Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to Yoram Hazony. 08/02/2023
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred, the podcast which gets underneath our public debates to the people and the principles driving them. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and I want to live in a world where we are seeking to understand even the people that we disagree with. And my goodness, can we find a lot of things to disagree about! Every episode, I talked to someone who has some kind of public voice or public platform, to try and get to their deep values and understand their story, really, to get a sense of what’s got them to where they are now. I talk to people from all different tribes: conservatives and liberals, atheists, and Christians, Sikhs, Jews, Baha’is, Muslims, whoever else I can find people who hold wildly different views on what gender is, and what we should do after Brexit and how we should think about race and everything else. I am trying to increase my empathy, and contribute to a common life not marked by some kind of fake peace where we all pretend we’re the same or that we all agree, but by a baseline of respect and empathy, and if we can’t get that far, at least curiosity. In this episode, I spoke to your Yoram Hazony. Yoram is a philosopher, political theorist and Bible scholar who lives in Israel with his wife and nine children. He’s written books, including “The virtue of nationalism”, and “Conservatism: a Rediscovery”. We spoke about his adult conversion to Orthodox Judaism, why he thinks only conservatism can save democracy, and why he thinks nationalism and colonialism are opposites. There are some reflections from me at the end. And I really hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? Yoram Hazony’s answer
Yoram, I am going to characteristically try and go deep fast. There is no asking you what you had for breakfast. There is no kind of warming up. Because I want to ask you what is sacred to you. And this is to give you some… You can take it wherever you like, but if you want some kind of guard rails or guide rails, it doesn’t necessarily have to be religious, but it can be. It is really about your deep principles. The things that if someone gave you gave you money to give up, you would feel an ick reaction. You would feel compromised. You would feel like something has been transgressed. And people have said all manner of different things. We probably don’t know what’s sacred to us, but I hope it is a generative question to give you a sort of slightly different kind of self–reflection. What bubbled up for you about what is sacred to you?
Yoram Hazony
When I think of what is sacred, I begin by thinking about my learning from my father growing up from the time I was a small child. And there are many things that are… that we inherit from our parents, whether we are aware of it or not. And I inherited from my father first of all a very powerful connection to the Jewish people, to the Jewish story, to the State of Israel as an expression of the Jewish story. And as I got older, this connection became an intellectual and spiritual adventure, and an exploration. I was, I think, in high school – I did not grow up in an observant Jewish family. I grew up in a liberal town, a college town, Princeton, New Jersey, where there was very, very little talk about tradition, scripture, God… All of these things were kind of, you know, beyond the pale. And as I got older, I pulled on these threads of my connection to the Jews as a people to try to understand what my ancestors had stood for, and what they had believed. And that led to Torah study, and that led to trying to understand the God of Israel. And so, at this point, I’m 58 years old. This is all a long time ago. My wife and I are Orthodox Jews, we live in the kind of community where there are 15 different synagogues, literally, in the neighbourhood, in Jerusalem. And the things that are sacred to me as an adult, and as a scholar, and a teacher, grew out of those original things as a child. At this point, the Sabbath is sacred. Our scriptures are sacred. The relationship… my relationship to God and His commandments is sacred. And we have a family in which we teach these things. Not every child comes out thinking what their parents think, thank God, but we do provide a framework and that feeling of sacredness is, I think, handed down.
Liberal childhood and the Jewish tradition
Elizabeth
I really want to come back to that, and particularly the pull towards… from a kind of childhood when your identity was very Jewish, but actually, religious practice wasn’t particularly handed down. Because lots of people go in the other direction, and I’m always interested in that trajectory. But I just want to stay a little bit on the childhood, because you were you were born in Israel, right? How much time did you spend going back and forth? And how do you think that kind of… do you feel like you had a two–culture childhood, or did you feel strongly American and someone who visited Israel?
Yoram Hazony
I was a year old when my father began teaching in Princeton, and my wife and I moved back to Israel after, you know, after college. I went back and forth some during graduate school, but so mostly I grew up in the United States, but I was growing up in a Jewish Israeli home. And so there certainly were two different cultures. And people actually asked me, you know… I was on a Jewish podcast a few days ago with an Israeli professor and he said, “Well, you know, why do you write about the Anglo–American tradition? You know, what does that have to do with us?” And it certainly has a lot to do with me, but I also think that there is a very deep connection between the English tradition, or the Anglo–American tradition, and the Jewish tradition. It’s not, you know, it’s not every nation in the world where, you know, you can, you know, start picking up old books and they’re filled to the brim from end to end with commentary and discussion about old Jewish books. And this is not only, you know, the Hebrew Bible. There are figures in English history who are who are extraordinarily well–versed in the Talmudic and the Rabbinic tradition and hit their, you know, their major political figures in England. So, I’ve always felt a pull towards England, as a close family relation.
