Stephen Chavura Pt. I | Western Civilisation | Conversations

[Music] [Music] do [Music] i'm joined here by dr stephen shavora one of australia's foremost experts on the history of church and state he's a prolific writer he lectures we've seen opinion pieces in the australian and the spectator you cover issues like free speech identity politics and the very worrying frankly state of our universities your most recent co-authored book is reason religion and the australian polity a secular state and we need to talk about a secular state because that's a very deeply misunderstood word today but we'll come to that in a moment can i begin by saying to you that you're an academic historian that i heard about first of all from some of your students long before i'd met you and one of them in particular said we've got this unusual lecture who asks questions that seem to challenge the orthodoxy and we all erupt and then we stop and say hang on we don't know why we think what we think and it emerges as a whole group of young people who loved being challenged and having their paradigms broken up a bit by you so i was always very keen to meet you personally and i must say i i think we're going to have a very interesting conversation but would you begin by coming to the issue of why you love history and why you think it matters because a lot of people would say it doesn't anymore just bunk like henry ford said yeah well first it's a real pleasure to be here john i think my my love of history is probably something i've had certainly since childhood i think in some ways uh there are two ways that you can really sort of escape the world and one is through science fiction but another is through history so i've always sort of had a love of history and i and i've always actually enjoyed talking uh to people who aren't necessarily of my generation because they were always able to tell me about what seemed to be to be another world with different technology different ways of thinking and things like that but i think what really struck me most was in my first year at university uh in the late 90s when one of my lecturers sort of it was one of it might even have been the very first lecture or tutorial i attended and he looked at us all and he said you are all hundreds of years old and i thought well that's very strange and what he meant was is that we as human beings are not just biological creatures i mean biologically i'm 41 years old but there is more to my identity and there is more that goes into explaining how i live my life and how i think than my biology and in actual fact i have imbibed ideas that i myself did not create that i'm not responsible for but predate me hundreds and hundreds of years and also i have been born into a pre-existing society with pre-existing institutions with again with pre-existing philosophical ideas that justify those institutions that again i myself did not create but have to a large extent shaped me and have been themselves evolving over thousands of years and so what really sort of came home to me was this idea that if i really want to understand myself i need actually to understand the origins of the institutions and the practices and the ideas that i was born into that have so shaped me and so for me one of the most important things about history is that it's actually a journey of self-discovery and anyone who wants to understand who they are must take some interest in history well it's an interesting way of putting it because i love history too and my degree is in history good but it's it seems to me today that there's an utter determination including on the part of a lot of modern historians to actually cut us off from our past and in particular to say to people of um i suppose you'd say of european descent that somehow rather western culture western history is a story of oppression of cruelty of uh patronizing paternalism if you like and that it ought to be discredited extraordinarily to the point where it's subject to massive revision and no longer to be relied upon yeah i i think that's actually a real problem in the universities and i think we can all see it sort of it's spilling out now literally into the streets um but this whole idea that western civilization is really just a history of oppression uh i mean ironically this whole program of critiquing is itself a product of western civilization so probably the first great sustained critique was saint augustine's book the city of god augustine writes this book in the oh gosh it was at the crossing over the fourth and fifth uh fourth and fifth centuries and essentially what saint augustine does is he looks at the roman empire and says well actually the roman empire says that it's sort of the eternal city that it stands for justice it stands for peace and order but saint augustine said that when you really look at it what it really stands for is just a lust for domination and so this whole idea that we can look at our own civilization and critique it and sort of unveil the hypocrisy that in itself ironically is a program firmly lodged in the west in western civilization itself started for the most part by saint augustine the early christian father and this again this this tradition of sort of looking back and critiquing it again it sort of comes up again with the renaissance and the reformation as they look back over hundreds of years and and fairly or unfairly said that the hundreds of years have been uh histories of of oppression and superstition and then it's sort of taken up again uh by the enlightenment thinkers again a western civilization phenomenon the enlightenment and they look to the past and say well this is sort of a horrible history of oppression and superstition and those sorts of things but second i think it's incredibly important uh in any course to actually teach uh the bad things that you know perhaps of course uh there is oppression there is slavery there is injustice there are all sorts of horrible things but the important thing is to remember that these are not unique to western civilization these are practices that are universally um uh pursued by all civilizations that have ever existed so and and i'm happy uh for universities to teach teach the oppression but what they also need to teach are the good things as well i think just the very pro project of critiquing of of of self-critique is very much a western phenomenon and i think that's a good thing that's come