You have to have a positive vision of the future. Rather than saying, you know, if the woke is saying all these people are evil and the anti-woke saying all these people are idiots, there is no there's no uh creative positive future there. And you guys, the Jesus lovers, you have your answers to that. Uh you're very clear about that, as I know.
SPEAKER_03So imagine that Shakespeare wanted to make himself known to Hamlet. He could write himself into the play.
SPEAKER_00Do you not think it's quite a weird thing for Shakespeare to do, though?
SPEAKER_03Apparently it's so Dorothy Sayers did did this in a in a detective novel. Um she sort of fell in love with her protagonist and decided to write herself into the story so they could they could actually meet.
SPEAKER_00Is this a live conversion? Is this what you got me on the show for? Just to be Constantine. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Constantine was of course the the emperor who brought Christianity to the Roman Empire. Exactly, exactly. You what you want me to follow in his footsteps, I take.
SPEAKER_01Hello and welcome back to the Speak Life Podcast, episode 462. My name's Thomas Thurrogate, media producer at Speak Life, and I'm delighted to bring you this conversation today. It's a conversation that Glenn had with Constantine Kissen. You might well have already heard of Constantine Kissin. He's all over the internet. He's one of the presenters on the YouTube channel Trigonometry, alongside Francis Foster. And they've interviewed a lot of the people that we've had on Speak Life over the years, actually, including Louise Perry and Mary Harrington. If you want to check out our interview with Louise Perry, that's episode 419 of the Speak Life podcast. So in this conversation, Glenn asks Constantine about a number of things, including what what we mean by wokeness or what what he thinks uh wokeness is post-wokeness and anti-wokeness, pulling those things apart. They talk about Constantine's Oxford Union speech that went viral online. I think it's on 1.8 million views on YouTube. They talk about the work on the trigonometry YouTube channel, Constantine's interactions with people like Jordan Peterson and cosmic sceptic Alex O'Connor. So Constantine has been in all sorts of conversations over the years with uh people who are interested in theology and philosophy. And they also talk about Constantine's new book, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. However, you found this episode, whether you've been listening to the Speak Live podcast for a while or whether you've just stumbled upon this, I think you're going to find something in this episode that will intrigue you or challenge you in all sorts of ways. Well, I'm going to hand over to Glenn and Constantine. Just one final thing. I just want to let you know that this conversation is part of a series that we're releasing on YouTube at the moment called The Way Back. And we're asking, in a post-Christian age, is there a way back to Christian faith? So Glenn has been talking to all sorts of people, Christians and non-Christians, about the Jesus story and how it has shaped our assumptions and what we hold most dear in the countries in which we find ourselves. So if you want to check out our other conversations in the Wayback series, we've already done about 12, including one with Mary Harrington. That's really fascinating. If you want to check that out. And we're bringing out more, we're bringing out one a week. Do head to our YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash speaklife media. Give us a subscribe and click the bell, and you will be the first to know when a new episode of The Way Back is released. Well, over to Glenn and Constantine.
SPEAKER_03Hello and welcome to Speak Life. My name is Glenn. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. We are in a series called The Way Back. Is there a way back to Christian faith in our post-Christian moment? Uh we happen to think so, and we've been tracking uh the uh exploits of Constantine Kisson for many years, actually now, and he joins me on the line from his trigonometry studios. Hello, Constantine. Hello, mate. How are you? I'm really well, thank you. Uh I have loved tracking uh all the sorts of stuff that you've been doing uh over the last many years. I guess you came onto my radar screen uh as you did on many people's radar screens, uh, when you uh turned down a comedy gig all those years ago. And uh what was it that they they they said that you weren't allowed to make certain kinds of jokes? Who were you not allowed to offend?
SPEAKER_00So they having seen me perform, uh they then sent me uh an invitation to to perform at their charity night, and they said that in order to perform I had to sign a behavioral agreement contract, uh which said that uh they have a zero tolerance policy on racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, islamophobia, anti-religion, anti-atheism, uh, and it also said that all jokes must be respectful and kind.
SPEAKER_03Which is easy. I mean, that's just yeah, uh an open goal for comedians. Exactly. Exactly. And uh you sort of sent a tweet out about this and uh went to bed and and the internet kind of exploded over it. What what happened next?
SPEAKER_00Uh so what happened next, very briefly summarized, is uh the story became the second most uh uh most read story on the BBC News website on the day that the then Prime Minister Theresa May was nearly removed from office by her own party. Um so it was Therese Prime Minister nearly removed from office by her own party, and then no-name comedian turns down unpaid charity gig from some too big college in second place. Which was when I started to realize that maybe I wasn't the only one that had concerns about the direction society was going, particularly around free speech and sort of making the wrong joke and saying the wrong thing, that I wasn't the only one that that was sort of feeling something odd in the water because I got thousands of messages from people, and and the and the the gist of what they were all saying was essentially like a lot of people now live with the feeling that they've signed that contract in their own life. So when they go to work, they worry about saying the wrong thing or making the wrong joke, the same at school, the same in college. And we were just actually, we've got some uh young uh people uh doing a bit of an internship for us here at the studio today. We were just having lunch and they were talking to us about how you know teachers will say to them, Well, you're not allowed to have that opinion and stuff like that. So the the m that was when I really realized that we were onto it wasn't just me and a bunch of other people being crazy, there was actually a real so social feeling about this issue that was going on across the country.
