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Douglas Murray: Racism, Marxism, and the War on the West | Lex Fridman Podcast #296


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I think that some people are deliberately trying
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to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past
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in order to say there's nothing good,
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nothing you can hold on to, no one you should revere,
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you've got no heroes, the whole thing comes down,
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who's left standing, oh, we've also got this idea
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from the 20th century still about Marxism,
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and no, no, I will not have the entire landscape
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deracinated, and then the worst ideas tried again.
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The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray,
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author of The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity,
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and his most recent book, The War on the West,
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How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason.
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He's a brilliant, fearless, and often controversial thinker
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who points out and pushes back against what he sees
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as the madness of our modern world.
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I should note that the use of the word Marxism
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and the West in this conversation refers primarily
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to cultural Marxism and the cultural values
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of Western civilization, respectively.
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This is in contrast to my previous conversation
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with Richard Wolff, where we focused on Marxism
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as primarily a critique of capitalism,
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and thus looking at it through the lens
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of economics and not culture.
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Nevertheless, these two episodes stand opposite
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of each other with very different perspectives
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on how we build a flourishing civilization together.
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I leave it to you, the listener, to think
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and to decide which is the better way.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors
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in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here's Douglas Murray.
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You recently wrote the book titled The War on the West,
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which in part says that the values, ideas,
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and history of Western civilization are under attack.
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So let's start with the basics.
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Historically and today, what are the ideas
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that represent Western civilization?
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The good, the bad, the ugly.
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I actually don't get stuck on definitions,
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precisely because, as you know, once you get stuck
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on definitions, there's a possibility
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you'll never get off them.
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Yes.
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I'd say a few things.
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Firstly, obviously the Western tradition
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is a specific tradition, a specific tradition
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of ideas, culture, well known to be, perhaps,
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easily defined by the combination of Athens
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and Jerusalem, the world of the Bible,
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and the world of ancient Greece and, indeed, Rome.
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Effectively, it creates European civilization,
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which itself spawns the rest of the Western civilizations,
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America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and others.
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But these are the main countries
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that we still refer to as the West.
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So there's a specific tradition
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and all the things that come from it.
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My shorthand cheat on this answer is to say,
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you know when you're not in it.
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So if you've ever been to Beijing, Shanghai,
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you know you're not in the West.
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Somewhere else, you know you're not in the West.
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When you're in Tokyo, you're somewhere extraordinary,
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but you know you're not in the West.
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Obviously, there are, let's say, borderline questions,
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like is Russia in the West,
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which I sort of leave open as a question.
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Possibly.
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Well, if you were placed into Moscow blindfolded
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and you woke up and you couldn't hear the language,
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or maybe you didn't know what the language sounded like,
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would you guess you were in the West or not?
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I think I was somewhere near it.
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Getting closer.
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I mean, you know, it's also a question, doesn't it,
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whether it's European.
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And I think the answer to that is not really,
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although massively influenced by Europe,
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but, and times wanting to reach towards it,
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at times wanting to stay away,
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but a part of the West, possibly, yes.
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But anyway, it's a very specific tradition.
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It's one of a number of major traditions in the world,
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and because it's hard to define
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doesn't mean it doesn't exist, you know.
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Are there certain characteristics and qualities
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about the values and the ideas that define it?
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Is the type of rule, the type of governmental structure?
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Yes.
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I mean, the rule of law, property owning democracies,
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and much more, I mean, these are, of course,
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things that ended up being developed in America
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and then given back to much of the rest of the West.
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I'd say there are other,
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perhaps more controversial attributes
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I would give to the West.
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One is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world,
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which is not shared, of course, by every other culture.
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The late philosopher George Steiner
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who said he could never get out of his head
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the haunting fact that the boats
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only seemed to go out from Europe.
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You know, the explorers, the scholars, the linguists,
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the people who wanted to discover other civilizations,
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and indeed, even resurrect ancient civilizations
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and lost civilizations.
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These were scholars that were always coming from the West
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to discover this elsewhere.
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By contrast, you know, there were never boats
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coming from Egypt to help the Anglo Saxons
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discover the origins of their language and so on.
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So I think there is a sort of ravenous interest
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in the rest of the world,
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which can be said to be a Western.
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Attribute, although it, of course,
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also has, one should immediately preface it,
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some downsides and many criticisms
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that can be made of some of the consequences
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of that interest.
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Because, of course, it's not entirely lacking
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in self interest.
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So it's not just the scholars, it's also.
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The armies.
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The armies, and they're looking to gain access
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and control over resources elsewhere.
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To market.
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And hence the imperial imperative.
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Exactly.
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To conquer, to expand.
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Although that itself, of course, is a universal thing.
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I mean, no civilization, I think, that we know of
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doesn't try to gain ground from its neighbors where it can.
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The Western ability to go further faster
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certainly gave an advantage in that regard.
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Do some civilizations get a bit more excited
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by that kind of idea than others?
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Possible.
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It's possible.
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Because you could say it's the Western civilization
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because the technological innovation was more efficient
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at doing that kind of thing.
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Absolutely.
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But maybe it wanted it more, too.
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Well, the Ottomans wanted it an awful lot
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and did very terribly well for many centuries,
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and one shouldn't forget that, as did others.
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I'd also say, by the way, and again,
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it's a very broad one, but it's worth throwing out there.
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I think self criticism is an important attribute
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of the Western mind, one that, as you know,
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is not common everywhere.
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Not all societies allow even their most vociferous critics
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to become rich.
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So criticism is a negative sounding word.
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It could be self introspection, self analysis,
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self reflection.
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And it can be what you need.
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And in the Western system, I'd argue that one of the
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advantages of the system of representative governance
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is that where there are problems in the system,
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you can attempt to sort them out by peaceable means.
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We listen to arguments, most famously in America
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in the late 20th century, the civil rights movement
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achieved its aims by force of moral argument
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and dissuaded the rest of the country
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that it had been wrong.
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That's not common in every society by any means.
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So I think there are certain attributes of the Western mind
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that you could say are, they're not entirely unique,
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but they are not as commonplace elsewhere.
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What about the emergence in hierarchies of asymmetry
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of power, most visible, most drastic in the form of slavery,
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for example?
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Well, I mean, everyone in the world is slavery,
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so I don't regard it as being a Western,
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a unique Western sin.
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It's rather hard to think of a civilization in history
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that didn't have slavery of some kind.
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One of the oddities of the Western ignorance of our day
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is that people seem to imagine that our societies
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in the West were the only ones who ever engaged
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in any vices.
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Alas, this isn't true.
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It's a sort of Rousseauian mistake,
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or at least one that's blossomed since Rousseau,
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that everybody else in the world was born
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into sort of Edenic innocence,
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and only we in the West had this sort of evil in us
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that caused us to do bad things to other people.
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Slavery was engaged in by everyone in the ancient world,
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of course, and through most of the modern world as well.
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Of course, there are 40 million slaves in the world today,
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so it's clearly not something that the species as a whole
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has a problem with.
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And that's more slaves, of course,
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than there were in the 19th century.
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And I'd say, on top of that, that the interesting thing
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about the Western mind as regards to slavery
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is that we were the civilization that did away with it.
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And by the way, the founding fathers of America,
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who today are lambasted routinely
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for being acquiescent in the slave trade,
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engaging in it, owning slaves.
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People almost don't even bother now to recognize the facts
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that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington,
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all wanted to see this trade done away with,
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couldn't hold the country together at the origins
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if they'd have made such an effort.
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And believed and hoped that it would be something
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that would be dealt with after their time.
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So the founding ideas had within them the notion
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that we should, as a people, get rid of this.
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The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence
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set up the conditions under which slavery
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will be impossible.
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All men are created equal.
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Once you've put that, that's a time bomb
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under the whole concept of slavery.
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That's ticking away, okay.
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And sure enough, it detonated in the next century.
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If we just step back and look at the human species,
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what does slavery teach you about human nature?
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The fact that slavery has appeared
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as a function of society throughout human history.
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There are two possibilities.
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One is it's what people think they can do
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when God's not watching.
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Another is it's what they can do
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if they think that God allows it.
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Really, really well put.
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And the fact that they want to do this kind of subjugation,
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what does that mean?
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Well, I mean, it's pretty straightforward in a way.
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There are people who get to work for free.
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It's economic in nature in some sense.
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Yes, but in order to do it,
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I mean, almost always there are some examples
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in the ancient world where this wasn't the case,
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but almost always it had to be a subjugated people
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or people that are regarded as different.
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One of the things actually I've tried to sort of inject
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into the discussion through this book among other things
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is a recognition that there were very major questions
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still going on in the 18th and early 19th century
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that were unresolved, which were one of the reasons
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why slavery was not as morally repugnant
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to people then as it is to us now.
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And that's the question of polygenesis and monogenesis.
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At the time of Thomas Jefferson,
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the founding fathers were thinking and working.
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They didn't know because nobody knew
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whether the human races were related or not.
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There were arguments, the monogenesis argument
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that we were all indeed from the same racial stock.
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Polygenesis argument was that we weren't.
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Black Africans, Ethiopians,
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they're often referred to at the time
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because they provided some of the first slaves,
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were different from white Europeans,
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simply not related in any way.
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And that makes it easier, of course.
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That makes it easier to enslave people
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if you think they're not your brother.
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Am I my brother's keeper?
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No, he's not your brother, and it's a very,
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it was a very troubling argument in the 18th, 19th century,
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also because there was a biblical question.
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It threw up a theological question, which was,
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I mean, people were literally debating this at the time.
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Was there also a black Adam and Eve?
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Was there, as it were, an Indian Adam and Eve,
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a Native American Adam and Eve?
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This was a serious theological debate
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because they didn't know the answer.
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People say that Darwin solved this.
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It wasn't just Darwin, of course,
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but by the late 19th century,
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the argument that we were not all related
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as human beings had suffered so many blows
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that you had to really be very, very ignorant,
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deliberately, willfully ignorant to ignore it by then.
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So it no longer was, after Darwin, a theological question.
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It became a moral question.
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It was already a moral question, but it clarified,
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Darwin clarifies it definitely,
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and then you're in this, as I say, in this situation
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of you're not subjugating some other people.
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You're subjugating your own kin,
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and that becomes morally unsustainable.
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So given that slavery in America
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is part of its history,
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how do we incorporate into the calculus of policy today,
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social discourse, what we learn in school?
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We can look at slavery in America.
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We can look at maybe more recent things,
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like in Europe, the other atrocities, the Holocaust.
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How do we incorporate that in terms of
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how we create policy, how we treat each other,
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all those kinds of things?
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What is the calculus of integrating the atrocities,
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the injustices of the past into the way we are today?
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That's a very complex question,
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because it's a moral question at this point,
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and a moral question long after the fact.
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I say at one point in the War on the West
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that the argument, for instance, on reparations now
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that goes on, and it's not a fringe argument anymore.
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Some people say, oh, you're pulling up this fringe argument.
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It really isn't.
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I mean, every contender for the Democratic nomination
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for the presidency in 2020 was willing to talk
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about the possibility of reparations.
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Some very eager that this country, America,
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goes through that entirely self destructive exercise.
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I say that there's a lot of problems with this,
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but if I could refine it down to one thing, I'd say this.
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It's no longer about a wealth transfer
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from one group of people who did something wrong
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to another group of people who were wronged.
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It would have been that, could have been that
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200 years ago.
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Today, it's not even the descendants of people
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who did something wrong giving money to people
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who were the descendants of people who were wronged.
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It's a wealth transfer from people who look like people
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who did a wrong thing in the past to another group
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of people who resemble people who were wronged.
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That's impossible to do, and I'm completely clear
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about this.
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There is no way in which you could organize
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such a wealth transfer on moral or practical reasons.
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America is filled with people who have the same skin color
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as us, for instance, who have no connection
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to the slave trade and should not be made to pay money
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00:16:27.520
to people who have some connection.
link |
00:16:30.600
And then the country's also filled with ethnic minorities
link |
00:16:34.200
who have come after slavery who would not be due
link |
00:16:39.240
for any reimbursement, as it were.
link |
00:16:42.760
The problem with this is, though, is that there are,
link |
00:16:46.520
I'm perfectly open to the possibility
link |
00:16:48.160
that there are residual inequities
link |
00:16:51.520
that exist in American life
link |
00:16:53.680
and that the consequences of slavery
link |
00:16:56.280
could be one of the factors that result from this.
link |
00:17:01.520
The thing is, I don't think it's a single issue answer.
link |
00:17:08.000
I think it's a multidimensional issue,
link |
00:17:10.400
something like black underachievement in America.
link |
00:17:12.560
It's obviously a multidimensional issue.
link |
00:17:16.000
Much of the left and others wish to say it's not.
link |
00:17:20.320
It's only about racism.
link |
00:17:22.360
And they can't answer why Asians who've arrived
link |
00:17:26.200
more recently don't, for instance,
link |
00:17:28.120
get held down by white supremacy.
link |
00:17:30.520
But actually, I say white supremacy in quotes, obviously.
link |
00:17:34.840
But don't get held back by it, but actually flourish
link |
00:17:37.520
to the extent that Asian Americans
link |
00:17:39.760
have higher household earnings
link |
00:17:41.760
and higher household mean equity than,
link |
00:17:47.720
home equity and so on, than white Americans.
link |
00:17:50.600
So I don't think that on the merits the evidence is there
link |
00:17:53.920
that racism is the explanation for black,
link |
00:17:56.760
ongoing black underachievement in some sections
link |
00:17:59.280
of the black community in America.
link |
00:18:01.280
It's obviously a part of it.
link |
00:18:03.000
Could you say that even those things like fatherlessness
link |
00:18:07.120
and similar family breakdown issues
link |
00:18:12.720
are a longterm consequence of it?
link |
00:18:16.520
Possibly, but it's being often said
link |
00:18:19.840
it's being awfully generous to people's ability
link |
00:18:23.040
to make bad decisions.
link |
00:18:24.880
For instance, how many generations after the Holocaust
link |
00:18:27.560
would you allow people to claim that everything
link |
00:18:30.600
that went wrong in the Jewish community
link |
00:18:33.040
was as a result of the Holocaust?
link |
00:18:35.440
I mean, is there some kind of term limit on this?
link |
00:18:39.120
I would have thought so.
link |
00:18:40.720
And I think most people probably think that's over.
link |
00:18:43.560
I think the details matter there, but it's very difficult.
link |
00:18:50.560
You're in deep waters, yeah.
link |
00:18:52.440
Oh, I enjoy swimming out in the ocean,
link |
00:18:54.360
so although I'm terrified of what's lurking
link |
00:18:58.440
underneath in the darkness.
link |
00:19:00.240
You're right, you're right to be.
link |
00:19:04.480
Okay, it's really complicated calculus
link |
00:19:07.400
with the Holocaust and with slavery.
link |
00:19:09.960
So the argument in America is that there's deep
link |
00:19:15.960
institutional racism against African Americans
link |
00:19:20.320
that's rooted in slavery.
link |
00:19:22.960
And so however that calculus turns out,
link |
00:19:28.080
that calculation, it still persists in the culture,
link |
00:19:31.400
in the institutions, in the allocation of resources,
link |
00:19:35.120
in the way that we communicate, in subtle ways,
link |
00:19:39.200
in major ways, all that kind of stuff.
link |
00:19:41.880
How is it possible to win or lose that argument
link |
00:19:46.080
of how much institutional racism there is
link |
00:19:48.120
that's rooted in slavery?
link |
00:19:50.840
Is it a winnable?
link |
00:19:52.120
It's an unquantifiable argument.
link |
00:19:55.160
And I'd like to apply some shortcuts
link |
00:19:58.880
to some of this, the following.
link |
00:20:01.920
Are, for instance, all, let's take the EVV1
link |
00:20:06.640
that's most often cited.
link |
00:20:09.080
If a white person is walking down a street in America
link |
00:20:12.000
and they see a group of young black men
link |
00:20:13.800
coming towards them and it's late at night
link |
00:20:15.520
and they cross the road, is it because of slavery?
link |
00:20:20.320
Is it because of institutional racism?
link |
00:20:23.400
No, it's because they've made a calculus
link |
00:20:26.080
based not entirely on unfounded beliefs
link |
00:20:34.080
that given crime rates, it's possible
link |
00:20:38.320
that this group of people might be a group of people
link |
00:20:41.560
they don't want to meet late at night.
link |
00:20:43.640
That's an ugly fact, but as crime statistics
link |
00:20:48.640
in American cities after American cities bear out,
link |
00:20:52.360
it's not an entirely unreasonable one.
link |
00:20:55.120
It's not reasonable every time, obviously, obviously.
link |
00:20:59.360
But is it attributable to slavery?
link |
00:21:02.920
That's a stretch.
link |
00:21:04.040
If you're in a city like Chicago
link |
00:21:07.920
where the homicide rates shot up in the last two years,
link |
00:21:13.080
albeit again, as always has to be remembered,
link |
00:21:16.160
mainly black on black gun violence and knife violence.
link |
00:21:21.400
Nevertheless, if you're in a city like Chicago
link |
00:21:23.920
and you make that calculus I've just suggested,
link |
00:21:26.640
the cliched one, the street late at night,
link |
00:21:31.080
there are other factors other than that.
link |
00:21:33.280
Factors other than a memory of slavery that kick in.
link |
00:21:39.920
And I'm afraid it's something which people
link |
00:21:42.840
don't want to particularly acknowledge in America
link |
00:21:44.560
for obvious reasons, because it's the ugliest
link |
00:21:45.960
damn debate in the world.
link |
00:21:47.680
But I was actually just writing in my column
link |
00:21:49.720
in New York Post today about a very interesting case
link |
00:21:53.360
that's sort of similar, which is the question
link |
00:21:56.200
of obesity in the US.
link |
00:21:58.680
As you know, America's the most overweight country
link |
00:22:02.040
in the world.
link |
00:22:03.640
America has, I think, 40% of the population is obese
link |
00:22:08.760
in medical ways, and the nearest next country
link |
00:22:11.320
is a long way down, that's New Zealand,
link |
00:22:13.080
at 30% of the population.
link |
00:22:14.440
So America's a long way ahead.
link |
00:22:16.240
Why during the coronavirus era when we know
link |
00:22:18.880
that obesity is the one clearest factor
link |
00:22:23.480
that's likely to lead to your hospitalization
link |
00:22:25.080
if you also get the virus?
link |
00:22:26.720
Why did almost no public health information
link |
00:22:29.080
in America focus on obesity?
link |
00:22:31.120
80% of the people who ended up hospitalized
link |
00:22:33.440
in America with coronavirus were obese.
link |
00:22:38.000
We locked the schools when there was no evidence
link |
00:22:41.120
that the coronavirus was deadly for children.
link |
00:22:43.680
We all wore cloth masks when there was
link |
00:22:45.800
a very little evidence that this was much use
link |
00:22:49.240
in stopping the spread of the virus.
link |
00:22:52.200
We had massive evidence about obesity being a problem,
link |
00:22:55.160
and we never addressed it.
link |
00:22:56.440
Why?
link |
00:22:57.280
Is it just because we worried about fat people?
link |
00:22:58.960
No, it's actually because about fat shaming, as it were.
link |
00:23:01.800
No, it's also because to a great extent
link |
00:23:03.520
it's a racial issue in America as well.
link |
00:23:05.520
And actually I quoted this new publication
link |
00:23:07.640
from the University of Chicago, as it happens,
link |
00:23:10.200
which makes that claim explicit, says,
link |
00:23:12.080
the reasons why people have views that are negative
link |
00:23:15.440
about obesity is because of racism and slavery.
link |
00:23:18.600
This is what everything is drawn back to in America.
link |
00:23:21.200
Anything you want to stop, you say it's because of racism,
link |
00:23:24.480
it's because of slavery.
link |
00:23:25.760
How about it's actually because you mind
link |
00:23:31.080
the hospitals getting clogged up,
link |
00:23:32.480
you mind people dying,
link |
00:23:34.280
you mind ethnic minorities disproportionately dying,
link |
00:23:37.880
and you'd like to say something about it.
link |
00:23:39.200
Once again, as in everything in America,
link |
00:23:41.000
it's cut off by some poorly educated academic
link |
00:23:46.320
saying it's about slavery.
link |
00:23:48.640
So we're really not, I mean, this requires
link |
00:23:51.520
a kind of form of brain surgery to perform it on a society,
link |
00:23:54.320
probably one that's not possible without killing the patient.
link |
00:23:57.320
And it's being done by people who are wearing mittens.
link |
00:24:04.880
So I'm sure that there's a few folks listening to this
link |
00:24:09.600
that are rolling their eyes and saying,
link |
00:24:12.200
here we go again, two white guys talking about
link |
00:24:16.960
the lack of institutional racism in America.
link |
00:24:20.820
First of all, what would you like to tell them?
link |
00:24:27.760
So our African American friends who are looking at this,
link |
00:24:31.980
and I've gotten the chance to talk to a bunch of them
link |
00:24:34.500
on Clubhouse recently.
link |
00:24:35.820
Clubhouse is this social app.
link |
00:24:37.220
And I really enjoy it.
link |
00:24:38.700
It's an absolute zoo of an app as far as I can see it.
link |
00:24:41.220
I personally love it because you get to talk to,
link |
00:24:44.540
as somebody who's an introvert and doesn't socialize much,
link |
00:24:48.020
I enjoy talking to people from all walks of life.
link |
00:24:52.100
So it gave me a chance to first of all practice
link |
00:24:55.020
Russian and Ukrainian, so I get the chance to do that.
link |
00:24:58.320
Then you get a chance to talk about Israel and Palestine
link |
00:25:00.580
with people who are from that part of the world.
link |
00:25:04.980
And you get to hear raw emotion of people from the ground
link |
00:25:10.180
where they start screaming, they start crying,
link |
00:25:14.040
they start being calm and collected and thoughtful.
link |
00:25:16.940
And this is as if you walked into a bar
link |
00:25:20.460
with custom picked regular folks, in quotes, regular folks.
link |
00:25:24.940
Just people that have, quote unquote, lived experiences.
link |
00:25:29.180
Real pain, real hope, real emotions, biases,
link |
00:25:34.020
and you get to listen to them go at it.
link |
00:25:36.100
With no, because it's an audio app,
link |
00:25:39.700
you're not allowed to start getting
link |
00:25:41.460
into a physical fist fight.
