Sohrab Ahmari’s The Unbroken Thread dismantles modern individualism by framing elite lifestyles—finance careers, Teslas, and European vacations—as hollow alternatives to tradition-bound lives rooted in duty and sacrifice. He contrasts this with classical freedom, arguing that limits like Sabbath observance paradoxically liberate, citing U.S. and England’s stress spikes after abandoning such practices. Using Seneca’s wisdom on death and pandemic-era fear, he critiques how unchecked autonomy distorts priorities, while St. Maximilian Kolbe’s Auschwitz sacrifice exposes contemporary society’s moral illiteracy. Ahmari also defends traditional natural law against Andrea Dworkin’s radical feminism, blending St. John Paul II’s theology with a warning about pornography’s societal harm. Rejecting conservative fears of coercion, he argues progressive liberalism already imposes its own orthodoxy—critical race theory, gender ideology—and urges conservatives to champion humane traditions instead. The book’s core: meaning demands binding oneself to something greater than self, not endless choice. [Automatically generated summary]
So last week we had a guest that many of you were very angry about, but we're not going to have that problem today because we have Saurabh Omari, who is not only a great guy, he is a fascinating thinker.
He has a terrific book out, a really interesting book called The Unbroken Thread, Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
And he is, of course, the op-ed editor of the New York Post and many other things.
But this book, The Unbroken Thread, is really fascinating.
Saurabh, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you.
Thank you, Andrew.
It's good to be back on your show.
So this book starts out with a description of a fantasy about your son, Maximilian.
And he grows up and he is an elite.
He works for a hedge fund or a publishing house.
He does yoga.
He has a girlfriend and a Tesla and they travel around Europe.
And you talk about this as kind of, this is your nightmare scenario.
What is so nightmarish about that life?
It sounds like a lot of fun.
Yeah, I guess there could be worse nightmares, but my assumption is, and please God, I hope it's true, that my son is not going to end up being, God forbid, an opioid addict, or something like that.
So given the way elites in the United States tend to transfer their elite status to their children, chances are our son is going to be upper middle class, like his mother and I.
So the reason I worry about that life is because it's a dark vision because I don't want my son to be, frankly, a man of purposeless decadence, unmoored from any kind of sense of tradition, unmoored from any kind of the classical and Christian accounts of what it truly means to be free, to be happy.
Rather, he's just quote unquote kept his options open all his life and sought to just sort of get ahead and maximize his own autonomy.
And the result is, I argue, that in fact he is not free because to be truly free means to bind yourself to something greater than yourself.
To be free means to accept duty and accept sacrifice.
That's the kind of older account of freedom that I hope to transmit to my son and maybe the reader or parents who are readers of this book.
And that's the project of the book to say perhaps the modern narrow account of freedom as mere choice might be wrong and it may be leading us to society to a bad place.
Here is what tradition broadly understood offers as an alternative.
That's the book's thesis.
I mean it's an interesting thesis in that it emphasizes, as the subtitle says, the wisdom of tradition, not necessarily of faith.
I mean, you're a man of faith, you've written a lot about faith, but that's not, you're not entirely writing about that here.
You're writing about tradition itself.
Is tradition enough in and of itself?
Well, the tradition that I talk about is heavily faith-inflected.
And a lot of, so I should note that the book is posed as 12 questions, 12 questions, each of which poke holes in one of our modern certainties.
But many of the questions ultimately have theological components.
So for example, we begin with one of the early questions is, is God reasonable?
Both in the sense that is it reasonable to believe in God and is that God a reasonable God?
So, you know, or why would God want you to take a day off?
And I actually addressed that through the life of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Obviously, the reasonable God question through Thomas Aquinas, he's the most fitting for that question.
But at any rate, you're right that, you know, there are plenty of traditions which don't deserve our reverence and many of them die out.
You know, traditions come and go.
They last for a while.
Not all of them endure.
But there is this enduring tradition which has a kind of religious component or has a religious expression, but elements of it can also be found in pagan philosophy.
