Sir Roger Scruton | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union

[Music] [Music] thank you very much for that warm welcome and it's a great privilege to be speaking in this August institution and I hope that I'll have something to say which at least does not is not greeted with a total disapproval but my topic of course is extremely controversial and it depends upon an ancient world not quite ancient distinction but that between the left and the right in politics as you know that distinction came into being at the French Revolution where the left were those people who were on the left of the king that's the consi and they the right for those who are on the right of the king who happened to be on the right of the king could have been the other way around and indeed it was the other way around for everybody except the king but the words have stuck with us and I think it's part of the confusion that there prevails in modern politics that we still don't really know quite what is contained in either idea but a bit of history I think is needed to begin this talk we have we have grown up at least my generation grew up with the idea that there's a profound distinction between capitalism on the one hand and socialism on the other this distinction was emphasized and rubbed into a spied of course the Cold War and the Soviet Union's claim to be a socialist state in the spirit of Marx and of course it went back to Karl Marx's own writings and in particular the writings of his disciple angles to try and embrace all of politics in that distinction distinction in capitalism on the one hand socialism on the other capitalism is failing there will be a crisis and they will fall and socialism is the alternative that we are preparing to put in its place and that's a very exciting and seductive view of things but I think we must remember that the two isms here and not in the same category one is descriptive the other is normative capitalism that word is used to describe an economic system one which is based on the free market and private property socialism however was not released originally meant to describe a system because there was no such system in existence it was a project with a goal a goal to bring about a different kind of society and very little effort was put into describing exactly how the arrangements of that society would be so it's a set to contrast them it's a bit like contrasting journalism and feminism you know as though you couldn't be a feminist journalist and and in fact of course as you know most women journalists are but you can be therefore perhaps a socialist capitalist indeed it is a convenient combination because it enables you to hold on to your money and still look good and I think that if you look around yourself as the people who call themselves socialist today you will be astonished by the extent of their prosperity so I think we should not be deceived by these labels into thinking that we understand the confrontation between between left and right in these terms but one reason the left is winning is that it has been easy of late to demonize capitalism demonize the kind of economic system that we enjoy and at the same time to promised some kind of rival system the details of which remain hidden and in any in any case of little interest to the general public and I think you're all familiar now with the weaknesses in the capitalist system as we have inherited it which has become subject to financial transactions in the world of arbitrage and the world world of futures and all the rest in which people with nothing to offer except inside knowledge of the way things work are able to cream off the surplus without making any contribution to the general assets of society asset stripping likewise you know we've seen this in the recent collapse of the monarch airline a consortium of people step in buy it and then borrow on the strength of its capital assets borrowed maximally pay themselves a dividend out of that borrowed money and then declare bankruptcy you know that can't possibly be right most people recognize it isn't right and of course this has been in people's minds right back from the time when Muhammad first railed against the loaning money at interest and ensuring your goods that was one of the first attempts to recognize that dealing in unreal estate so to speak is a way of cheating people and we've had a lot of at these cases around us in the farming community an American firm called a core steps in lends money to farmers on the strength of their farm and then suddenly declares that it's overvalued the farm and has to put it on the market and the farmer is cast adrift with nothing so there's a host of these transactions in which a predator who adds value to nothing privatizes the value that is otherwise dormant in the market and leaves everything stripped and most worth people think that something has gone wrong here but is it something that's gone wrong with capitalism as such or is there something else at stake to understand this I think we we should go back to the original defense of the free market in the works of Adam Smith and when Adam Smith defended the free market he didn't use the word capitalism this is a later theoretical term I think introduced by sassy Moore taken up by by Marx and undissociated with the theories of 19th century politics Smith in the wealth of nations is describing a society in which fundamental relations of trust and shared royalties are never put in question there are things which are not done not because they are illegal but because the law has never had to attend to them gossiping for example you know agreeing a deal and then upping the price when the other has already committed and therefore and thereby incurred a cost all those deals that I've just referred to deals in in futures and hypothetical ownership starting a business which are offers services of a long term kind and closing down as soon as it