TRIGGERnometry - The Eye-Opening Truth About Western Civilisation - Marc Sidwell

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

Marc Sidwell is Director of Research at The Henry Jackson Society. He has worked as a senior editor for the Telegraph and City A.M. and as publisher for the New Statesman. He is a Senior Fellow at the New Culture Forum for which he wrote and presented THE WEST, a landmark six-part documentary series celebrating the history, achievements and genius of Western Civilisation. Watch THE  WEST: https://www.westerncivilization.co.uk/ SPONSORED BY: AG1. Go to https://www.drinkAG1.com/triggernometry/ to get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase! Konstantin's book, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09RWMLNYH/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.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. 00:00 Intro  01:42 Marc Sidwell’s Background 03:59 The Origin of Authority & The Traditional Idea of the West 09:15 European Empire & The Slave Trade 11:16 The Importance of Understanding Our History 13:56 How The West Misrepresents Slavery 18:19 Christianity’s Role in The Development of Our Civilisation 21:44 Sponsor Message: AG1 23:40 How Did The Barbarians Become Christianised Over Time? 27:59 Why is The Magna Carta so Important to Our Nation? 31:57 The West Is Under Threat! 35:08 What Will Cause The Collapse of The West? 36:57 How Did The Enlightenment Happen? 42:43 Differences Between The West & The Islamic World 43:57 What Marc Learned During The Making of “THE WEST”? 45:58 If The West Keeps Disrupting Itself, What Does That Mean For Our Future? 50:06 How Has The Decline of Christianity Affected Our Civilisation? 52:08 Why Marc is Optimistic For The West 55:52 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I grew up with that Cold War idea of the West as a thing that was sort of moral and great and worth standing up for against the sort of slave empire of communism. And then I suddenly realized that like 20, 30 years, no one had been taught that. And the current generation don't know that story. In fact, they only know the other story, which is the one that says, you know, the West is uniquely evil and awful. We're under threat from without because there are very real people, Chinese and the Russians who are coming together now very explicitly.

saying, we want a different world order. What you get in Magna Carta is the idea of the rule of law. We talked about individualism. The thing about the rule of law is it says every individual, even the king, is under the same law. And we can go to court and we can thrash it out, but we'll follow the rules and we'll see who comes out on top. The other threat is inside. And that is the fact that we have started to not teach, first of all to not teach about Magna Carta or the West or what it is. and in fact to teach the opposite, to teach that it is awful.

The foundations of the Western system are just being knocked down casually by people don't understand because they haven't been taught what they mean and how everything that they value, everything that makes their lives what they are, rest on these things. And, you know, there's a reckoning that can come with that. Hello, Anne, welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin.

And this is a show for you. if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our terrific guest today is the senior fellow at the New Culture Forum and the presenter and director of a brilliant series, and I'm not just saying because I was in it, it is actually very, very good here on YouTube called The West. Mark said, well, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks so much for having me.

Oh, it's so great to have you. I already told you this story, but our audience should know. A lot of people, so you recorded some interviews with a lot of people and I was one of them, and I never had a chance to watch it because I've got a lot of stuff that I'm working on whatever. But so many people kept saying to me, oh, that series you were in is so good called The West. So I eventually watched that, and it is actually brilliant.

Before we talk about it, though, do tell us who are you, how you where you are, what has been the journey through life that brings you here talking to us. So I work with a number of think tanks. I'm a senior fellow at the New Culture Forum, which made the series. I'm also the head of research at the Henry Jackson Society, which stands up for the Free Society at home and abroad.

but actually I had a long gap in between. I used to work for ThinkTanks about 15 years ago. And then I thought, well, the world's doing okay. I think these problems are going to be fine. And I went off to have a career in business journalism, and I thought, that'd be fine. And then I looked up and I thought, oh, the world has actually gone mad since the end of the Cold War.

Things haven't gone well. Russia hasn't democratized China, certainly hasn't come into the family of nations and things at home are getting increasingly unfree and intolerant. And so it brought me back because I thought, we needed to start talking about these questions again, or I needed to re-engage with the debate. And in particular, the idea of the West, which is really the idea of this series, because, you know, I'm an 80s kid. I grew up with that Cold War idea of the West as a thing that

was sort of moral and great and worth standing up for against the sort of slave empire of communism. And then I suddenly realized that for like 20, 30 years, no one had been taught that. And the current generation don't know that story. In fact, they only know the other story, which is the one that says, you know, the West is uniquely evil and awful. So I thought I wanted to use new technology for a new generation and tell that story again that no one had heard for a long time. And you do it beautifully. And one of the things I really enjoyed about it,

and actually our producer Anton was saying it to you as you were sitting down, how informative it is. I'd like to think I'm one of the West's big fans. I have a whole book about it. But I actually learned so much. One of the things that you talk about, I found fascinating, is that the idea of democracy or the idea that authority should be answerable to the people below actually comes from barbarians. That was really interesting. Tell us about that.

Well, yeah, the older traditional idea of the West often is told in a narrative that goes back to ancient Greece and Rome as if there was a sort of unbroken tradition. And it's very true that the West draws on some ideas from ancient Greece and from Rome. It was a big influence. But there are problems historically with that narrative. There's really, there's a big break that happens. And the West, I think, really begins with the fall of Rome. It's what happens after the empire goes. And then you get the barbarians, the Germanic tribes, that come in.

