TRIGGERnometry - Why Are We Fighting a War on the Past? - Tim Stanley

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Tim Stanley is a historian, columnist and the author of Whatever Happened to Tradition? History, Belonging and the Future of the West https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/whatever-happened-to-tradition-9781472974129/ Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Peter Hitchens here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873620658 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 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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for allergy, act more rapidly and supera Claretin and Flownays at 1.24 HADY! Adelante. Even as people

reject British history, they're being incredibly British. And isn't it the ultimately the most British thing is to be self-deprecating and say, well, we're terrible. The only problem with that

is you end up an orphan. If you say my family is rotten, you wouldn't believe my family did. About like 200 years. I want nothing to do with my family. Well, that's all very well, but you wind up an orphan. And ultimately, as I found, when you buy a dog, you need someone to walk the dog for you. And if you've written off the rest of the family, you've got no one to do it. So no wonder we're feeling so lonely when we isolate ourselves, not only from people alive now, but people from the past. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Boster.

I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversation. with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a historian, leader writer for The Telegraph, and the author of whatever happened to tradition. Tim Stanley, welcome to Trigonometry. Hello. It's great to have you on. That was a very short hello from you.

Welcome on the show. I'm thrilled. This is the podcast. Is it? When my last book came out about seven years ago, if you didn't get on the BBC or Channel 4, your book basically didn't happen. And it's so fascinating that there are now all these different podcasts

that you can go on and your book can reach different people and new audiences. and this is one of my favorites. Well, before we get into talking about your book, which we both really, really enjoyed, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, how are you where you are, what has been your journey through life

that leads you to be sitting here rather than on the BBC. I'm a Cancerian. Which is a good place to start. It tells you everything you to know about me. I was born in Kent. I had a father and a mother, no brothers and sisters.

It's quite a small family. I went to grammar school. I then went to Cambridge where I studied history. I fell in love with America and ended up trying to spend as much time over there as possible. I studied, wrote about, taught a bit of American history, Sussex University, Royal Holloway. But I got sick of the fact that I could literally name all the people who'd read my books. Because that's the fate of an academic book. Hardly anyone reads them. So I decided to get into journalism. And over about a year or two, I just constantly badgered different newspapers. I worked my way out from the bottom. I really did.

I had no contacts. And eventually, I convinced the Daily Telegraph to use me as a sort of an assistant comment-type person in America. And somehow I managed to vaguely my way into the newspaper, and I ended up working as a leader-writer. So from history to journalism, that's basically the trajectory of my career. And you talk about popularizing your work. getting it out in front of more than just a handful of academics. I think your current latest book about tradition is so poignant at this moment and time. And we've been thinking about this on the show quite a bit.

And we've spoken to different people about it. And it kind of struck me a few weeks ago we were interviewing Posey Parker, who used to be a gender-critical feminist. Right. And one of the sort of key moments of that interview was her saying, bring back shame. Right. When talking about stuff.

Before that, I remember we've interviewed a Christian, Catholic, Christian Catholic, a Catholic in America called Mary Eberstadt, who wrote a book about how the sexual revolution created identity politics. We interviewed a lady called Alex Kishuta, who talked about how, she said, I don't have an ideology. I just know that the closer my lifestyle is to my grandmothers, you know, pickling cucumbers for winter and all of that, living in a small town in Romania, the better I feel as a woman. And we found that actually those interviews have been most popular with young women.

And your colleague Madeline Grant and the Telegraph wrote a piece about how she's one of a number of millennials who don't believe in God who now go to church. And I think all of this, at least in my opinion, is part of a feeling among particularly young people, but I think all of us really that we've been sold some kind of lie. And I think if I was to summarize that lie, I would say that it's the idea that, you know, the faster we throw in the bin 50,000 years of cultural development, the better freer, more exciting and thrilling and wonderful our lives are going to be. And I think a lot of people are starting to find that that isn't the case for them. Do you have something to say on that? Because I feel like you ought to. Well, I feel like that's the book. Yes, I agree with you. You use the word freedom. That's absolutely critical. We are nowadays taught that that is the highest value. And we are encouraged to think that we can be the authors of our own story. That, by the way, is a tradition. It's a Western

tradition. It's a very Western way of thinking. So ironically, by pursuing freedom and tearing up tradition, we're actually being very traditionally Western. On the other hand, it's first of all a myth, it's nonsense. You don't write yourself. No one can. Even when you kick against where you came from, you're recognizing where you came from. And decisions we made on your behalf about the way you are brought up that are almost invisible. So again, that point about it being a Western tradition, one's pursuit of oneself, is the product. of a certain upbringing. It's the way you're raised is to aspire to certain things. So, first of all, you can't escape the past. But secondly, the idea that those thousands of years, there isn't

something in there that's not valuable, precisely because it's been thrashed out over that period of time, they haven't whittled down certain basic problems and found certain solutions and coping mechanisms. The idea that you'd want to junk that social knowledge, I think, is absolutely mad, let alone the idea that you could come up with something better just off the top of your head. So I think what you're describing there, people looking backwards, is part of that process. What I would want to stress, however, is, I mean, you started with the word shame. And sometimes when we talk about tradition, it is talked about in terms of punishments, negativity, some things we've all become a bit too decadent and we need to be self-disciplined.

