something that that goes the heart of of plenty of what you're talking about and that is a kind of uh collapse of trust the the the the divisions that we see politically and socially and culturally uh seem to be characterized by a deep distrust but this isn't just a distrust between groups it's a distrust even in our basic institutions and i think some of what rod was talking about of the sort of conspiratorial um gestures that you see on both the left and the right at least in part are a function of a kind of breakdown in trust of our basic institutions and a groping for something solid that that seems to be worthy of trust even if it's something as is out there as q anon so a question that i have and then that's really open to all three of you is how is trust cultivated at the individual level how do we regain trust when we're so deeply divided by our suspicions when we think as as professor mitchell put it that that that that one group is fundamentally contaminated how do you pull back from that kind of of of polarity that kind of dualism so that we can once again see across those divides as uh that we're that were uh citizens of a nation that were human beings and and and how do we begin to cultivate or re-renew trust in each other and in our institutions may i susan yes to the institutional level question i would put this way only stakeholders can love their nations responsibly so i don't think you can get to the institutional trust until you address the the personal trust issue and one of my objections to identity politics is that it it starts with the claim i am this and it says the precondition under which you and i will do anything together is that you accept and recognize recognize that i i am this and you know in 1989 when i finished up my dissertation and had no job like so many of us i was asked to teach tok film spent three hours in the library reading the author's introduction and concluded i'd spend the rest of my life with this book i mean tocqueville saw the problem a long time ago in 1835 1840 in the second volume he says and mark mitchell will will have heard this infinite number of times he will recall this from his graduate years feelings and ideas that's exactly right feelings and ideas are renewed the heart enlarged the mind expanded only by the reciprocal actions of one upon another and what tocqueville saw was growing isolation and self-enclosure what i call selfie man by the way uh and he asked the question how can how can people be drawn out of themselves and what are the consequences of this the problem with identity politics it starts with the declaration i am and what tocqueville understood was that we don't really know who we are yet we we can start out with some sense of who we are but we can only come to discover who we are by building a world together in these face-to-face associations now if you strip away all the occasions for citizens to get together if the state steps in more and more so that you don't even need your fellow citizens then it becomes easy to make these affirmative declarations because you don't need other people so what i tell my students especially the ones who who are horrified that there might be people in their class with whom they have completely different political disagreements i say look around you everyone here is your fellow citizen whether you like them or not and what you have yet to discover is how across your differences you can come to understand something more about yourself and they can come to understand something more about themselves but the only way you build trust is by renewing these working these face-to-face mediating associations the family the churches the civic associations local politics and one of the problems with identity politics and i'll stop with this is that it attacks all those as being impure the existing family various groups et cetera local politics certainly the churches and so the very institutions that we need to build trust and to rebuild trust are the ones undermined by identity politics when i was doing research for my book the benedict option i learned something really important about a man who had been a leader of the underground uh the dissident movement and czechoslovakia a man named vaclav benda and uh dr benda had this revolutionary idea of combating totalitarianism by creating what he called a parallel polis his idea was that if we can't participate in this totalitarian system then we can't just sit back and be uh be atomized and paralyzed we have to get out there and rediscover our identities as as citizens fellow citizens so what he did what he would just call people together for picnics or for any excuse to get people together face to face because he knew that the communists controlled that country by making everybody afraid of everybody else by making them feel totally isolated and for him a counter-revolutionary act was just people getting together to enjoy each other's company we can do that now we don't have the government keeping us apart but we we exile ourselves to this um to the internet to social media this is how our life works today this is how i i live i went last weekend to birmingham alabama for the first time i had traveled anywhere since colbert started and it was fantastic i met people just guys and we just did stuff we went out and shot clays and just talked with each other i was knocked flat by how much my own isolation even though i'm well connected to the world people all over america and europe by my laptop how isolating it was not to see people face to face so i would echo what professor mitchell says get out there and see people it's hard to hate people once you look in their eyes you know i think we have one difficulty a really profound difficulty as americans and as participants in a modern liberal republic one of our founding myths at least i don't think our country or its founding is reducible to this is this idea of the social contract in the state of nature and in truth it's a very impoverished understanding because um individuals are not born isolated and atomized they're the products of the union of a man and woman we human beings much so more so than any other animals have a very long tutorial period we're not like the puppy or the kitten who needs the mother for a few weeks or months a lot of 29 year olds still seem to be living in their parents basements etc but our official self-understanding at one level of course it's modified by our national experience by the religious character of historically of most of the american people but this idea we already have a trust problem when we see the fundamental truth of the human condition being free and equal and separated individuals uh josh mitchell mentioned tocqueville tocqueville has a somewhat darker view of the american and the human condition than uh people who read him as a you know a very pro-american writer he is he called himself a half yankee in a letter and he thought america was provided much hope for those who want to create a political order in a democratic world that is in accord with liberty and human dignity and human greatness but he thought the profoundest tendencies of democratic life were atomizing and separating and dissolving he says somewhere the nature of democracy is equality it's this you know uh the sort of separation of equal individuals and he says the art of democracy the art of american democracy is liberty we have to do by artifice uh those mediating structures that professor mitchell spoke about the prodigious art of association the way america you know took was that great image in in when england they turned to a lord or magnate in france they turn to the state and america turn to themselves and he even