Latest / Thinking Class / #090 - Nathan Pinkoski - On The Moral Fragmentation Of The West & What Comes Next

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#090 - Nathan Pinkoski - On The Moral Fragmentation Of The West & What Comes Next · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillim, and today I'm speaking to Nathan Pinkowski.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nathan is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: He has published in a variety of academic and popular journals, including Compact, First Things, Perspectives on Political Science, and the Claremont Review of Books.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: His forthcoming book, Actually Existing Post-Libalism, examines the transformation of the West since 1989 and is under contract with basic books.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: He is also translating Eric Zemur's bestseller, The Suicide of the French, into English for Encounter Books.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Nathan and I think out loud about Nathan's academic journey, why Alistair McIntyre was one of the most important philosophers of our age, why modern moral discourse is so fragmented, and what we need to do to get some unity back into it, how technological change significantly influences political discourse, and how it has even reshaped humanity itself, why one of the most taboo books of the 20th century is now back in print, and why Nathan decided to write the four words to it, why we need a common moral language for societal unity, and why it is abundantly clear that multiculturalism presents challenges to national identity and cohesion, why the future of political philosophy may require abandoning liberal categories, and how Nathan lost trust in society's key institutions, and much, much more.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice and on Substack.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's grow Thinking Class together.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Nathan Pinkowski, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much for having me.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's a delight to be here.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Nathan, you have wide-ranging academic interests, and we'll be talking about some of those things today.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: The recently late uh philosopher Alastair McIntyre and the impact of his work and what it means for our understanding of the past and modernity and what we can learn from his intellectual humility, but also a bit about the machine age we'll get into.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that is being talked about by philosophers, right, as commentators across political speech sphere.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we can also talk a little bit about the uh very controversial book in some circles, The Camp of the Saints, which you have written a forward to, and it is um being published in Europe and the US later this year.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So before we get into all of that, Nathan, maybe we start with who it is you are and how you ended up to have all of these different focuses.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: Wonderful.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh, as I said, it's a delight to be here.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: So I was uh born in Canada um and uh didn't in Alberta um and did uh my first uh kind of intellectual training, academic training in political theory.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um so very much uh someone who came out of the the humanistic background, um, or at least the desire to uh to speak to a McIntyrean theme, perhaps, the desire to uh to assemble the fragments of that kind of education, uh went on to do master's and doctorate at Oxford again in political theory.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's where I really started um uh reading McIntyre, Alistair McIntyre very carefully, uh ended up uh being a uh writing a chapter on him for my um for my thesis.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then uh I think after that stage, like many uh people, this was sort of 2016, 2017, you had a sense of seismic political shifts going on.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: You were trying to understand that.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh one of the one of the dynamics that influenced me in that time that I was thinking about was uh just what it is to pass through a revolution and became more interested in French political thought, much of which uh is developed in response to uh, at least in modern times, right?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: The response to the French Revolution, what it is to think in response to uh to a serious um political and social rupture.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: So became more interested in that.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other side of it too, I think, was just after a while, um, and you're when you're engaging with these debates about uh, say, to speak on a McIntyre theme, what liberalism is, has it come to an end, it is exhausted, in what way, uh what's good about it, what's bad, these kinds of grand debates that are very much the preoccupation of uh political theorists.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: I began to think more and more that these debates were actually downstream of technological change.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and the more I thought about that and reflected on that, um, that was the kind of insight I wanted to develop further and further.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um and perhaps this is the the McIntyre uh side of me, but I wanted a practice to do this in.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: So um I worked, uh collaborated with um uh uh another uh uh academic um uh professor at uh Catholic University of America, Jonathan Asconus, uh, whose writings I very much recommend, and uh Mary Harrington, um, whose writings, of course I very much recommend, to develop a course that would kind of pursue this theme.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: And that's something that we've been running the three of us for a few years now.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and the more that I've taught it, the more that I've engaged in that practice, uh, the more um I've thought about it and reflected on it and uh wanted to uh better understand uh the mad times that we live in.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a brief little uh itinerary there about how I uh became interested in those themes.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: But I'd say now the kinds of things they end up writing about or thinking about, um there's still the humanistic um uh kind of classical training in political theory that that interests me.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: But the the two things that occupy most of my attention are uh trying to reflect on the sorts of technological changes that we we live in and how they've reshaped our political order, and then the questions in French political thought too uh responding to revolution, trying to understand that and and uh look for thinkers in that tradition who are neglected or not given attention in the English-speaking world, um but uh who should be.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, before we perhaps get on to our understanding of today's political events and whether we're we're witnessing some kind of proto-revolution within the the Western world uh and and indeed the impact of technology on our politics.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there's there's much uh ink to be spilled or or uh words to be put into the digital ether on on that one.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let's let's get into Alistair McIntyre because what what you've just opened with of how you've ended up, what you've been interested in in your academic studies, explains why you're so into McIntyre because he opens his famous book, After Virtue, uh published in 1982, with a thought experiment.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm paraphrasing somewhat here, so uh you as the subject matter expert can can put me right where I'm wrong.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: But uh he uh talks about a world in which there are um uh uh there are potential there are in the world of science.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think he's he does a lab experiment, or there's a there's a lab out somewhere.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um effectively the society in which they live is kind of being destroyed.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: There are only a few documents left which um which they could possibly rebuild everything that they thought their society knew on that basis.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem was is they miss important details.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: There are a whole bunch of concepts that they don't fully understand, but they employ them anyway.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he goes on to apply the analogy that um this is true of us in the modern era, particularly with regards to, as you've been talking about, the humanities, the the wisdom tradition, but to classical Christianity too, that that we no longer understand virtue in the sense of the classical Greek philosophy, even if we do sometimes talk about it, even if we do hold up virtue as being the highest good.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we can think about to begin with, Nathan, why do we think Alistair McIntyre's book After Virtue became this must-read for students and has had this uh long-reaching impact where it uh makes people realize just how much we've lost from the past?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what is it about his work that has been so everlasting?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I think it's well though the the image that you noted there, I think is a really arresting one.