SPEAKER_03And I think a lot of people then realized that it wasn't just them and and the the the popularity around your story kind of reflected the fact that there's kind of a silent majority on this, that we're we're all feeling the the chilling of speech and and the uh pressure to conform and say the right things. Do you get the feeling that this belief in free speech um is is a kind of a silent majority issue, or are are we just have we have we lost the notion that um people can disagree and that's okay?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't know. I think both can be true. I mean the the reason the silent majority is silent is it's worried about expressing its opinions. Uh so there is that element to it. And on the other hand, I I think as social media has become the place where these conversations are being had, or not only that, but actually the place that influences the way that these conversation conversations are being had elsewhere. I mean, if you you know, one of the examples that really stuck out for me is uh I I went I sometimes in the evening, just as I'm unwinding, I'll I'll open YouTube and watch various things, and you go down the wormhole as we all do. Um and I came across a parliamentary debate between John Prescott and William Haig uh in probably the late nineties, maybe, maybe would have been early noughties. And it is night and day to the way that we have political debates now, and they were just as robust back then, but there wasn't the animus, there wasn't the feeling like you were trying to destroy people. There was an element of play, there was humour, and and in that particular occasion, you know, people will remember John Prescott was a working class trade union labor guy, and William Haig, although I think he went to a grammar school, he suddenly comes across as a very posh, almost he he sounds like an old Deutonian type of character. And the entire exchange was William Haig basically taking the piss out of John Prescott for not being not being able to pronounce words properly. And John Prescott's reply to that wasn't, you know, um, I am a member of the oppressed working classes. It was like on this side of the house, we may get the words wrong, but we get the judgment right. In other words, it was a it was a debate, it was a discussion, and both sides understood that they were not out to destroy each other. What I think increasingly happens in the world of social media is it's all about pandering to the most extremist part of your base or your audience. And so nowadays politicians go into the House of Commons not to have a debate in the House of Commons, but to pander to their people on Twitter. And as a result of that, I think you end up with uh that sort of toxification of the debate in the politics, but then also in the media, of course, and elsewhere, because it's just all attempting to pander to social media where division and polarization and hate uh thrive.
SPEAKER_03Yes, well, we've always had uh division and polarization and hate, but uh but I guess one thing is that social media has absolutely supercharged um that that sort of tribal identity thing. One other thing, I guess, and it this has been part of your journey on the trigonometry um show, is um the the lines across which we disagree have changed such that um you know your old school Labour and your old school Tory uh would be engaged in discussions about class and and uh and kind of social mobility and and issues like that. One issue that's changed, I guess, um has been uh David Goodhart's uh uh division between the somewheres and the anywheres. And I and I guess um this this division between those who s see their identity as mainly built upon the local and the embodied and you know, you you know, uh the majority of Brits have grown up within like ten miles of where they were born as opposed to the globalists and those who consider, you know, the the anywheres uh who consider themselves sort of citizens of the world. Um tell me about how that and its interplay with Brexit in particular uh has kind of shaped things.
SPEAKER_00Well, Brexit predates trigonometry by a couple of years, actually. Trigonometry only started in 2018. Uh but one of the reasons that we started it was, you know, I am a first-generation immigrant and Francis, his mother came here from Venezuela, and her father, who was an English guy, married her in the eighties when, you know, marrying a w a dark-skinned immigrant wasn't necessarily the done thing. And we both felt that the way that the conversation was being had, as to remain anyways, Francis and I both, I would argue, uh, we just felt that the conversation was the way it was being had was A, inaccurate and B, frankly, insulting. I mean, I've lived in this country since 1995. The idea that half of the population voted to leave the European Union because they hate immigrants is just factually incorrect and frankly quite insulting to a huge number of people who are incredibly uh receptive and tolerant and open uh towards people from other places, but at the same time had a desire to express their political opinion on that issue. Um, and even if some of them were concerned about immigration, uh it's not racist to be concerned about immigration. I mean, the the the unspoken truth is a lot of first and second and third generation immigrants are actually not pro-unlimited levels of immigration and are certainly against illegal immigration, not least because they came here by following all the rules. And that, I'm afraid, is kind of the I think where a big part of the problem with where we are at the moment is uh where we essentially punish people who follow all the rules and and we reward people for not following the rules. And I'll give you a very personal example. Uh my wife and I had our first child uh a year ago, and it was his his first birthday a few weeks ago, and my w my mum wanted to come and spend a couple of weeks with us, partly to celebrate it. And my mum filled in her paperwork, made the application, I said I would pay for all the expenses that she incurred and whatever. Uh, this is a woman who's been to the UK over the last 30 years at least 20 times. Um has she has a full-time job, she's got uh children that she looks after back in the country that she lives. Her visa application is denied at the very same time that we have tens of thousands of people coming into the UK on small boats across the Channel, and we don't know who they are or why they're here. And that is kind of, I'm afraid, the the big picture elsewhere if you look at crime. I think we're in a very similar position where it feels like if your car gets uh broken into or your house gets burgled, you're all the best you're gonna get is a crime reference number from the police. Uh but they're quite keen to, you know, if if you push over a an extinction rebellion protest or if you say the wrong thing on Facebook or whatever, the police will be there pretty quickly. So I just think across a whole load of areas we we we've we've started to uh punish and demonize people who are expressing perfectly normal opinions. Uh and on the other hand, we're we're rewarding people who are doing things that they shouldn't be shouldn't be rewarded for doing.
SPEAKER_03And so um I I guess your your channel is discussing things like freedom of speech and th those sorts of issues. Um the the difference between elite discourse about subjects like like Brexit and and uh and also coming through into 2020 and the pandemic, again, I I would say that your your channel had um a a massive boost in terms of people starting to question narratives. And uh one of your chapters of your book, I I believe it began as a tweet thread and then it became a video and and then it's a real standout chapter in in your book about the breakdown of trust. Um was was the pandemic kind of a a really um crystallizing moment for you in in terms of thinking about who can we trust and why?