sort of makes a joke about it we form associations for everything to send missionaries to the antipodes and you know tempered societies to stop drinking that is all voluntary that is not written into our uh our contractual dna and this is another tocvillian theme for a long time we were better than our theory in other words americans did not do justice to their capacity for social and civic trust their remarkable philanthropic tendencies the fact that self-interest rightly understood is not a very accurate description of the generosity of many americans so i say all of this because i think what's happened and this is a little bit independent of recent developments that we've been highlighting today is i think in a way we've come to resemble more and more that troubled or problematic theory that for a long time didn't really describe who we were and it didn't describe who we were because as tocqueville said the spirit of liberty went hand in hand with the spirit of religion and uh americans may not have thought they were by nature social and political animals but they lived and acted like social and political animals but what happens when all the kind of extra liberal extra-modern elements in our official theory start to crowd out the sources of social trust and affection and communion and community or the ability to see the frenetic pace of commercial life tocqueville one of the simple points he makes we took sunday off you know i remember when i first moved to new england we had blue laws you know we couldn't buy liquor on sunday you couldn't go to the mall now if we went back to the blue laws which are a distant distant residue or puritanism people would say our fundamental liberties are at right i have a right to get drunk in the tavern on sunday you know i may i mention this because i do think there are all sorts of specific contemporary reasons for the erosion of trust but what i've mentioned is one the erosion of all those things that kept radical individualism at bay and i think the other one is the triumph of a postmodern metaphysic that reduces the human and political world to power and domination and exploitation and if you teach that enough if you teach that in schools and that's an essential part of intersectionality this world of innocence and and guilt ontological innocence and guilt people are going to still start to live that way so we now have an official metaphysic that is about will to power and systematic distrust i think that one thing that we struggle with is that as you said in your college that the student government wants to incentivize students to inform on each other right and this is one of the huge challenges to rebuilding trust uh i remember the fact that we're all carrying around in our pockets little computers that can record what people say at any time without people knowing about it if you are around a small group of people and there's one person in that group who wants to destroy you they turn their their phone on you say something that is very candid may not be racist or or bigoted in any way but it could get you in trouble all it takes is that person to broadcast it onto the the internet and you're done so i i remember reading about a case about something like this happening recently i remember telling my wife you know i don't ever want to go to a dinner party with people i don't already know that i can count on them not doing something like that and this is something i i don't know when people went outside of the communist world people had to worry about that but it genuinely is a thing when when people are prized and we've created a culture in which people are rewarded and lauded for turning in their friends for turning and their family members there was that case of a young woman in um in washington state i believe it was recently her mother and her uncle were at the january 6 march in washington dc and she outed them on the internet she said there they were at the moment massachusetts anyway she lo the mom lost her job now i wouldn't have wanted my mom to be at the at the january 6 rally but if she had done that you know god forbid that i should ever turn my mother in if she had not committed a crime and this woman had i should make a fool of her or or denounce her to the crowd well this woman who denounced her mother she had suddenly a million friends online like good for you standing up and her mother who was raised in the family mike the mother who was raising the family by herself was fired from her job as a nurse i think all she had done is go to the rally that's all she did she didn't break the rally and she's why would the hospital fire her i mean maybe it was i don't think it was a good idea to have that rally on january 6th but people shouldn't be fired for being at the rally but a daughter felt that her mother had to be taught a lesson she had to be publicly shamed before the world and she used this increasingly totalitarian instrument of social media to do so and this is this is how we what we have to do with our young people with our kids to prepare them for the world we're going into when i was in uh prague interviewing camilla bendava she's the wife of the late botswana bender whom i mentioned a second ago she's still alive i visited her apartment and her family were the only christians at that senior level of the czech resistance movement and i asked her what she did to help to raise these six catholic children under communism knowing that their parents were involved in the dissident movement and well her husband her late husband one of the things he did was to teach the kids what was evil in the world and how to spot evil in the world but her role was to read to the kids that her self-appointed role she said i read to them two hours a day no matter what and she's a philosophy professor her husband was sent to prison for his activities for four years and she still read to those kids i said what would you read to them she said well i'd read them the myths i read them good literature the kind of things that they weren't getting in school the classics and i read to them tolkien a lot of tolkien i said why tolkien she looked at me and said because we knew that mordor was real and she went on to explain that it was important for her and important for all of us to prepare the moral imaginations of our youth from an early age not just tell them again what's bad with the world but to tell them through telling them stories that have heroes in them about how to behave when when when you're put to the test she said that these kids could not understand what communism was really or the the technical details of what the parents and their parents friends were doing but they could understand the fellowship of the ring they could understand what sauron was that sort of thing and so by analogy these children knew that this is what it means when you are in fellowship to fight evil this is how one behaves and this is how those kids had their their hearts and minds prepared to stand up for the truth and uh and not to rat out their friends josh just a quick uh add-on here since tocqueville has been raised a number of times he says in one place the way you build these media institutions is through daily details daily duties exercise meaning it's analog it's with your neighbor and if you know you're going to deal with your neighbor for the next 20 years you're less likely to rat on them because they're going to be consequences you're going to have to deal with them the problem we have is that when we move from analog to digital then suddenly we our our network is beyond the local it's it's way beyond your local community and so you lose connection with the local well that's part of the problem