The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 247. The War On The West | Douglas Murray

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

This episode was recorded on March 14th, 2022.In this episode, Douglas Murray and I discuss the current assault on the West, slavery, gratitude, racist mathematics, whiteness, (non-Western) accomplishments, and individual sovereignty.Douglas Murray is the associate editor of The Spectator and the bestselling author of seven books, including The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam; The Madness of Crowds, and The War on the West.—Links—Follow Murray on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurrayInstagram: https://instagram.com/douglaskmurrayBuy ‘The War on the West’: https://amazon.com/War-West-Douglas-M...Read Murray’s articles: https://spectator.co.uk/writer/dougla...—Chapters—[0:00] Intro[1:36] Why ‘War’?[8:41] Western Values, Revenge, Nietzsche[14:13] Slavery, Individuality, Rationalism[21:11] Eradicating Slavery[27:42] Agency & Oppression[33:10] Psychopathic Expressors of Power[38:04] Wealth Inequality: Exclusively Capitalist?[47:25] On Whiteness[54:21] Axioms & Truth[1:02:21] The STEM Moat[1:08:46] The War on Western Art & Culture[1:19:14] Mass Graves & Burning Churches[1:25:52] Gratitude, Resentment, & The Brothers Karamazov[1:36:19] Ancestry & Living as Though God Exists[1:42:53] Faith, Evil, Cain & Abel#Oppression #Postmodernism #DouglasMurray #Western #Power #Whiteness

Welcome to episode 247 of the JBP podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. In this episode, Dad spoke to one of the world's foremost political writers, Douglas Murray, about great paintings, oppression, Dostoevsky, and the War on the West, which happens to be the title of Murray's latest book. He believes we're facing an all-out assault from within where anything's praised so long

as it was produced by the West, where history is re-appraised as driven by slavery, and where unreason is one of many weapons mobilized against democracy, science, and progress. Also mentioned in this episode, bullies with a victim complex, white supremacist mathematics, and the power of truth. Before we start, I wanted to quickly remind you that Dad's now on parlor, the world's premier free speech platform. You can find more personal posts there like pictures with Roger Penrose or Kermit the Frog.

Be sure to follow him on their app or just Google Jordan Peterson parlor. You get the idea. I hope you enjoy this episode. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hello, everyone. I'm pleased to be talking today to Mr. Douglas Murray, who is associate editor of the spectator and is now based in New York. His latest publication, the Madness of Crowds, was a bestseller. His last publication, The Madness of Crowds, was a bestseller. And book of the year for the Times and the Sunday Times. The book before that, the strange death of Europe,

immigration identity, Islam was published by Bloomsbury in May 2017. It spent almost 20 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list and was a number one bestseller in nonfiction. Douglas and I have spoken several times before, publicly, on my podcast and for Unheard. And he also moderated a discussion I had with Sam Harris. I've just finished his latest book, which is not out yet. The War on the West. When is it out, Douglas? It's out on the 26th of April. So hopefully by the time people see this, it will be out. Yeah. So, um, Yeah, so that's what we're going to talk about today. Your new book I read it yesterday, very pessimistic read. I might note and I thought I might start with something technical in some sense,

terminological. It might be regarded as a pretty inflammatory title, the war on the West. And maybe we'll start with that. What do you mean by war? And why use that term? Essentially, I thought you were going to start with the West, which is... Well, we'll do that next. Really? Not the one to have a tango.

Yeah. Well, we'll do that next for sure. War, because what I say in the book is that this is what we've been going through. We've been going through a war on everything to do with the foundations of the West, everything to do with the results of the Western inheritance. And when I say that, of course. I mean the war as I do it bit by bit on Western history, a war on Western peoples, a war on Western culture, a war on Western religion and philosophy. This is a position that I argue that we've come to in the present age where everything is bad if it came from us, let me say, us in the West. And everything is good so long as it hasn't come from us. Now, I should stress by the way that what I'm describing here is Western anti-Westonism.

There are plenty of other forms of anti-Westonism. There's Russia and anti-Westonism. There's Chinese anti-Westonism, also, through other kinds. But the one that I think is most interesting, partly because it's so pathological, is what I'm really writing about here, which is a Western anti-Westernism. Why we in the West have arrived at this strange place where, where we've venerate everything so long as it's not our own, we respect things so long as it hasn't been produced by the society that also produced us.

And I do think this is a fundamental assault. I think is fundamental assault as I try to demonstrate on all of the foundations, the principles, the foundational figures, the heroes, the great stories, the great themes of the West even, have all come in recent decades under this just relentless assault. And I try to explain why, why I think has happened, it's not entirely new phenomenon, as you know, I mean it's been a strain of Western thought arguably for some centuries, if not longer, but that in recent decades it's picked up a pace. And it's picked up a pace for some very obvious reasons. After the colonial era, it was inevitable that there was going to be an anti-colonial backlash, a post-colonial movement.

But that's lingered and turned into something else, as have all of the other backlashes that I lay out. So I do think it's a why, I think it's a complete and fundamental assault on everything that the West has produced. And I think that's why it's deserving of the term. So to what end? Well, that's a very interesting question because of course it's a different aim for different people. I mean, one of the people I write about at one point in the book is Fanon, a French fanon, a distinguished and highly cited post-colonial author who, like Edward Saïd, had a profound influence

in the academy. The forward to his last book was written by Sartre. He was very, very impressive in many ways figure. But his version of what should happen in the post-colonial era was, for instance, I mean, basically entirely Marxist. And it's one of the ironies I tried to tease out about this that, for instance, if in the post-colonial era, people had argued that societies that had been colonized

should be returned to a pre-colonial condition, with a return to, let's say, more of a native political and other habits. And that would have been one thing. But writers like Fanon were not doing that. They were arguing that the answer to the colonial era was Marxism. And of course, that has this tremendous irony, doesn't it, which is that they say, well, this one form of westernism, western colonialism, must be replaced because it's western, and what we'll replace it with is western Marxism. And so that's just one of the motivations. I think it was a very strong motivation, certainly in the immediate period of the postcolonial era

There are different versions of it now of course. There's the let's say the social one the one where it's just rather The gauche I mean of course famously writers like all well-pointed this out many decades ago Rather go to celebrate anything about your own society. And indeed, regarded as being slightly backward, a sign of a sort of low resolution figure that you would do such a thing. Whereas the veneration of other cultures was a demonstration of sophistication.

A sophisticate would do that. But we do end up in this position today, which is much more dangerous than that. One of the reasons I do is I do the assault on Western history and do it also by individuals, the figures that used to be in my own lifetime, I'm sure in yours, John, the absolutely foundational heroes of Western history have come in for specific assault and you could ask yourself, well maybe that's because they're overdue some reckoning and I think it's far more than that and I try to show that. I try to show for instance that the interpretation of, say Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln has actually become an assault based on the following

premise that if we can take down Churchill we sort of can get to the roots of taking down British patriotism. If we get if we assault Abraham Lincoln we've essentially not and don't understand what Jefferson we've not just assaulted them we've actually assaulted something that is the absolute root of the American ideal, the heroic story, the heroic figure. And then there's this further layer of that, which is not just with individuals, but with whole societies, so that, for instance, instead of understanding the history of racism as, well, racism is a highly regrettable and ugly human trait which is consistent across all human societies that we know about and it is a part of Western history. Instead the whole

of Western history is made into a history of racism in which racism was the guiding force. When, as I explained in the book, any fair estimate would see it as being an element within Western history, but by no means the thing that drove Western history. So it's this sort of thing. Okay, so let's concentrate on that then, in terms of the values that you regard as being under assault in this war. What do you think the canonical values are that are the subject of this intense criticism? Now, you described Marxism itself,

which is also a branch of Western thought, interestingly enough, as fundamental to this criticism. So, if it isn't, the Marxists basically make the claim that something like that, history and human institutions, and perhaps individuals as well, are to be understood as manifestations of their class identity. So as some form of group identity for the classical Marxist, it was class identity. And then history is to be viewed as the battle between an oppressor

class and an oppressed class. And the oppressor class is motivated by the desire to exploit the victimized class. And that's based. And then that's been transferred, I would say, to some degree in recent years to terminology that replaces economic class with race, but basically makes the same arguments. Is that seem? Okay. So, the claim then is that the central motivation is something like the will to use compulsion in the service of group-centered goals, I guess.

What's the Western counterclamant? And why, so that's one question, is's the Western counterclamant? And why, so that's one question, is there a Western counterclamant? Why should we reject that analysis of history given that things do get corrupted by power? Well, I quote in the opening, and later on in the book, as you know, a phrase of Nietzsche, which I sort of add to

from the genealogy of morals. When Nietzsche, which I sort of add to from the genealogy of morals. When Nietzsche refers in passing, I think he's such a remarkable phrase I wanted to bring it out and throw it to the forefront. He talks in the genealogy of morals of people who talk about justice, but mean revenge. Now, this seems to me to be an extraordinarily pertinent insight to our era. When you talk about

the scholars and writers I try to tear into in this book, they have, I'm thinking of figures like Ibrahmeks, Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, quite a number of others go on listing, but these are some of the main ones. There's simply not interest in a sort of fair analysis of the West or its history or its traditions or its claims. They're interested in the form of revenge. And some of them are perfectly open about that.

