What Is Killing Western Civilization? With Douglas Murray, Claire Fox and Yaron Brook

i'm clare fox i'm the director of the academy of ideas and i'm just here to um make our speakers tonight give them a little bit of a hard time ask them a few awkward questions but really is a precursor for you to have a conversation with them and i know that this is a much anticipated event and everybody here will be familiar with our speakers but let me formally introduce them and i run the academy of ideas and we're always trying to stir up and stimulate intellectual discussion no holds barred debate and i think we can say that internationally both of these speakers have sort of set a a trail before anything we've done in terms of being two of the most interesting challenging controversial sometimes and certainly never lazy uh kind of people who are in that space something that we very desperately need and of course there's yaron rook who is both our host and we'll be introducing uh starting the conversation tonight he's the host of a nationally syndicated yaron brook show he's a renowned best-selling author uh was an executive director for the iron rand institute for 17 years uh until last year and he remains chair of the board um and it's and is its primary uh spokesperson and obviously the iron rand institute are responsible for tonight and i'd like to thank annie for inviting me to chair and then we're going to hear from douglas murray who's a regular columnist at the spectator at standpoint he obviously is a prolific writer and frequently writes for other publications such as the sunday times the wall street journal um and is involved in many debates and and discussions um i prom has shared um been involved in prominent platforms both in the british uh european parliaments and also the white house and it's part of that kind of rolling uh series of debates that's going on with people like dave rubin and jordan peterson can we give them a warm welcome please [Applause] i think uh very significantly um and i've realized i didn't say the name of douglas's book which i will admit um it's so pertinent to tonight i didn't need to mention it um yeah can we kill the slides there we go oh god right well we're we're all about killing western civilization or is it dying we're killing the slides right in all seriousness i was thinking about this um issue i think any of us who are involved in considering contemporary society at the moment is concerned about the fate of western civilization but there is always a danger that when you say you know is western civilization dead or dying or being killed that you sound like some kind of conspiracy theorist lunatic or kind of paranoid or kind of a real uh scaremonger but i think we all know that something's going on you know something is happening that is making this kind of a conversation very important and relevant douglas has most explicitly written about it some of its themes in his book but i think anyone who is looking at contemporary society and its trends will know how important tonight's event is i know that this is being live streamed and i'm sure that people will be watching with some attention at what we talk about but what i would say was and somebody just asked downstairs whether our two speakers agreed with each other on this and what i would say is that you know it's not it's not kind of like what's your line on western civilization and is it under threat i mean uh we need to be we need to be a bit different than that i think i think what we need to do is to recognize that there's challenges to the concept of western civilization sometimes to its very physical entity but that if we all knew exactly how to resolve that or what the answers were then we wouldn't have to be organizing the debates and so i think we should have a certain humility in the face of this and as an audience and certainly myself as a chair we'll be listening to our two speakers and having an open and frank conversation about a what we think the issues are and and secondly how we think we might resolve some of them so erin can i ask you to give us a kind of ten minute introduction please sure thanks claire and uh thank you clan thank you douglas for for doing this uh it's a real pleasure for me uh to be here with you so i thought i'd start by maybe outlining what i think western civilization is because we all throw around this term and i think particularly today i think it's important for us to conceptualize exactly what we mean when we talk about western civilization because i don't think western civilization is western in the sense of a particular geography i don't even think western civilization is a particular ethnic group or a particular race and and it's weird that i even have to say this but these days i think it's important to say these things western civilization is a set of ideas it's a set of ideas that have shaped primarily western europe and later on maybe the united states and and more recently i think other parts of the world but it is a set of ideas that i think is rooted rooted primarily in greek philosophy in greece of all places i think it's a set of ideas that started there was lost to the west if you will for for centuries was rediscovered in the catholic church was uh spread again through europe and we have been benefiting from those ideas for the last five six hundred years what is the fundamental idea at the root of western civilization my view is it's the respect the recognition of reason as our means of knowledge it's the idea that reason is the way we know about the world this is a fundamentally aristotelian idea or a statillian concept the idea that we can observe reality as it is we can understand it we can learn from it and then we can shape it as a consequence we can integrate the data into new data into abstractions and we can actually shape the world around us and it's derivative from this idea of the efficacy of reason the efficacy of reason that every individual has this is not something that only the philosopher kings have that every individual has as a consequence of that of their efficacy of this tool that we have that every human being has it's indeed what makes us human is the idea that what is valuable what is crucial both morally and politically is the individual and not the group the tribe the state the nation the fill in the blank for the particular collective and if you think about these ideas these ideas are obviously very present in aristotle but they they really mature in the west during the period between the uh the renaissance and and certainly during the enlightenment and to me when i talk about western civilization i'm really talking about the enlightenment the values that the enlightenment taught us and in that sense i would consider the enemies of western civilization to include things ideas that came out of the west for example i think that communism is an enemy of western civilization i think fascism is an enemy of western civilization and i actually believe and this is where it might get more controversial that religion is an enemy a western civilization that christianity ultimately is not a friend of western civilization but at its core its enemy that what the enlightenment did was secularized religion secularized religion with the ideas of aristotle with the ideas of of of a reality-based philosophy a reality-based approach to life and centered us politically on the idea of the autonomy of the individual generating what we today call liberal constitutional democracies or whatever you want to you want to phrase it but so that is that is to me the core of western civilization in that sense i would say that western civilization has been under attack and indeed in dying a little bit for the last 200 years to some extent right since the real attacks on the enlightenment were originated by primarily german philosophers during the 19th century starting with kant hegel schopenhauer uh marx of course and uh and schools that emanate from them all the way today to the post-modernists and there's a direct link right there between those german philosophers and post-modernism today so it is that whole school of thought that has generated uh you know democracism the fascism the the the many derivatives that are the enemies of the enlightenment values that make us civilized and i think i think today we are further down the road of a of of of an erosion in uh those values and i think it's in in part of the manifestation of that and and i'll i'll just link it up to douglas's book which i'm which i've been reading so uh it's it's led us to a day-to-day where and part of i think the the the the stress we feel today is one we don't know what western civilization is most people just don't know they don't know about the enlightenment they don't have the enlightenment values they don't understand them they don't care about them uh certainly in america nobody knows your educational system here is moderately better than the american educational system but they have no idea they were founding fathers they wrote these documents these documents are somehow sacred because they say so and we you know whether you're right or left they don't really understand those documents and the intellectual sources of those ideas they just respect the documents and we live in this amazing materially wonderful place we don't know where that came from we don't know how fast how abnormal the error we live in today right the wealth we have today is unbelievably abnormal for all of human history we've been dirt poor under two dollars a day for all of human history until about 200 years ago they don't know where that come from where did that wealth come from it's just here right so they don't know the source of it they don't know again the ideological source that made it possible for us to be free we talk about free speech what are the roots of that why is that important where does it come from that's being under attack so we don't know what these ideas are and therefore they are easily susceptible for attack we don't defend them and as a consequence even when they are threatened physically as i think they are from certain elements within the islamic world we don't know what to do about it we flounder we are afraid to name the enemy we can't address them we can't fight a proper battle we we're not engaged in an intellectual battle but we're not even engaged in a military fight against our real enemies we kind of we're weak because we don't understand who we are and what the ideas represent let me just stand on this right there's never been a greater civilization in western civilization there never been better ideas than the ideas that have been generated in the enlightenment post enlightenment we've never humanity has never been richer never had greater opportunities and for me at least you know part of what represents this great culture is you know the artwork the artwork that was generated by western civilization everything that this culture has generated is under attack but the attack is primarily from within it's not from without so the primary who is so the title here is who's killing western civilization the answer is we are and primarily our intellectuals primarily our professors primarily our thinkers because they have detached themselves from the or they've rejected the real ideas at the heart and at the core of what western civilization really is thank you [Applause] okay a great provocative start there and lots of things that