link |
00:25:43.580
So even though it really sounds like people want it.
link |
00:25:46.260
It sounds like it's happening, yeah.
link |
00:25:47.580
Yeah, and so you get to really listen to that feeling.
link |
00:25:50.180
And for example, it allows a white guy like me
link |
00:25:53.500
from another part of the world,
link |
00:25:55.380
coming from the former Soviet Union,
link |
00:25:58.320
to go into a room with a few hundred African Americans
link |
00:26:03.500
screaming about Joe Rogan using the N word.
link |
00:26:07.720
And I get to really listen.
link |
00:26:09.100
There's very different perspectives on that
link |
00:26:11.420
in the African American community,
link |
00:26:13.180
and it's fascinating to listen.
link |
00:26:14.620
So I don't get access to that by excellent books
link |
00:26:19.000
and articles written and so on.
link |
00:26:20.420
You get that real raw emotion.
link |
00:26:22.300
And I'm just saying, there's a few of those folks
link |
00:26:24.460
listening to this with that real raw emotion.
link |
00:26:27.700
And one argument they say is you, Douglas Murray,
link |
00:26:32.940
and you, Lex Freeman, don't have the right
link |
00:26:36.180
to talk about race and racism in America.
link |
00:26:38.780
It is our struggle.
link |
00:26:40.580
You are from a privileged class of people
link |
00:26:42.540
that don't know what it's like to be a black man
link |
00:26:48.140
or woman in America walking down the street.
link |
00:26:51.140
Can you steel man that case?
link |
00:26:54.500
First of all, fuck that.
link |
00:26:56.740
That's not, I think we need to define steel, steel manning.
link |
00:27:01.120
Okay, I know what steel manning is.
link |
00:27:04.940
I really resent that form of argumentation.
link |
00:27:07.340
Sure.
link |
00:27:08.180
I really resent it.
link |
00:27:09.300
I have the right to talk about whatever the hell I want,
link |
00:27:11.800
and no one's gonna stop me or try to intimidate me
link |
00:27:14.700
or tell me that I can't simply because of my skin color.
link |
00:27:18.100
And I think that if I said to somebody else
link |
00:27:20.140
the other way around, it would be equally reprehensible.
link |
00:27:23.340
If I said, shut up, you have no right
link |
00:27:25.540
to criticize anything that Douglas Murray says
link |
00:27:27.420
because you've not got my skin color.
link |
00:27:29.940
Okay, it's not an exact comparison, but seriously,
link |
00:27:33.140
is that a reasonable form of argument?
link |
00:27:36.360
You haven't been through everything
link |
00:27:37.500
I've been through in my life, therefore you can't comment.
link |
00:27:39.900
No, in that case, nobody can talk about anything.
link |
00:27:43.640
We might as well pack up, go home, and isolate ourselves.
link |
00:27:47.260
Strong words, but can you try to steel man the case,
link |
00:27:49.980
not in this particular situation,
link |
00:27:51.320
but there's people that have lived through something
link |
00:27:57.200
that can comment in a very specific way,
link |
00:27:59.100
like for example, Holocaust survivors.
link |
00:28:00.860
Yes.
link |
00:28:03.180
There is a sense in which, maybe a basic sense of civility
link |
00:28:07.660
when a Holocaust survivor is speaking about
link |
00:28:10.140
their experience of the Holocaust,
link |
00:28:12.240
then an intellectual from a very different part of the world
link |
00:28:17.220
is simply writing about nuanced geopolitics of World War II
link |
00:28:23.040
just should not interrupt the Holocaust survivor.
link |
00:28:26.780
We physically interrupt them
link |
00:28:27.940
if they're telling their stories.
link |
00:28:28.780
No, with words, with logic and reason
link |
00:28:32.060
that the experience of the Holocaust survivor
link |
00:28:34.340
somehow fundamentally has a deeper understanding
link |
00:28:38.220
of the humanity and the injustice of the.
link |
00:28:42.220
First of all, again, we're in even deeper waters now,
link |
00:28:45.100
but in terms of wanting to listen to another person
link |
00:28:48.460
who has experienced something, yes, yes.
link |
00:28:52.700
But not endlessly, not endlessly.
link |
00:28:56.540
I mean, there are some people who've written about,
link |
00:28:58.340
I mean, there are people who've written about the Holocaust
link |
00:29:00.060
who didn't experience the Holocaust
link |
00:29:02.300
and have written about it better than people who did.
link |
00:29:05.900
It's not this idea that the lived experience
link |
00:29:09.840
to use this terrible modern jargon
link |
00:29:12.260
as if there's another type.
link |
00:29:14.060
This idea that the lived experience
link |
00:29:16.340
has to triumph over everything else is not always correct.
link |
00:29:20.680
It can be correct in some circumstances.
link |
00:29:23.720
If you are sitting in a room with a Holocaust survivor
link |
00:29:26.260
and somebody who'd never heard about the Holocaust
link |
00:29:28.620
and wanted to kind of shoot out their views on it, yeah,
link |
00:29:32.620
one of those people should be heard more than the other,
link |
00:29:34.740
obviously, obviously.
link |
00:29:37.260
If there's somebody who's experienced racism firsthand
link |
00:29:40.060
and there's somebody else who has never experienced it,
link |
00:29:42.980
then obviously you'd want to hear from the person
link |
00:29:45.340
who has experienced it firsthand,
link |
00:29:47.540
if that is the discussion underway.
link |
00:29:51.980
I don't think that it's the case
link |
00:29:53.900
that that is endlessly the case.
link |
00:29:55.980
I'm also highly reluctant to concede
link |
00:29:59.660
that there are groups of people
link |
00:30:00.940
who by dint of their skin color or anything else
link |
00:30:05.220
get to dominate the microphone.
link |
00:30:07.100
Now, of course, we're literally both speaking
link |
00:30:08.340
to microphones at the moment, so there's an irony to this,
link |
00:30:10.660
but let's skate over the irony.
link |
00:30:13.980
What I mean is people saying,
link |
00:30:15.620
you don't have the right to speak,
link |
00:30:17.620
I have the right to take the microphone from you
link |
00:30:19.700
and speak because I know best.
link |
00:30:22.180
Fine, if you know best, we'll argue it out
link |
00:30:26.340
and someone will win, long or short term.
link |
00:30:30.460
But the almost aggressive tone
link |
00:30:36.100
in which this is now leveled, I don't like the sound of,
link |
00:30:40.380
nobody's experience is completely understandable
link |
00:30:43.660
by another human being, nobody's.
link |
00:30:46.580
And what many people are asking us to do at the moment,
link |
00:30:49.300
us collectively is, to fall for that thing,
link |
00:30:52.500
I think it was Camille Foster who said it first,
link |
00:30:54.780
but I've adopted in recent years,
link |
00:30:57.260
is to say you must spend an inordinate amount of your life
link |
00:31:00.540
trying to understand me personally,
link |
00:31:03.420
my lived experience, everything about me.
link |
00:31:06.340
You should dedicate your life to trying to do that.
link |
00:31:10.540
Simultaneously, you'll never understand me.
link |
00:31:15.060
This is not an attractive invitation.
link |
00:31:17.180
This is an unwinnable game.
link |
00:31:20.860
So if somebody has a legitimate
link |
00:31:26.580
and important point to make, they should make it
link |
00:31:29.580
and they'll win through whatever their character is
link |
00:31:31.220
or whatever their race.
link |
00:31:32.060
And by the way, there are plenty of white people
link |
00:31:33.780
who experience racism as well.
link |
00:31:35.620
There are plenty of white people who do and have done,
link |
00:31:38.980
and increasingly so, which is one of the things
link |
00:31:40.980
I write about in the War on the West.
link |
00:31:42.740
I mean, I would argue that today in America,
link |
00:31:45.740
the only group who are actually allowed
link |
00:31:47.340
to be consistently, vilely racist against the white people.
link |
00:31:52.020
If you say disgusting things about black people
link |
00:31:54.660
in America in 2022, you will be over.
link |
00:31:58.500
You will be over.
link |
00:31:59.980
If you decide to talk about people's white tears,
link |
00:32:02.980
their white female tears, their white guilt,
link |
00:32:05.980
their white privilege, their white rage,
link |
00:32:08.580
and all these other pseudo pathologizing terms,
link |
00:32:11.980
you'll be just fine.
link |
00:32:12.900
You can be the chairman of the Joint Committee
link |
00:32:14.260
of the Staff, you can lecture at Yale University,
link |
00:32:16.980
absolutely fine, and the white people have to suck that up
link |
00:32:20.500
as if that's fine because there was racism
link |
00:32:23.300
in another direction in the past.
link |
00:32:24.620
So white people can have racism as well.
link |
00:32:27.180
Does that mean that I think that I have a right
link |
00:32:28.940
or other white people have a right to dominate the discourse
link |
00:32:31.340
by talking about their feelings of having been victims
link |
00:32:34.780
of racism?
link |
00:32:35.780
No, not particularly, because what does that get us?
link |
00:32:38.060
It gets us into an endless cycle of competitive victimhood.
link |
00:32:41.860
Am I saying that white people who've experienced violence
link |
00:32:44.860
have experienced historically anything like the violence
link |
00:32:48.100
that was perpetrated against black people
link |
00:32:49.780
in America historically?
link |
00:32:51.180
Obviously not.
link |
00:32:52.540
But what kind of competition do we want to enter here?
link |
00:32:58.780
And this is very, very important terrain now in America,
link |
00:33:03.300
because there's one other thing I have to throw in there,
link |
00:33:05.220
which is how do you work out the sincerity of the claim?
link |
00:33:09.220
How do you work out the sincerity of the claim being made?
link |
00:33:12.540
At one point in this latest book,
link |
00:33:14.980
I referred to a very useful bit in Nietzsche
link |
00:33:19.060
on the genealogy of morals,
link |
00:33:21.660
where, as you know, Nietzsche always has to be treated
link |
00:33:24.380
carefully, you know, when people say,
link |
00:33:26.340
I love Nietzsche, you have to say, which bits?
link |
00:33:29.460
So what exactly do you love about him?
link |
00:33:34.820
But,
link |
00:33:35.660
and a lot can be learned from the answer.
link |
00:33:38.660
But there are moments in Genealogy of Morals
link |
00:33:40.980
that were very useful for this book.
link |
00:33:42.980
One of them was the moment when Nietzsche uses a phrase
link |
00:33:45.900
that I've now stolen from myself, appropriated,
link |
00:33:48.260
you might say,
link |
00:33:50.540
where he refers to people who tear at wounds
link |
00:33:55.540
long since closed and then cry about the pain they feel.
link |
00:33:59.540
And Nietzsche says,
link |
00:34:01.020
I've never felt so much pain in my life
link |
00:34:03.900
as the pain they feel.
link |
00:34:08.140
Now, how do you know,
link |
00:34:10.900
how do you know whether the pain is real?
link |
00:34:14.500
How do you know?
link |
00:34:15.940
I'm not saying you can never know, but it's hard.
link |
00:34:20.780
So when somebody says,
link |
00:34:22.180
I feel that my life hasn't gone that well
link |
00:34:24.180
and it's because of something that was done
link |
00:34:25.700
to my ancestors 200 years ago,
link |
00:34:28.300
maybe they do feel that.
link |
00:34:30.380
Maybe they're right to feel that.
link |
00:34:32.660
Maybe they're using it up.
link |
00:34:34.580
Maybe they're using it as their reason for failure in life.
link |
00:34:37.980
Maybe they're using it as their reason to not even try.
link |
00:34:41.500
Maybe they're using it as their reason
link |
00:34:42.780
to smoke weed all day.
link |
00:34:45.620
I don't know.
link |
00:34:46.900
And who does know?
link |
00:34:47.740
How can you work that out?
link |
00:34:49.620
And that's why I come back to this thing of,
link |
00:34:51.420
who are we to constantly judge in this society
link |
00:34:55.180
other people who we don't know
link |
00:34:57.620
and attribute motives to them based on racial
link |
00:35:01.620
characteristics?
link |
00:35:03.860
And as you write in this part,
link |
00:35:07.140
I like your cultural appropriation of Nietzsche
link |
00:35:11.900
and at the same time, canceling Nietzsche
link |
00:35:16.260
in the same set of sentences.
link |
00:35:17.820
But you write in this part about evil.
link |
00:35:20.500
No, I didn't cancel Nietzsche.
link |
00:35:22.580
Well.
link |
00:35:23.420
Can't cancel Nietzsche, I was saying treat him carefully.
link |
00:35:27.100
Treat him carefully, fair enough.
link |
00:35:29.660
But you can judge a man's character
link |
00:35:31.820
by which parts of Nietzsche he quotes.
link |
00:35:35.060
That's fair enough, I think.
link |
00:35:36.540
I think when you meet people who do man and Superman
link |
00:35:38.540
a bit too much, you're in.
link |
00:35:42.140
Now you're pulling in even deeper water
link |
00:35:45.300
referencing Hitler here.
link |
00:35:47.100
Okay.
link |
00:35:48.460
So you write in this part of the book about evil.
link |
00:35:53.220
Quote, what is it that drives evil?
link |
00:35:57.260
Many things without doubt,
link |
00:35:58.500
but one of them is identified by several
link |
00:36:00.580
of the great philosophers is resentment.
link |
00:36:04.420
That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers
link |
00:36:06.580
for people who want to destroy.
link |
00:36:09.420
Colon, blaming someone else for having something
link |
00:36:12.180
you believe you deserve more.
link |
00:36:14.180
And you're saying this kind of resentment,
link |
00:36:17.500
we don't know as it surfaces whether it's genuine
link |
00:36:21.180
or if it's used to sort of play games of power
link |
00:36:25.740
to evil ends, can you speak to this?
link |
00:36:32.460
Because it's such a fascinating idea
link |
00:36:34.740
that one of the biggest drivers of evil
link |
00:36:37.980
in the world is resentment.
link |
00:36:41.420
Because if you look at, boy,
link |
00:36:43.940
if you look at human history, if you look at Hitler,
link |
00:36:47.300
so much of the propaganda, so much of the narrative
link |
00:36:49.700
was about resentment.
link |
00:36:52.100
So is that surface or is it level
link |
00:36:54.020
or is that deep, the resentment that drives evil?
link |
00:36:56.180
It can be any of the above.
link |
00:36:58.180
Let's first of all preface it, everybody has resentment.
link |
00:37:01.580
I use the term resentment which is sort of very similar
link |
00:37:06.140
to resentment, let's stick with resentment.
link |
00:37:09.540
So we don't sound too pretentious.
link |
00:37:17.460
Let me give you a quick example of somebody
link |
00:37:18.780
in our own day who has a form of resentment,
link |
00:37:21.780
Vladimir Putin.
link |
00:37:22.660
Did you see Navalny's documentary, Putin's Palace?
link |
00:37:26.420
Yes.
link |
00:37:27.260
Yeah.
link |
00:37:28.100
You remember the stuff about Putin
link |
00:37:29.780
as a young KGB officer in Germany?
link |
00:37:32.780
Remember the stuff about Putin and his first wife's
link |
00:37:34.740
resentment of one of his KGB colleagues
link |
00:37:37.020
who had an apartment that was a few meters bigger
link |
00:37:40.100
than the Putin's apartment?
link |
00:37:42.900
Yeah.
link |
00:37:43.740
It's very interesting.
link |
00:37:44.820
And by the way, I'm not saying that, you know,
link |
00:37:47.220
Vladimir Putin became the man he has become
link |
00:37:48.820
and invaded Ukraine because he didn't have an apartment
link |
00:37:50.820
he liked in Berlin or Munich or wherever he was.
link |
00:37:53.420
There's distinct possibility.
link |
00:37:55.180
My point is that resentment is a factor in all human lives
link |
00:38:02.220
and we all feel it in our lives
link |
00:38:05.140
and it's something that has to be struggled against.
link |
00:38:09.380
Resentment is, in political terms, can be a deadly,
link |
00:38:13.020
I mean, it's an incredibly deep thing to draw upon.
link |
00:38:16.860
I mean, you mentioned Hitler.
link |
00:38:18.060
Obviously one of the things that Hitler
link |
00:38:20.060
played on was resentment, obviously.
link |
00:38:24.540
Almost every revolutionary does.
link |
00:38:27.060
I mean, the French revolutionaries did as well.
link |
00:38:28.980
And not without cause.
link |
00:38:31.620
It's a good reason to feel that Versailles
link |
00:38:33.900
was not listening to Paris in the 1780s
link |
00:38:38.020
and feel resentment for Marie Antoinette
link |
00:38:41.700
in her palace within the palace,
link |
00:38:44.220
ignoring the bread shortages in Paris.
link |
00:38:47.380
So resentment is a very, it's a very understandable thing
link |
00:38:51.380
and sometimes it's justifiable
link |
00:38:53.180
and it's also deadly to the person as it is to the society.
link |
00:38:57.300
It's an incredibly deep, deep sentiment.
link |
00:38:59.980
Somebody else has got something that you should have.
link |
00:39:04.460
And the problem about it is that it has the potential
link |
00:39:07.540
to be endless.
link |
00:39:09.460
You can do it your whole life.
link |
00:39:11.460
And one of the ways I've sort of found myself
link |
00:39:14.540
explaining this to people is to say,
link |
00:39:15.860
it's also important to recognize that resentment
link |
00:39:18.180
is something that can cross absolutely every boundary.
link |
00:39:22.060
So for instance, it crosses all racial boundaries, obviously,
link |
00:39:26.420
and how it goes without saying.
link |
00:39:28.180
More interesting is it crosses all class boundaries
link |
00:39:30.660
and socioeconomic boundaries.
link |
00:39:33.380
And if I was to sort of simplify this thought,
link |
00:39:36.060
I would say, I guess that you and I
link |
00:39:39.500
and everybody watching knows or has known something
link |
00:39:44.500
or has known somebody in their lives
link |
00:39:47.820
who has almost nothing in worldly terms
link |
00:39:53.540
and is a generous person, a kindly person,
link |
00:39:57.020
a giving person, a happy person even, a cheerful person.
link |
00:40:03.300
And I think we probably have also,
link |
00:40:06.460
or many of us will have met people
link |
00:40:07.900
who seem to have everything
link |
00:40:09.300
and who are filled with resentment, filled with resentment.
link |
00:40:13.300
Somebody else has held them back from something.
link |
00:40:14.940
Their sister once did something,
link |
00:40:16.580
she got this and I should have got that.
link |
00:40:19.860
And on and on and on.
link |
00:40:22.020
It's a human trait.
link |
00:40:23.660
And one of the things that suggests to me
link |
00:40:26.780
is that we therefore have a choice in our lives about this.
link |
00:40:29.340
And this is something which we can do something about,
link |
00:40:32.020
not limitlessly, but for instance,
link |
00:40:35.900
I mean, there are very good reasons
link |
00:40:37.700
that some people in their lives might feel resentment.
link |
00:40:41.060
Let's say you're involved in a car crash
link |
00:40:44.020
and a friend fell asleep at the wheel
link |
00:40:46.500
and that's why you are spending the rest of your life
link |
00:40:48.700
in a wheelchair.
link |
00:40:50.100
It's a pertinent example of this
link |
00:40:51.420
in American politics at the moment.
link |
00:40:55.500
You would be justified in feeling resentment.
link |
00:40:58.980
And at some point you have to make a decision,
link |
00:41:01.020
which is, am I going to be that person or a different person?
link |
00:41:08.020
But even in that case, you're saying at the individual level
link |
00:41:10.500
and at the societal level is destructive to the mind,
link |
00:41:13.180
even when you're, quote unquote, justified.
link |
00:41:15.500
It rots you.
link |
00:41:16.820
It rots you because the best you can do
link |
00:41:21.340
is to eke out your days unfulfilled.
link |
00:41:26.540
So the antidote, as you describe, is gratitude.
link |
00:41:29.460
Yes.
link |
00:41:31.100
Gratitude is the antidote to evil in a sense.
link |
00:41:35.660
Gratitude is the individual level and the societal level.
link |
00:41:38.340
Gratitude is certainly the answer to resentment.
link |
00:41:41.700
I quote in The War on the West,
link |
00:41:44.700
when I read it the first time a few years ago,
link |
00:41:46.940
I was absolutely floored by the brothers Karamazov.
link |
00:41:52.420
Not everything in it, by the way,
link |
00:41:53.460
and I won't get into it,
link |
00:41:54.500
but I have some very big structural criticisms
link |
00:41:58.060
of the novel.
link |
00:41:59.620
Now you're just sweet talking to me
link |
00:42:01.500
because I'm a Dostoevsky fan, but I appreciate this.
link |
00:42:04.860
Oh, okay.
link |
00:42:06.220
Well, we could get into what I see
link |
00:42:07.660
as being the structural flaws in the brothers Karamazov,
link |
00:42:09.500
but anyway.
link |
00:42:10.340
Now I'm offended and triggered.
link |
00:42:12.220
Yeah, no, I mean, this is something coming out of Macbeth
link |
00:42:17.020
and saying, I didn't think it was much good.
link |
00:42:19.060
Yeah, there's structural flaws.
link |
00:42:20.740
Yeah, I thought the ending stank
link |
00:42:23.060
and the middle wasn't very good.
link |
00:42:24.620
No, when I read that novel,
link |
00:42:28.100
I was floored by a couple of things.
link |
00:42:30.020
One is, of course, at the moment
link |
00:42:32.100
where we realize the devil appears.
link |
00:42:34.860
The moment that Ivan says to his brother,
link |
00:42:37.380
you know he visits me,
link |
00:42:39.340
and you realize that he's talking about the devil,
link |
00:42:41.900
the whole novel goes into this totally different space.
link |
00:42:47.580
Anyway, it's even more
link |
00:42:49.060
than you've already realized the novel's about.
link |
00:42:51.660
And then when the conversation occurs between Ivan
link |
00:42:54.540
and the devil, I think he describes him
link |
00:42:57.860
as dressed in the French style
link |
00:43:02.860
of the early part of the 90th century.
link |
00:43:06.060
Very strange that the devil would be dressed like that,
link |
00:43:07.700
but sort of.