I mean, Kendi is perfectly open about the fact that in response to one thing, it might be necessary to punish another group. He says it completely, completely, frankly, in his most famous book, How to Be Ironically Titled, in appropriately titled How to Be an Anti-Racist. And it's extremely clear from the work of other people in this movement, people like Hannan Nicole Jones of the 1619 project. When you're really talking about, you're

certainly talking about what the people tearing down the heroes of the West is people are saying, okay, you had your go, and now we're going to have ours. And we're going to see how you like it, how you like being talked about in extraordinarily racist terms, how you like being lumped in and to marginalize as a group, for instance, white people, Western people, Western traditions. And again, this isn't an entirely new thing.

I point out again with one of the most prominent postcolonial writers, Edward Said, who every benign student who's had to study at almost any university has come across Orientalism at some point. And one of Said's fundamental critiques of the West is that it sort of, it essentialises people in the East. And, you know, there's quite a lot of points to make about that, but one of them is, he's extremely good at essentializing people in the West.

You know, he'll refer in passing, say, each to, for instance, your average 19th century European. What the hell was an average 19th century European? Any more than an average 19th century person in Africa or the Arabian Peninsula, you know, people of this revenge kind, which extraordinarily keen to use tools which they claimed to deprecate so long as that they furthered their particular political goals. And I think that they expose themselves again and again, and the problem in recent years, as I see it in the West, is that this process of revenge has taken on this exceptionally gleeful

attitude. People like Dianjo, visibly, audibly, cannot believe the luck they have that they can get away with saying that the things that they do. And the fact that when asked to provide evidence, they say things like Diangelo did recently in an interview, there's a collective glee in the white body when black bodies are punished. And her interview happens to be black asks her for evidence that she has done, so she just makes another outrage as claim. And this has become part of it. Okay, so let's go into this as deeply as we can. So I was thinking when reading your book about let's start with the issue of slavery. And it's certainly the case that the people that you're

describing and the intellectual and Marxist influence types who criticize the more traditional institutions of the West, except it as a given that slavery is wrong. And so you could imagine there might be two reasons for that, one reason would be one group should not have the upper hand over another or at least if you're the group that's in the oppressed class, you might not want that to be the case.

And the other argument is there's something intrinsically wrong with slavery as such, but that, but at the individual level. And so I guess one of the things that struck me is that unless you believe the second, you're just trying to swap one form of slavery for another and it isn't also clear why it's wrong. In slavery is wrong if you believe that the individual should be sovereign, able to make choices, able to make free and unconstrained choices that aren't subject to the arbitrary will of another.

But to believe that, you have to believe that there is such a thing as the individual. That's the right unit of analysis. And that the idea that that individual is valuable and sovereign in some fundamental sense is true. And then when I think that, I think there isn't anywhere in the world where that idea has been expressed more clearly than in the West. And so it's so interesting to see people object to slavery and object to the use of arbitrary power by one group over another, but also to reject wholesale.

The individualism, the notion of individual value that's at the heart of the Western enterprise It seems to be the basis for the rejection of slavery per se. You do point out for example that it wasn't obvious that Karl Marx objected to slavery on moral grounds So so it seems too obvious to even be asked why is slavery wrong? But when everything obvious is up for grabs, then it's perfectly reasonable to ask that. And so part of the problem with setting the group against the individual is that you see that the people who do that seem to invalidate their own moral claim that what they're opposing is wrong. Like on what basis is it wrong? And does that seem like a reasonable

position to you? Yes, I mean, one of the most fascinating things about this, I go into in the section on slavery in the book is that of course, historically speaking, it would have been highly unusual to be opposed to slavery in almost any era. And there were lots of reasons for that. I mean, you first of all have the, one of the questions, as you know, that I delve into at one point opposed to slavery in almost any era. And there were lots of reasons for that. I mean, you first of all have the, one of the questions, as you know, that I delve into at one point in the book is why are the Enlightenment philosophers

under particular attack at the moment? And there are various explanations you could give for that. One is that there is a genuine overdue reckoning, that there is a form of enlightenment, let's say, fundamentalism at the moment, that views figures of the enlightenment as particularly needing this sort of scouring and re-approach. Another is that they happened to have the misfortune to live in an era in which both the slave trade and colonialism currently seen as the two great wrongs of history, of the West, were going on

and that they didn't spend enough of their time countering them and that a manual can should have spent more time addressing slavery and less time addressing all of the questions that he addressed and that rather than talking about superstition and trying to pull that apart, David Hume should have been interested in colonialism and on and on. So that's another explanation and a third explanation which I think is perhaps more persuasive is that actually if you go for the enlightenment philosophers, you get to the one of the absolutely key things to assault, if you're going to assault the West, which are the ideas of rationalism and reason, and the application of the scientific method and much more. But the reason I mention this is because

of course, what's so fascinating is that there are two aspects of slavery in particular that need to be delved into. One is that thing of, well, everybody did it throughout history. And there's a counter which Kendi among others do, which is, well, Western slavery was worse because it was race-based. And by the way, that's absolute nonsense. I mean, countless societies had effectively race-based slavery, and indeed it's going on today in the Middle East and in Africa. But there was a specific reason actually why during the Enlightenment period, and I cite Thomas Jefferson on this,

he's very interesting figure, trying to think this through as they were going through it. One of the reasons why Thomas Jefferson is so interesting, because he is one of the most thoughtful people of his era, was still not aware of whether or not there was an answer or which way the answer went to what was still a live conversation then, which was the monogenesis and polygenesis argument. That was the argument over whether or not all the human races were from the same stock as it were, or whether we were all from different lives. That debate seems obvious to us now because it got answered later in the 19th century. It wasn't obvious at that time and people like Jefferson were trying to do what they could with it. So there was one version of the Defence of Slavery, which was, well these are all totally different

people, but then of course you have to counter that with the fact that, and again, Voltaire made this point, what is the greater evil, to sell somebody and buy somebody of a different country, a different race, and so on, or to sell your neighbour or your brother, or the member of your community. Now of course, this is just as it is, just as it was when Voltaire asked the question, it's an exceedingly uncomfortable question to ask today. And I don't ask it in order to say, well, there's an obvious answer,

but as everybody knows, the slave trade only existed, because people in Africa were selling their brothers and their neighbors and raiding neighboring towns of people who looked exactly like them and selling them to other black people in Africa, some of whom ended up in the slave trade going across the Atlantic, many more of whom went through the slave trade that went to Arabia. So, it took an awfully long time for our species to even begin and we're not there yet

by any means. I've met people in my own life who were slaves, were born slaves in Africa and elsewhere. This is by no means solved by our species, but we look back at it now as if it was perfectly obvious. Now, as if it was perfectly obvious. Well, look, okay, so my understanding of the history of ideas in the deepest sense is that it's very difficult for people, first of all, to understand that there is a universally valid human essence across cultures, right? And so most isolated peoples have regarded their own citizens as human and everyone else who isn't part of that group as not fully human and to develop a universal system of value despite that

proclivity has been extraordinarily difficult. And then to further make the case that each person regardless of their social status and power and all of that is also characterized by something that is best termed intrinsic worth that's associated with their personal sovereignty is or their individual sovereignty is also an extraordinarily difficult idea to conceptualize. And then, but, so first of all, we shouldn't be lulled into thinking that, as you pointed out, that those are human norms in some sense, they're not quite the contrary.

And then, I do believe it is the case that, first of all, perhaps in the religious domain, and we can talk about that first of all, perhaps in the religious domain, and we can talk about that later, and then later in the political domain, that notion of divine individual worth was developed and instituted in social institutions, most effectively, and in some sense solely in the West. And yes, and we could get into that in one angle. You talk about the British Empire's attempt to eradicate slavery worldwide. And also that that was driven by Christian notions

and by Christians specifically. And that it also occurred at great expense in relationship to the British Empire's function. So maybe you could just walk through that a bit, we could delve into that. Yes, and this is an important, particularly important one, because yes, first of all, as you well know, many of the people like William Will Beforce, who are most prominent in arguing the case for the abolition of slavery, were driven comprehensively by their Christian faith. And so, you know, as my late friend Rabbi Jonathan Sachs used to say, the claim that morality is self-evident, is self-evidently

untrue. These people were driven by a specific idea of morality and a specific set of values and indeed virtues. And it's a modern myth that we would have got there anyway. But the sanctity of the individual, the sanctity of the individual life and the autonomy of every individual, the necessity of every individual having autonomy was at the absolute base of the desire. First of all, to ban slavery in the British Empire. And then, and it was a, maybe people would say, well, you would say that, wouldn't you Douglas? Having been born and brought up in the UK, but a pretty remarkable thing that the British Empire

then decided to spend a considerable amount of blood and treasure, policing the high seas in order to stop slavery elsewhere. British sailors looting their lives, abhorting ships without sails that they would search the cargo holds for and discover were, for instance, a Brazilian slave trading ship trying to sneak through in disguise, because what Brazil didn't get rid of slavery until the 1880s, formally. And Britain policed the seas for this for many years, thousands of sailors lost their lives. And in the end, as I cite in the book,

the actual cost of eradicating the slave trade has been shown by a number of historians to have actually cost Britain more, first of all, in the actual endeavor, secondly, most importantly, in the paying out, the buying out, effectively, of companies engaged in the slave trade in order to make sure that they didn't continue their trade.

