Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, everybody. Welcome along to the dispatchers. My name is Brendan Malone, and I thought we'd do something a little bit different today and I would take you behind our Left Foot Media paywall and allow you to hear, for the first time ever, free to air an episode that has previously only been available to our five dollar monthly patrons. Now, the reason I thought I'd do this is twofold. Number one is to give you a bit of a taste for the kind of content that we have behind our paywall and encourage you, hopefully, to consider becoming a $5 monthly patron. All it takes is $5 a month and you get access to all of the patrons only content. We're producing episodes every single week, most weeks of the year, two episodes a week. And this particular show is called Thoughts From the Road. And as the name suggests, it's the episodes that I produce for our patrons when I'm away on the road. I take some portable podcasting equipment with me, and it's not quite as full as the regular weekly episodes, but it's still a decent episode, exploring usually a particular topic. And it's available exclusively to our $5 monthly patrons. To become a $5 monthly patron, just go to Patreon.com Left Foot Media and sign up there. And the great news is that our patrons only episodes are now also available on Spotify. That's right. If you're a patron, you can listen exclusively to our patrons only episodes on your Spotify app. Now, I'll post a link for that as well in the Show Notes for today's free to air episode. Because even if you are not currently a patron, you can actually access and become a patron now directly through Spotify. So I'll post that link as well. I'm sure some of you will be interested in that. The other reason I thought it would be good to make this episode of Thoughts From the Road available to a wider audience is because the question that it explores is actually quite an interesting and I think important one. And as you'll hear, it came from a tweet that I saw online a few weeks ago where someone asked the question, why has Conservatism failed to conserve anything? So without any further ado, let's have a listen to this episode. I really hope you enjoy it. Don't forget, if you want to get access to this and all of our other awesome patrons only content, go to Patreon.com Left Footmedia or the link that I will post in today's Show Notes and become a five dollar monthly patron. In the meantime, enjoy the episode. I've traveled this big world lonesome I have roamed I've laid down in green pastures I've rolled down rocky road hi, everybody. Welcome along to another episode of Thoughts From the Road. Today we're going to be exploring the question, why has Conservatism failed to conserve anything?
[00:02:41] Narrow is the road, the road to glory?
[00:02:47] Perdition gates are broad and wide on the steps you take to ponder from the past you're not far wonderful the narrow road the glory's worth the price I broke bread with the wicked hi everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Thoughts from the Road. I am still out of the office, thus the Thoughts from the Road episode this week. I'd love to hear your feedback about what you think about this concept and hopefully it's tiding you over because it's enjoyable to be able to put them together. What we're looking at today, today's topic of conversation is the question, well, why has Conservatism failed to actually conserve things? And the reason I wanted to actually have this discussion was because it was a tweet that I saw last week on Twitter where a conservative had posted the question. I think he's a conservative, maybe certainly at least conservative friendly person who had posted the tweet asking the question in your own words, what's the best explanation for why Conservatism failed to conserve anything? And so this is a person who's looking around society and saying gosh, in the west there's been all sorts of collapses in fundamental areas. And why is it that Conservatism failed in this regard?
[00:04:09] And it really struck me as a fascinating and very important question because I think there's some good answers to give for this but also I think it's maybe missing a few things as well. So one of the first things I would say before I even get into some reasons why I think we can say that key areas have not been conserved by Conservatism. Important aspects of the moral life and the social life of society have been undermined and even the economic life and other things as well by various conservative failures. Before we get into exploring why that has even happened, I would pose a counter question that would be this has Conservatism actually failed totally? Though the question is framed as if somehow Conservatism has failed to conserve anything at all. That's literally what it says. How come Conservatism has failed to conserve anything? But I'm not sure that's actually correct.
[00:05:05] Yes, you can see where in the political space and the laws associated with political machinations and legislations and lawmaking and all the rest of it, there's been some failures, right? There's no doubt about that in certain aspects of society. But in other areas, I think if you look beyond just politics and law and you take the much broader view of Conservatism, I think it's interesting to note that in actual fact, probably Conservatism has quietly conserved some things, but we just don't maybe necessarily recognize that. And we don't connect them so directly or intimately with Conservatism itself and the importance of that particular project. Because we sort of fail to see that Conservatism is about more than just a political cause. And I want to end by talking about that very important point. It's actually about preserving tradition and custom as well and I think there are some areas where there is still and I think we can provide ample evidence for the fact that conservatism has done some conserving. But we'll get to that point at the end. Before I get there, let me just unpack what I think are some reasons that I would give for why Conservatism really, I'm thinking here as a political movement has probably failed to conserve a lot of very important things. Well, not probably, but actually has failed to conserve a lot of important things and what has been the cause of that particular failure. So the first thing I'd say is that it's really essential to understand a little bit of history about modern conservatism. And one of the key points is that modern conservatism was very effectively infiltrated by liberals and libertarians. And I don't know if infiltrated such a fair word, but maybe it would be fairer to say that it became populated by libertarians and liberals and that forgive my squeaky chair if you can hear that in the background, by the way. This is one of the dramas of producing Thoughts from the Road episodes is you have to put up with things that aren't normally in the Home Office studio. So squeaky chairs being one of them. Conservatism was populated really post World War II by a lot of liberals and libertarians. And the reason this happens is well, it's probably twofold. One is a lot of people post World War II, they are really broken and scarred and horrified by the absolute atrocities of the Nazi regime, the Japanese regime, then of course, the horrors of the Russian regime, the Soviet communist regime. That starts to come to light as well. And so I think for a lot of people, they see this industrial genocide and slaughter and warfare, mechanized warfare on a mass global scale twice in a row. And a lot of them have had to live through it. And you can't blame them for sort of coming home from that and thinking we just want peace.
