The Green Room: has liberalism gone too far?

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week’s episode of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator's world edition Dominic Green meets the author Sohrab Ahmari for a chat about his new book, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering The Wisdom Of Tradition In An Age Of Chaos.

In it, Ahmari, a writer and New York Post op-ed editor, makes a compelling case for seeking the inherited traditions and ideals that give our lives meaning, via 12 fundamental questions that challenge our modern certainties. Among them: Is God reasonable? What is freedom for? What do we owe our parents, our bodies, one another? Exploring each question through the life and ideas of great thinkers, from Saint Augustine to Howard Thurman and from Abraham Joshua Heschel to Andrea Dworkin, Ahmari invites us to examine the hidden assumptions that drive our behaviour and, in so doing, to live more humanely in a world that has lost its way.

Don’t forget to subscribe to The Green Room for a weekly dose of books, arts and everything else that makes life worth living. Presented by Dominic Green and Arsalan Mohammad.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Amber Athe, the Spectator's Washington Editor, and I'm here to encourage you to subscribe to the Spectator's American Edition.
0:09.0	If you visit spectator. us forward slash subscribe, you can get our print and digital edition for just $7.99 a month.
0:18.0	This means you get unlimited access to our amazing website and will send you a beautiful
0:23.4	80-page monthly magazine. You'll also have access to our mobile app. Subscribe now at
0:29.0	spectator.us forward slash subscribe. You won't regret it.
0:52.1	Hello, I'm Dominic Green, my deputy editor of The Spectators World Edition, and welcome to this episode of The Green Room, our weekly podcast, books, arts, and all the other things that make life worth living.
0:57.6	This week, my guest is Sorab Amari.
1:01.2	He's the opinion page editor of The New York Post.
1:04.6	He's also the author of The Unbroken Thread,
1:08.7	Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
1:14.3	And it's the subject of Daniel McCarthy's lead review in the latest issue of our world edition.
1:17.3	Sora Amari, welcome to the green room.
1:20.3	Thank you for having me done.
1:21.9	Now, your new book, The Unbroken Thread, which is the lead review in the new edition of
1:26.6	Spectator, June's edition, is subtitled Discover in the new edition of Spectator, June's edition,
1:28.5	is subtitled discovering the wisdom of tradition in an age of chaos. And it made me wonder,
1:36.9	is this also merely an age of change, which is how John Stuart Mill, the great liberal thinker
1:42.4	the 19th century, described his era,
1:44.7	or is there something uniquely chaotic to our age? Well, if I were to try to put the subtitle
1:50.7	in a way that's more precise and gets at what I'm really trying to get at, but wouldn't be
1:56.4	helpful to the cause of selling books, here's how I would put it. We actually live in an age of intense
2:03.9	discipline. We are more regulated at a minute level than ever in terms of what we can say online.
	...

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