Elizabeth
If you don’t mind me asking, where did your parents move to Israel from? And did you have grandparents in Israel at the time?
Yoram Hazony
My father and mother were both born in Israel. So this is in British Mandatory Palestine before the declaration of the state. And my mother’s parents came from Poland in the early 1930s. My father’s parents came from Ukraine in the late 1920s. And yes, that’s a long time. It’s a long time ago and it’s still it’s still alive in all sorts of ways.
Conservative Labour and teenage loyalism
Elizabeth
Yeah. And you have spoken so much about the influence of your dad on your thought, and I… The categories are slightly confusing, because we all call political parties different things in different nations, don’t we? So it’s hard to kind of locate others, but your dad’s was effectively a kind of conservative vision of the world but you also use this phrase “Labour”. Help me understand what his kind of political philosophy was that you were imbibing when you were growing up.
Yoram Hazony
I was just visiting London and was handed a book about “Blue Labour”, and in which is an expression that’s new to me, but it’s actually very familiar from my childhood. The strongest political party in pre–state Israel and in Israel in the early decades was the Labour Party, headed for most of that time by David Ben Gurion. And, you know, there are many people today who… they look at that, and they think, you know, “Oh, that’s the left, they must be liberals”. And, you know, there’s pretty much not a single liberal bone in David Ben Gordon’s structure of ideas. He and his friends, his colleagues, all of the founders of this Israeli Labour movement, they had been born into Orthodox Jewish Eastern European homes. And they gave up on much of much of the observance, but maintained the framework of the Jewish story being told in the Bible, the Bible being the foundation for all Jewish ideas and values. So that included an attachment to the Jewish people or the Jewish nation, and especially the idea of the return of the Jewish exiles, into which they devoted their lives. This was in a period before World War One, immediately after World War One, in which Jews were free to leave Europe and go to the United States or to Britain, up until the mid–1920s. And so those few who chose to go to the land of Israel to take up, you know, the challenge of the British Mandate of trying to re–establish a Jewish homeland, these are people whose economics is on is on the Left. And they’re talking about economics based on the vision of the prophets in concern for the widow and the orphan. But their politics is framed both by nationalism, which is to say the aim of establishing an independent Jewish state which will be able to chart its own independent course. And in addition, there’s also a conservatism because they’re so concerned to pass on the heritage of the Jewish Bible, and the Jewish story, and Jewish history, these things are so central to what they want to see their children and their country about, that, you know, that it crosses over into a, you know, into a very, very staunch conservatism on a number of issues.
Elizabeth
Yeah, I think it is… we’ll talk more about this, and I might actually get you to do some definitions, which I never do, just because all of this language is so slippery, isn’t it? And the Left–Right binary, I think, has probably always been unhelpful, but it’s increasingly unhelpful. And I find the more I talk to particularly people of faith, that Blue Labour or Red Tory or Post–Liberal, or sense in which things are being pulled from the both sides of this perceived binary, comes up again and again. And I think it’s a reason why a lot of people feel politically homeless, actually, that the parties have forced quite artificial boxes in a lot of our nations. But I want to keep following the thread of your story for a bit longer, because you grew up in this kind of, as you’ve explained, kind of… maybe Blue Labour, very kind of Jewish nationalist household, went to Princeton… It sounds like you didn’t really rebel against that at all, that those political intuitions just deepened Is that right? You didn’t do the “kick against your parents thing” that lots of us do?
Yoram Hazony
No, I really, I really didn’t. And now that my wife and I have nine children, and seven of them are done with being teenagers and two more are teenagers. And now that, you know, I’ve had this experience, I’ve come to understand that there are some children who are just loyalists, and, you know, they… from a very young age, they’re happy in building up the framework that they got from their parents, and there are children for whom that’s more difficult. I’m not saying that they’re disloyal, but they feel that they need to… they have to build something that is their own. And, you know, both of these can end up being extremely productive and happy, or extremely unhappy. But I was very, very… I was definitely a loyalist. I was very happy to learn from my father. But, you know, as I mentioned, our home was not an observant home. And we talked about politics all the time, but my father was a physicist and he, you know, he didn’t read books, and, you know, magazines about, you know, politics or political theory. He just had, you know, strong opinions that we pretty much all… Every Israeli almost does. And so, there is an extension, there is a certain… I don’t know if I would– I wouldn’t call it a rebellion, but I don’t live my life the way that my father lived his life. And my wife and I, we returned to Israel, my father had moved to America, and always talked about returning to Israel, but he didn’t. So we live in Israel and we adopted the orthodoxy of my aunt and uncle. And I think this happens a great deal to two young people have a loyalist bent, that they turned to aunts and uncles, to grandparents, to, you know, to other beloved family members or community members, to help fill out a worldview that is not necessarily complete in the home in which they were growing up.