[00:07:54] We don't even want to pick another fight. Can't we just live in peace? And liberalism, not libertarianism, but liberalism seems to be like a negotiated truth sorry, a negotiated truth, rather where we'll sort of go to our separate corners and there will be this sort of agree to disagree type mentality and this is the way we'll keep the peace. You have your beliefs. You have your beliefs and we'll only focus on what's essential. We'll talk more about that particular point in just a minute. How do you decide what's essential and what's not?
[00:08:23] But there's sort of this negotiated truce amongst particularly men, I would imagine who had survived these atrocities. And why wouldn't you just want to come home and have peace? There's actually something very authentically conservative about that idea of wanting a peaceful, stable social order that's actually a very, very good and healthy conservative instinct. And the problem, though, of course, was that liberalism wasn't actually a negotiated truth and truce. Again. Sorry. Gosh. Fraudian slip. It certainly wasn't true either. But it wasn't a negotiated truce. And sadly, you can't really have respite from the battle. This is where we often get ourselves into trouble, is where we fail to recognize that we must always be at battle with something or other. If we are actually going to have a full and flourishing society and we're going to have a full and flourishing life, you have to engage. There is always a battle to be fought. And even if you've just finished an awful unnecessary global war with industrial genocide, that doesn't mean that other battles that are less horrific, but still probably just as important, maybe even more important, must not still be fought. They have to be fought. The fight has to continue. So the personal battle for virtue in our own life, for example, the personal battle to maintain a loving and caring household, there's a battle involved in these things. We have to struggle against our own laziness, our own comfort, our own sinful desires, the fear of what other people will think, all those kinds of things. And so unfortunately, those things just don't stop being a reality and you have to keep engaging with that. And you can't build a perfect world, utopia if you like, and liberalism doesn't give you that truce at all. You've actually still got to engage with things.
[00:10:17] Liberalism seemed like a negotiated truce though. And there is also something else that's really important going on and that is the rise of Soviet Communism. And so Marxism has sort of a tendency on the global stage after World War II and I think it's fair to say there were some missteps by the allies as well which helped to sort of precipitate that.
[00:10:36] But effectively, what the end result is that there's now this big global existential crisis and that poses a very serious threat to peace, stability and legitimate human flourishing, societal flourishing, peace, freedom, et cetera. And so liberals and conservatives and libertarians, they have something in common there. They recognize that threat. They hold that threat in common. So they come together to sort of try and I guess hold the line against that as the Marxist threat really does try and assert itself even in the west and particularly through academics who are very friendly to Marxism. And there's this crazy notion that right up until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Communism, where there's no longer any escaping the true reality of what's really going on because it's all laid bare, we can see for ourselves what has been happening. The stories, the records are now exposed. We've got everything, we've got the paperwork, we've got the receipts, so to speak, which actually tell us what really happened. And you can no longer be an academic who's trying to pretend that somehow Soviet Communism was actually this much better version of what the west was offering. You realize in actual fact, no, this totalitarianism corrupt inept regime is not a good thing at all. But believe it or not, up until that point you have academics and others who are trying to argue the case for communism. And so liberals and conservatists, they get together, libertarians as well and they sort of try and hold the line against that. And thankfully, successfully in the west they were able to do that. But here's the thing. What happens is the tendency is that conservatism sort of goes a bit quiet and it doesn't really, I guess, push its case much. Whereas liberalism and libertarianism, they're more than happy to trumpet and to evangelize and proselytize anyone they can to their particular movement and their particular ideas. But for whatever reason, conservatives, they just take a more maybe a more conservative literally approach and just sort of not sit this one out. But they sort of assume that good ideas maybe will win out and we'll talk more about that particular point in a minute. And so what happens is please forgive that noise that's the commercial construction in the building where I'm staying right now that you can hear someone operating a drill but they take a backseat while the liberals and the libertarians are more than happy to really push and promote their ideas. And funnily enough, conservatism actually in some way starts to swallow up various liberal ideas. And today we're at the point now where a lot of conservatives are actually it's not uncommon to find that they're actually more liberals than they are conservatives or even libertarians. And people mistake the two. And that's the reason for that because people who started out conservatists, they think liberalism liberalism started to take more of a hold. And also people who came in later maybe thought liberal ideas were actually part of the conservative canon, if you like. And so that's why today people often make that mistake and why we often see what I would call diet conservatism as quite a normal thing. People who don't really understand authentic conservatism and they think it is either just some sort of reactionary right wing movement or it's about economic liberalism or it's about libertarianism.