link |
00:43:10.820
And if you remember that he's sort of cross legged
link |
00:43:13.620
and rather a vain figure,
link |
00:43:16.100
but the devil mentions in passing to Ivan
link |
00:43:19.580
that he says, I don't know why,
link |
00:43:22.300
gratitude is not an instinct that's been given to me.
link |
00:43:30.980
Yeah, you're not allowed.
link |
00:43:32.180
This is not, given the role of being the devil,
link |
00:43:35.860
this is not one of the things.
link |
00:43:37.260
Just not one of the things.
link |
00:43:38.100
And you think, and of course,
link |
00:43:39.260
only a genius of Dostoevsky's stature could,
link |
00:43:42.060
I mean, a lesser genius would have made a whole novel
link |
00:43:45.100
out of that insight.
link |
00:43:47.060
Only Dostoevsky can just throw it away
link |
00:43:49.300
because there's such an abundance of riches
link |
00:43:51.420
that he still has to get through,
link |
00:43:53.500
the structural problems aside.
link |
00:43:55.300
But the, but the, but the.
link |
00:43:58.820
The passive aggressive, the microaggression
link |
00:44:02.140
in this conversation is palpable.
link |
00:44:04.420
A little knife fight.
link |
00:44:07.700
No, but the reason I mention this is because of course,
link |
00:44:09.940
when I saw this, this is such a brilliant insight
link |
00:44:13.460
by Dostoevsky because why would gratitude
link |
00:44:16.940
not be a sentiment that the devil was capable of?
link |
00:44:19.900
The answer is of course that if the devil
link |
00:44:22.820
was capable of gratitude, he wouldn't be the devil.
link |
00:44:25.980
He'd be somebody else.
link |
00:44:28.740
He has to be incapable of gratitude.
link |
00:44:31.460
Do you think for Dostoevsky that was as strong of an insight
link |
00:44:35.460
as it is for you?
link |
00:44:36.700
Because I think that's a really powerful idea
link |
00:44:39.460
that with gratitude, you don't get the resentment
link |
00:44:43.860
that rots you from the core.
link |
00:44:46.100
Yes, I think it was one of the just endless things
link |
00:44:48.900
that he saw in us.
link |
00:44:50.820
And the way I put it is that, I mean,
link |
00:44:54.020
I also think of it in terms of the era of deconstruction,
link |
00:44:57.940
which is one of the things I'd like us to call
link |
00:44:59.500
the era that's now ending.
link |
00:45:02.420
The era of deconstruction was the era that started,
link |
00:45:05.940
let's say from the 60s onwards,
link |
00:45:08.380
and was originally an academic game
link |
00:45:11.740
that then spilled out into the wider culture,
link |
00:45:13.740
which was let's take everything apart.
link |
00:45:16.980
Let's pull it all apart.
link |
00:45:19.540
There are lots of problems with it.
link |
00:45:20.900
One is it's quite boring.
link |
00:45:23.100
You don't get an awful lot from it.
link |
00:45:27.860
You also have the problem of what children find
link |
00:45:30.780
when they try to do this with bicycles,
link |
00:45:32.540
which is they can take it apart quite easily,
link |
00:45:34.420
but they can't put it back together.
link |
00:45:38.100
And the era of taking things apart as a game
link |
00:45:45.220
is one we've lived through,
link |
00:45:46.220
and it's been highly destructive,
link |
00:45:48.180
but you can do it for quite a long time.
link |
00:45:51.540
I'm going to look at this society,
link |
00:45:53.100
and I'm going to take it apart by showing systemic problems.
link |
00:45:56.620
I'm going to, at the end of that, what have you got?
link |
00:46:00.380
What have you done?
link |
00:46:01.220
What have you achieved?
link |
00:46:03.140
We need to interrogate this.
link |
00:46:05.460
Okay, interrogate.
link |
00:46:06.500
By all means, ask questions,
link |
00:46:07.420
but interrogate as a deliberate hostility to this.
link |
00:46:11.140
I'm going to interrogate this thing and take it apart.
link |
00:46:13.340
And again, at the end of it, what have you got?
link |
00:46:17.020
Whether you're interrogating a text or a piece of music
link |
00:46:21.180
or an idea or a society, fine.
link |
00:46:24.540
Question, endlessly question.
link |
00:46:26.300
Yes, interrogate assumes it's all a criminal in a cell
link |
00:46:33.540
and it's guilty, and therefore it must be taken apart.
link |
00:46:37.660
And that's what we've been doing for decades in the West.
link |
00:46:41.180
And that's resentment.
link |
00:46:43.780
That's one byproduct of resentment.
link |
00:46:46.180
You can't build the thing, but you know how to take it apart.
link |
00:46:50.980
Is a little bit of resentment good?
link |
00:46:53.500
So you have that, I love Tom Waits,
link |
00:46:56.940
and he has a song where a little drop of,
link |
00:47:00.220
I like my Tom with a little drop of poison.
link |
00:47:03.020
Is it good to do that?
link |
00:47:05.060
Is it good to have a little bit of poison in your drink?
link |
00:47:08.300
Depends what the poison is,
link |
00:47:09.620
and it depends if you know not to have another drink.
link |
00:47:13.700
It might be the case, you find out, as some alcoholics do,
link |
00:47:16.140
that one was too many and 10 is not enough.
link |
00:47:21.140
So there's a natural, in this case,
link |
00:47:25.020
this kind of deconstruction is a slippery slope.
link |
00:47:27.820
It becomes an addiction, it becomes a drug,
link |
00:47:29.820
and you just can't stop.
link |
00:47:31.100
Well, you'd have to wean yourself off it
link |
00:47:32.900
and try to start creating again.
link |
00:47:34.620
You'd have to start trying to put things together again.
link |
00:47:40.420
Something I think might be in the throes of starting
link |
00:47:45.180
as it happens.
link |
00:47:46.900
Well, speaking of taking things apart
link |
00:47:51.340
and not putting them together again,
link |
00:47:53.460
the idea of critical race theory.
link |
00:47:58.180
Can you, to me, explain, so I'm an engineer
link |
00:48:02.220
and have not been actually paying attention much,
link |
00:48:05.060
unfortunately, to these things.
link |
00:48:07.460
None of the people in your field were
link |
00:48:08.780
until it comes along and smacks you in the face.
link |
00:48:11.180
I've had that line of thinking from MIT.
link |
00:48:17.620
I said, well, surely whatever you folks are busy about
link |
00:48:22.060
yelling at each other for is a thing at Harvard and Yale.
link |
00:48:26.100
It's not going to.
link |
00:48:26.980
Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
link |
00:48:28.820
People in the STEM subjects thought it's not coming for us.
link |
00:48:31.420
It can't come to us and bang.
link |
00:48:33.700
Well, it hasn't quite been a bang.
link |
00:48:36.660
I'm not sure.
link |
00:48:37.500
Engineering is more safe than others.
link |
00:48:39.580
Yeah, so let's draw a line now
link |
00:48:43.000
between engineering and science.
link |
00:48:45.380
So I think engineering is,
link |
00:48:48.220
I'm sitting in a castle in the tallest tower
link |
00:48:51.940
with my pinky out drinking my martini saying, surely.
link |
00:48:56.140
The peasants below with their biology and their humanities
link |
00:49:00.620
will figure it all out.
link |
00:49:02.400
No, I'm just kidding.
link |
00:49:03.240
There's no pinky out.
link |
00:49:04.400
I drink vodka and I hang with the peasants.
link |
00:49:07.420
Okay, where is this?
link |
00:49:08.260
This metaphor has gone too far.
link |
00:49:11.620
Can you explain to this engineer
link |
00:49:14.460
what critical race theory is?
link |
00:49:16.420
Is it a term that's definable?
link |
00:49:19.460
Is there a tradition?
link |
00:49:20.780
Is there a history?
link |
00:49:21.620
What is good about it, what is bad about it?
link |
00:49:24.260
It is a tradition.
link |
00:49:25.100
It is a history.
link |
00:49:25.940
It's a school of thought.
link |
00:49:26.760
It started in the law roughly in the 1970s
link |
00:49:30.220
in some of the American academy.
link |
00:49:32.740
It spilled out.
link |
00:49:33.740
It always aimed to be an activist philosophy.
link |
00:49:36.780
People deny that now,
link |
00:49:38.080
but as I cite in The War in the West,
link |
00:49:40.420
the foundational texts say as much.
link |
00:49:43.100
This is an activist academic study.
link |
00:49:48.280
We're not just looking at the law.
link |
00:49:50.660
We seek to change the law.
link |
00:49:53.620
And it's built out into all of the other disciplines.
link |
00:49:56.260
I think there's a reason for that, by the way,
link |
00:49:57.660
which is it happened at the time
link |
00:49:58.820
that the humanities and others in America
link |
00:50:00.500
were increasingly weak and didn't know what to do,
link |
00:50:03.660
and they needed more games to play or new games to play.
link |
00:50:07.820
The psychologists got bored.
link |
00:50:09.420
Yeah, I mean, well, they needed tenure.
link |
00:50:12.780
They needed something to do.
link |
00:50:14.620
And I mean, it's not an original observation.
link |
00:50:16.900
Plenty of people have made this,
link |
00:50:17.780
but I mean, Neil Ferguson said it some time ago,
link |
00:50:19.740
for instance, that in the last 50 years
link |
00:50:23.420
in American academia, certainly in humanities departments,
link |
00:50:26.420
when somebody dies out who's a great scholar in something,
link |
00:50:29.980
that's just not replaced by somebody of equal stature.
link |
00:50:33.340
They're replaced by somebody who does theory
link |
00:50:36.100
or critical race theory.
link |
00:50:38.100
They're replaced by somebody who does the modern games.
link |
00:50:41.580
Somebody dies out who's a great historian of, say,
link |
00:50:44.500
I don't know, it's the one that's on my mind,
link |
00:50:46.960
Russian history or Russian literature,
link |
00:50:48.740
and they're not replaced by a similar scholar.
link |
00:50:53.180
In his observation and in yours, is this a recent development?
link |
00:50:57.660
It's happened in the last few decades, for sure.
link |
00:50:59.940
And it's sped up.
link |
00:51:01.500
Is it because we've gotten to the bottom
link |
00:51:02.940
of some of the biggest questions of history?
link |
00:51:04.960
No, it's because we're willing to forget the big questions.
link |
00:51:09.300
Because it's more fun to, big questions aren't as fun?
link |
00:51:12.180
No, partly it's, no, I should stress that partly isn't,
link |
00:51:15.460
this is in the weeds, but partly it's a result
link |
00:51:17.620
of the hyper specialization in academia.
link |
00:51:19.940
You know, if you said you'd like to write
link |
00:51:24.780
your dissertation on Hobbes,
link |
00:51:31.460
if you wanted to say something central
link |
00:51:36.660
to Kant's thought or Hegel's, I mean, that's not popular.
link |
00:51:42.780
What's popular is to take somebody way down the line
link |
00:51:45.920
from that, because there's a feeling
link |
00:51:47.320
that that's all been done.
link |
00:51:49.960
So you take something way, way, way down the line
link |
00:51:52.420
from that that's much less important,
link |
00:51:54.220
and then you sort of play with that.
link |
00:51:57.180
And I think most people, anyone who's watching
link |
00:51:58.920
who's been in a philosophy department
link |
00:52:00.980
or anything else in recent years will know that tendency.
link |
00:52:04.340
By the way, there's a very practical consequence of this.
link |
00:52:06.900
I saw this at the end of my friend Roger Scruton's life
link |
00:52:09.020
when he would occasionally, he didn't get tenure
link |
00:52:12.420
at universities, but he would occasionally be flown in
link |
00:52:15.660
even by his enemies to teach courses
link |
00:52:18.220
in various universities in basics of philosophy,
link |
00:52:20.980
because there was no one in the department able to do it.
link |
00:52:24.380
Like he would go in and teach for a semester,
link |
00:52:29.500
you know, Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer and others,
link |
00:52:34.020
because there was no one to do it,
link |
00:52:36.120
because they were all playing with the things
link |
00:52:38.100
way, way, way down the road from this.
link |
00:52:40.620
So that had already happened,
link |
00:52:42.940
and people were searching for new games to play,
link |
00:52:45.240
and the critical race theory stuff forced its way in,
link |
00:52:50.060
partly in the way that all of this
link |
00:52:52.540
that's now known as anti racism does,
link |
00:52:54.520
which is in a sort of bullying tone
link |
00:52:56.760
of saying if you don't follow this.
link |
00:52:58.180
It's the same way that all the things
link |
00:52:59.900
that are called studies,
link |
00:53:01.460
I think everything called studies in the humanities
link |
00:53:04.360
should be shut down.
link |
00:53:06.920
Because of the activist element.
link |
00:53:09.420
They're all activists, gay studies and queer studies,
link |
00:53:12.760
and nothing good has ever come from it.
link |
00:53:16.360
Nothing good.
link |
00:53:17.400
To push back, is it obvious that activism
link |
00:53:21.400
is a sign of a flaw in a discipline?
link |
00:53:24.720
So isn't it?
link |
00:53:26.040
It's a sign of the death of the discipline.
link |
00:53:27.840
It's a sign the discipline's over.
link |
00:53:29.800
But isn't it a good goal to have for discipline
link |
00:53:33.000
to enact change, positive change in the world?
link |
00:53:36.460
Or is that for politicians to do with the findings
link |
00:53:41.240
of science, not the scientists themselves?
link |
00:53:44.240
Why create an ideology and then set out
link |
00:53:47.040
to find disciplines that are weakly put together
link |
00:53:49.960
to try to back up your political ideology?
link |
00:53:53.560
So ideology should not be part of science or of humanities.
link |
00:54:00.400
Why would you, I mean, anyone could do it.
link |
00:54:05.640
You could decide to go in and be wildly right wing
link |
00:54:09.520
about something and only do things
link |
00:54:11.320
that prove your right wing ideas.
link |
00:54:13.720
Be fantastically antiacademic,
link |
00:54:16.280
fantastically anti science.
link |
00:54:18.400
It's an absurd way to mix up activism and academia.
link |
00:54:25.560
And it's absolutely rife.
link |
00:54:26.960
And Critical Race Theory is one of the ones
link |
00:54:28.760
that completely polluted the academy.
link |
00:54:31.680
Yeah, and there's been dark moments throughout history,
link |
00:54:34.360
both during World War II with both communism
link |
00:54:38.040
and Nazism, fascism that infiltrated science
link |
00:54:44.400
and then corrupted it.
link |
00:54:45.920
Yes, I mean, for instance, also,
link |
00:54:47.840
let's face it, in science, as in everything else,
link |
00:54:50.560
there are dark, difficult things.
link |
00:54:53.720
It's much better we know about them, face up to them
link |
00:54:55.840
and try to find a way socially to deal with them
link |
00:54:59.240
than that you leave them in the hands of some activist
link |
00:55:02.640
who wants to do stuff with them.
link |
00:55:04.960
Some of my best friends are activists.
link |
00:55:07.720
I'm just kidding, okay.
link |
00:55:09.080
None of my best friends are activists.
link |
00:55:11.240
That's how it should be.
link |
00:55:13.960
Well, I was kidding because I don't have any friends,
link |
00:55:15.880
but okay.
link |
00:55:18.120
No, I'm trying to gain some pity points.
link |
00:55:22.960
Okay, so to return.
link |
00:55:24.520
You have your clubhouse friends.
link |
00:55:27.040
Screaming away like deranged maniacs.
link |
00:55:31.280
Now, I'm anti clubhouse, by the way,
link |
00:55:32.400
because the only time I heard it was at Brett Weinstein one
link |
00:55:34.720
when he did that.
link |
00:55:36.360
I don't know if you heard that, early in clubhouse.
link |
00:55:38.280
I was invited to clubhouse by various people.
link |
00:55:39.960
He was like, oh, this is a really great civilized way
link |
00:55:41.520
to hang out and talk with interesting people.
link |
00:55:43.600
And I downloaded the app and I got on one,
link |
00:55:46.520
because Brett Weinstein said,
link |
00:55:48.480
I'm doing this conversation and I listened
link |
00:55:50.120
and it was the maddest damn discussion I've ever heard.
link |
00:55:54.160
Was it something about biology?
link |
00:55:55.600
Something about, was it during COVID times?
link |
00:55:58.960
At some point, Brett said,
link |
00:56:01.200
I'm an evolutionary biologist.
link |
00:56:06.200
And somebody else started saying, you're a eugenicist.
link |
00:56:09.760
And he said, no, I'm an evolutionary biologist.
link |
00:56:12.440
And somebody said, that's the same thing.
link |
00:56:14.920
And it just went on like that.
link |
00:56:16.520
And Brett desperately tried to explain,
link |
00:56:19.000
that's not the same thing as being a eugenicist.
link |
00:56:21.600
And he lost the clubhouse room.
link |
00:56:24.040
They thought that was the same thing.
link |
00:56:25.720
He'd come, it horribly reminded me of a time some years ago
link |
00:56:29.120
when a British newspaper ran a sort of realizing
link |
00:56:32.680
that the only thing you can unite people on
link |
00:56:34.240
in sexual ethics is revulsion against pedophilia,
link |
00:56:37.640
ran an anti pedo campaign.
link |
00:56:40.000
And shortly after pediatricians offices
link |
00:56:43.720
were torched in North of England
link |
00:56:46.000
by a mob who hadn't read the whole sign.
link |
00:56:48.880
Yeah, well, to me, like I said,
link |
00:56:53.020
a little bit of poison is good for the town, so.
link |
00:56:55.420
Anyhow, sorry, I interrupted you
link |
00:56:56.840
with flattering you with their people on clubhouse.
link |
00:56:58.760
I have many, I have multiples of friends, yes.
link |
00:57:04.320
Okay, we didn't get to some of the ideas
link |
00:57:08.080
of critical race theory.
link |
00:57:09.480
What exactly is it?
link |
00:57:11.940
I'm actually in part asking this question quite genuinely.
link |
00:57:14.480
Yeah, it's an attempt to look at everything
link |
00:57:17.580
among other things through the lens of race
link |
00:57:20.220
and to add race into things where it may not be
link |
00:57:24.360
as a way of adding,
link |
00:57:26.220
I'm trying to give the most generous estimation,
link |
00:57:30.040
to add race in as a conversation
link |
00:57:31.880
in a place where it may not have been in the conversation.
link |
00:57:36.960
And that means history too?
link |
00:57:38.600
The history of racism.
link |
00:57:40.440
Yeah, yeah, yeah, all history.
link |
00:57:43.320
And to look at it through these particular lenses.
link |
00:57:48.240
I mean, there's a certain, like all these things,
link |
00:57:50.800
there's a certain logic in it.
link |
00:57:51.880
Like with feminist studies or something,
link |
00:57:54.960
I mean, is there a utility in looking back
link |
00:57:57.280
through undoubtedly male dominated histories
link |
00:57:59.880
and asking where the more silent female voice was?
link |
00:58:03.640
Yes, very interesting.
link |
00:58:06.100
Not endlessly interesting.
link |
00:58:08.440
And can't be put exactly on the same par as,
link |
00:58:12.800
but it has a utility.
link |
00:58:16.660
It's that endlessly, sorry to interrupt,
link |
00:58:18.480
that endlessly part that seems to get us
link |
00:58:20.240
into trouble a lot here.
link |
00:58:21.600
Well, because of this thing of where do you stop?
link |
00:58:24.300
And that's always, I talked about this in my last book
link |
00:58:30.920
in the manners of crowds.
link |
00:58:32.120
It's one of the big conundrums in activist movements
link |
00:58:35.560
and particularly in activist academia.
link |
00:58:38.520
Where would you stop?
link |
00:58:39.360
It's not clear because you've got a job in it.
link |
00:58:42.080
You've got a pension in it.
link |
00:58:44.000
You've got, your only esteem in society
link |
00:58:48.480
is in keeping this gig going.
link |
00:58:50.300
I mean, is there any likelihood?
link |
00:58:55.660
Have you ever, there's the old academic joke, isn't it?
link |
00:58:58.780
The end of every conference, the only thing everyone
link |
00:59:00.900
agrees on is that we must have another conference
link |
00:59:02.740
like this one.
link |
00:59:05.220
It's the one thing they always agree on.
link |
00:59:07.300
This conference is so great, we must have another one.
link |
00:59:09.780
Well, that's a criticism you could apply
link |
00:59:11.300
to a lot of disciplines.
link |
00:59:12.460
Of course.
link |
00:59:13.300
Civil engineering, bridge building.
link |
00:59:15.460
At a certain point, do we need any more bridges?
link |
00:59:19.060
Can we just fly everywhere?
link |
00:59:22.340
So.
link |
00:59:23.180
At the very least, you need to keep the bridges up.
link |
00:59:26.100
Sure, and they would, critical race theory folks
link |
00:59:28.820
would probably make the same argument.
link |
00:59:30.940
At the very least, we need to keep the racism out.
link |
00:59:35.100
We have to make sure we don't descend into the racism.
link |
00:59:37.700
It assumes all the time that we are living
link |
00:59:39.820
on the cusp of the return of the KKK.
link |
00:59:42.320
Right.
link |
00:59:43.160
Which is totally wrong.
link |
00:59:44.580
I mean, it's a massive.
link |
00:59:45.540
You say that now, until the KKK armies march in.
link |
00:59:49.940
We don't always, we can't always predict the future.
link |
00:59:52.500
We can't always predict the future,
link |
00:59:53.820
and you can always say you should be careful,
link |
00:59:58.460
but you've also gotta be careful of people
link |
01:00:02.700
who've got their timing like totally, totally wrong,
link |
01:00:05.300
or their estimation of the society they're in.
link |
01:00:07.020
You mean like most of society before in the 1930s,
link |
01:00:12.020
when Hitler was, I mean, so many people got Hitler wrong.
link |
01:00:17.140
Sure they did.
link |
01:00:18.140
And so.
link |
01:00:18.980
Most people.
link |
01:00:19.820
So maybe it was nice to have the alarmist thinking there.
link |
01:00:23.660
Well.
link |
01:00:24.500
Beware of the man with the mustache.
link |
01:00:27.640
Yes.
link |
01:00:28.480
If only it was that easy.
link |
01:00:31.700
Not always a bob facial hair.
link |
01:00:33.340
I always say that, I mean, what.
link |
01:00:35.660
Very often is.
