TRIGGERnometry - Dr James Orr: The Barbarians Aren't at the Gates... They're Inside!

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Dr James Orr is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity, a position he took up after four years as McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Christ Church, Oxford. 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 the UK Chairman of The Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute that aims to strengthen the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries. Dr Orr is also heading up the National Conservatism conference in Westminster, London, which is taking place 15-17 May 2023. Tickets are available here: https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-uk-2023/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod 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

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gLP ones, testosterone, and peptides that reduce belly fat, restore energy, and boost recovery. Over 50,000 high performers have already broken through their plateaus. If you're ready to turn your hard work into measurable results, go to maximus tribe.com. That's maximus tribe.com. Trouble is that once the liberalism hits its summit uplands, the liberal doesn't become a conservative. That, the kind of immense a patriotic dynamism of liberalism is still there. What you're saying is progressives value change in and of itself, and they will keep pursuing it, even if they've got to a really good place. Sure. Where do we stop? When do we stop liberating? When do we stop progressing and say, actually, we've done pretty well, let's just try and settle down and conserve these gains?

You can never reason a person out of position that they would never reason into. And I think it's high time for some decolonization, but not the kind of decolonization that most people, most administrators these days have in mind. You need to recognize that ideas age in reverse. We get weaker as we get older. Ideas get stronger as they get older. Barbarians are not at the gates. They've been in the city. They're manning the citadel.

and they've been there for quite a while. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishon. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Can't tell you how excited we are for our guest today. He's an associate professor at Cambridge University.

We've had plenty of opportunity to speak with him in private. It doesn't do many interviews and it is a big waste that he doesn't because he's here, Dr. James. Welcome to Trigonometry. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. We've had so many conversations with you just privately over dinner or whatever in the past, various events.

And I've always just thought to myself, why are there no cameras here? Because it's always really interesting. As people watching can tell, I'm super excited to have you. Before we get into the conversation itself, who are you? What's been your journey through life? How did you make it here, James? My journey through life. Well, born and brought up in Brussels, Brussels, Belgium, where I lived my early years,

and then was packed off to boarding school to learn some man. as I was a pretty unruly kid, about age nine, I think. And so boarding school all the way through to 18, and then went to university ended up in London. I was a corporate lawyer for some years and worked in corporate finance. Pretty soul-sapping work, but character building. And about, let's have a think about that.

In 2009, I walked away, thanks to a very supportive and understanding wife, I left the law and became a student again, age 30. went up to Cambridge and started studying religion and theology and did some graduate work there, a diploma and masters, and then a PhD, it was a kind of gateway drug to the life of the mind, graduate studies in religion, and then increasingly in philosophy, in questions of meaning and metaphysics and morality. And I did that up until, let's ever think, gosh, about 2014 when I got the PhD, then moved across to Oxford to work with one of your previous guests, I think Professor Nigel Bigger at a place called the McDonald's Centre at Christchurch, Oxford,

which had four fabulous years, went through, had a ringside seat for the Empire Wars that Nigel went through in late 2017, 2018. And that was something of a wake-up call. I think I was sort of politically, well, not naive, but politically sort of disinterested, I'd say, until the rumblings of this sort of new kind of cultural revolution has started to emerge on campus, which must have been, I suppose, about 10 years ago. And then, after four years there, I moved back to Cambridge,

and I've now taken up a position there as an associate professor in philosophy of religion, and so I lecture and research in philosophy of religion, moral philosophy and those sorts of areas. I'm also, as of just a few months ago, chairman of something called the Edmund Burke Foundation, the Edmund Burke Foundation, UK. And we put on big conferences. We've got a big one coming up on national conservatism in the middle of May in Westminster in London.

And that's been a terrific sort of compliment to my main job and something I love to do in my spare time, just sort of help to kind of catalyze coalitions of people, many of whom I think will have appeared on your show before, talking about the urgent issues of our time, from all sorts of different political perspectives and observing this unusual new coalition emerging. I'm not sure quite what to call it. It's not really conservative. It's not really liberal.

I suppose it's stitched together by a sense that there is an emerging world of view that is very hostile to some of the kind of foundational assumptions that liberals, conservatives, and indeed, I think old school socialist chair. Anyway, that's probably more than you wanted to... It isn't, actually. It isn't.

But, you know, the reason I am so excited to have you on is I just love, like, throwing big questions at you and just seeing what comes up. And you've already opened one of them, which is the thing that I've been thinking about, we've been talking on the show about it quite a bit, which is you... Essentially, what you've identified is there is a threat to the founding principles of what I would describe Western civilization, right? That is there is a worldview that seeks to undermine and destroy and challenge all of that and people sort of have coalesced around opposition to that but now I think the next step is to go well what is the positive alternative right and that's something we've all I think been wrestling you know the Jordan Peterson arc project and Peter Thiel's talked about this and you are talking about it so how does that happen because You talk about how these ideas are antithetical to the founding principles of conservatism and liberalism and perhaps old school socialism, but those people are really not going to get on very well outside of opposing something that's a threat.

So how do we have a positive view of the future that we can all get behind? Well, we all share probably ultimately quite distinct understandings of human flourishing and the good and virtue and so on. And one of the tragedies of an increasingly polarized sort of marketplace of ideas is that we can't really have those conversations about the sort of differences and how we understand those kinds of questions. So, I mean, I think one's got to try to put oneself in the place of these, let's call them, just radical progressives, and recognize that by their own lights, they are doing the right thing. by their own lights, they've got a very clear conception of what it is to flourish as a human being. They've got a clear conception of what sin looks like, what moral error looks like. Looks like you, yeah, very, very close to me. And one of the problems, obviously, is that a lot of that, kind of, the moral coding, rests in,

often contingent, morally inert physiological characteristics, skin color or anatomy, or what you want to do between the sheets, which historically have just not been understood to have any proper bearing on what it is to flourish as a human being. And again, I think one should recognize that it's not coming from an evil place, a lot of the early champions of academic freedom and freedom of speech were from the left

and championed the rights of minorities and wanted to expand the franchise and so on and so forth. But as things have done, developed, and I think this is where I would probably depart from maybe you, both of you, and let's find out, is that, you know, that this is part of the liturgy of liberalism, that this is a feature of liberalism, not a bug. Now, my sort of liberal friends will say, and to me as a conservative, no, this is absolutely that this is, this is not a feature, it's a bug. It's a strange aberration. It's a metastasis of liberalism. It's sort of freedom that's just kind of, you know,

