The War on the West | Douglas Murray | EP 247

i i think it by this stage it is clear that there is not an aspect of western culture that has not been assaulted at such a fundamental and dishonest level that if you were to continue this game there's just nothing left nothing [Music] hello everyone i'm pleased to be talking today to mr douglas murray who is associate editor of the spectator and is now based in new york his latest publication the madness of crowds was a bestseller his last publication the madness of krauts was a bestseller and book of the year for the times and the sunday times is the book before that the strange death of europe immigration identity islam was published by bloomsbury in may 2017. it spent almost 20 weeks on the sunday times bestseller list and was the number one bestseller in non-fiction douglas and i have spoken several times before uh publicly on my podcast and for unheard and he also moderated a discussion i had with sam harris i've just finished his latest book which is not out yet the war on the west when is it out douglas it's out on the 26th of april so um hopefully by the time people see this it will be out yeah so um let's that's what we're going to talk about today your new book i read it yesterday and i thought i might start with something technical in some sense terminological it might be regarded as a pretty inflammatory title the war on the west and maybe we'll start with that what do you mean by war and why use that term um essentially the that's interesting i thought you were going to start with with the west which is well we'll do that naughty one next untangle yeah well we'll do that next for sure uh war uh because what i s what i say in the book is that this is what we've been going through we've been going through a war on everything to do with the foundations of the west everything to do with the results of the western inheritance and when i say that of course i mean the war as i do it bit by bit on western history a war on western peoples a war on western culture uh war on western religion and philosophy this position that i argue that we've come to in the present age where everything is bad if it came from us let me say us in the west and everything is good so long as it hasn't come from us now i should stress by the way that what i'm describing here is western anti-westernism uh there are plenty of other forms of anti-westernism russian anti-westernism there's chinese anti-westernism all sorts of other kinds but the one that i think is most interesting partly because it's so pathological is what i'm really writing about here which is western anti-westernism why we in the west have arrived at this strange place where where we venerate everything so long as it's not our own we respect things so long as it hasn't been produced by the society that also produced us and i do think this is a fundamental assault i think is fundamental assault as i try to demonstrate in the book on all of the foundations the principles the foundational figures the heroes the great stories the great the the great themes of the west even have all come in recent decades under this just relentless assault and i try to explain why why i think that's happened it's not an entirely new phenomenon as you know i mean it's been a strain of western thought arguably for for some centuries if not longer but that in recent decades it's picked up a pace and it's picked up a pace for some very obvious reasons after the colonial era it was inevitable that there was going to be an anti-colonial backlash a post-colonial movement but that's lingered and turned into something else as of all of the other backlashes that i lay out so i do think it's i think it's a i think it's a it's a complete and fundamental assault on everything that the west has produced and and i think that's why it's deserving of of of the term so to to what end well that's a very interesting question because of course it's a different aim for different people i mean one of the people i write about at one point in the book is um fanon uh franz fernandez distinguished and highly cited postcolonial author who like edward saeed had a profound influence in the academy uh the forward to his last book was written by satra he was a very very um impressive in many ways figure um but his his version of what should happen in the post-colonial era was for instance i mean basically entirely marxist and it's one of the it's one of the ironies i try to tease out about this that for instance if in the post-colonial era people had argued that societies that have been colonized should be returned to a pre-colonial condition with a return to let's say more of the native uh political and other habits then that would have been one thing but writers like fanon were not doing that they they they were arguing that the answer to the colonial era was was marxism and of course that that has this tremendous irony doesn't it which is that they say well this one form of of westernism western colonialism must be replaced because it's western and what we'll replace it with is western marxism uh and and so that's that's just one of the motivations i think was a very strong motivation certainly in the immediate period of the post-colonial era there are different versions of it now of course there's the let's say the social one the one where it's just rather gauche i mean of course famously writers like orwell pointed this out many decades ago rather gosh to celebrate anything about your own society and indeed regarded as being slightly backward a sign of a sort of low resolution figure that you would do such a thing whereas the veneration of other cultures was a was as a with a demonstration of sophistication a sophisticate would do that but we do end up in this position uh today which is it was much more dangerous than that uh one of the reasons i do the assault on western history and do do it also by individuals you know the figures it used to be and suddenly in my own lifetime i'm sure in yours jordan the some of the absolutely foundational heroes of western history have come in for specific assault and you could ask yourself well maybe that's because they're overdue some reckoning and i think it's far more than that and i try to show that i try to show for instance that the interpretation of say thomas jefferson or winston churchill or abraham lincoln has actually become an assault based on the following premise that if we can take down churchill we sort of can get to the roots of taking down british patriotism if we get if we assault abraham lincoln we've offend essentially not and done thomas jefferson we've not just assaulted them we've actually assaulted something that is the absolute root of the american ideal the the heroic story the heroic figure and then there's this further layer of that which is not just with individuals but with whole societies so that for instance instead of understanding the history of racism as well racism is a highly regrettable and ugly human trait which is consistent across all human societies that we know about uh and it is a part of western history instead the whole of western history is made into a history of racism in which racism was the guiding force when as i explained the book or any fair estimate would see it as being an element within western history but by no means the thing that drove western history so it's this sort of thing okay so let's let's concentrate on that then in terms of the values that you regard as uh being under assault in this war what do you think the canonical values are that are the subject of this intense criticism now and you described marxism itself which is also a branch of western thought interestingly enough as fundamental to this criticism so what if it isn't the marxists basically make the claim that something like the claim that history and human institutions and perhaps individuals as well are to be understood as manifestations of their class identity so as some form of group identity for for the classical marxists it was class identity and then history is to be viewed as the battle between an oppressor class and an oppressed class and the oppressor class is motivated by the desire to exploit the the victimized class and that's base and then that's been transferred i would say to some degree in recent years to terminology that replaces economic class with race but basically makes the same arguments does that seem okay so if so the claim then is that the central motivation is something like the will to use compulsion in the service of group centered goals i guess what's the western counter claimant and why so that's one question is there a western counter claim and why should we reject that analysis of history given that things do get corrupted by power well i i quote in the opening and um and later on in the book as you know a phrase of nature which i sort of add to from the genealogy of morals when nietzsche refers it um in passing but i think he's such a remarkable phrase i wanted to to bring it out and throw it to the forefront he talks in the genealogy of morals of of people who talk about justice but mean revenge now this seems to me to be an extraordinarily pertinent insight to our era when you when you actually when you talk about the some of the scholars and writers that i i try to tear into in this book uh they have i'm thinking of figures like ibrahim x kendi robin d'angelo um quite a number of others like you could go on listing but these are some of the main ones they're simply not interested it's clear in a sort of fair analysis of the west or its history or its traditions or its claims they're interested in a form of revenge and and some of them are perfectly open about that i mean i mean candy is perfectly open about the fact that in response to one thing it might be necessary to punish another group he says it completely completely frankly in in his most famous book how to be ironically titled in inappropriately titled how to be an anti-racist um so and it's extremely clear from the work of other people in this movement people like um hannah nicole jones of the 1619 project what you're really talking about you're certainly talking about with the people tearing down the heroes of the west is is people are saying okay you had your go and now we're going to have ours and we're going to see how you like it how you like being talked about in extraordinarily racist terms how you like being lumped in and homogenized as a group for instance white people or western people western traditions and again this isn't an entirely new thing i point out again with one of the most prominent postcolonial writers edward syed who every benighted student has had to study and almost any university has come across orientalism at some point and one of saeed's fundamental critiques of the west is that it sort of it essentializes people in the east and you know there's quite a lot of points to make about that but one of them is he's extremely good at decentralizing people in the west you know he'll refer in passing said to for instance your average 19th century european what the hell was an average 19th century european any more than a average 19th century person in africa or the arabian peninsula you know people of this this revenge kind were extraordinarily keen to use tools which they claimed to deprecate so long as they furthered their particular political goals and i think that they exposed themselves again and again and the problem in recent years as i see it in the west is that this process of revenge has taken on this exceptionally gleeful uh