we can uh discuss in greater detail afterwards i think it is unfashionable but very important to say we are the enemies of western civilization not everybody gets that it's always somebody else but um so that's very important particularly i i would i would also like to say that as a kantian somebody who respects canned and also the uh was formerly the publisher of living marxism obviously this is not everything that we agree with each other on but there we go um okay so um we're now going to uh uh hear from the author of the strange death of europe um i think the thing that's really fascinating actually uh douglas about your book is that a book that's called the strange death of europe that maybe only a few years ago kind of could have been cast out as some sort of strange aberration and read by a kind of small group of people has become a best seller and i've walked into airports all around them in all sorts of places and there's your book and people talking about it and i think that that's fascinating that people recognize something in that and want to understand it so i'm looking forward to hearing you speak well thank you claire and thank you to euron and first of all i should say thank you to all of you for coming out there are a lot of things you can do in london on a friday night and any rate i think it's an enormous tribute to you the fact that you want to come and discuss these subjects and that to my mind is a sign that we shouldn't be too pessimistic the fact that people want to engage in these discussions they want to think about these things is as i just said and enormously important and i think inspiring thing there are some people who say well people are always diagnosing the death of the west always diagnosing the end of europe i was doing an interview recently for the bbc about the anniversary of ozil spengler and his great masterpiece and this was one of the questions was put to me well oswald spengler said some of this 100 years ago to which i suppose there are two main answers there are many answers you could give but one of them is it's not obvious civilizations die within an electoral cycle and i suppose the second is even if you're wrong on this one it seems that it may be i say this somewhere near the start of my book it may be the case that even preemptory fears of our mortality may be one of the things that keeps us going which isn't such a bad idea to hold actually to to be constant even if i'm wrong even if spengler was wrong even if many other people who've written about similar subjects are wrong it may not be a bad thing to keep limber about this to be aware of it in a way that that is both realistic and avoiding something like hubris i say that there are two broad things that i believe are the answer to the broad question we're addressing here tonight and they broadly fall into two categories the first that i think is widely recognized now is the fact that the west is something that has changed very significantly that western civilization is something that has changed very significantly and the main reason for that without being around the bush is that the west consists of different people than it used to until really quite recently and there are many good things about that and there are some negatives about that there are some serious challenges about that uh we tend to be very good at talking up the positives very bad at thinking about the negatives because after all what will we do about negatives in this area what can we possibly do the second part is the us bit as it were that iran also touched on the us bit is to my mind uh at least as important it's a chicken and egg debate about which of these things came first or which caused the other but the second broadly speaking in my mind is to my mind is not just a loss of confidence in ourselves but what i describe is the sense that the story may have run out there's a wonderful french philosopher very little cited i think in english sadly called chantal del sol who wrote a book i always citing called icarus fallen and that book that came out in the in the 90s in france gives what i still think of as being an unequaled description of the state of of modern mankind certain modern european mankind broadly speaking after the fall of the war and she says that we find ourselves in the position that icarus uh would have been in if he'd survived the fall uh we dreamt these dreams in europe in particular we dreamt dreams of religion we dreamt dreams of states of nations we dreamt two dreams in the 20th century that were the worst nightmares anyone had ever dreamt fascism and communism and when the second of those dreams that turned into nightmares collapsed we found ourselves in this situation bruised singed beaten and yet still here so what do we do now there hasn't been much question about this broadly speaking the only question the only answer to that question when it is raised and it tends to be raised in the spirit of frivolity is why don't we have a nice time and have fun we can buy lots of things we don't much need and replace them shortly afterwards we can do jobs we don't much like in order to get those things we don't much need we can entertain ourselves we can watch television and then we die what's unattractive about that so this situation we find ourselves in is is a void and it's a void i think that will be filled and i at any rate i'm very wary about what fills it very worried about what fills it i think it's almost anything can walk in to avoid that extreme by the way i just mentioned that i don't think i've mentioned this before but one thing i've found in the 18 months or so since my book came out was that everybody among uh my critics at any rate and sadly there are some a few no very smart ones but there are some one of the things i have noticed is that my critics always focus on the first issue that i mentioned just now and that i mentioned in my book they all focus on the immigration stuff they want what i say not to be true they try to explain why they think it's not and so on and this at any rate for me is a great disappointment the main reason for the disappointment is that i was really hoping that people were going to challenge me on the second of those two things as i lay them out in the book and i don't think i found anybody who has done so which worries me because it suggests to me that i'm right and my worst fears are right i was hoping very much that people were going to counter this and i just haven't found it yet perhaps we will tonight but this attenuates much on my mind why why don't we have that second bit the us bit that euron and claire quite rightly mentioned why why why when it happens is it just evaporate why do we talk about us oh yeah sure sure we'll do that yeah why do why don't we why do we have this this this conversation so shallowly now i just add a couple of things to that three things that if i may firstly by the way we are going to be in disagreement on christianity we are going to be i don't say it because of any proselytizing desire god knows but but i think you cannot take christianity out of the west and have anything that's recognized and be the west because as i've often said uh citing the radical atheist priest theologian don cupid even the dreams we dream are still christian dreams the thing i think we are in agreement in agreement on is the enlightenment and i at any rate think that one of the things that we are all discovering at the moment much to our disappointment is that it turns out that the enlightenment which we on this stage and i think most people in this audience put much uh reliance upon we are in the midst of discovering that the enlightenment did not go very deep and it didn't go very wide we overestimated its its reach and its ability to penetrate second thing of the last three things i wanted to say is this if i was asked to sum up as it were the the root of the thing that worries me most about the question we're discussing tonight i suppose it would be this to reduce it that it seems at the moment in the west that we cannot be the source of our own regeneration and that a meaningful life in the west appears not to be able to be lived purely with what we have we need to go elsewhere for it now by the way this doesn't to my mind happen with other civilizations other cultures in the world at the moment particularly i think it'd be deemed to be rather rude if you went to somebody in a great culture like india and said you know indian culture is not really enough you should look around a bit more now we may well think that a lot of people may think that who who doesn't want to have the option of looking as widely as possible around the world for meaning but but the idea that the west can't do it on our own or at least we don't have the facilities ourselves in our own traditions in philosophy and religion and culture and much more is i think one of the things at the very root if not the root of this problem and i finished just by saying one other thing picking up on something that you're on you just said at the end of your remarks which is this you mentioned i'm so pleased you did because people don't very often and they should all the time mention the unbelievable oddity of what we are in now and i just mentioned that because everywhere at the moment you hear people saying things like uh um we've got to radically change things in order to have more of this because it's so unfair at the moment for x group and nobody ever says these demagogues compared to what compared to what historically what are you talking about when are you talking about for whom are you talking about this doesn't mean that uh we live in nirvana we're never going to doesn't mean we can't improve things we can but this idea this idea that is forever floated and never counted compared to what always something off there in the distance usually involving trampling through millions of bodies to get to something that turned out to be hell anyway anyhow that's probably enough for me for the time being thank you [Applause] and i'd like to recommend if p if people haven't read it actually um icarus has fallen as a book because it's a fantastic read and and really uh helps enrich i think this conversation and and uh i i it's one of my favorite books um i think this this one one of the things that is a theme is this idea of the west having been vacated or vacating itself and you you made the point about the void um there's a kind of a crisis of meaning but at the same time as there's a crisis of meaning i just wanted to ask you there does appear to be a search for meaning and one of the things which i've been trying to mull over if i'm if i'm if i'm going to be generous about the emergence of things like identity politics or even campaigns like the decolonization campaign when i say if i'm going to be generous i mean these are these are both trends which i spend most of my time arguing against for obvious reasons but i also see a lot of young people looking for something looking for meaning and if if western identities being vacated then being attracted i mean you were sort of saying douglas you know it's scary what fills the void but you can't just be able to stand there young people and not do anything so they'd start to look around so i just wanted to to to sort of ask you that i mean jaren just to start with i mean maybe people like us kind of stick the beat into some of these trends but actually is that our version of what you said douglas