Latest / Thinking Class / #058 - Harrison Pitt - Why Mass Immigration Will See The West Give Up Believing In Liberal Fictions

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#058 - Harrison Pitt - Why Mass Immigration Will See The West Give Up Believing In Liberal Fictions · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Classes.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Harrison Pitt.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Harrison is a writer at the European Conservative and a fellow at the New Culture Forum.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Harrison and I think out loud about the problem in talking about British values and why they cannot be reduced to bullet point summaries, the philosophical underpinnings of national identity and cultural heritage, the impact of mass immigration on British culture, whether integration in a diverse society is possible, the implications of multicultural policies in a historically homogeneous nation, the moral implications of diversity in Britain, why remigration is becoming a popular term across Europe, and the political will needed to address immigration issues, why cultural restoration is needed if the UK is ever to be recognizable in the near future, and much, much more.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Harrison is one of the smartest, gentlemanly, and down to worth young men you're likely to meet, but it has been said that there's little evidence of intellectual heft behind the right wing in Britain, particularly in comparison to Conservatives in the United States.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Harrison puts his claim to bed.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: He frequently gave me pause for thought, and I'm sure he will for you too.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was a delight to speak to him, and I'll be interested to see what he does in the future.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: As ever classmates, let's grow the show together, so please follow, like, subscribe on whatever platform you listen to or watch the show on.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, John.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: We've been playing a game of cat and mouse as we've we've sought to pin each other down for this, but I'm glad we finally have.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there is much to talk about.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: You are prolific in your writing uh and you cover a whole range of issues.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I think what marks you out as quite different in the uh cultural commentary space and political commentary space is you take a pretty academic lens to um topics of things like multiculturalism, diversity, equity, inclusion, British values, um, and the mass immigration, and you get right down to the philosophical level and and what it means for um for individuals, for societies, and you try and bring a human nature um and and and kind of deeply uh academic strand of thoughts to it to show why things are going to work or not work as the case may be.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, I'd like to open talking about British values because you've you've you've spoken in depth and written in depth about this of late.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think anyone who plugs into political debate, whichever side of the spectrum you're on, will hear talk about British values.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: So there'll be those who say it's really important that in an era of immigration that we have people who are able to integrate into British values, and then people ask them what British values are, and you you get some pretty common responses.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's usually tolerance, fair play, respect.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And there are these abstract ideals.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you you you, I think it's fair to say, think this is a a bit of an empty approach.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, you wrote to define a nation with a list of fashionable bullet points is to delude a rich heritage of meaning.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: It also nominates the descendants of the people who built it for erosion.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: After all, the whole gambit of the gamble of civic nationalism is to assume that so long as there is a continuity of shared values, it is not only possible but to cakewalk to replace a founding, long-established population and be left with exactly the same country.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: What are you trying to get at here, Harrison?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm try uh thank you, John.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm trying to get at uh the fact that it is um part and parcel of our experience with mass immigration that we have had to, in the name of inclusivity and in the name of trying um to be as uh welcoming as possible, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War, where there is a whole um sort of a whole political and moral and must somewhat even say theological imagination is infused with some very crude assumptions that stem from the Second World War and the institutions built in its aftermath.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's this fear uh that if you are not maximally welcoming, if you are not maximally inclusive, you know, Auschwitz is lurking right around the corner.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's a sort of constant pressure for people to um uh moralize our public discourse in a direction which is values-based rather than having anything to rather than being demographic based.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I I both sides fall into it.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So for example, it's um well, firstly, I'll talk about some of the conceptual difficulties with defining a nation in terms of its values.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the the the the first thing that needs to be said and needs to be said quite strongly, is that um a nation is best thought of as an organism that is itself subject to shifts in collective values.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um there were however many Englishmen in the 18th century, you know, who were uh who were hanging around writing, uh thinking, uh engaging in political controversies.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And these people are our countrymen, these people are our ancestors.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And yet it would be absurd to suggest that they subscribe to the precisely the same set of values that serve as a kind of snapshot of public opinion in Britain at this time.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And yet they are still our ancestors, they are still we are still linked to these people intergenerationally.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we share a history with them, we share a heritage with them, we share our country with them.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem with um uh defining nations purely in terms of values is that in a bid to welcome people who are who are um who have no ancestral connection to the various set of achievements that we associate with Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War, and obviously the Commonwealth immigration in 1948, and then of course we've had the the real boost in in mass immigration since 1997.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: In a bid to welcome as many of those people on board as possible, you end up, as I say in that in that piece, denuding a rich heritage of meaning, forgetting our links with our ancestors, forget link, forgetting the fact that, say, someone like Lord Bolingbroke, it's an example I bring up a lot, he was in favor of effective absolute monarchy.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: That goes against the value of constitutional monarchy that is um preeminent in Britain today.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: He was not, as far as I'm aware, in favor of gay marriage.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if there are Straussian reading readings of Bolingbroke which might uh which might uh you know get us thinking of him as a supporter of gay marriage, but he wasn't at the time.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't someone who talked much about democracy, wasn't someone who talked much about tolerance.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: These are three, again, values that are constant fairly frequently uh posited as being uh you know definitive aspects of Britain today.