And they're really, they're very poor, they're primitive. But they have this enormous focus on the individual and other sort of individual pride. And as a result, a sort of culture of not quite democracy, but of freedom, of free men who sort of vote together as who should be their leader. and that culture, I think, was enormously important in forming the West and giving its shape. I mean, not just on its own. I think also it's the interaction of that with Christianity, which is really the form in which the traditions of Rome came into that part of Europe, because Christianity and the Church survived the fall of Rome.

But I think that's a much more honest place to start the conversation about the West. And also it gets away from this sort of grand idea of the West as something that's sort of Roman and imperial and gets back to the real truth, the adventure of the West is this poor, primitive, divided corner of Europe that is nothing like as rich, nothing like as civilized in traditional terms as other parts of the world like China and the Islamic world, but that nonetheless has this thing in it, this spark out of which are going to come things that have never been seen before in human history, things like experimental science, like industrial capitalism, like parliamentary democracy. There was something there, something there that's about the individual. And that is

partly, I think, an inheritance out of those Germanic tribes. It's so interesting, because I've never really thought about it like that. But actually, the story of the West and the way that you describe it is a story of, depending how you want to look at it, either coming from very humble beginnings or a tremendous recovery from a gigantic setback, which is the collapse of Rome. And then, you know, I remember seeing various exhibitions here in the UK about what happened after the Romans left Britain. And the tribes that came after, who hadn't directly been in contact with the Roman civilization, the gap between them and the Romans technologically was so vast that they thought that the buildings that the Romans are directed here, which were nothing

as impressive as the ones they built actually in Rome, were the work of gods, because they couldn't imagine engineering at that level. And to come from that to being the most successful civilization in the history of the world, is quite remarkable, isn't it? It's quite remarkable. And I think the West, you know, it's the triumph of the small. It's the triumph of giving power to individuals. It didn't really happen because of like a grand theory. It happened because when Rome fell and then Europe was divided. No one could exert power from above to tell people what to do. Plus you had this culture from below that was quite individualistic anyway. So then people were free to play around with ideas. There wasn't enough people who could who could quash it. traditional civilizations, which in many ways the West isn't, are much more about stability, about power from the top, about great empires. And the problem with that is you can get to quite a high level of sophistication, but its primary virtue is stability and stasis and the people at the top keeping power. And they say no to the dangerous, crazy ideas that might

take them forward. And so that's why you don't get industrialization happening elsewhere, where you don't get all the crazy inventions. You know, Columbus going to the new world. Well, so the Chinese had great treasure voyages, huge, much more sophisticated fleets that went out into the world. But they weren't that interested because they thought they were more important.

And it was all controlled from the Imperial Court. So when the Imperial Court said, well, we don't want to do that anymore. Ban the ships, burn the ships, whatever. No one goes. In Europe, you have an independent, crazy guy, Columbus, who's like, I think that we can get you know, to Asia by going over the ocean. And he was wrong that you could do that because

he thought the world was much smaller than it actually was. And, you know, smart people could have told him that. But he had a crazy idea and he went around to different monarchs in Europe and he said, give me some money, I'll go and do this. Some said no. But there was always someone else you could go to. And in fact, I discovered which I didn't know, that if the Spanish hadn't said yes, Henry the seventh, I think it was in England, had said yes. He'd said yes to Columbus's brother, but by the time he got back, they'd already gone with Spanish money. So it's an interesting counterfactual, you know, that the English might have been the financiers of that voyage. But the point was it couldn't be stopped. There's something unstoppable

in the West because it's so divided and broken and competitive. There's always another power centre that you can go to. That means wild ideas sort of bubble up. It's a really good point because you wouldn't get that in China like you said before. There's so many aspects of your documentary that I found fascinating, in particular when you talk about empire and the slave trade, because it seems to me we have an absolutely blinked approach to talking about these subjects, which understandably can be seen as quite contentious. Absolutely, and I think this is very important because it's become a huge debate of the moment as to, you know, how should we feel about the British Empire?

And that's by no means is a particularly pro-imperial series. I tend to think that empire is the sort of traditional solution of civilization. You build a giant empire. The interesting thing about the European ones for all their faults and obviously terrible things suddenly happened, but there were lots of them. So even there, there was competition going on. But there was also all of these different, very unusual European values,

Western values bubbling under the surface, about the individual, about what you could and couldn't do to other peoples and how you might want to bring them on board. I talk about the example of Columbus, again, who, you know, a very complicated figure, not always a great guy, brought back some slaves, native slaves, to Spain. And the monarch said,

well, can we actually have these slaves? Is that right? And they spent several years thinking about it. And they said, well, no. Because those are potential Christians, these are people we could convert. And that means that they have to be treated with respect. They actually can't be enslaved.

And that was, you know, quite a bold way of thinking about the native populations, you know, because the sheer power dynamic, well, you could, obviously you could enslave them, but actually maybe there were reasons you couldn't. The tragedy, partly of what happened in the new world, was to do with, you know, the epidemics that were, no one could predict or control, which just wiped out millions and millions of people with diseases that they weren't used to being exposed to. Absolutely, in particular in South America, when the Spanish came over, there's a joke in Venezuela that the conquistadors gave the native population the flu

and then the flu gave the native population gonorrhea. So it was a lovely little exchange. But I was going to say, do you get... Wait, the flu? No, you mean the natives gave. No, no, no, no. The Spanish gave the native population the flu. The flu, the native population gave the Spanish.