out of western civilization particularly the christian heritage but secondly i think people who want to critique western civilization need to bear in mind that they're very critique that it involves oppression that it involves inequality that it involves violation of human rights that the underlying world view of that that equality is something that is good that human rights uh exist and that they are good that freedom is better than um subordination that these ideals themselves are products of western civilization but the critique has to be balanced and when it's not balanced that's when you get people very sadly enjoying many of the fruits enjoying living in prosperous societies enjoying education in western soul universities but actually feeling no connection no love no loyalty and no sense of personal investment that it's a project that is is well worth uh in many ways celebrating and preserving and consequently uh i think we're seeing um the results of that in in civil unrest uh which is essentially an attempt in in in some ways to pull down western civilization with no real idea as to what they're going to replace it with yeah this idea that you burn down the house that we've lived in or what's left of it without offering us an alternative it's revolution for the sake of revolution which seems to me to be very risky indeed you you mentioned the word balance surely critique proper critique means that you actually go after the hard facts you go after the evidence you try and interpret what has happened in the past on the basis of the best possible understanding of what really happened yes oh absolutely and and this is the thing with history history is always actually much more interesting than anything that you could make up and you can pretty much bet that any view of history that sees history as either holy good and holy righteous or holy evil is not really going to be based in a full reading of the facts because at the end of the day history is the interaction of human beings with large events that in many ways are beyond their control but the fact is that human beings we are complex creatures we are neither angels we are neither demons we are human and that means that any account that doesn't take that doesn't seriously good things that have come out of western civilization is is less lodged in history and probably more lodged in an ideological objection and historically probably the strongest and most powerful ideological objection to western civilization is is rooted again in an ideology that itself is a product of western civilization and that is marxism marxism for the most part sees very little good at least as marxism as as is mot is expressed in the modern world because it essentially sees western civilization as an unfolding of economic oppression and when you when you reduce everything that happens in history to simply the unfolding of economic oppression then it's going to be almost impossible for you to talk about the good things that have occurred and that's pretty much what has happened and so yeah in fact what we do need is to get back to a much more subtle understanding of history which is that history is essentially the story of human beings not of angels not of demons but of human beings who are capable of wonderful things who are fearfully and wonderfully made but still at the same time vitiated by sin and that will allow us to actually have an objective understanding of the genuinely bad things but it will also give us you know the ability to be able to recognize the genuinely good things and build on the good things i recently had the opportunity to conduct a conversation with coleman hughes in the united states now he's a very impressive very clear thinking a very approachable african-american it was fascinating conversation because he was in new york and you could hear the traffic in the background there's never-ending sirens and police great yeah but full of life yeah but he made this very point there's need to understand that we can learn from the good and the bad and if you take the black lives matter movement we got into a conversation about the horrors of slavery which to me has always been incomprehensible and even today is nowhere near dead globally nowhere near them yeah but where's it being fought from dreaded centers of western civilization that's where it's being brought from yes indeed it always has been yeah but he made the point that uh you know that uh i'm paraphrasing here but half the evil of slavery when you think of the british empire and the americans involving in slavery happened amongst blacks in africa where one tribe would go out slaughter the children and the old and uh infirm and round up the rest and sell them for a bunch of trickers yeah and something else that came across my desk that fascinated me the other day was to learn that in fact when the british decided that once and for all not only would they ban slavery as the most powerful nation on earth they would go set out to break it everywhere else in the rest of the world the royal navy was sent forth to go and intercept ships that were carrying slaves from other countries seventeen thousand white royal navy slavery uh that personnel apparently died seeking to end slavery that was hardly the act uh of a bunch of racists that was a actions of white people seeking to oppose racism and the horrors of slavery indeed and any statement to the effect that say something like racism is something that can only be practiced by a particular race in a strange way dehumanizes everyone else because racism is something that is actually of in many ways throughout history practiced uh by all races um and so when we say that only white people can be racist essentially what we're saying is that the complexity that goes into human nature that allows us to do both good things and bad things that that which really defines us as being human being is something that really only white people have and that that is actually quite dehumanizing but historically it's just a ridiculous statement i mean historically slavery was practiced um by you know pretty much all civilization so just sort of i think to myself it's very well known of course that the greeks uh thought that non-greeks were sort of natural slaves uh barbaroid uh where we get the word barbarian from the romans practice slavery but here's the thing when alexander marched into the persian empire in the 330s bc he