Douglas Murray: Racism, Marxism, and the War on the West

00:00:00.000 | I think that some people are deliberately trying to completely clear the cultural landscape

00:00:04.440 | of our past in order to say there's nothing good, nothing you can hold on to, no one you

00:00:10.200 | should revere, you've got no heroes, the whole thing comes down, who's left standing?

00:00:14.600 | Oh, we've also got this idea from the 20th century still about Marxism.

00:00:19.000 | And no, no, you will not have the entire landscape deracinated and then the worst ideas tried

00:00:28.160 | again.

00:00:31.320 | The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds, Gender,

00:00:36.680 | Race and Identity, and his most recent book, The War in the West, How to Prevail in the

00:00:42.440 | Age of Unreason.

00:00:44.840 | He's a brilliant, fearless, and often controversial thinker who points out and pushes back against

00:00:51.200 | what he sees as the madness of our modern world.

00:00:54.840 | I should note that the use of the word Marxism and the West in this conversation refers primarily

00:01:01.400 | to cultural Marxism and the cultural values of Western civilization, respectively.

00:01:07.600 | This is in contrast to my previous conversation with Richard Wolff, where we focused on Marxism

00:01:14.040 | as primarily a critique of capitalism and thus looking at it through the lens of economics

00:01:19.960 | and not culture.

00:01:21.720 | Nevertheless, these two episodes stand opposite of each other with very different perspectives

00:01:26.840 | on how we build a flourishing civilization together.

00:01:30.560 | I leave it to you, the listener, to think and to decide which is the better way.

00:01:38.160 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:40.080 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:43.560 | And now, dear friends, here's Douglas Murray.

00:01:48.040 | You recently wrote the book titled The War on the West, which in part says that the values,

00:01:54.360 | ideas, and history of Western civilization are under attack.

00:01:57.480 | So let's start with the basics.

00:02:00.240 | Historically and today, what are the ideas that represent Western civilization?

00:02:05.160 | The good, the bad, the ugly.

00:02:06.920 | - I actually don't get stuck on definitions precisely because, as you know, once you get

00:02:11.520 | stuck on definitions, there's a possibility you'll never get off them.

00:02:14.400 | - Yes.

00:02:15.400 | - I'd say a few things.

00:02:17.800 | Firstly, obviously, the Western tradition is a specific tradition, a specific tradition

00:02:22.800 | of ideas, culture, well-known to be perhaps easily defined by the combination of Athens

00:02:29.520 | and Jerusalem, the world of the Bible, and the world of ancient Greece and indeed Rome.

00:02:37.200 | It effectively creates European civilization, which itself spawns the rest of the Western

00:02:43.000 | civilizations, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and others.

00:02:48.200 | But these are the main countries that we still refer to as the West.

00:02:53.000 | So there's a specific tradition and all the things that come from it.

00:02:58.480 | My shorthand cheat on this answer is to say, you know when you're not in it.

00:03:05.320 | So if you've ever been to Beijing, Shanghai, you know you're not in the West, somewhere

00:03:10.880 | else, you know you're not in the West.

00:03:12.940 | When you're in Tokyo, somewhere extraordinary, but you know you're not in the West.

00:03:18.760 | Obviously there are, let's say, borderline questions like, is Russia in the West?

00:03:26.000 | Which I sort of leave open as a question.

00:03:31.840 | Possibly.

00:03:32.840 | - If you were placed into Moscow blindfolded and you woke up and you couldn't hear the

00:03:37.520 | language or maybe you didn't know what the language sounded like, would you guess you

00:03:41.200 | were in the West or not?

00:03:42.920 | - I think I was somewhere near it.

00:03:44.560 | - Getting closer.

00:03:45.560 | - I mean, you know, it's what Tolstoy asks the question, doesn't he, whether it's European.

00:03:51.280 | And I think the answer to that is not really, although massively influenced by Europe, but

00:03:57.520 | and times wanting to reach towards it at times wanting to stay away.

00:04:02.520 | But a part of the West, possibly, yes.

00:04:07.520 | But anyway, it's a very specific tradition.

00:04:10.680 | It's one of a number of major traditions in the world.

00:04:14.280 | And because it's hard to define doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

00:04:19.440 | - Are there certain characteristics and qualities about the values and the ideas that define

00:04:23.480 | it?

00:04:24.480 | Is the type of rule, the type of governmental structure?

00:04:28.040 | - Yes.

00:04:29.040 | I mean, the rule of law, property-owning democracies and much more.

00:04:34.080 | I mean, these are, of course, things that ended up being developed in America and then

00:04:38.880 | given back to much of the rest of the West.

00:04:42.960 | I say there are other perhaps more controversial attributes I would give to the West.

00:04:49.480 | One is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world, which is not shared, of course,

00:04:54.400 | by every other culture.

00:04:57.160 | The late philosopher George Steiner said he could never get out of his head the haunting

00:05:01.940 | fact that the boats only seemed to go out from Europe.

00:05:04.880 | You know, they didn't, the explorers, the scholars, the linguists, the people who wanted

00:05:12.120 | to discover other civilizations and indeed even resurrect ancient civilizations and lost

00:05:17.760 | civilizations.

00:05:18.760 | These were scholars that were always coming from the West to discover this elsewhere.

00:05:22.080 | By contrast, there were never boats coming from Egypt to help the Anglo-Saxons discover

00:05:28.200 | the origins of their language and so on.

00:05:30.560 | So I think there is a sort of ravenous interest in the rest of the world, which can be said

00:05:34.400 | to be a Western attribute, although it of course also has, one should immediately preface

00:05:39.320 | it, some downsides and many criticisms that can be made of some of the consequences of

00:05:43.360 | that interest.

00:05:44.360 | Because, of course, it's not entirely lacking in self-interest.

00:05:49.160 | - So it's not just the scholars, it's also-- - The armies.

00:05:54.160 | - The armies.

00:05:55.240 | And they're looking to gain access and control over resources elsewhere.

00:05:59.760 | - Markets.

00:06:00.760 | - And hence the imperial imperative.

00:06:03.200 | - Exactly.

00:06:04.200 | - To conquer, to expand.

00:06:06.440 | - Although that itself, of course, is a universal thing.

00:06:08.800 | I mean, no civilization I think that we know of doesn't try to gain ground from its neighbors

00:06:15.760 | where it can.

00:06:17.320 | The Western ability to go further, faster, certainly gave an advantage in that regard.

00:06:23.720 | - Do some civilizations get a bit more excited by that kind of idea than others?

00:06:28.600 | - Possible.

00:06:29.600 | It's possible.

00:06:30.600 | I mean, you could say it's the Western civilization because the technological innovation was more

00:06:37.600 | efficient at doing that kind of thing.

00:06:39.600 | - Yes, absolutely.

00:06:40.600 | - But maybe it wanted it more, too.

00:06:42.400 | - Well, the Ottomans wanted it an awful lot and did terribly well for many centuries.

00:06:47.840 | One shouldn't forget that.

00:06:51.360 | As did others.

00:06:52.360 | I'd also say, by the way, and again, it's a very broad one, but it's worth throwing

00:06:56.960 | out that I think self-criticism is an important attribute of the Western mind, one that, as

00:07:05.200 | you know, is not common everywhere.

00:07:08.040 | Not all societies allow even their most vociferous critics to become rich.

00:07:14.400 | - Criticism is a negative-sounding word.

00:07:16.000 | It could be self-introspection, self-analysis, self-reflection.

00:07:20.800 | - And it can be what you need.

00:07:24.640 | In the Western system, I'd argue that one of the advantages of the system of representative

00:07:29.320 | governance is that where there are problems in the system, you can attempt to sort them

00:07:35.200 | out by peaceable means.

00:07:38.680 | We listen to arguments, most famously in America in the late 20th century.

00:07:43.160 | The Civil Rights Movement achieved its aims by force of moral argument and persuaded the

00:07:48.680 | rest of the country that it had been wrong.

00:07:52.120 | It's not common in every society, by any means.

00:07:56.040 | So I think there are certain attributes of the Western mind that you could say are not

00:08:02.440 | entirely unique, but they are not as commonplace as well.

00:08:06.680 | - What about the emergence in hierarchies of asymmetry of power, most visible, most

00:08:14.720 | drastic in the form of slavery, for example?

00:08:17.280 | - Well, I mean, everyone in the world is slavery, so I don't regard it as being a Western...

00:08:21.840 | a unique Western sin.

00:08:25.280 | It's rather hard to think of a civilization in history that didn't have slavery of some

00:08:28.920 | kind.

00:08:29.920 | One of the oddities of the Western ignorance of our day is that people seem to imagine

00:08:33.840 | that our societies in the West were the only ones who ever engaged in any vices.

00:08:38.040 | Alas, this isn't true.

00:08:40.560 | It's a sort of Rousseauian mistake, or at least one that's blossomed since Rousseau,

00:08:45.680 | that everybody else in the world was born into sort of Edenic innocence, and only we

00:08:49.980 | in the West had this sort of evil in us that caused us to do bad things to other people.

00:08:56.280 | Slavery was engaged in by everyone in the ancient world, of course, and through most

00:09:00.400 | of the modern world as well.

00:09:01.720 | Of course, there are 40 million slaves in the world today, so it's clearly not something

00:09:05.960 | that the species as a whole has a problem with.

00:09:10.040 | That's more slaves, of course, than there were in the 19th century.

00:09:14.200 | And I'd say on top of that that the interesting thing about the Western mind as regards to

00:09:19.440 | slavery is that we were the civilization that did away with it.

00:09:23.960 | And by the way, the founding fathers of America who today are lambasted routinely for being

00:09:32.520 | acquiescent in the slave trade, engaging in it, owning slaves, people almost don't even

00:09:41.120 | bother now to recognize the facts that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington all wanted to

00:09:47.240 | see this trade done away with, couldn't hold the country together at the origins if they'd

00:09:51.520 | have made such an effort, and believed and hoped that it would be something that would

00:09:55.760 | be dealt with after their time.

00:09:58.860 | So the founding ideas had within them the notion that we should as a people get rid

00:10:05.160 | of this.

00:10:06.160 | The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence set up the conditions under which slavery

00:10:12.480 | will be impossible.

00:10:14.680 | All men are created equal.

00:10:16.840 | Once you've put that, that's a time bomb under the whole concept of slavery.

00:10:22.800 | - That's ticking away.

00:10:23.800 | Okay.

00:10:24.800 | - And sure enough, it detonated in the next century.

00:10:28.460 | - If we just step back and look at the human species, what does slavery teach you about

00:10:34.720 | human nature?

00:10:36.440 | The fact that slavery has appeared as a function of society throughout human history?

00:10:44.520 | - There are two possibilities.

00:10:48.140 | One is it's what people think they can do when God's not watching.

00:10:55.060 | Another is it's what they can do if they think that God allows it.

00:11:00.480 | - Really, really well put.

00:11:02.440 | And the fact that they want to do this kind of subjugation, what does that mean?

00:11:10.320 | - Well, I mean, it's pretty straightforward in a way.

00:11:14.840 | There are people who get to work for free.

00:11:17.120 | - It's economic in nature in some sense.

00:11:19.360 | - Yes.

00:11:20.360 | But in order to do it, I mean, almost always there are some examples in the ancient world

00:11:24.880 | where this wasn't the case, but almost always it had to be a subjugated people or people

00:11:28.480 | regarded as different.

00:11:30.680 | One of the things actually I've tried to sort of inject into the discussion through this

00:11:35.000 | book among other things is a recognition that there were very major questions still going

00:11:41.200 | on in the 18th and early 19th century that were unresolved, which were one of the reasons

00:11:46.800 | why slavery was not as morally repugnant to people then as it is to us now.

00:11:53.720 | And that's the question of polygenesis and monogenesis.

00:11:58.160 | At the time of Thomas Jefferson, the founding fathers were thinking and working.

00:12:03.160 | They didn't know because nobody knew whether the human races were related or not.

00:12:12.960 | There were arguments, the monogenesis argument that we were all indeed from the same racial

00:12:18.840 | stock.

00:12:19.840 | Polygenesis argument was that we weren't.

00:12:23.800 | Black Africans, Ethiopians, they're often referred to at the time because they provided

00:12:29.480 | some of the first slaves, were different from white Europeans, simply not related in any

00:12:34.400 | way.

00:12:35.720 | And that makes it easier, of course.

00:12:37.400 | That makes it easier to enslave people if you think they're not your brother.

00:12:41.280 | Am I my brother's keeper?

00:12:42.280 | No, he's not your brother.

00:12:46.600 | And it was a very troubling argument in the 18th and 19th century also because there was

00:12:55.160 | a biblical question.

00:12:56.160 | It threw up a theological question, which was, I mean, people were literally debating

00:13:02.640 | this at the time.

00:13:05.220 | Was there also a black Adam and Eve?

00:13:09.060 | Was there an Indian Adam and Eve, a Native American Adam and Eve?

00:13:14.320 | This was a serious theological debate because they didn't know the answer.

00:13:19.520 | People say that Darwin solved this.

00:13:23.000 | It wasn't just Darwin, of course, but by the late 19th century, the argument that we

00:13:29.400 | were not all related as human beings had suffered so many blows that you had to really be very,

00:13:38.120 | very ignorant, deliberately, willfully ignorant to ignore it by then.

00:13:41.500 | So it no longer was, after Darwin, a theological question.

00:13:45.260 | It became a moral question.

00:13:46.880 | It was already a moral question, but it clarified.

00:13:49.480 | Darwin clarifies it definitely.

00:13:51.480 | And then you're in this, as I say, you're in this situation of you're not subjugating

00:13:55.040 | some other people, you're subjugating your own kin.

00:13:58.920 | And that becomes morally unsustainable.

00:14:03.560 | - So given that slavery in America is part of its history, how do we incorporate into

00:14:15.920 | the calculus of policy today, social discourse, what we learn in school?

00:14:26.200 | We can look at slavery in America.

00:14:27.560 | We can look at maybe more recent things like in Europe, the other atrocities, the Holocaust.

00:14:36.240 | How do we incorporate that in terms of how we create policy, how we treat each other,

00:14:41.240 | all those kinds of things?

00:14:43.280 | What is the calculus of integrating the atrocities, the injustices of the past into the way we

00:14:49.940 | are today?

00:14:50.940 | - That's a very complex question because it's a moral question at this point, and a moral

00:14:56.720 | question long after the fact.

00:15:01.440 | I say at one point in the war in the West that the argument, for instance, on reparations

00:15:05.360 | now that goes on, and it's not a fringe argument anymore.

00:15:09.160 | Some people say, "Oh, you're pulling up this fringe argument."

00:15:11.080 | It really isn't.

00:15:12.080 | I think every contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2020 was

00:15:17.360 | willing to talk about the possibility of reparations, some very eager that this country, America,

00:15:24.280 | goes through that entirely self-destructive exercise.

00:15:30.600 | I say that there's a lot of problems with this, but if I could refine it down to one

00:15:34.400 | thing, I'd say this.

00:15:36.800 | It's no longer about a wealth transfer from one group of people who did something wrong

00:15:40.360 | to another group of people who were wronged.

00:15:43.560 | It would have been that, could have been that 200 years ago.

00:15:46.640 | Today it's not even the descendants of people who did something wrong giving money to people

00:15:50.520 | who were the descendants of people who were wronged.

00:15:53.800 | It's a wealth transfer from people who look like people who did a wrong thing in the past

00:15:58.400 | to another group of people who resemble people who were wronged.

00:16:03.160 | That's impossible to do.

00:16:04.760 | I'm completely clear about this.

00:16:07.200 | There is no way in which you could organize such a wealth transfer on moral or practical

00:16:16.840 | reasons.

00:16:17.840 | America is filled with people who have the same skin color as us, for instance, who have

00:16:23.080 | no connection to the slave trade and should not be made to pay money to people who have

00:16:28.720 | some connection.

00:16:30.800 | Then the country is also filled with ethnic minorities who have come after slavery who

00:16:36.480 | would not be due for any reimbursement as it were.

00:16:43.360 | The problem with this is though is that there are, I'm perfectly open to the possibility

00:16:48.040 | that there are residual inequities that exist in American life and that the consequences

00:16:55.400 | of slavery could be one of the factors that result from this.

00:17:01.560 | The thing is I don't think it's a single issue answer.

00:17:08.000 | I think it's a multidimensional issue.

00:17:10.600 | Something like black underachievement in America is obviously a multidimensional issue.

00:17:16.320 | Much of the left and others wish to say it's not, it's only about racism.

00:17:22.520 | They can't answer why Asians who've arrived more recently don't, for instance, get held

00:17:28.640 | down by white supremacy, but actually, I say white supremacy in quotes obviously, but don't

00:17:35.160 | get held back by it, but actually flourish to the extent that Asian Americans have higher

00:17:40.920 | household earnings and higher household mean equity than, home equity and so on, than white

00:17:49.720 | Americans.

00:17:52.440 | I don't think that on the merits the evidence is there that racism is the explanation for

00:17:58.040 | black ongoing, black underachievement in some sections of the black community in America.

00:18:03.680 | It's obviously a part of it.

00:18:04.920 | Could you say that even those things like fatherlessness and similar family breakdown

00:18:12.800 | issues are a long-term consequence of it?

00:18:17.840 | Possibly, but it's being awfully generous to people's ability to make bad decisions.

00:18:25.160 | For instance, how many generations after the Holocaust would you allow people to claim

00:18:29.720 | that everything that went wrong in the Jewish community was as a result of the Holocaust?

00:18:36.120 | Is there some kind of term limit on this?

00:18:39.120 | I would have thought so.

00:18:40.880 | I think most people probably think that's over.

00:18:43.520 | I think the details matter there, but it's very difficult.

00:18:51.160 | You're in deep waters here.

00:18:52.760 | I enjoy swimming out in the ocean, so although I'm terrified of what's lurking underneath

00:18:59.320 | in the darkness.

00:19:00.320 | You're right.

00:19:01.320 | You're right to be.

00:19:03.360 | Okay.

00:19:05.400 | It's really complicated calculus with the Holocaust and with slavery.

00:19:10.120 | The argument in America is that there's deep institutional racism against African Americans

00:19:20.280 | that's rooted in slavery.

00:19:26.080 | However that calculus turns out, that calculation, it still persists in the culture, in the institutions,

00:19:33.280 | in the allocation of resources, in the way that we communicate in subtle ways, in major

00:19:39.640 | ways, all that kind of stuff.

00:19:42.040 | How is it possible to win or lose that argument of how much institutional racism there is

00:19:48.040 | that's rooted in slavery?

00:19:50.920 | Is it a winnable-

00:19:51.920 | It's an unquantifiable argument.

00:19:57.280 | I'd like to apply some shortcuts to some of this.

00:20:00.000 | The following.

00:20:01.000 | Are, for instance, all, let's take the EVV1 that's most often cited.

00:20:09.240 | If a white person is walking down a street in America and they see a group of young black

00:20:13.440 | men coming towards them and it's late at night and they cross the road, is it because of

00:20:17.480 | slavery?

00:20:20.440 | Is it because of institutional racism?

00:20:22.840 | No.

00:20:24.160 | It's because they've made a calculus based not entirely on unfounded beliefs that given

00:20:36.120 | crime rates, it's possible that this group of people might be a group of people they

00:20:41.600 | don't want to meet late at night.

00:20:43.920 | It's an ugly fact, but crime statistics in American cities, African American cities bear

00:20:50.360 | out.

00:20:52.520 | It's not an entirely unreasonable one.

00:20:55.240 | It's not reasonable every time, obviously, obviously.

00:20:59.540 | But is it attributable to slavery?

00:21:03.120 | It's a stretch.

