Mary Eberstadt | The Sexual Revolution Was a Mistake

the root cause of the loneliness explosion is that this whole Revolution subtracted people out of other people's lives it did this by uh via family breakup via the fact that people have fewer siblings Aunts Uncles all of it it's an arithmetic problem and we have signs all around us that this is the root problem [Music] my guest today comes from America Mary ebastad holds the pannular chair in Christian culture at the Catholic information center in Washington DC and a senior research fellow at the faith and reason Institute she's an essayist a novelist and a frequent public speaker whose books of non-fiction include How the West really lost God a new theory of secularization Adam and Eve after the pill paradoxes of the sexual Revolution and Primal screams how the sexual Revolution created identity politics and Mary's been talking about that here in Australia ironically as I we record I'm in Sydney she's in Melbourne but we will be face to face before she returns home and I think you'll enjoy very much her approach to some of the really troubling things that are besetting our societies today her social commentary draws from many intellectual disciplines and her books and essays have been translated into Spanish French Italian polish Arabic Dutch Portuguese Lithuanian Hungarian and Turkish which is remarkable Central to her diverse interests are questions concerning the philosophy and counter culture or the culture of Western civilization and the fate and aspirations of post-modern man Mary thank you so much for giving us time today thanks for having me John can I begin where I don't think other conversationalists have begun I was really struck by something that you said when you're on my good friend uh Constantine Christian and he's offsider Francis Foster a trigonometry in London you were talking about the BLM rights the black lives matter riots in the United States and they were pretty bad and there was a lot of rage over them from people's you know sort of talking about irresponsibility and violence and and they were ugly but you saw something that I thought was very significant you saw loneliness I think despair unhappiness and the face of many of the young people participating and I was struck by the way in which you were plainly seeing their Humanity and almost recognizing a cry for help I cry for a bigger story for a purpose I I think what I'm driving at is my impression is that you are driven in terms of your very active engagement in the public debate you often say things just as I do that perhaps are not so popularly received but you're driven by Deep Humanity a deep concern for the well-being of young people in particular am I reading you properly yes thank you and to return to the question of those protests and riots uh in summer of 2020 in the United States I don't think most people outside the United States realize how significant those were there were in that summer over ten thousand incidents of unrest 500 of which turned violent and that's to say Americans were subjected to lots and lots of video capturing all of that and in that video one can see the expressions of rage and disconnection on the faces of so many young people and it was particularly striking to me John because as you know my work has been trying to capture that in a different way for years now I believe we have a serious problem among the young and I believe it is stemming from a radical kind of disconnection from things that most of humanity has taken for granted from from family from church from social groups and I think we've really reached a Tipping Point with all of that and part of why I feel compelled to make the case for conservatism in the Public Square is that I don't think the other side has an answer to any of that I don't think progressives recognize the suffering out there that has been caused by radical social change in the United States and across the West yeah just as an aside before we come back uh to to the central issues here I was in America recently and I was in a city that is widely regarded as one of the most Progressive inadverted commas in America and I actually met a couple of family ladies there very nice middle Americans and they were talking about those rides they made the observation that the defunding police the extraordinary answer to the problem left them feeling more vulnerable than ever and tempted themselves to go out and buy handguns in case there weren't any police if somebody attacked a member of their family I had a look at gun sales in America they've been rising steadily and these two ladies made the point that the irony of this is having made us feel very exposed having tempted us to think about buying handguns when we've never had them they'll then turn around and call for gun laws the very people who defunded the police have created an environment where we don't feel safe and to look after our families we think we've got to go and do the thing the very the progressives least want us to do the illogicality of all of this is one of the things that strikes me yes yes states that are under Progressive administrations there is not a major city on the East Coast that you can enter these days without being struck by the difference between 10 years ago five years ago and today and this is especially visible in Manhattan for example uh and it's one of the biggest problems we face in the U.S is this this breakdown that I think uh will be righted unlike some other kinds of breakdown in short order as new administrations come in so that's the good news the guardedly good news so to return return then to to what's happening um in terms of the modern language that you that is used Australia is on a trajectory I think that is not the similar to yours it might be in a different place some of the institutions in our country are a bit different about the rise of identity politics which I'd like to explore is often attributed in conversations I find and in writings and so forth to the grip that some progressives if I can put it that way uh I don't