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The Charlie Kirk Show
Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos with Sohrab Ahmari
00:44:16
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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody. Today on the Charlie Kirk show, super important episode. Stop what you're doing and listen to every word of this. You are going to love it. But before we get into it, please consider Supporting us at charliekirk.comSupport@charliekirk.comSupport. that is your portal to help support us, our team, our researchers, our editors, the travel costs, everything around the production of the Charlie Kirk show. You know, with all the cancellation, the and all the bad guys coming after people that are trying to tell the truth. When you Support us@charliekirk.com Support you are saying no to cancel culture. You are saying no to the digital assassins. You are saying yes to this program. And if you say to yourself, boy, I want millions of more people to listen to this program. I just wish my kids, my grandkids, my neighbors and more students would hear what this show has to say. That's where it all is made possible@charliekirk.com support as always. You can email us your questions freedomarliekirk.com Action packed episode, everybody. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for emailing us. And also get involved with turning point usa@tpusa.com can't forget that. Buckle up everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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B
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
- [01:16]
A
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives. And we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Hey everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show. I'm really excited for this conversation. With us is Sohrab Armari. And Sohrab, thank you for joining the Charlie Kirk Show. You are the author of a new book called the Unbroken Thread. Thread. Super thrilled to have you. Welcome.
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B
Thanks for having me, John.
- [02:01]
A
So let's start with your biography. It's a very interesting story and I think that it just lays a very important foundation for why you wrote this book. Tell us about yourself.
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B
Sure. I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. After the Iranian revolution. I was born to a very typical middle class, urban secular family of the type you meet a lot if you know Iranians. My parents had supported the Iranian revolution because they were like many other young Iranians. They thought they would get something like Western democracy. They had very fuzzy notions of what would happen and then instantaneously had come to regret it as the Islamist regime took over. So I was. I grew up in this milieu where we would. I was surrounded by Western books and movies, music, ideas. But in the world outside, obviously, you had to pretend to adhere to the public cult of the Islamic Republic, Shiism enforced with the sharp end of judicial floggings and amputations and so forth. And so, you know, when I was a teenager still living in Iran, I became an atheist. And. And then we were lucky enough to be able to get a green card, just my mother and I. My father never left Iran, and we immigrated to Utah, of all places. I had this idea of, like, you know, America as this decadent 1980s Manhattan that I'd seen in the movies. It shocked me when I showed up in Utah. And it's very religious, very communitarian in various ways. And so I kind of carried on the same revolution that I had launched in my old country against God, against traditional authority. I carried it on here as well. And, you know, I mean, I told my kind of personal story in a different book in a memoir called From Fire by Water. It's a longer story of how over the course of 20 years, you know, I came to not only come to believe in God, but to believe in a personal God and ultimately become a Roman Catholic and a political conservative as a result of reading, educating myself, Pope Benedict's books, reading the Bible, and also some life experiences that made it clear to me that there is an objective moral order and you have a choice of whether or not you bring your own life into conformity or not. So, yeah, that's my basic background.
- [04:31]
A
What's fascinating. And I. I think not everyone has the same experience of growing up in Iran and then coming to America, but I think there is this movement, myself being part of that, where there is kind of this desire to go to things that are eternal and more permanent, not changing things for the sake of changing them. I found myself reading more Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke than ever before. And I know that you comment on that a lot. And so just the book, again, is very important. It's the unbroken thread. And just some of the chapter titles are really interesting. I want to explore this with you. Starts on how do you justify your life? Is God reasonable? Why would God want you to take a day off, obviously defending the Sabbath? Can you be spiritual without being religious? Does God respect you? Does God need politics? Then you say, how must you serve Your parents should you think for yourself, what is freedom for? I want to talk to you about that one in particular. Is sex a private matter? And what do you owe your body and what's good about death? And so very provocative questions. I'm actually really excited to be able to read all of this. But the overarching theme is praising and making an argument for things that should not change in kind of this cult of progress that we're in both politically, economically and culturally. You're making an articulate and reasonable defense that no, we need some things that your great grandkids are going to enjoy the same way you do.