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's drawn from uh from the science fiction novel Canticle for Lebovitz, which imagines this monastic order uh that exists after a nuclear apocalypse, after a nuclear war.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: And the purpose of the monastic order is simply to assemble the fragments that remain of the of the natural sciences to try to build them up again over time.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: So you have these uh scenes where a monk is going out into the into the desert and then he'll discover some ruin and he'll pull out a fragment of some blueprint.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh it's it's a it's a very powerful image.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: And the the the provocation, if you will, that McIntyre has is that uh this is the state that we actually live in uh with respect to, as you say, the humanities and uh more particularly um the moral sciences, uh our ethical experience.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's a provocation because uh we then have to think, well, what was the nuclear holocaust that we went through?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: What was that, what was that?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and then secondly, um it's that we think, when and when we think we're we're doing or engaging in thinking about ethics, we're actually not.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: We're just assembling these little fragments of blueprints that we have no understanding of and trying to conjecture uh whole elaborate accounts of what these are when really we know um very little.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the the arresting power of it, and the reason why the the book um and this way of thinking has persisted for so long is uh is almost I think it almost came too early.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think uh the in the 70s and 80s there were obviously people who uh perceive the the breakdown of our of our moral language, uh the breakdown, these kinds of things that we we see now all the time in our in our in our political discourse, right?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: Hyperpartisanship, inability to talk to the other side, uh, breakdown of civil discourse.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um and McIntyre uh allows us to uh to raise that as a problem.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh uh and also uh I think this is key, to really understand that the problem has to do with a lack of unity and a lack of a common destination.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that's hard, I think, to um grasp in for a lot of us, and even the people who use the language and complain about the lack of civility or hyperpartisanship, they're still hesitant to see fragmentation, or let me put it like this, um, diversity, uh a diversity of ethical theories or ethical opinions as a problem.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: They want to celebrate this, think this is exactly where we should we should be, uh, in a kind of uh modern situation where you could have a variety of options to choose from.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um but McIntyre uh sees, or at least he argues, that this is not actually in itself a good thing.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: It poses a problem.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: When you don't have unity, when you don't have uh a common moral language, there's a problem here.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: And in the 80s, into the 90s and 2000s, right, it was very hard for people to see that.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think we're now at a stage where, because of our our uh the general political situation um in in most Western countries, uh the general social situation, we're now able to pick up after virtue and say, aha, he's talking about us.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh maybe he has something to speak to us.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe this uh this fixation that we had for a long time on um uh diversity or fragmentation uh or uh a variety of opinions as being in itself a good thing doesn't actually uh help us uh in any deep way.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: You you've referred to Alistair McIntyre in your obituary of him in Compact as the reluctant godfather of post-liberalism.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you can you can expound on on uh why that is the case, that he he occupies that role.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: But within that obituary you wrote, you talk about at the beginning uh of your article just how much of an exercise in intellectual humility that McIntyre was exercising through After Virtue, because effectively what he was chronicling was his own path from being part of the Marxist school to having disavowed it and ending up on an intellectual journey, which uh led him to those um discoveries that you've just uh so uh concisely put, which is we've seen the fragmentation of our our whole order, our whole societal order, and for these reasons.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um why is it that you think he's the reluctant godfather of post-liberalism?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps you can also just describe a little bit about his journey from Marxist to, I believe he referred to himself as a Thomist uh by the end of that book.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I think you can divide up uh McIntyre's life, and and this is I think what makes him just so interesting, into uh a number of different periods.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um the the first period would be his sort of Marxist period, um, where where uh he's uh he goes a little bit from different camps within the within the rich tapestry that is uh uh uh Marxism.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh sort of uh the best way to describe this is he comes to a sort of Trotskyite position.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh and yet one of the things he sees at this period, and then sort of brings it to an end, this is, I think, key for trying to understand McIntyre.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I would put it actually a very good way, a good question to pose to any uh thinkers is when they change their mind, do they have a good account of why they changed their mind?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh do they have an account of what problem they were unable to solve in the old way of thinking that they're now able to solve uh in the new way of thinking?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and um and what McIntyre saw was that the the Marxist paradigm as it was developing, this is sort of in the in the 50s now, um the when uh when he's still a young man but already uh a fairly accomplished philosopher.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: The problem that the Marxist paradigm was was missing is that it couldn't give uh a moral critique of Stalinism.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: You could point out, like many Marxists did in the West after the kind of definitive event that really shocked a lot of Marxists.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the British Communist Party lost uh a third of its membership almost overnight um in response to this, was the Soviet invasion of um of Hungary in 1956, um, because it was seen as sort of a naked display of imperialism, a naked display of power that shocked uh a lot of communists and uh they realized what the Soviet Union was at that point.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um but the point but Marx's uh uh uh McIntyre's concern was well, can you give can you actually philosophically justify your your criticism?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: And he felt that that what was missing in the Marxist paradigm was uh uh the capacity to provide that that that uh robust philosophical justification as to why Stalinism was wrong.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: And the temptation that a lot of people fell into um at the time and and afterwards uh was to just adopt the liberal language, to just go jump to the language of autonomy, of liberal individualism, of uh of human rights, and uh not think any deeper on it.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, and then here's a the problem, of course, for the for someone operating within the Marxist tradition and why this jump shouldn't be a natural one, even though many people made it, is that uh Marxism is extremely critical of liberalism, extremely critical of the language of rights, precisely because it sees the language of rights as a mask for the exercise of money, of of interests.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: They're often a way that uh class interests are instrumentalized.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: So in a moment, it seemed like there's a McIntyre's perspective on it, it seemed like everyone had just dumped their whole understanding and their whole development of a tradition that was critical of the language of rights, the language of liberal morality, the language of uh liberal political institutions, just throwing that out the window and become unreflective uh liberals.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that bothered him immensely.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't have an answer at the time to this, and this is what I would characterize as the next stage of his sort of career, intellectual career, sort of in the 60s and 70s.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't have an answer to what we should develop in response to this.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: He recognized that that um that Marxism, uh, particularly Stalinism, had uh had problems, and of course the liberal paradigm did.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: But he wanted to point out that the jump here for a lot of people really seemed arbitrary.