Latest / Thinking Class / #089 - Compilation - Saving Britain's Boys, Families And Its Nations

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#089 - Compilation - Saving Britain's Boys, Families And Its Nations · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_11: Hello classmates and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_11: I'm John Gillam and today you can expect to hear a compilation episode from some of the best bits of the show.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_11: I have been in the process of moving house recently and so haven't had the time to be able to interview guests.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_11: You can expect normal service to resume next week.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_11: But this week you can hear an episode about the state of boys and families in Britain, the state of the British nations, why the loss of faith in hyperliberalism are to blame for this, and what may be required to save our individual and collective souls.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_11: And you can expect to hear from Ed Davies of the Centre for Social Justice, Lois McClatchy Miller from the Alliance for Defending Freedom, Connor Tomlinson of Courage Media, Nima Parvini, also known as Academic Agent, the philosophers Carl Truman and Rizard Legutko, Father Benedict Kiley, Philip Tilkington and Bijan Amrani.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_11: I hope you enjoy the episode and that it it tells a bit a story.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_11: And before you get listening to it, how about you subscribe to the show on your podcast platform of choice on YouTube and on Substack?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_11: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_11: Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that project, but what it is that you're actually seeing amongst the boys of the United Kingdom, but why it's cause for concern.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_09: So the the sort of genesis of this came from our work with schools, actually.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_09: We were we spend a lot of time with um small frontline charities, schools, youth clubs, uh police, sort of trying to get under the under the skin of what's really going on out in the country.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_09: So the CSJ is quite unused like that.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_09: Although we're a think tank in an ivory tower, we have 800 small organizations we work with who feed into all our policy work.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_09: So we have managers in Northwest, Northeast, Yorkshire who will help find the best organizations and help us to understand.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_09: Um, and as we were going around the UK, we kept going to people in schools and youth clubs in particular who said there is something going on with our boys at the moment.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_09: And it was often a feeling more than anything else.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_09: It was a sort of, I can't put my finger on what it is, but I feel they are dropping out, that they are not happy, that there is something going on.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_09: And so what we set out to do was try and quantify that feeling, basically.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_09: So we we went into all the statistics to try and see what is it that people are feeling at the moment.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_09: Um and the Lost Boys report, which came out a few months ago, is is really it's just 70 pages of statistics, really.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_09: It's it's quite a depressing, dry read.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_09: Um, but what we found was really quite startling.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_09: And I think for me, I'm in my mid-40s and I think back to when I was at school.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_09: And actually, generally, it was pretty good for boys.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_09: So, in the space of not that long, in the grand scheme of things, it's got really bad.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_09: So, to sort of give you a quick run through of some of the key things, uh going to school.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_09: So, at the moment, one of the government's key targets is to have 75% of children school ready.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_09: When you look at the male-female breakdown, 75% of girls are already school ready.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_09: They've hit that target.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_09: But in boys, it's only 60%.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_09: So, right from day one at school, boys are starting behind.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_09: And then as they go through school, they will do worse in their SATs, they'll do worse in GCSEs, A levels, T levels, everyone's saying, Oh, you know, they're probably, if you do a vocational skills thing, they'll do better.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_09: Nope, they don't do anywhere near as well as the girls.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_09: Uh, they are less likely to go to university, they are less likely to get a good degree at university, they are then more likely to be unemployed or not in education, employment, or training.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_09: So at every stage, we have a generation now up to the age of sort of their mid-20s where they are behind girls.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_09: Um, and I think we then looked at some of the various other external factors around crime, around the internet, pornography and tech, all the various factors in boys' lives that might be contributing to this.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_09: And it really makes for quite a bleak picture, I'm afraid.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_09: Um, and when, as you say, when we went out with this, we were a little bit nervous.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_09: It's not a popular thing to talk about.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_09: We spent 50 years fighting for equality and women's rights, and quite rightly so.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_09: But actually, what we are now hearing on the ground is that that that is no longer the issue, really.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_09: That generally speaking, that is tending to go a lot better than it did.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_09: It's not perfect, there's still work to do, but particularly looking at that school age, that sort of 11 to 24-year-old maybe, that there's something going on with men and it's not great.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_09: And so that was part one of the report, and we're sort of corralling around part two and looking more at solutions now.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_09: We're going to be looking right from the very early years, sort of 0 to 5, through to primary school, uh, into the workplace.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_09: What are the things we can be putt putting in place uh for young men to try and turn that round?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_11: Well, I don't want to spoil your report, but uh maybe you could tell us a few of the solutions, uh maybe one per age range.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_11: What do you think we could do to get the ship back on course?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I was to boil it down into um something fairly simple.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_09: Essentially, that the question is how are we raising or even fathering metaphorically and literally our boys?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_09: And you have these sort of circles of influence around boys and young men that raise them and that they will both be taught by but also see how they behave.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_09: And in each of those circles, we're seeing there's there's just a real lack.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_09: So if you start at the very core, that family thing, we've talked a bit about family already.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_09: Actually, for half the boys in the country, they don't have their father at home by the time they're 16.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_09: So they're they're sort of navigating through adolescence without a model for what masculinity or being a man looks like.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_09: And it's not to say that every father was perfect in in years gone by, but the father only 50 years ago was probably there.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_09: So you're starting from that that that really important deficit.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_09: And then you go into the next stage, you think, right, well, who's in my community?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_09: What are those sports clubs or those teachers or those other men that might be in my life who can mentor me and sort of show me what masculinity might look like?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_09: And again, what we're seeing uh in schools, very few male teachers now, so only about one in three in secondary school, and a quarter of primary schools have no male teachers at all anymore.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_09: So it's very possible now that you grow up as a boy in the UK with no father at home, no male teachers at school, uh, not much engagement in sport anymore, that sort of thing.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_09: And so you could easily reach the age of 13 without ever really having had uh a man in your life now.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_09: Um, so you have those sort of those growing sort of circles of influence.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_09: And then at the top level, what you have is these sort of role model type things.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_09: And you know, Andrew Tate has become the bogeyman of the national role model.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_09: Um, but what he's done is he's spoken to some of these boys who don't have close role models to them, and so they're looking around.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_09: And when you listen to the likes of Andrew Tate, it's funny if I talk to I've got two teenage boys.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_09: If I say Andrew Tate, they're like he's years ago now, I he's a joke, he's not a serious person anymore.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_09: He is no one takes him seriously.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_09: But I think in the public conversation, people understand the type if I say Andrew Tate.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_09: When you listen to people like that, about 80% of what they say is pretty good advice.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_09: It's sort of, you know, it's that really basic.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_09: Get up, get out of bed, stop watching pornography, go and get a job, work hard.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_09: It then comes with 20% of really unpleasant stuff at the top, which you absolutely don't want.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_09: But if nobody is speaking that first 80% into these boys' lives, it's no wonder they're attracted to it.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_09: And we used to have exactly this, I mean, thinking back to I mean, go go back 20 years, sort of pre-internet, pre-that that problem, you had exactly the same problem with gangs.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_09: Our first um ever gangs paper at the CSJ was called Dying to Belong.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_09: And it was the same thing.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_09: It was these boys who were looking for male role models and they weren't finding them at home or in their schools.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_09: But the guy they dig see, sort of on the estate or wherever it was, who had a car and seemed to be doing stuff and had a girlfriend and all the rest.