- [06:08]
B
That's exactly right. And I put it all under the rubric of tradition. I mean, the book's subtitle is Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos. I'll tell you a little bit about the impetus for writing it. When I wrote it, I started writing it. My son Max, for whom the book in a way is written, he's 2 years old, he's now 4. And what drove me to write it is frankly my anxiety about what kind of a man our civilization, which is a lot of Max. And it's not like, you know, I worry that he'll become, God forbid, I don't know, an opioid addict. The way our society works. Chances are, you know, he'll inherit my upper middle class status, but that he'll grow up with a very impoverished account of what it means to be free. You know, we're immigrants to this country. We're obviously grateful for its legal kind of rights and the dignity that you get from our constitutional order, but what do you actually use those rights for? And I fear that not just elites, but ordinary people are just told to Being free means to just be unhindered by tradition, unhindered by authority. You just keep your options open, seek to get ahead in life. And of course that's in tension with all the great traditions of the world. Not just the Judeo Christian tradition, but also our Greco Roman or classical heritage and even some of the Eastern traditions. They all say that actually to be free means to be able to govern yourself so that the self government doesn't begin to mean how do I govern myself against a sort of external tyrant? Although that's important too. But to begin with, how do I govern the tyrant within me, my appetites? And how do I detach myself from my baser side? That's the older account of freedom. And the whole quest of the book is my attempt to tether my Max to this older account of freedom and what it means to be truly human, truly free. And the way I do it, because I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a theologian, I'm just a journalist and a storyteller is I pose those questions that you read off each of which kind of posts holes in one of our contemporary progressive certainties. And then I explore each of them through the life of one great thinker. So, for example, the question on the Sabbath is explored through the life of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great Hasidic mystic of the last century. The question about how do you serve your parents? Which is basically filial piety, couldn't go to anyone but Confucius. The question about how do you relate God and politics, obviously St. Augustine and so forth. So it kind of created, I think, an interesting genre where you have the questions and then each one is you don't get philosophy really thick. You're just reading a life story, the drama of a person's life. And as it happens, then the ideas are blended into the kind of biographical.
- [09:09]
A
So only you could have possibly wove together the Confessions and the Analects into one book. So I'm very impressed. So I want to. There's a lot. There's a lot of places I want to go with that. I want to start with one thing that you talked about which will apply to our listeners. As much as I'd love to explore the City of God and the City of Man with you, which I'm sure you write about extensively, and knowing you, you probably have a fair amount of Aquinas in here, too, is this idea of freedom. So when I ask young people, this is how I would have answered in 2013, by the way, because I grew up in a conservative movement that was dominated by libertarianism and all the excesses around that. I'm sure you hear this quite a lot, but it's just the way it was, right? It was Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and maybe Friedman, and a little bit of soul. That was the worldview, which was kind of a disregard for anything, that any society or culture or country, what really matters is what your personal capacity to do things. So I was always told that liberty was being able to do whatever you want to do, however you want to do it, whenever you want to do it, as long as someone doesn't get in the way. And I was never taught that liberty was the pursuit of virtue. Can you talk about that difference and how we need to better define what liberty and freedom actually is? And Is there a difference between liberty and freedom, or is that too much of a semantic difference?
- [10:36]
B
Yeah, Charlie, actually, I was the same. In other words, it's not like I came to my current views sort of sui generis out of nothing. I was also typically formed conservative, as you just described yourself, in my 20s. And then, like I said, fatherhood and faith changed everything, and I began to. Came to my more mature view. Now I explore the question of what it means to be free through Alexander's Solja, the Great question.
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A
The Gulag Archipelago. Yeah, sure.