which is instead of criticizing ourselves we end up blaming the the expression of the problem if you see what i mean so i just wondered how you balance that anyway yeah anything on that yeah i mean i yes i mean people need meaning as human beings we need meaning and before the enlightenment we were too poor and we're too busy to have time to think about what our meaning of our lives is we just did our job and we followed our religion and that was it over the last 200 years we've had enough time to actually contemplate meaning and it's it's crucial that a individual have a purpose in life and a meaning to what they're doing the problem is that most of the answers that people find for meaning are bad or wrong right i you know but this is the history of the last 200 years certainly of the 20th century you know we search for meaning and communism it seems to be back again these days uh and and we saw the results of that research in meaning in in our ethnic group our race or whatever in fascism and we saw the consequences of that we're seeing it again now even those being recycling identity politics is nothing but the the kind of eugenics of the of the early 20th century you know made more intellectually uh permissible these are all false paths and of course religion i think i wouldn't be surprised if religion makes a comeback in europe because of that search for meaning um unfortunately i think all of those paths are the wrong paths to go uh the the the core finding meaning is in your own life in who you are as an individual and what you stand for and the values and purpose that you assign to your life and what are the requirements for your individual happiness what objectively in reality is going to make you a successful prosperous flourishing human being and until we get to the point where we start looking at individuals core individuals and stop trying to find these these you know solutions i think we we continue to search for false to find false meanings and and continue to to march towards disaster you know and and people say look the west almost ended let's let's be real here right uh 70 years of communism almost killed the west we ignore that world war ii almost destroyed the west so it's not like it's being smooth sailing and now suddenly we're in crisis no we've been in crisis for over 100 years things get better because we resolve certain issues we defeat communism we defeat fascism and things get a little better and then we say okay but we defeated those now what and we're still searching for the deeper meaning of the enlightenment is my view it's it's the enlightenment was indeed it lacked depth to a certain extent and that's what we're still searching for it's a slightly crass way of putting it but um some years ago um i i probably made a mistake but i i spoke on a panel um uh his rear panel effectively and because they were being banned and i was speaking on free speech and it was a row between me and the audience and the rest of the panelists in effect because i said if you want me to defend you you have to sign up to enlightenment values i didn't go down well um but the the reason i mentioned this was because one of the law professors who was also on the panel civil libertarian said um to me she said we have an access course for lawyers because we find that you know with young people today especially if you're going to be socially inclusive you know they they can't study and they can't concentrate you know all the things i hate about contemporary education and um and then i basically had a situation whereby two young men stood up and started quoting at great length uh the tenets of sharia law which they'd managed to study themselves and and learn off my heart and they were her students i pointed out that maybe she needed to demand slightly more of them and i i say that because it struck me as that illustrated something to me which is we had such low expectations they were by the way just british asian kids who turned to radical islam we had such low expectations that we were excusing them and that they felt like they joined something which had higher expectations of them i'm not trying to be an apologist or provocative but is there anything in that it just it felt like there was something there is that too complicated sorry it's not too complicated no no i don't mean complicated i mean is it too convoluted for more important points you want to make well can i just pick up a couple of things before i get to that um firstly i mean just to reiterate what euron just said i mean i was reading a very there's a beautiful interview the other week in the the new states with uh clive james and the interviewer was trying to get clive to say something wittily rude about donald trump and he kept trying to get him to do it and eventually clive just said look you know when i was born hitler and stalin were still doing their work and as i was growing up chairman mao was going about steadily reducing the chinese population so don't don't like try to get me too excited about this guy you know like like please have some context about this and i do think that's that's important i think just because the second thing euron said the issue of meaning is it's got its back um it never goes away but my gosh it's back and not being addressed there are basically two broad outlines the way in which you can address the question of meaning the first is to say that we are meaning seeking creatures the second which is not the opposite but can follow on is and there is meaning now the first part of that that we are meaning seeking creatures you can pretty much get agreement on and there is meaning okay that's that's the beginning of a much longer and you can never settle that discussion you know you're not going to win that in a panel or something you're going to do it by vote but but to say merely we are meaning seeking beings but there is no meaning seems to me to be a very big recipe for trouble because as i said as you found out in that situation with hispanic here anything can walk into it they have they have a like you i've known quite a lot of people who've gone through that group some who came out many who came out but uh yes i mean this thing spoke to a deep sense of meaning at that time there was a specific by the way as you know i mean there was a specific historical reason for that broadly speaking whipped up by after the genocide of of muslims in the form of yugoslavia attempted wiping out of the muslim population in europe many uh uh muslims felt that not enough had been done as i've often pointed out not enough muslims subsequently said thank god for nato but never mind but but yes there's a specific set of grievances at the time which existed which should have been better addressed which weren't and which then led to movements like that which by the way is very successfully diminished i think as a movement certainly in this country falling apart um but yes i mean this is this is one this is one possibility that movements like that get some kind of moment i just i just would add one other thing to that if i may which is the one place that people are encouraged to find meaning at the moment is in politics and this seems to me to be a very bad idea because politics is extremely important it's extremely important to be involved in some way whether to be involved in the party or at least the vote to have your say it seems to me very important and cynicism about all of the political processes itself i think a very damaging dangerous thing i have to deal with that stuff carefully so politics is very very important but it is not the meaning of life and it is always a disaster when it is turned into that one of the reasons you see movements of political extremism is always because of people effectively putting leaning all of them desire for meaning in life onto the the leg of the stool that is politics fundamentally misunderstanding what the role of politics is that it's it's the broadly speaking get the groundwork in place for people to then pursue the life they want to pursue and with the meaning they want to pursue but not to make that thing itself the meaning it's always always and we see it at the moment the problem and i at any rate think that that that encouragement of people you know what have you done today to fight for x causes like you shouldn't have done anything most of the time you should have been a better son or daughter a better parent a better friend should be better to people around you were you a good neighbor today would be a much better question to ask um i'm i'm going to ask a crass question very quickly just just before i go out to the audience which is the question which you you know as you as you'll know uh douglas you've had most criticism as you've pointed out for your book in terms of immigration which is a crass reading of your book which everybody has tried to say not everybody i mean those people who don't like it crest people have tried to say remember when i mentioned humility at the start um anyway um it's not endless um i i think that um you know how do we kind of or how do you or either of you or is there any kind of uh tension there because there has been regardless of whether it's argued for in your book or not a tendency at a crass level actually uh by some people to say the problem of western civilization is immigration or is the other or its foreigners or is people bringing their religion and swamping us um you'll at least be familiar with the the meme and the trope but anyway so just you can explain whether you're saying that or not and it and but jaron what's your kind of view on the way that conversation is going because you're writing well obviously that's the way the conversation is going i mean uh i i do say horrible things about donald trump frequently because i believe them and i think it's important to to condemn you because i think while it's true he's no none of the people you mentioned he's a unique phenomena in american history and it's sad for american history to be at the point where with somebody as crass and as ugly as donald trump is is president of the united states so he has certainly made that argument america is in decline why because of immigrants america's in decline because it trades with china america's in decline because nothing america did but because of all these things other people have done to it which i think is absurd and and and and quite sickening so i view as i said i view western civilization as a set of ideas i welcome anybody who will adopt those ideas into what i consider western civilization i don't consider i consider immigration as a part a net positive again we'll get to muslim immigration in europe because i think that's a special case you know i don't think it's it's typical of immigration i think america is a land of immigrants i think america is an example of how you assimilate immigrants from all kinds of cultures from all kinds of environments into a western civilization into a civilized culture into a real culture now whether america has a real culture or not is an open question i guess but um i don't consider immigration in america a problem the problem i think today in america is that not enough immigrants not uh in in the united states there's a massive shortage of of of of good people coming into the country um i i don't consider immigration per se a threat again i consider us the threat it's the way we deal with the immigrants so yes it is a problem when mexicans come to