The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:01:16.880 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:01:21.560 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression

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00:01:32.820 moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping

00:01:37.440 patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new

00:01:42.680 series. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely

00:01:48.680 possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's

00:01:54.460 hope and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan

00:02:00.480 B. Peterson on depression and anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:02:09.480 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. This is season four, episode 17. I'm Michaela Peterson.

00:02:15.000 On this episode, my dad is joined by Stephen Fry. Stephen Fry is a noted British actor, writer,

00:02:21.580 comedian, political figure, journalist, poet, and intellectual. His list of accomplishments is

00:02:26.880 impressive to look at, and he is referred to by many of his compatriots as a national treasure of

00:02:32.040 England, also by me as a national treasure of England. Jordan Peterson and Stephen discuss a variety

00:02:38.360 of topics in the realm of drama, literature, and politics. They discuss atheism, religion, rationalism,

00:02:44.180 empiricism, myth, and story, bartering with reality, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology, resentment,

00:02:51.200 cruelty in the world, constitutional monarchy versus a democratic republic, and much more.

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00:04:15.060 I'd like to announce my new book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life. Unlike my previous book,

00:04:22.300 Beyond Order explores as its overarching theme how the dangers of too much security and control

00:04:27.960 might be profitably avoided. Because what we understand is insufficient, we need to keep one

00:04:33.800 foot within order while stretching the other tentatively into the beyond. I hope that people

00:04:39.480 find this book as helpful personally as they seem to have found the first set of 12 rules.

00:04:57.960 I'm pleased to have with me today Mr. Stephen Fry, who's been described by more than one of his

00:05:09.140 compatriots as a national treasure. If you want to develop a quick inferiority complex, I would recommend

00:05:14.920 going and reading Stephen's Wikipedia page. He's a prolific actor, screenwriter, playwright, journalist,

00:05:23.560 poet, intellectual, comedian, television presenter, advertisement presenter, magazine author,

00:05:31.160 autobiographist. It's a remarkable body of achievement and an intellectual figure in his own right who's

00:05:39.840 known at least in part for his discussions with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the

00:05:46.860 humanist atheists. And it's partly for that reason that I wanted to talk to him. I met Stephen much to my

00:05:53.080 pleasure during the monk debates in Toronto about three years ago, when we discussed political

00:05:58.760 correctness, which is one of the things I want to talk about and touch upon today. But mostly, I'm interested

00:06:04.680 in talking to him about the relationship between narrative and empiricism and rationalism. And so thank you very

00:06:12.900 much for agreeing to talk to me.

00:06:14.820 My pleasure. Lovely to be here.

00:06:16.620 So let me ask you, and then we'll go forward formally. What do you think we would be best?

00:06:27.580 What do you think would have the greatest impact with regards to our conversation? As far as you're

00:06:33.020 concerned? I mean, there must have been a reason that you, some reason, apart from just being agreeable

00:06:40.160 to do this. What do you think we might be able to accomplish uniquely?

00:06:45.300 Well, it's a little like the monk debate we shared a platform with. It's really because I'm so tired and

00:06:55.380 distressed and worried by the great fissure that has opened up the culture wars, whatever we like to

00:07:01.740 call it, the assumption that there is your friends and your enemy and no ground in between, no commonality

00:07:10.400 of, no cohesion of viewpoint, no shared things that can happen between people who apparently represent

00:07:17.080 different ways of looking at the world or different ways of trying to organize the world or whatever it

00:07:21.160 might be. And the very fact that I knew some friends of mine who disapproved of you

00:07:26.660 would think I was doing something wrong by associating with you. And I hope our debate

00:07:34.880 showed that wasn't the case. And I felt this would take that further forward, too. I do think,

00:07:42.300 you know, the last best hope for our society, in whichever way you want to look at it, whether you

00:07:47.060 want to look at it as some version of the West being able to stand up to the pressures put upon it by

00:07:54.220 China and Russia and other countries that are less interested in liberality in economics and in

00:08:01.200 the traditional political sense of liberality or kind of open society or whatever you want to call it,

00:08:08.940 that if we continue to fracture and we continue to find enemies amongst our own kind so much,

00:08:17.060 then really it's a very, very sad look at it. I mean, I'm hardly the first person to say this,

00:08:23.760 but, and I think you are, you know, a very interesting thinker and writer and talker.