SPEAKER_00It was a crystallizing moment in different ways for us. So first and foremost, it was the thing that forced us to take trigonometry full-time. Uh and uh during the pandemic, one of the things that happened is we had to leave the comedy club where we'd started the show from. Uh, and at that point, what we decided was to actually for Francis and our executive producer Anton to move in together and for me to be there half the week for us to record the show. So, first of all, on a practical level, it forced us to get more serious about what we were doing. And then, yes, you're right, having both supported the first lockdown because we we thought we didn't know what was going on, and it was not unreasonable to uh show a little bit of caution for a couple of weeks, which is if you remember what we were told. Uh, and then suddenly we find ourselves a year and a half into lockdown, and uh, you know, you you have to have the vaccine, otherwise you're not gonna be able to get a job for if you're working in in the medical in uh field or all sorts of other things going on. You're not gonna you know, the government's saying young people aren't gonna be able to go out, and you see these polls where like 20% of the public thinks that you know nightclubs should be permanently shut down irrespective of COVID. Whatever percentage of people think you should be forced to wear a mask on public transport, irrespective of COVID, and by by the way, irrespective of whether masks actually stop the spread of COVID. Uh and that point, I think, you know, the most common comment Francis and I get when we get recognized on the street is you got me through lockdown, and that's because we were very clear that what was happening was just uh an abuse of power. He was scared people making bad decisions, and uh we weren't having any of it.
SPEAKER_03I've heard somebody describe our current culture as not so much a post-truth culture as a post-trust culture, and you can see that breakdown in institutional trust happening left, right, and center. Um and so I I was very interested in um uh obviously another thing where you might have come across people's radars is uh your Oxford Union speech earlier this year, uh where you talk about uh the environment quite a lot.
SPEAKER_00I believe there are those of you here who are woke who are open to rational arguments, so let me make one. We are told that your generation cares more than any other about one issue in particular, and that issue is climate change. There is only one thing we can do in this country to stop climate change, and that is to make scientific and technological breakthroughs that will create the clean energy that is not only clean but also cheap.
SPEAKER_03And at the same time, I've I noticed um you put out tweets uh like this one in January of this year. You said the future is not woke, the future is not anti-woke, the future is post-woke. And that's fascinated me. And I've I just wonder, could you kind of talk us through that? Like to you, what does what does woke mean and what is po anti-woke mean? And then Okay.
SPEAKER_00Well, look, you it might take us on a long journey, but briefly, I mean, the chief problem I have with radical progressivism, which we call wokeness, is that it's uh as someone who who always thought of himself as liberal, um it is undoing key essential fundamental aspects of the liberal project. Uh one of them is the idea of equality, equality of opportunity, the idea that human beings are supposed to be treated as equals. And it is replacing that with a whole set of extremely old, extremely crude, and extremely discredited, at least in my view, ideas from which we rightly moved away. One of those was the idea that your skin colour or your ethnicity is important in deciding how you should be treated by society or how you should be treated under the law, how you should be treated in employment, or how you should be treated in whatever other field of in which you come into contact with other human beings, right? That to me is an extraordinarily backward step. The idea of re-racializing society and saying, you know, this group of ethnic, ethnically based people, they should be treated like this, and this group of people who would have this kind of colour should be treated differently, uh, to me is an extraordinary and very dangerous backward step that has the potential to backfire massively, particularly because if you're if you have the situation that we've had in the past where it's a minority that is being treated as second-class citizens, um you can sustain that for quite a long time, and eventually with enough uh pushback and enough hard work, you're probably going to overturn that. But if you start to get to the point where words like white or male or straight are become to be, you know, come to be used as pejoratives, you are building in quite a dangerous situation for the future because uh you are essentially I mean discriminating against may may be true on some some circumstances, but more broadly you're sort of demonizing the majority. And I don't think that's a recipe for a healthy society going forward. So that's the first part. What flows out of that, if you want to jump in, please do.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, okay, so yeah, we'll we'll talk about anti-woke in a second. Let's let's talk about woke for for a moment, and then somebody comes back and they say, well, this is just redressing decade after decade of injustices, and it's not a level play on playing field. And therefore, let's you know let's think about the black community in America, for instance. Um it's it's not as though you abolish the slave trade and everything's fine. It's not as though you simply have civil rights activism and everything's fine, there's redlining happening across states, and and there are all sorts of systemic injustices that require, if you if you do believe in equality, uh that require a a bit of a leg up, and and uh they also require a bit of um reflection on on the part of the dominant culture uh about ways that they are perpetuating injustices. What do you say to that?