00:21:05.760 | If you're in a city like Chicago where the homicide rates shot up in the last two years,

00:21:14.640 | albeit again, as always has to be remembered, mainly black on black, gun violence and knife

00:21:21.640 | violence.

00:21:22.640 | Nevertheless, if you're in a city like Chicago and you make that calculus I've just suggested,

00:21:29.400 | the cliched one, the street late at night, there are other factors other than a memory

00:21:34.840 | of slavery that kick in.

00:21:36.800 | I'm afraid it's something which people don't want to particularly acknowledge in America

00:21:44.400 | for obvious reasons, because it's the ugliest damn debate in the world.

00:21:47.720 | I was actually just writing in my column in the New York Post today about a very interesting

00:21:52.760 | case that's sort of similar, which is the question of obesity in the US.

00:21:58.720 | As you know, America's the most overweight country in the world.

00:22:04.080 | America has I think 40% of the population is obese in medical ways.

00:22:09.760 | The nearest next country is a long way down.

00:22:12.480 | That's New Zealand at 30% of the population.

00:22:14.320 | So America's a long way ahead.

00:22:16.360 | Why during the coronavirus era when we know that obesity is the one clearest factor that's

00:22:23.520 | likely to lead to your hospitalization if you also get the virus, why did almost no

00:22:27.720 | public health information in America focus on obesity?

00:22:30.720 | 80% of the people who ended up hospitalized in America with coronavirus were obese.

00:22:38.440 | We locked the schools when there was no evidence that the coronavirus was deadly for children.

00:22:43.780 | We all wore cloth masks when there was very little evidence that this was much use in

00:22:49.440 | stopping the spread of the virus.

00:22:52.280 | We had massive evidence about obesity being a problem and we never addressed it.

00:22:56.800 | Why?

00:22:57.800 | Is it just because we worried about fat people?

00:22:59.040 | No, it's actually because about fat shaming as it were.

00:23:01.760 | No, it's also because to a great extent it's a racial issue in America as well.

00:23:05.360 | Actually, I quoted this new publication from the University of Chicago as it happens, which

00:23:10.360 | makes that claim explicit.

00:23:11.480 | It says the reasons why people have views that are negative about obesity is because

00:23:16.620 | of racism and slavery.

00:23:18.740 | This is what everything is drawn back to in America.

00:23:21.580 | Anything you want to stop, you say it's because of racism, it's because of slavery.

00:23:25.920 | How about it's actually because you mind the hospitals getting clogged up, you mind people

00:23:33.400 | dying, you mind ethnic minorities disproportionately dying, and you'd like to say something about

00:23:39.160 | it.

00:23:40.160 | Once again, as in everything in America, it's cut off by some poorly educated academic saying

00:23:46.640 | it's about slavery.

00:23:50.760 | This requires a kind of form of brain surgery to perform it on a society, probably one that's

00:23:54.840 | not possible without killing the patient.

00:23:58.320 | It's being done by people who are wearing mittens.

00:24:05.320 | I'm sure that there's a few folks listening to this that are rolling their eyes and saying,

00:24:11.880 | "Here we go again, two white guys talking about the lack of institutional racism in

00:24:20.080 | America."

00:24:23.440 | First of all, what would you like to tell them?

00:24:28.800 | Our African American friends who are looking at this, and I've gotten a chance to talk

00:24:33.240 | to a bunch of them on Clubhouse recently.

00:24:35.920 | Clubhouse is this social app.

00:24:37.160 | - Yeah, yeah, I know.

00:24:38.160 | - And I really enjoy it.

00:24:39.160 | - It's an absolute zoo of an app as far as I can see.

00:24:41.160 | - I personally love it because you get to talk to, as somebody who's an introvert and

00:24:46.600 | doesn't socialize much, I enjoy talking to people from all walks of life.

00:24:52.280 | So it gave me a chance to, first of all, practice Russian and Ukrainian, so I get the chance

00:24:57.320 | to do that.

00:24:58.320 | Then you get a chance to talk about Israel and Palestine with people who are from that

00:25:03.840 | part of the world.

00:25:04.840 | And you get to hear raw emotion of people from the ground, where they start screaming,

00:25:12.300 | they start crying, they start being calm and collected and thoughtful.

00:25:17.680 | This is as if you walked into a bar with custom-picked regular folks, in quotes, regular folks.

00:25:25.080 | Just people that have, quote unquote, lived experiences, real pain, real hope, real emotions,

00:25:32.760 | biases, and you get to listen to them go at it.

00:25:38.360 | Because it's an audio app, you're not allowed to start getting into a physical fist fight.

00:25:43.720 | So even though it really sounds like people want it--

00:25:46.400 | - It sounds like it's happening, yeah.

00:25:47.680 | - Yeah, and so you get to really listen to that feeling.

00:25:50.200 | And for example, it allows a white guy like me, from another part of the world, coming

00:25:55.640 | from the former Soviet Union, to go into a room with a few hundred African Americans

00:26:03.480 | screaming about Joe Rogan using the N-word.

00:26:07.860 | And I get to really listen.

00:26:09.280 | There's very different perspectives on that in the African American community, and it's

00:26:13.360 | fascinating to listen.

00:26:14.680 | So I don't get access to that by excellent books and articles written and so on.

00:26:20.480 | You get that real raw emotion.

00:26:22.520 | And I'm just saying, there's a few of those folks listening to this with that real raw

00:26:26.680 | emotion, and one argument they say is, "You, Douglas Murray, and you, Lex Freeman, don't

00:26:34.080 | have the right to talk about race and racism in America.

00:26:38.920 | It is our struggle.

00:26:40.720 | You are from a privileged class of people that don't know what it's like to be a black

00:26:47.560 | man or woman in America walking down the street."

00:26:51.280 | Can you steelman that case?

00:26:53.080 | - First of all, fuck that.

00:26:57.720 | - I think we need to define steelmanning.

00:26:59.560 | Can you at least try it?

00:27:02.360 | - I know what steelmanning is.

00:27:04.920 | I really resent that form of argumentation.

00:27:07.600 | I really resent it.

00:27:08.600 | I have the right to talk about whatever the hell I want, and no one's gonna stop me or

00:27:12.800 | try to intimidate me or tell me that I can't simply because of my skin color.

00:27:18.240 | And I think that if I said to somebody else the other way around, it would be equally

00:27:21.680 | reprehensible.

00:27:22.680 | If I said, "Shut up, you have no right to criticize anything that Douglas Murray says

00:27:27.320 | because you've not got my skin color."

00:27:28.960 | Okay, it's not an exact comparison, but seriously, is that a reasonable form of argument?

00:27:36.520 | You haven't been through everything I've been through in my life, therefore you can't comment.

00:27:40.160 | No.

00:27:41.160 | In that case, nobody can talk about anything.

00:27:43.720 | We might as well pack up, go home, and isolate ourselves.

00:27:47.560 | - Strong words, but can you try to steelman the case, not in this particular situation,

00:27:51.520 | but there's people that have lived through something that can comment in a very specific

00:27:59.000 | way.

00:28:00.000 | Like for example, Holocaust survivors.

00:28:03.400 | There is a sense in which maybe a basic sense of civility when a Holocaust survivor is speaking

00:28:09.620 | about their experience of the Holocaust, then an intellectual from a very different part

00:28:16.680 | of the world is simply writing about nuanced geopolitics of World War II, just should not

00:28:24.600 | interrupt the Holocaust survivor.

00:28:26.880 | - We physically interrupt them if they're telling their story.

00:28:29.880 | - Is it logic and reason that the experience of the Holocaust survivor somehow fundamentally

00:28:36.920 | has a deeper understanding of the humanity and the injustice of the-

00:28:42.480 | - First of all, again, we're in even deeper waters now, but in terms of wanting to listen

00:28:47.600 | to another person who has experienced something, yes, yes, but not endlessly, not endlessly.

00:28:56.480 | I mean, there are people who've written about the Holocaust who didn't experience the Holocaust

00:29:02.240 | and have written about it better than people who did.

00:29:07.840 | This idea that the lived experience, to use this terrible modern jargon, as if there's

00:29:12.640 | another type, this idea that the lived experience has to triumph over everything else is not

00:29:19.200 | always correct.

00:29:20.760 | It can be correct in some circumstances.

00:29:23.820 | If you are sitting in a room with a Holocaust survivor and somebody who'd never heard about

00:29:27.680 | the Holocaust and wanted to kind of shoot out their views on it, yeah, one of those

00:29:33.000 | people should be heard more than the other, obviously, obviously.

00:29:37.400 | If there's somebody who's experienced racism firsthand and there's somebody else who has

00:29:40.920 | never experienced it, then obviously you'd want to hear from the person who has experienced

00:29:46.760 | it firsthand, if that is the discussion underway.

00:29:51.960 | I don't think that it's the case that that is endlessly the case.

00:29:57.120 | I'm also highly reluctant to concede that there are groups of people who, by dint of

00:30:03.040 | their skin color or anything else, get to dominate the microphone.

00:30:08.000 | Now, of course, we're literally both speaking into microphones at the moment, so there's

00:30:10.720 | an irony to this, but let's skate over the irony.

00:30:15.240 | What I mean is people saying, "You don't have the right to speak.

00:30:18.640 | I have the right to take the microphone from you and speak because I know best."

00:30:23.400 | Fine.

00:30:24.600 | If you know best, we'll argue it out and someone will win, long or short term.

00:30:31.520 | But the almost aggressive tone in which this is now leveled, I don't like the sound of.

00:30:41.800 | Nobody's experience is completely understandable by another human being.

00:30:46.480 | Nobody's.

00:30:47.580 | And what many people are asking us to do at the moment, us collectively is, to fall for

00:30:52.720 | that thing.

00:30:53.720 | I think it was Camille Foster who said it first, but I've adopted it in recent years,

00:30:58.020 | is to say, "You must spend an inordinate amount of your life trying to understand me personally,

00:31:04.160 | my lived experience, everything about me.

00:31:07.040 | You should dedicate your life to trying to do that.

00:31:11.440 | Simultaneously, you'll never understand me."

00:31:15.760 | This is not an attractive invitation.

00:31:19.600 | This is an unwinnable game.

00:31:22.800 | So if somebody has a legitimate and important point to make, they should make it and they'll

00:31:31.520 | win through whatever their character is, whatever their race.

00:31:33.960 | And by the way, there are plenty of white people who experience racism as well.

00:31:37.160 | There are plenty of white people who do and have done, and increasingly so, which is one

00:31:42.460 | of the things I write about in The War in the West.

00:31:45.220 | I would argue that today in America, the only group who are actually allowed to be consistently,

00:31:51.160 | vilely racist against the white people.

00:31:54.040 | If you say disgusting things about black people in America in 2022, you will be over.

00:32:00.540 | You will be over.

00:32:02.080 | If you decide to talk about people's white tears, their white female tears, their white

00:32:07.280 | guilt, their white privilege, their white rage, and all these other pseudo-pathologizing

00:32:12.560 | terms, you'll be just fine.

00:32:14.940 | You could be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

00:32:17.200 | You could lecture at Yale University.

00:32:19.280 | Absolutely fine.

00:32:20.280 | And the white people have to suck that up as if that's fine because there was racism

00:32:24.880 | in another direction in the past.

00:32:26.480 | So white people can have racism as well.

00:32:28.960 | Does that mean that I think that I have a right or other white people have a right to

00:32:31.900 | dominate the discourse by talking about their feelings of having been victims of racism?

00:32:37.400 | No, not particularly, because what does that get us?

00:32:39.800 | It gets us into an endless cycle of competitive victimhood.

00:32:43.640 | Am I saying that white people who've experienced violence have experienced historically anything

00:32:48.920 | like the violence that was perpetrated against black people in America historically?

00:32:53.480 | Obviously not.

00:32:54.480 | But what kind of competition do we want to enter here?

00:33:00.760 | And this is very, very important terrain now in America because there's one other thing

00:33:05.920 | I have to throw in there, which is how do you work out the sincerity of the claim?

00:33:12.000 | How do you work out the sincerity of the claim being made?

00:33:15.000 | At one point in this latest book, I referred to a very useful bit in Nietzsche on the genealogy

00:33:22.520 | of morals, where, as you know, Nietzsche always has to be treated carefully.

00:33:28.080 | When people say, "I love Nietzsche," you have to say, "Which bits?

00:33:34.520 | What exactly do you love about him?"

00:33:37.920 | But a lot can be learned from the answer.

00:33:44.820 | But there are moments in genealogy of morals that were very useful for this book.

00:33:49.300 | One of them was the moment when Nietzsche uses a phrase that I've now stolen from myself,

00:33:53.480 | or appropriated, you might say, where he refers to people who tear at wounds long since closed

00:34:02.800 | and then cry about the pain they feel.

00:34:07.600 | Now how do you know whether the pain is real?

00:34:14.000 | How do you know?

00:34:15.000 | I'm not saying you can never know, but it's hard.

00:34:20.240 | So when somebody says, "I feel that my life hasn't gone that well, and it's because of

00:34:24.140 | something that was done to my ancestors 200 years ago," maybe they do feel that.

00:34:29.920 | Maybe they're right to feel that.

00:34:32.180 | Maybe they're making it up.

00:34:34.180 | Maybe they're using it as their reason for failure in life.

00:34:37.560 | Maybe they're using it as their reason to not even try.

00:34:41.020 | Maybe they're using it as their reason to smoke weed all day.

00:34:44.940 | I don't know.

00:34:46.380 | And who does know?

00:34:47.380 | How can you work that out?

00:34:49.040 | And that's why I come back to this thing of, who are we to constantly judge in this society

00:34:54.420 | other people who we don't know and attribute motives to them based on racial or other characteristics?

00:35:04.000 | And as you write in this part, I like your cultural appropriation of Nietzsche, and at

00:35:12.240 | the same time canceling Nietzsche in the same set of sentences.

00:35:17.940 | But you write in this part about evil.

00:35:19.840 | No, I didn't cancel Nietzsche.

00:35:22.120 | Well.

00:35:23.120 | I can't cancel Nietzsche.

00:35:24.120 | I was saying, "Treat him carefully."

00:35:27.000 | Treat him carefully, fair enough.

00:35:29.000 | But you can judge a man's character by which parts of Nietzsche he quotes.

00:35:34.320 | Fair enough.

00:35:35.320 | I think when you meet people who do Man and Superman a bit too much.

00:35:42.600 | Now you're pulling in even deeper water, referencing Hitler here.

00:35:47.040 | Okay.

00:35:48.040 | So you write in this part of the book about evil.

00:35:51.920 | Quote, "What is it that drives evil?

00:35:57.440 | Many things without doubt, but one of them is identified by several of the great philosophers

00:36:02.200 | is resentment.

00:36:04.520 | That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers for people who want to destroy," colon, "blaming

00:36:10.720 | someone else for having something you believe you deserve more."

00:36:14.280 | And you're saying this kind of resentment, we don't know as it surfaces whether it's

00:36:20.480 | genuine or if it's used to sort of play games of power to evil ends.

00:36:29.600 | Can you speak to this?

00:36:31.360 | Because it's such a fascinating idea that one of the biggest drivers of evil in the

00:36:38.160 | world is resentment.

00:36:41.520 | Because if you look at, boy, if you look at human history, if you look at Hitler, so much

00:36:47.560 | of the propaganda, so much of the narrative was about resentment.

00:36:51.440 | So is that surface or is it level or is that deep?

00:36:55.320 | The resentment that drives evil.

00:36:56.320 | It can be any of the above.

00:36:57.680 | First of all, preface it, everybody has resentment.

00:37:02.560 | I use the term, resentment is thought very similar to resentment, less sick with resentment.

00:37:09.720 | So we don't sound too pretentious.

00:37:14.640 | The, let me give you a quick example of somebody in our own day who has a form of resentment,

00:37:22.000 | Vladimir Putin.

00:37:23.960 | Did you see Navalny's documentary, Putin's Palace?

00:37:27.480 | Yes.

00:37:28.840 | You remember the stuff about Putin as a young KGB officer in Germany?

00:37:32.960 | Remember the stuff about Putin and his first wife's resentment of one of his KGB colleagues

00:37:37.880 | who had an apartment that was a few meters bigger than the Putin's apartment?

00:37:42.840 | Yeah.

00:37:43.840 | It's very interesting.

00:37:44.840 | And by the way, I'm not saying that Vladimir Putin became the man he has become and invaded

00:37:50.280 | Ukraine because he didn't have an apartment he liked in Berlin or Munich or wherever he

00:37:54.440 | was.

00:37:55.440 | It's a distinct possibility.

00:37:56.440 | My point is that resentment is a factor in all human lives and we all feel it in our

00:38:05.760 | lives and it's something that has to be struggled against.

00:38:11.180 | Resentment is in political terms can be a deadly, I mean, it's an incredibly deep thing

00:38:15.760 | to draw upon.

00:38:16.760 | I mean, you mentioned Hitler.

00:38:19.360 | Obviously one of the things that Hitler played on was resentment, obviously.

00:38:24.920 | Almost every revolution does.

00:38:27.040 | I mean the French revolutionaries did as well and not without cause.

00:38:30.240 | There's a good reason to feel that Versailles was not listening to Paris in the 1780s and

00:38:38.400 | feel resentment for Marie Antoinette in her palace within the palace, ignoring the bread

00:38:45.160 | shortages in Paris.

00:38:49.240 | So resentment is a very understandable thing and sometimes it's justifiable and it's also

00:38:55.480 | deadly to the person as it is to the society.

00:38:59.120 | It's an incredibly deep, deep sentiment.

00:39:02.040 | Somebody else has got something that you should have.

00:39:06.080 | And the problem about it is that it has the potential to be endless.

00:39:11.240 | You can do it your whole life.

00:39:13.320 | And one of the ways I've sort of found myself explaining this to people is to say it's also

00:39:18.760 | important to recognize that resentment is something that can cross absolutely every

00:39:22.400 | boundary.

00:39:24.400 | So for instance, it crosses all racial boundaries, obviously, as I goes out saying.

00:39:30.600 | What's more interesting is it crosses all class boundaries and socioeconomic boundaries.

00:39:35.760 | And if I was to sort of simplify this thought, I would say, I guess that you and I and everybody

00:39:42.240 | watching knows or has known somebody in their lives who has almost nothing in worldly terms

00:39:53.400 | and is a generous person, a kindly person, a giving person, a happy person, even a cheerful

00:40:01.560 | person.

00:40:03.520 | And I think we probably have also, or many of us would have met people who seem to have

00:40:08.640 | everything and who are filled with resentment, filled with resentment.

00:40:14.960 | Somebody else has held them back from something.

00:40:16.440 | Their sister once did something.

00:40:18.720 | She shouldn't.

00:40:19.720 | She got this.

00:40:20.720 | I should have got that.

00:40:21.720 | And on and on and on.

00:40:23.600 | It's a human trait.

00:40:25.520 | And one of the things that suggests to me is that we therefore have a choice in our

00:40:29.960 | lives about this.

00:40:30.960 | This is something which we can do something about, not limitlessly.

00:40:35.880 | But for instance, I mean, there are very good reasons that some people in their lives might

00:40:40.440 | feel resentment.

00:40:42.680 | Let's say you're involved in a car crash and a friend fell asleep at the wheel and that's

00:40:48.040 | why you are spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair.

00:40:50.840 | That's a pertinent example of this in American politics at the moment.

00:40:57.000 | You would be justified in feeling resentment.

00:41:00.480 | And at some point you have to make a decision which is, am I going to be that person or

00:41:06.560 | a different person?

00:41:07.560 | - But even in that case, you're saying at the individual level and at societal level

00:41:12.480 | is destructive to the mind.

