TRIGGERnometry - DEBATE: Liberalism Vs Conservatism

Episode Date: November 11, 2023

This is very first in our new Debate series. This time Konstantin is joined by two of our favourite former guests, Dr James Orr and Professor Stephen Hicks, who mount their defences for Conservatism and Liberalism respectively. James Orr is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University. He holds a PhD and MPhil in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Classics from Balliol College, Oxford. He is Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and on the Advisory Board for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Stephen R. C. Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society. He is the author of six books, the latest of which is 'Liberalism Pro and Con' (available here: https://www.amazon.com//dp/1925826821/) Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The liberal aim to try and achieve civic peace is a good aim. I would challenge you, particularly given the last few weekends we've seen since October 7th, to say that we have civic peace. But my response to that from within the liberal tent is to say that liberalism needs to be muscular. So what we then have to say is the healthy form of conservatism, the healthy form of liberalism, we face a common enemy. Sometimes in order to preserve and conserve, change is necessary. And that's the big challenge that conservatism faces, just as the liberal faces the challenge,

when do you stop liberating and start becoming a conservative? Hey, guys, trigonometry needs your help. We took a big risk creating the show. And for us to keep doing the incredible work that you all love, we need your support. That's the only way we're going to stay independent and create content that you won't be able to find anywhere else. There is no other podcast where you'll hear interviews with Nigel Farage. week and the next week you've got Aaron Bastani, the founder of Left Wing Show Navarra Media, on the same platform. You know the mainstream media aren't honest. You know they've been caught

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us. Support us and help change the way we have conversations and make the world saner. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the first of what will be many debates here on Trigonometry. I'll be hosting some. Francis will be hosting others. I cannot tell you how delighted I am to be joined by two of our favorite ever guests on the show, Dr. James Orr and Professor Stephen Hicks. Welcome both. Thanks. We're going to have a debate about conservatism versus liberalism.

You've both written a couple of pieces for my substack and there'll be more coming. I want, Stephen, you had to go second in the written debate, so I'll go to you first. One of the, I thought, more persuasive criticism of liberalism, and we heard a lot of it at Ark, where we all were a few days ago, was that limits are liberating and the pursuit of unending freedom is actually destructive to society. What do you say to those people? Well, I think you have to start with a moral conception of what society is. We start with individuals who are both the agents. Individuals have agency.

You don't see them as pawns pushed around by forces beyond their control. So there is a conception of human nature at work, and that's a philosophical starting point. Not only of agents, but of moral worth, that whatever we're doing in society, that we're forming various kinds of social institutions, businesses, religions, families, governments, and so forth, It is with respect to the value of the individuals involved. So we come together to do business as individuals. We form families. It's two individuals who come together making a voluntary choice. And they then bring into the world another individual that needs to develop

as capacities for agency and moral self-responsibility. So it's not that freedom and individualism is corrosive of the social. It's rather that the social exists to preserve the individuals and enable individuals better by division of laborer being coordinated, achieve the values of the individual. When those social institutions are no longer serving that function, they should properly be dissolved. And new ones created. And this is partly why we're going to have an evolving and in some case revolving society. So it is making clear what your ultimate moral standard is. Some social institutions should be dissolved,

but that requires that you've made clear what your moral standard is, and you should have no problem with some social institutions going by the by, and you should be actively preserving other social institutions because they've proved their worth at protecting the rights and values of the individuals involved. But I suppose what people mean is when we look at the real world out there right now, is the dissolution of certain institutions has led to increasing atomization of people, people feeling disconnected from each other, from society. And that's why I think a lot of people are now starting to talk about.

But then I would say it's not freedom that is causing the atomism, right, that people are worrying about. So then we have to get to say, what do we mean by an atomized individual or an isolated individual or an individual who has come to be in an adversarial relationship to what we think of as a healthy social institution. And I think when you drill down and start looking at cases, it's not going to be too much freedom.

That's the problem. What is the problem? Well, it depends on when you drill down which kind of atomism you are worried about. So if you wanted to say, for example, you have individuals on social media who are feeling isolated from the world. and it's teenagers who are considering suicide.

Now, you might then say, well, we shouldn't have given these powerful liberating devices to them in the first place because they don't know how to do it. But I think what's actually happening in that particular subcase is you've got young people who are trying to develop a self and they are going into, in most cases,

what are echo chambers. And instead of developing a self, what they are doing is just echoing and reflecting what's going on there. have a certain amount of mob action with respect to those individuals. The mob action is not anything that is respectful of the individual. So you have a social environment, which is not conducive to healthy development of individuals. Instead, you've got a kind of, I would say, collective mob psychology that's destructive that's going on there. So you do end up with

isolated individuals, but it's not too much freedom. It's mob psychology. Very interesting. And James, I want to put some of the Stevens critiques of conservators into you in the second, but did you pick up anything there you wanted to come back on? Yeah, thanks. Well, and thanks for putting this together. It's a great honor to be part of the first trigonometry debate, and it's been great to exchange views in writing with Stephen. Thanks for orchestrating it. Vicenstein says at one point that a picture held us captive, and I think a picture holds the liberal mind captive. I think it's a myth. It's a very attractive. but it's a false myth. And you might call that myth something like a kind of secular creationism. A secular creationist believes that freedom and equality kind of pop into being from nothing around about 1776 Sunday afternoon in April about tea time. I think this is false. I do not think that the natural resting state of human beings is to be free, to exist without any

unchosen obligations to be simply primarily an individual and to take it as self-evident that every individual has an equal moral worth, that there is some readily available moral standard that all individuals left of their own devices will exercising their rationality, discern, track and live out. I think there's a reason that liberalism emerges in the 18th century. It's not because it starts ex nihilo from nothing, but because it is the fruit of long centuries of accumulated wisdom and tradition, beginning with the Hellenic tradition, fusing with the Hebraic tradition, and resulting in the end, yes, through fits and starts, it's a, it's a process of evolution. There's some revolution too, and when there is revolution, that's when things get ugly. So there's a big difference

to, I think, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. So that was just to sort of, you know, set the scene for my position. I don't think it's true that we are born into the world as individuals freely just deciding what obligations to undertake. We're literally born attached to a cord to our mum. That, that I think, is the more plausible account of how we start as human beings. Aristotle makes this point in the opening of the politics, before we are creatures of the polis, before we are political animals, politicon zon, we are paired animals, that is to say, we pair ourselves, male and female, we then naturally express ourselves through new human beings, new life. That itself is an unstable setup. We need to form ourselves into a village.

