The Madness of Crowds | Douglas Murray

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well douglas murray thank you very much for giving us your time this will be i think widely appreciated in australia in particular where you're well known now as a writer a commentator an appearance on television programs a writer of great note you've written about in the strange demise of europe and now you've launched the second book the madness of crowds gender race and identity which is also flying off the bookshelves and creating a very great deal of interest i look forward to talking to you about that but before i do that can you just tell us a little about yourself and how you came to your current positioning well i'm i've just turned 40 and actually the author of five books i wrote my first when i was very young a book of literary biography uh came out when i was at university at oxford so i've been a writer all my life um i write journalism as well uh right for almost all the newspapers in the uk and various others abroad including the australian um and i it's a rather unusual career path in some ways because i i think that i'm in an incredibly fortunate position and i don't underestimate that in any way and the fortunate position i'm in as i see it is that i'm allowed to say things that are true even if they are unpopular or politically incorrect or likely to be howled down by some group or other um some people mind that sort of thing and for some reason probably just having learned along the way i don't especially and i think it's the job of the small number of us in any society who are not beholden to some wobbly boss or weak hierarchy to say things that large numbers if not majorities of people recognize to be true but cannot say themselves so that's my self-appointed role terrific now before we start to unpack some of the things that you you do say can i just say i think the book is fantastic i was lying in bed this morning early thinking to myself just for the writing it ought to be a textbook in schools then there's the incredible research very detailed but thirdly the thing that struck me is it takes a lot of guts to do what you've done regardless of i mean you just sort of said you're in a position where you can be your own boss you can say what you believe to be true but it takes a lot of courage you know i don't think you're a person who's simply seeking to be controversial you think truth uh and deep exploration of issues actually matters yes yeah um there are people who simply seek controversy i i don't i mean um the british english philosopher roger scrutin said of me a little while ago that i'm i'm actually a very um amiable person it's just i've been bullied into being occasionally not amiable by not amiable people and um there's there's some truth in this i think that all ages engage in forms of self-deception and we are very very good at looking at the past and identifying that you know what were they thinking of why did they do that and we are inevitably rather bad at recognizing that our own age is likely to be doing things that our successes will look back at with at least equal amazement no what were they thinking of so i think one of the self-appointed roles of a writer should be identify the things now that we are doing that our successors will recognize to be insane and try to stop doing them early sounds terrific line of reasoning to me one final point on this issue though uh i think it was robert louis stevenson once observed i was a kid and i read that he'd said something like courage is not knowing no fear it's pushing ahead and overcoming the fear um yes the truth is i always say to people that if there's something they're worried about saying which they think is true they should probably say it anyway say it early get used to saying it early because otherwise you'll find yourself in a whole world of hell where you have to sustain lies sustain ideas that you know not to be true it's profoundly demoralizing it's demoralizing for society and it's demoralizing for an individual i don't think anything i do is courageous i know a lot of very courageous people from all sorts of different walks of life but um i think that it would be a very sad situation if telling the truth as you see it was deemed to be any kind of act of courage the water is always slightly warmer than people fear um you know people people are very fearful of putting even dipping a toe in to certain issues so again i mean one of my or my beliefs is that writers should try to as i say in the madness of crowds try to clear some of these minefields of our times so that it's safe for everyone else to or safer for everybody else to cross as well i think that's very valuable fits with jordan peterson who told an audience in sydney when he was asked a question about being battered by social media he said look get it out there after a couple of weeks the fury blows out and you can move on but you've got it there you've established a bit of a beach head yeah and but also i mean i've just not got that much tolerance for the people who think that for instance being flamed on twitter is that big a deal i mean uh you know my parents grew up in post-war era of rationing and then under the shadow of total nuclear annihilation my grandparents fought in and lived through the war we've got it very damn easy in our day so when people boast about being really attacked on social media i think oh yeah that must be hell for you again useful perspectives uh well the sale end of the book uh the contents page tells you that um you're not going to back away gay and then there's an interlude the marxist foundations women interlude the impact of tech race interlude on forgiveness which i found really interesting and we'll come to that four trans and then the conclusion where to from here what can we do now your thesis as i understand it in essence is that we're living through a post-modern era the grand metanarratives of the past have been largely discarded we've moved away from the judeo-christian basis of western culture in fact there seems to be a determined attempt now to deauthorize it and to paint it as evil and terrible and oppressive and cruel and even our political structures all the main political philosophies have essentially broken down and you see managerialism and ad-hocary yeah and lack of conviction and great cynicism in the community about that but you're saying we're trying to build a new metaphysics yes on bases that simply won't sustain it you say put together as a new foundation blocks as the foundation blocks of a numerality and metaphysics they form the basis for a general madness indeed a more unstable basis for social harmony could hardly be imagined the products of the system cannot reproduce the stability of a system that produced them and then this very important remark we're now asked to agree to things that we cannot believe yes i became fascinated i'm like you i've had less than you but i've had to do a fair amount of media in my time and one of the things i started to notice in the last 15 or so years in particular was that effectively a new metaphysics that is the new a new foundational morality appeared to be getting installed in our society um and it went something like this uh and again one can one can regret this or