attitude people like deangelo visibly audibly cannot believe the luck they have that they can get away with saying that the things that they do and when and the fact that when asked to provide evidence they say things like d'angelo did recently in an interview there's a collective glee in the white body when black bodies are punished you know and her interviewer who happens to be black asks her for evidence of this she has none so she just makes another outrageous claim and this has become this has become part of it okay so let's let's go into this as deeply as we can so i was thinking when reading your book about let's start with the issue of slavery and it's certainly the case that the people that you're describing and the intellectual and marxist influence types who criticize the the more traditional institutions of the west accept it as a given that slavery is wrong and so you could imagine there might be two reasons for that one reason would be one group should not have the upper hand over another or at least if you're the group that's in the uh oppressed class you might not want that to be the case and the other argument is there's something intrinsically wrong with slavery as such but that but at the individual level and so i guess one of the things that struck me is that unless you believe the second you're just trying to swap one form of slavery for another and it isn't also clear why it's wrong and slavery is wrong if you believe that the individual should be sovereign able to make choices able to make free and unconstrained choices that aren't subject to the arbitrary will of another but to believe that you have to believe that there is such a thing as the individual that's the right unit of analysis and that the idea that that individual is valuable and sovereign in some fundamental sense is true and then when i think that i think there isn't anywhere in the world where that idea has been expressed more clearly than in the west and so it's so interesting to see people object to slavery and object to the use of arbitrary power by one group over another but also to reject wholesale the individualism the notion of individual value that's at the heart of the western enterprise that seems to be the basis for the rejection of slavery per se you do point out for example that it wasn't obvious that karl marx objected to slavery on moral grounds so so it seems it's too obvious to even be asked why is slavery wrong but when everything obvious is up for grabs then it's perfectly reasonable to ask that and and so part of the problem with setting the group against the individual is that you see that the people who do that seem to invalidate their own moral claim that what they're opposing is wrong like on what basis is it wrong and does that seem like a reasonable position to you yes i mean one of the most fascinating things about this i go into in the section on slavery in the book is that of course um historically speaking it would have been highly unusual to be proposed to slavery in almost any era and there were lots of reasons for that i mean you you first of all have the one of the questions as you know that i delve into at one point in the book is why are the enlightenment philosophers under particular attack at the moment and there are various explanations you could give for that one is that there is a genuine overdue reckoning uh that there is a form of enlightenment let's say fundamentalism at the moment that views that views figures of the enlightenment as as particularly needing this sort of scouring and reapproach another is that they happen to have the misfortune to live in an era in which both the slave trade and colonialism currently seen as the two great wrongs of history of the west were going on and that they didn't spend enough of their time countering them and that emanuel kant should have spent more time addressing slavery and less time addressing all of the questions that he addressed and that rather than talking about superstition and trying to pull that apart david hume should have been interested in colonialism and on and on so that's another explanation and a third explanation which i think is perhaps more persuasive is that actually if you go for the enlightenment philosophers you get to the one of the absolutely key things to assault if you're going to assault the west which are the ideas of rationalism and reason and the application of the scientific method and much more but but but the reason i mention this is because of of course what's what's so fascinating is that there is there is there are two aspects of the slavery thing in particular need to be delved into one is that thing off well everybody did it throughout history um and there's a counter which candy among others do which is well western slavery was worse because it was race-based and by the way that's absolute nonsense i mean countless societies had effectively race-based slavery and indeed it's going on today in the middle east and in africa um but but but there but there was a specific reason actually why during the enlightenment period and i i cite thomas jefferson on this because he's a very interesting figure trying to think this through as they were going through it one of the reasons why thomas jefferson is so insecure interesting because he is one of the most thoughtful people of his era was still not aware of whether or not there was an answer or which way the answer went to what was still a live conversation then which was the monogenesis um uh and uh um polygenesis argument that was the argument over whether or not all the the human races were from the same stock as it were or whether we were all from different lines uh that debate seems obvious to us now because it got answered later in the 19th century uh it wasn't obvious at that time and people like jefferson were trying to do what they could with it so there was a sort of there was one version of the defense of slavery which was well these are all totally different people but then of course you have to counter that with the fact that and again voltaire made this point what is the greater evil to sell somebody and buy somebody of a different country a different race and so on or to sell your neighbor or your brother or the member of your community now of course this is a just as it is just as it was when voltaire asked the question it's an exceedingly uncomfortable question to ask today and i don't ask it in order to to say well there's an obvious answer but as everybody knows the slave trade only existed because people in africa were selling their brothers and their neighbors and raiding neighboring towns of people who looked exactly like them and selling them to other black people in africa some of whom ended up in the slave trade going across the atlantic many more of whom went through the slave trade that went to arabia so so it took an awfully long time for our species to even begin and we're not there yet by any means i've met i've met people in my own life who are slaves were born slaves in africa and elsewhere um this is by no means solved by our species but we look back at it now as if it was perfectly obvious well look okay so my understanding of of the history of ideas in the deepest sense is that it's very difficult for people first of all to understand that there is a universally valid human essence across cultures right and so most isolated peoples have regarded their own citizens as human and everyone else who isn't part of that group as not fully human and to to to develop a universal system of value despite that proclivity has been extraordinarily difficult and then to further make the case that each person regardless of their social status and power and all of that is also characterized by something that is best termed intrinsic worth that's associated with their personal sovereignty is or their individual sovereignty is also an extraordinarily difficult idea to conceptualize and then but so first of all we shouldn't be lulled into thinking that as you pointed out that those are human norms in some sense they're not quite the contrary and then i do believe it is the case that first of all perhaps in the religious domain we can talk about that later and then later in the political domain that notion of divine individual worth was developed and instituted in social institutions most effectively and in some sense solely in the west and yes and we could get into that in one angle you talk about the british empire's attempt to eradicate slavery worldwide and also that that was driven by christian notions and and by christians specifically and that it also occurred at great expense in relationship to the british empire's function yes so maybe you could just walk through that a bit we could delve into that yes this is a this is an important particularly important one because uh yes first of all as you well know many of the people like william wilberforce who are most prominent in arguing the case for the abolition of slavery uh uh were driven comprehensively by their christian faith and so you know as my late friend rabbi jonathan sachs used to say that the the claim that morality is self-evident is self-evidently untrue um these people were driven by a specific idea of morality and a specific set of values and indeed virtues and it's a modern um it's a modern myth that we would have got there anyway but the sanctity of the individual the sanctity of the individual life and the autonomy of every individual the necessity of every individual having autonomy was at the absolute base of the of the desire first of all to uh ban slavery in the british empire and then and it was a i guess maybe people would say well you would say that wouldn't you douglas having been born and brought up in the uk but a pretty remarkable thing that the british empire then decided to spend a considerable amount of blood and treasure policing the high seas in order to to stop slavery elsewhere uh british sailors losing their lives um boarding ships without sales that they would search the cargo holds for and discover were for instance a brilliant a brazilian uh slave trading ship trying to sneak through in disguise because brazil didn't get rid of slavery until the 1880s formerly and and and britain police the seas for this for many years uh thousands of sailors lost their lives and in the end as i cite in the book the actual cost of eradicating the slave trade has been shown by a number of modern historians to have actually cost britain more first of all in the actual uh um endeavor secondly most importantly in the in the uh the paying out the buying out effect for your companies engaged in the slave trade in order to make sure that they didn't continue their their trade and thirdly in the increased prices that everybody in britain had to pay throughout the 19th century because of the need to pay for goods that were coming from non-slave trading places these ended up being an exercise more costly than than the benefits accrued during the period of slavery so the reason why i mention this isn't actually just because of the way i speak or the fact that i happen to come from the uk it's because it then gets us to this very interesting question which is what would restitution ever look like and what i'm what i've noticed and what i as you know jordan a number of times in the book go into is this question of reparations as it's currently called what we might also call a sort of what would restitution look like on a number of historic wrongs and i've been very struck in the last two decades in particular by the fact that we