We are not different pieces on a chessboard

My conversation with David McGrogan about freedom, democracy, and the rise of authoritarianism.

Before I begin, I’d like to briefly mention something I said last week.

I quoted a line from Konstantin Kisin's reflections on his visit to Australia. 'This is the great paradox of the woke takeover of any society. 'Why are you being a divisive culture warrior?' they'll scream at you as they take the foundations of your society apart, brick by brick.' No sooner had Kisin left our shores than the Albanese government unveiled its plans to stop non-government schools from practising their religious ethos through the selection of their staff and students. The Australian Association of Christian Schools described Labor's proposals as a 'direct attack on faith and freedom of belief in Australia…it means the government can tell Christian schools who we can employ, what we can believe and teach.'  

How was this reported? It's just as Kisin described. Somehow, it's the Liberal Party, defending the rights of parents who choose to send their children to non-government schools, who are the ones launching a 'culture war'. David Crowe, chief political correspondent of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, reported last week that Anthony Albanese would only proceed with his plan if he had bipartisan support from the Coalition. Crowe wrote that this strategy from Labor 'will not give it [the Liberal Party] the fight it wants. That's because there will be no chance for the Liberals to start a culture war about Labor and the Greens joining forces to limit the liberty of religious schools.' 

So, according to Crowe, it's not Anthony Albanese and the ALP starting a culture war - it's Peter Dutton and the Liberal Party. Kisin would surely just shake his head.

The main thing I'd like to discuss today is the new series of IPA Encounters and its first episode for 2024 with David McGrogan, released a few days ago. IPA Encounters is a video interview series I do with the Institute of Public Affairs. Encounters started during the Covid lockdowns when we couldn't do live events, so instead, I spoke to guests from here and overseas on Zoom. IPA members could watch the discussion live and ask questions, and we recorded the episodes and made them available to the public on YouTube.

One of the first episodes of Encounters was in March 2021 with Jonathan Sumption, the former UK judge, one of the very few legal professionals anywhere in the English-speaking world who dared to speak out against the erosion of fundamental human rights during Covid. Sumption is no radical libertarian, and if anything, on politics, he's on the centre-left, and his views might have been expected to have had some sway. They didn't. The consensus was too strong. 

(As it happens next week is the fourth anniversary of a column I wrote in the Australian Financial Review. Just as the first lockdowns were being enforced. It was the first of many such articles. I didn't choose the headline and the one-line summary, but it captured exactly what I was trying to say. 'Beautiful one day, police state the next. Economic devastation, house arrest and a police state. Surely there could have been a better way.' I said this:

Future generations will ask why the public was so quick to accept the opinions of those experts who presented the worst-case scenarios rather than listen to other experts, no less qualified to offer a judgment but who suggested less draconian solutions than those that came to be implemented.

…in New South Wales, police officers harass people sitting alone on park benches. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother at least allowed Winston Smith to go outside.

My reference to 'future generations' was deliberate. There will only ever be a full accounting of what happened when the politicians, the experts, and those in the media who were complicit in the decisions made are gone. Too many people are too compromised for the truth to win out anytime in the foreseeable future. An entire generation of political leaders is compromised, which is why there's no point holding an inquiry or royal commission into the decisions made during Covid. The current UK Covid inquiry is a joke. Fifty-five professors and academics have written to the inquiry's chair warning that her 'lack of neutrality' means the inquiry 'gives the impression of being fundamentally biased' and appears to have led to 'predetermined conclusions, for example, to lockdown faster next time.' The letter also notes the chair is 'neglecting to hear evidence from those who suffered from the negative effects of pandemic policies, or scientists who disagree with the choices made by the government.' Ministers and government officials are either refusing to acknowledge the consequences of their decisions, or else they are re-writing history. As Dan Hannan put it a few years ago - the history of Covid will be misremembered: in time, everyone will convince themselves they were a lockdown sceptic, just as today the French believe that during the Second World War the whole country joined the Resistance.)

IPA Encounters proved popular, and there's a lot of interest in the topics we cover, such as the importance of freedom of speech and the future of freedom more broadly. I've now done nearly thirty episodes, and they're all available to watch on YouTube. Some of the people I've talked to include Mark Steyn, Toby Young, Robert Tombs, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Heather Mac Donald, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Chris Uhlman, Gerard Henderson, Martin Gurri, Marie Kawthar Douda, and talking of Covid the British journalist Isabel Oakeshott who broke the story of the UK 'lockdown files'. If you go to YouTube to watch my discussion with Steven Koonin, the former undersecretary for science in the Obama administration and author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, you'll see that YouTube (owned by Google) has inserted a sentence of 'Context' that says: 'Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.' Anyone who watches my 36-minute conversation with Koonin will quickly learn that every assertion of that sentence is, at a minimum, highly arguable.

