Speaker 1:
Welcome back. Our next activity is a conversation by two of the most important public intellectuals today. A conversation about the state of the West. It’s my pleasure to introduce today, Jordan Peterson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. And Douglas Murai, a well-known author and journalist, and the author of The Madness of Crowds and The War on the West. Welcome, Douglas.
Douglas Murray:
It’s a great pleasure to be with you. And if I can just say in advance how sad I am not to be able to be with you in-person. It’s incredibly boring visa problems which plague my life. But I’m particularly sorry, because it’s not just that I see that some friends are there. I think all of my friends are there. Anyhow, I miss you all the more.
Jordan Peterson:
It’s good to see you, Douglas.
Douglas Murray:
You too, man.
Jordan Peterson:
How’s the book selling?
Douglas Murray:
Very well. And, as you know, Jordan, the great pleasure of a book selling well is principally the demoralizing effect it has on one’s enemies.
Jordan Peterson:
So I guess we’re here to talk about The War in the West. So, I’ll open that a little bit. And then, away we can go. And, I’ve been in Athens and Jerusalem recently, and so that was really something. I did a documentary there on the origin of the idea of the logos in Athens. And then, a couple of documentaries in Jerusalem about the Christian idea of the logos, trying to, what would you say, puzzle out how those two traditions stacked on top of each other, right? Digging into the kind of things that we’d be talking about with Jonathan Pageau.
And, one of the things that’s really struck me… Or let me ask you what you think about this corrosive criticism of the Western tradition by the radicals on the left in particular, although you’re starting to see it on the right too, it seems to be predicated on the idea that the only motivational explanation for exploration and the generation or accumulation of wealth is the untrammeled manifestation of power and compulsion. Right? So there’s a narrative there, and the narrative is, you can explain all motivation by reference to a theory of power.
Douglas Murray:
Yes.
Jordan Peterson:
And you see that informing discussions, for example, like the 1619 project, which is insisting that the fundamental motivational base of the west is something like the desire to enslave and oppress. And this strikes me as it’s perverse in a very fundamental way that I think, by the way, is relevant to all the things that we should be talking about, relationship to free speech, which is that the fundamental proclivity of human organizations when they degenerate is to degenerate in the direction of the expression of power.
But there’s a counter force against that, and that counter force is something like I would say, both the Judeo-Christian and the Enlightenment tradition that pushes back against that tropic and malevolent tendency with the presupposition that we’re all made in the image of God and that we’re all of individual value. And that honesty, and truth, and the spirit of free and involuntary association is the right story. And, what I see so particularly damaging about the so-called war in the West is that much of the West’s success is predicated on the success of that story, which is such an unlikely story. And criticizing the west out of existence doesn’t mean the death of power and corruption. Far from it. It just means the death of that bit of spark that fights back against it. And so-
Douglas Murray:
That’s absolutely right. To build on that, yes, I mean principally what I’m writing about in The War on the West has been something that’s been obsessing me for years, all my adult life, which is, why has the culture which I come from, moved from self-criticism, which of course is something very unusual, uncommon at any age in cultures, but a culture of self-criticism, we criticize ourselves, we want to improve, we see things like racism where they do exist and we recognize that they’re bad. We like to rid ourselves of it. That’s not the case in many societies around the world. So, what is it about us that moved from self-criticism to self laceration, and now I think self-destruction? What I mean by that is, what is it about what’s going on in Western anti-westernism? And that’s the real thing that I’m interested in.
I think Western anti-Westernism is much more dangerous in the long run, than all the other types of anti-westernism. It’s much more dangerous than Arab anti-westernism, or Chinese anti-westernism, or anything else, or Russian anti-westernism. Western anti-westernism is a truly corrosive one, because it has fallen for or pushed this narrative that the West is to be seen solely through the lenses of racism, slavery, colonialism. And, this of course, as with all bad ideas, they’re always onto something. And, if you go to a society like America, and you say to them, “Did you know what your forebears did in the 18th and early 19th century?” Of course they’re not happy about it. They’re not proud of it. But what should their attitude be towards it? And what has been thrown into the mix in recent years has been, “You should see this as your original sin as a nation.”
Jordan Peterson:
… Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Douglas Murray:
Now I actually resent this, and this has been taken up on the right and the left in America, the notion of America having original sin. The reason I resent it is because if America has an original sin, what are the original sins of other countries? Now, what’s the original sin of Uganda or Nigeria? There must be some, unless there are some edenic societies and some evil ones. What has actually happened is that it’s only the western countries that have been put through this. So now, in Europe, of course Europe has the original sins, not just of racism and of slavery, but of also of colonialism. And, maybe a lot of this is particularly messy, because we’re not that far away from the era of colonialism. We don’t know how to weigh up properly what the pros and cons of the whole thing were. We can’t even have that conversation to a great extent.
