Andrew Clavin critiques the left’s "shutuppery"—its decades-long tactic of silencing dissent by labeling critics as fascists or racists—while praising American Sniper and mocking its hypocrisy in romanticizing capitalism (e.g., Steve Jobs) while enforcing big-government PC. He ties the left’s decline to moral relativism’s collapse, arguing atheist critiques of faith fail against Collins’ acknowledgment of science’s limits on meaning. Clavin insists absolute morality must replace relativism, framing it as the only viable political foundation post-2024. [Automatically generated summary]
So I heard that Ben Shapiro, our own dear Ben Shapiro, went to a high school in San Diego yesterday and was giving a speech to kind of underprivileged kids and he was talking about personal responsibility vis-a-vis money.
And the administrator, the vice principal, in the middle of his speech, shut the speech down and dismissed the school to keep them from hearing these hurtful messages about personal responsibility.
And I heard that and I thought, wait, they let Ben Shapiro into a high school?
I mean, did they not hear about the restraining order?
No, no, sir.
I actually enjoy it when the left is stupid and oppressive.
That's why for me, every day is a good day.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
So we'll get back to that.
We'll get back to the shutuppery of shutting Ben down and all the people who want people to be shut up and just be quiet.
But first, I've been continuing the sacred Christmas tradition of watching my screeners.
The screeners are the DVDs that the movie companies send to you at the end of the year.
If you're in the business and you have a vote, I can vote for the best screenplay of the year under WGA Writers' Guild rules.
So they send me all these things, and that's how I catch up on all the movies that I didn't really want to go to see or I didn't have time to see usually.
And so I go through them one by one.
And sometimes it's great.
Last year it was amazing.
Last year I saw Firefox, which was a terrific offbeat little film.
And then I saw American Sniper before anybody else.
And I sat there and I actually wrote a blog saying this is going to be one of the biggest hits of the year.
And they don't know it.
They don't know what an amazing smash this is going to be.
They were releasing it like a little picture, like, you know, some little Oscar-worthy film.
And I thought, no way, this is going to be a huge hit.
But they just didn't know it because they live in a bubble.
But so last night I watched Steve Jobs, which I thought was pretty good.
I mean, it was kind of a filmed play.
It was based on that Walter Isaacson biography, which I hear is terrific and I haven't read it.
It was written by Aaron Sorkin.
And, you know, it was creative.
It was different because it didn't really tell the biography.
It just sort of hit him at moments when he was about to make a release, when he was about to release a product.
And then there would be this dialogue that would bring you up to date with what was happening, his relationships.
It was good.
I didn't think it was great.
Sorkin is a terrific writer.
He has talent coming out of his ears, but he is, he's kind of shallow.
I mean, I just remember, I saw one of his earliest works, which was A Few Good Men as a play.
It was like the end of the 80s, maybe 1990, I can't remember.
And I remember thinking, I mean, no one had heard of him at that point.
I remember thinking, this guy really writes well, but he doesn't have that much to say.
And talent is blind.
Talent goes, lands on people who are profound and deep, and it lands on people who are shallow.
Sometimes people get so much talent that just the very fact of their talent is profound.
Like Ernest Hemingway was like that.
Ernest Hemingway, the way he wrote, actually changed the way people wrote, but it also, just the way he wrote was a philosophy.
The way he wrote was an anti-psychological, existential way of looking at life just by writing.
But he really wasn't that bright.
He wasn't that good a thinker.
And so after a while, his greatest writing is actually at the beginning of his career.
It doesn't get deeper and deeper and deeper like many writers, like Shakespeare gets deeper and deeper and deeper as he goes along.
Hemingway really doesn't.
His best work is at the beginning.
That's partially because he was an alcoholic, but also partially because he was, you know, just didn't have that much to say.
But Sorkin is a terrific writer.
He wrote one of my favorite thrillers, Malice.
If you've never seen Malice, it's a great, great thriller.
And this is good.
Let's take a quick look at it just to see the dialogue and the tone of it.
What did you do?
What did you do?
Why has Lisa not heard of me?
Man, how many fourth graders have heard of you?