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: They became um they became unreflective uh uh liberals and just sort of uh threw their Marxism off in the past.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that was just a youthful fascination.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: I don't really believe that stuff anymore.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh wasn't it nice when we all uh sat around uh and sang uh l'international together and uh and such.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: But but those days are past it.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: We're now we're now good liberals moving on into the the good liberal projects of the 60s and 70s.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: And McIntyre just couldn't do that, he couldn't make that jump.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so the next stage then was uh eventually in the sort of late 70s, early 80s is the the work that puts him to develop after virtue, uh, which is he basically realizes that he's been stuck in thinking in very modern terms uh about modern options, Marx, uh Marxism, liberalism, or or Kant, you could say, as a kind of quintessential liberal uh moral thinker, uh, that uh these were the options on the table for him.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: And what about the ancients?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what about Aristotle?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: What about the the tradition of Aristotelian uh morality um uh or Aristotelian ethics?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, he wasn't the first to um to think about this.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there'd been in the English uh world, English uh philosophical world uh very prominent philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, who'd uh essentially been making a version of this kind of this argument um for uh for decades.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um and McIntyre, more or less from a different starting point, came to believe that, well, maybe we should reconsider the Aristotelian paradigm.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what you see in After Virtue.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: After Virtue's positive argument, it's got its negative argument, the criticism of liberalism, the criticism of the Enlightened Project.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: But the positive argument is the case for uh for adopting Aristotelian ethics.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then just quickly on the you mentioned that the Thomism point, sometime in the mid-1980s, he basically uh realizes that it's Thomism that is the fulfillment of the Aristotelian tradition, that it's able to solve the problems, the philosophical problems that Aristotle uh himself couldn't resolve.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: So that's when McIntyre becomes a Catholic, becomes a Thomistic Catholic, and so he's writing um writing essays from uh and uh his philosophical writings from that point take on uh a Thomistic um perspective.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: So that's his that's and that's where he where he stays until the the end of his life uh in that in that camp, in the in the camp of uh of Aristotelian uh Thomism, you might say.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then just to speak to your other question about um where does where does it fit in to be post-liberal in in all this, or what kind of post-liberalism does uh does does McIntyre point towards?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, um on the one hand, there's this critical apparatus, which is basically for us to uh to understand that if we're going to make progress in moral philosophy, remember the image of fragmentation, uh, and and this is not a place we can leave off on, this is not a good situation to be, and we need to fix this.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a notion, and McIntyre very much believes this, is a notion that we need to we need to get back to making progress in ethics, making get back to making progress in in uh moral philosophy.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: And liberalism is not the way to do that, liberal categories are not the way to do that.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: So he's post-liberal uh in that sense, in that he wants to uh he wants to leave liberalism behind and develop with the help of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and that kind of uh pre-modern apparatus, develop the guides for a new way of thinking about philosophy and ultimately a new way of thinking about politics.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the post-liberal trajectory.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's where we get it from him.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: He's reluctant, though, in that uh, and this is a point I make in the article, a couple other people have um made this as well, that like Hegel, there's a kind of left McIntyreanism and there's a right McIntyreism.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: With Hegel, we talk about a left Hegelianism and a right Hegelianism.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: And uh with Hegel, the the kind of historical uh uh irony.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Is that probably Hegel is more on the side of uh of right Hegelianism in the kinds of institutions, and and certainly his religious formation um points more towards in that direction.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: But after Hegel uh move uh passes from the scene, um it's the left Hegelians who really uh ascend.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Marx comes out of that tradition, for instance, of left Hegelianism.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: With McIntyre, it's kind of the opposite.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, that uh McIntyre himself is partial to this sort of let's try to draw from the resources of the left, the resources of Marxism as much as possible, uh, very suspicious of anything that looks uh like conservatism, very hostile to um to uh Anglo-American conservatism, you know, he has uh only nasty things to say about Burke, uh, for instance.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but the people who get really energized by McIntyre uh decades on now are people who are coming out of some kind of conservative education.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: They're people of the right.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: So uh right McIntyreism seems to be the movement that has taken off.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: Left McIntyreism doesn't have a lot of, there are of course some people who who uh are are deeply engaged with this, but it's not a it's not a widespread uh uh movement.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um right McIntyreanism, you could say, has had a lot of uh a lot of various intellectual uh children.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's been quite uh uh it's been been uh definitely a movement that is expanding and has a sense of uh has the energy, has a sense of of growth.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the reluctant part in the in uh in this whole picture.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thinking about where we might be then uh now and what might develop as to the governing philosophies, whether they're pushed by uh a different regime or whether it's pushed by um this uh this um what's the right word?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the I mean discomfort is putting a too too milder uh word on it, but whether it's pushed by the an organic growth through the restlessness of people who are no longer wanting to live under this fragmented world.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: So to bring that into uh less abstract terms, so let's talk about Western nations typically being run along the hard multicultural lines, which is we're gonna be heavily pluralist, uh, we're gonna be relativist, which is to say that all cultures effectively are not to be judged by the same standards, but they're all also equally valid, the same, endowed with the same dignity, and we're not to pass judgment.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, now I think what we can see through this uh hard multiculturalism, which usually involves subverting a national culture, whether there are religious elements to that, so in the West through the Christian culture, or whether it's just more broadly the cultural norms of peoples that have populated those lands for however many hundreds and thousands of years, is uh you now have most people sitting outside of the anywhere class, as David Goodhart would call it.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: And even amongst those now, I'm starting to notice going, hang on, I'm not too sure the world in which we live is particularly good.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: So people don't like that they see the loss of um cultural um icons and times like Easter and Christmas, and then the promotion of other holy festivals of other religions um throughout the course of the year.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: They don't like seeing the social enemy on the streets, so they they they can go on Twitter or anywhere and see video upon video of cities just falling apart, whether it's through ethnic conflict or whether it's through um a kind of societal breakdown, increase in violence.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so they see that the current ruling prevailing order is uh effectively the promotion of tolerating the intolerable, and intolerable because of either cultural dissolution or because you're effectively having to live amongst the ruins of what you know was a once great civilization, even if, of course, small civilizations to do the usual British caveat would have had dark parts to them, right?