turns a profit leaving people totally dependent on a non-existent entity and so on these are things that Smith would never have approved of the background assumption to his whole defense of the market economy was that markets also create relations of mutual dependence which are not in themselves market relations but must be sustained by a sense of responsibility and whence comes that sense here is one point where the left and the right as they now are really do differ people on the Left tend to think of trust if they think of it at all as coming from a shared project you know we are building socialism together creating a fairer society shedding all the old constraints and hierarchies and that's by joining in this project we learn to trust each other as soldiers at the front we'll always trust each other because they have to when you've got a goal that you share trust is one of the immediate byproducts of that but people on the right don't see trust in that way they think of it as something inherited it's not something that comes from having a shared goal you can have it without a goal indeed it's the thing that makes it possible to live without a shared goal just being the person you are doing the thing that is yours and nevertheless relying upon your neighbors to accept you as that so people on the right tend to think of trust as inherited it already exists it's a kind of request and I'll say a little bit more about this later but I think insofar as we can talk of the distinction between right and left today today that is the real distinction between them that between those who want to build trust by making a new society and joining with others in that enterprise and those who want to preserve the trust that they have which they think of as imported in a political and social inheritance embodied in institutions like like this one and also in the wider institutions and traditions of civil society such as marriage to the family and and so on so why is the left in ascendancy if it is I think there there are two general explanations one is what the right lacks the right to conceived in the way I've just described it and the other being what the left has and I just want to summarize these two things first of all what the right lacks when I was some growing into political consciousness it was at the time of the Cold War in which everything including the survival of civilization seemed to be at stake and there are these two massive accumulations of power confronting each other across the no-man's land of Central Europe and all both armed to the teeth one of them being the so-called socialist states united by force under the Soviet Union now there being the what was then called the free world as I say the rest of Europe plus America that have liberated Europe from the Nazis and remained allied to it thereafter and that of course that confrontation gave sense to everything there was there was a there was a way of justifying being armed a way of justifying the rule of law a way of justifying the your economy all as parts of us contributions to this steady need for self-defense but now of course that is all gone and also what has gone is a real and still resonant memory of what socialism means in practice not only economically but politically and morally to now there were two kinds of socialism in those days of course there was that practiced by the Soviet Union which nobody had much to say for but there was that also which had periodically been in the ascendancy in Western Europe about which many people had quite a lot to say positive positive to say but in both cases there were certain salient features first of all economic stagnation that is something that we in Britain lived through it during the fifties and sixties and it was quite painful not just in the sense of unemployment but also the unprofitability of many of our industries and the fact that that the general public was frequently held to ransom by the trade unions working of trade unions formed of men working men and women working in the nationalized industries and you've not had your generation has not had that experience but of course every now and then the French have that experience and from all the evidence fairly fair - fed up with it but we had it in a big way during the times of Harold Wilson and shorty and shortly afterwards going with that there were of course the shortages of things of elementary fundamental needed things and the basic inability of industry to cope with sudden global changes but in our case in Britain that kind of those down sides of socialism coexisted with real democratic procedures and civil freedoms and that is a very important point it's not health people to think that socialism okay it makes mistakes it's it's it's weak economically but nevertheless it's perfectly compatible with democracy and has as its intention a great a fairer more just distribution of goods so it wasn't wiped away from people's consciousness in quite the way that it has been wiped away from the consciousness of people in Eastern Europe but the way was open nevertheless by our democratic socialism to the extinction of very very fundamental freedoms there was a sense that the state was not just in charge of the economy but also in charge of the society - and that its goal should be to impose upon society some kind of recipe for social justice which would he would replace the traditional hierarchies and forms of domination with a more equal distribution of goods and advantages and this happened very clearly in the in the realm of education there was no move to abolish private education that was very important during there during the socialist period of our country after the Second World War but there was a move which was eventually successful to abolish the choice of schools for people who sent their children to States schools I was one of those lucky children who were sent to a Grammar School and got the same kind