Should Ancient Traditions Guide Our Societies Today?

We're living through a time of profound upheaval, polarization, instability, a growing sense of disconnection. For some, it's because we've strayed too far from the traditions and values that once gave our lives meaning. But others argue those old ways were just not meant for today. So, do we need a new way of living? Or should we look to the past to move forward? In other words, should ancient traditions guide our societies today? In this episode of Doha Debates, we're joined by global thinkers, each with their own take on this issue. Even if we don't want to accept the solutions or the answers that are given by past traditions or past societies, we have a lot to learn from them. We need to be very careful about how much authority we give to claims that something is natural or historical. We need to be very mindful of the politics behind it. We have to look to the past which is rich in resources and we have to develop particular methods of thinking about it. Their perspectives will be explored and questioned in a Majlis-style debate, grounded in understanding and a search for truth. Watching over all of this will be a group of university students and recent graduates. They come from different universities in Qatar Foundation's education city and beyond and have been preparing for this debate. We were sold this dream. The idea that global capitalism and western liberal democracy was going to solve the world. The reality is, is that that dream didn't work out. I don't know why we're debating extremes rather than trying to find the middle ground between traditionalism and liberalism. Because extremes is where people die. You think this is a successful society? Absolutely not. A successful society isn't based on freedom. It is based on the fulfillment of your actual people. You're saying that you're for freedom but you're not letting the other people practice what they actually want. So I don't feel like liberalism is about freedom. It's actually about oppression of others while freedom for some. What's progress? We have to be able to define progress and define a tradition to be able to say that we have progressed or we have regressed or we should be traditional or we shouldn't. After our guests finish their debate, the students will reflect and deliberate before returning with their own insights, ready to challenge, agree or offer entirely new perspectives. I'm Darylene Abugayda and this is Doha Debates. Welcome to you all. Thank you so much for joining us. Wael, is what we call progress actually moving us forward or have we lost something essential along the way? I doubt that in fact if I define progress in terms of human flourishing that we have done any of it. It's a way of convincing us of our current conditions of accepting or normalizing the conditions of modernity. And so the more we progress, obviously, the more we seem to destroy the environment, the more we seem to destroy our social fabric and the community and the family. And now we are reaching a point where we have waves of mental illness that are now pandemic proportions. And so all of this is in the name of progress. So I really would like to see other than material prosperity, which we do definitely have. Other than that, I would like to see where progress has accomplished anything, where we have progressed in other words. Bruno? I wouldn't go that far. I think of the last three or four centuries in the West as a revolutionary moment. We got rid of almost every form of authority, religious, natural, social. It was a kind of a drunkenness of liberation. And that had a positive side. I think it had a positive side on the arts, on literature, on philosophy. I'd be very reluctant to look to the past two or three centuries and not see a great flourishing of humanity. But at the same time, that revolutionary moment became very negative and very destructive. And it's not enough to build a society around revolution or around liberation. There has to be a positive side. And I think that's the task. Beginning now, I think we in the West now realize that fighting against authority is not enough. We have to build a society with its own traditions. Sophie, Bruno says he wouldn't go as far as Wael. What do you say? Well, I agree with elements that both my colleagues have brought up. I do think the progress is... It can be too simplistic a term. I'm trying to pin down exactly what we mean by that. It's tricky. In some ways, what we're talking about is the age-old battle of the ancients and the moderns. Do we want to change everything, rip up the rulebook, destabilize order, because that's more creative, because more people can get involved in society that way? Or actually, is that an inherently dangerous and destabilizing thing that we don't want to do because all that really ever amounts to is new power interests taking over? And historically, the answer is essentially both. You can't really disentangle the pair. I'm not sure I'd agree with my friend Bruno here that the last few centuries have been a great outpouring of liberation. I think we have removed some forms of authority, some traditional forms of authority, and we've replaced them with others. And maybe some of those others are far less accountable, possibly. So I think progress... We haven't not made it, but we haven't made it in a straight, linear style. We need to reconsider how we constitute our humanity, our subjectivity as humans. We need to think about what kind of practices that we ought to be pursuing in order to