That's what I was correct. You said the flu gave them gonorrhea. Oh, right, okay. That is a really interesting mix of things. Now, that is a version of history I have never heard. But do you sometimes get frustrated at how we discuss these topics? Because in a way, well, in many ways, it's completely, it's ridiculous. It's being discussed from a point of view that knows the answer.

I think that's the problem. And knows the answer basically is that the West is awful and the empires were terrible. And that, you know, slavery was of the West, the transatlantic slave trade, which obviously was a horrific thing, was the worst thing. was the worst thing ever in history and there was nothing else like it and that Western sin is the thing we must focus on. And that

has no nuance. It has no historical context. And it really just, it exists to kind of gnaw at Western confidence from within, which really matters. It matters today because that's the spirit you need to resist real

alternatives in the world, real alternatives from China, from Russia, which are places which they are now the first to stand up and make grand speeches about how the West is evil and talk about anti-colonialism and talk about all the terrible things the West did

while they are literally putting people in caps while they are literally aggressively invading other countries but they use this anti-Western language to sort of make up as if we are the villains while they're doing truly dreadful things and we need that confidence

to stand up against that And we can't have that if we have this false idea of history in which we are always the villains without even checking the facts. There's a great book by Nigel Beghar. And I interview him for the series as well. And I talked to Nigel about it. And that book, he says in the book and he said to me, you know, the reason he writes it is not just to tell the truth about empire and colonialism to offer a more nuanced moral account. but because that matters because otherwise we don't have the confidence today to preserve liberal democratic civilization against the forces which are ranged against it.

And it's a great point because if you spoke to someone about the transatlantic slave trade, they would be able to tell you certain things about it, and they would be able to explain why it happened. But if you ask someone about the trans-Saharan slave trade, they wouldn't have a clue. I mean, most people wouldn't. Unless they read my book. Or heard your wonderful interview about it, which is in the series, I think, which is very good. We have this conversation about whether slavery should be taught in schools and so on.

And my answer to that is yes. The problem is we don't teach about slavery in schools. What we teach about is the transatlantic slave trade. And this way of looking at the world is quite silly to me. It's sort of like evaluating whether a sprinter is fast or slow without comparing them to anybody else. You can't do it. You have to understand what was happening everywhere else at the same time. And I talk about my own family history of being slaves in Russia.

I talk about what was happening in my country, what was happening in Africa when the evil Western Cologne lists arrived. And by the way, the transatlantic slave trade was absolutely evil by the standards or the modern day. But it wasn't as bad as the trans-Saharan slave trade, which was conducted mainly by Muslim and Arab traders. didn't last as long, didn't take as many lives, didn't have such a high death rate, and slavery was continually practiced around the world much later, and only ended, by the way, thanks to the Western colonial powers, putting a lot of effort and a lot of money into it. Does that excuse the transatlantic slave trade?

Of course not. But it gives you the context to understand that the Western powers are and remain some of the most progressive, tolerant societies that have ever been created. and our crimes, which are many, there is no doubt there are many, should be seen in the context of that, in the context of the fact that other great civilizations and empires around the world, we're doing the exact same things and worse at the same time, and we ended it, we stopped it.

Not only did we end it within our own empires and our own borders, but we also then spent over a century, spending vast amounts of money and power and treasure out in the world trying to enforce this on other people and trying to stop slavery wherever we could. Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish the slave trade and then to abolish slavery and it then led the world in suppressing both of those, as I said, from Brazil across Africa to Malaysia. That was extraordinary. No other state had done that before. No other states had done that before, certainly not in Africa, certainly not in Asia, nor in a

among the indigenous peoples of North America. That was extraordinary. And we carried on doing that for until the end of the empire in the 1960s. And in the 1820s and 30s, the Slave Trade Department in the British Horon Oppos was the largest unit. And in the 1830s, 40s thereabouts, 13% of the total manpower of the Royal Navy was devoted to stopping slave ships leaving West Africa for the Americas, just stopping that quite apart from stopping slavery elsewhere. And that is an extraordinary legacy, an extraordinary moment in human history,

where slavery goes from being part of the background, something that's awful maybe, but something that's kind of understood that it happens sometimes, to being something that's morally unacceptable. and morally unacceptable because of a deep understanding of what the principles of Western civilization are, and that to live up to those more fully, we're going to have just wipe this thing out. Which brings us neatly onto Christianity, because that's really what you're talking about. But before we go there, I went to the Slavery Museum in Liverpool, and in many ways it's very good.

But nowhere in it, and I went through the whole thing, because it's an interesting subject, historically speaking, to look at. Does it say who was it that sold the slaves, nor does it really talk about how the slave trade was ended around the world, by the way, whose idea was that it should not happen? Can't trust Scouse as much. Well, that's certainly true. We have a Scouse of running the show. But Christianity, Mark, what is the role that Christianity plays in the development of our civilization? Because there are some people that might argue on David Starkey, who are, former guest on our show who might argue. Actually, it's the religion that brings down the Roman Empire. It's the sort of wokeness of antiquity that sort of takes a powerful and confident civilization and makes it meek and feeble and so on. And yet here we are. So what is the story

of Christianity in the context of our civilization? Christianity is a morally revolutionary way of thinking about the world. It is itself against dominance and power from the top and in many ways against empire, arguably. And it was a revolution inside the Roman system. Of course, the Roman system being imperial was in many ways very cruel, very terrible to women, in particular. It was often the women who understood, first of all, you know, the attraction of Christianity. And it spoke powerfully after the Roman period to these Germanic tribes. This was a whole new kind of heroism. and they were very attracted to, in part, I think, because it was a heroism that was democratic.