have people and again nietzsche puts his finger on it with uncanny precision i'm struck by the number of people who who who rip at long closed wounds rip them open and then scream at everyone about how hurt they are because in actual fact on a whole range of issues of what we're now reminded are historic wrongs something like considerable restitution happened an awfully long time ago i mean you still hear people saying it's extremely popular in american discourse that america never addressed the issue of slavery and you know you think well fighting a long and bloody civil war about it would have been one obvious way that they've clearly tried to address it and even that today is is pooh-poohed a number of condemned historians say oh it wasn't really about slavery it was a different power struggle it never is about the thing that the thing was about but but i'm very keen to address these uh ugly difficult corners of it because they say if you are interested in restitution of making making atonement for any any wrongs in the past you have to look at what actually has already happened in the past by way of atonement well there's also a christian slash western or judeo-christian slash western philosophy of atonement and that is that you atone for your shortcomings and perhaps for the unequal distribution of talents by trying to live a responsible generous productive and honest life and that it's actually a matter of individual moral striving rather than something that should be conceptualized at the group level and so i'm struck again and still i mean it i cannot understand if you accept the notion that the willingness of one group to oppress another is in some measure a human universal it's deeply characteristic of our history and that the reason that that's wrong is that individuals shouldn't be subject to arbitrary compulsion partly because it deprives the rest of us of their potential value as free agents and partly because it's that and and partly because it's it transgresses against part of their essential nature that's intrinsically valuable you can't oppose slavery on moral grounds as far as i can tell without implicitly accepting those axioms and so then it's so striking to me that the people who are simultaneously accusing the west of these uniquely awful predilections accept one of the great uh propositions of the west as central to their entire moral doctrine and then they accept it so centrally they don't even notice that it's true they just think it's self-evident well it's not so self-evident why why shouldn't i oppress someone if i can get away with it and why shouldn't my group right and and then and then we we have the one now which is the form of oppression that presents itself in the guise of the victim i i constantly come back in this book to the people who present themselves as victims and are clearly the bullies um people who who claim to be suffering from historic wrongs because it gives them a dominance that they would not otherwise have i mean let me give you two uh quick quite significant examples of this uh two of the most celebrated writers of the last generation in america are tan heezy coates and ibrahimo x kendi both of them have been recipients of macarthur genius awards um um kendy is now the only holder apart from the late ellie wiesel of the late nobel prize winner and holocaust survivor of one of the most prestigious chairs in an american ivy league university um uh the the the both of them have written memoirs that have been bestsellers and are highly fated and cited everywhere um and both of them have an origin story of racism that is absolutely risible um in the case of coates he describes a moment in one of his memoirs of getting into an elevator with his young child and a white woman gets into the elevator and he says behaves dismissively towards the child and coates describes how he wants to sort of fling this woman against the wall and sort of throttle her for this act of racism and at no point suggests that actually it's possible that the woman was having a bad day and it didn't matter who the child was or or that she was partially sighted or anything you know this immediate assumption this is racism we suffered it and we suffered it so appallingly i'm going to get a chapter of my book out of it and ibrahim x kendi's origin story of racism is equally visible and it's that when he was at primary school in the us um as a child on one occasion a teacher in the classroom uh called on a white girl when a quiet black girl in the class also had her hand up and wasn't called upon and kenny gets an entire chapter out of this and my suggestion on these cases is these people are presenting extremely minimal stories reasonably small stories of i don't by the way and i don't deny that racism exists in some forms today in america as in all societies but they present these reasonably small examples of racism in order to present themselves as a victim and then present themselves also as the judge and jury over everybody else currently alive uh there's it's also very different to say that institutions are corrupted or tempted by uh the willingness to use power the motivation to use power and that one of the manifestations of that is various form of uh arbitrary oppression and to claim that that's the central guiding principle of the institutions and the societies and then and that that also begs the question well if you criticize the west let's say for its grounding in willingness to use arbitrary power and compulsion what do you propose as an alternative and why do you believe that alternative exists does the alternative only exist outside of the western structure somehow what's their ex what's there except power it's only power it's only power and power in this era as you know jordan comes through the claim of oppression that the power is best exerted in our era first of all by claiming that the person has been a victim of oppression and secondly by wielding that alleged oppression sometimes true oppression but by wielding it as a tool to beat others so that for instance it's also interesting that the only reason that works let's say i claim moral virtue because i'm an anti-racist rather than a non-racist well why does that why does that work for me why do i have a platform why do i have it [Music] if people were psychopathic expressers of power and that was particularly true of western people they just say something like well yeah what's your point try to do something about it and you think that's wrong it's just because you're weak and i've got the power and i've got you under my thumb and to hell with you and your stupid ideas but that isn't what people do and when they're accused of being racist in the west they're they're struck to the heart generally speaking they're ashamed of themselves they'll they'll bend over backwards to apologize they they scour their conscience to see if they can find any example of where they might not have abided by the principle of divine sovereignty somehow and make obeisances in every possible direction and so that in itself seems to indicate that the primary claim is fundamentally untrue which and as you know i mean i write a chapter in the book as you know on them well what everyone else in the world is doing whilst we're doing this to ourselves and you know one of my favorite examples i i quote a lay colleague of mine's work on this is is racism within china and racism from china about the rest of the world but there's a term that the chinese use of wha of white people that that that roughly translates as ghosts um the idea being that i think it's quay um and the the idea is of course is that white people aren't really human like the simulacrum of a human being but not the real thing only the chinese people are the real thing well well that's really racism for sure and uh from the most heavily populated uh um country on earth and and there's no anyone certainly willing to use power and one's certainly willing to use power so this is an oddity so it looks to me for example i've tried to make this case that um the central animating spirit of the west is something like the spirit of voluntary association the spirit of voluntary cooperation uncompelled choice recognition of universal human dignity now we all fall short of acting that out and instilling it in our institutions but and i see that as a reflection of a deeper that deeper theological claim that we discussed earlier that each individual is in some sense of divine worth intrinsically and and and should be treated as intrinsically worthwhile as a consequence and and that out of that as far as i'm concerned emerges the entire tradition of natural rights and they're a delineation of the notion of that intrinsic worth that's not the expression of the will to power it's the precise opposite of that and so yes why are we so loath to give ourselves credit for the emergence of that idea in our attempts to abide by it why are we so prone to guilt in this this regard firstly because firstly we go about that thing that it's regarded as being somewhat um somewhat gauche and backward and unsophisticated to take such an attitude and the second is that we ge is a sec and there are many other reasons but a second is the completely misinformed idea and this comes from america in particular i'm afraid it's what america has been pumping around the world in recent decades the idea that what is what is bad in the west is uniquely bad and that comes from a complete and wholesale ignorance not just of history in the rest of the world but the rest of the world now i mean a total startling lack of context i mean if anything ever suffered from context collapse in our era it is everything to do with the west uh so that so that it is seen as there's another element sorry there's another element that seems to be me to be worthy of note too we're tortured for our moral insufficiency because of the existence of demonstrable inequality and the call for equity is part of the clarion call for the people who are conducting let's call it the war on the west and the proposition there is essentially marxist that wealth tends to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people which happens to be true although those people differ the proportion is small but the people change but what's so faulty about that in my estimation isn't the claim that that inequality exists or even the claim that there are negative aspects of that that might need to be addressed but the notion that that is somehow unique to the social institutions and the economic institutions of the west i hate that most particularly because i think it underestimates the problem you cannot blame inequality capitalism no i mean it's foolish yeah absolutely i mean let's take the other options on the table uh the remaining flotsam and jetsam of the cold war uh let's say you could say maybe you could say putin's russia you can certainly say cuba and a few other places what do we reckon is the inequality of wealth in these countries between let's say the oligarchs and the average russian um there was a documentary alexander navalny bravely made before going uh back to russia and being imprisoned and he had it released after he got back to um russia the other month and was promptly imprisoned uh he had the release of this documentary called putin's palace and one of the extraordinary things which did a lot of harm for putin at home because people were genuinely shocked and upset about this was that putin's palace on the black sea uh which he's been building for years the costs of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars has among other things a vineyard attached to it and there's a guest area a guest room near the vineyard and there's a guest lavatory in the guest room the vineyard and there's a lavatory brush there made of gold that costs the same as the average russian makes in a year so there's just one example of inequality in russia we could do the same thing for cuba and let's look at all of the other examples look at north korea um i've seen myself in a country which i visited many years ago but in a country where uh the general population starved by the millions in the 1990s and the the military elites were able to get hold on the black market of blue label johnny walker uh on the most expensive whiskies on the planet um take any of them because everyone talks about the compost colonials i mean of course post-colonial societies that haven't gone well they've been post-colonial societies that have gone very well like singapore in terms of productivity you could say that hong kong until very recently the same thing but let's talk about the the post-colonial societies that didn't go well zimbabwe for instance what was the wealth inequality in zimbabwe between the the wealth of mrs mugabe say and the average zimbabwean the the average life expectancy in zimbabwe during robert mugabe's reign halved he's one of the very few leaders in the world where life expectancy actually declined faster than people were living people were on a treadmill that was getting shorter and shorter with every step well what was wealth inequality like that what's wealth inequality like in angola these days i mean go anywhere and it is it is so obscene to present this as as you say as some kind of phenomenon of western capitalism as and as though any other system around could be better and and to present it as some sort of rigorous theory so all economic systems produce inequality it seems to be the reflection of a deep underlying law that we don't understand that well about how advantage tends to accrue as you accrue advantage and disadvantage tends to accrue as you accrue disadvantage positive feedback loops of some sort yes all economic systems result in inequality and different societies have evolved different mechanisms to deal with that but the only system that we know of that's also produced inequality but also produced the cessation of absolute privation are free market systems and china didn't manage that until they instituted instituted free market systems and free market systems work because sovereign individuals exercise choice over not only purchase but also employment and so people in the west are guilty about inequality and liable to rape themselves over the coals when its existence is pointed out but it's partly because they don't understand how pernicious the problem really is and they don't take credit for the fact that free markets have stopped people from starving you know it's only eight percent of people now live below the u.n line for absolute poverty compared to 40 percent in ronald reagan's time that's only 40 years 40 years and you can you go back to that phenomenon that again i don't think there's any evidence that in modern china the people involved with the politburo and the people who've done terribly well out of the last 20 years uh since particularly since china entered the wto i don't think there's any evidence of significant fears about inequality between the chinese elite and the average person there is something very specific about the western worry about inequality which again like the worry about slavery like the worry about guilt and historical guilt is a product of a thing that ought to be recognized as being a good part of the machine if i if if the machine was so pernicious we wouldn't care about inequality we would simply say as i'm afraid or we'd celebrate it even more which is a perfectly easy thing to do which is well if i have more it's because i'm better and the evidence that i'm better is clearly that i have more and what's your evidence for the contrary claim well people have intrinsic worth it's like yeah and you could go to another of the world's biggest economies uh india uh i don't know if you've ever been there it's an extraordinary culture very very rich a wonderful culture of just the most extraordinary place to visit but it also has a form of inequality which is grotesque to any western visitor i'm talking of course about the caste system which exists this day which is a form of slavery as well and which regards people if they're born into the wrong class as being literally untouchable the untouchable class in india is something you're born into and you will be in for your whole life now is that inequality oh yes is it systemic hell yes is is much being done about it not really people take a sort of view that well there's an old joke about princess margaret once being asked once hearing somebody refer to an extraordinarily grand english country house and the person says imagine this coming as just an accident of birth and princess margaret saying birth is no accident um now but but but actually that that view whether it was correctly attributed or not is regarded by us as being laughable and visible it's not being been regarded as being laughable at all visible in one of the most important societies in the world today india and historically that certainly wasn't regarded as laughable in any sense the notion that uh you didn't have divine value in some sense or ultimate value as a consequence of your birth that that was an extraordinarily difficult idea to supplant uproot and transform because it that also seemed in some real sense self-evident and then the evidence was your success and i'm afraid here we also get to what i regard as being one of the hardest to discuss but most necessary to identify aspects of what i'm trying to tackle in this book which is what i go straight on to in the first chapter which is what i regard as being and describe as a now outright war on white people now of course this is very difficult to talk about because people say first of all you're guilty of self-pity of some kind or or you know boohoo poor you um but as i show i think in some remorseless detail in that chapter um if you want to if you wanted for some reason to attack africa um or everyone from north africa downwards you would at some point if you were to be driven by such an animus you would be attacking black people um if you decided to turn on everything to do with chinese culture at some point you would be attacking chinese people and so it is in the case of the west that since historically the west has been predominantly populated not entirely but predominantly populated by white people the assault on the west has to include and now does include an extraordinarily ugly and increasingly ugly assault on white people whereby the own in in societies which quite rightly abhor racism the only group of people against whom racism is completely acceptable has become white people and this is this is to my mind one of the great unsavables but necessary to address issues of our time because it seems to me that this can't go on much longer it's an extraordinarily dangerous game that's being played and one with such negative consequences not least the consequences of likely backlash that it has to be had out in the open at the point at which you are deciding people's futures in the workplace based on their on whether they're white or not and that being white means you're marked down but application to schools and universities involves you being marked down if you're white but access to medical care as i give examples of in the book you will be deprived of it if you happen to be white in certain jurisdictions and this and very much more is absolute poison in our societies and i think is one of the things that has to be addressed uh if we really don't like racism we have to tackle the rise of this new racism which has become totally acceptable and every day well to also to identify western ideas let's say as somehow white means that you to the degree that those ideas have a universal value which might even be the universal value say of making the case that slavery is wrong you have to deny them to other people who aren't of that race right you you you you contaminate them irretrievably i've seen attempts for example to make the case that the emphasis on logic and excellence is somehow white and that to accept those uh values as paramount [Music] means that you've just fallen under the sway of a certain kind of racism and to the degree that that's faulty in its essence i mean if the thing is worth doing then by definition it's worth doing well and if nothing is worth doing then we don't do anything and there's nothing to talk about and so the notion that excellence is somehow associated with a given race or a racial view is preposterous and demoralizing and but and and also something that's greatly detrimental at least in principle to the very people that are supposed to be helped by such doctrines well yes it's possible that the whiteness the assault on white up as people of the assault on uh the western let's say the western legacy and that what is happening is a a desire to enact that revenge i referred to earlier and a desire to to take apart what what some of us thought was actually an ideal which is the ideal that the western tradition is not actually the preserve of white people but it's a universal inheritance and i say this repeatedly in the book this is one way of looking at it is is to say one of the interesting things about so-called let's is a phrase i don't like to use but let's say white culture western culture one of the remarkable things about it has been yes in its negative forms it has attempted to force itself upon people it is positive forms it invites anyone who wants to be part of it to share in it which is again not the case with other cultures there is there is no way even in let's say in the political systems of any other country outside of the west if you were to migrate there from a western country you would not be able to work your your way up to the prime ministership presidency or even the cabinet of of most other countries in the world if you if you were an outsider the west is is is specifically in our era exceptionally open and believes that its own inheritance its own traditions its own political order its institutions not just should be open but have to be open to anybody who wants to be a part of them so that's and and that ideal is one of the ones that in the name of anti-racism is being taken apart in our time she's saying no no no these things only belong to the white people and as i say in in uh toward the end of the of the war on the west wow are the conclusions that you get to from their negative i mean wow are the consequences of that down the road negative because and as i lay out as you know in quite a lengthy passage there is a there is a response to that just waiting to be said so do you think do you think that the core values of the west are tenable and maintainable in the absence of the underlying religious substrate so i'm i'm thinking about jacques derrida for example and derek daredev criticized what he called the logocentrism of the west and its emphasis for example on binary oppositions and binary oppositions are the foundation of computation so maybe criticizing that too deeply is unwise but in any case the it seems to me that the notion of individual sovereignty is in some sense a religious claim and this gets you can think about the west one stream of western thought is the enlightenment