As Nigel Bigger demonstrated, when he tried to start the ethics of empire course at Oxford University. And when Nigel and I were speaking at the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford a few nights ago, I said to him in front of the audience, “If we’re going to try to work out what the ethics of empire are, well Oxford University would seem to me to be the ideal place to do it. Where do you want it to be done? Berkeley? A lesser university even than that?” You would surely want the Regis professor of ethics at Oxford University to be thinking about this. But no, you’re not allowed to do that. Bam, over, you can’t even discuss it. So, you’ve just got to, as it were, pay your penance, the eternal penance of coming from the West.
And, just quickly, here’s where the rubber hits the road on it. And that’s on every historical hero. Every historical hero that you and I grew up with, Jordan, has now being pulled down, sometimes quite literally. If you look at America, America is in the process of destroying every single one of its founding fathers. I spoke to one of Teddy Roosevelt’s biographers recently. And I said to him, “Well, I suppose you are here to argue the case for the third most wanted man on Mount Rushmore.” The point is that everybody, everybody, Abraham Lincoln, it doesn’t matter, Lincoln’s statues come down. Lincoln’s name is defaced in Britain and in Canada. Winston Churchill statue keeps on being the focal point of people, attacking him for living in the past, for having some Victorian views, without any realization that if you’re born in the Victorian era, it’s quite likely you’re going to have some Victorian views. However, people in the past didn’t think precisely what we think about race, and colonialism, and slavery in 2022. And so, to hell with a lot of them, we don’t need them.
And the place where it’s become most dangerous in my view, and I say this in the book, is with philosophers. Some years ago I was speaking at a campus in America. And a young student came up to me after… I think I mentioned this in The Strange Death of Europe. And he said to me, “You mentioned Immanuel Kant in your lecture. You know that Kant used the N-word.” And I said, “Well, I didn’t know that especially. And I’m not quite sure what you mean. I don’t think the word was used in Germany in that period. But, maybe there was a word similar to it. But, maybe you’re thinking of another word in German. But, are you absolutely sure about this?” And this guy seemed less and less sure but was… Anyway, Kant’s a racist. And, it suddenly dawned on me, of course, of course, because if Kant’s a racist, you don’t need to contend with Kant.
Jordan Peterson:
Right, right, right. Right.
Douglas Murray:
It means you can skip him, because he’s abandoned.
Jordan Peterson:
It isn’t only that you don’t have to contend with him. And this is one of the most pathological things that universities do, which is… That’s a long list of pathological things that universities do, but they offer students in their messianic stage of development. So, Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist, pointed out that there was a late stage of cognitive development that he called the Messianic, which very few developmental psychologists ever talk about. And, it occurs in the latter part of adolescents, when adolescents who are making the transition to full individuality are looking for, I would say, something like a heroic role to take on in relationship to their cultural progression and their enculturation. And, it is during that messianic phase, for example, when people are best inducted into the military, because they’re also catalyzing their group identity, and often on the cultural and musical front as well.
Douglas Murray:
Yes.
Jordan Peterson:
So there seems to be neurological reasons as well, because there’s a radical reorganization of neurological structure in later adolescence. And, in any case, the universities capitalize on that messianic phase and they offer a very straightforward proposition, which is something like, “Here’s a very simple narrative, which is that, everything that great people have ever done in your culture was done as a consequence of their malevolence, and their oppression, and their power.” And, they’re also very complicated to think through, so that’s annoying. And, “You can just be morally superior to them by claiming that you are right, because you know these five things, and they’re wrong despite their stacks of learning, and depth, and deep knowledge.” And then, not only do the universities promote that view actively and, what would you say, offer it as an enticement to instant moral superiority, but they provide their students with a network and a peer group that aggrandizes them, and the faculty do this as well, as a consequence of adopting this stance.
Douglas Murray:
Yes.
Jordan Peterson:
And, well, it’s unbelievably dangerous. I mean, to say the least.
Douglas Murray:
Part of what you just described is what the late George Steiner described in a phrase I wish was better used, more often used, which is, “Nostalgia for the absolute.” You’re looking at young people in particular who have a nostalgia for the absolute, an absolutest view of the world where you can, as you say, stand as judge, jury, and executioner of everyone who is in the past, people guilty of living in the past, dead white males who have the three sins of being white, male, and dead. That’s the worst thing. I mean, what losers are we talking about here? They even died.
And, the one that worries me most actually, and I do this in one of the chaps in The War in the West says, “Look at what they’ve done to all of the philosophers of the enlightenment.” Now, there are several things you can interpret this now to steel man the argument. You could say, “Well look, we haven’t actually gone over the extent to which certain major enlightenment philosophers were, for instance, share owners in slaving companies, or empire companies, or East India company, and so on.” You could say that. In fact, it’s a slightly ridiculous point, because this is all known and has been for a long time. Or you can say, “The enlightenment philosophers weren’t doing what we think they should be doing.” Ibram X. Kendi and others attack David Hume over a single footnote that all scholars of Hume know and are embarrassed by. And again, by the way, it’s clear that, Ibram X. Kendi of Hume has literally only read that one footnote.
Jordan Peterson:
Right, right, right. Well, that’s convenient.