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_09: They were like, Well, I want to latch onto him.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_09: And that was often someone in a gang, someone who was making some money from dealing or whatever it might be.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_09: And it's a very similar thing.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_09: And so, on that outer level, we get quite fixed on the well, if we just shut down the manosphere or the internet or whatever it might be, get rid of Taylor, we'll solve this.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_09: But what you're seeing is that's the sort of last resort of people who don't have male roles in their community and don't have a father at home and all these different things.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_09: And so, in terms of solutions, coming back to what it looks like, it looks like putting men in the lives of young boys in each of these different spheres to raise them to understand what a good model of masculinity looks like.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_09: Um and hopefully we'll sort of get onto the detail of that in the coming months, but as a starting point, that's probably where we're gonna go.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_11: One thing that I wanted to get into actually, ecology is um is is I again, if anyone who works in the modern world where we are constantly on laptops and all that kind of thing, or we're just in air-conditioned buildings, is you've you talked about walk in the woods.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_11: A couple of things I've done in the last few years has been getting out and learning some some bushcraft, quite literally being under under wood cover and being shown how to understand what woods to use for fires and shelter and build all of those things and make your own food and and skin animals and gut them and fillet them, all those kind of things.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_11: I'm I'm not good at it, but to actually do it and then spend the night in that shelter um is something which gave me uh a number of things.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_11: First of all, a rush like I've never had before as I passed each stage gate.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_11: Oh, look, I'm I'm I'm a little bit closer to a bit more comfort, but only for a certain period of time before I had to think about the next thing.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_11: And I I don't consider myself to be an anxious or a depressed person, but what I do know as someone who spends a lot of time in his head in the modern world is that in the course of a working day, you definitely feel weariness in your soul.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_11: Uh and and and but when you're out and you're always thinking about lots of things, there's like a thousand different things going on.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_11: But once you're out, say, covered by trees, thinking about where's the wood for the fire, and lighting the fire, repairing the food, and all of those things, is that it all goes away.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_11: Every single bit of it goes away.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_11: You know, eating some of the things growing on the forest floor, you're preparing fresh food.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_11: It's none of that goes away.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_11: All of the things that we worry about, the next to-do list, the thing you need to do on your phone, on the app, on the whatever, it's all gone.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_11: And it feels, as you just said before, like you're becoming human.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_11: And I would argue that um besides all of those points we talked about with religiosity and the rest of it, and how that is humanizing, we need to recognize where we've come from, and that the world that we live in right now, elements of it are so unbelievably counter to our nature that it's no wonder most of us are looking around for answers and help and feeling like victims.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_07: Right.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_07: So we evolved to a certain context.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_07: 99.9% of our ancestors or more were uh Paleolithic, actually, you know, stone stone edge.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_07: Uh so if we're not in the context of physicality of community and tribe, then that might look like you know, singing, dancing, hugging, you know, the things people do, right?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_07: Eating together, you know.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_07: I'm very much Mediterranean about this.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_07: I've got an Italian girlfriend that she's taught me a lot about this part.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_07: If we're not in the contact of ecology, and I, you know, for example, little changes, right?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_07: Like go for a walk every day.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_07: An hour in the morning, an hour at night, you know, in the park, if you live in a city.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_07: I've deliberately always bought uh got houses by parks, for example, if I live in a city.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_07: I've deliberately moved to places where I'd buy a river, for example, or by the coast, you know, ways to walk along the seafront.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_07: Even in Deccan and Brighton, I could walk along the seafront and have, you know, if nothing else, you're eco-regulated would be the word.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_07: We could think of this in terms of self-regulation, co-regulation.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_07: Eco-regulation, I made that up in theo-regulation, you know, the this contact with spirit, meaning or profundity, which makes us sane.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_07: It's like these are the four anchors, the four connections.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_07: Um I take my coaching calls outside.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_07: I just said to all my coaching clients, hey, we're going to do the coaching on the phone from now on, and I'm going to be in the botanic gardens.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, that's the deal.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_07: If you want to do it on Zoom, it'll cost you double.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_07: Right?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_07: And then they're all like, cool, we'll do it on the phone.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_07: Right?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_07: So it's like now we do phone coaching and I sit in the park and I'm, you know, looking at a heron and sitting under a tree and naming the local turtles or whatever while I'm when I'm coaching someone.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_07: It's fantastic.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_07: So that's a lifestyle change I've made.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_07: And I'm aware people are in very different situations depending on where they live.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_07: But I would say this should be a factor in choosing your home.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_07: You know, my house, my house is full of houseplants for a reason.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_07: Uh we have a balcony, you know, some of it you can choose, some of it takes time.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_07: But yeah, the ecological connection, absolutely true.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_07: The same as building the community, letting rid of getting rid of the guilt you have of being English or French or whatever you are, actually embracing your where you come from and your people.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_07: Uh that's not a bad thing.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_07: That's a normal, healthy thing.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_07: This is psychologically necessary.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_07: So uh I've come at this through the route as like being a psychologist, right?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_07: Just going.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_07: Well, we're talking to the uh my team that I supervise in Ukraine, who they do thousands of hours of therapy for soldiers and civilians and all sorts of people in Ukraine.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_07: And we we basically worked out over the last three years.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_07: I I was there on the ground um, I think in week three of the full-scale invasion.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_07: I'd been to Ukraine like 20 times before because I had a I was married to a Ukrainian.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_07: And we were like, well, what actually keeps people sane under the most extreme conditions?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_07: And it's actually exactly the same stuff as keeps people sane working in a job in the city of London, right?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_07: It's okay, what does that look like practically?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_07: Let's give people something they can use.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_07: So you need some kind of a physical practice.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_07: You know, for me it's weightlifting.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_07: It used to be martial arts, for some people it's conscious dance, it's kind of a fun hippie one.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_07: Uh some kind of something that gets you in your body.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_07: All right.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_07: You need to build community.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_07: That's not given to us in modernity.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_07: We need to actually establish it in person and online.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_07: There's a certain amount of my time each week I spend doing that.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, and that might be just talking to the neighbors, right?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_07: It might be really making an effort to go to weddings, to build a men's group.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_07: Ecologically, I spend three hours a day minimum outside.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_07: And I work a 45-hour week office job essentially.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_07: I just move my coaching calls outside, I go for a walk in the morning, walk for an evening, sit out in the sun at lunchtime, and get that ecological connection.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_07: And then, you know, I try to connect more deeply to the land with things like you're saying of my friend Matt Hill, for example, runs these good survivalist camps and he mixes them with martial arts, and you go out in the woods in the in the in the in the south of England, it's fantastic.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_07: I'd recommend Matt if you're in the UK.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_07: And then theological connection.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_07: I pop into church every day.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_07: You know, for me as a sort of postmodern recovered Catholic, I um just go sit in the chapel.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_07: And um my modern mind struggles with some aspects of Catholicism, but I know I feel better when I sit quietly for 10 minutes in church.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_07: I used to meditate a lot, I still do, I still have a Buddhist practice to some extent.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_07: That's, you know, you can be a secular Buddhist.