April 21, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:15
2955 Liberals and Conservatives Will Never Agree - A Conversation with William Gairdner
Stefan Molyneux and William Gairdner discuss the massive divide between liberals and conservatives - and why the two groups will never, ever agree.Dr. William Gairdner is a businessman, concerned citizen, and resident of Willowdale, Ontario. Following his career as a track and field athlete, Dr. Gairdner pursued academia and holds an M.A. in Linguistics, and M.A. in English Literature, and a Ph.D. in Literature from Stanford University. Dr. Gairdner is the author of 7 books and has been a major conservative voice in Canada, primarily through his popular books, The Trouble with Canada Still, The Trouble with Democracy, and The Trouble with the Family! Book List and Full Transcript: fdrurl.com/william-gairdner
Back for his hat trick is William Gerdner, who is a Canadian intellectual and raconteur, I think is the official phrase, and author and columnist and academic, who has written a really great new book called The Great Divide, why liberals and conservatives will never, and just in case you didn't get it, never ever, I've got to get those in there, never ever agree.
William, thank you so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure.
My pleasure.
Nice to see you again.
So I wonder if you could give us or give my audience the thesis, because I think conservatism has been very much associated with particular strains of the U.S., which in many ways can be viewed as a reaction to liberalism.
But I wonder if you could give people an overview of the divides as you see them reaching all the way back through to ancient Greece.
There you go.
Nice, quick, concise opening.
Well, first of all, I'd like to tell your listeners that the book is not about party politics.
It's more about political and moral philosophy.
The metaphor I like to use is, there's a fellow standing out on a beautiful day, standing out on a nice street on a sunny afternoon, and suddenly there's an enormous gap in the road, and he sees buildings falling down, and he says, oh my god, there's an earthquake.
But, of course, that's not the earthquake.
It's the rubble or the consequences of the earthquake.
The real earthquake is the tension between the geological forces beneath the ground, which he can't see.
He just sees the consequences of it.
Well, this book is about ideological forces beneath the surface that we can't see normally.
And the whole objective of my book is to bring them to the surface so we can understand the political and moral rubble that's lying around.
And it really is everywhere.
You know, one of my perhaps not better habits, or you could say addictions, is when I read an article in the U.S. media on a website.
I like the article, read the article, and I will invariably dip down to the comments.
And here you can see, I mean, it's absolutely ferocious and nonstop.
And I mean, so full of vitriol and aggression.
I was reading about the tragedy earlier.
With the Germanwings airline pilot who seems to have intentionally downed his plane.
And of course, people were attempting to tie it back to Barack Obama, and then, you know, someone else.
And it immediately went back to this bichromatic non-rainbow of the US political divide.
And it really is, it's everywhere.
And it is one of these debates or arguments that...
That increases, it seems to me, in vitriol because there's no objective way of trying to determine truth and falsehood.
That which is considered essential, but which cannot be proven, tends to create the most escalating conflicts in society.
Would you put these divides into those categories?
Well, I would.
You know, there's about eight main topics in the Great Divide, such as the nature of Well, the nature of human nature, the liberal conservative divide over that entire concept.
When people ask me for an example of what I'm writing about, I say, well, the difference, the divide over human nature is a good example.
Most modern liberals tend to see human nature as something malleable, maybe completely malleable.
I mean, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first big proponents of this Modern view of human nature, which was really heretical at the time.
He said the objective of the political philosopher, I'm quoting him, is to change human nature, unquote.
I mean, how do you do that?
Well, you do it with progressive policies and laws, et cetera, et cetera.
And the objective is to perfect human society.
Because if human nature is really malleable, that means it can be perfected by policy.
Well, the conservative view from Aristotle forward is really that human nature is rather fixed It's certainly not perfectible.
Most of us are fallen in some way or other.
If you're a Christian, you say sinful.
But if you're just a secular fellow with historical experience, you say, we just keep on making mistakes and given the opportunity.
And if we're not surrounded with some kind of environment that stops us from going through red lights when we shouldn't and things like that, like order and more.
My motto for history goes something like this.
New mistakes, different costumes.
That's really as far as...
As it goes.
Yeah, okay.
So maybe that's the modern Aristotelian view.
At any rate, you know, these two concepts of human nature simply cannot be reconciled.
And that's why in my subtitle, which some people say is negative, I say, no, it's not negative.
It's provocative, and it's pointing to a fundamental truth, that you cannot reconcile those two opposing views of human nature.
It's the same with the opposing liberal and conservative views of democracy.
That basically has a more temporal element.
For example, the fiasco modern liberal.
Who even thinks about it?
What does democracy really mean and what should it mean?
The typical modern liberal will say, well, it means it's got to do with the will of the people, the will of the people now, like expressing their will, making laws that lead to a decent society and living under them by consent.
A typical conservative will say, well, I don't agree with you.
It's not about now.
It's about past, present, and future.
I mean, Edmund Burke put this in his own phrase, which I'm quoting him perfectly, when he said that democracy was really about those dead, those living, and those yet to be born.
And what he was introducing in that concept was the nature of democratic obligation.
It's not just about the will.
It's about our obligations and duties to those who died for us, to give us the country that we have, to those who surround us because we need to live with them without killing each other, and to those future citizens to whom we ought to be leaving some kind of inheritance of a good society rather than what we're doing now, which is leaving them a ton of debt that they have to pay off.