[00:14:03] There's a big confusion around that today. But basically the problem, of course, with all of this going back to the post World War II situation is liberalism doesn't have a vision for goodness, truth and beauty. It has a philosophy which says you decide for yourself. The autonomous, self choosing individual will choose for themselves and they will choose how they live and what they believe to be good, true and beautiful. And so that has a huge impact. You can't conserve things if you don't have an objective standard by which you can measure that which should be conserved, that which might need to be reformed and that which comes along which should be rejected. If you're now living in a culture that says we'll just live and let live, then that actually gives a very powerful foothold to revolutionaries who want to come along and say, well, okay, here's my ideas. Why can't we shape society around them? And then, of course, the other big factor here is the separation of the private and the public. And this is a really big thing that comes out of Enlightenment liberalism, and it really goes back to Francis Bacon. And Francis Bacon is the founding father, really, of empiricism, this idea that you can't claim anything to be objectively true and therefore every person can be held to that standard unless you can actually prove that thing to be empirically true. So you have to use empirical measures, empirical testing measures and standards to prove it to be true. Now, that works fine for the natural sciences. You can put things under microscopes. You can test them in labs, you can dissect them. You can actually use empirical methods. But you can't do that with virtue. You can't do that with moral precepts, with moral truths, because they don't exist in the material world. So you can't subject them to the principles of empiricism. You know what else you can't subject to the principles of empiricism? Well, the principle of empiricism, because empiricism itself doesn't exist in the material world. It is a principle. And so you can't even verify that using its own standard. If you can't verify it empirically, it can't be held by everyone. Well, what about empiricism? How can you hold everyone to empiricism then? Because it can't be empirically verified. But what happens is this notion, which seems sound initially to some people, this idea, well, only empirical things should be held by everyone to be true. And anything else, it's not up to everyone else, or you can't sort of enforce it upon everyone, is it throws a whole lot of stuff out that we absolutely need in society. So virtue, moral claims, moral truths, theological truths and claims, religious truths and claims, they all go out the window because they are not subject to empirical testing. And it also gives an absolutely unwarranted authority to the material sciences. They now become dominant when really they have not earned that right. It's just an ideology which actually allows them to suddenly take in ascendancy and a strong foothold that in actual fact isn't good because you end up with situations like Hiroshima and Nagasaki are two very clear examples of this, where you have science without moral restraint. Now, because science can be empirically tested, I can show you what an atom bomb does. I can show you how to build one. I can show you the effects of it. I can show you the test footage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But none of that tells me the most important thing of all, whether or not and how I should use that technology. That's a moral question. And guess what? That's not empirically testable. So all of a sudden practical technology and medical science gains this dominance and power that is dangerous and not at all justified. But what we also end up with is this is the beginnings of the separation of public and private life. So what do you have in the public square? Well, anything that's universal is public and everyone can be bound by that, regardless of their religious creeds or personal philosophies. But then anything outside of that belongs in the private square. So you get this public private thing and then what that does is that relegates a lot of moral questions into the private space. Virtue is in the private space and the public life is a whole different kettle of fish. What happens is this straightaway creates a problem because if you're trying to conserve goodness, truth and beauty, you don't have an objective standard and you're relegating moral standards into the private sphere. Well, it's up to you as an individual to decide what's right for you. And you only keep certain universals and some moral universals, but sort of only a certain number of them in the sort of private public divide, then, yeah, you've got a real problem now about how you can conserve things, because what's the standard that you're using?
[00:18:32] And often it's not actually obvious universal truths that you need to go deeper than that to actually have that conservation of what is good, true and beautiful.
[00:18:43] Second factor, of course, is the loss of faith in Western society. And there's just no denying the link between conservatism and Christianity. And we'll talk more about that when I sum up today. But the loss of faith was hugely devastating for the conservative project, the loss of faith in society. And this comes on the back of the private public divide.
[00:19:05] Faith gets relegated to the private sphere. And then also the whole notion of empiricism that's playing into this. And then also the utopian sort of ideals, political utopianism, technological, scientific utopianism that comes on the back of all of this. And of course, liberalism in general. It's trying to keep the fruit that it got from Christianity respect for human dignity, respect for the individual sacredness of life, et cetera, and the natural rights that would rightly flow out of that. The obvious conclusions that can be drawn. But it doesn't want the tree, it doesn't want Christianity. And that's a real problem. You can get away with that for a little bit, but eventually society forgets where the actual fruit came from and why the fruit is actually that important in the first place. And the end result of all of this is basically Christian leadership. It becomes weaker and there's an increasing silence from Christian leadership and even sometimes a capitulation that's been a constant problem capitulation to the technologies and powers and ideologies of the age.