intoxicated freedom. It's not liberty, it's license. My suspicion, and it's just a suspicion, my position at the moment is that liberalism was always going to unravel this way, that there's something within liberalism that is intrinsically transgressive, that is intrinsically restless, and there's always chafing at the bonds of conventions, whether it's social conventions or legal conventions and so on. And so, you know, you imagine, you know, the liberal has the sort of his sunlit uplands, right? That's the horizon towards which the moral arc of the universe, as Obama quotes Martin Luther King, is always tending. And the trouble is that once the liberalism hits its sunlit uplands, the liberal doesn't become a conservative. You know, the liberal doesn't

say, right, we've now got to conserve the sunlit uplands. That, the kind of immense of patriotanism of liberalism is still there. And so they might ask, well, what about the 1.2% of the population of the sunlit uplands that would prefer the moonlit uplands? What about them? Hey? What about their rights? Okay, well, right. Well, their rights are paramount. And we must now reorganize the sunlit uplands to create a space that respects the moonlit uplanders. And that means we can't call the upland sunlit or moonlit anymore. They're just lit. Lit uplands. So you get my point. What you're saying is progressives value change in and of itself and they will keep pursuing it even if they've got to a really good place. That's what you're arguing. That's what I'm arguing.

And I don't think, you know, that I think is a plausible take on the dynamic of liberalism. I should say, by the way, that conservatives have the opposite problem. Yes. Right. So if if the central question for liberals and progressives is liberals metastasizing inter-progressive, as I say, organically and naturally, is where do we stop? When do we stop liberating? When do we stop progressing and say, actually, we've done pretty well, let's just try and settle down and conserve these gains? The Conservatives is saying, well, why change? Change? What do you mean change? We've got to conserve this stuff? No, absolutely not. And so there's a sort of flip-side sort of dilemma for the conservative, which the Conservatives have always had, which is, well, you know,

the world changes, our environment changes, culture changes, wars happen, what's got to adapt. But it's not in the conservative DNA to sort of accommodate change. And so both sides have these sort of, you know, reverse and structurally kind of complicit problems. And so that's a big challenge at the moment. And so there are some who would say, look, we can recover liberalism. We've got to see this as a strange offshoot. And I don't want to say that, Progressivism is just issues directly, is just wholly the creature of liberalism. There are clearly other strands.

I mean, there is a Marxist strand. There are certain hallmarks of the Marxist frame of mind in progressivism. The tendency to really see the world as split in two tiers between oppressor and oppressed. The idea that there is some revolution behind, just behind the corner that is going to set everything to rise. the idea that there has to be, you know, that there is a kind of, that victory looks like control of the ownership and means of cultural production

and distribution and distribution of ideas in particular. That's true. There's also a therapeutic element, I think, in the progressive world view, that I don't know if that comes quite from liberalism, but what you're seeing clearly is that old-school John Stuart Mill type liberalism, you know, that rests on things like the no harm principle, you know, I'm free to do whatever I want, provided, you know, my freedom to act stops, you know, my fists freedom stops at your nose and so on and so forth. I mean, what's happened there is, I think, quite an interesting phenomenon,

and it's described by a chap called, what's his name, Nicholas Haslam, he's an Australian psychologist, it's called concept creep. And we're familiar with it. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. But particularly the concept creep around language of harm, violence, care, kindness and so on, and it's sort of the positive side as well. And effectively what's happened is that Mill's principle, I think, as harm has become increasingly psychologized and as you've come to the view that, you know, hurty words damage you and disagreement is just tantamount personal assault, then Mills' sort of principle, liberalism can get weaponized.

And say, well, that means we now have appropriate restrictions are not just on everything you say, but really on everything you think, because restrictions on what you say will affect the way you think. And this is something we're seeing, obviously, in the academy, right across the English-speaking world and to some extent in continental Europe,

but perhaps it's less aggressive over that. So, yes, I mean, that... It's very, very tempting, particularly when you work, like I do in sort of history of ideas, to say, well, this particular social phenomenon is obviously rooted to, you know, obviously emerges from that philosopher's study. Things are just not as simple as that.

And I think we sometimes overstate or rather ignore the contingent in human affairs and in history. So, you know, there was always talk on the internet about being white-pilled or black pills. Have you got a positive thing about the view of the future which you seem to? you envisage a post-woke world, or do you have a negative sort of view of the future? And I think that's simply underplays just how random history, randomly history unfolds. I mean, imagine yourself at a dinner party in Berlin in January, 1989,

or a spam party or whatever they had for dinner in Berlin in 1989. And imagine someone turning to you and saying, in 10 months, all this will be over. It'll all be gone. And I think people would have thought you were completely mad. I mean, there were certainly signs that the Soviet regime was creaking and he was seeing some insurrection movements here and solidarity in Poland, in Czechoslovak and so on.

But the idea that suddenly it would just go was almost unthinkable. And I think similarly today, I mean, this is probably Gristier-Ey-or-Mond. Mill Constantine with your remark, you know, what are we going to do? How do we think constructively? One of the things we need to start thinking constructively is hope. You know, the sense that it will come to an end, and let's get started on building the alternative that's going to take its place. And that's a very hard thing to do when things look grim, and particularly when they

look kind of structurally grim, when laws and institute, the whole institutional landscape of the West, or much of it, seems sort of hypnotize. mesmerized by the identitarian agenda. So yeah, that's... Take the great pill. James, you spoke, and that was a forensically brilliant analysis of where we find ourselves. You omitted one thing that, considering your background

and your area of study, I found a little bit surprising in that you didn't mention the religious element to this. I didn't mention the religious element, because I think the comparison between progress, Progressivism and new forms of pathological forms of progressivism and religion can be wildly overstated. I mean, religion itself is notoriously indeterminate concept that, and, you know, colleagues who work in religion say this often. There's certain sort of definitional criteria for religion that will just encompass virtually everything, including things that we would normally associate, identify as a religion.

loving the Chelsea Football Club has all the trappings of a kind of cult the belief based entirely on faith. There we go, there we go, and that's right, that's right. Yeah, and they get a bit angry when you contravene. And converse, you can restrict the definition of religion so, you know, in such a narrow way that you cease to have any

sense of, you know, there's things that you would want to include as a religion, say, for example, Mahayana Buddhism, you'd want to include as a religion that you can't if you define religion by orientation to a god, for example. Nevertheless, as I said, I think there are certain hallmark, well, there are certain sort of trappings of progressivism that probably could identify as religious. And I do think that once a kind of common inheritance

leaves a society, and particularly leave, dissolves relatively quickly, seen particularly in the West, certainly in the UK over the last 30, 40, 50 years, that does create a vacuum. Nature appore, the natural world appores a vacuum, the spiritual world abhors a vacuum, as it la. And by spiritual, I don't mean sort of woo-woo spiritual. You may just be a card-carrying atheist, but you still will recognize that religion is a real phenomenon in human history. And you'll recognize that actually modernity is engaged in a kind of very large, uncontrolled, old experiment in seeing how we can get on, large, large societies can function without the one thing that all human societies up until, in a scheme of human history, five minutes ago, had as central,