SPEAKER_00Uh well it's not true. So if you look at uh first of all, there's no such thing as the black community. It doesn't exist. There's no black community in America, and there's no black community in the UK. Uh African Americans uh from ac actually who are first-generation immigrants from Africa, the people Ghanaian Americans, Nigerian Americans, uh do way better than the local white and black population in the United States. Jamaican Americans do better in terms of education and earnings and so on than the local population and the white population in America. Japanese Americans do better, Chinese Americans do better, Korean Americans do better. You can go down the list. Um the same is true in the UK. Uh people who have come from Africa, first generation or second generation, uh are incredibly successful in our education system. They do incredibly well. Uh the Caribbean community is the one that that that is suffering and struggling. And so, first of all, you have to disentangle uh race from what we're actually talking about, which is it's a class issue. Poor people. Get a worse outcome in life than people who have money and people who have a certain attitude to getting ahead an education, who teach their children certain values, who have a certain family structure. That's really where you start if you're actually trying to solve these problems. And so from the perspective of attempting to ride the wrongs of the past, you're not righting the wrongs of the past by telling black people they're oppressed. The way you ride the wrongs of the past is to improve educational outcomes in the inner city, to help families stay together in the inner city and so on and so forth. There's actually practical outcomes. And we've interviewed people on the show, people like Tony Soule and Catherine Burbel Singh and a bunch of others from the so-called black community who will tell you the exact opposite of what you're being told on TV. And that's because they actually work in the inner city communities, educate children in those communities, and what they will tell you is those cities, those children's needs need are values, education, family stability. And that is the way a lot of these problems get solved. So that's the first part. The second part is I do not believe that the solution, I mean, the the central tenet of uh radical progressive ideology when it comes to race is expressed by this guy called Ibrah Kendi. And he says the solution to past discrimination is present discrimination. In other words, if there was discrimination in the past, the only way to fix it is by discriminating against other people in the present. What these people never seem to ask themselves is what will be the solution when present discrimination that you are applying now becomes past discrimination? When people catch up to the fact that what you call positive discrimination is not positive at all. You know, in America they have a situation where, for example, if you're an Asian student or a Jewish student, you have to get a way higher grade than a black student or a Latino student to get into the same college. How is that fixing the problem of racism? It's not. And so I don't believe that positive discrimination is possible. There's no such thing. You're just discriminating against someone else. Uh what we have to do is eliminate discrimination entirely, and then people have to succeed or fail on their own merits. That's it. I'm a first-generation immigrant with dark skin in this country. I was called a packy when I was at school. I didn't die. I'm still here. I run a successful YouTube channel. I'm I've made a great life for myself here. And if you want to do that, the opportunity is there if you want to take it. Very good.
SPEAKER_03And and people can uh check out my interview with uh Catherine Burbel Singh, uh, which is on our channel as well. I'm very much looking forward to going and visiting uh Michaela her Michaela School in Brent uh later on this year. But okay, so so that's the woke. Yeah, that's the woke, right?
SPEAKER_00That's the woke. So now there's the anti-woke.
SPEAKER_04Go on.
SPEAKER_00The well, the radical progressive mindset is a fundamentally destructive, deconstructive uh mindset which has nothing to offer in terms of solutions. It's about tearing down the founding principles of, in my opinion, Western civilization. So that's what they want. Uh it's a kind of anguish-based primal scream, society isn't the way I want it to be, let's tear it all down and start again. And as you know, in an immigrant's love letter to the West, I make the point that this isn't the first time this rally and cry has been put out there by people who didn't know what they were doing. In response to that, you naturally generate, and in my opinion, an equally, potentially in the future, at least equally dangerous and equally destructive force, which is anti-wokeness, which is the other side of that same abyss, if you like. You get a bunch of people who are angry about what is being done to their society, angry about what was being done to their community, angry about the shutting down of free speech, angry about the re-rationalization of society, and rightly want to express that. The problem with with that, and I certainly would consider that I have been on a journey towards through that process, if you like. So I I'm not saying the anti-woke are all idiots and and they're all doing the wrong thing, because the journey of my life and the journey of trigonometry has been through that process too, and going, look, I don't like what's going on, let's work out what it is, let's speak out against it, let's challenge it robustly, which you have to do. My point when I talk about getting to a post-workplace is you have to have a positive vision of the future. Rather than saying, you know, if the worker saying all these people are evil and the anti-woke saying all these people are idiots, there is no there's no uh creative positive future there. It's people arguing with each other about how wrong each other is without offering people, and and I think what we have to start to think about, and you guys, the Jesus lovers, you have your answers to that. Uh you are very clear about that, as I know. Uh, but as you also know, you know, most societies in the West certainly are becoming more secular over time, so the answers that you are offering may uh may be a harder sell for some people, in my opinion. We have to have an also have a secular offering to people that says, look, you don't have to believe in God and go to church, but here are some of the things that traditionally will give your life meaning and purpose. Um, and we're not saying you must do this, these are the seven commandments of secularism. But if you want a good life, historically speaking, here are some of the ways that people have done that in the past. And that is the conversation I'm interested in having. It's a very difficult one because in our hyper-liberal society, the moment you start to make any generalized statement about any group of people, uh, everyone has a meltdown. Uh, but yes, I think on balance, uh, having family and having children gives your life meaning and purpose in the way that not having them is unlikely to do. Doesn't mean everyone should have children, doesn't mean I want to force anyone to have children, but generally speaking, that will do it. The pursuit of a meaningful career that makes you feel like you're contributing to the world in some kind of positive way, that will almost certainly uh provide some of the meaning and purpose you want. Uh, a healthy family dynamic, you know, men and women are different. Uh, and so uh, while of course, I'm not suggesting women should get back in the kitchen uh in any sense of the word at all, uh we have to recognize that there are differences between us and how we coexist, particularly within the family unit, isn't going to be this sort of genderless dream that people imagine because our brains are wired differently, our psychology is different. My wife and I have spent 20 years uh reading and working on our relationship and on ourselves to understand those differences and to benefit from them because they're mutually complementary, something that you know, this stupid moronic battle of the sexes that's been imposed on us from outside wouldn't want you to believe. Uh, so those are just some starting points for some very basic principles we can talk about. And then you add on top of that the thing we've been talking about already, which is healthy discussion and disagreement is fine and it and and and good. But we must remember we are part of a society, and yes, we can have our arguments about all sorts of political issues, but we've got to remember that we are a nation of people who have common interests, and so we mustn't destroy ourselves in the process of trying to w work out who's right and who's wrong.