[00:20:07] What you need to conserve what is good, true and beautiful is a voice in your society, an institution which is holding up clearly and coherently that which is good, true and beautiful. And when that voice becomes ineffectual or weak, then guess what? Where is that standard coming from? Everything then gets relegated to relativism and subjectivism. The individual will decide for themselves. And there's no strong moral compass, so just make your own moral compass and as long as you're not hurting anybody else, you'll be fine. And so it's hard to conserve in an environment like that. Number three, I think it's hard to bargain effectively when the other side is offering increasing licentiousness. That's the thing about liberalism. It's just increasing what you call personal liberty, but it's really licentiousness that's increasing. We'll give you the right and the social norm. If you like to do increasingly liberal things, you can satisfy and gratify yourself however you like. And increasingly we'll make that more and more liberal. And so when you're offering increasing licentiousness, which is pleasure, which is hedonistic in nature, which feels good, which increases your comfort, et cetera, et cetera, then it's hard to bargain effectively when you're on the other side of the ledger saying like authentic conservatism does. Well, unfortunately, hedonism is an absolute dead end for a society, any very dangerous place to go. You've actually got to be willing to suffer for goodness and truth because you have to. You just do. And it's important you'll flourish. But the road that have to walk is not an easy one. And so the other side is saying, oh no, don't listen to them. We'll just give you the power. We'll give you more and more power. And power is a very corrupting and appealing kind of thing. We'll give you more and more comfort. We'll give you more and more licentiousness and gratification or ways to gratify yourself or normalize them. And you can see how it's hard to actually bargain in that situation and present your case when you're saying often, well, no, you can't really do that. We have to think about other factors. We have to think about suffering and self sacrifice. And you can get away with self sacrifice and calls for self sacrifice in a time of war. Which brings me to point number four, because we haven't really had a major crisis that has forced us to evaluate our choices. But a war will do that. So in a time of major war or major famine or some other financial crisis, then you can actually talk about self sacrifice because you've got no other option, right? You realize, well, we can't all be hedonists if there's no food on the table. We can't all be hedonists if there's no money in the bank. We can't all be hedonists if there is this absolutely horrific authoritarian regime, totalitarian regime that wants to destroy the world and put people in camps and all the rest of it, hedonism suddenly becomes a far less important concern and we must unite. And so a major crisis actually doesn't just unite people, but it forces us to evaluate our choices and what is actually important. And so you can get away with calls for self sacrifice during a war at World War II, but once that threat sort of diminishes or becomes localized, which a lot of threats after that do. Apart from the existential. Threat of shared mutual sort of nuclear sorry, I was going to say assimilation. Annihilation I suppose we would be all assimilated in some way or other, but yeah, then basically but even that is still sort of localized to incidents and to it's like a low hum fear that just sits in the background humming away. It's not like a war where you're constantly under threat, constantly under siege. And so effectively that means we've sort of been getting away with not conserving things because we haven't had the major crisis yet. And that fools you into thinking, oh, well, maybe it doesn't matter.
[00:23:41] What do we need to conserve? Well, look, we're all comfortable, we're licentious, we've got hedonism, there's no major crisis, so we're not really forced to think too deeply about these things. And so it's hard for conservatism to actually mount its case. All it can do is be a prophet that warns in that situation and then sadly, when the crisis hits, it has to be there to try and help people pick up the pieces. Number five, I think there was the overly optimistic belief that people had, and it's a mistaken one, that society is basically like a pendulum and that culture is like a pendulum too, that a pendulum will only swing so far in one direction, but then it's always guaranteed to swing back. And I would argue that's not true.
[00:24:20] That idea, I think is incorrect. That's really grounded subtly in a progressive view of history and the subtle infiltration of progressive thinking there, that somehow society is constantly progressing towards the good. And so therefore you could have a pendulum movement that might swing wildly one direction, but it will always right itself because society is never going to sort of fall off a cliff. But that's not true. That is absolutely not true. You could have a pendulum swing that's so great that the whole thing falls in on itself and the whole grandfather clock effectively collapses. I think a better metaphor and I've been saying this for a while now in presentations that I've been giving publicly, but I think a better metaphor that should be used when we think about culture and society is that it's actually like a garden.
[00:25:03] And with a garden it's just like a culture with a society. If you don't plant the right plants in your garden, you won't get any good fruit. If you plant plants that are not suitable to the climate or that are toxic, you're not going to get good fruit, right? So you have to actually plant if you want flowers and beautiful things, you have to plant beautiful flowering plants. If you want good food to eat, you have to plant the right kind of plants that will give you good food to eat. If you want to ensure that happens, you also have to cultivate and care for and nurture a garden. And if you don't, even if you've planted the right stuff at the beginning, but if you don't tend to it, guess what happens? The weeds take over, and you might get pockets of fruit. But what could be your flourishing is diminished. Your harvest, the yield that you get is severely diminished by that. And I think that's a very good and a more appropriate metaphor, because what that means is that a society can collapse. It can be overwhelmed and subsumed by the weeds, basically. And I think this overly optimistic belief in pendulum swings caused us to sort of sit back and say, well, maybe we don't need to do anything. A lot of conservatives thought, oh, no, common sense will prevail. People will come right again. Now, the one area where I think there's a bit of an exception here is that I think transgender ideology is a bit of an exception because it's such a stark break from reality. Normally when progressivism breaks from reality, it's a gradual break. Bit by bit by bit, there's an incremental sort of erosion. But transgenderism is A, a really stark break from reality. It's very sudden. And B, it's also something that is inherent to everyone. Your maleness or your femaleness is inherent to every single person. You know it. Now, other things that liberalism, where they've been successful, they target pockets and they normally fringe things. So they might say, well, let's talk about some sort of sexual liberalization or more libertarian approach to, say, prostitution. But most people aren't involved in prostitution. It doesn't really connect with them. And they just sort of think, okay, we'll live and let live. Someone else not hurting anybody. They're freely consenting. Why can't they make their own choices? It doesn't connect with us in the same way as, like, our biological sex does. It's inherent to who we are. My maleness. I understand my maleness. And when someone turns up and says, your maleness doesn't exist, it's not a real thing. We should teach kids that they can be men trapped in women's bodies, everyone.
[00:27:33] That's an experience that's personal to everybody. And so that's why I think there is kind of a noticeable difference with that one. But basically outside of that kind of a thing, and there's not many of those, we didn't really shore up our flanks because we had this optimistic belief, well, common sense will prevail, but what if common sense doesn't actually prevail? So you need to tend to the garden. You really do.