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_07: I think there's meditations that fit with Christianity that can be quite helpful.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_07: And those things are connected.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_07: Like, who doesn't feel closer to God in the woods?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_07: Like that's where God spoke to all the prophets, is in the desert, in the mountains, in the forest.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_07: When it says wilderness, that just means in the Bible, that just means outside the city.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_07: That's what it means.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_07: Wilderness means outside the city.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_07: So like these things are connected, and the more I'm in my body, the better my relationship is, the better my, you know, the better sex I have with my partner, the easier it is for me to be in my body, you know, personally.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_07: So these things are all connected as well, right?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_07: The nice thing is you get virtuous circles.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_07: If you just start with one, right?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_07: Like buy a dog, right?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_07: Just start with just start with one thing, like do a little bit of yoga.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_07: It's like get outside every day, you know, say a prayer for one minute every day.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_07: Like I go to 12-step recovery groups, I'm long-term sober, and it's like, you know, they just do the serenity prayer.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_07: Very simple, 30 seconds.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_07: No one can object to the serenity prayer.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_07: It's it's actually the heart of stress management.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_07: I teach it at workshops now, it's genius.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_07: You know, what you can accept and what you what you need to change.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_07: Um little practices.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_07: That's all you need.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_07: And the key thing for the sort of internet generation is it's not just about listening to podcasts.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_07: Like John, I was happy to hear you know you've been doing these physical things, and I bet Connor is and other people out there, you know, uh Carl and other people.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_07: It's not enough just to sit and get angry on the internet, to listen to podcasts, to watch YouTube videos.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_07: It's like you need to do some of these practices.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_07: Like, I'm not a particularly smart guy in some ways now.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_07: I've was far too alcoholic for that.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_07: You know, nowadays I'm not the smartest tool, the sharpest tool in the box, but I think I'm pretty good at helping people develop practices.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_07: So that's the thing I I would lean like young men to do, for example, is not just to get angry on the internet, but to actually get in the real world and you know talk to girls, go to church, lift weights, etc.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_11: Protests, for example, the 1960 civil rights movement in the USA or Russian Revolution of 1917 were in fact tightly organized and funded by elite.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_11: And so I guess uh what I've got to ask you here, Nima, is um I've heard Vivek Ramaswamy say the guys with the golds make the rules that was in his woke ink book.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_11: Uh we now have seen a big vibe shift, a counter-elite come into uh power in the US with Trump Mask Vance RFK.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_11: Uh if ideology follows power, um, if we've got the unipolar world coming back for at least a fitting moment where they're saying you guys have really screwed things up and things are bad, this is the way you fix it.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_11: Do you think that the problems we've just been highlighting here, where people just don't see the problems and aren't willing to do anything about them because they don't want to see them, do you think that that changes?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_11: Are we downstream of that, or is it not as simple as that?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_06: No, I mean I I'm I I'm a little bit less optimistic about uh quote unquote vibe shit than a lot of people are because if I if you just take a step back and have a look at well, what are the forces at play here, what are the interests of power, um I have maintained that um woke whatever woke was it was a failed ideology.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_06: Right, it was I mean it's fundamentally from the point of view of political technology that works in the interests of power, right?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_06: Why is it bad?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_06: I mean ideology should bring people together to get people to buy into the system and and why divided people in people who gave into the system um you know made enemies of people who should agree to fight to the system, you know, manageable class or intellectuals who uh identify reasons, for example, um you know, who then you know um motivate you to work against work um so it was clear that it was a problem uh the system needed to correct.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_06: Um so it's not that surprising to me that you've got people like Elon Musk, Ramashwamy uh and and various other so-called tech bros who let's not forget they were there in the 90s, they were there in the 2000s.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_06: Uh the the DEI stuff and the work stuff was actually becoming an operational problem.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_06: Um it was also uh becoming a problem for uh military recruitment.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, of course, you can't have an imperium, you can't have an empire where the army is being hollowed out and weakened by uh a pernicious and toxic ideology.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_06: So at least two years ago I wrote an article called Putting the Work Away uh where I said look one way or the other the system is gonna pull back on this stuff because the bottom line is military recruitment is half of where it should be, and you can't have a system where almost a third of the population should die.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, if you look at it from the point of view of power by power, I just mean the American system as a whole.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_06: Uh if you fast if you go back three years and think about how many people had doubted about the 2020 election, about democracy as a whole, about uh any other institutions, about Hollywood, about you name it, they they had checked out, they were against it, they you know, they didn't like it.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_06: Uh all it's really taken is Trump winning, uh or being allowed to win, some might want to put it that way, and a couple of weeks of executive orders, and now we're so back, now everybody's back in, now everybody's looking forward to the movies coming out again, and you know, America's back maybe and all this.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_06: Um and you know, it's as simple as I mean you don't really need a deep understanding of elite theory to see that actually the system is kind of self corrected and Trump is probably I mean, like what I said was if they do this, Trump will probably buy the American system plus thirty to fifty years or something like that.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_06: And I do I genuinely believe Trump comes as the savior to the system, not as the overthrow of the system.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_06: Now it may look revolutionary because the system has a lot of rotten it.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, I do believe that various um uh arms of the organism had either become rotten or gone rogue.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_06: You know, the the Democrat the Democratic Party in America uh I think had got to levels of corruption that are intolerable for any system.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_06: Okay, so one way or the other it needed to self-correct.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_06: Um but now that it's doing so, I think a lot of people who three years ago would have quite happily said that they don't really believe in democracy or uh whatnot are probably back on the reservation.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_06: Um so in a sense, while it's uh you know, from the point of view of stability and order, it's good that Trump has won.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_06: But from the overall point of view of um, you know, if you want this structure to fall, Trump has done the opposite, he's saved at least for the time being.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_06: You know, there's there's I do think we're the US Empire is in its late phase.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_06: Um, in fact, I put out a video very recently that people can go and check out uh talking about how tariffs are a sign of an empire on the downward swing.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_06: If you look at the British Empire in the 1930s, they also started putting up the tariffs.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_06: The 1930s were actually the height of the British Empire in terms of total area control.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_06: Um, but yeah, in you know, in the space of 20, 30 years, the British Empire was gone, right?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, uh by the death of Churchill, it'd be gone in 1965 so it can happen that quickly, but nobody in 1930 say would have believed you if you'd said, oh well, in 30 years' time all of this will be gone.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_06: Um but the fact they'd move from laissez-faire to free trade as a doctrine to tariffs and trade wars, um, is something that uh happens in the late empire, mainly because free trade is best understood as a control mechanism for power, as a kind of soft control mechanism, uh, which America has done and done pretty well from World War II up until now.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_06: That structure's falling apart, and if if Trump represents anything, it is the the end of that period of American uh of American kind of real dominance in the world.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_11: The pressures on Gen Z then with regards to how they come to view the world is downstream of multiple anti-civilizational factors.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_11: So the internet by its very nature and the way that we are plugged into a network that is ethereal and as you mentioned, comes from many different angles, and people can choose their own cultures, is it's immediately the thread is cut between the user and wherever it is that they're situated in place and time and amongst people.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_11: And then we've had the ideological transformation or formation within the education system over the years, which has left those of us inhabiting the here and now with very little to hold on to.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_11: So it'd be really interesting to hear about why you think there has been a movement toward the anti-civilizational movements and ideas, uh, instead of, for example, taking the route that you and others on the reactionary right, as you've described them, have chosen, which is plumbing the past for its wisdom and the things that we can learn and the cultures that we can build.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_11: What what what represents those anti-civilizational ideas and how can we define them?