but here's the other part uh we're moving toward uh some people say we're moving toward a world dominated by artificial intelligence and which which will be plugged into artificial intelligence but the question is where in the brain stem will we be plugged in and i mean that quite literally so we have you know kind of primitive reptilian mind where we have the impulses of fight and flight slightly higher up we have kind of primitive human understandings of shame and what's happened now is that in analog communities we can learn these very high levels of trust association uh the delicacy of human affairs but when you plug into this digital world which connects to your most basal units then all of a sudden we revisit human prehistory and so now what you get is social media where you're really only capable of shaming or praising and while we have to have some of that in life what we learn in the daily details of life is that things are much more nuanced than that so in a way being plugged into this advanced digital network has returned us to the most primitive human level and that's our problem think about that in terms of in relationship to the disparagement of rationality which is a higher brain function that is necessary for um a kind of fully human engagement is certainly necessary for deliberative politics for compromise for for rational debate about the goods that we will pursue together um rationality itself is being is being uh accused of being the kind of province of of a certain group or or or a culture and and we need to dispense with that but that seems to be in exchange for precisely what you're talking about this lower level functioning that is horrifying to contemplate a society based in those terms if i may so what i was raising in my talk was the return of the primitive meaning this pagan urge to purge imminent pagan urge to purge imminent groups was supplanted by christianity and so i was making a theological argument about what happens when we move to the so-called secular age we return to the pagan but if you put that together with this technological claim that i've just raised namely it can it speaks to what is lowest in us then you get a kind of technological amplification of this pagan thing that i'm seeing that we're returning to so it's it's it's doubly dangerous and then as you say mark you know when reason is associated with whiteness we're gonna have a real problem yeah i would say that um and i think there's an important point to make before a largely christian audience perhaps the root of our discontents is less the threats to religious liberty and religion as fundamental they are i completely agree with rod that this we have to prepare ourselves for this and this is an essential feature of the of the emerging i call it the not so soft totalitarianism because it doesn't it appears to be less and less soft as we proceed but i think the root of it all is a crisis of reason in other words we live in a civilization that has a very diminished understanding of the dignity of man you know pascal says we're the thinking read you know we can be destroyed by a drop of water but the universe thinks nothing you know that the dignity of all man's dignity lies in thought and pascal did not mean that in the spirit of a modern reductive rationalist he was a very devout and serious christian but the dignity of thought of reason and i mean the practical reason too that human beings together to cite a simple definition from aristotle at the beginning of his politics we have speech and reason logos and we can discuss the advantageous and the just our dogs can't do it our animals can't do it our neuroscientists can't explain it because they're always looking like where is consciousness in the brain well consciousness is not located in a part of the brain but this diminished understanding of our dignity this diminished confidence in what the greeks called noetic reason that reasoned properly understood is not just pragmatic or instrumental rationality the nazis were good at that the communists with their hydroelectric plants and nuclear bombs and the soviet union were pretty good in that but the secret of the west the vitality of the west is lay in this capacious understanding of the soul and its properties and um when we lose confidence in that that uh in our dignity as rooted in these the rich capacity of the soul to ascertain i don't care how fallen we are reality still has a dignity and structure our freedom still has ends and purposes that are ascertainable by reason and i think very few the social sciences don't believe that we use this watery empty term values as a substitute for the good or for virtues so i do think that's a real problem that um at the the source of our and maybe this had something to do with the enlightenment there was a kind of excessive valorization of reason but of the wrong kind but nonetheless i think we including christians we need to recover the idea that the truth is in principle attainable by thinking men and women what do you do though dan in a case like what happened at yale university in the fall of 2015 and i think this will ultimately be seen one day as one of the key turning points of the unraveling of our culture you can see all this by the way what i'm about to tell you on youtube uh in the fall of 2015 yale university sent out a message to all the students telling them be careful what kind of halloween costume you wear you might trigger somebody might culturally appropriate you know their their culture well within the residential colleges at yale they have each residential college has house parents in this one college silliman i believe the house parents were nicholas and erica christakis both yale faculty members erica christakis sent out a note to all the students living in that particular college saying is it really the business of a university to tell grown adults legal adults what they can and can't wear for halloween those students turned on the on erica christakis like a vicious mob they accused her of being racist bigoted insensitive not caring about them on and on and on on youtube you can see an instance in which her husband nicholas confronts a mob on the quad there i guess at silliman and he tries to engage them in rational debate socratic debate wants to hear them you hear me let's talk about this these students will have none of it they scream at him they curse him they're they're hysterical some of them are crying and you see a man defeated you see the defeat of rationality there at one of the most elite universities in the world and of course a few days later yale university sided with the mob erica christakis is no longer there at yale i think this is so important though because it shows how impotent reason is in the face of the mob if it doesn't have if it's not enforced by those in authority if they will not protect establish and defend the conditions within which rational debate can happen and i think this is the problem we have now is that those who have been made responsible uh as presidents of colleges and and other cultural authorities when they capitulate to the mob this hysterical emotional mob it's over well i agree completely with you when i'm talking about the authority of reason this is a reason that has to be acculturated it has to be supported by sound mores and traditions we need authoritative institutions reason the idea that reason can win out over hateful and coercive ideology by a socratic seminar is a form of enlightenment utopianism right but what do we do though we have a society now where all our institutions which could have been counted on the past to defend the conditions within which rationality can exist when they've been overrun