Villages are vulnerable, as we learnt, Kibbutz is a vulnerable. We need to expand and we need to form together. And now, for Aristotle, the best unit for a moral community, a stable, social, moral order was the polis. That may vary from era to era. It may be in city state, it may be a nation state. It may be a relatively stable. stable empire. So that, I think, is a much more empirically aligned and accurate account of what it is to be human. Now, of course, it's not to say that freedom doesn't matter, and it's not to say that we don't freely take on obligations further down the line. We choose our spouses. We may not choose our parents or our siblings. We may not easily choose our nation. You've chosen Britain, but not

and those people rest with the moral community in which they find themselves. We might say, well, we freely enter into a marriage. Now, historically, that's been seen as a covenant, a lifelong promise. Liberalism changes that, turns it into a contract. Why? It has to be a contract. James, just to explain the difference of people. What is the difference between a covenant contract? Well, there's a lot of literature on this, but let's say roughly that a covenant is a unilateral promise and commitment. That is not, that, that explains. It expects reciprocity but doesn't require it. A contract is a, and it has some sort of public features.

It's something that you make before others that is known about, is publicly known. It's not a kind of private arrangement. I think that's an important element too. It's not a contract. The contract is the sort of dominant metaphor for the whole, for the liberal universe. Social contract could be a vertical contract with a state as Hobbes stresses in Leviathan, or, I think more plausibly, it's a Lockean contract with, that we, you know, we enter into. So the language of consent, individual rights. I'm free to enter the contract,

and I'm free to breach it. If I do breach it, then there are certain maybe obligations I might have to make up for and so on and so forth. Now, again, I think that abstracts and sort of legalises and removes human arrangements away from our natural state. Very quickly, just the final point, this question of moral worth, that the sort of the liberal, mind assumes that moral worth and objective moral standards are not only available but universally available. The liberal project is a universal project. Conservative projects tend not to be. Though when we come to talk about conservatism, I'll say a little bit more about that, because I think there's some criticism that can be made to the conservative position on that front.

So the liberal paradigm is a universalizing paradigm. That is to say human rights is universally applicable. That is the sort of standard yarnstick. That's the standard manifesto for liberal morality. And yet, when we press the liberal on what is this moral standard? And the liberal says, well, we all agree on this. We all have to agree on this. You realize that it's impossible without surrendering freedom of thought, without surrendering the freedom to choose what will always be rival and conflicting concepts of the conceptions of the good. John Rawls, by far in a way, influential liberal, political liberal of the last 50 years, devises this thought experiment. Liberals are always devising thought experiments,

precisely because they want to abstract away from particular contingent concrete circumstances to imagine this kind of universal, timeless utopia that's applicable to all times and to all places. And in this thought experiment, he says, well, in order to pull this off, in order to imagine a maximally just society, we have to bracket, quote, our comprehensive metaphysical commitment. Now what lies within that phrase? Everything, not just the God stuff. What we are as human beings, conceptions of human nature,

what makes us free, what are worth consists in. These are inevitably contentious philosophical questions that are never going to command universal agreement. The only reason there's an illusion of agreement that emerges at the 18th century is precisely because there's been a settled intellectual, social and cultural pattern from Plato and Aristotle all the way through late antiquity,

the high Middle Ages, and emerging into fruition. Yes, with big political breaks like the Reformation in the 16th century and the French Revolution in the 18th century, but those are kind of optical illusions. Those revolutions lead us to believe, and especially the way history is taught in the textbooks, you've got the Enlightenment. Well, what comes before the Enlightenment?

Darkness. What comes before Renaissance? Death. And so there's this sort of... As I said, there's a mythology to liberalism that thinks that it all starts with a break, and I say it's not. It's the fruits of the very order

that conservatives seek to preserve. I want to come back to conservatism a second, but still in the flurry of punches there, so come back on this. Particularly the idea that liberalism is interfering in things like marriage and changing the way that we do things. So it's beautifully said, like three huge topics, right,

put out there, and I'm going to take just the first one. I started it. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so let's take this first one about the liberal mythos, right? That somehow in the Enlightenment, there's this radical break with the past and suddenly liberalism. We're all free, autonomous self-right. That is a conservative myth about liberalism. There are no liberals. Now, John Rawls is a disaster. We'll come back to him in a moment. He's your guy. He is not. He is the opposite. of my guy. That's the third topic that you are putting out there.

Every single important liberal in the tradition, right, liberalism does have its tradition, we'll say, look, by the time we get to the Enlightenment, you are exactly right. The founding fathers of the United States are saying, no, we have to go back to Greece, we have to go back to Rome. There are certain long political traditions.

At the same time, they are very well aware if we are interested in religious freedom, for example, the First Amendment, I know we're Britain, but I'm going to use this American example, in the Bill of Rights, in the First Amendment, the very first thing is freedom of religion. And it's very clear that this comes out of already two centuries of battles over religious freedom, religious toleration, and so forth. The more broad-ranging intellectual freedoms in the sciences, for example, it's already two to three centuries of debates over whether we should be intellectually free in the sciences or not. To extend to artistic freedom, are we going to censor the theaters, or are we going to allow literary people do whatever? Already going back to the Renaissance, we have now more than two centuries, we have three to four centuries of debates and hard-fought battles. So what we have then is a multi-front battle with respect to the arts, with respect to the sciences, with respect to religion, with respect to all of the civil freedoms. And so, yes, absolutely, the Enlightenment is a capstone.