There's a very positive dimension to tradition as well. I mean, the other thing you described there was people trying to be more like their grandparents. Well, that's more of a positive thing, making your own stuff, walking rather than taking the car, not using plastic bag. Well, they're sort of getting life that's simpler and more traditional in its style. And that's really much more what the book's about. This is not a handbag over the head of Western Man. I'm not saying, you dirty little thing. You must go back to the 1950s.

On the contrary, the further you look back, you might actually find some points of liberation and colour, which are really rather exciting and upbeat. And it's a really, really interesting point, because it just feels that we tend to be progressing not only fast, but at warp speed now. Is that me? Yes. Yes, you're getting known. No, no, no, no.

This is a very important point that I sort of concluded in the course of writing this, that I've noticed that many people in my generation are nostalgic. not just for their own use, but use that came before them, that things have moved so fast, even in their own lifetime, that actually their points of reference for how they would like to live are not when they were a kid, but their father or their grandparents. So if you turn on the telly, I'm struck by how it's all call a midwife, Danton Abbey. It's 1950s or 1920s or 1930s. There are very few rosy shows about the 1990s. Now I'm going to be bothered to go back to. to that particular period. So my youth isn't really represented there at all. If you think about

when we went through the pandemic, what were the historical parallels we reached for? It was the war. A bit bizarre, because there have been actual pandemics you could reach for as much better analogies for how to behave. But that looms so large as a moral story that for many of us, we reach back to that. And I agree. I think it comes down to the pace of change has been so great within a lifetime that actually for the past offers a sense of the solid because it's unchanging. So people reach back to something that came even before because it seems a little more solid. And it's not just even been in the last few years, but even when you, if you take during the pandemic, it seemed that the world speeded up even more. The moment George Floyd was murdered,

it just seemed to be that we just shifted. Everything just shifted again. Yes. in a way that was very, very confusing for a lot of people, when people were almost had to question themselves and think to themselves, am I now racist? I don't think I'm racist, but am I now racist? Yes, yes. And it's not just that circumstances change, but also it feels like morality changes

and language changes, which is very unusual for that to happen again within not just a lifetime, but a space of a couple of years. So to take the lockdown, for example, I thought that recognised British value pre-lockdown was mind-your-own was mind-your-own business. That's what I thought we were all about in this country. And I like that.

That's why I came here. Then I discovered almost overnight that it wasn't just that that value was contestable or problematic, but actually that the opposite was true. And it was a British value to keep an eye out on people. So it – and these things are not written in stone. appreciate that values change dramatically over time. I just think it's a little unusual for them to change so far, so dramatically. And as I say, for the language to shift with it so that one is no longer an expectant mother in the course of your lifetime, you can suddenly wake up and

discover that you're in fact a pregnant person. And that these changes in language affect meaning and they affect how people feel and assess themselves. So it actually feels increasingly as though old definitions of what it meant to be human are built on shifting sands. So no one, no one people are looking back, looking back to points in the past, which, as I say, because it's happened and it's therefore it's unchangeable, it's immutable, people look back and think, well, I prefer that when I understood what a woman or what a lady was to this period of extraordinary rapid change. So are you saying that we're sort of like, we feel like we're holding onto a train from which we're about to fall out, fall out, and we just crave the time when it wasn't going

quite so fast where we felt a little bit more secure? Yes, and that's a myth. There has always been changed. And one of the things that really struck me when researching this book, because I didn't really know a lot about the 19th centuries, I ended up having to do an insane amount of crammed reading about the 19th century. I was struck by how many complaints made in the 19th century could be made now. And they were related to industrialization, the rise of the train, newspapers, all these sorts of things.