link |
01:00:36.580
These two clean shaven chaps both say,
link |
01:00:39.220
one of the problems of everybody
link |
01:00:40.220
knowing a little bit about Nazism
link |
01:00:42.660
is that they think that they know where evil comes from
link |
01:00:48.240
and that it comes from like a German with a small mustache,
link |
01:00:52.100
getting people to goose step, for instance.
link |
01:00:54.800
And that's not correct.
link |
01:00:57.220
A much better understanding of it is,
link |
01:00:59.600
it can come from all number of directions
link |
01:01:03.120
and keep your antennae as good as you can.
link |
01:01:06.260
But once you end up in this society, which I would argue,
link |
01:01:10.300
certainly parts of America, where you're always in 1938,
link |
01:01:15.040
that's not healthy for a society either,
link |
01:01:17.940
where people are so primed and think they're so well trained
link |
01:01:22.020
because they spent a term in school
link |
01:01:25.820
learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust,
link |
01:01:28.140
think they're so well trained in Hitler spotting
link |
01:01:31.780
that they can do it all the time.
link |
01:01:32.980
Look at all these phrases we now have in our societies,
link |
01:01:35.300
like dog whistle.
link |
01:01:37.300
You know, as I always say,
link |
01:01:38.140
if you hear the whistle, you're the dog.
link |
01:01:40.120
But people say, that's a dog whistle,
link |
01:01:43.340
as if they're highly trained anti Nazis.
link |
01:01:47.540
I mean, you know, there should be some humility in it.
link |
01:01:50.140
We should be careful, we should be wary for sure.
link |
01:01:54.300
And we should also be slightly humble
link |
01:01:57.220
in our inability to spot everything.
link |
01:02:01.560
If not significantly humble, right, so if we can,
link |
01:02:10.860
there's something funny, if not dark,
link |
01:02:15.400
about the activity of Hitler spotting,
link |
01:02:19.900
if I just may take an aside.
link |
01:02:21.480
But so critical race theory, how much racism,
link |
01:02:27.020
what is racism?
link |
01:02:28.700
How much of it is in our world today?
link |
01:02:31.200
If we were thinking about this activity of Hitler spotting,
link |
01:02:37.620
and trying to steel man the case
link |
01:02:39.620
of if not critical race theory,
link |
01:02:41.100
but people who look for racism in our world,
link |
01:02:45.740
how much would you say?
link |
01:02:48.100
Well, it's a good thing to try to define.
link |
01:02:50.100
I would say that racism is the belief
link |
01:02:54.880
that other people are inferior to you.
link |
01:02:57.860
You could say, you could see a form of it
link |
01:03:00.140
where you thought people were superior to you.
link |
01:03:02.460
That could also happen, but more commonly,
link |
01:03:04.620
you see a group of people as being inferior to you
link |
01:03:07.260
simply by dint of the fact
link |
01:03:08.580
that they have a different racial background.
link |
01:03:12.380
And that's sort of the easiest way to define racism.
link |
01:03:20.980
As I say, I mean, there are types of racism,
link |
01:03:23.380
mainly antisemitism actually, perhaps it's the only one,
link |
01:03:26.820
which weirdly relies on a hatred of people
link |
01:03:30.860
who a certain type of person thinks are better than them.
link |
01:03:35.740
And that's a particular peculiarity,
link |
01:03:37.900
one of the peculiarities of antisemitism.
link |
01:03:40.160
Well, antisemitism somehow does both, right?
link |
01:03:42.820
Yes, one of the eternal fascinating things
link |
01:03:46.340
about antisemitism is it can do,
link |
01:03:47.860
it does everything at the same time.
link |
01:03:50.820
It's like a quantum racism.
link |
01:03:52.860
Yes.
link |
01:03:53.700
They're both superior and inferior.
link |
01:03:54.940
You know Vasily Grosman's Life and Fate?
link |
01:03:59.980
So in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
01:04:02.340
which a Persian friend of mine always said
link |
01:04:03.780
was one of only two great novels of the 20th century,
link |
01:04:06.020
she was a very harsh literary critic.
link |
01:04:07.980
What was the other one?
link |
01:04:09.020
Oh, The Leopard, obviously.
link |
01:04:10.880
The Leopard?
link |
01:04:11.720
The Leopard by Giuseppe Dallan Pedusa, yeah.
link |
01:04:14.060
Okay.
link |
01:04:14.900
She's definitely right on that one.
link |
01:04:16.840
Life and Fate is a...
link |
01:04:17.680
I'm learning so much today, yes.
link |
01:04:19.520
Life and Fate is an extraordinary book,
link |
01:04:24.000
mainly about, well, you know, Grosman was obviously
link |
01:04:28.660
Jewish himself, but he saw almost everything
link |
01:04:34.300
that he could have done in the Second World War.
link |
01:04:36.220
He saw Stalingrad, he was a journalist,
link |
01:04:38.700
and he wrote firsthand accounts of Stalingrad.
link |
01:04:42.020
He was also the first journalist into Treblinka,
link |
01:04:45.940
and his account, which you can read in one
link |
01:04:47.380
of the collections of his journalism,
link |
01:04:49.300
his account of walking into Treblinka
link |
01:04:51.260
is just one of the most devastating, haunting pieces
link |
01:04:54.660
of journalism or prose you can read.
link |
01:04:56.700
Anyhow, I mention him because Grosman,
link |
01:04:58.800
in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
01:05:00.260
which is about a 900 page novel,
link |
01:05:03.460
in the middle of it, which is about the dark axis
link |
01:05:06.160
around Stalingrad, he, well, at one point,
link |
01:05:12.580
he amazingly sort of goes into the minds
link |
01:05:14.300
of Earth Hitler and Stalin, and he says,
link |
01:05:17.420
Stalin, in his study, feels his counterpart
link |
01:05:22.180
in Berlin, and he says he feels very close
link |
01:05:24.300
to him at this moment.
link |
01:05:26.420
Wow, around Stalingrad, like leading up to the back.
link |
01:05:29.700
After Stalingrad, when the Germans are lost,
link |
01:05:32.100
he says he feels the closeness of Hitler.
link |
01:05:35.300
But Grosman, in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
01:05:37.460
slap bang at the worst hours of the 20th century,
link |
01:05:41.740
suddenly dedicates a chapter to anti semitism,
link |
01:05:45.680
and I've seen anti semitism as something
link |
01:05:48.900
I've always been very interested in,
link |
01:05:51.460
because I've always had an instinctive utter revulsion
link |
01:05:54.780
of it, and also partly because of having seen bits of it
link |
01:06:01.940
in the Middle East and elsewhere,
link |
01:06:02.820
but I mention this because Grosman,
link |
01:06:05.340
in the middle of Life and Fate, takes time out
link |
01:06:08.140
and does this like three page explanation,
link |
01:06:10.620
three page description of anti semitism,
link |
01:06:12.900
and it's extraordinary.
link |
01:06:14.260
I mean, the only thing I can think of
link |
01:06:16.060
that's equally good is Gregor von Retzori,
link |
01:06:24.260
who wrote a luridly titled, but brilliant set of novellas
link |
01:06:28.860
called The Confessions of an Anti Semite,
link |
01:06:31.460
and about pre First World War anti semitism
link |
01:06:35.420
in Eastern and Central Europe.
link |
01:06:36.740
Anyway, Grosman says, in the middle of Life and Fate,
link |
01:06:40.900
that one of the extraordinary things about anti semitism
link |
01:06:44.820
is that it does everything at the same time,
link |
01:06:47.260
that the Jews get condemned in one place for being rich
link |
01:06:50.140
and in another for being poor,
link |
01:06:52.340
condemned in one place for assimilating
link |
01:06:54.820
and another for not assimilating,
link |
01:06:58.540
for assimilating too much and assimilating too little,
link |
01:07:01.820
for being too successful for not being successful enough.
link |
01:07:05.500
So I think it's the only racism that includes within it,
link |
01:07:10.980
a detestation, for the real anti semit,
link |
01:07:14.500
a detestation of people that the person may perceive
link |
01:07:17.580
to be better than them, correctly or otherwise.
link |
01:07:21.300
By the way, I'm embarrassed to say I have not read
link |
01:07:24.740
this one of two greatest novels
link |
01:07:26.620
of the 20th century, Life and Fate, Zhizny Sidba.
link |
01:07:29.540
And just to read off of Wikipedia,
link |
01:07:31.180
we see that Grosman, a Ukrainian Jew,
link |
01:07:32.860
became a correspondent for the Soviet military paper,
link |
01:07:35.700
Krasnaya Zvezda, having volunteered
link |
01:07:38.300
and been rejected from military service,
link |
01:07:40.700
he spent a thousand days in the front lines,
link |
01:07:43.140
roughly three of the four years of the conflict
link |
01:07:45.540
between the Germans and the Soviets,
link |
01:07:48.060
and the main themes covered in,
link |
01:07:51.860
how's it go, Life and Fate, I keep thinking Zhizny Sidba,
link |
01:07:55.340
is a theme on Jewish identity and the Holocaust,
link |
01:07:58.500
Grosman's idea of humanity and the human goodness,
link |
01:08:01.180
Stalin's distortion of reality and values,
link |
01:08:04.460
and science, life goes on, and reality of war.
link |
01:08:07.980
It's interesting, I need to definitely, definitely read it.
link |
01:08:10.780
I think you'll really get a lot from it.
link |
01:08:13.260
One of the other things, sorry, I'm raffling it,
link |
01:08:14.660
but one of the other things he does
link |
01:08:15.860
is that he has this extraordinary ability
link |
01:08:17.860
to talk about the absolute highest levels of the conflict
link |
01:08:22.820
and then zoom in, it's rather like the camera work
link |
01:08:24.860
they use in things like Lord of the Rings,
link |
01:08:26.700
where he zooms down and gets one person
link |
01:08:30.300
in the midst of all this, and you get on that.
link |
01:08:32.900
Or puts you in the study, too.
link |
01:08:34.180
So I personally have read and reread
link |
01:08:36.820
the William Shires, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
link |
01:08:39.460
who's another journalist who was there,
link |
01:08:44.080
but he does not do, interestingly enough,
link |
01:08:46.580
given such a large novel, kind of the definitive work,
link |
01:08:50.660
the definitive original work that goes
link |
01:08:52.720
to source materials on Hitler,
link |
01:08:54.940
he doesn't touch anti semitism really.
link |
01:09:00.020
So.
link |
01:09:01.260
Big thing to miss out.
link |
01:09:02.480
Well, he just says it very calmly and objectively
link |
01:09:06.900
as he does for most of the work,
link |
01:09:08.280
that this was the fact of life.
link |
01:09:12.260
There's a lot of cruelty throughout,
link |
01:09:13.820
but he doesn't get to.
link |
01:09:15.220
Well, one of the things is, of course,
link |
01:09:16.820
they lost the war because of anti semitism.
link |
01:09:19.780
I mean, that's one kind of important way to view it.
link |
01:09:22.500
It's how Andrew Roberts, another historian, said it,
link |
01:09:24.420
is that in the end, the Nazis lost the war
link |
01:09:26.700
because they were Nazis.
link |
01:09:29.540
It sounds almost too neat, but it's worth remembering
link |
01:09:32.460
that at the end of the war,
link |
01:09:35.660
when the Germans need to be transporting troops
link |
01:09:38.740
and they need to be transporting very basic supplies,
link |
01:09:42.620
Eichmann makes sure he gets the trains
link |
01:09:45.140
to transport the Jews right up to the end.
link |
01:09:49.180
Well, that's certainly a dark possibility.
link |
01:09:52.500
Anyhow, but to go back to racism in general.
link |
01:09:55.860
Racism in general, apart from anti semitism,
link |
01:09:58.020
relies on the perception that another group of people,
link |
01:10:04.260
a racial group, other than your own, are inferior to you.
link |
01:10:07.940
That's what I'd say is the easiest shorthand of racism.
link |
01:10:11.220
And of course, it's one of the stupidest things
link |
01:10:15.340
that our species is capable of.
link |
01:10:17.860
I mean, one of the stupidest,
link |
01:10:19.660
that you can look at a person and guess them
link |
01:10:24.580
in their entirety, in fact, because of their skin color.
link |
01:10:28.140
I mean, it's like, what a stupid idea that is,
link |
01:10:31.820
as well as being an evil one.
link |
01:10:32.860
But I would say that one of the,
link |
01:10:39.020
I think it's a dangerous thing in our era
link |
01:10:41.140
that there are bits of it coming back.
link |
01:10:43.060
That's why I say we do need sort of,
link |
01:10:46.220
we need our antennae working.
link |
01:10:48.540
We just don't need them to be overactive
link |
01:10:50.460
or underactive, you know.
link |
01:10:53.260
Now, the book is War in the West,
link |
01:10:55.460
but speaking of racism, racism towards different groups
link |
01:11:00.260
based on their skin color,
link |
01:11:01.460
you've said that there's a war on white people in the US.
link |
01:11:05.340
Would you say that's the case?
link |
01:11:06.660
Would you say that there is significant
link |
01:11:11.060
racism towards white people in the United States?
link |
01:11:13.420
I'd say that white people in the United States
link |
01:11:15.500
are the only people who are told
link |
01:11:16.540
that they have hereditary sin.
link |
01:11:20.180
And that's a big one, just to start with.
link |
01:11:22.340
Based strictly on the color of their skin.
link |
01:11:23.660
Based on their skin color.
link |
01:11:25.620
I mean, I would find it so repugnant if,
link |
01:11:29.420
and I hope everybody would join me in feeling this,
link |
01:11:31.660
I would feel it so repugnant
link |
01:11:33.660
if there were any school of thought in America today
link |
01:11:36.140
that had any grasp on the public attention
link |
01:11:41.140
that said that black people were born into evil
link |
01:11:43.900
because of something their ancestors had done.
link |
01:11:46.340
Like they had the mark of Cain upon them.
link |
01:11:49.660
I mean, I think it would be such a vicious way
link |
01:11:54.260
to try to demoralize a group of people
link |
01:11:59.260
and to tell them that the things they would be able
link |
01:12:02.700
to achieve in their lives are much lessened
link |
01:12:04.860
because they should spend significant portions
link |
01:12:07.780
of their lives trying to do something
link |
01:12:09.700
that they didn't do.
link |
01:12:11.300
Is there a difference?
link |
01:12:14.020
And the obvious point left unsaid,
link |
01:12:17.220
but let's say it, nobody in the public square says that.
link |
01:12:23.420
I mean, they're the maniacs at the far fringes,
link |
01:12:25.620
but nobody in the mainstream would dare to say that,
link |
01:12:29.900
or I think even think that about any group of people
link |
01:12:32.420
other than white people.
link |
01:12:34.140
And does this mean that white people are more likely
link |
01:12:37.940
or does this mean that white people are more disadvantaged
link |
01:12:41.220
than black people?
link |
01:12:42.180
No, and again, let's not make this a competition,
link |
01:12:44.980
but let's not get into, I just desperately urge people
link |
01:12:48.700
not to get into the idea of hereditary sin
link |
01:12:51.380
according to racial background.
link |
01:12:53.980
Is there something to be said about the feature aspect,
link |
01:12:57.220
sort of play devil's advocate,
link |
01:12:59.140
about the asymmetry of sort of accusations
link |
01:13:04.820
towards the majority?
link |
01:13:06.340
So because white, so it's easier to attack a majority.
link |
01:13:09.260
It is much easier, but is there something to be said
link |
01:13:11.300
about that being a useful function of society
link |
01:13:14.060
that you always attack, that the minority has
link |
01:13:19.260
disproportionate power to attack the majority
link |
01:13:22.100
so that you can always keep the majority in check?
link |
01:13:24.860
Well, it's a dangerous game to play, isn't it?
link |
01:13:28.220
I think.
link |
01:13:29.060
It's a very dangerous game to play.
link |
01:13:30.500
That's a good summary of entirety of human civilization.
link |
01:13:33.340
Oh yeah, everything is dangerous.
link |
01:13:35.820
But it's a very dangerous game to play that.
link |
01:13:37.780
I wrote about this a bit in the Madness of Crowds
link |
01:13:39.700
when I was saying like gay rights people,
link |
01:13:43.060
the ones that still exist,
link |
01:13:44.380
the ones who don't have homes to go to,
link |
01:13:47.300
who want to beat up on straight people in a way,
link |
01:13:51.580
or want to make straight people feel like they're
link |
01:13:54.940
kind of unremarkable, uncool, you know, boring straights.
link |
01:14:00.780
So boring.
link |
01:14:02.380
So not like the magical pixie fairy dust gays.
link |
01:14:07.980
That's a bad idea to push that one.
link |
01:14:10.820
That's a bad idea.
link |
01:14:11.740
And some gays push that.
link |
01:14:15.420
Highly unwise, given the fact that about
link |
01:14:19.100
two to 3% of the population are actually gay,
link |
01:14:21.060
although now there's like an additional 20%
link |
01:14:23.740
who think they're like two spirit or something
link |
01:14:25.900
and all that bullshit, but they're just attention seekers.
link |
01:14:30.900
So let's not spend too much time on that.
link |
01:14:34.140
But equally, as I said in the Madness of Crowds,
link |
01:14:37.300
with the feminist movement,
link |
01:14:40.580
very unwise for half of the species
link |
01:14:43.420
to say that the other half of the species isn't needed.
link |
01:14:47.220
And there were always third and fourth wave feminists
link |
01:14:49.900
willing to make that nuts argument.
link |
01:14:53.740
Not first wave feminists.
link |
01:14:54.860
You didn't hear it in first wave feminists.
link |
01:14:56.020
You didn't hear it.
link |
01:14:56.860
Suffragette tended not to say we like the vote
link |
01:15:00.300
and men are scum.
link |
01:15:03.540
It would have been hard to have won everyone
link |
01:15:05.180
over to their side.
link |
01:15:06.540
Not least the men they needed to win over to their side.
link |
01:15:09.180
But you do get third and fourth wave feminists
link |
01:15:10.860
who say like, do we need men?
link |
01:15:14.020
Or men are all X.
link |
01:15:15.460
Again, it's a bad idea.
link |
01:15:17.340
It's a bad idea tactically.
link |
01:15:19.740
What if men, Richard Wrangham, somebody from Harvard,
link |
01:15:25.700
describes that men are the originators of violence,
link |
01:15:29.620
physical violence in society.
link |
01:15:31.660
And he argues that actually the world would be better off.
link |
01:15:35.540
No, just a very cold calculus.
link |
01:15:38.660
If you get rid of men,
link |
01:15:40.180
there will be a lot less violence in society is his claim.
link |
01:15:44.300
But who says you need to get rid of violence in society?
link |
01:15:47.580
But shouldn't that at least be a discussion?
link |
01:15:50.460
The pros and cons.
link |
01:15:51.660
Have a debate, a panel discussion,
link |
01:15:54.140
violence, pros and cons.
link |
01:15:55.620
Well, that's the sort of thing, if I can say so,
link |
01:15:57.540
that some weak ass academic decides to do
link |
01:15:59.980
because he thinks that his area of Boston
link |
01:16:02.580
would be nicer or whatever.
link |
01:16:06.380
He might decide it's useful
link |
01:16:07.780
if he was living in Kiev today to have violent men.
link |
01:16:13.820
I mean, it might, if New York was invaded right now,
link |
01:16:17.980
I'd need some violent men around here.
link |
01:16:22.020
But it wouldn't be invaded if there's no violent men.
link |
01:16:25.740
Well, there's also, at least there's some level of threat
link |
01:16:32.020
that you ought to exude that puts people off.
link |
01:16:35.660
If I was in, you know, I'm very glad
link |
01:16:39.580
that the men and women of Ukraine are capable of
link |
01:16:42.540
and more than capable of fighting for their country
link |
01:16:47.620
and for their neighbors and their families and much more.
link |
01:16:49.860
But it's better that there was violence ready to unleash
link |
01:16:54.860
when violence was unleashed upon them
link |
01:16:57.100
than that the whole society had been told
link |
01:16:59.020
that they should identify as non binary.
link |
01:17:03.220
But at least it's a conversation to have.
link |
01:17:05.460
Isn't there aspect to the sort of the feminist movement
link |
01:17:12.100
that is correct in challenging the...
link |
01:17:17.060
Some forms of violence, domestic violence, for instance.
link |
01:17:20.200
Although women are capable of that as well.
link |
01:17:23.060
I'm learning about this.
link |
01:17:24.380
We're all learning about this at the moment.
link |
01:17:26.820
I can't help but watch the entirety of it go down
link |
01:17:29.220
in this beautiful mess that is human relations.
link |
01:17:31.460
Okay.
link |
01:17:32.300
But just to finish up that thought,
link |
01:17:33.660
it's very unwise for women to war against men
link |
01:17:39.260
as it would be for men to war against women.
link |
01:17:41.220
It's highly, highly unwise to war on a majority population.
link |
01:17:45.300
And in America, Britain and other Western countries,
link |
01:17:47.740
white people are still a majority.
link |
01:17:49.780
And so why would you tell the majority of their evil
link |
01:17:52.900
by dint of their skin color?
link |
01:17:55.140
And think that that would be a good way
link |
01:17:56.700
to keep them in check.
link |
01:17:59.060
I mean, I'm not guilty of anything because of my skin color.
link |
01:18:02.060
I'm not guilty of anything.
link |
01:18:03.300
My ancestors didn't do anything wrong.
link |
01:18:05.820
And even if they had,
link |
01:18:06.700
why would I be held responsible for it?
link |
01:18:09.980
So to go back to Nietzsche,
link |
01:18:13.100
is there some aspect to where,
link |
01:18:14.780
if we try to explain the forces at play here,
link |
01:18:18.300
is it the will to power playing itself out
link |
01:18:22.500
from individual human nature
link |
01:18:23.980
and from group behavior nature?
link |
01:18:27.780
Is there some elements to this
link |
01:18:30.020
which is the game we play as human beings
link |
01:18:32.740
is always when we have less power,
link |
01:18:34.780
we try to find ways to gain more power.
link |
01:18:36.900
That's certainly one.
link |
01:18:39.260
The desire to grab is,
link |
01:18:42.740
let me see if I can find a quote for you on that.
link |
01:18:45.780
The desire to grab that which we think we're owed
link |
01:18:49.860
and to do it often in the guise of justice.
link |
01:18:56.780
I mean, justice is one of the great terms of our age
link |
01:19:00.700
and one of the great bogus terms of our age.
