Multiculturalism, Religion and the Therapeutic Age | Dr. James Orr

you know it's funny you know in the Modern Age we we're kind of torn between a tyranny of the minority and a tyranny of the majority and we're sometimes you know it's the wisdom of crowds sometimes it's the madness of crowds and crowds can be both very wise and very mad and it's not always clear how those those those work but it's the basic principle that we should test received wisdom however established it and Consolidated it might seem um because received wisdom to the extent that it's not just mathematical proofs is always open to being tested uh is always you know it's always possible that it might be [Music] [Music] wrong Dr James o is associate professor of philosophy of religion at the faculty of divinity Cambridge university in the United Kingdom he's the author of several books and many academic articles his expertise is in the philosophy of religion and he is a regular commentator on issues facing Britain and the West more generally today he's also the UK chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation James it's terrific of you to join me we've known one another for a while partly because we were on the organizing committee for the art conference in London but many of my listeners will actually know you because they will have heard you or seen you interacting with the extraordinary Jordan Peterson and a group of others including Oz Guinness and Dennis Prager talking through the importance in this day and age of the Torah the early books of uh uh of of the Old Testament in setting up what might be called the ideas of covenantal governance cooperation subsidiarity a societal structure that works and and gives people human opportunity for human flourishing and and advancement so that must have been a very interesting time a group of you gathered together and as I say many of our listeners will have heard heard those or seen them or both it was a great privilege to be involved John uh just as it's a great privilege to to be with you today and and and these sort of long form content is just a wonderful way to take a deep text take a difficult problem and to chew it over at Great length and in the case of the Exodus um discussions I think we went for not far off 40 hours um which were edited down of course I mean I remember on the second day we were still on chapter 3 uh there are 40 chapters in Exodus and I said to Jordan look God put the Israelites into the desert for 40 years you're going to have us in this studio for 40 days and the the daily wide team very graciously agreed to a second series so but we kept going and going and going because the as you say the the the early books of of the Old Testament Hebrew scriptures are are are Limitless they are depthless and uh uh both in themselves just they are conceptually fascinating um they are fascinating to the secular mind as we discovered because not every many of the viewpoints around that table took a to took a took a sort of secular perspective um uh but also in their applicability to the Modern Age um uh as you say this question questions of Covenant over contract this is this is an increasingly big question in in so contract's a narrow thing yeah it's narrowly defined and it's designed to make certain that you can get out of it now to put it in the negative pretty easily if you want to where is a covenantal Arrangement entered into between peoples individuals or vast numbers of people uh and so forth It's All About cooperation it's all about seeking the best for everyone it's all about an attitude of mind that says we'll all pitch in I think that's right I think there's something intrinsic to the notion of Covenant that involves promise and involves a dimension of unilaterality that is to say contract God can't enter into contracts but he can make Covenants he can make promises he can certain he can certainly constrain himself he can make impose obligations on himself um but there aren't any sort of contractual Provisions you can enter with God and for go and for God to remain god um so there's a notion of Promise there's an a notion of permanence I think to Covenant where there aren't sort of Escape Clauses in covenants um and there's a sense of self-giving of of a kind of I suppose a form of Grace a sort of gift uh you Covenant and you make a commitment you bind yourself uh and that elicits the the The Binding of another uh uh the free entering entering freely into a covenantal agreement and I think of course the question that looms if you once you've moved from questions of social contract and the contractarianism that develops after Hobs and lo and Russo in in the uh uh 17th and 18th century you shift towards uh if we start thinking about covenantalism you do start thinking about the vertical Covenant which is of course where where Exodus begins and Genesis begins in many ways that the horizontal Covenant emerges out of is underpinned by underwritten by a vertical Covenant uh now that's a much more difficult question to address in uh an age that is uh as secular as ours um where religion has been as it were privatized it is something that's been domesticated uh religion is something to be conducted only between consenting adults behind closed doors if you must if if you absolutely must then we'd rather you wouldn't we rather you didn't this is the great rosian uh system uh John roll's theory of Justice 19 1971 he says you know in order to achieve a maximally just Society we must bracket our quote comprehensive metaphysical commitments uh and by that of course he includes contentious religious commitments but in fact far broader metaphysical commitments too metaphysical commitments that aren't obviously religious but that are plainly philosophical uh about Freedom uh about human nature who we are as human beings about our Consciousness about rationality and so on those are plainly comprehensive metaphysical commitments that reasonable people can disagree about and yet we're supposed to bracket those and then work out how to be a just Society questions of Justice itself questions of equality these are contentious questions that we're debating all the time in the seminar rooms in roll's Harvard pits Oxford well these are very difficult times and uh it's important to have these debates it really is as we try to find a Better Way Forward at a time of enormous self-doubt even self-loathing but we'll come back to that because what I'd like to begin with is why you as a very very capable person uh a professional lawyer uh switched really into philosophy uh and in a very senior role now you carry that forward came CD University presuming it wasn't pursuit of great wealth I can't imagine that would have worked out too well what drove you down that road not Financial wealth there's time wealth there are other forms of wealth T but but and I'm not sure about capable but I was uh privileged enough to have a wonderful education in the English system the English schools some the best in the world the English private schools and I did lots of Latin and Greek which I found terrifying and deadly to to deadly boring to begin with but it began to open up for me in my teenage years and I started to read a little bit of Plato and that carried on at University so I I was interested in philosophy but I didn't think I was any good at it in fact I certainly wasn't any good at it I I was always intimidated by by uh people who who did philosophy I did I did so I did the bare minimum at University I had to I did classic so you have to do some ancient philosophy um the catalytic moment was in fact when I was working as a lawyer in the in London in the city the really catalytic moment was a conversion to Christianity uh it wasn't a very bookish conversion it was actually a pretty it was a sort of series of damine moments um at the end of which I came to the view that God was real H and that the Christian uh Revelation was the truest and most authentic uh uh revelation of of God uh so that immediately set me on the path to looking for the sort of philosophical scaffolding uh for the for these experiences and that that's what got me into contemporary philosophy that's where I started reading philosophy at the weekends and uh it was soon every other you know every other weekend then it was soon every weekend and I would I would nip across from my offices in freshfields at on Fleet Street to the Kings College London Library uh in the evenings and at the weekends and after a few months of this my wife turned to me and said uh your brother's negotiating for Saturday afternoons at Stanford bridge to watch Chelsea you're negotiating to go to a University library and sit with some dusty books and read them you know this is not normal behavior have you considered that you may have a vocation or you may have uh this this this is something that you may want to take