The 19th century people were... There was a brilliant psychiatrist, a liberal Zionist called Max Simon Nordau, who wrote a brilliant book called, to generation, I think, in which he describes the condition of his patience. And he concludes that the world has gone mad on the basis of the people who he's treating. And he actually more or less predicts what would become the Second World War in about 30 or 40 years' time. He's remarkably prophetic. And it is the overloading information. It's the pace of change. And that's already there in the 19th century. But to answer the question about

holding on to something, yes, that is what the feeling is. And I think that's partly where Brexit and Trump come in. I think that's part of what we've been through in the last four or five years. The language of take back control. I think it's not just, it was misinterpreted as simply about restoring parliament or controlling borders. I think it's even bigger than that. I think it's actually the individual wishes to be able to actually say to history, stop there. I want to take stock, I want to understand my relationship with you, and I want to regain a sense of investment and a stake in my own life. And is it the internet that's done this or is there more to have done that, Tim? I think the internet has accelerated it. As I say, it's really a two or

300-year process, but definitely it's become much faster with the communications revolution. There's no denying that. But I also think it is the natural terminus of the Western tradition. As I mentioned at the beginning, we have it hardwired into our DNA to question things constantly and analyze things and scrutinize them. And the internet has helped to accelerate that process. But it's also the atomisation of society, isn't it? This progress that we seem to be on. And we seem to devalue community and promote identity. And that to me just seems a way to the madhouse, isn't it? Yes and no, because I'm sympathetic towards identity politics to the extent that I think it is a symptom as much as a cause of everything we've described. It's understandable that the atomized individual

looking for an identity might reach out for a group and say, okay, that makes sense of my life. And if you look at Black Lives Matter, for instance, like when Black Lives Matter says, we need to deconstruct the nuclear family, you might just read that and say, well, they just hate families. That's not quite true. They actually talk about going back to older forms of family. They see the nuclear family as a white imposition, a modern invention, etc. But they're not anti-family or community by any means. It's just one senses that they feel no investment in the current social structures. so they are individuals looking for something else. So I see that as a symptom, but undeniably, yes,

it does also ironically help to perpetuate this problem of us becoming more and more like individuals. And of course, that's not just a, sometimes when people talk about atomization, it's a little bit theoretical, but we all know in our everyday lives that it is a lived reality. Because, for instance, I have, as I sort of mentioned at the beginning,

I have a very small family. I live alone. I'm a classic example of an atomized individual in the 21st century. We don't live the way that we used to, which is not just as part of large families, but also crucially, large kinship networks, where you have, where if something goes wrong, you don't just have to fall back on your wife or your mom and dad, you might have extended relationships of aunts and uncles, etc., etc. So the actual pattern of our lives has changed. It's a very, very good point. when I was reading your book, I kept thinking about religion. Because when I was younger, and, you know, reading Dawkins, a God delusion, you just think to yourself, where do we need religion?

We have science now. Yes. We have logics. We have facts. Yes. And then we've taken religion out, and you're looking around going, maybe we did need it. Yeah, yeah. Well, those facts won't comfort you when someone dies. They just don't. This is the problem with them. I mean, you, you, you may, you, you mentioned someone going to my friend Maddie Grant, going to church without believing in God. See, that's very interesting. It raises the question why. If you don't believe in God, it could seem a bit mad because the whole point of the church is to worship God. And if you don't, but... But is that true, though, Tim, because the shift from the pagan religions or the sort of multi-whetheredic religions, right, the Romans, the Greeks, etc. Ordinary people weren't allowed in the

temple. And the shift from that to Christianity included making the church the house of God. I don't think Madeline, I don't know, I haven't spoken to her about this specific issue, but I think young people who go to church without necessarily believing in God do so for the community element of it rather than the belief in God and maybe just a sort of meditative practice as well at a place where you no longer for one time in your life are obsessed with yourself. Yes. Yeah. And there is something beyond you, which I think a lot of people crave for now. I'd agree with that, except that, and Mandy's a very good friend, they don't want to talk about her without being here. We're just talking about another person

that he's not here for no reason. But ultimately, if you wanted to do that, you could, for instance, join a political party. I don't think it's just the community. And I would say, first of all, what is it that draws the community? It is the belief. So everyone else around you probably believes in God, even if you don't. They are there for a reason. And second of all, once you are there, what is it you're hit with? Well, it's not just the community, is it? It's either the preaching or it's the experience of transcendence

depending upon the kind of church that you go to. What I would say is to, I am religious, but I made a point when writing the book not to make it all about religion, I saved religion until the very end, partly because I've learned from doing things like Thought for the Day, that the moment you try to inject religion

to the conversation, you lose someone, so it's better to introduce it very subtly. But also because I, I wanted to make the point that traditions serve human needs. Some are indeed just invented and imposed, and that can be horrible, and fundamentalism is an example of that. But in most cases, they've actually evolved over time to meet people's very basic needs. And even if you don't feel in your heart belief in God, I think you can see the psychological benefit and what it's speaking to. And there are certain moments in people's lives, typically when they give birth, when they get married, when they die, or when a loved, a loved one,

dies, when they instinctively reach for the church. And it's partly because the church has developed a language that we do not have. At those moments, these experiences are so profound that there's almost no everyday language to describe them. How do you feel when your husband or wife has died? The church lends you the language. And even if you don't believe in reincarnation or going to heaven or whatever, it almost doesn't matter. You're allowing someone with thousands of years of experience to speak on your half and provide comfort. And so you don't, no, you don't have to believe. But I think that the belief can come because you realize that what's generating this tradition, what sustains it, is the belief. And over time, I think that can come.