SPEAKER_01Hi folks, it's Thomas Thoroughgood here, media producer at Speak Life. You might recognise my voice as the guy who does the filler bits on the podcast. It's part of my job to think of how we can include you more in the work of Speak Life and bring you behind the scenes, if you will. And so we have a very exciting thing called the Speak Life Discord server. It's an online platform where you can interact with other Speak Life supporters and the Speak Life team. We have bonus content, creative theological discussion, and lots of fun along the way. So if you want to join that, you can just go to speaklife.org.uk forward slash give. Okay, back to the podcast.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. No, I I I I can get on board with with so much of that. Interesting, you you talk about the the male and female thing. Um let me let me just zero in on that just for a second. We had uh Louise Pat Perry on the channel last year as I'm uh you you've had on on trigonometry as well. I'm a huge fan of hers. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of of hers as well. And uh as I asked I asked her this question. I s I said, are you nervous about pressing into the differences between men and women? Because as a Christian, I can say, look, on page one of the Bible it says male and female are made in God's image. They are both equal in the eyes of God. That is a given. Now you can press into the differences without actually losing this equality that's at the most profound level possible. If you ditch the Bible, and if you ditch that sort of transcendent sense of the absolute utter equality of male and female, do you worry that pressing into the differences between male and female might actually make you lose the equality? And she paused and she said, Ah, it's all from Christianity, isn't it? And we had a we had a great conversation about that. And and uh you know, she said on on uh Jordan Peterson's podcast that feminism has been uh or just uh just to champion the equal rights of women has been a profoundly Christian thing. And I would say it's a pro a profoundly Christian thing in that you've got the God-given equality which actually enables you to say, and we're different, and we don't therefore need to shape our lives in exactly the same way in order to uphold uh equality. And you've got that that interesting interplay of equality and diversity which I I see um uh flourishing in a Christian kind of context. How uh do do you do you see a problem in a secular kind of uh context? I I worry whether without this idea of the image of God and everybody being equal in that sense, you just get this punch up between those who really go for equality meaning uniformity and those who go for um distinction and particularity, and that just leads to sort of a a kind of a war of the genders.
SPEAKER_00That's interesting. I I think uh it depend really fundamentally depends on on how you define the meaning of equality. What I mean by equality is two things. Number one, what you're talking about, which is in a religious context, you would say that everybody has the spark of divinity within them, and therefore they are we're all by virtue of being human, we're all worthy of dignity and respect and and all of that. Um which I I understand it's easier to get there from religion, but I also don't think you need religion in the modern society to get there, right? We could just say that's what we mean by equality, and therefore people shouldn't be treated worse or better because of their sex or the color of their skin or so on. Uh, however, I'm afraid what we the path that we've gone down is um we are so traumatized by the imposition of gender roles on men and women in history that we are unable to accept the truth, which is that there is an element of those gender roles that is quite natural and naturally evolved. My wife becoming a mother has changed her attitude to everything dramatically, and she is a completely different human being as a result. With me, it has also changed me, but it's actually made me more of the gender role that I had in the past. So whereas we were both kind of working and very hard, hard working and driven in our careers before, her response to becoming pregnant and then having a child has been to basically, you know, I don't think she she wants to do a little bit of her work stuff, but that isn't where her mind is at. She certainly doesn't want to be going out there and you know bringing in loads of money. That's really not where her focus is. With me, it's been the other way. Like, I'm much more um uh gender role typical set, you know, typical, if you like. You know, I'm out there going like I gotta provide for my family, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. Um, and those differences, as I said earlier, they're complementary. Of course, when you've got an infant, a person with breasts and milk and and and a naturally evolved ability to know exactly what that infant needs in that moment. Like my wife looks at my son and she can know that he he's about to have a peer approval without like he can't speak, he can't say anything. He often like she can just tell. I can't, right? So so the those differences make particularly the rearing of children uh much easier than pretending that we should all do the same thing and be the same. But I guess to come back to your primal question, do you need religion for that? I personally don't believe so. I just think we have to be clearer about what we mean by equality. Although, of course, I would acknowledge that if you if you have a sacred text, whether it is religious or some other sacred text, you know, the constitution or whatever, it's easier if you have something that's embedded and unique, uh universally observed, to impose something like that uh on everybody.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. There was a a a Russian philosopher, you can help me with the the um uh the pronunciation, Vladimir Siloviev. Um he said, Man descended from a man descended from apes, therefore we must love one another. As as a kind of a parody of, is there a way of grounding kind of a universal morality in a in a purely secular worldview? Man descended from apes, what follows from that? Does it does it follow from that that therefore we have inviolable human rights? Does it follow from that that we must uh look after the weak of our society? Does it follow from that that we should prize liberty and choice and autonomy? Does it follow from that that uh there are these values of compassion or progress or th those sorts of things? And I guess I just come back to um why should we want to have an ethic of equal human dignity and value across all people um if there isn't something that's uh already there such that we recognize uh an equality to all people rather than impose equality as a sort of a a political program.
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean th you're you're uh no disrespect, but you're there's an element of linguistic games there, or maybe it's not linguistic games, sorry, Glenn, I take that back straight away. Your world view means that you experience what you are saying as recognizing as opposed to imposing. But to a non-religious person, you saying I have holy scripture here that says this is the same imposition that a secular imposition would make would be, which is I have a reason here that says to me that we should have equality between men and women. Uh I think we've just got ourselves confused more than anything about what we mean by that term. And if we can disentangle ourselves from that misunderstanding, um, you know, there's a bigger conversation about which is where do we get this idea in the West from? And yes, of course it's from religion. Of course it is. There's no there's no argument about that. My point from a much more practical perspective, I I, as you probably, if you watch my conversation with Jordan Peterson, you know that I'm much more empirically minded about these things. I'm interested in how how we make a society better now. I recognize that um there are a lot of people of my generation in particular who are sort of children of Hitchens and Dawkins. You're you're gonna struggle to get a lot of us, and particularly younger people, to, you know, to go to church on a Sunday. So to me, the question is how do you take some of the good things about religion, and it's not just the Christian religion, by the way, there are other religions that have useful ideas about how society should be run, uh, and how do you offer them to people in a way that's enticing? Uh, because that is probably what's going to make society better. So, from an equality perspective, I just think um it's demonstrably true that we live in a healthier society if we treat each other in that way. Um, you know, historically speaking, the the transition towards that has been to the benefit of both men and women, in my opinion. Now, we sometimes overdo that, right? But empirically speaking, I would argue uh that's an observable fact. If it comes from Christianity, that's great, but you're not going to get everybody to buy into it.