And then there is a kind of aha moment that many intellectuals are reaching in the 1700s. After we fought all of these particular battles, now we are in a position to generalize and say, it's not just artistic freedom or religious freedom or scientific freedom or freedom to go into whatever kind of business you want. Yes, we are going to generalize to these universal principles. So the myth is, and this is,

This is often a conservative reading that somehow we're springing de novo into existence. I don't think that's a proper reading of liberal. The liberals are proud of their history. Now, to turn the tables a little bit, if we then say the liberals want to say in the social order, there are going to be lots of values that are contested on an honor, and there's going to be a great deal of evolution that goes on. Where the liberals are insisting that liberty comes first is in one area and one area only. That is in the political area.

When we are talking about families, when we're talking about other institutions, people might have different orders of what their values are. And we might have contending values in those social... But when we are talking about politics, specifically, when we are talking about government, we have to be very, very clear, because government is in every single society, an instrument of compulsion.

It makes its rules. All other social institutions, of course, have rules, but those are rules that are flexible. You can opt in and out of business, opt in and out of a church, opt in and out of playing this or that sport. So they all have their rules, but those are particular rules

for those institutions and people voluntarily sign onto them. When we're talking about governments, we are talking about a different kind of animal. And it's an 800-pound gorilla animal that says our rules are going to apply to everybody in the society. And our rules, if you break one of these rules,

the police are going to come to you. We will put you in jail if we find that you are wrong. And we have these rules with respect to foreign people protecting our people. You come here, we will use our military. So when we are talking about the moral order, the liberals are insistent, the purpose of government, all of the universal rules and the willingness to use force against anybody, it has to be only with reference to the protection of individual liberty. That's where the insistence comes in.

That's where the enforcement comes in. Now, against that, what I read from Professor Orr and other conservatives, now conservatism, of course, is a big tent, so I'm going to try to tailor it as much as possible to yours, is to say, well, we can't do that because we have to have a prior kind of order within which individuals come into existence, and that order has hierarchical elements,

and it has traditions. And so we have order, tradition, hierarchy and those are going to be values that trump liberty in many cases, including in political cases. And that's where the liberal gets worried. Because then we want to say, well, there are good orders and there are bad orders. There are good hierarchies and there are bad hierarchies. How are we going to sort those out? You do need a principle before you, a moral principle, to sort out all of those values. You can't just start with all of those. And if we then go back to the history, and this is why I think the myth, the conservative myth about the liberal history is important.

We say over the course of the centuries, when all of these hard-fought battles are being won, they are being won by the liberals. They are not being won by the conservatives. In every single generation, we go to the late 1400s and we say, we need, you know, this is a generation of Michelangelo, Leonardo a little earlier, and so on. The artists are saying, we need artistic freedom. And it is precisely conservatives of that era that are saying, no, order and tradition that is stifling the liberal developments there. In the next century, when we're talking about religious freedom, it's the liberals of that generation saying, no, individuals need to take charge of their own conscience, get the state out of it, and so forth. And it is precisely the people of order,

tradition and hierarchy, who are stifling that development of individual liberty. In the case of science, when the scientists like Galileo are saying, you know, stop torturing scientists, start using intimidation. We need to be free thinking and liberal in this intellectual zone is precisely the conservatives of that era, saying, no, order and tradition and hierarchy and so forth. So I think the right way to read this history is that what has happened is that liberals are in all of these areas the ones who are fighting the battle, making the progress. It's the conservatives who are reactionary in varying degrees. Some of them are just saying no and using force, compulsion, to stop the advance of those ones.

But then the more reasonable conservatives, typically, once the battle has been won by the liberals, they accommodate. And they say, okay, now we will fold this into the tradition, but it is now a liberal conservative, where the liberals one that did all the work, the conservatives accommodate that after, and then you get to what I think of as more reasonable conservatives in the later modern world. James, yes, of course. I'm conscious that we're sort of, we're firing a lot of rounds at each other.

We should really take them one by one. That's just the first issue, you put on the table. Let me just, let's try and I'll try and impose. We only have like an hour and a half total. Maybe we'll, maybe all that is do a sequel. So let me just, let me take it, respond to your response. So there's the first question of the narrating of the history and the conservative myth that liberalism pops into being out of nothing

the kind of the secular creationism line that I started off with. There's also this question about government and the state that is only in the political arena that the liberalism values freedom and then questions about artistic freedom and science. Let's just go with those four. I know there are lots of other points that you made. I'm sorry if I don't address them. look the historic the sort of periodization question that it is the enlightenment

that is how it's tall that I think you know I'm I think there's a lot to your reading or your re-nuration but I think it is a re-narration I think it is a sort of heterodox take I wish there were more liberals who were running this I think it I think when conservatives say that there is this enlightenment moment that is talked about that's the metaphor that's used that we talk about the dark ages the middle ages why are the middle between what? Between the high noon of classical antiquity and the rebirth of humanism leading to enlightenment. I just think that is the way things are told. Just look at the labels. They don't lie. I mean, I think they do lie. I think, and I'm glad

that you agree with me that they lie. But that I think is the standard school university textbook story and I don't think it's, I think it is a myth, but I don't think it's a myth that conservatives think that it's a myth, if you see what I mean. We can keep talking about that. But I think it takes us on to a point that will be helpful for our discussion, which is that we're probably, the way that this is set up, we're probably being a little bit too binary. We've been, Constantine, you know, would be very upset with us. We've got to seek to be a little bit non-binary. There's a sort of pendulum swing. So the idea is that, you know, the liberal is, doesn't care at all about the sort of order that might constrain us and provide

the enabling conditions of freedom for virtue as opposed to raw anarchic freedom. And conversely, the Conservatives can ignore the fact that freedom actually has been, you know, part of our history, as in Western civilised, same region, way, way, way back to Democratic Athens, Parisi, I think of the importance of freedom of speech within the Athenian Assembly, or Isonomi, I think, of equality before the law. These are clearly liberal ideas. I completely accept that. What I say is that there's a kind of crystallization of a kind of constellated themes around freedom, the two engine rooms of liberalism from the early modern period onward,