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's in in a really perverse move, it is in order to admit people who have no ancestral connection to Britain that we dilute the values that supposedly define us in order to bring them on board, in order to try and make sure that it's as um you know, in order to try and make sure that it is as inclusive a melting pot as possible.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in the process, we evict from our national story necessarily, if they didn't subscribe to these values, certain people who have been integral to our history from you know the medieval period onwards.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so it just doesn't capture our our our deepest human intuitions about what it is to belong.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um most of people's most of the way that people live is according not to abstract precepts.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: People don't live really according to propositions.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: These are very thin things which um maybe um may be you know fitting for robots and computers, but not but not for human beings and the and the and the um the the the the much the much deeper pre-rational forms of belonging uh for which we all crave.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder exactly where this shift from being able to recognize your ancestral inheritance uh or cultural inheritance has dropped away, particularly with regards to modern Britain.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think modern England most um uh most obviously.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I live in Edinburgh and we have Burden's Knights every every year, and the Scots still the every man Scott certainly knows that the the literary heritage.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Indeed, you walk down Prince's Street and you'll see one of the most unbelievable gothic structures that was built purely just as a memorial to Walter Scott uh and a railway station named after him.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, as I was walking through it yesterday, you know, via the post office on my way home, I saw uh an opening tract from one of his poems which um spoke of uh his native land, and uh it was unabashedly uh uh proud of where he is from and he was speaking to his his brethren, as it were.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think staying on the Scotland point a little bit longer, I I don't watch a lot of television, but um, every now and then I find myself watching a documentary series, and there's one about the sacred isles of Scotland, and um in fact, I think it was just on the Isles in general, one of them was on Iona, and there were these uh visits to families who'd been on some of the outer Hebrides for generations, and it was remarkable that as they were sailing around on the boats with the presenter, that they were saying that these barren-looking islands which had some ruins on due to people going off to the cities to find work or whatever, they would look at those islands and they would see their ancestors, they felt like they were still walking among them.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And at some point, I don't know whether it's too simplistic to say this, but at some point, this you know, blank slate view of the world, the year zero ideology, as Frank Faraday has has called it, this total severance from whatever that Edmund Burke idea of the contract being between the the dead, the living, and those yet to be born, um that doesn't exist really anymore, does it?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what's your take?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: What how do you think we we lost that?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I've had to learn it.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: I went through the the unrooted ahistorical view of the world, and it wasn't until my late 20s that I rediscovered it.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um what where how how do you think we've we've lost that?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think it I think it is um, as I implied a little bit earlier, but I'm happy to develop the point, it is um part and parcel of the whole uh post-war imagination uh that infuses uh so much of our discourse.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um and to be clear, I don't think that this is like to explain it in historical terms isn't to isn't to justify it logically or conceptually.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there are all sorts of category errors.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a very crude um moral imagination that we have today, but by virtue of the fact that we do seem to think that any form of um any assertion of collective identity on the part, particular specifically because the Holocaust occurred in Europe, any any assertion of collective identity on the part of host populations, which tend to be majority-white of European countries um is all of a sudden uh completely forbidden because there is this just sort of um this uh, in my view, very ill-conceived moral panic that because it is possible to assert one's collective identity in a way that writes off outsiders as intolerable pollutants.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't use the term ethnonationalism very much because I think it's a bit of a very vague, indeterminate um term.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but running with it for the moment, there is a version of hard ethnic nationalism which the Nazis do properly you know represent, where it is not just a question of loving Germany or wanting to preserve your people in their homeland, but in fact wanting to assert yourself violently against people who you write off as intolerable pollutants, as Untermensch, as Bolksfremde, alien peoples, as the Nazis used to call them.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and because that is that has been so uh horrifying to us, rightly, and because that our whole um post-war setup, not just institutionally in terms of the international institutions, but also in terms of the way in which we talk about politics, the moral presuppositions that we bring to politics, whenever you have a white majority European country that is saying, like defining itself in fairly unwavering terms, even if it's doing it in a way which doesn't necessitate the kind of you know malicious persecution of minorities, even if it doesn't mean that you're on the cusp of invading your neighbors, even if it doesn't mean that you have this sort of you're that you subscribe to this, in fact, very um this is the set one sense in which the Nazis can be code quite left-wing, this utopianism about building some kind of well, year zero in the case of the Nazis, the 3,000, the thousand-year Reich that they wanted uh to build.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, their utopianism was very biological rather than social, which is why I think that we give the Soviets uh a bit of uh people intuitively give the Soviets a little bit more credit because I don't want to go on about this, but there's a sense in which we we're not as horrified by the Soviets, because let's take, for example, the way in which the Nazis viewed Jews and take the way in which the Soviets viewed Kulaks, the rich peasants in the countryside who were standing in the way of the dream of egalitarianism in rural Russia.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: In principle, if a kulak, because it would they their utopianism was social rather than biological, they used to the communists' utopian was social rather than biological.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: In principle, a kulak, and of course many of them didn't do this, but they could technically say, I I um I renounce my own class and I join the effort to a kulak can in principle stop being a kulak just by handing over his capital, handing over his land, handing over his resources, and join the the you know the ranks of the anointed.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um that that option is in technically open to him.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, many of them didn't choose it, and they were hanged from the nearest tree by these communist intellectuals who were uh you know uh completely rupturing these villages um at the time.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: But in principle, a Jewish person in Nazi Germany or a gypsy in Nazi Germany or a homosexual in Nazi Germany or a Jehovah's Witness in Nazi, they cannot, in principle, well actually forget the Jehovah's Witness because that's confessional, you can technically not be one.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the p it given that the Nazi utopianism was biological, it was about asserting um the superiority of what is in our bones and the irredeemable inferiority of what is in their bones.