You can't write code.
You're not an engineer.
You're not a designer.
You can't put a hammer to a nail.
I built the circuit for it.
The graphical interface was stolen from Xerox Park.
Jeff Raskin was the leader of the Mac team before you threw him off his own project.
Everything, someone else designed the box.
So how come 10 times in a day, I read Steve Jobs as a genius.
What do you do?
I play the orchestra.
And you're a good musician.
You sit right there.
You're the best in your role.
So that's, you know, ultimately, I thought this film was kind of sentimental about Jobs.
It made him nicer than he actually was.
And I think what Sorkin was really doing was writing about himself.
He was writing about this guy who he feels is just brilliant and revolutionary, but not that nice a guy.
And I think that's what he was writing about.
But he wasn't really writing about Steve Jobs, and it got kind of sentimental.
The one thing, though, that is really fascinating, kind of leads into what I want to talk about, is like so many on the left, people just adore jobs.
I mean, and this movie, and Sorkin is a real lefty.
He wrote The West Wing, but he just romanticizes what Jobs is doing.
And what Jobs is doing is corporate chicanery and marketing.
That's what he's, you know, it's corporate maneuvering.
I shouldn't call it chicanery.
It's not dishonest.
He's just maneuvering in the corporate field.
And he's marketing this product.
We saw that was Seth Rogan playing Wozniak, one of the guys who really developed it.
And he's sort of organizing it and keeping watch on the design.
But he's not doing any of that.
He's a marketing expert, basically, and a brilliant man, Steve Jobs, and all this.
And I agree with the fascination with him.
He's a fascinating American character.
But what makes him a fascinating character is that he's a capitalist.
He is the absolute, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, Carnegie or one of the old railroad barons.
That's what he's like.
He's like that guy.
And so the left loves this stuff.
And of course, corporate chiefs, corporate billionaires are now the most left-wing people in the country because they have figured out that big regulation, big government helps big corporations.
It keeps the little guy from competing because the little guy doesn't have the lawyers to deal with the red tape.
So the corporations love the left, plus all this political correctness is great for them because it doesn't offend anybody.
It's typical, typical corporate, you know, don't say anything, don't offend anybody, just sell the Coca-Cola.
Capitalist Criticisms00:15:20
And so and so, you know, it really is funny that the left lives by conservative principles.
They admire conservative principles.
They know conservative principles are right, but they can't say it.
You're not allowed to say it because then you're not virtuous.
If you come out and say capitalism is good, competition is good, one idea beating another idea is good.
Self-reliance, if you come out and say what Ben said at that high school, they all live by it.
They all live by the, you know, good taking care of George Soros, no one protects his money from taxation better than George Soros as he seeks to tax our money and spread it around.
No one does a better job protecting his money.
They all live by it.
But if you say it, if you say it, then it exposes their philosophy as false.
So that's what we're going to talk about.
We're going to talk about shutuppery.
At the moment, we've been talking all week about the death of a bad idea.
We're watching a bad idea right in front of us collapse and die.
And the way that the left is protecting, nobody wants to let the idea go because their power depends on it.
Barack Obama is in power because of this idea.
And we'll go back.
I'll go back over it and talk about it.
But in order to stop people from pointing out, oh, look, this idea is dying.
You shouldn't actually have power if you have this idea.
They have to shut you up.
Google, the president of Google, get this.
I mean, we're talking about corporations loving the left.
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, has backed a hate speech spell checker.
And we know how well the usual spell checkers work.
So you could just say, no, no, I meant to spell the country Niger.
You know, I didn't, Nigeria.
I didn't mean to say that.
So he wants a hate speech spell checker that would nudge ordinary web users away from unwelcome forms of expression on social media.
Writing in the New York Times, Schmidt said that it was important to use the web's power of connectivity to bring out the best, to force out the best in people, to bring out the best in people.
So corporations are now going to decide which thoughts you're allowed to have, which words you're allowed to search, which ideas you're allowed to express.
Great thinking.
What could possibly go wrong?
So this is shutuppery.
And I think, I actually think that I invented, coined the term shutuppery.