further well most wives would have been horrified at have thought that I'd walk away from a a fancy lawyer job and and into into becoming a student again but that's exactly what what I did at the age of 30 with a young family and to went up to Cambridge and entered entered a pretty uncertain time as a graduate student but a glorious time I was very fortunate to to be accepted in the faculty of divinity at Cambridge as a graduate student where I now teach full-time and I had a brief period in in Oxford after my Graduate Studies with the great Nigel bigger uh at Christ Church and that's when we really started to get forced into the culture wars uh and the Empire Wars in particular we could talk about that in a bit perhaps um and then I went ended up back back in Cambridge but the the key moment for me towards philosophy was was faith that that was the that was what instilled in me the sort of intellectual restlessness about you know there about the fundamental questions so were the likes of bertran Russell wrong when he implied that Christian faith was somehow incompatible with philosophy can you be both yeah Vicken Stein has a wonderful remark somewhere where he says that all of Russell's books of course you knew Russell very well all of Russell's books should be divided into two and you should have the black books and the red books I can't remember which way around it is but the the Black Books everyone must read and the red books are complete nonsense don't don't touch them and I think a lot of Russell's writings on religion should be were were in in Vick genin's view as well in on the sort of Latter half the kind of post 1918 1919 phase of Russell's life um it it's hard to know where to start explaining what's wrong with the thought that philosophy and religion or faith are intrinsically incompatible I think the belief that they are uh is itself a symptom of this tendency of the tendency of all of us in the modern age to think that all ideas begin began roughly 100 years ago and everything before that was darkness and and confusion um and there is a tendency in in contemporary Analytics anglophone philosophy to think that but and Russell and G more started philosophy at the high table of Trinity College Cambridge and somewhere around you know October 1903 and everything up to that was just to be an embarrassment to be forgotten but of course philosophy goes right back to the dawn of time the dawn of thought the dawn the beginnings of the human record even before Socrates uh you have thinkers like Alex agras and Bailey and xenophanes and so on who who are doing philosophy it's a sort of philosophy it's a sort of Natural Science and their answers are freighted with appeals to Divinity uh Socrates is put on trial not for being an atheist but for introducing New Gods um not even epicur it's very very difficult to find in the ancient world or late Antiquity or the medieval period a philosopher who you could say is is an atheist that is to say repudiates all content to religious beliefs and uh uh you know even the epicurian were committed to the existence of the gods they they just didn't didn't think they were around anymore they they got bored and G off and and gone somewhere else but actually finding an atheist pre let's say pre 1600 is not very not very easy even if you think of Ansel Ansel when he's talking about um when he's trying to put the atheist perspective has to quote scripture has to quote the fic character in in the Psalms the fool who says in his heart that there is no God he doesn't say oh those atheists who claim that that that there is no God I mean it's it's an almost inconceivable uh inconceivable thought that that there are such things so atheism is it's a very new kid on the Block as it were it's a it's a in the grand sweep of of of Western history and in the grand The Sweep of the world so both diachronically and synchronically as it were uh atheism though it's got a sort of disproportionately vocal uh uh uh uh representation these days and the last 100 years is actually quite a curious and I'd say quite sort of superstitious position uh one that requires the suspension of uh partial suspension of of of Reason uh and a kind of skepticism and agnosticism about all kinds of dimensions of human experience and reality uh I sometimes call them the MW I think I B I borrow that from from somebody else but you think of uh morality uh you think of uh think of Music think of mathematics think of meaning metaphysics itself these are all plainly fascinating domains about which intellig in intelligible questions can be raised and and answers given that are that elude the dominant philosophical orthodoxies of our age which roughly speaking is the view that all truths are scientific truths or reducible to Scientific truths this is the view sometimes called scientism or naturalism or sometimes physicalism materialism you know it is the house philosophy of secular liberalism uh but it can't cope with the nword it can't cope with mind it can't cope with morality it can't cope with uh music as something irreducible can't even cope with mathematics these are all uh these are all domains that that you can't can't be put under a microscope you can't do scientific tests on uh that the empiricist is going to miss um and so in a way you know atheism and and reductive physicalism brings with it a not just an impoverished view of religion but an impoverished view of human nature and an impoverished view of reality itself would you say that your Christianity has been more informed by your interest in philosophy or would you say the other way around it's a very difficult question because many Christian claims uh many of the kind of most fundamental architectonic Christian claims are plainly philosophical claims God exists that is a philosophical claim it is is open to argument arguments in its favor and it's open to arguments against it philosophical arguments not just Bland appeals to Revelation or whatever um uh uh Christ is two Natures in one person without confusion change division or separation because of the Council of caran tells us uh now that's a doctrinal credal claim but it's got to work philosophically uh so how does it work philosophically well we have to start thinking about what is a nature and what is a person and the these are intrinsically philosophical problems that are with us still um think of the old debate about you know uh uh can I be free to choose what I have for breakfast tomorrow morning if God already knows what I'm going to have for breakfast tomorrow morning you know there's a sort of you know does if if if I'm really free then God God's knowledge is false about what I'm going to have for breakfast if if God's knowledge is fixed then I have got no choice about what I have for breakfast it's going to be the cornflakes now there's a just you know that's very that's the same argument as we as we work with today in in the secular context between determinism is it Darwin all the way down or are we genuinely free on on top of that um in my own case I I think to go back to your question I actually started with uh my Faith began as it were my conversion experiences were experiences that is say they were they were didn't rely on books or ideas um but but answered skeptical prayers but I immediately went not into philosophy but into the history to of the New Testament that was my first that was my starting point I had been fortunate enough as I said earlier to pick up Greek and if you got some classical Greek then coire Greek the New Testament Greek is just gloriously readable all of the New Testament except for Hebrews and Revelation you could pretty much read I could pretty much read um a site read um and this was a revelation because there was they were the new the 27 sort of New Testament texts were both continuous with the texts i' read from the same period in the first century and also very different they were continuous in the sense that they were texts they were documents from the first century um and suddenly I was you know everything I've done at uh in Classics and reading tacus reading suetonius reading Caesar all the tools that I applied were there I said well why shouldn't I use the same tools on these documents um no no no no reason for sort of double standards and so on so there was a continuity there but there was a sharp discontinuity mainly I noticed in the tech the manuscript tradition you know when we're reading tetus for example tacitus is wonderful annals I mean there's only sort of four of the I mean it's it's it's pot marked I mean it it's there's hardly any there's lot big big big chunks missing and we have to sort of guess what happened in the uh for for a lot of the lot of the Emperors um because the manuscript tradition is so poor um or even Homer you know the elot gets to us only via a tiny tiny number of manuscripts from late