was the sort of glue that tied a society together. And it ties a society together not through laws, but by commanding, as it were, a source of moral authority that is basically pre-political. I mean, that's the fundamental advantage of religion. I mean, I think it was Talib, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, who's, he drew the analogy of saying, you know, just restaurants charge you, you know, get you in with the food and get your money with the booze. And he says, well, religion's a little bit like that, you know, it gets you in with all of these beliefs, but really it's giving you the rules, and it's giving you these sort of unspoken, often inarticulated, extra legal conventions, guardrails, a sort of social fabric that's very, very difficult,

almost impossible for any government or any central authority to legislate. And it certainly kind of inculcates, I think particularly in the Abrahamic traditions, particularly in the Hebraic and then the Christian traditions, it's gone. There are certain sort of codes that operate on the basis of very clear prohibitions and commands to do certain things. I mean, compare the Greek tradition. The Greek tradition, Aristotle, it's like nothing in excess. Meda and Agan, just don't overreach yourself.

The gods will strike you down, but love your friends, hate your enemies and so on. But it's all sort of moderation. Whereas the sort of, you know, the decalogue is, thou shalt not. And it can seem, particularly in a sort of liberal context, as rather sort of intimidating and terrifying and absolutist. But as you know, looking at religion as an evolutionary phenomenon, interdicts prohibitions, blanket, prohibitions, blanket sort of commands like that, are much cleaner and clearer.

They're easier to pass on. They're easier to inherit. They are much easier to apply in large sort of complex, across large complex populations. So religion does have a bearing, absolutely. And I think that, you know, if we are, are going to try and find some constructive vision of the way forward, there does need to be some, maybe it doesn't need to be a religious one. I mean, maybe there is something we've missed.

Maybe there is a kind of dewy-eyed Dawkinsian humanism that we can sort of all kind of share and just agree to live by and sort of get on. But I think the last 50, 60 years has shown that that in the absence of these very, very sort of complex belief systems, others, other sort of, you know, cruder systems of moral accountability and so on begin to creep in. So, I mean, and I think there's a difference, you know, a society that is, let's say, broadly speaking, shares

exist in the same moral universe, with roughly speaking the same assumptions about what counts is right and wrong, rough, what counts as a flourishing human being and a human being that is suffering. I mean, that doesn't mean that you need to be a theocracy. I mean, it doesn't mean that you need, you know, even more than, you know, half the population believing any of the stuff. You can still, as it were, as I know, many atheists who were much more aggressive 15 years ago during the sort of the new atheist revolution, I mean, a lot of atheist friends I have for a much,

actually one of the things that got me interested in religion in the first place. I'm very grateful to that lot. But a lot of my atheist friends who were much more aggressive back in those days. Now, I mean, they're still atheists, a lot of them. Some of them are not actually. Some of them moved over to the other side. But a lot of them say, gosh, yeah, I can see what the effects are of leaving this stuff behind. I think Ross Dowett has a line somewhere in the American context, you know.

If you didn't like the religious right, just wait until you see the post-religious right. And actually, you know, and I think you can say that of the language. left too. If he didn't like the kind of, you know, religiously settled Christian socialist left or whatever, you know, just wait until you see the hard kind of, you know, Fabian Marxist left. Do you think we've become, and particularly I'm glad you brought up the new atheist movement, because one of sort of their central tenets was we don't really need religion. It served its purpose. It's, you know, it was awful, it did all these unspeakably vile things. People suffered as a result. we've moved beyond that.

Yeah, yeah. And that was always a pretty naive argument. I mean, not that there were, I mean, there won a lot of naive arguments spoke forward by the new atheists in my view, but that was just, you know, anyone with a passing familiarity of the history of the 20th century, just couldn't.

You know, we're saying, oh yeah, well, thank goodness, once we're past religion, we'll be fine, you know. Look how well the atheists behave. That's right. And then what would happen is things would descend, And this is particularly when you're arguing about Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great. You get into this awful situation where you're sort of trading genocide. Oh, well, you know, think of what sort of proportion of the population of the Americas was slaughtered as a result of, you know,

a sort of Catholic imperialism or whatever it might be. And look at how many did Stalin kill? And it's just cool got very unseemly. And both sides missed the point. there, which is a very, as clear a data point as human history offers up, namely that what is Solzhenitsyn's line, the line between good and evil does not fall between nation states, but goes right through the human heart. And so the question is, what is the correct analysis of the human condition? How is it that we produce a Hitler and a Mother Teresa? And that's a

philosophical question. The secular humanist answer to that is, well, evil is just a kind of some sort of aberration. Basically, human beings are all cuddly teddy bears, provided, provided they are unshackled from the chains of whatever oppressor liberalism is chafing against. Sometimes that was, that was good. There were genuine liberal victories and important ones. But as I said earlier, now we're getting the point where a lot of those just, it is almost unthinkable for a certain liberal-minded progressive to accept that limits can be liberating. I mean, this is a key conservative insight that we all know deep down.

I mean, I drove here today. I couldn't have got here had it not been for the fact that there's a dense web of conventions and rules and laws that are limits that are at one level, seen from one point of view, constraints on my agency. Now, but they're not constraints. I mean, there are constraints on my agency, but there are constraints that enable me to get here

without really worrying about it or thinking about it. And that is something that it's quite difficult to accept when we have a view of the self as basically autonomous. This is the sort of liberal Enlightenment view. We're free. We're autonomous. We pop into the world. Yeah, we may love our own.

moms and that sort of thing. But basically, you know, we're on our own, we're autonomous. And any obligations that we might find ourselves sort of caught up in need to be freely entered into. We must give our consent to obligations. Obligations can really only arise if we choose them. Now that seems to be plainly false. And sort of the conservative critique of that is, I mean, of course not. Yeah. I mean, not only do you love your mum, what is Conquest's first law? He's got three laws. Well, the first one is everyone is conservative about what they best. You're going to be conservative about your kids. There are certain things that you're going to let, you know, you'll be happy. This is Rob, my friend, Rob Hedden's beliefs. I think you've had a,

his luxury beliefs idea. You know, you can be, you can be a conservative about what you know best. And then, you know, you don't care about how your sort of, our other beliefs might trickle through into wider society. So that, that idea that limits can be liberating, that freedom, that true freedom should be not just raw freedom, not just raw license, but somehow ordered and downstream of basically non-liberal, I wouldn't say illiberal, but non-liberal forms of human life. I mean, what are the three-Fs? Three F's, faith, family flag, a most of a sort of convenient way of putting it. That's the orders. The exhibit says, faith first, family second, flag, the moral community, the nation state, could be a city state,

could be in the United States, it could be in a sort of federated, a federal state. Once those three are in place, then freedom flows well, freedom functions. Freedom is ordered. A little bit like you see this argument in the free markets with Hayek and others. You can't just have complete anarchy.