It's a community as well. It's the way it binds you together. I was raised Catholic. We always used to go to Sunday mass 5 o'clock and you used to sit down, used to see the same faces. Now, even if you didn't know them in any great depth, there's a comfort to seeing the same people again. It anchors you in community. Yeah, and also it gives you something to do on a Sunday morning.

Again, don't knock that. The lack of structure in the week. I have a slightly odd week because I work at weekends and sometimes it's just not possible to do my usual mass on a Sunday. And on those days, I just feel lost. I've lost that sense of structure to the week. Really, that's what religion's about it. It marks the year.

It gives structure to your year. The liturgical year is wonderful. It explains to you what you're going through. Things don't just happen to you. You actually have a sort of dialogue with the universe. You have a sense of place within it. So, Tim, now that we've lost all the people who are uncomfortable, we're talking about religion.

Well, Francis and I are both non-believers, but it's a very interesting conversation. And I keep coming back in my mind to the point you made it at the very beginning, which is it is a core tenet of Western civilization to question and to seek freedom. Yes. Is that an inevitably self-destructive force then? Because I suspect one of the reasons that we believe in God less than we used to, for the people like Francis and I exist even,

is that we want to be free of the external impositions on us, of the authority saying, don't do this. And if you do that, then you're bad. and wrong and you will be punished and you will be looked badly upon by your community. Are we careering off the deep end here with this endless pursuit of freedom? Or is there going to be some kind of natural built-in-to-the-mechanism that says to us, okay, we've got the freedom now. Let's just make sure that we don't lose it by doing something else.

Yeah. I think an important caveat to my argument is that even within those sort of traditions that I'm saying look back to, you'll still find that sort of DNA strand of the search for freedom and moral autonomy. So you find it within Christianity as well, which is why it is at once a very conservative religion, a religion of churches. It's also a religion of reformations and of constant change. And every generation or so, the church will settle and look like it's sort of, it's found its place in the world. And someone will come along and say, no, it's not pure enough. And there's also this feeling within Christianity that faith must be chosen. So there are lots of ways

in which even those things that I would like us to look back to and revive, I recognize that that that desire for freedom is within them. But yes, I do think it is self-destructive, and I think it's a real problem. And what I'm arguing in the book is that I'd like people to look a little bit beyond, I'd like people to look before the Enlightenment, because there was a medieval consensus which was very different, which saw freedom in a very different way. I'd like them to look beyond Europe a little bit, because there is Russia, there is Japan, there are other countries which deal with the same problems we have and handle them in a very different way. and to just think beyond themselves and beyond the desire for liberation constantly,

and to look for freedom in things which are settled. And that's a key point of the book that you really can't have liberty without order. And there are certain traditions like notions of authority, which we just recoil against nowadays. But the point is that these things defend liberty, because if there's chaos, ultimately, you can't be free. And I do fear that's where we're headed towards. I flinched a little bit when you said the word order.

I think we've all sort of, we all now, not all, a lot of us think about it as a sort of ordnong. Like that's the vibe of that word. Yes. And it's difficult. But if I could just step in there. If you take the lockdown, for instance, I would say that a traditional society, I would hope, wouldn't have needed those draconian rules because the public would have been so public-spirited that they would have done the right thing without being told what to do.

When you have a breakdown in moral order, it requires the state to step in to tell people what to do. So the less there is this sort of organic, instinctive understanding of a moral consensus, the more you actually fall back upon the state to instruct people to behave a certain way. That makes sense. Let me pick up on something you said earlier, because we're both fascinated by history, and you were talking about how in the medieval times there was a consensus that was very different around the issue of freedom. Talk to us about the historical evolution of this very idea of individual autonomy and freedom. How has that changed over time?

Well, it's always there because, of course, the roots of the Enlightenment really come from humanism and the Renaissance, and that itself was looking back to Greek philosophy. So it's always there. But I think a key element of the medieval attitude towards the individual and towards life was this idea of everything being interconnected, that you are defined by, your relationship, not just by yourself and how you feel, but your relationship to other people. So whereas now we begin from the point of view of who am I, how do I feel, and we're intensely psychological, instead an older, more traditional approach towards life is to define oneself

in relationship to other people. And you find this in more traditional societies as well. So you might say not just, I am a woman, but I am a mother, I am a wife, or indeed you may say I'm a nurse as well. So I think that's one way in which it's slightly different. But if you live in a God-ordered universe, you start from a different set of first principles to the ones we have now, which again are very much about negotiation with morality. Whereas if you just say, look, things are as they are, because this is the understanding as we, this is the world as we understand it, as we have been told it, and as God has ordered it, that doesn't mean there is no freedom, it just means that your, the way you act starts from a different set of first