Elements of it can be found in the Far Eastern traditions.
And they all, you know, they disagree among themselves, but they all emphasize this idea that various limits imposed on you, whether by tradition itself or by nature, are actually sources of liberation.
And the loss of limits make you less free.
So a very obvious example is the Sabbath one that I mentioned.
Obviously, Muslims, Christians, and Jews disagree over which day to consecrate, but all of them agree that Sabbath restrictions are somehow connected with freedom.
And the American Sabbath was lost relatively recently.
This country had a sabbatarian tradition going back before the founding to the time of the colonies.
And we were told that if we, you know, the Sabbath was restrictive, why don't you just do as you please?
You can choose to shop, you can choose to work.
But in fact, we find that on the other side of that liberation, we're more harried.
Working class people especially don't have time to spend with their families, with their kids.
And generally speaking, not having peace with ourselves because we're always working, we're always consumed with activities.
So you see, again, something that appeared to be a restriction was a source of liberation.
And that same paradox works itself out in each of the books chapters in different dimensions of life.
You know, it's interesting.
I lived in England for seven years in the 90s.
And when I got there, their Sabbath tradition was much stronger than ours.
London would just shut down.
Everybody would disappear and go home.
By the time I left, that had fallen apart.
And you could see it.
It was much more harried life.
It was much more, it seemed like it was going to be more free.
And yet, in fact, it was somehow oppressive.
You could actually feel it.
So you make a really good point about it.
And I actually witnessed that happen in England in the world.
In a short span.
Yeah.
So some of the people you put forward are kind of what we might call the usual suspects of people that we know and respect, like Seneca.
I was interestingly just about three months ago was rereading Seneca.
And your chapter in Seneca is called something like, what's good about death?
That's a good question.
What is good about death?
Well, I think Seneca would argue that death provides a narrative end point without which your life just meanders to the point of being intolerable.
He associated a possibility of not there being natural death in life as an end point to life with the kinds of stories that don't have a clear beginning, middle, and an end and just sort of go on forever.
And he suggested that after a while, we would get we would tire of all of the life's bodily pleasures, its rivalries, its competitions.
All of those would become tiresome.
And so it's pointless and in fact paralyzing to the point of kind of harming your ability to live a good life if you constantly obsess about avoiding death.
So I think we saw that over the course of the pandemic.
And in fact, I wrote the Seneca chapter just as the pandemic was peaking in May, where it wasn't that Seneca would argue we should be jackasses.
And if he had lived now and he knew about the germ theory of disease, he would take reasonable precautions.
But he suggested that a kind of unreasonable fear of death that becomes all-consuming, or you treat one source of death, you magnify it to the point where you can't live anymore.
You're not living, first of all.
And then you become blind paradoxically to other sources of danger, like, for example, in our case, joblessness or social alienation for kids who weren't getting schooled because we so overwhelmingly focused on this one potential source of death, which is the coronavirus.
Is there a strange kind of paradox that the longer we live and the more our children are protected, and these are great wonders of science that our children don't die in the way they did, you know, just 100 years ago?
Is there a strange paradox where the longer we live, the more we feel we have to lose and the less we actually dare to live?
That if you actually increase life to 800 years, we just never leave our house.
Do you think that that's operational in this pandemic, the way people reacted to it?
Look, I think a strictly empirically minded person would say, well, how do you prove that?
Longer Lives, Lesser Courage00:11:39
I don't know.
But I think just anecdotally speaking, it's absolutely true.
And we saw it working out.
I got to say, you know, look, Seneca did not have the benefit of revelation.
He overlapped with Jesus, but he wasn't a Christian.
He was a pagan Roman.
But even I being a Christian, I found great solace during the pandemic in reading his advice, which is, you know, basically that you should begin each day thinking that it could be your last.
Again, not in a morbid or a weird way.
It just puts things in perspective.
You know, like, yes, I'm going to be reasonable.
