Blair: Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of the Secular Foxhole podcast.
Today we have a special guest, Professor Andrew Bernstein is here to discuss his latest
essay, the Case for Western Civilization.
Well, it to go along with that, there's at
least three people here that value Western civilization, so.
Hi, Andy, how are you?
Andrew: I'm good.
Blair and Martin, thanks for having me on
again.
Always good to be in, in the foxhole with you
guys.
Especially in the secular foxhole.
Blair: Yeah, yeah.
Yes, great to hear.
Andrew: Great to have you.
Blair: Great to have you.
Now this, it's quite a long, it's fairly long
essay and, but it's certainly very thorough.
But I must say you start off with a litany of
less than favorable accusations against Western civilization.
You want to delve into some of those?
Andrew: Well, yeah, it's funny because I think I started with Susan Sontag who was writing
back in the 1960s.
Blair: Yes, you did.
Andrew: Long before these accusations against white people in the west became intellectually
occurrent.
At 67 or 68, an essay she wrote, you know,
Susan Sontag, American writer and critic, in which she called the white race the cancer of
human history.
And so we've seen a lot of, you know, a lot of
leftist writers since then, especially more recently critical race theorists and critical
whiteness studies, you know, people like Robin Diangelo and Barbara Applebaum, of course,
Ibram X Kendi, people like that.
And their claim is the history, the historical
claim is that the white race is, and Western civilization, Europeans and Americans are
inherently, have been terribly imperialistic.
They're responsible for imperialism, genocide
of the American Indian population, slavery of blacks.
And some of these charges are true, obviously and the colonialism in Africa and the so
called scramble for Africa by European powers in the late 19th century.
And there's some truth.
Here's where you need a rational philosophy to
separate out one, the truth from the falsehoods in these accusations.
Yeah.
And then two, to examine it and assess it in
terms of a rational moral philosophy because it's, you know, my good friend Dr. Eric
Daniels, who's an objectivist and an American professor of American history, said to me
once, a long time ago, he said history is messy.
You know, it is, it's very mixed in so many ways.
But the, the critics of Western civilization in our day are not mixed.
They are full throated and unanimous.
Western civilization is evil.
They agree with Susan Sontag.
The white race is the, is the cancer of human
history.
Any attempts to defend Western civilization is
just an, is an attempt to paper, paper over genocide, slavery, imperialism and endless
killing.
Or murder of indigenous peoples.
And you know, Ward Churchill was one of those writers.
I had a whole, like you said, as a whole, you know, reference to whole litany of.
Of people who were.
Edward said.
There's a, you know, there's a endless.
I'm looking through the Howard Zinn, you know,
I'm looking through the David, the anthropologist David Graeber.
I mean, there's a whole.
There's a whole Franz Fanon.
There's a whole list of people, educated people, intellectuals who believe you're too
cardinal claims here.
One, Western civilization is primarily
responsible for slavery, imperialism, genocide.
That's the essence of Western civilization.
Slavery, imperialism, genocide and white
people.
There's the critical race theorists and the
critical whiteness studies people, you know, which is an ally discipline here.
That white people are in America today is still systemically racist and white people are
inherently racist.
This is a whole, this is a constellation of
claims that are integrated around the theme that Western civilization and the white people
who created it are essentially evil.
Evil and racist and evil.
Blair: Well, now, that's Western civilization according to them, right?
What, what is or what does Western quote unquote civilization consist of?
Like what's the rule of law, individual rights, things like that.
Correct.
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, we have to deal with the criticisms because some of them are true.
But we need to put it in a. In a full context, integrate.
See the big picture as Iran taught us so brilliantly.
What is Western civilization? Well, geographically, of course, it's the
civilization that was founded in Greece.
It's the civilization that was established by
the Europeans and later by European colonies, including North America, and would be became
the United States of America.
But it's not.
Even though it's referred to as the west, the essence of it is not geographical.
I think the essence of Western civilization is two things to me, and that is more than any
other culture in history, there's a commitment to reason and there's the commitment to
freedom, political economic liberty or individual rights.
And those were never consistently or universally applied.
They always were embattled in Europe and in the United States, for instance, the
commitment to reason developed in Greece.
Aristotle is the perfect example.
Had to fight a long cultural war against Christianity, tried to suppress the Greek
approach.
But I think more than any other culture,
Western civilization is committed to reason, to rational process.
And you see the fruits of it in freedom, philosophy, science, the arts and so on.
Embattled.
Nevertheless, to a significant degree, reason
was triumphant in the west, more so than any other culture.
And because of that, because of the great respect for Man's reasoning mind.
More than any other culture, the west has been Europe and the United States has been
committed to the rights of the individual to your own mind, to your own life, to political
economic liberty and of course, capitalism.
So I think those are the that's the essence of
Western civilization.
What makes it special, what makes it great,
and what makes it distinctive from all other cultures in the history of the world.