I am willing to be corrected, but I think my first satire video included the word shutuppery.
It was called shut up.
And I can't think of a time when it comes out of it.
And if you Google shutuppery, I come up.
So I think I get, I get, I want my picture in the dictionary next to the word shutuppery when it becomes a word.
The way this video, this is the first video I ever did.
This is the first really political expression I ever did that had me behind it, where I wasn't just saying, you know, I kind of grew up with the idea that artists shouldn't be political in that direct away.
But I kept, I would hang out in LA around other conservatives, and every now and again, Roger Simon would come by.
And Roger Simon has had a sort of parallel career to mine.
He's older than I am, so he's done everything first, but he was a mystery writer.
He's written screenplays.
He became a conservative.
He has no hair.
I think we have a lot in common.
And I would keep bumping into Roger, and he has this kind of voice like this, and he would say, you should come by.
I'm starting a place called PJTV, and you should come by and take a look at PJTV.
And I would go, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.
You know, I don't have time to do that stuff.
But one day, you know, I'm sitting around, and I think, what is PJTV?
And I go on and I saw Billy Whittle, you know, my pal Bill Whittle.
And I thought, wow, this guy is great, and he's smart, and he's incisive, and he's articulate, but the one thing he's not is insane, you know.
I could bring that to the game, you know, I could do what he's doing, but be insane.
And I went to Roger and I said, I would like to do the same kind of commentary, very short, but base it on kind of a, you know, a, who were the guys in Britain who did that crazy humor, the guys who did the life of Brian and so on.
Monty Python, yes.
I thought, thank you.
I thought it'd be kind of like Monty Python.
So I went in and did this video.
And this is the first one.
It's kind of primitive.
I think I got a lot better as I went along.
But the idea was shut up, that the left's argument for everything is shut up.
So take a quick look at me many years ago.
The left here has been making the shut up argument at least since the 70s, when it became clear that all their other arguments had failed.
Since it was the only argument remaining to them, they had to invent different ways to say it.
If you pointed out that their weakness allowed the murderous tyranny of communism to expand, for instance, well, you were a McCarthyite.
Shut up.
If you proved that their leniency toward criminals turned our cities into cesspools, you were a fascist.
Shut up.
When you pointed out that their welfare policies destroyed black families and created a social disaster of vast proportions, you were a racist, a sexist, uncivil, worse than Hitler.
All just different ways of saying, shut up.
All around the world, as leftism has failed everywhere, shutuppery has been called to its defense.
Shutuppery has been called to its defense.
We've been talking all week about the death of a bad idea, the failure of a bad idea, which is taking place, which really took place on 9-11, but it's taken 10 years and more now.
It's almost 15 years for us to assimilate the idea and to come back from some of the mistakes that George W. Bush made and some of the hatred that the left had, which kind of obscured the fact that this idea had died.
And now we gave the ball to Barack Obama, who is the avatar of this bad idea.
He is the incarnation of this bad idea.
And the bad idea is that there is no moral truth, that therefore all cultures are morally equal, and any culture who rises above another culture must have done something wrong.
Why would you rise above another culture if no idea is better than any other idea?
Competition is unnecessary, because why would you have this savage Darwinian thing where an idea like Steve Jobs' idea wins and another idea fails?
If all ideas are morally equal, why would you have to have competition?
And how can there be personal responsibility?
If you're poor, it must be because you're oppressed.
If you're poor, it can't be because you mismanage your money or you mismanage your life.
That's why Ben Shapiro has to be quiet.
That's why they have to send those kids home.
And I'm not saying everybody who's poor is responsible for their own poverty.
I'm simply saying that in a country like America, if you pull yourself together and if you behave in certain ways and don't have kids out of wedlock and get some education, you're not going to be poor.
You're not going to be poor your whole life.
Very small chance of your being poor.
So this idea is dying because we see in the jihadis, we see that some ideas suck.
And if they suck, then some ideas must be better than those ideas.
And if those ideas are better, if our ideas are better, if any idea is better, it has ramifications, has logical ramifications.
There are things that you must think if you think that some ideas are better.