cultivate a particular conception of the world. We are becoming increasingly empty from the inside and full on the outside. We go to the gym and build muscles. All these young men and women are spending more time in the gym than anywhere else, seeking money and cars and houses. But no one is saying, what kind of a human am I? What is my actual inner conviction of life? What does it mean for me to hold a set of values about family, about children, about friends, about love, about everything that really truly at the end of the day matters? And this is where tradition comes in. Tradition evolved there to create a kind of life that attends to the inner constitution of the subject. That's why children who are raised in tradition, meaning in big families with certain sets of values and customs and tend to be much healthier. They are stronger people. They're not fragile. They are not... They are emotionally mature and they don't collapse at the happening of any crisis in their lives. Now we are raising a generation that is totally fragile. That's so insulting. Kind of correct. I think a generation that finds an issue with people living their lives, they're the really fragile ones, right? I think it's their generation that's actually fragile because they can't handle the fact that people have an opinion that's different to them. Saying that we're fragile just because we're not following traditions from our parents or community seems to be a bit too simplified. I think if you went to other places where the commonality is that we don't have parents, you would see that people are actually rather strong there. I'm not saying that our reality is easy. Our reality is very difficult. But we have not trained our young generation to handle reality in a strong manner because this new generation, and I'm sorry to say this, these are the love of my life, the young men and women who are trying to decide our future. They are the most important thing we have. But they are increasingly empty from inside, increasingly fragile. And at my own university, one out of four undergraduate students suffers from serious mental illness. That means that they are thinking about suicide. And one out of five undergraduates. Imagine one-fourth, one-fifth of our students are at the brink. Because we're not empty, we're stressed about the world. And that is the scariest thing. Our students are going to be the leaders of the world. You said one in five people are depressed. Well, who are you to say they weren't depressed before? Maybe they weren't being diagnosed properly. It's like, calm down. It's not the end of the world that students take care of their mental health and go to therapists, you know? There's nothing wrong with that. He was saying it in a way as if it was a weak thing to feel, whereas it's not. So I took an offence to that for sure. One element of the modern project was not just the isolated, alienated individual, which is the standard narrative that emanated predominantly from Europe and America and lives to do nothing more than acquire and consume. However, the larger part of the modern project was actually also very reflective. And it was about challenging things that were just taken for granted. In terms of the younger generation, possibly I think it's just become more licensed and acceptable. And what I'm really, what I am so proud of the younger generation for is actually even in comparison from my own, the unwillingness to accept certain things. So I agree that there's a sense to which possibly we're talking about a slight reduction in resilience to some factors, but sometimes actually, it wasn't okay to be resilient to everything. It is okay to say, no, I'm not doing that. I don't like that. That's not okay. I think the mental health situation, as you're pointing out, it's utterly grave and terrifying the world over. And in some ways though, it's a completely rational response to the kind of crazy situation that we've got ourselves into. We are entitled to live according to how we want. Some people live in villages. Some people live in tribes. Some people live in groups in the mountains. Whatever the situation is, they are free to live and do themselves as they like. It might go along with some of your philosophy, Sophie, but I think that is the idea of tradition is the idea of actually democracy, because it's not the democracy we have today. What we have today is called democracy, but actually has very little democracy in it. The true democracy, true freedom, exists in those societies that are actually precisely traditional. The ones that we have mislabeled as tyrannical, as authoritarian, that's just because they don't fit our paradigm of existence. Let me give a metaphor or an image that I think goes in the same direction as what Wael is describing. I think of the human adventure as a group of people that land on a desert island, and they have to search for water. And water here signifies truth or the good life. They separate in different groups to look for water. These separate groups are different civilizations. They are looking for truth in different places. And then maybe some of these civilizations end up in a swamp, and they have to get out of the swamp. But what they shouldn't do is then to criticize the others for not being in the swamp with them. I think that would be a mistake. And we should be thankful that other people in different parts of the world are looking for different solutions, and maybe we can learn from them. Now, to talk about Western modernity, I do think in some respects we