- [11:12]
B
And. But in the book, I focus on the one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. And as you know, Solzhenitsyn obviously had been a severe critic of the communist regime and ultimately was forced into exile and made his way to the West. And for the first four years when he was in the west, he just lived quietly here and tried to keep his nose in his writing. But then in 1978, he was asked to give a commencement speech at Harvard. And this text is kind of one of the definitive texts for me and might be for you both. And what shocked his audience, his American audience, was that he devoted most of his speech not to criticizing the communist regime, although he absolutely detested it to the end of his days, but to critiquing the west where he saw that somehow the Western idea of freedom had become tyrannical in itself. Yes, focus on rights. Me, me, me, me had actually created a society in which a certain kind of low base, self maximizing type thrived and that that deeper account of freedom was lost. Of course, at the time, you know, every commentator, but with the exception of George Will, attacked him. You know, called him a theocrat, a kook, a mystic, an authoritarian. But in retrospect, the speech is quite prophetic. So how did someone who had, you know, lived in a Gulag for about a decade of his life, what could he teach us? Right? That was the question that was posed to him. You come from a society that has labor camps. What do you know about freedom? And actually, in the Life of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisova. So Zhenitsyn paints a very kind of crisp picture of what it really means to be free, even under conditions in which your choices are obviously very narrow. Because in a Gulag, the regime controls every minute of your day. You maybe have five minutes in the morning, five minutes in the evening, and every other kind of moment of your life is dominated by backbreaking labor and torture. Nevertheless, he observes in One Day the Life of an that some people Use even in that context in which your choices are so narrow. They act in service of others. They do what they're supposed to do, not because they love the regime, but because they want to help their comrades. They maintain their dignity even under kind of this kind of pressure. But some other human types kind of just let go. They give event to, to their worst side and just become kind of pathetic. And there are these character contrasts. And so what Solzhenitsyn was saying was that although everyone had lots and lots of choice in this new society in which he found himself in the west, the way that people were formed was to be that kind of base, self maximizing type. And he saw this in the west economic life, where large companies tried to take advantage of him as a writer. He saw it in the press, where even though the press have legal freedoms, they're actually paradoxically very conformist. And they all seem to sing from the same song sheet, which now obviously see very much as. Well, he saw it in these student movements that basically desecrated all the streets with ugly slogans. Is that freedom? Is that what we fought for? To try to be free from communism is to get this. And so, very shockingly, he famously said, if I were asked if I would propose your society, meaning the west, such as it is today, as a model for the transformation of mine, meaning the nation's trap behind the iron curtain, I would have to say, no, I would decline your society as a model. And so, yeah, I mean, that was a digressive answer. But I think it gets at something that mere legal rights don't amount to true freedom. And often an abusive account of rights that you're just me, me, me, me, me can make people less free. I'll give one more example on a very kind of narrow libertarian sense, what Facebook and Twitter do to censor publications like mine. I work at the New York Post, my day job. That's some libertarians would say, well, it's a private actor acting privately, so be it, Whatever, go build your own Facebook. But if you take a kind of holistic view of what's good for society and what actually vindicates those rights that we cherish in their most noble sense, for example, investigating power, powerful people like, you know, Hunter Biden and his father, who's now the most powerful man in the world, if you leave that up to kind of large corporate actors, actually you could lose those freedoms. And so you become subject to private tyrannies, even if you don't have public tyrannies like government tyrannies.