of education there as I might have got from the best of private schools so I was able to rise above a working-class background from which I came and eventually become the appalling creature you see before you now and but that was there was open to my class a choice which has since been removed from them under pressure from the socialist ways of thinking the grammar schools largely were closed and the comprehensive system produced in its in its stead and that actually has led to a greater distinct class distinction than existed before because now the distinction is between those who can afford private education and those who can't so there were quite a lot of invasions in that way of what some people would think of us the natural right to free choice but nevertheless criticism of the government was permitted and the BBC for example was astonishingly impartial in the days of English socialism it was a genuinely impartial commentator upon the society and the government of the day which is something of course it is ceased to be I think most people will recognize this that that if a conservative appears on the BBC it's as a token recognition that that you know quite a lot of people in the country are of that benighted persuasion we better let them appear for a bit in order that they should be humiliated properly and as one of those token conservatives who appears on the BBC I can assure you that the humiliation is complete nevertheless so there things have moved in in a different direction since then but I think we should always remember that when we had a socialist government in this country there was a real attempt to reconcile it with democratic procedures and with the free speech and freedom of of opinion in the areas including politics where people differ so that's one of the things that the right that's there for it's the immediate and remembered experience of what socialism was like those who've been through it especially those who've been through the Eastern European version of it will take a lot of persuading that they want to do it again but the younger generation who have not been through it we can't rely upon telling them what it was like because they will always recognize that we're that we have an interest in persuading them and they will just not believe it the other thing that the write lacks and this is really important is a full and articulated belief in itself and its values it's part of the nature of conservatives I said conservative people to muddle along the thought is you know we're at home here this is our place it's not it's not that bad we want to keep it like this and we recognize and I think all rational beings recognize that it's much easier to destroy things than to create them and so the good things that by which we are surrounded like this University like our own family that piece in the in the streets and all the rest those things are very good and we know that they could be destroyed tomorrow and that indeed there are people who want to destroy them so we should you know recognize that the best thing is to muddle along and not to put in question or to try to fix those things which are not fix no it's not which are not broken so existing compromises on this view ought not to be disturbed and that's all very respectable and good and it's why the Conservative Party has so many voters in its favor but of course at ten times of tension such as the one that we've radically entered now and times of doubt and a dispute people do want something more than that they want a statement of what it's all about but it is that that we are in favor of as opposed to what they're in favor of it of what is that can unite us under the pressure that we're going to be put under especially by a renovated and radicalized Labor Party so we need a statement of things to believe in when mrs. Thatcher suddenly came to eminence in the late 70s and retained that eminence for a decade she latched on to the idea of freedom saying that what we are about is freedom extending freedom to the individual to the individual in all the areas of his or her endeavor not just freedom to to undertake enterprises in the economic sphere but freedom of Education freedom of opinion freedom of association freedom just to be the thing that fulfills you and that we by supporting that are of course in conflict automatically with socialists who want to control things want to control things in the interests of greater equality or the interests of a state-controlled economy and so on and the Cold War which was still in existence gave some kind of credibility to what mrs. Thatcher said and it's you unite she was United with President Reagan and other American politicians in endorsing this idea that the Western alliance was an alliance around the idea of freedom freedom of the individual as embodied of course in the American Constitution which was the primary document on which Americans always depend and all that could be taken away that freedom so we must combine in order to defend it yeah but of course we've lost the the situation which makes that piece of propaganda as plausible as it was to my generation it doesn't end anymore hold a great deal of appeal especially for young people because most young people in today will say look her we have freedom that's fine we've got we accept that or what we want to do is to reconcile that freedom with certain other and more important or equally important goals such as equality adjust economy a society in which people are not at loggerheads with each other and so on so and it's quite possible for a socialist or socialist minded person to use the idea of freedom in that way so I think that many conservatives feel that they they have no longer got the kind of slogan that mrs. Thatcher provided them with all they have is what they have this country its traditions and customs and its way of being at peace with itself now my own view is that that's enough and