I'm going to take precautions.
But even if I take the greatest precautions, I might choke on a piece of apple and collapse and die.
And that could be the end of me.
So, you know, that gives you a sense of equanimity and calm, I think.
Yeah, no, I even as a believer, you know, a believer who has a kind of a solace in a transcendent heavenly horizon, still need that on a day-to-day basis.
Right.
Everyone wants to go to heaven, no one wants to die.
I think that's fair to say.
One of the chapters that got a lot of attention in the press, and I thought, you know, I thought some of the criticisms were worth paying attention to was a chapter on Andrea Dworkin.
And for those who don't remember Andrea Dorkin, she was almost like a parody of an unattractive, angry feminist who said that all sex is rape.
And what tradition is she in besides the annoying tradition?
So, look, I use Andrea Dworkin for the proposition that sex is not a private matter.
The chapter question is: is sex private?
And the reason I thought she'd be a useful figure for that, and I have to say, she's the only figure in the book who, first of all, wouldn't want to be placed next to these other figures, meaning she wouldn't want to be near C.S. Lewis or Augustine or Seneca or Tom and others like she fit uneasily.
But I think she usefully stands for this idea that having been a child of the 1960s kind of cultural ferment and the sexual revolution, by the 1980s, she reassesses all of that radically and says, no, this is, you know, sex liberationism is not working out well, particularly for women.
And that contrary to what the sex liberationist types were saying in the 60s, 70s, and then into the 80s and 90s, and still today, sex isn't just good, harmless fun, that there is a kind of public political dimension to it.
And what people do in the bedroom and how they do it has ramifications into the broader society of how you organize society.
And I think that point is very much salient today.
So, for example, we have a society that says, on the one hand, we never stop talking about human dignity.
We've never talked about it so much as we do today.
And yet, alongside that, we also know that about 100 million Americans a day visit Pornhub.
And when they do visit Pornhub, some of the most kind of popular categories involve choking and beating teenage or very young looking women.
In other words, it proves Andrea Dworkin's point, but this was also St. Augustine's point, I argue, that, again, that the lust for domination of the bedroom warps or affects how you organize the rest of society, and it can belie your highest aspiration.
Now, very quickly, I disagree with Andrea Dworkin's prognosis.
I think her diagnosis in some ways was salient, and it would not surprise someone like St. Augustine.
I say that in the chapter, which is a kind of shocking contrast between the two.
But her prognosis was basically men are shits, she said, and that's it.
There's no getting better.
Men are horrible.
Sex is horrible.
Whereas I suggest that the natural law tradition and various traditional ways of attempting to regulate human sexuality were the best ways to deal with this problem.
But of course, and someone like Andrew Dorkin would just dismiss all of that out of hand because that was all male supremacy or whatever.
So I take a complicated approach to her.
Unlike the other chapters, it's not hagiographic.
It's critical of her.
And it's more nuanced than maybe the press reviews of the book might suggest.
It is.
And it is interesting.
I mean, I was recently rereading some of the theology of the body from, what do you call him now?
Is he Saint John Paul?
Is it St. John Paul?
And it is interesting to me that it is such a high view of sex.
And when you read it, you think like, yes, this is obviously what we're supposed to be doing.
And yet it's very easy to slip into the immediate physicality of porn.
Yeah, and it does take a certain amount of religious training to actually elevate your life in that way.
It's very, very difficult.
You know, you tell a story.
You name your son Maximilian after a saint.
I name my children after James Bond villains, but I appreciate your naming him after a saint.
And the saint you name him after performs an act that is mind-bogglingly sacrificial and beautiful, where he replaces, he's in a death camp, in a Nazi death camp, and he replaces one of the people assigned to death and he takes his place.
And you ask the question, is there any way in a society like this one we can find, we will ever find that kind of faith, that kind of sacrifice and willingness to sacrifice and nobility of sacrifice?