And those are the things I think the left is trying to avoid.
Among those ideas, for instance, are the ideas you have to fight to defend good ideas.
And that is something that terrifies the left because of the Adam Bomb and because of World War I and because of all kinds of things.
They don't want to get in a fight.
Maybe just pure cowardice.
Who knows?
But these are all ramifications.
So as the idea dies, you see two things start to happen.
Shut up.
That's the first thing that happens.
Arguments against it have to be silenced.
And then you have the reaction rises up.
And yesterday I was talking about Donald Trump being a reactionary, a guy who's reacting.
He's reacting to bad ideas.
There's no question about it.
But he is a creation of Barack Obama.
And a lot of people were hitting me on Twitter last night saying, oh, you know, you've attacked our dear Donald Trump.
And I think I may have called him a fascist blowhard or something like that.
Yeah, it was maybe not my most polite moment.
But he is.
He's a fascist blowhard.
And the thing is they were saying, well, Israel restricts immigration.
Why can't we?
Well, first of all, Israel is a Jewish state.
Its basic brief for existence is different than our basic brief, which is religious tolerance and religious freedom.
And plus, Israel is just a little sliver of land on the border of the sea with surrounded by an ocean of Islamic crazies trying to kill them, dedicated to the proposition that they should die.
We're not in that position.
We can afford a little bit more tolerance.
We can afford to be, you know, there were people making really bad arguments like, how many lives is it worth to you?
Well, how many lives is it worth to me to go into space?
How many lives is it worth to me to drive a car?
You know, I mean, you know, you can't calculate these things.
We're taking risks all the time, every day.
The thing about Donald Trump is his character is bad.
That when you look at him, he is not a free market guy.
He is a big government guy.
He's a pro-Hillary guy.
He's a pro-Kilo guy.
He believes in taking away people's property if he can use government to do it for his own good.
There's no bottom to the guy.
There's no place where his morals start.
And his personality, we can point to his personality.
It almost doesn't matter what he's saying in the same way.
It doesn't matter what Barack Obama is saying.
The words come out of Barack Obama's mouth.
Do you care?
Do you care whether he says he's beating ISIS?
Do you care whether he says he's for big government or for small government?
Who cares what he says?
It's all in his actions.
And the same thing is true of Donald Trump.
He's playing you for a fool.
He is playing you for a fool.
And he's reacting.
He's part of this death of this bad idea.
He is what happens.
Fascism grows.
Fascism grows where bad ideas die, when they crumble.
We're angry.
We're angry being told to shut up.
We're angry at being told that what we see in front of our eyes isn't there.
It makes all of us angry.
You know, when I was a kid, this was true of religion.
One of the reasons I disliked religion as a kid, and I'm talking about it even as a little kid, was that you weren't allowed to talk about it.
If you said something against someone's religion, it's like, oh no, that's terrible.
And I used to think, I remember thinking this as a little boy, thinking, what are they sick?
Are they ill?
You have to drop your voice around religious people.
You know, I mean, it's like, you know, you can't say, well, maybe there is no God.
You know, you can't say that.
No, don't say that.
That's offensive.
That's offensive.
And I think, well, why?
You know, they ought to have an argument.
And the fact is, the fact is, that was a time when religion had had its way so long.
It was a protected form of speech for so long, a protected idea for so long, protected by the verities of the society, protected by a society that thought it's improper to question religion, that it let its arguments fall apart.
It didn't have to form any arguments.
And so when you questioned it, it was like, be quiet, shut up, shut up.
And that was a time when religion was losing its sway.
And when people challenged it, they had no arguments.
They had no arguments to defend their religion.
The Bible says so, and that's it, and that's the whole thing.
And that's a bad argument, so they have to shut people up.
Now, in the old days, those were the people in charge.
Now you have these left-wingers in charge who have their bad ideas, their verities, their religion, and they have to shut up the rest of us.
And every time you see shutuppery arise, you know there's a bad idea under it.
Here's the thing, though.
Moral relativism depends on atheism.
You can't, the minute you say there's something better than something else, and people, this drives people crazy when you say it to them.