link |
01:19:03.740
People forever talk about their search for justice.
link |
01:19:06.140
It's amazing how violent they can often be
link |
01:19:08.300
in their search for justice
link |
01:19:09.580
and how many rules they're willing to break
link |
01:19:11.860
so long as they can say they're after justice
link |
01:19:14.180
and how many norms they can trample
link |
01:19:16.220
so long as they can say it's in the name of justice.
link |
01:19:18.500
You can burn down buildings in the name of justice.
link |
01:19:21.420
Well, the majority groups throughout history,
link |
01:19:23.700
including those with white skin color
link |
01:19:25.620
have done the same in the name of justice.
link |
01:19:28.260
We come up with all kinds of sexy terms
link |
01:19:31.100
in our propaganda machines
link |
01:19:32.420
to sell whatever atrocities we'd like to commit.
link |
01:19:36.580
One of the quotes from Nietzsche that I liked
link |
01:19:40.100
and I quoted in this book.
link |
01:19:41.180
Careful, I'm judging you harshly.
link |
01:19:43.060
Yeah, of course.
link |
01:19:43.900
Nietzsche says that one of the dangers of men of resentment
link |
01:19:49.740
is they'll achieve their ultimate form of revenge,
link |
01:19:52.980
which is to turn happy people
link |
01:19:54.660
into unhappy people like themselves,
link |
01:19:57.380
to shove their misery in the faces of the happy
link |
01:19:59.780
so that in due course the happy,
link |
01:20:01.380
and this is quoting Nietzsche,
link |
01:20:02.660
start to be ashamed of their happiness
link |
01:20:05.300
and perhaps say to one another,
link |
01:20:06.780
it's a disgrace to be happy.
link |
01:20:08.900
There is too much misery.
link |
01:20:11.060
This is something to be averted.
link |
01:20:12.220
The sick, says Nietzsche, must not make the healthy sick too
link |
01:20:15.980
or make the healthy confuse themselves with the sick.
link |
01:20:20.060
Well, I think that again, there's a lot of that going on.
link |
01:20:24.100
How could I be happy when there is unhappiness in the world?
link |
01:20:27.060
Why should I not join the ranks of the unhappy?
link |
01:20:31.100
I think Dostoevsky has a book about that as well.
link |
01:20:34.140
Sure.
link |
01:20:34.980
Knows From Underground.
link |
01:20:36.300
Okay.
link |
01:20:39.340
This has been very Russian, Russian focus.
link |
01:20:41.580
I'm very pleased with another times,
link |
01:20:43.500
but Dostoevsky and Grossman and others have come in.
link |
01:20:46.340
I wasn't doing this as a sort of.
link |
01:20:49.020
Yeah, well, it's always good to plug the greats
link |
01:20:53.980
and get to know they're still relevant.
link |
01:20:57.060
Do you speak Russian by the way at all?
link |
01:20:59.780
Which I did.
link |
01:21:00.820
I'm told it's a 10 year language basically
link |
01:21:02.980
to learn from scratch as my friends who have done it.
link |
01:21:06.060
Well, there's the language and then there's the personality
link |
01:21:09.580
behind the language and the personality.
link |
01:21:11.300
I feel like you already have.
link |
01:21:12.940
So you just need to know the surface details.
link |
01:21:15.100
Okay.
link |
01:21:18.420
In fact, the silence to be silent in the Russian language
link |
01:21:22.780
is something that's already important.
link |
01:21:24.780
Oh, I should, if we had a moment,
link |
01:21:25.940
I'd tell you my story about Stalin's birthplace.
link |
01:21:28.140
Should I tell you that?
link |
01:21:28.980
No.
link |
01:21:29.820
I once went to Gori where Stalin was born.
link |
01:21:33.060
Have you been?
link |
01:21:33.900
No, no.
link |
01:21:34.740
I was there just after the Georgia war.
link |
01:21:36.660
And I went to the nomads land in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
link |
01:21:42.660
And I said, I really got to go to Gori also here
link |
01:21:47.300
because the shell had landed in Gori rather weirdly
link |
01:21:49.420
from the Russian side and Gori is where Stalin was born.
link |
01:21:53.300
And of course, Gori is in Georgia.
link |
01:21:55.580
And when we had the museum of Stalin's birthplace,
link |
01:21:59.420
they'd been trying to change for some years
link |
01:22:01.620
because it had been unadulteratedly pro Stalin for years.
link |
01:22:06.660
And the Georgian authorities,
link |
01:22:07.740
this is in Saakashvili's time,
link |
01:22:11.780
were trying to make it into a museum of Stalinism.
link |
01:22:15.620
And it was really tough.
link |
01:22:17.420
The only place I've seen which is similar
link |
01:22:19.020
is the house in Mexico City where Trotsky was killed.
link |
01:22:23.140
That also is that they're not quite sure to do.
link |
01:22:25.660
They don't want to say he's a bad guy
link |
01:22:27.940
because they think that people won't come anyhow.
link |
01:22:30.940
Stalin's house in Gori had changed
link |
01:22:32.420
from the museum of Stalin to the museum of Stalinism.
link |
01:22:34.180
There was this large Georgian woman with a pink pencil
link |
01:22:37.180
who just had clearly been doing the tour for 50 years
link |
01:22:40.740
and just pointed all the facts.
link |
01:22:41.940
She did that classic thing.
link |
01:22:43.020
I've also saw it once in North Korea
link |
01:22:44.820
where they sort of that sort of communist thing
link |
01:22:47.780
where they say, here is, this is 147 feet high
link |
01:22:51.540
by 13 feet deep.
link |
01:22:52.860
They give you lots of facts.
link |
01:22:53.900
I don't care.
link |
01:22:55.020
What does it matter?
link |
01:22:56.580
They always give you facts.
link |
01:22:58.780
This is Stalin's suitcase.
link |
01:23:00.180
It is 13 inches wide by, you know, this isn't.
link |
01:23:04.620
Anyhow, and this woman did all of this
link |
01:23:06.740
and it was all just wildly pro, not pro Stalin,
link |
01:23:09.540
just explaining Stalin's life.
link |
01:23:10.660
It was just a great local boy done good.
link |
01:23:13.780
They didn't mention the fact he killed
link |
01:23:14.980
more Georgians per capita than anyone else.
link |
01:23:17.180
Local boy done good.
link |
01:23:18.780
And we get to the end and before being taken to the gift shop
link |
01:23:23.260
where they sell red wine with Stalin's face on it
link |
01:23:25.700
and among other things, and a lighter with Stalin on it,
link |
01:23:32.100
they took you to a little room under the stairs
link |
01:23:35.260
and they said, this is a replica of interrogation cell
link |
01:23:38.940
to show, represent horror of what happened in Stalin time.
link |
01:23:44.420
Now, gift shop.
link |
01:23:45.740
As I said, there's no, no kind of thing.
link |
01:23:48.540
And I took the woman aside at the end.
link |
01:23:50.740
I discovered she'd said this to other journalists
link |
01:23:52.500
and visited before.
link |
01:23:53.740
I took her aside and said,
link |
01:23:54.900
what do you think about communist Stalin?
link |
01:23:57.820
And she said, let's say she'd obviously done this
link |
01:24:01.060
during communist times.
link |
01:24:03.460
She said, it's not my place to judge, that sort of thing.
link |
01:24:09.100
Which is an interesting comment in itself.
link |
01:24:10.780
I said, yeah, but he killed more Georgians than anyone
link |
01:24:12.980
and all that sort of thing.
link |
01:24:15.180
And she said, it's not my place to judge
link |
01:24:16.980
or to give my views and that sort of thing.
link |
01:24:19.020
And eventually I said, well, what do you feel about it?
link |
01:24:22.340
And she said, it was like a hurricane, it happened.
link |
01:24:29.700
That's interesting because if I may mention Clubhouse
link |
01:24:32.860
once again, I got a chance to talk to a few people
link |
01:24:35.900
from Mongolia, there's a woman from Mongolia
link |
01:24:39.100
and they talked about the fact
link |
01:24:40.660
that they deeply admire Stalin, love.
link |
01:24:43.500
She sounded, if I may, hopefully that's not crossing line.
link |
01:24:46.940
I think I'm representing her correctly in saying
link |
01:24:50.180
she admired him almost like, loved him.
link |
01:24:55.060
Like the way people love like Jesus, like a holy figure.
link |
01:25:00.100
Well, isn't that still the case in large parts of Russia?
link |
01:25:02.820
I mean, Stalin keeps on winning
link |
01:25:04.580
greatest Russian of all time.
link |
01:25:07.500
And that's perhaps, maybe there's a dip,
link |
01:25:10.300
but if we were to think about the long arc of history,
link |
01:25:12.940
perhaps that's going to go up and up and up and up.
link |
01:25:16.220
There's something about human memory
link |
01:25:18.540
that it just, you forget the details
link |
01:25:20.740
of the atrocities of the past and remember that.
link |
01:25:22.820
I mean, think of the number of people we talk about
link |
01:25:25.060
as historical heroes, Napoleon.
link |
01:25:27.580
I mean, British people don't talk about Napoleon as a hero,
link |
01:25:30.420
but the French, now you're, now you're on tricky ground.
link |
01:25:38.140
But no, but like the French, normally my Napoleon
link |
01:25:42.100
and there had many Admiral Aswit who was also
link |
01:25:44.740
an unbelievable brute and killed many people unnecessarily.
link |
01:25:49.340
And there are lots of figures from history
link |
01:25:51.740
that we sort of cover that over with.
link |
01:25:56.740
Yeah, yeah.
link |
01:25:58.540
Can we mention Churchill briefly?
link |
01:26:00.300
Because he is one of the, you can make a case for him
link |
01:26:06.140
being one of the great representers
link |
01:26:08.700
or great figures historically of Western civilization.
link |
01:26:12.260
And then there's a lot of people from, not a lot.
link |
01:26:16.820
I know, I have like three friends
link |
01:26:18.460
and one of them happens to be from London.
link |
01:26:21.260
And they say that he's not a good person.
link |
01:26:26.620
Why?
link |
01:26:27.460
So listen, this friend, we did not discuss.
link |
01:26:30.420
I just, this is an opinion poll of the three friends,
link |
01:26:33.180
but I do know that there's quite a bit, you know.
link |
01:26:35.340
There's a backlash going on at the moment.
link |
01:26:37.180
At the moment and in general, there's a spirit
link |
01:26:39.220
like reflecting on the darker sides
link |
01:26:42.300
of some of these historical figures,
link |
01:26:43.660
like challenging history through,
link |
01:26:46.660
it's not just critical race theory.
link |
01:26:48.340
It's challenging history through,
link |
01:26:52.020
well, are the people we think of as heroes,
link |
01:26:57.940
what are their flaws?
link |
01:26:59.340
And are they in fact villains that are convenient,
link |
01:27:02.980
sort of, we're there at the right time
link |
01:27:10.180
to accidentally do the right thing.
link |
01:27:12.020
Accidentally?
link |
01:27:15.220
I hope this isn't the representative fair summation
link |
01:27:19.460
of your friend in London's views.
link |
01:27:21.260
No, she's going to be quite mad at this,
link |
01:27:23.660
but I didn't say the name, so it could be any friend.
link |
01:27:26.180
It could be, it's like a girlfriend in Canada.
link |
01:27:28.740
Well, see, I.
link |
01:27:30.580
You've given that away.
link |
01:27:31.700
Well, that's, of course I would not.
link |
01:27:34.860
I made that up completely.
link |
01:27:36.140
It's all, just like my girlfriend in Canada,
link |
01:27:39.660
she's completely a figment of my imagination.
link |
01:27:41.780
Nevertheless, Winston Churchill is somebody,
link |
01:27:46.300
I mean, just looking at reading
link |
01:27:48.140
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
link |
01:27:49.340
is an incredible figure that to me,
link |
01:27:55.180
so much of World War II is marked,
link |
01:27:58.340
leading up to the war is marked
link |
01:27:59.980
by stunning amounts of cowardice by political leaders,
link |
01:28:03.740
and it's fascinating to watch here
link |
01:28:07.380
this person clearly with a drinking and a smoking problem.
link |
01:28:11.420
Was he?
link |
01:28:12.260
I didn't understand why that's a negative.
link |
01:28:13.980
No, I didn't say, you see.
link |
01:28:15.700
Yeah, you throw it in as if it is.
link |
01:28:17.860
No, well, it's called humor.
link |
01:28:19.700
I'll explain it to you one day what that means,
link |
01:28:21.460
but he stood.
link |
01:28:22.900
Explain dry humor.
link |
01:28:23.940
He stood up, he stood up to what we now see as evil
link |
01:28:31.980
when at the time it was not so obvious to see.
link |
01:28:36.900
You know, so that's just a fascinating figure
link |
01:28:39.820
of Western civilization.
link |
01:28:40.780
I'd love to get your comments.
link |
01:28:42.220
The real criticisms, I mean, smoking and drinking.
link |
01:28:45.380
The real criticisms of Churchill are quite easy to sum up,
link |
01:28:49.180
and I do so in the War on the West, actually.
link |
01:28:50.860
I say these are the things that they now use against him.
link |
01:28:54.060
Didn't do enough to avert the Bengal famine in 1943,
link |
01:28:56.860
for instance.
link |
01:28:57.700
That's been shot down by numerous historians,
link |
01:28:59.580
including Indian historians.
link |
01:29:01.660
In the middle of the war, in the middle of a world war,
link |
01:29:04.140
Churchill did what he could
link |
01:29:05.260
to get grain supplies diverted from Australia to Bengal.
link |
01:29:12.380
The famine was appalling.
link |
01:29:13.820
It was caused by a typhoon.
link |
01:29:15.020
It was not caused by Winston Churchill,
link |
01:29:17.700
and the idea that some, basically,
link |
01:29:22.060
Indian nationalist historians have pumped out
link |
01:29:24.260
in recent years, and just anti Churchill figures,
link |
01:29:28.140
that he actually wanted Indians to die
link |
01:29:31.140
is just total calumny.
link |
01:29:34.380
And when people claim, some people claim that,
link |
01:29:36.260
I mean, there was a few very ignorant scholars,
link |
01:29:39.220
nevertheless with some credentials,
link |
01:29:41.820
who claim that Churchill wanted the Indian population
link |
01:29:45.020
to basically be genocided.
link |
01:29:47.260
And it's complete nonsense,
link |
01:29:48.500
not least by the fact that during the period
link |
01:29:51.220
which in question Indian population boomed.
link |
01:29:56.140
So that's one of the main ones.
link |
01:29:59.660
Another one is that he had some views
link |
01:30:02.100
that we now had regarded as racist.
link |
01:30:03.420
He definitely regarded races
link |
01:30:04.660
as being of different characters,
link |
01:30:07.740
and that there were superior races,
link |
01:30:10.260
and the, as it were, the white European
link |
01:30:13.380
was a superior culture.
link |
01:30:19.420
He was born in Victorian England,
link |
01:30:21.780
so he had some Victorian attitudes.
link |
01:30:26.060
These are things in the negative side of the ledger,
link |
01:30:28.140
and as with all history,
link |
01:30:29.700
you should have a negative
link |
01:30:30.540
and a positive side of the ledger.
link |
01:30:31.900
Positive side of the ledger includes
link |
01:30:33.220
he almost certainly did more than any one human being
link |
01:30:35.260
to save the world from Nazism.
link |
01:30:37.260
So that should count as something.
link |
01:30:39.460
And one of the reasons I talk about Churchill
link |
01:30:41.220
in this regard is to stress that if you get,
link |
01:30:46.100
I'm not trying to stop anyone doing history at all.
link |
01:30:49.580
I don't think that the revisionism of recent years
link |
01:30:51.700
about Churchill or the founding fathers of America
link |
01:30:53.940
or anyone else is anything I want to stop.
link |
01:30:56.940
I find it interesting,
link |
01:30:58.220
find it interesting not least
link |
01:30:59.180
because it's so sloppy on occasions,
link |
01:31:00.500
but I find it interesting and it's important.
link |
01:31:02.220
And we should be able to see people in the round.
link |
01:31:04.700
But that includes recognizing
link |
01:31:08.340
the positive side of the ledger.
link |
01:31:10.500
And if you can't recognize that side,
link |
01:31:13.700
you're doing something else.
link |
01:31:15.740
You're doing something else.
link |
01:31:16.940
It's not history.
link |
01:31:18.580
It's some form of politicking of a very particular kind.
link |
01:31:23.380
And I think it's the same thing with the founding fathers.
link |
01:31:26.060
There are some people, for instance,
link |
01:31:27.220
certainly since the 90s who have pushed
link |
01:31:29.660
the Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson story
link |
01:31:32.820
to show that Thomas Jefferson was some kind of brute.
link |
01:31:35.540
As a result, we see Jefferson's statue
link |
01:31:39.740
being removed from the council chamber
link |
01:31:41.180
of the city we're sitting in last November
link |
01:31:43.380
by council members who said that Thomas Jefferson
link |
01:31:45.660
no longer represents our values.
link |
01:31:47.660
If you can't recognize greatness of Thomas Jefferson
link |
01:31:51.460
and that he had flaws,
link |
01:31:54.180
I mean, that's not a grownup debate.
link |
01:31:58.580
And weigh them and weigh them in the context of the time.
link |
01:32:01.380
But let me sort of throw a curveball at you then.
link |
01:32:05.900
What about recognizing the positive
link |
01:32:08.460
and the negative of a fellow with nice facial hair
link |
01:32:11.060
called Karl Marx?
link |
01:32:13.060
Sure, sure.
link |
01:32:14.420
I mean, I have a section in The War in the West,
link |
01:32:17.900
as you know, where I go for Karl Marx with some glee.
link |
01:32:22.420
So he seems to have gotten some popularity
link |
01:32:26.380
in the West recently.
link |
01:32:29.100
Not just recently, yeah.
link |
01:32:30.660
I mean, he's had a resurgence recently.
link |
01:32:32.700
Yes, resurgence.
link |
01:32:33.820
Well, that's because whenever things are seen to go wrong,
link |
01:32:36.940
people reach for other options.
link |
01:32:40.980
And when, for instance, it's very hard
link |
01:32:42.420
for people to accumulate capital,
link |
01:32:43.700
it's not obvious that they're gonna become capitalists.
link |
01:32:46.660
And so one thing that happens is people say,
link |
01:32:49.100
let's look at the Marxism thing again,
link |
01:32:50.660
see if that's a viable goer.
link |
01:32:52.820
And my argument would simply be,
link |
01:32:55.620
point me to one place that's worked.
link |
01:32:58.380
Well, the argument from the Marxists
link |
01:33:01.500
or the Marxian economists is that
link |
01:33:05.020
we've only really tried it once, the Soviets tried it,
link |
01:33:08.540
and then there's a few people
link |
01:33:10.420
that kind of tried the Soviet thing.
link |
01:33:12.340
Huber tried it?
link |
01:33:13.740
Well, they basically, it's an offshoot of the Soviet, yes.
link |
01:33:18.980
They've tried it.
link |
01:33:19.820
They tried it in Venezuela.
link |
01:33:22.180
Yes, yes, yes.
link |
01:33:23.380
So let's just quickly say,
link |
01:33:25.720
how did all these experiments go?
link |
01:33:28.820
Well, they failed in fascinating ways.
link |
01:33:31.180
They did, but they failed.
link |
01:33:32.660
Yes, they failed.
link |
01:33:33.500
We should stress, so grossly failed.
link |
01:33:36.860
So grossly failed that they threw millions
link |
01:33:39.380
and millions of people into completely thwarted lives
link |
01:33:43.960
that were much shorter than they should have been.
link |
01:33:47.260
Yeah, so the lesson to learn there,
link |
01:33:50.660
that you can learn several lessons.
link |
01:33:52.280
One is that anything that smells like Marxism
link |
01:33:56.180
is going to lead to a lot of problems.
link |
01:33:59.900
Now, another lesson could be,
link |
01:34:02.140
well, what is the fundamental idea that Marx had?
link |
01:34:05.940
He was criticizing capitalism and the flaws of capitalism.
link |
01:34:10.420
So is it possible to do better than capitalism?
link |
01:34:13.420
And that's, if you take that spirit, you start to wonder.
link |
01:34:16.740
That might actually become relevant in, I don't know,
link |
01:34:19.220
20, 30, 50 years when the machines start doing
link |
01:34:24.700
more and more of the labor, all those kinds of things.
link |
01:34:26.620
You start to ask questions.
link |
01:34:27.660
You finally might get to Marx's dream
link |
01:34:29.900
of what the average day would look like.
link |
01:34:31.820
Yes.
link |
01:34:33.860
Well, there's gonna be an awful lot
link |
01:34:35.020
of literary criticism then.
link |
01:34:38.260
If you remember, that's what Marx said
link |
01:34:39.740
that we would be doing in the evenings,
link |
01:34:41.260
the laborer in the evening.
link |
01:34:42.580
Well, he didn't know Twitter was a thing, or Netflix.
link |
01:34:45.340
So he would change.
link |
01:34:47.740
Are there things we could learn from Marx plausibly, possibly?
link |
01:34:51.740
I can't think of anything myself offhand.
link |
01:34:53.840
But to have a critique of capitalism
link |
01:34:56.780
isn't by any means a bad thing in this society.
link |
01:34:58.940
I'd rather that it was a critique of capitalism
link |
01:35:00.780
that showed how you improve capitalism,
link |
01:35:02.820
a critique of the free market that showed
link |
01:35:04.580
how people could get better access to the free market,
link |
01:35:07.380
how you could ensure, for instance,
link |
01:35:08.700
that young people get onto the property ladder,
link |
01:35:10.740
things like that.
link |
01:35:11.940
Those are constructive things.
link |
01:35:13.180
The people who say we must have Marxism,
link |
01:35:15.260
I mean, don't know what the hell they're talking about,
link |
01:35:17.340
because that never leads to any of those things.
link |
01:35:19.900
Haven't led in the past.
link |
01:35:22.020
It's never led in the past.
link |
01:35:23.020
And at some point, you've got to try to work out
link |
01:35:25.940
how many attempts you make at this damn philosophy
link |
01:35:30.300
before you realize that every attempt always
link |
01:35:32.540
leads to the same thing.