are stuck in a swamp. But I don't conclude from that, that it was all a mistake. I think Western modernity found some important truths about the nature of reality. Those truths, by the way, were then used and applied and learned by other civilizations. I think the best proof that Western modernity was not a mistake is that it has influenced China, India, Islam so profoundly. All of them had to learn from the West. If it was all a mistake, they would not have learned from the West, and they have. By the way, in my image or my metaphor, the paths that every civilization is taking looking for water are the traditions. You cannot find anything valuable in a day or a night. It takes a long time, a collective effort of searching. That's what the path is. There's nothing wrong with tradition. Tradition just means looking for something carefully and cautiously for a long time because it doesn't come immediately. That's pertinent to the idea, if I may. How would you judge any project or any experiment or any phenomenon other than its actual effects? It's European, it influenced the world. I agree. But influence in what direction? What is the final effect of that influence since the Industrial Revolution on the world at large? The European project is not a mistake in a historical sense. I agree. But it has failed. That's my point. Compared to what? And when we say it influenced the rest of the world, which is true, then we must see how it influenced the rest of the world in order to figure out what the problems are so we can reverse the damage. I have a problem with this sort of exceptionalism narrative around European, Europe and modernity. I think that actually there's this wonderful book called How the World Made the West, which shows that actually that modernity is a complete bricolage of borrowings or stealings from other places. In our everyday lives, we're part of economic communities, we're part of social communities, cultural communities. We take bits of our experiences all over the place. So I suppose I don't want to imagine a world where everyone's just doing their own democracy in a kind of neatly bounded way. I'm interested in how we respect that, but also know how to kind of live with the plurality of the world that we're currently living in and make that meaningful and make it more than just a kind of coexistence. So far, I love her. Of different groups. At the core, I think like, you know, anarchy, like, you know, I'm extremely anti-state, but I do understand that there's still a lot of violence if you go full anarchist. But the way that she was explaining it she's just amazing. I'm like a Sophie fan. When we look at the West today, there's a sense of complete chaos. There's a sense that people are not able to stand for anything. There's an enormous crisis of the traditional virtues. Courage, independence, freedom of thought. If we look at the crisis in world politics today, if we look at Gaza and we look how people in the West, not just politicians, because the tragedy is that it's not just politicians that are weak. People just don't stand up for things that they vaguely feel are wrong, but they don't have the convictions to know that they are wrong. They don't have the courage to stand up for those convictions. It's a moment of deep crisis and we might as well admit it. Why is it that, for example, Gaza or a certain kind of politics and now from Hungary to DC is possible even in human history? Why do we have the destruction of the earth environmentally? These are not questions that are beyond our understanding. We are not going to be able to fix them if we pursue the same ways of thinking that we have been doing for the past 200 years. The alternative is to look at other systems that operated within a different ecology of thought, of existence, of practice, to see what people have had that prevented them from, for example, let me give you a simple example. The idea of the rise of the corporation, which is the cause of so much of our trouble today, in terms of pollution, destruction of abuses and in the labor market, etc., etc. The corporation would never have arisen in Islam until the 19th century. It's impossible, because the way the Muslim society has operated in reality, in practice, over 1,200 years of actual Islamic history before colonialism comes to destroy the system. There is always one thing they insisted on that was sacred. There is no way for anyone to escape moral and legal accountability, which were one and the same, by the way. They didn't even distinguish between the legal and the moral. So in other words, you cannot have a limited liability company. You cannot risk the money of somebody else and get away with it. When we're looking back again, and it is tempting sometimes to look at the kind of beautiful and very noble aspirations as they're passed down to us from other traditions, particularly religious ones, but there always has to be that note in the back of your head saying, well, was everyone in that society enjoying that same kind of spiritual freedom? Or actually, did that society largely depend on a small group of people pursuing incredibly noble aims and some people getting very controlled, very limited, very restricted conditions? Indeed. Exactly. Because human rights did not exist back then, but you can integrate human rights with the same systems now, right? Certain liberal fundamental values are values that can be applicable to any society, right? Like me as a Muslim, I don't think every form of liberalism is something that is absolutely