Blair: Well, much like your essay, we will go back and forth with the praise and deserved
condemnation.
So let's talk about some of the accusations
against, about genocide for a minute.
Andrew: Or two, if you want a minute or two on genocide.
Well, yeah, it's a grim topic, but the main claim regarding genocide regards the American
Indian population or in what became politically correct terminology several
decades ago, the Native Americans.
And I just want to make a point about
terminology here because there's no accurate locution here because American Indian, the
old, older term that I grew up with and many of us grew up with, is inaccurate because
those tribes were not originally from India.
Native American, I think, is even more
inaccurate because the implication is they were indigenous to the North American
continent, which they most certainly were not.
It's been known for a very long time by
anthropologists that they migrated from Central Asia, you know, during the last ice
age, 10, 12,000 years ago.
So I use, I prefer American Indian because at
least the recognizes that they're of Asian.
These tribes are of Asian origin, indigenous
to North America.
No, but they were certainly here long before
the Europeans, you know, thousands of years before the Europeans ever arrived.
But the main claim about genocide against the west is the European and American attempt to
wipe out the American Indian population.
And yet it's been known for many years now and
many writers have written about it.
I like Dr. Clark Whistler, who was an
anthropologist from Columbia University and a curator at the American Museum of natural
history.
His PhD was in anthropology and his specialty
was American Indian culture.
His book Indians of the United States I think
is very good.
It's accurate, published like around 1940
before you know any any politically correct or woke prejudices infected academia.
And Whistler writes and any number of other people write the overwhelming deaths by, you
know, the American Indians suffered was from the transmission of European diseases such as
smallpox, for which they had no natural immunity.
And it may have been some European or American commanders who traded deliberately infected
smallpox blankets to the Indians in a deliberate attempt to wipe out various tribes.
That's possible.
Not a lot of evidence to support it.
Generally it's acknowledged that these were diseases were transmitted Naturally,
unintentionally.
And the Indian population simply had no
natural immunity to it.
And they were ravaged by European diseases,
smallpox in particular.
So genocide it was overwhelmingly.
That was unintentional.
And then all the evidence, if I'm American,
you know, influential Americans.
Benjamin Franklin, who wanted to send your
blacksmiths among the Indians so they have a productive trade.
George Washington, who wanted to live in peace with the Indians and wanted to encourage them
to be farmers.
Thomas Jefferson also wanted to live in peace
with the Indian tribes, so on and so on.
Ulysses S. Grant wanted them to become
American citizens, which eventually happened after World War I. By the late 19th century,
the US military had defeated the most warlike.
All of the warlike tribes, the Sioux, the
Apache, whoever it is.
And why didn't they wipe them out?
They consigned them to reservations.
If genocide was the attempt, why not just wipe
the Indian tribes out? But they didn't.
They consigned them to reservations.
And as I pointed out in the essay, the
reservations were not sealed.
Like a communist country behind an iron
curtain.
You know, many of those western tribes, you
know, tribes west of the Mississippi, were powerful warriors and true to the heritage.
A lot of them left the reservations, enlisted in the US military, were heroes in World War
I, later heroes in World War II.
And I went.
Let me one last point.
I went to College of South Dakota in 1970s and
the pine Ridge Reservation, huge Sioux reservations in western South Dakota.
And a number of my classmates were sue, you know, men or women who left the reservation to
go to college, get an education, have a career, you know, take advantage of life in an
advanced American civilization.
The reservations were never sealed, like, not
like a communist country.
So that's an important point.
Blair: Yeah, I. Two things I want to mention just in passing.
When I lived in Nashville, I met a young woman who's like half Cherokee, extraordinarily
attractive young lady.
She was working in a bank.
So they do assimilate, if you will.
And the other thing I want to mention is
these.
These critics, they are.
They apply modern terms to things that happened 200 years ago.
So their accusations, in a way, in my mind, aren't valid.
Because you're using today's terms to what? To identify what happened unintentionally, as
you say, you know, 200 years ago and so on.
Andrew: Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah.
There was genocide was a term, best of my knowledge, coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish
Jew who escaped the Nazis, you know, during the time of World War II and was writing about
the Armenian genocide or the Turks, that was a, that was a genocidal attempt.
So the term is 1930s, 1940s.
But the reality in 1915 was the Turks did
attempt to.
I don't want to use the term exterminate, that
applies to insects, but did attempt to annihilate the Armenian population
deliberately.
And the European and American leaders in the
new world did not attempt to deliberately wipe out the American Indian population.
If they wanted to, they could have done so circa 1880s when they defeated these tribes
and those tribes were exhausted and consigned to the reservations.
Would have been a bloody.
Would have been bloody for the US army because
these guys were mighty warriors.
But if they wanted to wipe out the Indian
population, they could have done so.
And they had the heavy guns, just using the
heavy guns, the artillery, you know, on the, on the, on these peaceful camps in the
reservations, they could have wiped out any number of American Indian men, women,
children.