america and when they they come to america to have a better life they come to america because america's freer they come to america because there's something about the american spirit that they want to adopt and their kids go to school and at the school the professors tell them no there's nothing special about america america is actually awful america's a horrible place mexico california really belonged to mexico you should you should be out in the streets advocating for returning california to mexico really they left mexico to come to california for a reason because it's not mexico but they're taught by americans by us that we are nothing we are beneath nothing multiculturalism is not about the elevation of other cultures to our level it's about the rejection of western civilization as a good culture not only a good culture the best culture in human history no other culture of human beings flourished lived longer lived wealthier lived happier created more products more art more material wealth more wealth of all sorts than it was to civilization and yet we denounce it particularly at our universities particularly at least my experience in america so i don't blame the immigrant kid who's coming in particularly the second generation of you know of condemning the united states i blame these professors who are teaching this and who are indoctrinating a whole generation in the inferiority of western civilization and i think to some extent and douglas mentions this in his book to some extent the problem is even with these muslim immigrants it's not so much that they are the problem it's that when they come here we don't expect them to live up to our standards so why aren't we prosecuting them fully for female genital mutilation why aren't we expecting them to live up to our standards just in a most basic level of just following the law and i think that's a big part of the problem is is if we appear weak and if we don't expect them to live up to us then yeah the worst elements within them or or if not the worst element the culture that they brought with them will sustain itself if they're told your culture is just as good good as us as ours then yeah well that's a problem no your culture is barbaric your culture is primitive your culture should die you came here adopt a better product a better culture if they were told that then i don't believe immigration would be a problem but they're not so immigration is a massive problem particularly because of this large immigration of muslims now i will you know i've got some stuff i'd say about mass immigration which i think is different than regular immigration about importing people and paying them to come which i think europe has done through its welfare state so there's a lot about the fact that we're kind of at war with certain elements within islamic world but we don't identify there's a lot to say about that topic but i don't think that what's killing western civilization or immigrants certainly not in america what's killing america is americans the choices and decisions americans have made the the the the intellectuals primarily in america have made and to blame it on the other i think is a is is a mistake okay first of all i agree that it can be a mistake in fact it always is a mistake unless there's anything to it obviously and i think people have to be aware of that and i think broadly speaking at any rate in europe we are aware of that we have if anything rather too strong antibodies to any discussion in this area i agree the the the expectation the the ability to claim fascism or xenophobia for instance is too easily used for instance let me explain an example why have why have we fallen i owe this observation to my friend eric weinstein who mentioned this to me on stage recently in australia why have we fallen for this idea that if you are a restrictionist on immigration you are also a xenophobe i'm a restrictionist on immigration and i'm a xenophile if anything i don't hate people from other places i'm very interested in other places i don't just want to sit in kent for the rest of my life i happen to love kent by the way no you know i i don't want to do i don't only want to speak to people from the same county or anything but why do we have nothing in our political language to conceive that you can be a restrictionist and a xenophile we don't it's if you want to restrict immigration it's because you hate people of different colored skins you hate you must hate other cultures you must only want to eat a certain type of food for the rest of your life and only speak to people from the same village or whatever it's it's it's unbelievably crass that at this point we're still at that level of debate on all this and we are you mentioned this uh um this issue by the way of you said something which i made my ears perk up you said this thing of that america needs good people i don't disagree i think it's just too easy a point to make without making the opposite point which is okay in that case who do you think are bad people now this is the real problem that we have with all discussion on immigration everybody says that everybody is just great and nobody wants to say what's bad and there's a reason for that built into the whole thing certainly in europe i don't talk about the case of america for now but in the case of europe it's for one particular reason you say why didn't we do a better job in persuading people to become part of this amazing thing that we've had the obvious reason is because we didn't expect this to happen we never planned for this we never planned for it when post war migration started did not start with the expectation that we would get to where we are now it just started and as angela merkel said in the popstarm speech in 2010 she said about the gasta baiter in germany and across europe she said after they came we thought they would go home now that's an amazing amazing admission to make from the german chancellor we didn't think they would stay now if uh you invite in millions of people into your country from in their case mainly from turkey it's likely that if you're inviting millions of turkish men millions of turkish men may well want to meet turkish women or at least women and when men meet women some things happen i'm told and if that happens it's likely that they're going to have to enter the school system oh of course you could it's not as if you can keep them out and you're going to enter the healthcare and so on and so forth and then before you know it you you change your idea you say well we'd like you to come and do these jobs and and and oh you're staying okay fine we need to take an attitude towards that and you invent various attitudes towards it and for a time we said sure you just do whatever you want pretty much and then we said actually you should become like us so i also do not blame an individual immigrant for that if if if if i an immigrant had come to britain in the 1950s and had gone through now i would be bloody confused about what was expected of me absolutely confused and that is not their fault it's ours i absolutely agree but that's because they say there was no overarching theory about this all this whole thing it it started it kept going and we had to keep adapting where we were as a response to that and that's why we're in this strange position now where as i say you cannot for instance argue anything that is restrictionist without these whole loads of other things coming in the final point on that which is i mean you you can't get even now if i say to a politician and i do it occasionally because i like to see them sometimes suffer yes if you say to a politician live on a stage if either of you were a serving politician from either the main parties i said to you who do we not want more of in britain now i know what happens because i've seen it their eyes go like sources they see their political demise happen in the next few seconds headlines excommunication from the party and so on the most i managed once for the smart young labour politician i managed to get her to say that she thought we shouldn't have more criminals and i said well what about some poor boy from tunisia say who stole something from the local market and went to prison for that but what he shouldn't come well no um we don't want more war criminals so there are about four guys in the hay who are going to be there for life and are not applying to come to live in london okay so if that's the best we can do we're in trouble but for the time being it is the best we can do and i don't say i said that'd be a final point my final point on that point is that this is the major problem on immigration we're all in we all want to talk the language of inclusion and rightly so because we need to include people who are here but the language of inclusion necessitates the language of exclusion not just what you do want to include but what you exclude and the point you make i mean it's now become if i may say that i'm something of a cliche the fgm debate but let's stick with it for a second you know london evening standard a couple of years ago starts a campaign stop fgm in our capital we've got prominent politicians small parties coming out against fgm what terrific paper the unleaving standard is to be doing this and so on and so still of course as we all know not one prosecution for that crime here but you know the total political unanimity you can now be opposed to it like the london evening stand it's not a wacky thing it was 15 years ago to oppose the mutilation of young girls genitals um and still nothing happens and and just as a thought experiment what would what should be easier to oppose than that don't hack away like that and ruin the lives of young girls please oh after 30 years still nothing happens but at least we can run front pages about it we can actually okay only just only because i don't know i'm now it's my fault but i do want to bring the audience in but i'm gonna i'm gonna be bringing out i'll take clumps of four or five people i think there's an awful lot that we might want to respond to challenge ask questions about so um i'll start here i don't know if there is a microphone from the organizers um but anyway if i if i start with that with you please because we're not going to be able to answer all of the points so just choose pick and choose the gentleman right at the back i i saw you next if you if you stand up and somebody might get to you sorry that didn't quite work with the mic horrible that was a terrible thing i i thought that sorry okay someone fit yes yeah um douglas was saying we never get on to let's talk it up you know let's remind ourselves why this is good and so far all i've heard this evening and i've enjoyed myself immensely but i'm putting you to it all i've heard this evening is let's have a few more fgm prosecutions can you please do better than that right okay thank you um uh yes okay right how am i gonna do this all right well obviously that person never because they're close no they're no just right close i was trying to stop you running i i yes i will make get you yes thank you um yeah i'd like to have a go answering this question about um the search for meaning um i think maybe one of the problems is that people in a search for meaning have turned inward of course western civilization was supposed to be about the individual but that doesn't necessarily mean that you've you've got to become this self-obsessed how do you feel are you offended or this kind of