Well, and I think one of the foundational arguments within the book, which I agree with for what it's worth, is that when sort of radical materialism carves out free will and carves out morality, ethical choices, the pursuit of eudomania or excellence, ethical choices, the pursuit of eudomania or excellence, moral excellence, which was at least the ancient Greek ideal.
When you carve that out in society, you have to have some way of, we all need to make decisions individually and collectively.
And when you carve out free will and ethics, you end up having to replace it with something.
And whether that something is the will of the majority, which has been frankly terrifying for most thinkers throughout history, There's nothing more dangerous than the mob for anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together.
Or you have to substitute something like the social good or, you know, the will of the world spirit in the Hegelian sense.
We still need to make decisions.
If you throw away one standard, it doesn't mean you can get rid of all standards.
And I think this flailing around on the liberal side, trying to find some compelling Mythology that can replace free will and virtue, I think, has been one of the causes of immense suffering in the modern world.
I think it has, too.
And it's interesting to trace it back to its earliest roots.
As you know from reading this book, Stephan, in the first part, I tried to do a simple sort of anatomy of liberalism.
Like, how did it begin?
I mean, I'm thinking mostly of North America, and how did it get us to where we are today?
I'm not suggesting my analysis is unique, but I will say I haven't really seen it before.
The first part of it, I talk about virtue liberalism.
Obviously, to anybody who reads the history of it all, the first American pilgrims and the first Canadian pilgrims who came to these countries were all deeply committed Christians.
I mean, you couldn't find an atheist because they probably hanged most of them before they got to our shores.
But at any rate, they were deeply religious people.
Over time, it didn't take that long.
I mean, we're talking about the Declaration of Independence era.
The philosophy of John Locke was what was taken on board.
Society was becoming more secular, more diverse, as the saying goes these days.
Religion was more or less falling into the background, and because people wanted to avoid religious warfare on the new continent, which the original pilgrims felt would be their new Jerusalem, okay, as soon as that became kind of a faded ideal, the idea was Can we go to something like self-interest, property rights, individual freedom, under a rule, in other words, what they call liberty under law?
I mean, you know all this.
So liberty under law and property rights were the ideal, mostly taken from the work of John Locke.
Jefferson summed it all up in the Declaration of Independence, which he basically today would be accused of plagiarizing from Locke.
And that's what we would say, because almost every word was Locke's philosophy.
That lasted for quite a while, 150 years maybe.
It served America in particular very well.
But people gradually began to see that it wasn't enough.
As some pundit remarked, it's not enough to say that the rich and the poor alike are free to sleep under park benches.
You know, we need something more than that.
A free society is not enough.
We need to stop talking about getting people to the starting line together because obviously A lot of them really screw up after that.
What about getting them to the finish line together?
Well, this change in philosophy brought about other enormous changes.
Today we call it statism or collectivism in its various guises.
The idea then was, by using the power and the force of the state, you can make people equal, not only at the starting line, but also at the finish line.
Let's use the power of the state to do that.
In my analysis, this meant that modern liberal democracies were no longer liberal in the oldest classical sense.
They were entering or taking on board a fundamental contradiction because you can't have the force of government making everybody equal and also bragging about his foundation and liberty at the same time.
So what modern statists have done, and I'm not saying it was done as in leading an orchestra and all that, it was kind of like an invisible ideological conductor of the orchestra.
What happened was, they decided, I say they, there's no they there.
This evolved, mutated, if you like.
They split the body politic into a public and a private body.
What would the public body be?
Well, the public body would be in places like Canada, well, we'll give you all equal access to medical care.
We'll give you all welfare if you deserve it.
We'll do this, we'll do that.
In other words, social programs, coast to coast, will get you all to the finish line together.
But they worried that people would be bitching about the loss of freedom.
So what they did was say, well, we'll give you all your bodily and sexual freedoms.
You can have abortion on demand.
You can have all the gay rights you want.
You can transgender.
You can have pornography, even in the finest hotels in the country, for 10 bucks or whatever it is, you know?
No problem.
So I saw a relationship between these two things.
Once the powers that be split the body, Almost everybody said, we're freer than we ever were, because they were enjoying their sexual and bodily freedoms, and they confused them with real freedoms.
And they forgot about the traditional and customary political and economic freedoms and the intensive regulation, which virtually permeated the political body of every modern democracy.
And the best place we see this, of course, is an unsustainable permanent National debt, which simply can never be paid off.
We will never pay these debts off without sinking our societies.
Well, and that goes back to, yeah, what was Trudeau's famous statement of the 70s?
The government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.
But I think it's really hard to make an argument that a freedom is a freedom if it requires subsidization through others.
Freedom of speech is one thing, forcing everyone to pay for my newspaper, like for me to run a newspaper and publish a newspaper.
That's another thing.
And I have no particular objections to personal sexual freedoms.
However, when the consequences of bad decisions in those personal sexual freedom arenas are forcibly subsidized by other people in terms of abortions, in terms of treatment for STDs, in terms of subsidies for people who get divorced and end up on the wrong side of the tracks, So, freedom is supposed to come with an associated level of responsibility.
You know, as the ancient proverb has it, take what you want and pay for it.
But when you have these social programs in place, and democracy seems to be the mass delusion that you can vote somehow out of the consequences of bad decisions, vote them into the ether and print money and borrow money and...
And make money out of nothing to cover up people's bad decisions.
It's not freedom.
Sexual freedom is not freedom if other people have to pay for the consequences of your bad decisions.