like that term very much but anyway we'll use it and everyone knows what we means by it uh the grip they have over Academia and have had for a long time the way that's filtered into our schools the way our children are raised but you have a very different take indeed in your latest book Primal screams you're really offering a quite different explanation one that centers on the decay of the family unit and the loss of a strong Primal sense of identity everyone talks about identity politics and inadverted commas I'd love to hear your take on how you describe it I was asked to in a formal lecture a while ago I don't think I did a very good job of it you kind of know what it is when you see it but what do we mean by identity politics and why have we allowed ourselves to be so well we've fallen for it that's a great question so identity politics begins in 1977 with a Manifesto by a radical African-American feminist group called The kambahi River Collective this is the first time that the phrase identity politics appears and it is worth reading that document not for its literary stature but for the fact that it tells us so much about what's about to come and what we are living with in that document the authors expressed their uh dissatisfaction their resignation to the fact that they can no longer trust the men in their lives they can only trust people exactly like them people who are victims exactly as they believe themselves to be and the document is a kind of perverse declaration of independence from the traditional family from society from the opposite sex that is to say John it's it's an incredibly sad telling of a kind of suffering that these women were experiencing now in our own day when we see identity Politics on campus and elsewhere and we see the kind of political theater that surrounds it it's very easy for us to dismiss it it's very easy to mock this stuff but I think that underneath those acts of political theater is something real and profound I think many especially many young people in the west are in the grips of an identity crisis that's what their language tells us they're always asking in effect who am I where exactly do I identify on the lgbtq Spectrum or on the spectrum of feminist ideas or on the spectrum of uh intersectionality and my Chicano Heritage or my Slovak Heritage etc etc they're asking these questions constantly in a way that I think tells us that these people have been on moored you know if you think about your own identity John if I were to ask you who are you and you were not to list all of your extraordinary professional affiliations and former affiliations my guess is that you would say uh you would describe yourself in relation to members of your family you might say I'm a husband I'm a father etc etc this is ordinary language this is how ordinary people talk we have to understand that this is not the language we are hearing from The Young especially the university educated Young they are desperately trying to construct identities out of political abstractions like heteronormativity uh they think that they are menaced by again political abstractions the gender binary for example about which we hear so much or a free-floating oppression uh structural racism these are very abstract categories you have to go to a university to learn them Ordinary People don't talk this way so the fact that people young people are grasping at these categories to explain themselves tells us that tells me anyway there are not enough people in their lives there are not enough shared fellow users of ordinary language and that is something I don't think we've seen before the 1977 document that you refer to I have read it it is very sad you do come away feeling very sorry for the people who put it together and they apply it but I think with you I came away thinking they're looking in all the wrong places for the answers and I'll just we'll put up on the screen the name of the paper if anyone wants to have a look at it now there was a time in my country when not many people went to University and they didn't have such a shaping influence today of course huge numbers of young people go to university and they tend to become the people who make up the cultural heft so what might for example um a critical theory was described by no less a figure than Stephen Pinker is so extraordinary you'd never think it'd gain any traction but it has it's it's it it's it's boiling over in our culture it's reshaping it it's leaving people really confused you mentioned the 1970s when the term identity politics first came together but I think you would say that a lot of this had its Genesis in the so-called sexual revolution in the 1960s that is not so much political as what's happened to people in their personal lives and you've just alluded to it the relative loneliness we don't have as many people around we're not in relationship with others the 1960s what happened are we right this is a sort of a fulcrum point when when the West really started to lose its way so first John I'd like to say that about identity politics in a nutshell I think that these people who believe they are victims are indeed victims I think there is truth there but they are not the victims of what they've been taught to believe they are not the victims of the traditional family for example with its heteronormativity exactly the opposite is true they are victims of loneliness and disconnection and of having been deprived of things that many generations before us took for granted all generations in fact uh the grounded people for example living in a large robust family with all of its problems and neuroses Etc uh gave people connections they could trust living in a large family gives people knowledge of the opposite sex before they get launched into the world they learn an understanding of the differences between boys and girls men and women Etc and they also acquire in virtue of a large family a lot of people who can help them in life who can teach them things who can teach them how to throw a football or how to make a connection to a job opportunity