Douglas Murray:
He didn’t stumble across it whilst reading the complete works of David Hume. And, you can see that from his own sourcing. He sources it from a book about the racism of enlightenment philosophers. So, well, David Hume was doing other things with his time than BLM activism. He was trying to separate out superstition from the society, not a bad thing to try to do in the age he lived in. It’s the same with Voltaire. The one erosion of this into French culture is Voltaire’s disappearance of the statue of him in Paris. It appears to have gone into a witness protection program. But Voltaire, who as we know, in the Candide gives one of the most devastating attacks on slavery. Devastating. And who also says remember, the most devastating thing of all where Voltaire said, “The only thing worse than what the Europeans are doing to the Africans is what the Africans are doing to their brother and sister Africans.”
Jordan Peterson:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Douglas Murray:
Now, there’s a good reason you’d want to take him out. But I’m talking about everybody. John Stewart Mill, gone. It’s everybody as it were right and left from the enlightenment. Now, and one reason I cite as a possibility for why they have actually come into the crosshairs is that the enlightenment philosophers and rationalism has to be kicked out of the way if you are going to do what the activists want to do next.
Jordan Peterson:
Yeah. Well, that’s a typical Marxist ploy.
Douglas Murray:
Yes.
Jordan Peterson:
Is to radicalize-
Douglas Murray:
The reason is the problem. Reason is the problem. Enlightenment. One of these people I attack in the book, a very undistinguished academic from the UK at Birmingham’s second university, I stress. Not the primary university in Birmingham, but the second university in Birmingham. A professor of grievance studies there called Kehinde Andrews said, “Reason and rationalism are the problem.”
Jordan Peterson:
… Mm-hmm.
Douglas Murray:
Well, I mean, in that case, you get to the situation that I suggested existed in New York last year, when the state council chamber voted to take down the statue of Thomas Jefferson that had been there since 1834. Removed it from its plinth, created it up, and wheeled it out the back door. And one of the female council members who’d voted for this outrage said, “Well, the thing is that Thomas Jefferson doesn’t represent our values.” And I suggested in one of the newspapers I write for, I suggested, “If Thomas Jefferson doesn’t represent our values in America, then who does?” And I suspect that the council member in question would say, “If you are able to be honest, well me, obviously.”
Jordan Peterson:
Right. Right, right, right. So, your comment about the objection to reason itself and rationality reminds me of the naivety that many conservative commentators have.
Douglas Murray:
Oh, yeah.
Jordan Peterson:
On the free speech front. Because I hear arguments being put forth for the promotion, say, of viewpoint diversity, which I think is a dreadfully counterproductive strategy, because it subverts the notion of free speech to the overarching ethos of diversity, and thereby elevates the ethos of diversity. But I also think that it’s misguided for a more fundamental reason, because I don’t believe the debate about free speech on campus is a debate about whether or not… Or about who should be allowed to speak. I think the debate about free speech in the West and on campuses more specifically is about whether or not the entire idea of free speech is just a facade worn by those who wield power to convince those who are oppress being oppressed, that there is such a thing as freedom and they’re on that side.
And so, the assault on the idea of the logos and the idea of dialogue isn’t about who should speak. It’s about whether or not there is even a space where autonomous individuals possessed of rationality and reason can exchange opinions in a manner that’s actually elevating and redemptive. And that’s the most caustic criticism coming, at least in part, from the postmodernists, is that no such space exists. That’s merely the most reprehensible and subtle element of the oppressive narrative. It’s a way more fundamental critique than the conservatives tend to realize.
Douglas Murray:
I completely agree. But, I’ll come onto conservatives in a second. But let me just say first, I mean, I completely agree with what you just said, and I think that it is worse than that. I think, Jordan, you and I, and I think most of the people with us in the room were educated in a way that believed in the pursuit of truth, not for its own sake, although that’s not nothing, but in order to get somewhere. In other words, the idea that at the end of that line, if you did it properly, you got to a truth. And if you got to a truth, then wow, that was somewhere. And maybe that was everything at some point, depending on the field in question.
Truth is also one of the things that is now described. And so many of these things, they sound so insane when I say them out loud, all I can say is, they’re in the book chapter and verse and the people who’ve said them. But, truth is believed by these radicals to be part of the problem. It’s believed to be a white construct, like punctuality, timeliness, accuracy, and things like that. And here’s the general-
Jordan Peterson:
All the conscientious virtues which are actually temperamental and certainly not race-based in the least, or ethnicity-based.
Douglas Murray:
… Exactly. And you visited our friend Katharine Birbalsingh’s school recently in London, where I don’t think there’s a white child there. Every single one of those children is being taught conscientiousness, punctuality, the belief in search for truth, and much more. So, I mean, it’s so insulting to every ethnic minority, apart from anything else. But here’s the joke as it were on conservatives. Conservatives made a number of strategic errors in recent years in my view. The first was this, the belief that this would stay in the academy, and that the marketplace would be thing that would make that happen.
In other words, as you know, and I think I said this to Jay and others somewhere we were at recently, the idea that the people doing studying lesbian dance and feminist magic at the university of somewhere-ville would leave and discover the marketplace had no need for them. And the joke was on us, because it turned out that the marketplace needed thousands of these so-and-sos. They went straight into content moderation in Silicon Valley. They went into every HR department in the world, including HR departments where the CEO hates this stuff. So that was the first joke on conservatives. The second was that this stuff wouldn’t come for STEM because-
Jordan Peterson:
Right. Yeah, that was real naive.