admire it but i think most people will recognize something like it that not very long ago uh if you wanted uh to be seen to be an ethical or good person there were certain things that were perhaps expected of you broadly speaking they were the inheritance of judeo-christian tradition and this included things like charity forgiveness virtue as understood in that tradition and a lot more and then at some point in the last 15 years i i say sped up very clearly in the last 10 years and then weaponized in the last five uh we see this another form of of morality not totally dissimilar in some of its um some of its appearances and that is that in order to be a good person to be seen as a good person in a society like australia or britain uh you would need to stress for instance that you were anti-racist as if everybody else in society was profoundly racist and you were one of the few brave souls willing still to battle racism you would need to present yourself as being entirely on the side of women in any and all circumstances and really talk about it an awful lot you know if you're a man stress your feminist credentials uh a tendency which as you know from reading the matters of crowds i'm intensely skeptical of you need to talk about lgbt all the time or at least as often as possible and uh and these and as well as a few other things you might add in uh green and perhaps a couple other things became what you stress in order to show that you're a good person now these these in the end i i started to realize were becoming load-bearing walls which i became very worried about and i'm very worried about because they don't they can't bear the load my view is is that lgbt rights equal white rights for women equal rights for people whatever their racial origin is a very desirable end point but it's an end point of liberalism in the good sense as we might understand it it's a hideous foundation why for two reasons in particular the first is that all of these these bases for a numerality have intense friction among themselves so as i point out in the trans chapter trans and women have intense friction as rights claims for reasons i explain trans and gay have intense friction between them for reasons i go into in the madness of crowds but there's a second reason as well which is that all of these things that we have been in societies like australia trying to base our morality on are themselves much more unstable components than we've been willing to admit so i say in the gay chapter the outset and i do gay at the outset partly because it's the only only one of these minority things i can claim to have any any crampons on on the wall of the important everest of uh of liberal rights um gay is much more unstable than we're willing to admit in our societies we still don't know very much about it uh i think we have to be a bit more humble about some of the issues around it as a result of that but i get on then to the women chat when i say we this one also is much more unstable than we're willing to admit are women and men exactly equal are is are men more competent than women in certain areas are women more competent than men in certain areas or have we just for convenience for the time being landed for instance in this strange place i think we're in where we have to pretend that women are exactly the same as men and also magically better we're very uncertain about this we tend to be totally certain we're very uncertain race absolute mess which we're we've been trying to think about and deal with as well as we can but there's a whole load of hell waiting for us if we keep leaning on it this hard and then trans which we know almost nothing about and our societies are pretending to be incredibly certain about and if i can sum up the problem in this in a sentence it is that this new morality we're trying to construct relies on us pretending we know about things that we don't know about trans and simultaneously demands that we pretend not to know about things that we all knew till yesterday relations between the sexes it's very interesting to me that you clearly spell out your the thing that you've just said in the book uh on gays that there are enormous differences within each grouping and uh they're heading so gays uh lesbians and so forth and enormous differences even frictions between them yes and in many ways it's i would imagine quite deeply resented i mean during the gay marriage debate in australia anybody who's watching the debate closely could see there was quite a range of views in the gay community quite a race and in fact there were quite a few who said we've never believed in marriage yeah but of course you didn't see that in the media it didn't suit the narrative you've got other people it seems often using inadverted commas these groupings that they've put together and insist our cogent and right hang together to pursue amend uh agendas of their own well often to pursue a specific political objective yeah i mean i wrote a piece in the spectator in the uk in support of gay marriage before it was popular to be in support of gay marriage and explain what i regard as being the conservative case for it which was an article which david cameron used as a basis for his first main speech on the issue i defend it as a right but i also i'm worried by and have been worried for a long time by the extraordinary intolerance of elements of the so-called gay community which i say so called because there is no such thing yeah i mean you know so this is one of the interesting aspects of this um there must be a there are a lot of gay people who don't want to be defined by their sexuality well they are a whole heap of other things yeah they're citizens they're they might be boiler makers they might be sydney city executives or whatever you but suddenly there's an insistence that they define themselves yeah and this is this has come in very recently and it's come in in each of the ones i described and it's a basis for madness when people say the gay community who are you talking about it's like women think this oh really 50 of the species all agree on something blacks say this really um now this is let me put another way if if somebody said i know um i just love the working class they who yeah um i just love the middle class who i love the arbitrage who are you talking about and it's the same why why would we be why would we be falling for this interpretation of society as depending solely or primarily on interest groups based on gender sex sexual orientation race and a bit more why would we be doing that why would we be taking the individualism out of individuals and lumping them in these demonstrably incoherent bodies that don't even exist they don't even exist the lgbt community take me to your leader come on i suppose in a way you know in in public office the thing that would have struck me about so much of this is that it it actually ends up dividing us hopelessly so we're forever focusing on on our differences on the things that divide us as citizens rather than the things that unite us and that we have in common what if that's the point well that's the point so that's your second chapter is is really on uh on the marks on the marxist thing now now this pulling together of of disparate groups who have grievances that can be stoked and sort