appreciating that is what politics ought to be about but of course it's not not something that you can easily transcribe into an activist political doctrine you know on the Left it's very easy to be an activist you're talking about the future Society you want to create and you can have a big notice board with the slogan your forward on it and people watching behind you this is naturally appealing but in my kind of conservatism that notice book could be pulled up but it would have only one word on it which would be hesitate you know a new cleaner you can see that well actually recruit a great deal of followers but what we still nevertheless have to have some kind of idea of what it is we're for if we're to persuade those who haven't yet been persuaded and this is where I think one has to have some recognition of the importance for ordinary people of the idea of home the place where they are the embedded legal order that they've inherited and their country is an icon of that and this has come under great fire of course because of the pressure from immigration and so on and as we saw over the whole brexit debate it's very easy to use those who want to make their home into the cause the political cause around which they build their coalition's it's easy to dismiss them as racists and xenophobes to which I reply is no that's it's not xenophobia to to wish to preserve your home but there is this other thing which I call eco phobia which is the desire to destroy it and we should be prepared to fight the battle at that level but the Conservative Party is clearly not prepared to fight that battle or any other battle as far as one can see and and again a conservative will say that's only right that's what conservatism is it's um not about battles it's about the love of the place where you are and the attempt to conserve it what's wrong with that okay so there's the weaknesses of the right and now what to the left has the positive things it has is this politics of goals you know it's constantly talking about what we can collectively achieve we need a new social order and we need to go forward together to that social order and you can generate a lot of inspiring rhetoric about that and this is has a very important metaphysical basis human beings make a radical distinction of course between the past and the future and they know in their hearts that the future can be changed whereas the past cannot be but they also know in their hearts that the future is unknowable but the past is knowable and there's a conflict a natural division among human beings between those who are interested in changing things and those who are interested in knowing things and among the latter of course are conservatives those who want to know about their condition and know it by looking at the past and seeing what in the past is useful and valuable and what is not that backward-looking attitude is fundamental to us but of course it isn't about changing things it's about understanding them whereas the left has this emphasis on the future always because the future can be changed the only problem with it is we don't know how to do it and the evidence of history is that when we think we know how to do it we will always make it worse but that means the conservative cause against what the left emphasis on the future does require a considerable knowledge of history in order to be propagated and that knowledge of history of course is going another very positive thing that the Left can offer to the ordinary voters the emphasis on the negative Hegel wrote about this in his phenomenology of spirit that the about the labor of the negative the need in all human intellectual and spiritual and moral endeavors first of all to put something positive forward but then to recognize that the negative will come immediately in the wake of it too to negate what you have said and you have to find out of the confrontation between the positive and the negative that resolution in which truth is embodied now that's a metaphysical and mystical idea but it survives in the work of Marx and Engels who recognized one half of what Hegel said they tell us that indeed politics is the labor of the negative it's there to negate things to negate those things that we recognize to be unjust oppressive or in some way divisive of human beings and therefore those things must be negated we don't need to argue the point we just say point out the things which we really are not prepared to tolerate and say we will not have that anymore and it's well part of the socialist genius to do this to make these negative judgments without making any comparative judgments stop people from thinking about alternatives just concentrate on what's bad in the here and now right okay so we we tell people and that our system of property ownership is unjust and because of you know it gives privileges to one class of people which it takes away from others and so on but we don't tell them to compare our system of property ownership with that that prevails from for instance in Germany or Italy or France or China you know leave comparative judgments aside we will always be able to argue the negative and that is true of all the things that you love including this University look how unjust it is that that you have this privilege and not the other people in your town or village whom you excluded by being here you know so there's plenty of negative things to be said about anything anything good and nothing good that you have somebody else might have had and doesn't because you have it so there we are concentrate on the injustice we saw this happening in the ground full Towers episode that when that that tower block was burnt burnt out and many people lost their lives and that was a terrible tragedy but immediately of course the the activists of the left started demonstrating in the streets saying Tories have blood on their hands nobody quite knew how it was the Tories had blood on their