Well, I agree with you and you and I have lots we agree on and some things we don't agree on.
I probably depart from your standard in some respect because, for example, I object to the government in Ontario with This is very recent here, to their sex ed program, where they're teaching six-year-olds that anal sex, for example, is something normal and nice, and if it ever crosses your mind, you should give it a try.
All that sort of thing, I think, is abominable, and so I do resist.
I feel that whether we like the standards or not, no society in history has ever survived without some kind of set of, I say freely assumed, shalls and shall nots.
There must be some kind of boundary, some kinds of conduct, standards of conduct, principles of behavior that we share.
This is like a language.
We share our moral system like a language and we speak it.
We are speakers of that system.
But when we go to radical individualism, unfortunately, because that's how I started, but now I see that when we go to radical individualism, we end up with a situation where egalitarian courts at the top can virtually batter their own free civil societies to pieces with egalitarian programs such as we have been discussing coast to coast.
They do that by removing the sorts of privileges that people have created for each other in their families, in their churches, in their radio stations, in their corporations.
And they say, no, you can't have those privileges.
Everybody's got to have that.
So they don't take your privileges away.
They just give them to everybody at once, subsidized by the government.
They remove the taint of privilege.
By turning everything into a handout.
Well, that means they also get rid of the intrinsic value and sense of honor which people have attributed to these privileges.
I'll just give you an example.
Take the country as the highest award for courage and bravery in battle.
Well, someone could complain and say, I deserve that award.
I should have one too.
You know, gimme, gimme, gimme.
The government says, you know, I'm exaggerating, of course, but the government says, well, let's give the highest honor we have for courage.
Courage even to cowards.
Look at your eyebrows.
You can see the immediate effect would be to devalue the symbol.
I feel that this is what egalitarian governments are doing in attacking freely assumed privileges and all the free associations of civil society.
But radical individuals are also doing it.
One of my dearest friends is a radical libertarian, and I say to him, I say, you are feeding us into the hands of the state.
Why do you say that?
I say, well, because your interests, your philosophical interests are contributing to the atomization of the social molecule, families, civil associations, voluntary groups that have gotten together to do whatever it is they do.
And not only that, but other people bearing your own standard are claiming rights and privileges from the government, which they don't qualify for.
And I've never bothered to qualify for it.
So in this sense, civil society is being torn apart from the top and the bottom.
Well, just to...
The great thing about this show is at least once a show I get to say words that I... I never thought I would ever utter in sequence.
Circling back to anal sex, just to put it on the record, my daughter is currently six and if any teacher tries to teach her about the joys of anal sex, I would be tempted to introduce that teacher to the joys of anal sex using their own stapler because I think that would be a completely egregious displacement of my authority as a parent.
It is my job as a parent at an age-appropriate time to teach my child about The complexities and challenges of human sexuality and not some government worker.
So I just really want to point that out.
Well said, well said.
So I can't help but think when reading this book that it ties into the book that you wrote, I think in the early 90s, which we talked about before that I remember very vividly you saying how emotional it was for you to write it called The War on the Family.
And the family is...
Now has just really become sort of a nuclear family and it's become a anything-goes kind of a family structure.
But the family, in terms of constituted immediate relatives, extended relatives, and it blends out into the community as a whole, you know, and it's not just like a single thing, like a spilt paint that just divides itself from everything else.
It really does blend to families and to marry and you blend out through friends and relatives into a wider community.
That family unit, to me, has gone through such an attack.
And I've really grown to appreciate the degree to which healthy, happy, functional families are foundational in resisting the state.
Because there's so much, particularly as a father yourself, you know, there's so...
Children require such a ridiculously high number of resources that an individual simply can't provide them.
I mean, think of a breastfeeding mom with two kids or three kids.
She cannot go out and get all the resources those kids need.
And so when you disintegrate the family...
The resource requirements are still as high, and it's generally the panic of not having the resources for your kids that drive people to vote for more state power.
You know, give me what kids need stuff.
And I think those two things, liberalism's hostility to the family, which, as you point out in the book, goes back to Plato's sadomasochistic fantasy of totalitarianism called the Republic.
This hostility to the family, you know, he wanted, like Marx wanted, women in common, free love, children raised by the state and so on.
And that seems to be very foundational to the liberal idea that somehow parenting is too important a task to be left to mere parents, which seems like a very strange paradox to me.
I think that was a good little speech that you gave on the topic and on my book.
The War Against the Family, as you reminded me, was a painful book to write in many respects.
But I think it's still very current, even though a lot of the data is 20 years old.
That book is still the only book which really exposes the total war on the family in the West.
Not by everybody, of course.
Most of us love our families, and the idea that we have a war going against the family is reprehensible.
But they don't realize that the radical fringe has always been attacking the family from Plato's day forward.
And that book tries to give the ideological background of that struggle.
And by the way, while you were speaking, you made me want to tell your listeners, I hope you don't mind the flagrant self-promotion, but The Great Divide is a A book that provides people with a kind of self-discovery because at the end of every chapter there's a table or a quiz and they can see where they stand.
How much more liberal or more conservative they happen to be on speaking philosophically and morally now on any of the chapters in the book.
So it's been a really interesting exercise for me to hear people write me or call me back and say, oh my gosh, I didn't realize I was talking one way and walking another.
You know?
So I really enjoy that kind of self-revelatory experience that I'm hearing.
Okay, back to the family.