[00:27:58] And unfortunately, Conservatism was sort of vulnerable in this regard. And initially, it sort of seems like there's a lot of people saying an idea is crazy, but that doesn't mean that that will always. Be the case, it might very quickly shift where all of a sudden the majority are like, okay, well, live and let live. For example, number six point is that there is a weakness within conservatism for protecting institutions. And this is actually a really important part of conservatism because we should want good, healthy, virtuous, well run and flourishing institutions. They do matter. Institutions do matter in society. They're part of the patrimony of tradition that's handed on to us. And they really do matter and they should be tended, they should be cared for. It's like that garden. You have to tend to and care for it. But here's the problem that conservatism had never had to grapple with previously, and that was this what if those institutions have fallen prey to errant ideologies? And what if they are so thoroughly corrupted you now struggle to tell the point at which the institution ends or begins and the point at which the ideology ends and begins. And so the ideology has so totally subsumed the institution that I guess it's like a virus that's so totally taken over a body that it's hard to treat it. You're sort of like, well, what do we do here? And this is where kind of again, the garden metaphor comes in. And what do you do with a garden that's been overwhelmed? Just like, what do you do with an institution that's been overwhelmed by weeds? You have to completely dig out the garden and restart. But what you don't do is you don't just tear the garden down and go away and think, well, I'll come back in a year's time and I'll find good fruit. What you do is you tear down the garden. You pull out that, which is if you can, you'll save good plants.
[00:29:47] This is why I love the garden metaphor. The more I think about it and the more I contemplate it, the more I think it's actually the right one is. Because what do you do? The conservatives have an authentic conservatism wants reform rather than revolution. So revolution is tearing everything out of the garden. Reform is where you go through the garden and you analyze and you are very careful and rational in your approach and you think about what sorry can be saved and what should be saved, what should be conserved. So you rip out the weeds, but you carefully work around plants that should be kept and then nurtured. And so it's not a revolution. You don't tear everything down. And then what you do though, is if you have to remove everything, you remove everything, but then you replant. So you reseed the garden. So you protect, you recover the institution. You don't just tear it down.
[00:30:35] And that's really important because sadly, even today some conservatives have sort of fallen prey, I think, to the revolutionary thinking where it's like we'll just tear it down. I know I was very vulnerable to that thinking for a while myself. And so I think the big issue is, well, how do we find strategies and what do we do to actually recover institutions that are authentically good, authentically well managed, authentically well run? That's quite a key. But what this means is conservative thinking, and conservative particularly in the political space, there's a bit of a weakness there for being willing to actually replant the garden, because the tendency is conservatism would favor keeping everything intact and looking for ways to reform. But that doesn't mean that reform doesn't necessarily involve some pretty hard and intense reform. It's not revolution, but the reform might actually be quite thorough going what needs to be done, and it might need to require replanting. But that's not something that conservatism has had to really consider. That tended to be probably more the way of thinking with revolutionary movements, which conservatism had absolutely resisted. And so there's a bit of a weakness there, and I think that's had a bearing on conserving goodness, truth and beauty. If your institutions are not doing that, you can't just hope that somehow you'll find a workaround, a backdoor that will allow you to conserve things while the institutions are also thoroughly corrupt. So it's a big and challenging issue, that one. I think number seven is the loss of trust in our political leaders. That's a big factor. And various scandals and exposes and some fear, some unfair, some true history, some truism where urban legends sort of take hold and people start to believe that no leader is reliable or that everything is totally fallible and fallen and corrupted when in actual fact, sort of more balanced reading of history, I think gives us a more nuanced perspective than that. But there has been, no doubting, a major loss of trust in political leaders. They have been exposed. And a big part of it is, what do they actually stand for? Where's their integrity? And that's been a growing problem. Watergate was definitely a big factor in the modern mind and really sort of a big moment for a lot of people, and it rippled out around the world. If you can't trust the US president post World War II, when the US was the shining beacon right, of freedom and reestablishing this new world order and making things better. And then all of a sudden, the leader of the free world, the most powerful man in the world has been exposed as absolutely being corrupt and a criminal. And it's sort of that has particularly because America's so invested everywhere around the world, that has big ramifications and then leader after leader starts falling prey to their own scandals and it also becomes more public. It's not to say that in the past leaders didn't have scandals. It's just you didn't have a mainstream media and mass media communication to broadcast your scandals and now social media live and very quickly to a global audience. And so it really powerfully, sort of erodes trust in our political leaders. And to be fair, maybe we needed to have that challenged a bit because maybe we had a far too idealized sort of utopian vision of leadership. Oh, they're like perfect, saintly, God ordained individuals and we failed to recognize the humanity and have nuance about all of that. That's why I think even today some Christians really struggled with Trump. I look at Trump and I was actually talking to a group this morning giving a presentation on this, and I talked about the fact that, yeah, he was this sort of verbose, rude man who loved McDonald's and steakhouses. And not fine food.