freedom and equality. That's the French Revolution. That's the American Revolution. That's what gets going in the late 18th century. Okay, so that's the first point. This second point about how liberalism is only worried about freedom in the political space. Now, I think if that's true, it actually confirms my worries that the liberal has this another myth, that there is a kind of secular, neutral public square in which we're all free because we've bracketed any contentious commitments that might lead to more nasty religious wars or civil wars or whatever that might be. Now, I think that's true and it's praiseworthy. The liberal aim to try and achieve civic peace is a good aim. We all want civic peace. I deny if we look around the cities of the West right

now, if we look at the fruits of the liberal project as they currently exist, I would challenge you, particularly given the last few weekends we've seen since October the 7th, to say that we have civic peace. James, I know you have so much more to say, but I feel like on that particular issue, that is a very good one to hone in on. Do you mind if we do? Let's do. What do you say to that? Because I think a lot of people will feel like, you know, the paradox of tolerance, the fact that we have allowed people into this country who don't share our values because we are so welcoming intolerant and liberal has created a society where because of the freedom we provide to people it is the most intolerant people who are now in the public square shouting things

what say you to that well i think then we need to bring in a at least one more player onto the social intellectual scene aside from liberalism and conservatism and that third or fourth player is going to be the problem case. So we're talking about a hopefully sophisticated version of liberalism, a sophisticated version of conservatism, but there are lots of unsophisticated philosophies, ideologies, and worldviews out there. How conservatism will handle them, how liberalism will handle them. That, of course, is a big project. But I think it would be faulty to say that somehow conservatism is responsible for that. And I'm not, I'm not going to make that argument, but I think it also doesn't work the other way to say that liberal...

Well, I am going to make that argument. No, no, no, but I understand. Right, I understand. So, where, there is then another... And there is, of course, a grain of truth to this, that, you know, liberalism, again, is a big tent. Just like there's, you know, very hidebound versions of conservatism, and then there are more flexible, evolving versions of conservatism as well. There are versions of liberalism that start to sound very namby-pamby. And these are going to be the more free-floating, rationalistic versions of liberalism that you are worried about. And I also worry about. And, you know, they are so concerned with saying, we need to respect other people's freedoms that I can never even

criticize other people. And so from that intellectual context, then you're going to get into a paradox of tolerance. But my response to that from within the liberal tent is to say that liberalism needs to be muscular, if I can use that metaphor. Once you have said, individuals matter. Individuals have rights, and we do have to come back to this universalism versus particulars in the localism issue for sure. And even if you want to elevate that and to say we are certain about that and that these rights are absolute, then you empower government to protect those rights, then that government

needs to be muscular in the protection of the... rights. So just as we say for example, any sort of murdering is wrong. It violates the right to life. Kidnapping and enslaving are wrong. Theft is wrong. So life, liberty, and property. The government should be empowered to whatever degree necessary to use force effectively in the service of those three rights. So the point of the so-called parabolic of tolerance is to say pretty much anything that is voluntary and peaceful is going to be tolerated. And so it is going to be a largely contentious, messy society and there's going to be a lot of value conflicts and so on. And we're going to try to resolve those as much as we possibly can

through voluntary mechanisms. But when we are clearly dealing with someone who is not interested in doing that, they are inserting force into the equation. Then the police come down hard on But that's not what's happening. So that's the second part of it. Why is that not happening? And it's not because liberalism is not saying we shouldn't protect people's liberty rights or we should allow assassination and killing and kidnapping and so forth. It's the third contenders who are both anti-liberal in their core, in their origin,

and they're significantly now part of the society. And we have let a lot of them in. and a significant number of the more intellectually sophisticated have captured certain institutions. So what we then have to say is the healthy form of conservatism, the healthy form of liberalism, we face a common enemy, which is the illiberal versions of various other things.

Let me just follow. You're most welcome to you. Let me just get into a slightly more nuanced edge case because let's say that you are for muscular liberalism and you will crack down on anybody who commit acts of violence. I think that's a minimum standard for a healthy society.

Absolutely. What about the fact that, for example, we all have freedom of speech in the liberal conception, and yet I don't think the conservative would support, and I not necessarily being conservative, would support the idea that someone should be able to walk into the public square

and publicly chant gas the Jews, for example, as people did in Australia, or shout pro Hamas slogans. But the liberal conception taken to, its logical conclusion is, well, they're not hurting anybody physically. They have freedom of speech. Why should they not be allowed to do that? My first answer would be what should sound like a good conservative answer, which is to say, on all of these edge cases, right, we have now many centuries of common law discussions about precisely those. And in the North American

tradition, right, we have a shorter, right, tradition of exactly those sorts of things. And so to get as nuanced as possible, then you have to go into all of those common law cases and say, what has law worked out when they are attending to all of the variables there? So, no, and then I would say, who is responsible for that public space? And if it's a public space, then the way we have worked things out right now is the government is responsible for it. And they are responsible for the administration of that public space, including if it's like a hides corner kind of place, in a place where, at a minimum,

still, people's lives, liberty and property is going to be respected. Any speech that goes in the direction of incitement, and where the line is drawn between speech that should be tolerated and when it becomes incitement, that has to be very nuanced. But once that line is crossed, then I would say, yeah, muscular liberalism. You shut that speaker down. All right. Well, I can see you're just a few things to say. I mean, this idea that conservatism and liberalism have got these sort of mutant siblings and that we're both in a position where we need to deal with the problem that this third challenger presents us with. I think that what we're seeing, the chaos, the tyranny, the atomisation, go back to your early point, Constantine, we can talk

about this later. I think the atomisation and the tyranny are structurally complicit features of liberalism. I'll explain why later on if we've got a moment. But if you start with a view of human nature of human beings as basically free, rational, autonomous, self-legislating agents who freely enter into obligations and ties, you just do think of human beings as basically fungible. It's hard to think of, therefore, it's impossible to come up with a moral objection to large numbers of people coming into your country, entering your moral community, not on terms that you set for them