It wasn't just a few people at the top who could be heroes, you know, the sort of the true aristocrats, but anyone, and that everyone mattered, and that that became a very, very powerful force in Western history. And, you know, more recently, I suppose, there has been a tendency to see the sort of key liberal democratic ideas as coming later, coming very much from the,

the Enlightenment, say. But scholarship, I think, has moved on since that time. And you see books, more popular books like Tom Holland's book, Dominion, more scholarly books like Larry Seedentop's book, Inventing the Individual, which go back much further in time and say, you really have to look to the medieval period, to the period where Christianity is this sort of dominant intellectual system inside Europe, inside the West.

And that that is what shapes a lot of these ideas about human rights, individual, rights and indeed democracy as well, and that that comes through into the present day. We're so Christian in a way that we don't culturally, that we don't really recognize it anymore. It's like a fish being in water and not knowing what water is. And that doesn't mean that everyone needs to be Christian or you need some kind of imposed Christianity, but culturally, the ideas that we take for granted are in many ways Christian. And as you say, the fight against the slave trade was profoundly driven by Christian sentiment.

And I think that Christian ability to go somewhere revolutionary and to say, well, we know this is the established system. This is like, you know, the economy is built on it in certain ways and it's making people rich. And it's just how things have been done. But to say, well, actually, no, no. And an ordinary person like William Wilberforce or someone who drinks their tea with sugar, in it can turn around and say, I can't be part of this and I won't have any sugar from enslaved plantations or I'll stand up against this. That vast popular movement that anti-slavery was was imbued with that spirit.

And that's very Christian. Mark, and fill in a historical gap for me. How do we go from the collapse of the Roman Empire, which by this point is already Christian, basically? Yeah. To the barbarian, sort of that period. and then the emergence of medieval kingdoms, which are all pretty much universally Christian in Europe.

How does that happen? How do the barbarians become Christianized over time? Well, as I say, the church is really the one bit of the Roman system that survives because it's not really part of the empire, but it's there within it. And it has a network across Europe of bishops. It has monasteries. You have this system forming that can survive the collapse. And as the empire goes away, the church is there providing a network of local power and of knowledge and literacy, even often.

And so that provides something of an intellectual culture that can then crystallize around these various Germanic tribes. And they recognize something in it. They recognize the fascination of the ideas. They quite like this sort of individualistic aspect. They find in it and they turn it into something perhaps rather more warlike. That appeals to them as well. There's different ways you can receive Christianity. They rather liked it as something they could wave as a battle flag as they went in,

which have been true in the Roman times too. That's why Constantine took it up as the symbol of the cross to go into battle under. But so the Germans took that, or the barbarians, we should say, took that idea. it became though a new kind of culture that formed, particularly in the northern monasteries in Britain. And then from there, long way from the old imperial centres in Rome, you get this new culture forming, particularly in the monasteries. And then you get a new movement back onto the continent. So you get this new imperial system trying to start up under the Carolingians. And they call a monk from Britain to go there and to, and to, you know, and to, you know, and to, you

take this new sort of mixture of the old classical culture and the sort of new thinking that's starting to emerge and to teach them. That becomes a new way of teaching Europe. And then that imperium, that attempt to recreate the Roman Empire goes away. But these ideas start to spread. And Europe starts to reform not as one empire, but as a series of competing nations. But they share this common language of Latin and then also. the local languages as well. And so you get a mixture of the ability to have a sort of shared intellectual culture, but also local, national cultures as well. And that's, again, so important in the West, this ability to have different, different nations, different cultures, different

centres. It's competing power centres. And there's always a restlessness. And that restlessness could be very bloody. Lots and lots of wars. But at the same time, that allows new technologies to develop the war technologies that develop in the West, particularly the use of gunpowder. Gunpowder comes from China. It doesn't really develop in the same way there as it does in Europe. And it's because Europe is fighting amongst itself, that there has to be a kind of arms race there with the new technology.

But also because they're developing systems within these nations to raise money for the wars. And that actually is parliaments. Parliaments are a very good way to legitimately raise more money from the nation in order to go and fight the wars and therefore to develop better gunpower technology or long bows or crossbows to fight with. So people sometimes want to separate out

the best bits of the West from the other bits and say, oh well, you know, democracy and it's peaceable, but oh yeah, we used to fight wars. It's the competitive warlike things that were going on inside the West, which are tied to its Christianity, that are tied to its parliaments. The West is a complex and dangerous thing. We shouldn't imagine it's perfect or it's wonderful,

but it was just this extraordinary fusion. And out of it, you get these things that just didn't happen elsewhere. And you talk about things that don't happen elsewhere, but you touch on the Magna Carta, and I found that fascinating, because I can't really remember in my education being taught about the Magna Carta or why it was so important to our name.

So let's explore that. Yeah, but you know, this sort of stuff used to be taught all the time everywhere. They used to be jokes about it. That's why there's the joke in, you know, the old Hancock. Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? Because, you know, everyone would know what it was and why that wasn't correct. We've stopped teaching this history.

What you get in Magna Carta, And this is really something that I think is central, and we perhaps haven't talked enough about yet, is the idea of the rule of law. We talked about individualism. And the thing about the rule of law is it says every individual, even the king, is under the same law. And we can go to court and we can thrash it out, but we'll follow the rules and we'll see who comes out on top. It's not but because you're rich and powerful and the king that you can just do what you like. Everyone gets a fair shot in court. I mean, you know, maybe someone's got a better lawyer, but in theory.