They say, why can't we have a morality without God?
Why can't we have a morality without God?
Pretty basic.
The minute you say something is morally better than something else, you mean that it is closer to a moral good, an absolute moral good.
It can't be just floating around in space, right?
It's relative to something.
It's closer to a moral good.
Not hurting somebody for fun is closer to a moral good.
And if you have an absolute moral good, it's not just a big stone with words on it.
Don't do that, right?
For something to be moral, it requires consciousness and will.
A hurricane that kills 50 people is not immoral.
It's just an act of nature.
A guy with a machine gun who kills 50 people is a bad guy.
So you need consciousness and will.
So the minute you say that something is better than something else, you actually are positing God.
We live at a time, or have lived up till now at a time, because this is the bad idea that is dying.
This is the bad idea that is dying.
We've lived in a time where the atmosphere was atheistic.
The atmosphere was materialistic for a really good reason.
For a really good reason.
Science is materialistic, and science was doing so much good stuff.
Science was explaining so much stuff that it was just natural to sort of assume that eventually you'd get to A. You know, you'd get to what the first cause and it would be like an atom or something like that.
And so scientists have had this kind of assumption of materialism, assumption of atheism.
When you really listen to the ideas of the atheists, and the atheists get all the press, they get all the press.
A guy comes along and says, oh, by the way, there really is a God, no press, zero press.
And some really smart people have said this.
They don't get covered at all.
But the minute a scientist comes out and says there's no God, or a writer comes out and says no God, he becomes famous.
The press will build him up.
When you listen to these guys, it's not that they're dumb.
They're smart, but they say dumb things.
Their arguments against God are not good.
I brought a couple along.
I just went and did a quick search.
Christopher Hitchens, I love quoting Christopher Hitchens because I think he was one of the terrific prose writers of my day.
When I read Hitchens on art, on culture, I didn't even have to see the byline.
I didn't have to see the byline.
I'd be sitting around reading him thinking, this guy is brilliant.
Who this?
Oh, Christopher Hitchens.
Of course.
It was always Christopher Hitchens because the guy was brilliant.
I only met him once, a thoroughly charming alcoholic, just one of those wonderful British.
All British writers are alcoholic.
All British actors and writers are alcoholic, but just as charming and delightful and polite as he could be and witty.
But just listen to him put forward.
His basic argument against religion was that religious people are violent.
And that's, of course, a ridiculous argument because all people are violent.
People kill people for atheistic reasons.
The communists killed more people than anybody else.
Nazis weren't religious at all.
But listen to this argument that he makes here.
He's a very, very brilliant man, making a very bad argument.
And the greatest obligation that you have is to keep an open mind and to realize that in our present state, human society, we're more and more overborne by how little we know and how little we know about more and more.
Or if you like, how much more we know, but how much less we know as we find out how much more and more there is to know.
In these circumstances, which I believe to be undeniable, the only respectable intellectual position is one of doubt, skepticism, reservation, and free, and I'd stress free and unfettered inquiry.
In that lies, as it has always lain, our only hope.
So you should beware always of those who say that these questions have already been decided.
In particular, to those who tell you that they've been decided by reservation, excuse me, by revelation, that there are handed down commandments and precepts that predate, in a sense, ourselves, and that the answers are already available if only we could see them.
Now, that is just a half argument.
It's a half argument.
Would anybody say, you know, we really have to keep our mind open about whether it's a good idea to drive a nail into somebody's forehead for fun?
Argument Against Predecided Truth00:08:15
Would anybody say that?
Do I have to say, after living with my wife for 35 years or so without having a single argument, do I have to say that we're well matched?
I have to keep my mind open about whether I want to live with this woman or not.
When I wake up every morning devoted to this, absolutely devoted to her.
Do I have to question that at some point?
At some point, no, you don't have to question that.
The value of what he's saying is that doubt is always a good thing.
Questioning is always a good thing, but it doesn't undermine your faith.
I mean, as a Jew who became a Christian, I have what I believe is a unique theology of the Jews.
I've never heard this anywhere else.
There are people who say that the Jews, the Christians who say the Jews must ultimately convert to be saved.
