Transcript
00:00:00 I think that some people are deliberately trying
00:00:02 to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past
00:00:05 in order to say there’s nothing good,
00:00:08 nothing you can hold on to, no one you should revere,
00:00:10 you’ve got no heroes, the whole thing comes down,
00:00:13 who’s left standing, oh, we’ve also got this idea
00:00:15 from the 20th century still about Marxism,
00:00:18 and no, no, I will not have the entire landscape
00:00:23 deracinated, and then the worst ideas tried again.
00:00:31 The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray,
00:00:33 author of The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity,
00:00:38 and his most recent book, The War on the West,
00:00:41 How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason.
00:00:44 He’s a brilliant, fearless, and often controversial thinker
00:00:48 who points out and pushes back against what he sees
00:00:52 as the madness of our modern world.
00:00:55 I should note that the use of the word Marxism
00:00:57 and the West in this conversation refers primarily
00:01:01 to cultural Marxism and the cultural values
00:01:04 of Western civilization, respectively.
00:01:07 This is in contrast to my previous conversation
00:01:10 with Richard Wolff, where we focused on Marxism
00:01:14 as primarily a critique of capitalism,
00:01:16 and thus looking at it through the lens
00:01:19 of economics and not culture.
00:01:21 Nevertheless, these two episodes stand opposite
00:01:24 of each other with very different perspectives
00:01:27 on how we build a flourishing civilization together.
00:01:30 I leave it to you, the listener, to think
00:01:34 and to decide which is the better way.
00:01:38 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:01:40 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:01:42 in the description.
00:01:43 And now, dear friends, here’s Douglas Murray.
00:01:48 You recently wrote the book titled The War on the West,
00:01:52 which in part says that the values, ideas,
00:01:54 and history of Western civilization are under attack.
00:01:57 So let’s start with the basics.
00:01:59 Historically and today, what are the ideas
00:02:03 that represent Western civilization?
00:02:05 The good, the bad, the ugly.
00:02:07 I actually don’t get stuck on definitions,
00:02:09 precisely because, as you know, once you get stuck
00:02:11 on definitions, there’s a possibility
00:02:13 you’ll never get off them.
00:02:13 Yes.
00:02:16 I’d say a few things.
00:02:17 Firstly, obviously the Western tradition
00:02:20 is a specific tradition, a specific tradition
00:02:22 of ideas, culture, well known to be, perhaps,
00:02:27 easily defined by the combination of Athens
00:02:29 and Jerusalem, the world of the Bible,
00:02:33 and the world of ancient Greece and, indeed, Rome.
00:02:38 Effectively, it creates European civilization,
00:02:41 which itself spawns the rest of the Western civilizations,
00:02:44 America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and others.
00:02:48 But these are the main countries
00:02:49 that we still refer to as the West.
00:02:52 So there’s a specific tradition
00:02:54 and all the things that come from it.
00:02:58 My shorthand cheat on this answer is to say,
00:03:02 you know when you’re not in it.
00:03:05 So if you’ve ever been to Beijing, Shanghai,
00:03:08 you know you’re not in the West.
00:03:10 Somewhere else, you know you’re not in the West.
00:03:12 When you’re in Tokyo, you’re somewhere extraordinary,
00:03:15 but you know you’re not in the West.
00:03:18 Obviously, there are, let’s say, borderline questions,
00:03:22 like is Russia in the West,
00:03:25 which I sort of leave open as a question.
00:03:31 Possibly.
00:03:32 Well, if you were placed into Moscow blindfolded
00:03:34 and you woke up and you couldn’t hear the language,
00:03:38 or maybe you didn’t know what the language sounded like,
00:03:40 would you guess you were in the West or not?
00:03:42 I think I was somewhere near it.
00:03:44 Getting closer.
00:03:47 I mean, you know, it’s also a question, doesn’t it,
00:03:49 whether it’s European.
00:03:51 And I think the answer to that is not really,
00:03:53 although massively influenced by Europe,
00:03:55 but, and times wanting to reach towards it,
00:03:59 at times wanting to stay away,
00:04:01 but a part of the West, possibly, yes.
00:04:07 But anyway, it’s a very specific tradition.
00:04:09 It’s one of a number of major traditions in the world,
00:04:13 and because it’s hard to define
00:04:16 doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, you know.
00:04:19 Are there certain characteristics and qualities
00:04:21 about the values and the ideas that define it?
00:04:23 Is the type of rule, the type of governmental structure?
00:04:28 Yes.
00:04:29 I mean, the rule of law, property owning democracies,
00:04:32 and much more, I mean, these are, of course,
00:04:35 things that ended up being developed in America
00:04:37 and then given back to much of the rest of the West.
00:04:42 I’d say there are other,
00:04:46 perhaps more controversial attributes
00:04:48 I would give to the West.
00:04:49 One is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world,
00:04:53 which is not shared, of course, by every other culture.
00:04:57 The late philosopher George Steiner
00:04:59 who said he could never get out of his head
00:05:00 the haunting fact that the boats
00:05:02 only seemed to go out from Europe.
00:05:05 You know, the explorers, the scholars, the linguists,
00:05:10 the people who wanted to discover other civilizations,
00:05:14 and indeed, even resurrect ancient civilizations
00:05:17 and lost civilizations.
00:05:18 These were scholars that were always coming from the West
00:05:21 to discover this elsewhere.
00:05:22 By contrast, you know, there were never boats
00:05:25 coming from Egypt to help the Anglo Saxons
00:05:27 discover the origins of their language and so on.
00:05:30 So I think there is a sort of ravenous interest
00:05:32 in the rest of the world,
00:05:33 which can be said to be a Western.
00:05:35 Attribute, although it, of course,
00:05:36 also has, one should immediately preface it,
00:05:39 some downsides and many criticisms
00:05:41 that can be made of some of the consequences
00:05:43 of that interest.
00:05:45 Because, of course, it’s not entirely lacking
00:05:48 in self interest.
00:05:50 So it’s not just the scholars, it’s also.
00:05:53 The armies.
00:05:54 The armies, and they’re looking to gain access
00:05:57 and control over resources elsewhere.
00:05:59 To market.
00:06:00 And hence the imperial imperative.
00:06:03 Exactly.
00:06:04 To conquer, to expand.
00:06:06 Although that itself, of course, is a universal thing.
00:06:08 I mean, no civilization, I think, that we know of
00:06:13 doesn’t try to gain ground from its neighbors where it can.
00:06:17 The Western ability to go further faster
00:06:21 certainly gave an advantage in that regard.
00:06:23 Do some civilizations get a bit more excited
00:06:26 by that kind of idea than others?
00:06:28 Possible.
00:06:29 It’s possible.
00:06:30 Because you could say it’s the Western civilization
00:06:33 because the technological innovation was more efficient
00:06:38 at doing that kind of thing.
00:06:39 Absolutely.
00:06:40 But maybe it wanted it more, too.
00:06:41 Well, the Ottomans wanted it an awful lot
00:06:44 and did very terribly well for many centuries,
00:06:48 and one shouldn’t forget that, as did others.
00:06:53 I’d also say, by the way, and again,
00:06:55 it’s a very broad one, but it’s worth throwing out there.
00:06:57 I think self criticism is an important attribute
00:07:02 of the Western mind, one that, as you know,
00:07:05 is not common everywhere.
00:07:07 Not all societies allow even their most vociferous critics
00:07:11 to become rich.
00:07:13 So criticism is a negative sounding word.
00:07:15 It could be self introspection, self analysis,
00:07:19 self reflection.
00:07:20 And it can be what you need.
00:07:23 And in the Western system, I’d argue that one of the
00:07:26 advantages of the system of representative governance
00:07:30 is that where there are problems in the system,
00:07:32 you can attempt to sort them out by peaceable means.
00:07:38 We listen to arguments, most famously in America
00:07:41 in the late 20th century, the civil rights movement
00:07:44 achieved its aims by force of moral argument
00:07:48 and dissuaded the rest of the country
00:07:49 that it had been wrong.
00:07:51 That’s not common in every society by any means.
00:07:55 So I think there are certain attributes of the Western mind
00:07:58 that you could say are, they’re not entirely unique,
00:08:03 but they are not as commonplace elsewhere.
00:08:06 What about the emergence in hierarchies of asymmetry
00:08:10 of power, most visible, most drastic in the form of slavery,
00:08:16 for example?
00:08:18 Well, I mean, everyone in the world is slavery,
00:08:19 so I don’t regard it as being a Western,
00:08:22 a unique Western sin.
00:08:25 It’s rather hard to think of a civilization in history
00:08:27 that didn’t have slavery of some kind.
00:08:29 One of the oddities of the Western ignorance of our day
00:08:32 is that people seem to imagine that our societies
00:08:35 in the West were the only ones who ever engaged
00:08:37 in any vices.
00:08:39 Alas, this isn’t true.
00:08:40 It’s a sort of Rousseauian mistake,
00:08:43 or at least one that’s blossomed since Rousseau,
00:08:45 that everybody else in the world was born
00:08:47 into sort of Edenic innocence,
00:08:49 and only we in the West had this sort of evil in us
00:08:52 that caused us to do bad things to other people.
00:08:55 Slavery was engaged in by everyone in the ancient world,
00:08:58 of course, and through most of the modern world as well.
00:09:01 Of course, there are 40 million slaves in the world today,
00:09:04 so it’s clearly not something that the species as a whole
00:09:07 has a problem with.
00:09:09 And that’s more slaves, of course,
00:09:11 than there were in the 19th century.
00:09:14 And I’d say, on top of that, that the interesting thing
00:09:17 about the Western mind as regards to slavery
00:09:19 is that we were the civilization that did away with it.
00:09:23 And by the way, the founding fathers of America,
00:09:26 who today are lambasted routinely
00:09:30 for being acquiescent in the slave trade,
00:09:35 engaging in it, owning slaves.
00:09:40 People almost don’t even bother now to recognize the facts
00:09:43 that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington,
00:09:46 all wanted to see this trade done away with,
00:09:49 couldn’t hold the country together at the origins
00:09:51 if they’d have made such an effort.
00:09:53 And believed and hoped that it would be something
00:09:55 that would be dealt with after their time.
00:09:58 So the founding ideas had within them the notion
00:10:03 that we should, as a people, get rid of this.
00:10:05 The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence
00:10:08 set up the conditions under which slavery
00:10:12 will be impossible.
00:10:14 All men are created equal.
00:10:16 Once you’ve put that, that’s a time bomb
00:10:19 under the whole concept of slavery.
00:10:22 That’s ticking away, okay.
00:10:24 And sure enough, it detonated in the next century.
00:10:28 If we just step back and look at the human species,
00:10:32 what does slavery teach you about human nature?
00:10:36 The fact that slavery has appeared
00:10:41 as a function of society throughout human history.
00:10:44 There are two possibilities.
00:10:47 One is it’s what people think they can do
00:10:51 when God’s not watching.
00:10:54 Another is it’s what they can do
00:10:56 if they think that God allows it.
00:11:00 Really, really well put.
00:11:02 And the fact that they want to do this kind of subjugation,
00:11:09 what does that mean?
00:11:10 Well, I mean, it’s pretty straightforward in a way.
00:11:14 There are people who get to work for free.
00:11:17 It’s economic in nature in some sense.
00:11:19 Yes, but in order to do it,
00:11:20 I mean, almost always there are some examples
00:11:24 in the ancient world where this wasn’t the case,
00:11:25 but almost always it had to be a subjugated people
00:11:28 or people that are regarded as different.
00:11:30 One of the things actually I’ve tried to sort of inject
00:11:32 into the discussion through this book among other things
00:11:35 is a recognition that there were very major questions
00:11:40 still going on in the 18th and early 19th century
00:11:43 that were unresolved, which were one of the reasons
00:11:46 why slavery was not as morally repugnant
00:11:50 to people then as it is to us now.
00:11:53 And that’s the question of polygenesis and monogenesis.
00:11:58 At the time of Thomas Jefferson,
00:11:59 the founding fathers were thinking and working.
00:12:03 They didn’t know because nobody knew
00:12:06 whether the human races were related or not.
00:12:12 There were arguments, the monogenesis argument
00:12:15 that we were all indeed from the same racial stock.
00:12:20 Polygenesis argument was that we weren’t.
00:12:23 Black Africans, Ethiopians,
00:12:26 they’re often referred to at the time
00:12:28 because they provided some of the first slaves,
00:12:30 were different from white Europeans,
00:12:33 simply not related in any way.
00:12:35 And that makes it easier, of course.
00:12:37 That makes it easier to enslave people
00:12:38 if you think they’re not your brother.
00:12:41 Am I my brother’s keeper?
00:12:42 No, he’s not your brother, and it’s a very,
00:12:51 it was a very troubling argument in the 18th, 19th century,
00:12:54 also because there was a biblical question.
00:12:56 It threw up a theological question, which was,
00:12:59 I mean, people were literally debating this at the time.
00:13:05 Was there also a black Adam and Eve?
00:13:08 Was there, as it were, an Indian Adam and Eve,
00:13:11 a Native American Adam and Eve?
00:13:14 This was a serious theological debate
00:13:17 because they didn’t know the answer.
00:13:19 People say that Darwin solved this.
00:13:22 It wasn’t just Darwin, of course,
00:13:25 but by the late 19th century,
00:13:28 the argument that we were not all related
00:13:32 as human beings had suffered so many blows
00:13:35 that you had to really be very, very ignorant,
00:13:38 deliberately, willfully ignorant to ignore it by then.
00:13:41 So it no longer was, after Darwin, a theological question.
00:13:45 It became a moral question.
00:13:46 It was already a moral question, but it clarified,
00:13:49 Darwin clarifies it definitely,
00:13:51 and then you’re in this, as I say, in this situation
00:13:53 of you’re not subjugating some other people.
00:13:55 You’re subjugating your own kin,
00:13:58 and that becomes morally unsustainable.
00:14:03 So given that slavery in America
00:14:07 is part of its history,
00:14:14 how do we incorporate into the calculus of policy today,
00:14:21 social discourse, what we learn in school?
00:14:26 We can look at slavery in America.
00:14:27 We can look at maybe more recent things,
00:14:30 like in Europe, the other atrocities, the Holocaust.
00:14:35 How do we incorporate that in terms of
00:14:39 how we create policy, how we treat each other,
00:14:41 all those kinds of things?
00:14:43 What is the calculus of integrating the atrocities,
00:14:47 the injustices of the past into the way we are today?
00:14:51 That’s a very complex question,
00:14:52 because it’s a moral question at this point,
00:14:56 and a moral question long after the fact.
00:15:01 I say at one point in the War on the West
00:15:02 that the argument, for instance, on reparations now
00:15:05 that goes on, and it’s not a fringe argument anymore.
00:15:09 Some people say, oh, you’re pulling up this fringe argument.
00:15:10 It really isn’t.
00:15:11 I mean, every contender for the Democratic nomination
00:15:14 for the presidency in 2020 was willing to talk
00:15:18 about the possibility of reparations.
00:15:20 Some very eager that this country, America,
00:15:24 goes through that entirely self destructive exercise.
00:15:28 I say that there’s a lot of problems with this,
00:15:33 but if I could refine it down to one thing, I’d say this.
00:15:36 It’s no longer about a wealth transfer
00:15:38 from one group of people who did something wrong
00:15:40 to another group of people who were wronged.
00:15:42 It would have been that, could have been that
00:15:44 200 years ago.
00:15:46 Today, it’s not even the descendants of people
00:15:48 who did something wrong giving money to people
00:15:50 who were the descendants of people who were wronged.
00:15:53 It’s a wealth transfer from people who look like people
00:15:56 who did a wrong thing in the past to another group
00:15:59 of people who resemble people who were wronged.
00:16:02 That’s impossible to do, and I’m completely clear
00:16:06 about this.
00:16:07 There is no way in which you could organize
00:16:11 such a wealth transfer on moral or practical reasons.
00:16:17 America is filled with people who have the same skin color
00:16:21 as us, for instance, who have no connection
00:16:23 to the slave trade and should not be made to pay money
00:16:27 to people who have some connection.
00:16:30 And then the country’s also filled with ethnic minorities
00:16:34 who have come after slavery who would not be due
00:16:39 for any reimbursement, as it were.
00:16:42 The problem with this is, though, is that there are,
00:16:46 I’m perfectly open to the possibility
00:16:48 that there are residual inequities
00:16:51 that exist in American life
00:16:53 and that the consequences of slavery
00:16:56 could be one of the factors that result from this.
00:17:01 The thing is, I don’t think it’s a single issue answer.
00:17:08 I think it’s a multidimensional issue,
00:17:10 something like black underachievement in America.
00:17:12 It’s obviously a multidimensional issue.
00:17:16 Much of the left and others wish to say it’s not.
00:17:20 It’s only about racism.
00:17:22 And they can’t answer why Asians who’ve arrived
00:17:26 more recently don’t, for instance,
00:17:28 get held down by white supremacy.
00:17:30 But actually, I say white supremacy in quotes, obviously.
00:17:34 But don’t get held back by it, but actually flourish
00:17:37 to the extent that Asian Americans
00:17:39 have higher household earnings
00:17:41 and higher household mean equity than,
00:17:47 home equity and so on, than white Americans.
00:17:50 So I don’t think that on the merits the evidence is there
00:17:53 that racism is the explanation for black,
00:17:56 ongoing black underachievement in some sections
00:17:59 of the black community in America.
00:18:01 It’s obviously a part of it.
00:18:03 Could you say that even those things like fatherlessness
00:18:07 and similar family breakdown issues
00:18:12 are a longterm consequence of it?
00:18:16 Possibly, but it’s being often said
00:18:19 it’s being awfully generous to people’s ability
00:18:23 to make bad decisions.
00:18:24 For instance, how many generations after the Holocaust
00:18:27 would you allow people to claim that everything
00:18:30 that went wrong in the Jewish community
00:18:33 was as a result of the Holocaust?
00:18:35 I mean, is there some kind of term limit on this?
00:18:39 I would have thought so.
00:18:40 And I think most people probably think that’s over.
00:18:43 I think the details matter there, but it’s very difficult.
00:18:50 You’re in deep waters, yeah.
00:18:52 Oh, I enjoy swimming out in the ocean,
00:18:54 so although I’m terrified of what’s lurking
00:18:58 underneath in the darkness.
00:19:00 You’re right, you’re right to be.
00:19:04 Okay, it’s really complicated calculus
00:19:07 with the Holocaust and with slavery.
00:19:09 So the argument in America is that there’s deep
00:19:15 institutional racism against African Americans
00:19:20 that’s rooted in slavery.
00:19:22 And so however that calculus turns out,
00:19:28 that calculation, it still persists in the culture,
00:19:31 in the institutions, in the allocation of resources,
00:19:35 in the way that we communicate, in subtle ways,
00:19:39 in major ways, all that kind of stuff.
00:19:41 How is it possible to win or lose that argument
00:19:46 of how much institutional racism there is
00:19:48 that’s rooted in slavery?
00:19:50 Is it a winnable?
00:19:52 It’s an unquantifiable argument.
00:19:55 And I’d like to apply some shortcuts
00:19:58 to some of this, the following.
00:20:01 Are, for instance, all, let’s take the EVV1
00:20:06 that’s most often cited.
00:20:09 If a white person is walking down a street in America
00:20:12 and they see a group of young black men
00:20:13 coming towards them and it’s late at night
00:20:15 and they cross the road, is it because of slavery?
00:20:20 Is it because of institutional racism?
00:20:23 No, it’s because they’ve made a calculus
00:20:26 based not entirely on unfounded beliefs
00:20:34 that given crime rates, it’s possible
00:20:38 that this group of people might be a group of people
00:20:41 they don’t want to meet late at night.
00:20:43 That’s an ugly fact, but as crime statistics
00:20:48 in American cities after American cities bear out,
00:20:52 it’s not an entirely unreasonable one.
00:20:55 It’s not reasonable every time, obviously, obviously.
00:20:59 But is it attributable to slavery?
00:21:02 That’s a stretch.