Because it's a story, the story, as you read it, tears come to your eyes at At the beauty of it, and yet it's hard to imagine most of the people you see on the street, including myself, it's hard to imagine elevating yourself in faith to that level.
Is that level gone?
I mean, is there something, what is it about the world that has cut us off from that kind of thing?
No, I mean, actually, I'm not as pessimistic as that might suggest.
I do think that lots of people, ordinary people, make sacrifices like that all the time, whether it, you know, health workers at the height of the pandemic, you know, when it was really like the death numbers were very high and we didn't know much about the virus, that what they were doing is self-sacrificial in that way.
Or just what ordinary moms and dads go through or put themselves through in order to, you know, protect their kids.
That's the same kind of self-sacrificial act.
And I think, you know, members of our armed forces constantly lay down their lives for their friends.
And when they do, we give them, you know, the Medal of Honor.
So, you know, I think it does go on.
What worries me is that the philosophical thrust of our age makes acts like that, like St. Maximilian Colbey's sacrifice at Auschwitz or the more ordinary sacrifices, makes acts like that kind of illegible for modern people.
And if we continue to form people the way we do, you know, just for elites, just be selfish, get ahead.
For people who aren't in the elites, even more precariously, you know, just consume your porn.
Here's your weed, legalize weed, here's your universal basic income.
Then you will get a world in which that sacrifice will become rarer and rarer.
And I think it's a bleak world that I would like to forestall where if people encountered something like a story like that, they wouldn't even be moved by it.
Because again, I think it becomes morally illegible to them.
We're talking to Saurabh Amari.
The book is The Unbroken Thread, Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
You know, you've written something somewhat about this, and you seem to avoid it in this book, but it's a problem that now is kind of especially on the right among conservatives of how to reintroduce into our world the kind of religious ideas on which our country is founded, how to get them back into the schools, how to get them back into the public forum.
And we keep running up against this idea that that is somehow limiting people's freedom to impose upon them an idea of the common.
Yeah.
No, I hear it all the time.
I have several answers to them because this objection is often posed to me all the time.
The first is that coercion is impossible.
Even an especially liberal society coerces individuals.
And we see that right now in the sense that we, contrary to all of this promise of liberalism, that it provides a neutral public square, classical liberalism is supposed to be the idea that it is indifferent as to ultimate accounts of human life.
It doesn't care what you hold to be the highest end of human life.
Just the mechanism for adjudicating between our disputes and protecting our rights.
That's all.
Well, we see that that's not true.
That in fact, liberalism, at least especially its progressive variety, has a substantive vision and it happens to be a very inhuman one.
But that vision is being coercively enforced, whether it's critical race theory, gender ideology, they enforce it against us very coercively.
It's just that not all of the coercion is meted out by like a government.
Some of it is, but lots of it is by private actors, large corporations, employers, private universities, or what have you.
But I think that's a distinction.
I mean, some conservatives, for them, that distinction isn't enough.
So it's the end of discussion.
Well, private actors can choose as they may, but I think that's a very blinkered view because it's a formal distinction.
It's a legal distinction, but its effects, you are being coerced.
So then if coercion of this kind is inevitable, then the question becomes, you know, what orthodoxy should you try to enshrine if you agree that the current one that's being rammed on our throats is inhuman and unreasonable?
CRT, gender ideology, et cetera.
So that's one answer.
The other answer, I mean, is a more philosophical answer, which is that, again, I have to cite authorities here, but Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, drawing from Aristotle, say that in order to build a virtuous citizenry, mere exhortations to virtue aren't enough.
So when conservatives say, just evangelize the culture or just, you know, go out there and do virtuous things, that's all good.
But, says Aquinas, again, quoting Aristotle, that, you know, that you need the support of laws because laws teach people.
By what they forbid and what they encourage, they shape different kinds of people.
So we have to not shy away from using law, again, in a reasonable way, in a humane way, to lead people to virtue.
In fact, that's all statesmanship is in the classical account.
Saurabh Bomari, the book is The Unbroken Thread, Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.