apparent, right? I think that certain parts of liberalism, for example, like a freedom of religion, religious practice, et cetera, in terms of the freedom of sharing of ideas, to an extent, of course, and all of these other ideas, I think they are applicable within an Islamic paradigm, right? And I think that's how we have innovation within a society. That's how we have a society that is able to continuously progress by getting all of each other's opinions and views, et cetera. There's another thing here that we need to bring into the conversation, which actually has to do a lot with dealing with tradition. Carl Schmitt called it the age of the political. It's like a tsunami that has engulfed everything in our life. Some traditions, most traditions, as they arise in all parts of the world, whether it is in the southern belt in the United States called fundamentalism, the fundamentalist evangelists, or it is the Muslim radical movements that are speaking on the name of Islam that supposedly existed in the past, or the Sikh and Hindu, and we know about all of these. These have nothing to do with, these are traditions that are totally reinvented in the name of the political. I think that's right, because not only did everything become politicized, and it was no longer possible to talk about the social and the communal as a different sphere, where actually things got done and things got decided, but it wasn't in that same political sense. So that contraption and erosion, and frankly attack and aggression on the part of the political to eradicating those community and social spaces, I think that's been a really defining feature of the modern now project in the 20th century. I mean, if you think about the areas that the state now intervenes in routinely, which would have previously, I think that is the big problem for me. It's maybe a quaint term, but this notion of what civil society really means, and actually that being an incredibly important political, non-political actor, in the sense that it moderates the political by having spheres of our life that it looks after, that it protects, that it is not subject to policy, centralized decision-making, which doesn't allow us to really connect and engage with the people, the communities, and the environments that we're living in. So I think that is a very important point for us to consider. Bruno, what do you think about the rise of the political and the impact that it has? I think what Guaido is talking about, at least how I see it, maybe he sees it differently, but he's really talking about nationality. This idea of the political, it's based on the friend-enemy distinction. It's based on the idea that it is us against them, but when you ask what does us and them mean, it's a profoundly irrational definition. But the idea of civilization, the idea of tradition, those are completely different from nationalism. Those are fundamentally irrational principles. They are about thought. They are about the exercise of thought. A civilization is an exercise in thought, in trying to look for solutions to the question of how to live. Nationalism is an exercise in anti-thought, is an exercise in stupidity. And that, I think, hopefully, as the West loses its global domination and hegemony, those fashions will disappear. The question would be, can a meaningful human existence that promotes human flourishing be anchored in a shifting ground, can be anchored in principles that can be redefined at will? Because ultimately, the name of modernity, the middle name of modernity, is this perpetual liquidity. Modernity is liquid. It changes, as we can see, in the last two years, we have no idea from one week to the next where the world is going. Really, just the last two years. And so the question is, can we invent in the realm of the secular, meaning where God cannot play a role in anything, or some metaphysical, cosmological high principles that come from, can we invent a tradition that has no anchor in fixed principles? Fixed first order principles, I must say. Let me add something very quickly. So I think the students are listening to us, and maybe one point we can discuss is precisely this point that Wawo raised. The West has become almost comical in its lack of principles. For example, gender relations. There were principles that were considered to be final, and the final truth about gender relations, that were valid around 2018. Around 2021, they changed dramatically with the Me Too movement, and not only that. They changed almost 180 degrees. Behaviors that in 1995 were on every romantic comedy became illegal. And then with the election of Donald Trump, gender relations changed again dramatically. So the most basic element of every society, relations between genders, and how they should be organized, and how they should be valued, how they should be regulated, not just legally, but in terms of what is the ideal, in the West now change almost month to month. How is this a way to organize a society? This is absolute insanity, right? We have to agree that. We don't know anything about anything anymore. I don't agree. We'll see what the students have to say, and if they think that this is insanity. One sentence, I can do it in a sentence. I do think that plurality could be sufficient of a grounding virtue in and of itself, without us having to fix any other point. And that doesn't mean anything goes, and that doesn't mean you can justify anything on total relativism. True plurality means taking seriously the people in the room with you, the environment that you're in, the