and there's a secular element to that but it emerged out of a deeper religious tradition that has this universalizing tendency and this universalizing claim um [Music] is it possible for the then i would say to what degree are is the assault on values that you see and diagnose and assault on religious values and is it possible to formulate a defense without simultaneously defending some of these underlying religious presumptions no i mean this is uh this is a german journalist bottom forward is dilemma isn't it the um can you sustain a system that isn't willing to to nurture the roots that gave birth to the system um and uh it's probably the the biggest underlying question of our era uh the the the the the claim has been some time yes of course and i think that that yes of course has been coming under significant strain in recent years as i said i mean it's it's um it's not clear that the sanctity of the individual is something that is enforceable purely through human rights doctrine and the court and the international court system yeah well it's not self-evident that it's fundamentally a rational claim it might be instead something more like the precondition for all claims that we regard as rational which is a whole an axiom rather than a conclusion and and axioms have to be accepted on faith by definition right in if you define faith as operation within the system that the axioms give rise to and i've been trying to puzzle this out deeply there's the idea of the divine individual in the west is associated with the idea of logos and it's associated with the notion as well that there's something about speech in particular truthful speech that is fundamentally redemptive and it's recognition of that i think that gives rise to our notion that freedom of speech is a cardinal value not because it gives you the freedom to speak exactly but because without that freedom we can't we can't think we can't yes we can't improve our institutions and and we can't get to truth that it isn't it isn't a mural it isn't a merely um theoretical exercise the point of the point of freedom of speech freedom of inquiry and all these things was to get to a truth it wasn't a game in itself right it was a belief that there was something to uncover at the end of that process that was more than worth right well when i talked to richard dawkins recently about such things and of course he's arguably the world's most famous atheist but i like talking to him and i think dawkins is possessed by the spirit of the truth to a market degree and so then one of the things i wonder is is science itself possible in the absence of the proposition that the truth will set you free i don't think that's a scientific proposition i think it's a it's a philosophical or a theological proposition i mean this comes to one of the great the great um uh jokes against uh conservatives in recent years uh i think i've said it to you in private before jordan but not publicly but that i mean one of the one of the great jokes against conservatives was that they tended to think that the deconstructionists for instance would inevitably stop at the borders of stem remember for years people sort of have risks and the fact that well you know your your your degree in lesbian dance theory you know you just wait till you have to go out into the market and and find a job with that useless degree but these people actually the joke was on the conservatives saying that they they did all fine degree their jobs they found them in hr departments and they told everyone else how to behave for the next generation so so um and then there was this sort of joke that the conservatives again had of sort of you know it it'll stop at the borders of stem because at some point the bridges need to stay up no no turns out that if you've got a more overriding uh theory and claim and ambition and drive in your era if the bridges do fall down it'll be because of institutional racism and constructional racism and much more and it'll be because you didn't do it hard enough it'll be just like the the nonsense that everyone said in communism look at look at the stuff of different ways of knowing i mean this goes back yeah i i am a deep deep contempt for derrida as i do for all of the deconstructionists not just because it's so easy to deconstruct and so hard to construct but because of course the deconstructionists always tried to deconstruct everything apart from their own university positions um and and uh derrida and code definitely started some of this and it's led to this this thing we now have one of the things i described in the book of the equitable maths nonsense where we come once again to the anti-white anti i would say also anti-black actually but certainly anti-western idea that mathematics is an is a western construct and that there are other ways of knowing that exist and which must be brought forth and you don't just get this in maths and by the way i mean as i as again as i lay out in remorseless detail in the book this is this is being taught in american schools this is being rolled out in in school district after school district in the u.s the idea that in maths in stem in general there are other ways of knowing other than the scientific method accurate mathematics things like showing your workings is an example of white uh supremacy and on and on and on and this is completely mainstream today to an extent that i think will shock many readers these things are effectively in the realm of voodoo because nobody ever explains what the other ways of knowing are um let me give you an example if you don't believe in the mathematical method that actually happens to have been refined in the west but poses some of its ancestry to a considerable indeed bewildering array of cultures around the world why you can't say oh that's interesting the west may have refined it but it's it's got its heritage elsewhere hurrah we're all able to own it why instead of that you have to say no this is a white supremacist thing so we're going to come up with other ways of knowing instead of addition and subtraction in the normal way of things what are the other ways of knowing what is this voodoo we're being told never explained never explained other than you get this little hint sometimes that it has something to do with better intuitiveness about the concerns of others and i give examples of this and basically you could also argue it's a sort of feminization of certain things for certain realms of study but essentially that the the white supremacists the male patriarchal thing is all about the answers and about accuracy and about being on time even i mean all of these to say that they're racist i hardly need saying but all of these things are white and therefore we need to look at these other ways of knowing which are never explained but there's something something which we're all meant to go along with i mean to say that this doesn't bear um examination is is is to vastly understate the matter yeah well i think the stem types are completely defenseless against all of this they tend to be apolitical in their machinations if they're credible scientists incredible researchers almost by definition because they're busy obsessively detailing out their specialized concerns and not paying attention to the broader context which works fine if the broader context is one in which their narrow and specialized productive pursuits are valued but fatal when that isn't the case and so one of the questions that we're facing now is what are the invisible ethical preconditions for the successful practice of science itself and weirdly enough that's kind of a postmodern question you know because the postmodernists did insist to some degree that we exist within stories although they don't believe in grand unifying narratives which begs the question for me then what unites us internally psychologically or socially if there's no unifying narrative if narrative is the fundamental answer the narrative in which science operates is something like well the pursuit of truth is valuable in and of itself and it's valuable because it's a benefit to people at the individual level and as long as that's in place it can all be ignored and science can act as if it's something unto itself and i know that's a tricky argument because it does veer in somewhat into the postmodern direction but we wouldn't pursue science if we didn't think the pursuit was valuable and redemptive yes right and was heading towards something but yes yes that can be attained by go ahead can you can you say the same thing about the humanities can you say the same thing about art can you say the same thing about metaphysics can you say the same thing about politics or economics or anything else and i think the answer in all of these things is that the priority of the era is representation not attainment of a goal that is worth attaining other than representation and and and this is where we get to this what i say in the war in the west is one of the deep underlying just questions we have to address which is is the game that our societies have decided to play worth playing and does it mean that we effectively win out in the end or not and let me flesh that out by saying what i mean is let's say that across america and all other western societies we managed to to completely nix the representation game and the diversity inclusion equity game was just solved and that every board in america and every other western country canada britain you name it every board had exactly the right representation or over representation of minority groups so that there was more trans people on every board more black people more minority ethnic people on every board or exactly the percentage that replicated the percentage in the country and that every board and every and every workforce across every imaginable discipline and every industry exactly replicated of course is i don't need to tell you the absurdity of this but that you know you had exactly 50 percent female firefighters and and exactly 50 percent of the police were women and if in america 13 of the population the black and 13 of the police are black and and under on and on and on and the same with engineers and the same with electricians and the same with absolutely everybody computer programmers a lot let's say you get to there do you beat china i i don't know that the question's at all clear the answers are all clear to that question um my own suspicion is actually it's a game that we're playing for politeness reasons and for some justifiable reasons in certain areas and i give the example in the book saying actually it makes sense to have a for instance a police force that represents the community pretty accurately um but do you actually need your uh for instance your basketball teams or your or your computer programmers all to also completely accurately represent the population and to have complete representation it doesn't seem to me that you'd win any particular game from doing so other than satisfying the game that the west has decided to play for the time being but at the end of that game well you win if you win if you you win if you regard holding those positions as a reward that's equivalent to privilege rather than as the opportunity to do something productive in and of itself right and so because that seems to be part of the conceptualization is while your job is a reward to be doled out rather than something that's productive in relationship to valuable ends and you mentioned the humanities earlier too i don't think there is humanities outside of the canon so science is nested inside