00:08:32.540 But it's clear that there are many who would really admire you and like you and follow you,

00:08:38.260 with whom I would have less in common than perhaps with you. I think on both sides, if you want to call

00:08:45.180 them sides, it's very easy to be a bit lax about disavowing people who like one, but whom one doesn't

00:08:55.300 like, if you see what I mean. It's so flattering to the ego to have followers, to have people say,

00:09:02.160 you're great, I love the things you say, that it's quite hard to say no, but you've misunderstood

00:09:08.200 me. That's not what I meant. That's not what I meant at all, to quit Elliot. So obviously I've

00:09:15.320 spent some time pointing out what I regard as the excesses of the radical left. I've certainly spent

00:09:23.880 no shortage of time pointing out the excesses of the radical right in my classes particularly,

00:09:28.820 but I'm not publicly known for that specifically. It's my resistance or, yeah, my resistance to

00:09:38.780 certain manoeuvres on the side of the radical left that propelled me into the public eye.

00:09:45.760 I've thought for a long while that the only people who can probably control the excesses of the radical

00:09:52.940 left are people who are in the moderate left, not people on the right or on the extreme right.

00:10:00.900 They're out of the argument to begin with, and this is associated in some sense, the difficulty of this

00:10:06.820 is in some sense the difficulty that you just described. If people have an affiliation with you,

00:10:14.980 then it's much more difficult to differentiate perhaps where you should. And so perhaps,

00:10:22.940 you see on the left, the moderate leftists, and then the more extreme leftists, but the left,

00:10:29.900 extreme leftists are also on the left, and they're friends of a type. And drawing that line

00:10:37.080 is extraordinarily difficult. And that's actually why, at least part of the reason why I'm

00:10:42.600 leery of any attempts to restrict free speech, because in those cases of difficult

00:10:52.900 differentiation, the only possible solution we have is dialogue about the problem, about exactly where to draw

00:11:01.540 the line. Yeah. Because otherwise we can't. No one knows how. Yeah. And I guess it's because extremism also, also

00:11:09.860 exists in degrees. And so you say, where do you stop? And well, that's very, very difficult to say, especially

00:11:16.820 among those who think like you, except for certain exceptions.

00:11:20.820 Yes, this is very true. And it's a sort of basic philosophical point, isn't it? That you can draw lines

00:11:27.920 between what is reasonable, and they can be very narrow lines. But if you keep drawing them out,

00:11:34.100 they become extreme. So for example, you can have what some people might regard as a reasonable age for

00:11:41.260 termination of the termination of a pregnancy due to some, you know, some issue. But if you keep adding

00:11:47.320 days to it, it then becomes a serious problem. And anything in that nature of differentiating and

00:11:55.840 drawing lines is bound to, is bound to cause that to be a problem. And I, however, am less confident

00:12:03.660 than you are that the left would be persuaded by someone like me, the hard left, the one wants to call

00:12:10.140 the extreme left or the radical left, wherever it is. And this may sound a bit like a bit of

00:12:15.800 boo-hooing, which is very easy to do. But if you're a soft liberal, as I think of myself, I can't find

00:12:21.960 any other designation, but that sort of thing, a centrist. These are insults to the left. I mean,

00:12:28.460 in English politics recently, for example, centrist was the boo word of the Corbynistas, the more

00:12:35.680 socialist end of the Labour Party, a party I've been a member of since I could vote.