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think the cultural safety net has been snipped in the name of unmitigated freedom, but all that's happened is people that would have fallen and not had the capacity to catch themselves and would have been otherwise caught by the safety net of wholesome cultural incentives have just smacked and hit the bottom.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: And anyone lurking around the sort of resentful goblins at the abyss have been picking them up and saying it's okay dwell down here with us, you know.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so it takes a lot more deliberateness and a degree of self-consciousness when you do have that moment of betrayal or pain, or for example, if if you're dad if your dad's not in the home, how do you learn the value of masculinity?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you go and seek out different advice online.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: You might go and read a book, you might go watch Joko Willing or Jordan Peterson or Chris Williamson or Girlfriend Andrew Tate.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so you're developing a critical consciousness of something that wasn't imparted onto you.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_03: And for the people who just follow algorithms, who follow incentives, who aren't super conscious of things, who just regurgitate rote-learned talking points because per luxury beliefs, it gets them access to exclusive clubs or job opportunities or resources or friendship circles, they are following the most perverse of civilizational incentives.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_03: So when you said a civilization on the decline, yes, because what are the cultural incentives?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_03: Cultural incentives are to indefinitely defer when you have your family until the point at which many people, even though they report wanting children, we've reached 50% in the UK of women over 30 having no children, 25, sorry, 25% of all women, therefore, and 50% of those women will never have kids, despite many of them wanting them.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_03: So you're going to be bereft of a family for the 40 years after 40.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: That's a great tragedy, and that's very, very painful.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: That's a lie told to people.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: We put out the myth that you are going to have more value in your life indefinitely filling in spreadsheets than surrounded by said loving family.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: The idea that a found family of grievance-based activists or online satellite communities is as good as a local community, a congregation, a fealty to people also invested in the future health and prosperity of your nation.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_03: And so we are atomizing people and giving people these surrogate relationships, which aren't morally nourishing, on the auspice of, oh, any vice you want to constantly indulge in, actually, that's just the freedom of your will.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_03: Anyone who gives you advice is imposing on your will, and everyone around you should be affirming you at all times that your conscience never does one of those pesky flare-ups and reminds you who actually have obligations to other people if you want a meaningful life.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what's being given to people who don't self-consciously curate an ethic against those perverse cultural incentives.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_03: So that's why civilization is on the decline, because we have all of those people doing all of those things in private, being encouraged by the most perverse and creepy people, either online or in their immediate orbit.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: They don't filter those people out of their lives.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_03: They never claw their way up out of the crabs that are snipping at their heels in the bucket.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_03: And then the default thing is whenever someone like me comes along for the lost how many years and has been saying, guys, I don't think this is a good idea.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_03: Young men, I think maybe you should not watch pornography until your eyes turn square.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: Young women, I don't think that you should hate men in your life just because you've had an encounter with one or two terrible men.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, some of them want to protect and provide and take care for you, and both of you should stop being in each other's throats and form a family.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_03: They go, Well, what two consenting or three consenting or four consenting adults and a horse do behind closed doors isn't any business of mine.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, if suddenly nobody's business is nobody's other business, then everyone in civilization is just, I don't know, gooning their way into oblivion and nobody cares for each other.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, no, I I am interested in other people's business.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_03: I do care about people.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's high time we started forming communities to shelter ourselves like a little Russian nesting doll against perverse cultural incentives.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_11: The communities you talked about there, that sounds to me like something Rod Dreja has spoken about and written about in his book, The Benedict Option, where he talks about how there's much that those of us who may be despairing at the direction of civilization could do to make sure that whenever the opportunity arises to recreate or rebuild civilization on sturdier routes, uh, we could go and create communities of people who are like-minded and focused on the things that you've spoken about, which are important, like the wisdom of the past and family and all of these things which we know work within our nature rather than against it and provide flourishing and is not just focused purely on the individual, which is, I suppose, where we've gotten to, right?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_11: As we are these atoms who can do whatever it is that we want to do because don't judge me when it's my choice, and that's the thing that is most important in this world.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_11: I suppose looking around, the economy is set up to whether it's digital or or physical, the economy is set up to create um lots of consumers and individual atomistic lives.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_11: And so I suppose the tidal wave um uh is is pretty strong at this point against civilizational ideas and trends.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_11: What prospect do you think that there is of the pendulum swinging back?
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_11: And what would need to happen, do you think?
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you need both personal resilience and structural reform.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I think personal resilience you can ensure independently.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_03: Structural reform you just have to push for collectively in different avenues and hope politicians are listening.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't think they will listen in the next five years.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: But but on that point, I mean, the economy is set up in such a way where we are classified as universal unisex consumer units rather than inextricable embodied constituents of a household.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_03: And we used to consider ourselves household, and we've moved from belonging to one household to the next.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_03: That was the sort of fulcrum on which movement from childhood to adulthood came about until very recently, really.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: The Industrial Revolution set this off, then the sexual revolution, the digital revolution.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_03: Basically, technology has dislodged us from time, place, people, and culture to think of ourselves as universal men, the anywhere class, David Goodhart talks about, that can be picked up and dropped off on any soil and not have any cultural, ethnic, historical holdover, and instead just produce goods, consume goods, and then, I don't know, be turned into sustainable carbon neutral mulch when we eventually expire and just go to sleep forever, because there's obviously no spiritual afterlife in the minds of these elites.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_03: Ivan Illich talked a lot about this in his book Gender.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um he also wrote a book called Shadow Work, but basically his concept is shadow work in that our lives are now reorganized around maximally creating productive work at work and then going home and then maximally recuperating using consumer goods to rest at an optimal level to re-enter the marketplace.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's the Sigma male grindset we we see of the, you know, the online right is as bad for this as anyone else, of lionizing Patrick Bateman because he has a perfect skincare routine, a perfect fitness routine, and he goes to work and he's you know very dedicated and formulaic.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_03: And you don't want that.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_03: Filling out spreadsheets at infinitum does not provide worth to your life.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_03: And especially when in an economy now where and and the TikTok girls that keep making, you know, TikToks in their car complaining about the cost of living and that are actually right about this, and I will defend them.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_03: Where you make nothing for no one, it cannibalizes your social life and increasing amount of your time for diminishing returns, and you have infinite consumer goods that are all transitory, they're all digital, they're all subscription services.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_03: You never actually own anything, you will own nothing and you will not be happy, it turns out.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: But you don't have the basic essentials that even the grandparents that we have, and you know, God bless them, I love them, but they are at fault for this, which is a home and the possibility of having a family under that roof.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_03: You don't need constant digital distractions, breads, and circuses.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_03: You can have a little bit of economic hardship so long as life can provide opportunities to create meaning and thick bonds of obligation to one another, which enrich your life, even though you are acting in service.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so essentially, like individual consumer capitalism has made everyone miserable.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: We don't need more stuff, we need more people with our good intentions in our lives that we can do stuff for.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_11: Lingering a little bit longer on the sex point, I don't think this is entirely obvious to people as to why sexual revolution and uh uh a doing down of family life uh would be so central to transformation.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_11: So, as you've pointed out, we we live in an era obsessed with sex.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_11: We have uh pride flags that adorn public buildings and corporate logos, uh, which uh represent several waves of the liberation movements of those same revolutionaries you've talking about.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_11: We've normalized abortion to a huge scale.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_11: So uh in the UK, 250,000 births every year are aborted ever since our abortion act in 1967.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_11: We've seen 10 million abortions take place.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, dating apps seem to be the way that people meet now, but it's typically uh a hookup culture that is promoted, and we see the word love being um uh commercialized and love is love.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_11: Uh what why is sex so critical to these progressive movements?