marched into the sort of the center of the persian empire persepolis and what he discovered were greeks who'd been enslaved by members of the persian empire so slavery was something something has just been universally distributed uh among all people it's something that that all people have have basically practiced and so to say that that sort of racism is is really just the preserve of white people it just just shows historical illiteracy and generally speaking the only way that modern anti-race anti-racism theorists can get away with such a ridiculous statement is when they re they just redefine redefine racism yeah that's what's happening that's what's happening around us and and that's actually a really dangerous thing because what it sends it's essentially sends a message out to society that racism is a sin that can only be committed by white people and that at the end of the day just divides people um you know if you define racism as a sin that anyone can and does commit whether black or white or whatever then at the very least everyone can admit that they are guilty of this problem but if you just say it's one person then that what that does is it makes everyone else the victim and it makes those people the oppressor and that is not a healthy recipe for any kind of stable society but do you know who who had a fantastic approach to this very issue it was a a a a an american slave named frederick douglass and uh frederick douglass wound up buying his own freedom i believe but frederick douglass was a very prominent anti-slavery campaigner in the 19th century and douglas recognized in actual fact that although slavery is a horror was a horrible blight on american society he recognized that this the the answer to slavery came out of the very principles of the american experiment itself and uh and um uh frederick douglass had some fascinating things to say about the founding fathers of america and frederick douglass wrote this in 1852 he writes fellow citizens i'm not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic so i respect the fathers of this republic the signers of the declaration of independence were brave men this is a black former slave speaking they were great men too great enough to give fame to a great age it does not often happen to a nation to raise at one time such a number of truly great men the point from which i am compelled to view them is not certainly the most favorable i and yet i cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration they were statesmen patriots and heroes and for the good that they did and the principles they contended for i will unite with you to honor their memory i'll repeat that last bit for the good that they did and very importantly the principles they contended for i will unite with you to honor their memory and what frederick douglass is saying there is that yes america is deeply marred by slavery however the answer to slavery the notion that all people are created equal the answer itself comes out of the american experiment and he could acknowledge that and that's what we're missing today so is that another way of saying that the american constitution in part reads we hold these truths truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal yeah that's the declaration of independence of 1776 correct he's yeah so they're they're actually honoring it in the breach because they're still keeping slavery but the seeds yes the outcome of that is the gradual ferment that ironically here so these vast vast numbers of white people involved in a terrible fight to the death an ugly horrible civil war no form of war worse than a civil war largely to free black people yes but that's not celebrated no um and and part of the reason is you know it was but it's not being now yeah and frederick douglass is saying yeah look i recognize that the american experience has been horrific for some people but that's not because america has lived up to its ideals it's because it hasn't lived up to its ideals you know in a way there are parallels in australia it's taken me a long time to see this but many aboriginal people just like many other australians walking up and down our streets think that the australian constitution is the document that says we'll all play fairly so if we haven't played fairly it must be the constitution that it's is at fault and that's behind a lot of the and i'm not trying to sound unsympathetic i just think that we need to understand what's really happening here and be more realistic about it the push for constitutional recognition whereas actually the problem is not in the constitution it's more in the breaching of the constitution but that very constitution gives rise to people who think about it to the idea that we should be treating everybody fairly it does itself seek to do that yeah well i mean the the you know so much of the story of of indigenous australia is is a very sad story um but it should also be remembered well a more subtle understanding of it is that even even then with the story of indigenous australia that that could be understood as a as a process that that didn't live up to the the earliest sort of hopes and wishes of of some of the europeans so australia was founded explicitly on the premise that it was not going to have slavery a slavery was not meant to occur at the founding of european australia and when arthur phillip came over here in 1788 he was basically told that the aboriginal australians or the natives as they were called back then were to be considered subjects of the crown now to us that might sound slightly oppressive they're considered subjects of the crown but to the british mindset to be a subject of the crown was actually a great honor because what that meant was that you had rights that you were supposed to enjoy the rights that the english enjoyed and enjoyed and so the convicts and early settlers were told in no uncertain terms that if you harm any of these natives you will receive the full force of the english law because you are harming subjects of the crown now of course we know tragically it did not turn out that way and it took until 1838 for white men to be mile creek the horrible horrific mile creek massacre for white men actually to be hanged for murdering aboriginal australians but i i guess in some ways there is a kind of an analogy with the american experiment and it may be something along the lines of that um indeed there was a horrific