thing um and i wonder that there's a there's a paradox that maybe to understand yours your place in the world you don't look in would you look outward that might be at the world around you it might be a history and also literature and i think the arts and literature in education have had a a real going over and i think that's a shame and i think maybe ex expecting young people to read more and read more from the canon and get their ideas from that might might be a way forward i don't know who you are so but i agree with everything that you said so that was very good and that the jet right this is let me take those two people there then i'm going to start the next time we'll start down here and we'll kind of walk back right so this sorry i'm trying to make there's two at the back still so i just deal with those two then i'll come back to you and if you can just briefly pick things up yeah thank you um my question goes to all three uh panelists um everyone agreed on the fact that the west is sort of devoid of a greater meaning at the moment douglas touched on it briefly in a very individualistic way in the meaning should be derived from those around you being a better neighbor but i'm wondering if all three could give an opinion on a meaning outside the individual a pan western meaning what should be our motive what should be our our purpose as a collective civilization thank you and i love the book by the way douglas thanks thank you and the person behind as well who had their hand up yeah hi next friday is the fourth anniversary of the umbrella revolution revolution in hong kong and they are people who look to western values such as liberty and human rights but um nobody seems to really stand up for them especially the uk because actually these people chose to leave communism to be under british protection um why is nobody standing up for these people who look for an alternative in the west okay thank you and douglas just pick up anything don't pick up all of it but if you just pick up a couple of points there i'm so i'm so pleased you mentioned that one i was in hong kong um as the protest was sort of dwindling really maybe a couple of years ago very sad site i came back and said to everyone in europe when i was back you know why has there been so little support for the protesters in hong kong you see here everyone says but it's china what are you going to do everyone i know in france says but it's china what are you going to do now the one country in the world that doesn't say that is america but nobody likes the surgeon so this is a a big problem i uh i happen to think that uh look i agree with you it's something that we should be more forthright about but then i was saying this recently to an audience in australia because australia is really going through a change i've seen about its attitudes now towards china you just see them on the cusp of the turn i said to them okay your big your big this audience is nice melbourne audience or something over here okay you're very all very big on like uh civil rights in uh you really like the dalai lama okay let's say that liking the dalai lama and wanting more human rights in china and better support of the protesters in hong kong means that your household gdp goes down by 10 how do you like the dalai lama now okay turns out the dalai lama can be ditched for 10 percent 15 you're gonna ditch the protesters in hong kong and so on i don't say this because i want to make them cynics i say it in order not to for them not to be posing about this like recognize the cost of your morality and either be willing to pay that price or don't pretend don't show up because that's my primary feeling about the protesters in hong kong they wanted us quite rightly to be on their side when they discovered that our price was very very cheap um as for the other questions when a question starts with a manual can't you really know you've got a good audience but let me skip that one and leave it to iran um i i wanted to pick up i suppose on just the the point the gentleman made about meaning um you're right i did make a somewhat interior point about that but let me try it in an exterior way um so so i'm not religious myself i very much understand the religious impulse i probably am religious i'm just a non-believer i don't think that you can get a better set of sources of meaning than what is in every bookshop and library in this city in many of the art galleries in this city and all of them in europe and much more now this makes me sound purely like an east seed but aesthetics isn't a bad place to start what does the um what does the uh antique torso of apollo say to rilke what is it in german um you must change your life now art very often poses that point to us it asks us it tells us you should change your life you must change your life now it does not give the dogmatic answers that religion by necessity has to give but it's not nothing and the people who present this as just something you could choose on the other hand you might choose not to really make a mistake what we have here is not nothing the discoveries of europe the art of europe the music of europe the literature of europe the painting of europe the sculpture of europe has anyone done more than this and they when anyone everyone worries about this because they think you're going to say oh and therefore it's for us it's going to be like you know the thing that happens when you say you get fearful at the end of demise to sing upon nuremberg when you think ah no it's it's a bit coming up about uh can we just skip that bit about it going to be german art for german people that's what people fear but my point is the opposite my point is this can be for everybody so why don't we say to people reach out and take it it can be yours what else are you going to do with your life then live in that inheritance and and and play a part in it and even if you don't see a part that you can play in it at least at least help it to keep going don't make your generation the final chapter of that after which what okay um i i think actually that that that last point is very useful because it's one of the things i wonder whether the audience recognized which is the universalizing character of western civilization is being lost in the accusation that if you even mention western civilization it means that you're a white supremacist who only likes the west and has never understood anything about anywhere else whereas actually historically western civilization was just the phrase that was used for the universal um the the best that we'd become and everybody wanted it and nobody ever kind of wandered around thinking that means i've sold out my eastern heritage or i mean that just didn't come into it did it so it's kind of got lost in this where the east has succeeded it it's extent because they've adopted elements of western civilization i mean for whatever historical reason the west came up with the ideas that work for human flourishing they they work the ideas of liberty the ideas of freedom the fact that demonstrators are demonstrating for democracy in in hong kong is because they're western these are western ideas that they've adopted good for them and i consider western civilization a universal civilization not a civilization of a particular geography i agree with everything douglas just said about art if you if you're looking to save western civilization one of the things we need to really resurrect and return to is the great aesthetic achievement of western civilization and and again this is the the issue of expectation uh when immigrants come here we should be telling them go listen to beethoven go go to the museums look these values are not because we're white skinned it has not i'm jewish i love beethoven and wagner you because the the values they represent are universal has nothing to do with the fact that they're german i mean it has something to do but but the essential what they're really conveying is a universal value and and universal meaning and in this era the last 200 250 years has produced particularly in its first 150 years has produced amazing universal masterpieces that should speak to all of us no matter the color of our skin no matter our background no matter where we come from and yes that's where we can find meaning in in in our own lives because i think at the end of the day meaning is about the choices you make the kind of person you want to become the values you create for yourself somebody asked about a meaning outside of us and part of the danger there is that when we talk about that we talk about a meaning outside of us we talk about some collective meaning you know the greatness of fill in the blank and i think there's many many dangers there the the what i'd like in terms of the is is objectively good values that are good for us liberty freedom fighting for those things that's that that gives one meaning uh you know capitalism i know it's a dirty word uh particularly sitting next to marxist but uh or former marxist but you know capitalism is is the kind of thing that is worth fighting for look at how many people are not poor anymore in the world because of capitalism there's a universal value and meaning outside of you but important to you it always returns to the value to you as an individual and viewing other people as individuals now i'm going to take a shot at these really quick one one one more thing i'm getting two two i'm gonna do the answer replacing christianity's enlightenment values you don't need religion in order to inspire passion and inspire and and discover truth and fight for truth uh truth is religion actually i think diverts us away from the search for real truth say enlightenment values uh and then i i just have to say tell me quickly about kant if you read in the introduction to critique of pure reason kant says that the purpose of what he's doing is to save christianity receive religion say faith farm the enlightenment kant is the first anti-enlightenment philosopher he is the rejection of the enlightenment in the beginning of a path towards something anti-enlightenment anti-everything that we we believe in the the anti-scientific revolution i'm so tempted to join in on the can't but i won't right okay so i've got the microphone is there sir yes uh my question is to douglas firstly i'm an australian and i fully agree with your concerns about uh the chinese government interference in australian government i'm very concerned about that um so i'm glad to hear that you've raised it on the on the other side of the world my question is how do we get the political class to talk about difficult issues you've touched upon it tonight you've talked about it in previous debates [Music] how do we get the political class particularly in this country to talk about other immigration or problems within within certain areas of the islamic community coming from australia i noticed that we're a little bit more open and honest sometimes too much on certain issues if you're someone like sarah champion you can pay a severe price for being outspoken on one what one would consider a particularly serious issue that being rape gangs i can't think of it more to paraphrase douglas i can't think of a more serious concern to raise further to the discussion on fgm so how do we get the political class to acknowledge these issues and talk about them without fear of losing their political careers and exposure and degradation to their personal lives okay thank you um so i promised