[00:34:04] But he was also this guy who did more for goodness and truth when it comes to protecting unborn lives than any other conservative president had actually done before him. And I'm like, well, I'm not particularly picky when it comes to leaders who improve human flourishing and moral outcomes in society. They might be obtuse, verbose, rude, arrogant, boastful people, but I'm also willing to accept that God can draw straight still with crooked lines. And so I'm not going to deify the guy, I'm not going to turn him into a saint because he's not that. But I'm a bit more nuanced and a bit more realistic where sadly, some people are not. They still have this I think a lot of people this really crazy belief that leaders know. Jacinda Ardern, for example, just because she talked about kindness a lot and had this particular brand built around that that somehow that meant that she know perfect and know that it can't be that she would be imperfect and that she would be making a moral know. People are fooled by the PR too often, I think. And so maybe it was a good thing that we had that challenge. But the problem is it hasn't really helped. We've just got this mass cynicism and it's hard to have the conservative goodness, truth and beauty being conserved when particularly even conservative leaders were some of them big ones, not all of them, but big ones were exposed. And then people start to say, well, you can't trust anyone. So the people saying we should conserve things are often also doing the bad things. So why should we trust them? They're just a bunch of hypocrites. Integrity really does matter. There's also been no doubt, number eight, a very powerful slew. It's an avalanche, an ongoing and constant avalanche now of very powerful propaganda. Propaganda, sorry, propaganda keeps happening over and over again. So I suppose it is propaganda and agenda and again, but propaganda against conservatism and particularly in the media and on social media now. And what's happened is this has been quantified by a couple of things. Number one is that people are reasoning less, they are thinking less deeply, they're very superficial more often than not now. And there's a lot of depth that is missing and all of us are corrupted by that. That's why we've got to be very careful about it, have the humility to recognize that we can all be corrupted by that lack of depth.
[00:36:15] But also there's the speed at which that happens now. And then there's these urban lith. Urban, urban, urban liths. Man, I'm having a real blinder today.
[00:36:25] That's so funny. Urban liths. What's an urban lith? I suppose it's a myth that has been elevated. So it's a lift, a lith. So I made up a new word mummy. That's not how that works unless you're a progressive son. But no, seriously, these urban myths started to spring up, and people believe things that aren't true about history and other moments in time and key political events, et cetera.
[00:36:55] It's hard in that sort of environment to tell the truth and to have the truth cut through, because there's this big, powerful propagandistic movement against it, against conservatism, against goodness and truth. And also people start buying into widespread mythologies. And those mythologies often create an idea that somehow the conservatives are bad, evil, oppressive, hateful people. And you can see how that all starts to work against you and works against conserving anything, really. Which brings me to point number nine, that ultimately, I think liberalism is a type of parasite that results in ever diminishing returns. I've already talked about how liberalism, Enlightenment liberalism, basically took the fruit from the tree of Christianity. It added in some of its own bad ideas as well, but it wanted to keep the fruit without the tree. This is something Frederick Nietzsche critiqued the Enlightenment Thinkers for. He said, you guys are talking like God still exists, but he doesn't. We've killed God, remember? That means we're free to self create and find our own meaning. He was also obviously very wrong, but he was right to critique them. But liberalism is a type of paras site. That way, it originally steals from Christianity.
[00:37:58] The problem is that the tree is not being tended. The garden is not being tended anymore. And so what do you end up with? You end up with ever diminishing returns. It's like a garden you don't care for. You're not going to get good crop yields if you don't fertilize and prune and all those other things you need to do. It just doesn't work that way. And so liberalism gives you constantly diminishing returns. And how this really manifests is there's this constant state of erosion or revolution going on in your society. Once you start eroding, the erosion doesn't suddenly stop.
[00:38:33] You have one revolution, and guess what happens? You've got revolutionaries already waiting in the wings before that first revolution has completed its cycle to revolt against the revolution. And that's just the constant cycle that we've been pulled into now constant state of erosion. And it's really hard to defend a line in the sand when the line in the sand is constantly well, the sand is constantly being swept away.
[00:38:56] It's hard for conservatism it's also a bit of the frog in a pot type syndrome where the water is getting hotter, but you don't realize it. And so if you're a conservative, you can very easily think, well, we must hold this particular line. But in actual fact, that particular line that you're trying to hold is already well beyond the line you should actually be holding because you're in a pot and you don't realize the temperature has changed.
[00:39:19] It's very hard for conservatism in that constant state of erosion, that sort of parasitic nature of liberalism.
[00:39:25] And of course, we're sort of drowning in our feelings based. What I mean by that is it's not even what do you think about this moral question? It's what do you feel about this moral question more often than not now. And it's sort of a feelings based, sound bite celebrity culture. And in that sort of feelings based, sound bite celebrity culture, it's very hard to defend truth because you have to do some intellectual heavy lifting and you have to do some self sacrifice to actually guard and safeguard and build and protect and nurture these kinds of things. But in a culture that's feelings based, that's about sound bites, that's about celebrity culture, hedonism and all the rest of it, heavy lifting and self sacrifice. They're not top on the agenda of priorities. You need a crisis to bring you back to that. But they're not top on the list. Right? Which brings me to number ten. We all value, and I include myself in this even conservatives who are striving to be good, true and beautiful in the way they live out their life we are all vulnerable to this fact that the society by and large, and all of us, we value our own comfort. And we easily lose sight of the sort of perpetual vigilance and struggle that is necessary. As the Christian Scriptures say, you got to take up your cross daily and a cross is not a comfortable thing. There's no such thing as apostrophe cross. The Christian Scriptures also tell us that the devil, the very prince of evil, the prince of lies, is like a roaring lion and he's constantly roaming about looking for people to devour. And I would say things as well, the institutions, the goodness, the truth and the beauty. If he can destroy it, if he can maim it, if he can vandalize it, he'll do it. And his roaming and his hunger is ceaseless.
[00:41:11] And what happens, though, when you are in a culture which values comfort and used to being comfortable? We easily lose sight of that fact that you actually need to be perpetually vigilant because rust never sleeps and so does the devil. He never sleeps. I was talking to a group this morning about that.