Douglas Murray:
… Effectively only the humanities had to suffer it. Well, guess what? We’ve now got equitable maths, which I write about in some length, not least, because I still offer a cash prize for anyone who could actually describe what an other way of knowing is. Other ways of knowing is the phrase for non-traditional maths.
Jordan Peterson:
They’re ineffable, Douglas.
Douglas Murray:
What’s that?
Jordan Peterson:
They’re ineffable. That whole demand for description.
Douglas Murray:
Oh, yeah.
Jordan Peterson:
That’s just a reflection of your patriarchal thinking.
Douglas Murray:
Of course. And if you say, “Look, I mean this bridge over here…” Since this is also coming into engineering, “This bridge over here, we’re not going to use traditional white capitalist ways to build the bridge. We’re going to use other ways of knowing.” After you, driving across that bridge. But here’s the thing of course, we, those of us who were conservatives, went on the presumption again, it would not get to STEM, because at some point the bridges have to stay up. And my conclusion after watching this year on year is if the bridges came down, it would be because of structural racism.
Jordan Peterson:
Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Douglas Murray:
And the third and final thing I would say on this is… And again, some people have heard me say this. But, we were too complacent about what is known as Herb Stein’s law, Herbert Stein’s law. The law that is most applied in economics, things that cannot go on won’t.
Jordan Peterson:
Yeah.
Douglas Murray:
And conservatives consoled ourselves with this for such a long time. And some years ago, I cited this to my friend, Larry Seed, a top distinguished academic at Oxford University, and the author of Inventing the Individual, which I’m sure most of you know. And I said this to Larry one evening over dinner, I said, “Well, Herb Steiner’s law, ‘Things that cannot go on won’t.'” And Larry looked at me with that look that you can only have if you spent your life at the university. And he said, “Oh Douglas, in my experience, things that cannot go on usually do.”
Jordan Peterson:
Well, it’s always a timeframe problem, isn’t it? I mean, if you can go on longer than you’re alive, which is plenty long enough for you. So hey, I got a question in relationship to the tearing down, let’s say, of these patriarchal figures. And so, it’s a more fundamental philosophical question in some sense. It’s definitely the case that the enlightenment types, the philosophers, went hard after the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Douglas Murray:
Oh, yeah.
Jordan Peterson:
And tended to view it as a superstitious impediment to the furtherance of enlightenment, let’s say. And so, I tend to think of this collapse of the patriarchal tradition, let’s say, including these figures that you’re describing as a descending consequence of what Nietzsche described as the death of God. And, I know from reading Mircea Eliade and other scholars of religious history, that these deaths of the predominant spirit have happened periodically in human culture. And well, they often lead to counterproductive revolutions, because that’s the fastest way for things to go downhill.
And so, you could argue that we lost that connection. We’ve talked about this, Douglas, we’ve lost that connection to the belief in something ultimately transcendent and strange, because you did point out that even scientists believe that if you pursue truth, you get somewhere good. And to me, I can’t help but see that as a fundamentally religious claim. Because it’s an axiom, right? It’s something you have to believe in before you even undertake the process of scientific investigation. And so, you see this belief in the transcendent collapse, and then you see the saint-like, in some sense, manifestations of that principle start to be torn down. Those would be the philosophers and the statesmen that you described. I know they’re not saints in the purest sense, but they’re still pillars of our culture.
Douglas Murray:
Yeah.
Jordan Peterson:
And then, you think that’s going to stop somewhere. But it doesn’t seem to me that it stops at all. It just keeps cascading downward, until we reestablish something like first principles.
Douglas Murray:
And may I throw in as well, one which we haven’t touched on yet, but is one of the cornerstones of what I’ve been writing about in The War in the West, which is the whole concept of cultural appropriation. This is of course absolute poison for culture as a whole. And, it was sometimes said of Leo Strauss by one of his students that essentially his beliefs in politics extended mainly to politics making philosophy possible. That the political system should be set up in a way such that philosophy was possible. I would say to myself that my own belief that politics should be so arranged that it allows culture to be possible, civilization to be possible. And so, I mind very much when I read about cultural appropriation and hear about it, and here’s just a thought quickly on it. I was very struck in recent years, meltdowns at distinguished institutions like Yale, and Harvard, and others were always over cultural appropriation to do with Halloween costumes. Everyone remembers the terrible treatment of the Christakis’s over that.
Jordan Peterson:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Douglas Murray:
And the other one that was always came up with hair braiding. And I always thought, “Why is it so frivolous? Why is it so frivolous? I mean, Halloween costumes don’t matter at Dam. Hair braiding, who cares about hairstyles particularly?” I mean, okay, everybody to some extent. But I mean, really, not the most important thing in a culture. And I realized, of course, the reason why the activists do this is because you couldn’t do it on the real stuff. You can’t. What they’re trying to do in siloing out certain ideas, certain sounds, certain texts is of course complete anathema to culture. As I point out, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, but when Olivier Messian, the great French composer was learning from Hindu Indian rhythm in the 1930s and ’40s and incorporated into his work, was he appropriating? No. He was paying deep homage to this extraordinary enriched tradition. When [inaudible 00:26:01], who died only a few years ago, was learning from African drumming. Was he stealing? No. He was paying homage to it. [inaudible 00:26:06].