hands these were counseled blocks built under socialist principles agreed after the war and built wrongly of course built wrongly because that kind of architecture is wrong and all conservatives know that it's wrong I spent my life fighting against tower blocks it doesn't do any good because tower blocks are the kind of things that that councils love to build and it solves a problem and of course there's been massive propaganda in favour of them but there you could by concentrating on this episode where everybody has strong feelings everybody thinks something terrible has happened you then make it not just something terrible that's happened but something evil that has been done and that's say that the labor of the negative working extremely effectively to use an episode a tragic episode to cast discredit upon the ordinary conservative conscience then there is another aspect of what the left has which makes it so difficult for the rights today which is what I call the culture of repudiation they down with us mentality there is a politics of resentment which takes the inheritance that we have of institutions laws customs and so on and condemns them because they're ours you know we are to blame for having these institutions and it's very easy of any institution any institution that is a benefit to you to argue that it is being bought at the cost of other people's suffering all the wonderful things built in in Oxford and around you were built upon the labor of others some of them slaves some of them people in other countries who had no hope of sharing the benefit alright so and you can do this with everything good you can say that because we have it because we enjoy it therefore it is bad we are we are unjustly exploiting the suffering that that brought it into being that the kind of argument is difficult to oppose and there's no knowing where it will end the only serious ending to it is that we should reject everything everything that we have and laid lie down in the desert and accept our punishment but but most people who make these arguments about who this repudiating of their traditional institutions aren't prepared to do that they usually belong to that class that I described at the beginning of this talk of capitalist socialists who are perfectly well provided for and not prepared to give up those things which are comfortable to themselves nevertheless these arguments repudiating arguments directed towards our inheritance have a very powerful force especially in the minds of young people so there there is my explanation what kind of anthropological explanation really as to why the the left is winning but now I should say in conclusion just a few things about why I think they shouldn't win and here of course I'm I'm on controversial ground not that I haven't been but this is even more controversial the first thing that has always occurred to me in my life is that the this emphasis on the negative even if it's justified in many cases it can eventually lead to a posture of destruction without creation oh yeah just just to criticize institutions and never to say what you're wishing wishing to put in that place is a very unhelpful thing and I think if you're going to criticize things you the obligation on you is to make a comparative judgment is that institution necessary does it have good effects if it goes what would you replace it with or does it need replacing and I think that is an argument which is very important to address because the whole of the history of 19th century socialism suggests to me that those advocating socialism then including Karl Marx didn't bother to ask the question why certain institutions exists why does the law exist what does it do for us and how would you replace it in the withering away at the state and so on and that I think is something very important that people who are in this room who are studying political science will recognize and this is a you don't just decide to get rid of institution because of the powers that are represented by them they also represent other things than power like knowledge necessary social knowledge and also guarantees of freedom and so on and this another thing and I think we need to emphasize is that creative activity does not on the whole come from the state even if we thought the state should have a bigger role in the creation and within the distribution of resources than it has today it itself will not take those initiatives that private enterprising people take it's it's held their nature of an entrepreneur to take a risk he takes a risk in order to gain a profit but he might not gain that profit institutions don't on the whole take risks or what they do it's with other people's money and this is something which I think we do observe from the history of socialism that it becomes an increasingly risk free society in which all risks are as it were offloaded on the state which the thought being that the state can bear them but the state then just becomes a universal insurance company covering every risk and ensuring that people actually don't take them in which case the economy begins to dwindle and die and I think that's something that we have seen in our more democratic forms of socialism - moreover I think the left causes are constantly shifting in order to exclude one by one the people who are identified as the enemy here one by one the institutions of our society have been condemned as oppressive and denounced the family in the 1960s then marriage itself their marriage becomes completely reshaped as a contractual agreement for the sake of sexual pleasure rather than for producing children and so on these institutions are one-by-one denounced as incompatible with the new forms of liberation and those who defend them I suddenly demonized I saw this very it was very interesting in the case of the gay marriage thing I don't want to say whether that's a good thing or a bad thing that it changed but what