The Subversive Power of the Sexual Revolution with Hamza Yusuf & Carl Trueman

[Music] Dr Truman I think I'd like to start with you because you didn't get into the summary of your book but I want to give people a little bit of a um trajectory you sort of trace the intellectual genealogy if you will of the sexual Revolution really and the story of and and you started that with the influential 18th century philosopher rouso who thought that most of our our most natural and perhaps moral self results when we act outwardly in accordance with our inner feelings in our inner um pristine nature and he I believe he is the one who coin the term noble savage yeah um my question is why did you choose rouso as the beginning of the sexual Revolution story and why do you think people in why you think Europe in particular was a cauldron or the Cradle of this uh these ideas to emerge yeah was very good questions as to the first the the I don't want to sound too much like a geeky historian uh the question of where you begin any historical narrative is always a vexed one because there's always somebody going to review your book and say well why didn't you start it the day before there was something happening the day before that and I've had some interesting correspondence with people emailing me and saying why didn't you start with deart why didn't you start with the Reformation why didn't you start with late medieval uh philosophy uh one lady emailed me and said what why didn't you start with Eve in the Garden of Eden uh and to which my answer is well the book had got to be less than 100,000 pages long I I I I had to start somewhere I chose rouso because I felt he was very representative of a particular moment that in the 18th century in both religious and relatively irreligious circles you have this wrestling with you know where is authority to be found and you you ask a very pertinent question you know why does uh uh what is it about Europe and I think one would have to say it's the reformation and it's the the invention of the printing press lead to a tremendous disruption of traditional external Authority structures which leads to several hundred years of philosophically wrestling with well where is authority to be found we see this perhaps most dramatically in deart you know of what can I be certain where where can I find that uh that place where I can stand and be certain in Christianity at the very same time that rouso is uh coming up with his idea of what we now call expressive individualism this granting of authority the feelings Jonathan Edwards the New England Puritan is writing a famous work the religious affections where from a very Christian Perspective he's wrestling with precisely the same problem what Authority do we grant our inner feelings given the problematic nature of external Authority at this point so so I I find rouso to be a very a brilliant representative and articulator of of that position and also he's been very influential because his theories about education really underg a lot of modern theories of Education again I'm not familiar with the the Islamic community but certainly in the broader generic Protestant American kind of world child centered learning is has proved very important and that kind of tracks back to rouso where the idea of education is not the Aristotelian idea that you you take hold of a a little Savage who's got all the right instincts but they need to be sort of bent and shaped to making them into a civilized member of society but the idea that actually the child is fundamentally sound and the school is simply there to allow them to express that soundness uh and that I think is where Russo you can trace a definite I would say institutional philosophical influence that's been very profound in the West on that note sh I'd like to ask you about these ideas certainly influence Muslims today sure but especially in the west but do you believe that the Islamic tradition is susceptable to the ideas that animate the modern [Music] self uh just a little um addition to that about rouso rouso who really is one of the main uh I think voices that there there are many I mean the first one was in the garden but there are many but what's interesting is he wrote this um treaties on education on how to raise a child and yet he abandoned all five of his children who ended up in uh in terrible conditions in France yeah and Vol was the one actually who outed him because he's telling everybody how to raise their kids and he abandoned his own kids infanticide in practice exactly yeah and and so it's very interesting because that seems to be a lot of these people these theorists you know Marx is another one I mean people forget you know his children committed suicide uh Freud's uh daughter also committed suicide I mean there's a lot of suicide around these people which is very fascinating uh who have all of these ways of telling us how we should do things that uh don't come from either Revelation or reason but come from appetite so it's just it's quite interesting that that seems to be one of the uh the consequences in terms I think Muslims are as susceptible as anybody else if if they're far from their religious tradition if once they lose the grounding of their religious tradition they're open to to everything and uh sophistry is is obviously very powerful it's it's one over many uh societies and cultures for periods of time and and the the people that can undermine sophistical reasoning usually have to be very well trained and and and they have to be also public they have to be out there um you know hence people I think like um Dr Truman you know interesting name too true man um you know is is out there they speaking a truth that needs to be spoken and a lot of people you know I know people that are gain death threats you know literally for just having an opinion about something that I think all of us should think deeply about given the impact that it's having on us so I I do I I'm very concerned about the Muslim Community and I do see Muslims um I think uh eming a lot of these ideas and sometimes without really even realizing it you know I mean I I increasingly we're seeing Muslims taking as imams people like Michel Fuko and Jac Dera and and uh yeah other people why do you think and one more question about that why do you think the Islamic tradition never had a rouso didn't produce that kind of character I mean you were talking about his private life as well but just I'm curious what you think about that why why they didn't produce somebody like that I think by the time people like that showed up the Muslims were pretty deified right this is the 18th century yeah so I think but I also think to be fair to to the Muslims as well um Islam is such a theocentric um tradition and and it it has survived well into the 21st century the theocentric of the Muslims um so I I think that there there there were a lot of antibodies to to some of these ideas