link |
01:35:34.220
I would say we could pretend that fascism has never
link |
01:35:36.740
been properly tried and that it was unfortunate what happened
link |
01:35:41.940
in Nazi Germany, but that wasn't real fascism.
link |
01:35:45.820
And Mussolini's fascism didn't go all that well,
link |
01:35:49.540
but it was a bit better.
link |
01:35:51.300
And maybe we could try a bit more Franco fascism.
link |
01:35:54.580
Nobody would have any time for this crap, nor should they.
link |
01:35:58.660
The people who try that are reviled, and quite rightly.
link |
01:36:02.120
So why do we tolerate it with the Marxism thing?
link |
01:36:04.660
And it's a great mystery to me,
link |
01:36:06.780
the way that people do tolerate it.
link |
01:36:08.740
Always, always in this stupid way of saying,
link |
01:36:11.860
we haven't done it yet.
link |
01:36:13.900
And if you keep trying the same recipe,
link |
01:36:16.220
and every time it comes out as shit,
link |
01:36:19.140
it's that the recipe is shit.
link |
01:36:21.260
Well, sort of, I'm trying to practice here
link |
01:36:23.420
by playing devil's advocate,
link |
01:36:24.460
practice the same idea that you mentioned,
link |
01:36:26.460
which is, when you say the word Marxism,
link |
01:36:29.340
should you throw out everything,
link |
01:36:30.700
or should you ask a question, is there good ideas here?
link |
01:36:34.500
And the same, it's the good,
link |
01:36:36.460
it's weighing the good and the bad,
link |
01:36:37.780
and being able to do so calmly and thoughtfully.
link |
01:36:40.660
Sure.
link |
01:36:41.820
You know the famous George Orwell comment
link |
01:36:45.580
on the style, in an argument with a Stalinist?
link |
01:36:48.780
Do you know this?
link |
01:36:49.620
That's one of my favorite quotes.
link |
01:36:51.380
George Orwell, in the early 40s,
link |
01:36:52.820
gets into an argument with a Stalinist.
link |
01:36:55.900
He's also a Marxist.
link |
01:36:58.620
And this is after the show trials, 37.
link |
01:37:04.020
This is when it's very clear
link |
01:37:06.500
what Marxism in the Russian form is.
link |
01:37:10.980
And this, Orwell is in the discussion with this Marxist,
link |
01:37:15.260
and it goes on and on,
link |
01:37:16.580
and eventually Orwell says,
link |
01:37:18.980
well, you know, what about the show trials,
link |
01:37:20.580
and what about what's happened in the Ukraine,
link |
01:37:23.060
and the famines, and much more,
link |
01:37:26.540
and the purges, and the purges, and the purges,
link |
01:37:29.140
and eventually the Stalinist says to Orwell
link |
01:37:33.060
what Orwell knows he's going to say all along,
link |
01:37:35.460
which is, he says,
link |
01:37:36.300
you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
link |
01:37:40.180
And Orwell says, where's the omelet?
link |
01:37:46.060
Oh, yeah, that's a good, that's a really good,
link |
01:37:49.580
because that's a...
link |
01:37:50.420
Look at this by this stage, okay?
link |
01:37:52.540
How many...
link |
01:37:53.380
Where's my damn omelet?
link |
01:37:54.580
How many just messy, big, bloody, eggy piles
link |
01:38:00.060
have the Marxists created by now in country after country?
link |
01:38:04.660
Yeah.
link |
01:38:05.500
Always next time they're going to produce the great omelet,
link |
01:38:08.780
but they never have, and they never will,
link |
01:38:11.460
because the whole thing is rotten from the start.
link |
01:38:14.620
But let me just also say one thing about,
link |
01:38:17.500
because of course Marx isn't as nice as he sounds,
link |
01:38:20.700
and that's one of the things that I try
link |
01:38:22.860
to highlight in the book is,
link |
01:38:24.180
if we're going to do this reductive thing
link |
01:38:25.940
of people in history and saying,
link |
01:38:26.940
well, they had views that were of their time,
link |
01:38:29.500
and we must therefore condemn them for them,
link |
01:38:32.020
say, fine, let's do the same thing with Marx.
link |
01:38:34.180
And there were things I quote in this book
link |
01:38:35.740
from Marx's letters, not least letters to Engels,
link |
01:38:38.420
and indeed in his published writings,
link |
01:38:40.740
in pieces he was writing for the American press
link |
01:38:44.060
in the 1850s,
link |
01:38:47.220
the way he has horrible views on slavery
link |
01:38:49.940
and colonialism and much more.
link |
01:38:53.860
But the main thing is, I mean,
link |
01:38:54.780
the horrible things he says about black people
link |
01:38:57.660
and the constant use of the N word.
link |
01:38:59.460
In fact, when I was doing the audio book
link |
01:39:00.780
for the war in the West, I had to decide,
link |
01:39:03.380
will I read out the quotes from Marx or not?
link |
01:39:05.740
If I had read them out, I'd have been canceled
link |
01:39:08.900
because people would have just said,
link |
01:39:11.260
you've been using the N word so much in this passage.
link |
01:39:14.460
And I slightly thought of doing it
link |
01:39:17.660
so that I could say I was only quoting Marx
link |
01:39:20.620
to try to hit the point home.
link |
01:39:22.420
In the end, of course, I was sensible and decided not to,
link |
01:39:24.260
but Marx's letters are disgusting on these terms.
link |
01:39:27.540
Since I highlighted this in this book
link |
01:39:29.380
and some of the media picked it up
link |
01:39:32.900
and have popularized this thing
link |
01:39:35.780
I'm trying to put into the system,
link |
01:39:37.340
which is if you're gonna accuse Churchill of racism,
link |
01:39:39.420
if you're gonna accuse Jefferson of racism,
link |
01:39:41.580
Washington of racism, and so on, what about Marx?
link |
01:39:44.220
The two things that Marxists have said since this came out
link |
01:39:46.660
has been, first of all, why are you saying this about Marx?
link |
01:39:49.380
He was a man of his time, like everyone else.
link |
01:39:54.260
And the second thing they say is,
link |
01:39:55.660
we don't go to Marx for his horrible abhorrent views on race.
link |
01:39:58.860
So talking about mixed race people as gorillas and so on.
link |
01:40:02.900
We don't go to him for that.
link |
01:40:04.300
We go to him for his economic theories.
link |
01:40:06.580
I say, okay, well, we don't go to Thomas Jefferson
link |
01:40:10.180
for his views on slaves.
link |
01:40:11.980
We don't go to Churchill for the precise language
link |
01:40:18.820
he used that points in the 1910s about Indians.
link |
01:40:21.420
Or his health advice.
link |
01:40:22.820
Or his health advice.
link |
01:40:24.620
Actually, I do get him for that.
link |
01:40:26.980
That explains so much.
link |
01:40:28.620
But let's have some standards on this.
link |
01:40:31.780
And that's why I'm very suspicious of the fact
link |
01:40:34.340
that the people don't do this with Marx
link |
01:40:36.100
because I think what they're trying,
link |
01:40:37.140
what some people are trying to do,
link |
01:40:38.380
and this may sound conspiratorial,
link |
01:40:40.060
but I really don't think it is.
link |
01:40:41.500
I think that some people are deliberately trying
link |
01:40:43.540
to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past
link |
01:40:47.220
in order to say there's nothing good.
link |
01:40:49.660
Nothing you can hold on to.
link |
01:40:51.100
No one you should revere.
link |
01:40:52.340
You've got no heroes.
link |
01:40:53.820
The whole thing comes down.
link |
01:40:55.180
Who's left standing?
link |
01:40:56.220
Oh, we've also got this idea from the 20th century
link |
01:40:58.460
still about Marxism.
link |
01:41:00.500
Well, the 19th and 20th centuries.
link |
01:41:02.540
And no, no.
link |
01:41:05.340
You will not have the entire landscape deracinated.
link |
01:41:09.740
And then the worst ideas tried again.
link |
01:41:13.060
So basically destroy all of history
link |
01:41:15.100
and the lessons learned from history
link |
01:41:16.580
and then start from scratch.
link |
01:41:17.860
And then it's completely any idea can work
link |
01:41:20.740
and then you could just take whatever.
link |
01:41:22.340
Well, and the thing is there are always some people
link |
01:41:24.380
with pre preferred ideas.
link |
01:41:25.940
And I mentioned this also with the postcolonialists.
link |
01:41:27.940
The postcolonialists were really interesting
link |
01:41:30.660
because when the European powers were moving
link |
01:41:33.300
from Africa and the Far East,
link |
01:41:35.700
postcolonial movements had one obvious move
link |
01:41:38.740
they could have done, which was to say,
link |
01:41:41.340
since the European powers have left,
link |
01:41:43.260
we will return to a pre colonial life,
link |
01:41:46.420
which in some of their places would have been returning
link |
01:41:48.300
to slave markets and slave ownership
link |
01:41:50.620
and slave selling and much more.
link |
01:41:52.500
But put that aside for a second.
link |
01:41:54.300
They could have said we have an indigenous culture
link |
01:41:56.300
which we will return to.
link |
01:41:58.100
Almost uniformly in the postcolonial era,
link |
01:42:01.100
you had figures like France Fanon,
link |
01:42:04.100
you had European intellectuals like Sartre,
link |
01:42:06.580
who said the Western powers are retreating
link |
01:42:09.780
from these countries and therefore we should institute
link |
01:42:12.140
in these countries what but Western Marxism.
link |
01:42:17.060
Well, it's not obvious to me that like the bad ideas
link |
01:42:20.020
will be the ones that emerge,
link |
01:42:21.300
but it's more likely the bad ideas would emerge
link |
01:42:23.660
in this kind of context when you erase history,
link |
01:42:26.540
when you erase tradition.
link |
01:42:27.380
When you erase history and you leave some ideas
link |
01:42:30.300
deliberately uninterrogated.
link |
01:42:33.500
I mean, as I say, find me one in a hundred
link |
01:42:37.980
American students who've heard of
link |
01:42:42.500
any of the communist despots of the 20th century.
link |
01:42:47.260
I mean, name recognition in,
link |
01:42:49.500
there was a poll done a few years ago in the UK
link |
01:42:52.260
and like name recognition among children,
link |
01:42:56.380
school children for Stalin, let alone Mao.
link |
01:43:01.380
I mean, Mao who kills more people than anyone,
link |
01:43:05.780
65 million Chinese, perhaps.
link |
01:43:09.500
How many students in America know what Mao was,
link |
01:43:13.100
who he was, where he was, nothing.
link |
01:43:16.460
Or the atrocities committed.
link |
01:43:17.900
Where the atrocities were committed.
link |
01:43:19.340
And I worry about that because it means
link |
01:43:21.700
that we might have learned one of the two lessons
link |
01:43:24.580
of the 20th century.
link |
01:43:26.100
We think we've learned one of the two lessons
link |
01:43:29.420
of the 20th century.
link |
01:43:30.300
We actually haven't learned that lesson.
link |
01:43:32.060
We've learned a little bit of it.
link |
01:43:33.820
And we've not learned the other one at all.
link |
01:43:35.780
Because that's why we still have people
link |
01:43:37.660
in American politics and elsewhere
link |
01:43:39.340
actually talking about collectivization and things.
link |
01:43:42.740
As if there's no problem with that.
link |
01:43:44.740
And as if it's perfectly obvious.
link |
01:43:46.580
And they could run it and they'd know
link |
01:43:48.100
exactly where to stop.
link |
01:43:49.540
What are the two lessons of the 20th century?
link |
01:43:51.420
Fascism and communism.
link |
01:43:55.260
Yeah.
link |
01:43:56.420
I mean, I'm not exactly sure what exactly the lessons are.
link |
01:44:00.900
No, it's not clear.
link |
01:44:02.020
If the lessons were very clear,
link |
01:44:03.540
we'd be better at it.
link |
01:44:04.900
Well, one is your book broadly applied
link |
01:44:08.260
of madness of crowds.
link |
01:44:10.580
That's one lesson.
link |
01:44:11.860
Well, how so?
link |
01:44:14.060
Meaning like large crowds can display herd like behavior.
link |
01:44:19.300
Yes, be very suspicious of crowds.
link |
01:44:21.260
Yeah.
link |
01:44:22.100
In general, I mean, you apply it in different,
link |
01:44:24.100
more to modern application.
link |
01:44:25.740
Yeah.
link |
01:44:26.580
In a sense, but that's rooted in history,
link |
01:44:29.580
that crowds can, when humans get together,
link |
01:44:32.420
they can do some quite radically silly things.
link |
01:44:35.500
Elias Kaneti is very good on that, crowds and power.
link |
01:44:40.460
And Eric Hoffer, who is a sort of self taught, amazing,
link |
01:44:45.660
not to say autodidactic writer,
link |
01:44:47.900
the true believer and so on.
link |
01:44:49.220
He was extremely good on that.
link |
01:44:51.420
But the reason I mentioned the two things,
link |
01:44:52.740
no, I mean, we should have realized
link |
01:44:53.860
the two nightmares of the 20th century fascism and communism,
link |
01:44:57.540
that we should know how they came about.
link |
01:45:00.020
And we're interested in learning
link |
01:45:01.220
how one of them came about, fascism.
link |
01:45:03.180
And we know some of the lessons,
link |
01:45:04.780
like don't treat other people as less than you
link |
01:45:08.340
because of their race.
link |
01:45:10.180
That's one lesson.
link |
01:45:12.140
But we've done some good at learning that.
link |
01:45:17.500
But the second one, not to do communism again,
link |
01:45:20.580
not to do socialism, I think we're way away from knowing
link |
01:45:26.540
because we don't know how it happened.
link |
01:45:29.500
And the little temptations are still there always.
link |
01:45:32.620
Look at people saying,
link |
01:45:33.460
I'm gonna expropriate your property.
link |
01:45:39.020
If people do things they don't like,
link |
01:45:40.500
they will get, we can't wait to take your property.
link |
01:45:42.940
Well, there's a sense, there's an appealing sense.
link |
01:45:45.780
Okay, every ideology has an appealing narrative behind it
link |
01:45:50.900
that sells the ideology.
link |
01:45:52.500
So for socialism, for communism is that there's a,
link |
01:45:57.140
it seems unfair that the working class
link |
01:45:59.740
does all of this work and gets only a fraction of the output.
link |
01:46:05.060
It just seems unfair.
link |
01:46:07.020
So you wanna make it.
link |
01:46:07.860
If they do get a fraction of the output, yes.
link |
01:46:10.140
Yes, and so it seems to be more fair
link |
01:46:14.900
if we increase that.
link |
01:46:16.260
If the workers own all of the value of their output
link |
01:46:21.500
and things that are more fair seems to be a good thing.
link |
01:46:26.780
I'd say, well, yeah, I mean, fairness is,
link |
01:46:29.900
I like fairness as a term.
link |
01:46:32.460
No, I much prefer fairness
link |
01:46:33.820
because it's a much easier thing to try to work out.
link |
01:46:36.860
It's quite amorphous itself as a concept,
link |
01:46:38.660
but everyone can recognize it.
link |
01:46:40.820
So for instance, should the boss of the company
link |
01:46:47.100
earn a million times that of the lowest paid employee?
link |
01:46:51.300
Doesn't seem fair.
link |
01:46:53.700
Should they earn maybe five or 10 times
link |
01:46:57.820
the salary of the lowest employee?
link |
01:47:00.620
Yeah, possibly, that could be fair.
link |
01:47:03.380
There are certain sort of multiples
link |
01:47:05.060
which are within the bounds of reasonableness.
link |
01:47:12.540
I think actually that's the much bigger problem
link |
01:47:17.260
in capitalism at the moment as I see it
link |
01:47:19.220
is the not untrue perception
link |
01:47:22.900
that a tiny number of people accrue a lot of the benefits
link |
01:47:27.900
and that the bit in the middle
link |
01:47:34.620
has become increasingly squeezed
link |
01:47:37.140
and is at danger always of falling
link |
01:47:38.940
all the way down to the bottom.
link |
01:47:40.300
I mean, I think in the snakes and ladders
link |
01:47:41.780
of American capitalism, for instance,
link |
01:47:43.460
it's a correct perception to say
link |
01:47:46.580
that the snakes go down awfully far.
link |
01:47:51.700
If you tread on the snake,
link |
01:47:53.980
you can plummet an awfully long way in America.
link |
01:47:56.700
And the deal in the game was that the ladders took you high
link |
01:48:02.500
and there's a perception, and again,
link |
01:48:03.980
it's not entirely wrong that the ladder system
link |
01:48:07.220
on the board is kind of broken.
link |
01:48:10.460
So what you're saying is you're a Marxist.
link |
01:48:13.460
I'm not saying I'm a Marxist.
link |
01:48:15.460
You heard that here first in the out of context blog post
link |
01:48:20.460
you're going to write about this.
link |
01:48:21.460
I get to that, I get back to this point.
link |
01:48:22.820
The way to critique capitalism,
link |
01:48:24.740
if it's gone bad, is to get better capitalists.
link |
01:48:28.100
Free markets where they're not fair should be made fair.
link |
01:48:31.300
Never decide that the answer is the thing
link |
01:48:35.060
that has never produced any human flourishing, i.e. Marxism.
link |
01:48:39.580
So as you describe in The Madness of Crowds
link |
01:48:41.900
the herd like behavior of humans that gets us into trouble,
link |
01:48:47.900
you as an individual thinker and others listening to this,
link |
01:48:51.900
how can you, because all of us are mids crowds,
link |
01:48:54.980
we're influenced by the society that's around us,
link |
01:48:57.820
by the people that's around us.
link |
01:48:59.140
How can we think independently?
link |
01:49:01.740
How can we, if you're in the Soviet Union
link |
01:49:09.580
at the beginning of the 20th century,
link |
01:49:12.420
if you're in, I don't know, Nazi Germany
link |
01:49:16.940
at the end of the 30s or the 40s,
link |
01:49:18.980
how can you think independently?
link |
01:49:20.660
Given, first of all, that it's hard to think independently,
link |
01:49:26.860
just intellectually speaking,
link |
01:49:28.540
but also that it just becomes more and more dangerous.
link |
01:49:33.700
So the incentive to think independently
link |
01:49:36.780
under the uncertainty that's usually involved with thinking
link |
01:49:40.180
is, I mean, it's a silly thing to say,
link |
01:49:42.860
but on Twitter there is a cost to be paid
link |
01:49:44.660
for going against the crowd on any silly thing.
link |
01:49:49.580
We can even talk about, what is it?
link |
01:49:52.860
Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.
link |
01:49:55.620
There's a crowd that believes that that was unjustified.
link |
01:49:59.060
I forget what the crowd decided.
link |
01:50:00.980
But I don't.
link |
01:50:01.820
Crowd split on that one.
link |
01:50:02.700
It's safe to have one opinion either way.
link |
01:50:04.620
Okay, it is, right.
link |
01:50:05.580
But there is, you put it very nicely,
link |
01:50:07.900
that there's clearly a calculus here
link |
01:50:10.260
and that you can measure, on Twitter in particular,
link |
01:50:12.620
you can measure kind of the crowd,
link |
01:50:14.380
a sense of where the crowd lays.
link |
01:50:16.100
Michael Jackson.
link |
01:50:17.060
Mm hmm.
link |
01:50:19.300
Well, oh boy.
link |
01:50:22.420
I don't want to, this is not a legal discussion.
link |
01:50:26.060
I don't have my lawyer present.
link |
01:50:27.980
I don't even have a lawyer.
link |
01:50:29.060
The man in question is dead.
link |
01:50:30.500
But I think most people who are not just diehard fans
link |
01:50:33.860
would concede that Michael Jackson
link |
01:50:35.020
had a strange relationship with children
link |
01:50:37.020
and was almost certainly a pedophile.
link |
01:50:42.060
Is that, was that, did the crowd agree on that?
link |
01:50:45.180
No, the crowd hasn't agreed because he's too famous
link |
01:50:47.020
and we all love Thriller.
link |
01:50:48.460
Yeah, we do.
link |
01:50:49.540
So you said people who are not fans, I just don't.
link |
01:50:52.460
No, I'm a fan of Michael Jackson,
link |
01:50:53.900
but I think he was almost certainly a pedophile.
link |
01:50:56.620
And, but nobody wants to give up dancing to bad at weddings.
link |
01:51:01.500
So they just kind of added in.
link |
01:51:04.300
It's fine.
link |
01:51:05.860
Seriously, it's a genius.
link |
01:51:07.340
Your law does not apply to Bill Cosby.
link |
01:51:12.020
Well, he wasn't, he was, of course,
link |
01:51:14.340
one of the most famous people in America.
link |
01:51:16.660
But maybe he wasn't regarded as talented.
link |
01:51:19.580
Oh, oh wow, there's depth to this calculation.
link |
01:51:22.780
There's a genius opt out in all cultures.
link |
01:51:26.140
There's a genius opt out in all cultures.
link |
01:51:27.540
Look at Lord Byron.
link |
01:51:28.580
Lord Byron shagged his sister.
link |
01:51:31.340
Doesn't affect his reputation.
link |
01:51:32.820
In fact, if anything, it kind of adds to it.
link |
01:51:34.900
But then again, this kind of war against the West,
link |
01:51:38.380
genius is actually makes you more likely,
link |
01:51:41.700
or no, to get canceled.
link |
01:51:43.780
So if you look at the genius of Thomas Jefferson, or...
link |
01:51:47.740
Well, yes, because if you haven't done anything remarkable,
link |
01:51:50.020
nobody will come looking for you passively, yeah.
link |
01:51:53.020
Oh, so genius can get you in trouble eventually.
link |
01:51:56.020
Sidle through life with nobody noticing.
link |
01:51:58.060
Be totally harmless and then die
link |
01:52:00.540
and hope you haven't used any carbon.
link |
01:52:05.700
But you were asking about how to survive
link |
01:52:08.980
the era of social media, as it were, and the crowds.
link |
01:52:13.180
And there's a very simple answer to that.
link |
01:52:15.500
Don't overrate the significance of the unreal world.
link |
01:52:22.180
Oh, come on, but this is still human psychology.
link |
01:52:25.260
Because you want to fit in.
link |
01:52:26.180
There's a, you want to...
link |
01:52:27.420
Why?
link |
01:52:28.860
Because you like people, and you're just as a...