of if you like used as battering rams for political objectives often without them probably even realizing that in a sense they're being used that perhaps they're the modern version of lenin's useful idiots yeah yeah this is um this is there's a pattern in all of this as i say in that chapter you can you can see the intellectual underpinnings and they come from this idea that if it's a it's a marxist idea but it's just transferred to the modern era where instead of talking about society and class structures you talk about in minority interest group structures and you lump people like this what what is what is the primary aim of this among other things it is a different interpretation of society which is therefore intended to segregate and pull apart societies as you and i might understand them so that people's primary affiliation is not that i'm an australian but or i'm british but i'm a member of the lgbt community in the greater sydney area for instance um you can predict with 100 accuracy the people who encourage this the people who will grab the latest claim by an interest group and run with it and it is always people always people who in the past had another way of trying to attack our societies had a radical marxist view of the world for instance we know this with the green issue where and again like like the rights issues i write about in this book they succeed because they're not onto nothing you know um the green movement is onto something with the environment and with our planet but it has this hideous red interior which keeps exposing itself as desiring not not a better relationship between ourselves and our environment but for instance the end of capitalism and it's the same with this uh i expose in each of the chapters that the people who make it repeatedly and desperately plain that they believe for instance that being a woman is should be merely the first step in a wider mission to bring down capitalism now i don't think most women are on board with that and most women would be rather surprised to be utilized in this fashion but that is very clearly and explicitly and i quote the the various scholars and writers who've been pushing this for years this is explicitly the aim and it's why as i say you can always predict exactly who is going to latch onto the latest claim when when for instance the big bearded man with male genitalia wins the women's weightlifting competition you can predict with 100 accuracy who is going to say yeah what's the problem with that and the people who are going to say i'm not sure clive the big weightlifter should be winning the women's category you can predict it and the people who say why have you got a problem with that bigot are always the same people who believed in the past that our societies needed to be pulled apart in another fashion and now they'd like to do it in this fashion so this what might be called i think accurately cultural marxism people groan and say oh here we go again but in reality it is the case isn't it that from the 20s on frankfurt school in the 30s you had gramski and so forth saying there's a problem in the overthrow of capitalism the working classes are not rising up yes they're always a letdown they're always a letdown they haven't done the job for us so we need to find a different way to achieve the same objectives and as to attack the cultural underpinnings of western society in particular i would have thought things like capitalism itself of course um also christianity in the churches and family families so the great loser out of a lot of this frankly i would say these culture wars are our children yeah you know we've deconstructed the family in so many ways and this further attacks the environment in which our kids grow up i've never quite understood how though the cultural marxists managed to so capture academia in the west and particularly it seems to me in the english-speaking countries oh that's yeah that's that's easy i mean first of all um academics can be i think fairly characterized as not among the bravest people in the world that once they get tenure they become very comfortable in a position they are this isn't always the case but they are to a considerable extent as long as they tick the right boxes and have the right views an unusual beast in nature and they have no predator um they are able to have a very comfortable position in which they can should express perhaps uncomfortable discoveries but the comfort of recent decades has become the comfort of espousing and following a basically culturally marxist view of the world um i the the literature the evidence of this is so overwhelming now particularly from america it has to be said and there are there are reasons within that why that's the case i mean look at the amount of money that is now that the people now run up to get an education in america uh it's happening in the uk as well but if you if you massively increase the number of people who who go to university and think they should go to university um you can't keep up a system that rewards people for having gone to those universities and you create a ponzi scheme which is what academia has to a great extent to become where social science departments grow and grow where the human resources departments grow and grow i can't remember the multiple now but it's only like three or four times more money is now spent in the american academy on the purely bureaucratic elements of it than even 20 years ago which means that young people in countries like america are running up massive debt in a ponzi scheme that cannot reward them because there aren't roles at the end of it for all of these people with the degrees they're given i think by the way there's a massive amount of resentment coming in the next few years from the people who realize they've been had i think this is one of the great dangers frankly for western society i agree with you uh but but but to go back to the origins of why academics might be in this position i mean let me put it another one this is one that make will make me enormously unpopular with some remaining friends in academia but it's also the case at a great extent this isn't where the bright people have gone in recent years tell me outside of specific sciences and competencies tell me a situation where in the last 20 years we would say this is a really big problem let's go to the universities and ask them for the answer when when in recent decades we've had massive issues have we been saying we must ask the professors what they think no we haven't for all sorts of reasons but one of them is they're not very good at giving us the answers anymore and and by the way the the place you'd go last for an answer would be the gender studies department of a west coast university you know let's go and see what they can tell us about the sexes oh there aren't sexes there's just 100 genders including two spirit people we just invented yesterday oh great they're useful this is a useful department thank goodness kids are getting into massive debt being lied to by these people um they've lost they've lost in large part the competence they had and i think that there's all sorts of reasons for that as i say among other things a massive expansion of that sector beyond where it should have gone well astonishing and one of the