[00:41:27] We often think, well, we've won a victory and now we've held the line. No, that's not it. You actually have to cultivate as well. You can't just say, oh, look, we saved that particular apple tree from a tornado. You've got to say, well what about all the other plants and trees that were pulled out along the way? What are we going to do about them? So the proactive and perpetual vigilance and struggle to actually live and propagate and cultivate and grow virtue in a society we've abandoned that largely and it's easy to be comfortable at the moment and you can get away with it. We've got enough money still sitting in the system and enough gadgets and everything else and we're still relatively in control of those things that we're comfortable. But once the script gets flipped a little bit, we have crisis, we run out of things, the costs start to get really high, the economic toll settles in and the devices start controlling us. All of a sudden then maybe we're forced to evaluate our decisions but at the moment we're sort of getting away with it because of comfort. Which brings me to number eleven.
[00:42:26] I think also there was an inability to maybe realize, particularly amongst conservatives, what was actually happening.
[00:42:34] I think what a lot of conservatives tended to think, and probably in some cases still do, is they think when a new attack is made on tradition, something that's good, true, and beautiful, and people try and carve off another piece of it. Normally, what happens is they come for it slice at a time, and conservatives are lulled into thinking, oh, it's just one slice of the loaf. That's all they want, when in actual fact, the intention was never to stop at one slice. This was just an incremental strategy to get the whole loaf. You just get it slice by slice and I think conservatives fail to recognize that. And then you're like a frog boiling in a pot and you get very desensitized to the fact that a third of the loaf is missing. And so you think that's the normal situation. You forget that you're supposed to have a whole loaf. And so you think, oh, it's not a big deal if we lose another third of the loaf or maybe another quarter or just another slice.
[00:43:25] And it doesn't seem that big, but in actual fact, when you realize that slice plus the missing third, that, hello, half the loaf is now gone. But there's sort of a failure, I think, to recognize what was actually happening. And I think we're probably a little bit more savvy about that now but still not really clear enough about how to respond and why we should mount good, effective arguments that really speak deeply to these issues and actually conserving things. We haven't really conserved enough or put our mind to conserving things. Which brings me to my final point, just to wrap it all up and that is this, that, and this is really important to understand is that conservatism is actually not primarily a political project. And so the framing of that tweet that first question is why has Conservatism failed to conserve anything? It implies that nothing's been conserved. Now, I think possibly at a political level, you could maybe make that argument. But even there, I think you'd struggle to make that argument that nothing's being conserved, but there's been a lot of carnage done at that level. But if you realize that Conservatism is not actually primarily a political movement, the authentic Conservatism of the original founders of Conservatism, they believe that their most important project was actually the promotion and the increase of Christian virtue in society. So it's not actually a political project. And when you think about that, you realize, well, in actual fact, conservative movements and Conservatism, the original authentic Conservatism has actually been successful. So one of the very clear ways it was successful was in the United Kingdom, in England in particular, when revolution was being fermented out of France. And so the French revolution kicks off and people are calling for the same thing in England but it's thanks to the likes of Edmund Burke, cardinal John Henry Newman, Benjamin Disraeli and others, the original sort of conservatives who actually do conserve and resist. Not only do they prevent revolution from taking hold in England, but they also protect a vision of human rights that is what you might call negative in basis rather than positive. So the French revolutionary version is my right to claim for myself the autonomous self choosing individual what I want. Whereas the liberal experience in the UK was a bit different. And so the liberal experience in the UK was no in actual fact it's about your right as an individual not to have certain rights eroded or taken off you. So you're not in the driving seat in that know, you still have principles of goodness and truth that are actually in the driving seat. They just can't cross certain boundaries whereas the French model is the other way around. The autonomous self choosing individual is in the driving seat and it's just this sort of anarchy that's Star Wars anarchy skywalker, this anarchy and sort of revolutionary destruction that happens. And so Conservatism actually did protect against that and so it was successful at Conserving in that regard. But again, if you look at the conservative project in its fullness you realize that it's not primarily a political project. It's about the promotion of Christian virtue. And that includes in your political sphere how do you actually live out know, St. Augustine termed the city of God. What does it look like to have political and social structures beyond the life of the church that actually reflect that Christian vision of reality? And so the promotion of Christian virtue is essential. And in the age of Christendom, I would argue that actually there was a very successful movement that did that, that cultivated that. And I think the reason I would say that is because when I look at society, I'll give you one really clear example. I was talking to a group about this just recently, the fact that everyone, almost everyone apart from some wayward academics and some very weird people who lack basic moral compass, everyone in our society would say that no infanticide is a grave evil and it's not okay to kill infants. That was a moral instinct that came directly from Christianity and this complete revolution that happened in society on the back of Christendom, that instinct is still with us. It still has been conserved. Now, yes, it is being eroded and yes, it is being attacked. But that instinct is still there. It's still a widespread instinct. And so there are still things here that have been and that's an example of the successful movement throughout, particularly the medieval period, the age of Christendom, where this instinct was built into baked into a society and it has still been conserved. It's still with us. But here's the thing. I make a distinction between what I call intentional virtue in a society and latent virtue. And so intentional virtue in a society is where people are intentionally striving to be virtuous, to live virtuous lives. Latent virtue is where there's like a latent virtue that's been built up over successive centuries or decades or generations. There's a certain customs and tradition basically that are sort of baked in and you're not really thinking too much about them, but they are still present in your society. And so there is latent virtue that has actually been conserved in our society. And the reason I say that is because even though intentional virtue, we're very weak in that at the moment we are. There's no doubt about that. How often is virtue being talked about? How often is it being encouraged? How often are families even schooling their kids in that even sadly, Christian families? There is a problem there with intentional virtue. We're weak in that regard. But I think we still have a fairly robust it's not perfect and it's not infallible by any stretch of the imagination. It could be pulled down absolutely with certain intense revolution and it certainly is being eroded at the edges. But there is a strong latent, or what you might call a bit more of a robust. There's still a framework of latent virtue, shall we say, that I'm trying to be as astute and as honest and as truthful as I can about this because it's not totally robust and it's not beyond being pulled down and overthrown. But the reason I know that that latent virtue is present is the fact that we still have a functioning society. We aren't in civil war yet, we aren't in random barbaric bloodshed on the streets. We still do have a rule of law. Yes, at times it's being eroded, but the rule of law is still considered important by people. We still have a moral compass at a social level where we are horrified by certain acts.