00:41:14.000 | Even when you're quote unquote justified.

00:41:16.200 | - It rots you.

00:41:17.520 | It rots you because the best you can do is to eke out your days unfulfilled.

00:41:27.240 | - So the antidote, as you describe, is gratitude.

00:41:30.640 | - Yes.

00:41:31.840 | - Gratitude is the antidote to evil in a sense.

00:41:35.280 | Gratitude at the individual level and at the societal level.

00:41:38.720 | - Gratitude is certainly the answer to resentment.

00:41:42.840 | I quote in the War on the West, when I read it the first time a few years ago, it's absolutely

00:41:47.480 | flawed by the Brothers Karamazov.

00:41:52.600 | Not everything in it, by the way, and I won't get into it, but I have some very big structural

00:41:57.360 | criticisms of the novel.

00:42:00.040 | - Now you're just sweet talking to me because I'm a Dostoevsky fan, but I appreciate this.

00:42:04.520 | - Okay.

00:42:05.520 | Well, we could get into what I see as the structural flaws in the Brothers Karamazov,

00:42:09.480 | but anyway.

00:42:10.480 | - Now I'm offended and triggered.

00:42:12.280 | - Yeah, no, I mean this is coming out of Macbeth and saying, "I didn't think it was much good."

00:42:19.120 | - Yeah, they're structural flaws.

00:42:20.600 | - Yeah, I thought the ending stank and the middle wasn't very good.

00:42:26.160 | When I read that novel, I was floored by a couple of things.

00:42:30.600 | One is, of course, the moment where we realize the devil appears.

00:42:34.960 | The moment that Ivan says to his brother, "You know he visits me," and you realize that

00:42:40.720 | he's talking about the devil, the whole novel goes into this totally different space.

00:42:46.920 | It's even more than you've already realized the novel's about.

00:42:51.840 | And then when the conversation occurs between Ivan and the devil, I think he describes him

00:42:57.840 | as dressed in the French style of the early part of the 19th century.

00:43:05.560 | Very strange that the devil would be dressed like that, but sort of...

00:43:11.520 | And if you remember, he's sort of crossed legs and rather a vain figure.

00:43:16.680 | But the devil mentions in passing to Ivan that, he says, "I don't know why gratitude

00:43:23.040 | is not an instinct that's being given to me."

00:43:30.480 | And you're not allowed, this is not...

00:43:34.360 | Given the role of being the devil, this is not one of the things.

00:43:38.320 | - And of course, only a genius of Dostoevsky's stature could...

00:43:42.000 | I mean, a lesser genius would have made a whole novel out of that insight.

00:43:47.360 | Only Dostoevsky can just throw it away, because there's such an abundance of riches that he

00:43:51.600 | still has to get through.

00:43:53.560 | The structural problems aside.

00:43:55.440 | - The passive aggressive, the microaggression in this conversation is palpable.

00:44:06.200 | - Little knife fight.

00:44:08.520 | But the reason I mention this is because, of course, when I saw it, I thought, this

00:44:12.280 | is such a brilliant insight by Dostoevsky, because why would gratitude not be a sentiment

00:44:17.840 | the devil was capable of?

00:44:20.000 | And the answer is, of course, that if the devil was capable of gratitude, he wouldn't

00:44:24.040 | be the devil.

00:44:25.040 | He'd be somebody else.

00:44:28.840 | He has to be incapable of gratitude.

00:44:31.560 | - Do you think, for Dostoevsky, that was as strong of an insight as it is for you?

00:44:36.480 | Because I think that's a really powerful idea, that with gratitude, you don't get the resentment

00:44:43.800 | that rots you from the core.

00:44:46.360 | - Yes, I think it was one of the just endless things that he saw in us.

00:44:52.280 | And the way I put it is that, I also think of it in terms of the era of deconstruction,

00:44:57.920 | which is one of the things I'd like us to call the era that's now ending.

00:45:02.440 | The era of deconstruction was the era that started, let's say, from the '60s onwards,

00:45:08.600 | and was originally an academic game that then spilled out into the wider culture, which

00:45:13.840 | was, let's take everything apart.

00:45:17.080 | Let's pull it all apart.

00:45:18.080 | There are lots of problems with it.

00:45:21.000 | One is it's quite boring.

00:45:23.160 | You don't get an awful lot from it.

00:45:28.080 | You also have the problem of what children find when they try to do this with bicycles,

00:45:32.560 | which is they can take it apart quite easily, but they can't put it back together.

00:45:38.480 | And the era of taking things apart as a game is one we've lived through, and it's been

00:45:46.560 | highly destructive.

00:45:47.760 | But you can do it for quite a long time.

00:45:51.440 | I'm going to look at this society, and I'm going to take it apart by showing systemic

00:45:56.480 | problems.

00:45:57.480 | I'm going to...

00:45:58.720 | At the end of that, what have you got?

00:46:00.440 | What have you done?

00:46:01.440 | What have you achieved?

00:46:03.220 | We need to interrogate this.

00:46:05.120 | Okay, interrogate, by all means, ask questions, but interrogate as a deliberate hostility

00:46:09.800 | to this.

00:46:11.120 | I'm going to interrogate this thing and take it apart, and again, at the end of it, what

00:46:14.760 | have you got?

00:46:17.160 | Whether you're interrogating a text or a piece of music or an idea or a society, fine.

00:46:24.600 | Question, endlessly question.

00:46:26.880 | Interrogate, assumes it's all a criminal in a cell, and it's guilty, and therefore it

00:46:35.480 | must be taken apart.

00:46:37.740 | And that's what we've been doing for decades in the West.

00:46:41.480 | And that's resentment.

00:46:43.980 | That's one byproduct of resentment.

00:46:46.280 | You can't build the thing, but you know how to take it apart.

00:46:51.160 | Is a little bit of resentment good?

00:46:53.120 | So you have, you know, that, I love Tom Waits, and he has a song where, "I like my Tom with

00:47:01.120 | a little drop of poison."

00:47:03.120 | Is it good to do that?

00:47:05.360 | Is it good to have a little bit of poison in your drink?

00:47:07.880 | Depends what the poison is, and it depends if you know not to have another drink.

00:47:13.120 | It might be the case, you find out, as some alcoholics do, that one was too many and ten

00:47:18.480 | is not enough.

00:47:21.260 | So there's a natural, in this case, this kind of deconstruction is a slippery slope.

00:47:27.880 | It becomes an addiction, becomes a drug, and you just can't stop.

00:47:31.640 | You'd have to wean yourself off it and try to start creating again.

00:47:35.640 | You'd have to start trying to put things together again.

00:47:41.040 | Something I think might be in the throes of starting as it happens.

00:47:47.120 | - Well, speaking of taking things apart and not putting them together again, the idea

00:47:54.080 | of critical race theory.

00:47:58.320 | Can you, to me, explain, so I'm an engineer and have not been actually paying attention

00:48:04.520 | much unfortunately to these--

00:48:06.880 | - None of the people in your field were until it comes along and smacks you in the face.

00:48:11.160 | - I've had that line of thinking from MIT, I said, "Well, surely whatever you folks are

00:48:21.120 | busy about yelling at each other for is a thing at Harvard and Yale."

00:48:26.280 | It's not going to--

00:48:27.280 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

00:48:28.280 | People in the STEM subjects thought, "It's not coming for us.

00:48:31.400 | It can't come to us," and bang.

00:48:33.880 | - Well, it hasn't quite been a bang.

00:48:37.440 | - Engineering is more safe than others.

00:48:40.520 | So, let's draw a line now between engineering and science.

00:48:46.200 | I think engineering is, I'm sitting in a castle in the tallest tower with my pinky out drinking

00:48:53.400 | my martini saying, "Surely the peasants below with their biology and their humanities will

00:49:01.440 | figure it all out."

00:49:02.440 | No, I'm just kidding.

00:49:03.440 | There's no pinky out.

00:49:04.440 | I drink vodka and I hang with the peasants.

00:49:07.560 | Okay, where is this?

00:49:08.560 | The metaphor has gone too far.

00:49:11.760 | Can you explain to this engineer what critical race theory is?

00:49:16.520 | Is it a term that's definable?

00:49:19.480 | Is there a tradition?

00:49:20.480 | Is there a history?

00:49:21.640 | What is good about it?

00:49:22.640 | What is bad about it?

00:49:24.360 | - It is a tradition.

00:49:25.360 | It is a history.

00:49:26.360 | It's a school of thought.

00:49:27.360 | It started in the law roughly in the 1970s in some of the American academy.

00:49:32.840 | It spilled out.

00:49:33.840 | It always aimed to be an activist philosophy.

00:49:37.000 | People deny that now, but as I cite in the war in the West, the foundational texts say

00:49:41.920 | as much.

00:49:42.920 | This is an activist academic study.

00:49:48.360 | We're not just looking at the law.

00:49:50.680 | We seek to change the law.

00:49:53.920 | It's built out into all of the other disciplines.

00:49:56.200 | I think there's a reason for that, by the way, which is it happened at the time that

00:49:58.880 | the humanities and others in America were increasingly weak and didn't know what to

00:50:02.960 | do, and they needed more games to play or new games to play.

00:50:07.840 | - The psychologists got bored.

00:50:09.320 | - Yeah.

00:50:10.320 | Well, they needed tenure.

00:50:12.880 | They needed something to do.

00:50:15.840 | It's not an original observation.

00:50:16.840 | Plenty of people have made this, but Neil Ferguson said this some time ago, for instance,

00:50:20.160 | that in the last 50 years in American academia, certainly in humanities departments, when

00:50:27.640 | somebody dies out who's a great scholar in something, that's just not replaced by somebody

00:50:31.600 | of equal stature.

00:50:33.400 | They're replaced by somebody who does theory or critical race theory.

00:50:38.120 | They're replaced by somebody who does the modern games.

00:50:41.920 | Somebody dies out who's a great historian of, say, I don't know, it's the one that's

00:50:45.080 | on my mind, Russian history or Russian literature, and they're not replaced by a similar scholar.

00:50:53.760 | - In his observation and in yours, is this a recent development?

00:50:57.760 | - It's happened in the last few decades, for sure, and it's sped up.

00:51:01.360 | - Is it because we've gotten to the bottom of some of the biggest questions of history?

00:51:05.120 | - No, it's because we're willing to forget the big questions.

00:51:09.400 | - Because it's more fun to, big questions are as fun?

00:51:12.120 | - Well, no, partly it's, no, I should stress that partly this isn't the reason, but partly

00:51:16.840 | it's a result of the hyper-specialization in academia.

00:51:21.400 | You know, if you said you'd like to write your dissertation on Hobbes, if you wanted

00:51:31.960 | to, if you, something central to Kant's thought or Hegel or something, I mean, that's not

00:51:40.240 | popular.

00:51:42.960 | What's popular is to take somebody way down the line from that because there's a feeling

00:51:47.200 | that that's all been done.

00:51:50.000 | So you take something way, way, way down the line from that that's much less important

00:51:54.120 | and then you sort of play with that.

00:51:57.240 | And I think most people, anyone who's watching who's been in a philosophy department or anything

00:52:01.080 | else in recent years will know that tendency.

00:52:04.360 | By the way, there's a very practical consequence of this.

00:52:06.760 | I saw this at the end of my friend Roger Scruton's life when he would occasionally, he didn't

00:52:11.840 | get tenure at universities, but he would occasionally be flown in even by his enemies to teach courses

00:52:18.080 | in various universities in basics of philosophy because there was no one in the department

00:52:22.800 | able to do it.

00:52:25.920 | He would go in and teach for a semester, you know, Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer and

00:52:33.600 | others because there was no one to do it because they were all playing with things way, way,

00:52:38.640 | way down the road from this.

00:52:40.720 | So that had already happened and people were searching for new games to play and the critical

00:52:46.300 | race theory stuff forced its way in partly in the way that all of this that's now known

00:52:53.440 | as anti-racism does, which is in a sort of bullying tone of saying if you don't follow

00:52:58.000 | this.

00:52:59.000 | It's the same way that all the things that are called studies, I think everything called

00:53:02.480 | studies in the humanities should be shut down.

00:53:07.160 | - Because of the activist element.

00:53:09.320 | - They're all activists.

00:53:10.840 | Gay studies and queer studies, nothing good has ever come from it.

00:53:16.820 | Nothing good.

00:53:17.820 | - To push back, is it obvious that activism is a sign of a flaw in a discipline?

00:53:24.820 | So isn't it--

00:53:25.820 | - It's a sign of the death of the discipline.

00:53:27.540 | It's a sign the discipline's over.

00:53:29.940 | - But isn't it a good goal to have for discipline to enact change, positive change in the world?

00:53:36.580 | - Or is that for politicians to do with the findings of science, not the scientists themselves?

00:53:44.320 | - Why create an ideology and then set out to find disciplines that are weakly put together

00:53:49.840 | to try to back up your political ideology?

00:53:53.640 | - So ideology should not be part of science or of the humanities?

00:54:00.480 | - No.

00:54:01.480 | I mean, anyone could do it.

00:54:05.740 | You could decide to go in and be wildly right-wing about something and only do things that prove

00:54:11.680 | your right-wing ideas, be fantastically anti-academic, fantastically anti-science.

00:54:18.880 | It's an absurd way to mix up activism and academia.

00:54:25.680 | And it's absolutely rife.

00:54:27.000 | And critical race theory is one of the ones that completely polluted the academy.

00:54:30.920 | - Yeah, and there's been dark moments throughout history, both during World War II with both

00:54:37.080 | communism and Nazism, fascism, that infiltrated science and then corrupted it.

00:54:46.080 | - Yes.

00:54:47.080 | I mean, for instance, also, let's face it, in science, as in everything else, there are

00:54:50.960 | dark, difficult things.

00:54:53.200 | It's much better we know about them, face up to them, and try to find a way socially

00:54:57.520 | to deal with them, than that you leave them in the hands of some activist who wants to

00:55:03.160 | do stuff with them.

00:55:05.360 | - Some of my best friends are activists.

00:55:07.360 | I'm just kidding.

00:55:08.360 | Okay.

00:55:09.360 | - Yeah.

00:55:10.360 | None of my best friends are activists.

00:55:11.440 | That's how it should be.

00:55:13.120 | - Well, I was kidding because I don't have any friends.

00:55:16.040 | But okay.

00:55:17.040 | Now I'm-- - Sure, that's not true.

00:55:19.320 | - I'm trying to gain some pity points.

00:55:22.960 | Okay.

00:55:23.960 | So to return-- - You have your clubhouse friends.

00:55:27.160 | - Screaming away like deranged maniacs.

00:55:30.120 | No, I'm anti-clubhouse, by the way, because the only time I heard it was that Brett Weinstein

00:55:34.480 | one when he did that.

00:55:36.120 | I don't know if you heard that early in clubhouse.

00:55:38.280 | I was invited to clubhouse with various people.

00:55:39.680 | He was like, "Oh, this is a really great, civilized way to hang out and talk with interesting

00:55:43.200 | people."

00:55:44.200 | And I downloaded the app, and I got on one night, and because Brett Weinstein said I'm

00:55:48.840 | doing this conversation, and I listened, and it was the maddest damn discussion I've ever

00:55:53.720 | heard.

00:55:54.720 | - Was it something about biology, something about, was it COVID times, all that?

00:55:59.080 | - At some point, Brett said, "I'm an evolutionary biologist."

00:56:06.520 | And somebody else started saying, "You're a eugenicist."

00:56:09.920 | And he said, "No, I'm an evolutionary biologist."

00:56:11.920 | And somebody else was like, "That's the same thing."

00:56:15.120 | And it just went on like that.

00:56:16.520 | And Brett desperately tried to explain that's not the same thing as being a eugenicist,

00:56:21.720 | and he lost the clubhouse room.

00:56:24.160 | They thought that was the same thing.

00:56:25.840 | He'd come, it horribly reminded me of a time some years ago when a British newspaper ran

00:56:30.720 | a sort of, realizing that the only thing you can unite people on in sexual ethics is revulsion

00:56:36.160 | against pedophilia, ran an anti-pedo campaign.

00:56:40.320 | And shortly after, pediatricians' offices were torched in north of England by a mob

00:56:46.640 | who hadn't read the whole sign.

00:56:48.920 | - Yeah, well, to me, like I said, a little bit of poison is good for the town.

00:56:55.080 | - Anyhow, sorry, I interrupted you with flattering you with people in clubhouse.

00:56:58.720 | - I have many, I have multiples of friends, yes.

00:57:06.600 | We didn't get to some of the ideas of critical race theory.

00:57:10.320 | What exactly is it?

00:57:11.880 | I'm actually in part asking this question quite genuinely.

00:57:16.120 | It's an attempt to look at everything among other things through the lens of race, and

00:57:20.520 | to add race into things where it may not be as a way of adding, I'm trying to give the

00:57:27.160 | most generous estimation, to add race in as a conversation in a place where it may not

00:57:32.880 | have been in the conversation.

00:57:37.120 | - And that means history too?

00:57:38.720 | The history of racism?

00:57:40.720 | - Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:57:41.960 | All history.

00:57:43.560 | And to look at it through these particular lenses.

00:57:48.040 | I mean, there's a certain, like all these things, there's a certain logic in it, like

00:57:53.360 | with feminist studies or something.

00:57:55.000 | I mean, is there a utility in looking back through undoubtedly male-dominated histories

00:57:59.760 | and asking where the more silent female voice was?

00:58:04.120 | Yes, very interesting.

00:58:06.240 | Not endlessly interesting, and can't be put exactly on the same par as, but it has a utility.

00:58:16.800 | - It's that endlessly, sorry to interrupt, that endlessly part that seems to get us into

00:58:20.360 | trouble a lot.

00:58:21.360 | - Yes, absolutely.

00:58:22.360 | Well, because of this thing of where do you stop?

00:58:24.560 | And that's always, I talked about this in my last book in the Manners of Crowds, it's

00:58:32.600 | one of the big conundrums in activist movements and particularly in activist academia.

00:58:38.640 | Where would you stop?

00:58:39.640 | It's not clear because you've got a job in it, you've got a pension in it, you've got

00:58:46.480 | your only esteem in society is in keeping this gig going.

00:58:50.720 | I mean, is there any likelihood, have you ever, there's the old academic joke, isn't

00:58:58.040 | it, that the end of every conference, the only thing everyone agrees on is that we must

00:59:01.800 | have another conference like this one?

00:59:05.280 | So one thing they always agree on, this conference is so great, we must have another one.

00:59:09.760 | - Well, that's a criticism you could apply to a lot of disciplines.

00:59:12.240 | - Of course.

00:59:13.240 | - Civil engineering, bridge building, at a certain point, do we need any more bridges?

00:59:19.160 | Can we just fly everywhere?

00:59:20.800 | - Well, at the very least, you need to keep the bridges up.

00:59:25.600 | - Sure, and they would, critical race theory folks would probably make the same argument,

00:59:31.040 | at the very least, we need to keep the racism out.

00:59:33.600 | We have to make sure we don't descend into the racism.

00:59:37.760 | - It assumes all the time that we are living on the cusp of the return of the KKK, which

00:59:42.920 | is totally wrong.

00:59:43.920 | I mean, it's a massive-- - Well, you say that now until the KKK armies

00:59:48.840 | march in.

00:59:49.920 | We can't always predict the future.

00:59:52.580 | - We can't always predict the future, and you can always say you should be careful,

00:59:58.700 | but you've also got to be careful of people who've got their timing totally, totally wrong,

01:00:05.420 | or their estimation of society they're in.

01:00:07.020 | - You mean like most of society before in the 1930s, when Hitler was, I mean, so many

01:00:14.980 | people got Hitler wrong.