00:21:04 If you’re in a city like Chicago
00:21:07 where the homicide rates shot up in the last two years,
00:21:13 albeit again, as always has to be remembered,
00:21:16 mainly black on black gun violence and knife violence.
00:21:21 Nevertheless, if you’re in a city like Chicago
00:21:23 and you make that calculus I’ve just suggested,
00:21:26 the cliched one, the street late at night,
00:21:31 there are other factors other than that.
00:21:33 Factors other than a memory of slavery that kick in.
00:21:39 And I’m afraid it’s something which people
00:21:42 don’t want to particularly acknowledge in America
00:21:44 for obvious reasons, because it’s the ugliest
00:21:45 damn debate in the world.
00:21:47 But I was actually just writing in my column
00:21:49 in New York Post today about a very interesting case
00:21:53 that’s sort of similar, which is the question
00:21:56 of obesity in the US.
00:21:58 As you know, America’s the most overweight country
00:22:02 in the world.
00:22:03 America has, I think, 40% of the population is obese
00:22:08 in medical ways, and the nearest next country
00:22:11 is a long way down, that’s New Zealand,
00:22:13 at 30% of the population.
00:22:14 So America’s a long way ahead.
00:22:16 Why during the coronavirus era when we know
00:22:18 that obesity is the one clearest factor
00:22:23 that’s likely to lead to your hospitalization
00:22:25 if you also get the virus?
00:22:26 Why did almost no public health information
00:22:29 in America focus on obesity?
00:22:31 80% of the people who ended up hospitalized
00:22:33 in America with coronavirus were obese.
00:22:38 We locked the schools when there was no evidence
00:22:41 that the coronavirus was deadly for children.
00:22:43 We all wore cloth masks when there was
00:22:45 a very little evidence that this was much use
00:22:49 in stopping the spread of the virus.
00:22:52 We had massive evidence about obesity being a problem,
00:22:55 and we never addressed it.
00:22:56 Why?
00:22:57 Is it just because we worried about fat people?
00:22:58 No, it’s actually because about fat shaming, as it were.
00:23:01 No, it’s also because to a great extent
00:23:03 it’s a racial issue in America as well.
00:23:05 And actually I quoted this new publication
00:23:07 from the University of Chicago, as it happens,
00:23:10 which makes that claim explicit, says,
00:23:12 the reasons why people have views that are negative
00:23:15 about obesity is because of racism and slavery.
00:23:18 This is what everything is drawn back to in America.
00:23:21 Anything you want to stop, you say it’s because of racism,
00:23:24 it’s because of slavery.
00:23:25 How about it’s actually because you mind
00:23:31 the hospitals getting clogged up,
00:23:32 you mind people dying,
00:23:34 you mind ethnic minorities disproportionately dying,
00:23:37 and you’d like to say something about it.
00:23:39 Once again, as in everything in America,
00:23:41 it’s cut off by some poorly educated academic
00:23:46 saying it’s about slavery.
00:23:48 So we’re really not, I mean, this requires
00:23:51 a kind of form of brain surgery to perform it on a society,
00:23:54 probably one that’s not possible without killing the patient.
00:23:57 And it’s being done by people who are wearing mittens.
00:24:04 So I’m sure that there’s a few folks listening to this
00:24:09 that are rolling their eyes and saying,
00:24:12 here we go again, two white guys talking about
00:24:16 the lack of institutional racism in America.
00:24:20 First of all, what would you like to tell them?
00:24:27 So our African American friends who are looking at this,
00:24:31 and I’ve gotten the chance to talk to a bunch of them
00:24:34 on Clubhouse recently.
00:24:35 Clubhouse is this social app.
00:24:37 And I really enjoy it.
00:24:38 It’s an absolute zoo of an app as far as I can see it.
00:24:41 I personally love it because you get to talk to,
00:24:44 as somebody who’s an introvert and doesn’t socialize much,
00:24:48 I enjoy talking to people from all walks of life.
00:24:52 So it gave me a chance to first of all practice
00:24:55 Russian and Ukrainian, so I get the chance to do that.
00:24:58 Then you get a chance to talk about Israel and Palestine
00:25:00 with people who are from that part of the world.
00:25:04 And you get to hear raw emotion of people from the ground
00:25:10 where they start screaming, they start crying,
00:25:14 they start being calm and collected and thoughtful.
00:25:16 And this is as if you walked into a bar
00:25:20 with custom picked regular folks, in quotes, regular folks.
00:25:24 Just people that have, quote unquote, lived experiences.
00:25:29 Real pain, real hope, real emotions, biases,
00:25:34 and you get to listen to them go at it.
00:25:36 With no, because it’s an audio app,
00:25:39 you’re not allowed to start getting
00:25:41 into a physical fist fight.
00:25:43 So even though it really sounds like people want it.
00:25:46 It sounds like it’s happening, yeah.
00:25:47 Yeah, and so you get to really listen to that feeling.
00:25:50 And for example, it allows a white guy like me
00:25:53 from another part of the world,
00:25:55 coming from the former Soviet Union,
00:25:58 to go into a room with a few hundred African Americans
00:26:03 screaming about Joe Rogan using the N word.
00:26:07 And I get to really listen.
00:26:09 There’s very different perspectives on that
00:26:11 in the African American community,
00:26:13 and it’s fascinating to listen.
00:26:14 So I don’t get access to that by excellent books
00:26:19 and articles written and so on.
00:26:20 You get that real raw emotion.
00:26:22 And I’m just saying, there’s a few of those folks
00:26:24 listening to this with that real raw emotion.
00:26:27 And one argument they say is you, Douglas Murray,
00:26:32 and you, Lex Freeman, don’t have the right
00:26:36 to talk about race and racism in America.
00:26:38 It is our struggle.
00:26:40 You are from a privileged class of people
00:26:42 that don’t know what it’s like to be a black man
00:26:48 or woman in America walking down the street.
00:26:51 Can you steel man that case?
00:26:54 First of all, fuck that.
00:26:56 That’s not, I think we need to define steel, steel manning.
00:27:01 Okay, I know what steel manning is.
00:27:04 I really resent that form of argumentation.
00:27:07 Sure.
00:27:08 I really resent it.
00:27:09 I have the right to talk about whatever the hell I want,
00:27:11 and no one’s gonna stop me or try to intimidate me
00:27:14 or tell me that I can’t simply because of my skin color.
00:27:18 And I think that if I said to somebody else
00:27:20 the other way around, it would be equally reprehensible.
00:27:23 If I said, shut up, you have no right
00:27:25 to criticize anything that Douglas Murray says
00:27:27 because you’ve not got my skin color.
00:27:29 Okay, it’s not an exact comparison, but seriously,
00:27:33 is that a reasonable form of argument?
00:27:36 You haven’t been through everything
00:27:37 I’ve been through in my life, therefore you can’t comment.
00:27:39 No, in that case, nobody can talk about anything.
00:27:43 We might as well pack up, go home, and isolate ourselves.
00:27:47 Strong words, but can you try to steel man the case,
00:27:49 not in this particular situation,
00:27:51 but there’s people that have lived through something
00:27:57 that can comment in a very specific way,
00:27:59 like for example, Holocaust survivors.
00:28:00 Yes.
00:28:03 There is a sense in which, maybe a basic sense of civility
00:28:07 when a Holocaust survivor is speaking about
00:28:10 their experience of the Holocaust,
00:28:12 then an intellectual from a very different part of the world
00:28:17 is simply writing about nuanced geopolitics of World War II
00:28:23 just should not interrupt the Holocaust survivor.
00:28:26 We physically interrupt them
00:28:27 if they’re telling their stories.
00:28:28 No, with words, with logic and reason
00:28:32 that the experience of the Holocaust survivor
00:28:34 somehow fundamentally has a deeper understanding
00:28:38 of the humanity and the injustice of the.
00:28:42 First of all, again, we’re in even deeper waters now,
00:28:45 but in terms of wanting to listen to another person
00:28:48 who has experienced something, yes, yes.
00:28:52 But not endlessly, not endlessly.
00:28:56 I mean, there are some people who’ve written about,
00:28:58 I mean, there are people who’ve written about the Holocaust
00:29:00 who didn’t experience the Holocaust
00:29:02 and have written about it better than people who did.
00:29:05 It’s not this idea that the lived experience
00:29:09 to use this terrible modern jargon
00:29:12 as if there’s another type.
00:29:14 This idea that the lived experience
00:29:16 has to triumph over everything else is not always correct.
00:29:20 It can be correct in some circumstances.
00:29:23 If you are sitting in a room with a Holocaust survivor
00:29:26 and somebody who’d never heard about the Holocaust
00:29:28 and wanted to kind of shoot out their views on it, yeah,
00:29:32 one of those people should be heard more than the other,
00:29:34 obviously, obviously.
00:29:37 If there’s somebody who’s experienced racism firsthand
00:29:40 and there’s somebody else who has never experienced it,
00:29:42 then obviously you’d want to hear from the person
00:29:45 who has experienced it firsthand,
00:29:47 if that is the discussion underway.
00:29:51 I don’t think that it’s the case
00:29:53 that that is endlessly the case.
00:29:55 I’m also highly reluctant to concede
00:29:59 that there are groups of people
00:30:00 who by dint of their skin color or anything else
00:30:05 get to dominate the microphone.
00:30:07 Now, of course, we’re literally both speaking
00:30:08 to microphones at the moment, so there’s an irony to this,
00:30:10 but let’s skate over the irony.
00:30:13 What I mean is people saying,
00:30:15 you don’t have the right to speak,
00:30:17 I have the right to take the microphone from you
00:30:19 and speak because I know best.
00:30:22 Fine, if you know best, we’ll argue it out
00:30:26 and someone will win, long or short term.
00:30:30 But the almost aggressive tone
00:30:36 in which this is now leveled, I don’t like the sound of,
00:30:40 nobody’s experience is completely understandable
00:30:43 by another human being, nobody’s.
00:30:46 And what many people are asking us to do at the moment,
00:30:49 us collectively is, to fall for that thing,
00:30:52 I think it was Camille Foster who said it first,
00:30:54 but I’ve adopted in recent years,
00:30:57 is to say you must spend an inordinate amount of your life
00:31:00 trying to understand me personally,
00:31:03 my lived experience, everything about me.
00:31:06 You should dedicate your life to trying to do that.
00:31:10 Simultaneously, you’ll never understand me.
00:31:15 This is not an attractive invitation.
00:31:17 This is an unwinnable game.
00:31:20 So if somebody has a legitimate
00:31:26 and important point to make, they should make it
00:31:29 and they’ll win through whatever their character is
00:31:31 or whatever their race.
00:31:32 And by the way, there are plenty of white people
00:31:33 who experience racism as well.
00:31:35 There are plenty of white people who do and have done,
00:31:38 and increasingly so, which is one of the things
00:31:40 I write about in the War on the West.
00:31:42 I mean, I would argue that today in America,
00:31:45 the only group who are actually allowed
00:31:47 to be consistently, vilely racist against the white people.
00:31:52 If you say disgusting things about black people
00:31:54 in America in 2022, you will be over.
00:31:58 You will be over.
00:31:59 If you decide to talk about people’s white tears,
00:32:02 their white female tears, their white guilt,
00:32:05 their white privilege, their white rage,
00:32:08 and all these other pseudo pathologizing terms,
00:32:11 you’ll be just fine.
00:32:12 You can be the chairman of the Joint Committee
00:32:14 of the Staff, you can lecture at Yale University,
00:32:16 absolutely fine, and the white people have to suck that up
00:32:20 as if that’s fine because there was racism
00:32:23 in another direction in the past.
00:32:24 So white people can have racism as well.
00:32:27 Does that mean that I think that I have a right
00:32:28 or other white people have a right to dominate the discourse
00:32:31 by talking about their feelings of having been victims
00:32:34 of racism?
00:32:35 No, not particularly, because what does that get us?
00:32:38 It gets us into an endless cycle of competitive victimhood.
00:32:41 Am I saying that white people who’ve experienced violence
00:32:44 have experienced historically anything like the violence
00:32:48 that was perpetrated against black people
00:32:49 in America historically?
00:32:51 Obviously not.
00:32:52 But what kind of competition do we want to enter here?
00:32:58 And this is very, very important terrain now in America,
00:33:03 because there’s one other thing I have to throw in there,
00:33:05 which is how do you work out the sincerity of the claim?
00:33:09 How do you work out the sincerity of the claim being made?
00:33:12 At one point in this latest book,
00:33:14 I referred to a very useful bit in Nietzsche
00:33:19 on the genealogy of morals,
00:33:21 where, as you know, Nietzsche always has to be treated
00:33:24 carefully, you know, when people say,
00:33:26 I love Nietzsche, you have to say, which bits?
00:33:29 So what exactly do you love about him?
00:33:34 But,
00:33:35 and a lot can be learned from the answer.
00:33:38 But there are moments in Genealogy of Morals
00:33:40 that were very useful for this book.
00:33:42 One of them was the moment when Nietzsche uses a phrase
00:33:45 that I’ve now stolen from myself, appropriated,
00:33:48 you might say,
00:33:50 where he refers to people who tear at wounds
00:33:55 long since closed and then cry about the pain they feel.
00:33:59 And Nietzsche says,
00:34:01 I’ve never felt so much pain in my life
00:34:03 as the pain they feel.
00:34:08 Now, how do you know,
00:34:10 how do you know whether the pain is real?
00:34:14 How do you know?
00:34:15 I’m not saying you can never know, but it’s hard.
00:34:20 So when somebody says,
00:34:22 I feel that my life hasn’t gone that well
00:34:24 and it’s because of something that was done
00:34:25 to my ancestors 200 years ago,
00:34:28 maybe they do feel that.
00:34:30 Maybe they’re right to feel that.
00:34:32 Maybe they’re using it up.
00:34:34 Maybe they’re using it as their reason for failure in life.
00:34:37 Maybe they’re using it as their reason to not even try.
00:34:41 Maybe they’re using it as their reason
00:34:42 to smoke weed all day.
00:34:45 I don’t know.
00:34:46 And who does know?
00:34:47 How can you work that out?
00:34:49 And that’s why I come back to this thing of,
00:34:51 who are we to constantly judge in this society
00:34:55 other people who we don’t know
00:34:57 and attribute motives to them based on racial
00:35:01 characteristics?
00:35:03 And as you write in this part,
00:35:07 I like your cultural appropriation of Nietzsche
00:35:11 and at the same time, canceling Nietzsche
00:35:16 in the same set of sentences.
00:35:17 But you write in this part about evil.
00:35:20 No, I didn’t cancel Nietzsche.
00:35:22 Well.
00:35:23 Can’t cancel Nietzsche, I was saying treat him carefully.
00:35:27 Treat him carefully, fair enough.
00:35:29 But you can judge a man’s character
00:35:31 by which parts of Nietzsche he quotes.
00:35:35 That’s fair enough, I think.
00:35:36 I think when you meet people who do man and Superman
00:35:38 a bit too much, you’re in.
00:35:42 Now you’re pulling in even deeper water
00:35:45 referencing Hitler here.
00:35:47 Okay.
00:35:48 So you write in this part of the book about evil.
00:35:53 Quote, what is it that drives evil?
00:35:57 Many things without doubt,
00:35:58 but one of them is identified by several
00:36:00 of the great philosophers is resentment.
00:36:04 That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers
00:36:06 for people who want to destroy.
00:36:09 Colon, blaming someone else for having something
00:36:12 you believe you deserve more.
00:36:14 And you’re saying this kind of resentment,
00:36:17 we don’t know as it surfaces whether it’s genuine
00:36:21 or if it’s used to sort of play games of power
00:36:25 to evil ends, can you speak to this?
00:36:32 Because it’s such a fascinating idea
00:36:34 that one of the biggest drivers of evil
00:36:37 in the world is resentment.
00:36:41 Because if you look at, boy,
00:36:43 if you look at human history, if you look at Hitler,
00:36:47 so much of the propaganda, so much of the narrative
00:36:49 was about resentment.
00:36:52 So is that surface or is it level
00:36:54 or is that deep, the resentment that drives evil?
00:36:56 It can be any of the above.
00:36:58 Let’s first of all preface it, everybody has resentment.
00:37:01 I use the term resentment which is sort of very similar
00:37:06 to resentment, let’s stick with resentment.
00:37:09 So we don’t sound too pretentious.
00:37:17 Let me give you a quick example of somebody
00:37:18 in our own day who has a form of resentment,
00:37:21 Vladimir Putin.
00:37:22 Did you see Navalny’s documentary, Putin’s Palace?
00:37:26 Yes.
00:37:27 Yeah.
00:37:28 You remember the stuff about Putin
00:37:29 as a young KGB officer in Germany?
00:37:32 Remember the stuff about Putin and his first wife’s
00:37:34 resentment of one of his KGB colleagues
00:37:37 who had an apartment that was a few meters bigger
00:37:40 than the Putin’s apartment?
00:37:42 Yeah.
00:37:43 It’s very interesting.
00:37:44 And by the way, I’m not saying that, you know,
00:37:47 Vladimir Putin became the man he has become
00:37:48 and invaded Ukraine because he didn’t have an apartment
00:37:50 he liked in Berlin or Munich or wherever he was.
00:37:53 There’s distinct possibility.
00:37:55 My point is that resentment is a factor in all human lives
00:38:02 and we all feel it in our lives
00:38:05 and it’s something that has to be struggled against.
00:38:09 Resentment is, in political terms, can be a deadly,
00:38:13 I mean, it’s an incredibly deep thing to draw upon.
00:38:16 I mean, you mentioned Hitler.
00:38:18 Obviously one of the things that Hitler
00:38:20 played on was resentment, obviously.
00:38:24 Almost every revolutionary does.
00:38:27 I mean, the French revolutionaries did as well.
00:38:28 And not without cause.
00:38:31 It’s a good reason to feel that Versailles
00:38:33 was not listening to Paris in the 1780s
00:38:38 and feel resentment for Marie Antoinette
00:38:41 in her palace within the palace,
00:38:44 ignoring the bread shortages in Paris.
00:38:47 So resentment is a very, it’s a very understandable thing
00:38:51 and sometimes it’s justifiable
00:38:53 and it’s also deadly to the person as it is to the society.
00:38:57 It’s an incredibly deep, deep sentiment.
00:38:59 Somebody else has got something that you should have.
00:39:04 And the problem about it is that it has the potential
00:39:07 to be endless.
00:39:09 You can do it your whole life.
00:39:11 And one of the ways I’ve sort of found myself
00:39:14 explaining this to people is to say,
00:39:15 it’s also important to recognize that resentment
00:39:18 is something that can cross absolutely every boundary.
00:39:22 So for instance, it crosses all racial boundaries, obviously,
00:39:26 and how it goes without saying.
00:39:28 More interesting is it crosses all class boundaries
00:39:30 and socioeconomic boundaries.
00:39:33 And if I was to sort of simplify this thought,
00:39:36 I would say, I guess that you and I
00:39:39 and everybody watching knows or has known something
00:39:44 or has known somebody in their lives
00:39:47 who has almost nothing in worldly terms
00:39:53 and is a generous person, a kindly person,
00:39:57 a giving person, a happy person even, a cheerful person.
00:40:03 And I think we probably have also,
00:40:06 or many of us will have met people
00:40:07 who seem to have everything
00:40:09 and who are filled with resentment, filled with resentment.
00:40:13 Somebody else has held them back from something.
00:40:14 Their sister once did something,
00:40:16 she got this and I should have got that.
00:40:19 And on and on and on.
00:40:22 It’s a human trait.
00:40:23 And one of the things that suggests to me
00:40:26 is that we therefore have a choice in our lives about this.
00:40:29 And this is something which we can do something about,
00:40:32 not limitlessly, but for instance,
00:40:35 I mean, there are very good reasons
00:40:37 that some people in their lives might feel resentment.
00:40:41 Let’s say you’re involved in a car crash
00:40:44 and a friend fell asleep at the wheel
00:40:46 and that’s why you are spending the rest of your life
00:40:48 in a wheelchair.
00:40:50 It’s a pertinent example of this
00:40:51 in American politics at the moment.
00:40:55 You would be justified in feeling resentment.