reasons it matters now is that such a high proportion of young people in the west go through university yeah and then they filter out into teaching our children into the media into all sorts of influential places now the boardrooms they've become centers of great wokeness yes in our country yes of course they have i mean the usb said the only small c conservatives you would find in university were generally in the economics department they would also always have marxists in the economics department but you would you would you'd often find that was where some conservatives were because the economics still needed conservative thought that's not the case so much anymore and it's certainly not the case in the humanities and the evidence and the what studies have been done show just the overwhelming preponderance of marxists self-identifying socialists and others you know i've often said in recent years and the only place you can really find open radical marxists after the cold war closes is in the university system although now we also have it in our political system so that's the development i have to say i'm still amazed at how willingly how readily how lazily people give up that much heralded sort of pursuit of evidence-based reasoning problem-solving that surely lies at the heart of western progress well um but i accept your thesis one way to argue it well one way of also thinking about this i think is the pursuit of truth has now got a massive blockade in its way and the blockade is me i so myself um so that you and i know this and we there are so many examples of it some of which i give in the book but don't go into that very difficult area why shouldn't i go into this very difficult area because it offends me now the obvious thing that the adults in the room do at that point is so so now we have become hostage to these people any people anyone who says don't go there it offends me and we step back and as i said like the other issues i mentioned earlier there's a good reason for that there's an advantage which is generally speaking in our societies we recognize that being nice to people is better than not being nice to people being polite not offending people is a good idea it's not been a view throughout human history and it's not globally at the moment but but in societies like australia broadly speaking we okay i'm sorry i offended you i'll try to avoid that um but if this means that there are whole areas we don't look into let me give an example quickly um the issue of child rearing child production parenthood um there are a whole set of very very painful issues within that almost unending number of painful issues and a lot of truths that need to be said and a lot of facts that need to be explored many things though we we know about we've been doing it for long enough as a species um however if somebody says if even one person says in a room that offends me we are likely to step back because we're treading on one of the most painful important things in the person's life so we're hostage to that and it means that you can very easily as a society once you say we're not going to talk about or explore difficult and painful things it's very easy society as a result to fall back and rely on lies or untruths and you now see the consequences of this i'm now 40. i see the consequences of it in my contemporaries who for instance were told at the outset of their careers you can have everything yeah that was an easy thing to tell people it was a nice thing to tell people is a very encouraging thing to tell people it was also a little bit untrue this is really important stuff i was talking to one of my neighbors at home in rural australia highly intelligent man very thoughtful man very pragmatic man and he said to me john you worry too much about this stuff people have got a lot of common sense but he's got three kids they're being educated in systems now where this madness has taken over my interpretation of your society correct me if i'm wrong this is a audacious thing to explain from australia and afterwards you can explain britain to me [Laughter] um but i was in australia last summer some before last night i was very sorry i did multiple city tour i was very struck by the fact that i thought that that i have relied um and i'm sure this happens the other way around i've relied in recent years on the assumption that your average australian retains a common sense that is perhaps absent from the average american these days uh not to mention perhaps the average bread that there was some um core of quite as far down the road is the way we would normally put it and while that may be true for many people i was very struck in city after city in australia and in new zealand that what i described in the madness of crowds was with attis yeah absolute heart in your country yeah that and i i was trying i've been trying to work out because i wrote a little bit of us about australia in the my previous book the strange death of europe as well as you know about the immigration question and specifically on the historical guilt issues and it seems to me among other things that i would love you to correct me on this but it seems to me among other things that australia has had a massive shift in its sense of itself it's your lifetime and that as a result it's become very vulnerable to this sort it has yeah i agree with that right and another man who'd agree with both of us was frank ferruti now he would not identify on the political spectrum where you and i might but he too would say australians still display a lot of common sense et cetera et cetera but i said to him do you think our universities have avoided the worst of this and he looked at me quick sharply and he said no i think you've fallen lazily into the worst yes of the british and americans yes but to come to the australian psych because there's something i want to draw out here you think of uh perhaps our most renowned sportsman certainly the one that i think i respect most personally long gone of course now donald bradman right unbelievable uh australian cricketer what was he known for his character and it was seen to epitomize what we thought mattered in character he was extraordinarily gracious in victory and humble in defeat other way round he was extraordinary gracious in defeat and humble in victory we admired him enormously he was a legend for that at what point in western culture did pride which is another word for self-centeredness eclipse humility as a premier value something to celebrate if you like well it comes down to the the same um axle shift as everything else which is broadly speaking did you think your society was a force for good or was it evil from the start since 1945 every western society has gone through this shift at some point usually for similar reasons and again the basis of it has some good things accounting for historical errors for instance by the way the oddity of this is that for instance all the countries that are made to feel worse at the moment are the places with the least reason to feel worse i mean we don't see massive self-interrogation in china no there's a reason there's a reason and there's a reason by the way which we should be proud of in our countries which is perhaps perhaps the free countries one of our freedoms is to beat up on