Concepts with Shawn Whatley

Many of our most popular ideas today are medieval. We are all, in some way, medieval thinkers.

Dr. Michael Bonner applies his experience as a historian and political consultant to the current crisis of liberalism. He explains what's going on by reaching back several thousand years.

Although this episode is heavy, his book is highly readable. He covers 2000 years of history in 200 pages. It helps if you know the people he references...

I'm trying something new: this is a lightly edited transcript from the start of the episode:

Thanks for listening!

Shawn: What do young people want these days? Do they want total unfettered freedom or do they want to be challenged? Check it out.

Kate: This is what I love talking about with young people, because they are ready to rise to this challenge, right? Young people want to be challenged. T...

Here's the other half of the Koch-Speer debate. As usual, Sean Speer offers a nuanced response that seeks to learn at least as much as he hopes to inform.

This whole conversation is essential for Canadians right now, conservatives especially. Its outcome determines the entire cant of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Sean laid out his argument here also: Six reasons why a state-imposed conservative culture is a terrible idea. 

Book...

Anthony says conservatives don't understand politics. He argues in Without Diminishment that "The state is the architect of culture, not a spectator."

Conservatives will keep losing until they realise that the must pick a side, when they form government. They cannot aim to simply manage the state. They need to shape it.

This is a hot debate in Canada right now. Anthony says there is no such thing as a neutral institution. All insti...

Matt Spoke builds communities, develops housing, creates start-up companies, serves on boards of directors, plans grass-roots political conferences, and raises a family.

Matt embodies a conservative life. 

I first met Matt at the Project Ontario conference he organized (with help from others) in Toronto. He speaks well, listens closely, and can carry a conversation as though you've known him forever. I admired his polish and walked...

Ben Woodfinden is a former director of communications for Pierre Poilievre. He has practical experience inside politics mixed with theoretical study and work as a consultant.

When Ben speaks, people listen.

Debate about first principles has finally returned to the Canadian non-left. A new, mostly younger group of conservative writers and speakers have challenged the status quo.

Young people, especially, find that Canada does not wo...

Canada cannot continue unless we share a common sense of what we love.

In BC, young students learn from daily land acknowledgements that they can never really call Canada their own. It belongs to someone else.

Students in Vancouver sing two national anthems, Canada’s and another belonging to coastal indigenous people. This goes beyond education and cultural awareness. These students learn to venerate indigenous nations to which the...

Want to be active in the public square? Join the symphony. Get involved in what you love. Be public about your pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Ray Pennings has spent his life building a winsome and articulate defence of religion in the pubic square. It is not weird to admit we have religious beliefs (including non belief); it's weird to pretend we do not have them.

Canada and USA differ with respect to our approac...

Toryism has faded in Canada, but it still gets blamed for backsliding and bad behaviour in Conservative Party politics.

(Full disclosure: I have never seen myself as a Tory, neither High, Low, Red, Blue, or traditional.)

Political labels, especially old ones, mean nothing without definition. Even with working definitions, labels often bleed into each other at the edges, especially upon application to policy and law.

Since Toryism c...

Conservative voters around the world are leaning into culture and away from economic issues. Sam Routley's research found that Canadian conservatives cling to the 1980's fusionism of traditional social policies and libertarian economics.

Can the 1980's fusionism hold?

Will economic determinism help Conservatives to win elections today?

Links to articles

Decoding Canada's Conservative Coalition

Sam's Substack: The Country of Our Def...

Young conservatives aren't falling in line.

Alex says, "We don't care. I'm not incentivized to look the other way. I don't need an invite to a table of six at Terroni in the back room to talk about continuing the status quo."

In a world when young voters can't afford a house in Canada, you'd think they'd obsess about economics. They don't. They care as much about culture as being able to afford a home.

Alexander Brown works at the ...

Is secular humanism a distortion of an older conservative humanism? And why are conservatives so obsessed with international trade?

The French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu argued that international trade promotes peace. He called it doux commerce, gentle commerce. 

In what sense is this a conservative idea?

Fascinating and somewhat subversive discussion with Alexander Rosenthal-Pubul! 

AI Summary:

In this episode of Concep...

What guides politics? What matters most in political decision making?

Since the 1980s, conservatives have looked to economics for guidance: economic growth, tax cuts, and decreased government spending capture the heart of political thought in North American Conservative political parties.

This sparks two questions. 1) How well did this approach perform? and 2) Will this approach address current social concerns, such as infertility,...

This episode is (ostensibly) about medicine, not politics.

What does human-centred care mean in a world of AI? Are doctors becoming obsolete, when it comes to decision making? When should we hand over our clinical judgement to AI?

I asked Ross Upshur for his thoughts on logical positivism. Are most doctors positivists?  

"Despite it being... as a philosophical and epistemological doctrine... been rather thoroughly discarded... a lo...

"Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions."

Grant Havers has been reading McLuhan for 30 years, and it shows in his new book "The Medium is Still the Message: Marshall McLuhan for Our Time."

It's rare to find a book so applicable to our time, especially one written by a philosophy prof! This book is excellent. I expect it will become THE book to reference when you write about McLuhan.

AI Summary:

In this episode of ...

Boomers have a worldview "frozen by fortune, not forged in fire." Through no fault of their own, the boomer generation remains blind to aspects of current reality from their experiences growing up in the post-WWII era. That era has ended.

For more on this, check out Dr. Nicholson's guest post on Peter Boghossian: The Boomerang 

Our discussion tackles Trump, scientism, climate change, 'masculinity crisis' (Calum says it's an immat...

Canada is libertarian on student cell phones in classrooms and statist on school choice (in most provinces).

We get a poor return on investment when it comes to education in Canada. Our math and reading scores are several years behind (even before Covid). Students are distracted by over 100 messages on their cellphones each day. And teachers cannot control their own classrooms.

We can do better, and Paige MacPherson shows how to do...

Gen Z sits at the cusp of major change in conservatism. Young people do not feel a warmth and longing for Reagan or Thatcher. Sure, they value freedom, but they also what to know where the guardrails stand.

Étienne-Alexandre speaks clearly for a new generation of non-left thinkers. He asks what might be the role of conservatism in the near future. He says we need to look beyond economic issues and start rebuilding culture.

Our epis...

Once again, Canadian university professors show their extremism in response to Charlie Kirk, a mirror of their praise for Oct 7. 

Professors shape opinion; they shape culture. Do we want the kind of culture they promote?

Turning to his book, Tristin argues that Canada's world-famous policy failures are self-inflicted. He believes we could recover, if we would simply "stop punching ourselves in the n*ts."

Links

How Canadian universi...