Antiquity in the case of the New Testament you had I realized you had 5,000 Greek 5,000 Greek manuscripts New Testament 10,000 Latin a whole load of other Lang too so that was the that there was a of sharp discontinuity very busy soall apparatus criticus at the bottom which shows you all the different um all the different readings uh which have been which textual critics look at to try and get the exact text that was a that was a revelation so it started with historicity claims and thinking hard about um the historical case for the life death and resurrection of Jesus and the early Christian Movement and then I had lunch one day with a friend in the city uh and I sort of told told him what I was reading and I you know laid out some of these sort of historicity arguments and um particularly for the resurrection and uh he said uh yeah F I don't believe that but I mean it's I said well look there's more evidence for it than say that you know Caesar Crossing the Rubicon um or for the Battle of acum why wouldn't you you know take these seriously at least the sort of he said well um dead people stay Dead uh I said so if I showed you a video it was 20 years ago VHS or a DVD of Easter morning the St you know the rock being rolled back and you actually you actually saw it you so what I would I would disbel disbelieve the DVD I said if I put you in a time machine and we went back to the cave and we were there somehow would you believe it he said no de people they they now since discovered this is hume's argument you know that that the evidence of on senses should be doubted if the uniform Uh custom of Human Experience denies it a little bit more more complicated than that I what that lunch taught me I left that lunch realizing that the historical approach to Faith could only really be a hobby what really mattered was the deeper philosophical claims that is to say if you were not willing to accept if your it started with your PRI and if your prize were all truths are scientific truths the naturalistic prize then of course dead people stay Dead uh those are the scientific truths and no historical evidence certainly not evidence from 2,000 years ago however strong it is relative to other historical documents from 2,000 years ago is going to be dispositive so I realized that the TR the real work would need to be done at the philosophical level how do you raise those priors so you're not going to find any kind of Christian evidences compelling or Islamic evidence is comp compelling or seek evidence is compelling if you haven't got a prior commitment to theism being possible naturalism being false and that will raise the probability and make it easier well certainly make it more reasonable or at least not will put you in a position where you're not ruling out a priori um the possibility of the claims being of non-naturalistic claims being made in test in documents like the New Testament being true it's certainly surely the case that just as no one can stand and say science can disprove God it's also the case that you can't find anything in the historical records that can be if you like proven to be wrong yes that's right I that's because science studies the repeatable scientific truths are true in virtue of their having been repeated empirically and hyp through through the hypothetical deductive model and history relies on the unrepeatable the you know the once the once and only ones um of course we look for patterns in history we look for ways they might rhyme but we are uh uh we're dealing with a different category of human inquiry and to go back to your question I mean not only uh uh I mean I my view is that not only is this I don't think there's such a thing as a scientific proof in fact I don't think science can prove itself um when you're using the language of proof you're really only using the language of mathematics the only proofs you get are in mathematics you know if give you an example if if we were to say if we were to find out that children were reading physics textbooks from the 1920s we'd be worried why because physics textbooks of the 1920s don't contain proofs they contain the best scientific theorizing of the 1920s but theorizing that the that thinking develops it develops it develops mathematical textbooks well would be delighted if children were working with mathematical textbooks from the 1920s why because you know mathematics rely you there are theorems in mathematics uh there are only theories in science and and science is falsifying itself all the time and science can't prove itself because science itself relies on uh prior truths being true uh notoriously science relies on mathematical truths being true um and mathematical truths are not scientific truths the scientific truths presuppose mathematical truths uh and the more science we do the more physics we do the more mathematical it gets um but but mathematics uh is even even more than history you know history at least happens once mathematics doesn't happen at all and yet it's always and everywhere true that 2 plus 2 equals four um you can't date it those truths are necessarily true they don't begin to be true they don't cease to be true they are Rock Solid truths they are pro they you can have you can develop proofs from them and they're more Rock Solid than any scientific conjecture uh uh or any scientific theory that's ever been that's ever been formulated you've spoken of what you call a historical shift as people have stopped even asking the big questions that we've been talking about and decided against belief broadly speaking in the west you have seen a lot of shifts and one that you've nailed in a very interesting way and I'm quoting uh it's been from sin to syndrome yes sin being the idea of wrongdoing which is one of the great objections people have of course to the Bible I don't know how you explain evil if you don't think there's sin people don't think it's through clearly but understandably I suppose there's a reaction against the idea that I might be myself to blame for a lot of world's ills um now we've had this shift from a Christian Society you're saying to a therapeutic Society what would you say is a therapeutic Society how's it manifesting itself why is it problematic to use a term that's banded around a lot yes I mean I I think that's right I I and I can't even not even sure that phrase is mine sin to syndrome I might have picked it up somewhere but it captures that shift very very nicely from a sense of moral AG moral culpability which presupposes moral agency and I think culpability and blame and sin they're not nice words these days but in fact they're words that do belong to a sort of conceptual web of nice things uh of things that have always been recognized to be important uh to recognize somebody as having committed wrongdoing rather than simply being the victim of uh some pathology is to treat that person as free and rational and k i don't agree with K about much but K is right that at least part of what human dignity consists in is freedom and reason so to treat somebody as a sinner is to treat them as somebody who is free and who is mature and rational um to treat them as a patient um in the grip of a syndrome I think is not to treat them with for Humanity and dignity worse it is to coin another fashionable word disempowering to say that somebody is in the grip of a pathology A syndrome rather than a sin why well if you've committed a sin you can seek forgiveness certainly within the Christian traditions and and other religious Traditions there are mechanisms salvific mechanisms the mechanisms for absolution and repentance and social recognition of second chances as well as condemnation if you've got a disease if you're wrongdoing is a is a symptom of something that is wrong with you or wrong with your mind you're stuck with it really or at least it's much less obvious how you get rid of it do you medicate your way out of it uh well yes sometimes do you uh find a therapeutic way out of it well yes sadly sometimes but most of the time these are problems that are fixed I have this condition uh and there's no way I can sort of get out of it and so you know Crimes start to be treated as diseases and criminals or wrongdoers start to be treated as patients and the state then turns into not that which gives expression to social condemnation through uh punishment and retribution but rather the state becomes a kind of omnicompetent therapist and that's a very dangerous development in my view because we we know that our moral instincts shared moral instincts help us to track moral truth broadly speaking there's a moral consensus in every society classifying pathologies classifying diseases me particularly psychological diseases are as it were um that that is a very tricky business you need to get in the experts who's in control of the experts the state is in control of the experts and so