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A
I Love that. And so the overemphasis on rights and not on duty or duties has been very destructive for our country. So in the conservative movement I grew up in, it was all rights centric and I, I actually have a lot of agreement with that. I think it's very important to understand what is a right and where does it come from. But right without a duty tends to just wither on the vine. It just tends to be somewhat of a self indulgent exercise. There's not the wise restraints to actually keep you free, which is actually in the stairwell of the Harvard Law School. I'm sure they'll remove it very soon because it's far too wise for Harvard where what you don't do, the restraints you have is actually what keeps you actually free, which is like you said, this idea of being able to, to be able to defeat the demon within you. And that's actually what's going to be able to make you free. So I first became aware of you when you were debating David French. I'm sure you've heard this a couple million times in the last few years. It was really interesting and fascinating because it was two very thoughtful people that it was a topic I never really actually thought about, which was whether or not we should regulate Drag Queen Story Hour. So I actually think the brilliance of the conversation was how kind of off the wall it was. But it's also just kind of so in some ways bizarre, to be perfectly honest. Right. And going into it, I thought to myself, kind of from this kind of rights based, more libertarian sympathy. Why not? I mean, I guess I don't like it. I'm a Christian. I think it's disgusting. I thought you did a really good job. Very articulate and I'm totally with you, by the way. I think that it should be illegal. We should use the power of the state. It's disgusting, it's gross. We should be able to call right and wrong. That wasn't a thing that happened overnight. Can you talk about that just from, you know, how the impact was from people getting to know you? I know that from my perspective, it was a hot debate item for at least in circles I was in for quite some time.
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B
Yes, it was, as Ross Douthat of the New York Times put it, it was a full employment bill for the conservative commentary. And I wrote a piece called Against David Frenchism, which has been called the Essay that Launched A Thousand Op EDS or A Thousand Hot Takes. I can't remember. But yeah, I mean, look, I'll take the start about it from a personal point of view. I think the. The end goal of a society is to help ordinary people live ordinary lives of decency and virtue. This is as old as Aristotle Ethics, book one. It's as old as Thomas Aquinas.
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A
The treatise all people, all action aims at some good. Good luck figuring out what that means. You gotta get to contemplation to figure that out. Sorry, go ahead.
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B
No, you're right, you're right. But to bring it down to the level of Drag Queen Story Hour. Look, as a father, look, I'm not gonna take my kids to Drag queen story Hour. And I know that you could say, well, that's the end of the discussion. But it's bizarre that in a society in which that. That's becoming normalized. And I think conservatives should have been and should be alarmed about developments like that. And it never stops with public libraries. It then becomes a kind of curricular program, as it's beginning to become that way, where it's a storytelling hour in schools. I mean, it always, you know, this kind of liberalism that wants to smash every limit, every taboo, every restriction, won't stop with what begins as a voluntary thing, almost immediately becomes. Eventually becomes a requirement, as we've seen with gender ideology. So I had this critique where I summed up the response of certain conservatives as David Frenchism, which is to say that, say the best we can do is to carve out a private space for people of faith to leave their lives at least unmolested by government. And we gotta let a drag queen happen as well in order to have that. Now, you know, I had a debate. I had two debates in person with David French. And because he's a litigator, he's very good at always bringing it back to kind of the practical question of, what are you going to do about it? You know, the Supreme Court precedents are against you. And he's right. But there's a kind of tyranny of the practical there where you have. I think when we've gotten to the point where drag queens interact with children, they've like, dream dressed like, looking like demons, we have to step back and say, okay, we have to go back to the speculative questions. What do we want as a society? Is this what we want? And if it's not what we want, then we have to throw everything we have at it legally, politically, what have you to stop this? Rather than say, well, since the 1950s, Supreme Court's jurisprudence has growing in X direction, and you can't change it. So what are you going to do about it? I think I can't accept that as a father.
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A
So let's dive into this deeper. And I want to, of course, go back to the book, but I'm super interested in this. What do you have to say for the critique that the David French type people would throw at you? And they throw at me, and I really don't care because my opinion is very similar. You have to defeat evil early and decisively. And if the courts rule against me, then so what? Then I'm going to do it again. Because we were given political power by voters. We didn't go stage a coup. They voted for us to defend their values. And I've just become a lot less interested in being able to define it perfectly. I don't know if that makes sense. Like, one of the problems with libertarianism is it's so ideological that the only way you could beat an ideologue is with an ideologue. Right. That's the only way. And it's just very practical. It's like, okay, this is bad, and I want to stop it. I'll let the lawyers figure out the rest of it. What do you have to say, though, about this kind of idea? How dare you use political power? Because how do you know what's better than somebody else?