principles. Isn't the problem with our society is that we don't worship God, we just worship ourselves now. And you see that with social media, with Instagram, you know, its entire focus on the self. So isn't part of the problem with talking about traditionalism is that we live in a society that incentivizes us to be selfish and narcissistic. Because we see the people who are selfish and narcissistic, they're the ones who get to the top, they're the celebrities,

they're the bankers, they're the wealthy, etc., etc. Yeah, yeah. And actually, in the medieval period, people were making precisely that complaint. That's the age group you belong to, mate, 500 years old. I think that's, I mean, those characters, you could read the Canterbury Tales and you'd see those representations there. So that is a human ongoing thing. I mean, some of the scriptures are about complaining about those attitudes as well.

So I'd say it's eternal, but I do agree. I think we've become over-psychological and everything is over-internalized. Is it – see, I'm reluctant to just say it's because we don't believe in God, partly because, again, I will lose lots of people who I'd like to see by the book. I think you can say God is useful – is useful. in the sense that it draws our attention away from the self and to something else. Another way of thinking about it is, what are your points of reference for aspiration? This is one thing that really troubles me.

I think we're one of the first societies in history that has very little moral aspiration, that doesn't have a strong sense of this is the kind of person you should be. It's constantly being negotiated, and it's constantly up for debate. But there is no, there is less and less of a sense of ideal. And that's part of what religion does, is it provides you with ideal human beings and ideal types, crucially with moral content. So they're not just ideal because they are beautiful or strong or anything like that, but because they are good people. So in Christianity, saints are very often poor, they're mad, they're very difficult people, but they're extraordinary people who put their own life on the line for other people.

That should be who your ideal is. In this society, insofar as we have ideals, it's either for the rich, people who made it, and that's who you want to aspire to, or it's for a set of things which I would describe as not being really moral. I mean, this is Frank Faradis point, is that we obsess about, we've got hooked on words that have no moral content.

So one of the ideals of our society is to be diverse. That's just a descriptor. just to say that this room is diverse. It doesn't mean any of us are moral people in it. We're hey, we've got 10 out of 10 because we're a diverse group of people. So what? That doesn't say anything about us and our moral character.

Another is inclusion. Well, hey, you could include a murderer in your party if you wanted to. Again, no moral content. So religion doesn't... Religion offers ideals, but crucially, they are usually ideals with a moral content.

Tim, so as a sort of You're talking about moral history in a way here, and you bring up the evolution of language. That's something I've studied very carefully myself. As a former translator, comedian, I obsess about words all the time. And there's a chapter in my book about the evolution of language. But you mentioned diversity.

You mention inclusion. Why have these particular, I mean, non-ideals, ideals, right? Things that, as you say, don't have that moral content, but nonetheless, we hold up as being ideal, particularly here in Britain. Why are we so keen to focus on that at the moment? I think partly because it's easy. The irony is it's sold to us as a struggle to get those things,

but actually they're quite easy to achieve. And it's partly because we live in a capitalist order, and it's something that capitalism can do without having to make an enormous sacrifice. It's something businesses can do. Businesses can go diverse, and they can sell diversity, and they can sell themselves as diverse, and they can gain a huge custom base, like HSBC,

by pushing certain woke things and selling themselves to us. They're not actually giving their money away, are they? Well, they're laundering drug dealers' money at the same time. You've got a portrait of Stalin on the wall, and this is by no means to entorse Marxism, but at least that aimed for a genuine redistribution of wealth and power. One of the frustrating things about this new moral paradigm is it doesn't actually do that.

it doesn't actually level anything or make anyone more equal or make society genuinely fairer. So I think that's one reason is because it's an easy form of moral progress. It's easy to track and it doesn't cost very much money. Hold on. Let me say it doesn't make it fair. What about minorities that have been historically discriminated against and now their lives are a lot easier and they're being given up? That's unfair. That's unfair to me to say that.

You're quite right. And that's a fair point. But I suppose being old-fashioned and having in my youth been a socialist myself, I just always thought that I measure fairness in the genuine redistribution of wealth and power. And I don't actually see that happening. And there must be a reason why B-A-E systems is pro-diversity. The company, for those of you don't know, makes British armaments. Yeah.

And they sponsored a Pride Festival, I think, in the Isle of Wight somewhere. I just thought that's extraordinary, an equal opportunity weapons dealer. That is morality turned upside down. And it's not a morality that would be recognized 100 years ago when the left pacifistic and genuinely into redistribution and into getting rid of all arms would have thought associations with that kind of group to be absolutely abhorrent. But that's so interesting because a lot of these companies are like that.