you actually move from a position of sort of moral consensus and I think democracy depends upon you know the the plumber leaving school at 16 having just as much uh just as capable and fully functioning U Moral Moral capacity for moral judgment as a you know fancy Professor with with multiple ethics degrees um so we shift there to um morality moral judgment becomes a sort of question of technique and expertise and that I think is is a disturbing development and you see this with sort of you know the language of health and safety you see it as sort of invoking and justifying um very clear erosions of of civil liberties uh and I think one of the big you know we've talked and I know you've talked with your guests on previous podcast John about this you know left and right not quite being the correct prism to understand the Public Square with through anymore and I think that's absolutely right and the question I think is what are the other spectrums and axes and I at least one of them is um uh uh is is risk and safety or freedom and safety how do that's a that's a tradeoff clearly we can't just uh allow total freedom in a way that undermines in serious ways Public Safety on the other hand it's obvious that we can't just live in lockdown the whole time that there are more important things in life than the avoidance of death uh we're going to have to walk across the street even though there is a you know a minimal risk that we might get run over and so on so how do we find that tradeoff um and I think I think that's going to be that that axis as it were of public disagreement is is emerging more and more in recent years uh partly driven by by plagues uh uh but also driven I think by the um the transposition from that the move from sin to syndrome and the language of the psychologizing of of of medicine um my own view is that mental health is is an unfortunate phrase I I I know what people mean by it but I think it's it's a metaphor that's got out of control uh there's physical there's I don't think there's any such thing as physical health uh all health is physical health in my view um mental health what is mental health me the phrase mental health implies that there is a medical science as it were that is focused on the mind as an object of scientific inquiry like a bone or a cancer cancerous cell if that's true then the champions of mental health as a phrase as a literal phrase a non- metaphorical phrase have solved one of the biggest problems in the history of philosophy namely the mindbody problem and the mindbody problem just is the problem of is the Mind an object a scientific object is the mind the brain now my view and maybe not a popular view in in contemporary philosophy but certainly I'd say the overwhelming consensus of of philosophers in in in the west has been that yeah that when we're talking about Soul or mind or Consciousness we are talking about something that's real and not fully reducible to underlying neurophysiological States now maybe that's right maybe that's wrong it's an open question the phrase mental health closes that question it says we've settled that question we've we we've settled the question of whether or not the mind is something that can be both explored by scientific means and solved and addressed as it were cured by a scientific means and I think that that's a that's there's a deep conceptual confusion category mistake mistake embedded in that phrase which is leads to all kinds of dialogues of the death and policy confusion because we start to then think of we start to then think of um you know psychological suffering in terms that are the same as uh physical suffering so we'll look at sort of you know cancer rates uh and waiting lists and then we'll look at um rates and waiting lists for generalized anxiety disorder Gad is one of these phrases a student explained to me the other day which I think is um you know just being AIT a little bit anxious you know so this is this is a deep problem and it's one that I think disconnects us maybe this is accelerated by the digital Revolution but it disconnects us from and renders problematic as it were ordinary features of Human Experience um I asked a young person the other day to explain to me what um uh what was what was the phrase I think it was uh social social phobia so what is social phobia well it's it turned out that it was just anxiety um I've got Gad one person said generalized anxiety disorder I said well you know what why do you think you've got Gad he said well I you know I I don't know I'm just feeling very stressed and I pointed out that the student had very important exams in in in a few months time I said do do you think that's why you've got Gad and she said yes probably that's definit I'm worrying a lot about my exams I said well well not only is that normal it's it's actually good you know it's it's good to feel anxious about about your exams because you're going to do better and it's a totally normal non-pathological response to an ordinary human scenario um there was a study done a few years ago uh a fascinating article by a group of psychologists trying to explore at what point Point grief becomes PTSD and it's fascinating trying to watching these experts trying to trying to fix the appropriate limits on Grief so you know they were trying to settle the question of you know how long is it reasonable for you to feel grief over the death of a loved one uh you know at which point does it just cease to be acceptable what point does grief turn into a pathology well my view is that just there is no answer that should you shouldn't even be looking for an answer to that question different for it's going to be different for everyone and you're not going to be able to quantify it and it's done of your B you know you leave me you know leave leave me alone with all your your fancy acronyms uh and if I once I've got PTSD then I if you start calling it PTSD then I guarantee that I'll have that longer uh for uh than than than than my grief may have lasted had I not pathologized it just following this through a little bit from a from a sort of uh more Layman perspective I suppose it seems to me that with the loss of the idea of sin and as you've said that's tied to agency if you're fully human and dignity fully engaged you need to have a mechanism for dealing with the fact that there is evil you need then to move to the point where we're all capable of it and life isn't a battle between good and bad people because we're all a mixture that was a traditional understanding and that led to Concepts like conf you know fessing up facing reality you've got it wrong you need to apologize and the notion of forgiveness and it seems to me that a therapeutic Society actually because it can't deal with guilt and fessing up and forgiveness turns out to be anything but therapeutic it's actually quite cruel and for young people today the idea of cancel cult so the great terror is you can't be forgiven yeah if you've done something something that is wrong even if it's not wrong frankly in the eyes of you know the people around you and they cancel you you're not going to be forgiven There's No Redemption and it's not even going to be forgotten so a therapy culture turns out I'm just testing this by you to see whether I sort of got a bit of a handle on what you're saying turns that actually to be a very cruel one it denies agency it denies forgiveness it denies a sort of um attitude of deep commitment to accepting others in the end MH mhm I think that's absolutely right and and you know if if if everything if everything is therapeutic then then then as it were nothing is therapeutic that is say if everything is is can be explained in just sort of psychological terms then then then we do sort of start to lose our grip on being able to work out well what genuine instances of psychological suffering might be and I think there is a cruelty to it yes because there is an idea there is this sense that once you've got as it were a psychological condition that you can't you can't really escape from it um there is no cure there's no medicine there's medication and that opens up you know the pharmaceutical Solutions uh and uh and I take very seriously left-wing critiques of big farmer being deeply complicit in the Triumph of the therapeutic um uh and because it renders individuals uh dependent increasing numbers of of individuals dependent on uh on on big farmer and certainly the rates there was a report quite recently in in the UK showing staggering levels of um uh consumption of anti-depressants particularly up you know up in Scotland and uh this this and amongst their children yeah yes absolutely right absolutely right and so this um this this way of and that comes from the assumption that if somebody's got suffering from poor mental health then there must be some solution to it that's analogous to um uh the solutions