this gentleman here just because he's had his hand hooked from the very start um this gentleman here please he no but yeah pass it along and he can take it yeah thank you and then i'll take a little gaggle yeah and then there's some more yeah yeah thank you thanks for a really simulating discussion um so on the search for meaning um you spoke about you all spoke about the um you know well actually actually there is actually you do have people who demand you know a certain moral relativism between really awful ideas that we've talked about and what we've managed to create and instill in the west and my question really is to to you know any of you is what's the motive behind this what like it's easy to kind of say and i you know when i do it myself sometimes it's just their evil or they're just you know they want to see the west fail is it guilt is it that they're uninformed is it that they're misinformed um i wanted to get your take on that and because you know you could argue fairly the west has done and when we're individuals so we don't want to just attribute blame to everyone from because of past issues but the west has made mistakes in the past in the us the uk um slavery for example but the difference in the west is that we ended slavery and some and and the rest of the world didn't most slavery takes place in some sort of africa the far east south america so um could you kind of give the devil its due in a way i know it might be difficult and in a way kind of steel man post-modern argument in terms of you know why they why they have the perspectives that they have on on the west and why like you say iran the mexican kid goes to the us and he gets lectured about how amazing mexico is could you still man that argument and give us a insight into that thank you okay thank you a little little gaggle of people here now i'm going to take you all right and you're going to be and you're going to be quick and she could hi a quick one for douglas you mentioned very early on um about how the west was not or western civilization was not able to regenerate or to to regenerate the enthusiasm or or the culture of western civilization we weren't able to do it we needed something from outside i didn't get that that point too well um and putting my manager hat on so what do we do about it what what are the next steps okay thank you and yes that that yeah hello hi uh so to yaron mainly and it was answering the question about christianity i don't really think yes sorry i don't think it's been answered well enough and i actually think one of the cause of all of this discussion is atheism i think that the atheism and i'm not religious but i just look around and i think religious people defend their civilizations atheists do not and i think it's that's my question last night so the the lady behind you then i'm coming to that row then i'm coming back and then i'll do what the rest of you after and then we've got to go home right anyway yes okay right uh mr murray's book um lays out a very stark numerical comparison between immigration and history and immigration in the past 10 years and gives a very reasonable common sense argument for its unsustainability and i wonder however correct individualism might be epistemically or ethically how practicable is it in addressing these material concerns that we face today and dare i say it i have to wonder if adherence to one's tribe one's nation um however not philosophically backed uh might serve us better in addressing these this uh demographic okay well i i i think that you i don't agree with you but i think that you raise uh something which a lot of people are thinking at the moment and i think that's true as we know that identity politics is expressing itself in a variety of ways and i've i i know that that's an important thing that you've raised there okay so yes yes you know what you're doing yes carry on yeah well yeah if the panel is going to deal with the question of christianity i would like to ask a counter question it seems to me that uh the one of the fundamental tenets of christianity is altruism in other words sacrificing yourself for other people which does seem to be a cause uh an excuse for so much collectivism and that young lady there then i'll come back yeah then i'll come back i know you can't deal with it but it's nice to get a sense of what the audience are thinking about but anyway they go just to uh go forward on the idea of the search for meaning i think you've raised a really good point douglas about not often showing pride uh in our country in our school system as well um but that it can quite often maybe go further than that in terms of actually being able to give them the tools to search for meeting uh sometimes even if you go back to religion you can look at it and say well if you're not religious and suddenly you don't believe in an afterlife there's this huge void and that can be a very scary thing to actually think about will that come as we look further into things we can often find those voids but actually in our school system are we giving them the tools to be able to handle that to have the the ability to see other things to be immersed in other experiences to have the pride and to actually have the tools to be able to deal with it and find it for themselves or are we seeing a generation coming forward going i want to i want to make a difference but when you challenge them on it they don't know what difference they want to make yeah very interesting um and just just pick something up i'll start with you no i'll start with no i'm let i'm coming back i'll start with you pick up a few afterwards yeah right anything you want to pick up very quick douglas please fantastic to have questions um i'll be very brief uh how can the political class address this gentleman i think one thing in particular which is there has to be a price for not direct not addressing it at the moment there is only a price for addressing difficult questions there is no reward for addressing them sarah champion who i believe you mentioned the labour mp who as you say i mean this happened this monstrosity happened in her constituency why should she not say it um and so i think that the people who don't say it there should be some means of effectively punishing punishing them as politicians now i have often said that i think that that will happen at some point i saw it come very close after the massacre in paris in november 2015 when i thought that both angela merkel and jean-claude juncker when they went quiet they went quiet because they knew that if it turned out the people in massacred 130 people in one night had come through the migrant routes that they had encouraged then there was going to be hell to pay in europe now i happen to think that that will happen at some point i think that is bound to happen at some point and there will be a political price to pay the problem is that i don't see it i see the the further away it is the more it's postponed the more unpleasant it's going to be is my prognosis uh the gentleman asked us to steal man the argument of the post-modernist broadly speaking i think the post-modernist you could put them into two groups one ones who genuinely are post-modernists and ones who are happy to ride on post-modernism until it gets them to their destination which is for instance communism or anarchy all sorts of things but i mean broadly speaking though they're two different groups and as always the people who are being written don't know they're being written but the post-modernists the the real ones of which there are there are some um broadly speaking i think that that it slightly ties in if i may say so with the regeneration point which stand from there mate it's sort of part of the same thing something like this everything that we've done ourselves everything that comes from our own history and tradition is in some way fetid like philosophy is very dangerous ground because we still haven't worked out what happened in the 20th century and still all got crime scene tape around it and that that is not a bad reason to be fearful of something you know 100 million people dead from communism however many tens of millions dead from nazism you know it's worth being white and that's why people even even philosophers who get mentioned we get back to it this is this endless thing of going back to these sources and trying to find out where the whole thing went wrong and that means it's dangerous it means that philosophy is dangerous words are dangerous ideas are dangerous so why don't we just like pull the whole thing apart make it undangerous make it just meaningless because that way nobody can do anything dangerous again and there's something like that going on the endless the endless um thing that that they're doing even within groups of pulling groups apart seems to me to be part of the thing let no let nobody organize along any kind of communal grounds or communal lines something like that um the regeneration point i wanted to make what was that um yes as i said that we seem not to be able to think we've got it ourselves that we have to go elsewhere to get it seems to me and this comes back as i say to this thing that that the art is dangerous because it's been misused sure sure it has is that a reason not to be involved religion has gone wrong therefore we have nothing to do with religion sure religion has gone wrong does that mean you have nothing to do with religion i think this is a this is one of our self-imposed things which is a virtue is that we remember i was looking the other day at that stephen pinker book from only about what 14 years ago the blank slate has a wonderful chart of the the proportions of of males who are killed in bloody violent conflict in the west and in a whole set of places around the world that most people from the west have never heard of and the bit on the graph of p of men killed in violent warfare in the west is like this and all of these things that people have not heard of is like this on the chart it's like again compared to what what do you what do you what do you what do you what are you doing when you make these claims about it is it just that we happen to be the people who remember things and therefore we remember all of this stuff including the terrible stuff is it that other people are better at forgetting sometimes yes the turkish government for instance is encouraging people to forget uh just very quickly i do need to pick up on the on the ladies point about it very very timely yeah um you can't give us millions of questions yeah no but you don't i'm getting but i will be i will we will have to be evicted from the room i will be brief look i think the main thing about this the education the tool is something is this there seems to me to be a broad attempt to educate children to be world citizens and world citizens can when they're brought up as such can very rarely point to any other country accurately on a map because to be a citizen in the world you don't have to actually visit the world now my own view is in education the best thing you can do for any child is to bring them up very thoroughly within a tradition with a cannon with reference points that they can find throughout their lives and then having learned that to encourage them to go out into the world and discover it but if you encourage them to go from that bit out it's all mush it's all mush unless you have that place to start from there's this beautiful thing that woody allen i think we can