history that unfolded after settlement in australia but it was not necessarily anything intended by the founding by the founding men and the ideals that they brought over with them well like you i've long been fascinated with the great american experiment in freedom the revolution that actually produced freedom unlike so many other revolutions and people scoff at that because anti-americanism is very cheap and easy and nobody pretends they're perfect but the reality is they've been a great beacon for that value that they say they believe in more than anything which is personal freedom they didn't get there easily they argued long and hard amongst themselves about how to get the balance right because of the fallibility of people and the possible possibility for mob rule taking over on the other hand how do they recognize the nobility of the individual and maximize their freedoms the debates were absolutely endless there's two big questions that arise out of this from my mind uh one is that um in 1798 john adams said this a very very famous con remark our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other well people today would say that's nonsense we can only be free when we get rid of that basis for our freedoms we've got to dispose of it it's cruel it's oppressive um was adams actually do you think right is a history or unfolding of events telling us that maybe he really was right oh well i mean i i think that's true and well i mean adam's basic thesis there is that the american experiment in in freedom uh requires a precondition that people are restrained by moral principles which of course in the 18th century meant religious principles and that is not something that is unique to john adams even john stuart mill writing later in the 1850s said that for any kind of a healthy free constitutional representative democracy to work the people need virtue if people don't have virtue if people don't have self-restraint then essentially what happens is that people stop trusting one another for freedom to work for a free society to work you need people who you can trust you don't enter into contracts with people that you can't trust you wouldn't enter into contract with someone who you didn't think had a fairly strong moral fiber now you might now someone will come along and say oh but you know you've always got the state to make sure that people honor their word but that's the very point that john adams is making that if all you are left with to make sure that people honor their word is not an internal sense of morality but the state then by definition it is no longer a free country because it is the state that is stepping in all the time to make sure that people do the right thing rather than an actual genuine commitment uh to morality but the other the other part of of of john adams quote is that you know that it requires a religious people and again that this is also very interesting because historically the foundation of morality has tended to be understood in terms of religion and today people understand the foundation of morality uh less so in those terms but that is actually the historical anomaly throughout most of history even the greatest thinkers have considered the the foundation of morality to somehow be connected with the idea that human beings are accountable to a god or gods and so what happens when you take away the religious element of public morality well what it kind of leaves is a sort of vacuum and there's a sense in which the whole project of the enlightenment turned out to be an attempt to sort of fill that vacuum with something else and one doesn't want to exaggerate the secular is the sort of the secular nature of the enlightenment period and we could probably talk about this a bit more later because the british enlightenment was far more open and and hospitable to religion than say the french enlightenment was but even the french enlightenment thinkers tended to believe in god they were what we would call deists and even someone like voltaire the most anti-christian of the french enlightenment philosophers thought that the only thing more dangerous and pernicious to the world than christianity was atheism uh let's repeat that that's a yeah believed that yeah really interesting point yeah voltaire was no friend of christianity uh he hated christianity but he sincerely believed that the one thing that was worse than christianity was atheism uh because atheism as far as voltaire is concerned means that there are no consequences there are really no moral laws that we have to obey and there are no consequences for any of our actions and and consequently there's really no foundation for any kind of civil order and so voltaire and like others like jean jacques husso and and and other french philosophical thinkers although they weren't christians they were not atheists for the most part they they thought that in a sense belief in god is rational otherwise how do you explain the universe but also belief in god is a kind of necessary moral principle without god what are you left with and even emmanuel can't the german enlightenment thinker thought the same thing he thought at the end of the day after even all his very ingenious moral philosophy he thought at the end of the day you you have to refer to god as a matter of moral necessity without the idea of a god it's almost impossible says immanuel kant to make any sense of the existence of any moral laws and i guess in some ways the thinker who really saw this most clearly was a thinker who was incredibly hostile not just to christianity but also to the enlightenment and that was the german philosopher frederick nature friedrich nietzsche exactly who basically said that the whole enlightenment project is little more than an attempt to put christianity on different foundations and he was absolutely right he in coming to the view that all religion poisons everything to use more modern language all you're left with the only morality left is the struggle for power the strong man and those of another one of my guests pointed out mussolini when he first met hitler gave him a complete leather-bound set of nietzsche's books the only morality is strength and of course to some extent infused with the darwinian darwinianist idea darwinist idea yeah of the fittest shall survive now i don't want to offend people who after a long period of careful thought have concluded that they can't believe in god but