01:00:17.380 | - Sure they did.

01:00:18.380 | Most people.

01:00:20.620 | - Maybe it was nice to have the alarmist thinking there, beware of the man with the mustache.

01:00:28.460 | - If only it was that easy.

01:00:30.860 | - It's not always about facial hair.

01:00:33.100 | - I always say that, I mean, one-- - It very often is.

01:00:36.620 | - These two clean-shaven chaps both say.

01:00:39.420 | One of the problems of everybody knowing a little bit about Nazism is that they think

01:00:45.100 | that they know where evil comes from, and that it comes from like a German with a small

01:00:50.780 | mustache getting people to goose step, for instance, and that's not correct.

01:00:57.180 | A much better understanding of it is it can come from all number of directions and keep

01:01:03.580 | your antennae as good as you can, but once you end up in this society, which I would

01:01:09.940 | argue certainly parts of America in, where you're always in 1938, that's not healthy

01:01:15.900 | for a society either, where people are so primed and think they're so well-trained because

01:01:22.260 | they spent a term in school learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust, think

01:01:28.420 | they're so well-trained in Hitler spotting that they can do it all the time.

01:01:33.060 | Look at all these phrases we now have in our societies like dog whistle.

01:01:37.500 | As I always say, if you hear the whistle, you're the dog, but people say that's a dog

01:01:42.860 | whistle as if they're highly trained anti-Nazis.

01:01:47.540 | I mean, there should be some humility in it.

01:01:50.180 | We should be careful.

01:01:51.180 | We should be wary for sure, and we should also be slightly humble in our inability to

01:02:00.220 | spot everything.

01:02:01.220 | - If not significantly humble.

01:02:04.100 | Right.

01:02:05.140 | So if we can, there's something funny if not dark about the activity of Hitler spotting,

01:02:18.980 | if I just may take it aside.

01:02:22.540 | So critical race theory, how much racism, what is racism?

01:02:28.860 | How much of it is in our world today?

01:02:31.320 | If we're thinking about this activity of Hitler spotting, how, and trying to steel man the

01:02:38.880 | case of if not critical race theory, but people who look for racism in our world, how much

01:02:46.300 | would you say?

01:02:47.300 | - Well, it's a good thing to try to define.

01:02:50.100 | I would say that racism is the belief that other people are inferior to you.

01:02:58.120 | You could see a form of it where you thought people were superior to you.

01:03:02.580 | That could also happen, but more commonly is you see a group of people as being inferior

01:03:06.860 | to you simply by dint of the fact that they have a different racial background.

01:03:12.860 | And that's sort of the easiest way to define racism.

01:03:21.080 | As I say, I mean, there are types of racism, mainly anti-Semitism actually, perhaps it's

01:03:25.300 | the only one, which weirdly relies on a hatred of people who a certain type of person thinks

01:03:33.580 | are better than them.

01:03:35.860 | And that's a particular peculiarity, one of the peculiarities of anti-Semitism.

01:03:39.820 | - Well, anti-Semitism somehow does both, right?

01:03:42.860 | - Yes, well, one of the eternal fascinating things about anti-Semitism is it can do, it

01:03:48.020 | does everything at the same time.

01:03:50.060 | - It's like a quantum racism.

01:03:52.380 | - Yes.

01:03:53.380 | - You're both superior and inferior.

01:03:55.020 | - You know that, do you know Vassily Grossman's "Life and Fate"?

01:04:00.100 | So in the middle of "Life and Fate," which a Persian friend of mine always said was one

01:04:04.020 | of only two great novels of the 20th century, she was a very harsh literary critic.

01:04:07.580 | - What was the other one?

01:04:08.980 | - Oh, "The Leopard," obviously.

01:04:10.940 | - "The Leopard"?

01:04:11.940 | - "The Leopard," of Giuseppe de Lamperdusa, yeah.

01:04:14.980 | She's definitely right on that one.

01:04:17.060 | "Life and Fate" is--

01:04:18.060 | - I'm learning so much today, yes.

01:04:19.060 | - "Life and Fate" is an extraordinary book, mainly about, well, you know Grossman was

01:04:26.100 | obviously Jewish himself, but he saw almost everything that he could have done in the

01:04:35.620 | Second World War.

01:04:36.620 | He saw Stalingrad, he was a journalist, and he wrote firsthand accounts of Stalingrad.

01:04:42.300 | He was also the first journalist into Treblinka, and his account, which you can read in one

01:04:47.300 | of the collections of his journalism, his account of walking into Treblinka is just

01:04:51.580 | one of the most devastating, haunting pieces of journalism or prose you can read.

01:04:56.420 | Anyhow, I mention him because Grossman, in the middle of "Life and Fate," which is about

01:05:00.780 | a 900-page novel, in the middle of it, which is about the dark axis around Stalingrad,

01:05:11.860 | he way at one point, amazingly, he sort of goes into the minds of both Hitler and Stalin.

01:05:17.020 | He says Stalin, in his study, feels his counterpart in Berlin, and he says he feels very close

01:05:24.100 | to him at this moment.

01:05:26.500 | - Wow, around Stalingrad, like leading up to the battle.

01:05:29.940 | - After Stalingrad, when the Germans are lost, he says he feels the closeness of Hitler.

01:05:35.380 | But Grossman, in the middle of "Life and Fate," slap bang at the worst hours of the 20th century,

01:05:42.060 | suddenly dedicates a chapter to antisemitism.

01:05:47.580 | And antisemitism is something I've always been very interested in, because I've always

01:05:51.980 | had the instinctive utter revulsion of it, and also partly because of having seen bits

01:06:00.020 | of it in the Middle East and elsewhere.

01:06:02.900 | But I mention this because Grossman, in the middle of "Life and Fate," takes time out

01:06:08.060 | and does this three-page description of antisemitism, and it's extraordinary.

01:06:15.140 | The only thing I can think of that's equally good is Gregor von Redsor, who wrote a luridly

01:06:26.460 | titled but brilliant set of novellas called "The Confessions of an Antisemite," about

01:06:33.940 | pre-First World War antisemitism in Eastern and Central Europe.

01:06:37.340 | Grossman says, in the middle of "Life and Fate," that one of the extraordinary things

01:06:43.940 | about antisemitism is that it does everything at the same time.

01:06:47.420 | The Jews get condemned in one place for being rich and in another for being poor, condemned

01:06:52.760 | in one place for assimilating and in another for not assimilating, for assimilating too

01:06:59.460 | much and assimilating too little, for being too successful, for not being successful enough.

01:07:05.620 | So I think it's the only racism that includes within it a detestation, for the real antisemite,

01:07:14.460 | a detestation of people that the person may perceive to be better than them, correctly

01:07:20.380 | or otherwise.

01:07:21.460 | - By the way, I'm embarrassed to say I have not read this one of two greatest novels of

01:07:26.660 | the 20th century, "Life and Fate," "The Zhizni Sedba."

01:07:29.740 | And just to read off of Wikipedia, "Vasily Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew, became a correspondent

01:07:33.860 | for the Soviet military paper, Krasna Zvezda.

01:07:37.420 | Having volunteered and been rejected for military service, he spent a thousand days on the front

01:07:42.380 | lines, roughly three of the four years of the conflict between the Germans and the Soviets.

01:07:48.220 | And the main themes covered in," how's it go, "Life and Fate," I keep thinking, "Zhizni

01:07:54.780 | Sedba," is a theme on Jewish identity and the Holocaust, Grossman's idea of humanity

01:07:59.860 | and the human goodness, Stalin's distortion of reality and values, and science that goes

01:08:06.180 | on in reality of war.

01:08:08.140 | It's interesting, I need to definitely read it.

01:08:10.740 | - I think you'll really get a lot from it.

01:08:13.380 | One of the other things, sorry, but one of the other things he does is he has this extraordinary

01:08:17.420 | ability to talk about the absolute highest levels of the conflict and then zoom in.

01:08:23.660 | It's rather like the camera work they use in things like "Lord of the Rings," where

01:08:27.340 | he zooms down and then gets one person in the midst of all this, and you get on that.

01:08:32.980 | - Or put you in the study, too.

01:08:34.260 | So I personally have read and reread the William Shires' "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,"

01:08:39.540 | who's another journalist who was there, but he does not do it.

01:08:46.060 | Interestingly enough, given such a large novel, kind of the definitive original work that

01:08:52.480 | goes to source materials on Hitler, he doesn't touch anti-Semitism really.

01:08:59.300 | - Big thing to miss out.

01:09:02.700 | - Well, he just says it very calmly and objectively as he does for most of the work, that this

01:09:08.620 | was the fact of life.

01:09:12.380 | There's a lot of cruelty throughout, but he doesn't get to--

01:09:14.820 | - Well, one of the things is, of course, he lost the war because of anti-Semitism.

01:09:20.140 | One kind of important way to view it, as Andrew Roberts and other historians say, is that

01:09:24.820 | in the end, the Nazis lost the war because they were Nazis.

01:09:29.740 | It sounds almost too neat, but it's worth remembering that at the end of the war, when

01:09:35.820 | the Germans need to be transporting troops and they need to be transporting very basic

01:09:41.460 | supplies, Eichmann makes sure he gets the trains to transport the Jews right up to the

01:09:48.140 | end.

01:09:49.140 | - Well, that's certainly a dark possibility.

01:09:51.540 | - Anyhow, but to go back to racism in general, racism in general, apart from anti-Semitism,

01:09:58.260 | relies on the perception that another group of people, a racial group, other than your

01:10:06.020 | own are inferior to you.

01:10:08.340 | That's what I'd say is the easiest shorthand of racism.

01:10:11.380 | Of course, it's one of the stupidest things that our species is capable of.

01:10:18.340 | One of the stupidest that you can look at a person and guess them in their entirety,

01:10:25.620 | in fact, because of their skin color.

01:10:28.140 | I mean, it's like, what a stupid idea that is, as well as being an evil one.

01:10:32.980 | But I would say that one of the, I think it's a dangerous thing in our era that there are

01:10:41.940 | bits of it coming back.

01:10:43.140 | That's why I say we do need sort of, we need our antennae working.

01:10:48.620 | We just don't need them to be overactive or underactive.

01:10:53.340 | - Now the book is "War in the West," but speaking of racism, racism towards different groups

01:11:00.140 | based on their skin color, you've said that there's a war on white people in the US.

01:11:05.460 | Would you say that's the case?

01:11:06.740 | Would you say that there is significant racism towards white people in the United States?

01:11:13.420 | - I'd say that white people in the United States are the only people who are told that

01:11:16.620 | they have hereditary sin.

01:11:20.460 | That's a big one just to start with.

01:11:22.700 | - Based strictly on their skin color.

01:11:23.700 | - Based on their skin color.

01:11:24.700 | I mean, I would find it so repugnant if, and I hope everybody would join me in feeling

01:11:31.460 | this, I would feel it's so repugnant if there were any school of thought in America today

01:11:35.980 | that had any grasp on the public attention that said that black people were born into

01:11:46.020 | evil because of something their ancestors had done.

01:11:49.100 | Like they had the mark of Cain upon them.

01:11:52.460 | I mean, I think it would be such a vicious way to try to demoralize a group of people

01:12:02.060 | and to tell them that the things they would be able to achieve in their lives are much

01:12:06.880 | lessened because they should spend significant portions of their lives trying to atone for

01:12:11.740 | something they didn't do.

01:12:13.680 | - Is there a difference?

01:12:16.580 | - And the point, the obvious point, left unsaid, but I'll say it.

01:12:21.900 | Nobody in the public square says that.

01:12:25.820 | I mean, they're the maniacs of the far fringes, but nobody in the mainstream would dare to

01:12:31.660 | say that, or I think even think that about any group of people other than white people.

01:12:36.900 | And does this mean that white people are more disadvantaged than black people?

01:12:42.340 | No.

01:12:43.340 | And again, let's not make this a competition, but let's not get into, I just desperately

01:12:48.020 | urge people not to get into the idea of hereditary sin according to racial background.

01:12:54.140 | - Is there something to be said about the feature aspect, to sort of play devil's advocate,

01:12:59.620 | about the asymmetry of sort of accusations towards the majority?

01:13:06.460 | - Yes, of course.

01:13:07.460 | - Because white-- - It's much easier to attack a majority.

01:13:09.420 | - It is much easier, but is there something to be said about that being a useful function

01:13:12.860 | of society that you always attack, that the minority has disproportionate power to attack

01:13:20.980 | the majority so that you can always keep the majority in check?

01:13:25.020 | - Well, it's a dangerous game to play, isn't it?

01:13:28.180 | - I think-- - It's a very dangerous game to play.

01:13:30.620 | - That's a good summary of entirety of human civilization.

01:13:32.940 | - Oh yeah, everything's dangerous.

01:13:35.900 | But it's a very dangerous game to play that.

01:13:37.740 | I wrote about this a bit in "The Madness of Crowds" when I was saying to gay rights people,

01:13:43.140 | the ones that still exist, the ones who don't have homes to go to, who want to beat up on

01:13:49.460 | straight people in a way, or want to make straight people feel like they're kind of

01:13:55.340 | unremarkable, uncool, boring straights.

01:13:59.580 | So boring.

01:14:01.500 | So, not like the magical pixie fairy dust gays.

01:14:08.140 | That's a bad idea to push that one.

01:14:10.980 | That's a bad idea.

01:14:11.980 | And some gays push that.

01:14:15.780 | Very unwise, given the fact that about 2-3% of the population are actually gay, although

01:14:21.500 | now there's like an additional 20% who think they're like two-spirit or something, and

01:14:26.660 | all that bullshit.

01:14:27.660 | But they're just attention seekers, so let's not spend too much time on that.

01:14:34.380 | But equally, as I've said in "The Madness of Crowds" with the feminist movement, very

01:14:40.980 | unwise for half of the species to say that the other half of the species isn't needed.

01:14:47.340 | And there were always third and fourth wave feminists willing to make that nuts argument.

01:14:54.100 | Not first wave feminists, you didn't hear it in first wave feminists, you didn't hear

01:14:56.380 | it, suffragettes tended not to say, "We'd like the vote."

01:15:00.420 | And men, a scum, it would have been hard to have won everyone over to their side, not

01:15:06.700 | least the men they needed to win over to their side.

01:15:09.400 | But you do get third and fourth wave feminists who say, "Do we need men?"

01:15:14.320 | Or "Men are all X."

01:15:15.440 | Again, it's a bad idea.

01:15:16.840 | It's a bad idea tactically.

01:15:19.920 | - What if men, Richard Wrangham, somebody from Harvard, describes that men are the originators

01:15:28.880 | of violence, physical violence in society.

01:15:31.800 | And he argues that actually the world would be better off.

01:15:34.880 | - No, just a very cold calculus.

01:15:38.720 | If you get rid of men, there would be a lot less violence in society is his claim.

01:15:44.160 | - But who says you need to get rid of violence in society?

01:15:47.720 | - But shouldn't that at least be a discussion?

01:15:49.400 | - I'm very happy with the discussion.

01:15:51.760 | - Have a debate, a panel discussion, violence, pros and cons.

01:15:55.760 | - Well that's the sort of thing, if I can say so, that some weak ass academic decides

01:15:59.440 | to do because he thinks that his area of Boston would be nicer or whatever.

01:16:06.480 | He might decide it's useful if he was living in Kiev today to have violent men.

01:16:13.840 | I mean, it might, if New York was invaded right now, I'd need some violent men around

01:16:20.000 | here.

01:16:21.000 | - But it wouldn't be invaded if there's no violent men.

01:16:25.920 | - Well that's- - There's the argument.

01:16:27.960 | - There's also, at least there's some level of threat that you ought to exude that puts

01:16:34.000 | people off.

01:16:35.780 | If I was in, you know, I'm very glad that the men and women of Ukraine are capable of,

01:16:42.760 | and more than capable of, fighting for their country and for their neighbors and their

01:16:48.680 | families and much more.

01:16:50.080 | But it's better that, that there was violence ready to unleash when violence was unleashed

01:16:56.160 | upon them than that the whole society had been told that they should identify as non-binary.

01:17:03.360 | - But at least it's a conversation to have, isn't there, isn't there aspect to the sort

01:17:10.600 | of the feminist movement that is correct in challenging the-

01:17:17.200 | - Some forms of violence, domestic violence for instance, although women are capable of

01:17:21.080 | that as well.

01:17:23.000 | - I'm learning about this.

01:17:24.440 | We're all learning about this at the moment.

01:17:26.800 | - I can't help but watch the entirety of it go down in this beautiful mess that is human

01:17:30.880 | relations.

01:17:31.880 | Okay.

01:17:32.880 | - But just to finish up that thought, it's very unwise for women to war against men,

01:17:39.400 | as it would be for men to war against women.

01:17:41.400 | It's highly, highly unwise to war on a majority population.

01:17:45.440 | And in America, Britain and other Western countries, white people are still a majority.

01:17:49.920 | And so why would you tell the majority that they're evil by dint of their skin color and

01:17:55.360 | think that that would be a good way to keep them in check?

01:17:59.120 | I mean, I'm not guilty of anything because of my skin color.

01:18:01.720 | I'm not guilty of anything.

01:18:03.440 | My ancestors didn't do anything wrong.

01:18:05.980 | And even if they had, why would I be held responsible for it?

01:18:10.120 | - So to go back to Nietzsche, is there some aspect to where if we try to explain the forces

01:18:17.080 | at play here, is it the will to power playing itself out from individual human nature and

01:18:24.040 | from group behavior nature?

01:18:28.400 | Is there some elements to this, which is the game we play as human beings is always when

01:18:33.720 | we have less power, we try to find ways to gain more power?

01:18:37.240 | - That's certainly one.

01:18:39.400 | The desire to grab is, let me see if I can find a quote for you on that.

01:18:46.000 | The desire to grab that which we think we're owed and to do it often in the guise of justice.

01:18:56.840 | I mean, justice is one of the great terms of our age and one of the very great bogus

01:19:01.940 | terms of our age.

01:19:04.040 | People forever talk about their search for justice.

01:19:06.240 | It's amazing how violent they can often be in their search for justice and how many rules

01:19:10.960 | they're willing to break so long as they can say they're after justice and how many norms

01:19:15.240 | they can trample so long as they can say it's in the name of justice.

01:19:18.600 | You can burn down buildings in the name of justice.

01:19:22.000 | - The majority groups throughout history, including those with white skin color, have

01:19:26.200 | done the same in the name of justice.

01:19:28.440 | We come up with all kinds of sexy terms in our propaganda machines to sell whatever atrocities

01:19:34.440 | we'd like to commit.

01:19:36.800 | - One of the quotes from Nietzsche that I liked, and I quoted in this.

01:19:41.280 | - Careful, I'm judging you harshly.

01:19:43.240 | - Of course.

01:19:44.240 | Nietzsche says that one of the dangers of men of resentment is they'll achieve their

01:19:50.800 | ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves,

01:19:57.400 | to shove their misery in the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy, and

01:20:01.480 | this is quoting Nietzsche, "start to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say to one

01:20:06.200 | another it's a disgrace to be happy.

01:20:08.960 | There is too much misery."

01:20:11.000 | This is something to be averted.

01:20:12.000 | "For the sick," says Nietzsche, "must not make the healthy sick too, or make the healthy

01:20:16.920 | confuse themselves with the sick."

01:20:20.240 | Well, I think that again, there's a lot of that going on.

01:20:24.260 | How could I be happy when there is unhappiness in the world?

01:20:27.240 | Why should I not join the ranks of the unhappy?

01:20:31.120 | - I think Dostoevsky has a book about that as well.

01:20:33.960 | - Sure.