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B
I mean, first of all, if you don't want a real political power, you shouldn't be in the business of politics. And this is the bizarre thing about the. I totally agree as a whole that we're here to win elections and win Supreme Court seats and win lower court seats, but not actually use that power to do anything from the conservative ends. And look, so that's one question I think, easily settled away. If you're in politics, you want to wield power toward some end. And so then the question becomes, how can you tell the difference between good things and bad things as the two.
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A
That's the actual conversation, though.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I. You know, all of Western tradition tells me that there is an objective morality and there is a true anthropology about what makes people happy. And there are false anthropologies that hold up things for people that look like happiness, but in fact, at the end of it, they find degradation, shame, and unhappy. And so, yeah, politics is about using power. It's about using power. I would say more important than using power is using authority, because power can just be this sort of raw exercise of, I have power over you, Charlie. Do that. You know, of course, yeah, I don't want no one. But authority is legitimate. Authority is authority that it might be coercive, but it's aimed at ultimately the good of a society and good of family.
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A
And
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B
that's perfectly in line with the conscience. In other words, we shouldn't think of conscience and true authority as opponents of each other. This is a very kind of liberal mentality where it says if you coerce someone's conscience, you must be sort of doing something wrong, when in fact, the conscience means nothing if it's not the reflection of some universal moral law. If the notion of conscience becomes so privatized. So you say, well, my conscience says it's wrong to kill babies, and someone else's conscience says it's right to kill babies. And no one can be sure which of the two consciences is in the right. That's actually an attack on the idea of conscience. Conscience is only conscience if it's in line with the dictates of the moral law, the natural law of the divine law. And so I just have. I know I gave a very long answer, but the bottom line is I just have no patience for people to say, well, how can you be sure what's good and bad?
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A
Yeah, so what I think it is, Sohrab, is that. And I get it because I used to be here, and I've tried to actually get to the root of it. So if you kind of peel back the layers of David French, I think there's actually something that I could agree with, which is this fear of. Of totalitarianism. I actually think that I'm gonna try to give him the benefit of good intentions, that if we dare use power, we're gonna have gulags everywhere. And I hate that. So I'd rather just be indifferent, allow things to fall apart and actually live under a different form of tyranny. But at least we don't have that form of tyranny. Right? So that's kind of the way the conservative movement was trained to think about this, which was the road to serfdom, which is that if we were to ever give power to the state in any way, shape or form, by the way, if the state's good for anything, it should be against, I don't know, chemical castration of children and getting, you know, having pedophiles not being able to read books to young kids. Bizarre how that leads to gulags. But that's kind of the thought process, right? Which is that we're not allowed to use political power no matter what, even if it results in things we don't like. Because I don't think David French likes David. Drag, Drag, Screen Tori. I think he made that very clear. But I also think he's afraid of what might actually happen after it instead of what is. Is that too much of kind of an abstraction conservatism instead of like an empirical conservatism.
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B
No, I mean, you're right, that. That's. I think that's always the anxiety and it's very bizarre. I had a debate with very perfectly nice, intelligent libertarian, but, you know, I posed my views, and again, my views rest on the authority of Aristotle and St. Thomas that, you know, the role of a ruler is to help people achieve happiness. And that.
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A
How radical of you.
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B
Yeah, but immediately goes to the Gulag. And I really don't understand it. I think the fact is that one way or another, some orthodoxy is going to be enshrined in society. Some account of the ultimate ends of human life is going to be sort of enshrined and imposed on us. And the question is whether it's a good one or a bad one. And so you notice the conservative abandonment of the public square, the unwillingness to enforce what's good and bad and to help people tell the difference between the two and have helped society discern the difference between the two has not led to a kind of libertarian utopia. We have instead is other views being other orthodoxies being imposed on us that are far worse than Judeo Christian orthodoxy. Totally, Whether it's gender ideology or critical race theory or what have you. These are extremely coercive, often using private power, as I've mentioned, because it's not necessarily always government that's doing it. It's also corporations and universities and so forth. But nevertheless, there's no escaping. There's no escaping the decision to say, what is an orthodoxy in our society? What do we support? And the law is a teacher. If the law permits something, it signals to the people that that thing is good or acceptable at the very least. And so that's how you change the morality of a society. And it just has no bottom. It would just go down to the pits.