that we offered to bad physical health medicine now it's not the same thing though you know psychological suffering is a qualitatively different kind of thing it's it's it's not it's not it's still suffering I mean nobody's suggesting that I don't want don't for a moment want to say that psychological suffering isn't real I'm simply saying that framing it by analogy by metaphor that then gets concretized to um with respect to the phys physical medical medical Sciences introduces all sorts of problems one of which is the only real solution to this is something that's analogous to physical cures pills yeah so so here we have a situation where I think you and I are broadly agreeing here uh you're at a level well above me I have to say James but but let's let's let's try and tease out something here uh we're saying that in fact it seems that a therapeutic culture is is one in which um it turns out that many modern attitudes are hurtful and even harmful to people's well-being but that therapeutic Society now if you like which which is is is pretty widespread it's pretty thick uh through our society they're saying we're the ones we Christian Believers when we talk about Sin and guilt and conscience in the way that we do we're the ones that can be hurtful and even harmful so we've got a real problem and in my own country this is manifesting as a in a debate over religious freedoms uh the term itself's interesting do you find Freedom through religion or do you find Freedom by if you like pushing it back into the private square and if possible obliterating it all together we've got ourselves in a mess haven't we yeah I think that's absolutely right absolutely right uh um and I've been tracking that debate over religious freedom quite a lot in in Australia and and and indeed indeed elsewhere um I mean I you know part of the difficulty here I think is expanding again it's connected to what we were saying earlier about the psychology ing of absolutely everything um you know with John Stewart Mill the classical liberal has his no harm principle you know my my uh my freedom to do what I want uh ends with my you know fist at your on your on your face as it were I mean I no harm no physical harm can be should be uh should be inflicted but within that I am my autonomous self capable of uh I'm free to exercise um myself I'm free to take whatever decision I want and to to to act on them as I see fit once the notion of harm is psychologized as you say then all bets are off the if if you then wed that to the no harm principle then you've got a recipe for tyranny because the problem of psychologizing harm is that it's not at all obvious what evidence against their having been a harm they being a harm having been committed it it looks like and there there simply isn't any objective what is the the the the the dispositive evidence is the subjective self-reported claim that I am harmed I feel hurt I feel offended uh there's no jury that can inspect evidence and reach and deliberate uh over whether or not that that claim is true uh because psychological harm is by definition uh something to which only the subject has private privileged access um and it doesn't matter you go to Harley Street and you go to some of the best psychologist in the world is not going to give you is not going to be able to have access to that to that to to those private States now that's uh that changes the sort of incentive structures in very really fundamental ways it's a recipe for tyranny because it you can just now apply Classical liberalism you know psychologized and tweaked and you've got a recipe of tyranny because you effectively the the the society starts to move at the same Pace as the most most offended well has to stop and put everything down as but to um as the most offended person in in the in in the class you know has a tantrum or or or or screams and now we don't know if it's veridical or not we don't know if if there's if if it's true or not but if if if the person knows that that Society is going to stop or the institution is going to respond um then there's a there's obviously an incentive structure in place to you know you use and abuse the system um so it is it's it's it's obviously it's a profound it's a profound concern um and of course these things have a habit psychological conditions psychological um you know syndromes have have the habit of being you know self-fulfilling uh and and and capable of being spread with extraordinary speed through mesis and mytic effect as we know um this is sometimes called the the verta effect after gerta's the sorrow of the young verto or the Marilyn Monroe effect uh this is a very good example of where the no harm principle breaks down on the question of suicide now suicide seems to be the paradigmatically private act private purely private exercise of my free will over my own life no one can tell me not to and so on this is the classic sort of liberal case for decriminalizing suicide um but of course as we know after the Sorrows of the young verta was a huge hit in gerter in the late 18th century and Mar mon when Marilyn Monroe died and so on these these have enormous mytic effects they're not purely private decisions especially if you have a a public status um there's a very powerful mytic effect um I remember when I was a post doctoral fellow in in Oxford I lived on a staircase and would go in and every morning I would see some well-meaning of a well-meaning poster uh from the you know the college nurse with an enormous question mark on it and underneath it would say worried depressed feeling low you know we're here to help and it was a you know nice thing to do but I would walk in very chirpy every morning and uh then I'd look at the poster and think well gosh actually maybe I'm not feeling all right you know actually there were there there is that that that little problem I'm worried about maybe I'm not worrying about it enough you know and so on it's so there's a sort of self-fulfilling um um effect and there's a mytic effect and so these things can spread very very quickly um and become real they become real um and uh so it is it's a it's a deep deep difficulty and it's not at all clear how one emerges from it either because um one doesn't want to belittle or trivialize it um and one doesn't want to you know in a way you know Vicken Stein says famously a picture hold holds us captive and as it were the therapeutic as a sort of the architect the conceptual architecture of the therapeutic is so sort of structured modern culture that it it holds us captive it's hard to see how we can break out there are bunkers and I think um religious communities are bunkers because they can speak as it were the old language the language from the the and and and there are communities that tend to have the antibodies as it were uh to use another medical metaphor the antibodies to the therapeutic to the therap utic culture and and also recognize I mean Christianity has certainly been here before I mean if you look at the sort of philosophies of late Antiquity this idea of philosophy is a way of life and stoicism is a way of life epicureanism is a way of life pythagoreanism as a way of life you know philosophy was like religion in that sense you know if you're a Pythagorean you were a vegetarian and that's because you had certain beliefs about the transmigration of Souls and it was both a religious Pythagoras was both the leader of a religious cult and also a brilliant mathematician and plainly philosopher and they were you know they were as it were therapeutic we would think I mean it's a Greek word therapeia caring as a sort of and and the caring of the pukare therap of the pukare as sort of looking after of the Soul this was a classical Pagan idea that Christianity was perfectly well aware of and defied and and it introduced a rival arrival scheme that in you know eventually won out um and which saw or uh and didn't which didn't see suffering as intrinsically wrong as always intrinsically negative understood that suffering could be it could be virtuous it could be a good uh this is a profoundly countercultural uh indeed scandalous thought to the Pagan mind that that that suffering could as it were be generative could be frighted with meaning uh that it wasn't the wasn't the end of the world as it were um but we have got to that point where you we're Beyond naturee you know this nature is whatever uh what whatever doesn't kill you make you makes you stronger H whatever doesn't kill you makes you weaker is the idea now you know anything we must we must make sure that we are as protected as possible um but we know that actually exposure to risk and danger is a recipe for psychological resilience um there's the famous study of the kids here in London during the blitz um the the the the the contrasting studies over time on a whole wide range of outcomes of the kids who grew