And thirdly, in the increased prices that everybody in Britain had to pay for the 19th century because of the need to pay for goods that were coming from non-slave trading places, these ended up being an exercise more costly than the benefits accrued during the period of slavery. So the reason why I mentioned this isn't actually just because of the way I speak or the fact that I happened to come from the UK. It's because it then gets us to this very interesting question which is what would restitution ever look like?

And what I noticed, and what I, as you know Jordan, in a number of times in the book go into, is this question of reparations, as it's currently called. What might also call a sort of, what would restitution look like on a number of historic wrongs? And I've been very struck in the last two decades in particular by the fact that we have people and again, Nietzsche puts his finger on it with an uncanny precision. I'm struck by the number of people who rip at long closed wounds, rip them open, and then scream at everyone about how hurt they are.

Because in actual fact, on a whole range of issues of what we're now reminded are historic wrongs. Something like considerable restitution happened an awfully long time ago. You still hear people saying it's extremely popular in American discourse, that America never addressed the issue of slavery. Fighting along a bloody civil war about it would have been one obvious way that they clearly tried to address it. And even that today is poo-pooed, a number of contemporary historians say, oh, it wasn't really about slavery, it was a different power struggle. It never is about the thing that the thing was about. But I'm very keen to address these ugly, difficult corners of it. So I say, if you are interested in restitution

of making, making atonement for any wrongs in the past, you have to look at what actually has already happened in the past by way of atonement. Well, there's also a Christian slash Western or Judeo-Christian slash Western philosophy of atonement. And that is that you atone for your shortcomings and perhaps for the unequal distribution of talents by trying to live a responsible, generous, productive, and honest life, and that it's actually a matter of the individual moral striving

rather than something that should be conceptualized at the group level. And so I'm struck again and still, I mean, I cannot understand if you accept the notion that the willingness of one group to oppress another is in some measure a human universal. It's deeply characteristic of our history. And that the reason that that's wrong is that individuals shouldn't be subject to arbitrary compulsion, partly because it deprives the rest of us of their potential value as free agents, and partly because it transgresses against part of their essential nature that's intrinsically valuable. You can't oppose slavery on moral grounds as far as I can tell without implicitly accepting those axioms.

And so then it's so striking to me that the people who are simultaneously accusing the West of these uniquely awful predilections accept one of the great propositions of the West as central to their entire moral doctrine, and then they've accepted so centrally, they don't even notice that it's true. They just think it's self-evident. Well, it's not so self-evident. Why shouldn't I oppress someone

if I can get away with it? Yes, and why shouldn't my group? Right. And then we have the one now, which is the form of oppression that presents itself in the guise of the victim. I constantly come back in this book to the people who present themselves as victims and are clearly the bullies, people who claim to be suffering from historic wrongs because it gives them a dominance that they would not otherwise have. I mean let me give you two quick but quite significant examples of this. Two of the most celebrated writers of the last generation in America are Tannisie Coates and Abraham X Kenney. Both of

them have been recipients of MacArthur Genius awards. Kendi is now the only holder apart from the late Ellie Vizel, of the late Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor of one of the most prestigious chairs in the American Ivy League University. The both of them have written memoirs that have been bestsellers and are highly fated and cited everywhere. And both of them have an origin story of racism that is absolutely rhythmical. In the case of Cokes, he describes a moment in one of his memoirs of getting into an elevator with his young child, and a white woman gets into the elevator, and he says behaves dismissively towards the child and Cotes describes how he wants to sort of fling this woman against the wall and sort of throttle her for this act of

racism and at no point suggests that actually it's possible that the woman was having a bad day and it didn't matter who the child was or that she was partially sighted or anything. There's sort of the immediate assumption that this is racism, we suffered it and we suffered it. So appallingly, I'm going to get a chapter of my book out of it. And Ibrahim X. Kendi's origin story of racism is equally reasonable and it's that when he was at primary school in the US as a child on one occasion, a teacher in the classroom called on a white girl when a quiet black girl in the class also had her hand up and wasn't called upon.

And Kennedy gets an entire chapter out of this. And my suggestion on these cases is these people are presenting extremely minimal stories, inventing extremely minimal stories, reasonably small stories of, I don't know, and I don't deny that racism exists in some forms today in America as in all societies, but they present these reasonably small examples of racism in order to present themselves as a victim and then present themselves also as the judge and jury

over everybody else currently alive. And then there's also, it's also very different to say that institutions are corrupted or tempted by the willingness to use power, the motivation to use power, and that one of the manifestations of that is various form of arbitrary oppression, and to claim that that's the central guiding principle of the institutions and the societies. And then that also begs the question, well, if you criticize the West, let's say, for its grounding in willingness to use arbitrary power and compulsion, what do you propose as an alternative? And why do you believe that alternative exists? Make it

the alternative only exists outside of the Western structure somehow? What's there except power? It's only power. It's only power and power in this era as you know Jordan comes through the claim of oppression That that power is best exerted in our era First of all by claiming that the person has been a victim of oppression and Secondly, by wielding that alleged depression sometimes true oppression, but by wielding it as a tool to beat others. It's also interesting that the only reason that works, let's say, I claim more of virtue because I'm an anti-racist rather than a non-racist. Why does that work for me? Why do I have a platform? Why do I have a... Because... Yes, because...

Our era cares about racism. Only because our era doesn't like racism. Which belies the central proposition. If no one cared, if people were psychopathic expressors of power, and that was particularly true of Western people, they just say something like, well, yeah, what's your point? Try to do something about it. And you think that's wrong.

It's just because you're weak. And I've got the power and I've got you under my thumb and to hell with you and your stupid ideas. But that isn't what people do. And when they're accused of being racist in the West, they're struck to the heart, generally speaking. They're ashamed of themselves. They'll bend over backwards to apologize. They scour their conscience to see if they can find any example

of where they might not have abided by the principle of divine sovereignty somehow and make obeisances in every possible direction. And so that in itself seems to indicate that the primary claim is fundamentally untrue. Which, as you know, I write a chapter in the book, as you know, on them, well, what everyone else in the world is doing, whilst we're doing this to ourselves. And, you know, one of my favorite examples,

I quote a lay colleague of mine's work on this, is racism within China and racism from China about the rest of the world. There's a term that the Chinese use of white people that roughly translates as ghosts. The idea being that I think is quay, The idea being that I think is quay, and the idea is, of course, is that white people aren't really human. Well, like the simulacrum of a human being, but not the real thing, only the Chinese people, the real thing. Well, that's really racism, for sure.

And from the most heavily populated country on earth and there's no change. And one certainly willing to use power and one certainly willing to use power. So it looks to me, for example, I've tried to make this case that the central animating spirit of the West is something like the spirit of voluntary association, the spirit of voluntary cooperation, uncompelled choice, recognition of universal human dignity. Now, we all fall short of acting that out and instilling it in our institutions. But and I see that as a reflection of a deeper, that deeper theological claim that we discussed earlier, that each individual is in some sense of divine worth intrinsically and should be treated as intrinsically worthwhile as a consequence. And that out of that as far as I'm concerned, worthwhile as a consequence. And that out of that as far as I'm concerned, emerges the entire tradition

of natural rights and there are a deletiation of the notion of that intrinsic worth. That's not the expression of the will to power. It's the precise opposite of that. And so why are we so low to give ourselves credit for the emergence of that idea and our attempts to abide by it? Why are we so prone to guilt in this regard? Firstly, because, firstly, we would go about that thing that it's regarded as being somewhat somewhat ghost and backward and unsophisticated to take such an attitude. And the second is that we, there are many other reasons, but a second is the completely misinformed idea.

And this comes from America in particular, I'm afraid, it's what America has been pumping around the world in recent decades. The idea that what is bad in the West is uniquely bad, and that comes from a complete and wholesale ignorance, not just of history in the rest of the world, but the rest of the world now. I mean, a total startling lack of context. I mean, if anything ever suffered from context, collapse in our era, it is everything to do with the West, so that it is seen as, there's another element that, there's another element that seems to be, me to be worthy of note two, we're tortured for our moral insufficiency because of the existence of demonstrable inequality.