Manchester City, again, supporting BLM, their manager came out and spoke about the evils of slavery. You go, but you're owned by Qataris. Right. You know, you just go, it's so paper thin. Yes. I would understand if they hid it, but they don't even bother hiding it. No.

They just put a pride flag or BLM and then they go, well, that's it. Yeah. That's all we need to do. And it won't be happening in the country that's the sponsor, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking forward to Harry Kane, wearing a, pride, he had the rainbow captain's arm bad. I'm sure he's not going to be wearing that in guitar. And look, a lot of people believe it. And a lot of people genuinely want to help. And I do feel

a little bit bad about being sarcastic or doubting that. And some of what they want, that fairness, that equality, these are good things. And I'm not against them. I just, as I say, always be suspicious when a big business endorses an idea. Because ultimately it's motivated by the bottom by how much money it makes. And I just, I suspect that they're doing this because it's, it's an easy win. Tim, but come back to, I just want to finish up on this idea about, uh, these values, inclusion, diversity. Surely there's got to be something there because my experience when I talk to people in this country as an outsider, someone comes from Russia is people here feel very guilty about the past. Right. That is the primary response of

many people about this country's history. Britain being one of the greatest countries in the history of the world, by the way, just to put that out there, right? So to me, as an outsider, that I don't get it. I don't understand it. And I know it's part of the British tradition that all well talked about, that, you know, most intellectuals would rather be seen stealing from the poor box than standing for the national anthem. But nonetheless, I feel like these movements for inclusion and diversity in the way that they are now, again, I agree with you, equality and knowledge very good. They seem to me to be stemming in a very fundamental. mental shift in our perception of our past, of our history, of our tradition. Do you feel that's a factor there? Yeah, no, I think that's really true. The past can be a place of learning, both the good and bad. And they very often pick up on the bad, but sometimes you lose a sight of the good, and we go back to aspirational ideals, the good just, the past does throw some up. And the problem is if you just write off the past, and you say, basically everyone before this date was racist and sexist,

and they were like sort of ignorant Neanderthals, you lose a lot of good learning as well. I think Britain is the best country in the world because it's my country. If I were born again, I may well choose to be Norwegian. I get the impression that they have a much better life than we do. But it's instinctive and natural to people

to say this is the best because it's mine. In the same way that you'd say, my mum cooks the best flam, right? She probably doesn't. I'm sure there are some Michelin-Star chefs you do it much, much better. But to you, it is the best. And that kind of personal attachment to things is perfectly natural. And I think it's rather artificial and strange. I never psychologically got it why people don't feel that. It seems normal to me. And you're right, there is a war on the past.

It is a very Christian idea. Again, I come back to, this is the fascinating, complex thing about tradition as much of what seems to be kicking against it is actually an endorsement of it. And in a lot of that language about slavery, I hear echoes of original sin. I'm a Catholic. And this idea that we did something a long time ago that was so bad that everything is stained by it ever since and we've got to make up for it and the tone for it, well, that's a form of original sin.

So even as people reject British history, they're being incredibly British. And isn't it the ultimately the most British thing is to be self-deprecating and say, well, we're terrible? The only problem with that is you end up an orphan. If you say my family is rotten, you wouldn't believe what my family did. About like 200 years, I want nothing to do with my family. Well, that's all very well, but you wind up an orphan. And ultimately, as I found, when you buy a dog, you need someone to walk the dog for you.

And if you've written off the rest of the family, you've got no one to do it. So no wonder we're feeling so lonely when we isolate ourselves, not only from people alive now, but people from the past. It's a great point. One thing I would push back on with the original sin, isn't part of the problem now with the way we look at things. Some people have original sin and some people don't. Right, yes, yes. But that, yeah, that's true. I think there's a, this can get a bit weird and niche, but I think a lot of woke is actually Calvinist. So I said Catholic, but that might be the wrong way to approach it. And in Calvinism, you have this idea that some people are going to heaven

and only God knows. And some people are going to hell, only God knows. And it's sort of, it's, It's a decision that's taking my Twitter feed. It's something over which it's not that you have no control, but because God knows everything, he already knows. So how are we to tell who's heaven-bound and who's hellbound? Because we want a church, and we don't want to let the hell-bound people into our church. So you develop this theory of visible sainthood,

that people have to act like they're going to heaven. They don't know if they are or they're not, but they've got to act like they are. And I see some of that in woke as well. There's this attempt to be a visible saint By signing up to certain things Using certain language to prove that you are not going to hell So yes, you're right

Some people are definitely not sinful But it's more than just even that It's people who might be sinful Are desperately keen to prove that they're not And that's what I think we're in right now Is a cult of a calvinist cult of visible sainthood And what do you think the future is going to be? Do you think that it's

Because there's some people who think look, this is here, this is here to stay. We have to accept it. We have to work within these remits. There's some people who say, no, we need to take it on, we need to challenge it, we need to fight it. Yes. Where do we go from here? Well, I could sell 10 times more books by saying it's all over and we're doomed. But again, my experience of history is that's not the case, because at so many points in Western history, we have said, well, that's that then.