Well, I think it's a topic which obviously touches everything, and if you ask me, which in a way you did, I would say that the freely associated, voluntarily formed family, the married mother and father living together with their dependent children, is an ancient institution.
It's the first political society, as Aristotle It informed us so long ago, and it has always been the enemy of radical planners, socialists, always been an enemy of what the French call l'état dirigiste, etc., etc., and so much so that we even, you can see it in that book, we even have people telling us that parents should be licensed before they can have children.
It's the government that knows better than parents do what's best for their children.
And all those kind of things.
It's still around.
That's what Kathleen Wynne is doing in Ontario with her sex ed program.
She's basically saying, you folks don't know what you're talking about.
We do.
We are the change agents of society, and we will whip you all into shape with our education program.
Yeah, and as you mentioned, dazzle people with sexual opportunism to the point where they don't realize the degree to which their traditional rights are being eroded.
I mean, it's a lot easier to to titillate young people in school with lurid tales of sexual possibilities than to inform them of exactly how much debt is piling on their tiny shoulders every minute of every day.
And it's a great distraction for them, of course.
And that, of course, It's one of these tragic things that they will teach you about anal sex, but they won't teach you about critical thinking, reason, your artistic and intellectual history, particularly in the West, because that's all white male privilege and so on.
They won't teach you the foundations of your culture.
They won't teach you the values that you've inherited from thousands of years ago and why they're there.
It is very much a very surface...
Manipulation.
Which, again, is the idea that human beings can be rearranged like Legos to just become whatever it is that you want.
And whenever people try that, you know, from Sparta to the French Revolution to all of the horrors of left and right wing totalitarianism of the 20th century, you say, ah, human nature is incredibly malleable.
We can do anything we want with it.
And when human nature or people's fundamental drivers and incentives, the biological reasons why we're at the top of the food pyramid...
When that fails to cooperate, you must escalate.
You don't ever say, well, the theory doesn't work, so I guess we'll scratch it and go back to something else.
When you have this social engineering and it fails to work, there's always this escalation, which results in the Reign of Terror in France and various escalations throughout the West.
That is really tragic, and that's when you know people are addicted to a...
I don't exactly know how to...
It's an insult to religion to call it a religious perspective.
But when there's no possibility that negative feedback on your theory can dismantle your theory, it's almost like it's cult-like, the approach to this liberal ideology.
Yes, I agree.
That was really well said.
How does that spin back to the story I'm telling in my book?
The reason people like that keep doing what they're doing is because they are devoted in a foundational sense to this concept of a malleable human nature.
And so if you can't pull that foundation stone out of the ideological building, what I call the architecture of their ideology, is supported by that single foundation stone.
If you can't pull that out and defeat that argument, you will never defeat the rest of it.
They would just keep going back to it and put the building up again.
They put the building up in the French Revolution.
They put it up in all sorts of European societies in the 20th century.
It got knocked down and people are still trying to put it up on the same foundation stone.
So I think these are the arguments we have to have.
And the Great Divide is really my humble effort to try to bring people to the point where, look, stop shouting each other about how outraged you are, you know, and start dealing with the underlying arguments.
I often say, I go give a speech somewhere and somebody will stand up.
It's usually a radical feminist or someone like that.
And she will say, Mr.
Gairdner, I'm outraged by what you've been saying.
And I look her right in the eye and I say, well, you couldn't be more outraged than I am.
Now, what's your point?
You know, and it's amazing.
It's like watching air come out of a balloon.
And if they have any intelligence, they look me back in the eye and they say, I understand.
What you're trying to say is you'd like to hear a fact or a statement of truth that you can deal with and debate.
I said, yeah, because I can't debate your emotions.
Well, and I mean, I gave a speech in Detroit last summer.
I think I went right up after a Canadian senator.
And we had to face down bomb threats for the speech.
Now, when I was younger, and this may have been growing up in England, but when I was younger, Bill, I'm sure this was probably the case for you.
When I was younger, the first person to get upset in an intellectual argument lost.
I mean, it's the equivalent of, let's play tennis, and I'm going to get so angry, I'm going to throw my tennis racket away, right over the chain-link fence.
Well, you've just lost the tennis game, because now you've basically said you can't play anymore.
You can't play within the rules, because you just threw the...
And reason being the racket, throw it away, and it's like, okay, well, you've just lost.
But now, somehow, it's changed to the point where you throw away your tennis racket, and yay, I've won!
You know, it's like it's become this weird thing where the most offended person has suddenly won.
Well, it's amazing.
I like the way you said that.
Yes, the most offended person.
So it's like a contest for emotional volume, you know, and yeah, it's just amazing.
And, you know, again, you go to a cocktail party.
When I was a young man, if you went to a cocktail party and your elders were standing around and one of them asked you your opinion on something important, if you said something like this, if you said, well, it's true for you, but it's not true for me, they would look at you like you were some kind of No, they would ask you to go back to the children's table and play with the crackers and the glasses that you couldn't hurt yourself with, and they'd say, you're not quite ready for speaking with taller people yet.
Yeah, right.
So if you were of age, they expected you to have an opinion and to be able to defend it.
And they listened, not only to the arguments that you made, but the style with which you made your arguments.
Could you support them properly?
Could you speak with, you know, decent English?
Could you string your concepts together so that they made sense?
And if they ridiculed you at all, which sometimes would happen, it wasn't emotionally.
It was because of the logic or the illogic of your argument that they didn't agree with.
So then you have to go back and do it again.