- [28:21]
A
So I love that the law is a teacher. If you would have said that to me five years ago, I would have been like, no, of course not. You can't legislate morality.
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B
So same here.
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A
Yeah, so I'm. I want you to explain that to our listeners that tend to be more kind of classical liberal. And I have a lot of patience and I really do a lot of grace. And one of the reasons I'm evangelical, but I'm a very pro Catholic Evangelical. I just love how the Catholic Church doesn't change. It's like, oh, that's actually the one thing I know that's not going to change. I really respect that. Don't change. Because I actually think that just from a human psychological perspective. But when things are constantly changing, there's no permanence, there's just chaos, there's just uncertainty. It drives people mad. It really does. Which is why I think we're seeing all this other chemical addiction and suicide is kind of, I think, an extension of the lack of permanency. And I want to explore that with you. But can you talk about this? What do you mean, the law as a teacher? Because I was taught by Austrian economics that you can't legislate morality and people have to come at their way in their own voluntary exchanges. Help unpack that.
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B
First of all, even in a libertarian society, you do legislate morality in some sense. Right. So libertarians accept, for example, contract enforcement.
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A
Yes.
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B
Contract enforcement relies on the idea that honesty is good or that people should fulfill the.
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A
Totally agree.
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B
You know, insofar as we ban murder, again, we, we assert that there is value in human life and that it's wrong to take it unjustly. But look, again, the idea that law is a teacher and helps shape foreign people is very obvious. And you see it in the sense that all of the culture war transformations that we've had since the 1960s began with legal and political changes, and, and then they filter to the culture. Gay marriage was unthinkable 10 years ago, or whatever it was, and now it's become a norm and a lot of people have learned to accept it. So you see, when power shifts, when authority shifts, people change their minds. And the idea that you should only have kind of voluntary, private exhortations to virtue. I have to go to the treatise on law. St. Thomas Aquinas says in the Treatise on Law that, referring to Aristotle, that private exhortations to virtue are good and we should do that. Churches should do their thing, synagogues should do their thing, but that they're not efficacious because they have no power. Discipline when people don't act virtuously, which the law requires.
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A
So you mentioned Thomas Aquinas. We could do the summa theological later. I'm really interested in your thought of the greatest, most prolific writers ever. No, but this is a really interesting point, which is what is the good? And that really is basically what we're talking about here. And you just kind of connected a bunch of dots. I can't Wait to go talk to some libertarians at some point about this. It's like, wait, so you do believe that contract enforcement's important? So there is some form of objective integrity that you think should be upheld? Because it's not wrong to be able, it's not right to be able just to default on a deal. And so if that's right, what else might be right? And so this idea that you can't legislate morality has been around for quite some time and I think it's declining in popularity on the conservative side or on the center. I mean like people actually think that no, our leaders and our laws should be a reflection of our values. And so what do you have to say to the criticism? And I, I get this all the time. I just really don't care cuz I'm not running for political office is, oh, this is your own myopic view of the world. You know, most of us are secular. We don't subscribe to this. Why are you talking about Aristotle and Aquinas and Augustine and the church fathers? I'm an Enlightenment guy. Let each to their own. I mean, come on, why would you want to tell me how to live my life? I won't tell you how to live yours. We're all classical liberals. That's what makes America so special and great. What do you have to say about that?