ourselves yeah i agree sure but we have the capacity to self-examine and work our way to a better position right there's a large part of the thesis of your book but we've done it well but having almost arrived at the railway station suddenly we've decided we've made no progress at all we've gone backwards we're absolutely terrible and the trains just run off down the platform that's right the the new generation comes along with the with believing in many cases i mean having been lied to that societies like australia and britain are the most racist societies on earth or the most sexist societies on earth or homophobic or etc etc compared to which societies precisely in the world um so the staggering lack of geographical and historical context in our country i mean this is another this is another failing of the university system if the university system had merit it would it would be inculcating in young people among other things a sense of damn gratitude for starters just for starters um uh some sense of perspective on the world i mean i've been very lucky in my career i've traveled extremely widely across every continent in the world and one of the things i know everywhere i go is how lucky i've been how lucky i've been to be born in a society i've been born into at the time i was born here privileged even privileged and and it's such a hard thing to measure as you say in the book but yeah but um but as i say all of our societies at some point got shifted onto this idea that actually we weren't very good we weren't very virtuous that we'd done so much wrong and this is where we become susceptible enormously susceptible to anybody who claims to have a different way of doing things and who claims to have the answer for instance to everything let me just tease this out a little the loss of historical knowledge of background seems to me to be terrible i don't think you can work out where you are where you want to go if you can't establish where you've come from yes basic app reading if you like it seems to me now one of the great lessons i would have thought of history is it tonight to deny people freedom of conscience belief religion is to deny to deny them the most fundamental freedoms of all and again frank for rudy made this point he said the first freedom in a way in the west was freedom of conscience we stopped burning one another at the stake because it was barbaric it was not christian and it was also stupid today's minority may turn out to be tomorrow's majority you talk about that a bit that it appears that some people who have been pushing for rights having achieved them then turn the jackpot that they once yes we're on the receiving end around and attack others yes in fact you make uh there's something in here that really jumped out at me uh you said almost immediately after gay marriage became legal in germany acceptance of it was made a condition of citizenship yes in the state of uh baden wittenberg a condition of citizenship can i ask your staff where does that leave the left those figures and in free country they're right to believers who don't believe in marriage at all they suddenly have to say right we do actually sign up and we now believe in marriage and it's a new version but only for gays but that's absurd that is to deny everything that our own history's taught us see i would be one who say we ought to learn our history so much of it has given us the freedoms that we have but if you want to understand where we've gone wrong we can learn from the things we've gone wrong as well we're not prepared to even learn the things we got wrong or from the things that we got wrong yeah the things we got right well one of the reasons why the the the new metaphysics new religion i describe in this book is identifiable is because the people who follow it behave with all the zealotry that religious fanatics have behaved with in the past it's not enough that they believe something you have to believe it too um i wrote in the spectator recently about the uh it's a minor it's a it's a minor thing but uh there's a restaurant in america called chick-fil-a yes i saw that um chick-fil-a uh some of the people family it's a christian family business um pretty big china it's a big change third largest chain uh restaurant in america opened uh um for the first time in the uk uh in october and uh announced shortly afterwards that it's closing uh because of protests by local self-appointed gay activists uh because chick-fil-a in america the christian family found it gave donations about 10 years ago to a family church family oriented charities which included opposition to gay marriage and so on so forth so here's the thing with that like with the equinox gym controversies in the summer in the us is it's not enough that that these people choose not to eat their chicken nuggets at this place you mustn't either and they mustn't serve chicken nuggets and they must close well even if the family who run chick-fil-a are the most opposed to gay marriage ever i still think if some people want to eat their chicken nuggets they should have the damn right to do so but that that instinct is not there in the social justice warriors of our time it's not just that they don't want the thing they don't want you to do the thing i thought to have the right to do the thing because only by total decimation of their enemies can they win that isn't liberalism no in any interpretation of the term any interpretation and how does it fit with the insistence of gays in america for example but also we see this in australia that um you know the the baker issue the baking of the wedding cake oh no no you you cannot possibly exercise your conscience if a gay couple want a wedding cake you must provide it how does it fit with the right on the other side to close a business down because it has a different perspective how about going back to the courage issue maybe these people are all just incredibly cowardly and lazy maybe that's what's going on you see it it's quite easy to say i refuse to eat my chicken nuggets at that place in reading that's quite easy i mean i've spent all my life ducking eating chicken nuggets in reading i can keep doing it if i want but but it's if you think that's the main issue in that rights issue it means among other things you can avoid the harder ones well here's a harder one there's still dozens of countries in the world where it's illegal to be gay there are still around a dozen countries where you can be executed for being gay if you're a gay rights activist might and that be a place to start might and that yeah might not be one closer to the boat as it happens i know nobody's meant to say anything at all uh um praising of him but as it happens donald trump has said he wants to make this a priority actually he he is his administration is looking at trying to stop the countries which still make being gay illegal from doing so they going to tie it to aid and all sorts of other things that strikes me as being a very good laudatory gay rights move let's let's make let's try to make sure that there's nowhere in the world you get hanged or stoned for being gay it's also for many individuals a bit of a hard one why well it means you have to make a value judgment it means you have to say actually i think the way we do things in our society