Now, that's a very different society.
It's one that matures us quickly, I think, compared to one in which we go to outrage.
Well, I mean, when I was in college, I was, of course, on the debating team.
And boy, I mean, you had to study your Cicero.
You had to study your rebuttals.
You had to make detailed notes.
There wasn't just two commandments, yell, cry, and then, oh, look, I've won!
I mean, it was really quite complex.
I've always sort of thought political correctness is like calling in an airstrike on a chess game.
It's a little bit more complex than what people are saying.
This idea that, well, I've been offended, I've been upset, and therefore society should bend to my will is more akin to the nature of a tantrum than it is to a philosophical argument and would have gotten no respect whatsoever, quite the counter when I was younger.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Well, we're on the same page there, that's for sure.
So anyway, it's certainly my hope for this book that it spurs that kind of talk, and I think it already has.
We've done about, since March 1st, when a book was released, we've done about 25 radio interviews, mostly in the U.S., which has been quite an interesting experience.
Some of them are deeply Christian stations, which we don't find so often in Canada.
And there's a booming voice in the background saying something like this.
The Bible, the only book that doesn't evolve.
Actually, I think linguistically that's not quite true.
From the sort of ancient Aramaic and Hebrew, I believe there's been quite a bit.
But let's talk about that because religion doesn't come up a huge amount, at least on my show.
But I have talked about it more recently and my growing appreciation for the pro-family, pro-children in particular values that religion has helped to or is working to help to transmit across the generational gaps.
So there is generally this idea that on the liberal side, it's much more secular.
In other words, their deity happens to be the state, and their religion happens to be sort of this empty-headed, deterministic environmental materialism.
Whereas on the conservative side, there's more religiosity, there's more free will, there's more ethics, and there's more you are the consequences of your choices, not only your environment.
Well, of course, as you point out in the book, Twin studies don't deny genetics and sociology doesn't deny environment, but they're scarcely the towering inevitabilities that those on the liberal side point out.
So where do you see the role of religion in these two opposing elements?
Well, I guess in my book a couple of times I made the statement that I believe morality sits on top of religion and politics and political philosophy Sit on top of morality.
If you're good, and I know you are, at deconstructing the systems created by most philosophers in the world, you usually find that they are some kind of more intellectual echo of an underlying moral system.
You know, Christianity tells us we all have moral freedom.
Well, what was Immanuel Kant about if not about moral freedom?
You know what I mean?
That sort of thing.
So philosophy tends to echo its underlying moral substructure.
So, in that sense, I'd say religion has been at the foundation of all civilizations.
I don't think there ever has been a holy, secular civilization which has survived.
The only thing that got very close to that was the French Revolution, probably.
And then, in a way, the Germans tried it before and during the Second World War.
These societies have always collapsed because they simply surrendered the notion of the transcendent good.
And they surrender the notion of some kind of natural law, which is beyond the positive laws of humans, to which we can aspire so that we can make the state better, so to speak, and make ourselves better.
When we lose that sense that there's some higher self to which we can arrive through self-discipline and self-reliance and self-scrutiny, I think it all fell down then to power.
It comes down to who's the most persuasive in the political system.
In other words, who's the most powerful and has been able to get a hold of the levers of power and shape us according to their own vision of the good.
In that sense, we lose our moral way, I think, when we lose that framework.
Originally, at least, religion has always provided.
I don't mean to go on too much here, but people like me tend to see the modern, secular, materialistic systems of the 20th century as political religions.
Okay, so the hardwiring of Christianity was that there's a kingdom of heaven to which we should aspire and religion should help us get there.
The hardwiring of the secular materialist is the same, except we're building the kingdom of heaven here on earth and not in the afterlife.
Other than that, and I think that's why people like Eric Vogelin described these systems as political religions.
Well, except political religions more on the style of Islam than on the style of Christianity.
Christianity, at least post-Roman Empire, has tried to spread itself by the word, whereas other religions try to spread themselves, not all, but some other religions try to spread themselves by the sword.
And the state, of course, is a monopoly of coercion in a geographical area.
When you have a religion called the state, you are automatically a very violence-prone individual because you will not go out and proselytize among those who are unbelievers in your religion.
You will instead pass laws and round them with police cars if they should disagree.
And I think that's one of the reasons why I've really become much more critical of secular idealism as opposed to religious idealism, at least in the Christian Western tradition.
Religious idealism is, you know, I'd really like to convince you how to get to heaven, but if you don't want to, well, God gave you free will, so that's fine.
Whereas for secular idealism, it's do it or Gulag.
That really tends to be the trend, which is incredibly dangerous.
I mean, if my neighbor believes in Thor and I don't, you know, we can probably both chat over the fence about our respective garden patches.
But if my neighbor is a communist and he gets his way, I'm going to have a very bad time of it indeed.
And I think that's where the secular religion aspect doesn't encompass just how dangerous secular materialism is if you take out God and replace it with the state.
Yes, and that's what I meant when I said those who seize the levers of power and force us to do things their way.
You put it very well.
That's exactly what happened in the 20th century.
I should say, God forbid, it happens again.
You know, we've had enough of that.
But nothing prevents it.
If you have no transcendent standard of the good to which you can point, nothing prevents it at all.
It's all a matter of power.
Now, of course, many of the great critics of modern secular democracy have said that that is the way we're heading our own softer way.
We don't need machine guns for it just now.
And we don't need the gulag, you know, to lock up our dissenters.