Spiritual Homecoming
Elizabeth
I want to ask you a question. And I tried asking Rabbi Sacks – the late and wonderful Rabbi Sacks – this question, and he looked at me with a very sardonic raised eyebrow, and said, “Hmm, people don’t really ask those kind of questions in my community.” So please, forgive me if it’s intrusive, but I want to get… I’m really interested in conversion or renewal, or what it is that draws people into religious practice or religious identity, either from a kind of completely different place, or from a, as you had, a kind of frame. And I’d love to hear, if you’re willing – and again, it’s hard for academics, this sort of emotional and spiritual pull – what was it that was going on in you, when you and maybe your wife at the same time were like, “No, actually, we do want to be reading Scripture, we do want to be praying, we do want to be observing the Sabbath.” What do you think you were following?
Yoram Hazony
Well, there’s both a push and a pull. I think that, regardless of how people who become religious – converts or penitents, people who become more religious, become more pious – to me, it seems that regardless of the particular thing that that is moving them, there’s always a strong, a powerful sense of homecoming, an emotional homecoming. Like, you felt a tension because you’re in the wrong place. And then you move into the right place – sometimes, it happens quickly, and sometimes it happens over many, many years – and that feeling of homecoming, it can be just overwhelming, but it’s a feeling that you weren’t in the right place in the world, and you’ve found your place, okay. So that’s sort of in the most abstract sense. Let me try to make it a little a little bit more particular. The feeling of being 18 or 20 and coming into your intellectual and emotional strength is often today – I mean, probably all through history, to a certain degree, but especially today – is often accompanied by a rootlessness. People feel that they didn’t get much of an inheritance from their families, that they didn’t have extended families, because families are so small, so they don’t even know what that would be like. And then, the experience of university is often, you know, cutting them off from whatever, you know, from the families and communities that they grew up with. Whatever they had ends up being kind of cut off the moment that you’re with all these young people at college, and there really isn’t much guidance from, you know, from adults. The fact, you know, you go to classes, sometimes your professors. But mostly, young people are living in a society of people that’s almost exclusively people their own age. And the thing that is most characteristic of that university society is that it is not a society that is conserving anything. It doesn’t inherit and transmit. Very few of the young people you meet in university have a firm grasp of some kind of religious or political tradition which they are then capable of handing to people around them. And so, I talked about this general feeling of homecoming, which pulls you, but the push is that if you’re at all sensitive to spiritual things – which everybody is to some degree or another – then you know, you look at the, you know, the drinking and the sexual pursuits, you know, which can be very, very entertaining and satisfying for, you know, for a brief time, but when you look at this, you say, you know, “Is this really what life is about?” If you’re Jewish, then you might also ask yourself something like, well, you know, “So many of my ancestors devoted themselves at great risk and in the face of persecution and suffering to other things, what would they have thought of me, here, now?” And the answer is pretty clear: it’s that, although they probably would have been somewhat disappointed that, you know, that’s all that, you know, that their efforts came to. And when I was 18, I started visiting Orthodox communities. And at that point, these, you know, these different things came together. The feeling that, “No, my ancestors really weren’t that foolish. They had a point of view that was worth considering.” And I very much wanted to learn that point of view. And the more I learned that point of view, the more I felt this feeling of homecoming that I began with.
Conservatism versus Liberalism
Elizabeth
Yeah, I think we’ll come back to this at the end. But I have a sense that that is happening to a lot of people right now: the sense of both, kind of, need for a framework, and a need for a sense of homecoming and not knowing where to look. I think it’s very distinctive of our kind of spiritual and social moment. But I want to pick up the thread about what we owe generationally, because it feels very central to your definition of conservatism and I hear it in your definition much more clearly, than in many public understandings of conservatism. Could you just unpack this sense of conserving and transmitting things and what you mean by it?