but they did come in I mean there were intellectuals that were reading um these ideas I mean certainly in the in the 19th century you start seeing this the influence of European thought on some of the scholars like um uh Muhammad Abdu I mean Muhammad Abdu identified himself as he wanted to be the Luther of uh of the of the Islamic community Dr Truman I have one more thing about the rouso then you also go after that to the romantics the romanticism and The Poets yeah you know you have um William wardsworth and Shelly and William Blake and then you have a uh you said something which really struck struck me you said well while we you were talking about um these poet he said while he would not he would no doubt have wretched a de thought William wsw stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian yes just draw me the true line from World's word to Kardashians what is that yeah just walk through walk us through that connection yes a few people took objections to that line actually fell I was really too hard on Words withth and I I think in retrospect I probably was it was it was a bit of rhetoric to catch the the imagination but I think there is a connection in that uh what you get with the romantics with this this emphasis upon the inself and being able to tune the emotions and give expression outwardly to the emotions really does tie in ultimately with the idea that the authentic human being is the one who presents outwardly as they feel themselves to be inwardly now the difference between say a Hugh hefer well the numerous differences between a Hugh hefer and a William Wordsworth one of them I think is that Wordsworth would certainly have regarded human nature as having a moral shape and a structure so for him it wasn't simply a case of letting it all hang out he would have had a definite vision of what what a civilized or maybe civilized the wrong word but what a a morally attuned person would be uh and even rouso would have been like that I mean I think we we all understand that uh morality and ethics have what one might call an effective or even an aesthetic component in that you know if we walk out uh of the meeting tonight and we see somebody me mugged on the other side of the street and we don't feel something we have to Google is is that a good thing or a bad thing what should I do I think we'd say that that that person who has to do that is is morally inadequate in some way but woodsworth is and even Rous correct that morality has to have a an effective grounding as well what happens I think is the say the gap between woodsworth and and Hefner is that notion of any kind of moral structure disappears so all you end end up with a feelings completely detached from any kind of moral thology or moral structure and so yeah and that but did Russo or The Poets realize what they were doing or what they were unleashing in a way is that what you're I I think if you some Romantics I think are more radical than others Shelly is definitely a sexual revolutionary in a way that I don't think woodsworth is a sexual revolutionary I think with with Wordsworth he I hope I'm not misrepresenting but I think there's almost a kind of pantheistic view of the world where the world itself has a kind of divine structure and conforming myself to that which happens to correlate precisely with who I should be in the first place will lead to a moral Society so I don't think the Romantics consciously trying to or not all of them consciously trying to bring about a sexual Revolution Shelly I think is different William Blake is different but Wordsworth and coid no sh any thoughts about that the poets The Romantics and and well I mean you know they follow the metaphysical poets right so it's it's a move into sentiment from from from uh some higher order thinking right so um yeah I mean there's there's very interesting Evolutions that you can see and literature certainly plays a major role I mean the by the end of the 19th century you have the ARs Gracia artist which becomes you know a uh a motto for one of the major Hollywood Studios MGM MGM with the the roaring lion which is taken out of uh you know the devil is like a roaring lion out of the New Testament so so um and Oscar wild was obviously at the heart of that movement which was prior to that it was art for God's Sak MH you know there was a higher purpose to Art and so then it becomes Art For Art's Sake and um once you remove God from art really art dissipates in any serious way but I think the idea of moral sentiment which becomes increasingly important with people like by the time Adam Smith is writing I mean that's how he's looking at and it and and and they see morality as feelings more than uh as as as a a habitus of the Soul that's acquired over effort you know it's that what we don't like uh is uh what we don't uh what we like is good and what we don't like is is bad and and it it it becomes subjectivity that we're looking morality becomes something that uh is experienced in the interior of of the individual as opposed to something that has an objective reality that's identifiable yeah so and that's so key I think to the transformation that's taking place uh I remember around about 2014 I was teaching at a seminary and I had students asking me you know can you give us good arguments against gay marriage and my answer I give you numerous good arguments against gay marriage but none of them will work because most of the people who are now Pro gay marriage have not come to that position because of an argument they've come because they've seen a movie or a sitcom their emotions have been transformed and attuned by the products of culture to which they've been exposed and that's where I think again as we look at the rising generation of young people we need to realize we can't necessarily argue them to hold the same positions because they've not been argued out of those positions it's other things in play that have shaped their their moral intuitions for one for better ter I'd like to on that point you just said something else you early in your book you talk about um the social imaginary and I'm curious because most people as you said don't read all these thinkers haven't read the books and haven't but they still have emed yeah the ideas yeah so talk about what that imaginary is and how does that those thoughts and those thinkers those ideas filter down to everybody in the culture yeah well the social imagin is a term used by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor to talk about how cultures operate really and he's making this point that uh you know people don't read Marx they don't read nature they don't read Freud and they don't have to have read them to actually have intuitions that operate along Marxist Freudian nichan kind of lines because the social imagin really refers to the way we we actually live uh we live in ways that that shape our instinctive relationship to the world I mean I could