for example since the 1960s Revolution has wrecked all of that for a lot of people so let's go to what happened in the early 1960s the promise was that the sexual Revolution would liberate men and women right and especially women the promise was that artificial contraception adopted on Moss would strengthen marriages by giving people control over their fertility all of this probably seemed like common sense at the time a lot of people believed in it and yet over the decades we saw quite the opposite happen instead of strengthening marriage the post-revolutionary world saw a marriage marital breakup on a scale never before witnessed it's a cohabitation sore on a scale never seen before why does cohabitation matter because homes in which people are not married are even more likely to split up than homes in which people are married abortion became ubiquitous and fatherless homes as we know are now the norm in many parts of the West my point in this litany is that these Trends are known to everyone but what we really aren't looking at is that the children of these homes The Adolescents of these homes the young adults who then grow up without a model for how to create this institution called the family themselves and I believe that a lot of our most pressing social problems are coming from the fact that the sexual revolution has been embraced uncritically across most of the West certainly in all of its Elite precincts and that no one is countenancing the damage out there that is now pouring into the streets our campuses our streets are full of young people who have no idea what to do except to rage and they haven't even been supplied the proper language for their rage and so what I'm trying to do in focusing on the sexual Revolution is to identify a culprit in all of this that no one wants to look at for understandable reasons we're all affected by these Trends in one way or another in our own lives and our own families but what if something that most of us think is value free turns out to be the cause of what ails us this is the Paradox I keep trying to drive at I was recently in your country and to reinforce what you said there would be people who'd be angry about the things that we're now saying uh let's face it they would be and they'd vehemently disagree and they'd say look all of this has set us free free and yet the research is overwhelming um on loneliness you've got an explosion in loneliness because people have fewer children later in life they have fewer siblings and fewer aunts and uncles family relationships are much more stressed or and broken and the demographic numbers from around the world you've got a bubble of countries coming through in the 20s where there's a demographic collapse another bubble coming through in the 30s which uh Australia is going to be part of by the way Australia land of opportunity where the birth rate is just absolutely in free fall um so on the one hand the research is very clear we have fewer people to connect with we are much lonelier on the other there's a really alarming research now really alarming showing that young people are actually increasingly very unhappy and going back to my earlier point you seem driven by this unhappiness I'm driven by this unhappiness how does it happen in the freest even with our current difficulties uh most prosperous societies where we anticipate long lives where our lives can be extremely interesting we're so deeply unhappy so we can't get away from the fact that there is a problem and I emphasize that because there's an inclination to say that the solution to the problem is more of the same whereas Common Sense would say perhaps we ought to stop digging while we're behind the loneliness problem you describe is visible across the demographic Spectrum now it started out being documented among the elderly let's start there why are so many older people without people to visit them without people who can call them by their first name in every Western Country jaundice is a mounting social problem again I'm trying to get to the root cause of this the root cause of the loneliness explosion is that inadvertently but really the sexual Revolution subtracted people out of other people's lives it did this by uh via family breakup via the fact that people have fewer siblings Aunts Uncles all of it it's an arithmetic problem and in one sense root of it and we have signs all around us that are not in social science that this is the root problem for example let me mention a couple of specifics the American rapper Tupac Shakur uh wrote what I think is the most informative rap song uh ever written it's called Papa's song I believe and in it he offers the image of a boy who has to learn to play catch by himself who has to learn to catch a baseball by himself because his father isn't there and so the song is all about rage against this absent father my point is in that example the popular culture is telling us the same thing that some of us are trying to document with abstruse charts another example straight from the headlines we all know there have been a series of tragic shootings in the United States where teenagers have taken guns into schools and massacred people in the latest such tragic example the shooter left a note about why he did this it's just happened he said I have no family I have no friends what more Stark proof do we need about what's ailing kids out there the problem John is that they are being told all the wrong remedies for their situation and so for example if they listen to uh climate change activists young people are told you really shouldn't have kids because it's bad for the planet another abstraction in my view which is not to say climate change isn't real but to devise your ethical uh structure around something as abstract as the planet is pretty problematic I think nevertheless there are young people who are dead set on not having children because of the planet why is this a problem well because if radical loneliness is the root cause of their woes then telling them not to have kids is exactly the wrong kind of advice