00:40:58 And at some point you have to make a decision,
00:41:01 which is, am I going to be that person or a different person?
00:41:08 But even in that case, you’re saying at the individual level
00:41:10 and at the societal level is destructive to the mind,
00:41:13 even when you’re, quote unquote, justified.
00:41:15 It rots you.
00:41:16 It rots you because the best you can do
00:41:21 is to eke out your days unfulfilled.
00:41:26 So the antidote, as you describe, is gratitude.
00:41:29 Yes.
00:41:31 Gratitude is the antidote to evil in a sense.
00:41:35 Gratitude is the individual level and the societal level.
00:41:38 Gratitude is certainly the answer to resentment.
00:41:41 I quote in The War on the West,
00:41:44 when I read it the first time a few years ago,
00:41:46 I was absolutely floored by the brothers Karamazov.
00:41:52 Not everything in it, by the way,
00:41:53 and I won’t get into it,
00:41:54 but I have some very big structural criticisms
00:41:58 of the novel.
00:41:59 Now you’re just sweet talking to me
00:42:01 because I’m a Dostoevsky fan, but I appreciate this.
00:42:04 Oh, okay.
00:42:06 Well, we could get into what I see
00:42:07 as being the structural flaws in the brothers Karamazov,
00:42:09 but anyway.
00:42:10 Now I’m offended and triggered.
00:42:12 Yeah, no, I mean, this is something coming out of Macbeth
00:42:17 and saying, I didn’t think it was much good.
00:42:19 Yeah, there’s structural flaws.
00:42:20 Yeah, I thought the ending stank
00:42:23 and the middle wasn’t very good.
00:42:24 No, when I read that novel,
00:42:28 I was floored by a couple of things.
00:42:30 One is, of course, at the moment
00:42:32 where we realize the devil appears.
00:42:34 The moment that Ivan says to his brother,
00:42:37 you know he visits me,
00:42:39 and you realize that he’s talking about the devil,
00:42:41 the whole novel goes into this totally different space.
00:42:47 Anyway, it’s even more
00:42:49 than you’ve already realized the novel’s about.
00:42:51 And then when the conversation occurs between Ivan
00:42:54 and the devil, I think he describes him
00:42:57 as dressed in the French style
00:43:02 of the early part of the 90th century.
00:43:06 Very strange that the devil would be dressed like that,
00:43:07 but sort of.
00:43:10 And if you remember that he’s sort of cross legged
00:43:13 and rather a vain figure,
00:43:16 but the devil mentions in passing to Ivan
00:43:19 that he says, I don’t know why,
00:43:22 gratitude is not an instinct that’s been given to me.
00:43:30 Yeah, you’re not allowed.
00:43:32 This is not, given the role of being the devil,
00:43:35 this is not one of the things.
00:43:37 Just not one of the things.
00:43:38 And you think, and of course,
00:43:39 only a genius of Dostoevsky’s stature could,
00:43:42 I mean, a lesser genius would have made a whole novel
00:43:45 out of that insight.
00:43:47 Only Dostoevsky can just throw it away
00:43:49 because there’s such an abundance of riches
00:43:51 that he still has to get through,
00:43:53 the structural problems aside.
00:43:55 But the, but the, but the.
00:43:58 The passive aggressive, the microaggression
00:44:02 in this conversation is palpable.
00:44:04 A little knife fight.
00:44:07 No, but the reason I mention this is because of course,
00:44:09 when I saw this, this is such a brilliant insight
00:44:13 by Dostoevsky because why would gratitude
00:44:16 not be a sentiment that the devil was capable of?
00:44:19 The answer is of course that if the devil
00:44:22 was capable of gratitude, he wouldn’t be the devil.
00:44:25 He’d be somebody else.
00:44:28 He has to be incapable of gratitude.
00:44:31 Do you think for Dostoevsky that was as strong of an insight
00:44:35 as it is for you?
00:44:36 Because I think that’s a really powerful idea
00:44:39 that with gratitude, you don’t get the resentment
00:44:43 that rots you from the core.
00:44:46 Yes, I think it was one of the just endless things
00:44:48 that he saw in us.
00:44:50 And the way I put it is that, I mean,
00:44:54 I also think of it in terms of the era of deconstruction,
00:44:57 which is one of the things I’d like us to call
00:44:59 the era that’s now ending.
00:45:02 The era of deconstruction was the era that started,
00:45:05 let’s say from the 60s onwards,
00:45:08 and was originally an academic game
00:45:11 that then spilled out into the wider culture,
00:45:13 which was let’s take everything apart.
00:45:16 Let’s pull it all apart.
00:45:19 There are lots of problems with it.
00:45:20 One is it’s quite boring.
00:45:23 You don’t get an awful lot from it.
00:45:27 You also have the problem of what children find
00:45:30 when they try to do this with bicycles,
00:45:32 which is they can take it apart quite easily,
00:45:34 but they can’t put it back together.
00:45:38 And the era of taking things apart as a game
00:45:45 is one we’ve lived through,
00:45:46 and it’s been highly destructive,
00:45:48 but you can do it for quite a long time.
00:45:51 I’m going to look at this society,
00:45:53 and I’m going to take it apart by showing systemic problems.
00:45:56 I’m going to, at the end of that, what have you got?
00:46:00 What have you done?
00:46:01 What have you achieved?
00:46:03 We need to interrogate this.
00:46:05 Okay, interrogate.
00:46:06 By all means, ask questions,
00:46:07 but interrogate as a deliberate hostility to this.
00:46:11 I’m going to interrogate this thing and take it apart.
00:46:13 And again, at the end of it, what have you got?
00:46:17 Whether you’re interrogating a text or a piece of music
00:46:21 or an idea or a society, fine.
00:46:24 Question, endlessly question.
00:46:26 Yes, interrogate assumes it’s all a criminal in a cell
00:46:33 and it’s guilty, and therefore it must be taken apart.
00:46:37 And that’s what we’ve been doing for decades in the West.
00:46:41 And that’s resentment.
00:46:43 That’s one byproduct of resentment.
00:46:46 You can’t build the thing, but you know how to take it apart.
00:46:50 Is a little bit of resentment good?
00:46:53 So you have that, I love Tom Waits,
00:46:56 and he has a song where a little drop of,
00:47:00 I like my Tom with a little drop of poison.
00:47:03 Is it good to do that?
00:47:05 Is it good to have a little bit of poison in your drink?
00:47:08 Depends what the poison is,
00:47:09 and it depends if you know not to have another drink.
00:47:13 It might be the case, you find out, as some alcoholics do,
00:47:16 that one was too many and 10 is not enough.
00:47:21 So there’s a natural, in this case,
00:47:25 this kind of deconstruction is a slippery slope.
00:47:27 It becomes an addiction, it becomes a drug,
00:47:29 and you just can’t stop.
00:47:31 Well, you’d have to wean yourself off it
00:47:32 and try to start creating again.
00:47:34 You’d have to start trying to put things together again.
00:47:40 Something I think might be in the throes of starting
00:47:45 as it happens.
00:47:46 Well, speaking of taking things apart
00:47:51 and not putting them together again,
00:47:53 the idea of critical race theory.
00:47:58 Can you, to me, explain, so I’m an engineer
00:48:02 and have not been actually paying attention much,
00:48:05 unfortunately, to these things.
00:48:07 None of the people in your field were
00:48:08 until it comes along and smacks you in the face.
00:48:11 I’ve had that line of thinking from MIT.
00:48:17 I said, well, surely whatever you folks are busy about
00:48:22 yelling at each other for is a thing at Harvard and Yale.
00:48:26 It’s not going to.
00:48:26 Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
00:48:28 People in the STEM subjects thought it’s not coming for us.
00:48:31 It can’t come to us and bang.
00:48:33 Well, it hasn’t quite been a bang.
00:48:36 I’m not sure.
00:48:37 Engineering is more safe than others.
00:48:39 Yeah, so let’s draw a line now
00:48:43 between engineering and science.
00:48:45 So I think engineering is,
00:48:48 I’m sitting in a castle in the tallest tower
00:48:51 with my pinky out drinking my martini saying, surely.
00:48:56 The peasants below with their biology and their humanities
00:49:00 will figure it all out.
00:49:02 No, I’m just kidding.
00:49:03 There’s no pinky out.
00:49:04 I drink vodka and I hang with the peasants.
00:49:07 Okay, where is this?
00:49:08 This metaphor has gone too far.
00:49:11 Can you explain to this engineer
00:49:14 what critical race theory is?
00:49:16 Is it a term that’s definable?
00:49:19 Is there a tradition?
00:49:20 Is there a history?
00:49:21 What is good about it, what is bad about it?
00:49:24 It is a tradition.
00:49:25 It is a history.
00:49:25 It’s a school of thought.
00:49:26 It started in the law roughly in the 1970s
00:49:30 in some of the American academy.
00:49:32 It spilled out.
00:49:33 It always aimed to be an activist philosophy.
00:49:36 People deny that now,
00:49:38 but as I cite in The War in the West,
00:49:40 the foundational texts say as much.
00:49:43 This is an activist academic study.
00:49:48 We’re not just looking at the law.
00:49:50 We seek to change the law.
00:49:53 And it’s built out into all of the other disciplines.
00:49:56 I think there’s a reason for that, by the way,
00:49:57 which is it happened at the time
00:49:58 that the humanities and others in America
00:50:00 were increasingly weak and didn’t know what to do,
00:50:03 and they needed more games to play or new games to play.
00:50:07 The psychologists got bored.
00:50:09 Yeah, I mean, well, they needed tenure.
00:50:12 They needed something to do.
00:50:14 And I mean, it’s not an original observation.
00:50:16 Plenty of people have made this,
00:50:17 but I mean, Neil Ferguson said it some time ago,
00:50:19 for instance, that in the last 50 years
00:50:23 in American academia, certainly in humanities departments,
00:50:26 when somebody dies out who’s a great scholar in something,
00:50:29 that’s just not replaced by somebody of equal stature.
00:50:33 They’re replaced by somebody who does theory
00:50:36 or critical race theory.
00:50:38 They’re replaced by somebody who does the modern games.
00:50:41 Somebody dies out who’s a great historian of, say,
00:50:44 I don’t know, it’s the one that’s on my mind,
00:50:46 Russian history or Russian literature,
00:50:48 and they’re not replaced by a similar scholar.
00:50:53 In his observation and in yours, is this a recent development?
00:50:57 It’s happened in the last few decades, for sure.
00:50:59 And it’s sped up.
00:51:01 Is it because we’ve gotten to the bottom
00:51:02 of some of the biggest questions of history?
00:51:04 No, it’s because we’re willing to forget the big questions.
00:51:09 Because it’s more fun to, big questions aren’t as fun?
00:51:12 No, partly it’s, no, I should stress that partly isn’t,
00:51:15 this is in the weeds, but partly it’s a result
00:51:17 of the hyper specialization in academia.
00:51:19 You know, if you said you’d like to write
00:51:24 your dissertation on Hobbes,
00:51:31 if you wanted to say something central
00:51:36 to Kant’s thought or Hegel’s, I mean, that’s not popular.
00:51:42 What’s popular is to take somebody way down the line
00:51:45 from that, because there’s a feeling
00:51:47 that that’s all been done.
00:51:49 So you take something way, way, way down the line
00:51:52 from that that’s much less important,
00:51:54 and then you sort of play with that.
00:51:57 And I think most people, anyone who’s watching
00:51:58 who’s been in a philosophy department
00:52:00 or anything else in recent years will know that tendency.
00:52:04 By the way, there’s a very practical consequence of this.
00:52:06 I saw this at the end of my friend Roger Scruton’s life
00:52:09 when he would occasionally, he didn’t get tenure
00:52:12 at universities, but he would occasionally be flown in
00:52:15 even by his enemies to teach courses
00:52:18 in various universities in basics of philosophy,
00:52:20 because there was no one in the department able to do it.
00:52:24 Like he would go in and teach for a semester,
00:52:29 you know, Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer and others,
00:52:34 because there was no one to do it,
00:52:36 because they were all playing with the things
00:52:38 way, way, way down the road from this.
00:52:40 So that had already happened,
00:52:42 and people were searching for new games to play,
00:52:45 and the critical race theory stuff forced its way in,
00:52:50 partly in the way that all of this
00:52:52 that’s now known as anti racism does,
00:52:54 which is in a sort of bullying tone
00:52:56 of saying if you don’t follow this.
00:52:58 It’s the same way that all the things
00:52:59 that are called studies,
00:53:01 I think everything called studies in the humanities
00:53:04 should be shut down.
00:53:06 Because of the activist element.
00:53:09 They’re all activists, gay studies and queer studies,
00:53:12 and nothing good has ever come from it.
00:53:16 Nothing good.
00:53:17 To push back, is it obvious that activism
00:53:21 is a sign of a flaw in a discipline?
00:53:24 So isn’t it?
00:53:26 It’s a sign of the death of the discipline.
00:53:27 It’s a sign the discipline’s over.
00:53:29 But isn’t it a good goal to have for discipline
00:53:33 to enact change, positive change in the world?
00:53:36 Or is that for politicians to do with the findings
00:53:41 of science, not the scientists themselves?
00:53:44 Why create an ideology and then set out
00:53:47 to find disciplines that are weakly put together
00:53:49 to try to back up your political ideology?
00:53:53 So ideology should not be part of science or of humanities.
00:54:00 Why would you, I mean, anyone could do it.
00:54:05 You could decide to go in and be wildly right wing
00:54:09 about something and only do things
00:54:11 that prove your right wing ideas.
00:54:13 Be fantastically antiacademic,
00:54:16 fantastically anti science.
00:54:18 It’s an absurd way to mix up activism and academia.
00:54:25 And it’s absolutely rife.
00:54:26 And Critical Race Theory is one of the ones
00:54:28 that completely polluted the academy.
00:54:31 Yeah, and there’s been dark moments throughout history,
00:54:34 both during World War II with both communism
00:54:38 and Nazism, fascism that infiltrated science
00:54:44 and then corrupted it.
00:54:45 Yes, I mean, for instance, also,
00:54:47 let’s face it, in science, as in everything else,
00:54:50 there are dark, difficult things.
00:54:53 It’s much better we know about them, face up to them
00:54:55 and try to find a way socially to deal with them
00:54:59 than that you leave them in the hands of some activist
00:55:02 who wants to do stuff with them.
00:55:04 Some of my best friends are activists.
00:55:07 I’m just kidding, okay.
00:55:09 None of my best friends are activists.
00:55:11 That’s how it should be.
00:55:13 Well, I was kidding because I don’t have any friends,
00:55:15 but okay.
00:55:18 No, I’m trying to gain some pity points.
00:55:22 Okay, so to return.
00:55:24 You have your clubhouse friends.
00:55:27 Screaming away like deranged maniacs.
00:55:31 Now, I’m anti clubhouse, by the way,
00:55:32 because the only time I heard it was at Brett Weinstein one
00:55:34 when he did that.
00:55:36 I don’t know if you heard that, early in clubhouse.
00:55:38 I was invited to clubhouse by various people.
00:55:39 He was like, oh, this is a really great civilized way
00:55:41 to hang out and talk with interesting people.
00:55:43 And I downloaded the app and I got on one,
00:55:46 because Brett Weinstein said,
00:55:48 I’m doing this conversation and I listened
00:55:50 and it was the maddest damn discussion I’ve ever heard.
00:55:54 Was it something about biology?
00:55:55 Something about, was it during COVID times?
00:55:58 At some point, Brett said,
00:56:01 I’m an evolutionary biologist.
00:56:06 And somebody else started saying, you’re a eugenicist.
00:56:09 And he said, no, I’m an evolutionary biologist.
00:56:12 And somebody said, that’s the same thing.
00:56:14 And it just went on like that.
00:56:16 And Brett desperately tried to explain,
00:56:19 that’s not the same thing as being a eugenicist.
00:56:21 And he lost the clubhouse room.
00:56:24 They thought that was the same thing.
00:56:25 He’d come, it horribly reminded me of a time some years ago
00:56:29 when a British newspaper ran a sort of realizing
00:56:32 that the only thing you can unite people on
00:56:34 in sexual ethics is revulsion against pedophilia,
00:56:37 ran an anti pedo campaign.
00:56:40 And shortly after pediatricians offices
00:56:43 were torched in North of England
00:56:46 by a mob who hadn’t read the whole sign.
00:56:48 Yeah, well, to me, like I said,
00:56:53 a little bit of poison is good for the town, so.
00:56:55 Anyhow, sorry, I interrupted you
00:56:56 with flattering you with their people on clubhouse.
00:56:58 I have many, I have multiples of friends, yes.
00:57:04 Okay, we didn’t get to some of the ideas
00:57:08 of critical race theory.
00:57:09 What exactly is it?
00:57:11 I’m actually in part asking this question quite genuinely.
00:57:14 Yeah, it’s an attempt to look at everything
00:57:17 among other things through the lens of race
00:57:20 and to add race into things where it may not be
00:57:24 as a way of adding,
00:57:26 I’m trying to give the most generous estimation,
00:57:30 to add race in as a conversation
00:57:31 in a place where it may not have been in the conversation.
00:57:36 And that means history too?
00:57:38 The history of racism.
00:57:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah, all history.
00:57:43 And to look at it through these particular lenses.
00:57:48 I mean, there’s a certain, like all these things,
00:57:50 there’s a certain logic in it.
00:57:51 Like with feminist studies or something,
00:57:54 I mean, is there a utility in looking back
00:57:57 through undoubtedly male dominated histories
00:57:59 and asking where the more silent female voice was?
00:58:03 Yes, very interesting.
00:58:06 Not endlessly interesting.
00:58:08 And can’t be put exactly on the same par as,
00:58:12 but it has a utility.
00:58:16 It’s that endlessly, sorry to interrupt,
00:58:18 that endlessly part that seems to get us
00:58:20 into trouble a lot here.
00:58:21 Well, because of this thing of where do you stop?
00:58:24 And that’s always, I talked about this in my last book
00:58:30 in the manners of crowds.
00:58:32 It’s one of the big conundrums in activist movements
00:58:35 and particularly in activist academia.
00:58:38 Where would you stop?
00:58:39 It’s not clear because you’ve got a job in it.
00:58:42 You’ve got a pension in it.
00:58:44 You’ve got, your only esteem in society
00:58:48 is in keeping this gig going.
00:58:50 I mean, is there any likelihood?
00:58:55 Have you ever, there’s the old academic joke, isn’t it?
00:58:58 The end of every conference, the only thing everyone
00:59:00 agrees on is that we must have another conference
00:59:02 like this one.
00:59:05 It’s the one thing they always agree on.
00:59:07 This conference is so great, we must have another one.
00:59:09 Well, that’s a criticism you could apply
00:59:11 to a lot of disciplines.
00:59:12 Of course.
00:59:13 Civil engineering, bridge building.
00:59:15 At a certain point, do we need any more bridges?
00:59:19 Can we just fly everywhere?
00:59:22 So.
00:59:23 At the very least, you need to keep the bridges up.
00:59:26 Sure, and they would, critical race theory folks
00:59:28 would probably make the same argument.
00:59:30 At the very least, we need to keep the racism out.
00:59:35 We have to make sure we don’t descend into the racism.
00:59:37 It assumes all the time that we are living
00:59:39 on the cusp of the return of the KKK.
00:59:42 Right.
00:59:43 Which is totally wrong.
00:59:44 I mean, it’s a massive.
00:59:45 You say that now, until the KKK armies march in.
00:59:49 We don’t always, we can’t always predict the future.
00:59:52 We can’t always predict the future,
00:59:53 and you can always say you should be careful,
00:59:58 but you’ve also gotta be careful of people
01:00:02 who’ve got their timing like totally, totally wrong,
01:00:05 or their estimation of the society they’re in.
01:00:07 You mean like most of society before in the 1930s,
01:00:12 when Hitler was, I mean, so many people got Hitler wrong.
01:00:17 Sure they did.
01:00:18 And so.
01:00:18 Most people.
01:00:19 So maybe it was nice to have the alarmist thinking there.
01:00:23 Well.
01:00:24 Beware of the man with the mustache.
01:00:27 Yes.