use a very trivial example I I have a colleague from Grove City here tonight actually teaches in the in the stem section of the uh the college and he will confirm that I'm utterly ignorant about science uh but you know when I leave the room tonight I'm going to leave through the door at the back I don't know how atoms work I don't how door I don't know the scientific argument for why doors are good for leaving rooms rather than walls it's just intui ly that's my experience and it makes sense when you transfer that into other Realms of human existence uh morality for example very few of us have read you know profound Toms on morality that have persuaded us that stealing's wrong it's just Mom and Dad brought us up that way our intuitions have been shaped in a way that we just instinctively know that that stealing is wrong we may not be able to give a watertight argument as to why but we just know and Taylor's trying to get at the fact that in some ways one might say the most important beliefs we have about life the universe morality Etc are intuitive beliefs not often reinforced by arguments but reinforced Often by by social be behaviors so in the Christian church for example we we don't just have a preaching on Sunday we'll also have these things called sacraments we'll have baptism we'll have the Lord's Supper we have rituals that aren't argument but have an effect on the emotions and therefore over time cumulatively transform the way we think about the world and that I think is very important when we think about the sexual Revolution to realize this is not the result that somebody came up with a great argument it's for example hey somebody developed the pill and once you have the pill you can start thinking that sex is Recreation uh you can start acting that way and getting away with it it's not an argument it's an intuition shaped by a technology that has fashioned a particular kind of behavior is that the zit G is that what that is well you know it's very interesting that um you know I I don't think trickle down economics is real but but I do believe in trickle down philosophy like philosophy really does trickle down and and so the ideas of philosophers of one generation become a common common coin of of the succeeding Generations if they're if they're powerful enough um and if if they take hold amongst the intellectuals of of that community so but you can see if if if you just look at certain aspects of just human beings um there has always been these type of phenomena in in in the human I mean we have the story of Sodom and Gomorrah um we we we also know for instance I mean uh a really interesting uh narrative is rabes who who wrote this famous book about these two giants the father and the son uh gargantuan and pentag and in there he has this Abby that Gargantua builts called The Abbey of thma and he inverts all of these ideas he was actually at one time a Franciscan uh Monk and there's a whole debate about if he was anti-christian or if he was a Christian humanist but um I'll leave that to The rabian Experts um but the Abby of thala written over it as you go in is uh do what thou Wilt and he inverts the the traditional Oaths uh you know these these um covenants that the the monks take of Chasity poverty and obedience and he Tums them to richness and then uh uh Noble relations and um and freedom Lous basically saying that the reason that people sin is because there are laws so if we get rid of these laws there's nothing to rebel against and that human beings will be good because it's their nature to be good if they're not told what to do so that moves into some really interesting people in in the uh 18th century so you get these people like um Lord Wharton who starts the hellfire club and uh these are people that literally get together in England they have prostitutes dress up as nuns they they uh they come in mock costumes of biblical characters and they have a a raish good time in their clubs and that and that created these gentleman clubs uh where where they would go and do outrageous things um so the elite were rebelling but they kind of saw that it was important to keep the masses believing these things like for instance uh in in in Russ in Russia the a lot of the aristocrats were atheists um but they spoke in French when they wanted to talk about this because they didn't want their servants to hear these things because they understood that if these ideas get out there then people are going to Rebel well once you kind of get rid of all the aristocracy and then you create these democracies you don't really need those rules anymore in the same way you don't need to keep the masses in the same type and so you have um you have this really interesting movement called Hinton ISM which is um James Hinton who was a a preacher in London and he ended up uh kind of again having as his theme do what thou Wilt love and do what thou Wilt and so uh from him there's a character you know Alistair Crowley who then um re revives the Rab's um Abby of thalma so he was a bisexual and wanted to liberate people from the tyranny of these social constraints because he thought that they should be free and in fact he said that the time is coming when people will be free of the tyranny of being a male or a female where they could actually Cho and he wrote this in 1905 so this this has been going on for a while there was there's another character havlock Ellis who uh again wrote a six volume work on the psychology of of sex um he was a bisexual also and uh his wife was an open bisexual uh lease and and actually promoted like open marriage and these things well one of his acolytes was U Margaret Sanger who starts um Planned Parenthood because he was a big promoter of birth control and birth control is Central to this whole transformation without birth control a lot of these things just would not have happened so birth control was very very important so so you can see these these lineages but you can even go further back in the United States we had a very interesting lady who came from from Scotland um Fanny Wright um Francis W right who was a freethinker amazing lady um she was an abolitionist she was a socialist so she started this commune in Te in Tennessee called nishoba where there was free sex no marriage she she was invited to by Thomas Jefferson you know to Mon it's just amazing stuff so you know the elites have always kind of had these interests and there were Fanny Wright um societies All Over America she toured all over and then you have this very interesting character Magnus hersfeld who uh was also a homosexual heavily influenced by um uh Freud and by uh havlock Ellis very interested in that but he went he became a physician and then he basically coined the term transvesti and uh wrote a lot about homosexuality he was homosexual himself and performed the first transgender operation in 1927 um and argued you know that we need to allow people to be themselves