Yoram Hazony
So, let me explain how I’m using it in my books, and when I teach people. So let’s start with liberalism. To make it very simple, a liberal is somebody who thinks that you have what you need to understand the political world. If you approach it from that perspective, from the assumption first that human beings are all, by nature, free and equal. And second, that human beings undertake moral and political obligation by choice, by consent. That you need to agree in order to be obligated. And from there, you know, you get political ideas like, you know, the purpose of the state is to defend those liberties and equalities that are ours by nature. Now, there are many different kinds of liberals – there’s progressive liberals and classical liberals and libertarians – but all of them begin with the assumptions that I just described about the free and equal individual, and consent. Conservatives may, and often do, care a great deal about individual liberties, but they begin their political view from a different, a very different place. Conservatives begin with an actual nation, or an actual religion, an actual community. And the question they ask is, “What would I have to do, what we have to do, if we were going to take what is good about this already–existing community that I’ve inherited, that I didn’t create?” I was born into it or maybe I moved into it as an adult, but still, I didn’t create it. So what would I have to do in order to see that what’s good and healthy and sound about it is propagated and continued into future generations? The moment that you begin from that spot, then you have to ask questions that liberals rarely ask, questions like, you know, “Is that a need for boundaries?” “How does inheritance work?” “Do we have to honour everything that comes from the past, or just some things?” “And if we want to repair and improve instead of just preserving things, because all things – human things – run down, if we want to repair and improve, then how would we go about doing that?” So then you get to words like “restoration”. And restoration is always, you know, some kind of a repentance. It’s saying, “we’ve gone off the track, and we need to go back to certain things that used to work.” Now see, Liberals and Conservatives, there can be overlap and influence and collaboration. But I think fundamentally, these are very different views. And if you are strictly liberal, if you really stick to thinking that the important thing is that everybody be free and equal and exercise their choice, then that means you’re raised – both in school and by your parents – by people who are implicitly saying, “You don’t need anything but yourself. Just think for yourself, whatever makes you happy.” By the way, I grew up like this too; most people do now. Parents say, “Whatever, makes you happy – think for yourself.” And that’s a noble thing to want to build up the child, but on the other hand, if that’s all that you hear, then honouring anything inherited from the past becomes very difficult. And the results for a great many people (I think people are beginning to understand this now) is that the gift of being able to choose anything you want without guardrails, just whatever you think: it’s not entirely a gift for a great many people. They say, “But how would I know? How could I possibly choose?” And it becomes paralysing.
Elizabeth
And very, very unusual historically, right? Because most societies have had kind of initiation rites and rituals and a sort of fairly substantial planned way in which they hand children a vision of what the good life is, which they can then accept or reject. But the liberal vision, I think what I’m hearing from you, is that its entirety is individual freedom, which again – and you’re very clear in your book, which I really appreciated – it is a really good thing. And there’s been many, many gifts of kind of that liberal political inheritance post the Second World War.
Woke neo–Marxism
Your argument seems to imply that the kind of results of this ‘underfocus’ on what we can serve from the past and how we transmit it to the future has led to – your kind of shorthand for it is – “woke neo–Marxism”. And I want to kind of: 1. get you to define that, and 2. if I may ask, if there is an alternative way of talking about it? Because I know there will be people listening who that immediately makes them want to turn off. They are more convinced of the kind of importance and the Justice imperative, which some of them might get from biblical sources, of a kind of what we’ve seen in the last few years: a kind of uptick in the kind of visibility of group identities and dynamics of power between group identities. And I just wanted to name that because I think what you’re saying about is very interesting, and its relationship with conservatism, but I want you to unpack it within those frames. Does that make sense? Or am I asking too much and being quite annoying?
Yoram Hazony
No, that’s fine. There is a chapter in my book which is about Marxism and the role that it’s playing in public life right now. And I do my best to try to, not just to criticise, but to show the strength, the attractive power of Marxism in its various forms, including the current forms. Because I don’t think that there’s sufficient understanding of this often among conservatives. The Marxist framework begins by critiquing, you know, what Marx and his comrades called the ‘bourgeois ideas’ or ‘bourgeois society’. Today, we call it liberal society or liberal ideas. And the principal criticism is that liberalism – because it begins with the freedom of the individual, and, you know, then individuals are supposedly come to some big agreement, and that’s where the state comes from – because of this emphasis on the individual and individual choice, Marx says that a realistic understanding of society becomes impossible, because that’s not what human beings are empirically like. Empirically – and this I think is a very, very strong point – empirically, human beings, they’re not born free and equal. Every human being is born into something, into a family, into a tribe, into a nation, into a religion. And human beings have group loyalties. They’re sticky, they’re powerfully committed to many things that are inherited. Now, they may later rebel and make adjustments, but the way we begin our lives is not as free and equal individuals. But as individuals, we’re not at all equal to our, you know, our parents and our older family members. And we’re not very free, you know. I have a three year old grandson who’s in my house a lot and he’s, you know, he wants to be free, but he’s not. You know, he doesn’t get to do what he wants. And so, Marx says, “Look, this is completely misleading.” This is not what human beings are like; let’s talk about what they’re actually like. And from the beginning of saying, “Look, human beings are sticky and they form cohesive collectives throughout their lives. Even if they leave and join a different one, they still always end up being part of some kind or another collective.” And he points out that our understanding of moral and political obligation is inherited through the common sense of the collective. In fact, Marx sees this mostly as being – not only, but largely – as being something very sinister. He sees the power relations among groups as necessarily leading to the exploitation of all the weaker groups by whatever the strongest group is. And, one of the important tools that he develops is this concept of a ruling ideology, which later ends up being called “false consciousness”, which is the fact that strong groups, a strong group, when they develop ideas that help them understand, you know, why they’re right – and it’s not it’s not hypocritical, it’s natural, they just… that’s the way the human mind works – but then they teach the worldview of why they’re right to weaker groups. And that creates kind of, like a possibility of a mental oppression, in addition to other kinds of oppression and exploitation. I think all of these phenomena are real. And the reason that, you know, when you go to university, and you have a good Marxist professor, so many students are attracted to them is because of the fact that you get this feeling that they’re talking about real things.