an underlying ethic that presumes that let's say the universe is understandable that there's some association between that and logic that pursuing the truth in relationship to knowledge of the world has this redemptive quality and that there are very careful ways of doing that but the humanities is also nested but even in some sense more self-evidently inside the idea of a cannon and that cannon is traditional and if you throw out the traditional canon i think by definition you throw the humanities and well i mean as you know in the chapter on culture i go into this because i i think by this stage it is clear that there is not an aspect of western culture that has not been assaulted at such a fundamental and dishonest level but if you were to continue this game there's just nothing left nothing uh the british library in 2020 announced that they were um going to create a list of authors whose work was in the british library including manuscripts and important documents by these authors who had some connection to the slave trade or colonialism and they produced this sort of black list of authors including the late poet laureate ted hughes who died in 1998 who was born in considerable poverty in yorkshire in the 1930s who had nothing to do with the british empire and the british library claimed that one of his ancestors in the 17th century had benefited from the slave trade i mean this isn't even the sins of the father debate anymore this is the sins of the ancestor four centuries earlier debate and by the way it turned out among other things that the british library can't even get researchers these days because the research researchers turned out to have selected a person called nicholas ferrer who actually was opposed to the slave trade and wasn't an ancestor of ted hughes so they they weirdly just decided to posthumously defame somebody uh and this isn't at all uncommon the tate uh gallery in london i i give an example one that i might come on to is particularly painful to me but there's an example of um one of the masterpieces they have in there i don't know if you know the work but it's uh a beautiful painting called the resurrection cucumber by stanley spencer on the great mid-century british artists and it's a huge vast canvas which the tate is exceptionally lucky to have um painted in the 1930s and it is a depiction of the of the physical resurrection of the dead at the day of judgment and they're all coming out of their tombs in the graveyard of his local church in the village of cookhome and it's a profoundly moving painting to me i've always been i used to occasionally my lunch time just go to sit in front of this canvas some of the dead coming out of the tombs are recognizably apparently neighbors of spencer's from his village but he wanted to show the resurrection of all humanity so he also includes you know there are black men and women coming out of some of the graves as well he didn't have to do that but he wanted to show the literal representation of the actual physical resurrection well the tate now has a descriptor beside this sublime painting saying that it is a racist painting because whereas stanley spencer accurately depicts his neighbors from his village in england the black people in the painting are generic black people copied from national geographic magazine of the time well stanley spencer didn't have any black neighbors you know so what so what there weren't any black people in his village in the 1930s in england and how dare these people but they've done it now on everything yet to be morally superior to a genius they get to be maori superior to a genius and but but what concerns me is that they they they pull down a sublime thing into their banal monotone uh utterly monomaniacal view of of of the world which is that race is the only thing that matters let me give you one example example if i may because it's particularly painful to me there's a wonderful painter i'm very an artist i'm very fond of called rex whistler um who uh english artists from the early 20th century everybody adored him he was clearly an exceptionally lovable human being and an exceptionally talented artist and his first artwork was a mural for the tape that he he did in his early 20s and he worked all around the clock for months and months on end to complete this mural called in pursuit of rare meets it's a fantasy a beautiful fantasy landscape and an arcadian landscape that goes around all four walls of the gallery and a couple of years ago a group whose whose name was white pube only consisting of a couple of people decided that this mural was racist and they decided it because of two figures one of whom was a chinese figure they said was generic and the other was because in one corner of the forest in one of the bits of the rest of a tiny figure about two inches high is a is a young black boy clearly in distress being pulled on a chain by a woman in a white fully frock now clearly rex whistler he always included sort of ugly things like this as a drowning child a white rounding white child elsewhere in it it's clearly et in arcadia ego you know that's clearly what he's saying he was always saying this all of his work always included this you know there'd be a two more he'd even painted himself in things as a lowly street sweeper you know and he had a wonderful sense of humor and a wonderful and dark sense of the carbon nature of all things even in arcadia this was decided two years ago by the tape to be a racist painting and they have closed the room until further notice they looked into whether or not they could actually remove after 100 years actually remove this from the walls of the gallery and they it seems that they can't because part of it's on plaster so they've locked the room and the reason i mind this among many other reasons is because they have posthumously declared rex whistler to be a racist they said that he has he reflected the racist attitudes of his time rex whistler died on his first day in action in normandy in 1944. how dare these people do this how dare they do it to everybody in our past to all of our heroes to all of our artistic heroes how dare they say that the story of the west is purely a story of racism and xenophobia and and colonialism and slavery how dare they not even bother to weigh that up as i say in one point in the book weigh it up against just let you know let's name a few cities paris florence rome venice just for starters how dare they not be able to even weigh up the achievements that have come from this allegedly unremittingly terrible past but worse than that and the point i really wanted to make jordan is what they are driving us to and i feel it very very strongly myself is how dare you do this to our ancestors how dare you do this to all of our heroes and then the follow-on thought is this if you have no respect for my ancestors i see no reason why i should have respect for yours if you have no respect for my past and my culture i don't see why i should continue to say that i have respect for yours if you have nothing good to say about me why should i have anything good to say about you and what i suggest is that in the west at the moment we are in a potentially short holding pattern a holding pattern based on politeness or as kenneth clark lord clarke of civilization put it that fundamental aspect of western culture courtesy we are in a period of courtesy where we have been willing to say [Music] okay you can keep rampaging through the past of the west and assaulting my ancestors and insulting my predecessors and saying all of these negative things about my past and i am pretending for the time being or saying out of courtesy that you can do this and i will put up with it for a time and i will even say and there are these other ways of knowing and so on but there is a moment there where that absolutely stops and as i say at the end of the book as you know jordan i say there's a very clear place where you can do that the courtesy stops at a certain point and it stops when you say you know what this politeness seems not to be working for us so let's go for the impolite things and the impolite things that can be said are legion and nobody should want to go there but that's where we're being led so these great cities that you point to and the great achievements that went along with them to me they're the consequence of the manifestation of the best of the human spirit universally speaking that was made possible by societies that recognize the existence of such of the best and so that was a precondition and to and to associate them in some sense with western culture with white culture and then to associate them with nothing but the spirit of oppression is to simultaneously deny that that spirit exists and can produce things of universal transcendent value and i can't see that that's going to be good for anyone except for people who can make moral hay of that in the short term to ratchet themselves up what uh to produce for themselves positions of authority that would not be available to them if they weren't able to weaponize guilt and claim the moral upper hand yes well so let let me ask you another question one of the accusations that's levied at me from fairly frequently is that my concern about such things which i would say in many ways is similar to yours isn't is evidence of my i'm exaggerating this is illusory none of this is actually happening um point to the evidence exactly and i think well i see it in the spread of such ideas in the universities and then downstream into culture but people aren't particularly awake to that fact i mean in my home province in ontario there's a bill that purports to be anti-racists that that's going to transform the entire education system by fiat into a system that is part of the war on the west let's say and and that and people who conduct that war will be rewarded for that how do you know that why do you believe that this is a serious concern well because as i say they they decided to come for absolutely everything because it's not just a judeo-christian tradition of the west but the enlightenment tradition of the west too it's the religious tradition and the secular tradition it's it's the it's it's the american politicians and leaders and presidents who were on the side of the south in the civil war and the ones who are on the side of the north it it comes for people who owned slaves and those who who were opposed to slavery it comes from people who were in favor of empire and those who were against empire it comes for those who lived in the arab empire and everyone who lived before it and everyone who lived after it the people who lived in the era of slavery and all of the people who live after it it it's so comprehensive and i mean you mentioned canada just now there's a highly pertinent example which is the the that insane spate of church burning that went on in your native country uh a year ago um just to remind people um as a clay there was a claim that graves of indigenous children were found beside what had been a school and it had been run by the catholic church and that these were graves of children therefore murdered by the catholic church and in no time prominent figures in canada i list some of them in the book and you know some of them as well jordan start to tweet out things like burn it all down and churches including indigenous built churches in canada go up in flames across parts of the country well in what other situation would that have been regarded as being something you just shrug off and by the way to date no evidence has been produced of these