I have a similar problem with a lot of contemporary feminism the kind of career first feminism that those of us who were in college in the 1980s and especially and by you know again the idea that you should go through life as a woman and get your career all set and later how much later in your 30s in your 40s start to think about children this is the wrong idea to feed people whose problem is loneliness and disconnection so another reason I feel for the the young of the West is that I think they're being bombarded with exactly the worst messages for their situation which is why some of us need to work harder to get the word out there you're being coped you're being told exactly uh the thing that will make you more miserable you touched on something there just uh it'd be interested in your views on a little more uh in relation to the gun laws I'm often asked about them even on U.S media because we introduced a set of gun laws in Australia at the time that I was in government it was controversial at the time and I should add that those laws allow you if you have a legitimate reason for firearms to obtain them but um there are illegitimate reasons for wanting firearms and you won't get one in Australia but in a minute so so there's always this why can't America do what Australia's done it seems to me that one issue you're never allowed to raise is what is the very thing you've just touched on what drives young kids given that Americans have always had access to Firearms to do now what didn't happen in previous times and part of the answer let's build the cap it's one of the things we're really not allowed to talk about it's fatherlessness and yet I would have thought the social and economic cost of fatherlessness is so massive it's the elephant in the room I'm amazed that we're not allowed to talk about it why is it so taboo given that it inflicts such misery including on women or perhaps particularly on women that's another great question I think the answer the shortest answer is that if we are allowed to talk about fatherlessness then we cannot avoid the consequences of fatherlessness and if we can't avoid those consequences then we are threatening rollback of the sexual Revolution and that is something that a great many people in the west never want to see is roll back in any form I mean look what happened when there was just rollback in the matter of abortion by the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case there was a lot of uh there was quite a bit of outpouring of Rage about that decision and for months in the United States we've been bombarded with shout my abortion other pro-abortion kinds of propaganda every leading newspaper finds stories about this every single day that's to say that gives you an inkling of how Fierce the denial and the resistance is out there that's why nobody wants to talk about fatherlessness it's not because the consequences aren't well documented ever since James Q Wilson did his Monumental work on crime decades ago it's been known that almost all violent criminals came from fatherless homes that tells us something important I think uh similarly getting back to the case of these the cases of these recent Shooters these kids also are coming almost to a man from fatherless homes in fact years ago when I first started keeping track of the family's situations of these killers I found a case in which one of them came from an apparently intact home and I remember writing an asterisk next to it because it was that remarkable given the overall pattern so again John I think we are being forced by events to bring all of this uh depressing but important stuff to the table and the problem we have in the United States and maybe you have it in Australia is that even on the conservative side there's a lot of resistance to this in the name of libertarianism uh and on the Progressive slash liberal side there's almost no willingness to talk about it at all so that is the the wall of denial that has to be broken through to get to a place where we can ask how to actually address these things one of the areas in my country where this is most noticeable for people who actually mix occasionally with indigenous people on the ground is wise indigenous leaders have said things to me like can't you understand the damage that's being done to our young people they are being socialized by the trash end of what they call Whitey society and you're still not allowed to talk about it in the name of civil libertarian libertarianism despite the damage despite the loneliness a couple of things I'd love to just seek your views on a bit more one is that um you make the comment that strangely one of the ironic sort of outcomes of the sexual Revolution was that it empowered it actually has had the net effect in the long term of empowering the already powerful and weakening the weakening the weak the very thing that its proponents said it wouldn't do how do the sexual Revolution turn out to play into the desires of men not that they're doing very well it has to be said but at the cost of both women and children so let's talk about the metoo movement because I think the metoo movement offers robust evidence for the thesis that the sexual revolution has been bad for women what happened during me too well I had to read through a number of these accounts of accusations at one point because I was writing about them uh and it was striking that men and women were describing things in very different ways it was like a rashaman play uh they were describing the same event but in words that made it clear they were coming from other planets now you might say some of that is just the war between the Sexes or the difference between the sexes but I think it showed us something else in case after case you had these um women the product of elite universities in Elite Fields like Hollywood journalism Etc coming forward to say that these men had done terrible things that is to say these young women no matter how well educated had apparently been sent into the world without ever having been told don't go to a man's hotel