happened was if you look back that for a long time politicians said no we're not in favor of gay marriage Barack Obama question said no of course I'm not in favor of that I'm in favor of homosexual rights of course but not in favor of of altering the institution of marriage in this way within a year he was saying I am in favor of gay marriage and within another year he was joining forces with those who say that those who are against gay marriage are homophobes you know the enemies of society so something which had had been judged perfectly legitimate to oppose suddenly becomes the criterion of moral merit and I think we've seen this in in all sorts of issues that we've gone through in recent years all of us are within one tiny step of being demonized there's something that you're still holding on to that somebody tomorrow will tell you it is oppressive to hold on to and that you you are the enemy of the people and that is something which I think is inherent to this left-wing view there's a negative repudiating view it means that once it gets into office you're never safe from the going the next step towards total anarchy so and although that's perhaps an extreme way of putting it I'll leave it to you to denounce me we've got 20 minutes to do it thank you right so firstly thank you so much to Roger for taking the time to speak here this evening that was certainly very fascinating we will open straight up to the audience for questions so if you have a question please raise your hand nice and high and wait for a microphone to come to you let's start with you in the orange shirt you stand up as well okay thank you very much so you talked about kind of these different economic systems of socialism capitalism and drew sort of a dichotomy and more the way that I think about and looking at the economy is kind of we have different goods and services that we have to figure out a way to allocate you know we've got bread we've got medical care we've got you know defense spending we've got you know diet coke and all of these things we have to find a way to allocate and so well I think's going on a lot with the left is that it's more about trying to find ways to in certain markets look at the market and say in this market how can we maximize total surplus or how can we be most efficient and features of certain types of products like healthcare don't lend themselves in the view of a lot of people including economists many economists to distribution efficiently through a free market and that doesn't mean that those people are socialists or embrace some broader system for government control of everything but it's just about looking at individual products goods and services and saying what's the best way what's the surplus maximizing way that we can allocate this product whether it's government or capitalism so I'm curious what your view is on that and whether you think that's what's going on whether you think it's a broader trend of socialism and economic planning that's still dominant hmm well that this is very good point one reason why I'm skeptical of the distinction between socialism and capitalism is that that's not what they did think the conflict between left and right now consists in and we have lived for a long time with a mixed economy all over the Western world in which the government does interfere as you rightly say in the distribution of certain goods but not through nationalizing their production but rather through regulating the market in according to rules of law which all participants in the market can accept so there is certainly the old distinction that Karl Marx was interested in has vanished but it doesn't mean that there isn't a residue of that distinction still animating people great thank you for that question yeah let's go to you thank you I wanted to ask and in light of the fact that in cultural culture culture generally today and academia in particular conservatism is viewed often as anti intellect and anti empathy would you say that there is a particular mistake that conservatives are making that is perpetuating those perceptions and two what would you say would be the best way perhaps starting on an interpersonal level to counteract those perceptions very good question I would say first of all it is true that conservatives a lot of conservatives are not very bright but I think it's sheer snobbery to come its share snobbery to condemn people on grounds of their intellect especially when you look back of over the damage that intellectuals have done in it will rather better if they'd all been as stupid as the ordinary conservative but but also I think on the empathy issue I think people on the left are very good at pretending to be sympathetic you know the whole virtue signalling business that we're now fed up with to be quite honest he's pretending to a sympathy which which paints you in beautiful virtuous colors but avoiding the cost of it real sympathy has a cost you've got to start giving up your property and your time in order to look after that person you know there was I remember it's on a recently on a television program Reese MOG said proposed a question to the audience the BBC audience therefore carefully selected for a left-wing bias to they said who is in favor of offering a refuge to to asylum seekers from from Syria I'm just opening the doors all the hands went up and he asked how many of you who have actually offered place in your house to a Syrian refugee no hand went up you know I think these are significant differences and conservatives do have to be careful not to not to simulate the Great Society of pretense which is growing around us and be the real thing but it does mean that they're not as visible great thank you for that question yeah let's go through youth back on the ends where yeah you were turning around yeah hi thank you for the talk I really enjoyed it I am from Eastern Europe so I wanted to bring in a bit of that perspective as