01:00:28 If only it was that easy.
01:00:31 Not always a bob facial hair.
01:00:33 I always say that, I mean, what.
01:00:35 Very often is.
01:00:36 These two clean shaven chaps both say,
01:00:39 one of the problems of everybody
01:00:40 knowing a little bit about Nazism
01:00:42 is that they think that they know where evil comes from
01:00:48 and that it comes from like a German with a small mustache,
01:00:52 getting people to goose step, for instance.
01:00:54 And that’s not correct.
01:00:57 A much better understanding of it is,
01:00:59 it can come from all number of directions
01:01:03 and keep your antennae as good as you can.
01:01:06 But once you end up in this society, which I would argue,
01:01:10 certainly parts of America, where you’re always in 1938,
01:01:15 that’s not healthy for a society either,
01:01:17 where people are so primed and think they’re so well trained
01:01:22 because they spent a term in school
01:01:25 learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust,
01:01:28 think they’re so well trained in Hitler spotting
01:01:31 that they can do it all the time.
01:01:32 Look at all these phrases we now have in our societies,
01:01:35 like dog whistle.
01:01:37 You know, as I always say,
01:01:38 if you hear the whistle, you’re the dog.
01:01:40 But people say, that’s a dog whistle,
01:01:43 as if they’re highly trained anti Nazis.
01:01:47 I mean, you know, there should be some humility in it.
01:01:50 We should be careful, we should be wary for sure.
01:01:54 And we should also be slightly humble
01:01:57 in our inability to spot everything.
01:02:01 If not significantly humble, right, so if we can,
01:02:10 there’s something funny, if not dark,
01:02:15 about the activity of Hitler spotting,
01:02:19 if I just may take an aside.
01:02:21 But so critical race theory, how much racism,
01:02:27 what is racism?
01:02:28 How much of it is in our world today?
01:02:31 If we were thinking about this activity of Hitler spotting,
01:02:37 and trying to steel man the case
01:02:39 of if not critical race theory,
01:02:41 but people who look for racism in our world,
01:02:45 how much would you say?
01:02:48 Well, it’s a good thing to try to define.
01:02:50 I would say that racism is the belief
01:02:54 that other people are inferior to you.
01:02:57 You could say, you could see a form of it
01:03:00 where you thought people were superior to you.
01:03:02 That could also happen, but more commonly,
01:03:04 you see a group of people as being inferior to you
01:03:07 simply by dint of the fact
01:03:08 that they have a different racial background.
01:03:12 And that’s sort of the easiest way to define racism.
01:03:20 As I say, I mean, there are types of racism,
01:03:23 mainly antisemitism actually, perhaps it’s the only one,
01:03:26 which weirdly relies on a hatred of people
01:03:30 who a certain type of person thinks are better than them.
01:03:35 And that’s a particular peculiarity,
01:03:37 one of the peculiarities of antisemitism.
01:03:40 Well, antisemitism somehow does both, right?
01:03:42 Yes, one of the eternal fascinating things
01:03:46 about antisemitism is it can do,
01:03:47 it does everything at the same time.
01:03:50 It’s like a quantum racism.
01:03:52 Yes.
01:03:53 They’re both superior and inferior.
01:03:54 You know Vasily Grosman’s Life and Fate?
01:03:59 So in the middle of Life and Fate,
01:04:02 which a Persian friend of mine always said
01:04:03 was one of only two great novels of the 20th century,
01:04:06 she was a very harsh literary critic.
01:04:07 What was the other one?
01:04:09 Oh, The Leopard, obviously.
01:04:10 The Leopard?
01:04:11 The Leopard by Giuseppe Dallan Pedusa, yeah.
01:04:14 Okay.
01:04:14 She’s definitely right on that one.
01:04:16 Life and Fate is a…
01:04:17 I’m learning so much today, yes.
01:04:19 Life and Fate is an extraordinary book,
01:04:24 mainly about, well, you know, Grosman was obviously
01:04:28 Jewish himself, but he saw almost everything
01:04:34 that he could have done in the Second World War.
01:04:36 He saw Stalingrad, he was a journalist,
01:04:38 and he wrote firsthand accounts of Stalingrad.
01:04:42 He was also the first journalist into Treblinka,
01:04:45 and his account, which you can read in one
01:04:47 of the collections of his journalism,
01:04:49 his account of walking into Treblinka
01:04:51 is just one of the most devastating, haunting pieces
01:04:54 of journalism or prose you can read.
01:04:56 Anyhow, I mention him because Grosman,
01:04:58 in the middle of Life and Fate,
01:05:00 which is about a 900 page novel,
01:05:03 in the middle of it, which is about the dark axis
01:05:06 around Stalingrad, he, well, at one point,
01:05:12 he amazingly sort of goes into the minds
01:05:14 of Earth Hitler and Stalin, and he says,
01:05:17 Stalin, in his study, feels his counterpart
01:05:22 in Berlin, and he says he feels very close
01:05:24 to him at this moment.
01:05:26 Wow, around Stalingrad, like leading up to the back.
01:05:29 After Stalingrad, when the Germans are lost,
01:05:32 he says he feels the closeness of Hitler.
01:05:35 But Grosman, in the middle of Life and Fate,
01:05:37 slap bang at the worst hours of the 20th century,
01:05:41 suddenly dedicates a chapter to anti semitism,
01:05:45 and I’ve seen anti semitism as something
01:05:48 I’ve always been very interested in,
01:05:51 because I’ve always had an instinctive utter revulsion
01:05:54 of it, and also partly because of having seen bits of it
01:06:01 in the Middle East and elsewhere,
01:06:02 but I mention this because Grosman,
01:06:05 in the middle of Life and Fate, takes time out
01:06:08 and does this like three page explanation,
01:06:10 three page description of anti semitism,
01:06:12 and it’s extraordinary.
01:06:14 I mean, the only thing I can think of
01:06:16 that’s equally good is Gregor von Retzori,
01:06:24 who wrote a luridly titled, but brilliant set of novellas
01:06:28 called The Confessions of an Anti Semite,
01:06:31 and about pre First World War anti semitism
01:06:35 in Eastern and Central Europe.
01:06:36 Anyway, Grosman says, in the middle of Life and Fate,
01:06:40 that one of the extraordinary things about anti semitism
01:06:44 is that it does everything at the same time,
01:06:47 that the Jews get condemned in one place for being rich
01:06:50 and in another for being poor,
01:06:52 condemned in one place for assimilating
01:06:54 and another for not assimilating,
01:06:58 for assimilating too much and assimilating too little,
01:07:01 for being too successful for not being successful enough.
01:07:05 So I think it’s the only racism that includes within it,
01:07:10 a detestation, for the real anti semit,
01:07:14 a detestation of people that the person may perceive
01:07:17 to be better than them, correctly or otherwise.
01:07:21 By the way, I’m embarrassed to say I have not read
01:07:24 this one of two greatest novels
01:07:26 of the 20th century, Life and Fate, Zhizny Sidba.
01:07:29 And just to read off of Wikipedia,
01:07:31 we see that Grosman, a Ukrainian Jew,
01:07:32 became a correspondent for the Soviet military paper,
01:07:35 Krasnaya Zvezda, having volunteered
01:07:38 and been rejected from military service,
01:07:40 he spent a thousand days in the front lines,
01:07:43 roughly three of the four years of the conflict
01:07:45 between the Germans and the Soviets,
01:07:48 and the main themes covered in,
01:07:51 how’s it go, Life and Fate, I keep thinking Zhizny Sidba,
01:07:55 is a theme on Jewish identity and the Holocaust,
01:07:58 Grosman’s idea of humanity and the human goodness,
01:08:01 Stalin’s distortion of reality and values,
01:08:04 and science, life goes on, and reality of war.
01:08:07 It’s interesting, I need to definitely, definitely read it.
01:08:10 I think you’ll really get a lot from it.
01:08:13 One of the other things, sorry, I’m raffling it,
01:08:14 but one of the other things he does
01:08:15 is that he has this extraordinary ability
01:08:17 to talk about the absolute highest levels of the conflict
01:08:22 and then zoom in, it’s rather like the camera work
01:08:24 they use in things like Lord of the Rings,
01:08:26 where he zooms down and gets one person
01:08:30 in the midst of all this, and you get on that.
01:08:32 Or puts you in the study, too.
01:08:34 So I personally have read and reread
01:08:36 the William Shires, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
01:08:39 who’s another journalist who was there,
01:08:44 but he does not do, interestingly enough,
01:08:46 given such a large novel, kind of the definitive work,
01:08:50 the definitive original work that goes
01:08:52 to source materials on Hitler,
01:08:54 he doesn’t touch anti semitism really.
01:09:00 So.
01:09:01 Big thing to miss out.
01:09:02 Well, he just says it very calmly and objectively
01:09:06 as he does for most of the work,
01:09:08 that this was the fact of life.
01:09:12 There’s a lot of cruelty throughout,
01:09:13 but he doesn’t get to.
01:09:15 Well, one of the things is, of course,
01:09:16 they lost the war because of anti semitism.
01:09:19 I mean, that’s one kind of important way to view it.
01:09:22 It’s how Andrew Roberts, another historian, said it,
01:09:24 is that in the end, the Nazis lost the war
01:09:26 because they were Nazis.
01:09:29 It sounds almost too neat, but it’s worth remembering
01:09:32 that at the end of the war,
01:09:35 when the Germans need to be transporting troops
01:09:38 and they need to be transporting very basic supplies,
01:09:42 Eichmann makes sure he gets the trains
01:09:45 to transport the Jews right up to the end.
01:09:49 Well, that’s certainly a dark possibility.
01:09:52 Anyhow, but to go back to racism in general.
01:09:55 Racism in general, apart from anti semitism,
01:09:58 relies on the perception that another group of people,
01:10:04 a racial group, other than your own, are inferior to you.
01:10:07 That’s what I’d say is the easiest shorthand of racism.
01:10:11 And of course, it’s one of the stupidest things
01:10:15 that our species is capable of.
01:10:17 I mean, one of the stupidest,
01:10:19 that you can look at a person and guess them
01:10:24 in their entirety, in fact, because of their skin color.
01:10:28 I mean, it’s like, what a stupid idea that is,
01:10:31 as well as being an evil one.
01:10:32 But I would say that one of the,
01:10:39 I think it’s a dangerous thing in our era
01:10:41 that there are bits of it coming back.
01:10:43 That’s why I say we do need sort of,
01:10:46 we need our antennae working.
01:10:48 We just don’t need them to be overactive
01:10:50 or underactive, you know.
01:10:53 Now, the book is War in the West,
01:10:55 but speaking of racism, racism towards different groups
01:11:00 based on their skin color,
01:11:01 you’ve said that there’s a war on white people in the US.
01:11:05 Would you say that’s the case?
01:11:06 Would you say that there is significant
01:11:11 racism towards white people in the United States?
01:11:13 I’d say that white people in the United States
01:11:15 are the only people who are told
01:11:16 that they have hereditary sin.
01:11:20 And that’s a big one, just to start with.
01:11:22 Based strictly on the color of their skin.
01:11:23 Based on their skin color.
01:11:25 I mean, I would find it so repugnant if,
01:11:29 and I hope everybody would join me in feeling this,
01:11:31 I would feel it so repugnant
01:11:33 if there were any school of thought in America today
01:11:36 that had any grasp on the public attention
01:11:41 that said that black people were born into evil
01:11:43 because of something their ancestors had done.
01:11:46 Like they had the mark of Cain upon them.
01:11:49 I mean, I think it would be such a vicious way
01:11:54 to try to demoralize a group of people
01:11:59 and to tell them that the things they would be able
01:12:02 to achieve in their lives are much lessened
01:12:04 because they should spend significant portions
01:12:07 of their lives trying to do something
01:12:09 that they didn’t do.
01:12:11 Is there a difference?
01:12:14 And the obvious point left unsaid,
01:12:17 but let’s say it, nobody in the public square says that.
01:12:23 I mean, they’re the maniacs at the far fringes,
01:12:25 but nobody in the mainstream would dare to say that,
01:12:29 or I think even think that about any group of people
01:12:32 other than white people.
01:12:34 And does this mean that white people are more likely
01:12:37 or does this mean that white people are more disadvantaged
01:12:41 than black people?
01:12:42 No, and again, let’s not make this a competition,
01:12:44 but let’s not get into, I just desperately urge people
01:12:48 not to get into the idea of hereditary sin
01:12:51 according to racial background.
01:12:53 Is there something to be said about the feature aspect,
01:12:57 sort of play devil’s advocate,
01:12:59 about the asymmetry of sort of accusations
01:13:04 towards the majority?
01:13:06 So because white, so it’s easier to attack a majority.
01:13:09 It is much easier, but is there something to be said
01:13:11 about that being a useful function of society
01:13:14 that you always attack, that the minority has
01:13:19 disproportionate power to attack the majority
01:13:22 so that you can always keep the majority in check?
01:13:24 Well, it’s a dangerous game to play, isn’t it?
01:13:28 I think.
01:13:29 It’s a very dangerous game to play.
01:13:30 That’s a good summary of entirety of human civilization.
01:13:33 Oh yeah, everything is dangerous.
01:13:35 But it’s a very dangerous game to play that.
01:13:37 I wrote about this a bit in the Madness of Crowds
01:13:39 when I was saying like gay rights people,
01:13:43 the ones that still exist,
01:13:44 the ones who don’t have homes to go to,
01:13:47 who want to beat up on straight people in a way,
01:13:51 or want to make straight people feel like they’re
01:13:54 kind of unremarkable, uncool, you know, boring straights.
01:14:00 So boring.
01:14:02 So not like the magical pixie fairy dust gays.
01:14:07 That’s a bad idea to push that one.
01:14:10 That’s a bad idea.
01:14:11 And some gays push that.
01:14:15 Highly unwise, given the fact that about
01:14:19 two to 3% of the population are actually gay,
01:14:21 although now there’s like an additional 20%
01:14:23 who think they’re like two spirit or something
01:14:25 and all that bullshit, but they’re just attention seekers.
01:14:30 So let’s not spend too much time on that.
01:14:34 But equally, as I said in the Madness of Crowds,
01:14:37 with the feminist movement,
01:14:40 very unwise for half of the species
01:14:43 to say that the other half of the species isn’t needed.
01:14:47 And there were always third and fourth wave feminists
01:14:49 willing to make that nuts argument.
01:14:53 Not first wave feminists.
01:14:54 You didn’t hear it in first wave feminists.
01:14:56 You didn’t hear it.
01:14:56 Suffragette tended not to say we like the vote
01:15:00 and men are scum.
01:15:03 It would have been hard to have won everyone
01:15:05 over to their side.
01:15:06 Not least the men they needed to win over to their side.
01:15:09 But you do get third and fourth wave feminists
01:15:10 who say like, do we need men?
01:15:14 Or men are all X.
01:15:15 Again, it’s a bad idea.
01:15:17 It’s a bad idea tactically.
01:15:19 What if men, Richard Wrangham, somebody from Harvard,
01:15:25 describes that men are the originators of violence,
01:15:29 physical violence in society.
01:15:31 And he argues that actually the world would be better off.
01:15:35 No, just a very cold calculus.
01:15:38 If you get rid of men,
01:15:40 there will be a lot less violence in society is his claim.
01:15:44 But who says you need to get rid of violence in society?
01:15:47 But shouldn’t that at least be a discussion?
01:15:50 The pros and cons.
01:15:51 Have a debate, a panel discussion,
01:15:54 violence, pros and cons.
01:15:55 Well, that’s the sort of thing, if I can say so,
01:15:57 that some weak ass academic decides to do
01:15:59 because he thinks that his area of Boston
01:16:02 would be nicer or whatever.
01:16:06 He might decide it’s useful
01:16:07 if he was living in Kiev today to have violent men.
01:16:13 I mean, it might, if New York was invaded right now,
01:16:17 I’d need some violent men around here.
01:16:22 But it wouldn’t be invaded if there’s no violent men.
01:16:25 Well, there’s also, at least there’s some level of threat
01:16:32 that you ought to exude that puts people off.
01:16:35 If I was in, you know, I’m very glad
01:16:39 that the men and women of Ukraine are capable of
01:16:42 and more than capable of fighting for their country
01:16:47 and for their neighbors and their families and much more.
01:16:49 But it’s better that there was violence ready to unleash
01:16:54 when violence was unleashed upon them
01:16:57 than that the whole society had been told
01:16:59 that they should identify as non binary.
01:17:03 But at least it’s a conversation to have.
01:17:05 Isn’t there aspect to the sort of the feminist movement
01:17:12 that is correct in challenging the…
01:17:17 Some forms of violence, domestic violence, for instance.
01:17:20 Although women are capable of that as well.
01:17:23 I’m learning about this.
01:17:24 We’re all learning about this at the moment.
01:17:26 I can’t help but watch the entirety of it go down
01:17:29 in this beautiful mess that is human relations.
01:17:31 Okay.
01:17:32 But just to finish up that thought,
01:17:33 it’s very unwise for women to war against men
01:17:39 as it would be for men to war against women.
01:17:41 It’s highly, highly unwise to war on a majority population.
01:17:45 And in America, Britain and other Western countries,
01:17:47 white people are still a majority.
01:17:49 And so why would you tell the majority of their evil
01:17:52 by dint of their skin color?
01:17:55 And think that that would be a good way
01:17:56 to keep them in check.
01:17:59 I mean, I’m not guilty of anything because of my skin color.
01:18:02 I’m not guilty of anything.
01:18:03 My ancestors didn’t do anything wrong.
01:18:05 And even if they had,
01:18:06 why would I be held responsible for it?
01:18:09 So to go back to Nietzsche,
01:18:13 is there some aspect to where,
01:18:14 if we try to explain the forces at play here,
01:18:18 is it the will to power playing itself out
01:18:22 from individual human nature
01:18:23 and from group behavior nature?
01:18:27 Is there some elements to this
01:18:30 which is the game we play as human beings
01:18:32 is always when we have less power,
01:18:34 we try to find ways to gain more power.
01:18:36 That’s certainly one.
01:18:39 The desire to grab is,
01:18:42 let me see if I can find a quote for you on that.
01:18:45 The desire to grab that which we think we’re owed
01:18:49 and to do it often in the guise of justice.
01:18:56 I mean, justice is one of the great terms of our age
01:19:00 and one of the great bogus terms of our age.
01:19:03 People forever talk about their search for justice.
01:19:06 It’s amazing how violent they can often be
01:19:08 in their search for justice
01:19:09 and how many rules they’re willing to break
01:19:11 so long as they can say they’re after justice
01:19:14 and how many norms they can trample
01:19:16 so long as they can say it’s in the name of justice.
01:19:18 You can burn down buildings in the name of justice.
01:19:21 Well, the majority groups throughout history,
01:19:23 including those with white skin color
01:19:25 have done the same in the name of justice.
01:19:28 We come up with all kinds of sexy terms
01:19:31 in our propaganda machines
01:19:32 to sell whatever atrocities we’d like to commit.
01:19:36 One of the quotes from Nietzsche that I liked
01:19:40 and I quoted in this book.
01:19:41 Careful, I’m judging you harshly.
01:19:43 Yeah, of course.
01:19:43 Nietzsche says that one of the dangers of men of resentment
01:19:49 is they’ll achieve their ultimate form of revenge,
01:19:52 which is to turn happy people
01:19:54 into unhappy people like themselves,
01:19:57 to shove their misery in the faces of the happy
01:19:59 so that in due course the happy,
01:20:01 and this is quoting Nietzsche,
01:20:02 start to be ashamed of their happiness
01:20:05 and perhaps say to one another,
01:20:06 it’s a disgrace to be happy.
01:20:08 There is too much misery.
01:20:11 This is something to be averted.
01:20:12 The sick, says Nietzsche, must not make the healthy sick too
01:20:15 or make the healthy confuse themselves with the sick.
01:20:20 Well, I think that again, there’s a lot of that going on.
01:20:24 How could I be happy when there is unhappiness in the world?
01:20:27 Why should I not join the ranks of the unhappy?
01:20:31 I think Dostoevsky has a book about that as well.