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: That option is not open to the Jewish person, that option is not open to the to the gypsy.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: That option, if we um think that um homosexuality is natural, is not an option for the homosexual.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: They cannot renounce that.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and therefore it it haunts us a little bit more for that reason.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is why we find the Nazis intuitively more immoral than the communists, even if it can be proved that on the technical numerical tally, the communists kill more people.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so it's because we live with operate with that um sort of post-war uh moral panic about what it is to assert the givenness of a certain nature, to make an assertion of collective identity and to frame uh belonging in terms which are not perfectly negotiable, not perfectly changeable.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not anyone can just be blissfully admitted to this, the kind of the blank slate idea.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like that that like the blank slate is viewed as the as the as the um as the indispensable dam that is preventing uh that is preventing us from falling into the sort of uh rapacious fascism that we saw in the 1930s and 40s.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I really do think it does stem from that, and it is just successively, over the course of time, that moral panic gets ramped up more and more and more.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we can, in many ways, view wokery, particularly the racial aspect of wokery.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think the trans stuff is, I think the different strands of wokery are conceptually separable from one another.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you have lots of people who hate BLM but are partial to gender ideology and vice versa.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: But the particularly the kind of the race communism that is, I would I regard as the governing aspect of wokism has uh in many ways just represents the canonization of that trend in the post-war uh era, and it's landed us in this in this situation.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm in favour of a humble, humane assertion of collective identity on the part of host countries, whether Scottish or English, Hungarian, uh, Jewish.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: If it comes to that, in many ways, what's happening in Israel at the moment, the real debate is whether Jews in Israel count.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is this is actually this is the reason why the left is so haunted on Israel.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: You have people on the left who view Jews uh correct on the right, sorry, who view Jews sorry, sorry.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's all it's a very complicated, messy debate.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not going to try and simplify it too much, but suffice it to say, I don't know, someone like someone who's left wing but is pro-Zionist.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: You could go with someone like Barry Weiss in the in the uh in the United States.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think she left liberal, worked with the New York Times, very pro-Israel.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And she cites the post-war era in favor of her Zionism.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, Jews, if stateless, are at risk.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a very reasonable claim.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's uh I think that's a very solid claim.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: I would just extend it a little further to other people's.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing about being Jewish that gives you a monopoly on being at the mercy of forces outside of your own control if you become stateless.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, I think that Zionism has a strong moral claim in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in the aftermath of um, and and the and people who defend Zionism draw from that post-war, um that post-war mythology, which is not to say it's not true, but the post-war, the the the way in which it infuses all of our discourse.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh on the on the other side of things, there are people who kind of try and frame Israel as some kind of new Nazi state.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but they're both drawing from the same resources in a strange way.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: I happen to sympathize more with the former than with the with the latter, but it goes to show how no one really escapes the um uh the kind of uh post-war moral and theological imagination uh that infuses all of our discourse at the moment.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it, to answer your question, it prop properly speaking, does stem from that.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: So any any any any gravitation on the part of an individual towards what is his ancestrally, well, if it's not, if it's your only yours ancestrally, it can't be hers ancestrally, it can't be his ancestrally, and people start getting very nervous about where this all leads later down the line.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's necessary, but nevertheless, that's where we are.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Throughout that, as you were describing the link, the the effectively quite clear link between uh a people and a culture and their their cultural products, uh, is and whilst also talking about how this blank slate view comes to rule the roost, particularly when we're talking about the notion of integration in an era of mass immigration.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: When it comes to social policy, you can't get moved for this notion of we must c we must integrate, and some would suggest that a policy of multiculturalism is the means by which of doing that.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, before I ask the question, it would be good for you to unpack multiculturalism as a policy a bit more because the common take is that the reason why there's so much so many problems with multiculturalism is because there isn't this, as you put it, this this humble um yet assertive um um uh assertion of a host culture.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's rather let things uh not let things run allowed folks to step into the space and bring their own cultures forward and to promote them.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um what's quite interesting is those who would typically be supportive of multiculturalism would typically have the blank slate view, whereas multiculturalism suggests that peoples have a link to a culture.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, you've written that people tend to have the multiculturalism policy the wrong way around.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: They see it as the cause of our issues, and really it's the effect and uh from a cause which is ultimately mass immigration, and that is peoples are always going to push through on their own cultural, religious, and ethnic identities because it's it's what we do.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um could you explain that a bit more?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very uh shrewd observation, John, and uh I agree with you, uh, particularly with what you were saying there about there's a sense in which the multicultural culturalist, as opposed to say the assimilationist, is conceding less to the black slaves because he is coming to the debate with an understanding that peoples are not um infinitely fungible, and as a result, there just there does need to be this acknowledgement that people are going to have in-group preferences and they're going to want to practice what they regard as their own ancestral culture accordingly.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: But the multiculturalist becomes very unrealistic when he says that this will be lead to uh you know a piece.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think as Roy Jenkins, who I think is the is probably worth classifying as the arch multiculturalist in our country in the post war era, the the sometime liberal politician and then SPD politicians.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, sorry, Labour and then uh SPD and all that sort of thing.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: SDP, sorry.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, or was he a liberal advocate?