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I guess if if if he's pushing he was pushing for uh let's return to the pre-modern elements, this is where we need to build out a healthy society once more.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is there have been others who followed him since then.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I know the the um the editor uh for First Things, R.R.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Reno, wrote his book, The Return of the Strong Gods, which is about nationalism and populism.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: But he was suggesting that you know you need to tether those to something that is good and true and beautiful in his respect.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's the Bible, that's Christianity.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and McIntyre said at the end of his, or said, or wrote at the end of After Virtue, his final two chapters were on choosing one way or the other.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: One of them was the the the Thomas Aquinas way, Thomism, and thus aligning with Roman Catholicism.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, or the other was with was Nietzsche, who he saw as the anti-philosopher, someone who was basically disavowing all of the modern liberal uh or political ideologies and even Christianity as well, uh, but saying, look, we should we need to go back to the past if we're ever going to make uh anything of ourselves.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: So what I know, Nathan, you do write about the current affairs as well.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what do you see as the potential pathways uh now that this liberal order, the international liberal order, appears to be collapsing?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: What prospects do you see of this return to pre-modern ideals and in what form could they take, do you think?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a great question.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think for for McIntyre, um, of course, the the issue here is the philosophical language we draw upon.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: So, and this is perhaps coming out of his background as uh as a as a Marxist, he's very hesitant to talk about restoring or rebuilding old communities, pre-modern communities as they were, because as his fellow leftists will say, well, these these or uh as you alluded to there, um they have a very dark side as well, and we wouldn't want to bring back those.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: So he sees this as kind of a a project to uh to find and develop the moral language that we need, the the language of ethics, and to try to instantiate that in certain practices uh and uh to build that out um um through our activity.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there's there's a lot to be said for that approach, but I think the limit that people run into, and this is sort of a classic criticism of McIntyre, is is uh is this isn't really um this isn't really politics in the way that we now experience it today.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: This is uh a kind of uh perhaps an obsession with local spaces, with fishing villages, uh with very small um communities as the place to start, and there's a lot of value in that.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: But the way that we experience politics, and this is probably because of technological change and the way that we've organized our societies, is a much, much larger scale.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a limit with uh with McIntyre that I think a lot of people who read him run into that problem at some point and sort of perceive that as a as a drawback.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing I'd say too is that he's very good at describing the the problems of of um of fragmentation and the problems of breakdown.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but uh the what exactly the the scripts are that are available to us have shifted uh quite dramatically um since the 1980s or even the early 1990s, uh, when he's really at the sort of zenith of his intellectual career and talking about this.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: One thing I'd put, and this is something that I've written about, but something that I think is just more and more the the case, is that we already live coming out of that era in uh in a post-liberal world.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's just not the one that uh McIntyre would describe as his sort of ideal form of post-liberalism.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because the categories have changed uh for how we're governed, how we organize society, what our kind of concepts or key concepts are have changed so much.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: So you mentioned the kind of multiculturalism problem here.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: I think this is a key one whereby uh to actually apply multiculturalism uh in the way that you're talking about, um, which we we have done in uh in nearly all Western countries for some time, is an asymmetrical application.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's what you gestured to there.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's the sense that the historic majority needs to abandon its identity, needs to abandon its uh its ethos, um, but the minorities uh get to keep theirs, preserve theirs, and in fact, we use the power of the state to enhance, um, to enhance their identity, to uh to build it up.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: This is asymmetrical, this is unequal, this requires all the things that you see now uh and read about now, it requires uh affirmative action, it requires preferential hiring practices, it requires you to organize the political economy of the state, to favor those groups.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it requires you a very British problem, but other countries have had this issue too.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: It requires you to cover up for their crimes because there's a risk of unrest if people know too much about what is happening.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and from the perspective of asymmetrical multiculturalism, you could understand why you would do that.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's so important to preserve the kind of order that we have, to preserve the notion that we can all live together harmoniously, that uh if there are, if there are accounts of of uh of of uh of either cartels or small groups that are engaging in in all kinds of uh some of the most sinister and wicked crimes, it's better that people don't know about that.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's safer because of the threat that that might pose to um to order.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: So this is a world, I think, when we see, I think what was going on in the in the late 90s and the 2000s to kind of keep this going, this is a world whereby we've left that whole aspect behind.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I would put it that the options on the table now, um, philosophically, I think McIntyre's right, uh, in the sense that it is sort of a Nietzsche-Aristotle question.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but politically, in terms of how we fill this out, the the options are really do we lean more into this asymmetrical multiculturalism uh or uh do we try to um to reverse it?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I think what's key here is that no matter what we do, the tools we're going to be drawing upon are not going to be liberal uh tools.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: They're going to be tools that um uh that are post-liberal, that that uh that require us to abandon uh abandon certain um uh uh traditional uh liberal categories or put those aside.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give one example of what I mean here just to be concrete about it, right?
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: To make affirmative action stop happening in American universities, what you have to do, because the university system is so attached to it, because the the people running the university are so attached to it, is you have to put them under pretty constant government surveillance.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: You have to look at their hiring practices, you have to uh monitor them to make sure they're not in breach of the Civil Rights Act, uh, to make sure they're not discriminating against anyone.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_02: That requires constant monitoring.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: That's kind of what the Civil Rights Act required in the first place.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: But my point here is that to get one back, if you're someone who says, you know, Harvard should not ever be discriminating on the basis of race, and they have a history of doing that, and we can document that and see how that's happened.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: Now we have a Supreme Court uh case that demonstrates that they were doing that for some time and uh confirms that that's illegal, that there's the and unconstitutional.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um in order to get to get to a world where Harvard does not discriminate on the basis of race, you have to uh monitor Harvard on a pretty consistent basis and punish them for infractions, maybe withdraw their funding.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh other options are on the table too.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: But this is not freedom of association anymore.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: This is not you sitting back under the liberal principle and saying, well, the university can run because it's a private institution, because it's a private corporation, it can run and organize itself however its members uh please.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: Liberal, a liberal principle, a freedom of association principle that you can uh see very eloquently defended in John Locke, right, and elsewhere.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: But to get out of that order, you have to draw upon tools that are not liberal, to get out of the order of racial discrimination.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think that's the dilemma that a lot of us uh face now, uh, is that you have people who, for um uh uh very liberal reasons, do not want to see discrimination on the basis of race.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: For very liberal reasons, do not want to see uh a judicial system that provides uh preferences, uh, in whether it's in sentencing guidelines, uh, or whether it's uh just in sweeping um stories about um sexual abuse under the rug, not addressing it, uh, not having inquiries.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: You you want to have uh people treated equally uh in equal circumstances, in this in the same circumstances, sorry.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so no discrimination, uh no preferential sentencing on the basis of race.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but how do you get back to that, uh that that system?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because we have been operating it for a very long time.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh in order to uh to push it uh back to something like that, uh you are going to have to draw upon tools that are not going to be the quote unquote uh liberal uh tools.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: So this is the this is, I think, the the problem that we face now.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not just a British problem, it's not just an American problem, it's really a civilizational uh level uh problem.