They didn't do that.
Blair: And let's claim.
Andrew: The claim is beyond false, guys, it's, it's a flat out lie.
Blair: Yeah, yeah.
In my mind certainly that's true.
And look again, let's jump back to today here in Connecticut, the Mohegan Sun Casino is run
by the Mohegan Indian tribe.
Andrew: Yeah.
Blair: And. And that's certainly the area around that where they've.
I'm assuming there's a reservation there, although I haven't honestly looked.
Those homes, although basic and modest, are, Are all built by that.
The wealth obtained by the casino.
Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I've been on base.
Blair: The wealth that isn't drained by the state.
Andrew: Right, right.
Are the Indians with the casinos, are they tax
exempt? I'm not sure whether they have to pay taxes or
they, well, certainly pay state taxes.
Blair: I'm not sure about federal taxes.
Andrew: Yeah. Okay. I've been on the Pine Ridge Reservation, the enormous Sioux
reservation in western South Dakota.
And any pretty.
It's like, it's like going into the projects.
You know, there's a lot of drug trafficking,
just like in the, in the projects.
We have a large black American population in
many of the urban areas that there's drug trafficking, there's violence between and
amongst the gangs.
There's a high homicide rate.
It's really, it's, you know, it's just really tragic how many young men kill each other and
how many innocent people get caught in the crossfire.
But my point, of course, is today and for a long time, the reservations are not sealed and
the people who want a better life leave, you know, to go to school and have a career and
get, you know, just like people can leave the projects, get, you know, move to a better
neighborhood, get a, get it.
Get a job, you know, move to a better
neighborhood, raise their kids in a safer.
In a safe area.
And people do.
Blair: Yes, yes.
Now you moving along here, you also mentioned
things like the Asian communists and the Mongols and so on.
Now what, what are.
Is that related to more false accusations or
what?
Andrew: Yeah, the accusation is that you white Westerners have been uniquely evil in terms of
these heinous crimes.
The enslavement of black Africans, you know,
the transatlantic slave trade.
Blair: Yes.
Andrew: You know, the colonialism I mentioned.
Leopold ii, King of Belgium, who established
his fiefdom, you know, established his fiefdom in the Congo, in the Belgian Congo.
And he's a slow, you know, making money, stealing, you know, exploiting the rubber and
the, and the, and the ivory tusks and, you know, and everything.
So there was a lot of, There was a lot of evil here.
King Leopold II in Belgium was a monster.
Ludicrous.
Von Mises called him a lot of Dick Conquistadore.
But the claim is that this is, the leftist claim is that these kind of depredations of
colonialism, killing American Indians, taking their lands, enslavement of black Africans is
uniquely Western, that this is what the west did.
And the implication is, since they don't talk about the rest of the world when they're
making these accusations, the implication is, you know, people around the world were like,
you know, innocent little boy scouts who were exploited and brutalized by the evil white
man.
So, you know, if Susan Sontek says, well, the
white race is the cancer of history, we need to look more broadly at history and let's.
Well, let's see what went on in the rest of the world.
And so I gave three examples, right.
One was the Mongols.
Almost, Almost unbelievable.
Unfathomably destructive.
Genghis Khan today was 13, you know, 13th century Mongol conqueror.
Today they claim 40 million murders on the hands of Genghis Khan and his men.
40 million using swords, spears and fire as weapons of mass destruction.
Tamerlane, another Mongol conqueror in the 14th century, again, his favorite form of
architecture, Matthew White says was a wrote.
Wrote a really grim book.
Atrocities is the title, but like the hundred worst atrocities in human history.
But he's White is an expert on these atrocities.
He points out Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror in the 14th century.
His favorite form of architecture was the tower of skulls.
He'd have his men drag all the civilians out of a conquered city, chop off their heads Men,
women, children, babies, pregnant women, everybody.
And then pile their skulls in so many towers and like 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 human skulls
ring the city.
Mongols did a few good things, but.
Martin: The, the, and, and talking about that also as a remark, Andy, didn't they also do
other things when they conquered? So in a way many people could be traced back
to the Mongolians, right?
Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan had nobody knows how many fathered, you know,
nobody knows how many children, you know, from the many wives he had, the concubines, the sex
slaves of the, you know, the, of the conquered women who he raped or had sex with.
Nobody knows.
But yeah, yeah, he tried to repopulate the
world after depopulating it, you know, but unfortunately, probably some of that was rape
of, you know, of conquered women.
But the Mongols are unbelievably destructive
and modern Westerners don't just kind of conveniently ignore that.
And from there I went to the Arab Muslims and their, and some of their converts like the
Turks and you know, the, they, they conquered them.
Muslims conquered this vast empire to the east, which they still hold to this day,
imposed Islam on those countries to this day.
If somebody leaves the one true faith, it's
apostasy that it's a capital offense.