01:20:34.960 | - "Nos from Underground."

01:20:35.960 | Okay.

01:20:36.960 | This has been very Russian, Russian focused.

01:20:41.640 | I'm very pleased with the number of times both Dostoevsky and Grossman and others have

01:20:45.240 | come in.

01:20:46.240 | I wasn't doing this as a sort of...

01:20:48.840 | - Yeah, well, it's always good to plug the greats and get to know they're still relevant.

01:20:57.160 | Do you speak Russian, by the way, at all?

01:20:59.920 | - Which I did.

01:21:00.920 | I'm told it's a 10-year language, basically, to learn from scratch, as my friends who have

01:21:05.520 | done it.

01:21:06.520 | - Well, there's the language and then there's the personality behind the language and the

01:21:10.640 | personality I feel like you already have.

01:21:13.000 | So you just need to know the surface details.

01:21:15.800 | Okay.

01:21:18.440 | In fact, the silence, to be silent in the Russian language is something that's already

01:21:24.200 | important.

01:21:25.200 | - If we had a moment, I'd tell you my story about Stalin's birthplace.

01:21:27.680 | Should I tell you that?

01:21:28.680 | - No.

01:21:29.680 | - I once went to Gori, where Stalin was born.

01:21:31.720 | Have you been?

01:21:32.720 | - No.

01:21:33.720 | - I was there just after the Georgia War.

01:21:37.600 | And I went to the no man's land in south of Setya and Abkhazia.

01:21:43.080 | And I said, "I've really got to go to Gori or somewhere," because a shell had landed

01:21:48.280 | in Gori, rather weirdly, from the Russian side.

01:21:50.800 | And Gori is where Stalin was born.

01:21:53.640 | And of course, Gori's in Georgia.

01:21:55.920 | And anyhow, the museum of Stalin's birthplace, they'd been trying to change for some years

01:22:01.600 | because it had been unadulteratedly pro-Stalin for years.

01:22:06.760 | And the Georgian authorities, this is in Chekhovili's time, were trying to make it into a museum

01:22:13.360 | of Stalinism.

01:22:14.360 | And it was really tough.

01:22:17.560 | The only place I've seen which is similar is the house in Mexico City where Trotsky

01:22:21.360 | was killed.

01:22:23.280 | That also is like they're not quite sure what to do.

01:22:26.520 | They don't want to say he's a bad guy because they think that people won't come anyhow.

01:22:31.280 | Stalin's house in Gori had changed from a museum of Stalinism to a museum of Stalinism.

01:22:34.240 | There was this large Georgian woman with a pink pencil who had clearly been doing the

01:22:38.440 | tour for 50 years.

01:22:41.040 | And just pointed all the facts.

01:22:42.040 | She did that classic thing I've also saw once in North Korea, that sort of communist thing

01:22:47.680 | where they say, "This is 147 feet high by 13 feet deep."

01:22:52.880 | It gives you lots of facts.

01:22:53.880 | I don't care.

01:22:54.880 | Why does it matter?

01:22:55.880 | It will give you facts.

01:22:58.880 | This is Stalin's suitcase.

01:23:00.240 | It is 13 inches wide by, you know, this.

01:23:04.960 | Anyhow, this woman did all of this and it was all just wildly pro, not pro Stalin, just

01:23:09.720 | explained Stalin's life.

01:23:10.720 | It was just a great local boy done good.

01:23:13.840 | They didn't mention the fact he killed more Georgians per capita than anyone else.

01:23:19.200 | And we get to the end and before being taken to the gift shop where they sell red wine

01:23:24.420 | with Stalin's face on it, among other things, and a lighter with Stalin on it, they took

01:23:33.800 | you to a little room under the stairs and they said, "This is a replica of interrogation

01:23:38.520 | cell to represent horror of what happened in Stalin time.

01:23:44.520 | Now gift shop."

01:23:45.520 | And I took the woman aside at the end.

01:23:50.720 | I scourged her.

01:23:51.720 | She'd said this to other journalists who had visited before.

01:23:53.720 | I took her aside and I said, "What do you think about comrade Stalin?"

01:23:58.000 | And she said, let's say she'd obviously done this during communist times.

01:24:03.820 | She said, "It's not my place to judge," that sort of thing, which is an interesting comment

01:24:10.200 | in itself.

01:24:11.200 | I said, "Yeah, but he killed more Georgians than anyone," and all that sort of thing.

01:24:15.320 | She said, "It's not my place to judge or to give my views," and that sort of thing.

01:24:19.280 | And eventually I said, "Well, what do you feel about it?"

01:24:22.680 | And she said, "It was like a hurricane.

01:24:26.720 | It happened."

01:24:27.720 | - That's interesting because if I may mention Clubhouse once again, I got a chance to talk

01:24:34.940 | to a few people from Mongolia.

01:24:36.880 | There's a woman from Mongolia and they talked about the fact that they deeply admire Stalin.

01:24:44.040 | She sounded, if I may, hopefully that's not crossing the line.

01:24:46.960 | I think I'm representing her correctly in saying she admired him almost like loved him,

01:24:55.120 | like the way people love Jesus, like a holy figure.

01:25:00.040 | - But isn't that still the case in large parts of Russia?

01:25:03.800 | Stalin keeps on winning greatest Russian of all time.

01:25:08.080 | - And that's perhaps, maybe there's a dip, but if we were to think about the long arc

01:25:12.320 | of history, perhaps that's going to go up and up and up and up.

01:25:15.840 | There's something about human memory that you forget the details of the atrocities of

01:25:21.640 | the past and remember the--

01:25:22.720 | - I mean, think of the number of people we talk about as historical heroes.

01:25:26.520 | Napoleon.

01:25:27.520 | I mean, British people don't talk about Napoleon as a hero, but the French.

01:25:34.680 | - You didn't think that Dostoyevsky, now again--

01:25:36.760 | - Now you're on tricky ground.

01:25:38.240 | But the French are enormously admired of Napoleon and they had many admirable aspects of him.

01:25:44.320 | He was also an unbelievable brute and killed many people unnecessarily.

01:25:49.800 | And there are lots of figures from history that we sort of cover that over with.

01:25:55.360 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:25:58.680 | Can we mention Churchill briefly?

01:26:00.640 | Because he is one of the, you could make a case for him being one of the great representers

01:26:08.600 | or great figures historically of Western civilization.

01:26:12.440 | And then there's a lot of people from, not a lot.

01:26:17.160 | I have like three friends and one of them happens to be from London and they say that

01:26:22.520 | he's not a good person.

01:26:26.520 | - Why?

01:26:27.560 | - So listen, this friend, we did not discuss, this is an opinion poll of the three friends,

01:26:33.320 | but I do know that there's quite a bit--

01:26:35.480 | - There's a backcash going on at the moment.

01:26:37.280 | - At the moment and in general, there's a spirit like reflecting on the darker sides

01:26:42.280 | of some of these historical figures, like challenging history through, it's not just

01:26:47.360 | critical race theory, it's challenging history through, well, are the people we think of

01:26:56.360 | as heroes, what are their flaws?

01:26:59.480 | And are they in fact villains that are convenient?

01:27:05.280 | Sort of were there at the right time to accidentally do the right thing?

01:27:12.880 | - Accidentally?

01:27:15.200 | I hope this isn't the representative fair summation of your friend in London's views.

01:27:21.280 | - No, she's going to be quite mad at this, but I didn't say the name, so it could be

01:27:25.520 | any friend.

01:27:26.520 | It could be--

01:27:27.520 | - But we know it's a she.

01:27:28.520 | - It's my girlfriend from Canada.

01:27:29.520 | Well, see, I--

01:27:30.520 | - You've given that away.

01:27:31.520 | - Well, that's, of course, I would not, I made that up completely.

01:27:36.600 | It's all, just like my girlfriend in Canada, she's completely a figment of my imagination.

01:27:42.200 | Nevertheless, Winston Churchill is somebody, I mean, just looking at, reading the rise

01:27:48.360 | and fall of the Third Reich is an incredible figure that to me, so much of World War II

01:27:57.060 | is marked, leading up to the war is marked by stunning amounts of cowardice by political

01:28:02.560 | leaders and it's fascinating to watch here this person clearly with the drinking and

01:28:09.840 | a smoking problem.

01:28:10.840 | - What was it?

01:28:11.840 | I don't understand why that's a negative.

01:28:13.840 | - No, I didn't say, you see--

01:28:15.680 | - Yeah, you throw it in as if it is.

01:28:17.760 | - No, well, it's called humor.

01:28:19.720 | I'll explain it to you one day what that means.

01:28:21.600 | But he stood--

01:28:22.600 | - I'll explain dry humor.

01:28:25.340 | - He stood up.

01:28:27.040 | He stood up to what we now see as evil when at the time it was not so obvious to see.

01:28:35.640 | So, that's just a fascinating figure of Western civilization.

01:28:40.800 | I'd love to get your comments.

01:28:42.320 | - The real criticisms, I mean, smoking and drinking.

01:28:45.480 | The real criticisms of Churchill are quite easy to sum up and I do so in the War on the

01:28:50.200 | West, actually.

01:28:51.200 | I say these are the things that they now use against him.

01:28:54.280 | You do enough to avert the Bengal famine in 1943, for instance.

01:28:57.760 | That's been shot down by numerous historians, including Indian historians.

01:29:01.720 | In the middle of a world war, Churchill did what he could to get grain supplies diverted

01:29:08.080 | from Australia to Bengal.

01:29:12.600 | The famine was appalling.

01:29:13.920 | It was caused by a typhoon.

01:29:14.920 | It was not caused by Winston Churchill.

01:29:18.040 | And the idea that some, basically Indian nationalist historians have pumped out in recent years

01:29:25.320 | and just anti-Churchill figures that he actually wanted Indians to die is just total calumny.

01:29:34.440 | And when people claim, some people claim that, I mean, there was a few very ignorant scholars,

01:29:39.080 | nevertheless with some credentials, who claim that Churchill wanted the Indian population

01:29:44.840 | to basically be genocided.

01:29:47.360 | And it's complete nonsense, not least by the fact that during the period which in question

01:29:52.640 | the Indian population boomed.

01:29:56.320 | So that's one of the main ones.

01:29:59.940 | Another one is that he had some views that we now regard as racist.

01:30:03.480 | He definitely regarded races as being of different characters and that there were superior races

01:30:10.160 | and as it were, the white European was a superior culture.

01:30:19.560 | He was born in Victorian England, so he has some Victorian attitudes.

01:30:26.440 | These are things in the negative side of the ledger and as with all history, you should

01:30:29.920 | have a negative and a positive side of the ledger.

01:30:32.240 | Positive side of the ledger includes he almost certainly did more than any one human being

01:30:35.160 | to save the world from Nazism.

01:30:37.360 | So that should count as something.

01:30:39.040 | And one of the reasons I talk about Churchill in this regard is to stress that if you get,

01:30:46.080 | I'm not trying to stop anyone doing history at all.

01:30:49.560 | I don't think the revisionism of recent years about Churchill or the founding fathers of

01:30:53.480 | America or anyone else is anything I want to stop.

01:30:56.920 | I find it interesting, I find it interesting not least because it's so sloppy on occasions,

01:31:00.320 | but I find it interesting and it's important.

01:31:02.360 | And we should be able to see people in the round.

01:31:05.080 | But that includes recognizing the positive side of the ledger.

01:31:10.720 | And if you can't recognize that side, you're doing something else.

01:31:15.480 | You're doing something else.

01:31:17.040 | It's not history.

01:31:18.840 | It's some form of politicking of a very particular kind.

01:31:23.560 | And I think it's the same thing with the founding fathers.

01:31:26.200 | There are some people for instance, certainly since the 90s who have pushed the Sally Hemings,

01:31:31.120 | Thomas Jefferson story to show that Thomas Jefferson was some kind of brute.

01:31:35.680 | As a result, we see Jefferson's statue being removed from the council chamber in the city

01:31:41.480 | we're sitting in last November by council members who said that Thomas Jefferson no

01:31:45.720 | longer represents our values.

01:31:47.640 | If you can't recognize greatness of Thomas Jefferson and that he had flaws, I mean, that's

01:31:56.600 | not a grown up debate.

01:31:58.680 | And weigh them and weigh them in the context of the time.

01:32:01.600 | But let me sort of throw a curveball at you then.

01:32:06.320 | What about recognizing the positive and the negative of a fellow with nice facial hair

01:32:10.960 | called Karl Marx?

01:32:12.560 | - Sure, sure.

01:32:14.400 | I mean, I have a section in the "War in the West" as you know, where I go for Karl Marx

01:32:19.240 | with some glee.

01:32:22.520 | So he seems to have gotten some popularity in the West recently.

01:32:29.400 | - Not just recently, yeah.

01:32:30.400 | I mean, he's had a resurgence recently.

01:32:32.800 | - Yes, resurgence.

01:32:33.800 | - Well, that's because whenever things are seen to go wrong, people reach for other options.

01:32:41.120 | And when for instance, it's very hard for people to accumulate capital, it's not obvious

01:32:44.200 | that they're gonna become capitalists.

01:32:46.960 | And so one thing that happens is people say, let's look at the Marxism thing again, see

01:32:50.760 | if that's a viable goer.

01:32:52.960 | And my argument would simply be, point me to one place that's worked.

01:32:58.040 | - Well, the argument from the Marxist or the Marxian economists is that we've only really

01:33:06.240 | tried it once, the Soviets tried it.

01:33:08.640 | And then if there's a few people that kind of tried the Soviet thing.

01:33:12.240 | - Cuba tried it?

01:33:13.880 | - Well, they basically, it's an offshoot of the Soviet.

01:33:16.760 | - Sure, they tried it.

01:33:18.320 | - Yes, they've tried it.

01:33:19.320 | - They tried it in Venezuela.

01:33:21.320 | - Yes, yes, yes.

01:33:23.560 | - So let's just quickly say, how did all these experiments go?

01:33:27.640 | - They did not, well, they failed in fascinating ways.

01:33:31.280 | - They did, but they failed.

01:33:32.280 | - Yes, they failed.

01:33:33.280 | - And we should stress, so grossly failed.

01:33:37.040 | So grossly failed that they threw millions and millions of people into completely thwarted

01:33:42.940 | lives that were much shorter than they should have been.

01:33:46.720 | - Yeah, so the lesson to learn there, you can learn several lessons.

01:33:52.480 | One is that anything that smells like Marxism is going to lead to a lot of problems.

01:34:00.000 | Now another lesson could be, well, what is the fundamental idea that Marx had?

01:34:06.240 | He was criticizing capitalism and the flaws of capitalism.

01:34:10.520 | So is it possible to do better than capitalism?

01:34:13.600 | And that's, if you take that spirit, you start to wonder.

01:34:16.960 | That might actually become relevant in, I don't know, 20, 30, 50 years when the machines

01:34:24.200 | start doing more and more of the labor, all those kinds of things, you start to ask questions.

01:34:27.760 | - You finally might get to Marx's dream of what the average day would look like.

01:34:31.920 | - Yes.

01:34:32.920 | - Well, there's gonna be an awful lot of literary criticism then.

01:34:36.560 | If you remember, that's what Marx said that we would be doing in the evening, the laborer

01:34:41.720 | in the evening.

01:34:42.720 | - He didn't know Twitter was a thing or Netflix, so he would change.

01:34:47.800 | - Are there things we could learn from Marx, plausibly, possibly?

01:34:51.160 | I can't think of anything myself offhand.

01:34:54.000 | But to have a critique of capitalism isn't by any means a bad thing in this society.

01:34:59.040 | I'd rather that it was a critique of capitalism that showed how you improve capitalism, a

01:35:03.320 | critique of free market that showed how people could get better access to the free market,

01:35:07.400 | how you could ensure, for instance, that young people get onto the property ladder, things

01:35:10.880 | like that.

01:35:11.880 | Those are constructive things.

01:35:13.160 | The people who say we must have Marxism, I mean, don't know what the hell they're talking

01:35:16.480 | about because that never leads to any of those things.

01:35:20.120 | - Haven't learned in the past.

01:35:22.080 | - It's never learned in the past.

01:35:23.200 | And at some point, you've got to try to work out how many attempts you make at this damn

01:35:29.240 | philosophy before you realize that every attempt always leads to the same thing.

01:35:34.800 | We could pretend that fascism has never been properly tried and that it was unfortunate

01:35:41.240 | what happened in Nazi Germany, but that wasn't real fascism.

01:35:46.040 | And in Mussolini's fascism, it didn't go all that well, but it was a bit better.

01:35:51.360 | And maybe we could try a bit more Franco fascism.

01:35:54.880 | Nobody would have any time for this crap, nor should they.

01:35:58.720 | The people who try that are reviled and quite rightly.

01:36:02.240 | So why do we tolerate it with the Marxism thing?

01:36:04.840 | And it's a great mystery to me the way that people do tolerate it.

01:36:08.840 | Always, always in this stupid way of saying we haven't done it yet.

01:36:14.000 | If you keep trying the same recipe and every time it comes out as shit, it's that the recipe

01:36:20.120 | is shit.

01:36:21.120 | - Well, sort of, I'm trying to practice here by playing devil's advocate practice, the

01:36:24.920 | same idea that you mentioned, which is when you say the word Marxism, should you throw

01:36:29.960 | out everything or should you ask a question?

01:36:32.400 | Is there a good ideas here?

01:36:34.720 | And the same, it's weighing the good and the bad and being able to do so calmly and thoughtfully.

01:36:40.640 | - Sure.

01:36:41.640 | Do you know the famous George Orwell comment on the Stalinist?

01:36:46.360 | Do you know?

01:36:47.360 | - No.

01:36:48.360 | - That's one of my favorite quotes.

01:36:51.360 | George Orwell in the early '40s gets into an argument with a Stalinist, who's obviously

01:36:57.680 | a Marxist.

01:36:59.000 | And this is after the show trial, it's '37.

01:37:04.080 | This is when it's very clear what Marxism in the Russian form is.

01:37:11.360 | And Orwell is in the discussion with this Marxist and it goes on and on.

01:37:16.800 | And eventually Orwell says, well, what about the show trials and what about what's happened

01:37:22.240 | in Ukraine and the famines and much more and the purges and the purges and the purges.

01:37:29.240 | And eventually the Stalinist says to Orwell, what Orwell knows he's going to say all along,

01:37:35.560 | which is he says, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

01:37:40.320 | And Orwell says, where's the omelet?

01:37:43.640 | - Oh yeah, that's a good, that's a really good.

01:37:49.320 | - Look at this by this stage, okay?

01:37:52.680 | How many- - Where's my damn omelet?

01:37:54.680 | - How many just messy, big, bloody, eggy piles have the Marxists created by now in country

01:38:02.800 | after country?

01:38:05.440 | Always next time they're going to produce the great omelet, but they never have and

01:38:10.280 | they never will because the whole thing is rotten from the start.

01:38:14.760 | But let me just also say one thing about, because of course Marx isn't as nice as he

01:38:19.320 | sounds.

01:38:20.720 | And that's one of the things that I try to highlight in the book is if we're going to

01:38:24.760 | do this reductive thing of people in history and saying, well, they had views that were

01:38:28.040 | of their time and we must therefore condemn them for them.

01:38:32.080 | So fine, let's do the same thing with Marx.

01:38:34.400 | And there were things I quote in this book from Marxist letters, not least letters to

01:38:37.360 | Engels and indeed in his published writings, he was writing for the American press in the

01:38:44.320 | 50s, the way he has horrible views on slavery and colonialism and much more.

01:38:54.000 | But the main thing is, I mean, the horrible things he says about black people and the

01:38:57.800 | constant use of the N word.