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: But in any case, he's he's a he's a big figure in the in these debates.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he he defined multiculturalism in in these terms as um rather than to trying to transform people into one common mold, as he puts it, which which shows that he's against the black slate idea that you can just, you know, infinitely mix populations uh together and you'll just get one common culture.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: He's he's actually been quite realistic about that.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um rather than be forcing people into one bland caramel common mold, I think he puts it something like that.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you would let them, people cleave to their own cultures, but as he puts it, in a spirit of mutual tolerance and understanding.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's when it starts getting uh very uh unrealistic.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um as for um the way that we think about multiculturalism, uh yes, I I do think that it is an inseparable, it is inseparable from our experiment with diversity and and mass immigration.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't require me to make any sort of chauvinistic assertions.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but people naturally, in the same way that we are more drawn naturally to our families uh and to our own children than to the children of strangers.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Most people, not all, I'm not a un I'm not universal in my assertions here.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are examples of people, though.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine, um Ayan Hersey Ali, is someone who clearly was born into a radically different culture from ours and has voluntarily opted out of that and has opted into Western culture.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the the really exceptional thing about Ayn Hersey Ali is that she is exceptional.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And and and and and for that reason, I'm not in favor of staking our homelands on the idea that we can turn every single immigrant into a replica of Ayan Hersey Ali.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's just that is just unrealistic.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Most people do cleave naturally and instinctively and intuitively to what they regard as their ancestral culture, just as most people are drawn to their own families.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: Again, it's the same with families.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing on my father's side, um, a Catholic uh family, uh my my my father had an adopted sister growing up, you know, and uh she's a fully fledged member uh to this day of the Pitt family.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: But it would be insulting to go too far with that and to you know like dilute the Pitt family to the point where people who actually do have that strong ancestral connection to being a pit, if that means anything.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: What are Pitt values?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think I think when we think of nations on the analogy with families, we we we we find ourselves in much more uh humane places and we realise that certain loyalties are non-negotiable, they're not purely uh values-based, and they are heavily conditioned by a perception of ancestral uh belonging.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: And while there will be exceptions to this, there will be people who opt out of their um their ancestral cultures and gravitate with genuine, fully fledged loyalty towards new ones that technically their ancestors didn't build.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we shouldn't conclude too much from this.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the assimilationists go too far in thinking that provided you have just this these really fancy, glitzy civics programs, you're going to be able to turn every single immigrant, wherever they hail from, into Iron Hershey Ali.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is not plausible.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and there's a sense in which the multiculturalists, in making more concessions to human nature and saying, let them do their thing here, let them do her thing that are being a bit more realistic.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it in fact it is in parts of the world that are already saddled with diversity, where I think multicultural, yes, there's a strong argument to be made for some form of coexistence.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, obviously we want that, sorry.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: But what I mean is multiculturalism is a helpful means to genuine forms of coexistence.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the multicultural Charles Taylor is a Canadian, he's a multicultural, multiculturalist of sorts, and he he came to multiculturalism because he was grappling with issues to do with how do you get French Quebecis and Anglo-Canadians sort of living together.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: So once you're already saddled with the problem of diversity, then multiculturalism steps in as a helpful way of managing things.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: But what was so what's so um disparaging about our own case is that we we weren't a balkanized wasteland that needed this, uh, needed to have this sort of uh new operating system brought in.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um we were a homogeneous country, and I think we we should have we should have um counted our blessings and remained one rather than voluntarily balkanizing ourselves it's uh it's something that I don't think will decrease in salience uh as a topic uh in the coming years, and uh you do sense even I would even say within the centre, this isn't just a right-wing conversation where um where where, for example, you do find uh people who aren't considered beyond the pale bringing up someone like Enoch Powell, not necessarily as a a good guy, but having um having made a few relevant points.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's quite interesting to watch that name be brought out in mainstream uh interviews.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've hit even Stephen Edgenton bring bring it up in some GB News interviews and um and and historians as well.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was just speaking to to Robert Toomes about it, whereas I I feel like uh um I I feel as though this uh question of whether people um consented to it, obviously that question can be um agonized over in perpetuity.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: It seems as though we have to make do.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then the question becomes whether people agree with it or not, because there's there are things that have to be given up.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Is do does do you just have to go full Catherine Burble Singh in every public institution, whether people think it's a compromise worth making or not?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Which is to say, you get every kid eating the same meal so as not to offend the sensibilities of um people's ancestral homelands and cultures and all those things, and and and have them singing the the national anthem and the hymns and supporting the football clubs at um at various cup competitions, uh it's clearly imperfect.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: And as you say, there are um there is a time in the past where there weren't the the um divisions that that exist at the moment because of these cultural conflicts, however they exist.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so what what do you think if if we think integration may be a myth because of the intractable um um properties, wrong word, but the intractable nature of human nature, I suppose.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um how do you go forward in a a balkanized society to actually live up close to one another without rubbing up against one another?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, this is this is obviously um a very uh difficult question.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that one problem with so the I I do think it's morally relevant that this is a fairly recent phenomenon.