And the call for equity is part of the clarion call for the people who are conducting, let's call it, the war on the West. And the proposition there is essentially Marxist that wealth tends to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, which happens to be true, although those people differ. The proportion is small, but the people change. But what's so faulty about that, in my estimation, isn't the claim that that inequality exists, or even the claim that there are negative aspects of that that might need to be addressed, but the notion that that is somehow unique to the social institutions and the economic institutions of the West. I hate that most

particularly because I think it underestimates the problem. You cannot blame inequality and capitalism. No, I mean, it's foolish. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's take the other options on the table. The remaining flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War. Let's say you can say, maybe you can say Putin's Russia. You can certainly say Cuba and a few other places. What do we reckon is the inequality of wealth in these countries between, let's say, the oligarchs and the average Russian. There was a documentary Alexander Navalny bravely made before going back to Russia and being

imprisoned, and he had it released after he got back to Russia the other month that was promptly imprisoned. He had the release of this documentary called Putin's Palace, and one of the extraordinary things we did a lot of harm for Putin at home, because people were genuinely shocked and upset about this, was that Putens Palace on the Black Sea, which he's been building for years, and the cost of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, has, among other things, a vineyard attached to it. And there's a guest area, a guest room near the vineyard,

and there's a guest lavatory in the guest room, the vineyard, and there's a guest lavatory in the guest room, the vineyard, and there's a lavatory brush there made of gold that costs the same as the average Russian makes in a year. So there's just one example of inequality in Russia. We could do the same thing for Cuba, let's look at all of the other examples. Look at North Korea. Look at North Korea. I've seen myself in a country, which I visited many years ago, but in a country where the general population starved by the millions in the 1990s,

and the military elites were able to get hold on the black market of blue-label Johnny Walker, on the most expensive whiskies on the planet. Take any of the, because everyone talks about the post-colonial, I mean, of course, the post-colonial societies that haven't gone well, they've been post-colonial societies have gone very well, like Singapore in terms of productivity.

You can say that Hong Kong until very recently, the same thing. But let's talk about the post-colonial societies that didn't go well, Zimbabwe, for instance. What was the wealth in Equality in Zimbabwe between the wealth of Mrs. Mugabe, say, and the average Zimbabwean? The average life expectancy in Zimbabwe

during Robert Mugabe's reign halved. He's one of the very few leaders in the world where life expectancy actually declined faster than people were living. People were on a treadmill that was getting shorter and shorter with every step. Well, what was wealth inequality like there? What's wealth inequality like in Angola these days?

I mean, go anywhere. It is so obscene to present this as you say as some kind of phenomenon of Western capitalism and as though any other system around could be better. As end to present it, there's some sort of rigorous theory. So all economic systems produce inequality. It seems to be the reflection of a deep underlying law that we don't understand that well about how advantage tends to accrue as you accrue advantage. And disadvantage tends to accrue as you accrue disadvantage, positive feedback loops of some sort.

All economic systems result in inequality and different societies have evolved different mechanisms to deal with that. But the only system that we know of that's also produced inequality but also produced the cessation of absolute privation, our free market systems. And China didn't manage that till they instituted, instituted free market systems. And free market systems work because sovereign individuals exercise choice over not only purchase, but also employment. And so people in the West are guilty about inequality and libel to

rate themselves over the coals when its existence has pointed out, but it's partly because they don't understand how pernicious the problem really is and they don't take credit for the fact that free markets have stopped people from starving. You know, it's only 8% of people now live below the UN line for absolute poverty compared to 40% in Ronald Reagan's time. It's only 40 years, 40 years. And you go back to that phenomenon that again, I don't think there's any evidence that in modern China, the people involved with the Politburo and the people who've done terribly well out of the last 20 years, since China entered the WTO.

I don't think there's any evidence of significant fears about inequality between the Chinese elite and the average person. There is something very specific about the Western worry about inequality, which again, like the worry about slavery, like the worry about guilt and historical guilt, is a product of a thing that ought to be recognized as being a good part of the machine. If the machine was so panicious, we wouldn't care about inequality. We would simply say, as I'm afraid, or we'd celebrate it even more,

which is a perfectly easy thing to do, which is, well, if I have more, it's because I'm better and the evidence that I'm better is clearly that I have more. And what's your evidence for the contrary claim? Well, people have intrinsic worth. It's like, yeah. And you get to another of the world's biggest economies in India. I don't know if you have a beanbag. It's an extraordinary culture. Very, very rich, a wonderful culture, and it's the most extraordinary place to visit, but it also

has a form of inequality which is grotesque to any Western visitor, I'm talking of course about the caste system, which exists this day, which is a form of slavery as well, and which regards people if they're born into the wrong classes being literally untouchable. The untouchable class in India is something you're born into and you will be in for your whole life. Now, is that inequality? Oh yes, is it systemic? Hell yes. Is much being done about it, not really. People take a sort of view that, well, there's an old joke about Princess Margaret

once being asked what, once hearing somebody refer to an extraordinarily grand English country house and the person says, imagine this coming as just an accident of birth and Princess Margaret saying, birth is no accident. Now, but actually that view, and to birth and Princess Margaret saying, birth is no accident. Now, but actually that view, whether it was correct, it triptych, it's not,

is regarded by us as being laughable and visible. It's not being regarded as being laughable or at all visible in one of the most important societies in the world today, India. And historically that certainly wasn't regarded as laughable in any sense, the notion that you didn't have divine value in some sense or ultimate value as a consequence of your birth, that that was an extraordinarily difficult idea to supplant uproot and transform because that also seemed in some real sense self-evident. Yes. And the evidence was your success.

And I'm afraid here we also get to what I regard as being one of the hardest to discuss, but most necessary to identify aspects of what I'm trying to tackle in this book, which is what I go straight on to in the first chapter, which is what I regard as being and describe as an outright war on white people. Now, of course, this is very difficult to talk about because people say, first of all, your guilty of self-pity of some kind or boo-hoo, poor you. But as I show, I think in some remorseless detail in that chapter. If you wanted for some reason to attack Africa or everyone from North Africa downwards, you would at some point, if you were to be driven by such an animus, you would be attacking black people. If you decided to turn on everything to do a Chinese culture, at some

point you would be attacking Chinese people. And so it is in the case of the West that since historically the West has been predominantly populated not entirely but predominantly populated by white people. The assault on the West has to include and now does include an extraordinarily ugly and increasingly ugly assault on white people, whereby the own in societies which quite rightly have a whore racism, the only group of people against whom racism is completely acceptable has become white people. And this is, this is to my mind, one of great unsayables, but necessary to address issues of our time,

because it seems to me that this can't go on much longer. It's an extraordinarily dangerous game that's been played, and one with such negative consequences, not least the consequences of likely backlash, that it has to be had out in the open. At the point at which you are deciding people's futures in the workplace based on whether they're white or not and that being white means you're marked down, that application to schools and universities involves you being marked down if you're white,

that access to medical care, as I give examples of in the book, that you will be deprived of it if you happen to be white in certain jurisdictions. And this, and very much more, is absolute poison in our societies. And I think is one of the things that has to be addressed. If we really don't like racism, we have to tackle the rise of this new racism, which has become totally acceptable in every day. To also to identify Western ideas, let's say, as somehow white,

means that you, to the degree that those ideas have a universal value, which might even be the universal value, say of making the case that slavery is wrong, you have to deny them to other people who aren't of that race. Right? You, you, you, You contaminate them irretrievably. I've seen attempts, for example, to make the case that the emphasis on logic and excellence is somehow white and that to accept those values as paramount means that you've just fallen under the sway of a certain kind of racism and to the degree that that's faulty in its essence. I mean, if the thing is worth doing then by definition, it's worth doing well. And if nothing is worth doing, then we don't do anything.

And there's nothing to talk about. And so the notion that excellence is somehow associated with a given race or a racial view is preposterous and demoralizing. And also something that's greatly detrimental, at least in principle, to the very people that are supposed to be helped by such doctrines. people that are supposed to be helped by such doctrines? Well, yes, it's possible in the whiteness that the assault on white people

is and has become tied up as part of the assault on the Western, let's say the Western legacy, and that what is happening is a desire to enact that revenge I referred to earlier and a desire to take apart what some of us thought was actually an ideal which is the ideal that the Western tradition is not actually the preserve of white people but is a universal inheritance and And I say this repeat at the end of the book, this is one way of looking at it, is to say one of the interesting things about so called, let's, I don't like to use, let's say white culture, Western culture, one of the remarkable things about it has been yes in its negative forms, it has attempted to force itself upon people. In its positive forms, it invites anyone who wants to be part of it to share in it,

which is again, not the case with other cultures. There is no way, even in, let's say in the political systems of any other country. Outside of the West, if you were to migrate there from a Western country, you would not be able to work your soul your way up to the Prime Minister's ship presidency or even the cabinet of most other countries in the world if you were an outsider. The West is specifically in our era exceptionally open and believes that its own inheritance, its own traditions, its own political order, its institutions, not just should be

open but have to be open to anybody who wants to be a part of them. And that ideal is one of the ones that in the name of anti-racism is being taken apart in our time. She's saying, no, no, no, these things only belong to the white people. And as I say, toward the end of the war on the West, wow, are the conclusions that you get to from their negative. I mean, wow, are the consequences of that down the road negative because, and as I lay out, as you know, in quite a lengthy passage, there is a there is a response to that just waiting to be said.