link |
01:52:31.860
Why not just like a small number of people
link |
01:52:33.460
and ignore the rest?
link |
01:52:34.700
Yeah, that's...
link |
01:52:36.060
That's what I do.
link |
01:52:37.300
Well, I mean, I actually like most people,
link |
01:52:39.620
and that isn't a general thing.
link |
01:52:40.700
I don't have detestation for most people at all.
link |
01:52:44.420
Most people I kind of enjoy speaking with and being with.
link |
01:52:48.460
But in terms of storing your sense of self worth
link |
01:52:52.500
in absolute strangers, big mistake.
link |
01:52:54.900
Yeah, well, me, that's...
link |
01:52:56.940
Listen, let's turn into a therapy session.
link |
01:52:58.980
Because for me, and I think I represent
link |
01:53:01.140
some number of population, is I'm pretty self critical.
link |
01:53:03.900
I'm looking for myself in the world.
link |
01:53:06.020
And there is a depth of connection
link |
01:53:09.020
with people on the internet.
link |
01:53:10.780
I mean, I have some...
link |
01:53:11.620
I think there's a shallowness of it.
link |
01:53:13.300
It's shallow connection.
link |
01:53:14.660
Interesting, I...
link |
01:53:15.900
Put it this way.
link |
01:53:16.740
If you became very ill tomorrow, would any of them help?
link |
01:53:21.060
On the internet?
link |
01:53:21.900
No, no.
link |
01:53:22.740
Good, that's a good test.
link |
01:53:24.140
Yeah, that's a good test.
link |
01:53:25.100
But then at the end of the day, yeah, you're right.
link |
01:53:27.820
Your very close friends would help, family would help.
link |
01:53:30.020
Yeah, and perhaps that's the only thing...
link |
01:53:32.900
You can't store significant amounts of trust,
link |
01:53:39.220
or faith, or belief, or self worth
link |
01:53:43.180
in places which will not return it to you.
link |
01:53:46.780
Okay, so let's talk about the more extreme case,
link |
01:53:49.220
the harsher case.
link |
01:53:50.060
When you talk about the things you talk about
link |
01:53:53.340
in the war on the West and madness of crowds,
link |
01:53:57.940
I mean, you're getting a lot of blowback, I'm sure.
link |
01:54:03.820
As for the listener, you just shrugged lightly.
link |
01:54:07.300
It was a zen like look on your face.
link |
01:54:10.460
So you don't...
link |
01:54:12.180
All you need is Sam Harris to say
link |
01:54:14.820
that you're brilliant and you're happy.
link |
01:54:16.860
No, no, I love Sam.
link |
01:54:20.340
Yeah.
link |
01:54:21.780
Deeply pleased when he flatters me, but I mean,
link |
01:54:24.060
and he's nice about me, but no, I don't just rely on Sam.
link |
01:54:27.780
No, I mean, why would I mind?
link |
01:54:32.460
I mean, maybe it's self selecting.
link |
01:54:34.180
If I didn't have the view I had about that,
link |
01:54:37.980
or whatever armory it is that I have on that,
link |
01:54:40.780
I wouldn't do what I did, maybe.
link |
01:54:43.420
I mean, have you been to some dark places psychologically
link |
01:54:45.900
because of the challenging ideas you explore?
link |
01:54:48.980
So like significant self doubt, just kind of...
link |
01:54:52.180
I can't say I've been unaffected by everything in my life.
link |
01:54:55.500
By any means, that would make me an automaton of some kind.
link |
01:55:01.100
There's definitely times I've got things wrong
link |
01:55:02.980
and regretted that.
link |
01:55:05.500
There's times I've...
link |
01:55:10.260
There was a period around the time I wrote my book,
link |
01:55:13.700
The Strange Death of Europe,
link |
01:55:15.580
which was a very, very dark time.
link |
01:55:21.220
And it wasn't because I was having a dark time in my life,
link |
01:55:25.180
but because of the book I was writing.
link |
01:55:27.340
Oh, because of the places you had to go
link |
01:55:30.180
in order to write that book.
link |
01:55:32.220
And, well, I was contemplating the end of a civilization.
link |
01:55:35.540
So occasionally now I have maybe slightly too pat
link |
01:55:40.420
at this stage, but sometimes readers come up to me
link |
01:55:43.580
in the street or whatever and say,
link |
01:55:44.820
you know, I love The Strange Death of Europe.
link |
01:55:47.780
And will say, you know, very depressing book to read,
link |
01:55:50.700
however, I would say, well, you should have tried
link |
01:55:53.020
writing it.
link |
01:55:53.860
But it was because, I mean, it has chunks of it,
link |
01:56:01.460
which I'm very proud of in particular
link |
01:56:02.820
about the death of religion, the death of God,
link |
01:56:06.980
the loss of meaning and the void.
link |
01:56:11.740
And that's difficult stuff to write about
link |
01:56:14.940
and to grapple with.
link |
01:56:17.020
And there is a sort of, I haven't reread that book
link |
01:56:20.660
since it came out,
link |
01:56:21.740
but I think there are passages in it
link |
01:56:25.340
which reveal what I was thinking very clearly
link |
01:56:28.260
in the poetry of it, as it were, as well as the detail.
link |
01:56:34.860
But, yeah, I can't say, I'm used to saying
link |
01:56:43.340
what I think and what I see.
link |
01:56:46.180
And if there's any pushback I've got from that,
link |
01:56:49.380
I'm completely consoled that I'm saying what I see
link |
01:56:51.740
with my own eyes.
link |
01:56:54.740
That's your source of strength,
link |
01:56:56.100
is that you're always seeking the truth as best you see it.
link |
01:56:59.540
Well, I can't agree to go along with a lie
link |
01:57:03.180
if I've seen something with my own eyes.
link |
01:57:06.840
Do you ever, so speaking of Sam Harris,
link |
01:57:10.540
and I mentioned to you offline, a lot of people,
link |
01:57:13.340
I talk to a lot of smart people in my private life
link |
01:57:16.100
on this podcast, and a lot of them will reference you
link |
01:57:18.980
as their example of a very smart person.
link |
01:57:23.300
So given that compliment, do you ever worry
link |
01:57:29.260
that your sort of ego grows to a level
link |
01:57:33.700
where what you think is the truth is no longer the truth?
link |
01:57:38.100
Is this kind of, it blinds you?
link |
01:57:44.420
And also, on top of that,
link |
01:57:46.620
the fact that you stand against the crowd often,
link |
01:57:50.620
that there's part of it that appeals to you,
link |
01:57:52.540
that you like to point out the emperor has no clothes.
link |
01:57:56.380
I get a certain thrill from the friction.
link |
01:57:58.540
Yeah, that sometimes both your ego
link |
01:58:02.700
and the thrill of friction will get you
link |
01:58:06.100
to deviate from the truth and instead,
link |
01:58:08.840
just look for the friction.
link |
01:58:10.500
Could do, could do for sure.
link |
01:58:13.940
I try to keep alive to that.
link |
01:58:16.100
I mean, early in my career, I realized that, for instance,
link |
01:58:20.380
I didn't want to make enemies unnecessarily,
link |
01:58:25.060
any more than strictly necessary,
link |
01:58:26.420
because there was a very large number
link |
01:58:27.980
of already necessary enemies.
link |
01:58:30.220
And I remember once, I won't go into the details,
link |
01:58:31.860
but I already had one sort of thing I'd done that week,
link |
01:58:35.500
and then another thing came out,
link |
01:58:36.540
and I just thought, I can't, I can't do that.
link |
01:58:39.380
And I remember thinking, don't be the sort of person
link |
01:58:42.340
who's forever creating storms,
link |
01:58:46.220
and I tried to make sure I wasn't.
link |
01:58:47.980
And I think I've pretty much stuck to that.
link |
01:58:51.100
But to answer your question,
link |
01:58:54.420
well, the first thing is I'm as confident as I can be
link |
01:58:58.660
that I wouldn't fall into the trap you described.
link |
01:59:01.500
Two reasons.
link |
01:59:03.860
I mean, one is that I don't think of myself
link |
01:59:05.500
as a wildly intelligent person,
link |
01:59:09.100
partly because I'm very, very aware
link |
01:59:11.380
of the things I know nothing about.
link |
01:59:13.980
I mean, for instance, I have almost no knowledge
link |
01:59:17.380
of the details of finance or economic theory.
link |
01:59:26.340
I mean, the real details.
link |
01:59:28.140
I don't mean the big picture of the kind
link |
01:59:29.740
that we were just discussing earlier,
link |
01:59:30.860
but I have, if you put the periodic table in front of me,
link |
01:59:35.860
the periodic table in front of me,
link |
01:59:39.420
I would struggle to do more than a handful.
link |
01:59:47.740
I am very conscious of huge gaps in my knowledge.
link |
01:59:53.940
And where I have gaps or chasms,
link |
01:59:57.020
I tend to find that I have a disproportionate admiration
link |
01:59:59.300
for the people who know that stuff.
link |
02:00:01.500
Like I'm wildly impressed by people who understand money,
link |
02:00:04.540
really understand it, because I think,
link |
02:00:06.060
how the hell do you do that?
link |
02:00:09.860
And the same thing with biologists, medics,
link |
02:00:14.780
stuff I just know very little about.
link |
02:00:17.580
And that's a source of humility for you, just knowing that.
link |
02:00:19.580
Yes, I mean, I think, well, I can get on that stuff,
link |
02:00:21.620
but I mean, Jesus, if you got me on the general knowledge.
link |
02:00:25.300
I would say that thing, some years ago,
link |
02:00:26.780
there's a thing in the UK called University Challenge.
link |
02:00:29.580
And I was asked some years ago on to,
link |
02:00:34.660
there's a sort of psych celebrity,
link |
02:00:36.180
one of former students of the universities or colleges
link |
02:00:40.100
asked to go back for the Christmas special.
link |
02:00:42.420
And I was asked to be one of the people from my old college
link |
02:00:45.780
to go back and compete in the sort of celebrity alumni one.
link |
02:00:49.180
And the only thing I actually wanted to do,
link |
02:00:50.500
it was go discover the Louis Theroux
link |
02:00:52.020
had been to my college before my time.
link |
02:00:53.580
And he was on, he'd agreed to be on the team.
link |
02:00:55.780
And I thought, well, I'd love to meet Louis Theroux,
link |
02:00:57.700
that'd be great fun.
link |
02:00:58.980
And anyhow, and I said, well, I really don't want to do it.
link |
02:01:01.900
And they said, come on, you'd be great.
link |
02:01:03.220
I said, I wouldn't, I'd show myself up
link |
02:01:05.020
to be a total asshole and ignoramus.
link |
02:01:07.380
And as it was, I sat down my flat
link |
02:01:10.780
and I watched some past episodes of University Challenge.
link |
02:01:14.940
I realized I'd have just sat mute for the whole half hour.
link |
02:01:20.540
I just couldn't, the first question was about physics.
link |
02:01:23.220
And the second one was about, as it was,
link |
02:01:25.980
I watched the one and I could answer the first two
link |
02:01:29.180
or three questions of the one that actually went out
link |
02:01:32.180
because they made it a bit simpler.
link |
02:01:35.340
But I mean, I'm terribly conscious of the,
link |
02:01:37.820
and I said to the producers, I said, I can't go on
link |
02:01:39.980
because I mean, I just couldn't answer the questions.
link |
02:01:42.060
These unbelievably smart students seem to be able to answer
link |
02:01:44.660
on a whole range of things.
link |
02:01:46.060
So I'm perfectly aware of my limitations and...
link |
02:01:51.340
You contemplate your limitations.
link |
02:01:53.540
Yeah, and they're forever before me, you know.
link |
02:01:56.300
They're not hard to find in every day.
link |
02:01:58.860
And then on top of that, I suppose, it's,
link |
02:02:03.060
in a way, you know that line from Rudyard Kipling's
link |
02:02:08.460
alternately brilliant and slightly nauseating poem, If?
link |
02:02:13.780
There's a line.
link |
02:02:14.980
You just enjoy a good poem, can you?
link |
02:02:16.940
Well, no, it's not, I can enjoy a great poem.
link |
02:02:21.220
But I mean, a good poem.
link |
02:02:23.180
This is, you know, slightly off.
link |
02:02:25.380
But, well, it's up to you.
link |
02:02:26.940
This goes to your criticism of Dostoevsky.
link |
02:02:29.500
Take Douglas's criticism with a grain of salt, so.
link |
02:02:34.700
Maybe I've read it too many memorial services and things.
link |
02:02:37.700
But that line is a good piece of advice.
link |
02:02:41.860
If you can learn to meet triumph and disaster
link |
02:02:44.220
and greet these two imposters just the same.
link |
02:02:48.420
That's a good line.
link |
02:02:49.740
It's a good line.
link |
02:02:50.740
It's skipping off an amazing turn of line.
link |
02:02:53.260
But I do think that it's a very sensible thing
link |
02:02:56.100
to try to greet triumph and disaster
link |
02:03:00.660
and regard them as imposters and greet them just the same.
link |
02:03:03.860
And actually, anyone who knows me knows that I never,
link |
02:03:08.740
partly it's because I have a sort of belief in the old gods
link |
02:03:12.700
and that the moment that I thought
link |
02:03:14.260
that I was at the moment of triumph,
link |
02:03:16.380
the fates would hitch up their skirts
link |
02:03:18.140
and run at me at a million miles an hour.
link |
02:03:20.780
But it's also because, anyone who knows me knows
link |
02:03:26.100
I never have a moment when I say,
link |
02:03:30.820
that's just great.
link |
02:03:32.460
I feel totally fulfilled and victorious.
link |
02:03:37.340
I mean, it happened to me recently
link |
02:03:39.140
when the war in the West went straight to number one
link |
02:03:41.580
in the bestseller list.
link |
02:03:43.340
How long did that last in terms of your self satisfaction?
link |
02:03:46.140
Didn't happen.
link |
02:03:47.820
Not even for a brief moment?
link |
02:03:49.100
No.
link |
02:03:51.540
When I first saw that it was selling,
link |
02:03:54.020
I had that moment of elation.
link |
02:03:55.440
I thought, good, I've done it, it's out.
link |
02:03:59.540
And I did have a moment of elation then, definitely.
link |
02:04:03.180
But it doesn't last, partly because I tell myself
link |
02:04:05.180
it mustn't last.
link |
02:04:07.100
Because as you said, fate hitches up its skirt.
link |
02:04:12.180
Is that skirts?
link |
02:04:14.180
I don't, this, you brits with your poetry,
link |
02:04:17.940
even when it's nauseating.
link |
02:04:20.500
As of 2022, this year, what's your final analysis
link |
02:04:24.540
of the political leadership and the human mind
link |
02:04:27.880
and the human being of Donald Trump?
link |
02:04:32.520
I sort of avoided this for years.
link |
02:04:34.540
Just talking about Trump.
link |
02:04:35.980
Tried to avoid talking about Trump for years.
link |
02:04:37.660
Same reason I tried to avoid writing about Brexit.
link |
02:04:39.700
Do you think that Trump, just sorry on a small tangent,
link |
02:04:41.820
do you think that Trump's story is over
link |
02:04:45.740
or are we just done with volume one?
link |
02:04:47.700
I have no idea.
link |
02:04:48.540
The people I know who know him say that he's running.
link |
02:04:53.020
And I think that in general, Republicans have to,
link |
02:04:59.080
do have a choice in front of them.
link |
02:05:02.740
A one friend put it to me recently, said,
link |
02:05:06.000
you've got to go in with your toughest fighter.
link |
02:05:08.420
And I understand that instinct and I also think
link |
02:05:16.580
it's a very dangerous instinct
link |
02:05:18.580
because what if your toughest fighter
link |
02:05:20.420
is also your biggest liability?
link |
02:05:23.700
What's the best way to get out the Democrat vote
link |
02:05:25.460
in 2024 than to have Donald Trump running?
link |
02:05:28.060
And the people that are doing the war in the West,
link |
02:05:30.220
they're pretty tough fighters.
link |
02:05:32.780
They are.
link |
02:05:33.860
And I'm cautious about this because I know every way
link |
02:05:37.580
I tread it's dangerous, but let me just be frank.
link |
02:05:41.100
Tread gracefully.
link |
02:05:42.500
I'll tread as gracefully as I can.
link |
02:05:44.340
My Wellington boots, my galoshes.
link |
02:05:49.620
Here's the thing, I think everybody knows what Trump is.
link |
02:05:54.640
I think we all knew for years.
link |
02:05:56.900
And I feel sorry for the conservatives who had to pretend
link |
02:05:59.300
that he was something he wasn't.
link |
02:06:02.780
I felt sorry for the ones who had to pretend
link |
02:06:07.540
that for instance he was some devout Christian
link |
02:06:09.820
or a man of faith or a man of great integrity
link |
02:06:13.860
or all of these sorts of things.
link |
02:06:16.420
Because in the public eye for years,
link |
02:06:18.540
it'd be obvious that wasn't the case.
link |
02:06:20.900
But he has something extraordinary.
link |
02:06:26.260
One thing is a method of communication
link |
02:06:28.820
that you've just got to say was unbelievable.
link |
02:06:32.580
In one fundamental way that you can't look away
link |
02:06:35.240
for some reason.
link |
02:06:36.080
Can't look away.
link |
02:06:36.980
I mean, I mean watching him clear everyone out of the way
link |
02:06:42.460
in 2016 was thrilling
link |
02:06:45.100
because those people needed clearing away.
link |
02:06:47.980
You know, I mean, it's just horrifying.
link |
02:06:49.540
What America is going to give us another Bush?
link |
02:06:53.100
What's so great about this family?
link |
02:06:57.060
America is going to give us another Clinton.
link |
02:06:58.460
We're going to get to choose any Clinton on the Bush.
link |
02:07:01.340
Mark Stein said, whatever, we'll just wait for the day
link |
02:07:03.460
the Clintons and the Bushes into marry
link |
02:07:05.060
and then we can really have a monarchy again.
link |
02:07:08.700
So I was very pleased to see him clear them away.
link |
02:07:12.160
I was very pleased to see him sort of raise
link |
02:07:16.980
some of the issues that needed raising.
link |
02:07:18.740
I thought it was a sort of breath of fresh air
link |
02:07:21.100
and I wished it wasn't him doing it.
link |
02:07:24.740
And then there was a question of him governing
link |
02:07:26.640
and it was just perfectly clear
link |
02:07:27.680
he didn't know how to govern.
link |
02:07:30.360
What he did have, however, what he does have
link |
02:07:32.820
is an incredible ability to fight.
link |
02:07:35.140
And some of the forces he was arraigned against
link |
02:07:37.100
were arraigned against him.
link |
02:07:38.280
My gosh, they would have taken down anyone else.
link |
02:07:41.580
I mean, they'd have probably done some similar BS
link |
02:07:46.780
against Ted Cruz if he, you know, or Marco Rubio.
link |
02:07:51.140
You know, they'd have said, some people admitted,
link |
02:07:54.420
they'd have accused all these people of racism
link |
02:07:56.320
and misogyny and everything else as well,
link |
02:07:57.780
just like they did Mitt Romney,
link |
02:07:58.820
just like they did John McCain.
link |
02:08:01.220
But Trump was the one ugly enough
link |
02:08:03.540
and bruisey enough to fight.
link |
02:08:06.540
And also a willingness or a lack of willingness
link |
02:08:12.540
to play sort of the civil game of politics.
link |
02:08:18.020
You know, at a party when politeness gets you in trouble.
link |
02:08:23.780
You show up and everybody's polite
link |
02:08:25.460
and you just out of momentum want to be being polite
link |
02:08:28.220
and all of a sudden you're on an island
link |
02:08:30.060
with Jeffrey Epstein and it gets you
link |
02:08:33.100
into a huge amount of trouble.
link |
02:08:34.460
But so Trump has these sort of extraordinary qualities,
link |
02:08:37.140
but I just, you know, look, he screwed up
link |
02:08:41.060
during his time in office because he didn't achieve
link |
02:08:43.380
as much as he should have done.
link |
02:08:44.940
And you could say that about every president,
link |
02:08:46.300
but I refuse to acknowledge that two years
link |
02:08:47.980
when he had both houses in the beginning,
link |
02:08:50.100
he just didn't know what levers to pull.
link |
02:08:52.300
You know, I mean, he was sitting in the office
link |
02:08:54.500
behind the Oval Office tweeting, watching the news.
link |
02:08:58.180
I'm sorry, that's not a president.
link |
02:09:00.260
And he couldn't fill and didn't fill positions
link |
02:09:03.900
because people knew, I mean,
link |
02:09:05.660
people who were very loyal to him,
link |
02:09:08.020
he would just, you know, he'd get them to do something loyal
link |
02:09:10.780
and then destroy them.
link |
02:09:12.380
And I think, and then we get onto the thing about,
link |
02:09:15.740
and here we get onto the, you know,
link |
02:09:17.380
what of course is very, very fractious terrain,
link |
02:09:19.780
but, you know, I covered the 2020 election
link |
02:09:22.460
and I was traveling all around the states
link |
02:09:24.420
and I went to Trump rally and all sorts of stuff.
link |
02:09:27.940
And I, I mean, I was in DC on election night
link |
02:09:31.700
and it got very ugly at one point
link |
02:09:35.940
in so called Black Lives Matter Plaza.
link |
02:09:38.660
When it looked like Trump might win,
link |
02:09:40.020
when Florida came in and got really,
link |
02:09:41.980
I could feel the air were very, very heated
link |
02:09:44.380
and like some Antifa people started getting into black lock
link |
02:09:48.140
and this sort of stuff.
link |
02:09:48.980
And I thought this town is gonna burn, you know,
link |
02:09:51.540
if Trump wins.
link |
02:09:53.380
And in the aftermath of the vote,
link |
02:09:55.500
I was willing to hang around in Washington for a bit
link |
02:09:57.260
and then I saw what it was gonna drag on.
link |
02:09:59.620
And I saw some of his people and others and people told me
link |
02:10:02.180
they had great evidence of vote rigging
link |
02:10:03.700
and all this sort of thing.
link |
02:10:05.220
And I'm afraid I'm one of those people
link |
02:10:07.380
who doesn't believe that the evidence that they presented
link |
02:10:11.060
is good enough to justify the claim
link |
02:10:12.580
that he won the election.