just as a christian is constantly challenged to think through their position i think there are massive challenges for atheists to work out how we might live if there is no god i mean nietzsche saw the problem as an atheist yeah and let's put it kindly he died in a padded cell yeah well i mean look i think it's i i think what we want to make clear is that i think you and i would share this this belief is that the problem with atheism is not that it necessarily leads to nazism and a survival of the fittest mentality it doesn't the problem with atheism is that it doesn't necessarily lead to anything and which means that it doesn't necessarily lead to something that could stop um a kind of nazi mentality there's nothing in atheism that that you can derive from atheism that says we ought to take a strong stance against some of these horrific ideologies and and and nietzsche nietzsche is a fascinating figure because nietzsche was one of those 19th century philosophers and there were others as well who really understood the implications of of atheism modern atheist philosophers like richard dawkins and sam harris and lawrence krauss they kind of have this triumphant celebratory joyful atheism and so it's sort of freeing us all from something really really oppressive and it's sort of the beginning of sort of a whole new age of optimism whereas thinkers like nietzsche in germany and other thinkers in england like matthew arnold they saw the cost of the decline of christianity in culture and among the intellectual class and the cost was meaning the cost was any foundation for believing that life has any objective meaning and any foundation for morality and nietzsche and you know this john but nietzsche in a very famous book he wrote called the gay science uh likens uh the loss of faith which he calls the death of god uh he likens it to sort of unchaining the earth from the sun or taking a sponge and wiping away the horizon these are things that the man who is delivering this message that god is dead is not celebrating he's kind of standing there in fearful awe of what human beings have done as they have set god aside and he and he asks the question where are we going the earth it's going up it's going down it's going left it's going right it's just hurtling into outer space with no direction and that was something that the 19th century atheists understood that if you take away the the theological christian foundation for morality and for what philosophers might call sort of normativity any kind of values then you're left with nothingness you're left with nihilism now nature steps in and kind of tries to fill the fill the void in a rather nasty way and exactly as you say that he tries to fill it with power and so for nietzsche nietzsche sort of tries to kind of go back to a pre-christian ancient ethic a kind of a homeric uh heroic power-centric ethic and he brings this out in his book the genealogy of morals and he says well those who strong people for having their way over weak people he says they're just as irrational as the lambs who criticize the eagles who find the lambs very very tasty i mean nietzsche says you know if we're just basically biological machines who have evolved along darwinian lines and nietzsche is writing you know 30 years after darwin publishes his origin of species in 1859 if we are basically sort of darwinian biological machines it's kind of irrational to hold people morally accountable accountable for behaving that way and that's the universe that we're left with with nietzsche and he understood that now it's often assumed that of course the fou the writers of the american constitution were necessarily christian they were more religious that was the age and what have you but in reality most of them would have been deists or enlightenment people probably the exception of alexander hamilton whose place in history has been i think much underplaced because he died so young and in a foolish way but i'm often struck by well-meaning people who i think would say what's your problem you don't need a religious base look at the american forefathers they saw these great ideas of the worth of all individuals as self-evident truths that seems to me to be something that falls over pretty quickly because although they were very clever and we rightly admire the american founders in fact it's not self-evident at all that these truths are to be upheld if it was peace would reign right across the world in fact peaceful societies have been the anomaly and still are well as many uh sort of philosophers have said after after the declaration of independence a few things are less self-evident than the idea that all human beings are equal but the clue is almost found in the declaration of independence itself where he says that we find these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal and so what we can sort of see is that the only reason someone like thomas jefferson and others thought that human equality whatever that means is is self-evident like two plus two equals four is because they themselves had been formed in a culture that took something like that for granted and that culture was very much a judeo-christian culture uh and there's a sense in which the declaration of independence and its its assertion of human equality and human dignity in a way that is a tremendous product of the impact that christianity wound up having on politics since its inception now in terms of how christianity has impacted politics over the years i think just the best way to think about it sort of in the abstract is that christianity the legacy of christianity politically speaking is essentially the unfolding of the idea that all human beings are created in the image of god but not just that that idea together with the idea that all human beings are sinful and what that meant was that politics and social organization could on the one hand aspire to honoring the intrinsic dignity of human beings and yet at the same time so what that meant was that progress was something that was possible actual moral progress in society that is our institutions evolving to honor our dignity more and more but also that that sense of progress could be at the same time restrained by a realistic understanding that human beings are not perfectable or at least not perfectable in this life but restrained by an understanding of human sinfulness and so what the christian tradition enabled was a belief