But we do have human rights tribunals and these kinds of government agencies.
I should share with your listeners.
When I was a young man, probably 18 or 19, there was something around called Life Magazine.
It was a large format, you know, a great big centerfold when you opened it up.
And I'll never forget one day, I opened it up on my knees and there was this enormous photograph of Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
And there was a million students there, all dressed in exactly the same uniforms, exactly the same little black pillbox hats on, and all waving Mao's Red Book over their heads.
And I turned to my mother and I said, wow, you have to feel sorry for these kids.
They're my age and they're completely brainwashed.
Look at this.
I was shocked, and I never thought in my whole life that we would see anything even close to that in our country.
And in fact, George Jonas, who's a very well-known Canadian journalist who escaped from Hungary to come to Canada in the 50s, when I asked him about this, he said, Bill, he said, it was like a disease, and we fled the disease to come to Canada, he said, but it followed us.
Yeah, no, and I mean, we only have to look at Mark Stein's experience through McLean's to get more of just the kind of chilling effect that this can have.
Now, one thing I think that I'd like to chat a little bit more about is evil.
Which is, I talk about evil on my show.
And I get these reactions from people like, I'm talking about voodoo or some other form of superstition.
And in sort of perusing how people are responding to, you give this guy to return to this fellow who crashed the plane in Europe into the Alps and killed 150 people, including himself.
And there are, of course, these two narratives.
And I, you know, when I was reading through your book, I thought of these two narratives, they really showed up in reviewing this.
And one of the narratives was brain chemistry.
You know, he was mentally, he had a brain chemistry imbalance, and he just didn't get the right medication.
Like he had some sort of illness, some sort of disease, for which there is no moral component whatsoever.
Like, he can't just be an evil guy.
He's got to have some brain chemistry imbalance.
It's like diabetes.
There's no moral component to it.
And yet, there are also people who are like, I hope he burns in hell forever.
In other words, they reacted to this murder-suicide with 149 unwilling victims as a grave moral evil.
And I think that the relationship between evil and I think you touched upon it in your chapter on morality, but I think it's quite foundational to these two different worldviews.
If you don't believe in evil, let's put people in charge, because human beings are perfectible.
But if you believe in evil, then giving people power is the great invitation to serving some very bad elements in the human psyche.
Yes, again, well said.
I think it's, first of all, half soft to you for even bringing the topic up.
This topic is simply not discussed much these days.
In the same way, I often say to my friends, I can't remember the last time I saw a really serious editorial in a major newspaper on the importance of human liberty.
It just doesn't happen.
You'll see it on rights.
You'll see articles on rights all over the place and how we need this and we need that, we deserve this and we deserve that, but very little on liberty, certainly nothing on evil unless you're dealing with a deeply Christian theological journal or I didn't discuss this much in my book, but it's certainly latent in a number of the chapters.
This idea that human beings are not perfectible, we are fallen in many ways, we are certainly corruptible, that if we're not surrounded with or imbued with what Aristotle called a second nature, Then watch out, because there's going to be evil.
It can start with what seem to be very small things, like bad manners in children, foul-mouthed people.
We go to a hockey game to watch my nine-year-old grandson play, and right next to me, there are these kids not much older, using the foulest language.
Well, I have to go over to them and say, hey, cut it out.
You know, first of all, it's a public place.
Secondly, even if it weren't, you know, what kind of young man are you going to grow up to be speaking like this?
Sorry to interrupt, but I think this is part of the civil society that's been lost with the welfare state, which is you actually went over, and I do this periodically as well, just intervene where I see people behaving badly in public spaces.
It's not the most comfortable thing to do, but it seems to me it's like your minor contribution to making the world a place you want to grow old in and have a civilized society continue.
And this is something that...
When you fail to recognize that there is evil and that we all have a responsibility on making the tiny course corrections to those around us to keep us in the straight and narrow rather than, you know, the path to perfidy, then we give up and we hope that somehow arbitrary rules or more rules are going to save us from this.
So now, of course, there's this, ah, crazy guy crashed plane.
Sorry, it's just such an illustrative example.
But there's like, crazy guy crashed plane into Alps.
Now, my first thought is, okay, so that's a very evil action.
And was there no one around him who saw that he was having significant problems with his ethics?
And his fiancée said that she saw particularly immoral actions.
He'd had an affair apparently on his fiancée for five months.
That's pretty nasty.
But his aunt said, oh no, everything was perfectly fine.
He was nice.
He was wonderful and so on.
And I think that these massive evils are the result to some degree of people not giving course corrections earlier on in life.
And if the family can't do it, then it should be other people as well.
But now all the people are saying, well, okay, so now we need to change medical privacy laws.
We can solve that so that the doctors can say to the airline he was crazy.
Or, you know, now we have to have more people, two people always in the cockpit at any given time.
Like, Because people aren't taking responsibility for helping everyone around them become good, we just have to have more and more and more regulations to the point where we can't even breathe air anymore.
I like to see you get so worked up.
It's a serious topic.
It's funny.
I'm going to have another sip of coffee just in case I need another one of those.
You know, yesterday I was having an internet debate with some friends.
Well, we did it over our cell phones, you know, firing arguments back and forth.
And I used the quotation from Edmund Burke.
I was talking about something.
And I said, don't forget Edmund Burke's great statement.
He said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
And there was a bit of silence following that.
And then I wrote back and I said, you know, he didn't say That good men had to do bad things.
He said, all they have to do is nothing.