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: I don't like this isn't something that is being uh we've had contrary to much propaganda, um, this is not a uh like diversity is not something that Britain was built on.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh diversity is not something that Britain has uh had any real experience with for very long.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um there are certain respects in my view, I wouldn't sort of go you know uh crazy and puritanical about things, but there are certain uh uh respects in which these problems are uh irreversible.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, sorry, are reversible still.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um we there are still parts of the country where Britain remains a very uh homogeneous, intact, uh settled culture.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um in other words, we haven't gone full Balkans yet.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I do think that for based on where we are at the moment, uh it is uh morally justified to try and pause where the process that we've been living through involuntarily, as you say, without consent for a good many decades, and in certain places, whether through uh forced deportations, particularly in the case of people who are eligible for citizenship elsewhere and have committed offences here.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: There are plenty of people like that.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: There are over 1.2 million illegal immigrants living in Britain.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: If the first thing you do upon uh uh you know, uh once you've arrived on British soil, if your very arrival on British soil is itself an act of illegality, that doesn't should not qualify you for any kind of amnesty or future citizenship or settlement here.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: You should be deported.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in other respects, uh we can give people, as the the very fluffy and progressive consonant is experimenting with at the moment, inducements uh to leave, uh remigration uh programs.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: It it in my view, this sort of discourse does need to be mainstreamed because then it uh we mentioned Enoch Powell, what is the first line of his um rivers of blood speech?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is the it is it is the duty of statesmen to um to be on guard against preventable evils or something like that.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because I think a lot of it is still preventable, whether by pausing or by reversing much of what has happened.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that we're fully in the kind of territory yet where, you know, like Catherine Burbel sings panopticon, dystopian, uh wretched form of multiculturalism, which I don't, I mean, she I'm sure she gets very good results in schools, and I and I don't want to discount her success as a head as a headmistress, and I don't want to, I certainly don't want to discount her disciplinarian attitude to things.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think that as a pedagogical technique, um, that's far um preferable, and the results speak for themselves, uh, as compared with the more liberal creative uh forms of creative thinking that are often encouraged in schools.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't want to discount her project entirely, but it seems to me to be incredibly uh bloodless and sterile to be forcing all of the students at school from you know forswearing any uh any um attachment to the culture that has reared them, whether we're talking about white British kids in the school or whether we're talking about some of the immigrant uh children there too.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think there is something uh anti-human about that.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, I will say that the more you change your culture in response to immigrants having arrived there, that is that is generally interpreted as a form of weakness that makes even the forms of assimilation that are possible completely impossible.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, uh so and I I don't think that we should be, in other words, uh surrendering either to multiculturism or to sort of tepid assertions of uh British values, vague, ill-defined, fashionable, you know.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I don't think we should be doing either of those things at this point.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: I still think that we're in territory where much of what's happened is could be is can be caused, and uh more than we might imagine at the moment can be reversed.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: It will just take uh political will and leadership.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it needn't be it needn't be um you know ugly or immoral or anything like that.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's necessary at all.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Dear classmate John here.
• 33:54
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• 33:57
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• 34:06
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• 34:09
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• 34:22
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• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: You brought up the word re-migration, which I think it's for there to say you was behind a cordon sanateur, along with the um author, philosopher who popularized it at least in dark corners of the literary world.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: So Renaud Camus, the French philosopher, uh who of course is is is famous, perhaps infamous, for being um the uh the the creator of the notion of the great replacement theory, which is uh typically typically banded around as uh a conspiracy theory to to um to um dismiss those who raise the demographic changes that are being seen across the West.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's fair to say that that in itself is out from behind the cordon sanitaire as well.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: And as you've mentioned, there are countries in the European Union and even outside of the European Union, like Switzerland um and Sweden that are now taking steps to even reverse people's citizenship if they deem them having it to not be making a sufficient contribution to society.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now I was speaking to uh um some guests about this offline, um particularly in light of the regime change that's taken place in in Syria, and it's become a common talking point, and we're seeing it in Germany already, which is okay, we've got um a regime change having to take place in Syria, lots of Syrian immigrants um or or asylum seekers haven't been received by countries all over the Western world since um the Bashar al-Assad regime was um turning its fire on its citizens back in 2011 and and onwards.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: And there has been talk of, well, when is it safe for them to go back?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: Let's make sure that happens because asylum should not be an open-ended invitation.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, the people that I've spoken to about are off the record, as it were, whilst they have some confidence that other countries may well do this, is there is little confidence, I suppose, that that Britain would revoke asylum or refugee status.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose this isn't just even in relation to Syria, this is the broader re migration question, which is whilst it's popularizing everywhere else, as people run the data and go, this costs an awful lot of money.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: We can see crime stats going in a certain direction, and generally we can see the electorate becoming unhappy with it.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: Can you ever see that conversation taking hold in in Britain, particularly when you have a leader of reform who I think most people would have expected to be talking about these things, saying that he wouldn't because it would be bad optics?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, what what what do you think?
