Today, Samuel Barnes, author of Missing Axioms and The Iconoclast, joins the King and I to discuss the role religion, the secular, and identity play in the political right. The conversation begins from our dueling articles, my “Toward a Religious Right,” and Samuel’s “Against a Merely Religious Right.”
In my essay, I argued that, if the political right, conservatism, does not make its object the conservation and continuation of a religious heritage, then its adherents will tend to identify the object of conservation as a racial or ethnic group. In order to preserve both morality and a kind of universalism, the Right should be religious.
In Samuel’s essay, he argued that the Right is not merely concerned with the preservation of a religious heritage or any philosophical proposition. It is also concerned with the preservation of peoples in all their particularity - as the Québecois are concerned with their ethnic identity, the Welsh with theirs, the English with theirs. These are fine-grained, historic ethnicities, not races, mind you.
It should be noted that Samuel is himself English, and that the divide on the Right we are discussing is partly due to differences between the US, a propositional nation, and the countries of Europe.
What follows is a lively exchange about the nature and purpose of politics, from first principles. Enjoy this episode of The Flâneur and the Philosopher.
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Chapters:
2:00 - What is the right preserving?
10:00 - Is politics a godly or an earthly thing?
22:00 - Is effective change through politics anyway, or through culture, ideas, and religion?
29:00 - Is preserving ethnic identity a goal of the right?
43:00 - Does the Right have a positive vision of the good life? Or are we merely against things?
53:00 - How can the Right save us from the tyranny of pleasure?
To learn more about our guest, Samuel Barnes, visit samuelbarnes.com.
Politics...Some Godly Thing?