00:12:40.140 And I felt very, very, very much buffeted about and despised for my, oh, dear, but really,

00:12:49.680 and oh, must we, you know, it's very, you know, I do think of myself as a sort of cardigan

00:12:54.740 beslippered old fool who is loathed on both sides. And it is, of course, historically true that

00:13:01.400 in the 1930s, which is the decade we always go back to when we're very worried about the direction

00:13:08.000 we're travelling in now, the communists and the Nazis both were absolutely on one mind when it

00:13:17.020 came to people like me, Jewish, semi-intellectual, soft liberals who, you know, who went, oh, no,

00:13:22.720 but shush. Because we didn't have any positivity, any certainty. We didn't turn, we didn't, you know,

00:13:28.460 it's, and as I say, I know it sounds like I'm sort of taking on a victim status here that, oh,

00:13:35.100 poor liberals, because after all, we've ruled the world for 200 years. And part of the political

00:13:39.880 and cultural argument in the world at the moment is that the liberal project, the Enlightenment

00:13:45.420 project, if you want to call it that, has failed.

00:13:48.120 Well, I would say we've cooperatively guided the world, because I think ruled is the wrong

00:13:54.140 term. Well, exactly, we wouldn't want to.

00:13:55.660 Monarchs and tyrants rule, and it's a really important distinction, because that power is

00:14:01.140 grounded in the sovereignty of the people. And imperfect as that may be, it's more grounded

00:14:07.360 in the sovereignty of the people than any other system we've ever managed to whip up.

00:14:11.400 So, I mean, it's difficult also, because it's difficult to make centrism dramatic and romantic.

00:14:22.240 And it's much easier to make extremism dramatic and romantic. And that's one of its primary

00:14:26.520 attractions. And that attraction should not be underestimated. And it's partly why I'm so

00:14:30.840 interested in talking to you, because you are this incredible dramatist, you have this unbelievable

00:14:36.060 talent that manifests itself in a manner that I thought I was reading your Wikipedia biography in

00:14:42.180 some detail, and it requires that. I thought if you want to give yourself an inferiority complex

00:14:47.520 quickly, going through your Wikipedia entry is a very good way of doing that. I mean, you have 50 films

00:14:53.040 and like 40 TV shows and five novels and seven autobiographies and a career in comedy that was

00:15:01.160 absolutely outstanding that would have been a lifetime achievement in and of itself and a whole

00:15:06.580 variety of ornery doctorates. And, and you have an intellectual end that's not trivial as well,

00:15:11.700 because you were involved with Hitchens and Dawkins and the horsemen of the, of the atheist movement.

00:15:17.620 Yeah. And I want to really want to talk to you about that too, because I especially am interested in

00:15:23.760 your opinions, because of all those people, you're the one that has the most connection with you, with,

00:15:32.140 with, with, uh, with drama and literature and fiction. And you, you, you just published a couple of books,

00:15:40.540 myth, mythos, um, heroism, heroes, heroes. And there's, there's a third one in that trilogy. It just escapes my

00:15:48.340 mind. Troy. Troy. And so you're obviously extraordinarily sensitive to the power and

00:15:55.700 necessity of literary accounts, but then you're also a humanistic atheist. And that's very,

00:16:04.340 I'm very curious about that. I mean, someone like Dawkins, he's so rational that I think for him,

00:16:11.300 and I don't know if this is fair, and it might be a bit of a, of a stereotype, but it'll do for

00:16:16.780 rhetorical purposes. He's not gripped by drama in the same way you are. And there's a truth in drama

00:16:24.580 that's not trivial. And that truth is allied with religious truth. So I want to go there too.

00:16:30.820 I can't speak for Richard. It's just been his 80th birthday. So we wish him happy birthday. And he's,

00:16:36.180 he's not the, the shrill beast of, of atheism that some people regard him as, but I won't speak for him,

00:16:42.780 obviously. Um, but, but what I would say is that, yes, you're right. He's a rationalist. And I

00:16:46.700 don't think I am. I think I'm an empiricist. And I think that's part of my love of drama and myth and

00:16:54.500 story and literature and history even is these are all to do with experience, with human experience,

00:17:01.000 the register of human experience, um, of, of testing an idea against what actually happens and how people

00:17:07.720 actually behave rather than, uh, devising a system of reason. Um, and it's not the reason when

00:17:16.280 empiricism are always absolutely opposed, but they sometimes are. And in the, in, in the history of