In other words, what he was implying was that there is a principle of good in the world, which is put forward by good people, and there's a principle of evil in the world.
It's a Manichean view, if you like.
But the idea was that if good men simply do nothing, they don't have to be bad, just have to do nothing, evil will fill the vacuum, because it's out there all the time.
And so my friend wrote back, you know what he did?
Just to illustrate your point, he wrote me back just the one word evil with a question mark.
Evil?
And I wrote back and said, yes, evil.
He didn't accept the word evil.
And I wrote back and I said, yes, evil.
That is what Burke was talking about.
And it's what I'm talking about.
And evil is wondering, again, I don't know.
There's so many reasons as to why it could be the case in North America that there's been this specific disbelief in evil.
I don't know if it's because they've never been bombed.
You know, my family, you know, half German and half Irish British.
And so my mother was born in Germany in the 1930s.
And had a very, very bad time of it as a child.
And, you know, one of my uncles was on a bombing raid over Dresden that killed my mother's mother.
And I mean, there was a great evil.
I'm not saying that everyone in my family, but there was a great problem with evil that sort of was transmitted through my family.
Like the close to Christendom suicide of the 20th century in Europe, I think gave a lot of Europeans a very strong sense of That there is a great danger called evil that could wipe out not just our civilization, but with the advent of nuclear weapons, life on this planet.
That evil has become a desperately risky and dangerous virus in society.
And yet, you know, I remember in grad school, I was at U of T, and bringing the question of evil to bear, again, people were just like, it's like I was talking about being abducted by a space alien, rather than getting the transmissions of the fight of good and evil that's really been constant throughout human history.
Well, I think what you're describing, we could say, if we analyze it even further, would be it's a form of public egotism.
Not just individual egotism, but the public as a whole.
It's like a mass A mass belief that we cannot be evil, that we are fundamentally good because we are fundamentally malleable in our human nature.
We can rely on the state to make things better.
We will arrive at the perfect society someday and that kind of thing if we just pay a little more in taxes and hire a few more people.
I just did an op-ed piece, by the way, which is being published in a On the big American political website down there, I forget the name of it now.
I just got news of it a few minutes ago.
But it's about this very thing.
And in the article, I was talking about how all these Western democracies are becoming what I call tripartite states.
Well, a tripartite state is one in which one-third of the people are creating the wealth and the jobs.
One-third of the people at some level, whether federal, municipal, or state, or provincial, as here in Canada, are working for the government.
And one-third are getting significant benefits, either in cash or kind, from the government.
Well, anybody can see that the last two segments, when they go to the polls, are always going to gang up on the first segment.
It's like two wolves and a sheep voting on what they're going to have for dinner.
And I think this is what has happened to all our societies.
And people say, is it game over?
I said, well, you know, I remember Francis Fukuyama was talking about liberalism as the sort of end of history, in what I always thought was kind of a good title, but a misleading one, because history never ends unless the world ends.
Classical liberal democracy, rather modern liberalism, modern liberal democracy, as he was describing it, was not the last stage.
But what I'm calling libertarian socialism may be, because we have sufficiently stunned the people with their own self-gratification and their own sexual pleasures that they simply don't care about over-regulation and taxation.
They would rather go get on their pornography screen or whatever it is they're doing, or run down the street and have a tax-funded abortion if they have Oh my god, you're pregnant, and let's get rid of it, and all this sort of thing.
Those are our preoccupations now, and not our fundamental political, economic, and all those other kinds of freedoms that we used to enjoy.
So, I think we have to...
There is a tragic phenomenon among the young.
Oh, it's so great being of an age where I can say, among the young!
What, what, what?
I should have a monocle, I think, like...
Some sort of monopoly piece.
But you could sort of term it pastophobia.
And I don't know if it comes out of technology where like yesterday's technology is always bad.
And, you know, the movies that were shot in the 40s are grainy and, you know, gosh, that orange look of the color movies in the 60s.
Everything in the past is just worse and everything in the future is just better.
And, of course, you know, with regards to technology, yeah, I agree that.
You and I would not be having much fun doing this interview over yogurt cups and string.
And so there is a sense in which...
Preferring things in the present and future makes sense in certain circumstances, technology in particular.
But the idea that the past has valuable lessons accumulated through really ugly human experiences to teach us.
The economist Murray Rothbard used to sort of refer to this as the great relearning because he would go and visit communes in the 60s and everyone just sort of lived together and bathed community.
And then they all got lice.
And it's like, oh, yes, that's why we bathed separately and have soap and so on.
And there was this great relearning of things that had been accepted as valuable in the past for thousands of years.
You know, you need two parents to raise a child.
Whatever you subsidize, you get more of.
Whatever you tax, you decrease.
And if you subsidize a responsibility, you'll get more of it.
And if you tax responsibility, you get less of it.
And so on.
These lessons which have been really painfully accumulated through human history, the idea of going back to the past, because people say, oh, yes, but in the past, women were unequal and there was slavery.
So there's nothing of value.
Everything must be about the present and the future.
And I think that one of the lessons that I got out of your book is that, yeah, let's circle back.
I mean, there were mistakes in the past, but there may, in fact, be more mistakes in the present.
And the past has very important lessons to offer us.
It doesn't mean we accept uncritically everything in the past, but it does mean that we can't just push on as if there was no accumulated wisdom from history.
Well, interesting to hear you again on that, Stéphane.