SPEAKER_03But it's yeah, so I guess my argument is not that you need the a holy scripture to tell you that each person is equal any more than you than you need the IKEA manual to figure out how to assemble the table. But I would say those four legs and that flat top do indeed form a table. I don't I don't need that scripture to tell me what the table is, but there is a reality of tableness that those sort of uh pieces assemble into, and I would say th by by parallel, I'm not saying you need uh Genesis chapter one to uh believe in the equality of all people, but I would say Genesis chapter one is describing uh a moral fact that is that is there before we before anyone comes to claim it as that fact. So, you know, I don't know if you've uh been watching Succession, but um Logan Roy uh in season three, uh people sort of ask him whether he's worried about legal consequences to whatever nefarious activities he's he's getting up to in season three. And he says, uh the law is just politics and politics is just people. And uh at that stage, you know, everyone watching that wants to say, no, the law is not politics. There's got to be something above politicians that can be bought off, as Logan Roy buys off politicians. There's got to be something above the social, above the the the the human, I would say to say that this is true whether this society claims it to be true or or not. And and I guess uh that's not an argument about okay, uh a holy scripture that needs to come in and tell us these things, but it is a fact of uh well it it it is a claim about what humans are like. And I would say if you want to say that humans are um by nature equal no matter their race, class, distinctions, whatever, if you want to say that humans are by their nature equal, you're already making a quite theological claim about what they're like. What how do you respond to that?
SPEAKER_00Um it to me it's uh immaterial whether it's a theological claim or not. Uh I'm interested in practicality in in in this particular instance, right? Um and even you know, the f the fact is the statement you just made uh about human beings are equal is completely untrue. And we know this as we observe the world. People are not equal. So to me, the big the bigger part of this is we don't know what we mean by equal, right? Yeah. That's the real problem. Um if you look, I have no problem with the argument that the reason that Western societies develop the idea of equality, which that is to say that all human beings deserve dignity and so on, is because of Christianity. I am I'm no opponent of Christianity or a critic or anything like that. Um so I'm happy to accept that. I'm just thinking about the society we live in now, in which people are mostly not religious, and increasingly so. How do we retain social cohesion and how do we challenge some of these terrible ideas about in essentially that are designed to embed a completely um they're designed to undermine the idea of equality in my view? We talked about it earlier, wokeness. Um how do we challenge that effectively, including when speaking to people who are not religious and are unlikely to become religious?
SPEAKER_03Does that make sense? It totally does. And I I think so I I wrote a book last year. Interestingly, you said about the the the seven laws of secular morality. Interestingly, I I dive into seven values that we tend to take for granted um in a in a secular liberal democracy. I talk about equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, and progress as things that we already believe. And I think step one, whether people end up coming to church or not, I do think step one is to make people understand the profoundly um gut-level, intuitive, uh belief-driven level that we we argue these things about. Because as you absolutely rightly said, empirically speaking, do we do we notice equality? You know, can you put it into a test tube and do a test on two different human beings to find out they're equality? You can't really. Um are any of these uh moral intuitions uh uh empirically grounded? Actually they're not. They're not. No. But they are beliefs. And therefore I guess therefore I would question uh Constantine yourself whether whether you are um a pure empiricist in that sense. I I would say that you have gut level intuitions by which you navigate the world and it's just worth uh figuring out uh historically where they came from. And as you say, you know, there's that there's the Tom Holland thesis, yes, it's come from Christianity, and I I'm on board with that. And then I'd also want to press into the logical uh derivation of these things that it's not because I'm a highly evolved ape, therefore I have human rights. It's it's that this is what humans are actually like. And so I'm not trying to make people take a leap of faith. It's I want to point out the fact that they're already mid-air, and I think there's there's some ground that needs to go beneath your feet that actually grounds those beliefs. Does that kind of make sense?
SPEAKER_00It does. Uh and I can see why it would make sense from your perspective. What I'm saying to you, of course I have gut level intuitions and everything, and uh I am a product of my time, right? And a product of the environment that I grew up in. So, and that that in in my case, the environment of growing up in Russia and in the UK, both of those are uh are or were at least Christian countries predominantly until recently. So to some extent, my worldview will have been influenced by that. I'm just saying that in terms of my own work and what I'm thinking about going forward is uh I believe a vision is needed. This is one of the reasons I think Jordan Peterson was very effective, particularly at the beginning, where he he talked about religious or religiously derived values and the stories that come from uh holy scripture without sort of saying, without making it about a belief in God, right? It was much more about what are the useful lessons of this, of and and what are the useful things to you. And I think in the society that we live in now, I just see a lot of people who are looking for answers, but they they're the the the religious door is not one through which they have any intention of walking. So the question for me is okay, let's let's go in through the religious door, let's take the useful stuff and at least give them that. Otherwise, we're gonna be in a really bad place really, really quickly.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, no, I I I totally get on board with that. And that that's where I'm sort of coming from in my my book, The Air We Breathe. So, yeah, pointing out things like equality, they are not empiric empirically based, they are belief-based. Um, what what are the foundations? Perhaps we could take a different one. Um, freedom of speech, for instance, as something that's very uh sort of dear to your heart. I think that presupposes a difference between words and violence. Um which interestingly, Alex O'Connor pressed into with you um recently on on uh on his channel, uh cosmic skeptic, uh atheist YouTuber and blogger um and podcaster. So he made he made the point that that I'm often making as well, that if there is no kind of if we don't have souls and if there's no such thing as that level to reality, but it's all a physical reality, then at at bottom there isn't anything different between the neurological firings of my brain when you call me a a nasty name or the neurological firings of my brain when you slap me across the cheek. Therefore the distinction between words and violences collapse. Words and violence collapses, doesn't it? Um yeah. How do you reflect on that?