So, do you think that the core values of the West are tenable and maintainable in the absence of the underlying religious substrate? So I'm thinking about Chuck Derrida, for example, and religious substrate. So I'm thinking about Chuck Derrida, for example, and Derrida criticized what he called the logo centrism of the West. And it's emphasis, for example, on binary oppositions and binary oppositions are the foundation of computation. So maybe criticizing that too deeply is unwise. But in any case, it seems to me that the notion of individual sovereignty is in some sense a religious claim. And you can think about the West, one stream of Western thought is the enlightenment. And there's a secular element to that.

But it emerged out of a deeper religious tradition that has this universalizing tendency and this universalizing claim. Is it possible for the, then I would say to what degree is the assault on values that you see and diagnose an assault on religious values and is it possible to formulate a defense without simultaneously defending some of these underlying religious presumptions?

No, this is German Jewish pocketforder's dilemma, isn't it? The can-you sustain a system that isn't willing to nurture the roots of gay birth to the system? to the roots that gave birth to the system. And it's probably the biggest underlying question of our era. The claim has been sometimes yes, of course. And I think that that, yes, of course, has been coming under significant strain in recent years. As I said, it's not clear that the sanctity of the individual is something that is

enforceable purely through human rights doctrine and the international court system. Well, it's not self-evident that it's fundamentally a rational claim. It might be instead something more like the pre-conditioned for all claims that we regard as rational, which is a whole did an axiom rather than a conclusion. And axioms have to be accepted on faith by definition, right? If you define faith as operation within the system that the axioms give rise to. within the system that the axioms give rise to. And I've been trying to puzzle this out deeply. There's the idea of the divine individual in the West is associated with the idea of logos.

And it's associated with the notion as well that there's something about speech, in particular, truthful speech that is fundamentally redemptive. And it's recognition of that, I think, that gives rise to our notion that freedom of speech is a cardinal value, not because it gives you the freedom to speak exactly, but because without

that freedom we can't think, we can't improve our institutions. And we can't get to truth. It isn't a merely theoretical exercise. The point of freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, and all these things, was to get to a truth. It wasn't a game in itself. It was a belief that there was something to uncover at the end of that process that was more than worth discovering. Right. Well, when I talk to Richard Dawkins recently,

amongst such things, and of course, he's arguably the world's most famous atheist, but I like talking to him. And I think Dawkins is possessed by the spirit of the truth to a more degree. And so then one of the things I wonder is, truth to a market degree. So then one of the things I wonder is, is science itself possible in the absence of the proposition that the truth will set you free? I don't think that's a scientific proposition. Well, I think it's a philosophical or a theological proposition. I mean, this comes to one of the great jokes against conservatives in recent years. I think I said it's to you in private before, John, but not publicly. But one of the great jokes against conservatives was that they tended to think that the deconstructionists,

for instance, would inevitably stop at the borders of STEM. You remember, for years people sort of have r rich sense of the fact that well, you know, your degree in lesbian dance theory, you know, you just wait till you have to go out into the market and find a job with that useless degree. But these people actually, the joke, was on the conservative saying that they did all find degree jobs. They found them in HR departments and they told everyone else how to behave for the next generation. So, and then there was this sort of joke

that the Conservatives again had of sort of, it'll stop at the borders of STEM because at some point the bridges need to stay up. No, no, turns out that if you've got a more overriding theory and claim and ambition and drive in your era. If the bridges do fall down, it'll be because of institutional racism and constructional racism and much more, and it'll be because you didn't do it hard enough. It'll be just like the nonsense that everyone said in communism. Look at this stuff of different ways of knowing. I mean, this goes back. I am

different ways of knowing. I mean, this goes back, yeah. I am a deep, deep contempt for Derrida, as I do for all of the deconstruction, it's not just because it's so easy to deconstruct and so hard to construct, but because of course the deconstruction is always tried to deconstruct everything apart from their own university positions.

And Derrida and code definitely started some of this. And it's led to this thing we now have, one of the things I described in the book, of the equitable maths nonsense, where we come once again to the anti-white, anti, I would say also anti-black actually, but certainly anti-Western idea that mathematics is a Western construct and that there are other ways of knowing

that exist and which must be brought forth. And you don't just get this in maths. By the way, I mean, as I, again, as I loud in remorseless detail in the book, this is, this is being taught in American schools, this is being rolled out in school district after school district in the US. The idea that in maths, in STEM in general, there are other ways of knowing, other than the scientific method, accurate mathematics. Things like showing your working is an example of white supremacy and on and on and on. This is completely mainstream today to an extent that I think will shock many readers. These things are effectively in the realm of voodoo because nobody ever explains what the other ways of knowing are.

Let me give you an example. If you don't believe in the mathematical method, that actually happens to have been refined in the West but poses some of its ancestry to a considerable, indeed, bewildering array of cultures around the world. Why you can't say, oh, that's interesting. The West may have refined it, but it's got its heritage elsewhere. Hoorah.

We're all able to own it. Why instead of that, you have to say, no, this is a white supremacist thing. So we're going to come up with other ways of knowing, instead of addition and subtraction in the normal way of things. What are the other ways of knowing? What is this voodoo we're being told? Never explained. Never explained. Other than you get this little hint sometimes that it has something to do with, better intuitiveness about the concerns of others. And I give examples of this and basically you could also argue as a sort of feminization of certain things, certain realms of study, but essentially that the

white supremacist, the male patriarchal thing is all about the answers and about accuracy and about being on time, even, I mean all of these to say that they're racist, hardly need saying, but all of these things are white and therefore we need to look at these other ways of knowing which are never explained, but there's something, something which we're all meant to go along with. I mean, to say that this doesn't bear examination is, is, is, is to vastly understate the matter. Yeah, well, I think the STEM types are completely defenseless against all of this. They tend to be apolitical in their machinations if they're credible scientists and credible researchers almost by definition because they're busy

obsessively detailing out their specialized concerns and not paying attention to the broader context, which works fine if the broader context is one in which their narrow and specialized productive pursuits are valued. But fatal when that isn't the case. And so one of the questions that we're facing now is, what are the invisible ethical preconditions for the successful practice of science itself? And weirdly enough, that's kind of a post-modern question, you know, because the postmodernists did insist to some degree that we exist within stories, although they don't believe in grand unifying narratives, which begs the question for me, then what unites us internally, psychologically, or socially, if there's no

unifying narrative, if narrative is the fundamental answer. The narrative in which science operates is something like, well, the pursuit of truth is valuable in and of itself. And it's valuable because it's a benefit to people at the individual level. And as long as that's in place, it can all be ignored. And science can act as if it's something unto itself. And I know that's a tricky argument because it does there in somewhat into the postmodern direction. But we wouldn't pursue science if we didn't think the pursuit was valuable and redemptive.

Yes. Right. And was heading towards something. But yes, yes. can you say that can be obtained by the yep go ahead. Can you say the same thing about the humanities? Can you say the same thing about art? Can you say the same thing about metaphysics? Can you say the same thing about politics or economics or anything else. And I think the answer on all of these things is that the priority of the era is representation, not attainment of a goal that is worth attaining

other than representation. And this is where we get to this. What I say in the one of the West is one of the deep underlying, just questions we have to address, which is, is the game that our societies have decided to play worth playing, and does it mean that we effectively win out in the end or not? And that you fleshed it out by saying, what I mean is, let's say that across America and all other Western societies, we managed to completely nix the representation game and that the diversity, inclusion, equity, game was just solved. And that every board in America, in every other Western country, Canada, Britain, you name it. Every board had exactly the right representation or overrepresentation of minority groups,

so that there was more trans people on every board, more black people, more minority ethnic people on every board, or exactly the percentage that replicated the percentage in the country, and that every board and every workforce across every imaginable discipline and every industry exactly replicated, of course, is I don't need to tell you the absurdity of this, but you had exactly 50% female firefighters and exactly 50% of the police were women.

And if in America, 13% of the population are black, and 13% of the police were women. And if in America, 13% of the population are black, and 13% of the police are black. And on and on and on. And the same with engineers and the same with electricians and the same with absolutely everybody. Computer programmers are a lot. Let's say you get to there. Do you beat China?