Elizabeth
They’ve seen something.
Yoram Hazony
Right, that all the liberal teachers are just pretending it doesn’t exist. Actually, they can’t see it at all. And so, all of that is important, and it allows you, it can, in a good way, it can sensitise you to exploitation and to oppression and to ‘false consciousness’. All of these things can be useful. I think the place that Marxism goes badly wrong is in the assertion, in Marx’s assertion, that every strong group necessarily has to exploit and oppress the weaker groups within reach. And so here’s where, you know, a conservative, you know, has to break with Marxists. I mean, certainly reading the Bible, I mean, you can easily see these kinds of dynamics of oppression and exploitation, but conservatives will say that Marx’s answer, his answer is, “You have to destroy the ruling group. You have to destroy the ruling ideology. The only answer is revolution.” And that implies – although, you know, Marx is kind of a utopian when he talks about the future – but Marxists always imply that there’s going to be something better afterwards. That, you know, when their group takes power, then they’re not going to be the oppressors. But conservatives say that’s ridiculous, that every revolution creates, you know, creates new oppression and the way to reach the most just society is not through constant revolution, but through the inculcation of a belief in the strong groups in society that they owe things to the weaker groups. That they can get along with the weaker groups. That that the stability of society is based on a on a kind of a negotiation, which is ongoing among the various groups, so that each group can come to feel that it is honoured, that it has a place, that it is benefiting. Now, I’m not using the word ‘equality’ here, because stronger groups are always going to benefit in a disproportionate way to weaker groups. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to seek and attain a greater measure of justice without the destruction of the revolution, which returns us all to barbarism.
Gratitude in a just conservative society
Elizabeth
I think the shorthand that I’m coming up with in my head is, that those with a conservative bent are broadly positive, more positive, about the past and more negative about the future. And those with a more liberal / Marxist bent a more negative about the past and more positive about the future. And I think some of that’s just temperamental, right? It’s like, not just political philosophy. It might just be your personality coming through in what you think. I’m trying to think what a guest that I’ve had on formally would ask you, if they were asking an honest question. And I think, if we go back to my very budget, non–academic rubric of positivity and negativity towards the past in the future as a shorthand, that is easier for those who – at least the ancestors or their kind of people who share their group identity had a much harder time in the past: people of colour, gay people, women… – frankly, it’s harder for them to feel as positive about the legacy of what is passed on. And to think maybe, “Well, surely we can do better than that, there must be something better in the future.” And the kind of conservative vision that you’ve laid out of “Yes, that’s tempting, but it won’t happen. What needs to happen is the strong groups take the responsibility for justice, essentially.” How does that happen? Because I think a lot of what’s driving this movement, particularly amongst young people and people of colour etc., is this sense that that doesn’t happen, that the strong group doesn’t share power. You know, that they don’t have the values, they don’t have the character to set up a just conservative society. Where do you see that happening, and what would help?