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_11: What why is it political and why is it prevalent?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well I think from the very beginning of modern uh the idea of modern revolution, uh sex was there and uh the hostility to family was there.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Even uh the early stages of the Bolshevik revolution, but later on it changed.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh or you read Marx and and Engels, they hate family because family is uh a place, especially a family uh well, sort of classical family when you have parents and you have children and grandchildren or grandparents and they somehow stick together.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that is this transmission of norms.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you are very much influenced by uh what you see and hear and what you manage to incorporate in a family life.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that helps when you are in dire situation.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: For instance, uh I uh well we know it perfectly well from our Polish experience that when you were arrested and uh uh you were faced with a difficult decision, right?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh sign something or not to sign something.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: So the first reaction that you have, the first the first impulse that you feel is that uh from your family life because you were taught that way and you uh you you just tell yourself what would my grandmother say if she finds it out.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: So uh the whole point of all political revolutions was to make uh to to disintegrate the communities, right?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: And to make society consist of individuals that is of helpless human beings, right?
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you are an individual, you are deprived of your family of all the heritage that you manage to build and to somehow uh uh consume so to speak, and uh and and you are led by it, uh then you are uh in a way you are immune and you are more difficult to uh be an object of uh manipulation.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well you can read it's it's a very uh simple point you can read uh it in in uh George Orwell's right uh books when in in 1989 that this protagonist tries to find some scraps of uh history, right, of uh local culture, some songs he heard.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you if you want to to create a new man, homo novus, right?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: A new man, you have to get rid of everything, right?
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: And and and and eliminate uh this this uh stuff and uh uh have a sort of clean slate, uh so to um so to speak.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: So so that that that I think you it's very important that that the the family has always been an enemy number one, right?
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: And uh family was also uh a place where you learned your sort of sexual conduct, right?
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh family uh life, uh uh courtship, uh procreation, marriage, I mean everything, all these things are coming together.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but uh sex became uh again starting from a different perspective, uh in nineteen in in in the nineteen fifties, I think, uh among the sociologists or political philosophers there was a tendency to identify the the modern era, the the times they were living in as the end of ideology.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you had it in the States, you had it in France, uh, you had it, I think, in the Great Britain too.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: The end of ideology means that the wealth has become stable, the institutions uh function more or less properly, and there is no there is no villain, right?
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: There is no enemy you have to fight, there is no monster you have to kill in order to liberate people.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: Before these were the capitalists, uh right, the bourgeoisie uh, uh and now they are all gone.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: There was en bourgeoisement.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean everybody became a bourgeois because uh because the the societies became wealthier.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and now what uh that then comes the sex, and the sex has the obvious enemy, right?
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: These are the parents, the teachers, uh the culture, literature, which uh for many years has been putting you in a certain sex uh sex role and uh imposing on you all kinds of uh restraints.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: And these these are these these monsters that that had to be killed.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: So uh when you uh read uh or you see the documentaries from 1960s, these these young uh people believe themselves to be uh fighting on the barricades like um like Bolsheviks or like uh uh the French revolutionaries in 1789.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: That was the enemy.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh the more uh the longer was the the revolution of this process, it turned out that uh the the number of the enemies increased.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was not only the schools, it was not only the church, it was not only the parents, but uh but language, right?
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: Language which which became sexist or homophobic, and the language it which shaped your mind.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: So in order to make you really free uh well in your sexual identity, they had to uh undergo a sort of uh surgical operation, right?
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: That uh that all these wrong ideas uh uh have to be somehow uh eliminated.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if you are if you are not able to do it yourself, we will help you at the at the beginning we will help you.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then the court, right, may order you to undergo such an operation because uh if you resist of changing your attitude and change your language, it means you are sick.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: And you should be treated.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what happened uh uh in the communist uh world uh some time ago.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: We you raised anti communist uh uh ideas, uh that they put you to prison, but it also can uh uh could send you to uh uh uh psychiatrist or the psychiatrist psychiatrist clinic, and you will be treated like like a Like a sick man.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: So this the sex is just to uh sum up, uh it's it's very private, so enables you enables the authorities right to interfere with your private right.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: It has the enemies, which at that time people were thinking did not exist.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean enemies in the sense of uh uh the the defenders of the status quo, the the kings that had to be abolished and beheaded, and so on.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a it's and it's a very good uh uh uh instrument to uh increase, drastically increase the power of the uh bureaucracy.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_11: Dear classmate John here.
• 44:48
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• 44:51
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• 45:00
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• 45:03
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• 45:16
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• 45:19
  SPEAKER_11: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_11: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_11: I want to delve a little bit into Christianity here, and um I suppose I'll begin with an article, a very lovely article that Louise Perry had written for First Things, and she you you must recognize it.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_11: And um, she she was but she began with a passage from Tom Holland's Dominion, which in which he argues that whatever it is you think of the Western world, it's absolutely been shaped by Christianity.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_11: And let me show you how, because if I compare it to ancient Greece and Rome, which lots of people like to think we're closer to than that, is actually the moral values we have are a total inversion of those things where you know the weak must just effectively suffer the strong.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_11: And uh she then goes on to show the archaeological evidence of mass pits of babies that had been aborted by Roman women.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_11: And it wasn't until the rise of Christianity that we saw abortion become taboo and then all life start being seen as sacred.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_11: And I suppose my question, Lois, is it it there's no surprise that uh we are a de-Christianized country here in Britain, or at least we are trending in that direction?
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, certainly the political class we have doesn't subscribe to that, and many of our policy choices, whether it's on assisted suicide, uh known as assisted dying, or on the abortion act of 1967, run counter to a tradition and an ethical worldview that we had for so much longer.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_11: Do you do you see the society as having the tools in which to be able to see life as sacred once more?
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_11: Or do you think do you think that the the Christian question might be a the the the connotations with Christianity might be a turn off for people and you actually but you actually need it to be able to get round the bend again?