Magna Carta is the point, one of the key points, where we say that. It's fairly early days in the development of that idea, to be fair, right? It's the barons taking some of the power away from the king. It's not like the ordinary, you know, the idea that the ordinary person is entitled to the same justice as a king. In that day, would have been ridiculous. Yeah, but, you know, it's there in principle. It's the barons were fighting for it. And even though it's just barons against a king, sort of princelings against a prince,

but that there is still, it's not one emperor over the court, over the great empire. And it's those divisions that eventually play down and mean that everyone is ultimately in the same place. And before that, too, you know, the old law codes of people like the Visigoths, talking about the barbarians again, you know, which is a name that we used to mean sort of completely outrageous and barbaric, people who tear things down. They had very, very strong law codes that were about giving people rights, giving women rights. They could choose who to marry

after they got to a certain age as like 20 or something like that. So not exactly modern rights, but more than you might expect. But that idea of law, I think, is central. And, you know, something that occurred to me in working on this is we don't even notice how deep it is culturally for us. Like you look around at every big news story, like the Supreme Court this week,

very important decisions going down in America. It's a law story. Or you go and look at novels or movies, it's John Grisham or things like this. Or, you know, in Shakespeare, it's Merchant of Venice. Law, again, so common we don't even notice it. It's this really powerful thing. And then you go somewhere else.

You go to China. There's no rule of law. There are things that might look like it. There are things that might look like courts. But China is a place where there are what? Two to five million people in prison, not a single one of them has had a fair trial. You know, it's like 99% of prosecutions ending convictions. 99% of appeals are refused.

This is not a system has anything approaching rule of law. I was talking this week with some Western businessman who spent time inside Chinese prisons. And, you know, it's terrifying to hear those stories. And it's those moments when you suddenly realize how much we take. for granted. I think this is a big problem with the West, right? It's like, we grow up in it. We're used to, we think, they think, oh, this is just how things are. You take one step outside that, and you suddenly realize how different things can be. It doesn't have to be this way. And that's a great point. We do take things for granted. And you talk about in the documentary,

you use the word threat several times, and you say the West is under threat. Well, I mean, what do you mean by that, Mark? I mean, look around. We're not under threat, are we? I mean, France, maybe, but not here. We're under threat from without and we're under threat from within. We're under threat from without because there are very real people, Chinese and the Russians, who are coming together now very explicitly and saying we want a different world order. We think our way, even though it involves putting people in camps for their religion or because it involves us shamelessly invading and butchering people in another country,

but we think our way is better than your way. And if we can, we're going to take over and we're going to impose a different system, a system in which individuals don't matter, in which things are run from the top, in which there is no rule of law. Now, okay, we can feel pretty safe from that here, maybe, but, you know, they're getting stronger. They're very powerful. We are really going to care about them if Chinese invade Taiwan, and suddenly we can't get the microchips that run everything in our country, you know, from cars to watches to mobile phones. This stuff really will affect us. just as your energy bills last winter, your energy bills this winter, are affected by what Putin's up to in Ukraine,

even if you don't care or have the sort of personal connection that Constantine does to what's going on there. So that is a real threat. But the other threat is inside. And that is the fact that, especially at the top level, in the universities and the schools, we have started to not teach, first of all, to not teach about Magna Carta or the West or what it is, And in fact, to teach the opposite, to teach that it is awful, that we've done terrible things. We need to apologize for them. And that we're not very special.

If we are special, we're special in being awful. And if you do that, it's like I was saying about what Nigel Biggar's been working on you. If you do that, you don't have the confidence to stand up against people like Russia and China. And things inside start to go away. And even without that external threat, you start to throw things away. because you don't think you need them. You start to tear down meritocracy. You start to say, well, equality,

it's all very well this individualistic approach, but, you know, we need to do more for people of color, or we need to do more for certain groups. So actually, we won't judge people by the content of the character anymore. We'll start judging them by the color of their skin. Scientific objectivity, oh, that's very nice, but maybe we should look at other systems of knowing and not worry so much about, you know,

just following objective reality. We are in a period where, you know, the basic building blocks, the foundations of the Western system are just being knocked down casually by people don't understand because they haven't been taught what they mean and how everything that they value,

everything that, you know, makes their lives what they are, rest on these things. And, you know, there's a reckoning that can come with that. And do you think that this is how, civilizations collapse and implode. Is this what happened to the Roman Empire? Is this what happened to other empires? Or is it something different? I think the West is so different that it's hard to draw comparisons. The thing about most traditional civilizations is that they're very stable, right? You have this authoritative system from above. It doesn't change that much. It can become

quite grand and go on for a long time, but it can break quite fast. And then they don't really have a way to come back. The West, of course, has already fallen in a way. It's like, it's sort of starts in a sort of post-apocalyptic setting of Western Europe after the empire's gone. And that makes it very resilient. It's a sort of distributed bottom-up system. So, and it also means it continually renews itself. So I think the West does have the potential to survive and go on much longer than a normal civilization. But it needs to hold on to itself. And if it doesn't do that, you know, it can just get lost. And because it's so unusual in human history, it could get replaced by, you know, it could go back to the norm.