• 36:07
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• 36:09
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• 36:42
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• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, effectively, what we're saying is that when those who want to move the dial away from this are going to be getting into power, they effectively need to be willing to use the machinery of the state uh and the power that is behind it to wrench control from the previous uh regime holders.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's effectively regime change, it's a counter a counter movement to whatever we have now.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose Trump uh in Trump 2.0 is an excellent example uh of it in some of the things that he's done, is that if you compare it to his first term, he swept to power, uh, wasn't able to get an awful lot done in his first term, um, partly because he was obfuscated all along the way.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: But then, four years out of office, he ended up with this whole counter-regime uh movement that came behind him, even people who were of the previous regime going, actually, yeah, I see which way the wind's blowing, I'll jump on board, and then was able to come along and just start changing things, writing executive orders and all the rest of it, going, No, I know, I know how power works.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I suppose we've seen it in the United Kingdom, albeit not in the same direction.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: So when we get a Labour government, they know how to use power, and so they come and go, right, we've got a particular vision, and we are going to use every part of the state apparatus to bring that vision to life.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the Conservatives were effectively accused of both partly being on board with the same vision as the Labour Party, uh, but also partly just going, well, can't really do anything because we're relying on liberal discourse to change things, but of course, no one else is playing that game, only you were.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so let's think about the technological um impact on politics.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: We we've talked a little bit about um um technocracy, I suppose.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: Rule by an expert class, albeit we've been alluding to it, and we've been making allusions to the impact of technology on on politics.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh maybe maybe we can open up as a bit of a free format here, Nathan.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um when when you and your contemporaries are talking about living in the age of the machine and what that means for our politics and our culture, what is it that you're trying to get at?
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: What what what is it that you're trying to describe about the world in which we live?
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a it's a great question.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think there are there are a couple of features.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh one is um is we're talking about a tendency to um to perceive um uh uh yeah, okay, let me put phrase it like this.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the in the very first place, by raising this kind of question, this kind of framing, we're inviting someone to think about um a technology in a different way, that it's not something that is just neutral, that sort of sits in the background is invisible and can be used for uh whichever purpose the person who picks it up uh can have, uh something distant, a kind of uh an object on a shelf, perhaps, that we pick up or put back on as we need it.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's rather for us to think about uh technology not as something neutral.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I think the specific way that's important for us to think about is something that is that is already reshaping the way that we that we live and reshaping who we are and how we understand our own humanity and to push it even further, reshaping our very conception of humanity itself.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think there's two ways that that uh one once you get out of, once you see technology as something and as the machine, as something visible, once you begin to notice it, once you begin to uh to at least see what I what I just said there about the the potential for it to reshape our our consciousness, ourselves, um, as uh something that is that is intelligible.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe you you're you're somewhat skeptical of that uh frame, but you say, okay, I think I understand what what he's getting at.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_02: I understand my smartphone addiction and how I can't put it down, uh my uh the the way that social media has has redefined how I interact with people.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, okay, I I'm I'm with you on that point, uh Dr.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: Pinkosky, but uh but but what what else is is is going on?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think there are two things that I would want to draw attention to.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_02: One is that um the way technology has reshaped our political order uh is something that that I think we're we're coming now to better understand how a lot of the way that we organize our our our uh our politics is downstream of certain technological changes that render certain policies or renders certain ways of organizing our our political order possible.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: And a classic example that uh I think many of us now realize just how extensive it was is the kinds of measures that were imposed in 2020, 2021 with respect to the pandemic.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that was only possible in a world whereby we had the capacity to take a great deal of our activities, or to put a little more provocatively, a particular class had the capacity to put most of its activities online in a kind of Zoom room, uh in Skype sessions, uh uh to move their activities where they didn't actually have to go into an office and physically meet people, but could do more or less the same thing online.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: And because of that possibility, at least for that uh that class of people, um you were able to basically see the policy measures as well.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_02: Look, uh, we can implement this, and there's not gonna be any any uh any radical disruption of your of your life.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_02: No one's gonna be cutting the power, the power is still gonna be there, you can still do your work, uh, you can still uh be an upstanding member of the of the laptop classes, uh producing all that you normally do.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we're uh we're just not gonna see each other anymore.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: And what I want us to be aware of here is that to think in those ways was only possible because we had something like the internet um at hand uh ready to render that kind of of um of strategy or way of thinking intelligible for us as a as a live option.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that's uh and that's what happened.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so the the takeaway here is that we've already passed through a political moment or a historical moment, I guess I should say, where our technology did change what was possible politically and uh oblige us to um to uh uh to reorganize um our whole politics.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_02: Because of course, this wasn't actually something that was perhaps it's minimally disruptive if most of your work is already online.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_02: But to make that whole system work, as we well know, uh, required uh required a great deal of changes from everyone else uh in society to kind of make that that one um particular segment of the population carry on as as they did before, require very dramatic restructuring of um of everything else uh to the point whereby um well, we don't need to revisit uh uh COVID policies, but I think the the the the disruptions, say to to schools uh and how How damaging that was to the minds and psychological educational formation of young people, to those who were older and lost a chance to have regular visitors.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: All this was rendered possible because we thought, well, we can do this and carry on, and the GDP line won't be too badly disrupted.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: And if it is, we'll just throw more money around, et cetera, et cetera.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: So again, point here is that technology made that kind of policy options possible and required us to radically reconfigure the state and reconfigure the way that we used uh both government and social power during that time.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and what we could discuss as a kind of something downstream of this would be whether we see this as the natural outworking of something called uh managerialism, a kind of other um ideological uh setup.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I think that's that's one thing.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: And the last point I'll say here, just quickly, I think, and it goes a little bit to the same kind of experience if we take the COVID years as sort of a characteristic phenomenon of how this rule by the machine uh works.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um it was a moment for the people who uh lived through it and were attentive to what was happening, whereby uh we saw our own conception of ourselves uh change.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um it became the the the way you had to interact with people, the way you had to do something fundamentally deeply human, your your social uh relations, all had to be mediated into an online virtual uh setting.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: And you were expected to be happy with this and like this.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_02: And what's key there is that is that we had uh we had um a kind of uh demand that you would enjoy and you would find this this new order humanly satisfying, uh whether you were um and the kinds of things you have to push toff to the side, whether it's the the the very young children who are who are upset and crying, why they can't see uh their relatives, why they can't see their friends anymore, and just uh stunned by by this and wondering if they did something wrong, these sort of experiences that the young uh people had during the pandemic on the other side of it, um older people who uh weren't allowed to have visitors and wasting away in loneliness.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: We were supposed to accept this as part of a good human order, a kind of uh a society ordered to the common good, a society ordered to uh to human flourishing would do this.