Yoram Hazony
Well, you know, it’s an important question. It’s a very difficult question to answer across the divide of worldviews, because, you know, I don’t want to speak for, you know, for different minority groups. I’ll just speak, you know, as a Jew. I’ll try to understand this. I don’t believe in a competition of, you know, “Who suffered more?” I mean, just the thought of it makes me kind of ill. But I think that if you were to stage such a competition, I think the Jews would, you know, do reasonably well. You know, being able to make the case that they deserve the brownie for the, you know, for being one of the most persecuted peoples. You know, I think that the idea that, you know, that I would spend my life embittered and angry and hostile and trying to damage others because of things that happened, you know, to my ancestors, or even, you know, even things that I experienced, I mean, this just seems like a wretched form of existence. I mean, part of what I think distinguishes not just a conservative worldview, but in particular, a biblical worldview, is that – if you know the Bible well, even a little bit well – then you understand that our world is not a world of instant justice. That’s just not reality. I mean, the Hebrew slaves, you know, they’re enslaved in Egypt for centuries, being not just enslaved, their children massacred and their religion forbidden. And, what? What are you supposed to say about this? That, you know, we were enslaved and massacred for centuries, therefore what? Therefore, I can’t lead a good life? I can’t improve things? I can’t change my world for the better? A religious worldview says that, you know, that this world is a world in which there is a great deal of suffering: suffering, hatred, killing, persecution, injustice… There’s no end of it. And the question that you have is, “What role are you going to play?” And a religious person says, “The role that I’m going to play is that, first of all, I’m going to be grateful for what good I can find.” And second, a religious person thinks, “My role is to try to understand what God would wish in terms of improvement, of betterment, for my people and for other peoples. And what can I do to play some kind of small role in bringing that about?” I see that as a healthy constructive life – which I’m not saying that every religious person has a healthy constructive attitude, of course – but a healthy constructive life is possible within a Jewish biblical framework or a Christian biblical framework, even though those two things are not the same. And it becomes extremely difficult when you’re a Marxist. Because the Marxist view is one that is fundamentally ungrateful. It’s not just that it’s sceptical about the past, it’s ungrateful about the past. And so it sees the past as evil. And it is so optimistic about the future that it’s absurd. I mean, it’s just absurd to think that every group in history until today has oppressed the weak and done good for the strong, but that you yourself are going to come to power and you’re going to escape it.
The Biblical argument for nationalism
Elizabeth
Thank you, that is really, really helpful. I know from your work that that is such a key ingredient for you. That the reason that the kind of post–war Liberalism can no longer hold is that the religious ethic that’s formed the kind of Anglo–American conservative world, that kind of biblical command to care for the weak and the vulnerable, and to welcome the stranger and to use your power with integrity and seek justice, is no longer holding. So that part of your vision of a kind of healthy Conservatism in which people flourish, requires almost a religious framework. The other ingredient that I can see, and it’s been a real theme throughout the theme in your work is this idea of nationalism, of the nation. Of independent nations as kind of the best way to organise society, to create flourishing for humans. And I’d love you to unpack that for me a bit because, as you know, having been communicating around it, lots of people’s reactions to nationalism was deeply negative. And your binary that nationalism and imperialism, or nationalism and colonialism, are not – as I would have thought – “colonialism is nationalism on steroids”, but actually, that they’re opposites, is really key. And I’d love to hear more about that.
Yoram Hazony
Sure, let’s, let’s begin with the definition. When I say nationalism, I’m talking about a principled political standpoint, that sees the world is governed best when many nations are able to chart their own independent course according to their own traditions and their own interests. Okay, so this is not a utopian argument. I’m not claiming that there’s some way, you know, to bring every single people on Earth to national independence and peace simultaneously, and that there’s no trade–offs. There’s no utopianism here. I think, in general, that human beings can be pretty crummy, and that means that they use every possible ideology you can come up with in order to do crummy things. So there are evil imperialists, and there are evil nationalists, and there are evil tribalists, and you can keep going. So there’s no utopian claim here. The claim is, again, a claim drawn from the Hebrew Bible, which is that, as a general matter, the independence of a nation allows for a government that cares more about its people than you would have if the nation has been governed, you know, by some Syrian or Babylonian or Roman Empire in which hundreds of different nations are conquered and governed by force by some distant ruler. Okay, so if people care at all about democracy, then they should notice that there are no democratic empires in world history. That the moment that you have a many, many nations being governed by a particular conquering nation, that’s always by force. It never develops into democracy. And the only place where something like democracy is capable of occurring, so far as we know empirically, thus far in history, the only place where we see it is in independent nations. Okay, again, I’m not I’m not saying that, you know, that if you have an independent nation, that means the ruler is good to his people. It doesn’t. But the biblical insistence that each nation has borders, that the Jewish people – even though supposedly, you know, Moses is talking to God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and getting the ‘best law’ – but still, he’s told that his people have to have borders, they’re not allowed to conquer the neighbouring peoples. And moreover, they have to have a king and a prophet who are from their own people. This is not saying that there are no good kings or prophets in other people. But it’s like this principle that comes from Scripture – doesn’t come from Greek thought or Roman thought, it comes from the Bible – that the freedom of a nation is based on having your own people ruling, because those people are most likely to be able to sympathise and to care for justice. That principle of national freedom is what then becomes the basis in England and other Western countries for the development of a government that is not only explicitly responsible to all of its people, but also that seeks systematic representation from all of its people. This is only possible in a single nation, where the people of that nation feel sufficient mutual loyalty, sufficient trust to be able to allow a system in which votes are taken and peaceful transitions of power are allowed. So, you know, there is no way to separate democracy from nationalism, from independent nations.