still quote woody allen i'm not sure i haven't checked the news today but but woody allen once said in an interview that he felt that having not gone to university he had missed out on what he sort of did this the bridge he could do bits of it he just felt he couldn't do now you don't have to go to university to do that you can self-teach for this but to know how you get from there to there means you can then go out and do it endlessly to only get little bits that are disjointed the whole world is going to be chaos to you okay thank you right um you're on no you're on i'm just going to say no i'm just going to explain we're not going to have time for very many people there's two people there i'm going to take three people over here after yaron's taught and i'm very sorry because we've run out of time and then you'll have to sort them individually as they sign books so let me say i mean it saddens me that so many people particularly the secular people in the audience are so uh painting for religion and and i find it really interesting because religion has this uh monopoly it seems on meaning on the sacred on you know maybe a certain a passion for ideas and i think that is unbelievably sad and untrue um i think the problem is that we haven't really thoroughly cleansed ourselves of all the damage religion can do you know it served its purpose at a time but but but does not anymore i think we still hold on to christian morality which i think for example the gentleman mentioned i think is is is a dangerous morality at the end of the day it is a morality that leads us towards the collectivism and the destructive tendencies that yes atheists did but in the name of the same morality that's been taught for 2000 years under communism and fascism and other forms of collectivism it leads into that i mean the enlightenment at the end of the day is an incomplete project it was not fully completed and one of the things the enlightenment thinkers refused to do and i include from from from locke on uh through certainly adam smith is they refuse to challenge some of the premises of religion in particular its morality they they they challenge it in metaphysics they challenge an epistemology but they refuse to challenge it in in in ethics and i think it's over ready to do so until we can find meaning purpose in our own lives as individuals and really ground our political individualism in a moral individualism then i i i think we're going to be lost and and i think it's hard to to to fight for something unless you clearly understand it and have full fully embraced it but but think about you know think about what we have today we keep going somebody said we're all negative no i mean i keep saying and i think douglas keeps saying look how wonderful life is in the west in spite of the immigrants in spite of all the problems spite of all the things i mean we live longer we have access i mean one of the things i marvel at i consider myself at home and control using my iphone to control my amazing uh stereo system i have access to every piece of music ever written pretty much you know to the greatest not just the greatest music but every in particular interpretation of a beethoven's seventh symphony i can listen to and in my own time whenever i feel like it in in my own i mean it's unthinkable the kind of access we have to this to the great aesthetics but but generally to the great product of of of human achievement um so let's see let's embrace that that's what we're fighting for that's what being passionate about that's worth standing on the barricades and rejecting barbarism for for my ability to do that to to live the kind of life that is accessible to each one of us the product of individualism the product of capitalism the product of liberty we should be passionate about fighting for it and where we're lacking and i think we're lacking in a proper moral code that's what we need to be investing in in in investigating and re-embracing philosophy to investigate to to morality should be a science of how of discovering the values and virtues that make our life successful as human beings make our lives the best life that it can be as human beings and if we embrace that what's what's more sacred than your own life and what's more what's more you know use any of the religious terms and just apply it into the secular and you get that same passion and that same commitment that i think that i think in and look i know back in a minute just just one one look i'm not going to get into a whole the whole history of religion right but you certainly don't want to go through back to an era in which catholics were killing protestants i mean they make the muslims seem a little meek if you go back to a 30-year war the 100-year war i mean we don't want to go back to an era where we took religion seriously right we can far far secularists look at religion say oh they have some nice things over there but we don't want to really embrace it as a serious thing because when we did we slaughtered one another it was not a happy period of european history when europe took its religion seriously so uh so so let's let's embrace the values the secular values that are out there that are pro-human that are pro-flourishing all right fantastic um don't ask any questions i'll take a couple of points and then you two can have a minute each at the end to give us your final thought so don't ask them questions because then they'll say they've got need to answer them and we'll be here all night right i just joined the conversation yeah i just thought maybe it might be uh advantageous to try and look for and promote uh secular secularism in islam you know whether in the renaissance look look for what what the what traditions they have which are of value their music or persian poetry or and so on their architecture and try and bring them into europe bring them into the european story as opposed to say listen to beethoven yeah i'm just joking of course no that's not thank you and the lady behind well this is a question but um are you saying that western civilization is in decline or uh or is it a risk of being in decline or destruction and if it's if it is in decline then what is worse now what is worse about life now there's no chance i can answer that bloody hell that's the old point tonight right okay yes sir yeah i'm joking sorry just my points on the super on supranational uh governmental structures yugoslavia soviet union eu and not the cause but the sort of they're an accelerant on the problem so the supranational structure in the sort of bureaucratic authoritarian soulless cultures that they have such as multiculturalism that's empty invite all the world into being this glorious new citizen that i think is part of the problem as well that mindset the uh macro merkle version of it as opposed to what now looks to be the orb and salvini alternative okay thank you so there's that gentleman there and then yeah you um i think one of the biggest problems we face is an education specifically the fact that we're not honestly conversant with history in an honest way because i believe many of the things both of you or everyone on the panel argues against is easily dispellable by an honest reflection on history why for instance was it that i spent countless years learning about henry viii and his and his six wives and about the crimes of hitler as if i'd forgotten after a year or the next year or the next year why is it that we never learn about the evils of socialism and history i mean i'm not expecting you to answer this i'm just asking everyone to sort of reflect why is it in our education system that certain things are sort of left unaddressed completely rhetorical question as i say yes and the gentleman behind behind yeah yeah no no you you you yeah you blocked it sorry and then you yeah okay thank you um all over the west in every election which i observe the electorate are moving further and further to the right they're voting for anti-islamic parties as we've discussed there is a huge void what fills that void is open to discussion i think douglas mentioned the fact that um the longer this goes on the more dangerous that it was in your work but the more dangerous uh the response might be my question to you specifically i think iran is what is the response going to be when the anti-islamic parties actually get into power because if the current trends continue especially in europe we are five to 15 years away for an entire continent being controlled by parties who want to to whatever extent deal with the islamic problem and they will they propose dealing with that in different ways and what do you how do you think they're going to deal with it are they going to use reason are they going to use force okay yes um technology killing capitalism so we have a sense where amazon is becoming a huge organization and we can't let it become a political so even if it's slightly political it has huge impacts on the day-to-day lives of everyone so i think in the sense that technology is actually killing freedom and liberty okay interesting thank you and then i'm sorry final point for the floor this gentleman i'm sorry everyone my question is for iran uh iran i think that perfection is the enemy of the good and you said earlier that we should encourage beethoven to others the outsiders but i like to think and i know objectivism has an opinion on hedonism and i agree with it but what i do think is if we're on the campus we i think it's it's valuable to approach the leftists and say look if you want to do what you do in your bedroom or the nightclub do be aware that there are people who have a very frowning opinion on that and they want to physically punish you and i think as i said perfection is the enemy of good so we we could say okay you know defend your hedonism at least for now let's gain an inch because if i think that's a really good way to sort of get the emotional uh side of them so and i'll actually know what your thoughts are on that okay uh thank you audience i i really like to thank the uh both of you and before i bring you in for stimulating such a lot of discussion and i know that i didn't get time to bring everyone in but i think the fact that people wanted to speak is an indication of the fact that this is a conversation that needs to happen and that people want to join in and we we've had some fantastic answers from the front but there's a lot there's a lot more isn't there so i think that's why i'd like to uh thank the uh the organizers because i think you see that you've stimulated that kind of conversation i i wanted to just pose to you one one dilemma and i can assure you that i'm going to get some stick i have had some stick for sharing this tonight and people will say you know that this is that there is the rise of anti-islam right-wing parties who that gentleman said that this is inevitably a lot of the things we've heard tonight will feed into that and that there is a problem of people thinking that um radical islam and muslims are interchangeable in the way they view things we know that that happens there is a problem potentially i i i don't i don't think there's a rise of of racism in the way that people describe but i do recognize something of a kind of white identity emerging which makes me feel bloody anxious i can tell you now i don't like identity politics like white identity politics isn't going to make me even feel better let me tell you um and uh so i wondered how i know i'm now asking you a