We could get back to a system of top-down control, could go back to all the things that are kind of the default of human history. And we need to hold onto it just because it's so unusual. And that, you know, it has so much more to give. We aren't there yet, right? You know, the West keeps changing and moving upward. as someone, Walter Russell Meade, the historian, says, you know, we are, we're building a space rocket. We're not, we're not building a rest home. We're here to, you know, go to the stars and keep doing crazy new things. The West is, needs to hold onto its roots. But, you know, it keeps growing up

into the sky as well, trying to live up to these extraordinary ideals that it has. And Mark, one of the great gifts the Western civilization did give to the world is the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. How does the world, how does that? does that happen? How does that come about? What is the process that the West takes to get to that point where suddenly people decide, oh, let's invent the scientific method and think about, you know, various things that come with the Enlightenment? It's an incredibly hard thing to do. And this is why it doesn't happen elsewhere. And in the West, it takes a very long time as well. The West has two things going for it, though, apart from, you know, it's general sort of individualistic

sort of setting where mad ideas can be allowed to sort of bubble through. Firstly, it's quite an inventive culture. That was always true. It's two from the Germanic days. You get things going on with a lot of automation early, well before the Industrial Revolution. You've got water mills, windmills. These are taken to a new level of sophistication in the West. So there's an inventiveness going on. You've also got Christianity, which we've talked about before. Now, Christianity is sometimes seen, particularly from sort of enlightenment perspective, as being somewhat opposed to scientific thought. And certainly there were moments when the center of the church wanted to stand against certain ideas. But Christianity in the West, at its root, had the idea of a reasoned order,

that God himself was logical and created, an ordered creation that followed certain rules. And one of the key inventions I talk about in the series, which is very early on, in the Middle Ages, is the invention of the mechanical clock. And this doesn't happen elsewhere. You get water clocks, you get sand clocks, sand timers, things that are about the flow of time. But to create a machine that ticks and talks and sees time as distinct units, it's really very different, very challenging thing to build. And it turns up in the Middle Ages, and it's actually... actually used, not just to be in every town square and to, you know, help people coordinate their days and work in different ways, but also to demonstrate models of the cosmos.

And these models are wrong. There's sort of Christian models in which the sun is at the earth is at the center and the sun and everything else goes around it. But it's very much a sort of clockwork universe built by God with us at the center of it. And that, you know, survives for centuries, but it's tied, you see, this rational Christian order to this idea of an orderly world where you can build things within it and you can follow the rules and you can make new things like the clock. So that's there, that's all under the surface, but very hard to get from that to experimental science. It starts to happen in the universities, which is a place again where different ideas can come along. What you really need to do is you need to put

the theoretical thinking together with the people who are good with their hands. And that just takes a very long time for people to get around to it and to start to do it. And it starts to happen when they start to notice the gaps in the clockwork universe that they've got. They start to say, oh, anyone, there's a star in the sky that shouldn't be there if we have this neat mechanical model. It was a supernova. And then someone invents the telescope, which comes out of another very interesting invention, which is eyeglasses, but the telescope suddenly allows you to look at things in the sky

and you see the moon, and it doesn't look like the theory says it is. And so it's people, you know, we think about, I know Galileo, we think about these people as just having ideas or doing theory, but they're working with their hands to build new instruments to see things. And it's that ability to combine the two, to have an idea of theory, an abstract theory about the world, and then to build things to help you test it. And that's what starts to develop.

And in fact, that feeds into the industrial revolution as well because what James Watt does with the steam engine, which is the center of that, is to improve it and to make it more efficient. But he does it by knowing theoretical people, by talking to them about their new ideas, and then hammering and going and smelting and working with iron to see if he can make a new thing that works

and trying and trying again. So that's sort of trial and error with the hands put together with this theoretical, abstract thinking about the world and that then those two together, suddenly you have this ability to not just have one invention, but to sort of have a way of inventing and inventing

and getting to know this ordered world in a whole new way, and it just opens doors that we're still walking through. And it's the ability to tolerate, heretical thought as well, although that wasn't always a case. And of course, there were great thinkers who unfortunately paid with their lives for their thinking, their thoughts, and their work. But we were able to tolerate that in the West, weren't we? We were able to tolerate that within universities because they were kind of independent

institutions. That goes back to the idea of law. You know, they could special law that allow them to be these independent corporations, but also because they were sort of independent princes. So, again, it's a bit like Columbus. You go and find another patron, going another power center that will protect you for their own personal reasons from the papacy. So, yeah, you know, maybe the Pope doesn't want you to say that we're not at the center of the universe. But, you know, there's probably a prince up the road who will look after you and have you at his call, particularly if you're going to help him come up with cool new inventions that will maybe help him defeat his neighbours or something.

And do you think that is the main difference between the West and the Islamic world? Because as a lot of people will be able to tell you, at one point, the Islamic world, was streets ahead of us when it came to science and maths, etc. Absolutely, yeah. And I talk about in the documentary how there's a lot of sort of westernised names that we have for the people who really influenced us in important ways and provided things into the West that we'd lost. Al-Hazen is very important for lenses.

So his tracts are picked up by Roger Bacon in England, and that leads in some ways to spectacles. The theory's all wrong. That's the interesting part about that. They have these theoretical ideas, but they're not developing them practically, so they're not testing them. In some ways, it gets a bit frozen there. There's a point, yeah, where they could have gone down that road. But this is what, as I say, is kind of the default of human history.

