The time has come! I am very excited to announce the launch of our new podcast on YouTube where I will be talking to a number of fascinating people about their fields and ideas and about the task of Restoration. Like and subscribe here to our YouTube channel as well so you can keep up-to-date with all the latest video content we will be uploading!
In our first podcast we spoke to our friend Douglas Murray. We discussed the threat of Islamism, campus protests, cultural confidence, and the Great Man theory of history, among other things.
We hope you enjoy hearing his thoughts as much as we did and that you come away with a sense of optimism about the things which we can restore.
When we asked him about stewardship, gratitude, and whether he had hope for the future of our society, he had the following to say:
Q: I guess with gratitude comes a sense of stewardship. if you're grateful for it, then you really want to look after it and pass it on. Have we lost that?
Douglas: We need to regain it. And the best way of regaining it is to realize it's at risk.
Q: Do you have much hope that we can regain these things?
Douglas: Huge hope.
But it will not come at the behest of government policy.
It will not come because the... Deputy Minister for Homeland Affairs announces a white paper that will look into this. It will not happen by a government review or a judicial review. It will happen by men and women being remarkable. That’s only how it happened in the past. And it's only how it'll happen now. It means people have to step forward.
They have to use their talents. they have to not subdue themselves, and they have to have the idea, again, of life as an heroic journey and not as this miserable thing of what I call the harmlessness aspiration. The harmlessness one being, you know, go through your life, don't emit any carbon… be reliant on the welfare state.
But, you know, don't make any fuss, really, and don't offend anybody and so on. And then just sort of slip out in the crematorium near you. No, no, the aim should be the heroic journey of a life towards a direction which orients towards truth in the recognition that Truth is not just some kind of game, but a real thing which gets you somewhere and will get us somewhere.
So, yes, I have huge optimism on that. But it's with people. It's only with people.
The goal of Restoration is to remind our readers (and now listeners!) that there is plenty we can do as a community and as individuals to restore our shared inheritance and rebuild our broken institutions. There are very few people who can articulate this as poetically as Douglas.
Enjoy.
Douglas is one of the great men he talks about. Ayaan is too, a great woman. May those who count stand up and be counted. There is still a place for heroism, even if the quiet variety, in this world.
I hope these will be followed up with a transcript for those of us who prefer the written word...