Graham Jones Macalier is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University in Maryland.

He is co-author of a new book, The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, Conservative Humanism and the Western Tradition.

That is our topic today. Welcome, Professor McAlear.

Thank you. Delighted to be here.

First, would you like to give a nod to your co-author?

Yes. Alex Rosenthal and I, longtime friends.

We were at the University of Leuven in or Leuven in Belgium together.

And in fact, the idea of the book was Alex's.

He wrote to me around COVID and asked, you know, we've got time on our hands.

Why don't we try and pull together some of our ideas from many conversations over many, many years.

So that's, in fact, it's Alex who's the sort of remote origin of the book.

Okay, very good, very good.

Well, first, some terms to clarify.

You say in the preface that progressivism is, quote, a variant of liberal commercial civilization.

Describe for us the nature of that variation, please.

Well, really, the one sort of anchor of the book is a kind of inquiry into Fukuyama and, you know, his very, very famous book, The End of History, which is kind of representative into Fukuyama and you know his very very famous book the end of history which is

kind of representative i think of a um so very dominant position that the west holds right which is that

we are a commercial civilization uh you know we are not fundamentally a know, we are not fundamentally a military civilization.

We are not fundamentally a religious civilization.

That is to say, our young do not fundamentally go into the military

or fundamentally into religious orders.

They think about jobs.

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