Will Durant, very sober minded American
historian, said bluntly in the story of civilization that the Islamic conquest of
India was the bloodiest story in history.
One Indian historian claims that over those
centuries following roughly 1000 AD, that Islamic conquerors annihilated 80 million
Hindus.
Claims 80 million Hindus.
And of course, I don't know what the exact number is.
Nobody knows.
But Islam is a fanatically monotheistic
religion.
And the Hindus say things like, you know,
there are millions of gods which strike the jihadist year as blasphemy.
And so, you know, they butchered millions of Hindus.
The Turks, of course, I mentioned before, during World War I, attempted genocide of the
entire Armenian population, murdered roughly one and a half million civilians.
Muslim invaders repeatedly invaded Europe, conquered Spain, invaded France.
Later on, the Ottoman Empire, of course, conquered large parts of eastern and central
Europe.
The Mediterranean for a long time was referred
to as an Ottoman lake.
They took any.
They took hundreds of thousands of white European Christian slaves, including many
white women who they preferred as concubines, sex slaves.
And today when people talk about slavery, it's like the only form of slavery they seem to
know of is white Westerners enslaving black Africans.
And the Islamic slave trade out of sub Saharan Africa was significantly more extensive than
the European trade.
The numbers vary from source to source, but
everybody concedes the Muslims enslave more.
You're long before the Europeans ever got
involved in the slave trade, enslaved more black black Africans.
And in a way the treatment was even worse because the Muslims castrated their slaves,
which explains the dearth of a black population in the Middle east today.
So. And today, of course, you know, the religion of peace commits one atrocity,
terrorist atrocity after another.
And then I went on to the Communist.
Martin: Yeah, Andy, before that, I wanted talking about that a symbolic date there.
9 11.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
Martin: That's also little historical thing that Osama bin Laden recognized.
Andrew: Yes, thanks for bringing that up, Martin.
Most Americans don't know, and I don't know if people in the Western world generally know.
The second time the Turks besieged Vienna in 1683.
And think about how much of Europe the Turks had conquered.
Much of Eastern and Central Europe was conquered by the Muslims and besieged Vienna.
They besieged it before in 1520s, under Suleiman the Magnificent.
1683, King John Sobieski, a poem, devout Catholic, noted Muslim follower, brought his
army down out of the hills and they routed the Turks in front of the gates of Vienna.
Different accounts historically, but generally it was claimed to be on September 12, 1683,
which means that September 11, 1683 was the high point of the Islamic long coveted attempt
to conquer Christian Europe.
That was the high point of it.
After that, of course, the Ottoman Empire slowly went into decline.
1680s, you look at the date, Britain's going to go through its industrial revolution soon.
The west becomes certainly starting in Britain.
The west becomes, you see John Locke's influence, the principle of individual rights.
The west becomes politically freer.
Industrial revolution.
You free the mind of all these great thinkers in Britain.
British industrial revolution.
The British become wealthier.
Western Europe in time becomes wealthy.
You see the rise of the west, the decline of
the Arab Islamic world.
People don't realize it anymore.
For a thousand years, the struggle between Christianity and Islam or between Europe and
the Middle east was dominated by the Muslims.
It was the Muslims invading Europe.
And the Mediterranean was an Ottoman lake.
It wasn't an Italian lake or a French lake.
But after this, the shoe goes on to the other foot, right?
You see Napoleon conquering Egypt.
And the British defeat Napoleon and the French
conquer Algeria and Morocco, large parts of North Africa.
You see the scramble for Africa in the 19th century.
And of course, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I by the British famous
Lawrence of Arabia incident, you see eventually the establishment of the State of
Israel in 1948.
All of this Western imperialism as the Islamic
world sees it, but prior to that, for a thousand years, it was the Muslims invading
Europe.
And the Europeans did a good job defending
themselves.
But other than the Crusades, which again was a
defensive struggle because the Muslims had conquered large parts of the Byzantine Empire
and eventually conquered Constantinople.
But, you know, the Europeans did a good job
defending themselves.
But to this day, the Arab look, according to
Islam, Islam is the one true faith destined to rule the world and whatever it takes,
conquest, terrorism, murder, rape, whatever it takes.
And Islam is still very much on that philosophy.
They're just not as strong as the west, so they can't conquer the west militarily
anymore.
So they perpetrate terrorist acts, terrorist
atrocities instead.
So but you know, the West, Western, the
Western leftist intellectuals treat the Islamic world as generally victims of the
West.
It's like they'll start history at around
1800, you know, as the west is growing stronger and conquering North Africa.
And all that happened before that is like a blank out, as John Gwalt says in but maybe the
most egregious example of the Asian Communists.
And I pointed out, I couldn't even deal with, I couldn't even discuss the Soviets because
the Soviet leadership was white.
And I was concerned here to point out the
atrocities perpetrated by non white, non Westerners.
