Sunday Thoughts: 500 Club, My Request Of You, and Curing Cultural Amnesia And Saving Our Souls
Dear Classmates. I hope you’ve all had a peaceful week filled with moments of joy for good measure. Thinking Class continues to go from strength to strength on YouTube and the channel now has nearly 600 subscribers. I intend to shoot a trailer for the channel during the summer and pay to promote it to increase engagement with the channel. In the meantime, if you like what I do and spend any time on YouTube you will be hugely helping grow the show’s reach by logging on and subscribing to the channel here.
What people are saying
Here are some of the comments I’ve received this week via email or on social media.
This is from the head of a security and terrorism intelligence data organisation:
We need more balanced debate online and Thinking Class is an excellent example of that. Getting back to thoughts and ideas rather than feelings will help get society back on track.
From a viewer who watched the episode with Paul Morland on demography on YouTube:
This conversation could not have been had in the public domain five years ago. However, the Overton window is still firmly fixed on the left of politics, meaning that having such a debate in the workplace would mean facing a disciplinary or losing your job.
From a subscriber who is a writer, and who has generously sent me a copy of his recent book, on the conversation with Frank Furedi which you can watch here or listen to here:
A brilliant and important interview. It deserves a lot more viewers--but they will come. Mr Furedi is right: the current elite can't be reformed. A new counter-cultural intellectual 'elite'--I don't particularly like that word, but it will have to do--must come together as an alternative. Our civilization is at stake, quite literally.
A viewer on the recent episode with Helen Pluckrose on defending the benefits of liberal society:
Disappointment at the algorithm being tuned to attention and controversy (namely being fed more Peter and James...as much as I respect them both also). I'm glad this came up after a search specifically for what Helen in that group was up to and very happy and satisfied to find this. Wonderful exchanges throughout and very informative. Sad that the social engagement is so obviously low by view count and comments for how long its been up, but I am extremely appreciative of it.
Finally, a viewer on the conversation with Sebastian Milbank, particularly on why the left wins and the right doesn’t:
You guys have a good way of talking and presentation and could be very good at persuading left moderates. However, it seems you do not yet understand that this is a full attempt at a slow marxist communist revolution and they are absolutely antithetical to our notions of society.
I do, and I suspect Sebastian does too, understand that particular ideological threat, however it’s the bulk of people in the centre that need to be persuaded because it is they who have their hand on the tiller.
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Links and recommendations
Keystones of Britain’s History | James Stevens Curl in The Critic
“Education” in schools is failing youngsters very badly. A vacuum of identity and knowledge has been created, and where you have a vacuum something else will enter the vacant space. It is clear that is happening, when trivia, vulgarity, greed and falsehoods are valued above depth, beauty, generosity and truth — and even failure is generously rewarded. The evidence of what was vibrant creativity is all around us on these islands, if we can only be bothered to seek it out. If we ignore it, we do so in peril, for we will betray and lose our very souls.
How academia launders activism | Max Klinger’s Substack
I had a spiritual breakthrough thanks to Russell Brand |
’s SubstackThe culture is changing at warp speed | Ted Gioia’s Substack
Why liberals, not radicals, are mainly responsible for woke institutions | Eric Kaufmann’s Substack
Why the left failed on October 7th | Hadley Freeman in UnHerd
WATCH: Freddie Sayers on the disinformation movement | UnHerd
The true nature of the culture war | ΚΡῨΠΤΌΣ’s Seeking the Hidden Thing
Roger Scruton’s 1968 Lessons for Our Time |
In The European ConservativeThat era was the making of one of the greatest contemporary thinkers of the Right: Sir Roger Scruton, who told of how bearing witness in Paris to the 1968 student riots turned him into a lifelong conservative. In a 2003 essay in New Criterion, Scruton recalled those tumultuous events. He confronted a French friend who had been among the brick-throwing protesters demonstrating against “the old fascist”—Gen. de Gaulle, a liberator of France from Nazi occupation.
What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously pompous: but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people I knew.
She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.
Dreher finishes the article with an exhortation of sorts:
At the time of his death in 2020, Scruton left a philosophical legacy from which conservative thinkers will draw for decades to come. This too is a fruit—a life-giving one—of the poisonous seeds sown by the radicals of the soixante-huitard generation. In that 2003 essay, Scruton said that he came understand conservatism “not as a political credo only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon.”
He then called bringing Burke’s wisdom to the world of modern politics “perhaps the greatest task that we now confront.” Two decades on, it still is. This is a task made more difficult by the fact that older thinkers of the Right are too tightly bound to the Reagan-Thatcher reaction to the Sixties that they cannot perceive the ways in which the world has changed since then, requiring different responses.
We can hope that somewhere—perhaps on a campus tormented by hate-filled radicals and surrendered by gutless administrators, or perhaps in a coffee shop somewhere far away, watching it all unfold on the Internet—another, doubtless very different, Roger Scruton is watching, learning, and preparing himself to be a prophet of his own time.
Thinking Class Podcast
This week I spoke with
, Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, on Thinking Class. It was somewhat of a premiere insofar as it was the first time that Eric has been on a podcast talking about his upcoming book.The book is released this month in the US under the title The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism. The UK version is due to launch next month under the title Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution.
You can listen to the show here on Substack or watch it on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe, like, share, and comment.
I also spoke with Carl Trueman, author of the excellent The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and The Road To Sexual Revolution. The episode is due for release on Friday 11th May.
Popular this week
Lionel Shriver on what breaks her heart about Britain and why she left:
Sebastian Milbank on why the worldview of the left has made such ground over the years:
Eric Kaufmann on what cultural socialism is and why it took over as the ruling ideology:
Ian Williams on why China’s future is not golden:
Until next time, Classmates.