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B
That's a fantastical view of America. First of all, I think there's a lot of retconning, you know, in movies where they go back and change the story to make the sort of sequels work. So they change the sort of stories of the earlier episodes. But it's a kind of retconning that America was never as classically liberal as our libertarian friends describe it. I mean, we've had, we've had obscenity laws since before there was a republic. There were common law obscenity laws. We had the idea that, you know, frankly that Christianity is part of the common law after the republic as well. In other words, in the 19th century, after the First Amendment, you still had blasphemy conviction in the United States. I'm not saying we should bring back blasphemy laws in that way per se today maybe, but the point is that it was never as the United States was never as classical liberal libertarian as people imagine. You know, up until 1970s set 80s and well into the 2010s, you had blue laws that uphold the Sabbath. The idea that it's good for workers to be able to get one day to spend with family and let alone with God. So our libertarian friends have to say that all American history up until the very recent past was this horrible, totalitarian, authoritarian place in order to justify their views. In other words, they have to take this kind of bizarre view of the past as just a land of oppression. Now it was for African Americans, I don't deny that. But insofar as there were, for example, religious laws that applied equally to all people, there were, there were laws that were based on kind of religious concepts of right and wrong. So we're going to treat all of American history as pif, pif, smelly wrong. I don't want to have anything to do with it. That's not real. And then you see today how impossible neutrality is right now that conservatives have relinquished enforcing morality. It's not like the enforcement of morality has gone away. As we just said, you're coerced in every dimension of life. And you're being coerced to say things that are so much more sort of bizarre than anything any Judeo Christian doctrine. You're being coerced to say that there are 135 genders, or you're being coerced to say that people born with white skin have carried this racial sin, that they can't wash the stain of racial sin. So one way or another, some morality will be imposed, whether it's a humane one, reasonable one, or Ibrahim Kindi's morality.
- [35:22]
A
So here's a question for you. Is liberalism sustainable or will it always end in a form of authoritarianism?
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B
I'm of the view that there's something in OG liberalism itself, embedded in it that ultimately leads us to where we are now, to progressive liberalism.
- [35:42]
A
So sorry to interrupt, but go back. What you mean by og do you mean like Rene Descartes?
- [35:47]
B
Yeah, well, classical liberalism, Enlightenment philosophy, I would say, okay, the idea that man should be tried to become the absolute master of his own destiny.
- [36:01]
A
So David Hume, Immanuel Kant, that's who you're talking about?
- [36:05]
B
Okay, yeah. All those guys ultimately, although their own philosophy didn't in the 18th and 19th century, you couldn't see this coming necessarily, although some did this. The kind of ever expanding horizon of liberation is somehow the impulse of all liberalism. And so it chips away at the moral substrate that's required to sustain true freedom. And it constantly looks for some new group to liberate. Right? So it's like, you know, as soon as you had like your abortion rights, then gay marriage, as soon as you had gay marriage, transgender rights, as soon as you have transgender Rights, then polyamory, and so on and so forth. There's something in the ideology itself that can't live with any traditional restraints. And in that sense, it's real acidic to the kind of moral substrate that you need for, like you said, a society where everything doesn't change all the time. There has to be something permanent. There's this drive in liberalism that I think is very hard to change.
- [37:11]
A
So Russell Kirk said one of the six canons of conservatism should be that if you're going to change something, you must do so in accordance to your laws, your customs, and your traditions. What should ever change? And if we are going to change something, what should that be? Because in your book Unbroken Thread, you talk about that. You know, we should appreciate things that should not change, should anything ever change. Is there a wisdom towards the proper way of improvement? Or are you in a belief? You're like, you know what? I want to go live in the 1300s?
- [37:43]
B
No, no, no, not at all. I'm not any kind of a. Kind of romantic or pining for a union of throne and altar. What would that even mean in the United States, we don't have a. We don't have a. We don't have a throne to which we would marry our altar anyway and which altar. But no. So, I mean, I don't pine for the 13th century and St. Louis reign, although I appreciate it. I would say that certainly. I mean, I'm not opposed to scientific inquiry. For example, I should benefit from the advance of science and technology and improve lives for billions of people. Though I oppose what I would call scientism, which is the tendency to apply the scientific outlook to the whole of human life. Yes, and so forth, but to apply. To apply the scientific output to the whole of human life. But the traditions that I sort of include in the book are all based on the idea that some limits are worth preserving. But there are plenty of traditions that are also kind of bad traditions. You know, racism was a bad tradition, but it had some traditional pedigree in this country, and it was terrible. Right. But how did we ultimately overcome racism? How did we change what was legitimately wrong? The greatest kind of activists against slavery and then against Jim Crow spoke from a place of a higher tradition, namely a true account of Christianity. Right. Martin Luther King, William Wilberforce, the great man, abolitionist crusader. All these people use that higher plane of permanent truths to attack traditions that were bad traditions and deserve to be sort of left behind in the past. So there's no doubt in my mind that There are bad traditions. Not everything that's old necessarily deserves to be preserved or in amber.