The communists are the worst.
I mean, Islam, like I said in the essay, Islam
at least had a golden age where Islamic thinkers made advances in any number of
different fields.
Astronomy and medicine and literature and any
number of fields influenced by Aristotle, of course.
Yes, yes, it was definitely inspired by the Greeks and Aristotle in particular.
Absolutely right.
But the golden age of Islam ends roughly 1200
A.D. you know, roughly 800 years ago.
For the last eight centuries, I think the
Islamic world's been in the dark ages, but the Communists never had a golden age.
Well, they had a gulag totalitarianism, mass murder.
Can look at Mao's mass murder in China, look at the insanity in Cambodia, North Korea, the
gigantic slave labor, even like 10% of the entire population is a brutal slave labor as
we speak.
You know, these are, these are the most evil
people in history, along with the Nazis and but to the leftist Western intellectuals, you
know, these, I mean, the communists are much worse than any, than the west at its worst.
And so I went through all these examples before I even got to the major point to point
out that the criticisms of the west, you know, especially Susan Sontek, put it very nicely.
The white race is the cancer of human history.
Western civilization is evil.
This is a gigantic example of the half truth fallacy.
That is where you look at part of the truth, those parts that tend to corroborate your
conclusion and you simply ignore or neglect those parts of the truth that are relevant but
that tend to disprove your conclusion.
So you know, these depredations of the
Mongols, the Muslims, the communists, they do not reduce the guilt of any white villain so
much as one scintilla, but they do raise a question and that is why single out the white
man? Why are we singling out Western civilization
when these other guys, if anything, were at least as bad and maybe even worse?
I think the communists were.
Yeah, I think they're all worse than the west
at its worst.
So it's, it's a gigantic example of half truth
fallacy.
And that doesn't even, that doesn't even
count.
We haven't even gotten yet to the main point
about the half truth and that is the enormous life giving achievements of Western
civilization which get completely overlooked by the critics.
Of course give the advances in medicine I mentioned, well, the advances in agriculture I
mentioned Norman Borlaug and the Green revolution that you know, by some, by some
estimates have, you know, saved a billion lives around the world.
Borlaug was an American agricultural scientist and medicine I mentioned Maurice Hillman at
Merck who, whose vaccines and you know, for various measles and rubella and all kinds of
diseases again saved millions and millions of lives around the world and go on and on, you
know, Jonas Salk and Albert Saban with the, you know, the vaccine for the dreaded polio
virus.
Western science, Western medical science has
saved millions and millions and millions of lives of people all over the world.
They just give you know, so many examples of the great accomplishments of Western
civilization in science and philosophy, in the arts, and had to mention John Locke and the
rise of the principle of individual rights, political economic liberty, capitalism and the
stupendous wealth creation that benefits people all over the world, especially in
Europe, North America and the Asian tigers.
But we trade with people all over the world
that benefits them and critically.
And I took great pleasure in writing this on
slavery, Tommy Sowell and any number of other writers point out slavery was ubiquitous.
Slavery has existed all over the world going all the way back into the mists of prehistory.
It's not the white race, you know, who was, whose response originated.
Yeah, yeah, no way.
A white man didn't originate.
It's been all over the world forever.
White men didn't originate it, but they ended
it.
Because the principle of individual rights in
Britain is what gave rise for the first time in history to a concerted abolitionist
movement that succeeded to a significant degree in certainly curtailing slavery.
And, you know, starting in Western territories, British territory, 19th century,
the Brits, the French, the Americans all abolished slavery in the.
In the 19th century, the Brits pressured the Ottoman Empire.
They never did succeed in stamping out slavery in the Ottoman Empire, but succeeded in
curtailing it.
And, you know, I think there's a great line in
the essay where I said slavery was ubiquitous, abolitionism was western.
And that's absolutely true.
Blair: Absolutely.
I want to.
Go ahead.
Go ahead, Martin.
Martin: Yeah, thanks, Blair.
Isn't it the case also that still slavery is
around in certain parts of the world, like in Africa, in different tribes?
Andrew: Oh, yeah, absolutely right.
Martin.
I mentioned just before, 10% of the entire population of North Korea is in heavy,
including children or heavy, brutal slave labor as we speak.
You know, sometimes if I'm feeling sorry for myself, you know, I think, well, wait a
minute, I got a lot to be grateful for.
I could have been born in North Korea, you
know, I wasn't, thank God.
I was born in the United States.
Yeah.
And in North Africa, in Sudan, and, you know,
jihadist regime.
And under Islam, it's impermissible to enslave
a co religionist, but everybody else is fair game.
You can enslave everybody else.
And South Sudan is largely black.
And yes, the Islamic regime of North Sudan arms guerrilla outfits, or at very least
tolerates them.
And they've slaughtered.
How do you say that, duffer?
Blair: Darfur is what I've heard it as.
Andrew: Yeah, Darfur.