Different lessons of the Holocaust
Elizabeth
It really came alive for me in your argument, and I think it’s in your “In Praise of Nationalism” book, that there are two different responses to the Holocaust. Could you unpack for me why you think the kind of European Union and Israel are these two representative responses to the Holocaust? Because very counterintuitive, but very illuminating.
Yoram Hazony
Yes. So I mentioned David Ben Gurion and the Labour movement earlier that was responsible for the political establishment of Israel. And many, many liberals have a great deal of criticism even, you know, disdain or horror for Ben Gurion and the Israeli Labour movement, because they were so focused on empowerment, on the amassing, the building up and the wielding of political power by the Jews as a people, which had been disempowered for a very, very long time. When you look at the way that Holocaust is discussed in Europe and in Israel, you’re immediately struck by the fact that that, you know, many, many Europeans philosophers and political leaders talk about the Holocaust as though the European Union could be the answer to the Holocaust. Like, how do we prevent having this happen again? And it’s interesting because in Israel, also politics was from the founding of the state about how can we make sure this never happens again? And Ben Gordon’s answer, the Labour Zionist answer was, the way we will prevent this from ever happening again, is by making sure that every Jew knows how to shoot, that there is a Jewish army, that there is a Jewish diplomatic corps, that we engage in political alliances with other nations… God forbid is going wrong. We can do everything that we can in order to politically or militarily bring about a cessation of the persecution. So that’s one lesson of the Holocaust. That’s the Israeli lesson, Ben Gurion’s lesson of the Holocaust. What do we learn from the Holocaust? Ben Gurion would say, that being so weak that you can’t defend your own children is sinful. And this is almost a mirror image of a view that says, “How do we prevent the Holocaust from ever happening again?” Well, the reason that it happened, okay – and this is, you know, this is not an unreasonable proposal – it’s people, liberals or Marxists will say, “Well, the reason that it happened is because of national independence. It’s because the Germans had national independence, so they were able to decide for themselves to elect evildoers, evil mongers. And then they use their independence in order to persecute and to slaughter millions and to wage war and kill many millions more.” So that’s a reasonable observation. It’s reasonable until you say, “Okay, so what’s our answer as the European Union?” And the answer is, “Well, we’re going to remove political power from all of the nations and we’re going to send it up. So we’re going to kick political power – military, economic, political, and diplomatic power – upstairs.” To what? To an international body, which is another group of people wielding power in the name of empire, okay. And look, there have been people making this argument since antiquity. I mean, when you dig in the sands in the Middle East, what you what you find is, you find these archives of ancient imperial governments where they explain why they are conquering the entire world. And the answer is that they want to bring peace and economic prosperity to the four corners of the earth. That what the Babylonians thought that their God was sending them to do. That’s what the Assyrians thought their God was sending them to do. And now we have the European Union saying exactly the same thing: “The Holocaust proves that there shouldn’t be any independent nations. People should not care for their own children. We’ll care for their children and you should all trust us that we’ll care for your children better than you will.”
Elizabeth
Yoram Hazony, sadly, we are out of time. Thank you so much for talking to me on The Sacred.