SPEAKER_00Well, I'll say to you the same thing I said to Alex, which is I don't think that's true. Um the the neurochemical reaction you have to being called a word is something over which you have control. Uh the pain you feel when I slap you in the face is not something over which you feel control, uh, where you have control. Uh now a lot of people feel that because someone said something offensive to them or something to them that they think is offensive, that their reaction isn't voluntary, but it's really not. If you change the way you think, you will experience those things differently. You can't really do that with physical uh with physical things. Um So I I don't I don't really buy that argument particularly.
SPEAKER_03Would you say there's a difference between um there's a difference between persuasion and coercion, isn't there? That you know the words words are all we have in in this sense of healthy dialogue and debate that changes minds. That that is uh a very different thing to um you know forcing someone to do something either just financially or with a threat of violence. The we we're talking very different things, aren't we? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. And at that stage, I I think we're tapping into something quite interesting about um you know, Jesus said, put away your sword, those who live by the sword will die by the sword, and and here's someone who then in the New Testament says, um, go and spread the gospel through the the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. And and obviously the the Dark Ages were a very um mixed um uh a very mixed experiment in how the church was meant to uh forward its end via persuasion and not via violence, and and the Spanish Inquisition and Crusades and things like that are uh horrendous uh exceptions to the rule. But they're they're kind of the exceptions that prove that there is a rule, that we hate the idea of compelled belief. And we feel very strongly that persuasion is the way to forge your ends and and not violence. Um and and again, I yeah, I I just wonder whether that presses into there's there's something different between what the Bible would call logos and word and something and and the flesh and the material reality, and that we kind of know we we need to prioritize the one over the other. And I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_00But I'm see, I'm not an atheist and I never have been, and so the idea that the soul exists isn't controversial to me.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, my view is uh I I'm I'm quite a spiritual person. I've experienced all sorts of really uh incredibly non-embodied, inexplic you know, physiologically inexplicable things in my life. So I'm not uh I certainly would never claim that uh you know we're just we're just uh phys we're just physical animals and we have no soul at all. That's interesting.
SPEAKER_03And so when you talk about it's difficult for secular people to get on board with the idea of God, um what what are you thinking about when you when if you if you hear a Christian like me say God, um what what does that sort of mean to you and and what might be the resistance to that?
SPEAKER_00That's a good question. What do I think about I mean the you know the cartoon version is the old man in the sky. Right, right. Uh that's the cartoon version. But I suppose to a certain extent that is that there is an entity with some kind of intentionality that created the world and everyone in it, and that's sort of sitting out up there evaluating, you know, uh evaluating, you know, sort of nodding uh not nodding, but wagging its finger as you watch porn letter now or whatever. You know what I mean? Like that that sort of like sort of right, wrong, bad, you know, judging you uh from that perspective.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's always my next question. When when if somebody ever says to me they don't believe in God, my next question is well, which God don't you believe in? And they end up describing some kind of distant individual high on power, low on personality, Zeus, basically, with a thunderbolt Regid Hurl, and I kind of say, well, I'm I don't know about the Thunderbolt, but the rest of it, yeah. The rest, yeah, yeah. As though God is kind of a super being within the created order. And I at that stage I always sort of think, you know, if if Hamlet ever wondered where Shakespeare was, you've got you've got two different answers to Hamlet. If Hamlet's like, Where is Shakespeare? I don't believe in Shakespeare. Show me Shakespeare. Like one answer is Shakespeare is is actually nowhere in your universe, and another answer is Shakespeare is your universe. In him you live and move and have your being.
SPEAKER_00And and and I think that's I mean that's a that's a a line from So how does how does the universe have a son that it sends down into itself to spread a certain message and to die for the sins of the people that it's created?
SPEAKER_03So imagine that Shakespeare wanted to make himself known to Hamlet. He could write himself into the play as William Shakespeare.
SPEAKER_00And you know Do you not think it's quite a weird thing for Shakespeare to do, though?
SPEAKER_03Apparently it's so Dorothy Sayers did did this in a in a detective novel. Um she sort of fell in love with her protagonist and and decided to write herself into the story so they could they could actually meet. Yeah. And explain that. So I I I think I think when you when you do create something, you you have that kind of sense. And I often think people who tell stories are creators of worlds already. And there's a number of things that follow from that. One is that you know no one has ever created a world without suffering and sorrow. Like you you tell a story in which there's a bright kingdom and then the dragon comes and steals somebody away, and there's a dark clouds and storm and chaos, and you know, maybe the hero steps forward and and wins the day through struggle. Like every every story we've ever told actually has a shape to it, a little bit like what you just said, you know, that there is a fall, um, that there is through love a hero who comes and and wins the day through struggle and sacrifice. And and I guess that, yeah, the Christian story is that the author writes himself in as the central hero and through love brings about the happily ever after, and that's why the stories that resonate with us have that kind of shape to them. I don't know if that resonates with you at all.