room at two in the morning even if he is your boss or especially if he is your boss there's a kind of Common Sense knowledge that is lacking uh out there that's very visible when you read through these accounts of depredation and to say that is not excuse me to say that is not to judge any individual case it's just to observe that there has been a Descent of social knowledge about the opposite sex how did this happen it happened partly because with so many fatherless homes out there how our boy his or girls supposed to know what an adult man is about for better or worse and with so many small homes so many broken families smaller families there are just fewer people from whom to learn you know and to say that is not to point fingers it's just to say that 50 years ago say when the West Was less materially well off it was still better off in terms of Social Capital than it is today because there were stronger families because there were stronger and bigger networks because boys and girls men and women were a little less of a mystery to each other because there were more people from whom to learn that stuff this sounds very basic but again John I think this goes to the the root of so many of our problems and the fact that feminism has sent up all of this noise obscuring the basic facts that women are unprotected out there in ways that feminism doesn't acknowledge this does not help again going back to that fascinating conversation on trigonometry uh and and we'll put the strap line up for viewers who want to go and have a look at that I think it's a bit over a year old but it's a great conversation you made the observation now that because we're so reluctant to talk about some of these issues ourselves it might be useful to look at how the Animal Kingdom in fact these uh far more family oriented towards its members than we might have previously thought and a great deal of what animals learn when they're young comes from observing older animals and indeed other young animals I found that very interesting yes and it does give us a vernacular in which to discuss these things uh that are otherwise very hard to discuss when we're talking about Homo sapiens so there has been an explosion of animal science uh in the last couple of decades especially uh thanks to MRI imaging and all kinds of fascinating new instruments and what it has taught is something that would have surprised previous generations it has taught that most mammals live in families in regular old nuclear and extended families I opened the book Primal screens with the image of the Lone Wolf we all take this image for granted but it turns out that in nature there is not really such thing as a lone wolf wolves run around in family groupings they don't run around in random packs and the same is true of of most other mammals this is one reason John why elephants are increasingly not allowed in circuses because now we know that elephant nature is intensely familial and that elephants suffer when they are taken away from their families and so it seems deeply ironic to say the least that we know these things when it comes to other species and on the Progressive side of the spectrum especially there is no dearth of people lining up to help the elephants to help the Lions to help them live in the communities they were meant to live in which is to say their family communities and yet we can't turn that lens on ourselves so what does it teach us that animals live this way I think it teaches us a lot for example I give an example in Primal screams of a time when young male elephants were rampaging in some Park and the humans couldn't figure out how to stop this until one thought to fly in a bull elephant who is older and bigger and turned out that's all it took to make the younger elephants behave now that's not to say our problems are that easily solved but that was indicative another story from the animal world that I think is important about social learning concerns cats this sounds so simple and isn't so if you have a cat and that cat goes up a tree is it able to get down or not it turns out animal science has a lot to say about this the reason some cats are able to climb down from trees is that they have watched other cats they've had cats from whom to learn typically mothers and siblings have figured this out before them cats who go up trees and can't come down from trees are cats that haven't learned this because they haven't had the opportunity to observe others of their kind doing this thing what does that tell us about the world we are in it tells us that again by subtracting all of these people out of our Lives we have reached a kind of a Nader of social learning that wasn't there before and that's why I keep using these examples about animals in Primal screams because they are illustrations of what might otherwise sound like abstract arguments about social science interesting tell me um I'd be interested in your views recently the results of the last census in Australia were revealed and it emerged that fewer people than ever uh claim any attachment to Christian faith less than half Australians now identify as a Christian um and there was much uh you know rejoicing in a lot of elite circles you know this is further evidence that we're scientifically literate that we're more rational we're putting hatred and bigotry behind us because as people who believe the Bible seem to be so down on minority groups and so on and so forth the flip side of that coin seems to me that we are lonelier more tribalized more distrustful less coherent as a society and no one seems to ask the obvious question is there a relationship between the decline of Christianity and our increasing I'm going to use the word very frankly incoherency as a society in your view yes absolutely absolutely I believe there's a connection there look if you were unfortunate and you lost your parents and you didn't have a family Etc all of that takes one way of constructing identity off the table but kicking Christianity out of the Public Square takes the other obvious way of constructing identity