Jordan Peterson:
Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Douglas Murray:
When balinese music infuses into the music of Benjamin Britain, what’s he doing? He’s deeply moved. He has a whole renaissance of his career, and of his sound world, and of his language because he’s discovered the music of Bali. Is that appropriation? No. It’s the deepest form of homage you could have.
Jordan Peterson:
Right.
Douglas Murray:
And so, what these people are doing is actually cursing culture in the name of preserving it.
Jordan Peterson:
Mm-hmm. Well, they’re also doing the same thing they’re doing on the free speech front, because those examples that you just gave are stellar examples of true dialogue. So you have a musical genius who’s enveloped by his or her own logos, the creative genius encountering an entire tradition that’s communicating in the same domain in a creatively different manner. And then, what is genuinely creative, which is the generation of culture itself, emerges as a consequence of that dialogue. And that brings me to another point I wanted to raise with you. Before we started to talk today, we heard some accounts of people who’ve been quite nicely mobbed in the way that gives you post-traumatic stress disorder. It makes you fear for your family, and your career, and your culture, and the souls of the people around you. And, one of the things we’re wrestling with here at this convention is, what’s the moral obligation of all the attendees in relationship to academic freedom? And, one of the things that we might point out is that as an academic and as a free human being, you have a responsibility to abide by your own logos.
And so, all of us around here, we have to think very hard about when we’re silent, when we’re not supposed to be. And, you’re silent when you’re not supposed to be, what you’re not saying is making you resentful. And that’s a sign that you’re not being true to the spirit that you’re attempting to foster if you’re a true… Well, if you’re truly creative, if you’re a true avatar of culture, if you’re a true academic. It’s like, “Well, when do I have to say something?” Well, when it would hurt me not to. And that’s not just careless activism or troublemaking. I’d rather take the risk now and say what I need to say, and not remain silent, despite the fact that it may come at some real cost, or I can pay the price later and everyone else will.
I was just in Albania. You want to find out what happens to a society when everyone decides they’re not going to say what they think. You should just go to Albania and spend a couple of weeks there and see what the hell happened to that country. The worst hell hole of the entire Soviet enterprise, which is really saying something. And so, it’s incumbent on us to engage in that process of logos in our exchanges to involve ourselves in that creative endeavor. And every time we step back, when we know we have something to say, we’re letting the people who are stealing the culture steal it. And as stewards of the culture, that’s the ultimate sin for academics and creative people alike.
Douglas Murray:
I agree. I mean, the Solzhenitsyn often on your mind as he is on mine, Jordan. And, I mean, what I find still one of the most haunting parts of the Gulag Archipelago is that description he gives, I think in volume one of the fact that after the revolution begins in Petrograd and they start seizing people from the streets. One day, two or three secret policemen get out of a van and try to pull a perfectly respectable middle class woman into the van. And she shrieks, and screams, and passes by intervene. And they stop the secret police taking her. And she’s safe. Now as it happens, she goes back to her apartment, because she’s taken quietly in the night, which is much easier. And they learned how to do that. But the question Solzhenitsyn always has and the thing he can’t solve is, why didn’t we all do that?
Jordan Peterson:
Well, we touched on that today too, because Jay, for example, talked about the consequences of being mobbed. And so, what happens is the narcissistic and psychopathic machiavellians, they figure out how to isolate people, like predators isolate their prey in a group.
Douglas Murray:
That’s right.
Jordan Peterson:
And then they mob them. And I’ve spoken with hundreds of people now who’ve been mobbed and excluded. And I haven’t met a single person who wasn’t shaken to the core by it. And, I know that on the clinical front there’s two big categories of fear. There’s fear of biological vulnerability and mortality. And so, that would be insanity, and suffering, and death, all of that biological vulnerability. But the second great category of fear is something like exposure, and contempt, and alienation at the hand of your fellow men.
Douglas Murray:
Yes.
Jordan Peterson:
And well, so what happens to people… One of the weapons that the people who want to, what would you say, feast on the corpse of culture, to their own benefit, is that they can isolate people and mob them. And they terrify everyone else so badly that they start to become silent. And it’s not surprising, because it is no bloody fun to go through that. It’s shakes you.
Douglas Murray:
No. No, no. But here’s a strategy for winning is to have to get through the other side of that. Now, you mentioned Jay, hi, Jay. Great hero of course. And, I don’t by any means downplay, I mean, losing however many pounds it was he lost. And I’ve seen that with others. My friend Toby Young, literally weight fell off him, because he couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep. It was devastating. However, we need to find a way for it to be less devastating. And, there are several reasons for that. One of which is that who would want to join something or do something if they saw repeatedly the negative effects of what the crowd is doing? And, I use the analogy here and I’m sure that everybody at the conference is like me a horny handed son of the soil. So you’ll all get the reference I’m about to make. But if you’ve ever seen a sheep dog in action, you’ll know that the sheep dog, of course, it controls the herd not by running straight into the middle of them, but by going to the herd at the corners and nipping at the feet.