01:20:34 Sure.
01:20:34 Knows From Underground.
01:20:36 Okay.
01:20:39 This has been very Russian, Russian focus.
01:20:41 I’m very pleased with another times,
01:20:43 but Dostoevsky and Grossman and others have come in.
01:20:46 I wasn’t doing this as a sort of.
01:20:49 Yeah, well, it’s always good to plug the greats
01:20:53 and get to know they’re still relevant.
01:20:57 Do you speak Russian by the way at all?
01:20:59 Which I did.
01:21:00 I’m told it’s a 10 year language basically
01:21:02 to learn from scratch as my friends who have done it.
01:21:06 Well, there’s the language and then there’s the personality
01:21:09 behind the language and the personality.
01:21:11 I feel like you already have.
01:21:12 So you just need to know the surface details.
01:21:15 Okay.
01:21:18 In fact, the silence to be silent in the Russian language
01:21:22 is something that’s already important.
01:21:24 Oh, I should, if we had a moment,
01:21:25 I’d tell you my story about Stalin’s birthplace.
01:21:28 Should I tell you that?
01:21:28 No.
01:21:29 I once went to Gori where Stalin was born.
01:21:33 Have you been?
01:21:33 No, no.
01:21:34 I was there just after the Georgia war.
01:21:36 And I went to the nomads land in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
01:21:42 And I said, I really got to go to Gori also here
01:21:47 because the shell had landed in Gori rather weirdly
01:21:49 from the Russian side and Gori is where Stalin was born.
01:21:53 And of course, Gori is in Georgia.
01:21:55 And when we had the museum of Stalin’s birthplace,
01:21:59 they’d been trying to change for some years
01:22:01 because it had been unadulteratedly pro Stalin for years.
01:22:06 And the Georgian authorities,
01:22:07 this is in Saakashvili’s time,
01:22:11 were trying to make it into a museum of Stalinism.
01:22:15 And it was really tough.
01:22:17 The only place I’ve seen which is similar
01:22:19 is the house in Mexico City where Trotsky was killed.
01:22:23 That also is that they’re not quite sure to do.
01:22:25 They don’t want to say he’s a bad guy
01:22:27 because they think that people won’t come anyhow.
01:22:30 Stalin’s house in Gori had changed
01:22:32 from the museum of Stalin to the museum of Stalinism.
01:22:34 There was this large Georgian woman with a pink pencil
01:22:37 who just had clearly been doing the tour for 50 years
01:22:40 and just pointed all the facts.
01:22:41 She did that classic thing.
01:22:43 I’ve also saw it once in North Korea
01:22:44 where they sort of that sort of communist thing
01:22:47 where they say, here is, this is 147 feet high
01:22:51 by 13 feet deep.
01:22:52 They give you lots of facts.
01:22:53 I don’t care.
01:22:55 What does it matter?
01:22:56 They always give you facts.
01:22:58 This is Stalin’s suitcase.
01:23:00 It is 13 inches wide by, you know, this isn’t.
01:23:04 Anyhow, and this woman did all of this
01:23:06 and it was all just wildly pro, not pro Stalin,
01:23:09 just explaining Stalin’s life.
01:23:10 It was just a great local boy done good.
01:23:13 They didn’t mention the fact he killed
01:23:14 more Georgians per capita than anyone else.
01:23:17 Local boy done good.
01:23:18 And we get to the end and before being taken to the gift shop
01:23:23 where they sell red wine with Stalin’s face on it
01:23:25 and among other things, and a lighter with Stalin on it,
01:23:32 they took you to a little room under the stairs
01:23:35 and they said, this is a replica of interrogation cell
01:23:38 to show, represent horror of what happened in Stalin time.
01:23:44 Now, gift shop.
01:23:45 As I said, there’s no, no kind of thing.
01:23:48 And I took the woman aside at the end.
01:23:50 I discovered she’d said this to other journalists
01:23:52 and visited before.
01:23:53 I took her aside and said,
01:23:54 what do you think about communist Stalin?
01:23:57 And she said, let’s say she’d obviously done this
01:24:01 during communist times.
01:24:03 She said, it’s not my place to judge, that sort of thing.
01:24:09 Which is an interesting comment in itself.
01:24:10 I said, yeah, but he killed more Georgians than anyone
01:24:12 and all that sort of thing.
01:24:15 And she said, it’s not my place to judge
01:24:16 or to give my views and that sort of thing.
01:24:19 And eventually I said, well, what do you feel about it?
01:24:22 And she said, it was like a hurricane, it happened.
01:24:29 That’s interesting because if I may mention Clubhouse
01:24:32 once again, I got a chance to talk to a few people
01:24:35 from Mongolia, there’s a woman from Mongolia
01:24:39 and they talked about the fact
01:24:40 that they deeply admire Stalin, love.
01:24:43 She sounded, if I may, hopefully that’s not crossing line.
01:24:46 I think I’m representing her correctly in saying
01:24:50 she admired him almost like, loved him.
01:24:55 Like the way people love like Jesus, like a holy figure.
01:25:00 Well, isn’t that still the case in large parts of Russia?
01:25:02 I mean, Stalin keeps on winning
01:25:04 greatest Russian of all time.
01:25:07 And that’s perhaps, maybe there’s a dip,
01:25:10 but if we were to think about the long arc of history,
01:25:12 perhaps that’s going to go up and up and up and up.
01:25:16 There’s something about human memory
01:25:18 that it just, you forget the details
01:25:20 of the atrocities of the past and remember that.
01:25:22 I mean, think of the number of people we talk about
01:25:25 as historical heroes, Napoleon.
01:25:27 I mean, British people don’t talk about Napoleon as a hero,
01:25:30 but the French, now you’re, now you’re on tricky ground.
01:25:38 But no, but like the French, normally my Napoleon
01:25:42 and there had many Admiral Aswit who was also
01:25:44 an unbelievable brute and killed many people unnecessarily.
01:25:49 And there are lots of figures from history
01:25:51 that we sort of cover that over with.
01:25:56 Yeah, yeah.
01:25:58 Can we mention Churchill briefly?
01:26:00 Because he is one of the, you can make a case for him
01:26:06 being one of the great representers
01:26:08 or great figures historically of Western civilization.
01:26:12 And then there’s a lot of people from, not a lot.
01:26:16 I know, I have like three friends
01:26:18 and one of them happens to be from London.
01:26:21 And they say that he’s not a good person.
01:26:26 Why?
01:26:27 So listen, this friend, we did not discuss.
01:26:30 I just, this is an opinion poll of the three friends,
01:26:33 but I do know that there’s quite a bit, you know.
01:26:35 There’s a backlash going on at the moment.
01:26:37 At the moment and in general, there’s a spirit
01:26:39 like reflecting on the darker sides
01:26:42 of some of these historical figures,
01:26:43 like challenging history through,
01:26:46 it’s not just critical race theory.
01:26:48 It’s challenging history through,
01:26:52 well, are the people we think of as heroes,
01:26:57 what are their flaws?
01:26:59 And are they in fact villains that are convenient,
01:27:02 sort of, we’re there at the right time
01:27:10 to accidentally do the right thing.
01:27:12 Accidentally?
01:27:15 I hope this isn’t the representative fair summation
01:27:19 of your friend in London’s views.
01:27:21 No, she’s going to be quite mad at this,
01:27:23 but I didn’t say the name, so it could be any friend.
01:27:26 It could be, it’s like a girlfriend in Canada.
01:27:28 Well, see, I.
01:27:30 You’ve given that away.
01:27:31 Well, that’s, of course I would not.
01:27:34 I made that up completely.
01:27:36 It’s all, just like my girlfriend in Canada,
01:27:39 she’s completely a figment of my imagination.
01:27:41 Nevertheless, Winston Churchill is somebody,
01:27:46 I mean, just looking at reading
01:27:48 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
01:27:49 is an incredible figure that to me,
01:27:55 so much of World War II is marked,
01:27:58 leading up to the war is marked
01:27:59 by stunning amounts of cowardice by political leaders,
01:28:03 and it’s fascinating to watch here
01:28:07 this person clearly with a drinking and a smoking problem.
01:28:11 Was he?
01:28:12 I didn’t understand why that’s a negative.
01:28:13 No, I didn’t say, you see.
01:28:15 Yeah, you throw it in as if it is.
01:28:17 No, well, it’s called humor.
01:28:19 I’ll explain it to you one day what that means,
01:28:21 but he stood.
01:28:22 Explain dry humor.
01:28:23 He stood up, he stood up to what we now see as evil
01:28:31 when at the time it was not so obvious to see.
01:28:36 You know, so that’s just a fascinating figure
01:28:39 of Western civilization.
01:28:40 I’d love to get your comments.
01:28:42 The real criticisms, I mean, smoking and drinking.
01:28:45 The real criticisms of Churchill are quite easy to sum up,
01:28:49 and I do so in the War on the West, actually.
01:28:50 I say these are the things that they now use against him.
01:28:54 Didn’t do enough to avert the Bengal famine in 1943,
01:28:56 for instance.
01:28:57 That’s been shot down by numerous historians,
01:28:59 including Indian historians.
01:29:01 In the middle of the war, in the middle of a world war,
01:29:04 Churchill did what he could
01:29:05 to get grain supplies diverted from Australia to Bengal.
01:29:12 The famine was appalling.
01:29:13 It was caused by a typhoon.
01:29:15 It was not caused by Winston Churchill,
01:29:17 and the idea that some, basically,
01:29:22 Indian nationalist historians have pumped out
01:29:24 in recent years, and just anti Churchill figures,
01:29:28 that he actually wanted Indians to die
01:29:31 is just total calumny.
01:29:34 And when people claim, some people claim that,
01:29:36 I mean, there was a few very ignorant scholars,
01:29:39 nevertheless with some credentials,
01:29:41 who claim that Churchill wanted the Indian population
01:29:45 to basically be genocided.
01:29:47 And it’s complete nonsense,
01:29:48 not least by the fact that during the period
01:29:51 which in question Indian population boomed.
01:29:56 So that’s one of the main ones.
01:29:59 Another one is that he had some views
01:30:02 that we now had regarded as racist.
01:30:03 He definitely regarded races
01:30:04 as being of different characters,
01:30:07 and that there were superior races,
01:30:10 and the, as it were, the white European
01:30:13 was a superior culture.
01:30:19 He was born in Victorian England,
01:30:21 so he had some Victorian attitudes.
01:30:26 These are things in the negative side of the ledger,
01:30:28 and as with all history,
01:30:29 you should have a negative
01:30:30 and a positive side of the ledger.
01:30:31 Positive side of the ledger includes
01:30:33 he almost certainly did more than any one human being
01:30:35 to save the world from Nazism.
01:30:37 So that should count as something.
01:30:39 And one of the reasons I talk about Churchill
01:30:41 in this regard is to stress that if you get,
01:30:46 I’m not trying to stop anyone doing history at all.
01:30:49 I don’t think that the revisionism of recent years
01:30:51 about Churchill or the founding fathers of America
01:30:53 or anyone else is anything I want to stop.
01:30:56 I find it interesting,
01:30:58 find it interesting not least
01:30:59 because it’s so sloppy on occasions,
01:31:00 but I find it interesting and it’s important.
01:31:02 And we should be able to see people in the round.
01:31:04 But that includes recognizing
01:31:08 the positive side of the ledger.
01:31:10 And if you can’t recognize that side,
01:31:13 you’re doing something else.
01:31:15 You’re doing something else.
01:31:16 It’s not history.
01:31:18 It’s some form of politicking of a very particular kind.
01:31:23 And I think it’s the same thing with the founding fathers.
01:31:26 There are some people, for instance,
01:31:27 certainly since the 90s who have pushed
01:31:29 the Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson story
01:31:32 to show that Thomas Jefferson was some kind of brute.
01:31:35 As a result, we see Jefferson’s statue
01:31:39 being removed from the council chamber
01:31:41 of the city we’re sitting in last November
01:31:43 by council members who said that Thomas Jefferson
01:31:45 no longer represents our values.
01:31:47 If you can’t recognize greatness of Thomas Jefferson
01:31:51 and that he had flaws,
01:31:54 I mean, that’s not a grownup debate.
01:31:58 And weigh them and weigh them in the context of the time.
01:32:01 But let me sort of throw a curveball at you then.
01:32:05 What about recognizing the positive
01:32:08 and the negative of a fellow with nice facial hair
01:32:11 called Karl Marx?
01:32:13 Sure, sure.
01:32:14 I mean, I have a section in The War in the West,
01:32:17 as you know, where I go for Karl Marx with some glee.
01:32:22 So he seems to have gotten some popularity
01:32:26 in the West recently.
01:32:29 Not just recently, yeah.
01:32:30 I mean, he’s had a resurgence recently.
01:32:32 Yes, resurgence.
01:32:33 Well, that’s because whenever things are seen to go wrong,
01:32:36 people reach for other options.
01:32:40 And when, for instance, it’s very hard
01:32:42 for people to accumulate capital,
01:32:43 it’s not obvious that they’re gonna become capitalists.
01:32:46 And so one thing that happens is people say,
01:32:49 let’s look at the Marxism thing again,
01:32:50 see if that’s a viable goer.
01:32:52 And my argument would simply be,
01:32:55 point me to one place that’s worked.
01:32:58 Well, the argument from the Marxists
01:33:01 or the Marxian economists is that
01:33:05 we’ve only really tried it once, the Soviets tried it,
01:33:08 and then there’s a few people
01:33:10 that kind of tried the Soviet thing.
01:33:12 Huber tried it?
01:33:13 Well, they basically, it’s an offshoot of the Soviet, yes.
01:33:18 They’ve tried it.
01:33:19 They tried it in Venezuela.
01:33:22 Yes, yes, yes.
01:33:23 So let’s just quickly say,
01:33:25 how did all these experiments go?
01:33:28 Well, they failed in fascinating ways.
01:33:31 They did, but they failed.
01:33:32 Yes, they failed.
01:33:33 We should stress, so grossly failed.
01:33:36 So grossly failed that they threw millions
01:33:39 and millions of people into completely thwarted lives
01:33:43 that were much shorter than they should have been.
01:33:47 Yeah, so the lesson to learn there,
01:33:50 that you can learn several lessons.
01:33:52 One is that anything that smells like Marxism
01:33:56 is going to lead to a lot of problems.
01:33:59 Now, another lesson could be,
01:34:02 well, what is the fundamental idea that Marx had?
01:34:05 He was criticizing capitalism and the flaws of capitalism.
01:34:10 So is it possible to do better than capitalism?
01:34:13 And that’s, if you take that spirit, you start to wonder.
01:34:16 That might actually become relevant in, I don’t know,
01:34:19 20, 30, 50 years when the machines start doing
01:34:24 more and more of the labor, all those kinds of things.
01:34:26 You start to ask questions.
01:34:27 You finally might get to Marx’s dream
01:34:29 of what the average day would look like.
01:34:31 Yes.
01:34:33 Well, there’s gonna be an awful lot
01:34:35 of literary criticism then.
01:34:38 If you remember, that’s what Marx said
01:34:39 that we would be doing in the evenings,
01:34:41 the laborer in the evening.
01:34:42 Well, he didn’t know Twitter was a thing, or Netflix.
01:34:45 So he would change.
01:34:47 Are there things we could learn from Marx plausibly, possibly?
01:34:51 I can’t think of anything myself offhand.
01:34:53 But to have a critique of capitalism
01:34:56 isn’t by any means a bad thing in this society.
01:34:58 I’d rather that it was a critique of capitalism
01:35:00 that showed how you improve capitalism,
01:35:02 a critique of the free market that showed
01:35:04 how people could get better access to the free market,
01:35:07 how you could ensure, for instance,
01:35:08 that young people get onto the property ladder,
01:35:10 things like that.
01:35:11 Those are constructive things.
01:35:13 The people who say we must have Marxism,
01:35:15 I mean, don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,
01:35:17 because that never leads to any of those things.
01:35:19 Haven’t led in the past.
01:35:22 It’s never led in the past.
01:35:23 And at some point, you’ve got to try to work out
01:35:25 how many attempts you make at this damn philosophy
01:35:30 before you realize that every attempt always
01:35:32 leads to the same thing.
01:35:34 I would say we could pretend that fascism has never
01:35:36 been properly tried and that it was unfortunate what happened
01:35:41 in Nazi Germany, but that wasn’t real fascism.
01:35:45 And Mussolini’s fascism didn’t go all that well,
01:35:49 but it was a bit better.
01:35:51 And maybe we could try a bit more Franco fascism.
01:35:54 Nobody would have any time for this crap, nor should they.
01:35:58 The people who try that are reviled, and quite rightly.
01:36:02 So why do we tolerate it with the Marxism thing?
01:36:04 And it’s a great mystery to me,
01:36:06 the way that people do tolerate it.
01:36:08 Always, always in this stupid way of saying,
01:36:11 we haven’t done it yet.
01:36:13 And if you keep trying the same recipe,
01:36:16 and every time it comes out as shit,
01:36:19 it’s that the recipe is shit.
01:36:21 Well, sort of, I’m trying to practice here
01:36:23 by playing devil’s advocate,
01:36:24 practice the same idea that you mentioned,
01:36:26 which is, when you say the word Marxism,
01:36:29 should you throw out everything,
01:36:30 or should you ask a question, is there good ideas here?
01:36:34 And the same, it’s the good,
01:36:36 it’s weighing the good and the bad,
01:36:37 and being able to do so calmly and thoughtfully.
01:36:40 Sure.
01:36:41 You know the famous George Orwell comment
01:36:45 on the style, in an argument with a Stalinist?
01:36:48 Do you know this?
01:36:49 That’s one of my favorite quotes.
01:36:51 George Orwell, in the early 40s,
01:36:52 gets into an argument with a Stalinist.
01:36:55 He’s also a Marxist.
01:36:58 And this is after the show trials, 37.
01:37:04 This is when it’s very clear
01:37:06 what Marxism in the Russian form is.
01:37:10 And this, Orwell is in the discussion with this Marxist,
01:37:15 and it goes on and on,
01:37:16 and eventually Orwell says,
01:37:18 well, you know, what about the show trials,
01:37:20 and what about what’s happened in the Ukraine,
01:37:23 and the famines, and much more,
01:37:26 and the purges, and the purges, and the purges,
01:37:29 and eventually the Stalinist says to Orwell
01:37:33 what Orwell knows he’s going to say all along,
01:37:35 which is, he says,
01:37:36 you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
01:37:40 And Orwell says, where’s the omelet?
01:37:46 Oh, yeah, that’s a good, that’s a really good,
01:37:49 because that’s a…
01:37:50 Look at this by this stage, okay?
01:37:52 How many…
01:37:53 Where’s my damn omelet?
01:37:54 How many just messy, big, bloody, eggy piles
01:38:00 have the Marxists created by now in country after country?
01:38:04 Yeah.
01:38:05 Always next time they’re going to produce the great omelet,
01:38:08 but they never have, and they never will,
01:38:11 because the whole thing is rotten from the start.
01:38:14 But let me just also say one thing about,
01:38:17 because of course Marx isn’t as nice as he sounds,
01:38:20 and that’s one of the things that I try
01:38:22 to highlight in the book is,
01:38:24 if we’re going to do this reductive thing
01:38:25 of people in history and saying,
01:38:26 well, they had views that were of their time,
01:38:29 and we must therefore condemn them for them,
01:38:32 say, fine, let’s do the same thing with Marx.
01:38:34 And there were things I quote in this book
01:38:35 from Marx’s letters, not least letters to Engels,
01:38:38 and indeed in his published writings,
01:38:40 in pieces he was writing for the American press
01:38:44 in the 1850s,
01:38:47 the way he has horrible views on slavery
01:38:49 and colonialism and much more.
01:38:53 But the main thing is, I mean,
01:38:54 the horrible things he says about black people
01:38:57 and the constant use of the N word.
01:38:59 In fact, when I was doing the audio book
01:39:00 for the war in the West, I had to decide,
01:39:03 will I read out the quotes from Marx or not?
01:39:05 If I had read them out, I’d have been canceled
01:39:08 because people would have just said,
01:39:11 you’ve been using the N word so much in this passage.