We're finished. And then we've bounced back. everything goes in cycles and everything moves in fashions. And in fact, that would come back to poor old Madeline, must bring her on the show to explain herself. We go back to Maddie and young people going to church even though they don't believe in God. That's very interesting.

Where is that being transmitted? If you weren't necessarily raised that way, if you don't believe in that, why would you be drawn to this thing? I see lots of young people doing that. The future is, yes, more tension and chaos and fuel cues and things like that. But the future is probably also Renaissance and restoration, because it always has been. And I think these, the good things that we've discussed are so powerful and attractive, I do think they win people back. It's just up to a new generation to make the case for them.

And that's part of what the point of the book is. I'm making a case for something that in the past people didn't feel they had to make a case for, because it's just taken for granted. But no, we need to start all over again. And there are lots of people doing that like Jordan Peterson. I find Peterson's books fascinating because I read them and I think this is bloody obvious He's just saying things that are blindingly obvious Like tidy your room, I don't do it But he just said he says things are blah

But there is a generation of people Who don't know blindingly obvious things And they need to be reinstructed in them Well, you were talking about Jordan Peterson And that is such a powerful point Because if you were to say If an alien came down from the skies You asked us before we started the show

You said who's the biggest person you've had on Have you had Jordan Peterson? And you go, well, this Canadian professor who refused to bow down to some particular law that they introduced in Canada, and suddenly he is the biggest intellectual star in the world, or certainly the Western, the English-speaking world. And I think the reason is the crisis of meaning that people talk about. Yes. What traditionally and historically have people used, human beings used, to give their lives meaning? And how does that differ to us today?

First of all, Peterson literally wrote a book called Maps of Meaning, of course, and read it. The first time I read in my thought, this is just young. It's about archetypes. Peterson is young at heart. And the point about archetypes is that you, again, have these aspirational ideals that you say to people, this is what a man is like, this is what a woman is like. It doesn't mean that's what we are actually like. It just means that you're given templates to people.

And you tell, you explain how to be a human being through story, stories, stories which you can place yourself into, stories about danger, hope, charity, things like that. And that's much of what religion does. It gives us in Jesus Christ the model of the perfect person to compare yourself to. As we mentioned earlier, freedom, really freedom, the individual personality should be to some extent relational, so that you find meaning in your relationship with other people and with structures. So I, I, I, That I think is the answer is to find redemption in other people. How can I help them? How can I have a good relationship with them?

How do I fit within a society? What is my role? And how do I serve? Rather than beginning from the point of view of how do I get on, how do I actually flourish as a member of this community and this society? Do you think we're going to see a resurgence of religion or Christianity? We have young people, Generation Zee, or whatever they're called, going to church, 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning? We're not quite there, yeah. Benedict XVI talked about the future

being a smaller but more faithful church. We're moving away from the hangover of ethnic religion, cultural religion, where you went to church because it's what your parents did, except, well, people's parents have stopped going. So certain ideas are not being transmitted anymore. Therefore, people will rediscover them in a whole new way. And I think that process will be very slow

and it might be slight. Though again, I come back to this as nothing unusual. many people were complaining in the 19th century that Christianity become a very middle-class thing, that the working class had drifted away from the church. So, yes, I think the future could be that, but you've got to make it happen. It's certainly that in other societies.

And we mustn't be too Western-centric. Religion's doing very well in other countries, in Latin America, in Africa and the Middle East. I wrote a little song to remind you, Choice Hotels gets you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotels got it all, A rooftop bar, have a ball. Cocktails up here feel just right.

It's Cambria amazing all right. Bring a date, your team, or even your mom. Book direct at choiceotails.com. See you on the roof. No, it's true. And that is a problem with the West, I think, is that we have this naval-gazing attitude where we just look at ourselves and our culture and our societies

without actually looking at outwards. Yes, and we have a habit of thinking that how we feel is universal. It's very frustrating. And again, it's a very Christian thing to do, this idea that it's not just my God, it's the entire world's God. And his laws don't just apply to me.

They apply to the entire world. And the West has inherited that sense of universalism and universality. We very often tell ourselves that our attitudes towards freedom and our definitions of what the good life is, everyone either shares them, which of course is nonsense because we know they don't, the Taliban don't, or if you took away certain structures from people's lives, they would choose them.