Jordan Peterson:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Douglas Murray:
Now, I think this is the analogy of what the social justice activists and others have done in recent years. And it’s sometimes quite a lot more than a nip at an edge of the. Sometimes, like, Jordan, you say they just try to savage you. They try to make sure that no one else is going to do it. So, I have a suggested, which I certainly always try to do in my life and whenever I as a rather happy warrior, I’m a happy warrior because I’m not institutionalized. I’m not an institution, so I’m free. But I always say to particularly young audiences who are coming up, people say, “Oh, I bet you get a lot of abuse and things.” And I say, “Well, why would I care? I mean, I don’t even know if I do. I don’t feel like I do. I don’t feel abused.” People on the street, like with you, Jordan, come up to me and say nice things.
Now, perhaps the nasty ones just wouldn’t come over. And I’m very glad of it. But essentially, I say to people, “You’ve no idea how great it is being able to tell the truth. You have a much better life. Much sexier people will like you.”
Jordan Peterson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Douglas Murray:
You’ll definitely make more money. And, like Boris Johnson once said years ago, I can’t remember, he said, “Vote conservative and you’ll get a faster car, and your wife’s boobs will grow.” Or something like this. But, what I’m trying to say something like that is to say, actually life will be better. And that’s been my experience.
Jordan Peterson:
Well, that’s the idea of abiding by the truth that’s driving the scientist too is that the truth actually is what sets you free.
Douglas Murray:
Exactly.
Jordan Peterson:
And one of the things I’ve learned too is, and this might be useful for people who are listening is because a lot of you, if you do say what you have to say, you’re going to get come for. And so then, you might ask, “Well, what should you do in those circumstances?” And I would say, “Well, you should prepare yourself to begin with, because you might want to have more than one leg to stand on when that happens.” Right?
“You need a strategy. You need to get your family and your true friends around you too so that you have some social support. And then, when the mob comes for you, do not apologize, unless you did something wrong. And even then, you should be careful. Because, if you apologize… Well first of all, you’re not going to make the first mob happy, because they only want to mob you, and they don’t care really what you did. And all that’ll happen is you’ll generate a second mob which will look just like the first mob to you, because mobs are all the same, and they’ll come after you for apologizing. And then, not only do you have two mobs after you, you’ve also cut the ground out from underneath yourself.”
And, my experience, I’ve been mobbed I would think about 40 times. I think it’s something like that. And my family has learned how to deal with that to some degree, because every time it happens, there’s always the possibility that you’re going to get taken out. But one of the things we have learned is that if you just bloody well hold your ground, right? Which is not easy, and that’s that interim period where stupid things that shouldn’t keep happening won’t keep happening. It’s like, yeah, but you might die in the intervening months. If you wait it out, not only will you be vindicated, but it will reverse. And so then, what you’ll find is the worst attacks successfully challenged are the ones that mount to your increased credibility. And that’s a tough thing to learn, but it’s true.
Speaker 1:
Thank you very much Jordan and Douglas for this great conversation. We’re running out of time. But I’m going to open it up for a few questions. There are some questions. Rick? Maybe you can use this.
Rick Shweder:
I’m Rick Shweder, I’m a cultural anthropologist and cultural psychologist at the University of Chicago. I want to thank you for that conversation. I have one question for each of you. For Douglas, I believe it was Thomas Hobbs who said, “All countries are born in sin.”
Douglas Murray:
Mm-hmm.
Rick Shweder:
And I’m wondering whether it’s possible to distinguish between the original sin that Hobbs had in mind, an inherent sin in which eternal penance becomes necessary and where you end up romanticizing the other and becoming a reverse developmentalist seeing the other as superior to yourself. Sometimes it sounds like there’s an attempt to deny the original sin, and it seems to me that’s a mistake, but you don’t have to have the original sin become inherent sin. And I wonder what you think of that distinction. Jordan, Cardinal Newman observing people disagreeing said, “When we disagree with each other, if we truly understood what each other meant, we would discover that all our disagreements are either trivial or insurmountable.”
And, by trivial, he meant the disagreement was occurring because of error, ignorance, or confusion on one or the other party’s behalf or both. And, if you got rid of the ignorance and the confusion about the meaning of words, you would agree. That’s a trivial disagreement in his view. But there are these insurmountable disagreements where reason has its limits. I mean, the reason for factions in life, James Madison observed it in Federalist 10 is because of a combination of self-love and the limits of reason.