off the table if you were that figurative orphan you could find a home in Christianity it would teach you that you had obligations to real life fellow human beings that you're supposed to do good works for them that you are brothers and sisters United in Christ that you have a place in the cosmos and a place a relationship to the supernatural that you are made in the image of God Christianity supplies a community ready-made including for people who have no other community and so trying to disgrace Christianity just hurts the most vulnerable by depriving them of that option too and we have to ask ourselves John I I know as well as you do what Elites have to say about Christianity and what all the problems are with it but our our society is really getting nicer because we've been liberated from all of that in the United States uh the war against Christianity is putting it too strongly but the um the adversaries of Christianity go after Christian Charities and this is a point I think is very important they go after emergency pregnancy centers uh Senator Elizabeth Warren said for example that she wanted to abolish all 300 of them in her State they go after adoption agencies they try to make it hard to send presents to kids in Guatemala if they have any kind of religious content etc etc who does this hurt this hurt the intended beneficiaries of these Charities so here we have an example where I think progressivism the kind of progressives who support these efforts who get up in the morning happy to be making food and diapers less available to desperate women who need them for their babies those kinds of people are not enhancing our Public Square they're not making our societies a Kinder gentler place and this problem I think we see across the West the idea that we will liberate ourselves by getting rid of Christianity um doesn't take into account that we are liberating ourselves from a code of conduct that tells us we are supposed to take care of one another we are supposed to love one another we are supposed to do good works and all the rest of it so yes I think the decline of Christianity across the West is part of the ferocity out there it's it's part of why politics feels so vicious these days because the code of conduct that would keep things more civil is um is on the decline it does seem to me that uh one of the consequences of people no longer regularly attending church services where they're reminded of their own failings and reminder that they have an obligation to their neighbors and that forgiveness is a good thing is that we no longer do forgiveness and I wonder how any society can work when we won't forgive Lord Jonathan sacks sadly now no longer with us made the observation to me and listeners will have heard me say this that uh in the past perhaps but our society no longer does forgiveness the best you can hope for is that people might forget if we've made a mistake or done something inappropriate but social media doesn't allow for that either so we're very harshly judgmental we seem to have found new ways of destroying people's lives if they dare to dissent yes absolutely and John this is why I have some hope about identity politics and its eventual fate I don't think we can live in this unforgiving prison that identity politics provides I don't think human beings can live without forgiveness and the problem with identity politics is that it casts everyone into the Allies camp or the enemies camp and if you are in the enemy's Camp if you are an oppressor there is never going to be exoneration for you I think deep down intuitively people know that this trap can't go on that everyone makes mistakes that they need to be forgiven for those mistakes they need Society to forgive them for those mistakes and identity politics has no language for that it has no mechanism for repentance and exoneration and Redemption and I believe over time that this will spell the Doom of identity Politics as people who find themselves in need of those things realize that they can't be had in this crabbed little political world you mentioned the word Redemption because it's not just a willingness is it to forgive others the Christian concept is that you can be forgiven and restored so to speak you know you can you can go on um in a restored capacity uh and and and be a useful contributor participant and so forth whereas what I've noticed in this country is that what will sometimes happen now is that people will be take a position it's not popular it may or may not have been the right thing to do that's irrelevant there's a pile on social media massively exacerbated the person and I've seen politicians do this issue groveling apologies when actually often they've actually not done anything wrong they ought to stand by their position and argue it but no the only way to get the howling pack off your back is to offer a groveling apology but there's no Redemption you know so you're on the scrap Heap then oh you've apologized good you've admitted that you've done the wrong thing you're an evil person you deserve to be shut out there's no restitution don't think there's a way back for you and that's quite a rapid change uh I can think of one very prominent politician in Great Britain in the 1960s who did some very stupid things was disgraced but carefully said about doing good deeds for the rest of his life and died a hero there was restitution we don't even seem to do restitution anymore when you've been killed by our culture and I think this really terrifies young people they think that's going to be the end of it for me I've been judgment has been passed on me and there's no way back yes absolutely part of the burden part of the burden they carry around is the problem of social media the problem that one single tweet or one stupid thing said on Facebook might prevent them from getting that job or worse yet might prevent them from remaining a member in good standing in some political identitarian community so this is one more burden that they carry around again though John I think it's it's so unnatural to live in this way to