alleged mass graves it happened on the basis of an investigation using ultrasound that turns out not to have yet produced one grave so we are so primed we are so primed at this idea that for instance the catholic church who which i am not a you know defender to the death or anything but the the institutions like that are so evil that they deliberately killed children in countries like canada hid them in mass graves and now you can burn down the churches if you want what other religious tradition in canada would be would be allowed to be treated like that in the present or would it be just sort of brush it off that it happened it happens all around us and it's not just in the academies as you know it's spilt out many years ago it's everywhere and it now has this completely um physical manifestation on the streets when the so-called 1619 riots kicked off and just reminded us this is the 1619 project which tries to completely reframe all of american history to say that the heroic story of america is not a story of heroism it's one of slavery and subjugation which is why they start in 1619 when the riots after the death of george floyd began the murder of george floyd began in 2020 somebody says they should be called the 16 riots and the woman who who fronted the 1619 project at the new york times so we're not talking about some kooky far out fringe publication says the 1619 riots i'd be honored and these are the riots where sure they start to pull down statues of general lee okay don't wouldn't go to wouldn't go to the uh the wall for that one at all uh but then it's jefferson and then it's lincoln and then it's absolutely every damn figure in american history who ends up getting assailed well that's no longer a theoretical thing that's not just students reading derrida that's not just an ex that's not just papers on foucault this is the manifestation of some of their thought often by people who've never read them but this is long ago the spilling out even of their own thought simply into this thing where the era decides everything in our own past must be scoured what's to come after they don't tell us any more than they tell us what the other ways of knowing might be what are you trying to accomplish with the book douglas do you think apart from clarifying your own thoughts quite a number of things one is to alert people to the scale of what is being attempted against western countries another is to point to the unfairness of it the simple unfairness of it the unjustness of it another is to arm people with the i think reasonable and correct rebuttals to it to remind people of the context of history and the context of the rest of the world so that we get ourselves and our own past in a proper light and get the rest of the world in a proper light i mean you have an interesting you have an interesting interlude in there so there's four chapters race history religion and culture and there's three interludes uh china reparations and maybe the most interesting or one the one that struck me most particularly was an interlude on gratitude and so you elevate that as a moral virtue and and it's the antithesis in some sense of of of a resentment for history gratitude talk about that for a bit why did that why that value particularly well as you know it's one you've thought about a lot and spoken written about a lot is it's one that a number of my friends have um and i i just it's been one of the underlying things in my life and whenever i'm asked to sort of explain as it were why i come to some of the conclusions i come to on things i i come back to this this term um [Music] my our late friend roger scrutin one that i think actually the last thing he wrote i quote in the book was a diary for the spectator where he reflected on his last year of his life and roger said to to approach death is is to approach what what life really means and what it means is gratitude um now that was the last thing he wrote um i thought about it a lot i i quote dostoyevsky as you know from the brothers karamazov where the devil the devil is incapable of is incapable of gratitude um which i i is it is deeply telling and brilliant right exactly well that was also penned at about the same time that nietzsche was pointing to resentment as the driving force behind movements for example that later became revolutionary marxism yes and and the more and and outlining the moral hazard associated with that exactly and and nietzsche and some other writers who come after him on resentment i i've spent a lot of time reading in recent years i think it's i think that resentment is is along with that desire for revenge in the name of justice one of the absolutely underlying drivers of our time many of the great philosophers realize this resentment is a terrifically strong driver and and as again as nietzsche and others said um it it's a terrific way to avoid any culpability because there's only the only way as you well know the only the the only way to turn around resentment apart from gratitude would be for the person of resentment to recognize that there is a reason why they feel resentment and that there is a person who is responsible for the things that they are angry about but that the person is themselves this is of course such a profoundly disturbing uh life disturbing thing to acknowledge that almost nobody deeply embedded in resentment can uh why we always look for excuses we always put it on other people it's so hard to take responsibility ourselves for what has not gone wrong in our own life so much harder compared to putting it on any other group of people or another individual a person we believe has done us wrong or a group we believe have done us wrong it's so easy to manipulate our species against other groups of people my god what's the history of the jews but a history of people pouring their resentments onto this tiny group of people for daring to continue to exist and thrive across societies um you know the history of anti-semitism is that as it is in our own days the great explanation for how where some people can pour their resentment but but the but the main thing you that you that you have to count and i've i've long said this to conservatives in my own country and elsewhere is the the you have to address things at an equally deep level and when people say uh i can't remember if we've talked about this before but when people say for instance um how will the right respond to the left on this issue you very often see things like they know well we'll need to do more house building on uh brownfield sites or something like this and you and and i i think you're mad i mean you're you're countering resentment you can't do that with a bit of bureaucracy now how can you how can you counter resentment it is only i believe by gratitude it is only by completely inverting that sentiment and i think that in our own lives as well as in societies this is eminently possible you and i both know this you can you can you can stand in front of a painting and you can you could endlessly work out the cost that that painting had had had what the cost of it had been what the cost of it had been for instance if were the people who worked in the workshop of this master adequately paid where there were paints that were sourced from specific minerals were those minerals justly acquired and were people along every stage of the process justly rewarded for providing the material you could break that down endlessly or you could stand back and marvel at the madonna of the rocks you know you could stand in front of michelangelo's pieta and you could think about what the workmen who got the piece of marble out of the quarry went through and whether they were adequately paid and whether they had all the life choices necessary to for them to be able to decide whether they wanted to be quarriers in marble or you can stand back and marvel at michelangelo's pieta you you can do this in every city in europe you can look at venice and say this was a trading city where not everyone was always adequately rewarded for their labor or you can marvel at venice you can you can do this on absolutely every everything can be deconstructed to this utmost point at which you cannot see the value in anything because you claim to be looking for the for the for the basically for the checks and the bills historically speaking and in the present day and it is such a a reductive mean-minded obsessive way that our era actually is looking at things it actually is tearing everything apart in this way it actually is looking for racism everywhere it is looking for colonialism and slavery and blame and guilt and i just say how about turning that around and saying just have some damn gratitude for what you found yourself living among and as i say all i can all i can suggest is that our age in the west has gone through a vast context collapse and i'm very struck by the fact that many many people if not a majority who come to the west from outside of the west do not share this ravenous hatred uh i have a friend who's a school teacher in a a school in london who has said before that that one of the best ways to make sure that a pupil who is misbehaving as it well playing up um in a very uh very dominantly you know immigrant background school one of the best ways to make sure that uh they change their life attitude is if they are taken back to the country of origin at some point in a school holiday by their parents because they might not particularly like they may they may be told in their school in new york or in london or or ontario that they are living in a patriarchal racist society but wow when they go back and see their first and second cousins in bangladesh they might they they come back with a a different view my view in general is is that we in the west have undergone a massive context collapse about the nature of our own past our own societies i think we have to turn it around i don't think it's sustainable to continue to war on ourselves and on every part of our own history not least also because we deserve the right to have heroes and heroic narratives and things of which we're proud we absolutely have that right as every other society in the world does so i'm trying to do a more reasonable audit on an era which i think has been deeply unreasonable to itself as i say this is a this is a western on western crime that is being committed it is completely possible to mend it and that's why this very very depressing subject matter in some ways i try as you know by the end of the book to show people actually this is positive this is a way out and these are the ways out these are the ways in which you can try to turn the ear of resentment into a personal and wider appreciation of gratitude that of getting things into a proper order and of getting things into a proper sense of themselves because my god we need it i've been trying to conceptualize gratitude as a form of courage no well because there's there's evidence for tragedy and atrocity obviously and everywhere and that can make you despair that gratitude is also part of separating the wheat from the chaff right is that you want to you want to appreciate the things that are of high value and so and i i wanted to ask maybe close with one more question it's a complicated question maybe i'll put it in two parts you know in in the biblical narrative the first two human beings that emerge in any real sense are cain and abel they're the first who are born rather than directly created and it's a rather depressing beginning point because they're they're fragile brothers and cain is bitter and resentful and abel