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think that was definitely true for the boomer generation and Gen X, uh, and probably also millennials were probably too late for us as well.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: But um Gen Z, very interestingly, uh, you've probably seen the headlines over Easter weekend where it talked about a kind of revival of faith among Shenzhen.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's been four generations.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think the boomers um rebellion was not going to church because their parents wanted them to.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that kind of and that gave birth to the new atheist movement and the sexual evolution to extent and kind of trickled down into all the things that we experienced in um that rejection of Christianity and that moral framework has bled out over the next four generations.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: But Gen Z didn't know the generation that ever went to church or held this moral framework.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: So they don't have that to rebel against.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, their rebellion now is looking at the state that we find ourselves in um with all this.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's boring now to say woke nonsense because it's still overused, but you know what I mean.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of we're now needing a Supreme Court to tell us what a woman is.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um they are looking around, and um, the statistics show especially men, uh, but also women uh in that generation are going back to church and are seeking that kind of transcendence and truth.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think that means that everything is solved and everything's going to be great again, but I think it it does offer some hope in a very hopeless world and that um these things are being sought out, that um truth and reality are being called for, and that they are seeking something that is very different to what they have been offered.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so if they're looking at a society which is on the brink of ancient Rome, maybe they're looking back to see what came next, which was the better thing, which was Christianity.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_11: Well, that probably leads me on to a question which I got from page one, I think, of your your book, where you argue that England's loss of faith is more consequential than Brexit.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_08: Why Brexit in reality is in practical terms about sort of trading relationships, freedom of movement, um, the question of whether we allow a particular foreign court's jurisdiction, um and not unimportant things.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_08: I mean, of course if people cannot exercise their right of free movement, their right to work abroad, of course, it's going to change people's lives.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_08: And some people have chosen to use Brexit as a question of uh modern identity.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_08: I think the idea that being pro-EU allies yourself to um an elite is something that uh really drove the debate.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_08: It was a really a class question internally, as much as anything.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_08: Uh and that is the closest it got to being a cultural question because uh there's there's a cultural sophistication that I think is inherent with the notion of being pro-EU.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_08: And the idea of being local uh and uh attached to this place, we're seeing as I think of rather rather low status.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_08: But Christianity has given us the very existence of England as a nation state.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_08: It was a foundational principle behind laws, it's a sort of driving principle behind our ethics, it's been a driving principle behind uh a vast amount of our culture.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_08: I won't say everything behind our culture, but a vast uh amount of our culture.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_08: And the break from that, so I mean, him singing is is just one aspect of it.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_08: But I mean, so many um ideas in terms of spirituality, literature, how we arrange the public sphere, what we think is are important in terms of our ethics, charities, laws, the way that we treat each other.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_08: Um that is far more profound and ancient than Brexit.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_08: Our relationship with the EU is the 1970s.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_08: Our relationship with um Christianity is 597 or before, depending on where you start the clock.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_08: I think it's easiest to start the clock in 597 for practical purposes, uh but uh this you know Christianity made the nation state.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_08: Um Christianity made kingship, Christianity made uh the basis of the development of of law, um, art, landscape, all of this.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_08: And suddenly we start to move away from it.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_08: So we move into a completely uh untested uh world.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_08: I mean you might argue vis-a-vis the European Union, we've we've gone through periods of relationship with supranational bodies, particularly with the papacy from say the 1100s to uh the 1530s.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_08: And indeed, I suppose relationship with um the continents vis-a-vis the um Norman and antagenet uh kings.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_08: So, you know, that's not unusual for us.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_08: But the absence of Christianity is completely unprecedented.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_11: So so when when you find figures uh saying talking of the cultural changes since let's let's just put a line in the sand, post post-war Britain as being the instantiation of a year zero.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_11: Uh we're we're we're bulldozing the old order, as it were.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_11: For whatever reason, it's not served us and it's not progressive enough, and it doesn't allow us, as you've talked about, to self-actualise, it's quite repressive, and actually libertinism is is what we ought to strive for in some way.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_11: It's it's me to make the sovereign choice no matter what.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, and I suppose there are many different variations of that.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_11: Um what when people say that there are we are we are being governed by those with a year o year zero mentality, uh does that stacks up then?
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_11: It's not an unfair accusation to be making.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_08: Yes, I mean I I don't like to um comment on this is a rather unfortunate public relations strategy of of the Prime Minister at the moment.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_08: Um but it was very telling over Easter that he uh he thanked Christians at Easter time for their contribution uh to uh national life.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_08: And you know, the word contribution is um uh is very telling, of course, isn't it?
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_08: Because uh it suggests it's one thing amongst many rather than the foundation and cornerstone of uh um what we happen uh to be.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_08: Um so that I found that very striking um that uh it may just be a lack of knowledge, or that maybe it is a policy of of trying to uh uh relegate it and to move away from it, indeed to generate a year zero notion so that uh England is governed uh not uh from a tradition uh which is based on Christianity, but really from an imperial oversight tradition of many different uh um many different uh um religious confessions and um a bulkanized sort of state, which is an alarming idea.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_08: And it's also unnecessary, really, because I think and I argue this in my book that actually if we did uh hang closely to Christianity and more confidently, it actually does offer us a much more secure basis for the happy relationship between different faiths uh in the country.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_08: So I I think again, it's part of the consequence of consequence of the lack of confidence.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_08: If um I think the the official reasoning goes we've got to treat Christianity as one thing amongst many, then actually I would argue that if Christianity is secure in the public sphere, it's actually easier for other religions uh to feel happy and secure in the public sphere because they have a sense that instead of a secular world, there is a place for religion in the public sphere, where Christianity will look after other faiths.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_08: And also it's rather discom-populating.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_08: I think um I mean I I think particularly for for Muslims to have this notion that there is uh a governance uh government that is not uh based in on religion in any sort of way.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_08: And that makes the profession of religion in public life per se, by any religion, uh actually rather difficult and and worrisome.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_08: And I think you can compare our model with France, where you have this very um strident laïcité and uh religion appearing in public life uh as uh being something that seems wrong per se.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_08: But of course there's a sense of resentment uh um, I think from uh immigrant communities that has this notion that well the your notion of laicité is just um a secularized Christianity, and you're using that as a uh um shield uh to protect against um any uh sign of Muslim presence in public life.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_08: And of course that makes a great attention.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_08: If you actually said, okay, uh this place is Christian, of course you're welcome to uh practice your religion here, but uh Christianity will be the thing which sets the tenor for public light, then there's no sort of uh ingrained resentment that you're saying one thing and actually using it as a shield for um Christianity which won't show its face.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_11: Let's bring the conversation closer to home.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_11: So we've alluded to uh Britain.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_11: Uh Britain is undergoing uh uh a demographic change which is likely unparalleled in in history, particularly at this scale and pace.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_11: And there are now, I think, 10% of the country um or seven percent of the country are Muslim.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, we are starting to see um the increasing presence of Islam in public life, whether it's the uh the the eat lights that are being uh put around London by Sadiq Khan, there are also conversations uh which seem to be gathering pace day to day of the um the institution of um an Islamophobia law here in in Britain.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_11: And uh I think it's fair to say that there are increasing levels of um combativeness going on in parliament between independent MPs uh that are typically pro-Gaza and those who are either broadly allied with them um or against them, and there is even talk of um Halal and all the rest of it being um under the spotlight.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_11: So there is certainly some conflict going on here between Islam and Britain.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_11: Um, what does the the state of civic relations here look like?
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_11: And can you find examples of persecution of Christians here in Britain?
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_11: Because I think most people would not consider it to be on a par with the Middle East, Nigeria, for example.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's not.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_05: And that would be um absurd, in fact.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_05: Um I again, I one time I was in Iraq early on when the when the um all the IDPs, as they're called, internally displaced persons were in the refugee camps, and I was talking to a priest from Mosul uh who said, he said to me, My my church, my 800-year-old church, uh has been taken over as a torture center by ISIS.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_05: My house has been stolen by my neighbors.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_05: Um and then I said to him, sort of rather stupidly, I said, Well, Father, you know, we're we're we're getting persecution in in England in the West as well.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_05: He said, You haven't had your head cut off.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_05: And that's a kind of a point.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_05: However, what we are seeing across Europe, this is not just Britain, although it does seem to be uh almost the worst in Britain now, although you know we just saw in in Brussels some incidents, and we think of again, perhaps a lot of um listeners and viewers don't know the case of Paive Ryson, the the Finnish MP.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_05: Paive is was a member of the Finnish Parliament, a minister, and she tweeted uh a Bible verse and and she objected to pride um as a right of free speech, quoting the Bible, and she's been tried, she's on her third trial uh for free speech.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_05: Effectively, if she was found guilty, it would mean the Bible would be considered a hate speech, a book.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_05: Um so people call her the the canary in the coal mine for for free speech in Europe, but Britain is increasingly, and it's often by the state, the organs of the state, to it's across the board, it's free speech, which is critical.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_05: Uh we have the right.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_05: Christians are very um, I'm not gonna say are easily offended, because we're attacked all the time, but it it has it's to be expected that Christianity will be attacked and rudely and vilely, perhaps.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_05: We just have to bear that.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_05: But it's it's very interesting how any kind of criticism of Islam, uh and not uh a vile and unpleasant criticism, just factual criticisms of Islam seems to be almost verboten now and will perhaps be.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_05: There's a there's uh some kind of Islamophobia law coming in.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_05: We have Christian street preachers.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_05: These are not anecdotal, again, these are facts.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_05: Christian street preachers are uh arrested, uh cases of the the nurses who wear crosses, being told you can't wear the cross.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_05: And uh I haven't seen a case, I may be wrong, of for example, a Muslim being told you can't wear the crescent moon, or uh it just doesn't happen.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_05: So it's not Christians sort of whining and being we're a minority.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_05: That's also a fact which perhaps some of the clergy, maybe the bishops, don't quite realize that we are a minority of a minority now.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, but we have rights, and Britain, England is the is really the home of free speech and democracy, and that is being eroded, there is no doubt.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_05: And Christianity, while it's still in theory the the official religion of this country, and we have a veneer of Christianity.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_05: If a tourist comes here, they look at the cathedrals and think the king is the head of the Church of England, and but the reality is it's A, it's a very secular state now, and I I really speak of England more than more than Britain, but it's a very secular country.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_05: Uh but in that secular country, as we know, I think Pope Benedict once said um uh about a vacuum, and we know nature cause a vacuum.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_05: When there's a vacuum of spirituality and of faith, something will fill it, either aggressive secularism, or if a new religion is growing, um that also gets more and more power.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_05: And Islam, uh quite aggressive Islam, is growing in this country, and Christians can work with Muslims on many things, for example, on some certain family issues, etc.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_05: And we can, I've always said we can live in peace with Islam.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_05: The question is, can Islam live in peace with us?