Elizabeth Oldfield’s reflection on her conversation with Yoram Hazony
Well, Yoram seems like a really thoughtful guy. Again and again, both in the interview and in his writing, he’s really clear. There’s lots that we don’t know, that he doesn’t know, that he doesn’t have a kind of utopian proposal that he thinks is going to fix everything, which was just found quite refreshing. I was quite nervous going into this interview, actually, because it’s quite dense political philosophy and some of his writing and all of the definitions and the terms are used differently by different people in different spaces. So it’s actually quite hard to fight your way through to understand what someone is arguing for. But I did, after talking to him, get this really clear sense of his definition of conservatism being basically about what we passed down. A sense of interconnectedness between generations. And that question of what do we owe each other, being through time as well as to those currently living and around us. And it really chimed to actually with a lot of conversations I hear in progressive spaces about ancestors. He used the phrase ancestors and really reflected on his ancestors such a lot. And I know for a lot of people of colour, and a lot of people coming from indigenous communities, there’s been this huge uptick in interest in ancestors and what we’ve received from the past. And it’s an another example of where I often hear parallel conversations happening on the Left and the Right for want of less… you know, for shorthand, parallel conversations happening in different tribes, oftentimes with the exact same language, but an assumption that, yeah, that these things are wildly different. Often these tribes have got more in common than they necessarily know. It really struck with me, his thing about some children are just loyalists, not least because we had a chat about it with our production team afterwards. And we’re talking about the different roles that we play in our own families. Again, I often think there’s how much temperament is just shot through, not just the way, the roles we play in our families, but in the political positions that we find ourselves drawn to. There’s been big studies showing that some people just have much higher tolerance for change and they tend to lean progressive, and some people have a much higher appetite for stability, and they tend to lean conservative. And this idea that, you know, some children are loyalists, that some people feel a really strong moral intuition about kind of receiving what’s been passed on from their parents and maintaining it. If you think about Jonathan Haidt’s work on ‘moral tastebuds’, that actually we do have these different intuitive values. There’s moral and political intuitions. This, like felt sense of what’s important in the world, and we’re quite different on those things. But lots of that happens kind of subconsciously, semi–consciously, and it’s very easy to think that other people’s intuitions are obviously wrong, and obviously wrong to them. A thought that was coming to mind as I was thinking about kind of loyalists within families, loyalists within nations was – even for me, sounds like a sort of very ‘fun city’ one – but whether actually we need each other? That as in a family, probably the person saying, “Look, let’s continue the legacy that our parents left us”, and the child saying, “No”, you know, “most of this needs to go to the tip”, maybe need each other? That there’s something dynamic in that conversation, in that relationship? That it may be that those within a community or a nation wanting to push us forward, wanting to say there’s better ahead, wanting to say, kind of, “Let’s innovate, let’s build”, can risk tearing too much down, can risk kind of hubris or utopianism about what’s possible, and they need the loyalists or the conservatives to say “Look, what do we need to restore? What do we need to maintain? What do we need to carry forward? What are the gifts that we’ve received in the past?” But that the Conservatives and those who want to pass down and maintain need those who can see actually the faults in the past or the sins in the past, and help them neck up, not get stuck in the past and not be backward–looking but build a better future. Whether there’s any way we can frame this – and this is probably just my not wanting to demonise anybody – but there’s any way we can frame the relationship between those two temperaments. Those two attitudes to the past and the future are somehow dynamic, or somehow a healthy conversation that we need, rather than ‘one needs to be right and one needs to be wrong’, and ‘one needs to win and one needs to lose’, because that feels like it is not leading us in good directions. I loved how he spoke to a sense of his religious – I called it a conversion, but I guess it’s more like a deepening or discovery of his pre–existing Jewish identity, with deepening religious practice of homecoming. And I have lots of friends who I talk about these things, with lots of whom are not religious themselves, or are sort of spiritual interested and open, but I was having a conversation with some of them a few months ago around this language of God, and the difficulty of talking about God, and whether that language is even useful, or what alternative languages might be and our various and very different intuitions around that thing. And someone said to me, “You know, why does God feel like fear?” and I said, “God feels like home.” And so it was just very emotionally resonant for me. And I wonder, again, if there’s a temperament thing in there. A previous guest, David Goodhart, talked about ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’. You know, those who actually feel a strong need for home, maybe – who have strong value in rooting and in the local and in small networks of interconnected solidarity – and for those who do feel more like individuals, for better or worse, who feel more mobile and global, and that he calls them ‘anywheres’. And whether we could have more compassion on each other? That those who have a strong need for roots and home could be less disparaging of those who don’t, even as we might wonder why? And those who feel more global and less nationally orientated, or less locally oriented, could try and be less disparaging about those who are? Gosh, I’m sounding ever so “motherhood and apple pie” today. I think the final thing I want to say is just, we have kind of Yoram’s polar opposite on this series of the podcast, a guy called Jared Yates Sexton, which were very helpful for me to talk to someone who has kind of… two people who have very different visions of what the life, a good life looks like, a good society looks like, who are suspicious of the opposite thing. And many of you may know exactly what you think about these things. But I don’t, actually. The more I listen to people with their visions of the world and the good life, the more I feel a sense of epistemic humility and how complex the world is. And our systems and our nations, and our politics, and how impossible it is for any one person or any one group to hold that complexity in our heads. And maybe that’s bottling it, maybe I’m just giving up on the ‘noble Enlightenment project’ of applying my reason to understand the world and so know how we could fix it. But I’m more and more drawn personally to this sense of “Okay, I don’t need to understand this.” All this is not a council of despair. Actually, it’s a council of what is the work that I can do to seek justice, and to love mercy. And in my case, to walk humbly with God. What is the action in my small part of this planet I can take to be loving my neighbour and to be seeking to grow in freedom. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep listening to people with grand visions and grand analyses of the world because I find it fascinating. And I hope you do too.
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