that we can actually improve the condition of human beings and yet not falling into the trap of utopianism which history has also taught has proven to be incredibly destructive and the impact that christianity has had on politics and society is uh just it's it's impossible to underestimate but it's got to be understood in terms of different traditions of christianity so for example very early on you know in obviously in the book of matthew in the book of mark christ himself draws a distinction between what we today would call the church and the state now for a distinction to be drawn between the church and the state in the ancient world that in itself was something of a revolution because as ancient historians will say in the ancient world and this was pretty common in ancient cultures there really was no separate there was no distinction really between uh what we would call religion and politics it was all sort of inter intertwined uh very often rulers perform the tasks of priests and rulers were worshiped as gods whereas jesus says no these two terms are to be distinguished so that in itself was very important but in the medieval period what the roman catholic theologians do is that they take some ideas that are kind of around there in the ancient world particularly from the stoics this idea of a natural law sort of a law that is above governments and not necessarily created by human beings and they really develop it in a fine philosophical way and really make completely standard during the middle ages the idea that in actual fact there are moral principles that are above the state and so early christianity and medieval christianity suddenly makes totalitarianism absolutely impossible in a way that it wasn't really impossible in the roman empire because it essentially says that there are limits to what rulers can do and those limits are contained in the natural law the law of god and even there's an is an earthly institution that can hold a ruler accountable and that is the church that is a massive change in in in in politics in history and then when you go to the reformation period the protestant christians uh took some of the ideas again of of medieval catholic christians on the notion of of of legitimate political rule by cons by the consent of people who are ruled and notions that individuals have individual rights these were things developed by catholics and the protestants emphasized these things even more particularly the puritan protestants who had a very heavy emphasis on the notion that government is only legitimate if it has the consent of the subjects and they base that to a large extent actually on their reading of the bible and their reading of the new testament and the way that they believe the church was organized which is essentially congregations electing their own pastors and this puritan tradition had a tremendous impact on the first sort of great figure of modern liberal democracy john locke and john locke writes his two treatises of government uh where he bases his ideas of property rights and and his ideas of government by consent on the idea that we are created in the image of god and where god's property and so all of this is a massive revolution in compare compared to how people in the ancient world tended to think in the ancient world justice was often just used as a synonym for power and the classic example of that is the million dialogue in 416 bc where the athenians basically say to the island of melos you know join us or we'll absolutely destroy you and the millions say well what about justice and the athenians say to the millions this is what justice is that the strong will do what they can and the weak will suffer what they must that was a very common commonly accepted understanding of justice in the ancient world the reason it becomes a minority view of justice and to this and nowadays is seen as the very opposite of justice is because of the christian influence and of course tom holland writes a lot about this sort of thing in his book dominion but the fact that we have uh justifications for democracy today that say all people are equal the fact that we believe for the most part that utopian projects will only result in destruction is be because humans are intrinsically flawed these are very much i would say gifts actually of of christianity throughout the ages i was once struck by a neat little what i thought was a piece of writing by an american we're so good we had to give ourselves the vote we're so bad we had to give ourselves the vote and it's a reference to the nobility of the individual pascal might have put it uh man is uh the most noble thing in the universe but he's also uh the you know the scum of the universe capable of being both yeah so we had to give ourselves a vote because everyone should have a say in where the society goes should authorize the government but then because people that you elect to power are corruptable they become lazy they become self-centered you've got to give them the people the power to remove them that reminds me of a very famous quote from the american theologian reinhold niebuhr i think it was from his book the children of light and the children of darkness which is itself of course a quote from the new testament and the quote is something like this and i don't think anyone said it any better but i'll use the masculine language of the original quote but man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible man's tendency to injustice makes democracy necessary and so if everyone was just mere demons with no capacity to do anything good democracy would suddenly would immediately fall into mob rule and warfare and the greeks themselves had a word for mob rule oculocracy having said that though we do have a capacity so we do have a capacity to treat one another justly and yet we have a tendency not to which means that we have to hold one another account as well and historically what we found is that the best way to hold one another account to account uh is through democratic procedure and so i th the unique i think contribution that christianity brings to democracy is a very powerful justification for democracy and it is essentially that democracy is the best way to keep other people's sin in check and at the same time the best way to honor the dignity in other human beings and i think historically that has actually proven to be um that's proven to bear fruit when you look at