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, and this is all to do again with um not just tolerate tolerance and toleration, it's to do with integration.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_05: Um, so there are a lot of questions, but the situation for what I call Orthodox Christians, small O, Bible-believing Christians, etc., uh, is getting tougher.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_11: I think we should certainly come back to that, that undifferentiated human matter uh idea, the constant interchangeability, and how people are perhaps responding to that.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_11: But lingering a little bit longer on liberalism's origins and how and its impact on other nations as it's gone international, because I know you look at this picture quite heavily in your book, and just generally as a as a commentator, is as you as you spawned, you've you've mentioned liberalism spawned from England.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_11: It was an outgrowth of Cromwellianism revolution, and it was a reflection of the religious hostilities that had been experienced in the country.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_11: And then other aspects of liberalism as they grew in other parts of Europe, like Immanuel Kant, who effectively lived in the easternmost seat of power in Prussia, this wonderful cosmopolitan city.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_11: He lived alone, as you point out.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_11: He loved order, and he believed that the universe tended toward a perfection that was within cosmopolitanism, that that was that was the destiny of humanity.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_11: And these ideas all went international.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_11: What do you think the practical impacts have been on some nations, whether it's birth rates, for example, just to set you off, uh, that have shown some examples of this the social fabric being dissolved, as you've you've put it?
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_04: Well, maybe you go back one step before describing some of the uh issues that that liberalism has has raised.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think we've seen um very hardcore or purified liberalism uh until quite recently.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_04: I think this is kind of the key to understand that um proponents of liberalism up until recently have made the assumption that we've basically been living in liberal societies since the Enlightenment.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_04: And by making that assumption, you can say, well, isn't liberalism great because society's better today than it was in 1750, right?
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_04: And of course, these are always poisoned uh debates anyway, because you're you're basically lumping everything in together and you're saying every development in scientific progress from 1750 must be kept in the same camp as every political development from 1750.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_04: Of course, those those are completely separate issues.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_04: There's there's despite the illusions uh that people will put forward, there's very little link between developments in chemistry in the 18th century and developments in political ideologies in the 18th century.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_04: Of course, these things bounce off each other and so on, but there's there's no inherent link between these two things.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_04: Um, as we're starting to see uh scientific progress increasingly shift to China, we'll increasingly see this.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_04: You'll have a completely non-liberal society.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_04: I was in Beijing two weeks ago, it's a completely non-liberal society, um, engaging in scientific developments that are going to start in some areas outpacing the West.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's just the reality.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_04: It's already started, and it will be taking place in a non-liberal society, and we'll see that there's no inherent link between material progress and liberalism.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_04: That was an illusion created by various uh political forces at any given historical moment.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_04: But the my point would even be broader that we simply did not live in predominantly liberal societies until quite recently.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_04: Um, what we ended up living in is societies that embedded some aspects of liberal ideology within them.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_04: So I like to take there's two really easy examples here.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_04: We'll just go for one, I suppose, is Britain in the 19th century, right?
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_04: Britain in the 19th century is generally regarded today in the historiography, the liberal historiography of today.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_04: You might call it Whig historiography, some people call it, in reference to the liberal faction, the Whigs in Britain.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and and what they what this historiography tells us is that in the 19th century, Britain became the first kind of moderate liberal society.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_04: Um and I'm not sure what really the evidence for this is.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um Britain in the 19th century is not uh particularly democratic, first of all.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_04: Not that liberalism and democracy have uh are are equivalent, they're not, but often the liberal proponents uh make that so.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_04: Um, Britain in the 19th century is predominantly an aristocratic society.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_04: Um uh liberal reformers begin to change that at the end of the 19th century, the reform acts, the attacks on the aristocracy and the land of gentry, and so on.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_04: But through most of the 19th century, through most of the Industrial Revolution, Britain is not in any way a liberal society.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_04: And more than the political structure itself, um, the way people live their lives day to day have has almost nothing to do with liberalism.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_04: The the average person described in a Charles Dickens novel is not a liberal in any sense.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_04: They're basically Christian people.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_04: Um, are they as believing in 1870 England as they were in 1170 England?
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_04: No.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_04: The developments in the church doctrines and so on had gone a long way by then.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_04: And there was a form of what you might call liberal Christianity, although perhaps that's a contradiction in terms, embedded in the society at that point.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_04: But the fact of the matter is that the it was a very hierarchical society in a lot of ways.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_04: In a lot of ways the people live day to day.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_04: The liberalism that was there at the time was very limited, and it was basically limited to economic relationships.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_04: And even those were only being really experimented with at the time, you might think of repeal of the corn laws or you know, um uh uh the pre the pre-factory act kind of you know, laissez-faire, anything goes approach to the development of industry in Britain and so on.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_04: Um, again, we won't make moral judgments on these things, we won't say if they're good or bad, but there was an awful lot of experimentation with laissez-faire economic policy in the 19th century.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_04: That does not equate to having a liberal society.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_04: And so I think when we you could say the same for post-war United States, between 1945 and call it whenever you want, 1990, I suppose.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_04: Um American liberals today, uh especially conservative liberals, will tell you that that was kind of a golden point of liberalism.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_04: It showed how functional the system was, etc., etc.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_04: And look, that society did become more extremely liberal over time.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, that's true.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_04: But at the golden age, in the mid-1950s, mid-1960s, your average person, again, is very similar to the person I'm describing in in 1870 Britain.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_04: They're they basically live uh broadly Christian lives, whether they're believers or not.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_04: That's basically where their morality comes from.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_04: That's basically how they view uh their their immediate social relations, that's how they justify their relatively large family sizes, their relatively stable family structures.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_04: Divorce is a rarity, just to point out one aspect that's very different from today.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so we only really get to um the beginning of uh what I'd consider actual liberal societies after the end of the Cold War.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_04: And I call this in the book the the rise of hyperliberalism.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_04: This is the point at which we really do start to experiment with the liberal ideas that have been there for a very long time.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_04: You could find them in John Stuart Mill, William Godwin, and Britain, you'll find them in uh various American radical writers in the 1920s.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and it was at this point where where the the egalitarian impulse, the the kind of um homogenizing impulse begins to kick in, probably in the 1990s.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_04: And I'd say by the mid-2010s, we reached a point of liberalism uh that that we've never seen before, that were in that were implicit in the writings of John Locke, even if he shot if he would have shied away from them.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_04: They were definitely explicit by the time, for example, of John Stuart Mill writing about social relationships and so on.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_04: But they only become a mass, oh, and I should say they are very present among the elite baby boomers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but not disseminated to the broader society.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_04: Those principles become effectively democratized and very broadly uh uh disseminated by, I'd say, the mid-2010s, by the Obama period, effectively.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_04: And that was that was when we really started to see a liberal society develop, or we began to experiment with a liberal society.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_04: Now, has it been successful?