David McGrogan is my first guest on IPA Encounters for the year. We released the video of the discussion last week, and it has already been watched over 10,000 times. The episode's title is 'Freedom, Democracy, and the Rise of Authoritarianism', and I've included a link to it below. David is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School in the UK who's written for some of the world's most important liberty-centred publications and organisations, including The Critic, the Brownstone Institute, the American Institute for Economic Research, and Law & Liberty. Before our discussion, I'd never spoken to David, and my first contact with him was when I sent him an email introducing myself, telling him about the Institute of Public Affairs and asking whether he'd talk to me on Zoom for Encounters. He generously got back to me within twenty-four hours and said he'd be delighted to.  

I got in touch with David because his writing about freedom, the human condition, and the future of the West is some of the most articulate, beautifully expressed, and empathetic writing I've come across in recent times. I first started reading David on Toby Young's brilliant website, The Daily Sceptic. One of the subjects David wrote about was the Covid lockdowns; he did what few others do. He didn't just talk about what happened; he explored why it happened, why politicians made the decisions they did, and why the public meekly accepted those decisions. He ranged into political and intellectual history, and his piece from August last year on The Daily Sceptic, 'The West has Gone Woke - Yet the Paranoid Left Still Believes Right-Wing Ideas Control Culture,' is spot on. He wrote about the complaint of the left that the ideology of conservative and liberal thinkers such as Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss and Friedrich Hayek had an all-pervasive and malign influence on politics in the West. If only the left's fantasy were true. But it isn't. McGrogan is correct - 'From the growth in the size of the state to the technocratisation of government, and from the ascendance of ESG and EDI to the cultural dominance of 'wokeness', there is barely anything about the world we live in today that suggests that the teachings of [these thinkers] had the remotest influence on public life, anywhere.'

In a follow-up piece, David explained how Adam Smith described the tendency of experts to want to organise the world.

We are being made ever more subject to an 'all-encompassing, intrusive, regulatory and totalising mode of governance, which seeks to enjoin the entirety of society together in the realisation of ends', and this tendency is becoming more aggressive and authoritarian: you may well have noticed.

This calls to mind an important passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Adam Smith describes the dangers of being governed by the 'man of system'. Such a man, 'apt to be very wise in his own conceit' is

“often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the small deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard.”

I started reading David's Substack email, 'News from Uncibal', and was struck by the clarity with which he explained the challenges of the modern world. Following the meeting of Jordan Peterson's Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London last year, David wrote about storytelling. He made the point that there was a lot of discussion at the conference about the need to tell a 'better story' - which is true, but he went on to say something more profound.

My contention would be that we suffer from a much more serious malady, which is that - leaving aside whether the stories we hear are negative or positive or need to be 'better' - we have a serious, and growing, deficit in storytelling full stop. 

And here we need to think a little more carefully about what stories are and why they are important in structuring our thought. In The Sibling Society (a now largely forgotten book that I have written about before) the poet Robert Bly gives an interesting definition of adulthood: '[A]n adult is able to organise the random emotions and events of his or her life into a memory, a rough meaning, a story.'

I increasingly see the wisdom in this view. For a toddler beginning to make sense of the world, life comes in a series of unforeseen events that have no rational connection to each other. Gradually, she learns to connect events together and piece them into something resembling a coherent personal narrative. This allows her, as she grows into adulthood, to understand her life in terms of an ongoing story - with a beginning, middle, and end (which is, of course, in the future). And this then gives her the capacity to construct goals within the short-, medium-, and long-term, and to think about the kind of legacy she would like her life to leave behind. This ultimately gives her the capacity to imagine her life as having an overarching meaning, from which she can then derive purpose and guidance in her conduct. 

David concluded:

When life is chiefly experienced simply as a haphazard and meandering sequence of events, then that is what it will appear to be. The consequences of this are plain - a bleak and passive worldview in which life is understood as not just meaningless, but also ungraspable; something which absolutely cannot be made sense of, since it has no sense, and therefore something which it is not really worth engaging with very much at all. 

This also explains, I think, why the default mode of interaction of so many people now seems to be one of ironic detachment; this is not just an affectation, but a necessary consequence of a basic inability to conceive of the world as being something with which to engage sincerely, and fully.

Recommended Watching and Reading

• This is the link to my discussion with David on IPA Encounters. It's free to subscribe to David's Substack emails, 'News from Uncibal' - which you can do here. As you can probably tell, I can't speak too highly of them. These are some of my recent favourites: 'Machiavelli's Bear Hunt - The only way out is through; 'The Crisis of Masculinity and the Interior Life - Good and bad ways to lose a leg'; and 'How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Further Impoverishing the Poor - Economic development is a naughty plan'. 

• It's also free to subscribe to emails from The Daily Sceptic, which you can do here. The site's motto 'Question Everything. Stay Sane. Live Free' is an excellent summary of the purpose of the writing it publishes. This piece from last week 'R.I.P. The Scottish Enlightenment 1697-2024' is outstanding and would be published in few other places.

kind regards John