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, even if it's done in a non-nasty, harsh way, as you said, uh as you were suggesting before, uh, do you ever see that coming to Britain, or is it a case of Britain does things differently and we'll go our own way?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: I I I I um I do hope so.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: I do hope that the discourse changes on this.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: That I think uh Canada and and we at the moment are in a contest to see who can be the slowest kids in the class.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, while we've got Donald Trump um breaking the mould of American politics, winning not just every single bloody swing state that was up for grabs, but the popular vote as well, which has been considered unthinkable this century uh for Republicans on a program of mass deportations, getting not only Republicans uh uh sort of reporting sort of 95% support for this policy, but as some polls show, even a good significant chunk of registered Democrats saying that they support it as well.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is extraordinary.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, likewise, as you mentioned on the continent, we've had uh Sweden talking openly about giving immigrants inducements uh to leave, financial inducements to leave permanently, and never uh to return on the grounds that they are poorly integrated and poorly assimilated.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's particularly the case in Sweden, which only has a population of around 10 million people.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: Germans and the Austrians are talking about this as well.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: There's a sense in which the continent is necessarily going to be more prone and sensitive to public opinion because public opinion is more immediately reflected in uh shares of seats that um parties have in their national legislatures because they have uh proportional representation.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not endorsing that we go down that route here uh for reasons which are probably too tedious for me to go into.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: I have spoken about them before on uh the New Culture Forum.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you type in um um I deprogrammed um uh Lewis Brackball, who was the guest on that on that show, um, which we spoke about it then.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: I explained to Lewis.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis and I had an amicable gentlemanly disagreement about the respective merits of PR uh and first past the post.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in favour of first past the post for reasons which I, as I say, I won't go into.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's a sense in which you can understand why the continent is a bit further ahead because there are these more immediate democratic pressures that are a function of their of their electoral system.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: I certainly hope that with enough pressure um uh uh some of these concepts can start to be mainstreamed uh in Britain.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's going to take um a greater level of ambition than reform uh collectively, as a party seemed to be showing at the moment.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: However, I don't want to be uh too premature in writing them off as containment or writing them off as uh you know uh not up to scratch and all this sort of thing.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: They are they are uh as uh one of their um MPs, uh who I won't name him, told me recently, it's it's like um it's like you're trying to build an aircraft while in mid-air.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a they're they're a startup party, uh they've just got their foot into the door in in Westminster, and they don't fully uh understand the uh system.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a sense in which they uh be they need or they feel they need, and this I disagree with this, but they feel that the way to um to succeed in British politics is to sort of rather than focusing on consolidating the support that they already have and trying to grow that by the sheer force of your what you're offering the people, um, there's a sense in which they feel like they in that professionalization means tagging to the center uh a little.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: The only my the my criticism of that is that by doing that too much, and you you basically invalidate the very reason for your existence as an insurgent political party, namely the desperate need that we have in this seemingly uh uni party system for a radical frame-breaking alternative.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in my view, true leadership amounts to not diluting your principles so that you're it's like Groucho Marx says.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: He says, uh, ladies and gentlemen, those are my principles, and if you don't like them, well, I've got other ones.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you need to believe in your principles and make them make them a make a compelling bid for people's support, particularly at a time like this, where we're going through a period of immense political, social, and cultural ferment in Britain.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's precisely at that time, that sort of time, that people's sentiments, people's loyal uh political loyalties are most up for grabs.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that reform should have more self-confidence in their in their in in the righteousness of what they're fundamentally about, which is, I think, um trying to um you know engineer some kind of restoration in Britain.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that in my view, that is not going to be feasible unless, in a humane fashion, through um through both uh in the case of criminals, forcible deportations, and in the case of non-uh criminals, um sort of voluntary uh remigration and giving them inducements to leave, unless we do that, this kind of restoration just isn't possible because this is another sense in which assimilation only really makes sense once you have an already very intact, confident host culture.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if, as in many of our towns and cities today, that host culture not only isn't self-confident, but doesn't exist anymore because it has been so uh bulldozed by the arrival of immigrant populations.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like what is the assimilation strategy in Tower Hamlets?
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: What is the assimilation strategy in Hare Hills and Leeds?