the the countries in the world where people most want to live they are democracies with a strong christian heritage as well now many people in in those democracies in our culture today many of yours and my friends would say oh no no you've got that all wrong it was the enlightenment that gave us freedom it wasn't the reformation it wasn't religion they were all always fighting one another it resulted in tensions in war it had to be brought to an end the enlightenment was just growing out of religious conflict and warfare and that's what's provided us with contrast your response i think it's horribly simplistic because what people forget is that as the enlightenment is taking place particularly through the 18th century there's another huge event that is taking place at the same time and that is the evangelical revivals and so when we talk about everything that's going on in the 18th century which we sort of call the enlightenment century we have to take into account that it is not just sort of enlightenment ideas of reason that are forming the way that people think and shaping institutions and and social changes that are taking place but also evangelical christianity and the the obvious example of this is of course uh someone like william wilberforce and the abolition of slavery but it's so important to remember that that again most enlightenment thinkers were not atheists most enlightenment thinkers did really believe that god is necessary for any sort of coherent moral theory there were some who did not believe that so there are people like for example jeremy bentham and some of the french philosophers who did not believe that but those people tended not to be the mainstream thinkers the more mainstream thinkers in the enlightenment someone like for example in england a guy named william paley who had a famous argument for the existence of god based on the idea if you were walking down the beach and you came across something that seemed to tell the time what is the best way to understand where that thing came from did it come together by chance through random forces of nature or was it designed well how much more complex is the universe two o'clock so how much more or we think that the universe is designed that's william paley who was one of the most influential enlightenment thinkers of the british tradition and when william paley believed strongly in reason but he believed that reason supported christianity and that it even supported an established church the point that i want to make is is that yeah the enlightenment period was absolutely seminal in bringing about uh modern many modern notions of freedom and many modern uh political practices such as modern democracy which in in many ways the thought about modern democracy predates the enlightenment to many puritans i should just say but again the problem is that when people the problem is when people characterize the enlightenment as some kind of secular anti-religious process that took place to some extent that is the case of the enlightenment in france but the french enlightenment was quite unique for the age and many other countries looked at the french experiment with with kind of horror being horrified that they pulled down the church being horrified that some of the french philosoph declared no god the more mainstream expressions of the enlightenment were more like the british enlightenment which said okay we don't want to base our social institutions and our social practices on superstition and oppression by which they generally meant roman catholicism but we believe that there are reasonable expressions of christianity most enlightenment thinkers thought john locke himself an early enlightenment thinker wrote a whole book called the reasonableness of christianity and much of the british enlightenment and the german enlightened i would say the american enlightenment was an attempt to in a sense re-state many christian moral principles on grounds that they considered to be reasonable and rational but that to the enlightenment mind did not necessarily mean anti-religious seems to me that there's another very important point there though too the age of enlightenment was meant to be the age of reason we could figure things out by reason yet many enlightenment figures had some views that were anything but compassionate there were major enlightenment figures who believed that slavery was part of the natural order of things that women were inferior and that racism was acceptable oh absolutely i mean i mean there's a great short article that's available online by professor peter harrison at the university of queensland showing uh the enlightenment thinkers like voltaire david hume emanuel khan these are the greatest of the enlightenment thinkers that they had views on race that we would today consider to be just classical racism um and so yeah the problem is that people nowadays tend to define the enlightenment in terms of their own most cherished ideals and the thing is that the enlightenment thinkers were not as sort of cosmopolitan as we would like to think they were but at the same time for the most part they were not as secular as we would like to think they think they were in terms of america americans during the 19th century who were arguing against slavery so and america was an enlightenment country but when you look at a lot of the the the tracts and the leaflets against slavery in america they were not arguments based on science or sort of pure reason as we would call today there are arguments based on the idea that humans are created in the image of god again essentially what the anti-slavery movement was to a large extent was a later unfolding of this idea that we are created in the image of god let me read an absolutely incredible quote from an anti-slaver her name was angelina grimke she was an anti-slaver in america and also a feminist and this is what she has to say about um slave about slavery she says read then on the subject of slavery this is something she wrote in 1836 search the script search the scriptures daily whether the things i've told you are true other books and papers might be a great help to you in this investigation but they are not necessary and it is hardly probable that your committees of vigilance will allow you to have any other the bible then is the book i want you to read in the spirit of inquiry and she goes on to say that our books and papers are mostly commentaries