01:38:59.480 | In fact, when I was doing the audio book for the "Wall of West," I had to decide, will

01:39:03.520 | I read out the quotes from Marx or not?

01:39:05.800 | If I had read them out, I'd have been canceled because people would have just said, you've

01:39:11.640 | been using the N word so much in this passage.

01:39:15.720 | And I slightly thought of doing it so that I could say I was only quoting Marx to try

01:39:20.880 | to hit the point home.

01:39:22.040 | In the end, of course, I was sensible and decided not to.

01:39:24.320 | But Marxist letters are disgusting on these terms.

01:39:27.760 | Since I highlighted this in this book and some of the media picked it up and have popularized

01:39:35.400 | this thing I'm trying to put into the system, which is if you're going to accuse Churchill

01:39:38.840 | of racism, if you're going to accuse Jefferson of racism, Washington of racism, and so on,

01:39:43.400 | what about Marx?

01:39:44.400 | The two things that Marxists have said since this came out has been, first of all, why

01:39:48.120 | are you saying this about Marx?

01:39:49.480 | He was a man of his time, like everyone else.

01:39:54.400 | And the second thing they say is, we don't go to Marx for his horrible, abhorrent views

01:39:58.260 | on race.

01:39:59.260 | They're talking about mixed race people as guerrillas and so on.

01:40:03.000 | We don't go to him for that.

01:40:04.360 | We go to him for his economic theories.

01:40:06.240 | I say, okay, well, we don't go to Thomas Jefferson for his views on slaves.

01:40:13.840 | We don't go to Churchill for the precise language he used at points in the 1910s about Indians.

01:40:21.560 | Or his health advice.

01:40:22.920 | Or his health advice.

01:40:23.920 | Actually, I do go to him for that.

01:40:27.120 | But-

01:40:28.120 | That explains so much.

01:40:29.120 | But let's have some standards on this.

01:40:31.900 | And that's why I'm very suspicious of the fact that the people don't do this with Marx,

01:40:36.120 | because I think what some people are trying to do, and this may sound conspiratorial,

01:40:39.760 | but I really don't think it is.

01:40:41.440 | I think that some people are deliberately trying to completely clear the cultural landscape

01:40:45.960 | of our past in order to say there's nothing good, nothing you can hold on to, no one you

01:40:51.700 | should revere.

01:40:52.700 | You've got no heroes.

01:40:53.880 | The whole thing comes down.

01:40:55.400 | Who's left standing?

01:40:56.400 | Oh, we've also got this idea from the 20th century still about Marxism.

01:40:59.600 | Or the 19th and 20th centuries.

01:41:02.840 | And no.

01:41:03.840 | No.

01:41:04.840 | You will not have the entire landscape deracinated.

01:41:09.880 | And then the worst ideas tried again.

01:41:13.160 | So basically destroy all of history and the lessons learned from history and then start

01:41:17.200 | from scratch and then it's completely any idea can work and then you can just take whatever.

01:41:22.320 | Well, and the thing is there are always some people with pre-prepared ideas.

01:41:26.040 | And I mentioned this also with the post-colonialists.

01:41:27.960 | The post-colonialists were really interesting.

01:41:30.760 | Because when the European powers were moving from Africa and the Far East, post-colonial

01:41:36.440 | movements had one obvious move they could have done, which was to say since the European

01:41:42.280 | powers have left, we will return to a pre-colonial life.

01:41:46.560 | Which in some of their places would have been returning to slave markets and slave ownership

01:41:50.560 | and slave selling and much more.

01:41:52.160 | But put that aside for a second.

01:41:54.400 | They could have said we have an indigenous culture which we will return to.

01:41:58.520 | Just uniformly in the post-colonial era, you had figures like France Fanon, you had European

01:42:05.000 | intellectuals like Sartre who said the Western powers are retreating from these countries

01:42:10.680 | and therefore we should institute in these countries what but Western Marxism.

01:42:15.560 | Well, it's not obvious to me that like the bad ideas would be the ones that emerge, but

01:42:21.720 | it's more likely that the bad ideas would emerge in this kind of context when you erase

01:42:25.040 | history, when you erase tradition.

01:42:27.280 | When you erase history and you leave some ideas deliberately uninterrogated.

01:42:33.480 | I mean, as I say, find me one in a hundred American students who've heard of any of the

01:42:42.960 | communist despots of the 20th century.

01:42:47.240 | I mean, name recognition in, there was a poll done a few years ago in the UK and like name

01:42:53.160 | recognition among children, school children for Stalin, let alone Mao.

01:43:02.040 | I mean Mao who kills more people than anyone, 65 million Chinese perhaps.

01:43:09.680 | How many students in America know what Mao was, who he was, where he was, nothing.

01:43:16.600 | Or the atrocities committed.

01:43:18.120 | Where the atrocities were committed.

01:43:19.120 | And I worry about that because it means that we might have learned one of the two lessons

01:43:24.480 | of the 20th century.

01:43:26.360 | We think we've learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century.

01:43:30.440 | We actually haven't learned that lesson.

01:43:32.200 | We've learned a little bit of it and we've not learned the other one at all because that's

01:43:36.520 | why we still have people in American politics and elsewhere actually talking about collectivization

01:43:41.680 | and things as if there's no problem with that and as if it's perfectly obvious and they

01:43:46.840 | could run it and they'd know exactly where to stop.

01:43:49.760 | What are the two lessons of the 20th century?

01:43:51.840 | Fascism and communism.

01:43:54.840 | Yeah, I mean I'm not exactly sure what exactly the lessons are.

01:44:00.720 | No, it's not clear.

01:44:02.000 | If the lessons were very clear we'd be better at it.

01:44:05.040 | Well one is your book broadly applied of madness of crowds.

01:44:10.720 | That's one lesson.

01:44:12.040 | How so?

01:44:14.360 | Something like large crowds can display herd-like behavior.

01:44:19.360 | Yes, be very suspicious of crowds.

01:44:21.360 | Yeah, in general.

01:44:22.360 | I mean you apply it in different, more to modern application in a sense but that's rooted

01:44:29.000 | in history that crowds can, when humans get together they can do some quite radically

01:44:34.640 | silly things.

01:44:35.640 | Elias Kennetty's very good on that, crowds and power.

01:44:40.560 | And Eric Hoffer who's a sort of self-taught amazing, not to say autodidactic writer, the

01:44:48.000 | true believer and so on.

01:44:49.400 | He was extremely good on that.

01:44:51.560 | But the reason I mention the two things, no I mean we should have realized the two nightmares

01:44:54.760 | of the 20th century, fascism and communism.

01:44:57.640 | That we should know how they came about and we're interested in learning how one of them

01:45:01.800 | came about, fascism.

01:45:02.800 | And we know some of the lessons like don't treat other people as less than you because

01:45:08.640 | of their race.

01:45:10.400 | That's one lesson.

01:45:12.400 | But we've done some good at learning that.

01:45:17.600 | But the second one, not to do communism again, not to do socialism.

01:45:23.600 | I think we're way away from knowing because we don't know how it happened.

01:45:29.600 | And the little temptations are still there always.

01:45:32.160 | Look at the people saying I'm going to expropriate your property.

01:45:39.320 | People do things they don't like.

01:45:40.520 | They will get, we can't wait to take your property.

01:45:43.040 | - Well there's a sense, there's an appealing sense.

01:45:47.600 | Every ideology has an appealing narrative behind it that sells the ideology.

01:45:52.640 | So for socialism, for communism, it seems unfair that the working class does all of

01:46:00.320 | this work and gets only a fraction of the output.

01:46:05.200 | It just seems unfair.

01:46:07.200 | - If they do get a fraction of the output, yes.

01:46:11.480 | - Yes.

01:46:12.480 | And so it seems to be more fair if we increase that.

01:46:16.400 | If the workers own all of the value of their output and the things that are more fair seems

01:46:24.360 | to be a good thing.

01:46:26.760 | - I'd say, well yeah, I mean fairness is, I like fairness as a term.

01:46:31.960 | No, I much prefer fairness because it's a much easier thing to try to work out.

01:46:36.920 | It's quite amorphous itself as a concept but everyone can recognize it.

01:46:40.920 | So for instance, should the boss of the company earn a million times that of the lowest paid

01:46:50.600 | employee?

01:46:51.600 | It doesn't seem fair.

01:46:53.960 | Should they earn maybe five or ten times the salary of the lowest paid employee?

01:47:00.920 | Yeah, possibly.

01:47:01.960 | That could be fair.

01:47:03.440 | There are certain sort of multiples which are within the bounds of reasonableness.

01:47:12.440 | I think actually that's the much bigger problem in capitalism at the moment as I see it, is

01:47:20.320 | the not untrue perception that a tiny number of people get a lot of the, accrue a lot of

01:47:26.920 | the benefits and that the bit in the middle has become increasingly squeezed and is at

01:47:38.200 | danger always of falling all the way down to the bottom.

01:47:40.960 | I mean I think in the snakes and ladders of American capitalism for instance, it's a correct

01:47:46.200 | perception to say that the snakes go down awfully far.

01:47:51.600 | If you tread on the snake, you can plummet an awfully long way in America.

01:47:58.640 | And the deal in the game was that the ladders took you high and there's a perception, and

01:48:05.120 | again it's not entirely wrong, that the ladder system on the board is kind of broken.

01:48:12.080 | So what you're saying is you're a Marxist.

01:48:14.920 | I'm not saying I'm a Marxist.

01:48:17.000 | You heard that here first in the out of context blog post you're going to write about this.

01:48:22.880 | I get back to this point, the way to critique capitalism if it's gone bad is to get better

01:48:28.840 | capitalism.

01:48:29.840 | Free markets where they're not fair should be made fair.

01:48:33.320 | Never decide that the answer is the thing that has never produced any human flourishing,

01:48:39.280 | i.e. Marxism.

01:48:41.200 | So as you describe in the madness of crowds, the herd-like behavior of humans that gets

01:48:45.880 | us into trouble, you as an individual thinker and others listening to this, how can you,

01:48:54.200 | because all of us are amidst crowds, we're influenced by the society that's around us,

01:48:58.800 | by the people that's around us, how can we think independently?

01:49:02.680 | How can we, you know, if you're in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 20th century,

01:49:13.400 | if you're in, I don't know, Nazi Germany at the end of the 30s or 40s, how can you think

01:49:20.520 | independently given, first of all, that it's hard to think independently, just intellectually

01:49:27.840 | speaking, but also that it just becomes more and more dangerous.

01:49:33.760 | So the incentive to think independently under the uncertainty that's usually involved with

01:49:39.680 | thinking is, I mean, it's a silly thing to say, but on Twitter there is a cost to be

01:49:44.160 | paid for going against the crowd on any silly thing.

01:49:49.760 | We can even talk about, what is it, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock.

01:49:55.440 | You know, there's a crowd that believes that that was unjustified.

01:49:59.040 | I forget what the crowd decided.

01:50:01.960 | - Crowd split on that one, it's safe to have one opinion either way.

01:50:04.480 | - Okay, it is, right.

01:50:05.680 | But there is, you put it very nicely, that there's clearly a calculus here and that you

01:50:10.680 | can measure on Twitter in particular, you can measure kind of the crowd, a sense of

01:50:14.760 | where the crowd lays.

01:50:16.440 | - Michael Jackson.

01:50:17.440 | - Well, oh boy.

01:50:22.440 | I don't want to, this is not a legal discussion, I don't have my lawyer present.

01:50:27.960 | I don't even have a lawyer.

01:50:28.960 | - The man in question is dead.

01:50:30.680 | But I think most people who are not just diehard fans would concede that Michael Jackson had

01:50:35.120 | a strange relationship with children and was almost certainly a pedophile.

01:50:43.600 | - Did the crowd agree on that?

01:50:44.960 | - No, the crowd hasn't agreed because he's too famous and we all love thriller.

01:50:48.160 | - Yeah, we do.

01:50:49.640 | So you said people who are not fans, I just don't.

01:50:52.360 | - No, I'm a fan of Michael Jackson, but I think he was almost certainly a pedophile.

01:50:57.920 | But nobody wants to give up dancing to bad at weddings.

01:51:01.680 | So they just kind of added in, it's fine.

01:51:05.560 | Seriously.

01:51:06.560 | - But see, your law does not apply to Bill Cosby.

01:51:10.760 | - Ah, well, he was of course one of the most famous people in America, but maybe he wasn't

01:51:17.520 | regarded as talented.

01:51:18.520 | - Oh, wow, there's depth to this calculation.

01:51:22.280 | - Oh yeah, there's a genius opt-out in all cultures.

01:51:26.240 | There's a genius opt-out in all cultures.

01:51:27.600 | Look at Lord Byron.

01:51:28.600 | Lord Byron shagged his sister.

01:51:31.600 | Doesn't affect his reputation.

01:51:32.600 | In fact, if anything, it kind of adds to it.

01:51:34.960 | - But then again, this kind of war against the West, genius actually makes you more likely

01:51:41.640 | or no to get canceled.

01:51:43.920 | So if you look at the genius of Thomas Jefferson or--

01:51:47.840 | - Well yes, because if you haven't done anything remarkable, nobody will come looking for you

01:51:51.200 | past tremendously.

01:51:52.200 | - Okay.

01:51:53.200 | - Yeah.

01:51:54.200 | - So a genius can get you in trouble eventually.

01:51:55.200 | - Sidle through life.

01:51:56.200 | - Okay.

01:51:57.200 | - Sidle through life with nobody noticing.

01:51:58.200 | You're totally harmless and then die and hope you haven't used any carbon.

01:52:06.200 | But you were asking about how to survive the era of social media, as it were, and the crowds.

01:52:13.800 | And there's a very simple answer to that.

01:52:17.120 | Don't overrate the significance of the unreal world.

01:52:21.240 | - Oh, come on, but this is still human psychology.

01:52:24.760 | Because you want to fit in.

01:52:26.040 | There's a, you want to--

01:52:27.480 | - Why?

01:52:28.480 | - Because you like people and you're just as a--

01:52:31.840 | - Why not just like a small number of people and ignore the rest?

01:52:34.840 | - Yeah, that's--

01:52:35.840 | - That's what I do.

01:52:36.840 | - Well, I--

01:52:37.840 | - I mean, I actually like most people.

01:52:39.440 | This isn't a general thing.

01:52:40.680 | I don't have detestation for most people at all.

01:52:44.000 | Most people I come with I enjoy speaking with and being with.

01:52:48.600 | But in terms of storing your sense of self-worth in absolute strangers, big mistake.

01:52:54.680 | - Yeah.

01:52:55.880 | - So, me, that's, this is now, this turned into a therapy session.

01:52:58.880 | Because for me, and I think I represent some number of population, is I'm pretty self-critical.

01:53:03.840 | I'm looking for myself in the world.

01:53:06.520 | And there is a depth of connection with people on the internet.

01:53:10.680 | I mean, I have some--

01:53:11.680 | - I think there's a shallowness of it.

01:53:13.360 | - It's shallow connection.

01:53:14.360 | Interesting.

01:53:15.360 | I--

01:53:16.360 | - Put it this way.

01:53:17.360 | If you became very ill tomorrow, would any of them help?

01:53:21.080 | - On the internet?

01:53:22.080 | No.

01:53:23.080 | - No.

01:53:24.080 | - No.

01:53:25.080 | - No.

01:53:26.080 | - No.

01:53:27.080 | - But then at the end of the day, yeah, you're right.

01:53:28.080 | Very close friends would help, family would help.

01:53:30.080 | Yeah.

01:53:31.080 | - Yeah.

01:53:32.080 | - And perhaps that's the only thing--

01:53:33.080 | - You can't store significant amounts of trust or faith or belief or self-worth in places

01:53:44.040 | which will not return it to you.

01:53:46.360 | - Okay.

01:53:47.440 | So let's talk about the more extreme case, the harsher case.

01:53:50.080 | When you talk about the things you talk about in the war on the West and madness of crowds,

01:53:57.880 | I mean, you're getting a lot of blowback, I'm sure.

01:54:03.920 | As for the listener, you just shrugged lightly with a zen-like look on your face.

01:54:09.760 | So you don't, all you need is Sam Harris to say that you're brilliant and you're happy.

01:54:16.920 | - No, I'm very, I love Sam.

01:54:20.040 | - Yeah.

01:54:21.040 | - I'm deeply pleased when he flatters me, and he's nice about me, but no, I don't just

01:54:25.840 | reliance on him.

01:54:26.840 | No, I mean, why would I mind?

01:54:31.840 | I mean, maybe it's self-selecting.

01:54:34.960 | If I didn't have the view I had about that or whatever armory it is that I have on that,

01:54:40.760 | I wouldn't do what I did maybe.

01:54:42.720 | - I mean, have you been to some dark places psychologically because of the challenging

01:54:47.320 | ideas you explore, like significant self-doubt, just kind of?

01:54:52.160 | - I can't say I've been unaffected by everything in my life.

01:54:55.400 | By any means, that would make me an automaton of some kind.

01:55:01.240 | There's definitely times I've got things wrong and regretted that.

01:55:05.640 | There's times I've, there was a period around the time I wrote my book, "The Strange Death

01:55:14.200 | of Europe," which was a very, very dark time.

01:55:22.320 | It wasn't because I was having a dark time in my life, but because of the book I was

01:55:26.080 | writing.

01:55:27.080 | - Oh, because of the places you had to go in order to write the book.

01:55:32.080 | - Yeah.

01:55:33.080 | Well, I was contemplating the end of a civilization.

01:55:37.560 | Occasionally now, I have maybe slightly too pat at this stage, but sometimes readers come

01:55:43.220 | up to me in the street or whatever and say, "I love 'The Strange Death of Europe.'"

01:55:48.000 | And will say, "Very depressing book to read, however."

01:55:51.200 | I would say, "Well, you should have tried writing it."

01:55:56.840 | But it was because it has chunks of it which I'm very proud of, in particular about the

01:56:05.480 | death of religion, the death of God, the loss of meaning, and the void.

01:56:12.160 | And that's difficult stuff to write about and to grapple with.

01:56:17.240 | And there is a sort of, I haven't re-read that book since it came out, but I think there

01:56:23.920 | are passages in it which reveal what I was thinking very clearly in the poetry of it

01:56:29.720 | as it were, as well as the detail.

01:56:35.080 | But yeah, I can't say, I'm used to saying what I think and what I see.

01:56:46.440 | And if there's any pushback I've got from that, I'm completely consoled that I'm saying

01:56:51.240 | what I see with my own eyes.

01:56:55.000 | - That's your source of strength, is that you're always seeking the truth as best you

01:56:59.160 | see it.

01:57:00.160 | - I can't agree to go along with a lie if I've seen something with my own eyes.

01:57:07.720 | - So speaking of Sam Harris, and I mentioned to you offline, I talk to a lot of smart people

01:57:14.640 | in my private life on this podcast, and a lot of them will reference you as their example

01:57:20.720 | of a very smart person.

01:57:23.500 | So given that compliment, do you ever worry that your ego grows to a level where you're

01:57:34.060 | not, what you think is the truth is no longer the truth?

01:57:38.220 | Is this kind of, it blinds you?

01:57:44.580 | And also, on top of that, the fact that you stand against the crowd often, that there's

01:57:51.060 | part of it that appeals to you, that you like to point out the emperor has no clothes.

01:57:56.340 | - I get a certain thrill from the friction.

01:57:59.540 | - That sometimes both your ego and the thrill of friction will get you to deviate from the

01:58:07.700 | truth and instead just look for the friction.

01:58:10.620 | - Could do, could do for sure.

01:58:13.940 | I try to keep alive to that.