well so I was thinking about what you said about negative politics and talking about well it's bad what we should change and so on and I think attaching that to the left is quite um maybe anglocentric perspective because in many countries it's also the right that's doing that say in Poland the far-right was the party that sort of won on the negative politics of look how these parties have been mismanaging the economy how you people have lost out so I was just thinking that's I don't think it's necessarily something that's attached to either the left or the right but maybe more to just like bad politics or big rhetoric that doesn't really attached to specific policies and just on that note I wanted to say that I think this is also happening in the UK to an extent that the right is talking about what people fear and is using that as a way to also have this negative politics of you fear terrorism when you fear migration and and so on and so on so I don't know if you could respond to that in in some way yes that's a welcome question in a way the the as I said you can't quite right I was speaking from an English perspective which is inevitable because that's that's what I am and my was simple view is that conservatism as I understand it comes from love of what we have and any is a philosophy of love and it's not about destruction it's about changing things to accommodate necessary change and but it's about holding on to something you love in Eastern Europe I don't know which country you are from your English is so perfect I'm from Poland so stalking well there you're apparently slightly different in that not everything was destroyed by the communists they did not stray the Catholic Church and because the Catholic Church gave people an icon of the Poland that they could still love the Catholic Church was able ultimately to destroy the Communists and that was a remarkable achievement I'm not saying that things since then have been anything like what they what people hoped they would be when that change came but one should look back with some recognition then that there that there were ordinary natural conservative feelings which were able to achieve a great and necessary political goal what came out of the collapse of communism in your country spread immediately to everywhere else and ok in the vacuum that succeeded it all kinds of new forces came into existence and you as a young pole will be bound we going through your anti-clerical period where you where you think that the priesthood is responsible for everything and they're the Kachinsky of cause this is the cause of some kind of fascist dictatorship don't you you that's what you think can I respond to that I don't know I don't want to take up like question time but I feel like this quite personal address so I personally think that the reason why we have the law injustice body is because we don't have a left in Poland and because they address these negative emotions future using this negative rhetoric and that's partly to do with people being afraid of socialism or even just talking about anything social justice like after communism is you know as your greeing with me though that the situation has changed in such a way that that old way of defining the left it was so easy for Pete your parents generation is no longer available right thank you for that question yeah let's go to aegis there are so many questions there you can keep the microphone and then thanks I'd love to hear your opinion on the ethics of global poverty in regard to what if said I find it very understandable that people in wealthy countries like the UK want to hold on to the status quo and want to hold on to their wealth and their way of life and also same with regard to climate change for example just the way we consume red notes very convenient to stay in the same way for other people who already enjoy the benefits of the system but what would you say from the perspective of person living in extreme poverty of or of future generations who will be affected by climate change for them for from their perspective we ought to give much more we ought to do my make much more changes Thanks yes I would say that if there are ways which we could act which clearly would lift people out of poverty elsewhere and that we can do it without as it were destroying our motive to be helpful that then we should do it and it snowed you know you have a a comfortable home where you where you with your family and the people you love and that is the meaning of your life at a certain stand you might want to welcome somebody into it who needs help but after a while I have to have that you know after inviting say three people three disruptive people into it it's no longer the refuge for you that it was it's no longer the source of joy and and hope and and love in your life you've destroyed what you had you can't expect people to do that and it would be wrong to say that you have got to give up your happiness in order to give other people a chance what you have to do is reconcile holding on to your happiness the thing which makes you the thing that you are makes you the generous thing that you can be hold on to that and then find the ways of helping others many people say by giving aid to poor countries we just simply finance the moe Garvey's of this world who expropriate it and put it into the Swiss bank account we don't know you know but what we do know is that if you're really concerned about the poverty of people in Zimbabwe you've got to go there and do something about it don't just sit around thinking by giving your money to Oxfam it's bound to end up in the right box it might be actually exacerbating the situation so taking full responsibility for the poverty of others and for their needs and their freedoms is a it's a costly thing because isn't done just by these symbolic gestures great thank you for that question now let's go to you in the middle yeah thank you um what has