- [39:56]
A
Yeah. And to the science part, it was actually Christians who led the scientific revolution because they did it for the glory of God, because they found the world worthy of natural inquiry. If you look through the top 52 scientists in the scientific revolution, 50 out of 52 were self described Christians. And Sir Isaac Newton wrote more about biblical prophecy than physics. It's a fun little side note. So to kind of sum it all together, the unbroken thread. Let's talk just for a couple minutes. Application. What does this mean from a public policy standpoint, From a political. Political standpoint. Aristotle, you've mentioned Aristotle a lot. He said that politics is the highest form of community because it brings morality and sociability together. That we are all political animals. So let's talk politics, the unbroken thread. What are we supposed to do about this?
- [40:46]
B
So, I mean, the book is at a kind of more intellectual plane. And I don't make kind of policy claims. I will do that elsewhere in my kind of output. But in sort of practical terms, I suggest we should bring back, for example, Blue laws, the idea that there should be a one day a week that we set aside. And obviously there's a kind of religious component to that, set aside as a family or a community for worship and for scripture. But also there's a kind of temporal, secular element to it, which is that a day of rest gives workers a break. And we're all very harried by our phones, whether if you're a white collar professional, you're constantly getting alerts on your phone in a way that's distracting, drives you mad. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, you're much less likely to get time in a regular way to spend children. So working class people especially need to kind of wait other policy goals. I mean, I think in one of the book's chapters, what do you owe your body? That chapter is really a critique of Gnosticism, the ancient idea which has come back that human beings are just sort of mental, spiritual beings that happen to be trapped in fleshly bodies.
- [42:02]
A
That's a very Eastern thought too, though.
- [42:04]
B
It's an ancient heresy of the kind of late antique Middle east and North Africa. But it has found resurgence, I would argue, in the coronavirus restrictions. Right. So many people you hear now who want to have kind of permanent lockdowns are. It's like, well, why do kids need to actually go to school? Let's learn from screen. Now, as a parent, I tell you that's how nonsensical and bizarre it is to imagine the kids can learn from screen. But there is a kind of gnostic impulse in that. The idea that, you know, let's mask forever, that's deeply alienated because we're embodied beings and I recognize you and I can read your character. I can lose your soul from your face. I have no other way. So permanent mask regime. So if the book has like an immediate public policy application, it's the chapter on the body, how important it is to have embodied relationships, embodied communities shake people's hands. You see them and you. You live in real community rather than just everything virtually. So that chapter, I would argue is, without ever saying so, is a kind of total critique of the permanent lockdown mentality. And I think that's an immediate goal where classical liberals and conservatives like me can find common cause. We might come at it from different reasons. They just think it's a violation of rights. I think it harms. It harms our ability to be fully human. But bottom line, we should all oppose this idea that we should just live our lives remotely. That's not human.
- [43:43]
A
Well, I love it. Well, there's so much more I wanted to get to, but time is not unlimited, so. The Unbroken Thread. Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in the Age of Chaos. Love your writing. This was an honor. So, Rob and anything else you wanted to mention?
- [43:58]
B
No, that's it. Thank you very much for having me. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all the rest of the major shops.
- [44:04]
A
Great. All right, talk to you soon. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us your thoughts. Freedom at charliekirk. Com. God bless you. Speak to you soon.