I don't know that the questions are all clear. The answers are all clear to that question. My own suspicion is actually it's a game that we're playing for politeness reasons and for some justifiable reasons in certain areas. I give the example in the book, saying, actually, it makes sense to have, for instance, a police force that represents the community pretty accurately. But do you actually need your, for instance, your basketball teams or your computer programmers all to also completely, accurately represent the population? And to have complete representation. It doesn't seem to me that you win any particular game from doing so other than satisfying the game that the West has decided to play for the time being. But at

the end of that game, well you win if you win if you win if you regard holding those positions as a reward that's equivalent to privilege rather than as the opportunity to do something productive in and of itself, right? And so because that seems to be part of the conceptualization is, well, your job is a reward to be doled out rather than something that's productive in relationship to valuable ends. And you mentioned the humanities earlier too. I don't think there is humanities outside of the canon. So science is nested inside an underlying ethic that presumes that,

let's say, the universe is understandable that there's some association between that and logic, that pursuing the truth in relationship to knowledge of the world has this redemptive quality and that there are very careful ways of doing that. But the humanities is also nested, but even in some sense, more self-evidently, inside the idea of a canon. And that canon is traditional. And if you throw out the traditional canon, I think by definition you throw out the humanities.

And, well, as you know, in the chapter on culture, I go into this because I think by this stage, it is clear that there is not an aspect of Western culture that has not been assaulted at such a fundamental and dishonest level that if you were to continue this game there's just nothing left, nothing. The British Library in 2020 announced that they were going to create a list of authors whose work was in the British Library, including manuscripts and important documents by these authors, who had some connection to the slave trade or colonialism. And they produced this sort of black list of authors, including the late poet laureate Ted Hughes who died in 1998, who was born in considerable poverty in Yorkshire in 1930s,

who had nothing to do with the British Empire and the British Library claimed that one of his ancestors in the 17th century had benefited from the slave trade. I mean, this isn't even the sins of the father debate anymore. This is the sins of the ancestor for centuries earlier debate. And by the way, it turned out, among other things, that the British Library can't even get researchers these days, because the researchers turned out to have selected a person called Nicholas Fera, who actually was opposed to

the slave trade and wasn't an ancestor of Ted Hughes. So they weirdly just decided to posthumously defame somebody. And this isn't at all uncommon. The Tate Gallery in London. I give an example, one that I might come onto is particularly painful to me, but there's an example of one of the masterpiece I say having there. I don't know if you know the work, but it's a beautiful painting called The Resurrection Cookham by Stanley Spencer on the great mid--century British artists. It's a huge vast canvas which the tape is exceptionally lucky to have. Paintings in the 1930s and it is a depiction of the physical resurrection of the dead at the day of judgment. They're all coming out of their tombs in the graveyard of his local church in the village of Kukum.

And it's a profoundly moving painting. To me, I've always been, I used to occasionally my lunchtime just go to sit in front of this canvas. Some of the dead coming out of the tombs are recognisably apparently neighbors of Spencer's from his village, but he wanted to show the resurrection of all humanity. So he also includes, you know, there are black men and women coming out of some of the graves as well. He didn't have to do that, but he wanted to show the resurrection of all humanity. So he also includes, you know, there are black men and women coming out of some of the graves as well. He didn't have to do that, but he wanted to show the literal representation of the actual physical resurrection. Well, the tape now has a descriptor beside this sublime painting. Saying that is it is a racist painting because whereas Stanley Spencer accurately depicts his

neighbors from his village in England, the black people in the painting are generic black people copied from National Geographic magazine of the time. Well Stanley Spencer didn't have any black neighbors, you know, so what, So what? There weren't any black people in his village in the 1930s in England. And how dare these people, but they've done it now on everything, but they're bigger to be more superior to a genius. They get to be more superior to a genius. And what concerns me is that they pull down a sublime thing into their banal, monotone, utterly monomaniacal view of the world, which is that race is the only thing that matters. Let me give you one example of example if I may,

because it's particularly painful to me. There's a wonderful painter. I'm a very, an artist, a very fond of, called Rex Whistler, who English artist from the early 20th century, everybody adored him, he was clearly an exceptionally lovable human being, and an exceptionally talented artist. And his first artwork was a mural for the tape that he did in his early 20s, and he worked all around the clock for months, months on end to complete this mural called in pursuit of rare meats. It's a fantasy, a beautiful fantasy landscape and an Arcadian landscape that goes around all four walls of the gallery. And a couple of years

ago, a group whose name was White Pube, only consisting of a couple of people, decided that this mural was racist. And they decided it because of two figures, one of whom was a Chinese figure they said was generic. And the other was because in one corner of the forest, in one of the bits of the rest, a tiny figure of about two inches high, is a young black boy clearly in distress, being pulled on a chain by a woman in a whitefully

frock. Now clearly Rex Whistler, he always included sort of ugly things like this as a drowning child, a white, drowning white child, that's weren't it? It's clearly atin arcade, you know? That's clearly what he's saying. He was always saying is all of his work always included this. You know, there'd be a tomb or he even painted himself in things as a lowly street sweeper you know. And he had a wonderful sense of humor and a wonderful and dark sense of the macabre nature of all things even in Arcadia. This was decided two years ago by the tape to be a racist painting. And they have closed the room until further notice. They looked into whether or not they could actually remove after 100 years actually remove this from

the walls of the gallery. And they seem that they can't because part of it's on plaster. So they've locked the room. And the reason I mind this among among many other reasons, is because they have posthumously declared Rex Whistler to be a racist. They said that he is reflected the racist attitudes of his time. Rex Whistler died on his first day in action in Normandy in 1944. How dare these people do this? How dare they do it to everybody in our past,

to all of our heroes, to all of our artistic heroes? How dare they say that the story of the West is purely a story of racism and xenophobia and colonialism and slavery. How dare they not even bother to weigh that up, as I say in one point in the book, just let's name a few cities, Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice, just for starters. How dare they not be able to even weigh up the achievements that have come from this allegedly unremittingly terrible past but worse than that and the point I really wanted to make John is What they are driving us to and I feel it very very strongly myself is how dare you do this to our ancestors? How dare you do this to all of our heroes and then the following thought is this. If you have no respect for my ancestors, I see no

reason why I should have respect for yours. If you have no respect for my past and my culture, I don't see why I should continue to say that I have respect for yours. If you have nothing good to say about me, why should I have anything good to say about you? And what I suggest is that in the West at the moment we are in a potentially short holding pattern, a holding pattern based on politeness or as Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark of Civilization, put it, that fundamental aspect of Western culture, courtesy. We are in a period of courtesy where we have been willing to say, okay, you can keep rampaging through the past of the West and assaulting my ancestors and assaulting my predecessors

and saying all of these negative things about my past and I am pretending for the time being or saying out of courtesy that you can do this and I will put up with it for a time and I will even say, and there are these other ways of knowing and so on. But there is a moment there where that absolutely stops. And as I say at the end of the book, as you know Jordan, I say, there is a very clear place where you can do that. The courtesy stops at a certain point and it stops when you

say, you know what? This politeness seems not to be working for us. So let's go for the impolite things. And the impolite things that can be said are legion. And nobody should want to go there, but that's where we're being led. So these great cities that you point to and the great achievements that went along with them, to me, they're the consequence of the manifestation of the best of the human spirit universally speaking that was made possible by societies that recognized the existence of such of the best.

And so that was a precondition. And to associate them in some sense with Western culture, with white culture, and then to associate them with nothing but the spirit of oppression, is to simultaneously deny that that spirit exists and can produce things of that that spirit exists and can produce things of universal transcendent value. And I can't see that that's going to be good for anyone except for people who can make moral hay of that in the short term to ratchet themselves up. To produce for themselves positions of authority that would not be available to them if they weren't able to weaponize guilt and claim the moral upper hand. Yes. So let me ask you another question. One of the accusations that's levied at me from fairly frequently is that my concern about such things, which I would say in many ways is similar to yours,

is evidence of my, I'm exaggerating, this is illusory. None of this is actually happening. Point to the evidence exactly, and I think, well, I see it in the spread of such ideas in the universities and then downstream into culture, but people aren't particularly awake to that fact. I mean, in my home province in Ontario, there's a bill that purports to be anti-racists that's going to transform the entire education system

by fiat into a system that is part of the war on the West, let's say, and people who conduct that war will be rewarded for that. How do you know that? Why do you believe that this is a serious concern? Well, because, as I say, they decided to come for absolutely everything. Because it's not just a Judeo-Christian tradition of the West, but the Enlightenment tradition of the West too. It's the religious tradition and the secular tradition. It's the American politicians and leaders and presidents who were on the side of the South in the Civil War

and the ones who were on the side of the North. It comes for people who owned slaves and those who were opposed to slavery. It comes for people who were in favor of empire and those who were against empire. It comes for those who lived in the air of empire and everyone who lived before it and everyone who lived after it, the people who lived in the air of slavery and all the people who live after it. It's so comprehensive. And you mentioned Canada just now. There's a highly pertinent example, which is that insane spate of church burning the wenton in your native country a year ago. Just to remind people, there was a claim

that graves of indigenous children were found, it beside what had been a school and it had been run by the Catholic Church. And that these were graves of children, therefore murdered by the Catholic Church. And in no time, prominent figures in Canada, I list some of them in the book, and you know some of them as well, Jordan, start to tweet out things like, burn it all down. And churches, including Indigenous-built churches in Canada, go up in flames across parts of the country. Well, in one of the situation would that have been regarded as being something you just shrug off? And by the way, to date, no evidence has been produced of these alleged mass graves.