01:58:18.020 | Early in my career I realized that, for instance, I didn't want to make enemies unnecessarily,

01:58:25.220 | any more than strictly necessary, because there was a very large number of already necessary

01:58:29.020 | enemies.

01:58:30.020 | And I remember once, I won't go into the details, but I already had one sort of thing I'd done

01:58:35.020 | that week, and then another thing came out, and I just thought, I can't do that.

01:58:39.540 | And I remember thinking, don't be the sort of person who's forever creating storms.

01:58:46.300 | And I tried to make sure I wasn't, and I think I pretty much stuck to that.

01:58:51.180 | But to answer your question, well, the first thing is I'm as confident as I can be that

01:58:59.540 | I wouldn't fall into the trap you described for two reasons.

01:59:04.220 | One is that I don't think of myself as a wildly intelligent person, partly because I'm very,

01:59:10.780 | very aware of the things I know nothing about.

01:59:14.300 | For instance, I have almost no knowledge of the details of finance or economic theory.

01:59:26.260 | I mean, the real details.

01:59:28.100 | I don't mean the big picture of the kind that we were just discussing earlier.

01:59:30.900 | But if you put the periodic table in front of me, I would struggle to do more than a

01:59:44.700 | handful.

01:59:47.700 | I am very conscious of huge gaps in my knowledge.

01:59:53.780 | And where I have gaps or chasms, I tend to find I have a disproportionate admiration

01:59:59.220 | for the people who know that stuff.

02:00:01.100 | I'm wildly impressed by people who understand money, really understand it.

02:00:05.500 | They sort of think, "How the hell do you do that?"

02:00:10.340 | And the same thing with biologists, medics, stuff I just know very little about.

02:00:17.260 | - And that's a source of humility for you, just knowing that.

02:00:19.740 | - Yes, I think I'm okay on that stuff, but Jesus, if you got me on the general knowledge,

02:00:24.860 | I would say that some years ago, there's a thing in the UK called University Challenge.

02:00:32.620 | I was asked some years ago on to, there's a sort of celebrity, one of former students

02:00:38.140 | of the universities or colleges, asked to go back for the Christmas special.

02:00:43.540 | And I was asked to be one of the people from my old college to go back and compete in the

02:00:47.100 | sort of celebrity alumni one.

02:00:49.300 | And the only reason I actually wanted to do it was because I discovered that Louis Theroux

02:00:51.860 | had been to my college before my time.

02:00:53.660 | And he'd agreed to be on the team.

02:00:55.980 | And I thought, "I'd love to meet Louis Theroux.

02:00:57.700 | That'd be great fun."

02:00:59.500 | And anyhow, and I said, "Well, I really don't want to do it."

02:01:02.020 | And they said, "Come on, you'd be great."

02:01:03.260 | I said, "I wouldn't.

02:01:04.260 | I'd show myself up and be a total asshole and ignoramus."

02:01:07.700 | And as it was, I sat down my flat and I watched some past episodes of University Challenge.

02:01:13.820 | I realized I'd just sat in mute for the whole half hour.

02:01:20.580 | I just couldn't, the first question was about physics and the second one was about...

02:01:25.620 | As it was, I watched the one and I could answer the first two or three questions of the one

02:01:31.020 | that actually went out because they made it a bit simpler.

02:01:35.860 | But I mean, I'm terribly conscious of the fact, and I said to the producers, I said,

02:01:39.140 | "I can't go on because I just couldn't answer the questions."

02:01:42.140 | These unbelievably smart students seem to be able to answer on a whole range of things.

02:01:46.220 | So I'm perfectly aware of my limitations.

02:01:51.620 | - You contemplate your limitations.

02:01:53.340 | - Yeah, and they're forever before me.

02:01:56.860 | Not hard to find in every day.

02:01:59.500 | And then on top of that, I suppose it's, in a way, you know that line from Rudyard Kipling's

02:02:08.540 | alternately brilliant and slightly nauseating poem, "If."

02:02:13.940 | There's a line-

02:02:14.940 | - You just enjoy a good poem, can't you?

02:02:17.060 | - Well, no, it's not-

02:02:18.060 | - Where's the noise?

02:02:19.060 | - I can enjoy a great poem, but I mean, a good poem.

02:02:23.260 | This is slightly off, but-

02:02:26.340 | - This goes to your criticism of Dostoevsky.

02:02:30.620 | Take Douglas' criticism with a grain of salt.

02:02:33.780 | - Maybe I've read it too many memorial services and things, but that line is a good piece

02:02:40.940 | of advice, "If you can learn to meet triumph and disaster and greet these two imposters

02:02:46.620 | just the same."

02:02:47.620 | That's a good line.

02:02:48.620 | It's a good line, as Kipling often did, an amazing turn of line.

02:02:53.420 | But I do think that it's a very sensible thing to try to greet triumph and disaster and regard

02:03:01.220 | them as imposters and greet them just the same.

02:03:04.020 | And actually, anyone who knows me knows that I never, partly it's because I have a sort

02:03:10.060 | of belief in the old gods, and at the moment that I thought that I was at the moment of

02:03:15.140 | triumph, the fates would hitch up their skirts and run at me at a million miles an hour.

02:03:22.200 | But it's also because anyone who knows me knows I never have a moment when I say, "That's

02:03:31.220 | just great.

02:03:32.460 | I feel totally fulfilled and victorious."

02:03:37.340 | I mean, it happened to me recently when "War in the West" went straight to number one in

02:03:41.860 | the bestseller list.

02:03:43.420 | - How long did that last in terms of your self-satisfaction?

02:03:45.620 | - It didn't happen.

02:03:46.620 | - Not even for a brief moment?

02:03:49.980 | - No.

02:03:51.720 | When I first saw that it was selling, I had that moment of elation.

02:03:55.420 | I thought, "Good, I've done it.

02:03:58.100 | It's out."

02:03:59.620 | And I did have a moment of elation then, definitely.

02:04:03.300 | But it doesn't last, partly because I tell myself it mustn't last.

02:04:07.340 | - Because as you said, fate hitches up its skirt.

02:04:12.780 | Is that skirts?

02:04:15.500 | You brits with your poetry, even when it's nauseating.

02:04:20.620 | As of 2022, this year, what's your final analysis of the political leadership and the human

02:04:27.300 | mind and the human being of Donald Trump?

02:04:32.460 | - I sort of avoided this for years.

02:04:34.900 | - Just talking about Trump?

02:04:35.900 | - I tried to avoid talking about Trump for years.

02:04:37.300 | It's the same reason I tried to avoid writing about Brexit.

02:04:39.740 | - Do you think that Trump, just sorry on a small tangent, do you think that Trump's story

02:04:44.460 | is over or are we just done with volume one?

02:04:47.660 | - I've no idea.

02:04:48.660 | The people I know who know him say that he's running.

02:04:54.580 | And I think that in general, Republicans have to, do have a choice in front of them.

02:05:03.100 | One friend put it to me recently, said, "You've got to go in with your toughest fighter."

02:05:11.380 | And I understand that instinct.

02:05:15.700 | And I also think it's a very dangerous instinct, because what if your toughest fighter is also

02:05:20.740 | your biggest liability?

02:05:23.940 | What's the best way to get out the Democrat vote in 2024 than to have Donald Trump running?

02:05:28.220 | - And the people that are doing the war in the West, they're pretty tough fighters.

02:05:32.820 | - They are.

02:05:34.340 | And I'm cautious about this because I know every way I tread is dangerous, but let me

02:05:39.180 | just be frank.

02:05:40.180 | - Tread gracefully.

02:05:41.180 | - I'll tread as gracefully as I can in my Wellington boots, in my galoshes.

02:05:50.020 | Here's the thing.

02:05:52.500 | I think everybody knows what Trump is.

02:05:54.620 | I think we all knew for years.

02:05:57.060 | And I feel sorry for the conservatives who had to pretend that he was something he wasn't.

02:06:02.740 | I felt sorry for the ones who had to pretend that, for instance, he was some devout Christian

02:06:09.700 | or a man of faith or a man of great integrity or all of these sorts of things.

02:06:16.660 | Because in the public eye for years, it'd been obvious that wasn't the case.

02:06:21.580 | But he has something extraordinary.

02:06:26.520 | One thing is a method of communication that you've just got to say was unbelievable.

02:06:33.140 | - In one fundamental way that you can't look away for some reason.

02:06:36.140 | - Can't look away.

02:06:37.140 | I mean, watching him clear everyone out of the way in 2016 was thrilling because those

02:06:45.660 | people needed clearing away.

02:06:47.340 | I mean, it's just horrifying what America's going to give us another Bush.

02:06:53.260 | What's so great about this family?

02:06:57.420 | America's going to give us another Clinton.

02:06:58.420 | We're going to get to choose between a Clinton and a Bush.

02:07:01.540 | Mark Stein said, "We'll just wait for the day the Clintons and the Bushes into Mary

02:07:05.020 | and then we can really have a monarchy again."

02:07:08.860 | So I was very pleased to see him clear them away.

02:07:12.140 | I was very pleased to see him sort of raise some of the issues that needed raising.

02:07:18.780 | I thought it was a sort of breath of fresh air and I wished it wasn't him doing it.

02:07:24.860 | And then there was a question of him governing and it was just perfectly clear he didn't

02:07:28.060 | know how to govern.

02:07:30.540 | What he did have, however, what he does have is an incredible ability to fight.

02:07:35.380 | And some of the forces he was arraigned against were arraigned against him.

02:07:38.460 | My gosh, they would have taken down anyone else.

02:07:41.580 | I mean, they'd have probably done some similar BS against Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

02:07:51.420 | They'd have said, some people admitted, they'd have accused all these people of racism and

02:07:56.580 | misogyny and everything else as well, just like they did Mitt Romney, just like they

02:07:59.180 | did John McCain.

02:08:01.380 | But Trump was the one ugly enough and bruisy enough to fight.

02:08:06.660 | And also a willingness or a lack of willingness to play sort of the civil game of politics

02:08:17.980 | at a party when politeness gets you in trouble.

02:08:23.700 | You show up and everybody's polite and you just out of momentum want to be being polite

02:08:28.260 | and all of a sudden you're on an island with Jeffrey Epstein and it gets you into a huge

02:08:33.500 | amount of trouble.

02:08:34.660 | But so Trump has these sort of extraordinary qualities, but I just, you know, look, he

02:08:39.660 | screwed up during his time in office because he didn't achieve as much as he should have

02:08:44.580 | done.

02:08:45.580 | And you could say that about every president, but I refuse to acknowledge that two years

02:08:47.900 | when he had both houses in the beginning, he just didn't know what levers to pull.

02:08:52.420 | You know, I mean, he was sitting in the office behind the Oval Office tweeting, watching

02:08:56.920 | the news.

02:08:57.920 | I'm sorry, that's not a president.

02:09:00.740 | And he couldn't fill and didn't fill positions because people knew, I mean, people who were

02:09:06.180 | very loyal to him, he would just, you know, he'd get them to do something loyal and then

02:09:10.900 | destroy them.

02:09:12.780 | And I think, and then we get onto the thing about, and here we get onto the, you know,

02:09:17.500 | what of course is very, very fractious terrain, but, you know, I covered the 2020 election

02:09:22.340 | and I was traveling all around the states and I went to Trump rally and all sorts of

02:09:27.700 | stuff.

02:09:28.700 | And I, I mean, I was in DC on election night and, um, when, and it got very ugly at one

02:09:34.700 | point, um, in so-called black lives matter Plaza, when it looked like Trump might win

02:09:39.900 | when Florida came in and got really, I could feel the air were very, very heated.

02:09:44.500 | And I, some Antifa people started getting into black block and this sort of stuff.

02:09:48.980 | And I thought this town was going to burn, you know, if, if Trump wins and in the aftermath

02:09:54.780 | of the vote, I was willing to hang around and watching for a bit.

02:09:58.420 | And then I saw it, it was going to drag on.

02:10:00.820 | And I saw some of his people and others and people told me they had great evidence of

02:10:04.260 | vote rigging and all this sort of thing.

02:10:06.460 | And I'm afraid I'm one of those people who doesn't believe that the evidence that they

02:10:11.540 | presented is good enough to justify the claim that he won the election.

02:10:16.340 | And I, and people say, have you seen 2000 mules?

02:10:19.700 | And have you seen, look, the evidence isn't there.

02:10:23.340 | But the, the election was won by Donald Trump.

02:10:27.060 | And I think that what he did on January the 6th was unbelievably dangerous.

02:10:34.260 | And you know, here it is possible for us to hold two ideas in our head at the same time.

02:10:38.900 | January the 6th was not nothing, nor was it an insurrection and attempt to stage a coup.

02:10:46.220 | And there's a vanishing number of people in the U S or as Eric Weinstein said, that the

02:10:53.260 | it's like, this is the, the, the roof that you have to walk along.

02:10:57.740 | And like the, the sides are very steep if you fall off either side.

02:11:03.740 | Is there some sense given the forces that are waging war in the West, you said this

02:11:10.380 | feeling perhaps because of Antifa or something else that this town is going to burn and maybe

02:11:17.220 | a continued feeling that this town is going to burn with the January 6th events.

02:11:22.980 | Are you worried about the future of the United States in the coming years because of the,

02:11:30.820 | the, the, there's a feeling of escalation.

02:11:33.780 | Is that just a war of Twitter or is there, is there a real brewing of something?

02:11:41.300 | Oh, it's real.

02:11:42.620 | And how, well, let me then respond to that.

02:11:45.740 | How, what is the hopeful?

02:11:47.700 | If you, if you 10 years from now, look back at the United States and say, we turned it

02:11:55.500 | around, what would be the reason?

02:11:58.580 | What would be the ways, the mechanisms that we do so?

02:12:01.220 | I'll tell you, since I, since I wrote this book, there are two things in particular that

02:12:06.780 | I've been really pleased that a specific type of specialists has approached me on to say

02:12:12.500 | that things I've written about actually have more application than I realized.

02:12:17.400 | One is the gratitude issue.

02:12:19.820 | A number of people have approached me who have gone through AA, Alcoholics Anonymous.

02:12:26.040 | They sometimes say, have you ever been to AA?

02:12:27.820 | And that's a bit personal question.

02:12:31.780 | But they say, but the reason they ask it is because they say, well, because if you go

02:12:37.360 | to drug rehabilitation or alcohol anonymous, Norm MacDonald said, it doesn't sound very

02:12:44.740 | anonymous.

02:12:45.740 | It's like when you say your name and you tell everyone the worst things you've ever done.

02:12:48.560 | That's the opposite of anonymous.

02:12:50.480 | Anyhow, but they say, look, because if you go to these things, apparently you're asked

02:12:55.640 | to as part of your recovery, say what you're grateful for, like list what you're grateful

02:13:01.520 | for.

02:13:02.520 | I didn't know that by the way, until, until, until the book was out.

02:13:05.300 | And so that turned out to have more application than I knew.

02:13:08.280 | The other thing though, is that I say that it's absolutely crucial in America that we

02:13:12.160 | try to find things that we agree on.

02:13:14.560 | And a couple of times since the book came out, I've been approached by people who marriage

02:13:18.280 | counselors, um, but we've also said, I mean, we've been through marriage counseling.

02:13:22.680 | Again, that's a very personal question.

02:13:25.200 | Stop asking me personal questions.

02:13:27.800 | No, but they, and I say, well, why?

02:13:30.960 | Because this is, this is one of the things that we do in couples therapy is trying to

02:13:38.360 | find things you agree on.

02:13:41.800 | And I think this is very important in America and it's made much harder by the fact, and

02:13:47.920 | I've said this many times, but forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but it's made much

02:13:52.560 | harder by the fact that having different opinions is very last century.

02:13:57.600 | Now we all have different facts or at least the two sides have different facts.

02:14:03.160 | One half of the country, roughly, or let's say 40%, 30%, whatever you want to put it

02:14:07.920 | with a tired minority in the middle.

02:14:12.040 | One segment of the country believes that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and that the

02:14:16.280 | Russians interfered and got Donald Trump into power.

02:14:19.840 | Another half of the country believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

02:14:22.680 | If you can't agree on who wins elections, it's very hard to see who you, what you agree

02:14:26.220 | on as a country.

02:14:27.840 | That's one of the reasons I mind the war on American history and Western history is one

02:14:32.440 | of the things you have to agree on is at least some attitude towards your past.

02:14:36.120 | You don't have to go on everything.

02:14:37.120 | But like the public square has to have public heroes who are agreed to be heroes to some

02:14:41.920 | extent, warts and all.

02:14:45.460 | If you don't have that, if actually you think for instance like half the country thinks

02:14:49.760 | founding fathers were pretty good, the other half thinks they were absolutely rotten, racist

02:14:55.000 | and so on.

02:14:56.000 | If half the country basically thinks it would have been better if Columbus had taken a different

02:14:59.720 | turn, never found America, gone back home and said, "I don't know, nothing out there,"

02:15:05.360 | that would have been better.

02:15:06.360 | And the other half is pretty glad in the end that we've got America.

02:15:13.680 | You know, you've got to agree on something.

02:15:16.720 | And I just see in America, so I do think we've got to try to find things to agree on, like

02:15:20.560 | a reasonable attitude towards the past.

02:15:23.240 | That's why that matters.

02:15:24.240 | And again, I stress, I'm not trying to say that everything in the American past was good.

02:15:29.600 | God knows that wouldn't stand up for a second of scrutiny or self-scrutiny.

02:15:33.400 | But nor was it all bad.

02:15:35.200 | This wasn't a country formed in sin and in an eradicable sin.

02:15:40.760 | It wasn't founded in 1619 in order to make the country wicked and incapable of escaping

02:15:47.680 | that wickedness.

02:15:48.680 | You know, these are things that will matter enormously in the years ahead.

02:15:53.020 | Because if you can't agree on anything, including who your heroes are, like the whole thing

02:16:00.280 | is just one massive division.

02:16:01.880 | And we'll see what I think we're already seeing, which is people basically going to states

02:16:06.240 | where it's more like the life they want to live.

02:16:09.160 | And some people say to me, well, that's okay.

02:16:11.600 | And the genius of the founding is that it allows for that.

02:16:16.560 | That's possible, but it's also, it eradicates part of what has been American public life,

02:16:22.760 | which is the ability to look at each other and discuss face to face.

02:16:27.160 | And I see things like this bomb placed on America the other week with the Supreme Court

02:16:31.440 | leak, the draft leak as being just a further example of that.

02:16:37.200 | I'm very, very worried about it in America.

02:16:39.720 | And because if America screws up everything, everything else in the world goes.

02:16:45.000 | - Yeah, there's the degree to which America is still the beacon of these ideas on which

02:16:52.600 | the country was founded and has been able to live out in better and better forms, sort

02:16:59.200 | of live out the actual ideals of the founding principles versus like--

02:17:03.240 | - And with the desire to improve.

02:17:05.160 | - Yeah, constantly.

02:17:06.160 | - An imperfect union.

02:17:07.840 | - Yeah, well, as I generally have hope that people want to sort of, in terms of gratitude,

02:17:15.080 | people are aware of how good it feels to be grateful.

02:17:20.920 | It's a better life psychologically.

02:17:22.520 | The resentment is a thing that destroys you from within.

02:17:26.000 | So I just feel that people will long for that and will find that.

02:17:31.920 | That's the American way.

02:17:33.760 | Some of the division that we reveal now has to do with new technologies like social media

02:17:39.000 | that kind of is a small kind of deviation from the path we're on because it's a new,

02:17:45.440 | we got a new toy, just like nuclear weapons.

02:17:48.000 | - Yeah, which are relatively new.

02:17:51.160 | But we need to find reasonable attitudes towards these things.