he was the first person also to make the argument that homosexuality was something you were born with because he differed with Freud uh who believed it was actually usually some uh unhealthy uh attachment to the mother I think was his failure of edus complex yeah so I want to get back to um this idea of Nature and Human Nature um and Sh I wanted to ask you I mean this idea that Dr Truman just explained about the inner feelings being considered authentic that that's my authentic self what I feel inside right and this comes from Russo's idea of of human you know nature but Russo also departed from the Christian idea of the original sin he believed that people are born moral right and that Society corrupts them you know society's fault not my fault um but in Islam the prophetic tradition we have teaches that every child is born in Conformity with n with the nature and the idea of the fitra so I'd like you to address this notion that you know on the face of it it seems like that aligns with Russo's idea of a moral you know being people are born with the moral nature and yet it's not so how do we understand the fetra in terms of the Russo and the tradition of of the original sin do you want to come on on that first I me I'll uh I simply affirm that what you're saying is correct about rouso you in an odd way I think nich and Freud are closer to what Christians believe about NE and Freud don't believe it's Fallen human nature but in Christianity while we believe that you know Adam and evea created pristine the fall corrupts and the all the progeny of Adam and Eve are are corrupted after that which functionally actually makes Freud and N More insightful from my perspective because they realize human beings as we're now constituted are have a dark and destructive tilt and drive I mean I think for Muslims you get into debates about um about natural law um there is a soft natural law I don't think it's a hard natural law but there is a soft natural law in our tradition um which recognizes you we have this tradition of which has three uh elements um so which is basically the aesthetic aspect of Ethics you know that good deeds are beautiful bad Deeds are ugly and that the intellect has access to to certain certain elements within that like for instance the intellect it's rational to understand that knowledge is good and that um ignorance is bad but in relation to judgment which relates to punishments and to reward uh that's God's domain only so the the dominant opinion amongst the Muslims is that that is the realm of God and that has to be introduced and that's where the messengers come the prophets come to inform people what's what's expected and what they will be rewarded and punished for and so the idea is if that Warner does not come then they're not held accountable in terms of rewards and punishments um so but the F this idea of the principial nature of the human being is that human beings are born with an inclination to truth but there's default settings that they have to to deal with and and so there's an inclination um you know everybody it's a fallen nature we I mean we don't have the augustinian original sin concept but we do understand that we're in a fallen state that we were in uh uh Eden and and now we're in the this and we have this proclivity which the prophet s wasam said all of you are sinners and when they complained about Sin the prophet Sall alaihi wasallam said if you didn't sin God would create people that would sin and because one of his names is tab the one who who turns to the repentant m so in Allah is is expressing his uh God's nature in that so so that we we do and he said also that if you didn't sin the Angels would be shaking your hands on the streets so so it's part of human nature and I think the worst thing about what's happened in our civilization and what's happening globally you know Christ said to the uh to the woman who was being condemned by uh people um for having committed uh adultery you know once he says to whoever hasn't sinned let him cast the first stone um when they all leave he looks at her and asks where her accuses are and then he tells her you know then I I don't have anything go and sin no more what the Antichrist says is go there is no more sin so it's an inversion of of that truth which is that we have to repent but if there's no sin there's nothing to repent from and that's why one of my teachers told me whatever you tell the Muslims uh in in just tell them to make sure never to permit the impermissible because once they do that they close the door of repentance and that door is always open as long as you haven't closed it I ask about that because what you just touched upon it seems the world we're living in right right now social um trends that are going on these ideas of the sexual Revolution everything seems to be pulling us away from that principial nature I mean that's hard to how you know that how do we retain that well we it the the prophet s described holding on to religion in the latter days like holding on to a hot coal in your hand it's how how difficult it would be and and the current um cultural phenomena that we're seeing is is so harmful to to the young people to the children I mean they're growing up being indoctrinated into things that um are just you know they're they're robbing them of their innocence and and and and we have an obligation as parents to try to keep them in that innocence they'll come out of the garden of childhood but we should do as parents our best at keeping them in that Garden but there's something that you know a lot of the people that promote certain uh uh as aspects of of what Dr Truman talks about in this book you know they have this idea of the dominance of Innocence that they they the reason they have drag queen hour is because they want to uh enculturate these young children into the idea that this is normal because they believe that if you if you leave them in a heteronormative culture and that's the word they use if you leave them in a culture that where heterosexuality is the norm then they're going to see that as abnormal so you have to get them as early as possible to break down that barrier so that then they normalize it you know the Arabs have a saying you know the stable boy gets used to the stench you know so if you you know if you can get them early and this is a a a Jesuit principle you know if we have them before seven we'll have them on our deathbeds I mean getting getting the children children as early as possible is going to ensure that the uh what you're teaching them has a lasting power Dr Truman I want to get to the um the current cultural moment if you will and and really the heart of your book which is the sexual Revolution as it exists now where people are defining themselves purely by as you mentioned in your talk earlier by their sexual desires and what they prefer and I'm not talking about the what the American comedian called the alphabet