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: And of course it was it was nuts.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_02: It was actually nuts and required us to visibly look away from the the pain of loneliness, the psychological suffering that that uh young and old people uh were going through uh to look the other way in the name of what we perceive to be a good human order, what we're being told was it was a good human order.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: And this is, I think, exactly what the what one's pointing at, or one's trying to point at when one talks about rule by the machine.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's forcing us to reimagine ourselves, what a good life looks like, what a good human life looks like, uh, and forcing us to ignore, to uh to um uh to look the other way whenever someone tries to draw attention to the real uh visceral pain, the real uh suffering, the the real damage that this is doing to our humanity.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: Listening to you talk about the damage being done to our humanity through the machine age, uh I suppose there are from time to time prophetic voices that um crop up and and point these things out.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh you and others are doing that within the technological age of now, or at least it's current iteration.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: You are you are somewhat taken me back to thinking about Thomas Carlisle, who I've become a little bit obsessed of of late, where he was one of those first talking about the impact of the beginning of the machine age on the human condition and just how uh degrading it was, and how it was the captains of industry.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose that uh you know the the analogous of the laptop class uh at the time um that were creating policies and running the ship for not just their own benefits, but just as the world as they saw it, and it had this downstream impact on how everyone lived their lives.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: It brought them in from these kind of rural agrarian settings, which by the way, I'm not going to romanticize in any particular way, but a settled, rooted community life that had been there for generations and generations and all the rest of it.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: And before you know it, you're there, and your whole day is instead of it being rooted around the sun, you you're rooted around the mill work or uh the steel refinery work or all the rest of it.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose thinking about just how self-serving the captains of industry can be with regards to the policy framework and the economic environment is I wonder if they're running out of roads.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is just me spitballing at this point, where the worship of the machine in some way, it's this utopian project, there's a mammonism to it because it's all about efficiency, it's all about being able to uh create as much money as possible and to try and find shortcuts to things.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: And uh if I think about the obsession with AI at the moment and trying to embed it in everything that an organization does, is effectively um it's the laptop class now trying to outsource their thinking to something else, knowing that for a period they will actually create efficiencies to the point where they might make themselves a little bit less busy, less effort, make a lot more money, be able to scale it, but in the end might have just sawed off the branch upon which they were sitting on.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes me wonder if actually, in the end, the machine that has been worshipped and fed all of this uh effort uh might just show how uh neutral it is with regards to who it serves when all of a sudden those jobs in the laptop class and and those similar to it no longer exist, or at least have been reduced to the point of um almost nothing because the people running indust the industries have gone, oh well, I could just have someone who can do the job 80% as well as the other person.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but they do it in you know a 20th of the time, and that that someone is a computer.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so let's let's see just how far technological change begins to impact our politics because it'd be quite interesting if uh the elite class to starts to drop the port cullis when it um when suddenly they've got the hordes running up the the path towards them to take them out when in the past it hadn't usually been.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: But Nathan, thinking about um some of your other other work uh before we let you go, because I know we're we're approaching the end of our conversation.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: So um I suppose another preoccupation of uh the elite class is openness, whether it's uh open trade, open borders, all the rest of it.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a book which uh was released in the 70s.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was written by a Frenchman, John Rian Raspail, probably totally uh butchered his name.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: Camp of the Yeah, I haven't, that's good.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um Camp of the Saints.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um it shows a world of open borders, specifically a world in the West in which um peoples from much less developed nations, different social mores, a lack of civility, arrive en masse on the shores of a nation, and that's uh that nation takes them in because of the ideas that it has told itself are uh sacrosanct and cannot be um cannot be transgressed in any way.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh is it a very expensive book to get your hands on because it effectively ended up in print for uh for a while, and then because of its controversy, no other publisher would touch it.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: But Vauban Books uh has since gotten the rights to it, translated it, turned it into a book which is coming out again this year, and you decided to write a four four words to it.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps you can tell us a little bit about why it became taboo and why you think it's made a comeback and the importance of its return.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so um the the thing that I think is a couple things that that people should know about it, because it is it is a book that um that sort of has been maligned uh by uh or perhaps been taken up as too exciting by various versions of racialists, whether they're progressives or some other kind.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um but when you actually read the book, I think uh, first of all, if you know something about the author himself, you'll see why you can't really see it as a novel about uh uh a screed for racial supremacy.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um Raspay made his name as a travel writer, as someone who specifically went to far corners of the world and documented indigenous peoples that were disappearing.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh and and uh what he was trying to do was try uh to transmit their stories, uh to transmit their accounts before they vanished from the earth.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he had, as a young man, particularly moving experiences traveling in North America, where he'd come across the remnants of um of uh of what you call First Nations or Native peoples their um their reserves or the abandoned villages, and being very much struck by the tragedy of this.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so this isn't someone who views the third world as something that is, or the non-European world, as people who are uh biologically inferior or something like that.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um there he's he's someone who wanted to document the tragedy of many vanishing peoples before they uh they slipped away from the earth.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh second thing is that he's a very accomplished novelist.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he near he won uh some of the most prestigious literary prizes in France for his other works, uh was nearly admitted into L'Académie Française, the highest kind of intellectual honor you can get.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um he won the majority, but you need a two-thirds majority to get in.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_02: So he didn't quite uh didn't quite make it, um, but still won the highest prize literary prize they had to offer.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: So this is not someone who's a fringe figure.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: This is not someone who's who's uh who writes uh racialist screeds on the side or anything like that.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think once you know that and you go into the novel, then you're able to see for what it is, which is a novel about our own, we in the West, it's particularly focuses on France, but it's uh but it's something that extrapolates further and you can see it further, um, that it's about our own malaise and our own our own guilt, our own self-hatred, our own incapacity to understand uh our sense of worth.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_02: And what what it does, and this is the part that's I think makes it very relevant, is it's not really about uh who's coming from what corner of the world, like what specific specific area.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's more using that the device of a million migrants who are going to land in France as a as a mirror to see how we as a as a people, how we as a civilization in the West think about this, what kinds of categories we we draw, uh, and what he's trying to point at is our own sense of our our the logic of self-hatred and how that nihilism uh culminates in our own destruction.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_02: The the breakdown in the novel, um, the breakdown, the ultimate breakdown of order in the West happens actually before the migrants land, before they even land, the the political order has fallen apart.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a key theme that he's trying to point out.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_02: And what we get from it now, I think, is uh you you pick up this book and you really see uh how it has a deep, deep insight into the Western way of thinking that has that has become uh predominant since the 1970s.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_02: When Hurspi wrote this, there was there the it was a fictional event.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_02: It was almost a fantastic, it was a fantastical event.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_02: You didn't have uh you didn't have mass migration on the scale that we we now have it today.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_02: The numbers that that he refers to in the book, uh a million um these are uh rookie numbers, right, by present-day terms, right?