on the bible that was for the most part the anti-slavery movement in enlightenment america and anyone who doesn't appreciate that really doesn't understand the full richness of the enlightenment but to come to australia steve what can our history tell us about how we have become the country we are today one of the i think one of the the best things one of my students ever told me was a young man who came up to me after i taught a semester after i taught her a course on australian history at where i currently teach at campion college in sydney and he said you know dr shavurah he said i loved australia before i took your class but now that i after taking your class i love australia even more and i i don't run my australian history classes to create sort of little nationalists that's not the reason but i think what he was getting at and what i try to do is just show how the unique and historical oddities of australian history really explain why we are the country that we are today and in terms of of sort of major forces that historically kind of explain why australians are the way they are quite pragmatic uh often quite fast to look to the government to solve our problems and quite egalitarian our egalitarianism was noticed ruefully and and bemoaned even as early as the 19th century by europeans who came over and found that they weren't treated like they were back in europe i think three things really come to mind and that is the fact that the original people who came to australia in the late 18th and early 19th century were not australians this is something that i tell my students in the very first lecture australia was not settled by australians australia was settled by the british the people who came to australia in 1788 had british minds and they brought with them the ideas of the british enlightenment which meant uh tremendous respect for the rule of law and the respect for the role that religion plays in any stable civilized society so that was something that had tremendous influence on the australian civil order the other thing that's had a huge impact in australia is of course what the great geoffrey blaney who you've interviewed called the tyranny of distance the fact that australia was so far from any european civilization at the time and the fact that the australian continent is so huge and generally very sparsely populated meant that there were certain things that the government had to do because they couldn't be done by private enterprise and those things included the building of churches so um uh up until then and well throughout the first half of the 19th century uh colonial governments uh helped to build churches helped to pay clergy because they just weren't enough people living together for the most part to put their money together and voluntarily build these things so we the government had to build churches the government had to build railways from the mid 19th century onwards where in other countries they were being built by private entrepreneurs government was also distributing land early on to convicts and that brings us to sort of the third really unique factor convictism which gave australia a strong egalitarian and anti-authority tendency and i think the irish catholics also brought that but the other thing with convictism is that it accelerated australia's path to democracy not just because we had a kind of egalitarian streak in our culture from early on but because after land was given to the convicts it turned out embarrassingly to be the case that when the vote was introduced uh when the sort of the when the vote was injured was introduced um to elect people to legislative councils in new south wales because a lot of ex-convicts had land that had made more had made money over the years they actually could afford the vote and good sort of upstanding god-fearing scots and english and welsh who came over couldn't and so the great fear was that it would be a convict-dominated legislative uh legislative assembly and so basically the franchise in the 1850s was brought down so low that pretty much all men could vote basically making a democracy out of all the colonies by the end of the 1850s and so in order to under and the other aspect of australia of australia's character again that that pragmatism a kind of anti-ideological slant and maybe for better or worse a preoccupation with making money that probably goes back to the tyranny of distance as well where when you think about it who on earth would even come to australia in the early days well basically people who were bent on making their fortune here who had who who were high energy but really wanted to make money and those are the sorts of people that came over and those to a large extent are the sorts of people who built this country the other thing is that again the tyranny of distance also meant that our religion very early on was strongly influenced again by protestant evangelicalism because the evangelicals in the 18th and 19th century in england particularly in the later 18th century very often couldn't find jobs in the church of england they were just not wanted they were they were seen as well kind of crazy and so the only places a lot of them could actually find jobs were actually over in the colonies and so there was a disproportionate number of evangelicals who came over here and so australia to a large extent was a product of all these forces but also evangelical christianity because of the tyranny of distance that no one else wanted to come over here early on and of course all that that is documented in stuart pigeon and bob linder's history of evangelicalism in australia but when you understand all the forces that have made us quite pragmatic that have made us maybe a bit too quick to look to the state that have made us very egalitarian you can't help but marvel at the strangeness idiosyncrasy of our history and and i think really really like it but they're some of the things that would help us to understand why we are the way that we are thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel there and also click the notification bell to stay up to date with new [Music] releases

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 9,348

Rating: 4.9478259 out of 5

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, Stephen Chavura, Western Civilisation, Christian history, Free speech

Id: GhliJWaXEJE

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021