people the lgbtq I A plus whatever you in your book you unpacked that a little bit by showing some contradictions within that movement if you can call it that um gays and lesbians still believe in a binary yeah men and women right but queer people and transgender people don't accept that feminists you know um don't accept a male transitioning to becom a female as a woman yeah um how where do you think this is headed in terms of do you think it'll actually Splinter because of those things or do you think it'll actually you know come apart because of those differences eventually I think it is splintering before our eyes you you if you look at feminism you know feminism is hopelessly divided over the issue of transgenderism the status of men claiming to be women women claiming to be men because of the the debate over the normativity of female physiology uh so I I where I think it's heading is this I think that we will ultimately see the Triumph of what I call quom that politically this is being this will be pushing towards queerness as as the category which in some ways is an empty category it's it's the category that negates all other categories is fluid yeah I mean I use in the in the book to illustrate this I pull this anecdote from a major feminist uh book actually and it's the story it's it's a it's a personal testimony of a woman who's been living with another woman in a lesbian relationship for maybe a decade and then she finds that her lesbian partner is now convinced that um the partner is convinced that she is a man trapped in a woman's body so she transitions to being a man and that leaves the original woman with this real dilemma and what's going is she now straight because she's sexually attracted to a woman who's become a man uh uh and and if if she is then she loses her own identity as a lesbian uh on the other hand if she maintains her identity as a lesbian she denies the identity of her partner and at the end of this anecdote she says and but but ultimately I've become very happy in my queer identity which is kind of any anything goes yeah it's the category that denies all categories so I think politically what we will see is if things continue on the track they're going down uh the T and the Q will ultimately consume all of the others I mean it's not a particularly useful piece of information for most of the people in this room but the number of lesbian bars in the United States now is very small I think it could be single figures uh now it's possible that lesbian bars have more or less disappeared because hey it's safer for lesbians to go into ordinary bars now that's one possible explanation a more persuasive explanation is that that lesbianism itself is in a kind of Crisis because of transgenderism and if you don't know what a woman is then you can't really know what a lesbian is uh so I I I think that what we will witness is the uh the Triumph of the Q in the end queerness and just as a as an aside you people say the lgbtq I a the inclusion of the i in that uh alphabet is entirely mischievous because intersex is a medical condition that is a medical condition and it can be treated it's not a it's not a question of direction of sexual desire as the L the G and the B are nor is a question of psychological conviction about identity which runs contrary to the body it's actually a medical condition and one of the ways of of uh obscuring the issue is to fold in the the eye with the rest and it's a highly mischievous move I think and one that really needs to be called out with more regularity than than it is at the moment and don't forget the plus the plus because that I think so many letters are being added yeah it's just it's so many letters were being added yeah yeah you've seen the pride flag as well you know new color each year the pride flag is modified if you use last year's pride flag man you're a right-wing reactionary you know it's uh very Through the Looking Glass I can say um yeah sh you you know the last piece you wrote for renov and if you and if you haven't read it you should really read read it um was titled the cultural Devolution and you talked about victimhood culture but one of the points you made relates to what we're talking about here you talked about the you know um the normative Center being displaced marginalized right yeah the marginal the peripherals are kind of become well we have this let talk about that a little bit I mean we have this concept of and and so this exists within Christianity also this idea of the inversion of realities and it's something that the devil is noted for is is to invert things and so you centralize the marginal and you marginalize the the central I mean one of the key uh aspects of critical theory is to do that it's to flip things um it's to foreground the background you to and and in some ways it can be a useful exercise sometimes because you see things that you hadn't noticed before and and that's why you know there is some truth but um you know if if you if you want to get at a lot of the um Madness so to speak of of what's happening because a lot of people are feeling especially those who grew up in a world that had some level of commit commitment to rationalism like chumsky is a good example of somebody who despite whatever political positions he has he still has a commitment to rationalism like he he believes in reason as a concept um this is being lost and I and there is a a person who I think is really important um it's when the Tome arrived I almost pulled a muscle lifting it but um it's a book that a man who he was an Oxford professor of social anthropology JD Unwin and he wrote a book called sex and culture and in that book he he actually studied 86 societies and he determined that the Creative Energy of a society becomes completely dissipated once it unleashes sexuality and so he said that if and he identifies prenuptual and postnuptial continents he said the most important was prenuptual continents that when young people begin to explore sexuality before marriage it completely dissipates the energies of of the society and he saw that within three generations and he' identified a generation as 33 years he saw within three generations uh the so society would have lost monogamy um religion and rational thinking and he said he did not find any exceptions to that in all and this is not a Christian he he said I have no moral judgment I this is he he was a a social Anthropologist so we are well into the second generation because he he identified the first generation which would be the 60s when when these ideas were abandoned and a lot people don't realize this but you know a lot of these cultural events that happened in the 60s were already indicating some of these things if you if you look for instance you know at the Beatles The Beatles have Alistar Crawley on the Sergeant Pepper lonely hearts c as one of their influences he was actually in a BBC um poll was 73 out of the 100 