beyond barely minimal ones of don't celebrate terror and don't kill people, right? There's no sort of ethic there. There's nothing within those abstract universal liberal principles that's actually going to command the concrete loyalties of flesh and blood human beings. What commands the loyalty of flesh and blood human beings is family, neighborhood, corporation, religious communities,

guilds, maybe secular communities, and I think nations. I mean, I think nation states is the outermost limit of those concentric circles of political affections and nauties beyond which they become abstract. Nobody's going to sort of get up

and nobody's going to die for the European Union. Nobody's going to get up and put their hands on their hearts and sing, oh to joy, when the EU flag. I mean, maybe some wool in Brussels, but it's not... And is Linton. So the conservative parent is to say,

look, we are what we are. It would be wonderful, maybe. if we were these perfect liberal, rational, autonomous beings, but that's just not what we are. And if you look, for example, at the doctrine of multiculturalism, that is a paradigm liberal doctrine. What it says is we are not going to make any demands on you, even when you enter into our moral community,

as to how you understand the fundamental moral questions. We're going to say we're not one culture, we're many cultures. So we can have as many silos as we want, and because of the sort of doctrinaire, a prior right commitment to the idea that it doesn't matter because whoever's in the silos, they're all liberal, rational, self-legislating selves who will, left to their own devices, just see that equality, goodness, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is the only moral code worth living by, and more primary superseding political loyalties to one's origin country, will just magically fall away

as you pass through the passport gates at Heathrow. There's just a sort of magic wand and you just forget all of those loyalties, forget all those concrete attachments to kin and to family, to ethnicity, to tribe, to religion, to origin country and would just become a British citizen. And I just think that's another myth.

I think it's plainly false. And I think it's why what we're seeing on the streets of our liberal Western capital cities all over at the moment is a fruit of liberalism. And those fruits, those effects, those consequences would not have arisen in a truly conservative polity.

That is to say, a polity that says this is not just any random collection of individual agents. These are a people. They are French. They are from Papua New Guinea. They are from Australia. They've got this story and not any other. These are the people we've, over the years, as you say, the common law, that is something, this is the moral code that has slowly evolved and over the long history of our people. That is the settled wisdom of our people. The paradigm for liberals is not the common law. It's rights-based regimes.

It's rights documents. It's the Declaration of Rights. It's the European Court of Human Rights. It's the very conventions and documents that is paralyzing today's conservative government in the UK from deporting these people who are celebrating the terrorist attacks on October 7. Stephen, come back quickly because we've spent almost all the entire time interrogating the liberal position.

I want to come to interrogate in the concerns position, but come back on this. Okay, so very good. Then I think we're in, if we take that line and say there is this myth of the free rational, autonomous, atomized individual, and then we want to put the blame on liberalism for where we are, then I think the argument is there going to be. Liberalism has not been tough enough on people who are not going to adopt that position. And then you add to that an understanding of human nature, what commands our loyalties and so forth, that you think liberalism is not in keeping with.

And so it's going to be a failed project. We don't die for documents. Well, sometimes we do. But then to go to the other side of what I think would be a false dichotomy here then would be to say what conservatism then is to say is we start in a particular context and we are bound to a particular religion, a particular family, a particular language and a whole bunch of particular things. And if you then, that's not just a metaphor, if we are bound and constituted and our identities and our value structure comes to be formed in that particular context, then you are going to be very close to a kind of relativism because then you're going to point out that obviously people are born into all sorts of different local contexts all over the world and they're going to be very different in various ways.

And if you deny the capacity of us as rational people to abstract from those differences to see a common humanity, excuse me, a common humanity, then you're going to say all we have is contentious groups. But from this conservative position, you're going to see no way out of it because what really binds us, what commands us. And notice how strong that language is, is these particular tribal loyalties. And if you are then worried about the people who are doing terrible things out on the streets of London and various other places, It's precisely those people. Those are the people the conservatives are describing and valorizing because those people are tribalists

who were born into a certain tradition, a certain language, a certain family structure, and they are bound and commanded by it. But the conservative argument presumably would be we don't let people from a different conservative culture into us. That's right. So then you want to balkanize the world into the different tribes. Better than balkanizing your own society.

Okay. Quite. Well. Okay. So, but notice what I said that. I think is a false alternative. Okay. So somehow what we need to do with the healthy conservative and the healthy liberalism is to say we are not culture-bound

relativists and all the best that we can do is relativize versus we are some sort of free-floating individual, right, rational agents and just anything goes, right? That's the false alternative we need to get past to get to the next stage of the discussion. And how do we? I'm very keen to

understand, but I don't yet, Steve. Right. So this is, I think, where the epistemological issues come in. Is it possible for individuals to whatever their particular circumstances they are born into, to rise above them? Say, I was born into this religion, but I'm not bound to this religion. I am going to think it through as an adult, do some comparative religions, and as a rational individual with good education and free exploration. I can make my own decision. I was born into this family, but I don't just uncritically accept this family because some families are dysfunctional, some families are functional, and I am going to learn the lessons of my family structure, and I'm probably going to do better in the next time. So we have the cognitive power to rise above our circumstances. No denying that. No denying that. Well, the conservatives will strike me as. Let me come back to this. Yeah. Well, Constance, you take it. There's a lot of directions we could go. I'm just wary that I don't want it to be all one way.

Can I just say, I think this pivots very neatly to a criticism of conservatism that I think is very powerful, if not the most powerful. This is the relativism charge. So maybe we can, maybe this is a good point to which we can sort of turn to criticise my position. But just as we're going at, the relativism problem, I think, is baked in even more so. I don't think it is baked into conservatism and I'll explain why, but I think it is structurally baked into liberalism. Remember, liberalism is the view that we are free to choose our conceptions of the good. We are free, nobody's going to tell us what our metaphysical conception of human nature is. And that just is going to lead to conflict. We're going to just have rival conceptions of the good.