and they've uh i mean i i don't know how we rebuild it yeah and you know those uh though those conservative political thinkers oak shot would be one burke in a way when when they're the the sound advice to follow the intimations of our tradition is is sound advice but what happens when they have on we've had this revolutionary break and we can no longer appeal to them then we have to engage in something much more radical and foundational you know we can't we can't we can't depend on sound prejudice we can't depend on institutions that are going to defend a situation where those housemasters could have a reasonable conversation with the students without it turning into a you know uh an angry and uh totalitarian mob but yeah no no i don't i didn't mean anything naive about reason i just meant unless we have a restoration of confidence that these issues can be adjudicated before the tribunal of reason we're lost because then we're really stuck with a view of reality which is all about will to power racial struggle class struggle whatever this gender category of fake where you just refer to grammar by the way don't have a gender reveal gender is a fake category uh you know they're not 97 genders it's a category that good people have mistakenly accommodated and they should expunge from their vocabulary josh um listening to the back and forth between my colleagues and you know as i indicated in my talk today i'm i'm rather haunted by by the closing of the clearing of reason you know reason aims for wisdom but the question is whether in a christian and post-christian world whether wisdom can only come after you've solved the problem of atonement and so uh you know you had the yale faculty member trying to speak wisdom but the crew around him the mob around him was concerned not with wisdom but with atonement and and that's that's the quandary that we're in right now which is why as much as i completely agree with dan i mean dan is is showing us what we need to have in order to have a decent society the question is whether none of that can be heard when when when we're fixed on the problem of atonement and so in my view we can't even go back to what is great about america until we get straight in our head how we deal with transgression and innocence and the way the new american awakening is doing it is through picking out an imminent group to scapegoat and this is a defection from christianity until we switch that around and realize that there's one sufficient scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world and the rest of us are broken there could be no humility there can be no great longings for wonder and wisdom because all you can think about is how you have been victimized so we're not going to get this straight we're not even going to come out of this unless we are clear that there's one sufficient sacrifice if we don't hold to that position it will be one group after another and the next shiblet that will fall the next pillar that will fall is going to be free speech because if you're concerned with purging hate that first amendment is going to fall really quickly and that is right now the one thing that conservatives are still hanging on to in the hope that that will provide a a fortification wall against the oncoming horde and i frankly think it will fall i want to point out something that's happening right now that we can see happening in real time about the manufacture of an official lie that's going to justify scapegoating this week we saw the horrific killings in atlanta a young man driven mad by his sexual rage uh murdered eight people six of them asians at spas where he had gone for sex and uh by his own confession to the police he went there to punish these women who are temptations for him uh his friends have told the the uh and told the reporters yeah he said that he wasn't going after them because they were asian he was going after them because these were the spas he had gone to because he thought it would be easier to get sex there the man is is tormented he's depraved but this seems to be a matter from the evidence we have now of sexual depravity and pornography addiction to pornography but that's not the story the media is telling the media is seizing on the story that this is anti-asian prejudice because six of the eight people killed were asian now this man did hate asians and was doing this out of motivation for hating asians then we need to talk about it we need to to condemn it we need to act on it but there is no evidence yet that he is was motivated by this in fact there's a lot of evidence that he had other motivations but our media are so obsessed with making the facts fit the narrative that they are completely twisting this in a similar way that they twisted the covington catholic story a couple of years ago with the kids with the maga hat and it is frankly horrifying to me to see how in their in their eagerness to scapegoat and to frighten people and to frighten asians into thinking this could happen to you when it doesn't seem to have been that this is what the french call the grommund soldiers the big lie this is a lie of totalitarian import portions and it's at the service of a mendacious ideological project look we know that the serious interracial violence directed against asian americans sadly comes mainly from black americans we can go all the way back to rodney king in 92 with the assault on koreatown this is a real problem in west coast cities and it's driven in part by resentment over the comparative success of asian americans and some of the you know the troubling problems with the black community in big cities but that issue which is a real issue will not be discussed but this absolutely false artificial issue that asian americans should be scared that there's some kind of frontal assault racially motivated coming from white supremacists it's made up it's it's not a there are in life there are what thomas aquinas called disputed questions but this is not a disputed people causing harm to asians primarily in this country are harvard and and in universities like that that are not allowing asians to get in well the president and the vice president or president harris as she was recently called by the president they uh they want to go to atlanta and they feed into this racialist narrative and yet they have officially presented critical race theory as the official ideology of the united states and that evan kennedy-inspired view that all disparities or discrimination would lead to draconian quotas limiting admission of asian americans to universities graduate programs professional programs and the logic has to be that the tremendous success and hard work and achievement in the asian community when it comes to education is rooted in will to power exploitation and racism that is the premise in other words that's what you would have to believe that this is an unfair domination on the part of asian americans so the same people who are stoking up racial conflict are also in favor of an ideological project that logically requires discrimination against agents and i i just bring that up to say that this is how lies and propaganda are generated in real time by newsrooms by media people and academics some college profes college presidents are condemning this act of anti-aging hate when we don't have the facts to justify that conclusion if we do get the facts absolutely but i bring that up to say that this is how the this the search for truth itself has been poisoned by ideology yeah yeah i want to come back to uh josh's point because about the relationship between atonement and reason i agree completely with him but i've made the argument in several presentations and in a few writings that