question but i'm the chair of aloud anyway right okay um because we need to uh all go and buy uh uh uh books and sign them and so on but just give us your final thoughts first of all i can slightly try to type those questions the partisan europe point i spend a certain amount of my time still going to well i think by the end of this year i've once again been to every country in the eu um i'm using a different country every week so i get it somewhat chaotic but fairly clear insight into what's happening my own view has been for a long time that that it's all moving some way out to my side which is not happy news for everyone but this is what happens when you postpone things you should have dealt with a long time ago and at some point the account is called in and i just hope that it's done in a decent way i think there are some people who will do it in a decent way and i think there are some who do it in the most in decent way imaginable but by the way among other things nobody here cares to delineate which is which which is all part of the problem because everyone's still a racist everyone's still a fascist and the fastest way to create those things is to keep using that term about everybody including the majority of the public in every country um very quickly somebody mentioned religion again i just suppose i'd mention this i mean religion is very strong it's the strongest drink in the cabinet and so you have to approach it carefully you have to be careful not to take too much of it it doesn't mean you should take none it doesn't mean you should walk away from the cabinet or indeed lock it just know that these are very very dangerous strong substances but there's a reason because they're the only things that claim to be able to go right down to the bottom of the well and bring up the real stuff now i think that one of the conclusions i've started to come to has been that that we may be in this phase of discovering that the only thing worse than religion is its absence and that people are going to have the religious urge whether you or i or any of us like it or not and that something's going to walk into it what is identity politics but a kind of religion what is the social justice warrior isn't but a kind of religion all of this stuff is recognizable the desire to flagellate yourself the desire to exonerate yourself the desire to be better than the other person to judge the other person to not judge yourself or to judge yourself by some standard but a lesser standard and so on and so forth the problem we have in the west is that we are stuck in something that nietzsche foresaw which is that we have the remainders of christianity in terms of guilt but we have no means for the alleviation of guilt and this is this is the deep underlying problem for us so i just say that religion is going to be in the mix you're going to have to find a way to live with it always it ain't going away but i suppose there's a lot more to say but i just finally would say once one thing if i may which is it seems to me that the thing that we miss and it hasn't come up like the thing we keep missing is something alan bloom one of my great heroes wrote in a book some 30 years ago or so he said about american students in the 80s he said that they had a comp they had a very good idea of what a good body was they had no idea anymore what a good soul was and it seems to me that again like mentioning beethoven it's a sort of embarrassing thing to mention but we're going to have to mention it anyway the creation the education the upbringing of good souls is of primary importance thank you very much so i agree with regard to religion it's it's attractiveness and and i agree with with that many of these secular beliefs or indeed religious beliefs i would even argue that communism um is ultimately a religion it is that which is based on faith and not reason it is that which sacrifices the individual to the community to the group to the tribe to the country to whatever that is the enemy and if that is religion and religion whether it's identity politics or whether it's communism whether it's christianity is the enemy anything that's anti-reason in my book is the enemy uh we need to replace religion we need to pro to to help people uh substitute that desire for meaning that they that they get from all these types of religions was something better was something based on reason and i think the the creating of character creating of a of a human soul as douglas just mentioned is the way to do that what we should be seeking as as as as a western civilization but what are those universal values what are the values that truly lead to individual success the individual flourishing and we need to help people discover those values teach them those values and let's say in this sense maybe i'm more of a globalist because i'd like to see i'd i'd like to see the canon be the best rather than the canon that happens to be from where i was born geographically i'd like to to find the best canon and teach the best canon so we can shape the best souls and we can shape the best characters we're not really shaping them they're shaping themselves but we can expose people to the opportunity to shape the best souls possible to achieve the best meaning for their own life possible and i think we find that not in religion but we find it we'll find it in that dangerous field that field of philosophy so i would encourage people to delve deeper into philosophy to look for the answers in philosophy rather than in faith rather than in emotion in reason in fact in reality um so you know there's so much more i mean one of the beauties of this is is the extent to which you know there's so many things we haven't talked about right the the extent to which the welfare state is partially responsible for the mess we're in today and and including the immigration master without the welfare state uh we wouldn't maybe be in such a such a mess with the immigration we haven't talked about what i view as the dramatic decline in the aesthetic quality of the art that we're producing over the last hundred years and maybe maybe that as a sign of the decline of western civilization more than anything else i can imagine the lack of universality in the in aesthetics product that being that is being produced today and then somebody mentioned history you know you talk about we don't teach kids about the evils of socialism and i'll end with this what we really don't teach kids and nobody knows no matter what educational system i is about the beauty of capitalism you know we teach the 19th century from the perspective of dickens but dickens tells a line tiny little sliver what the 19th century was the 19th century was about people going from two dollars a day to wealth it's about going from life expectancy of 39 to over 60. it's about the creation of the modern world it's about the arts and it's not an accident that that the art is is created during 19th century beethoven is the first the reason maybe between keeps coming to my mind beethoven is the first composer to make money off of his composition without being dependent on some aristocrat writing him checks but actually doing public concerts and selling tickets that's capitalism the beauty of capitalism the beauty of the industrial revolution the beauty of the 19th century the most important century in human history in terms of progress that is what we don't teach forget the negatives we don't teach the positives we don't teach what is really sustaining human life so there's no so to me it's it's it's it's not it's not surprising that people don't know meaning they're infatuated with socialism they're infatuated with with communism now or with white supremacy or whatever because they don't know what's positive they don't know what's led to the greatest civilization in human history which is what we're living through in spite of its decline it's still the greatest time to be alive if you're a human being in terms of what you can do with your own life particularly if you take it on a global on a global scale so let's teach the positive let's focus on the positive focus on the [Music] beauty no i okay okay um uh we're about to go i mean just just i was going to just thank uh uh first of all um um to thank uh razzie and uh um annie for organizing tonight and putting in the work behind the scenes um i was getting really roused up uh by everything that jaron said from that kind of him to capitalism at the end but i've decided that as he's just done that i will just uh uh do a bit of capitalist advertising so um he made the point about all of the unanswered questions well luckily the battle of ideas festival is happening in three or four weeks time which erin has spoken at in the past uh where we have 400 speakers and 100 panel debates over one weekend and practically everything he said there is actually got a panel debate discussing it and and we won't all agree at all i think that tonight has indicated just the richness of the kind of questions people have and i do apologize uh to both of you as speakers because i know you could have answered all those questions in a lot more time but i think that we got a flavor of what you as an audience were thinking about and we've got some very profound and useful it's like getting a book reading group alan bloom is also one of my favorite books there we go we agree on a lot of things um you know what a call to arms and just on that call to arms because you are all about to go and buy the books that we've just been talking about and get them signed and have one-to-one conversations yaron just wants to say something about the work of the iron rand institute yeah so just just quickly this event once sponsored by the android institute we're based in the united states but of course today it doesn't matter who you're based everything's online so i encourage you to search out our material on the on on youtube uh on our website ironman.org also for those of you who are students in the audience we have many programs of students including a lot of free conferences we pay you we pay you to come basically so i encourage you to get engaged and you know from our perspective many of the philosophical answers to the questions that were raised today are in her writing so i encourage you all to go read ella shrugged thank you thank you very much right okay um i've just got to say that the battle of ideas first of all we don't pay you to come what happened there on the capitalist moment there right we don't pay you to come you have to pay for yourself and also one of the books on sale outside is mine so you go and buy it i'm now going to have a cigarette and then we'll be signing books thank you all very much indeed thanks thank you that was great it was great

Channel: Ayn Rand Institute

Views: 335,312

Rating: 4.6022649 out of 5

Keywords: Atlas Shrugged, Anthem, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand Institute, Fountainhead, Individualism, Objectivism, Objectivist, Philosophy, Reason, Rights, Capitalism, Freedom, Liberty, Atheism, Libertarianism, douglas murray, claire fox, yaron brook, western civilization, dark web, Tribalism, tyranny, What is killing Western Civilization?, society, culture, morality, civilisation, civilization, debate, academia, Douglas Murray Islam, douglas murray debate, douglas murray sam harris, rgv, trump, politics, ethics, europe, god

Id: mJZqKKFn3Hk

Length: 102min 31sec (6151 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2018