They've got to be constraints. And in fact, you want the constraints in order for the freedom to be conducive to flourishing. I suppose the, not that I want to delve too deeply into this, but the immediate pop-up in my head was the obvious counter to that is, if faith, flag, and family is what produces freedom. The progressive counter argument to that is, but not for the moonlit uplanders, right?

That version of freedom that you're talking about, the progressive argument is freedom for someone who looks like you. Yeah. But it's not freedom for someone who looks like me. It's not freedom for someone who's gay or trans or whatever. And it's freedom for the majority to the exclusion of the minority. Yeah, absolutely right. That's the standard critique.

And it's true. Sometimes it's a well-founded critique that certain expressions of religion here, Hitchens isn't wrong about some of the examples he uses. And some expressions of nationalism in the past and patriotism in the past have it indeed. led to, you know, nasty forms of oppression. But I think that the issue is, you know, do you have, not just do you inherit the moral norms and moral reflexes of your faith or your family or your flag, but what is the best way of structuring a society so that everyone, you can, that can be maximal flourishing for all? And so that means that at the level of the level of

the state, or the level of the sort of central authorities, there has to be, as it were, a degree of procedural neutrality. And liberalism is right about this. If you're organizing large, large, complex societies, there have to be certain principles that are principles which are blind to nationality in certain contexts, that are blind to your family structure, that don't take your religion into account. I think the trouble with a lot of those critiques is that they assume precisely what they think they're criticizing, namely that those features do matter. The rule of law should not be, should not apply to war. Well, of course. That's why I oppose workness so much, because it's obvious that it's a reversal of that very liberal principle. Yeah. The liberal principle

that everyone should be treated as an individual who is worthy and has value is being reversed by the idea that some people's skin color makes them less worthy or more worthy than others. It's absurd. But I want to come back to a couple of the things you said, James, because you used the word that I've heard you've used before, but the way you used a lot of light bulbs,

I mean, you talked about pre-political. And I think therein lies the answer to all of this, which is, we have to have something that we all agree on, basically. Now, let's put God to one side because we don't all agree about that. It's just a fact whether you'd like that or to be different or I'd like that, whatever.

What do we have left that is pre-politically agreed on in our society? Because for some time, I thought that maybe it's, you know, Western values or British values. But you walk up to the random person on the street, asking what British values are, they're going to run away from you, right? So what do we have left that is pre-political? Well, I would say increasingly little, or at least the sort of engines that drove are kind of,

that produced the glue that stitches together in a way that transcended the sort of mechanisms of state and law and so on, are under attack. And I think this is basically because there's been a shift to thinking of all pre-political domains as intrinsically political. And like family, sorry to interrupt, but this is such a good example because for me, a new father, the idea that having a family and children and blah, blah, blah, it's like a self-evident truth that that is something a society is inevitably built around. And if you observe a society, you can't, you can't deny that that's not true.

But there are people to whom the very notion of even advocating for the idea of family being central to society is a political statement that they find up horror because it excludes the means. moonlit upland. Right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. So there can be no, there is no kind of non-political dimension to human life. And this is something which, you know, again, I think it is, you know, it's a broadly religious idea. This is, this is a thesis not about the state, not about public policy, but about the way the world is. And so there's nothing within the world that that escapes the system, the system of oppression, the system of kind of our sort of structural captivity. And now, at one level, it's not wrong.

I mean, Aristotle has a famous line in politics that man is a politic on zon, is a political animal, by which he means he's an animal that belongs to the polis. That is an animal that is not designed to be, to exist alone. We are, to that extent, all political. We're all part of a moral community, but we've got to negotiate our participation in that in all sorts of different ways.

But yes, that's right. I mean, I think you've now got a situation where there can be no pre-political, everything, even configurations of family, the understanding of family life. Faith is now seen as freighted with, you know, ideologically problematic, assumptions or often faith is seen as an opportunity to sort of, you know, drive, drive a kind of

truck right through the established conventions that the faith historically had built up. So, you know, it is, it's a real struggle. And I think probably one of the reasons that conservatives tend to do so badly in a lot of these struggles is that politics. isn't everything. Politics is not something that you're going to do at the weekends. That it's, that it's, whereas, hopefully, whereas I see on the other side, there is a kind of, actually sometimes, you know, morally remarkable investment in the political, so it just dominates every, every, every, every aspect of those, those activist lives. It's that, it's that important. And there can be no weekends in the, in the, in the,

to liberate ourselves from tyranny. But, James, you haven't run off and joined a convent or jumped off a cliff or whatever, from which I deduce that you do believe something can be done about this? Yes. Because you're still doing stuff in the world. I'm still doing stuff and loving it,

and I'm happy and free and I'm doing work that I love with people I love spending time with. I think I'm fortunate. I'm in a remarkable university that has been through some spasms and here and there. But broadly speaking, when you look across the landscape, certainly of higher education across the West, certainly over the other side of the Atlantic, a place like Cambridge is still very much a place where you can speak freely, not many people maybe share the views that I share,

and there can be some resistance to it sometimes. But broadly speaking, it's a function, more than a functioning institution, and it's an institution in which one can live in intellectually and professionally flourishing life. But, yeah, I mean, there is, you know, I think they're broad, sometimes I think that, you know, people who are pessimistic about the consequences

of this revolution, are sometimes. sometimes think you're sort of in like a little bit, like you're in the 1520s, just right after the Reformation. You broadly had three strands. You had the sort of Lutherans, or early Lutherans anyway, I thought, well, we can reform this. The institution is bad, but we can reform it from within. Just give us a bit more time, a bit of diplomacy, a bit of organizing. We'll, you know, we'll regain the university, we'll regain the university, or regain this institution. And then I think there's a more radical strand that says, no, it's over. We're done here.

We need to build parallel institutions. I think you're seeing this in the United States. You're seeing to some degree a kind of sorting mechanism, a sorting pattern and sort of been into the red states and the blue states. And that's the kind of Calvinist option.