is better than the way they do in that society well that's cultural imperialism deep cultural imperialism who are you to say that they shouldn't shove the wall on the gays um and again much of the lazy cowardly social justice movements that pretend they're incredibly brave don't want to get into that run an awfully long way very fast hmm power seems to be at the heart of a lot of this new if i can put it this way anger uh this sort of desire to uproot everything why is it that we don't see the pursuit of power for the ugliness that it is i mean acton was surely right we should be wary of power it does corrupt an absolute power does tend towards absolute corruption we don't seem to value things like love harmony community turning the other cheek forgiveness they seem to be under ruthless attack as belonging to an era we despise which enjoyed a christian conception a consensus in terms of the way we viewed the world and our neighbor well one of the striking things about going to society is radically different from your own and why it's worth doing is because it can wipe you of some of your presumptions about what the natural state of mankind is yeah you know um a lot of people in countries like australia who think that for instance loving your neighbor is the natural default condition of people have an awful shock coming to them not just in their own countries where of course nobody can entirely live up to that very strenuous command but in all sorts of countries and societies around the world where people act and behave differently where the state of nature is always is is different um our society has put a premium or did put a premium in the past as you mentioned earlier the quicker example on magnanimity in victory for instance um humility and defeat or graciousness in defeat among other things these are not the natural defaults these are learned behaviors learned because there was a deeper undertow beneath them that told you that these things were worthwhile charity for instance is not the state of nature of mankind to be charitable let alone charitable to people you haven't even met and are very unlikely to meet these are learned behaviors taught behaviors from a very specific tradition that isn't to say that other traditions don't have elements with themselves they do they have versions of it but our societies today have become fixated in the post-christian era have become fixated on power as the primary dynamic and understanding mechanism for human society and my view is as i say in the part about foucault in this book i think this is a really deeply perverted way to look at society where we interpret interest groups and others as forever scurrying to achieve power and we entirely ignore what for most of us remain the more important drivers in our lives if you were to say to somebody what drives you if you went up the average person in melbourne said what drives you if they said power you'd step away slowly more likely they would say something along the lines of um love for my family friends they might have a wider group of people they express that towards community towns civic perhaps even nation um they wouldn't say power now the reason why we're bad at talking about this is among other things because it's a more embarrassing icky thing to talk about than power to purely look at power dynamics are the men powerful over the women are white people powerful over people of color and so on and so on and infinite is it slightly easier to do than to talk about the flip side of that which is love forgiveness charity and more and i think conservatives have been bad about talking about some of this as other people have conservatives in recent decades have to a great extent thought that the point of their philosophy is to talk about the marketplace and economics and leave the rest that's been a disaster been a disaster uh one thing that brought it home i i'm i'm reviewing a book at the moment in which he an economist has written about the collapse of lehman and when you actually his thesis is essentially that the abandonment of the classic virtues prudence integrity courage and so on and so forth was what led to that frightful mess in other words the abandonment of morality has disastrous economic outcomes and conservatives have by and large missed that as i think those who might have been classic liberals and uh small libertarians by and large have missed it as well and short-termism and they played right into the hands of those who dislike capitalism in the first place yes i mean well there's been i mean because capitalism has produced a better system than any other system we know of of course doesn't mean it doesn't have flaws within it and one of the flaws always has been um short-term it's why family businesses can often be so successful is because as you know the um if you were to raid the whole thing strip it present a false version of itself that you're going to suffer for it um there's a phenomenon i've often noticed of family businesses for instance ending up in the hands of outsiders who squeeze maximize profits because they want to run off quite shortly afterwards and having made their pile um a conservative approach to this small c conservative process among other things would say but this is a this is an immoral thing to do in itself because it's not your right to simply squeeze the value that's been accumulated by others run away with it and then allow it to collapse that's not a decent thing to do there by the way there are versions of this and i'm sure there are in australia there have been quite public versions of people who are now being shamed for that kind of behavior oh absolutely and it's very i think it's a i think it's a positive step uh people like philip green who uh asset stripped a major um high street chain here it's being exposed yeah but it's a terrible thing that it's happening and it's there's a sense in which it starts to wind back freedoms we had a commission of inquiry in the royal commission of inquiry into the banks and the financial sector in australia revealed some terrible behaviour to be fair a lot of people behave very decently and they get tired of the same brush but nonetheless there's a massive problem and the reaction is people say oh thank you we had the royal commission of inquiry now we can have 78 new sets of pieces of legislation more surveillance more monitoring greater fines and then we find that credit starts to become a problem because everybody becomes cautious so the problem in essence is that the bankers weren't asking themselves what they ought to do rather what can we get away with there is a um there's an additional problem we've put upon our shoulders which is there are i i'm sure the germans would have a term for this but there are there are categories of problem which we we don't address because the only people who've been trying to address them are people with the worst possible answers capitalism i think falls into this basket um uh the people who have been critiquing it the most for many years have made a lot of other people not want to critique it because those people who've been critiquing it all along have an answer and it's marxism yes yeah so we avoid that we avoid having the discussion because we simply don't want it's the same thing with the