context that you're in, and working through what that means collectively. Okay, so this is a great time now to check in with the students and see what they think. So throughout this debate, our group of students and recent graduates has been carefully listening to your ideas and all the arguments that you put forward. And next, I'll join them as they reflect and deliberate on what they've just heard. And after their discussion, they'll return to share their own perspectives along with questions and challenges. Hey guys, so you all heard from our speakers a short time ago. It was a pretty interesting debate on traditionalism. Sundus Wael, who was one of the speakers of course, said that children who are raised in tradition are much healthier. And then he went on to say that today we're raising a fragile generation. I wonder what you thought of that and whether you had any reaction to it. I found it very insensitive for him to put it that way. And it kind of seemed like he was blaming us for having feelings. He was blaming us for having a reaction to the state of the world. I think it's normal and human and healthy to be anxious and to be fearful when you look around the world and to feel depressed by the state of the world that we live in now. So I wanna build off that point. And I'd argue that I think what the debate was missing was two important questions. Number one, whose tradition? And then number two, what normative political system should be used to it to kind of answer these issues? Because I would agree with Professor Halak that there is a spiritual emptiness in many people today, especially in the West. But I think that we should address the social question, the spiritual question via community and via faith and via families. And that maybe we can reduce the power of the state, but I don't think we should get rid of liberalism entirely. I agree with Raed. Why should we actually care about people's social wellbeing? People are, they're individuals at the end of the day. The debate in liberalism or the whole point of liberalism is non-interference. It is the preservation of individual rights, right? If you say that there is a lack of spirituality amongst people, that is a personal problem amongst the people. The state should not be coming in and saying that this is like how you should feel or this is like, oh, you're lacking spirituality. Like, why is the question about that? This is insane. If I could respond to Madassar. This is actually insane. Go ahead, John, go ahead. If I could respond to Madassar, I think the reason why states do care about like the individuals because we have an overarching system, primarily an economic system, such as capitalism, that completely affects our spirituality. People feel like that their work is meaningless because there's an alienation of labor happening within a capitalist society. And now I'm not advocating for a return to Soviet-style communism because I think that there's also an alienation in these previous political systems. But I believe that we have to seriously reckon with what capitalism has done to the spirit. When capitalism and liberalism rose, we had three things. Mortality rates of children decreased a lot. GDP increased and the way of living increased as well. So now we die older. So you can see that liberalism and capitalism actually led to very good results. Is it a problem that maybe we're losing some type of like community or engagement with God? Maybe, but when you look at it in the grander scheme of things, I think we need to acknowledge that it has been a very good result. It really works if you try to include more things. So I want to- Toyama, you agree with Felicia? Because you're nodding. I kind of get what Felicia is trying to say, but I also question how long will this progress last, right? This liberalism emphasis on productivity and then extractions of resources and land is I think causing a lot of like not only spiritual disconnect, but it's also causing environmental harm, right? So what we're doing is we're going to dominate nature. We are going to extract nature. And to bring my personal perspective into it, I belong to an indigenous group where our land is communal and we worship nature, right? It goes directly against what liberalism is trying to say. And when we look at material progress, we also should look at how long this progress will last and what like Professor Halak said, what even is progress? I am a Kirat. So Kirat is a minority group in Nepal and our society is kind of based around nature worship. I mean, we have had a lot of conflict with the state about this. So many developmental projects that have enclosed on our sacred land or our sacred forest. But in this liberal model, they don't understand that land can be something much more than something just to be exploited, something that is supposed to be just productive. So I feel like the liberal democracy is in a way failing us and it's causing a lot of chaos in my country. Yeah, so with regards to like the argument of liberalism, I think that we have to be able to like compartmentalize it, right? When we're asking, do we have a rigid form of tradition to be able to actually fall back on? I think definitely we do. I think the Islam of today is the same as Islam of the prophets, ISM himself. I do understand that a liberal point of view, for example, in terms of like organization of a government or in terms of free market can have more innovation, can have more material, how do I say, success. However, the social liberalism is I think where Dr. Wal