We need a Geneva. We're fed up with Brian, we need Geneva, we'll start again. And I sometimes think there's a third strand, and I think of these as what I call the digital Anabaptists. So the Anabaptist said, you know, now the problem is institutions

full stop, and we need networks, and we need to operate, and we can only flourish and operate outside the institutions. And I actually see what you guys are doing to sort of fall into that third strand. You are, you know, you've got enormous influence and reach, and you're engaged in a lot of these discussions and matters, but in a completely non-institutional mode. And that's actually very, very effective, particularly in this new digital public square,

which opens up all sorts of, you know, interesting kind of opportunities and dynamics. So I'm, you know, I'm in the first camp because I think in Cambridge, you know, all is not lost by any means. And I think the same is true of Oxford. If I were in some other universities in this country and certainly if I were many universities in the United States, I think I probably would say Barry Wise, Neil Ferguson, are spot on. they need to, we need to start something new. All my friend Stephen Blackwood who started Ralston College

or we need separate institutions. I just got back from Hillsdale College. It was hosted by the great Larry Arne, the president of Hillsdale College. Just a small classical liberal arts, Christian college, but it's a remarkable place. And just sticking to, you know, the Western canon, it's pretty ecumenical,

not denominational, and is doing fantastic work. And then, you know, and I admire and support people who want to build their new Geneva's and admire and support those who are operating outside the institutions in what you might call networks. I mean, this is Neil's Square and the Tower distinction, which I find very helpful. I mean, a lot of people are thinking, you know, the idea is that, you know, the tower is the way we tend to look at history, you know, big institutions, popes, kings, great men, etc.

Whereas in fact, a lot of the drivers of historical change and cultural change, economic change, are operating in the square down below, in the marketplace, through networks that are largely invisible to the naked eye of the historian. They're just harder to see. You know, you can trace the history of the institution much more easily than you can trace

the development of a sort of network of friends and, you know, patterns of correspondence and so on and so forth. But I think increasingly, the good that is to come, I do believe, is around the corner, will be those sort of networks in the square, as it were, or perhaps networks that end up in the tower. And there's something, there's a huge advantage to networks, I think.

And, you know, they're much more flexible. They can adapt much more rapidly to changing circumstances. Networks accommodate disagreement very well. You know, if you sort of, a couple people are fall out, or two important people and it fall out, that can be a disaster for an institution, institution splits, there's schisms and so on and so on. In a network, you just sort of, you know, rearrange the nodes a bit, maybe cut a couple off, but, you know, it's very, very sort of adaptable that changes.

The trouble is, I mean, institutions, you know, have this legacy that can go way beyond, you know, the lifetimes of its members, whereas networks are much more dependent on its people, on the people who make it up, which is not a bad thing. I mean, you know, it's, the good thing about networks is that they're easier to trust. I mean, you know,

I think it's more likely that the British Museum is going to go woke. Probably has gone woke. No, it is very woke. I was there a couple of months ago and I was staggered by what I saw. Right.

So more likely the British Museum to go, very likely the British Museum, guys, go away, than you, Francis will go away. That is to say, you know, people are much harder to, capture in that way, whereas institutions remarkably are, and we've seen this with astonishing speed. And that puts conservatives in a funny, you know, paradoxical situation, because the instinct is

to conserve. But why would we want to conserve capture? You know, we don't like burning things down. But what happens when maybe, you know, you do need to go off and do something else? You need to just say, look, this has got to the point where, you know, this is an institution that is hostile to me and hostile to all the values I hold dear, and I think hostile to the founding vision of the people who set it up and have been stewarding it over time. But, you know, I'm not going to spend my money and my time trying to keep it going and change it from within. And that puts conservatives in a very difficult position, or at least people with small

sea conservative instincts. And they're not natural reactionaries. It's not, you know, they don't like the barricades. So, yeah, that's a sort of spread of options as I see them and different people are sort of tuning themselves into different ones. And James, and what would you say to those people who go, look, everything that happens in America, we ingest, we take, and then we just apply it and we've seen it.

Look how bad things are over there. Look at bad things are, for instance, at Columbia University, which are talking about getting rid of the SATs as a way of assessing a student's academic ability. I mean, this is inevitably what's going to happen here, isn't it? So I agree. I mean, I agree that we are largely operating within our institutions and within our culture

and within, to some extent, our policymaking with a, dare I say it, a colonised mindset. And I think it's high-time. for some decolonization, but not the kind of decolonization that most people, most administrators these days have in mind of the UK. That is to say, we've lost our sense of what it is to be, I say to be British, but at least to emerge from this particular moral community, with this particular history, this particular make-up of people, these particular traditions. Yes, demographically we're very different, but we're very different mainly because a lot of people have

come over to live here since the Second World War because they love this rainy little island for some reason. And it's not because it's not the rain and it's not the food. There's some reason that something's attracted to them over here. And it's not because it's America. It's something different. And so we've lost that. I mean, I think there is a sense that it is quite extraordinary that I was talking to an academic about this the other day. It is quite extraordinary that the death of a man, tragic death of a man in a foreign city 5,000 miles away, can lead within 48 hours to that academic being asked about the skin color

of the authors on his undergraduate reading list. I mean, that is an ideology working at such speed and in such lockstep, but it's very, very hard to know how to respond to it, or let alone, you know, resist it. And again, I think people with conservative instincts are at a structural disadvantage here. Why? Because conservatives are conserving. This is a familiar point that conservatives are conserving their own particular traditions, their own particular laws and language and literature and religious expressions and so on. And so, you know, the Soviets used to have a common term, short for communist international, was founded in 1919, a movement. that tried to implement this idea of workers of the world unite.

It was an intrinsically cross-border universalizing movement. And similarly today, you could say, wokesters of the world unite. I mean, it has got a sort of transnational appeal. Well, let's add some nuance to that, James, because I don't think that's actually entirely true compared to the common term, because the common-turn idea was, for communism to work, everybody gets it, right? Like, otherwise, you're going to have places that are better, and then it's not going to work.

But with wokeness, it is a uniquely anglo-sphere phenomenon. Now, it is leaking out, you know, I did an interview for a German newspaper today. Like, people are such. But generally, it's an angloosphere phenomenon. Why are we so vulnerable to this mind virus in the anglosphere? Well, I mean, going back to what I suggested earlier, that if I'm right that this is a feature of liberalism, not a buck, then you would expect the feature to emerge in that part of the world

where liberalism has been dominant. So I think that's got a lot to do with it. And if you then marry that to the culture of the therapeutic, which we haven't really talked that much about, but the emergence of homo-psychologicus, the idea that human beings are primarily to be understood in terms of their sort of psychological balance and so on, if you throw that into the mix,

if you throw in some of the sort of Protestant evangelical impulses that, again, are quite sort of, you know, broadly particularly, historically at least distinctive to the English-speaking world, then you've got a kind of heady mix that I think explains quite naturally why wokeery, this kind of metastaside progressivism, has emerged in the English-speaking world rather than anywhere else.

But as with the other kind of institutions and ideas that we exported, rule of law and habeas corpus, et cetera, et cetera, it seems that this one also has export potential. It has export financial, potentially exactly right. But why does it?