It happened on the basis of an investigation using ultrasound that turns out not to have yet produced one grave. So we are so primed, we are so primed at this idea that for instance the Catholic Church, which I am not a defender to the death or anything, but the institutions like that are so evil that they deliberately killed children in countries like Canada, hid them in mass graves and now you can burn down the churches if you want. What other religious tradition in Canada would be allowed to be treated like that in the present or would it be just sort of brushed off that it happened? It happens all around us, and it's not just in the academies, as you know,

it's spilt out many years ago, it's everywhere, and it now has this completely physical manifestation on the streets. When the so-called 1619 riots kicked off, and just a reminder, it is this, the 1619 project which tries to completely reframe all of American history To say that the heroic story of America is not a story of heroism It's one of slavery and subjugation, which is why they started in 1619 when the riots after the death of George Floyd began the murder of George Floyd began in

2020 Somebody says they should be called the 1619 riots and the woman who fronted the 1619 project at the New York Times, so we're not talking about some kooky far out fringe publication, says the 1619 riots, I'd be honored. And these are the riots where, sure they start to pull down statues of General Lee, okay? Don't wouldn't go to the wall for that one at all,

but then it's Jefferson, and then it's Lincoln. And then it's absolutely every damn figure in American history who ends up getting assailed. Well, that's no longer a theoretical thing. That's not just student-reading derrider. That's not just papers on Foucault. This is a manifestation of some of their thought, often by people who never read them, but this is long ago the spilling out even of their own thought. simply into this thing where the ear decides everything in our own past must be scoured. What's to come after? They don't tell us any more than they tell us what the other ways of knowing might be. What are you trying to accomplish with the book, Douglas, do you think, apart from clarifying

your own thoughts? Quite a number of things. One is to alert people to the scale of what is being attempted against Western countries. Another is to point to the unfairness of it, the simple unfairness of it, the unjustness of it, the simple unfairness of it, the unjustness of it. Another is to arm people with the, I think, reasonable and correct rebuttals to it, to remind people of the context of history and the context of the rest of the world, so that we get ourselves and our own past in a proper light and get the rest of the world in a proper light. You have an interesting interlude in there. So there's four chapters, race, history, religion, and culture, and there's three interludes,

China, reparations, and maybe the most interesting, or the one that struck me me most particularly was an interlude on gratitude. And so you elevate that as a moral virtue. And, and it's the antithesis in some sense of, of a resentment for history. A gratitude, talk about that a bit. Why did that, why that value particularly? Well, it's one you've thought about a lot and spoken and written about a lot. It's one that a number of my friends have. It's been one of the underlying things in my life and whenever I'm asked to explain why I come to some of the conclusions I come to on things, I come back to this term. I'll let Frances Crouton, I think actually the last thing he wrote,

I quote in the book, was a diary for the spectator where he reflected on his last year of his life. And Roger said to approach death is to approach what life really means and what it means is gratitude. Now that was the last thing he wrote. I thought about it a lot. I quote Dostoevsky as you know from the brothers Karamazov where the devil is incapable of gratitude which I I would use deeply telling, and brilliant, only Dostoevsky would dismiss it. It's so interesting that that, right, exact. Well, that was also pended about the same time that Nietzsche was pointing to resentment as the driving force behind movements, for example,

that later became revolutionary Marxism. Yes. And outlining the moral hazard associated with that. Exactly. And in Nietzsche and some other writers who come after him on resentment, I spent a lot of time reading in recent years. I think that resentment is along with that desire for revenge in the name of justice, one of the absolutely underlying drivers of our time. Many of the great philosophers realize this. Resentment is a terrifically strong driver. And, again, as Nietzsche and others said, it's a terrific way to avoid Mae'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r rydym yn ymwch i'r prysyn, ac mae'r prysyn yn ymwch i'r prysyn yn ymwch i'r prysyn, ac mae'r prysyn yn ymwch i'r prysyn. Ymwch i'r prysyn yn ymwch i'r prysyn yn ymwch i'r prysyn yn ymwch i'r prysyn yn ymwch i'r prysyn yn ymwch i'r prysyn yn ymwch i'r prysyn. in resentment can. Why we always look for excuses. We always put it on other people. It's so hard

to take responsibility ourselves for what has not gone wrong in our own life so much harder compared to putting it on any other group of people or another individual. A person we believe has done us wrong or a group we believe have done us wrong. It's so easy to manipulate our species against other groups of people. My God, what's the history of the Jews, but the history of people pouring their resentments onto this tiny group of people for daring to continue to exist and thrive across societies. The history of anti-Semitism is that, as it is in our own days, the great explanation for where some people can pour their resentment. But the main thing that you have to count, and I've long said this to conservatives and my own country, and elsewhere, is that you have to address

things at an equally deep level. And when people say, I can't remember if we've talked about this before, but when people say, for instance, how will the right respond to the left on this issue? You very often see things like, you know, well, we'll need to do more house building on brownfield sites or something like this. And I say, you're mad. I mean, you're countering resentment that you can't do that mean, you're countering resentment. You can't do that with a bit of bureaucraties. Now, how can you counter resentment? It is only, I believe, by gratitude.

It is only by completely inverting that sentiment. And I think that in our own lives, as well as in societies, this is eminently possible. You and I both know this, you can stand in front of a painting and you could endlessly work out the cost that that painting had what the cost of it had been. What the cost of it had been, for the cost of it had been for instance, were the people who worked in the workshop of this master adequately paid? Were there were paints that were sourced from specific minerals? Were those minerals justly acquired and were people along every stage of

the process justly rewarded for providing the material. You could break that down endlessly or you could stand back and marvel at the Madonna of the Rocks. You could stand in front of Michelangelo's Pieter and you could think about what the workmen who got the piece of marble out of the quarry went through. And whether they were adequately paid and whether they had all of the life choices necessary for them to be able to decide whether they wanted to be quarriers in marble. Or you can stand back and marvel at Michelangelo's pieta.

You can do this in every city in Europe. You can look at Venice and say, this was a trading city where not everyone was always adequately rewarded for their labor. Or you can marvel at Venice. You can do this on absolutely every, everything can be deconstructed to this utmost point at which you cannot see the value in anything,

because you claim to be looking for the, for the, for the, for the, basically for the checks and the bills, historically speaking and in the present day. And it is such a, a reductive, mean-minded, obsessive way that our era actually is looking at things. It actually is tearing everything apart in this way.

It actually is looking for racism everywhere. It is looking for colonialism and slavery and blame and guilt. And I just say, how about turning that around and saying, just have some damn gratitude for what you've found yourself living among. And as I say, all I can suggest is that our age in the West has gone through a vast context collapse. And I am very struck by the fact that many, many people, if not a majority, who come to the West from outside of the West, do not share this ravenous hatred. I have a friend who's a school teacher in a school in London who has said before that one of the best ways to make sure that a pupil who is misbehaving behaving as it were, playing up in a very, very dominantly immigrant background school.

One of the best ways to make sure that they change their life attitude is if they are taken back to the country of origin at some point in the school holiday by their parents, because they might not particularly like, they may be told in their school in New York or in London or Ontario, that they are living in a patriarchal racist society. But wow, when they go back and see their first and second cousins in Bangladesh, they come back with a different view. My view in general is that we in the west have undergone

a massive context collapse about the nature of our own past, our own societies. I think we have to turn it around. I don't think it's sustainable to continue to war on ourselves and on every part of our own history, not least also because we deserve the right to have heroes and heroic narratives and things of which we're proud. We absolutely have that right as every other society in the world does. So I'm trying to do a more reasonable audit on an era which I think has been deeply unreasonable to itself. As I say, this is a Western crime that is being committed. It is completely possible to mend it.

And that's why there's very, very depressing subject matter in some ways. I try, as you know, by the end of the book to show people, actually this is positive. this is a way out. And these are the ways out, these are the ways in which you can try to turn the ear of resentment into a personal and wide appreciation of gratitude, and of getting things into a proper order, and of getting things into a proper sense of themselves, because my God, we need it. and of getting things into a proper sense of themselves, because my God, we need it. I've been trying to conceptualize gratitude as a form of courage. No, well, because there's evidence for tragedy and atrocity, obviously, and everywhere, and that can make you despair. That gratitude is also part of separating the wheat from the chaff, right?