and I think where a lot of us, where we begin to have this contention. The social liberalism where everything's okay, where morality becomes subjective, where there is no actual right, no actual wrong. It is actually something that we get to decide communally. There have been huge achievements that have been made by liberalism, right? There have been objective, good things that have happened. But the solution ultimately isn't returning to oppressive traditionalist systems of power, right? It's actually learning lessons from the past and then reimagining what our future can look like instead of romanticizing a path that doesn't exist. Fine, so we'll talk about the solutions and the alternatives with the speakers in a little while. So guys, this was a great conversation, really powerful kind of exchange of ideas. So we really appreciate it. The conversation though is not over yet. So are you guys ready to meet the speakers face-to-face? The person that sort of like sparks a lot of clash is definitely Rod with everyone in the cast because he normally has like these sorts of like intriguing proposals that he makes and everyone's like, oh, how and why you're going with that approach. Personally, to me, the person that sort of created that spark was Mudassir. I think me and Mudassir, we agreed most of the time, but Mudassir kind of gave me a different way of looking at things in the sense that I think Mudassir was really good at talking about more of the theoretical side of it than I was. I want to first talk about like, you know, like separating empire and capitalism from liberalism, like, you know, trying to kind of make that distinction. That and also like, you know, try and narrow down to what do you, what do they mean by traditionalism? Whose tradition? Because personally, not a huge fan of cultural or moral relativism. You know what I mean? So I'm really looking forward to discussing that. So we're back here in the Majlis. And earlier on, we heard some compelling arguments from our speakers, which was followed by some interesting deliberations by our students, some really thought provoking conversations, which I'd like us all to share now. And Bruno, I'll start with you, because a while ago, you used an analogy, right? It was a water analogy. And what you said is that people are looking, there can be a desert. Correct me if I'm wrong. There's a desert and people are looking for water. But my question to you is, is the source of the water all the same? Yes. You know, I think human beings fundamentally agree on the fact that they're looking for basically the same thing. They're looking for some source of truth. They may disagree on what this truth is, on whether it is the final truth that they have found, whether someone else is correct or not. But the fact that we can talk, the fact that we can discuss, the fact that we can have dialogues like this one, shows to me, at least, that we have a fundamental agreement about what we're looking for. And in some cases, we can even agree that we have found it, but I don't think the search is ever over. Sophie, are the water wells all feeding from the same source, do you think? I follow what Bruno's saying, the extent to which we're all looking for something, some sort of points from which to navigate. That point may change multiple times in the course of our lives and our community lives. But we all want that point, that anchorage. I'm wondering if that is true anymore, that actually that, you know, sort of that deep need and search for anchorage and that point of meaning is, in fact, what motivates us anymore. So I'm going to be ambivalent on that. I don't know that we're all searching for the same thing. Okay, honest answer. Yeah, I worry that we might confuse water for a mirage in the desert. Water has equality. There are poisonous wells, there are good, healthy wells, and there are mirages. We need to know which one to choose. And I think tradition, again, to come back to tradition, tradition tells us, teaches us that there is a certain kind of water that we should be looking for and take that lesson seriously. What if liberalism just works better than tradition? What if liberalism works better than tradition? What if the reason why it's so prevalent is not because it's like a dominating discourse, but rather it just works better, like people's rights are better protected, minorities are better protected. I don't think we have the same understanding of liberalism. I see your definition navigating at the, what I call the surface and the appearances of what liberalism is. Liberalism is a long historical project that has been implicated deeply and structurally with every form of colonialism and imperialism. Liberalism itself is responsible for the slave trade to begin with. Liberalism is responsible for the extraction of all the resources of Asia. But to push back on this point, it's not unique to liberalism, though. The slave trade was in the Islamic civilization. The nations, for example, with genocide and colonialism also happened in the Islamic empire. The Armenian genocide happened under an Islamic caliphate, right? So it's not unique to the state. That's true. But again, here, there's another problem in the argument in that we need to be very careful about our language. When you say slave, this is something we throw freedom, whatever, equality, almost every word we say is a minefield. Again, slavery is a major field of research. The American slavery, as we know, has absolutely nothing to do with Islamic slavery. Muslims aren't slaves. And