this present crisis this rise of a new and dangerous and monstrous ideological manikinism where some people are guilty for who they are and others are eternal victims of course as josh argues in his recent book american awakening that permanent victim status deprives them of agency responsibility and hence humanity but never mind but i say there's a connection between our failure to educate two or three generations about the human meaning of 20th century totalitarianism this brings things back to rod's book because the structures jordan peterson has pointed out in a recent introduction to a paperback edition of social nations gulag archipelago the structure of woke um guilt and atonement is exactly the same as we saw with the 20th century totalitarians the world would be an infinitely better place if we got rid of those groups who are intrinsically evil for hitler it was the jewish bacillus for the communists it was the kulaks the hard-working industries peasants it was the christians it was the merchants it was the bourgeoisie but um people were eliminated not because of what they had done but because of who they are evil was localized in certain groups and was not the drama of good and evil was not something that belongs to every heart and every human soul that was a ground of social nation's critique of marxist leninism that that belief that evil is not intrinsic to the human condition and human soul but it's a product of an unjust exploitative society with certain groups as its agents that is the logic that always culminates in totalitarianism and the big lie and what was sultan easton's famous most famous line from the gulag archipelago about the line through the human heart yeah he says that when he was in the camps rotting on prison straw he came to realize that the line between good and evil lay not through ideologies not through regimes not through nations and parties but through every human heart and then he goes on to say we can restrict evil within each of our souls and hearts but any political or ideological project to expel it from the world will only amplify it a million-fold by making something like cosmic evil a reality in human society so i think we never what do we do we had a bunch of economists telling us that uh you know uh uh you know it was it was a failure of economics or uh or we had frank fukuyama telling us oh it's the end of history and capitalism campus democracy was historically inevitable which is a marxist argument about the west victory in the cold war in other words we had everything but a truthful examination of why the 20th century was a century of horrors and i'd like to believe that if that lesson had been learned or at least it had been introduced and examined that people could more readily see the structural connection between this affliction of identity politics and the evil of totalitarianism i know very few people who talk about this they don't make the connection it's uh i don't know why they don't make the connection it's so self-evident i wonder if um if i just put a question maybe specifically to josh for a moment and that is it seems that ideology uh has already been discussed in america at this moment history has been racialized in in ways that that aren't constructive and actually um uh exacerbate the problem but the the reaction that often happens is no there's no there's no there's no racial thing to deal with that's not a a an issue that that we just need to to to forget about it and i wonder if there's a a more healthy approach to dealing with the the ongoing racial concerns that aren't that isn't rooted in a kind of of uh ideology of of race that that ultimately makes things worse or a denial of of any kind of of difficult history that needs to be worked through what's what's a third way that could actually be uh perhaps rooted in in the gospel but but is is has a kind of real tangible uh uh way that we can that we can move forward on this without just just ending in in what seems to be uh ongoing conflict or a willful ignoring of the problem so i'll answer that first i'm going to make an observation during the kavanaugh hearings the world was divided between the misogynists and those who are not misogynists and and for the moment the world is being divided between the racists and the non-racists and you can be sure for anti-racist thank you what do you say about the anti-racism you're either racist or anti-racist if you're accused of being racist you deny it you're even more of a racist sorry josh yeah so but but five years from now it'll be something else it'll be the deniers and the affirmers for climate change you can rest assured that the lines of distinction whatever the left is going to find new lines of distinction to call out the transgressors and i i hope you remember during the kavanaugh the hearings men and women across the country were looking at each other in ways that you really you don't want people to look at each other because they were wondering are you a rapist are you not a rapist i mean you really don't want to have your society being organized this way so so my first point is that yeah now we've got this issue of race on the table but it will change because it has to change but there's going to be fatigue about this and then we'll move on to something else this is going to go on ad infinitum okay now you may have detected in my talk that part of my objection to identity politics especially on the racial question is that it does nothing uh you'll excuse my french but in the 1960s we had a phrase called sit on your ass white liberals and in my view that is still a relevant category uh the members of the woke elect are many instances uh that that same sort of crew and and i'm you know my father's family came from the mountains of lebanon in the 1890s 1200 years of second class citizen under islamic rule you know and it's not just second-class citizenship it was a mess but we come to this country and we're part of this country and we take on its burdens and i think i think we do need to take on the burden and i think one of the things conservatives have failed to do is to recognize we have to find we have to find constructive ways to talk about race and so many conservatives want to say well we live in a colorblind society because they think that if you open the door one tiny crack you ultimately have to move to a multi-trillion dollar state-sponsored uh welfare system and that's simply not true but when conservatives are silent then it's not off the mark for people to to think of conservatives as racists so i think there has to be a constructive way of dealing with race question and i work very closely with bob woodson who runs 1776 unites and in the woodson center and bob wrote a book called the triumphs of joseph he's a black man he's black he he wrote a book called the triumphs of joseph and it's a biblical model of charity and he says look there it is joseph the the slave a very competent slave is is understood by pharaoh to to have these capacities to help heal his people and so pharaoh says to joseph it's yours let me know how i can help here's the resources go for it and so bob who was who when he's 83 marched in the civil rights movement set up the woodson center in the by the 1970 said i'm done with the race grievance industry and and and what he does he says is this he he'll go into a milwaukee is this example that i think of and he'll walk into the worst part of town and he'll go to the barber shops and the beauty shops and say who do you go to if you're in trouble and you'll find five or ten pillars of the community he says all my friends have x's before their name ex-con ex-prostitute ex-drug addict and he finds these people whose lives