up in the Blitz and the kids who in London during the Blitz and the kids were evacuated to Scotland and on every single outcome every single measure the blitz kids were more resilient psychologically than the than the kids who've been evacuated that's interesting I once had a I say a very dear friend of mine I was complaining bitterly about being attacked in the media by uh someone back in Australia and I said I felt like I was suffering and this good friend said to me if you weren't suffering John I want to tell you you'd be insufferable cuz it's keeping you you know from bloated ideas about yourself there's a bit of Truth in that there is there really is but as you say we live in an age that doesn't believe suffering is part of The Human Experience we're about the first age that ever has things have been so comfortable we have so much and yet it's not working can I just drill in you you you touched on on this idea of um you know Do no harm so I guess that's a bit of a progression isn't it you had the covenantal agreement once that that you know as part of your faith you would love your neighbor as yourself and you do under them as you want to done under them and that sort of morphed into you know just sort of keep out of their way don't don't visit any harm on anybody in fact it's very hard if you're living for yourself very hard not to inflict harm on others and as we've seen uh we live in a culture where everybody's saying someone has inflicted harm on me that's at the heart of the therapeutic culture it seems to me and so in a sense exercising those freedoms that we've had in the west to live as we like Works only while ever it's conducted in a framework of responsibility and genuine commitment to others once it becomes selfish or disrespectful of others Freedom can in fact in itself become the the very enemy of Freedom yes this is the great Paradox this is the great Paradox that conservatives understand but the Liberals liberals can't cope with there are plenty of other things that conservatives don't understand or can't cope with um um but but this is the the great Paradox that that total freedom leads to unfreedom that if freedom is the thing you you most value or most prioritize then it's the last thing you'll actually get actually personally and in terms of the structures of society at both levels with a personal just think of a relationship think of the meaning that you one's life is invested with through through a a strong lifelong friendship a lifelong friendship brings with it constraints constraints on the sorts of things we will do and say with respect to that person um we don't even think of them as constraints um because they are just trivially instrumental constraints on our freedom um um given the riches that flow from the Friendship um or consider at even more basic level you know just driving around driving through London I mean you're not it's not actually that easy to drive around still allowed to do it are you at the moment I think who is our dear lead the our dear leader has put so many restrictions on what you can and can't do what you can and can't drive that it's very very very difficult but I mean there is basically free flowing traffic and free flowing traffic depends upon there being an incredibly elaborate system of rules and conventions and limits and constraints it it's those precise limits that Liberate the traffic and this idea that limits liberate is it it may seem paradoxical but it's the most obvious thing in the world when you think about it liberalism can't cope with that can't cope with limits it's always chafing against limits um it can't deal with with really W with any limits at all because any limit seems to be or can be construed as and correctly as a constraint on my freedom yeah but you're not free no once you turn it into license no absolutely when we we literally born tied to by a biological cord to our moms I mean we're born with this physical cord limit we're born into a dense web of unchosen obligations and yes maybe it's possible to cut free of those those unchosen obligations over time but you're not going to be able to live a fulfilling life if you don't pick up certain other obligations that you will agree to to to to abide by um and so this is you know it's you know part of the difficulty of a political philosophy that motivates and encourages individual Freedom above all else is that it becomes pretty obvious in how we're moving from the priv to the public it becomes pretty obvious that the only possible policeman and guardian for my the exercise of my individual freedoms against my fellow citizens is the state um you know if it's a non-state actor then it's it it is an a front on my my individual Freedom it's some other group of individuals doing it then that we we we all I have to start turning towards a single Leviathan as it were that is going to protect my freedoms but once we get to that point then we've got to the we're lurching towards the very tyranny that liberalism set out trying to avert because the omnicompetent state is the as the sole guarantor left of my individual freedoms once I've cut myself a drift from all the unchosen obligations that I might have that I previously had to to Nation to Neighborhood to family to friends to guilds and so on and so forth uh uh I still need something to secure my freedom to enforce my contractual uh rights and and to protect my property rights and so on and so forth and and so uh one becomes dependent more and more dependent on on on the state uh and that becomes the primary the primary relationship and Burks platoon disappear Civil Society dis disappears all of those intermediary institutions that make up the make up the fabric of certainly this country and I think as toille saw in in America makes up the sort of what so distinctive about about American culture all of that starts to Fall Away uh I think it might have been Charles Carlson who said it's either the conscience or the Constable you know the extent to which we exercise sensible restraint yeah and our freedoms wisely we won't need the comforable to the extent that we don't and you see it everywhere because you know I know as a former legislator but it's only built up an incredible head of steam since then uh the whole idea now that um my freedoms are being impinged upon I'm not being treated rightly has to be addressed by more and more and more and more endless red tape and government intervention the Colombian philosopher Nicholas Gomez deila uh once said that dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies um and it's often thought that a proliferation of Regulation and laws and crime um criminal and and and civil codes are evidence of a of a of of a flourishing or sophisticated Society in fact it's I think much more evidence of a society ill ites with itself that has to con compensate for the corrosion of public trust by uh through the constable in the form of the form of law um and so I and I think we are certainly seeing more and more of that um and it's it's disquieting in the end the building will topple over I wonder whether our modern obsession with freedom of speech which so often centers on someone feeling offended or whatever perhaps because people use social media unwisely and they cancel others and then they think well this free speech thing's no good is isn't creating in fact a far deeper problem that's being obscured which is that we're not having really robust conversations that little you know that can be completely depersonalized they're about what sort of society we want to sort of have what is the role of the individual versus the government um you know what sort of economic model should we should we follow what have you the trivialization that that some of my listeners might think that's an unfair word to use but around the issues of freedom of speech are obscuring the greater problem we're not having the great debates anymore I think that's true and false I think it's it's true in the sense that um the Legacy institutions are um struggling to avoid a kind of sclerosis and group think and I think that's true also of the established institutions of of of Western Society I think it's false in the sense that you are now seeing the emergence of a sort of digital ecosystem that is opening up opportunities for long form discussions of the kind we're having now and you exemplify so well in in this in the in your in your podcasts of really thinking hard about these these questions and disseminating these discussions uh on a scale that was previously unimaginable um so I think there's you know it's easy to get we one can be pessimistic but but I think one one should be there's cuse for optimism optimism too um in a way way in some ways it's both you know the Twilight of free speech and also sort of golden age uh of free speech as well um you know I myself I've been in the trenches