I have often thought, and you're getting me excited about it again, I've often thought it would be great to do a book called Judged by History.
We are always judging history.
We write books about the past, as you say, in which we judge our forebears, usually negatively.
Very seldom do you read a book in which someone is judging them positively.
But I would like to see a book written by, for example, an expert on Aristotle, an expert on Jesus, an expert on Aquinas, an expert on whoever, you know, writing about us.
In other words, the book would be written about us from their point of view and we would be filtered through their mindsets and their expectations for how we should be behaving.
It would be an interesting book.
So, judged by history would be the title.
Yeah, if you could get a window into the future, what would you like and what would you be appalled by?
And I think they'd be fascinated by the technology and they'd be appalled at basic statistics like in America in the 1960s, 97% of kids were born in wedlock.
Now, among certain segments of the US population, it's below 50%.
And they would say, wow, that's like only 50 years or so.
What an incredible change, and for the worse.
And we just don't track any of this stuff, but we'll have to live with the consequences for a long, long time.
I think so, too.
And as you know, in the first part of the Great Divide, there's that chart.
My friend Donnie just last week said, oh boy, he said, that chart on Libertarian socialism, like what has happened in the last 50 years is worth the whole book to me, he said, because I was just shocked at the change from the 1950s to today in every one of these areas.
And, you know, I'd really recommend this because I mean, my audience covers a pretty wide gamut of perspectives.
But really, you know, if you're not what's called a conservative, which is an unfortunate phrase, but rooted in history, I think would be probably a better but unwieldy phrase, is that reading a book like this is a very exciting challenge.
I sort of get the same experience when I read something by Charles Murray, which is like, wow, this is really challenging stuff.
But the data and the arguments are very, very hard to resist, you know, and there's nothing that, you know, like a blade is sharpened against a whetstone and intelligence is sharpened by surprising but well-founded opinions.
And that's why I really urge people to read this book.
And we'll put a list, of course, of books and links that people can get from you because you've got, I mean, and also, I mean, not to be...
Overly complimentary, but it's really, really well written.
It's engaging.
You know how to drop a humor bomb alongside a truth grenade so that the truth goes off with less noise.
And it's witty, it's engaging, it's challenging, and it's very well researched.
And so I just really want to recommend that people get a hold of a copy of this book.
It's always a delight when you come out with something new.
Now, I guess, you know, having just finished a book, it's sort of like asking a woman two minutes after labor, hey, do you want another kid?
But do you have anything sort of cooking on the back burner for future projects?
You know, Stephan, right now what I'm trying to do, and I know your show is going to help with this, I want to get the book moving.
I feel it's going to be kind of a self-starter once it gets going, but shows like this, radio shows, TV, whatever, and this op-ed article, which is coming out soon, are going to get it moving.
I hope it just takes off because I feel that Western civilization, but And Canada now has been sinking, sinking below the level of kind of decent debate, and we need to bring it up.
And if this book only does that, or contributes to that, I will be extremely pleased.
But I must say, I'm 74 years old now.
I was getting a little tired as the deadline approached, and there were two chapters I wanted to do, which I didn't.
One of them was the chapter on the family.
Which I will include if we go to a second or third printing.
I will put it in this book and expand it a bit.
And the other thing which I think is absolutely essential is a chapter on the liberal conservative divide over the whole question of rights, which must be aired because I think we've gone rights crazy.
And this has been almost parallel by the degree to which we have surrendered self-reliance and all that sort of thing, which we all grew up on and are now seeing so little of.
No, I hear you.
I mean, rights have become a form of involuntary servitude in that what everyone clamors for must coercively be supplied by someone else.
So it becomes a very win-lose.
Rights were supposed to be win-win, and now it's become very much a win-lose.
It's a kind of, you know, there's five bucks on the table and everyone's got a gun and a hand.
It's like, and whoever wins, everybody else loses.
Yes, well, in our country, unfortunately, well, like in Canada, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has encouraged that tendency.
One of my complaints in this book is that these kinds of documents have enabled and encouraged the courts to take a lead role in what our own Supreme Court Justice calls improving democracy.
That tendency has infantilized our legislature.
We have politicians who simply will not raise an issue until they run it by the judges.
They send it over to the court to get some view from the clerks over there.
How will this pass muster at the Supreme Court level?
And if the answer is no, they don't dare legislate, even if they sincerely believe that it ought to be a law.
So we're being run by judges.
We have a bureaucracy, no longer a guarded and limited democracy, which we used to have.
And the same is true in the USA, where this whole business of Judges reading meanings into written documents which were never put there by their founders and were never intended to be there by their founders, in fact, which would have appalled their founders, is the modern trend in all the Western democracies.
And I just don't know when the people, the sacred people, are going to wake up and realize that and fight back.
And I hope my book enables them to do that.
Well, sadly, like most collectives, the only way they'll wake up is screaming.
You know, human beings, generally, if you don't listen by reason, you have to learn by bitter experience, like addicts.
You either convince someone to stop taking a dangerous drug, or they have to hit rock bottom.
And, of course, we're doing what we can to try and wake people more gently, but my fear is that they're going to wake up screaming.
And like most people who wake up screaming, they will not make the very best decisions upon the moment of awakening.
Of course, books like this, my show to a degree, and the work that you've done over many years is doing its very best to prod people into a state of wakefulness without panic and overreaction.
So thanks so much for your time today, William.
Of course, we'll do what we can to help push the book out, and you're certainly welcome back anytime.