link |
02:10:14.740
And I, and people say, have you seen 2000 mules
link |
02:10:18.540
and have you seen, look, the evidence isn't there,
link |
02:10:22.220
that the election was won by Donald Trump.
link |
02:10:24.820
And I think that what he did on January the 6th
link |
02:10:28.860
was unbelievably dangerous.
link |
02:10:32.300
And, you know, here it is possible for us to hold two ideas
link |
02:10:35.900
in our head at the same time.
link |
02:10:37.340
January the 6th was not nothing,
link |
02:10:40.340
nor was it an insurrection and attempt to stage a coup.
link |
02:10:44.380
And there's a vanishing number of people in the US.
link |
02:10:49.380
It was Eric Weinstein who said that the,
link |
02:10:51.820
it's like, this is the roof that you have to walk along.
link |
02:10:56.820
And like the sides are very steep
link |
02:11:00.580
if you fall off either side.
link |
02:11:02.900
Is there some sense, given the forces
link |
02:11:06.740
that are waging war in the West,
link |
02:11:08.980
you said this feeling, perhaps because of Antifa
link |
02:11:13.300
or something else, that this town is gonna burn
link |
02:11:16.220
and maybe a continued feeling that this town
link |
02:11:18.340
is going to burn with the January 6th events.
link |
02:11:22.420
Are you worried about the future of the United States
link |
02:11:27.540
in the coming years because of the feeling of escalation?
link |
02:11:33.220
Is that just a war of Twitter?
link |
02:11:36.460
Or is there a real brewing of something?
link |
02:11:40.740
Oh, it's real.
link |
02:11:41.980
And how, well, let me then respond to that.
link |
02:11:45.060
How, what is the hopeful?
link |
02:11:47.060
If you 10 years from now look back at the United States
link |
02:11:54.540
and say we turned it around, what would be the reason?
link |
02:11:58.780
What would be the ways, the mechanisms that we do so?
link |
02:12:01.100
Tell you, since I wrote this book,
link |
02:12:04.380
there are two things in particular
link |
02:12:05.980
that I've been really pleased that a specific type
link |
02:12:10.180
of specialist has approached me on
link |
02:12:12.280
to say that things I've written about
link |
02:12:14.420
actually have more application than I realized.
link |
02:12:17.220
One is the gratitude issue.
link |
02:12:19.820
A number of people have approached me
link |
02:12:21.220
who have gone through AA, Alcoholics Anonymous.
link |
02:12:25.980
They sometimes say, have you ever been to AA?
link |
02:12:27.740
And that's a bit of a personal question.
link |
02:12:34.100
But they say, but the reason they ask it is because they say,
link |
02:12:36.580
well, because if you go to drug rehabilitation
link |
02:12:38.620
or Alcoholics Anonymous, Norm Macdonald said,
link |
02:12:43.620
it doesn't sound very anonymous.
link |
02:12:45.020
You stand up in a room, you say your name
link |
02:12:46.380
and you tell everyone the worst things you've ever done.
link |
02:12:48.820
Sounds the opposite of anonymous.
link |
02:12:50.260
Anyhow, but they say, look,
link |
02:12:52.700
because if you go to these things,
link |
02:12:54.500
apparently you're asked to, as part of your recovery,
link |
02:12:58.580
say what you're grateful for,
link |
02:13:00.420
like list what you're grateful for.
link |
02:13:02.020
I didn't know that by the way, until the book was out.
link |
02:13:05.140
And so that turned out to have more application
link |
02:13:07.180
than I knew.
link |
02:13:08.180
The other thing though, is that I say
link |
02:13:09.620
that it's absolutely crucial in America
link |
02:13:11.980
that we try to find things that we agree on.
link |
02:13:14.260
And a couple of times since the book came out,
link |
02:13:16.420
I've been approached by people who are marriage counselors.
link |
02:13:20.220
But we've also said, have you ever been
link |
02:13:21.740
through marriage counseling?
link |
02:13:22.580
And again, that's a very personal question.
link |
02:13:25.020
Stop asking me personal questions.
link |
02:13:27.660
No, but they said, and I said, well, why?
link |
02:13:30.660
Because this is one of the things that we do
link |
02:13:35.220
in couples therapy, is try to find things you agree on.
link |
02:13:39.860
And I think this is very important in America.
link |
02:13:45.460
And it's made much harder by the fact,
link |
02:13:47.860
and I've said this many times,
link |
02:13:48.700
but forgive me if I'm repeating myself,
link |
02:13:50.500
but it's made much harder by the fact
link |
02:13:53.340
that having different opinions is very last century.
link |
02:13:57.460
Now we all have different facts,
link |
02:13:59.100
or at least the two sides have different facts.
link |
02:14:02.220
One half of the country roughly,
link |
02:14:05.140
or let's say 40%, 30%, whatever you want to put it,
link |
02:14:07.940
with a tired minority in the middle.
link |
02:14:11.300
One segment of the country believes
link |
02:14:13.420
that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election
link |
02:14:15.980
and that the Russians interfered
link |
02:14:17.100
and got Donald Trump into power.
link |
02:14:19.500
Another half of the country believes
link |
02:14:20.940
that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
link |
02:14:23.060
If you can't agree on who wins elections,
link |
02:14:24.620
it's very hard to see what you agree on as a country.
link |
02:14:27.620
That's one of the reasons I mind the war
link |
02:14:29.380
on American history and Western history,
link |
02:14:31.380
is one of the things you have to agree on
link |
02:14:33.620
is at least some attitude towards your past.
link |
02:14:36.060
You don't have to agree on everything.
link |
02:14:37.740
But the public square has to have public heroes
link |
02:14:40.460
who are agreed to be heroes to some extent,
link |
02:14:43.260
warts and all.
link |
02:14:45.380
If you don't have that,
link |
02:14:47.100
if actually you think for instance,
link |
02:14:48.780
half the country thinks the founding fathers
link |
02:14:50.580
were pretty good,
link |
02:14:52.060
the other half thinks they were absolutely rotten,
link |
02:14:54.500
racist and so on.
link |
02:14:55.780
If half the country basically thinks
link |
02:14:57.500
it would have been better if Columbus
link |
02:14:58.900
had taken a different turn, never found America,
link |
02:15:01.700
gone back home and said, I don't know, nothing out there,
link |
02:15:05.220
that would have been better.
link |
02:15:06.380
And the other half's pretty glad in the end
link |
02:15:08.660
that we've got America.
link |
02:15:13.900
You've got to agree on something.
link |
02:15:16.540
And I just see in America,
link |
02:15:18.500
I do think we've got to try to find things to agree on,
link |
02:15:20.500
like a reasonable attitude towards the past.
link |
02:15:23.060
That's why that matters.
link |
02:15:24.700
And again, I stress, I'm not trying to say
link |
02:15:27.460
that everything in the American past was good.
link |
02:15:29.420
God knows that wouldn't stand up to a second of scrutiny
link |
02:15:31.980
or self scrutiny.
link |
02:15:33.260
But nor was it all bad.
link |
02:15:35.100
This wasn't a country formed in sin
link |
02:15:38.740
and in an eradicable sin.
link |
02:15:40.700
It wasn't founded in 1619
link |
02:15:42.900
in order to make the country wicked
link |
02:15:45.820
and incapable of escaping that wickedness.
link |
02:15:49.100
These are things that will matter enormously
link |
02:15:51.460
in the years ahead,
link |
02:15:52.740
because if you can't agree on anything,
link |
02:15:55.780
including who your heroes are,
link |
02:15:59.580
the whole thing is just one massive division
link |
02:16:02.020
and we'll see what I think we're already seeing,
link |
02:16:04.100
which is people basically going to states
link |
02:16:06.300
where it's more like the life they want to live.
link |
02:16:09.020
And some people say to me, well, that's okay.
link |
02:16:11.460
And the genius of the founding is that it allows for that.
link |
02:16:16.340
That's possible, but it's also,
link |
02:16:18.620
it eradicates part of what has been American public life,
link |
02:16:22.700
which is the ability to look at each other
link |
02:16:24.460
and discuss face to face.
link |
02:16:26.860
And I see things like this bomb placed under America
link |
02:16:30.060
the other week with the Supreme Court League,
link |
02:16:31.980
the draft league as being just a further example of that.
link |
02:16:37.220
I'm very, very worried about it in America.
link |
02:16:39.220
And because if America screws up everything,
link |
02:16:43.220
everything else in the world goes.
link |
02:16:45.700
Yeah, there's the degree to which America is still
link |
02:16:48.020
the beacon of these ideas on which the country was founded
link |
02:16:53.860
and has been able to live out in better and better forms,
link |
02:16:58.860
sort of live out the actual ideals of the founding principles
link |
02:17:02.580
versus like.
link |
02:17:03.420
And with the desire to improve.
link |
02:17:05.380
Yeah, constantly.
link |
02:17:06.220
An imperfect union.
link |
02:17:08.300
Yeah, well, as I generally have hope that people want
link |
02:17:12.180
to sort of, in terms of gratitude,
link |
02:17:14.780
people are aware of how good it feels to be grateful.
link |
02:17:20.780
It's a better life psychologically.
link |
02:17:22.460
The resentment is a thing that destroys you from within.
link |
02:17:25.860
So I just feel that people will long for that
link |
02:17:30.540
and will find that.
link |
02:17:31.380
And that's the American way.
link |
02:17:33.580
Some of the division that we reveal now has to do
link |
02:17:36.660
with new technologies like social media.
link |
02:17:38.860
That kind of is a small kind of deviation
link |
02:17:43.220
from the path we're on because it's a new,
link |
02:17:45.340
we've got a new toy, just like nuclear weapons.
link |
02:17:47.860
Yeah, which are relatively new.
link |
02:17:50.900
But we need to find reasonable attitudes
link |
02:17:53.700
towards these things.
link |
02:17:54.540
And that's why I say it matters how you and my feedback
link |
02:17:58.180
on social media, because we're all going through it
link |
02:18:01.340
to some extent.
link |
02:18:02.180
Yeah, we're learning.
link |
02:18:03.020
And we're learning.
link |
02:18:03.860
And we've got to learn how to do this without going mad.
link |
02:18:08.500
I say this, it was my minimalist call to friends
link |
02:18:12.380
in this era was the main job is not to go insane.
link |
02:18:16.820
Yeah.
link |
02:18:17.660
Yeah.
link |
02:18:20.500
And yeah, like walk towards sanity.
link |
02:18:22.780
Because I'm sure there's a Hunter S. Thompson quote
link |
02:18:26.900
in there, like insanity on the weekends
link |
02:18:29.140
can be at least fun.
link |
02:18:30.460
Okay, do you have advice for young people
link |
02:18:35.580
that just put down their TikTok and are listening
link |
02:18:38.700
to this podcast in high school and college
link |
02:18:41.540
about how to have a career, how to have a life
link |
02:18:43.940
they can be proud of?
link |
02:18:47.220
It's a very broad question.
link |
02:18:48.180
But of course, I mean, I can give specific advice
link |
02:18:52.100
to people who want to be writers and so on,
link |
02:18:53.380
but that's a bit niche, maybe.
link |
02:18:56.060
Well, writers will be very interesting,
link |
02:18:57.740
sorry to interrupt.
link |
02:18:58.740
Also how to put your ideas down on paper
link |
02:19:00.820
and think through the ideas, develop them
link |
02:19:03.100
and have the guts to go to a large audience,
link |
02:19:07.100
especially when the ideas are sort of controversial
link |
02:19:09.620
or dangerous or difficult.
link |
02:19:10.940
Well, the main thing to do is to read.
link |
02:19:13.340
When I was a schoolboy, I'd ever have a book in my pocket,
link |
02:19:17.820
the side pocket of my jacket, only side pocket,
link |
02:19:20.380
and would read.
link |
02:19:21.540
And that wasn't just because I was swatish in some way,
link |
02:19:26.900
but because I discovered probably at some point
link |
02:19:30.740
in my early teens, I discovered something.
link |
02:19:32.740
I wrote about this once.
link |
02:19:34.660
I discovered that books were dangerous,
link |
02:19:39.580
which was a thrilling discovery.
link |
02:19:44.500
I discovered that they could contain anything.
link |
02:19:47.860
And also people didn't know what you were reading.
link |
02:19:50.380
I remember I get far too young an age,
link |
02:19:52.660
I read The Doors of Perception of Aldous Huxley,
link |
02:19:56.820
and I didn't make head or tail of it probably,
link |
02:20:01.900
but I knew that it was about something really interesting
link |
02:20:04.380
and dangerous.
link |
02:20:06.660
And I thought constantly when I read poetry
link |
02:20:10.660
or read history, I think I was just constantly thrilled
link |
02:20:16.300
and wanted to know more.
link |
02:20:18.820
And if you wanna become a writer, you have to be a reader.
link |
02:20:26.340
You have to read the best stuff.
link |
02:20:29.660
And obviously people disagree or agree on what that is,
link |
02:20:33.540
and you'll find the people that really impress you.
link |
02:20:37.460
But I know that I just came across certain writers
link |
02:20:39.620
who just knocked me off my feet.
link |
02:20:42.220
And when you find those people, read everything
link |
02:20:50.380
and cling on to them and find other people like that,
link |
02:20:53.580
find other writers like that, people that are connected
link |
02:20:56.980
by history or scholarship or circles or whatever.
link |
02:21:01.620
For you, was it fiction or nonfiction?
link |
02:21:03.940
Is there a particular books that you just remember
link |
02:21:06.380
or just give you pause?
link |
02:21:07.940
Well, I remember that the first book
link |
02:21:09.340
that absolutely threw me was the Lord of the Flies
link |
02:21:13.180
of William Golding, which used to be a signed text
link |
02:21:15.380
and everyone's a bit snotty about because it's so popular.
link |
02:21:19.820
But I was thrown because I think it was the first adult book
link |
02:21:22.780
I read in that I had been used to the world
link |
02:21:26.380
of children's literature of everything ends up fine
link |
02:21:29.780
in the end, the lost all get found.
link |
02:21:34.180
And this was the first book I read where that's not the case
link |
02:21:37.780
the world turns out differently.
link |
02:21:39.580
And I remember for days afterwards,
link |
02:21:42.500
I was just in a state of shock.
link |
02:21:46.020
I couldn't believe what I'd just discovered
link |
02:21:51.380
and partly because I sort of intuited it must be true.
link |
02:21:55.380
And of course, that is not to say that the Lord of the Flies
link |
02:21:57.340
lots of scholarship on what children do in this situation
link |
02:22:01.020
of being on the island when they do congregate and anyhow.
link |
02:22:04.540
But yes, that was a sort of introduction to the adult world
link |
02:22:07.020
and it was shocking and thrilling and I wanted more of it.
link |
02:22:14.540
It was dangerous.
link |
02:22:15.580
And it was dangerous.
link |
02:22:16.420
And then of course, when I became interested in sex,
link |
02:22:19.540
let alone when I realized I was gay,
link |
02:22:21.340
I realized books were a very, very good way to learn
link |
02:22:23.700
about what I was.
link |
02:22:25.660
And that was even more dangerous in a way.
link |
02:22:28.540
And I thought, I mean, nobody knows what I know.
link |
02:22:33.340
You discovered sex, that was an invention in books?
link |
02:22:36.420
What do you mean?
link |
02:22:37.260
No, what I mean is, nobody, no, no, no, no.
link |
02:22:39.420
What I mean is that one of the things that gay people have
link |
02:22:41.660
when they're growing up is that
link |
02:22:43.540
you have this terribly big secret
link |
02:22:45.380
and you don't think the world will ever know,
link |
02:22:47.100
you hope the world will never know.
link |
02:22:49.460
And it's been called by one psychologist,
link |
02:22:54.020
the little boy with a big secret.
link |
02:22:56.180
And so if you discover that other people
link |
02:22:59.900
have the same secret, there's a sort of,
link |
02:23:03.220
thank God for that.
link |
02:23:04.460
But I mean, that's just a version
link |
02:23:07.420
of what everybody gets in reading in a way,
link |
02:23:09.380
which is the thrill of discovery
link |
02:23:11.020
that somebody else thought something you thought
link |
02:23:14.180
only you'd thought.
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02:23:15.340
I mean, one of the greatest thrills in all of literature
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02:23:18.820
is when a voice comes from across the centuries
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02:23:21.420
and seems to leave a handprint, you know.
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02:23:24.700
And makes you feel a little bit less alone
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02:23:26.740
because somebody else feels,
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02:23:28.500
sees the world the same way, is the same way.
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02:23:31.020
That's what C.S. Lewis is said to have said,
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02:23:34.380
we read to know we're not alone.
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02:23:37.740
But we don't only read to know we're not alone,
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02:23:39.300
we read to become other people.
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02:23:42.740
I mean, I think I saw in books
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02:23:44.300
a version of the life I wanted to live
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02:23:45.980
and then I decided to live it.
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02:23:48.180
And I'm fortunate enough to have done so.
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02:23:52.780
I wanted to live in the world of ideas
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02:23:54.580
and books and debate.
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02:23:58.340
I wanted to live in the debates of my time, you know.
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02:24:01.620
And I remember when, like a lot of people,
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02:24:04.460
I read Auden when I was young.
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02:24:06.420
And, you know, certain lines obviously stuck with me.
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02:24:09.740
But that poem of his which everybody, you know,
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02:24:12.980
knows and which he hated, September the 1st, 1939,
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02:24:17.780
I remember certain lines in that just like whacked me.
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02:24:22.340
What's that one, you know, sitting on a dive
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02:24:24.060
and for a second or three, degraded and alone,
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02:24:28.660
at the end of a low, dishonest decade.
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02:24:31.340
Of course, there's a problem with that line,
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02:24:32.700
which is you kind of want to be living
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02:24:34.220
at the end of a low, dishonest decade as well.
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02:24:36.540
It sounds sort of cool in a way.
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02:24:38.620
You know, you're the only person who sees it.
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02:24:41.260
But, so yeah, anyhow, that's the diversion.
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02:24:43.500
But the point is, if you want to be a writer,
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02:24:45.340
you've got to be a reader.
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02:24:47.540
And apart from anything else,
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02:24:48.460
you discover the lilt of language
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02:24:50.900
and the things you can do.
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02:24:53.380
And I've read people who, and I still do,
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02:24:56.220
I think, my God, I didn't know, how did you do that?
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02:25:00.100
In fact, books for me now, and articles and other things,
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02:25:03.060
fall into two categories.
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02:25:04.180
One is, I know how you did that.
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02:25:07.060
And the other is, I don't know how you did that.
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02:25:10.260
And the best feeling as a writer
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02:25:13.260
is when you do the second one.
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02:25:16.700
And it happens occasionally in my writing life.
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02:25:19.460
Will you almost like return to something you've written
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02:25:21.540
or like right after you write it?
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02:25:22.540
No, the moment you write it.
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02:25:23.940
You wonder, how did I do that?
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02:25:25.580
Yes.
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02:25:26.660
That's the most, I've never said that before.
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02:25:29.380
That's the happiest thing in writing.
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02:25:32.500
Very occasionally, it sounds,
link |
02:25:33.860
but I've occasionally finished something.
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02:25:37.540
Funny enough, it happened some years ago
link |
02:25:38.900
in a long piece I wrote about the artist, Basquiat.
link |
02:25:44.540
I finished the piece and I gasped.
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02:25:47.940
I didn't know, because that's also a thing with writing,
link |
02:25:50.940
is you, it's not, sometimes people say you need to write
link |
02:25:55.380
in order to know what you think.
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02:25:56.300
That's not quite true.
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02:25:58.180
Sometimes that's a very bad piece of advice
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02:26:00.500
for some writers who don't know what they think
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02:26:03.420
and it's not gonna become clearer
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02:26:04.740
if they just start typing.
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02:26:09.000
But sometimes it is true that you,
link |
02:26:12.780
there's a thought that's just waiting there
link |
02:26:15.660
and a clarity that comes across
link |
02:26:17.660
and suddenly the sentence emerges in your brain.
link |
02:26:20.660
And by the time you typed it, you just go, yes.
link |
02:26:25.540
That's the greatest feeling as a writer.
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02:26:27.220
Almost like it came from somewhere else.
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02:26:29.780
That's what Bakunin says about what's the moment.
link |
02:26:34.900
It's Tom Stoppard's favorite quote
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02:26:36.540
about Bakunin saying what happens in the moment
link |
02:26:38.780
where the writer's pen, when he pauses,
link |
02:26:42.100
where does he go in that moment?
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02:26:45.220
Yeah.
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02:26:46.620
That's so interesting.
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02:26:49.860
Because I think the answer to that question
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02:26:52.400
will help us explain consciousness
link |
02:26:54.460
and all those other weird things about the human mind.
link |
02:26:58.180
So that was advice for writers.
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02:26:59.660
I didn't really give any advice for people in general.
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02:27:02.880
Is that, oh, you wanna give health advice?
link |
02:27:05.240
No.
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02:27:06.080
To your channel, Churchill?
link |
02:27:07.540
No, I don't wanna give health advice.
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02:27:09.140
Clearly.
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02:27:10.260
Because you implied that Churchill
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02:27:12.100
was one of your early guides in that aspect.
link |
02:27:15.240
So when you discovered your sexuality,
link |
02:27:17.780
let me ask about love.
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02:27:19.280
Far too personal of a question to ask a Brit.
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02:27:25.320
But what was that like?
link |
02:27:28.160
And broadly speaking, what's the role of love
link |
02:27:31.720
in the human condition?
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02:27:35.100
Sex and love.
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02:27:37.040
And for you personally, discovering that you were
link |
02:27:40.880
and maybe telling the world that you were gay.
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02:27:44.960
I'm very perilously personal.
link |
02:27:48.040
I do actually have a sort of rule
link |
02:27:49.400
that I don't talk about in my personal life.
link |
02:27:51.400
Rules are meant to be broken.
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02:27:52.720
Okay, well I'll break it a little bit.
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02:27:57.200
One of the ways in which growing up
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02:27:58.800
and realizing you're gay differs from growing up
link |
02:28:00.400
and being straight is that it's almost inevitable
link |
02:28:05.240
that your first passions will be unrequited.
link |
02:28:10.560
Oh wow, I never thought about that, yeah.
link |
02:28:13.520
Now that's not to say, there's plenty of unrequited love
</