have been utterly transformed gang members everything and he says how can i help you and they they are the pillars of the community everybody who's in trouble goes to them because their lives have been transformed and bob's model is very simple stop with the racial guilt start with the responsibility we have we don't have collective guilt we have collective responsibility so let us be the pharaohs and find the joseph's of all of our communities and you don't have to go to washington to figure this out you go to your own town and you just kind of ask around say black and white who are the people you go to and then you figure out in your own private charity you do not advertise this that's biblical too you don't advertise it you go and you help these people and bob says this is the only way that the least among us can be helped and what we've set up instead is a massive race race grievance industry which is contributed to by a certain portion of the black population and a certain portion of the white population which are in cahoots it's a terrible thing to say but it is the truth because both need a permanent underclass of black americans to be able to justify the claim that america is systemically racist and the political import of the claim that america is systemically racist is you can't help yourself your churches can't help yourself your friends can't help and your families can't help only the state can help and this is deplorable so we have to step away from that we have to be responsible to deal with the wounds in america we have to help the least among us and there's a way to do it in the eastern orthodox church of which i'm a apart at the beginning of lent every year it starts with what's called forgiveness sunday and we have vespers at the end of the day evening prayer and forgiveness sunday and at the end of that service every member of the church goes face to face with every other member of the church however long it takes and you bow down and say forgive me my brother or my sister i've sinned against you that person says god forgives and i forgive and then they ask you for forgiveness and again you do this until everybody has asked that face to face and ask for forgiveness and given forgiveness and this is how we start lent christianity the church has the only thing i can think of that will enable true racial reconciliation for a couple of reasons one christian theology assumes that everybody is sinful all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god there are no completely innocent victims and all no completely guilty perpetrators because we have all sinned and received forgiveness from christ we have an obligation therefore to forgive others who ask our forgiveness and i think that uh one reason i think professor mark mitchell is right that so many white people are afraid to say you know what there is a racial problem there is racism in this country because they're afraid to admit that puts them at a complete disadvantage uh against opponents who would use that admission to destroy them but if we can come into the church together and admit that there is sin all around and the sin may be much greater on one side than the other that's true but there is also uh sin is universal and the mandate to forgive is also universal that i think is the only way i can see to do this because i can remember when i was living in dallas there was a movement to try to get people of all races to come together to talk over dinners about racial reconciliation a good idea in theory but the only kind of people only white people who went to it were people who were already quite liberal and who were happy to confess guilt but people who now is self-criticism right right but the conservatives on you and i was one of them i would have liked to have been part of that but i also knew that this was one of those situations where you can't speak honestly because if you as a white person as a white conservative especially admitted to anything that could be construed as guilt then you're over yeah it's over for you this morning in my remarks i quoted uh the lines by max schaeler the german philosopher who said repentance and not utopia is the truly revolutionary force in the world i think that's absolutely right christianity alone has the capacity to take us out of the cycle of recrimination of mutual accusation it it allows under the common judgment of god people to confess their sinfulness you know albert camus who was no christian but he had uh uh although many christians like him uh albert camus developed a very acute sense of how quickly victims can become executioners uh look at uh today you know it's a common orthodoxy the colonialism and empire are terrible evils i think the historical truth is very mixed there are some good empires and and some decent colonial administration but that that said i don't want to get myself in trouble with a folsom defense of colonialism but the fact is one only has to look at some of the successor governments in the third world after decolonization to see the rise of some very nasty oppressive authoritarian and totalitarian regimes who are oppressing their own people as cruelly and in many cases much more cruelly than the old colonial powers and and so um we have to have some understanding of the possibility of mutual accountability and mutual repentance that doesn't that gets out of the truly a historical view that some groups are permanently eternally destined to oppress and others are innocent victims it just had one last thing about i the the christian path sketched by somebody like robert woodson is very admirable and very needed for a situation but we also need what i would call the frederick douglass path uh frederick douglass i do not think was a particularly devout christian and he was a man of great personal pride and it was his pride that made him not only fight the evils of slavery but it was also his pride that led him to fight white paternalism and he famously said we don't want anything from you just leave us alone and i suspect right now that the black community would be in much better shape if something of that proud magnanimous libertarian spirit leave us alone let us use our freedom let us use our god-given gifts let us let us engage in common enterprises that allow us to move over not an animosity to white america but not dependent on white america i think we need the christian approach but we also need that that that appeal to legitimate pride and that's the opposite of victimization let's go to a question from our audience thank you um my question is is it possible for conservatives to take um to take advantage of the fact or at least take hope in the fact that um uh unlike nazism or bolshevism the secular religion that exists today is already fracturing into so many different camps such as radical feminists or lgbt advocacy groups well i mean anything that that is not rooted in reality will collapse eventually the soviet uh soviet experiment had to ultimately collapse because you can only deny reality for so long but look at how many lives were taken how many lives were destroyed and institutions were destroyed until the collapse happened i believe that something similar is going to happen here i think that in 20 years we'll look back at what was done to to children to minors in the name of transgenderism the mutilations and we'll look back on it with horror and how do we fall into that but um and it'll be good that when we realize how crazy that was and and turn away from it but in the meantime how how many lives and how many bodies will have been ruined so i i think yeah we can take some comfort in that but when you see when you look at the example of what communism did in