most influential British people in all of history um I I do want to um talk about the the current public disc course has taken place about you know the sexual identities um and one of the things sh that I I want to ask you about this is about this idea of liberalism itself you know people have been arguing Believers or even some secular people who are pushing back are framing this as a issue of freedom of speech for us you know or religious freedom but that still those are all liberalism Notions and ideas from liberalism and the question really I'm thinking about here is that that's the political philosophy liberalism that you know produced what we actually facing that's where this came from and so the idea that do you believe that liberal values you know and making alliances with secular segments of society who are in agreement with us is that part of the solution or is that actually part of the problem you know how do we use those terms to to actually fix it because liberalism can't fix itself in many ways I'm just curious about your thoughts on that well uh there's a an article that was written 1951 ARL coloy who was a a very interesting called the three writers of the apocalypse and he actually identified a kind of totalitarianism and three fascism communism but the third he said was the one that nobody saw it coming which was what he called Progressive liberalism the seeds of it were there you know and I mentioned that to uh to um very very esteemed uh Professor from Princeton and and he said well you know they didn't produce you know the pilgrims and the Nazis and this and I said not yet like we haven't seen where this is going so I I think without a a religious tradition I mean it's very interesting Benjamin Rush who was who was I think he's my favorite of all the founding fathers yeah but Benjamin Rush said that the system of government that we have is predicated on a religious belief MH and he said even if uh the Americans take muhammadanism as their code it would still work but without it it won't and and I I really think that they understood that that you cannot ground you can have a secular person who is moral but but I would argue that their morality is the remnants of the of the Christian Capital that they're they're living on and and uh but nonetheless I do believe there are very moral secular people um but you can't ground Morality In secularism it it will always be positivistic it will always be simply the arbitrary nature of the law and once you have that then it's you're in the fotan world of just it's power that will determine um what's right and what's wrong and right now um the religious people are very powerless and and uh and these materialists are are you know they they have uh their voice now and and there's a little bit of a payback I think you know I mean I I think looking back and looking at the repression and oppression uh throughout history I think there is a kind of how does it feel you yeah it's interesting Philip Reef that I deal with in the in the larger book uh uh Freudian sociologist but makes a point somewhere that that Western Society at the moment is in a unique position in that it now it's faced with having to justify itself on the basis of itself and he observes that's that's never been successfully done in history typically Society have always looked beyond themselves to something Transcendent uh in order to organize some sacred order in order to organize their social order and I think that I mean that I think kind of summarizes what you just said shik humza and also I think one of the the symptoms of this is that and I say this to students in class that you'll see uh less and less confidence in in Democratic process and more and more of the big questions in society being determined by either executive order or by Supreme Court that the the idea of a common consensus that one can achieve among the people disappears and everything defaults to the kind of fuli and power PL how many seats can we get on the Supreme Court will our man in the White House sign an executive order uh so I think we see all the signs around us of a democratic process it's it's not irredeemable I some people say it's like living in viar Germany I think viar Germany was very different to the United States today no history of strong Democratic institutions it had just lost a World War no real strong history of national identity I think America is in a much better position than that but we are seeing symptoms emerging that shows that at least at this point in time uh the social order is becoming very equivocal right we have nothing Beyond it to ground it I mean I don't think all the early founding fathers were Orthodox Christians but they had a sort of vague belief in God and the moral shape of the universe that sort of organized things for them a well I think they understood I mean even Hume you know arguably would would have you know would have said you really don't want the masses to become atheists yeah I mean they they the elite always understood the social utility of religion and in fact that's a marxian argument against it right is that it's it's basically to control people which doesn't explain why they all the great world religions arose in The Crucible of persecution right you know so they they weren't in power yeah um yeah so so yeah I think um the hyper what what uh Gregory calls the hyper pluralism which is happening I think is a very dangerous thing because I think you do you you know religio this idea of the mill of something that holds and binds people together um 90% of people identified with Christianity only a few decades ago in the United States now it's at 64% and there and and this is JD unwin's argument that that religion goes you know and so you know the hypers sexualization of our of our culture and civilization what some call you know the pornification of America is is a very dangerous sign because uh one of the things that uh Dorothy seers argues is that when people lose religion they often replace it with this kind of dionysian uh you know the baconalia of of sexual orgiastic uh expression but the danger of that is that it ends up what anwin said that you're going You're Society cannot sustain itself and and there's a very interesting because the the the Latin term for for um lust was luxuria which is a society that is surfed it it it's so satiated that it begins to explore um you know lust as and and it gets darker and darker as it moves along because it needs a higher level of stimulus but those daughters that come out of luxuria are are very terrifying because self-love there's eight Daughters of lust you know self-love is is is is one of them hatred of God you know to that you begin to hate God for depriving you of those Pleasures right and then inconstancy distraction become which is also one of in Rab's Abby of thma distraction was one of his three virtues you know so that in inconstancy and and thoughtlessness