Why is this idea so powerful because you're a philosopher, you deal in the world of ideas? Why is this idea so... I mean, people compare it to a virus. To me, it's almost a cliche now, but when I was working in the comedy industry, I was in it pre-woke, we both were.

And then all of a sudden, we just saw it spread and not just infect the industry, all the comedians, but also audiences as well. So why are the ideas so powerful? I mean, partly perhaps, because we've shifted, these ideas have shifted from the kind of normal sort of sphere of the political to what you might call the biopolitical,

that is to say, these issues now affect what it is to be me. Now, you could imagine, you know, back in the 1970s, you always had this big ding-dong between left and right over, say, you know, the intervention by the state or the degree of ownership of the means of production and economic distribution and so on and so forth. Now debates have shifted to issues that at least one side thinks pertain

to the constitutive elements in a person's identity. That one's sexual orientation, for example, or one's skin color or one's anatomy or whatever it might be, it actually belongs to, you know, is what I am. And therefore, any disagreement with it isn't just disagreement with a lifestyle or a set of political ideas, but is somehow an objection to me.

And so this is why you get these sort of strange language you hear on campus of erasure. You're erasing my existence. Or my, you know, and to talk of bodies. You know, bodies are sort of sites of moral focus. It's a language that can, you know, sound very strange to our ears. But that's what's going on. This is the biopolitical. And this makes disagreement almost always turn into, or be seen as, a kind of assault, a kind of an attack.

I mean, evangelical Christians, they have this motto, what was it, hate the sin, love the sinner. This is the idea. You heard this in the same-sex marriage debates in the United States, whenever it was 10 years ago. We love all people, we love all people, but there's certain activities that we find to be morally objectionable and not conducive to human flourishing. For many years, this was just a sort of normal distinction to draw. The arrival of identity politics meant that it was impossible to hate the sin and love the sin. Hating the sin meant hating the sinner because the sin was just, as it were, under what was

understood as the sin was just intrinsic to what a person was. So that really ramps up the, you know, ramps up the sort of decibel levels of public debate. And if you then add to the mix, this sort of therapeutic shift from sin to syndrome, where, you know, what were previously seen as forms of life or activities or acts that were are invaluable in moral terms, negatively or sort of condemned in moral terms, but are now somehow, you know, where they're not welcome, are not actually, you know, not actually my fault, but due to the sort of certain forms of psychological oppression that I've been subjected to, you've there got a sort of a recipe for kind of the deep kind of tectonic disagreement that

that is almost just impossible to bridge. And this is why we see the dialogue of the death that you've seen so much of you that you guys picked up on almost earlier than almost anyone on the comedy circuit. And James, I suppose the one thing we haven't talked about,

and you mentioned the Reformation, I mean, the Reformation is a product to some extent of the changing nature of the media environment, to put it very, you know, very fancifully for what it was, you know, the ability for people to read more and for the fact that not only the church

could print information for people to read, that changed the entire landscape. You get centuries of religious war, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it seems to me, at least, like we've just lived through another revolution and we are still living through another revolution of exactly the same kind. And I would argue, and I'm interested to hear your opinion,

that the fact that we live online as much as we do now means that ideas that sound good but are practically not true will reliably outperform ideas that sound bad but are practically more true. And I would argue that a large reason why this spread of this ideology is coincided with the spread of social media and online communication is that woke ideas sound great.

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot to that and that they've got a kind of self-sustaining energy and appeal and that the emergence of the digital public square and digital means of communication has just sort of, you know, made the, you know, it just accelerated the kind of transmission of these different ideas and accelerated to the dissolution of all of those bonds that would hold a society together. And, you know, and you see, and there's a kind of capitalist I mentioned to this too, you know, as markets become more liquid, then that's going to have, you know, subversive effects

on a settled moral community that is broadly tradition-based. That's not always a bad thing. I mean, you know, and it has, you know, ownership and capital and employment can have subversive effects, which are not, you know, not necessarily bad effects. I think of maybe traditional African communities, and, you know, it's hard to be patriarchal when your daughter's earning more than you, for example. So, yes, I mean, but I think you're right to compare it to the Reformation. I mean, I think it's what we're seeing at the moment, I think what we're living through is of that order of magnitude. I think it's that sort of epochal a shift, both in terms of technology and in the reconfiguration of,

public space and the marketplace of ideas that it's bringing about, partly because it's, I mean, it's dissolving the marketplace. This is something that is very, very difficult for conservatives to cope with, because, you know, the sort of conservatives had basically worked out how to conserve what they wanted to conserve, but these acids are just far more powerful than they're able to deal with. And so that's why you're seeing, as it were, the sort of phenomena that have held people together,

whether it's faith or whether it's ordinary, you know, normal sort of ordinary family structures or allegiance to a common nation state or just allegiance to your local town, your local village. All of that has now sort of gone out the window. And so there's a kind of you know, there's an asymmetry, as it were, the technology has sort of accelerated the asymmetry

between those who value what's near and dear, who want to devote their affections to basically to the local or to the land or to this country rather than the world. It makes it very, very hard to kind of sustain that, to make that idea appealing. And so, so, this is, yeah, I mean, that's no doubt at all that technology is driven, you know, has made these ideas sort of a lot more attractive and has sort of accelerated their spread.

Isn't also part of the problem as well, that conservatism simply isn't cool, James? And I'll give you an example of this. If you think of any of the great artists, we'll take music, for example, particularly of the last 50 or 60 years, the great artists, David Bowie, were transgressive. Yeah. They were progressive. They were They subverted societal norms. They played with what we know to be, you know, the norms, as I said before. Conservatives are never going to do that because they intent on keeping things as they are.

And isn't that the problem as well? People ask me, we're a conservative comedian. Of course, there are some comedians who are conservative, but the vast majority in the people who are attracted to the arts are themselves. liberal by nature because they have open-mindedness, they're progressive, they want things to change. And by the way, even in this country, the comedians who you would say are conservative,

Jeff Norco. Yeah. Really isn't a conservative. Leo Kirst, really isn't it. Simon Evans. You know, like these are people who are, they're not on the left, but they're not sitting there saying,

we must conserve what we have. Like, they still have a kind of countercultural or at least, you know, unorthodox views about the world. They're not trying to preserve everything exactly rigidly as it is. There's a wonderful line by a Scottish poet whose name escapes me for the time being. He says, let me write the songs of a nation and I care not who writes its laws. And there's no doubt that culture, whether artistic creation, has a kind of binding effect, is able to elicit the desires and the loyalties and the feelings of people far, far better than the kind of, you know,

the alternative, far far better than kind of, you know, rules and traditions and going to church or whatever it might be. So you're right. There is a problem there. Feelings don't care about your facts. And the people who are best able to excite and quicken your feelings are the ones who have got an advantage. I suppose what I'd say is that there's been, there has been a sort of boomeramming effect that you guys have lived through and you've witnessed, and Jeff and others, and Simon, have witnessed. Yes, you're right, that the Conservatives weren't able, you know, sort of, what, at least recently, I'm going to say it's always been true, but, you know, the last 50, 60 years when artistic freedom has been associated with political freedom, often in very effective and powerful ways.