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: Are you going to drop copies of John Fortescue through everyone's letterbox and hope that they get the memo?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like there comes a point where the demographic foundations that make assimilation possible are so radically out of your favor that it's impotent even to talk about it.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I don't think that this restoration that reform is uh clearly keen to engineer and to be part of, as much as it has much as to engineer to be part of it too, because it will be deeper than just political, it will be cultural, it will be civilizational.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's not going to happen without mainstreaming.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what is I'm pleased to see becoming fairly mainstream, both in the United States and on the continent.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully we can we can we can uh stop being uh the slowest kid in the class sometime soon.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but we but it we it it will take reform, much more gumption on the part of reform for that to happen.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose the the question being uh is how people Not on the right will take to these kind of sentiments because uh I suppose up until very recently, perhaps even up until the Keostarmer speech after the immigration figures were raised for the previous year, um, they'd originally been estimated around 750,000 net.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we've lost about four or five hundred thousand abroad, so it's 1.2 million people had come in.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was then raised to, well, actually, it was closer to a million net, and so we're a few hundred thousand off.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: And Keir Starmer took the opportunity to lambast the Tories, and indeed has continued to do so in Prime Minister's questions for having deliberately changed policy that this wasn't an accident, this wasn't just letting things slip.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: This was by design that this number of people had come over.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: And it was quite interesting to watch the online discourse around that, where uh clearly there were people on the right who jumped on that and said, Oh, so it wasn't a con we're not conspiracists after all.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I sensed that Kia Starmer may well have changed or provided a permission structure, maybe without realizing it, maybe with realizing it, for those who would have typically avoided the conversation for fear of being branded racist or thinking it's not the decent um decent thing to do amongst the the the polite um uh polite society, I suppose, to talk about this.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I've certainly noticed amongst people that I speak to that are not necessarily engaging every day with this kind of question and would have typically not really said anything in response to points being raised around this, but now I'm noticing quite a lot of people talk about this stuff, and and to the to the extent that I remember around the general election talking about reform, and lots of people were going, Well, could never because you know our allergy is racist, he's a fascist.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: But then the the Starmer speech, the Trump election.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm noticing the same people actually saying, Well, you know, maybe it's not about you, you can not like the messenger, but maybe the message is about right, and that was a big change.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: So, could it what what prospects do you see?
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: Prospects is probably the wrong way of putting it.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think it is inevitable that ultimately moderates and those people who typically stayed away from this conversation will be drawn into it the more that the salience of mass immigration becomes clear to them, i.e., it becomes obvious what's happened and what's changed?
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think it's only a matter of time before people just get on board with the kind of things you've been talking about?
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um I will never, almost never, uh use the word inevitable.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: So no, I would not say it's inevitable, but I would say that it is um highly uh plausible um that that will happen.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but it's interesting as well that you use the word salience.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, most uh political scientists understand that when it comes to gauging public opinion in mass democracies, like straw polls uh about certain questions, about certain proposals, about certain policies don't really matter on their own.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because I mean, we could technically ask people tomorrow, you know, um, if you could say, are you do you would prefer uh the alternative vote or the STV electoral system?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you will get an answer.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and let's say you you you get rid of I don't know and not I don't care.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: So people have to answer.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you technically you will have, yeah, we've got a we've got to we've gauge public opinion.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: But the real question is, are people thinking about those sorts of things when they get into the voting booth?
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so salience, the certain the salience that political issues carry is much, much more important than where do people fall technically whenever you try and gauge where they are.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this was Farroge's immense uh achievement in Brexit.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um he managed to get what for many was a very arcane constitutional uh matter.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he managed to get people caring deeply about that and voting for it, uh often voting for the first time in many decades in 2016 in that referendum, because not because he started talking as Jacob Rees Mogg does about Dicey's constitution and the need to restore the the proper powers of parliament and all these very arcane eyefalutin things that most people don't care about.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't because Farage spoke about Brexit in those grandiose Victorian terms, it's because he tied it inextricably to mass immigration.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what got people voting for Brexit.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um and likewise on this, I think the bet the so you're right at the moment, um terms like uh re migration, terms like replacement migration, which have historically hitherto been the preserve of the kind of creative so-called dissident right, do in in the in the minds of many moderates, so-called, uh uh th those sorts of terms do leave a bad taste in their mouths.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that's something that people who think that those that those are the ethical directions in which to take things need to contend with.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: However, I think that the the better job we do as a movement, if we are a movement, whatever you want to call us, of tying everyday concerns, bread and butter concerns that people do have to immigration and to the necessity of not only pausing it but reversing it in certain respects.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, another thing I forgot to mention that there are two that you could be the forcible deportation for violent criminals and for prisoners, and not even violent criminals.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you spit on the street and you're eligible for citizenship elsewhere, you should be deported.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like very strict enforcement of if you find a f if a foreign national commits a crime in Britain, however small, even a misdemeanor, they're out.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: So there's that category.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's also the people who aren't maybe committing crimes but are an obvious net fiscal drain and are receiving welfare.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: They're eligible for citizenship elsewhere.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: You cut the welfare off, they might even go home themselves, and then of course giving people positive financial inducements to lead.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: You've got all of these three categories.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: In my view, they're all perfectly morally and politically defensible as as um as policy options.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: And um the better job we do of tying these three separate categories to things that people really do care about, like tax and spend, nuts and bolts, fiscal matters.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: For example, the more that people say, why are we taking pensioners' winter fuel allowance away at a time when we have 10,000 people being heated foreigners being heated in our prisons?