you know what we call and then um the abhorrence of of uh of the afterlife you know but with despair there's a despair that goes with it because one of the reasons that you can constrain yourself sexually is hope for uh achieving a greater glory you know so but once you lose that hope you have the despair you know so so um and and then a kind of uh rashness and finally love of the world so these are these are the daughters that result from uh somebody giving complete completely into incontinence which isn't even a word anymore like it's used in medicine for somebody that can't hold their urine or feces but it used to be a a very important moral term uh in our culture I want to um as we wind down here I want to ask about you know how do all of us in this room presumably and people who are you know um believe in biological sex and the binary uh um one of the arguments we always face in the Public Square is um you know you need to have some compassion these are people experiencing gender dysphoria and um this is who they really believe they are there should be some sympathy for them some recognition of their wanting to assert themselves or I'd like to have both of you you put on your pastor or your shik hat on in this case and and tell us what where's the line between compassion and acceptance where do you draw that line it's an interesting question and it to some extent uh when I was teaching at Seminary students would say to me you know Professor what would you do in this situation my answer was always well every situation is unique so it's very different difficult to provide a one size for its all but I think in a Christian context if I was faced with a a young man as I have been struggling with say gender dysphoria first thing I would want to do strategically pastorally is is get him to tell me how it started why he thinks that way how does it present itself I'd want first of all him to know that I cared for him as a person uh secondly I I think I would want to you and again make this General point I don't think any any decent human being desires to see somebody struggling with gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction suffering I mean it's not that the solutions we propose are designed to hurt these people uh we actually want to best help them and so for example on gender dysphoria I would say the evidence seems suggest that uh physical transitioning does not solve the problem suicide rates are catastrophic for people who've transitioned the same as they are for people who haven't transitioned which would suggest to me that the solution is not biological transitioning it's it's something else so all of those to preface that I say we need to care for the individual uh and we need to to also press on that individual that whatever we do relative to them arises out of that love for them now as a Christian what am I going to do I'm going to point them to the Lord Jesus Christ uh I'm going to have confidence that that God Can Transform uh that the Holy Spirit can work in the lives of an individual and transform that isn't always the case we all struggle with things as Christians that you know we can spend a lifetime struggling with with them and maybe God does not take them away from us but I do want to press the person towards the supernatural I don't think that uh my own view of homosexuality transgenderism etc etc these are not purely physical physiological or psychological issues they're spiritual issues as well and therefore I'd want to bring some sort of spiritual care to bear for me that would involve you know you need to be in church on a Sunday you need to hear God's word preached you need to be uh particularly with a transgender issue I think a lot of it is to do with a desire to belong uh a desire to be loved and affirmed you need to be part of a community a church should be providing that kind of hospitable Community for people sh comes out yeah I think that a lot of um I mean certainly with young people what's happening with the children to me is just it's abusive um and it's just wrong and I think more people need to speak out against it I don't think children should be put on puberty blockers thing you know not even FDA approved as drugs for that which is amazing that nobody seems to really I mean when you think about that there isn't a single state in the United States of all 50 states where an under 18yearold can get a tattoo because that would be regarded as too traumatic a change of the body and yet we can have these transgender treatments for kids under 18 that shows you how perverted the thinking about children their bodies is in the United States at this point loss of rationalism yeah that's unwin's argument so um so I I you know and then we have to you know our Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam predicted these things so we were told that towards the latter days you would see much more of these things so this is something that we have to be aware of that these are the tribulations of the latter days um and uh I I think there are things that we don't fully understand we have a lot of estrogen mimickers in in in uh in the world today with plastics um we also have millions of women if not hundreds of Millions on estrogen uh pills and progesterone so they've got these um hormones flowing in their body that are not normal to the physiology of their body many of them get pregnant during this time we don't know what that's doing to the developing fetus I mean there's there's so many things that we don't fully understand um Aristotle in in the Nic kamakan ethics mentions that um pederasty was one of the reasons uh Early Childhood trauma was one of the reasons I mean he doesn't use that word childhood trauma but he says children that were molested often end up having those proclivities when they get older so this isn't something new he also mentions in the politics that um one of the Greek city states uh promoted homosexuality as a form of birth control and I think the globalists who really feel that we're way overpopulated I think a lot of them are promoting these things because they want to see less people born they that's why they promote abortion uh birth control pills all these things so you know but to to answer the question I think it's a a case by casee uh basis I don't think there's any one answer but I I totally concur with um with Dr Truman that the the supernatural we cannot there there's a there's a Hadith of our Prophet Sall alhi wasallam that says do not leave me to my to my soul for even the blink of an eye you know that without without Divine Aid we can do nothing and uh the poet said you know that if God's Aid is not help helping the servant of God then the thing that most harms him is his own efforts and so people and and you know when I was uh going to school in Southern California there was this uh uh group they were called Victory Outreach and they had drug addicts that cold