the 20th century uh from its its debut on the world stage until its final collapse and see all the blood that flowed its cold comfort indeed let me um add that the the the way this new awakening holds together requires a prime transgressor so that you have to have one object of wrath that covers over the differences you have with other groups so lg the letter all the letters together each of the group because i can't keep up with the letters each of the groups they have differences and the only unity that they can have is if they stand against a common transgressor that's why whiteness has to constantly be held up now you know i mentioned my father's family was from lebanon my mother's family german welsh you know 1700's when i want to find out something about a person i don't ask are you white i want to know national origin that begins to tell me something and so one thing i would suggest is okay fine there are 153 different pronouns if there are 153 different pronouns i'm not going to check the box mark white anymore i'm done and i would suggest that all of you say i refuse to be glomped into one big category that describes nothing and go back to national origin grandma was from county cork uh i think rod is absolutely right that um doctrines and ideological approaches and regimes can be contranatorium to use the old latin phrase against nature but they can do immense damage in the process so they have to be resisted and i like an idea of thomas aquinas the the greatest catholic doctor of the church who said and they treat us on law question 91 human free will and prudence is a part of god's providence so in good time uh the working out of the deepest wellsprings of human nature and the guidance of a providential god all these inhuman ideologies will collapse but they're going to collapse in part because we helped them collapse we fought we fought back we reminded people of certain liberating and necessary truths so we just can't be passive or quiescent our resistance is part and in fact our resistance in part reveals how these movements and ideologies are so against nature so yeah i i think recogni we can gain hope from a knowledge that these approaches are not viable that they're not in core with the the deepest nature and needs of the human soul but we've got to also resist them and i think there's always a temptation for christians to succumb to passivity leave everything in god's hands well god doesn't want us to leave everything in his hands he wants us to collaborate we're going to take one more question from the audience and then i'm going to pose one question to each of our panelists in conclusion uh hello yeah uh so we've heard about different movements like maybe social justice and i think um with each movement sometimes there's a figure ahead like for instance with social justice right now it's even mixed candy something i'm interested in hearing your thoughts on is how technology plays into this and you've kind of all touched on it a bit um i think uh technology is going to kind of merge with secular humanism in a very impactful way and there's a there's a scholar named javal noah harari i'm wondering if any of you have encountered his ideas but he has this trilogy of books that have been relatively impactful i think they're going to become more impactful and they're going to gain more traction the first is homo sapiens which is all about evolution the second is homodaeus where he has this theory where humans will become integrated with technology and will become gods and his third book which i've read is 21 lessons for the 21st century and he takes he takes a humanistic stance um like saying like life isn't a story um i guess my question is um we hear about different ideologies like there's transgenderism there's social justice i think the underpinning for all of those is um a sort of more independent religious secularism he has an entire chapter in the book about what secularism is it's not just the absence of religion it is it is its own ideology and even um so i'm wondering if any of you have encountered his ideas i'm wondering uh how you feel about the role technology is going to play in all of this and also just the exploration of the mind itself because he he you know he also has some spirituality to his ideas the very last chapter is on meditation and he thinks that we all need to use like meditation to explore the mind um so i'm wondering what if you encounter his ideas uh how you think technology will affect all this and uh how it'll affect the mind okay technology homo deus title of one of his books this goes takes us right back to the garden of eden right ye shall be his gods i i think it's horrifying and i know that harare is one of the the the uh somebody that people in silicon valley love and they see a lot of these people see technology as liberating human potential but this is something they believe in because they believe in original innocence not original sin uh i see technology as being primarily a threat to enslave and deny our our humanity in the current age now we see what's happening in china with the social credit system using advanced technology and artificial intelligence to enslave people and control them i tend to be very much a techno pessimist because technology hi this kind of technology advanced technology is arising precisely at the moment when christianity and the christian uh christian anthropology and understanding of human nature has faded away certainly from the elites in the society and is beginning to fade away from most people so i'm really pessimistic about it let me uh dovetail with what mr dreyer said and i'll give you a little political theory lesson if you look at the opening passage of the republic you'll find that socrates and glaucon are down in the in the pyrex in the marketplace and they encounter they encounter polly marcus a man whose name means warlord he's the warrior and they're celebrating a feast of bendis a lunar feast what are they trying to do what does war try to do it tries to save us from death maybe by killing other people or through generation if you're dealing with the family but there the opening scene of the republic is these desperate people trying to live forever through mortality and and what the republic is saying is there's there's a homecoming for us uh and it's beyond the generative world but the brilliance of the republic is to say we live in two worlds and the christian too has this understanding that there's there's uh we have a body and it will it will rot and die and but there's a resurrect hope of the resurrection so whether it's plato or christianity there is some understanding of these of a kind of transgenerational world so to speak so when we come back when there's a resurrection we won't be married anymore so so the longing is right i mean even in plato and even in christianity there's an understanding that there's more than what's here and so tocqueville will say the short space of a man 60 years will never capture the whole of his imagination alone among created beings man has an immense longing to exist in immense disgust with existence sounds like pascal and it's right it does so but what's gone wrong here is that and this is exactly what what rogers finished with is we've lost sight of the christian peace and and maybe even the platonic peace but not the longing for immortality and what the christian does and what plato says is you can't escape the world of generation yes there's something more but it's not something we're going to bring about and the audacity of the current moment with technology is to believe that we can move to a transgenerative world a transhuman world and i think the the inner truth so to speak such