makes the sacrifices that are acceptable to god and flourishes and it's because of that flourishing that cain decides to destroy him and the depth psychology that i've read and the literary criticism tradition that's emerged from that suggests in some sense that those are the earliest manifestations of two patterns of deeply rooted patterns of behavior one you might regard as the spirit of abel and the other the spirit of cain and our era is characterized by this tremendous increase in the speed of communication and it seems to me that that's produced an exaggeration of this battle and it seems also to me in some sense that it is a theological battle it's it's it's the anti-logos aspect of it is a theological battle and that it has to be addressed in some sense at that level and so i guess what i'm asking you is well first of all what you think of those ideas and second if this is how this may have changed your views on what would you say the necessary truth of the religious suppositions that underlie that notion of the sovereignty of the individual i guess that's um yes i mean i uh i laid out in the strange death of europe what i think of as being not just my own but certainly modern europe's current malays in regards to the christian tradition uh the difficulty of it i i think as you've also said in the past i've i've often tried to live with what cardinal ratzinger when he was still cardinal ratzinger uh it said as the invitation to live as though god exists which i thought was a deeply brilliant um invitation a very generous invitation actually from a soon-to-be pope um and uh i i think as i've i've expressed a number of times recently that that in any case uh you you need a tradition to come from in order to know what the others are and that the the modern idea that as it were you can splash around among all of the faith traditions of the world as a child and come out more roundly formed seems to me to be doing everything exactly in reverse and that that really the way in which a child to be read is in one tradition so that they can then go out having been versed in one tradition and know the others discover the others as they go along but that the complexity of that is something that only an adult can go through you you know you can only understand the things that the traditions have in common if you know the one that you've come from and you can only actually admire them other traditions on their own terms really if you know and and and have some reverence for the one that you've come from otherwise it's all just a sort of mishmash of yoga-like banalities i i'm not so i i certainly know how much i owe personally to this tradition and i know my deeply um complex conflicted and inadequate uh answers to it i um it's you know i i often have to fall back on quotes but um i i was i'm not i'm not jewish i'm christian by upbringing but um i remember something i mentioned earlier late friend rabbi sachs he once said to me he said that isaiah berlin friend was once asked uh what it meant to be a jew and he said to be a jew is to have a sense of of history and uh um and jonathan sachs said isaiah was almost right and he said and i said what do you mean he said i corrected him he said to be jewish is to have a sense of memory um it's a it's a pretty good clarification um i think one has a role in society to have a sense of memory and in that case if you're from a society like i am like you are that memory is absolutely god haunted and christ haunted biblically biblically haunted and there's no way around that i don't resist it i don't i certain and i i also i long ago came to the same conclusion that roger scrutin did and he encouraged me to which was at least don't war on it you know um and there's many other things that are worth warring on but unless and less and until the christian religion was to return to the stage of that it was at in parts of europe in the 15th and 16th centuries there's no no need to i don't see the the episcopalian church in america for instance as particularly requiring my um my critique um so i do have a um i have a complex attitude towards it but i um i try to remain i try to remain in dialogue with the religion is the way i would i would put it and not to close the door i think that's uh that's one of the i think i told you when we met possibly that the the word israel means those who wrestle with god yes yes and that's that's very interesting as far as i'm concerned yes that's the nature of unbelief in some senses to wrestle with the notion of what constitutes the highest virtues what the the former bishop of edinburgh was a sort of secularist himself by the end of his career but a deeply distinguished and humanist figure um called richard holloway once rather beautifully said that the everyone assumes that the opposite of um of of uh faith is is doubt but the opposite of no sorry the opposite of doubt is faith but it isn't its certainty um certainty is is the um is the problem in that in that in that mix of absolute perhaps having conflicted views is inevitable if if not necessary um as for cain label um is it isn't one of the many things in that story the fact that as so often in the early books of the bible the torah that you're being reminded that you're both people i mean that that that everyone has both of these things in their hearts and that just as we the the the path yeah both these paths are always open to all of us isn't that what we're one of the things that we're being told well we're we're always tempted by the desire to get away with insufficient sacrifices you know to cut corners and to not do things as well and at as much cost as we might we're all tempted by what would you say the spirit of revenge that we might allow to inhabit us if we became sufficiently bitter we're all tempted to tear down idle our ideals because they also simultaneously judge us we're all tempted to shake our fist at god but if that spirit gets up gets the upper hand well the consequence for cain is that his sin is so much that he cannot bear it and it be i believe that if we in the west tear down everything of value because we've given too much sway to the spirit of resentment and revenge the consequences us for us all will be something so cataclysmic that we won't be able to bear it and i i couldn't agree more and we come back to this thing that we don't know what it would be if the men of resentment had their way in what they're doing and pulled everything down as they are trying to pull down all of our stories all of our heroes all of our history all of our culture read our culture as a story not of admiration for the world and learning from the world but actually theft from the world if they did this on everything and succeeded as they're doing at the moment what is it exactly at the end of this other than the again the other ways of knowing what is it that lies there and the one answer you can get for people is essentially a version of that thing that tom wolf um described in radical chic you know the uh the essay on the the party at the bernstein's apartment in new york in the early seventies that the burns that leonard bernstein his wife threw for the black panthers and of course thomas wolfe tommel fantastically destroys this obscene obscene event where the where the the uh liberal elite of new york are having canapes listening to these revolutionaries describing how they want to destroy and pull down the society they're in and there's a wonderful moment in it where i think zotto preminger one of bernstein's friends is sitting in his in his chair and he says to under the panthers but what are you going to do once you have pulled down all of the existing structures but but what are you going to do and he keeps pushing this panther on it on this until this black panther says you can't put a blueprint on the future man and leonard bernstein leans forward in his chair and says you mean you're just gonna wing it and that's really what we're dealing with we're dealing with people who don't know what they're going to do they're going to pull everything down and then wing it well if we undermine that which unites us right and if we're united around something like recognition of the value of the individual the divine sovereignty of the individual let's say if we pull that down and destroy it then it's the group it's the war of every conceivable group against every other conceivable group that's the only alternative that i can see because there's an infinite number of arbitrarily oppressed groups absolutely and and i would just add a coder to that which is you know i think people should be very aware careful of what they wish for in this you know as you know at the end of the the war in the west i say you know of all of the unpalatable answers the one coming the way of the people who want to make this racial is is worse than any you know it would consist of saying this thing that you believe is so appalling right we've been courteous enough end of courtesy why don't we go to the aboriginal peoples or the first nations peoples for any vaccines why don't we find other ways of knowing for cancer cures why are all of these things products of the thing that you say you hate and the people you ki for politeness is sake everyone says can also contribute and do in certain ways but are not better than this that the other ways of knowing are actually worse and then if you say oh and by the way that's not universal after all because you've told us it isn't it's just ours wow is the 21st century hell well as far as i can tell from delving into it that that the end goal of the spirit of cain is hell yes right yes and we've been warned about that for a very long time and still have background yes well you the 20th century might not have been enough i hope it was that's that's a a horrible horrible thought but i agree i agree so to this book is coming out april you said 26 26 so it describes the battle of ideas that currently is tearing our culture apart and i would say in some real sense destabilizing the entire world and so people can read it and they can draw their own conclusions and see their own way forward but it's an alarm bell and it should be ringing loud anything else mr murray no just to remember i just just i would just add since you did say at the beginning that it was very depressing it's also quite amusing if i say so myself and i have to put in i have to put in that plug i agree that what i describe is highly depressing but it is it is as i say i try to show a way out and i do actually try to give readers some fun along the way and you can't not because some of what i'm attacking is so reasonable that um once again when i was doing the audio book as i was for the mans of crowds there were points i had to say to the sound engineer i'm sorry i just the reason i'm laughing so much i promise is not it's not my own jokes it's the things i'm reading when you read them out loud are so even more ridiculous than they are on the page but um yeah it may be um gloomy in places but there is fun along the way good to talk to you again always great to see you jordan thank you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,541,765

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Karl Jung, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson, douglas murray, douglas murray debate, jb peterson, douglas murray madness of crowds, jb peterson podcast, douglas murray the west, jordan peterson the west, america under attack, the war on western culture

Id: fd5qf4pG-xg

Length: 111min 34sec (6694 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022