They've slaughtered various black African
tribes.
They've enslaved thousands of black Africans.
So many parts of the world, slavery not only continues, I don't want to say it flourishes
because something evil doesn't flourish, but it's widespread and popular and legal.
Now, slavery exists all over the world, but it's illegal.
The sex slave trade, for example, but it's illegal in the western countries.
It's illegal in China under communism, the gulags run by the government.
It's legal in North Korea, it's legal in Sudan.
So, yeah, it's the Western commitment to abolitionism that has wiped out slavery to a
significant degree.
Not everywhere, but to a significant degree in
the world.
And that's the principle of individual rights
applied in action.
Blair: Right.
So right now, let me, let me throw this out
real quick.
I've long, and certainly when I've thought
about things like this.
I've, I'm just wondering, and you may or may
not have thought about this, but I just wonder.
There's certain people that are incapable of living in freedom, that psychologically
incapable of understanding freedom.
Does that make any sense?
I mean, you again, all these critics of Western civilization, which is fundamentally
about individual freedom, yet they attack it.
In my mind, that means they're incapable of
living in freedom.
Does that make any sense?
Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I think there are some people who aren't evil.
They just.
Freedom means to take responsibility for my
own life.
My mommy and daddy aren't going to take care
of me anymore.
The welfare state, the big brother state or
the nanny state's not going to take care of me.
Under freedom, I have to take care of myself.
Some people aren't evil, but, you know,
there's this crazy harmless and there's crazy dangerous and they're just kind of the
harmless.
They may be, may have some form of mental
illness, they may be crazy homeless, but they're not capable of holding a job and
taking care of themselves.
And they'll need their family or private
voluntary charity in a free society to take care of them.
Then there's the evil people that you're talking about who want to destroy freedom.
Right? And they're not only incapable of living for
themselves.
They want to make sure that you and I don't
get, you know, don't get to live.
I remember once talking to my sister who a
very smart, very common, sensible person, you know, about various American communists who
went to Cuba and they talked about, you know, what a great guy Fidel is.
And they had such a great, they had such a great time when they were in Cuba and my
sister got irate and she said to me, well, why don't they go live there then?
You know, And I, which is a, which is a very, very good question.
And it occurred to me in, in that conversation, they don't want to live in Cuba.
They want, they want it, they don't want to live in a communist state.
They want to impose communism here and make you and I live under, you know, live under
communism.
So, yeah, there's these, these evil guys.
They, they, they're power lusters.
They want to, they, they can't live under
freedom and they want to make sure that you and I don't either.
Blair: So now, again, very shortly after this, the section we've been covering, you mentioned
a hero of mine, James Lindsay.
Andrew: Oh, yeah.
Blair: I've been trying to get him on the show, but to no avail yet.
But he is, I think he's the foremost critic, or if that's the right word, of crt.
Critical race theory.
Andrew: Yes.
Blair: And again, you touched on him in your essay.
Can you go into that? Yeah, it's under the subheading the reasons
for the assault on whites and the West.
Andrew: Right, right.
Because, you know, just to set it up, you
know, we see that the west at its worst is not as bad as these other bad guys.
And at its best, it's the most life giving culture that we know of.
There's no culture that we know of that promoted human life around the world as
effectively as Western civilization did.
So why the attacks on the West?
Why attack the best with all the bad in it? It's the best culture in history and give a
pass to the worst.
I mean, that's.
If we assume that the critics of Western civilization are honest.
That's a puzzling, you know, that's, that's a puzzling issue.
That's a good question to raise.
Blair: Yes.
Martin: And that.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
And that, you're right.
That brings us into critical race theory and its subcategory.
One of them, I think, perhaps the single most irrational thing I've ever heard of, perhaps,
maybe the only exception being the Nazis, perhaps is critical whiteness studies.
And very similar to the Nazis.
They just, you know, they, they just reversed,
favored and disfavored races.
But yeah, so James Lindsay is a, he's a
mathematician.
Right.
I think his PhD is in mathematics.
Blair: I think that.
Andrew: Right, yeah.
But he's a, he's a brilliant cultural critic
and does a very effective job of analyzing critical race theory, which goes back, I don't
know the antecedents of crt, but I know the essence of it today.
And that is the two major claims that the CRT advocates make.
One is that America Today in 2024 is still systemically racist, as if we've never changed
from the Jim Crow era until White people, white people are inherently racist.
And James Lindsay gives a very, very good explication of that.
But the starting point for the, for crt.
And unfortunately, I think Lindsay agrees with
this to some extent and I think, and I think it's false.
And that is the claim that the white race is a social construct, that race is not
biologically based, that it's, that it's constructed socially and, you know, I mean,
what does that even mean?
Blair: I.
Andrew: Anyway, yeah, I mean, what it means.
And Lindsay gives a good account of it, I
think.
But you can get it also from the, from the
horse's mouth, from Robin D'ANGELO.