as this of the transgender movement is a recognition that there's something beyond the world of generation well every christian is going to say that but the but the audacity of it is to say well we can institute that now but the bald facts of mortal life is that we are we are created man and woman and we are thrown into a world of generation and any civilization that loses sight of that will die in one generation i i think uh the the uh the whole movement that sacralizes artificial intelligence and i mean there's so many problems with the one is the complete incapacity to imagine a higher form of reason noetic reason if you want to call it that that is not simply about computational knowledge however sophisticated you know computers beating the world chess champion and that kind of thing they can do it but they can't reflect about the nature and destiny of man the human soul the nature of freedom the meaning and purpose of life and those are the ultimate concerns of reason at its highest level so these demi-educated silicon valley technocrats and scientists have a they're not liberally educated they do have the longing for immortality but without their liberal education they don't understand that this worldly immortality is a monstrosity that what the both the biblical and classical traditions teach is immortality is uh the i was desirable because it takes us above ourselves and brings us into communion with uh something higher something enduring and eternal um and um you know swift talks about this in the at the end of the third book uh of gulliver's travels uh these strollbrooks these really mean people who live forever indefinite extension of human life will not satisfy the human longing for the eternal for hope for communion it's uh it's a great chimera and so um you know that's why when you i remember i don't know if it was surrounding about ray kurzweil who was the theoretician of transhumanism the whole thing is like you know semi-psychotic science fiction uh but you know this is what happens the religious impulse doesn't die as i think professor mitchell was saying and it takes these incredibly uh perverse forms and of course they don't believe in evil they believe in original innocence as was said and they have no sense that maybe man playing god crosses so many limits that in the end we have all these biotech companies in america that have created chimeras you know half human half animal now they kill them before they come to term but this is a country so wedded to the false authority of science you know there's people who have those signs in there that we believe science we trust science uh they um we could not as we could not even get congress to pass a law after dolly you know the cloning of a sheep in 1997 to outlaw human cloning is it so unreasonable to say this is a line we don't want to cross is science so autonomous from common life and moral judgment that our notion of rights now extend to the rights to indefinitely replicate ourselves in a false and perverse pursuit of this worldly immortality so i think the whole project is insane metaphysical madness as burke said every myth tells us that if you try to go beyond limits to become god to become homo dais it will end in disaster i think we need to listen to our myths the um we're in our waning minutes right now and some of the conversations i suppose we could go on for another two hours but we're gonna we're gonna wrap this up and some of the presentations uh i think rightfully have been uh characterized by by deep concern and warning but i wanna leave with just a simple question that each of you can maybe take one minute to answer and that is what gives you hope is what do you see what where are the glimmers of hope that that keep you going so we're going to start with professor mahoney then professor mitchell and and rodriguez one minute what gives you hope microphone microphone i thought i had a booming voice i i have spent a lot of time reading and writing and commenting on the works of alexander solzhenitsyn and the remarkable thing is if you read either the three volumes of the gulag archipelago are simply the authorized abridgement that has all the essentials solzhenitsyn insists one reason he wanted an abridgement because he said people didn't get far enough to notice this is a book about catharsis and hope it is a it's a story of the fact that the most menacious violent ideological project in human history could not crush the deepest longings of the human soul and that is a book that gives me great hope because a man like solzhenitsyn came out of this not only unscathed but with a kind of wisdom a spiritual wisdom a deep humanity the full set of the classical virtues that he wouldn't have had unless he had encounter an encounter with this lie so i'd like to see in the example of solzhenitsyn somebody who shows us that out of the most monstrous efforts to distort our humanity out of the most monstrous lies can come resurrection can come the victory of hope and catharsis professor mitchell i would say two things quickly uh one what gives me hope is people i meet who are involved in the everyday world carpenters the plumbers the farmers they haven't yet been poisoned by this second i'm given hope by the fact that even when i talk to my students around the world because i teach everywhere who believe in this new church the american awakening and i asked them this question how's that working for you what i find is that they don't really have great answers and so i think what we have to do is keep asking that question it's a totalizing system but as both of my colleagues had said have said you know when it's a lie it can't be sustained and so i think the gentle question how's that working for you it gives me hope yeah um i want to piggyback on what dan mahoney said sultanates in one of his famous lines from gulag archipelago is bless you prison shocking thing to say for a man who was who is subjected to what soldier needs and went through but prison the suffering redeemed him and taught him things that he wouldn't have known otherwise and that's where i find hope too first of all in the conviction that as a christian as i said in my talk hope is not the same as optimism optimism tells us that everything's going to work out for the good it might not for us we all we are promised as christians is the cross you know but if we unite our suffering to christ and suffer in love and for love of christ and love of neighbor then god will use our suffering and our witness and our testimony for the redemption of the world and um that is that is where i find hope we may not ever live to see it god could surprise us as i mentioned in my talk these people in eastern europe almost none of them thought they would live to see the end of communism and yet it happened uh and so that's where i i find hope and then everyday life hope in small things and my my children and my friends and the people i meet along the way who do seek the good the true and the beautiful and who are compassionate people and who are not defeated by the world as russell kirk the great conservative said the world remains sun lit despite its vices and that's true there's hope in that let that be the final word please join me in welcoming thanking our panel you

Channel: Patrick Henry College

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Keywords: Patrick Henry College, Hillsdale College, Classical Education, Liberal Arts, Classical and Christian, Christian College, Christian Thought, Preserving America, Foundations Lecture, Jack W. Haye, Mike Farris, Michael P Farris, Alliance Defending Freedom

Id: 1OWe6baXZIo

Length: 74min 1sec (4441 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021