on certainly academic freedom and freedom of speech issues but I've not had I mean I can't think of one occasion when I've had really U my University tell me I can't say something or or or um you know threaten me with consequences of having said something there are sometimes you know processes and you know Loom and so on but it's it's I've generally found it found it okay but it's true that within um you know within sort of mainstream Society there are there is this sense of walking on eggshells of course and I think the problem with group think I've said this before that the trouble with group think is that wrong think becomes evil think that that that a sufficiently once a minority intellectual minority gets sufficiently small on a particular View you it becomes very easy and obvious to demonize it it's not just simply error it's or descent it's it's it's evil it's it's there it's malevolent um and uh especially if the group you know group think is is Allied to you know what everyone knows to be the case or the evidence or whatever it might be um and that's something we need to and I think there's a sort of certain Tipping Point effect so it you know it could be that you know a Public Square where you've got a 7030 split on a contentious issue is a healthy Public Square I mean even though there is you know there it's it's a bit out of kilter and you when and then there's a sort of maybe the difference between 75 and 25 on the issue is a difference between the 30% being able to speak out and 25% suddenly being completely you silent this is very interesting that I mean I I would think the sweep of History's taught us and I've certainly seen seen over my own lifetime but very frequently the people who have the minority view there may be very few in numbers it might be almost disregarded and written off as a nutcases perspective in fact have turned out to be right but their arguments hard heard because they're so easily dismissed yes that's absolutely right I I I think that's Pro that's a that's a it's a true dynamic um certainly in the in the Natural Sciences um and you know think of the great the great Geniuses that the West has produced they always you know you typically started as a voice a lone voice of one um and so you know it's funny you know in the Modern Age we we're kind of torn between a tyranny of the minority and a tyranny of the majority and we're sometimes you know it's the wisdom of crowds sometimes it's the madness of crowds and crowds can be both very wise and very mad and it's not always clear how those those those work but yes the basic principle that we should test received wisdom however established it and Consolidated it might seem um because received wisdom to the extent that it's not just mathematical proofs is always open to being tested uh is always you know it's always possible that it might be wrong um that that you know trying to sort of close that down is um is is is is I think a you know a recipe for for social sclerosis and you know mil puts this very well this is these are the classic Arguments for freedom of speech from the liberal perspective um in chap chapter 2 of on Liberty 1859 you know he you know you might be wrong argument number one you might be wrong um perfectly possible you're not going to know if you're wrong if you haven't exposed your your your views to uh if you don't allow others freely to criticize you um you know argument number two chances are you're partly right and partly wrong that's for most most of us are partly right and partly wrong about everything um and you're not but you're not going to know which bits are right and which bits are wrong if you haven't you know put it through the Sorting mechanism which requires there to be people who are freely and without fear going to criticize and and and sort through your arguments and tell you which bits are right and which bits are wrong and the third argument my favorite he who knows only his own side knows little of that John Stewart Mill John Stewart Mill chapter 2 on Liberty that is to say it's a very subtle Point even if you're completely right you're not really going to know that you're right or not really going to feel the force of your right views if you if they haven't been through The Crucible of criticism open Fair free criticism scrutiny and the you know all all three of those arguments are are I think powerful they've come under criticism and in fact as a conservative you know million liberalism has all kinds of problems for for me we've talked about the thean principle um both psychologically applied and and applied in the usual sense but but of course you know Mills on Liberty is a sort of Manifesto for experiments in living you know motivating everyone you know to to you know to test the conventions and always to test the sort of you know received structures and and established patterns of uh Family Faith flag uh which I'm not particularly on board with I mean I want that I want to live in a society in which people who want to conduct experiments in living are are free to do so um but I don't like living in I'm not keen on a society where those people are as it were lionized and those experiments and living are seen to be what all must do on leaving you know on attaining freedom and uh on on leaving University or whatever those the sort of you know the 60s uh uh the 60s approach I think uh is not not not not wise but Mill has a lot of lot to say about you know to to to to our modern problems uh certainly within Council culture and and and over freedom of speech um and you know as do many others but these are the you know the debates are happening certainly in Britain I feel in the University context and actually more broadly in the Public Square um there are if not in the Legacy Media institutions there are now disruptive agents in the media landscape in the institutional landscape um perhaps not so much the party political landscape sadly um but of um you know non-conform expressions of profoundly non-conformist opinion um I think this especially true of the debate between uh trans uh supporters of trans ideology and the gender critical feminists you know I think uh the the the British gender critical feminists have modeled how respectful civil disagreement that presupposes freedom of speech freedom of conscience and academic freedom it can be done and can actually um lead to you know a a a a healthy Public Square um and I think that the same is the same I think is true probably of debates over race too I think generally speaking provided we're not trying to import um sort of neuralgia over over race from the United States and transpose it into the UK context I think generally speaking you know maybe in 2020 when we were doing just just that importing I think generally speaking we have had um we've had you know better debates over over race and Heritage and and history of course there have been flash points but generally speaking it's been I think you know often very difficult but um you generally informed and fair and and and clarifying whether that will continue to be the case is it's not at all it's not at all clear um but I feel the the Public Square is in a better state of health relative to the United States certainly and that where it's uh where we're things are going wrong can generally be attributed to us um us importing problems from the United States and I've said this before somewhere that um you know it's great I'm I've been a brexit since I was 13 I grew up Brussels I know whereof I speak um you know wonderful that we have reclaimed our political sovereignty from Brussels but there's no point in regaining our political sovereignty from Brussels if we're going to surrender our cultural sovereignty to Washington New York Harvard and Silicon Valley and uh there's there's no point in in becoming a free and Sovereign Nation again with respect to the European Union if we're just going to be a sort of colonial sat tropy of the global American Empire Amen to that uh I think that Britain has played an incredibly positive role net in net terms if you like uh in in if you like building a civilized approach to living with one another and it' be a great shame to see it not return to a leadership role in that regard but one of the flash points uh that you Ed that term a moment ago that I think is really deeply concerning to any thoughtful Observer centers on the outrageous attack by Hamas uh on on um Israel and the rapid emergence that there are many in the west who loathe Israel uh and who are prepared to turn at the very least a surprisingly Blind Eye to what Hamas did and the evil that it represented and you made a very interesting comment as I understand it you tweeted at one stage import the Arab world become the Arab world be very interested to know what you you meant by that if you could just fill us well uh uh I was asked by a colleague