And there are people who say that the Christians have replaced the Jews as God-chosen people because God makes promises and then thinks, eh, forget.
I was drunk.
It was dark.
I was, you know, forget the whole thing.
But my theology, see, there's an idea in the Christian church that the Christian church is the body of Christ.
And in the Bible, Paul writes about how different parts of the body have different functions.
So different parts of the body might be the teaching part.
You might be a teacher.
You might not be Mother Teresa who goes out into the streets for the poor, or you might be that person.
You might be the charity person who does that.
I believe that Jews, and some Jews will find this offensive, I know, but I believe the Jews, whether they like it or not, are part of the body of Christ.
They're the part of the body of Christ that doubts.
They are the part that keeps us honest.
They are the part that does not believe.
And I think all of us, if we want our faith to be alive, have to have this part that we can go to and say, what if it's all nonsense?
Let me listen to your argument.
Let me hear your argument.
I never tell anybody to shut up.
I don't want anybody to shut up.
I want to hear it.
I want them to be polite, but I want to hear their argument against what I believe.
So Hitchens is right that we need doubt, but that doesn't negate the need for faith or the worthiness of faith.
All truth limits what you think.
If you know the world is round, you can't be flat.
Once you have faith in God, you no longer think in terms of moral relativism.
You just can't.
Now, let's listen, just to prove what I'm saying about the morality, let's listen to Richard Dawkins, another brilliant guy, trying to form a sense of what morality would look like.
In the moral sphere, I think they would be based upon criteria such as suffering instead of absolutist criteria like all killing of humans is wrong, for example, including killing of early human embryos.
We would instead say, well, who's suffering?
At what point in the balance does the suffering switch over to the other side when there's a choice?
If we got rid of absolutist moral criteria, we might stop saying human life is absolutely sacred and you can't put a monetary value on it.
Yes, we might.
We might well start saying that, which would not be such a good thing.
You know, why should suffering, why should suffering be a quality that we avoid in other people?
You know, this is the Marquis de Sade said this.
The Marquis de Sade is the reason I stopped being an atheist, because the Marquis de Saud, who is where we get the word sadism from, he was an actual sad, he was the first open sadist.
The Marquis de Sade is the only honest atheist I ever read.
And when I read him, I thought, yes, that is a logical argument for atheism, and I want no part of it.
I don't want to be a part of the sadistic world.
Marquis de Sade wrote these pornographic books.
They were filled with sadistic pornography, but there were also books of philosophy.
And the philosophy makes perfect sense.
And one of the things he says is, you know, why is your suffering more important than my pleasure?
And he even puts it in terms of equality, because he was dealing, it was the time of the French Revolution.
He says, if we're equal, why is your suffering, more important than my pleasure?
And if I'm stronger than you, why isn't my pleasure more important?
This argument, by the way, didn't work out well for women in his books, as you can imagine.
But it's a perfectly valid argument.
What Dawkins is saying, you just ask why.
And this is one of the things, if you listen to scientists making arguments, they'll say, well, this doesn't make sense and that doesn't make sense, but a lot of science now doesn't make sense.
And we're dealing with a different realm.
We're dealing with something that is outside of material and therefore outside of time and outside of space.
Listen to Francis Collins for a minute.
Francis Collins is a devout, I believe he's a fundamentalist Christian essentially, who believes in evolution and who headed the human genome project, that project to map what's inside the human genome so they can start to manipulate genes and maybe cure diseases that way.
Listen to him talking about why scientists don't believe and why he does.
If you want to answer questions about how nature works, how biology works, for instance, science is the way to get there.
Scientists believe in that, and they are very troubled by a suggestion that other kinds of approaches can be taken to derive truth about nature.
And some, I think, have seen faith as therefore a threat to the scientific method and therefore to be resisted.
But faith in its proper perspective is really asking a different set of questions.
And that's why I don't think there needs to be a conflict here.
The kinds of questions that faith can help one address are more in the philosophical realm.
Why are we all here?
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Is there a God?
Isn't it clear that those aren't scientific questions and that science doesn't have much to say about them?