live with no Horizon of redemption that I am hopeful about this I think simple human nature is going to reassert itself on this point that may be overly optimistic well you and I are both active in the in the in the hope that we can hopefully influence things for the better for the sake of people not for the sake of winning arguments um but to come back um to this question of the loss of faith in the West a few years ago I talked to a young person in Australia studying science and they had real questions arising out of their study of science about the existence of God I asked that person more recently uh whether that was why they decided not to practice their faith anymore and the reply was oh no I I realized long ago that science can't prove or disprove God that arguments are relevant it has more to do with my experiences it was an experiential argument you know I look for God he doesn't seem to be there you've said something pretty blunt but losing God has nothing to do with reason and science it has everything to do and living in ways which have made it harder for many people to hear his voice I thought that was a very interesting insight thank you this goes again to the family and I know when many people here quote the family invoked their eyes glaze over and that shouldn't happen because the point about the connection between religiosity and the family is Elemental I think so ever since Nietzsche it's been assumed by uh sophisticated people that and quote God is dead that's the metaphor I'm proposing a different metaphor I am proposing that God's Not Dead we've gone deaf and we've gone deaf because we are no longer participating in Creation in a way that allowed the people before us a glimpse of divinity we generally speaking no longer have those rhythms of constant exposure to birth to death to loss to sacrifice which is what family life is it is one sacrifice after another that gives us a glimpse into the Beyond and into the idea that there is a purpose to this a lot of people today have lost this John they don't have those Elemental connections or if they do they don't have them in the same Supply with the same intensity and so I believe that what is dryly called secularization in the west reduces to exactly this after the sexual Revolution many people wanted to live as if these connections didn't matter and the loss became theirs because what living in this atomized way has done to us has done to humanity is to decrease the chances of understanding our connection in the cosmos you touched on uh conservatives not being willing to perhaps not even able to mount the case for Traditional Values anymore we've talked about how it's almost impossible to talk about family anymore I know you don't see yourself as a policy person uh but I'm just wondering whether you have any sort of ideas as to how political leaders given that politics now and governments this is one of the great ironies in the absence of God they become the Arbiters of what's right and wrong the law becomes a standard Setter the law comes to determine not so much reflect what is right and wrong but to determine what is right and wrong because increasingly the law and government are Upstream of culture rather than Downstream which was the traditional democratic model in the face of this if you were in the old days the labor party in in Britain and America particularly were Fierce Defenders of the family Fierce it was one of the mantras I always ran in quite short order it's gone uh these days the left seems to have stopped talking about the importance of family altogether I do meet many people on the right side of politics who say this is really serious how do we get back into this debate any any clues I know you say you're not a policy person but what should leaders do in the face of this Carnage because it is Carnage anybody wants to deny that just go and look in my country at the stats around how so many young people are suffering anxiety depression self-harm look at the breakdown in in in in in Trust and in relationships you can't deny it it's very real someone needs to lead how do you do it in this this environment that we're in today do you think Mary apart from the sort of work you're doing what a political leaders do from the point of view of policy I think given the undeniable empirical record out there about what family decline has done to our societies we need politicians to look at every possible experiment that would make it easier to get married easier to have families easier to have families of size we're talking about incentives and those incentives will be ferociously opposed by people who thinks that marriage shouldn't be privileged I think the record shows that it should that's one kind of answer another kind of answer is to go after some of the things that we know are bad for family formation one of the most frustrating things in the United States is that we have for example very good laws on the books lawyers tell me so against obscenity and yet there's no prosecution of pornography anywhere this is something that needs to be gone after it is a proven contributor to romantic trouble to marital breakup it's often cited in divorce cases now we need to do something about pornography that's something else uh that falls to policy makers to consider now outside of policy there are experiments Grassroots experiments that I think will be all for the better in the United States we have the experiment of classical schools for example non-denominational private schools Charter Schools where Greek and Latin are taught where uh non-anti-american history is taught Etc these Grassroots experiments in education I think over the long run will be all to the good of the family and I think similarly the fact that the parents of America seem to be Awakening to the problem of what is taught in American public schools is also all to the good so we have to clear away uh some of what's clogging everything up out there and I think we're we're seeing Signs of Life on all of those fronts so that's an initial laundry list for policy makers and