01:39:14 And I slightly thought of doing it
01:39:17 so that I could say I was only quoting Marx
01:39:20 to try to hit the point home.
01:39:22 In the end, of course, I was sensible and decided not to,
01:39:24 but Marx’s letters are disgusting on these terms.
01:39:27 Since I highlighted this in this book
01:39:29 and some of the media picked it up
01:39:32 and have popularized this thing
01:39:35 I’m trying to put into the system,
01:39:37 which is if you’re gonna accuse Churchill of racism,
01:39:39 if you’re gonna accuse Jefferson of racism,
01:39:41 Washington of racism, and so on, what about Marx?
01:39:44 The two things that Marxists have said since this came out
01:39:46 has been, first of all, why are you saying this about Marx?
01:39:49 He was a man of his time, like everyone else.
01:39:54 And the second thing they say is,
01:39:55 we don’t go to Marx for his horrible abhorrent views on race.
01:39:58 So talking about mixed race people as gorillas and so on.
01:40:02 We don’t go to him for that.
01:40:04 We go to him for his economic theories.
01:40:06 I say, okay, well, we don’t go to Thomas Jefferson
01:40:10 for his views on slaves.
01:40:11 We don’t go to Churchill for the precise language
01:40:18 he used that points in the 1910s about Indians.
01:40:21 Or his health advice.
01:40:22 Or his health advice.
01:40:24 Actually, I do get him for that.
01:40:26 That explains so much.
01:40:28 But let’s have some standards on this.
01:40:31 And that’s why I’m very suspicious of the fact
01:40:34 that the people don’t do this with Marx
01:40:36 because I think what they’re trying,
01:40:37 what some people are trying to do,
01:40:38 and this may sound conspiratorial,
01:40:40 but I really don’t think it is.
01:40:41 I think that some people are deliberately trying
01:40:43 to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past
01:40:47 in order to say there’s nothing good.
01:40:49 Nothing you can hold on to.
01:40:51 No one you should revere.
01:40:52 You’ve got no heroes.
01:40:53 The whole thing comes down.
01:40:55 Who’s left standing?
01:40:56 Oh, we’ve also got this idea from the 20th century
01:40:58 still about Marxism.
01:41:00 Well, the 19th and 20th centuries.
01:41:02 And no, no.
01:41:05 You will not have the entire landscape deracinated.
01:41:09 And then the worst ideas tried again.
01:41:13 So basically destroy all of history
01:41:15 and the lessons learned from history
01:41:16 and then start from scratch.
01:41:17 And then it’s completely any idea can work
01:41:20 and then you could just take whatever.
01:41:22 Well, and the thing is there are always some people
01:41:24 with pre preferred ideas.
01:41:25 And I mentioned this also with the postcolonialists.
01:41:27 The postcolonialists were really interesting
01:41:30 because when the European powers were moving
01:41:33 from Africa and the Far East,
01:41:35 postcolonial movements had one obvious move
01:41:38 they could have done, which was to say,
01:41:41 since the European powers have left,
01:41:43 we will return to a pre colonial life,
01:41:46 which in some of their places would have been returning
01:41:48 to slave markets and slave ownership
01:41:50 and slave selling and much more.
01:41:52 But put that aside for a second.
01:41:54 They could have said we have an indigenous culture
01:41:56 which we will return to.
01:41:58 Almost uniformly in the postcolonial era,
01:42:01 you had figures like France Fanon,
01:42:04 you had European intellectuals like Sartre,
01:42:06 who said the Western powers are retreating
01:42:09 from these countries and therefore we should institute
01:42:12 in these countries what but Western Marxism.
01:42:17 Well, it’s not obvious to me that like the bad ideas
01:42:20 will be the ones that emerge,
01:42:21 but it’s more likely the bad ideas would emerge
01:42:23 in this kind of context when you erase history,
01:42:26 when you erase tradition.
01:42:27 When you erase history and you leave some ideas
01:42:30 deliberately uninterrogated.
01:42:33 I mean, as I say, find me one in a hundred
01:42:37 American students who’ve heard of
01:42:42 any of the communist despots of the 20th century.
01:42:47 I mean, name recognition in,
01:42:49 there was a poll done a few years ago in the UK
01:42:52 and like name recognition among children,
01:42:56 school children for Stalin, let alone Mao.
01:43:01 I mean, Mao who kills more people than anyone,
01:43:05 65 million Chinese, perhaps.
01:43:09 How many students in America know what Mao was,
01:43:13 who he was, where he was, nothing.
01:43:16 Or the atrocities committed.
01:43:17 Where the atrocities were committed.
01:43:19 And I worry about that because it means
01:43:21 that we might have learned one of the two lessons
01:43:24 of the 20th century.
01:43:26 We think we’ve learned one of the two lessons
01:43:29 of the 20th century.
01:43:30 We actually haven’t learned that lesson.
01:43:32 We’ve learned a little bit of it.
01:43:33 And we’ve not learned the other one at all.
01:43:35 Because that’s why we still have people
01:43:37 in American politics and elsewhere
01:43:39 actually talking about collectivization and things.
01:43:42 As if there’s no problem with that.
01:43:44 And as if it’s perfectly obvious.
01:43:46 And they could run it and they’d know
01:43:48 exactly where to stop.
01:43:49 What are the two lessons of the 20th century?
01:43:51 Fascism and communism.
01:43:55 Yeah.
01:43:56 I mean, I’m not exactly sure what exactly the lessons are.
01:44:00 No, it’s not clear.
01:44:02 If the lessons were very clear,
01:44:03 we’d be better at it.
01:44:04 Well, one is your book broadly applied
01:44:08 of madness of crowds.
01:44:10 That’s one lesson.
01:44:11 Well, how so?
01:44:14 Meaning like large crowds can display herd like behavior.
01:44:19 Yes, be very suspicious of crowds.
01:44:21 Yeah.
01:44:22 In general, I mean, you apply it in different,
01:44:24 more to modern application.
01:44:25 Yeah.
01:44:26 In a sense, but that’s rooted in history,
01:44:29 that crowds can, when humans get together,
01:44:32 they can do some quite radically silly things.
01:44:35 Elias Kaneti is very good on that, crowds and power.
01:44:40 And Eric Hoffer, who is a sort of self taught, amazing,
01:44:45 not to say autodidactic writer,
01:44:47 the true believer and so on.
01:44:49 He was extremely good on that.
01:44:51 But the reason I mentioned the two things,
01:44:52 no, I mean, we should have realized
01:44:53 the two nightmares of the 20th century fascism and communism,
01:44:57 that we should know how they came about.
01:45:00 And we’re interested in learning
01:45:01 how one of them came about, fascism.
01:45:03 And we know some of the lessons,
01:45:04 like don’t treat other people as less than you
01:45:08 because of their race.
01:45:10 That’s one lesson.
01:45:12 But we’ve done some good at learning that.
01:45:17 But the second one, not to do communism again,
01:45:20 not to do socialism, I think we’re way away from knowing
01:45:26 because we don’t know how it happened.
01:45:29 And the little temptations are still there always.
01:45:32 Look at people saying,
01:45:33 I’m gonna expropriate your property.
01:45:39 If people do things they don’t like,
01:45:40 they will get, we can’t wait to take your property.
01:45:42 Well, there’s a sense, there’s an appealing sense.
01:45:45 Okay, every ideology has an appealing narrative behind it
01:45:50 that sells the ideology.
01:45:52 So for socialism, for communism is that there’s a,
01:45:57 it seems unfair that the working class
01:45:59 does all of this work and gets only a fraction of the output.
01:46:05 It just seems unfair.
01:46:07 So you wanna make it.
01:46:07 If they do get a fraction of the output, yes.
01:46:10 Yes, and so it seems to be more fair
01:46:14 if we increase that.
01:46:16 If the workers own all of the value of their output
01:46:21 and things that are more fair seems to be a good thing.
01:46:26 I’d say, well, yeah, I mean, fairness is,
01:46:29 I like fairness as a term.
01:46:32 No, I much prefer fairness
01:46:33 because it’s a much easier thing to try to work out.
01:46:36 It’s quite amorphous itself as a concept,
01:46:38 but everyone can recognize it.
01:46:40 So for instance, should the boss of the company
01:46:47 earn a million times that of the lowest paid employee?
01:46:51 Doesn’t seem fair.
01:46:53 Should they earn maybe five or 10 times
01:46:57 the salary of the lowest employee?
01:47:00 Yeah, possibly, that could be fair.
01:47:03 There are certain sort of multiples
01:47:05 which are within the bounds of reasonableness.
01:47:12 I think actually that’s the much bigger problem
01:47:17 in capitalism at the moment as I see it
01:47:19 is the not untrue perception
01:47:22 that a tiny number of people accrue a lot of the benefits
01:47:27 and that the bit in the middle
01:47:34 has become increasingly squeezed
01:47:37 and is at danger always of falling
01:47:38 all the way down to the bottom.
01:47:40 I mean, I think in the snakes and ladders
01:47:41 of American capitalism, for instance,
01:47:43 it’s a correct perception to say
01:47:46 that the snakes go down awfully far.
01:47:51 If you tread on the snake,
01:47:53 you can plummet an awfully long way in America.
01:47:56 And the deal in the game was that the ladders took you high
01:48:02 and there’s a perception, and again,
01:48:03 it’s not entirely wrong that the ladder system
01:48:07 on the board is kind of broken.
01:48:10 So what you’re saying is you’re a Marxist.
01:48:13 I’m not saying I’m a Marxist.
01:48:15 You heard that here first in the out of context blog post
01:48:20 you’re going to write about this.
01:48:21 I get to that, I get back to this point.
01:48:22 The way to critique capitalism,
01:48:24 if it’s gone bad, is to get better capitalists.
01:48:28 Free markets where they’re not fair should be made fair.
01:48:31 Never decide that the answer is the thing
01:48:35 that has never produced any human flourishing, i.e. Marxism.
01:48:39 So as you describe in The Madness of Crowds
01:48:41 the herd like behavior of humans that gets us into trouble,
01:48:47 you as an individual thinker and others listening to this,
01:48:51 how can you, because all of us are mids crowds,
01:48:54 we’re influenced by the society that’s around us,
01:48:57 by the people that’s around us.
01:48:59 How can we think independently?
01:49:01 How can we, if you’re in the Soviet Union
01:49:09 at the beginning of the 20th century,
01:49:12 if you’re in, I don’t know, Nazi Germany
01:49:16 at the end of the 30s or the 40s,
01:49:18 how can you think independently?
01:49:20 Given, first of all, that it’s hard to think independently,
01:49:26 just intellectually speaking,
01:49:28 but also that it just becomes more and more dangerous.
01:49:33 So the incentive to think independently
01:49:36 under the uncertainty that’s usually involved with thinking
01:49:40 is, I mean, it’s a silly thing to say,
01:49:42 but on Twitter there is a cost to be paid
01:49:44 for going against the crowd on any silly thing.
01:49:49 We can even talk about, what is it?
01:49:52 Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.
01:49:55 There’s a crowd that believes that that was unjustified.
01:49:59 I forget what the crowd decided.
01:50:00 But I don’t.
01:50:01 Crowd split on that one.
01:50:02 It’s safe to have one opinion either way.
01:50:04 Okay, it is, right.
01:50:05 But there is, you put it very nicely,
01:50:07 that there’s clearly a calculus here
01:50:10 and that you can measure, on Twitter in particular,
01:50:12 you can measure kind of the crowd,
01:50:14 a sense of where the crowd lays.
01:50:16 Michael Jackson.
01:50:17 Mm hmm.
01:50:19 Well, oh boy.
01:50:22 I don’t want to, this is not a legal discussion.
01:50:26 I don’t have my lawyer present.
01:50:27 I don’t even have a lawyer.
01:50:29 The man in question is dead.
01:50:30 But I think most people who are not just diehard fans
01:50:33 would concede that Michael Jackson
01:50:35 had a strange relationship with children
01:50:37 and was almost certainly a pedophile.
01:50:42 Is that, was that, did the crowd agree on that?
01:50:45 No, the crowd hasn’t agreed because he’s too famous
01:50:47 and we all love Thriller.
01:50:48 Yeah, we do.
01:50:49 So you said people who are not fans, I just don’t.
01:50:52 No, I’m a fan of Michael Jackson,
01:50:53 but I think he was almost certainly a pedophile.
01:50:56 And, but nobody wants to give up dancing to bad at weddings.
01:51:01 So they just kind of added in.
01:51:04 It’s fine.
01:51:05 Seriously, it’s a genius.
01:51:07 Your law does not apply to Bill Cosby.
01:51:12 Well, he wasn’t, he was, of course,
01:51:14 one of the most famous people in America.
01:51:16 But maybe he wasn’t regarded as talented.
01:51:19 Oh, oh wow, there’s depth to this calculation.
01:51:22 There’s a genius opt out in all cultures.
01:51:26 There’s a genius opt out in all cultures.
01:51:27 Look at Lord Byron.
01:51:28 Lord Byron shagged his sister.
01:51:31 Doesn’t affect his reputation.
01:51:32 In fact, if anything, it kind of adds to it.
01:51:34 But then again, this kind of war against the West,
01:51:38 genius is actually makes you more likely,
01:51:41 or no, to get canceled.
01:51:43 So if you look at the genius of Thomas Jefferson, or…
01:51:47 Well, yes, because if you haven’t done anything remarkable,
01:51:50 nobody will come looking for you passively, yeah.
01:51:53 Oh, so genius can get you in trouble eventually.
01:51:56 Sidle through life with nobody noticing.
01:51:58 Be totally harmless and then die
01:52:00 and hope you haven’t used any carbon.
01:52:05 But you were asking about how to survive
01:52:08 the era of social media, as it were, and the crowds.
01:52:13 And there’s a very simple answer to that.
01:52:15 Don’t overrate the significance of the unreal world.
01:52:22 Oh, come on, but this is still human psychology.
01:52:25 Because you want to fit in.
01:52:26 There’s a, you want to…
01:52:27 Why?
01:52:28 Because you like people, and you’re just as a…
01:52:31 Why not just like a small number of people
01:52:33 and ignore the rest?
01:52:34 Yeah, that’s…
01:52:36 That’s what I do.
01:52:37 Well, I mean, I actually like most people,
01:52:39 and that isn’t a general thing.
01:52:40 I don’t have detestation for most people at all.
01:52:44 Most people I kind of enjoy speaking with and being with.
01:52:48 But in terms of storing your sense of self worth
01:52:52 in absolute strangers, big mistake.
01:52:54 Yeah, well, me, that’s…
01:52:56 Listen, let’s turn into a therapy session.
01:52:58 Because for me, and I think I represent
01:53:01 some number of population, is I’m pretty self critical.
01:53:03 I’m looking for myself in the world.
01:53:06 And there is a depth of connection
01:53:09 with people on the internet.
01:53:10 I mean, I have some…
01:53:11 I think there’s a shallowness of it.
01:53:13 It’s shallow connection.
01:53:14 Interesting, I…
01:53:15 Put it this way.
01:53:16 If you became very ill tomorrow, would any of them help?
01:53:21 On the internet?
01:53:21 No, no.
01:53:22 Good, that’s a good test.
01:53:24 Yeah, that’s a good test.
01:53:25 But then at the end of the day, yeah, you’re right.
01:53:27 Your very close friends would help, family would help.
01:53:30 Yeah, and perhaps that’s the only thing…
01:53:32 You can’t store significant amounts of trust,
01:53:39 or faith, or belief, or self worth
01:53:43 in places which will not return it to you.
01:53:46 Okay, so let’s talk about the more extreme case,
01:53:49 the harsher case.
01:53:50 When you talk about the things you talk about
01:53:53 in the war on the West and madness of crowds,
01:53:57 I mean, you’re getting a lot of blowback, I’m sure.
01:54:03 As for the listener, you just shrugged lightly.
01:54:07 It was a zen like look on your face.
01:54:10 So you don’t…
01:54:12 All you need is Sam Harris to say
01:54:14 that you’re brilliant and you’re happy.
01:54:16 No, no, I love Sam.
01:54:20 Yeah.
01:54:21 Deeply pleased when he flatters me, but I mean,
01:54:24 and he’s nice about me, but no, I don’t just rely on Sam.
01:54:27 No, I mean, why would I mind?
01:54:32 I mean, maybe it’s self selecting.
01:54:34 If I didn’t have the view I had about that,
01:54:37 or whatever armory it is that I have on that,
01:54:40 I wouldn’t do what I did, maybe.
01:54:43 I mean, have you been to some dark places psychologically
01:54:45 because of the challenging ideas you explore?
01:54:48 So like significant self doubt, just kind of…
01:54:52 I can’t say I’ve been unaffected by everything in my life.
01:54:55 By any means, that would make me an automaton of some kind.
01:55:01 There’s definitely times I’ve got things wrong
01:55:02 and regretted that.
01:55:05 There’s times I’ve…
01:55:10 There was a period around the time I wrote my book,
01:55:13 The Strange Death of Europe,
01:55:15 which was a very, very dark time.
01:55:21 And it wasn’t because I was having a dark time in my life,
01:55:25 but because of the book I was writing.
01:55:27 Oh, because of the places you had to go
01:55:30 in order to write that book.
01:55:32 And, well, I was contemplating the end of a civilization.
01:55:35 So occasionally now I have maybe slightly too pat
01:55:40 at this stage, but sometimes readers come up to me
01:55:43 in the street or whatever and say,
01:55:44 you know, I love The Strange Death of Europe.
01:55:47 And will say, you know, very depressing book to read,
01:55:50 however, I would say, well, you should have tried
01:55:53 writing it.
01:55:53 But it was because, I mean, it has chunks of it,
01:56:01 which I’m very proud of in particular
01:56:02 about the death of religion, the death of God,
01:56:06 the loss of meaning and the void.
01:56:11 And that’s difficult stuff to write about
01:56:14 and to grapple with.
01:56:17 And there is a sort of, I haven’t reread that book
01:56:20 since it came out,
01:56:21 but I think there are passages in it
01:56:25 which reveal what I was thinking very clearly
01:56:28 in the poetry of it, as it were, as well as the detail.
01:56:34 But, yeah, I can’t say, I’m used to saying
01:56:43 what I think and what I see.
01:56:46 And if there’s any pushback I’ve got from that,
01:56:49 I’m completely consoled that I’m saying what I see
01:56:51 with my own eyes.
01:56:54 That’s your source of strength,
01:56:56 is that you’re always seeking the truth as best you see it.
01:56:59 Well, I can’t agree to go along with a lie
01:57:03 if I’ve seen something with my own eyes.
01:57:06 Do you ever, so speaking of Sam Harris,
01:57:10 and I mentioned to you offline, a lot of people,
01:57:13 I talk to a lot of smart people in my private life
01:57:16 on this podcast, and a lot of them will reference you
01:57:18 as their example of a very smart person.
01:57:23 So given that compliment, do you ever worry
01:57:29 that your sort of ego grows to a level
01:57:33 where what you think is the truth is no longer the truth?
01:57:38 Is this kind of, it blinds you?
01:57:44 And also, on top of that,
01:57:46 the fact that you stand against the crowd often,
01:57:50 that there’s part of it that appeals to you,
01:57:52 that you like to point out the emperor has no clothes.
01:57:56 I get a certain thrill from the friction.
01:57:58 Yeah, that sometimes both your ego
01:58:02 and the thrill of friction will get you
01:58:06 to deviate from the truth and instead,
01:58:08 just look for the friction.
01:58:10 Could do, could do for sure.
01:58:13 I try to keep alive to that.
01:58:16 I mean, early in my career, I realized that, for instance,
01:58:20 I didn’t want to make enemies unnecessarily,
01:58:25 any more than strictly necessary,
01:58:26 because there was a very large number
01:58:27 of already necessary enemies.
01:58:30 And I remember once, I won’t go into the details,
01:58:31 but I already had one sort of thing I’d done that week,
01:58:35 and then another thing came out,
01:58:36 and I just thought, I can’t, I can’t do that.
01:58:39 And I remember thinking, don’t be the sort of person
01:58:42 who’s forever creating storms,
01:58:46 and I tried to make sure I wasn’t.