we have not only anthropological and historical evidence of it, it is enshrined in the law of the Sharia. That has absolutely nothing to do with... I'm not saying it wasn't slavery. There was a strong notion of slavery, but the quality of it is a different kind of thing. Okay. John Carlos, what do you want to say? So you mentioned about returning to tradition, right? And a lot of us have criticized your view about which kind of tradition and that tradition, as we know, even Islamic traditions have continuously changed over time and how culture influences tradition. Is there just one truth or are there multiple? And I'll add on to that. I mean, he's asking sort of, is there a timeless universal truth, which I'd also like to get Sophie and Bruno to answer as well. No, I don't believe that there is a timeless universal truth. I think there are multiple versions of truth. The issue is not that they exist. They have existed all throughout human history and actually they existed before much more than they exist now. Again, one of the myths of liberalism is that it can tolerate diversity. Actually, liberalism cannot tolerate diversity. As we know from actual political experiences, when a democratic government is elected in a certain place that is not desirable, it gets destroyed. The question is, how do the traditions that differ with each other establish certain kinds of relationship with each other? The pre-modern traditions, generally, were much more tolerant of each other and accommodating of each other than the liberal tradition of today. No, I agree with this fundamental point. I think Westerners today find it very difficult to accept that. But I think it's what history teaches us. There's clearly something about Western liberalism or modernity that is very intolerant of alternative ways of life. My concept of truth is very expansionary. It's similar to life experience. The universe is expansionary in that sense. It allows you to discover new things. It doesn't mean that what you find is not true or not valuable. But in that sense, there is never a final universal truth. That's why in my analogy of different civilizations looking for water in a desert explains why we shouldn't be angry that other people have different opinions. What I find sheer lunacy about Western modernity is that we get angry that there's someone in China or in India looking for water in a different place from where we are looking for it. I mentioned previously, so I think we all know where I stand. I'm definitely a pluralist on this issue. Certainly what Bruno is saying makes a lot of sense that in this ever-expanding universe more truths and true possibilities I think that's a phrase I'm particularly interested in true possibilities become apparent to us and that's important. It's that diversity that's going to help us. Going back to your question, which was, I thought, very good. How do we respond to the fact that liberalism seems to work? Now obviously we could question, do people have any choice but to accept it? So liberalism as a political project finds itself in a paradox, right? It says we want everyone to have liberty but we're going to define what that liberty looks like because if we don't define what it looks like then nobody will have liberty and it's a vicious circle. So why does it work? Because it really does. It does, you know, try and tackle that problem of plurality and complexity that modernity's laid bare. So it does work but there are certain people with very vested interests in it not working for everyone. If we didn't have liberalism none of us would be sitting here having this debate, like first and foremost. Like the plurality of ideas really does stem down to the... As a historian I beg to differ and I should register it strongly. If you knew, for example, what the majlises of the viziers and caliphs in Islam contained and which people came to debate and the variety of opinions and even beliefs. We have no prerogative over free speech and in fact we don't have much of it. When we talk about like liberalism, right, I think we have this confession like we tend to do this a lot not just with liberalism but any sort of like oppressive system, right? And secondly, when you talk about truth, right, like truth fundamentally is the truth, right? So when you say that, oh, like maybe you can have multiple ways of getting to the truth but the truth must exist because a world without just one truth is a world of endless conflict. I would like to disagree with sort of the idea that, you know, liberalism can't be attached to empire because empire kind of, you know, uses whatever ideology. Empires can use liberalism as a justifying ideology but simultaneously it's also a structure, right? Systems of inequality created by free market practices under liberal ideology. That is also part of how empire functions, right? And that creates a lot of the inequality we see in the world today. We do have to kind of consider the economic aspect here. Okay, let Wa'at respond to both what Ameer had to say. There are many, many, many words flying around that we need to take each word and analyze it carefully. There is lots of universalization too. You used the word empire. Again, like slavery. If empire always is the same everywhere, what's the difference between the Roman Empire, the Muslim Empire, or empires? And let's say the liberal empires, beginning especially with the British Empire in India and elsewhere. The liberal empire is the only empire that tried not only to colonize and extract resources of the