And one of the things that has been talked about for the last 50 years in the social sciences and philosophy, starting with Thomas Kuhn, is that dogma is not amenable. In fact, dogma plays a part in all scientific movements and it’s not getting rid of dogma that we should try to achieve, it’s challenging it, and constantly staying on the move between different dogmas which enable certain worldviews, each of which might have an illumination in it. Even though you’re not going to get agreement along the way, because reason has its limits. That’s what Khan taught us too. The phenomenal and the numinal. We’re not going to reach the numinal. It’s always going to be phenomenal, and that’s going to always leave room for assumption and premise. And these things enable reason. We don’t want to get rid of it and just leave us with pure reason, because that’s not going to take us all the way to meaning. I wonder what your observations are.
Douglas Murray:
Very briefly, it’s a subject I’ve thought about a lot in my book, The Strange Death of Europe, I wrote about the sense of guilt in Europe and specifically the spreading around of post-war German guilt, which I think is one of the things that’s striking about the continent, where a specific German crime, atrocity ended up being emblematic or symptomatic of the culture as a whole that it came from. And, this is of course devastating. And I think, in Europe we’re living in the devastation of that. It’s in the artwork of Richter and others. It’s just devastating that the aftermath of the second World War still, so much of culture is behind crime scene tape. And so many of the ideas, because of course… What’s that film that has the line, “If you got to hear from the path then what good was the path?” And that’s a very, very deep and painful question for Europeans to keep asking themselves.
But in general, the problem with original sin in a nation is that it has to be believable. And, the situation that Nietzche gets us into of… In a way he also tries to get us out of, but look at what Hannah Arendt, not a philosopher I much admire. But, look at what she said about the problem of action in the world in that work of hers in 1954, and on the work contract. Look at the problem she identifies of a culture which knows that action in the world is impossible to predict. The consequences of it are impossible to predict. So we never know when we say anything or do anything the world, we just can’t imagine the reverberations and sometimes they can be catastrophic.
What Aaron says is the only tool we’ve ever had to try to deal with this. It’s forgiveness. It’s having an ethic of forgiveness in society. So of course, the era we live in spends no time thinking about forgiveness and a lot of time practicing retribution. And I think it’s the same with countries. We spend a lot of time talking about the guilt. We should be able to address the question of is that guilt ever able to be lifted? As far as I see it in America at the moment, the talk of reparations, which now comes back in Britain as well, the talk of reparations is no longer even the descendants of people whom were wrong was done, being given money by the descendants of people who did the wrong. But people who look like people who were wronged in the past being given by money who look like people who did the wronging.
I mean, I wrote a rather provocative essay in the Times last year, or earlier this year when The War in the West came out saying, “We, Britain, don’t owe another penny in reparations. Not one penny. Because after King George signed the Anti-Slavery Act in 1807, the Royal Navy patrol, the high seas, for the next 60 years trying to stamp out slavery wherever it was in the globe, not just in British lands and in British territories. We lost thousands of sailors. This was a huge national cost. Everybody in Britain in the 19th century paid higher costs in goods throughout the 19th century, because we would not buy and trade with slave owning countries. We’ve given foreign aid for goodness knows how many decades now. So, I am at the end of my tether with the desire for reparations from the British. We paid the reparations. We don’t know another penny.” And I wish people said that, because they should say it, because otherwise what we’re getting is just an increase in tin-rattling from phonies, and frauds, and fakes.
Jordan Peterson:
So, I’ll tie some of the themes together in relationship, hopefully to the answer to your question. I don’t really believe that what we’re engaged in precisely when we’re undertaking redemptive dialogue is reducible to reason. I think it’s not mere reason. There’s also an admixture of faith in it that’s ineradicable. And that might be a consequence of our ineradicable ignorance. So, for you and I to have a productive dialogue, for example, we have to have faith that the exchange of our ideas is going to produce a positive consequence. And then you could imagine in relationship to your notion that some of it’s confusion and some of it’s intractable, there’s more like a hierarchy. The more fundamental the principle that you and I disagree on, the less easy it’s going to be for us to come to some synthesis through dialogue.
But then, you might ask yourself, “Well, what’s the precondition for genuine dialogue?” And I don’t think it’s a precondition of reason. I think it’s a precondition of transcendent faith. And I think this is the faith. I just did a series of lectures which I’m going to release next year on the Sermon on the Mount, and it contains a very interesting set of ethical presuppositions. So the first presupposition is something like, orient yourself to the highest good that you’re capable of imagining. And that would be the establishment of a relationships… That would approximate a relationship with something unitarian monotheistic. And it’s something like the vision of life more abundant. And it’s something like a vision of universal brotherhood and sovereign citizenship. It’s something like that. But, fix your sight on that, and then pay as much attention as you possibly can to the present moment.
And I think that that’s the spirit that manifests itself in redemptive dialogue. And the reason I don’t think that it’s pure rationality is because it’s not merely about the objective extraction of identifiable patterns in the material world. It’s something like the negotiation of a joint strategy for movement uphill. And that’s represented symbolically in ideas like the city on the hill or Jerusalem and the long march uphill. And I think that when we participate in that, we produce reasonable dialogue, and we produce an increment rationality. But I don’t think the fundamental motivation can be reduced to rationality.