01:58:47 And I think I’ve pretty much stuck to that.
01:58:51 But to answer your question,
01:58:54 well, the first thing is I’m as confident as I can be
01:58:58 that I wouldn’t fall into the trap you described.
01:59:01 Two reasons.
01:59:03 I mean, one is that I don’t think of myself
01:59:05 as a wildly intelligent person,
01:59:09 partly because I’m very, very aware
01:59:11 of the things I know nothing about.
01:59:13 I mean, for instance, I have almost no knowledge
01:59:17 of the details of finance or economic theory.
01:59:26 I mean, the real details.
01:59:28 I don’t mean the big picture of the kind
01:59:29 that we were just discussing earlier,
01:59:30 but I have, if you put the periodic table in front of me,
01:59:35 the periodic table in front of me,
01:59:39 I would struggle to do more than a handful.
01:59:47 I am very conscious of huge gaps in my knowledge.
01:59:53 And where I have gaps or chasms,
01:59:57 I tend to find that I have a disproportionate admiration
01:59:59 for the people who know that stuff.
02:00:01 Like I’m wildly impressed by people who understand money,
02:00:04 really understand it, because I think,
02:00:06 how the hell do you do that?
02:00:09 And the same thing with biologists, medics,
02:00:14 stuff I just know very little about.
02:00:17 And that’s a source of humility for you, just knowing that.
02:00:19 Yes, I mean, I think, well, I can get on that stuff,
02:00:21 but I mean, Jesus, if you got me on the general knowledge.
02:00:25 I would say that thing, some years ago,
02:00:26 there’s a thing in the UK called University Challenge.
02:00:29 And I was asked some years ago on to,
02:00:34 there’s a sort of psych celebrity,
02:00:36 one of former students of the universities or colleges
02:00:40 asked to go back for the Christmas special.
02:00:42 And I was asked to be one of the people from my old college
02:00:45 to go back and compete in the sort of celebrity alumni one.
02:00:49 And the only thing I actually wanted to do,
02:00:50 it was go discover the Louis Theroux
02:00:52 had been to my college before my time.
02:00:53 And he was on, he’d agreed to be on the team.
02:00:55 And I thought, well, I’d love to meet Louis Theroux,
02:00:57 that’d be great fun.
02:00:58 And anyhow, and I said, well, I really don’t want to do it.
02:01:01 And they said, come on, you’d be great.
02:01:03 I said, I wouldn’t, I’d show myself up
02:01:05 to be a total asshole and ignoramus.
02:01:07 And as it was, I sat down my flat
02:01:10 and I watched some past episodes of University Challenge.
02:01:14 I realized I’d have just sat mute for the whole half hour.
02:01:20 I just couldn’t, the first question was about physics.
02:01:23 And the second one was about, as it was,
02:01:25 I watched the one and I could answer the first two
02:01:29 or three questions of the one that actually went out
02:01:32 because they made it a bit simpler.
02:01:35 But I mean, I’m terribly conscious of the,
02:01:37 and I said to the producers, I said, I can’t go on
02:01:39 because I mean, I just couldn’t answer the questions.
02:01:42 These unbelievably smart students seem to be able to answer
02:01:44 on a whole range of things.
02:01:46 So I’m perfectly aware of my limitations and…
02:01:51 You contemplate your limitations.
02:01:53 Yeah, and they’re forever before me, you know.
02:01:56 They’re not hard to find in every day.
02:01:58 And then on top of that, I suppose, it’s,
02:02:03 in a way, you know that line from Rudyard Kipling’s
02:02:08 alternately brilliant and slightly nauseating poem, If?
02:02:13 There’s a line.
02:02:14 You just enjoy a good poem, can you?
02:02:16 Well, no, it’s not, I can enjoy a great poem.
02:02:21 But I mean, a good poem.
02:02:23 This is, you know, slightly off.
02:02:25 But, well, it’s up to you.
02:02:26 This goes to your criticism of Dostoevsky.
02:02:29 Take Douglas’s criticism with a grain of salt, so.
02:02:34 Maybe I’ve read it too many memorial services and things.
02:02:37 But that line is a good piece of advice.
02:02:41 If you can learn to meet triumph and disaster
02:02:44 and greet these two imposters just the same.
02:02:48 That’s a good line.
02:02:49 It’s a good line.
02:02:50 It’s skipping off an amazing turn of line.
02:02:53 But I do think that it’s a very sensible thing
02:02:56 to try to greet triumph and disaster
02:03:00 and regard them as imposters and greet them just the same.
02:03:03 And actually, anyone who knows me knows that I never,
02:03:08 partly it’s because I have a sort of belief in the old gods
02:03:12 and that the moment that I thought
02:03:14 that I was at the moment of triumph,
02:03:16 the fates would hitch up their skirts
02:03:18 and run at me at a million miles an hour.
02:03:20 But it’s also because, anyone who knows me knows
02:03:26 I never have a moment when I say,
02:03:30 that’s just great.
02:03:32 I feel totally fulfilled and victorious.
02:03:37 I mean, it happened to me recently
02:03:39 when the war in the West went straight to number one
02:03:41 in the bestseller list.
02:03:43 How long did that last in terms of your self satisfaction?
02:03:46 Didn’t happen.
02:03:47 Not even for a brief moment?
02:03:49 No.
02:03:51 When I first saw that it was selling,
02:03:54 I had that moment of elation.
02:03:55 I thought, good, I’ve done it, it’s out.
02:03:59 And I did have a moment of elation then, definitely.
02:04:03 But it doesn’t last, partly because I tell myself
02:04:05 it mustn’t last.
02:04:07 Because as you said, fate hitches up its skirt.
02:04:12 Is that skirts?
02:04:14 I don’t, this, you brits with your poetry,
02:04:17 even when it’s nauseating.
02:04:20 As of 2022, this year, what’s your final analysis
02:04:24 of the political leadership and the human mind
02:04:27 and the human being of Donald Trump?
02:04:32 I sort of avoided this for years.
02:04:34 Just talking about Trump.
02:04:35 Tried to avoid talking about Trump for years.
02:04:37 Same reason I tried to avoid writing about Brexit.
02:04:39 Do you think that Trump, just sorry on a small tangent,
02:04:41 do you think that Trump’s story is over
02:04:45 or are we just done with volume one?
02:04:47 I have no idea.
02:04:48 The people I know who know him say that he’s running.
02:04:53 And I think that in general, Republicans have to,
02:04:59 do have a choice in front of them.
02:05:02 A one friend put it to me recently, said,
02:05:06 you’ve got to go in with your toughest fighter.
02:05:08 And I understand that instinct and I also think
02:05:16 it’s a very dangerous instinct
02:05:18 because what if your toughest fighter
02:05:20 is also your biggest liability?
02:05:23 What’s the best way to get out the Democrat vote
02:05:25 in 2024 than to have Donald Trump running?
02:05:28 And the people that are doing the war in the West,
02:05:30 they’re pretty tough fighters.
02:05:32 They are.
02:05:33 And I’m cautious about this because I know every way
02:05:37 I tread it’s dangerous, but let me just be frank.
02:05:41 Tread gracefully.
02:05:42 I’ll tread as gracefully as I can.
02:05:44 My Wellington boots, my galoshes.
02:05:49 Here’s the thing, I think everybody knows what Trump is.
02:05:54 I think we all knew for years.
02:05:56 And I feel sorry for the conservatives who had to pretend
02:05:59 that he was something he wasn’t.
02:06:02 I felt sorry for the ones who had to pretend
02:06:07 that for instance he was some devout Christian
02:06:09 or a man of faith or a man of great integrity
02:06:13 or all of these sorts of things.
02:06:16 Because in the public eye for years,
02:06:18 it’d be obvious that wasn’t the case.
02:06:20 But he has something extraordinary.
02:06:26 One thing is a method of communication
02:06:28 that you’ve just got to say was unbelievable.
02:06:32 In one fundamental way that you can’t look away
02:06:35 for some reason.
02:06:36 Can’t look away.
02:06:36 I mean, I mean watching him clear everyone out of the way
02:06:42 in 2016 was thrilling
02:06:45 because those people needed clearing away.
02:06:47 You know, I mean, it’s just horrifying.
02:06:49 What America is going to give us another Bush?
02:06:53 What’s so great about this family?
02:06:57 America is going to give us another Clinton.
02:06:58 We’re going to get to choose any Clinton on the Bush.
02:07:01 Mark Stein said, whatever, we’ll just wait for the day
02:07:03 the Clintons and the Bushes into marry
02:07:05 and then we can really have a monarchy again.
02:07:08 So I was very pleased to see him clear them away.
02:07:12 I was very pleased to see him sort of raise
02:07:16 some of the issues that needed raising.
02:07:18 I thought it was a sort of breath of fresh air
02:07:21 and I wished it wasn’t him doing it.
02:07:24 And then there was a question of him governing
02:07:26 and it was just perfectly clear
02:07:27 he didn’t know how to govern.
02:07:30 What he did have, however, what he does have
02:07:32 is an incredible ability to fight.
02:07:35 And some of the forces he was arraigned against
02:07:37 were arraigned against him.
02:07:38 My gosh, they would have taken down anyone else.
02:07:41 I mean, they’d have probably done some similar BS
02:07:46 against Ted Cruz if he, you know, or Marco Rubio.
02:07:51 You know, they’d have said, some people admitted,
02:07:54 they’d have accused all these people of racism
02:07:56 and misogyny and everything else as well,
02:07:57 just like they did Mitt Romney,
02:07:58 just like they did John McCain.
02:08:01 But Trump was the one ugly enough
02:08:03 and bruisey enough to fight.
02:08:06 And also a willingness or a lack of willingness
02:08:12 to play sort of the civil game of politics.
02:08:18 You know, at a party when politeness gets you in trouble.
02:08:23 You show up and everybody’s polite
02:08:25 and you just out of momentum want to be being polite
02:08:28 and all of a sudden you’re on an island
02:08:30 with Jeffrey Epstein and it gets you
02:08:33 into a huge amount of trouble.
02:08:34 But so Trump has these sort of extraordinary qualities,
02:08:37 but I just, you know, look, he screwed up
02:08:41 during his time in office because he didn’t achieve
02:08:43 as much as he should have done.
02:08:44 And you could say that about every president,
02:08:46 but I refuse to acknowledge that two years
02:08:47 when he had both houses in the beginning,
02:08:50 he just didn’t know what levers to pull.
02:08:52 You know, I mean, he was sitting in the office
02:08:54 behind the Oval Office tweeting, watching the news.
02:08:58 I’m sorry, that’s not a president.
02:09:00 And he couldn’t fill and didn’t fill positions
02:09:03 because people knew, I mean,
02:09:05 people who were very loyal to him,
02:09:08 he would just, you know, he’d get them to do something loyal
02:09:10 and then destroy them.
02:09:12 And I think, and then we get onto the thing about,
02:09:15 and here we get onto the, you know,
02:09:17 what of course is very, very fractious terrain,
02:09:19 but, you know, I covered the 2020 election
02:09:22 and I was traveling all around the states
02:09:24 and I went to Trump rally and all sorts of stuff.
02:09:27 And I, I mean, I was in DC on election night
02:09:31 and it got very ugly at one point
02:09:35 in so called Black Lives Matter Plaza.
02:09:38 When it looked like Trump might win,
02:09:40 when Florida came in and got really,
02:09:41 I could feel the air were very, very heated
02:09:44 and like some Antifa people started getting into black lock
02:09:48 and this sort of stuff.
02:09:48 And I thought this town is gonna burn, you know,
02:09:51 if Trump wins.
02:09:53 And in the aftermath of the vote,
02:09:55 I was willing to hang around in Washington for a bit
02:09:57 and then I saw what it was gonna drag on.
02:09:59 And I saw some of his people and others and people told me
02:10:02 they had great evidence of vote rigging
02:10:03 and all this sort of thing.
02:10:05 And I’m afraid I’m one of those people
02:10:07 who doesn’t believe that the evidence that they presented
02:10:11 is good enough to justify the claim
02:10:12 that he won the election.
02:10:14 And I, and people say, have you seen 2000 mules
02:10:18 and have you seen, look, the evidence isn’t there,
02:10:22 that the election was won by Donald Trump.
02:10:24 And I think that what he did on January the 6th
02:10:28 was unbelievably dangerous.
02:10:32 And, you know, here it is possible for us to hold two ideas
02:10:35 in our head at the same time.
02:10:37 January the 6th was not nothing,
02:10:40 nor was it an insurrection and attempt to stage a coup.
02:10:44 And there’s a vanishing number of people in the US.
02:10:49 It was Eric Weinstein who said that the,
02:10:51 it’s like, this is the roof that you have to walk along.
02:10:56 And like the sides are very steep
02:11:00 if you fall off either side.
02:11:02 Is there some sense, given the forces
02:11:06 that are waging war in the West,
02:11:08 you said this feeling, perhaps because of Antifa
02:11:13 or something else, that this town is gonna burn
02:11:16 and maybe a continued feeling that this town
02:11:18 is going to burn with the January 6th events.
02:11:22 Are you worried about the future of the United States
02:11:27 in the coming years because of the feeling of escalation?
02:11:33 Is that just a war of Twitter?
02:11:36 Or is there a real brewing of something?
02:11:40 Oh, it’s real.
02:11:41 And how, well, let me then respond to that.
02:11:45 How, what is the hopeful?
02:11:47 If you 10 years from now look back at the United States
02:11:54 and say we turned it around, what would be the reason?
02:11:58 What would be the ways, the mechanisms that we do so?
02:12:01 Tell you, since I wrote this book,
02:12:04 there are two things in particular
02:12:05 that I’ve been really pleased that a specific type
02:12:10 of specialist has approached me on
02:12:12 to say that things I’ve written about
02:12:14 actually have more application than I realized.
02:12:17 One is the gratitude issue.
02:12:19 A number of people have approached me
02:12:21 who have gone through AA, Alcoholics Anonymous.
02:12:25 They sometimes say, have you ever been to AA?
02:12:27 And that’s a bit of a personal question.
02:12:34 But they say, but the reason they ask it is because they say,
02:12:36 well, because if you go to drug rehabilitation
02:12:38 or Alcoholics Anonymous, Norm Macdonald said,
02:12:43 it doesn’t sound very anonymous.
02:12:45 You stand up in a room, you say your name
02:12:46 and you tell everyone the worst things you’ve ever done.
02:12:48 Sounds the opposite of anonymous.
02:12:50 Anyhow, but they say, look,
02:12:52 because if you go to these things,
02:12:54 apparently you’re asked to, as part of your recovery,
02:12:58 say what you’re grateful for,
02:13:00 like list what you’re grateful for.
02:13:02 I didn’t know that by the way, until the book was out.
02:13:05 And so that turned out to have more application
02:13:07 than I knew.
02:13:08 The other thing though, is that I say
02:13:09 that it’s absolutely crucial in America
02:13:11 that we try to find things that we agree on.
02:13:14 And a couple of times since the book came out,
02:13:16 I’ve been approached by people who are marriage counselors.
02:13:20 But we’ve also said, have you ever been
02:13:21 through marriage counseling?
02:13:22 And again, that’s a very personal question.
02:13:25 Stop asking me personal questions.
02:13:27 No, but they said, and I said, well, why?
02:13:30 Because this is one of the things that we do
02:13:35 in couples therapy, is try to find things you agree on.
02:13:39 And I think this is very important in America.
02:13:45 And it’s made much harder by the fact,
02:13:47 and I’ve said this many times,
02:13:48 but forgive me if I’m repeating myself,
02:13:50 but it’s made much harder by the fact
02:13:53 that having different opinions is very last century.
02:13:57 Now we all have different facts,
02:13:59 or at least the two sides have different facts.
02:14:02 One half of the country roughly,
02:14:05 or let’s say 40%, 30%, whatever you want to put it,
02:14:07 with a tired minority in the middle.
02:14:11 One segment of the country believes
02:14:13 that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election
02:14:15 and that the Russians interfered
02:14:17 and got Donald Trump into power.
02:14:19 Another half of the country believes
02:14:20 that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
02:14:23 If you can’t agree on who wins elections,
02:14:24 it’s very hard to see what you agree on as a country.
02:14:27 That’s one of the reasons I mind the war
02:14:29 on American history and Western history,
02:14:31 is one of the things you have to agree on
02:14:33 is at least some attitude towards your past.
02:14:36 You don’t have to agree on everything.
02:14:37 But the public square has to have public heroes
02:14:40 who are agreed to be heroes to some extent,
02:14:43 warts and all.
02:14:45 If you don’t have that,
02:14:47 if actually you think for instance,
02:14:48 half the country thinks the founding fathers
02:14:50 were pretty good,
02:14:52 the other half thinks they were absolutely rotten,
02:14:54 racist and so on.
02:14:55 If half the country basically thinks
02:14:57 it would have been better if Columbus
02:14:58 had taken a different turn, never found America,
02:15:01 gone back home and said, I don’t know, nothing out there,
02:15:05 that would have been better.
02:15:06 And the other half’s pretty glad in the end
02:15:08 that we’ve got America.
02:15:13 You’ve got to agree on something.
02:15:16 And I just see in America,
02:15:18 I do think we’ve got to try to find things to agree on,
02:15:20 like a reasonable attitude towards the past.
02:15:23 That’s why that matters.
02:15:24 And again, I stress, I’m not trying to say
02:15:27 that everything in the American past was good.
02:15:29 God knows that wouldn’t stand up to a second of scrutiny
02:15:31 or self scrutiny.
02:15:33 But nor was it all bad.
02:15:35 This wasn’t a country formed in sin
02:15:38 and in an eradicable sin.
02:15:40 It wasn’t founded in 1619
02:15:42 in order to make the country wicked
02:15:45 and incapable of escaping that wickedness.
02:15:49 These are things that will matter enormously
02:15:51 in the years ahead,
02:15:52 because if you can’t agree on anything,
02:15:55 including who your heroes are,
02:15:59 the whole thing is just one massive division
02:16:02 and we’ll see what I think we’re already seeing,
02:16:04 which is people basically going to states
02:16:06 where it’s more like the life they want to live.
02:16:09 And some people say to me, well, that’s okay.
02:16:11 And the genius of the founding is that it allows for that.
02:16:16 That’s possible, but it’s also,
02:16:18 it eradicates part of what has been American public life,
02:16:22 which is the ability to look at each other
02:16:24 and discuss face to face.
02:16:26 And I see things like this bomb placed under America
02:16:30 the other week with the Supreme Court League,
02:16:31 the draft league as being just a further example of that.
02:16:37 I’m very, very worried about it in America.
02:16:39 And because if America screws up everything,
02:16:43 everything else in the world goes.
02:16:45 Yeah, there’s the degree to which America is still
02:16:48 the beacon of these ideas on which the country was founded
02:16:53 and has been able to live out in better and better forms,
02:16:58 sort of live out the actual ideals of the founding principles
02:17:02 versus like.
02:17:03 And with the desire to improve.
02:17:05 Yeah, constantly.
02:17:06 An imperfect union.
02:17:08 Yeah, well, as I generally have hope that people want
02:17:12 to sort of, in terms of gratitude,
02:17:14 people are aware of how good it feels to be grateful.
02:17:20 It’s a better life psychologically.
02:17:22 The resentment is a thing that destroys you from within.
02:17:25 So I just feel that people will long for that
02:17:30 and will find that.
02:17:31 And that’s the American way.
02:17:33 Some of the division that we reveal now has to do
02:17:36 with new technologies like social media.
02:17:38 That kind of is a small kind of deviation
02:17:43 from the path we’re on because it’s a new,
02:17:45 we’ve got a new toy, just like nuclear weapons.
02:17:47 Yeah, which are relatively new.
02:17:50 But we need to find reasonable attitudes
02:17:53 towards these things.
02:17:54 And that’s why I say it matters how you and my feedback
02:17:58 on social media, because we’re all going through it
02:18:01 to some extent.
02:18:02 Yeah, we’re learning.
02:18:03 And we’re learning.
02:18:03 And we’ve got to learn how to do this without going mad.