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the that's the amount that that Germany brought in in 2015, and then they brought in a similar amount in 2016 and so forth.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_02: You could make the same comparisons to Canada or Britain's gotten pretty close to that through the Boris Wave, right?
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: So again, it it's it's a it's a fantasy, it's a fictional novel that is meant to draw attention to a deeper malaise within our own, our own uh, our own condition, our own civilization.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: And those are the themes that resonate most when you when you read it, and why I think you can see and pick it up nowadays and and see uh uh and see what a what a profoundly dystopian novel it is, in that it shows where this process of thinking takes us to our own uh to our own destruction.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_02: Our own self-hatred uh will lead to our desire to destroy ourselves.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's there's really no other way um way to put it.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and the other thing I'd say too is that what he's particularly good at is he's showing that it's not so much the the problem that faces us is not so much a relativism or a like a lack of sense of meaning or purpose, a kind of aimlessness.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_02: And and this actually goes back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago with respect to the is Nietzsche still an option on the table?
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I actually think that there are very few, to use a Nietzschean term, there are very few last men out there in the sense of people who uh live their whole lives with a sense of uh I of just uh pursuing um a particular material pleasure and that's it, and they don't want to be bothered by anything higher.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_02: There obviously these people exist.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_02: But what tends to happen with those people is it's sort of like a halfway house.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_02: You get pulled into something else.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you get pulled into some other um into some other deeper uh uh movement.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_02: And what uh what I spy is drawing attention to in the novel is is that the spiritual energy that comes from the promotion of mass migration is ultimately a kind of fake messianism, it's a it's a it's a false uh eschatology where you look upon uh migration as some uh as some sort of world historical, almost quasi-theological, uh quasi-theological uh movement that is supposed to save us in some way.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_02: The migrant has a special capacity to heal our to heal our our our wounds, to heal our civilization, whether you and you can put that in different directions too, right?
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it's to deal with our historic legacy of racism.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it's to uh work harder than we do because we don't know how to work anymore, and they'll do the jobs that we don't do uh anymore.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_02: So there are various ways you can spin this, and there are left-wing versions of this and right-wing versions, but but the the broader issue there is a kind of messianism of some sort, a kind of messianic, uh, to use the theological term, right?
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_02: But this is soteriology of migration, a soteriology that is attributed to the migrant where uh where he's supposed to have the capacity to save us uh in some way.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_02: And Raspai is very good for pointing that out, uh for drawing attention to that spiritual, the spiritual energy of that project.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's not something that is that is uh empty there.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_02: People who genuinely think this and and they use uh all the the power that they have, whether it's in the NGO world, whether it's in the legal world, whether it's in the in the in the representative institutions, uh in the government, um, to advance that.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_02: And he he's able for us to see that as one of the great uh uh I think rightly understood, spiritual movements uh exist in our in our time.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's a kind of religion of humanity, it's a kind of Christian heresy, but it is it is a spiritual movement with with a lot of energy.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you see that as one of the principal problems or conundrums we face in the West today, I think we can get past the an earlier iteration, an iteration that a lot of us uh was very popular kind of um in an earlier time where we say, oh, our problem is just relativism, no one believes in anything anymore.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_02: We do believe in something, but the energy of that, the logic of it, will be something that takes us to our own destruction.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you pick up this novel, and I encourage people to do it, because now you have the chance, uh I think uh uh the and the price is very affordable, right?
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_02: $24.95 on Amazon, right?
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh paperback edition.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you can actually read this and see what is, I think, one of the great dystopian novels of our time, one that should just be read as just as relevant uh as 1984 or uh or Brave New World.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the other one that comes to mind uh is Children of Men.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_02: All these four novels, I think, if you read them alongside each other, you'd really get uh an unparalleled insight into the problems that face us in the 21st century.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and a final footnote on that before I ask the question I ask all of my guests, Nathan, uh, is that Vauban books seem to be on a serious uh run of form with regards to um helping the public understand the moment we're in.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: So uh probably as controversially, if not more so, is that there was a translation of the enemy of the disaster, uh, a series of essays by Renault Camus, who is the chap uh who is um attributed for coming up with the great replacement theory.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: He will contend I never added the theory bit.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just describing the age we live in, replacism, which is to say that our leaders ultimately treat us all like undifferentiated human matter.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: You can move us all around.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter where we're we're, where we're from, we're just all contributing to the machine.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is they've destroyed the civilization that we once knew and loved in the meantime, and it's a shadow of its former self.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he says it's the crime of the 21st century, it's caused great harm.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's quite interesting because it only came out in English less than two years ago, and to see the spread of that directly and indirectly into discourse uh amongst public intellectuals and commentators across the political sphere has been huge.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Camp of the Saints has effectively been behind a cordon sanitaire since the 70s, because apart from the people who wanted to go and spend the hundred quids to go and get a tatty used version of the book from eBay, uh no one's had a chance to read it.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I dare say it will contribute more to the discourse as you you've been talking about.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: But finally, Nathan, because I know you've got to go, is uh the question uh which very much um embodies the spirit of intellectual humility, which we we talked about with Alistair McIntyre, and that is what have you changed your mind on in the course of your life?
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: It might have been an absolute or maybe something not quite as consequential.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um one of the things that comes to mind, uh, and this is perhaps uh something that speaks to the British context a bit, is as I said, I grew up in in Canada.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're someone who grows up in Canada and for a number of reasons sort of leans conservative, you you end up idealizing a lot of uh British institutions.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_02: You look towards uh the great alliance of the English-speaking peoples, right?