And Barbara Applebaum and you know, Ibram X
Kendi and you know, and people, and people.
Taezy Coates, you know, people, people like
that, that, you know, leftists.
But the claim is that some group of people
just arbitrarily defined themselves as white.
Claimed, claimed intellectual moral
superiority on the, on the basis of being white.
Excluded arbitrarily a whole bunch of other, you know, you know, people they didn't like,
Indians, blacks, you know, you know, so on, excluded them from membership in the club, as
it were.
They claimed, you know, self proclaimed,
intellectually immorally superior which gave them the moral right to conquer, enslave,
murder, large, large parts of the, you know, of the inferior, the inferior races.
That's an arbitrary social construct.
Now to me this is, this is just false.
You know, I pointed out, look, look at the empirical data.
First of all, it's perceptually obvious that there's, you know, that there's different
color race, there's people with different color, people with their facial structure, you
know, this cheekbones relative to the, to the eyes, configured, you know, slightly
differently and so on and so forth.
Which argues for.
These are perceptual level facts.
They're observed, they're observable facts.
Which argues for physical genesis, not social, not a social genesis for whatever the
underlying biology is.
I think the key point about race is several
points trivial.
But the true but trivial point about race is
it's real.
I don't think it's socially constructed, it's
biologically based, it's perceptually self evident.
You could actually, you could see it.
The key point about race is it's trivial.
It's, it tells us nothing about the, the most important characteristics of a human being,
namely their moral character, whether intelligence or their proficiency at their,
you know, in their profession.
But above all, moral character is what matters
above all.
And you know, race is irrelevant to that.
Real but trivial.
Like, you know, with white people, some have
blonde hair, some have red hair, some have brown hair, whatever.
It's real, but it's trivial.
Tells us nothing important about, about the
person.
But anyway, so the white race was a social
construct on the part of people just several centuries ago.
It's a power play, it's a power struggle.
They wanted power.
And so that was the gestation of the white race according to the CRT movement.
Do you notice, by the way, I quoted an unbelievable essay, Harvard Magazine of all
Harvard Magazine, I think was 2002, abolish the white race.
Martin: That's scary.
Blair: Yes, that's scary.
Although I've heard it many times from
different people as well.
Other.
Andrew: Yeah, this Harvard magazine is supposed to be, you know, a serious
intellectual center.
Abolish the white race.
And they said, they said in the essay, though the authors said they wanted to.
They want to destroy, not deconstruct, but destroy the social construct that is the white
race.
Martin: Was it written by a Caucasian or.
Andrew: I think so, yeah, most.
Martin: So I have.
Andrew: Guys are white.
Yeah.
Blair: Yeah.
Martin: So I have a question about that.
Before the so called survey or census that you
do in usa, why is that so focused on what race and other things that you are belonging to, so
to speak.
Have you thought about that?
That you divide a country and the citizens in different, like white or Caucasians, Latino,
black, colored, all kind of different ways.
Have you thought about that?
Why they doing this census and with surveys over time.
Andrew: Yeah, it's a little bit.
Martin, that's a, that's a really good
question.
And I just want to, you know, as a preamble to
answering the question, I just want to go give an example.
I was five, six years ago, I was lecturing at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
Yeah, okay.
And it's a really good crowd, you know, really
intelligent people.
I don't even remember what I was lecturing on
at this, at this point.
But somebody in the Q and A raised the
question, why is the United States so much more racist than Europe?
So anyway, my jaw hit the floor at that question.
And after I picked my jaw up off the floor, I said, you want a serious answer to that?
And the person said, yes.
So I said, okay, you asked for it, you know,
okay, yes, no, look around the rooms, like hundred people where we're in London.
I said, is, is anybody here Irish? The.
Right away you go, a bunch of answers.
But right away, the question that rolled his
eyes.
I get it.
I get, I get where you're coming from.
So, you know, I discussed the brutal, you
know, subjugation of the Irish.
And I'm a big Anglophile.
I love the English, but you know, what they did in Ireland was not their shining hour.
Right.
And then I said, well, second, let's go
across, let's go across the channel to the continent.
There's this group of people on the continent, they're called Jews, you know, and they went
off on, you know, in the pogroms and persecution and when, you know, and then, you
know, the jingoistic nationalism, which is a form of, you know, tribalism, it's a form of
racism.
The Napoleonic Wars, World War I, you know, go
on.
Anyway, my point is, Armenian genocide didn't
take place in Europe.
It was in Turkey.
But my point, of course, is racism in different forms all over the world, and
certainly in the United States.
And this is a legacy of racism.
And if up to me, we will all recognize, you know, colorblind individualism, which I think
was the spirit of your question.
Martin, none of this matters.
Latino, white, black, Asian, whatever is none of that.
None of this stuff matters.
Let's just, you know, it's real, but it's
trivial.
We could jettison it.