You have these flurings or these moments where knowledge could break through, but ultimately you're within a civilized system in the sense of something that's controlled by great princes from the top down. it's very centralized. It doesn't have somewhere you can go and hide from that and think the crazy thoughts. And it gets, it gets shut down. And there's a lot of documentary makers who say that when they make a documentary, I'm a huge fan of documentaries, I love them, that it's a real journey. It's almost a journey of a discovery when you make a documentary. So what did you actually learn as you were doing this? Yeah, it was a huge journey. And, you know, the funny thing with Constantine's interviews, we did that, sort of, you know, in the summer or something. And that was like months or so before we were returning to it and trying to work out which bits to use.

You do have a sort of time to really sort of think things through. I think one thing I've mentioned already, the idea of law and how important that was to the West, that's something that really struck me as I was making it. But I think too it made me more optimistic about the West because a lot of people can be like, oh, we're all doomed. If they think about the West, they think, oh, well, you know, even if I like it, it's in decline, but when you study its story

and you realize how often it's been, you know, in a terrible state or in the bottom of a hole and it's come back. And you see this sort of structure that it has where it can sort of reinvent itself from below because it's so distributed. You know, this idea of the West as in twilight is in decline.

It's like the place of sunset. But it's, I really don't think so. It's always, it's always the sun coming over the horizon. There's always another dawn in the West. And so that made me much more optimistic. But in a way, I think that's so important because it's people thinking, oh, well, the West is over, isn't it? Even if you think it's fine and it had an interesting run, its day is done really now, isn't it? Once you start thinking that, you're looking around for someone to surrender to because you're wondering, well, who's going to be next? Maybe it's China. Maybe it's Russia.

Maybe it's the Soviet Union, you know. You need. to have some confidence that there's still exciting things for us to do. Otherwise, you know, why would you bother to keep our institutions, our traditions, our traditions alive? Well, we are locked now culturally in, I mean, I'm so glad you came onto that because this is, you've talked about the past, but the future is arguably more important, although depending on the past, of course. We're locked in this cultural standoff now between a bunch of different groups, but one of the

things that's going on is you have this group of people who've essentially either given up on the West or people who think the West is uniquely evil for the reasons that you elaborated on. And on the other hand, you have people who are so fed up of what those people are doing to the West that they've also given up on the West. And now they are, you know, some of them, you see this online, certainly, sort of celebrating Vladimir Putin as this great savior of Christendom, you know. And that's because I think they are so fed up. up with a lot of the cultural changes they see in the West.

And I suppose one of the things I see out of this conversation that I wanted to ask you is if it is an essential quality of our civilization that we keep disrupting ourselves, what does that mean for our future? Because a lot of people would argue, I mean, our show is based on essentially going, what the hell is going on? And there's a lot of disruption, very fast-paced change. A lot of lots of normal people are suddenly finding themselves in a position. where the beliefs they had two years ago

are now really, like, outrageous and can't be said in public, and the pace of change seems to be getting faster and faster. So where does that leave us going forward? We have to find a way to adjust to that change and hold on to something, and that is the riddle of the West. I talk about it a bit in the last episode of the series. You know, we have a tradition of disrupting, of doing new things, and we need that because you just put us under glass,

and sort of say, well, we've got to sort of hold on to this tradition as like a, you know, as a static thing. It won't work. And it's really difficult. But I think what we used to have when we would talk about the West and say, well, no, these are the things that matter, you know, about treating individuals equally, about democracy. The institutional framework that we've built up, free speech, all these things, those are the things we've built to sort of hold and channel the Western energy. into healthy directions and into a way that everyone can live their lives in ways that are, you know, fruitful. And we can continue to grow the economy and, you know, do more exciting things, discover new things. And so those are the things we have to preserve.

And people now are just carelessly tearing things down because they don't understand, you know, how much they matter. But if we don't have that, well, you know, there are two dangers. One danger is the danger of, you know, slipping back into a sort of, you know, Russia, China-type system, which is terrifying in its own way. The other thing is that that Western spirit, which is, I think, quite dangerous if it's not contained within these institutions, it goes back in a way to the worst of the barbarians, right, because those Germanic tribes were brutal and uncivilized in many ways. And Christianity and all the other things of the West have spent centuries turning that energy into something more fruitful. But, you know,

social justice warriors or the people on the, you know, the right who think, you know, a Bronze Age mindset is the way to go. Both of those are harking back to a pre-Western idea, which is thrilling, but very, very dangerous. And they're loot, because they don't have the tradition of the West, what that turned that heroic impulse into. At the center of the West, you know, there is this heroic impulse. Your life matters. You are on an adventure and you are the hero at the center of it. But you need to center that within the institutions that allow that to not just be destructive and tear everyone down and make everything worse for everyone else. And the way to do that is all the institutions that we spent centuries working out.

And what impact has a fact that we've become, and I'm saying this as an agnostic, Kostom, an agnostic, what has the impact of the decline in Christianity had on our civilization? Well, of course, it's a decline in church attendance more than it is, in some ways, a decline in Christian values, I think. And I think one of the problems at the moment is people don't quite know how to teach that. But I think you can't really be culturally literate in the West if you don't know something about Christianity, which doesn't mean teaching people to follow it as a faith. But they surely need to know something about it because you can't really understand not just our art. You can't really understand, you know, the Sistine Chapel or, you know, Michael Angelou's David or lots of things like that.