turkey by discovering um you know their Christianity cold turkey and and really gave it up overnight and we know that's true with with many Muslims uh we've seen that in in uh in certain communities where if if they really Embrace in a deep way Faith um these things are everything is something to overcome we definitely have to have compassion for people because these are grave tribulations um and we're living in a very unnatural world I think hence Through the Looking Glass I mean he wrote that book to show us what a world would he was a logician he was a teacher of logic mathematical logic so he wanted to show what a world would look like without reason and so in that that way we really have gone through the Looking Glass because Humpty Dumpty has the argument with Alice about words and she said it can't mean that hump is it can mean whatever I say it means you know it's it's who's going to be Master that's the real decision right so I mean Humpty Dumpty you know but he eventually fell off the wall and all all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put them back together again and that's what's going to happen to our society you know all the king's horses and All the King's Men won't be able to put it back together again if that world uh becomes the world that we all share um we're almost out of time but I want you to both of you to address one last thing quickly if you can um which is you know when we look at what's happening and what where this is headed it the picture is very Bleak I mean it looks very uh we feel helpless and we a lot of people feel hopeless about this so my question to both of you is to you know what would you say to all of us who are looking for this whether people who are religious and other people who are secular were still worried about this um how do we find how how do we keep hope alive two thoughts one well I know three thoughts first of all I think there are some hints already that that some aspects of the sexual Revolution may be turned back I do think on the transgender issue for some of the reasons you've just outlined uh you know you can fight nature for only so long I think we could well see on the transgender issue within the next for maybe not in my lifetime but within the next 40 50 years that could be turned around because I think there will be law suits coming that kids who've been used as chemistry sets by their parents by big Pharma uh by the medical profession they will sue the 14-year-old who's been yeah we don't allow 14y olds to make Intelligent Decisions about what's out for dinner how on Earth can we allow them to make an intelligent decision about whether they want children in 20 30 years time they will sue and this is America and when big lawsuits start coming down things will change secondly I think we can have hope at a local level uh uh none of us here probably can have much of an impact on the whole of culture but where we can have an impact is on the people we know on our neighborhoods in our communities with our own children and I think we need to be good stewards of of of what we have uh if identity is grounded in strong Community then we should be strong communities and there's no reason why we shouldn't be strong communities whatever the government does in fact history would suggest that when governments come after after certain groups those groups become stronger communities the lgbtq movement is a good example of that so uh and again one I don't know much about Islam but one of the things I think Judaism Islam and Christianity have in common is an emphasis on Hospitality of which I was a recipient in in Turkey all those years ago I think hospitality is huge for building communities for shaping the way people think I don't remember much about the lectures I went to at college but I do remember the professors who opened their houses to me uh and I think we can all have a huge impact and we can pass on Hope by being strong communities thirdly and this is where you know Christianity and Islam will diverge at this point where do I find hope I'd have to say the promise to the church you know the promise is to church the Gates of Hell will not Prevail we know who wins in the end Jesus wins in the end so as a Christian I look to the promise to the to the church at the end of that but I think there are two of those three points we should be able to agree on no no thanks for that go ahead check well we believe Jesus wins in the end too we don't have problem with that they um I just want to read something because you know I the people at Zuna have heard me this is like beating the dead horse but I genuinely believe that liberal education is one of the most important antidotes to a lot of this madness and and I just want to read from Dr Truman's book here he says take for example education traditional Notions of Education assumed that students were raw material in need of training which would shape them into adult members of society by imparting skills and knowledge necessary for fitting into the larger social framework that is the Adult World this Vision was not simply technical liberal arts education also saw the teaching of the great Classics of culture literature art music philosophy as shaping the the students understanding of what it means to be human to be educated was to be transformed by exposure to a range of ideas whether one agreed with them or not one Society accepts the basic Russo style premise that culture is what makes us inauthentic by perverting the voice of Nature and then refracts this through the critical lenses provided by n Marx Freud and the new Left of Reich and marus this traditional notion of Education must be abandoned and so I I genuinely believe liberal education is the antidote uh in the deepest sense of that teaching people really to think deeply to engage ideas W wi with the tools that enable them to see through falsehood um I I was uh once asked to contribute to a book of all these different religious prayers and to put your favorite prayer of of your prophet in in uh and so the prayer that I chose was our Prophet said oh God show me the truth as truth and let me follow it and show me falsehood as falsehood and let me avoid it and that desire to know the truth is a human desire uh pointed out in the opening statement of the metaphysics that all all people really do want to know and they want to know the truth and the truth shall shall set thee free so we we have to uh promote truth We Believe In Truth we're people of Truth and as long as truth is in the world there's hope uh and and the Quran clearly states that when when truth comes falsehood vanishes so we need more truth it's a great place to end please join me in thanking both of our speakers [Applause] [Music] tonight

Channel: Renovatio: The Journal of Zaytuna College

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Length: 66min 18sec (3978 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2023