The whole human race would benefit from it.
I think the United States has the best chance
of becoming a multi.
Peaceful, multiracial polyglot society.
It's very difficult to do.
History shows us it's history to do.
But the principle of individual rights the country was founded on, I think gives the
United States an advantage in the attempt to overcome racism.
I just want to say this cold, blind individualism, you know, is the panacea for
racism in any of its forms directed against whites or blacks or Jews or Christians or, you
know, or whomever.
And you see the left today rejecting it.
So it's a microaggression they claim.
I just want to say publicly here, anybody who
repudiates colorblind individualism, the recognition that only character matters or
character matters above all, far and away, above all races, trivial.
Anybody who rejects colorblind individualism cannot, in logic or in ethics, claim to be a
foe of racism.
It's the.
In logic, it's the only panacea for racism
that there is.
And I think we're still, you know, we still.
I think that's still a legacy of it.
You know, to do that on the census, I would.
I would eliminate it.
But racism is a worldwide problem, and the
United States, I think, is the best chance to overcome it.
But we certainly haven't done it yet.
Blair: Andy, just for my own clarification and I. Some of what you said, at least to me, was.
Garba, would you go over the part where you said the people who don't advocate a white.
The color.
I mean, excuse me, a colorless society.
Andrew: Yeah.
Martin: Colorblind individual.
Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.
Blair: They are the actual racist.
Is that what you said, or.
Andrew: Yes. Yeah. Colorblind individualism means we know.
We. We recognize that character above all matters and that people make moral choices.
That's.
That's what defines their worth as a human
being, is the moral choices that they make and the color of their skin and these other racial
characteristics are enormously secondary and irrelevant.
To their moral character.
So that's what the essence of colorblind
individualism.
We recognize that race doesn't matter, and we
recognize that human beings are individual first, foremost, and always not members of a
tribe, and that they make moral choices that define them.
That's the only cure in logic for racism in any form.
And the people who reject it, like a lot of leftists who claim colorblind.
To argue for colorblind individualism is to commit a microaggression.
And I said those leftists are racist.
And I want to go on public record as saying
that anybody who rejects colorblind individualism, who believes it's a
microaggression, cannot, in logic or in ethics, claim to be a foe of racism because
you're rejecting the only panacea for racism that there is.
Martin: And Andy, I got here also for the record, now I got an idea about potential.
You could say podcast, because you have this.
Had this great podcast on hero worship and
heroes together with others, and maybe that could be like a series of defending Western
civilization and take out great examples and follow through the history and so on.
Andrew: Well, that's a. Yeah, that's a good idea.
Martin.
The Hero show that you're referring to we did
with John Hersey and then with Robert Begley was under the auspices of the Objective
Standard Institute.
Martin: Yeah. And where everybody could find the article that you have written.
Yep.
Andrew: Yeah. And Craig Biddle, who runs osi, gave me Crop launch to, you know, gave me the
intellectual property rights, as it were, that if I want to reprise that show, whether by
myself or with you guys or.
Martin: Great to hear.
Andrew: Yeah. That we can reprise the Hero show and defend the great heroes of Western
civilization as well as other human beings who reached achievements that were supportive of
human life.
Martin: Yeah. Because I think that's very important to say because you have.
And I want to end on a positive note, but you have some people and groups that are saying
that they are defending Western civilization, but often it's boiled down to very like the
Christian faith or the Yudo Christian tradition or some other things like that.
But that's why I asked about this question you said about this symbolic year and to learn
from the history and then continue and then show that the United States of America is the
greatest example and others could.
Inspired by that.
So that's great to.
Andrew: Yeah, thank you.
And I just want to say I, you know, agree 100%
with Ayn Rand that the.
The essence of moral virtue is, you know,
living in accordance with the requirements of human life and promoting human life.
That.
That which.
That which furthers human life is the good.
And that which harms human life, what kills it
is the evil.
And there is not, to repeat, there is not a
culture in history that we know of that supported human life and whose achievements
benefit human life all over the world nearly as much as those of Western civilization.
And for anybody all over the world, male or female, any race or tribe or nationality, if
they care.
If we care about human life, then we need to
support the main principles of Western civilization.
Reason, philosophy, science, the arts, freedom, individual rights, capitalism.
We need to support these principles if we do, if we care about human life, because then
human beings all over the world will benefit from this as they do.
Look at what this has done for the Asian tigers over the last 80 years or so.
Blair: Well, ladies and gentlemen, on that note, I think we should wrap it up.
Andy.
We've been talking to Andy Bernstein, of
course, on his great essay, the Case for Western Civilization.
Andy, thanks for manning the foxhole with us.
Andrew: Always. Thanks, Blair and Martin.
Always good to man the foxhole with you guys.
If I had to go to war, I couldn't find two guys, you know, that I'd be more happy to go
to war with.
Martin: Great to hear, Andy. Thank you very much.
Blair: All right.