inequality discussion right i think which is that there is a there are so many discussions to have about inequality and actually there's been quite a lot of literature about them about that issue over the decades it's sort of been run through already uh it's nothing new that debate that we're going through but it's very striking to me that again the political rights tended to avoid the inequality debate why because the people who've been thinking about it have an answer it's marxism sure and we want to be absolutely sure if we have that conversation that they're not going to smuggle marxism in when we're not looking if i can go back though to this issue of the way in which we've actually completely turned on its head now the beliefs and values that underpinned western society i mean we really have i mean the christian model of relationship with your neighbor is established by the idea of christ dying on a cross not for his friends even but for his enemies you know turn the other cheek do under others you'd have them do under yourselves um and then i suppose the sort of the the sort of minimalist version of that at least do no harm out of milk but it's all gone we've actually reversed it all together in the in in the interests of the big me of selfism of radical autonomy that says i will do with my life and my body and my money and my time and my relationships what i choose we've actually inverted the worldview if you like that that drove our freedoms and i think for me as someone of christian belief the greatest question i mean i accept that people have absolutely the right to choose or not choose faith but the greatest check a question of all the greatest challenge for the secularists is on what basis will we establish a workable respect for others because no society of a democratic tradition can possibly survive i i believe it's impossible to survive if you can't find a basis a rational basis that's powerful enough to change people's behavior so that we break free i mean you make the point we're reverting to type progressives say we're moving endlessly to a better future but in reality as you say from looking at other societies as you travel the world we're losing if you like what we had and reverting rather than progressing well what's the single hardest command within christianity you can get almost everything of christianity from earlier or other sources you can get almost everything in christianity of jesus's teachings from the ancient greeks um [Music] a lot of the wisdom is very similar what is the thing that is totally revolutionary about what jesus says it's the commandment to love your enemies yes and that is a and demonstrated in christian belief by him actually dying for his enemy he was dying for them this is this is this is a world historical change of a command that demands a world historical change my own view of this is that it is possible in individuals on occasions with exceptional grace um and that it that it is almost impossible for most people most of the time but the commandment to to do that at the very least reigns in the worst of our nature that knowing how we should behave ideally means that we can step back from the worst of ourselves which we know and intuit this is not an easy thing to replicate without its foundational claim which is a foundational claim the truth claim made within christianity it's what i i quote in the strange death of europe a german uh uh jurist book bockenforder who posed this question in the 1960s can a society can a society the short version of his of his um challenges can a society continue in the same manner if the thing that gave the source to the society is itself now cut off and as i say in the strange death of europe possibly for a time when you're running on the the fumes still yeah of that implication um can it sustain forever no because if you don't if you don't believe in the driving force of it then once the people who did believe it have died out you're you're still going on a memory of it and then that dies out so this is a very big challenge and it's a challenge which i think the intersectionalists and the social justice warriors and so on have knowingly or otherwise recognized which is why they're trying to dig in a new metaphysics fast the metaphysics of lgbt women race etc and i can only say i am absolutely convinced that this is your book is right that cannot sustain a free functioning workable society it just isn't it's hopelessly inadequate to the task hopefully hopelessly inadequate and divisive and doesn't provide very much meaning um uh but so so here's here's a big here's a big challenge and i wish i could get more people to think about this i i given the chapter on forgiveness in the madness of crowds as you know a um a challenge which is we live in the most unforgiving era that history could ever have known because we live in an era in which action in the world as hannah aaron uh puts it in the essay of hers i quote unless it was in the early 50s action in the world was always our biggest problem as human beings because we we could never undo our actions and we always knew that it's uh it's one of the main catastrophes of being a human yes we don't know how our words will reverberate we don't know how our actions will reverberate and we can never undo them never what's the only mechanism hannah aaron said what's the only mechanism we ever came up with to try to deal with this terrible catastrophe it's forgiveness or something like forgiveness it's a mechanism to try to undo the undoable thing now nobody in our societies today spends any time thinking about forgiveness at the moment in history when acting in the world has never been more precarious where a young person can tweet and destroy their lives like that yeah whether it's modern burning of the burning of the state and it can happen cancel something they take their lives yeah okay uh completely wrong photo on facebook give examples in the book terrible pitiful examples of you know and i i that's why i sort of resent the the looking the looking to millennials and after as being snowflakes or you know i said they've got a they've got a very good reason to be worried and to be tip-toeing like never before yeah because say the wrong thing which everyone's only agreed is the wrong thing 24 hours ago and you're toast you're over you you may not ever get a job you're online forever for the you're stuck with your worst joke your worst photograph you only slip we thank goodness grew up in an era before this where we could make mistakes and they weren't with us forever so so there's two aspects of that really is forgiveness and forgetting and rabbi jonathan sachs observed that um with the abandonment of the main source of the concept of forgiveness and our insistence that we practice it to the best of our ability and that we look to it for relief when we know we've done the wrong thing in our society the judeo-christian influence with its loss it's washing out so that i said to him what happens when that's gone he said well you have to hope that people will forget but the age of social media makes that impossible so you have neither forgiveness nor the capacity to forget pretty devastating for young people it's a devastating situation i'm very sympathetic to young people growing up and they