And I think that, that faith in the transcendent doesn’t face the same limitations that rationality per se faces, because I don’t think we have anything other than that to battle against the exigencies of the world. We have our capacity to aim up in the most stellar manner possible, and then to abide by the truth in our dialogue and to attend to the present. And if we do that as scientists, then we’re good scientists. If we do that as businessmen, then we’re ethical businessmen. If we do that as husbands and wives, then we have productive relationships. And I think the enlightenment attempt to reduce that to rationality was an error, because it assumes that there’s nothing outside the rational domain. And, the axioms that make communication possible are not part of the interior structure of the rational world, not in some real sense. That’s a secondary consequence of something more fundamental, so.
Eric Rasmussen:
I’ve been canceled twice and it does get easier. Oh, Eric Rasmussen, MIT, Free Speech Alliance in Indiana. And it gets easier the second time, even though the bad guys also had been preparing more. And, I wrote up a tip of how to be canceled things on the web. And as you were talking Douglass, I was thinking it would be good if Toby Young would write such a thing, because there are all kinds of lessons, it would be nice to have shared. And you two also who’ve advised so many people… Pamela, are you here? Yeah. So, Pamela I was sitting with last night and somebody was calling her the mother hen of the canceled. And, it’s really important to talk with people in the psychological aspects, even if you think you’re tough like I thought I was tough, are so important. So, what would you guys say is advice for next time somebody… Oh, could you raise your hand if you were canceled here? How many people? Yeah. So, for the rest of you who don’t know how to be canceled, what could you advise?
Jordan Peterson:
Well, for me, a huge part of it was the supportive people that were around me in my family, and then in my extended community. And, it’s obvious to me that I wouldn’t have been able to survive through what had happened if I wouldn’t have both had a community of support, but also I would say, was in continual communication with that community and also accepted and reached out for their support. It’s like, if the mob comes from you, you’re alienated from your community. That’s really the definition of being mobbed. And so, what’s being stolen from you is that embeddedness in that community. And part of what you have as the protection against that is the integrity of your own community. And that’s hard on people too, because one of the things you may find is that when the mob comes for you, you didn’t actually know who your friends were. And that’s pretty damn bitter. That’s traumatizing, in some real sense, because you would encounter betrayal under those circumstances.
But, you definitely need your distributed social network. And that’s partly what we’re trying to build here, right? Is that, we’re coming together as is necessary to say, “Look, we’re not alone in this. There’s other people who are going through the same thing and who are thinking the same things. And, you don’t want to be thinking that you can do this alone.” And I would say too, no matter how tough you are… Douglas is particularly tough on that front, because there’s a lot of him that’s really fighter to the core. I wouldn’t say that’s particularly true of me, because this conflict, it’s not something I’m temperamentally suited for. But what saved me in those circumstances has definitely been the support of people around me, that’s been unbelievably important.
Well, and I would say the fact that I generally don’t regret what I said, because I don’t say things that I don’t think are true, except in error. And when I’m making mistakes, my goal is to say what I believe to be true. And, I do think, as Douglas pointed out, there is no doubt that there’s nothing more adventurous than the path of truth. It’s a way more exciting life, sometimes unbearably exciting. And that’s a benefit that’s not to be, what would you say, trivialized. The advantage to saying what you think is it’s you saying it. You get to have your life, right? That’s your words. That’s your life, man. Hey, what happens to you if you say your truth? That’s you. And if you forego that, well, what do you have? You cowed how and bow to the mob and you’re speaking the words of deception. So that’s not you. It’s some dread spirit that now inhabits you. And I would not recommend that. Really, really, that’s worse than being mobbed. And being mobbed is bad, but that’s worse.
Eric Rasmussen:
Thank you.
Douglas Murray:
That’s what Sam [inaudible 00:49:56] said after the [foreign language 00:49:57], that actually the lowest ebb was when he faked converting back to Islam.
Eric Rasmussen:
Uh-huh.
Douglas Murray:
And then, it didn’t make a difference anyway.
Jordan Peterson:
Right. Right. God, yes. That’s a bad outcome.
Douglas Murray:
“I’ve lost my pride and the situation hasn’t been-“
Jordan Peterson:
Right, right, right.
Douglas Murray:
… And who could blame him? Because that was the ultimate mobbing. But-
Jordan Peterson:
No, that’s the ultimate victory too, right? Because, you concede, and then you still lose, and you lose what was being attacked to begin with.
Douglas Murray:
… Yeah.
Jordan Peterson:
Yeah, that’s a really bad outcome.
Douglas Murray:
… That’s the worst. That’s the worst. That’s the worst one I know. I don’t blame him at all. But, Jordan first, maybe I’m temperamentally unsound in all sorts of ways. I don’t doubt it. But one of them is that I genuinely don’t care what very many people think. I deeply care what a small number of people who are friends of mine and who I admire think.
Jordan Peterson:
Mm-hmm.
Douglas Murray:
If they say, “Douglas, I really don’t think you should have said that.”
Speaker 1:
Thank you very much, Douglas. So unfortunately, we’ve run out time. There are many questions. But we need to continue with the program. Thank you very much Jordan and Douglas for a great-
Douglas Murray:
It’s my pleasure. Thank you.