02:17:54.560 | And that's why I say like it matters how you imbibe feedback on social media because we're

02:18:00.480 | all going through it to some extent.

02:18:02.120 | - We're learning.

02:18:03.120 | - And we're learning.

02:18:04.120 | And we've got to learn how to do this without going mad.

02:18:08.520 | I say this as my minimalist call to friends in this era was the main job is not to go

02:18:15.440 | insane.

02:18:16.440 | - Yeah.

02:18:17.440 | Yeah.

02:18:18.440 | And yeah, like walk towards sanity.

02:18:24.360 | Because I'm sure there's a Hunter S. Thompson quote in there, like insanity on the weekends

02:18:29.080 | can be at least fun.

02:18:30.320 | Okay, do you have advice for young people that just put down their TikTok and are listening

02:18:38.640 | to this podcast in high school and college about how to have a career, how to have a

02:18:43.520 | life they can be proud of?

02:18:45.400 | - It's a very broad question, but of course, I mean, I can give specific advice for people

02:18:52.320 | who want to be writers and so on, but that's a bit niche maybe.

02:18:56.760 | - Writers will be very interesting, sorry to interrupt.

02:18:59.000 | Also how to put your ideas down on paper and think that the ideas develop them and have

02:19:03.520 | the guts to go to a large audience, especially when the ideas are sort of controversial or

02:19:09.680 | dangerous or difficult.

02:19:10.680 | - Well, the main thing to do is to read.

02:19:13.440 | When I was a schoolboy, I'd ever have a book in my pocket, a side pocket of my jacket or

02:19:18.880 | any side pocket and would read.

02:19:23.560 | That wasn't just because I was swattish in some way, but because I discovered, probably

02:19:30.320 | at some point in my early teens, I discovered something.

02:19:32.760 | I read about this once.

02:19:34.680 | I discovered that books were dangerous, which was a thrilling discovery.

02:19:44.480 | I discovered that they could contain anything and also people didn't know what you were

02:19:49.680 | reading.

02:19:50.680 | I remember I got far too young an age, I read "The Doors of Perception" of Aldous Huxley

02:19:57.320 | and I didn't make head or tail of it probably, but I knew that it was about something really

02:20:03.600 | interesting and dangerous.

02:20:07.280 | I thought constantly when I read poetry or read history, I was just constantly thrilled

02:20:16.280 | and wanted to know more.

02:20:21.540 | If you want to become a writer, you have to be a reader.

02:20:26.460 | You have to read the best stuff.

02:20:28.640 | Obviously, people disagree or agree on what that is and you'll find the people that really

02:20:35.760 | impress you.

02:20:37.600 | But I know that I just came across certain writers who just knocked me off my feet.

02:20:46.440 | When you find those people, read everything and cling on to them and find other people

02:20:52.940 | like that, find other writers like that, people who are connected by history or scholarship

02:20:59.800 | or circles or whatever.

02:21:01.720 | For you, was it fiction or nonfiction?

02:21:04.040 | Was there particular books that you just remember or just give you pause?

02:21:07.720 | Well, I remember that the first book that absolutely threw me was "The Lord of the Flies"

02:21:13.160 | of William Golding, which used to be a signed text and everyone's a bit snotty about because

02:21:16.960 | it's so popular.

02:21:19.960 | But I was thrown because I think it was the first adult book I read in that I had been

02:21:24.960 | used to the world of children's literature of everything ends up fine in the end, the

02:21:30.840 | lost all get found.

02:21:34.320 | This was the first book I read where that's not the case, where the world turns out differently.

02:21:39.720 | I remember for days afterwards, I was just in a state of shock.

02:21:46.000 | I couldn't believe what I'd just discovered and partly because I sort of intuited it must

02:21:53.360 | be true.

02:21:54.360 | Of course, that is not to say that "The Lord of the Flies" has lots of scholarship on what

02:21:59.760 | children do in the situation of being on the island when they do congregate.

02:22:04.640 | But yes, that was a sort of introduction to the adult world and it was shocking and thrilling

02:22:09.000 | and I wanted more of it.

02:22:12.200 | It was dangerous.

02:22:14.760 | It was dangerous.

02:22:16.480 | And then of course, when I became interested in sex, let alone when I was gay, I read books

02:22:22.120 | were a very, very good way to learn about what I was.

02:22:25.920 | And that was even more dangerous in a way and I thought, "Nobody knows what I know."

02:22:33.760 | - You discovered sex?

02:22:34.760 | That was an invention in books?

02:22:36.160 | What do you mean?

02:22:37.160 | - No, what I mean is that one of the things that gay people have when they're growing

02:22:42.080 | up is that you have this terribly big secret and you don't think the world will ever know.

02:22:47.200 | You hope the world will never know.

02:22:49.840 | And it's been called by one psychologist, "The little boy with the big secret."

02:22:56.560 | And so if you discover that other people have the same secret, there's a sort of, "Thank

02:23:03.480 | God for that."

02:23:06.100 | But I mean, that's just a version of what everybody gets in reading in a way, which

02:23:09.520 | is the thrill of discovery that somebody else thought something you thought only you'd thought.

02:23:15.320 | I mean, one of the greatest thrills in all of literature is when a voice comes from across

02:23:20.480 | the centuries and seems to leave a handprint.

02:23:24.840 | - It makes you feel a little bit less alone because somebody else feels, sees the world

02:23:29.080 | the same way, is the same way.

02:23:30.960 | - That's what C.S. Lewis said, "We read to know we're not alone."

02:23:37.900 | But we don't only read to know we're not alone, we read to become other people.

02:23:42.720 | I mean, I think I saw in books a version of the life I wanted to live, and then I decided

02:23:46.640 | to live it.

02:23:48.320 | And I'm fortunate enough to have done so.

02:23:52.800 | I wanted to live in the world of ideas and books and debate.

02:23:58.320 | I wanted to live in the debates of my time.

02:24:01.960 | And I remember when, like a lot of people, I read Auden when I was young.

02:24:06.840 | And certain lines obviously stuck with me.

02:24:09.840 | But that poem of his, which everybody knows and which he hated, September 1st, 1939, I

02:24:17.960 | remember certain lines in that just whacked me.

02:24:21.440 | What's that one?

02:24:23.280 | Sitting on a dive, for a second, as we degrade and alone at the end of a low, dishonest decade.

02:24:30.400 | But of course, there's a problem with that line, which is you kind of want to be living

02:24:34.160 | at the end of a low, dishonest decade as well.

02:24:36.600 | It sounds sort of cool in a way.

02:24:39.200 | You're the only person who sees it.

02:24:41.400 | But so yeah, anyhow, there's a diversion.

02:24:43.560 | But the point is, if you want to be a writer, you've got to be a reader.

02:24:47.640 | And apart from anything else, you discover the lilt of language and the things you can

02:24:52.960 | do.

02:24:53.960 | And I've read people who, and I still do, who I think, my God, how did you do that?

02:25:00.180 | In fact, books for me now, and articles and other things, fall into two categories.

02:25:04.340 | One is I know how you did that.

02:25:07.400 | And the other is I don't know how you did that.

02:25:10.640 | And the best feeling as a writer is when you do the second one.

02:25:17.400 | And it happens occasionally in my writing life.

02:25:19.560 | - We almost like return to something you've written, or like right after you write it.

02:25:22.760 | - No, the moment you write it.

02:25:24.040 | - You wonder, how did I do that?

02:25:26.240 | - Yes.

02:25:27.240 | That's the most, I've never said that before, that's the happiest thing in writing.

02:25:32.800 | Very occasionally, this sounds, but I mean, I've occasionally finished something.

02:25:37.800 | Funny enough, it happened some years ago in a long piece I wrote about the artist Basquiat.

02:25:44.520 | I finished the piece and I gasped.

02:25:47.880 | I didn't know, because that's also a thing with writing is you, it's not, sometimes people

02:25:54.640 | say you need to write in order to know what you think.

02:25:56.440 | That's not quite true.

02:25:58.560 | And that's a very bad piece of advice for some writers who don't know what they think

02:26:03.400 | and it's not going to become clearer if they just start typing.

02:26:10.560 | Sometimes it is true that you, there's a thought that's just waiting there and a clarity that

02:26:16.880 | comes across and suddenly the sentence emerges in your brain.

02:26:20.780 | And by the time you typed it, you just go, yes.

02:26:25.760 | That's the greatest feeling as a writer.

02:26:27.480 | It's like it came from somewhere else.

02:26:30.040 | - That's what Bakunin says about what's the moment, it's Tom Stoppard's favorite quote

02:26:36.440 | about Bakunin saying what happens in the moment where the writer's pen, when he pauses, where

02:26:42.240 | does he go in that moment?

02:26:45.120 | - Yeah, that's so interesting.

02:26:50.000 | 'Cause I think the answer to that question will help us explain consciousness and all

02:26:54.680 | those other weird things about the human mind.

02:26:58.280 | So that was advice for writers.

02:26:59.640 | I didn't really give any advice to people in general.

02:27:03.720 | - You want to give health advice to Churchill?

02:27:06.320 | - No, I don't want to give health advice.

02:27:09.840 | - Clearly, because you implied that Churchill was one of your early guides in that aspect.

02:27:15.320 | So when you discovered your sexuality, let me ask about love.

02:27:21.760 | Far too personal of a question to ask a Brit, but what was that like, and broadly speaking,

02:27:30.640 | what's the role of love in the human condition?

02:27:35.440 | Sex and love.

02:27:37.160 | And for you personally, discovering that you were, and maybe telling the world that you

02:27:42.400 | were gay.

02:27:44.960 | - I'm very perilously personal.

02:27:47.640 | I do actually have a sort of rule that I don't talk about in my personal life.

02:27:51.680 | Rules are meant to be broken.

02:27:52.680 | - Okay, well I'll break it a little bit.

02:27:57.360 | One of the ways in which growing up and realizing you're gay differs from growing up and being

02:28:01.160 | straight is that it's almost inevitable that your first passions will be unrequited.

02:28:08.160 | - Oh wow, I never thought about that, yeah.

02:28:13.600 | - Now that's not to say, I mean, there's plenty of unrequited love among young men for young

02:28:18.800 | women, young women for young men, plenty of that.

02:28:21.840 | But it's almost inevitable if you're gay that your first passions will be totally unrequited.

02:28:30.200 | Because the odds are that the person in question will not be gay.

02:28:33.800 | - So the experience of love is mostly heartbreak.

02:28:37.600 | - Is heartbreak and disappointment.

02:28:40.880 | - Heartbreak can be beautiful too, formative.

02:28:43.360 | - Well again, it comes back to the thing of if you're a writer or something, because you

02:28:46.760 | can always do something with it.

02:28:49.040 | That's why all writers are sort of not to be trusted.

02:28:53.840 | - I didn't trust you the moment you walked in here.

02:28:56.560 | - No, I mean, it's a famous problem with writers, because you always think, well I could use

02:29:04.200 | that.

02:29:05.200 | It's a dangerous thing and all writers should be aware of it.

02:29:08.360 | - It's almost like a drug, right?

02:29:10.240 | - No, it's not like a drug.

02:29:12.280 | It's the fear that all things, even the greatest suffering, could be material.

02:29:20.240 | - What's the danger in that exactly?

02:29:22.560 | That seeing the material in the human experience, you don't experience it fully?

02:29:27.080 | - You don't experience it fully and you might be using it.

02:29:30.760 | I had a friend who wrote a poem about a friend who died in a motorcycle accident in Sydney

02:29:35.280 | in the 60s.

02:29:36.640 | And he said he knew at the moment he was told that his friend's death, a tiny bit of him

02:29:40.040 | thought I could use this for a poem.

02:29:42.320 | And he did and the poem was wonderful, but there's always that slight guilt for writers

02:29:45.520 | of, am I going to use that?

02:29:47.800 | Anyhow, that's a divergence.

02:29:50.200 | - Life is full of guilty pleasures and I think that's one of them.

02:29:52.880 | Because if you feel that guilt, really what you're doing is you're capturing that moment

02:29:57.960 | and you're going to impact the lives of many, many people by writing about that moment,

02:30:02.880 | because it's going to stimulate something that resonates with those people, because

02:30:06.600 | they had similar kinds of memories about a loss and a passion towards somebody that they

02:30:11.000 | had to lose.

02:30:12.000 | So don't, you know, but there's a good sign perhaps.

02:30:15.840 | - More obvious perhaps problem is reporting from war zones or bad places and wanting to

02:30:21.960 | find bad stories because it's useful.

02:30:25.000 | And there is a definite guilt you get from that sort of thing.

02:30:28.280 | Like the worse the situation, the more useful.

02:30:31.360 | Anyhow.

02:30:33.120 | No, so that's sort of the only difference that happens from growing up being gay.

02:30:36.640 | And it means that most, certainly in my generation, most gay men came to sexual or romantic maturity

02:30:44.920 | later.

02:30:46.240 | And there's lots of explanations of that maybe being one of the reasons for perceived or

02:30:52.640 | otherwise promiscuity among gay men, which is I think more easily persuaded by the fact

02:30:57.360 | that gay men behave like men would if women were men.

02:31:04.680 | - That's one explanation, but it's both a feature and a bug that you come to sexual

02:31:11.080 | flourishing later in life.

02:31:12.840 | That could be seen as a, in the trajectory of human life, that could be a positive or

02:31:17.720 | a negative.

02:31:18.720 | - Yeah.

02:31:19.720 | - But what's broadly speaking is the role of love in the human condition, Douglas.

02:31:24.920 | - Well, it's the nearest thing we have to finding the point.

02:31:30.440 | - What is the point?

02:31:31.440 | What's the meaning of life?

02:31:32.480 | Let's go there.

02:31:33.480 | - So what's the meaning is a hard one, of course.

02:31:36.400 | Where is the meaning is slightly easier.

02:31:40.760 | And I'd say that everyone can find that.

02:31:43.800 | You gravitate towards the places you find meaning.

02:31:47.120 | Now there's a conservative answer to this, which is quite useful.

02:31:49.560 | And it's certainly more useful than any others because the conservative answer is find meaning

02:31:53.480 | where people have found it before, which is a very, very good answer.

02:31:59.800 | If your ancestors have found meaning in a place of worship or a particular canon of

02:32:05.120 | work, go there because it's been proven by time to be able to give you the goods.

02:32:16.680 | Much more sensible than saying, "Hey, I don't know, discover new ways of meaning."

02:32:24.720 | But love is probably the nearest thing we can have to the divine on earth.

02:32:37.000 | And of course, the problem of what exactly, what type of love we mean is an issue.

02:32:43.840 | - But that goes to the fact that you don't like definitions anyway.

02:32:47.840 | - I do like definitions, I just think they need to be pinned down.

02:32:51.320 | But let's not go there at the moment because it's...

02:32:57.680 | - That's not pinned down love at the moment?

02:32:59.720 | - Well, no, because as you know, I mean, because of the different varieties of love and the

02:33:03.480 | fact that we have one word for it in our culture and that it means an awful lot of things and

02:33:06.840 | we don't delineate it well.

02:33:09.400 | But let's say human love with the greatest fulfillment in sexual love with another person

02:33:22.240 | is probably the greatest intimation you can have of what might otherwise only be superseded

02:33:31.800 | by divine love.

02:33:35.200 | And it's the sense that all young lovers have, which is that they've just walked through

02:33:43.600 | the low door in the garden and found themselves in bliss.

02:33:47.440 | And that this is, there's a beautiful, beautiful poem of, can I read it to you?

02:33:56.240 | - Yes, please.

02:33:57.240 | - I'll try to find it.

02:33:58.840 | There's a beautiful poem of Philip Larkin's, which slightly says what I'm, I'm trying not

02:34:07.360 | to duck your question by referring to other people, but...

02:34:10.680 | - Maybe that's the best way to answer the question.

02:34:13.320 | - Could be.

02:34:14.320 | - Is to read a poem.

02:34:16.840 | - So there's a poem by Philip Larkin called High Windows, which is remarkable because

02:34:26.860 | he came to sexual, he had a rather unhappy sex life, but he came to sexual fruition in

02:34:37.360 | the 40s and 50s and all the hell that that involved.

02:34:41.720 | And he took what I regard as being a really remarkable and important view on the sexual

02:34:49.840 | revolution in the 60s, which is that most people of his generation, most older people

02:34:53.320 | resented the young, they resented the freedom they had, and actually they pretended the

02:34:59.760 | freedom was terrible and it was always getting lightly done.

02:35:02.000 | And Philip Larkin, rather surprisingly, he was a very conservative person, took a different

02:35:05.400 | view and he says it in this poem, and the opening of the poem is, he says, "When I see

02:35:10.400 | a couple of kids and guess who's fucking her and she's taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

02:35:16.920 | I know this is paradise, everyone old has dreamed of all their lives, bonds and gestures

02:35:23.640 | pushed to one side like an outdated combine harvester, and everyone young going down the

02:35:30.280 | long slide to happiness endlessly.

02:35:34.480 | I wonder if anyone looked at me 40 years back and thought, that'll be the life, no God anymore,

02:35:41.320 | sweating in the dark about hell and that, or having to hide what you think of the priest,

02:35:47.080 | he and his lot will all go down the long slide like free bloody birds.

02:35:52.920 | And immediately, rather than words, comes the thought of high windows, the sun comprehending

02:36:00.000 | glass and beyond it the deep blue air that shows nothing and is nowhere and is endless."

02:36:09.680 | The divine, he found it.

02:36:12.880 | He found it in seeing a couple of young kids and knowing that one of them was wearing a

02:36:18.480 | diaphragm.

02:36:19.480 | Do you see what I mean?

02:36:21.240 | First of all, it's very counterintuitive, but secondly, there's the point that sex had

02:36:25.280 | been so tied up with misery.

02:36:29.400 | I mean, people don't remember this now when they talk about the past.

02:36:32.920 | I mean, one of my favorite books, Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, descriptions of what

02:36:38.040 | it was like trying to have sex in pre-First World War Vienna.

02:36:42.560 | All the men ended up going to female prostitutes.

02:36:46.280 | So many of them got syphilis and this was their first experience of sex.

02:36:49.680 | It was so goddamn awful and they were stuck with it all their lives.

02:36:54.880 | There's lots of stuff that's gone better in our last century and that's one of them.

02:36:59.600 | But you ask about love, yes, I do think that love is basically the thing that gives us

02:37:05.880 | the best glimpse of the divine.

02:37:08.200 | - And by the way, sex, liberating sex, doesn't buy you love either.

02:37:15.640 | - No.

02:37:16.640 | I mean, it throws in an entirely, it threw in another set of problems.

02:37:24.640 | - If there's any meaning on top of all of that is we like to find problems and solve

02:37:30.640 | that as a human species and sometimes we even create problems.

02:37:36.760 | Douglas, thank you for highlighting all the problems of human civilization and giving

02:37:42.400 | us a glimmer of hope for the future.

02:37:44.400 | This is an incredible conversation.

02:37:45.400 | Thank you for talking today.

02:37:46.400 | It's a huge honor.

02:37:47.400 | Thank you.

02:37:48.400 | - It was very kind of you to say that.

02:37:49.400 | Thank you.

02:37:50.400 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray.

02:37:53.880 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:37:58.080 | And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Murray himself.

02:38:02.640 | Disagreement is not oppression.

02:38:06.040 | Argument is not assault.

02:38:08.040 | Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence.

02:38:14.140 | The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.

02:38:19.280 | Thank you for listening.

02:38:20.280 | I hope to see you next time.

02:38:21.400 | Bye.

02:38:22.400 | - Bye.

02:38:23.400 | - Bye.

02:38:28.400 | [Department of Health & Human Services, USA; HRSA, Health Resources & Services Administration]

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

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