need a lot of help and advice and care and love i think to try to get through this and the adults have a disproportionate duty to help them i mean they always did but they especially now so the adults should be careful um about joining in the retributive era here's the other thing a bigger point if i may which is um [Music] we don't know exactly what we're doing maybe we never did but it's worth trying to think of answers your answer and the answer to a lot of people is we knew what we were doing till not long ago so why don't we as we're going through this unbelievable fog at the moment why don't we re-moor ourselves remor ourselves to our origins in religion faith that's that's one answer and by the way it's so striking that that answer is not given by the churches themselves i mean there's honorable exceptions with some honorable acceptance but by and large the the bishops certainly in the anglican communion where archbishop welby was once again this week discussing brexit uh um in a society where the archbishops talk about brexit an awful lot and not very much about the resurrection the church turns out to be one of the last places you'd go for christianity that's a terrible terrible let down by the churches who've decided in large part to jump on the bandwagons of the day to jump on green to jump on social justice issues and so on and the beliefs may you emasculate christianity if you make it captive to the reigning culture yes and uh and one of the reasons why people flee but the churches at any rate should and those who who follow the teachings of the churches should i think much more distinctly say there's a reason why we hold on to this still and there's a reason why we think it would be good for you as well now if all sorts of reasons i've written about in my last book i'm not in the position of being a believer myself although probably like various others i describe myself as a believer in belief and certainly a beneficiary of elements of it um i think that those who are in the position i am in on this also have a lot of work if not a lot more work to do and particularly for and with young people on this because we all have the same questions we always had as a species we try to work out what the hell it is we're doing here we don't really believe we're just a collection of atoms do we i don't think we do i think that there's something very instinctive in us i i one shorthand i say for this is um if you said to if you said to me well as a consumer douglas and i said what well i mean sure i mean i'm a consumer i consume things i buy things and consume them but but there's a bit more to it there's a bit more i sense yourself just because i sense there's more to myself than that as you do as we all do yeah and that's why we don't deliver that we think we're a collection of atoms right um we don't we don't live as if we're merely the thing we have that we are in it there's a there's a very deep sense in which ourselves know something about ourselves we find it extremely hard to communicate but we know it and this instinct is to the generation growing up now in the west this instinct is only being spoken to by people saying okay there's dearth of meaning but you can find it you can find it in endless retributive wars for justice issues on small and smaller minority points so you will find meaning in the world by insisting that the big bearded guy with a penis can win the women's weightlifting competition or the people that say otherwise are bigoted go for it guys now at the end of this process there is a presumption that there was a presentation that somehow we get to utopia you know that within our lifetimes utopia is graspable and it looks like total equality for everyone all the time and even if we got there and i would submit that we're never going to we never could things can be better but they're never going to get there even if we did what do we do then we're still stuck with the same questions about ourselves and for ourselves and i have some answers to that some suggestions for that um which largely rely on suggesting to people that we should live the lives we recognize to be good lives until yesterday and that lives of meaning can be found in the 21st century not with great ease [Music] with significant challenge with an awful lot of work a lot of commitment but they can be achieved and that deep meaning can still be found but the first thing people need to do is to realize that it cannot be found in the things that are being offered and so in a way what i've tried to do with the madness of crowds is to say i'm going to take apart this thing you're being offered to show you why it isn't going to work and i'm doing that because i want to then say do something better with your lives what is better almost anything other than this but get off this get off this fast don't waste a minute more of your life on this on working out where you are in a hierarchy on working out when you have a right to speak or think or how privileged you are or how privileged you are compared to the person beside you or the person to your left or your right or in front of you and where you're allowed to speak and where you're allowed to think in this world don't spend a minute longer doing this game this unwinnable horrible game because we live in an era in history where we could do so much we have access to information that we never dreamt of when we were growing up i can i can get to the source of a any book with a click of a finger press of a button we can save so much time we can get access to so much if you're a smart person anywhere in the world in the developing world or the developed world and you have access to youtube and to google you can do miracles that your ancestors collectively could never have done so why spend our time doing the retribution privilege game why not work out what we should be doing and start doing it well douglas i don't think you could finish on a more important note i think the one thing i would say as someone who admires your work enormously and thinks that you've provided an invaluable service with this book you've given us a mirror which we look into it shows us just how ugly our state is and surely any thinking person can only respond by saying i need to rethink is to encourage you to use that very powerful mind you've been blessed with i see it as a gift to all of us to keep teasing out those answers for me personally uh who has you know if you like in over my lifetime come to a profound belief that the resurrection was real uh i have to say that i think we need something extraordinarily powerful to change ourselves in other words we can only be renewed by the transforming of our minds and that is no small thing but thank you so much for the way in which you tell us so much about ourselves and challenges so deeply it's it's admirable and i wish you all the very best with it it's a pleasure [Music] you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 285,998

Keywords: Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, Identity Politics, John Anderson, LGBT, Feminism, Racism, Western Civilisation, Freedoms, Conservative, Culture Wars, SJW, Social justice warriors, Wokeism, Forgiveness

Id: qYaYk09kEDs

Length: 69min 40sec (4180 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020