That's why the adjective plural is often attached to liberal, plural democracies. The liberal, in attaching the word plural, basically concedes that the Kantian project, the canteen idea that left to our own devices, we're all going to come up with a singular conception of what a flourishing society looks like was never going to work at all. So liberal plural societies, how do we then cope with that? Well, what happens is we have plural conceptions of the good. How do we police and navigate and manage and integrate these? How do we hold a multicultural society together? Stephen, you're absolutely right. you need an £800-pound gorilla.

The Conservative says, you don't need the gorilla, or at least you can keep the gorilla in the cage and bring him out only in exceptional circumstances, if you have a moral community that has a clear self-understanding of itself, yet has a clear, a pride in itself, a pride that it can confer as it welcomes new guests to join its moral community

on the terms that it sets for themselves, both with the gifts that it offers, but also the duties that it expects, and because this is us. This is distinctive. This is the kind of community we are. So I think the relativism problem does emerge naturally from the liberal tradition.

But let's turn to conservatism. You're absolutely right, Stephen, and say this is not a problem that conservatism is free from. If we're all conserving our own particular traditions, isn't that itself a recipe of relativism? I mean, how are we going to cope with that? Well, my first response

preliminary response, would be to say, so what? It better to be a balkanized world than a balkanized society. We can at least navigate international relations. Not easy, there are wars, but much better to have divisions conducted along through diplomacy and war. It's better to be tribal among nation states than within a nation. Exactly right. Let me put a different criticism. The most persuasive one that I thought you put in the written part of,

this debate, which is that if conservatism is about the preservation of order and traditions, without the universal vision of what human beings are supposed to be able to do and how they're supposed to be able to live, we would still have slavery, women would still be second-class citizens and so on and so forth. What say to that? Good. Well, I mean, I think it's, I mean, notice what happens when, let's just take the abolitionist movement in this country. The first abolitionist its movement leads to the abolition, slavery, in 180 and 07 in the slave trade in 1833. How does it start? It starts with a criticism that comes from evangelicals. Thomas Clarkson, St. John's College, Cambridge. William Wilberforce, St. John's College, Cambridge.

They start making theological arguments about that, say, there can be no debate, there can be no rival conceptions of the view that human beings are not Kantian selves, but divine beings made in the image of God with an irreducible dignity and preciousness. And for that reason, this is Clarkson's, it was an undergraduate essay, the essay on the commerce of the human species, which became the manifesto for the abolitionist movement. I think conservatism preserves and inherits traditions that carry within it the seeds of its own reform. We see this with the abolitionist movement, we see it too with the logic of extending the franchise to women. Which tradition is the first to lift up women?

I say it's Christianity. Look at the way in which women feature in the Gospels. Now, look, I don't want to get into a theological... And by the way, is Christianity really conservative religion? Well, that's a whole other debate. But let's simply say that Christendom and the inherited moral traditions of Christendom are what, broadly speaking, conservatives in the West are seeking to preserve.

And I think what we're tiptoeing around here, I don't want to get down into the religion, sort of right down a religion rabbit hole, but I do just want to say that this is my deeper answer to your worries about relativism. There are many conservatives who are secular. I think that part of what the conservative is preserving

is a set of transcendent metaphysical commitments and obligations. And what that is, means is that it's not just relativism, it's not just everything's up for grabs. There is a settled way of understanding what human beings are. It's not the conception of human nature that emerges very rapidly in the 18th century. Who are the big thinkers of the French Revolution? De La Métrie, he writes Le Machine in the 1760s, I think. That is to say, man is mechanism.

Look at Darwin, the sort of great developments and reductive concept. of human nature in 19th century. We're basically just animals. We're in, we're out for ourselves and look at how that gets allied liberal doctrines of capitalism in the 20th century. So I think we've got a very clear transcendent sort of theological undercurrent that I think the best conservism does, it does in fact preserve. That's the, that's why it's not ultimately relativist. There are timeless, eternal transcendent truths that yes, have particular expressions and that will vary from time to place. Human beings evolve over time. Human culture evolves over time. But there is a kind of anchor, if you like, in a set of basic traditions that are both

revealed and rational. Stephen, make some of your arguments, because I thought that was one of the strongest among others. No, I think James is absolutely right. Ultimately, we are going to have to get back to metaphysics. Everything's down straight with metaphysics. Metaphysics and the epistemological issues about abstraction. There are people watching this. I want to to stay watching. Simplified this. We're not going to go. But I will make the history point.

Just to start with the abolition of slavery, you are exactly right that by the time we get to the 1700s, it's evangelicals who are front and center and a significant member. But I think that's the wrong reading of the abolition story, and

it's not going to be something internal to Christianity that is getting the credit for the abolitionist movement and its successes. And the point is going to be that Christianity was the dominant intellectual framework from 300s. And it had a monopoly, basically, for 700, 800, 900 years. Not a whisper against anything being wrong with slavery or, well, maybe a wister.

Greg Riggister, fourth century. But the institution of slavery, the institution of the subordination of women for well over a millennial. millennium, when you get to the 1700s and you have some evangelicals and others, this is already three centuries after the Renaissance. The first people to start significantly saying there's something wrong with slavery are in the 1500s, and they are Renaissance humanist, educated individuals who are starting to say there is something wrong here with this as an institution. And that picks up in the 1600s as we go through the religious battles over religious toleration, separation, separation of church and state. What you find then is a new form of Christianity. I would say John Locke is probably the best version here,

where you have a combination, early enlightenment philosophy combined with trying to make Christianity as reasonable as possible with a certain understanding of individuals, toleration, freedom, and so forth. Once that is put in place, and this is by the end of the 1600s, then in the 1700s, you've got a whole bunch of people who are now Renaissance humanist types, including Benjamin Franklin and the Thomas Jefferson's and so forth,