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_02: This kind of um uh thing.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_02: And that was something that uh that shaped a lot of my thinking when I was when I was young, um, in my kind of early 20s or so.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_02: And but um but what I realized from that, and there was one particular experience I'll recount in a second, was that a lot of that was wrapped up in a kind of liberal internationalism, which was maybe very well suited to a particular moment um and doesn't have the same uh value anymore and can fact uh mislead us.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the ways that uh that I discovered this was um uh was uh early when I first came to to Oxford, um, this was just when the Arab Spring was getting started.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so this would have been uh uh 2011.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and um I was invited to be on this as a student, uh I was invited to be on this panel with some of the great uh luminaries of the who were engaged in this.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_02: There was a BBC uh uh correspondent from the Middle East, so someone who'd spent most of his professional career writing about uh the Middle East.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_02: There was uh there were um uh couple academics who were specialists in the area, and then there was uh there was me, and then there was uh there was one other student, so two students as part of this discussion who were kind of brought in, uh given this opportunity.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I was on the one hand, I was very excited to speak alongside these because as and also too, because at this time I'm there joining Oxford, I idealize this wonderful uh institution of higher learning.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the BBC is always looked upon as kind of a superior version of the CBC.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, the CBC in Canada has its problems, but the BBC is a whole nother standard.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I was almost uh uh uh humble very humbled to be there and in awe of this.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_02: And um, but my talk was going to be on why the Arab Spring wasn't working out.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought I wrote it up and I thought afterwards, oh, this is not going to be anything interesting.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone else is gonna say exactly the same thing.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and this was at the moment, too, whereby the just on the timeline here, uh, it was clear that um Assad's government wasn't gonna fall uh and um And the way that it was playing out in Egypt was with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and then the militaries uh push back against that.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_02: So just so we know the timing of it here.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I was just pointing out some of these details and saying, well, look, has there really been uh this promise that we're expecting to see about a great democratic revolution across the whole Middle East is not taking place?
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_02: And that actually is most of the historical, the way that these sort of historical references or uh historical revolutions play out, most of them are failures.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I had this argument.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_02: I thought this is clear from just looking at the scene, everyone's gonna make this point.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'll have nothing original to say.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh oh well, I guess that's just what it happens when you speak along distinguished luminaries.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it turned out I was the only one who had that point of view.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone else was all starry-eyed about how the the democracy was going to sweep the Middle East, and they made fun of me.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_02: They made fun of me as this young student who's there standing alongside them.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I made I said something like uh uh um uh a cursory glance at Wikipedia will will show you a list of most uprisings, and most of them end in failures.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_02: They don't end in change.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_02: And the I can't remember who it was, whether it was the BBC journalist or the academic, were deriding me for making reference to this.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_02: So uh I didn't really think of this at the time.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's only something that I realized uh later on was a sort of typical strategy to deal with this.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: But the what I did realize at the time was the kind of awe, the kind of reverence I'd have with these people and the particular institutions that they represented, and the particular worldview that I thought had something that was uh insightful, um, that could help us understand the troubles of our own time, uh, did not live up to that.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so in McIntyre terms, it was kind of like an epistemological crisis whereby you look at these people that you've exalted and you admired, at least from a distance, and you think very highly of them.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_02: And then when you actually see the way they they operate, and importantly for McIntyre, right, the their inability to describe what's actually going on, because of course the Arab Spring did not produce a sweeping uh wave of democracies all across the Middle East.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I happen to be right.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_02: But the but that's not the main point here.
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_02: The main point is that is that for um for me at this young, I was 23 at the time, um for me, what that did is it is it uh turned me away from uh trust in the mainstream or legacy uh institutions that I admired, and particularly the ones that I associated with a kind of English-speaking uh political order, um liberal internationalism, for lack of a better term, that was uh supposed to have special insights to guide it.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_02: I think from that point onwards, I was uh became much more interested in things that were uh on the fringe, uh ideas, uh people things that weren't necessarily honored in the in the mainstream.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_02: I was ready to go looking um elsewhere after that point.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and maybe that goes to just a broader sense of the experience that many people have, many uh British people have now too, is that as I say, growing up in Canada, you uh if you lean conservative in some way, you tend to idealize um Britain and the British constitutional order.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_02: But throughout my 20s, more and more became I realized how much had changed, how much had been lost, how revolutionary the 90s were in Britain, the the the how uh deep the constitutional order was overhauled.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I think by the time that I was finished uh um there, um, I'd really begun to see the world in a very different way.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think the important thing that what it taught me is that I'd been inclined to see things in terms of continuity, uh kind of long institutional continuity, uh going back to 1945, maybe going back further, maybe going all the way back to Magna Carta, right?
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh sorts of things.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I was much more uh attentive to uh looking for ruptures, looking for breaks, and looking for them when other people were saying that they weren't there.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um so yeah, that that would be, I think, that one of the big uh moments that sticks with me that I reflect on uh occasionally and um probably was was uh fairly significant for pushing my my thinking in other directions.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, I would just be a normal uh liberal internationalist uh enjoying a good academic career, uh writing about the great books on one hand and complaining about the the people overturning the the post-war international order, right?
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the post-war rules-based order on the other hand, and uh it'd be very much in that in the mainstream institutions.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it's uh it's uh yes, uh fascinating account.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, whilst not everyone will get the chance of going and being on a panel at an August institution like Oxford, and then that's the moment that they realize that oh, some of these vaunted institutions actually uh aren't quite as bulletproof as we give them credit for, is I feel like that's almost where we're at with regards to people who very much haven't been through that elite education.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: They they look at the BBC, they look at the British state, they look at all of them, and they just don't trust a word that is said.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And if you go on any article that even talks about Keystarmer or Kia Starmer's LinkedIn profile or anything the BBC puts out, it's it doesn't matter whether they are right-leaning or old left from the former mining towns, or increasingly people like Tunbridge Wells Man, uh, who realize that the established order um has almost nothing of its former self in there, and actually people cannot trust them.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I think everyone in some way is on their own journey toward looking around the fringes as you have been.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I suppose people find different answers and all the rest of it.
• 1:12:10
  SPEAKER_00: But it's fascinating that that seems to be the experience of so many now, and something that certainly, certainly I can uh um empathize with.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Before I let you go, Nathan, where can people find you and your writings and uh what can we expect from you next?
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so uh I have a Substack, um uh pinkosky.substack uh.com, also Lament for the Nations.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's where I post uh most of my writings there.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um I tend to write for either the magazine first things um or for compact.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um those are the two venues I tend to write most for.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then what's coming up is we have the new edition of Camp of the Saints out.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_02: I encourage people to look into that.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'm doing um the first English translation of uh Eric Zemmo, the presidential candidate, French presidential candidate in 2022, doing the the translation of uh his book, The Suicide of the French, um, for encounter books.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um that should be out uh next year.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then my own book, uh tentatively titled Actually Existing Post-liberalism, is uh is under contract with basic books, and I'll be finishing that this year.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_02: So those are uh some things to look forward to if you um uh to have on your your radar uh for the the coming months and for the next calendar year.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, more power to you, Nathan.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'll include the links for the books that he have pre-orders and all the rest of it on there and also to your substacks so people can check those out.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'll certainly look forward to reading them, keep fighting the good fight, and hopefully we get to get into the weeds on some of these interesting topics again in the future.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: All right, thank you very much.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a pleasure.
• 1:14:05
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• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 1:14:30
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• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.