[00:49:59] One of the things about the sexual abuse crisis in the church and the various Christian churches have fallen prey to that. Even the sexual scandals that aren't abuse but are other types of sexual scandals. There's actually something really good and healthy about the fact that wider nonchristian society is saying, hey, this is absolutely reprehensible. Because, okay, some people are willing to try and use that as a cudgel against the church and are unfair in their assessment of those situations, but also the fact that they've got an instinct, a lot of people, that this shouldn't be happening and of all places, it shouldn't be happening in the church. That means that people still have a latent sense of virtue and a latent sense of truth that Christianity is supposed to be a place of integrity and Godliness and righteousness. If they'd lost that and we're sort of on the cusp of that to be fair in some circles but if we lose that, that's the moment that we're in real trouble because that's the moment people say oh, so what? Yeah, the church is involved in another sex scandal. Who cares?
[00:50:51] That's just business as usual for them now we haven't got to that stage yet so that's a good thing. There's an instinct still there. There's a latent virtue. The fact that we haven't collapsed as a society that the fact that we don't have open warfare and barbarism on our street. Yeah, we do have barbaric crimes but it just hasn't descended into absolute chaos sorry and anarchy. So there are certain things that are still present. I guess the person who wrote that Tweet might argue that they haven't been deliberately conserved though. So what has been done to conserve those things? And that might be a fair question is that just because the latent virtue is so baked in it's so deep and we perhaps have now really come to recognize that we don't want to lose that and so we sort of hold onto it?
[00:51:34] Or is it because people have actively conserved it and dedicated themselves to that? And I think that would be a fair question. But the point is I don't think conservatism has failed to conserve anything like it hasn't stopped conserving. Some things it's just some key areas definitely has been erosion and there is a crisis and a major problem in our society. And one of the fundamental failures I think is the failure to recognize that conservatism is not primarily a political project. It was a religious one. It was a project to promote and to grow Christian virtue in culture and that is where we've definitely failed to conserve and that's a problem. A society that does not have a sacred transcendent idea, a truth about reality in other words, there is a God and we must be accountable to that God and the of. I mean for me it's just a no brainer. There is only one God, the great I am and that's it. And if you lose sight of that sacred idea, then I'm sorry. How do you have a society? How do you meaningfully, how do you keep a society together? If everyone is acting as radical, autonomous, self choosing individuals and we don't believe that we have to actually be accountable to anything higher than ourselves, how do you keep a society together?
[00:52:52] You see this play out consistently time and time again with smaller societies, groups and things which sort of try and adopt this sort of total, pure egalitarianism and subjectivism. They end up just coming to an end because there are certain truths, there are certain natural law realities that are inescapable.
[00:53:10] And I think that's a big factor. And that's where we have failed. And I think that's where we need to really work hard and that work needs to begin in our own personal lives. So the conservation of goodness, truth and beauty has to begin with us. What's happening in my own heart and mind and then flowing out from that, the next thing is what am I practically doing to conserve goodness, truth and beauty? Am I praying enough? Am I studying my scriptures enough? If I'm honest with you folks, my scripture study has dropped off the boil a little bit in the last couple of weeks and I need to get back into the routine I had before that, prior to that.
[00:53:42] I really do. That's a failure to conserve goodness, truth and beauty. Am I praying? Am I serving my husband or my wife, my family, my household, my church, my coworkers? Am I thinking about and caring for the poor? All those kinds of things. What am I doing to conserve goodness, truth and beauty? And that's the essential project that we need. And I think a big part of that is actually knowing and understanding our Christian tradition. That means studying our scriptures and studying the church fathers and studying our theological traditions and different denominations. I know different people who listen to me come from different denominational backgrounds. You will have different traditions, but do you know them? Do you know the traditions of other denominations? That helps as well because I think we need to be together in the marketplace. And I think if we can be together, even if we don't agree on things, but we can be together with a civil disagreement so we're not hostile towards each other, then I think that's a more full and flourishing thing too. But all of that is about conserving goodness, truth and beauty. And of course, we must never live the lie. And that's why you hear me constantly talking about that and constantly ending my podcasts and signing off the way that I do because I believe it's so essential and you've just got to have it baked in. And so you got to keep repeating the truth and the mantra so that it just sort of it becomes the normative way of thinking about the world. And then acting in the world as well. So with that in mind, thank you so much again for your patronage. Thank you for tuning in. And don't forget live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I will see you next time on the dispatchers.
[00:55:13] Get the speaker box. Loud hitting that stuff. You hearing that sound?