and a whole bunch of evangelicals who are now coming out of this new form of modernized Christianity, then and only then does slavery go on the defense of Engoya? And then the same story would be told with respect to women. That's just the first half of the history story. Okay, well look, let's, we can, we can have a sort of history war here. And I just, I just think that, I just think it's a mistaken way of understanding the history. The evangelicals are not reading Lox's reasonableness of Christianity. They're reading the New Testament. Yeah. And, and, and slavery, they're reading it

through a locky and less. Would it not be fair to say, though, that the people who are most opposed to the emancipation of women and the lifting of the enslavement of Africans are also conservatives and Christians? I think it's an an anachronism to apply the binary to the 18th century when the word conservatism doesn't even emerge. People who believe in the preservation of the existing order. So yes, you're absolutely right. The conservatives do put a primacy. They think that the default presumption when faced with any kind of radical change should be stay with what you've got. Now, if you like, that's the converse problem of the liberal has. The liberal has doesn't know when to stop liberating and has to stop at some point before,

if the liberal doesn't stop liberating, you end up with a tyranny. You just have individual conceptions of the good, an atomized society that can only be held together by a tyranny. And that I think is where we're getting now. But just to say, the conservatism, a conservative position suffers from a similar kind of problem. What you've got in the, well, late 18th, century is the idea that we've got a

settled, a sort of settled hierarchy. We've got a hierarchy that works. Hierarchies are functional, flat flat sort of societies with no distinctions of office and function are dysfunctional societies. And so, and we recognize this. And I think conservatives

have often been guilty, and no doubt they were guilty in the 18th century, of conflating value and dignity with function. That is to say, That is to say, if you have high office that somehow you're invested with greater moral worth. I think that does emerge in the 18th and 19th century, but only because the theological conceptions of a full-blooded metaphysical human equality before God, priest and pauper kneeled together at the altar rail, that starts to dissipate.

And as that starts to dissipate, it becomes very difficult for hierarchies to seem morally okay. because there it just seems random. The only way you can understand equality is really in material terms. The allocation of offices and also increasingly salary and wealth. That is what human worth consists in.

It's a kind of secularising and materializing of human worth. So yes, I mean the Conservatives have to understand that sometimes in order to preserve and conserve change is necessary. And that's the big challenge that conservatism faces.

just as the liberal faces the challenge, when do you stop liberating and start becoming a conservative? Stephen, anything you want to say on that? Well, again, we have a number of issues here. In part, I think this comes down to partly a temperamental issue, right, where the conservatives is a more backwards-looking, not under any pejorative sense. We look backwards to look forwards. Yeah, what we have accomplished, and the liberal is forward-looking. How can we... From ground zero.

The conservative wants to change slowly. The liberal is more willing to say, we've got this great new I do, and let's go for it. And that, in part, for the intellectuals, I think does turn on the epistemological issues. This is about knowledge. When do we know?

And the thing that I think most liberals will find temperamentally objectionable is this conservative resistance to the idea that we can in fact discover truths, moral truths, that are universalizable and to act on them quickly. Now, this is partly then an epistemological confidence in the power of the human mind, and I think that one requires another discussion of its own. So in history of philosophy terms, my sense is you are much more Burke conservative,

and I'm going to be much more lock liberal. Can I come back on that point? I think it becomes morally important that if you are in these 1800s and you find someone saying given everything that we have discovered right now, are you not certain with moral certainty that slavery is an abomination?

It is disgusting. And that we know this that slaves are human beings with full dignity, capacity for freedom. And I am ready to general relies on that. And if someone temperamentally says, well, I'm not sure, right? You know, my tradition, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's going to be the moral objection to conservatism. That it builds,

of course, but it's going to build into itself a resistance to something that is. And then to say, well, we could change slowly. And we say, no, this is wrong. We should change quickly on this. And then the same thing, if there's any sort of resistance, once we recognize that women are capable of self-governance, rationality, running their own lives, free agency, that, well, you know, our tradition, we're not so sure about the generalization. All women, are you sure, right, and so forth? No, that is morally objectionable. So I think that it's going to be a epistemological issue that is partly a temperamental issue, but it's going to come into a moral conflict about. Okay. I think it's very helpful, actually, Stephen, to frame it that way. I think you're right,

it's an epistemological question, and I think you're also right that it, that it does. bleeds very quickly into a moral question. And I think the conservative comeback would be to say, yes, we are indeed very nervous when a set of traditions that have been running for centuries and centuries are being challenged and completely subverted and started again from ground, we're starting again from ground zero by a small gaggle of people who just have read lots of books and written lots of sort of furious tracts about how we must change everything right now. Yes, there's a nervousness now. Why? Because the conservative. it puts, takes very seriously the idea that the tradition is the democracy of the dead,

that there is an accumulated wisdom in tradition. And even if we don't fully understand, that is say, even if we don't have epistemological clarity of why it is that that fence is up in the field, we know that somebody at some point put it up there. We don't know if there's an angry bull somewhere hiding behind a tree about to attack us. But we're not going to put it down. That is to say, we're going to understand that rationality is, not always contained within a single head or a single sort of little group of heads.

That is to say, rationality is a point that Hayek makes, even though he doesn't say it, he denies he's a conservative. Rationality is dispersed. It's dispersed in all sorts of ways. It's dispersed in the price mechanism. It's also dispersed in the common law, as you said earlier. That is to say, what is the common law? The common law represents a tradition of epistemological humility.

The rights-based documents, declarations, day-noderns, are represent the liberal epistemology, that is to say, we've got it right, we've got the universal application, we're going to write this document and it's going to be applicable from here on in, at all times and all places, we might put in a few amendments if you're lucky. That the conservative approach is, no, these, we must respect the accumulated, the sedimentation of moral wisdom over the past. Yes, that's going to mean we're going to have to creak and change as new technologies emerge, as new wars and conflicts emerge. It's not to say, It's not a recipe for stasis and paralysis, but it's an adaptive method.