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_04: I'd say it's been an absolute catastrophe, not only on any social measure you want to take, but look how long it's lasted.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_04: If I'm correct that we basically reached peak liberalism in the second Obama administration, how long did it last?
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_04: The reaction was immediate.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_04: Like we you and I watched this in real time, and it felt like maybe it felt like it was longer than it was, but come on, we're in 2025 now, we can take a bit of a retrospective.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_04: The Obama administration gave rise to an immediate reaction.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_04: The next electoral cycle, it was rejected.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_04: So I think we're starting to see that when you actually try and apply the liberal program at every level in society and create the type of society that liberals have long wanted, it doesn't work because it's not a functional ideology.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_11: You've brought up Richard Dawkins, who effectively, in the face of the question of look, we're seeing rising progressivism, we're seeing the influence of Islamism within the West, and ultimately this is all happening in the rubble of the world that I suppose your very good polemics and um evolutionarily uh evolutionarily based arguments and and logic arguments uh contributed to he's gone, you know, I'd be culturally I'd culturally Christian, and if I had to choose on that basis, you know, I would choose that every single time over any of the other options.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_11: And I I I I heard Louise Perry, um, the the the British author who writes a lot about um uh w women's issues, I guess, um, and and makes the case against the sexual revolution, although this is tangential to that point, where she is talking more openly around Christianity as so many others have, and she's like, Look, I can days I have moments of of faith, days of the moments of doubt, but there's one thing I'm absolutely sure of is that Christianity is sociologically true.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_11: We only have to look at how well the societies function in comparison to all other historical societies.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_11: So, my question after that long preamble, Carl, is you know, do we need to rediscover our Christian and classical roots in the West in the face of the these challenging ideologies that are bringing it down?
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think we do, but I think the problem with with Richard Dawkins, and I I'm not so uh I've not kept I read Louise Perry's book, but I've not kept up with what she's been saying since.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think the problem that those who wish to say, well, we want Christianity because it it works, because it gives us the society we're like.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is they've not moved beyond the real challenge that Friedrich Nietzsche raises in the 19th century.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_02: When Nietzsche, in in the gay science, he has this famous passage where the madman runs into the town square and declares that God is dead.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_02: And he's actually haranguing atheists at that point.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's not he only gets to the church, the churches are so irrelevant, he doesn't go to the churches till later on in the day.
• 1:16:07
  SPEAKER_02: He's haranguing atheists, and the atheists laugh at him.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_02: And the madman says, no, you don't understand God is dead, we've killed him.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then to you to summarize what the madman says, he says, so everything's changed.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_02: You simply can't continue as if nothing's changed.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_02: All this stuff that was built on the idea of Christianity was built on the idea of Christianity being true.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I would say to Richard Dawkins, you know, at this point I sort of play the critical theory card in some ways, say, oh, you think Christianity works because it happens to justify the kind of society that you like.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_02: All you're doing is expressing your emotional preference.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Because even your definition of what works is simply that which conforms to the tastes of Richard Dawkins.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_02: So my challenge to those who want to have Christianity because it delivers culturally is I I you know I'm hearing the voice of Nietzsche's madman in the back of my head saying, but you can't do that.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_02: Excuse me, everything changes.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_02: You know, yes, you got rid of God.
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Now you've got to rethink the values that were built upon God at that point.
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I would say, yeah, we do need to rediscover our roots, but it's not as easy as you might think, because it's gonna make intellectual demands upon us that a Dawkins is gonna say, no, believe in God, that's you you you're you're an idiot if you do that.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you you it's it's idiotic.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_02: I would say, well, I I don't think the choice is between uh Dawkins, transgender progressivism, or Christianity.
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think the choice is between Christianity and progressivism.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think the kind of polite humanism that Richard Dawkins represents is really, I think I think it's being exposed as a non-viable option at this point.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_02: The very fact that he's having to use the language of Christianity now to express what is essentially secular humanism tells you that he knows he's in a bind at this point.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_02: He knows he's in a bind.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_02: The real battle is between a full-blooded theism and a full-blooded Nietzschean atheism.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's where the struggle is.
• 1:18:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then the struggle becomes: does God exist or not?
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it becomes not so much a cultural struggle as a metaphysical struggle at that point.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the bind we find ourselves in.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm delighted as a Christian that opportunities for conversation are opening up with guys like Richard Dawkins and Louise Perry and Mary Harrington.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_02: I would throw, I know Mary, but throw Mary Harrington into that part as well.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Delighted that I'm able to talk and be taken seriously now to some extent by by those that I would never have dreamed of having a point of contact with 10 years ago.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I hope those conversations go somewhere.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_02: But bottom line is if the sacred order isn't true, the social order is merely, as Nietzsche would say, a matter of the tastes whoever's ever's in charge.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_11: Well, that that point about it becoming feeling well, it feels normal to have conversations about religion once more without it immediately descending into a snorting, uh, a sneering contest.
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_11: And look, I I was guilty of that.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_11: I was the big Dawkins and Hitchens acolyte in my late teens and early 20s.
• 1:19:33
  SPEAKER_11: I thought, you know, I've I've sessed this, and yeah, here I am as a Christian.
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_11: And um, anyway, in the last few years, it has been really interesting to watch how within the culture, whether it's on big podcasts like trigonometry or or whatever, people are having this serious culture.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, you're on.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_02: I I was on trigonometry.
• 1:19:55
  SPEAKER_02: What interested me there was those guys, one of the questions they asked was, you know, can you have a moral society without without God?
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I I gave a typical academic kind of answer, and I said, well, you know, I can't hypothetically conceptualize every society.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_02: But I just said, I think you're really making it very, very difficult for yourself.
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_02: And what interested me about those guys was that they I think they've both recently become fathers.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, when you have children, that raises the stakes.
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Suddenly, you know, the iconoclasm of one's youth, when you're extrapolating it 50, 60, 70 years into the future, it becomes a whole lot more serious at that point.
• 1:20:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I yeah, the trigonometry, I love the trigonometry guys, they're great fun.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and yeah, I I they would never have had me on their show in the world of 20 years ago.
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, crazy guy like me who believes in God.
• 1:20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, what's he doing on a show like that?
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_11: Yeah, and and you know, I it's it's been building ever since you went on the show.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_11: I mean, um I think Constantin just released uh a video which has been viewed, I mean, hundreds of thousands of times at this stage, eight minutes long, The Atheist Delusion.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_11: And um I I mean we're we're clearly seeing it come back into the conversation, which is good.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_11: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at ThinkingClass and follow me on X at ThinkingClasses.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_11: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:21:34
  SPEAKER_11: Here, I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:21:44
  SPEAKER_11: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_11: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.