02:18:08 I say this, it was my minimalist call to friends
02:18:12 in this era was the main job is not to go insane.
02:18:16 Yeah.
02:18:17 Yeah.
02:18:20 And yeah, like walk towards sanity.
02:18:22 Because I’m sure there’s a Hunter S. Thompson quote
02:18:26 in there, like insanity on the weekends
02:18:29 can be at least fun.
02:18:30 Okay, do you have advice for young people
02:18:35 that just put down their TikTok and are listening
02:18:38 to this podcast in high school and college
02:18:41 about how to have a career, how to have a life
02:18:43 they can be proud of?
02:18:47 It’s a very broad question.
02:18:48 But of course, I mean, I can give specific advice
02:18:52 to people who want to be writers and so on,
02:18:53 but that’s a bit niche, maybe.
02:18:56 Well, writers will be very interesting,
02:18:57 sorry to interrupt.
02:18:58 Also how to put your ideas down on paper
02:19:00 and think through the ideas, develop them
02:19:03 and have the guts to go to a large audience,
02:19:07 especially when the ideas are sort of controversial
02:19:09 or dangerous or difficult.
02:19:10 Well, the main thing to do is to read.
02:19:13 When I was a schoolboy, I’d ever have a book in my pocket,
02:19:17 the side pocket of my jacket, only side pocket,
02:19:20 and would read.
02:19:21 And that wasn’t just because I was swatish in some way,
02:19:26 but because I discovered probably at some point
02:19:30 in my early teens, I discovered something.
02:19:32 I wrote about this once.
02:19:34 I discovered that books were dangerous,
02:19:39 which was a thrilling discovery.
02:19:44 I discovered that they could contain anything.
02:19:47 And also people didn’t know what you were reading.
02:19:50 I remember I get far too young an age,
02:19:52 I read The Doors of Perception of Aldous Huxley,
02:19:56 and I didn’t make head or tail of it probably,
02:20:01 but I knew that it was about something really interesting
02:20:04 and dangerous.
02:20:06 And I thought constantly when I read poetry
02:20:10 or read history, I think I was just constantly thrilled
02:20:16 and wanted to know more.
02:20:18 And if you wanna become a writer, you have to be a reader.
02:20:26 You have to read the best stuff.
02:20:29 And obviously people disagree or agree on what that is,
02:20:33 and you’ll find the people that really impress you.
02:20:37 But I know that I just came across certain writers
02:20:39 who just knocked me off my feet.
02:20:42 And when you find those people, read everything
02:20:50 and cling on to them and find other people like that,
02:20:53 find other writers like that, people that are connected
02:20:56 by history or scholarship or circles or whatever.
02:21:01 For you, was it fiction or nonfiction?
02:21:03 Is there a particular books that you just remember
02:21:06 or just give you pause?
02:21:07 Well, I remember that the first book
02:21:09 that absolutely threw me was the Lord of the Flies
02:21:13 of William Golding, which used to be a signed text
02:21:15 and everyone’s a bit snotty about because it’s so popular.
02:21:19 But I was thrown because I think it was the first adult book
02:21:22 I read in that I had been used to the world
02:21:26 of children’s literature of everything ends up fine
02:21:29 in the end, the lost all get found.
02:21:34 And this was the first book I read where that’s not the case
02:21:37 the world turns out differently.
02:21:39 And I remember for days afterwards,
02:21:42 I was just in a state of shock.
02:21:46 I couldn’t believe what I’d just discovered
02:21:51 and partly because I sort of intuited it must be true.
02:21:55 And of course, that is not to say that the Lord of the Flies
02:21:57 lots of scholarship on what children do in this situation
02:22:01 of being on the island when they do congregate and anyhow.
02:22:04 But yes, that was a sort of introduction to the adult world
02:22:07 and it was shocking and thrilling and I wanted more of it.
02:22:14 It was dangerous.
02:22:15 And it was dangerous.
02:22:16 And then of course, when I became interested in sex,
02:22:19 let alone when I realized I was gay,
02:22:21 I realized books were a very, very good way to learn
02:22:23 about what I was.
02:22:25 And that was even more dangerous in a way.
02:22:28 And I thought, I mean, nobody knows what I know.
02:22:33 You discovered sex, that was an invention in books?
02:22:36 What do you mean?
02:22:37 No, what I mean is, nobody, no, no, no, no.
02:22:39 What I mean is that one of the things that gay people have
02:22:41 when they’re growing up is that
02:22:43 you have this terribly big secret
02:22:45 and you don’t think the world will ever know,
02:22:47 you hope the world will never know.
02:22:49 And it’s been called by one psychologist,
02:22:54 the little boy with a big secret.
02:22:56 And so if you discover that other people
02:22:59 have the same secret, there’s a sort of,
02:23:03 thank God for that.
02:23:04 But I mean, that’s just a version
02:23:07 of what everybody gets in reading in a way,
02:23:09 which is the thrill of discovery
02:23:11 that somebody else thought something you thought
02:23:14 only you’d thought.
02:23:15 I mean, one of the greatest thrills in all of literature
02:23:18 is when a voice comes from across the centuries
02:23:21 and seems to leave a handprint, you know.
02:23:24 And makes you feel a little bit less alone
02:23:26 because somebody else feels,
02:23:28 sees the world the same way, is the same way.
02:23:31 That’s what C.S. Lewis is said to have said,
02:23:34 we read to know we’re not alone.
02:23:37 But we don’t only read to know we’re not alone,
02:23:39 we read to become other people.
02:23:42 I mean, I think I saw in books
02:23:44 a version of the life I wanted to live
02:23:45 and then I decided to live it.
02:23:48 And I’m fortunate enough to have done so.
02:23:52 I wanted to live in the world of ideas
02:23:54 and books and debate.
02:23:58 I wanted to live in the debates of my time, you know.
02:24:01 And I remember when, like a lot of people,
02:24:04 I read Auden when I was young.
02:24:06 And, you know, certain lines obviously stuck with me.
02:24:09 But that poem of his which everybody, you know,
02:24:12 knows and which he hated, September the 1st, 1939,
02:24:17 I remember certain lines in that just like whacked me.
02:24:22 What’s that one, you know, sitting on a dive
02:24:24 and for a second or three, degraded and alone,
02:24:28 at the end of a low, dishonest decade.
02:24:31 Of course, there’s a problem with that line,
02:24:32 which is you kind of want to be living
02:24:34 at the end of a low, dishonest decade as well.
02:24:36 It sounds sort of cool in a way.
02:24:38 You know, you’re the only person who sees it.
02:24:41 But, so yeah, anyhow, that’s the diversion.
02:24:43 But the point is, if you want to be a writer,
02:24:45 you’ve got to be a reader.
02:24:47 And apart from anything else,
02:24:48 you discover the lilt of language
02:24:50 and the things you can do.
02:24:53 And I’ve read people who, and I still do,
02:24:56 I think, my God, I didn’t know, how did you do that?
02:25:00 In fact, books for me now, and articles and other things,
02:25:03 fall into two categories.
02:25:04 One is, I know how you did that.
02:25:07 And the other is, I don’t know how you did that.
02:25:10 And the best feeling as a writer
02:25:13 is when you do the second one.
02:25:16 And it happens occasionally in my writing life.
02:25:19 Will you almost like return to something you’ve written
02:25:21 or like right after you write it?
02:25:22 No, the moment you write it.
02:25:23 You wonder, how did I do that?
02:25:25 Yes.
02:25:26 That’s the most, I’ve never said that before.
02:25:29 That’s the happiest thing in writing.
02:25:32 Very occasionally, it sounds,
02:25:33 but I’ve occasionally finished something.
02:25:37 Funny enough, it happened some years ago
02:25:38 in a long piece I wrote about the artist, Basquiat.
02:25:44 I finished the piece and I gasped.
02:25:47 I didn’t know, because that’s also a thing with writing,
02:25:50 is you, it’s not, sometimes people say you need to write
02:25:55 in order to know what you think.
02:25:56 That’s not quite true.
02:25:58 Sometimes that’s a very bad piece of advice
02:26:00 for some writers who don’t know what they think
02:26:03 and it’s not gonna become clearer
02:26:04 if they just start typing.
02:26:09 But sometimes it is true that you,
02:26:12 there’s a thought that’s just waiting there
02:26:15 and a clarity that comes across
02:26:17 and suddenly the sentence emerges in your brain.
02:26:20 And by the time you typed it, you just go, yes.
02:26:25 That’s the greatest feeling as a writer.
02:26:27 Almost like it came from somewhere else.
02:26:29 That’s what Bakunin says about what’s the moment.
02:26:34 It’s Tom Stoppard’s favorite quote
02:26:36 about Bakunin saying what happens in the moment
02:26:38 where the writer’s pen, when he pauses,
02:26:42 where does he go in that moment?
02:26:45 Yeah.
02:26:46 That’s so interesting.
02:26:49 Because I think the answer to that question
02:26:52 will help us explain consciousness
02:26:54 and all those other weird things about the human mind.
02:26:58 So that was advice for writers.
02:26:59 I didn’t really give any advice for people in general.
02:27:02 Is that, oh, you wanna give health advice?
02:27:05 No.
02:27:06 To your channel, Churchill?
02:27:07 No, I don’t wanna give health advice.
02:27:09 Clearly.
02:27:10 Because you implied that Churchill
02:27:12 was one of your early guides in that aspect.
02:27:15 So when you discovered your sexuality,
02:27:17 let me ask about love.
02:27:19 Far too personal of a question to ask a Brit.
02:27:25 But what was that like?
02:27:28 And broadly speaking, what’s the role of love
02:27:31 in the human condition?
02:27:35 Sex and love.
02:27:37 And for you personally, discovering that you were
02:27:40 and maybe telling the world that you were gay.
02:27:44 I’m very perilously personal.
02:27:48 I do actually have a sort of rule
02:27:49 that I don’t talk about in my personal life.
02:27:51 Rules are meant to be broken.
02:27:52 Okay, well I’ll break it a little bit.
02:27:57 One of the ways in which growing up
02:27:58 and realizing you’re gay differs from growing up
02:28:00 and being straight is that it’s almost inevitable
02:28:05 that your first passions will be unrequited.
02:28:10 Oh wow, I never thought about that, yeah.
02:28:13 Now that’s not to say, there’s plenty of unrequited love
02:28:17 among young men for young women,
02:28:19 young women for young men, plenty of that.
02:28:21 But it’s almost inevitable if you’re gay
02:28:23 that your first passions will be totally unrequited.
02:28:30 Because the odds are that the person in question
02:28:33 will not be gay.
02:28:33 So the experience of love is mostly heartbreak.
02:28:37 It’s heartbreak and disappointment.
02:28:40 Heartbreak can be beautiful too, it’s formative.
02:28:43 Well again, it comes back to the thing
02:28:45 if you’re a writer or something,
02:28:46 that you can always do something with it.
02:28:48 That’s why all writers are sort of not to be trusted.
02:28:53 I didn’t trust you the moment you walked in here.
02:28:56 No, I mean, it’s a famous problem with writers
02:29:02 because you always think, well I could use that.
02:29:06 It’s a dangerous thing and all writers should be aware.
02:29:08 It’s almost like a drug, right?
02:29:10 No, it’s not like a drug.
02:29:11 It’s the fear that all things,
02:29:15 even the greatest suffering could be material.
02:29:19 What’s the danger in that exactly?
02:29:22 That seeing the material in the human experience,
02:29:25 you don’t experience it fully?
02:29:26 You don’t experience it fully and you might be using it.
02:29:30 I had a friend who wrote a poem about a friend
02:29:33 who died in a motorcycle accident in Sydney in the 60s.
02:29:36 And he said he knew at the moment
02:29:38 he was told about his friend’s death.
02:29:39 A tiny bit of him thought I could use this for a poem.
02:29:42 And he did and the poem was wonderful.
02:29:43 But there’s always that slight guilt for writers
02:29:45 of am I going to use that?
02:29:48 Anyhow, that’s a diversion.
02:29:50 Life is full of guilty pleasures
02:29:51 and I think that’s one of them.
02:29:52 Because if you feel that guilt,
02:29:54 really what you’re doing is you’re capturing that moment
02:29:58 and you’re going to impact the lives of many, many people
02:30:01 by writing about that moment
02:30:02 because it’s going to stimulate something
02:30:04 that resonates with those people
02:30:06 because they had similar kinds of memories
02:30:08 about a loss and a passion towards somebody
02:30:10 that they had to lose.
02:30:11 So yes, but there’s a good sign, perhaps.
02:30:15 More obvious perhaps problem is reporting from war zones
02:30:19 or bad places and wanting to find bad stories
02:30:23 because it’s useful.
02:30:24 And there is a definite guilt you get
02:30:27 from that sort of thing.
02:30:28 Like the worse the situation, the more useful.
02:30:30 Anyhow, no, so that’s sort of the only difference
02:30:35 that happens from growing up being gay.
02:30:36 And it means that most, certainly in my generation,
02:30:39 most gay men came to sexual or romantic maturity later.
02:30:46 And there’s lots of explanations of that
02:30:49 maybe being one of the reasons for perceived
02:30:52 or otherwise promiscuity among gay men,
02:30:55 which is, I think, more easily persuaded
02:30:57 by the fact that gay men behave like men would
02:31:00 if women were men.
02:31:04 That’s one explanation,
02:31:06 but it’s both a feature and a bug
02:31:08 that you come to sexual flourishing later in life.
02:31:12 That could be seen as a, in the trajectory of human life,
02:31:16 that could be a positive or a negative.
02:31:18 But what’s, broadly speaking, is the role of love
02:31:21 in the human condition, Douglas?
02:31:25 Well, it’s the nearest thing we have to finding the point.
02:31:30 What is the point?
02:31:31 What’s the meaning of life?
02:31:32 Let’s go there.
02:31:33 So what’s the meaning is a hard one, of course.
02:31:36 Where is the meaning is slightly easier.
02:31:40 And I’d say that everyone can find that.
02:31:43 You gravitate towards the places you find meaning.
02:31:47 Now, there’s a conservative answer to this,
02:31:48 which is quite useful,
02:31:49 and it’s certainly more useful than any others,
02:31:51 because the conservative answer is find meaning
02:31:53 where people have found it before,
02:31:56 which is a very, very good answer.
02:31:59 If your ancestors have found meaning in a place of worship
02:32:02 or a particular canon of work, go there,
02:32:08 because it’s been proven by time
02:32:11 to be able to give you the goods.
02:32:16 Much more sensible than saying,
02:32:18 hey, I don’t know, discover new ways of meaning.
02:32:24 But love is,
02:32:26 love is probably the nearest thing we can have
02:32:33 to the divine on Earth.
02:32:36 And of course, the problem of what exactly,
02:32:40 what type of love we mean is an issue.
02:32:43 Well, that goes to the fact
02:32:44 that you don’t like definitions anyway.
02:32:47 I do like definitions.
02:32:48 I just think they need to be pinned down.
02:32:51 But let’s not go there at the moment,
02:32:55 because it’s, yeah.
02:32:57 That’s not pinned down love at the moment.
02:32:59 Well, no, because as you know,
02:33:01 I mean, because of the different varieties of love
02:33:03 and the fact that we have one word for it in our culture
02:33:05 and that it means an awful lot of things
02:33:06 and we don’t delineate it well.
02:33:09 But let’s say human love
02:33:12 with the greatest fulfillment in sexual,
02:33:18 fulfillment in sexual love with another person
02:33:21 is probably the greatest intimation you can have
02:33:26 of what might otherwise only be superseded by divine love.
02:33:35 And it’s the sense that all young lovers have,
02:33:40 which is that they’ve just walked through the low door
02:33:44 in the garden and found themselves in bliss.
02:33:47 And that this is,
02:33:48 there’s a beautiful, beautiful poem of,
02:33:55 can I read it to you?
02:33:56 Yes, please.
02:33:57 I’ll try to find it.
02:33:58 There’s a beautiful poem of Philip Larkins,
02:34:01 which slightly says what I’m,
02:34:06 I’m trying not to duck your question
02:34:08 by referring to other people, but.
02:34:10 Maybe that’s the best way to answer the question.
02:34:13 Could be.
02:34:14 Is to read a poem.
02:34:16 So there’s a poem by Philip Larkin called High Windows,
02:34:21 which is remarkable because he came to sexual,
02:34:30 he was straight, he had a rather unhappy sex life,
02:34:33 but he came to sexual affection in the 40s and 50s
02:34:38 and all the hell that that involved.
02:34:41 And he took what I,
02:34:46 I regard as being a really remarkable and important view
02:34:49 on the sexual revolution in the 60s,
02:34:51 which is that most people of his generation,
02:34:52 most older people resented the young.
02:34:57 They resented the freedom they had,
02:34:58 and actually they pretended the freedom was terrible
02:35:00 and it was always getting likely to.
02:35:02 And Philip Larkin, rather surprisingly,
02:35:03 he was a very conservative person, took a different view.
02:35:06 And he says it in his poem,
02:35:07 and the opening of the poem is he says,
02:35:09 when I see a couple of kids and guess he’s fucking her
02:35:13 and she’s taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
02:35:16 I know this is paradise.
02:35:19 Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives,
02:35:22 bonds and gestures pushed to one side
02:35:25 like an outdated combine harvester,
02:35:28 and everyone young going down the long slide
02:35:31 to happiness endlessly.
02:35:34 I wonder if anyone looked at me 40 years back and thought,
02:35:38 that’ll be the life, no God anymore,
02:35:41 or sweating in the dark about hell and that,
02:35:44 or having to hide what you think of the priest.
02:35:46 He and his lot will all go down the long slide
02:35:49 like free bloody birds.
02:35:52 And immediately, rather than words,
02:35:55 comes the thought of high windows,
02:35:58 the some comprehending glass,
02:36:01 and beyond it the deep blue air
02:36:03 that shows nothing and is nowhere and is endless.
02:36:08 The divine, he found it.
02:36:12 He found it in seeing a couple of young kids
02:36:16 and knowing that one of them was wearing a diaphragm.
02:36:20 Do you see what I mean?
02:36:21 First of all, it’s very counterintuitive,
02:36:22 but secondly, this is the point that sex
02:36:25 had been so tied up with misery.
02:36:29 I mean, people don’t remember this now
02:36:30 when they talk about the past.
02:36:32 I mean, there’s one of my favorite books,
02:36:34 Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday,
02:36:36 you know, descriptions of what it was like
02:36:39 trying to have sex in pre First World War Vienna.
02:36:42 You know, all the men ended up
02:36:43 going to female prostitutes.
02:36:45 You know, so many of them got syphilis,
02:36:48 and this was their first experience of sex.
02:36:49 It was so goddamn awful,
02:36:51 and they were stuck with it all their lives.
02:36:53 And so there’s lots of stuff that’s gone better
02:36:56 in our last century, and that’s one of them.
02:36:59 But you ask about love.
02:37:00 Yes, I do think that love is basically
02:37:02 the thing that gives us the best glimpse of the divine.
02:37:08 And by the way, sex, liberating sex,
02:37:12 doesn’t buy you love either.
02:37:15 No, I mean, it throws in an entirely,
02:37:19 it threw in another set of problems.
02:37:24 If there’s any meaning on top of all of that
02:37:27 is we like to find problems and solve that
02:37:31 as a human species, and sometimes we even create problems.
02:37:37 Douglas, thank you for highlighting
02:37:39 all the problems of human civilization
02:37:41 and giving us a glimmer of hope for the future.
02:37:44 This is an incredible conversation.
02:37:46 Thank you for talking today.
02:37:47 It’s a huge honor, thank you.
02:37:48 It was very kind of you to say that, thank you.
02:37:51 Thanks for listening to this conversation
02:37:52 with Douglas Murray.
02:37:54 To support this podcast,
02:37:55 please check out our sponsors in the description.
02:37:57 And now, let me leave you with some words
02:37:59 from Douglas Murray himself.
02:38:02 Disagreement is not oppression.
02:38:05 Argument is not assault.
02:38:08 Words, even provocative and repugnant ones,
02:38:12 are not violence.
02:38:14 The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.
02:38:19 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.