to clarify this uh tweet the other day and I refused to clarify it because uh I didn't I I said to clarify it would be to uh assume that it was in need of clarification uh there was some bad faith uh Miss readings of it that uh uh that that created quite a quite a fuss um uh yes so I mean it was simple really I you know if you uh uh if you bring in if there are large large numbers un unchecked immigration at scale without any clear accompanying policy or culture of assimilation uh which is the case if you are have a doctrin commitment within government to multiculturalism uh you are simply going to replic replicate the ethnic religious tribal tensions of the people you bring in when you cross you know you cross through passport control at herro you're here as a as an economic migrant for the first time you don't your all the views that you grow up with don't suddenly disappear and trans transmute themselves magically into the values that we associate with with Britain over over the over the centuries and so you know let's do a thought experiment to on this I mean imagine that Nigeria had imported 2 million Irishmen picked at random in you in the 1960s uh if they had import imported the Irish World they would have become the Irish world if they had also said there's your Irish ghetto you do your Irish thing don't worry about Nigeria we're just going to sort of keep an eye on you do your Irish stuff Irish pumps we love you know Ireland Ireland Ireland you you would have replicated the troubles in Belfast in Lagos um and so that's what I meant by the comment uh if you you know that's why we shouldn't be S shouldn't have been surprised to see within hours of the terrorist attacks on October the 7th with the blood of the victims was still warm before Israel had done anything had responded in any way at all we saw on the streets outside the Israeli Embassy in London fireworks being fired uh Israelis Jews terrified of Simply going to pay their respects at the embassy we saw Turkish Flags we saw muslims praying what were they what were they praying about were they praying for the the safety and uh the safe return of the hostages uh I don't who knows who knows we don't have we know well we don't we don't have the windows into men's Souls but uh those the flying of a Palestinian flag within hours of an attack as horrific as that the most horrific attack on Jews since the Holocaust was plainly a celebration of terrorism not a protest against Israeli policy towards Palestine it just in terms of the timing and that seemed to me that seems to to me obvious once two or 3 weeks have elapsed and there's a sort of strong Israeli response then sure I can I can see that flying a put up Palestinian flag starts to become it starts to revert to the sort of status St status quo anty um but that was the um uh that was the image or the video I think that the my my statement sort of went with and I still Stand By and not ined I think it was true at the time I think it's become true and more accurate with every hour that passes in every major city Across the Western world we we have seen these tensions being replicated we we've and just look at the numbers I mean we have you know um the the percentage of Brits who who do not think that Hamas is a terrorist organization is about 6% the percentage of londoners who think that Hamas is not a terrorist organization is 15% that is to say in a a city of roughly 10 million 1.5 million people think that what Hamas did on October the 7th to pregnant mothers to babies to children to Holocaust Survivors uh was not Terror 1.5 million now where do where does anti-semitism come from George Rell has a famous essay on this anti-Semitism in England I think he does record that the English are not free of anti-Semitism we we've had it shamefully we had it we expelled the Jews for 400 years from the 13th century to the 17th century and crom brought them back we're not complet free of it but we have not for centuries seen the levels of open anti-semitic abuse on the streets of our capital and all over the country um but particularly in our Capital that we've seen in in in recent weeks and it's shameful we should be ashamed of it this is why I was so proud to sign uh the October declaration which Laura dodsworth and Toby Young and others put together uh a few days ago in response to this a shocking letter by 4,000 celebrities that uh that that's that cited the plight of the population of of Gaza being used as political uh military porns by Hamas that they didn't point that out but were completely silent on the terrorist atrocities of October the 7th I mean this was extraordinary and U so there has been a respons to that letter is I think it's gathered nearly 30 40,000 uh signatures and um and so you know I think um no so I stand by the comment I there was a tantrum about it in the student newspapers but that's a fairly routine occurrence for me if you're one of the very few out ofth closet conservatives at camebridge you just you know and you've and and it's been a slow news week then you just that's what you do you go you don't go investigating go looking for stories you just open up Twitter and look down uh you'll look down Dr R's Twitter account and find something and and this is what happened I mean you know it's these These outrages are so confected um um you know it'll be a board editor or disgruntled colleague or student will look for something send it send it in or send it to the affected society and in this case I think it was the the Muslim or Arab or Palestinian student society and you know did you you read this tweet are you offended by it are you hurt by it yes of course we are right and then so now the story starts to come together and then there's you it's published and then of try to get some action online and then you sort of you write to write to Dr W's faculty does the University know about this how do H how could students possibly attend lectures when he's saying things like this and so and it just get confected this is sort of what my friend Doug Stokes calls the grievance industrial complex um uh you know it's just sort of whipped up and then you know then the maale will get a hold of it or or someone you some Tabo will get a hold of it and then the anti-work Brigade get on board and so you have this sort of woke anti-woke Dynamic and and it just gets so boring so boring and I Ian I try to ignore it as much much as I can and the university to its great credit lets me ignore it I haven't had any trouble at all a few a few conversations here and there but those conversations always ended with the reassurance that the University of Cambridge respects the freedom of its academics to say whatever they want within the law uh even if what they say may cause controversy um so I feel and I I'm not sure that's the case in Harvard or Princeton or I don't know if it is the case in Australian universities but you I feel free in a place like Cambridge to say what I want I mean I mean I know that there are likely to be tantrum but if you're if you're used to them and you know how the game works it's hard to get terribly bothered by them um there was an an amazing lecture earlier in the week by the great Peter teal in Oxford and one of Peter's brilliant points is that this whole work antiw work Dynamic is well it's partly in the Nan sense it's this sort of sense of you know I'm I'm disempowered and impoverished how can I kind of get up in the world well I can you know you know if if I'm if I'm in a very competitive workplace and I can you know there's 10 people fighting for one one promotion and I can get rid of three of them through doing some grievance archaeology on Twitter I mean of course I'm going to do it I'm going to love Council culture that's just a subtle point so it's but Peter's point is there's di as well diversity is a diversion strategy he very subtle the opportunity cost of constantly having to go at the pace of the slowest kid in the class or the most psychologically fragile kid in the class you know even if you win even if you win against the woke you've lost so much time that's so much energy I mean it's it's it's just it's just so demeaning isn't it I think trying to what satisfaction can one get from winning arguments in the Public Square that no men are actually men and women are actually women men can't become women and women can't become men I mean how does you know what sort of intellectual satisfaction are you going to get from that you've got Victory but at what price you've been very generous with your time I admire your mind I admire your good humor and your graciousness thanks very much thanks for having me [Music] John

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 51,498

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

Id: MBunh2s2kCM

Length: 79min 0sec (4740 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2023