institution Builders I'm sure you're right I mean one of the the things that a former Treasurer Peter Costello often used to say here that in Australia is that good economics is very good social policy and as an example of that housing affordability in this country has become a huge issue young people cannot get a house it is influencing the way they live their lives enormously including family formation very hard to put a roof over your head now but extraordinarily one of our most fantastic thinkers and writers in this country Judith Sloan uncovered that in some treasury papers that um treasury in this country is making a reference to the economic burden on cost of motherhood and what have we got to when smart people and treasuries can't understand that demographic collapses rapidly aging populations present the most massive economic costs you could ever imagine and I think I'm just saying that even at the highest level there is a lack of clear thinking about the importance of family formation not just for producing balanced adjusted children who can relate well but children in the numbers you need for a functioning Society in the future the prevalent privileging of motherhood would be a very good thing to bring back um I am no spokesman for any government including governments other than the one I live under but I would observe that Hungary is experimenting with some very interesting ideas on the family front and one of them is that women with four or more children do not have to pay income tax for the rest of their lives now I'm not saying that's exactly what we should try but it's certainly an example of a policy that might have a pretty significant effect on people's thinking about a family size uh so those are the kind of initiatives that I think our governments should be looking at well Mary you've been very generously all the time around that um if I may with just a reference you or a question around you gave a speech in the New South Wales Parliament the New South Wales is the biggest state for those listeners who are not Australian in in this country uh and uh I understand that you focused a bit on this issue of the rage if I can use that word that we now bring to our political discourse it's almost as though we use rage against an alternative view as a sort of loyalty test and it strikes me that one side of politics is and I'm using my left hand here is a little inclined to use the the what might be called the um the sort of tyranny of righteous intimidation to get others to agree and if you don't agree well your loyalty is not there so you're attacked the other side using my right hand is a little inclined to engage in sheer ugly rage and disrespect for other people when did the much touted idea that we've all got to live in tolerance now tolerance is a useful virtue I would have thought it was less powerful than love and the idea that you commit to your neighbor whether you like them or not but tolerance was the big catch cry you must be tolerant of people with a different view it's morphed surprisingly rapidly into this idea that when you get involved in politics your starting point is one of anger and of Rage how did that happen in your view quite so quickly I'm quite so badly I think partly the demise of Civility that you're describing is due to the fact that uh Christianity no longer puts hard breaks on that stuff in the minds of many people in other words throw out the Christian code of loving your neighbor and there's no reason not to go after your neighbor so this is partly a religious problem second I think that uh they're one of the biggest disputes of our time and this has been ongoing since the 1960s is over the sexual Revolution whether it's a good thing or whether we should take a second look and say we need to rain this thing in and we have to understand that's what's Central in these fights over religious liberty that we're seeing these these no-hold bar Holds Barred go after anybody make them lose their jobs ruin their good name Etc what we're seeing there is a fight over the sexual Revolution that is the only thing that these skirmishes are about they are not about the Commandment against stealing they are not about the question of uh Saints or the role of Mary or any of that stuff it's all about whether there will or will not be rollback of these things this thing given its consequences so I think part of what we have to do and I mean this especially for the conservative side is understand these seismic shifts that we are seeing that are affecting our society and we also have to not be that bad example of somebody violating the Norms of what should be the Norms of Civility ourselves so this is a message again uh especially to the right I think because we have to lead when we know that the other side won't in these matters a young person who who says I get it my life is really going to you know be measured in terms of relationships rather than material success but it's very hard in this day and age any advice for those young people who want to break the mold who don't want to get caught in this deep Vortex of the breaking of everything from romance through to meaningful relationships later in life and the whole continuum of of shattered relationships that that now so blights Western societies several simple things put down your phone don't look at pornography join something and try Church try places where you'll find real life community and a community of people who might have your back in a way that identity politics online and connections online never could they sound simple but again young people don't hear positive remedies to the situation that many of them are trapped in and I think those suggestions might be a good start Mary thank you for your time I wish you all the best thank you John it was a pleasure [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 68,117

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, Mary Eberstadt, The sexual revolution, Family breakdown

Id: 8CUkDsecoxQ

Length: 60min 3sec (3603 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023