SPEAKER_00Uh it well, what I would say is that those stories take that shape because that's human nature, and actually a lot a lot of that story, I mean, i there's there's a debate, in my opinion, to be had about which of those stories is more accurate. The sort of game of thrill thrones universe? Yes. Or or the more sort of triumph of adversity story, which one of those is you know Lord of the Rings.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Lord of the that that's right, perfect metaphor. Yeah. Um I don't know which one of those is historically more true. Um you know, when I look at my own life experience, for example, growing up in uh late Soviet Union, early 90s Russia, that was much more of a Game of Thrones world than than a Lord of the Rings. And the world I observe around me is much more Game of Thrones than Lord of the Rings.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
SPEAKER_00Um so to some extent I would argue that that shape of story is so appealing to human beings precisely because it's not true. But it speaks to uh our dreams and aspirations about the world that we would like to see, and it encourages us to be the best version of ourselves in the hope that that world can someday be created, or at least we can get closer to it.
SPEAKER_03And even as you give that account of things, you've kind of done a Lord of the Rings thing there. Kind of through through struggle, we can get somewhere better than we were. That's right.
SPEAKER_00But that's why that's why we like those stories, I think. So um the divine element of it uh doesn't seem to me, uh forgive me, to be necessary.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. It reminds me very much of um Darren Brown. He was once asked about his magic and why his magic is so so so compelling, and he's he's a showman as much as he is a magician. And he said so much magic is is boring because it tells the God story. And the God story is um you're in trouble with a snap of the fingers, everything comes up roses, and you take a bow. And and that's not very interesting. He said he said, The kind of magic I like to do is I like to tell the hero story. And the hero story is everything looks like it's falling apart, and there's no hope whatsoever, and then the protagonist shows up and then brings about this wonderful catastrophe that brings all things back right again and in the nick of time everything, you know, works out and there's a happily ever after. That's the that's the hero's story. And I remember listening to Darren Brown, who's gone on an interesting spiritual journey himself, but um from from belief to to atheism. But uh I just listened to that and I want to say, what if the God story is the hero story? And I guess that and the Christian message is um the the God who's worth bothering about is not the Zeus figure on height. The God who's worth bothering about is the hero who incarnates, descends down to the deepest depths, gives himself for the life of the world, and in struggle is uh moving things towards a happily ever after. And I think to the degree that we resonate with that, I think we're resonating with God. And it might not be the God that we thought of as the bearded individual who's far away. It's it it is the human condition. I love what you said, Constantine, about um it's uh what what resonates with people is is not so much the idea of God, and if by God people mean a distant individual, I can completely understand. What is most close to us is the human condition. And I think you know, in Christ what you've got is the God who becomes man, and he's the sort of man who who kind of resonates with us. And I I wonder like have you have you had a look into the like the Jesus stories, read the gospels, that kind of thing?
SPEAKER_00And and if so I not really not not since I was like very young. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That would be Is this a live conversion? Is this what you got me on the show for? Just to convert Constantine, yeah. Well, Constantine was of course the the emperor who brought Christianity to the Roman Empire. Exactly, exactly. Um, you what you want me to follow in his footsteps, I take. I do just for the clicks, obviously. That would get a lot of views. Um if I could convert live on air. Um, this is all very interesting. And look, by the way, the conception of God that you were talking about, which is God being the universe in which we all exist, uh that isn't really particularly counter to the way that I experience or th or think of the world. Um the other stuff which in which human beings get involved, uh the sort of more organized religion side of it, that's where I have um that's that's the bit I find a lot less appealing.
SPEAKER_03Yes. For sure. Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I I I totally get into that in the book. I I think that when we tend to think of the church, we think of something that is uh unequal, coercive, uh cruel, unenlightened, anti-science, restrictive, and regressive. Um which which interestingly though is is using those those same seven values uh as as our kind of starting point. So I can I can totally understand uh how uh organized religion has not covered itself in glory uh in in lots of ways. Um but Constantine, you've you've you've written this book, uh, An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. Um what are you hoping that it does?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's been out for a while now, so um I'm actually working on a second book which uh is going to be called Gratitude. So this will this is gonna get your juices flowing. Absolutely straight away, I'd imagine. Um But uh yeah, so the first book was really, you know, one of my frustrations to some extent with the first book was about the fact that I wrote a book uh expressing genuinely a very deep appreciation for everything we have in the West and trying to remind people why it's worth preserving and protecting. Uh, but in many ways it was quite a negative book, despite that. Uh there was a lot of criticism of where we're going wrong, and you know, that that's not unnecessary and not unhealthy in and of itself. But what what I really want to talk about uh now is um the journey of recognizing and accepting our own mistakes and those of others in our lives, um and those mistakes that were made by the people for whose crimes we're now supposed to apparently answer our ancestors, uh and and how do you recognize and accept those and move on without this endless self-flagellation and uh nihilism and self-loathing, which I think the West is becoming infected with. Um so it it that's really what I'm interested in right now is how do you how do we remember that what we have is really genuinely wonderful, and how do we be grateful for it? Because, you know, my experience is gratitude is such a powerful thing uh that when you engage in it, you end up in a better place and then you have more things to be grateful for. I love it.
SPEAKER_03So the future the future is post-woke when we are grateful and uh full of wonder and forgiveness is woven in. Um I can I can see where you're headed, Constantine. I can it it's to to God, it's to Jesus. Is that where I'm headed? But um, Constantine, you've been really generous with your time. Uh appreciate it. And uh yeah, no, I hope people uh go and subscribe to the trigonometry channel. If they haven't already, I'm sure they are. But uh Constantine Kissen, thank you for joining us. Glenn, really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01Well, there we go. Wasn't that fascinating? We'd love to extend our thanks to Constantine Kissen for coming on the show. It was great to have you. And yeah, thanks for listening, everyone. If you have any uh reflections on this episode or other episodes of the Speak Life Podcast, I'm gonna start something new. Listener correspondence. So probably the easiest thing is if you email me directly, actually. My email is Thomas at speaklife.org.uk. So drop me an email with your thoughts and uh next time I will read some of them out on air. So looking forward to hearing your reflections. Well, that's all from me. God bless, and we will catch you next week.