colonized, which every empire does. To that extent, I agree. But Europe is the only, because of its Christian history, is the only empire or set of empires that try to literally change the nature of the traditions and the humans that inhabit these traditions and make them European in its own image. Not all empires are the same. Jews and Christians and many others, and I'm one of the legacies of this long history, lived under Muslim rule for 1,400, 1,500 years. They remained Christian. They remained Jewish. They educated their children as they see fit. They defined their own sense of a human flourishing, and they became ministers and the big physicians of the court. The biggest traders, the richest people in Cairo were Christians and Jews. All I hear from you, and forgive me for saying this, all I hear is the regular stereotypical cliches that are circulating in the West, and we just keep repeating it. So begin to check every time you hear. Is it true? Bruno, what are you taking away from this conversation with the students? We heard a lot of thoughts about tolerance from people defending tradition and fewer thoughts about tolerance from people defending liberalism. But I think that's not entirely surprising. That's been my experience for a long time. This is a very critical moment in human history. It's the end of Western modernity. The West has to learn that it's one tradition among many. There's nothing special about it. There was a moment a few years ago when I thought the West would go down softly. It won't go down softly. It will go down fighting as hard as possible and using what is still the only source of superiority, which is military armament. So that leaves me very pessimistic and worried about the future. The rest of the world also has to learn, has to learn from, I mean, I think the main lesson of Western modernity that some truths taken to be truths were not truths, religious, natural, scientific. And that, I think, is happening. I think we see in China, we see in India, we see in Islam, not the same China, not the same India, not the same Islam as they were in the 18th century. These civilizations are actually learning from the West. I just hope the West can learn from them. OK, and what are you taking away from this conversation? This is music to my ears. And I like that you both agree that liberalism has taught us, modern humans, the finest art of arrogance. And this is very important. It's not about personal only arrogance. That comes always for granted. But it is epistemic arrogance, is that we always think that we know better than others. This is something fundamental that we need to think about very carefully. The problem of the modern world and the solution to it lies with the problems and the solution to liberalism. Liberalism has to come apart or redefine itself one way or another, but it cannot continue because it is driving us to the brink of extinction. The world is liberal today, and I don't think that we are in a good position. I think we need to rethink all the categories I have mentioned, from the environment to our social communal structures to, and most importantly, to our inner psyche and spirit. This is fundamental. Sophie, what will you take away from this conversation with the students? We're running out of time, so keep it brief. Well, actually, I'm going to take away an enormous amount of confidence because I think the most important thing right now is we're all having these challenging conversations and we're all confronting that process of confronting modernity's inner arrogance, but at the same time, in doing so, re-injecting some humility and hopefully finding some of the positives from that tradition whilst being very open to hearing what other people have to say. I think that will be great. We can continue in that vein. Okay, so a lot of food for thought, I'm sure. I'm sure the students agree with me as well, so thank you so much for all of that. That brings us to the end of this episode of Doha Debates. Thank you to our speakers, as always, to our students, all of you for watching and listening, and we've explored bold ideas. We've challenged assumptions, and we've opened space for understanding with respect and curiosity at the centre. The conversation doesn't end here. Now it's your turn. What do you think? You can share your thoughts, your questions, your own perspectives. We're listening. At the end of the conversation, I don't want to bring up names or anything, but a lot of people were very traditional and very, like, very extremely, radically, we're laughing and, like, kind of, like, even seeing, like, ha, ha, ha, see, you are the arrogant one because you are the most Western, when in reality, I think we should have tried to tackle the issue that a lot of traditional people tend to be very arrogant and very entitled, but I think we should always approach this with tolerance and not only hate on the West just because we hate the West, you know? I think it was Dr Bruno who said we see that people who are, like, aligning with the traditionalism approach, they tend to be more open, and then people who are siding with liberalism were a lot more authoritative than others. Like, there was a lot of, like, can't believe you said that, let me, let me respond to that. There is no way that you can just say that and, like, we move on from it. I must respond. I think if we could just reconcile with the fact that we can respect different opinions, we can respect each other, become more tolerant, become more kind. I don't know, we could always be kinder.