Is that you want to appreciate the things that are of high value. And so I wanted to ask, maybe close with one more question. It's a complicated question. Maybe I'll put it in two parts. You know, in the biblical narrative, the first two human beings that emerge in any real sense or can enable, they're the first who are born rather than directly created. And it's a rather depressing beginning point

because they're fractured side of brothers. And cane is bitter and resentful. And able makes the sacrifices that are acceptable to God and flourishes. And it's because of that flourishing that cane decides to destroy him. And the depth psychology that I've read and the literary criticism, tradition that emerged from that suggests in some sense that those are the earliest manifestations of two patterns of deeply rooted patterns of behavior. One, you might regard as the spirit of Abel and the other, the spirit of Cain. And our

era is characterized by this tremendous increase in the speed of communication. And it seems to me that that's produced an exaggeration of this battle. And it seems also to me, in some sense, that it is a theological battle. It's the anti-Logo's aspect of it is a theological battle and that it has to be addressed in some sense at that level. And so I guess what I'm asking you is, well, first of all, what you think of those ideas. And second, if this is how this may have changed your views on what would you say, the necessary truth of the religious suppositions that underlie that notion of the sovereignty of the individual, I guess that's. Yes, I mean, I laid out in the strange death of Europe what I think was being not just my own, but certainly

modern Europe's. Current malaise in regards to the Christian tradition and the difficulty of it. I think as you've also said in the past, I have often tried to live with what Cardinal Ratsinger, when he was still Cardinal Ratsinger, said as the invitation to live as though God exists, which I thought was deeply brilliant. Invitational and a very generous invitation, actually, for me, soon to be polled. And I think, as I've expressed a number of times recently, that in any case, you need a tradition to come from in order to know what the others are, and that the modern idea that is where you can splash around among all of the faith traditions of the world as a child,

and come out more roundly formed, seems to me, to be doing everything exactly in reverse and that really the way in which a child to be rid is in one tradition so that they can then go out having been versed in one tradition and know the others, discover the others as they go along. But the complexity of that is something that only an adult can go through. You can only understand the things that the traditions have in common if you know the one that you've come from. And you can only actually admire them, other traditions on their own terms really, if you know and have some reverence for the one that you've come from. Otherwise, it's all just a sort of mishmash of yoga-like banalities. So I certainly know how much I owe personally to this tradition, and I know my deeply complex, conflicted and inadequate answers to it. inadequate answers to it. It's, you know, I often have to fall back on quotes, but I was, I'm not Jewish, I'm Christian by upbringing, but I remember somebody I mentioned earlier,

Lit Krad friend Rabbi Saks, he once said to me, he said that Isaiah Berlin friend was once asked friend Rabbi Saks, he once said to me, he said that Isaiah Berlin, friend, was once asked what it meant to be a Jew, and he said to be a Jewist, to have a sense of history. And Jonathan Saks said, Isaiah was almost right, and he said, and I said, what do you mean he said, I corrected him, he said to be Jewish, is to have a sense of memory. It's a pretty good clarification. I think one has a role in society to have a sense of memory. And in that case, if you're from a society like I am, like you are, that memory is absolutely God haunted. And Christ haunted, biblically, biblically haunted. And there's no way around that. I don't resist it. I don't, I said, and I also, I long ago came to the same conclusion that Roger Spruchen did, and he encouraged

me too, which was at least don't war on it, you know. And there's many other things that are worth boring on, but unless and until the Christian religion was to return to the stage of that it was at in parts of Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, there's no need to. I don't see the Piscopalian church in America, for instance, as a particular requiring my critique. So I do have a complex attitude towards it, but I try to remain in dialogue with the religion as the way I would put it and not close the door. I think that's one of the other things that I told you when we met possibly that the the word Israel means those who wrestle with God. Yes. Yes.

And that's that's very interesting as far as I'm concerned. Yes. That's the nature of belief in some sense is to wrestle with the notion of what constitutes the highest virtues. Mm-hmm. Well, the former Bishop of Edinburgh was a sort of secularist himself by the end of his career, but a deeply distinguished and humanist figure called Richard Holloway, who once rather beautifully said that everyone assumes that the opposite of faith is doubt, but the opposite of doubt is faith, but it isn't. It's certainty. Certainty is the problem in that mix. perhaps having conflictive views is inevitable if not necessary. As for Cane Nable, isn't one of the many things in that story the fact that as so

often in the early books of the Bible, the Torah, that you're being reminded that you're both people, I mean that everyone has both of these things in their hearts and that just as we... The past, both these paths... We're all... Both these paths are always open to all of us. Isn't that what we're one of the things that we're always tempted by the desire to get away with insufficient sacrifices, to cut corners and to not do things as well and as much cost as we might. We're all tempted by what would you say?

The spirit of revenge that we might allow to inhabit us, if we became sufficiently bitter, we're all tempted to tear down our ideals because they also simultaneously judge us. We're all tempted to shake our fist at God. But if that spirit gets the upper hand, well, the consequence for Cain is that his sin is so much that he cannot bear it. And it bleak, I believe that if we in the West tear down everything of value, because we've given too much sway to the spirit of resentment and revenge, the consequences for us all will be something so cataclysmic that we won't be able to bear it. I couldn't agree more and we come back to this thing that we don't know what it would be.

If the men of resentment had their way in what they're doing and pulled everything down as they are trying, pulled down all of our stories, all of our heroes, all of our history, all of our culture, read our culture as a story, not of admiration for the world and learning from the world, i'n gweithio'r gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r

gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn fforddol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn ffordd o'r gydol yn fford for the Black Panthers. And of course, Thomas Wolf, Thomas Wolf, fantastically destroyers this obscene event where the liberal elite of New York are having cannabes listening to these revolutionaries describing how they want to destroy and pull down the society they're in. And there's a wonderful moment in it where I think it's Otto Preminger,

one of Bernstein's friends sitting in his chair and he says to one of the panthers, but what are you going to do once you have pulled down all of the existing structures? But what are you going to do? And he keeps pushing this panther on it, on this, until this black panther says, you can't put a blueprint on the future man.

And Leonard Bernstein leans forward in his chair and says, you mean you're just gonna wing it? And that's really what we're dealing with. We're dealing with people who don't know what they're going to do. They're gonna pull everything down and then wing it. Well, if we undermine that which unites us, right? And if we're united around something like recognition of the value of the individual, the divine sovereignty of the individual, let's say,

if we pull that down and destroy it, then it's the group, it's the war of every conceivable group against every other conceivable group. That's the only alternative that I can see because there's an infinite number of arbitrarily oppressed groups. Absolutely. And I would just add a coded to that, which is, you know, I think people should be very aware, careful of what they wish for in this. You know, as you know, at the end of the war on the West, I say, all of the unpalatable answers,

the one coming the way of the people who want to make this racial is worse than any. It would consist of saying, this thing that you believe is so appalling, right, we've been courteous enough, end of courtesy. Why don't we go to the Aboriginal peoples or the First Nations peoples for any vaccines? Why don't we find other ways of knowing for cancer cures? Why are all of these things, products of the thing that you say you hate,

and the people you keep, that for politeness is sake, everyone says, can also contribute, and do in certain ways, but are not better than this, that the other ways of knowing are actually worse. And then, if you say, oh, and by the way, that's not universal after all, because you've told us it isn't, it's just hours. Wow, is the 21st century hell. Well, as far as I can tell, from delving into it, that the end goal of the spirit of Cain is hell. Yes. that the end goal of the spirit of Cain is hell. Yes, right.

And we've been warned about that for a very long time. And still have background. Yes, well, the 20th century might not have been enough. I hope it was. That's a horrible, horrible thought, but I agree. I agree. So to this book is coming out April, you said 20,

26, so it describes the battle of ideas that currently is tearing our culture apart. And I would say in some real sense, destabilizing the entire world. And so people can read it and they can draw their own conclusions and see their own way forward. But it's an alarm bell and it should be ringing loud. Anything else, Mr. Murray? loud. Anything else, Mr. Murray? No, just sort of, I just, I would all just add since you did say at the beginning that it was very depressing, it's also quite

amusing if I say so myself. And I have to put in, I have to put in that plug. I agree that what I describe is highly depressing, but it is, as I say, I try to show a way out and I do actually try to give readers some fun along the way and you can't not because some of what I'm attacking is so reasonable that once again, when I was doing the audiobook, as I was for the man's or crowds, there were points I had to say to the sound engineer,

I'm sorry, I've just, the reason I'm laughing so much, I promise is not, it's not my own jokes, it's that the things I'm reading when you read them out loud are so even more ridiculous than they are on the page. But yeah, it may be gloomy in places, but there is funnel on the way. Good to talk to you again. Always great to see you Jordan. Thank you. you