And it recognizes that we don't have some sort of omniscient clarity just because we happen to be the ones walking around alive at the moment. James and Stephen, we have a few minutes left. And there's one thing I want to bring up that you mentioned there briefly that I think actually doesn't get talked about enough because people who think for a living like the two of you and to a lesser extent me. we sometimes want to believe that changes in society and progress, whatever we call that,

is primarily driven by ideas and by culture, whereas I think it's fair to say, to a large extent, it's driven by technology. I think that's such a great point. If I could just follow it, then there's just... Well, and, you know, our good friend Louis Perre, for example, makes this point about the sexual revolution. We can talk all we want about the emancipation of women because we're so progressive, but actually it happens because we finally have the technology. for it to be possible.

If I could just pick up on that point and marry it to Louise's wonderful work and the work of the other British feminists, the new reactionary feminists, you know, if it's true that the sort of liberal impulse has been a recipe for moral progress. I don't want to deny that. But there's a big difference when it comes to thinking

about what is it that, what's the sort of understanding of human beings that's motivating that moral progress? Stephen and I differed on what motivated the abolitionist movement. I say it was evangelicals. What are evangelicals? They're the ones who go back to the... They're always banging on about the Bible. They're not reading John Locke.

They're reading Paul. And they're seeing that what unfolds there is the logic of all human beings being equal in the eyes of God. Now, that's different from the liberal conception, which sees human beings as fungible. But there's no ultimate difference between men and women. That were just units.

And I think that is why transgenderism emerges, that ideology, for example, emerges, that confusion between men and women emerges within from naturally downstream of the liberal conception of human nature as a kind of basically blank slate, empty vessel. But back to your point,

Constantine, you're right that what catalyzes these changes is not just ideas. And Stephen and I, we've been talking about ideas and the history of ideas and so on. It is true that we academics often think that put a lot more attribute a lot more to ideas as factors of historical change than we ought to. Technology matters, as Louise argues, the pill in the 1960s has a massively transformative effect.

The invention of the washing machine, as Mary Harrington points out, has a radical transformation, etc. Not just technology, though, law. Many have argued Christopher Caldwell recently and Richard Hernania recently in the origins of wokeness, The Civil Rights Act 1964 has an enormous change in how we understand on the moral universe of society. I'd say in the UK context, I would add the equivalent would be the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010. This has become our new liberal constitution and it's been a disaster because it cuts absolutely against the accumulated wisdom of previous centuries. Stephen, probably what will be a final word to address that. And also I think, yes, the Liberals' relations.

with technology and also just that point that James made, which I think a lot of people will find persuasive, which is if human beings are free to blah blah blah, blah, now that we have the technology for people to change their sex easily, quote, unquote. I'm free to be whatever I want. Why can't, you know, isn't that what liberalism is created? Well, I think we are at the gates of an equivocation here. How we use the word free. So when we are talking about liberalism, we are talking about a political doctrine. It's in a social context, what things are we going to do with compulsion and what things are we going to do voluntarily? And the liberal has a way of dividing what is done voluntarily and what is done in compulsion. Now, when we say that people should be free politically and socially, we don't generalize that to all of reality to say, therefore you are free to make up your own physics, or to have your own version of the law of gravity,

or to make up your own biology, and so forth. All of those metaphysically given features of reality. They're not political features. Exactly. Right. That's right. No, but the point is that the concept of freedom is a social and political concept. It's not a physics concept.

It's not a biology concept. So, again, if we are talking about people who are, in the transgender movement, this is another complicated territory issue that we're putting out here, but the clearly disturbed individuals there who say, I can be free from biology, I can be free from physics. Well, then we are talking about people who are not rational, right, in any liberal sense, and said they have become unhinged for whatever reason, but that's not the debate that we are having between liberals. I think that's a very sensible point, and there's not much I have to disagree with that. I think we'll probably end on a note of consensus.

I just qualified to say if you've got freedom as the highest value and let's just assume you can sequester it within a political domain, that's only going to work if you've got outside the political domain a sense of what makes life meaningful that is shared at least to some degree. And I think that the stress on liberal neutrality, the programmatic neutrality, that liberalism, I think, for all sorts of good reasons, wants us to have in order to bring about civic peace, turns very quickly into a programmatic neutrality, which forces deep convictions about who we are,

deep metaphysical, religious convictions about who we are, what we ought to be and what we ought to do, pushes them into the private sphere so that those are questions simply to be settled behind closed doors between consenting adults. And so it's hardly surprising if those questions are then bracketed, that the sequestered political freedom becomes the dominant, the only kind of freedom, at least the only kind of freedom that has any currency in the public square, and so it's no surprise that liberalism then mutates into progressivism with its great doctrine that the personal is political. Everything becomes political.

All right, gentlemen, well, first of all, thank you so much. I thank our friends here unheard. And before we started this, actually, we were talking about the fact that modeling good conversation is what we are trying to do. So in the spitter of that, I'm going to add a little flourishing, flourish at the end there and ask you, what did you think was Stephen's strongest argument? I think Stephen had a number of strong arguments, so it's difficult to choose. I think by far the strongest one, though, was this worry, which I think conservatives do not take seriously enough,

that by prising the particular, conservatism don't have a story to tell. conservatives don't have a story to tell about human nature and its broader conceptions of human significance and morality. That's why I happen to think that that particularity must be an exemplification, an instantiation of some broader

set of transcendent commitments. This is why I think the religious impulse is a feature of conservatism, not a bug, and that's what rescues it from relativism. But Stephen is right to call out to object. because many conservatives wouldn't disagree with me on that. Stephen, same question to you?

I'd say that within liberalism, there is, again, as a big tent, that you're quite right to say there is the Kant version and in our generation the Rolls version. And I think both of those are disaster versions of liberalism. So there is a tendency in liberalism to want to generalize, to want to go to the abstract. And if that is not anchored, then that is going to be a disaster. Now, this does come to another philosophical issue,

the distinction between the empiricists and the rationalists. My version of liberalism is going to be much more empirically rooted. So I think you are exactly right, though, to say that the more free-floating rationalistic versions need to be reined in or need to be put on a better philosophical foundation, and they are problematic. Gentlemen, thank you for being here, and thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you soon with another brilliant episode.