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like same things like that, tying them together, uh doing the same thing with the farmers' tax.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's that that's the farm, the whole the punitive death tax that farmers are going to be suffering, I think next year is when it's going to come in.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: Tie that.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we persecuting the people who make all of our produce all work night and day to produce all of our food at a time when immigrants who are eligible for citizenship elsewhere are taking up social housing in our very enviable capital city?
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like it the more you the better job we do as a movement of tying these what have what have historically been quite uh, as I say, out there concepts, you know, remigration, replacement migration, to um, you know, uh things that people really do care about and they really do think about in the morning.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think that job will be made that much easier.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yes, again, it will require leadership and self-confidence uh in trying to win over the loyalties of everyday people.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: But it is possible and we shouldn't pretend that it isn't.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, watch this space.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Harrison, I know we're coming up to a hard stop, but before you go, I'd like to ask you a question I ask all of my guests.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and uh be very interested to see where you shake out on this one.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: You seem to be a man who knows his own mind, but but clearly takes in a lot of new information with with your with your analysis.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: The question is, what have you changed your mind on in the course of your life?
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: If there was anything that you once thought might have been set in stone, or that it was a relatively unshakable way that you've seen things, and and what was it that made you change your mind?
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's uh somewhat a cause of uh for embarrassment.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: But when I was um when I was sort of 14 to 17, I was not just a casual secularist and a casual atheist, but quite a rabid and evangelical one.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I did um fall, I would say.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean in many ways I'm I I'm grateful that it happened because it was crucial to my intellectual development, but I did get very swept up in the whole uh new atheist movement.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: I I came to it, I was born in 98, so I didn't miss it when it was at its peak in 2008, 2009.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: But in the early 2010s, I guess, when I was starting to experiment and think intellectually, I had a Catholic upbringing, uh, and I started to read some of this literature.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher Hitchin's God is not great.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was never actually that impressed with Dorcas's, but the philosophers, because I was philosophically inclined more than scientifically, and so and I found Dorcas's book actually even then pretty, pretty adolescent, and so it actually tells you a lot about him.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, I but the particularly um Hitchens and Harris, Sam Harris, I found pretty compelling in their uh arguments against uh Christianity and all forms of uh monotheistic religion.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: And as I say, uh I was very evangelical about it.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: I used to enjoy um triggering my RE teachers, religious education teachers, uh, at school, thinking I was an ever-so clever, you know, uh, you know, iconoclast.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it was uh in my mid to late teens that I discovered uh the intellectual virtues of natural uh theology, uh which is to say, um, uh as opposed to systematic theology.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: Natural theology is when um uh uh theologians draw try to draw conclusions of religious and theological significance from perfectly religiously neutral observations of the natural world.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: Systematic theology is more, well, once you already agree with Christianity, how do you how do we reconcile this with this?
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's systematic theology.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, like what is your opt-in to religious belief, natural theology?
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: I I didn't realise how rich and persuasive that tradition was.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have been uh studiously uh repenting intellectually uh ever since, and I am now um uh uh do my best being a good Christian in a way that I would have thought unimaginable when I was 14.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: Fascinating.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think what's what what I found particularly amusing is you said it was a source of embarrassment uh having been through that phase when you're between 14 and 17.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think this proves the the the intellectual chasm between you and I because I mean I'm I'm 10 years a senior, I think I was born in 87, and uh I I went through that a little bit later.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think it probably started when I was about 19 and maybe went until I was in my mid-20s.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then over time it, you know, I I I relaxed.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: I stopped going around browbeating people about those things, and I think it was as I was coming into my 30s, it really all started to unravel uh that particular worldview.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, thank you very much for sharing that.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's obviously very, very, very personal.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Harrison, you you're you're you're busy, you've got lots going on.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: Where can people find you and what can we expect to see from you next?
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so uh the the most of my writing is available at the European Conservative.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: I I write both rage commentaries there and I try to write at times as well are more reflective uh uh perennial essays of perennial interest.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you want to find me, type in European Conservative Harrison Pitt.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: I also do a monthly show for the European Conservative called The Forge, which is a sort of weekly discussion show, hopefully, hopefully not guaranteed, but hopefully going to have some sorry, monthly discussion show, but it gets really gets into them to the meat of these philosophical questions.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: The most recent one was a very dynamic conversation with uh theologian Nigel Bigger about the concept of natural and or human rights.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully in the new year, we'll we won't we may have some episodes coming up with John Gray, uh the philosopher, and perhaps uh Neil Ferguson, the historian as well.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: So those should be those are things that people can look out for.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: And other than that, I I do a weekly show with Connor Tomlinson, who's been on the show as well.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a good friend of mine, we do a weekly uh youth discussion show uh on the new on Peter Whittle's the new culture forum uh called Deprogrammed, and you can catch that every Thursday at seven o'clock.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that that that those keep me busy.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well if if you if you and Connor are the youth of today, then I think there might be at least some grandparents out there that will be quite quite happy with the the change of events uh that we're seeing.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Harrison, it's been it's been a pleasure.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: Good luck with everything.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we will, of course, speak again in the future, but keep fighting the good fight.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: And thanks very much for coming on.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: You too, John.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh happy Christmas, and uh maybe even run into you soon.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 57:37
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• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.