to be done to persuade people of my generation that identity politics is a bad idea sorry that what is a bad idea identity politics oh well I think cultivating your sense of humor about it would be quite important you know knowing when someone's being ridiculous and putting himself on display for the sake of it and knowing when somebody really has a problem and needs to be dealt with sympathetically that and that was always what we what things were like you know I grew up in in a world where every Friday in the East End of London the people were assembled in the pub the men dressed in their suits the women in all their glamour and finery and one of the men dressed as a woman on the stage doing a drag act and singing often obscene things you know this was part of the relaxation into the into the embarrassments of sexual identity you know where everything could be questioned theatrically for the moment and then they went home afterwards and resumed the family quarrel you know that that that sort of way of dealing with it was much more healthy than this constant navel watching that we were seeing today great thank you that question the time a couple more yeah let's go to you in the blue shirt thank for your talk I perceive that there was sort of two sorts of conservatism that you are talking about being both economic and cultural conservatism hmm so what extent do you think that those are linked and indeed could they be separated if they needed to be yes this is actually totally of the essence this question I think many ways one of the ways in which our conservative party has gone wrong is by trying to identify its philosophy purely in economic terms and that opens it to the the question that the first gentleman asked over there you know that that this is far too simple that the economic life is shaped by our social requirements - and those are important and those social requirements Express a cultural idea an idea of what it is for us to be together in this place so I think there there's a great room for a proper cultural policy on the conservative side a policy you know defending the sort of things that I represent and that's the explanation as to why I haven't gotten any place in British politics great thank you for that question yeah let's go to right at the very back from the blue jumper I've got an essay Jew in tomorrow so I want to ask you to what extent do you think that tourism was okay here in ideology well Thatcherism offers of course an article here in ideology and the word every politician who achieves eminence has an ism named after him or her you know there's a putinism let's face it now and there will be and there's Corbin ISM and and so on and none of them are coherent because all of them are defined in terms of the of the day to day vacillations of a particular human being and I think that was of true as true of Margaret Thatcher as of anybody else what she did have of course was a resolute unswerving patriotism that was what her ultimate ground of belief was she took up the freedom label without ever traveling to define what freedom really is and she was of course vehement about the free market as an expression of it but only in terms that could easily have been accepted by most of her opponents so I think that tourism is not detachable from the history of that particular woman and it wouldn't be interesting if it were detached from her great thank you all right question we have time for one more yeah let's go to ye up until two generations ago it was very easy it was a very simple correlation between class and politics in the last generation the upper class was called the upper class had been thoroughly emasculated the middle class have been silenced with a combination of law and political correctness interestingly much of the activism now is at the working-class level does the future of conservatism live with a working-class well there were or what there were thoughts of that kind expressed after the brexit vote because I obviously was strong working-class support for national independence but I think we have to recognize that the working class is on the way out as I say the working class as defined by the nineteenth-century observers it was the class of the employed people those people who owed their subsistence to being to working for somebody else for a salary or a wage now increasingly people that who do those jobs do it as self-employed people their emancipating themselves from the whole martyrdom if you like of employment so as to be their own masters and mistresses and I think that that is how it should be that we will eventually be one big middle class with a but at the very bottom the unfortunate and the wealth welfare dependent and so on at the very top people who speak with the accent like yours but they're no better than the rest of us you know and that and that's the way it will be in it we won Universal comedy great I'm afraid that is all we have time for so please join me and thank you you

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 669,595

Keywords: Oxford, Union, Oxford Union, Oxford Union Society, debate, debating, The Oxford Union, Oxford University

Id: KUbfMQ91Mps

Length: 59min 24sec (3564 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2017

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[u/MilerMilty]

what he said about Thatcher's ability to express support of capitalism and her lack of ability to express support of social conservatism has really made me 🤔. I don't think I ever have heard a politician articulate a defense of convention for it's own sake, and have always instead talked about the practicality of each and every convention. "economic freedom is good because it brings liberty in every other sphere" is not a defense of conservatism at it's core, but the defense of one of many conventions, and it's lazy and awfully bad for furthering the understanding of conservatism within the general public.