but since since the dawn of that kind of fusion is absolutely true that Conservatives has been on the back phone but what are we witnessing now what we're witnessing now is just as much I'd say far more sterility and sameness

in artistic production and in comedy and music and TV dramas and film I mean I was just looking down the Oscars list the other day and I realized that the last time I'd seen a film actually seen a film at all that had won best arcs go was I think 2014 and 2013 2014 and there's 12 years of stay I think it was and so it's not as if you know a kind of broadly liberal kind of transgressive momentum is um is is doesn't itself have negative

you know blowback effects and so we're now in this strange position where um you know artistic genius has been sort of desiccated, partly because novelty is discouraged. And the ideological lockstep demands innovation only in the ornamental. There's a new orthodoxy. Sorry. There's a new orthodoxy. And it's an orthodoxy that has to be conserved at all costs. And so there is a kind of, you know, and that conservation involves

excluding any sort of dangerous ideas or any new ways of expressing things that might go against or cut against the grain of the ideology that's being conserved. And you might say that one talks about conservatism and liberalism. I mean, really, these are, you know, they're parasitic terms. I mean, liberalism just, you know, there's always the second question that needs to come. Or freedom for what? You know, what kind of freedom? Freedom to do what?

Just any kind of freedom? Is that what you're sort of basing your whole worldview on? And same with the conservatives. Conserving what? I mean, it's an intrinsically kind of parasitic idea. Well, you're conserving. Do you want to be a conservative in Berlin in 1943? You want to conserve that?

No, I mean, obviously not. So this is where you have this interesting and quite interesting but often quite anemic debate in academic department, political departments, political philosophy department. and also among politicians between conservatives and liberals because, you know, the thought is

that conservatism is basically, you know, conserving the fruits of the previous revolution, you know, and that conservatism is a kind of hesitation within liberalism. It's sort of liberalism at the speed limit, you know, that there isn't something prior and deeper that's being conserved that comes before the Enlightenment, actually.

And now, I think that's true. And I think that a lot of conservatives, people who think that they're conservatives, are coming after the Enlightenment, see themselves as basically, you know, conserving liberalism from, you know, a couple of centuries ago. I mean, Roger Scruton is a great,

of whom I am an enormous admirer, and was fortunate enough to know him towards the end of his life. I mean, he is like this. I mean, he says that, you know, he's basically a canty, Everything before Kant is just, you know, confusion and delay and all this strange god stuff and all these sort of medevils, et cetera, et cetera. Really, it all begins there, but let's just, you know, let's go slow. Drive at the speed limit. So, yeah, I mean, this back and forth is helpful, but I think what we're seeing now is the emergence of something very, very different.

And in a funny way, you might have seen. seen this a kind of coalition between liberals and conservatives from the sort of post-war, or during the war and beyond the war, where effectively you couldn't really tell the difference between these two broad constituencies, broad sort of ideological families, because there was a common enemy uniting them in Marxism, Marxist-Leninism. And then you have this sort of strange, sort of unraveling period between the early 90s and, let's say, 2010, this sort of golden era, which I went through school and university in this, what we all thought, you know, end of history

and the sort of and the kind of the dusk of all kind of political conflict and all of that. But in fact, that was just a, you know, it was a pause. And there's a new religion and new outlook that is emerging now, which is creating once again a kind of very strong alignment between old-school liberals and conservatives, old-school lefties as well, old-school Marxists, who want to talk about class and not identity and so on.

And it's a great, you know, it's a great coalition to be in. It's a lot of fun. I mean, a lot of my, you know, if you told me that, you know, five, six years ago, I'd be cheering on gender-critical, lesbian, Marxist, feminists, you know, and they go for it.

You know, you're fighting a tremendous battle and seeing myself as broadly, you know, broadly aligned with their vision of freedom and reason and the pursuit of truth and so on. I mean, I'd have thought you were mad if I'd be, you know, if you told me I'd be, you know, part of an alliance with them. But but what we are where we are, and I think that's a, it's an exciting time. It's exciting time to be alive. I mean, imagine kind of coming of age in the late 80s. I mean, just how boring that would have been, you know. The ability to pry property.

There we go, all of that stuff. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you were enjoying yourself, James. But I'm curious. I mean, we've obviously talked about a lot of this in the past and with you today. What color is your pill is the question? What do you see coming? What is the future look like, according to Dr. James Orr?

Well, look, I mean, I probably don't share your kind of proximate optimism. I mean, I think that this is... Can I, sorry to interrupt you so early, but can I just adjust that? Because I am not saying I have looked into the future and what I see is this beautiful post-woke utopia in which we all hold hands and sing kumbaya and live happily ever after. I'm saying either it's that or it's the end of Western civilization as we've come to conceive of very very. So let's at least try and do that. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying I'm saying, I'm saying it's like, well, you know, this is the fight.

We've got to fight because this is what's happening. And my worry is if the fight is fought solely from the perspective of woke people or idiots, we can all agree on that, but there's not much we can agree on beyond that. And that is not a recipe for, you know, from a sales point of view, that's not a great sales technique. The other guy's shit is not a great sales technique. That's all I'm saying. I apologize for you. Very helpful, very helpful distinction.

And, you know, I agree with you. There's nothing to disagree with there. Look, I mean, I did classics at universities. So, I mean, I love studying civilizations that I thought were amazing, but that faded and vanished and disappeared. The Roman civilization lasted an unbelievably long time, I mean, in relative terms.

So civilizations, you know, Spangler's right. civilizations have a certain sort of life cycle and empires have a life cycle. I think some people have calculated it to roughly 250 years, which would give America another three years. 12-2026 midterms. It wasn't quite an empire when it started, so maybe we can give them a bit more time. Maybe and it would have certainly emerged from an empire maybe, but yeah so I you know it I think talk of white pills and black pills and this sort of talk is not helpful, partly because I think there's an element of contingency in how things, as I said earlier, and how things unfold, that we should always factor in.