But also a lot of intellectual thought as well, which, you know, is based around very Christian principles. So there needs to be, I think, some grounding in that. And that is very important to people. I mean, you know, I'm a Christian myself. I think, you know, if people go to church, they'll find that there's something very important and powerful then. But it's not to say that everyone in the West needs to be Christian. But what's emerged from that Christian background? Because Christianity in the West has placed so much emphasis on choice,

on people choosing who they marry, on people choosing the faith for themselves, that it's created a space in which you can choose what religion you follow for yourself. And that's a very Western sort of culturally Christian ideal. So as long as we have that, we have the basis of a society in which people can choose, to be Christian, then that's a good thing. Perhaps one of the worries in today's culture is that

Christians themselves are maybe moving into a sort of negative world where they're treated as somehow culturally hostile and alien and people who need to be sort of pushed out at the public square. So that concerns me more than the idea that just not so many people are going to church. And I really like the fact that you are optimistic because it's so refreshing. Because, you know, on this show as well, we talk to, you know, all different types of people with different viewpoints. And it can be very, very easy to slip into a negative mindset. It can be that, it's very tempting. And there's a lot of people who make a lot of money on it, particularly on this platform. So let's look at grounds for optimism. Why are you optimistic?

I'm optimistic because in the end, the energy of individual people to come up with crazy ideas they're going to sort things out is the most powerful force in the world. You know, look at the Wright brothers coming up with the plane. Just before they did powered flight, there'd been a big project to do it. You know, sort of government support, loads. Didn't work. And there's a big, big editorial in the New York Times. Maybe it's going to take a thousand years for us to come up with powered flight.

That's the way of things, if you just rely on that. A couple of bicycle mechanics playing around. Again, what I was talking about before, tinkering. and using theory, both together, and suddenly they do this thing which transforms human experience and suddenly allows us to do a thing that we've dreamed of throughout human history,

never been able to do. And that's, you know, an unparalleled thing to unlock, but it's too dangerous for places like Russia. It's too dangerous for places like China, because it brings down those systems, and they know that they can't stand it. That's why you've got things like Tiananmen Square,

where they have to crush the revolt and you sort of mash the protesters who are pro-democracy into, you know, into blood and pulp with tanks. But once you stop having that, then you can't discover these things. They've got, as far as they have, recently, because they've taken up the ideas that we've invented.

And we used to think that this was too optimistic. We used to think, oh, well, China is going to become like us because it's going to become rich and industrial, and that'll be fine. it doesn't work like that. You can become rich and stay within, you know, a very totalitarian system, as it turns out. It's not as good, maybe, you know, maybe not as productive, but you can do things. Some things maybe you can do faster.

So, you know, that's a scary thing. Then you suddenly realize you've got to hang on to the idea of the West, to the idea of what we have. Because actually, maybe it's quite special. Maybe it's not so easy to turn someone else to that. So grounds for optimism, but, but, you know, you need to be wary as well. You can't just have a sort of blind optimism that it'll everything will naturally go in a Western direction. I think the most important point is here in all of these conversations, the importance of understanding our history correctly. And it's one of the reasons I've been writing and talking about a lot, because if we don't have a healthy view of ourselves, I just don't, I think it's very difficult to then have a confidence.

and the future and have the right attitude about the future to deal with the challenges to come. And because of that, I think your documentary is really, really important and beautifully made. You've got some fantastic guests interviewed there, people who we've had on the show as well as others. Andrew Claven is in it. Nigel Bigger, you mentioned, James Bartholomew, a bunch of very, very good guests. So thank you for making it. It was a real pleasure to be involved.

I hope people go and check it out. It's on the New Culture Forum. YouTube channel available in six as a six-part series called The West. Make sure you go and check it out. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second on locals. Before we do, we've always got the same final question, as you know, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I think we should be talking about what to do about our universities.

Perhaps we are talking about this, but we need to be talking about it more. Specifically, what happened with the West, you can actually almost date it. In 1987, protests at Stanford, hey-ho, hey-ho, Western Civ has got to go. The Western Civilization course in the top elite universities of America were some of the most important courses they had. And they got torn out because they were politically incorrect. They considered them to be racist. 20, 30 years later, we see what happens. I think lots of people are, you know, the mass of people are quite ready to be proud of Western civilization

and to be pleased to learn more about it. When you take it out of the top institutions that produces the people who run all the institutions of society, it's a disaster. And it's very hard to know how to get the right ideas back into those places. And I think that is great intellectual challenge of our time. And, you know, there are great things people do around the edges and say, well, maybe we'll start a new university or something. It's powerful, it's powerful, but there are things you can only do from the centre. We talked about the Supreme Court earlier. Supreme Court and its ability to make decisions which, you know, I would argue, stand up for rule of law and very important Western principles,

happen because of the Federalist Society, which worked inside top American law schools, to bring top lawyers to think in a certain way and ultimately to be in a position of power in the Supreme Court in America. More broadly, what else can we do that's like that that takes these ideas back, not just to the people who are more receptive to, not just in our schools to every, everybody, but to the people who are going to have power in our society. The problem we've got is people right at the top who prefer fashionable ideas about how awful we are. Until we can reach them, it's very hard to change things around. Well, I would argue that actually we've just done it and you've done it with your series

and the conversations we're having and people writing books about these things actually is what will make that difference. Because actually, I really agree with you that I think the overwhelming majority of people in our countries, not just this country, but in many others, are ready to hear a balanced and sensible, healthy message about our past, our present and our future. So thank you very much for coming on and join us on locals where we will talk more with Mark and ask him your questions. Is there a particular trigger that might inspire a kind of renaissance of confidence here in the West?