And they might do. It's an experiment that we keep trying with nation building. But thus far, it hasn't worked. Some people do like the way we live. Undoubtedly, they do. But a lot of people we've discovered actually don't. You mentioned the Taliban, and it's interesting that you do, because some people have talked about the idea that you talk about things moving in cycles and history, and of course you're right. The idea that what will come in response to a lack of order

is a craving for order that goes too far another direction and people start to seek order from people who bring it with all sorts of terrible other things that in a free Western society actually warn. And I'm not talking about Islamic fundamentalism, only it could be lots, it could take shape in other forms. Are you concerned about that? Do you think

that's a possibility? I am concerned about that. I mean, I'm keen to say in the book that, because people will come back to me and say, look, so you want traditional forms of religion. Okay, well, is ISIS and the Taliban not traditional? Well, I'm not going to run away from that, to a certain extent they are. But I would argue they are quite untraditional in their manifestation of religion. For a start, they don't recognize evolution within tradition. They want to turn the clock right back to a fantasy of what things were like in the 7th century. And in some ways, things weren't actually like that. I mean, a classic example is ISIS reintroduced slavery for Yuzidis and non-Muslims. Well, there was slavery in the 7th century, but the trend was actually towards manumission.

Muhammad preached clemency and things like that. So if anything, Islam was moving in a certain direction, they've actually counted that and gone back. They are, fanatics and fundamentalists. They lack a nuance and a nuance understanding of what religion is and the way that it develops. Nevertheless, you're right. There is a great worry that if you don't provide answers, if intelligent people rooted in the past, with compassion, don't provide answers and direction, then something else will step in. And of course, in the 1930s, that was fascism and communism. And that's where it ends. And that is alarming. And that, that is alarming. And, And people were having this sort of conversation in the 1920s and 30s, by the way.

So you can't rule out fascism. And Europe has a history of doing it. We are just as capable of being brutal and nasty as any other part of the world. That's reassuring. That is very reassuring. One thing I've really enjoyed about this interview is, I assume you're a conservative in your politics. Not with a capital C. But, okay, but I would say that unlike small-seat conservatives, there's, you're quite optimistic. Oh, I'm very optimistic, yes.

And I find that quite in Congress, I would say, as a world, because a lot of the time when I talk to conservatives, and I have conservative leanings as well, particularly small-sea conservative leanings, I think they're rooted in pessimism a lot of the time. Yes. They seem to be, well, you know, if only we could go back to, you know, when we respected marriage or when we respected marriage or when we respected. tradition. We wouldn't have all this shit. Bring back hanging. But you see what I mean? There's an optimism,

which I don't often see in a lot of people who have those leanings. What I would say to them is two things. One, if you want life to be a certain way, live it. And many of them do, but I just think it's incumbent upon the individual. If you think marriage is important, right, okay, go and find yourself

a wife and have lots and lots of kids. It begins with you. Don't just berate society. It begins with you. The second thing I would say is that I think it's almost un-Christian to be, to despair. Indeed, it is. It is unchristian to despair because Christians at heart believe that Jesus Christ is coming back. Things are going to be okay. So if you go around and say, oh, it's all over and it's done, but that's a very unchristian attitude. It's also quite an un-British attitude. Again, one of those things I was raised to think Britishness was stiff upper lip. And there's a wonderful scene in, which I always like to quote in, carry on up the Kiber, when the palace is being stormed, and someone says to Sir Sidney Rough Diamond, what shall we do?

And Sir Sidney says, do? We're British. We'll do nothing. And finally, and particularly Americans who are apocalyptic, that's the most un-American attitude. America is all about positivity in being upbeat. So if you want to revive these traditions, live them, but also these traditions,

one of the reasons why they keep going is because they have faith in the future and their ability and self-confidence in their ability to persevere and to flourish and to flower and to change and to grow. So I think it's very... To me, it is actually going against the spirit of tradition to say it's all over and we're doomed.

All right. We're not going to ask you any more questions because it's nice to end on a positive note after the conversation we've just had. So we'll wrap it up there other than to say, Tim, brilliant book. Thanks so much for coming on, whatever happened to tradition. And we have one final question for you, as always. Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about? But we really should be.

Anything other than politics. That is my one big complaint about the modern world, is a obsession with politics. And it is the terminus of everything we've discussed, which is the rise of liberalism and the idea that everything in life can be debated and sorted out. And therefore, if you believe that, literally every single element of your life, not just from economics, but to who should be the next James Bond, is discussed in political terms. And I would just like to go for a week in this country in which we don't talk about politics.

That would be the most radical, radical proposition I can imagine. Amen, my friend, amen. Tim Stanley, thank you so much. We're going to ask you a couple of quick questions for locals. But in the meantime, thanks so much for coming on. And thank you for watching and listening at home. We'll see you with another brilliant interview like this one very, very soon. Or you can catch a raw show.

at exactly the same time. 7pm British Standard time, 2pm Eastern Standard. Or if you like, your Trigonometry on the Go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.