But you either have to say, well, those are inappropriate questions and we can't discuss them, or you have to say we need something besides science to pursue some of the things that humans are curious about.
For me, that makes perfect sense.
It does make perfect sense.
Of course it makes perfect sense.
Science is a hammer.
Everything looks like a nail.
But there are questions that don't, you know, do I love my wife is not a scientific question.
You know, am I joyful is not a scientific question.
And God is not really a scientific question, the existence of God.
Here's my argument.
Here's the argument I want to make to you.
My argument to you is that you already believe in God.
You don't know it.
You may not like it, but you already do.
You already believe in the spirit.
You already know you're not a piece of meat.
Nobody tells the story of his life in terms of his meat.
Nobody says, you know, I was small, I got big, I bent over, and I died.
Nobody, that's not the story of your life.
The story of your life is what you love, who you are, what you did, how you developed.
The story of your life is the story of your spirit.
Nobody thinks, some people think different things are fair and unfair, but nobody thinks those categories don't exist.
Nobody thinks there is no category of the fair and the unfair.
We all know some things are fair and some things are unfair, and we can argue about it.
We can argue about those things.
We know that things are right and wrong.
And anyone who says, if you listen to the left, what they say is this: there is no absolute morality, and therefore it's wrong to be prejudiced against another culture.
Well, what makes it wrong if there's no absolute morality?
It's not an argument that makes any sense.
You already believe in a world that makes sense, and the world that makes sense is a world with God in it.
And that is true of Richard Dawkins.
It was true of Christopher Hitchens when he was alive.
They all believed in the same thing.
But now the question is: since this idea of moral relativism and atheism with it is dying, since that idea is dying, what are we going to replace it with?
And what does it mean for our politics?
Because there's no going back, okay?
This is a new world.
Sex is not the same as it was.
War is not the same as it was.
Technology is going to change the very nature of being a human being.
Some of the stuff that Steve Jobs did is going to change the very nature of being a human being.
It already has.
We can't, you know, Jesus Christ may be the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but we're not.
This is a new world.
This is a new world.
And conservatives are always playing defense.
We're always saying, not that, don't do that, don't do this, don't do that.
New World Dawnings00:02:17
You know, the 50s, weren't that?
Wasn't that a wonderful time?
Well, it's a wonderful time for some people and not for others.
The point is, it's not coming back.
Time doesn't go in that direction.
So what are the implications?
What are the implications?
If we say boldly, without any reservation, if we say there is God, there is a moral good, a moral bad, an absolute morality, what does it mean for our politics?
We will have to talk about that more another day because I'm out of time, but we will stop and have Christmas stuff I like.
Now, I've already, this week, I've got you a great, really entertaining novel, The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis.
I recommended a really fun movie, Remember the Night.
So this one's a little bit more serious.
You know, the last Pope, Benedict XVI, was, in my opinion, one of the great, great theologians of any time, one of the great theologians in history.
The press was constantly picking on him about this little thing and that little thing, and some big things like the scandal in the church.
Meanwhile, he was writing these works of absolute genius.
I'm not a Catholic.
I didn't agree with everything he said, but since I'm not a Catholic, I don't have to agree with everything he said.
And actually, this book, as he makes clear, is not written under what I think they call the magisterium of the papacy.
You don't have to, he says in the opening of the book, you don't have to agree with it.
But it's a beautiful book.
He wrote a series of books as he was losing his powers on Jesus Christ.
And this one is called The Infancy Narratives.
And it's just lovely.
And he talks about the meaning of the Christmas story.
And he talks about it in a philosophical way without any kind of literalism.
He talks about what this story is telling us.
And it's almost poetry just at the level of its thought.
It's not complex.
It's very readable.
It is complex, but it's not hard to understand.
It's very readable.
It's very beautiful.
And as you can see, it's put out in a very beautiful edition.
So Jesus of Nazareth, The Infancy Narratives, Christmas stuff I like, really good stuff from Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinker.
That's it.
We have one more show to do this week, and we will do it, by golly, and we'll be back tomorrow.
This is Andrew Clavin with the Andrew Clavin Show.