I'm a Christian, and I take the view that biological death is not death, and that the human individual has a transcendent, infinite value that, you know, It is of a kind that reduces the lifetime of civilizations to nothing. That's all very well for you. There's a lot of us that are going to become bodies in the ground. And before we do, I want to, I mean, you mentioned the lifetime of civilizations. Do you think this is we're kind of on the downslope? I think it's hard to avoid that conclusion for the time.

being. I mean, I do think, you know, it may take a very long time, but if the question is, you know, have we passed our peak? I'd say, yeah, we probably have. And we may have passed it some time ago. And, you know, part of me thinks, you know, barbarians are not at the gates. They've been in, they've been in the city, they're manning the citadel, and they've been there for quite a while. Which is what happened in Rome to a large extent. They started to encroperate barbarian tribes into the military. This is an interesting, you know, in whatever it was, August 410 AD, the barbarians didn't besiege Rome. They strolled in.

They walked in. Civilizations typically destroy themselves from within. They become spent, exhausted. They are crippled by burdens that they themselves have generated. It's quite rare, apart from Genghis Khan, but it's quite rare for, as it were, foreign foes, external foes, to come in and sweep and destroy everything, destroy a civilization just like that.

They die from within. And I think it's hard to avoid the sort of smell of civilizational death at times, and very easy to get pessimistic. But, you know, as glorious as Western civilization has been, It doesn't have an automatic right to ascendancy. It has to be fought for. And we've forgotten how to fight for it.

And we've got nervous about fighting for it. The other side, the side that thinks that really anything to do Western civilization just is to be repudiated completely. It's well organized. It knows what it thinks. It may be statistically numerically in a minority. But that doesn't really matter. As we know, it tends to be.

minority elites that can achieve massive, massive social, cultural, and political change. And I can't remember what it is, but I mean, I don't want to compare them to the Bolsheviks. But think back to the, you know, in 1917, the Bolsheviks were a tiny, relatively small minority. And I think we're seeing, you know, it doesn't really matter what large swathes of the population actually believe. And in fact, when you do a lot of the polling on, for example, I don't know, attitudes to our imperial past and attitudes to our heritage or attitudes on, you know, sex and gender and so on. There's actually a very mixed picture, or very often, a clear majority that is against the sort of dominant elite voices. And we've recognised this pattern again and again. But it doesn't seem

to have any effect. And certainly the ballot box doesn't seem to, you know, do much. I mean, it doesn't seem to affect much change at all. I mean, there are signs, I think, here and there, maybe in the Conservative Party at the moment glimmers, there are signs in the United States and certain states in Florida and Texas and elsewhere, there are signs of some sort of more organized attempt to offer an alternative vision and a reasoned repudiation and critique

of the people who are kind of, you know, of the people who are kind of, these acids drip through and dissolving a sort of the settlement of Western civilization. And, you know, there may be reasons to be hopeful that they will kind of staunch the flow. Who knows? So, I mean, I'm broadly, you know, in the near term, pretty pessimistic. in the long term, look, there's a line of Horace's great Roman poet. I did Latin perth. I studied at university.

Here's a line that you can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but it's always going to come rushing in through the back door. So, you know, reality is a very good ally to have on your side. It's in the end, you're going to, and the more detached, an ideology becomes from underlying, the more it slips its moorings from the world, from human nature in particular, the less sustainable is going to become. And just the less self-evident those ideological claims are going to be. That's why there's been so much energy devoted to shutting down free speech

as why you've had such sort of kind of corrosive attacks on academic freedom because I think the more radical in ideology gets, the less it can afford the open playing field, you know, the sort of the crucible of scrutiny in a kind of open and free

marketplace of ideas. James, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. we always end with our final question, which is always the same, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? What's one thing that we're not talking about? My gosh, that's a very good question. Well, look, I mean, here's probably too bland and generic an answer, but one of the things we're not talking about is what are the pre-political sources of meaning?

that we can share, we can sort of draw on that will help us stitch ourselves together into a flourishing community. We know that culture has started to dissolve. We know that politics is a no-go area. Religion is complicated. How do we find, you know, what are those? What is the glue that could stitch us together? And we're not asking that question because, you know, it's very difficult to ask it. I mean, very, very few people have got, I've got the ideas. Hopefully that will, you know, emerge over time. So it's not as concrete an answer as back, maybe you were. But it's exactly the right answer for the moment, I think. That's why I asked you this question, because if there is an answer, it is going to be produced by asking the question.

Yeah. You know, and the difficulty we face, as I think you're right to say, is we don't have much in answer to that at the moment. But I think the reality is, the solution is within that answer to a lot of this stuff. And we're all, you know, those of us who are thinking about this stuff, we're all going to have to agree

on something beyond not liking the other people. That's just going to have to happen. And that may mean the problem for a lot of people, particularly, the sort of more liberal of us, is we don't like telling other people what to do. Yeah, absolutely. And once you get into the realms of, you know, it's family, it's this and it's that,

there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a hesitation there that perhaps is a reflection of the fact that 30 or 40 years ago, there were a lot of people going, you must have a family. And none of us wanted to be told that because we wanted to make our own choices in life. But maybe, maybe there is an opportunity to work out a more, and this is what Peterson and I talk, about when I was on his podcast is it has to be sort of invitational enrolling. It has to be like you don't have to have a family. You don't have to do anything. You're a free, atomized individual just like you believe.

However, if you want to have a good life, here's some of the things that people have found in the past that do help you towards that. Maybe that's what it looks like. Couldn't agree more. Read old books, trust old books, trust old books because you need to recognize that you need to recognize that ideas age in reverse. We get weaker as we get older, ideas get stronger as they get older. And there's a deep truth to that. When you're trying to implement a new ideology, you want historical ground zero. You want everybody to forget the past. It's all world's old line.

Whoever controls the past controls the present, whoever controls the present, controls the future and all of that. So read old books, not on Kindle. That that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, That would be, I think that would be, you know, wise advice and don't neglect, don't neglect the wisdom of the past. Spoken like a true conservative. Dr. James, before we let you go, we're obviously going to ask you a few questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see. And I think a lot of it is actually on the subject.

We haven't talked too much about, which is religion, because that is one of the things, obviously, that you do professionally. before we let you go, where can people find your work online and what would you like them to know about things coming up, etc.? Thank you. Well, look, I've just stepped into the bear pit. I've just stepped onto Twitter. My handle is JTW or O'DR. So you can follow me there.

I can't promise great wisdom, but at the moment I'm busy announcing speakers for this upcoming National Conservatism Conference middle of May, 15th, 16th, 17th, May, 2023 in Westminster, sign up, National Conservatism, UK. You'll find all the details on my Twitter profile. And if you can bear it,

you can inflict some of my academic work on yourselves by going to my faculty webpage at the Faculty of Divinity University of Cambridge. Look for my name. Dr. James-Doh, thank you so much and thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you on locals very shortly. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. What evidence is there that the biblical character we now know as Jesus, Yeshua, I think is the way you pronounce it, ever actually existed?