00:17:21.200 science, they have been, you know, you could argue that Pascal was a rationalist and, and, uh, Newton was

00:17:27.020 an empiricist for all his, you know, great mathematics and so on. He actually took a piece of cardboard and

00:17:32.320 punched a hole in it, um, which is something that a rationalist probably wouldn't, wouldn't do. So

00:17:37.340 it's experimenting in the crucible of human activity and observing what people say and hear. These are

00:17:44.780 the things comedians do all the time. It's the comic, it's, it's the comic mode is to hear somebody say

00:17:51.920 something grand and then say, yes, but GK Cheston is the perfect example of that. Now he was, he was

00:17:58.980 certainly no atheist. He was a very religious man indeed. Um, and, and a great hero of the

00:18:04.340 Catholic church. And some people even believe he should be, if not beatified, even sanctified. But,

00:18:09.480 um, he, he was a huge influence on me as a teenager growing up because I read his essays

00:18:14.420 and, uh, here's an example. Uh, um, he read, he, he, he opens an essay by saying, I read in the

00:18:22.360 newspaper the other day, this following sentence at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw,

00:18:28.980 modern woman rises to take her place in society. And I thought to myself, this is very good news.

00:18:36.140 Very encouraging. I wonder if it's true. Let's see now who's a modern woman. Oh, Mrs. Buttons.

00:18:41.300 She comes into clean every Tuesday and every Thursday. She lives in Clapham. She comes on the

00:18:45.980 omnibus and she scrubs the floors and she has three children. And if I say to myself at the trumpet call

00:18:52.860 of Ibsen and Shaw, Mrs. Buttons rises to take her place in society, I realize the sentence is not

00:18:59.340 only nonsense, it's pernicious nonsense. And, and, and that's a sort of almost comical example,

00:19:06.400 really of saying, you don't trust an abstract statement. You do not trust someone saying a plus a

00:19:12.740 equals two a, because there is no such thing in the universe as a. And although we're all capable

00:19:19.060 of doing substitutional metaphorizing or algebra, as it were, with ideas, the fact is, it's much

00:19:25.420 better to say one thing of something that is real that we know, plus another thing of something that

00:19:30.500 is real that we know and have experienced is two of those things. Once you start abstracting and,

00:19:37.740 and, and, and that's what rationalism often is. It's, it's going off on an algebraic journey,

00:19:44.560 which can produce beautiful thoughts and ideas and beautiful schemes. But for me, it is beating

00:19:51.520 that out on the anvil of human experience is the absolute key. And it's a long intellectual tradition,

00:19:57.700 empiricism. And, uh, I think we're in danger of losing it in a way, because I want to unpack three

00:20:04.240 things that you, that you just said that are very, very complicated. So the first thing you did was

00:20:09.540 draw a distinction between rationalism and empiricism. And you associated Dawkins more with

00:20:14.900 rationalism and yourself more with empiricism. And not entirely, but yeah, no, no, no. Fair enough.

00:20:20.300 Just as example. And, and you, you did that in an attempt to also describe, um, the effect or influence

00:20:29.360 or consequence or reason for your interest in drama or for the fact that drama grips you. So I want to

00:20:36.240 start with the distinction between human or between empiricism and rationalism. So everyone listening

00:20:40.760 understands. So walk us through that first. Well, empiricism is, is, um, is an intellectual

00:20:47.460 tradition of, of using experience or trial and error or, or experiment to, to prove or disprove or to

00:20:57.300 investigate an idea. So if you have an idea, I mean, a perfect example is in the 18th and 19th century,

00:21:06.100 a lot of women were dying of childbirth, uh, at childbirth, uh, appalling deaths, what we would

00:21:12.340 now call septicemia. The babies and the mothers were dying and nobody knew why, because there was no germ

00:21:18.280 theory. Nobody had an idea that there were these tiny things that could infect our systems. Um, so people

00:21:25.280 tried to weasen and they said, well, uh, maybe it's the smell because it's a bad smell around there was a

00:21:33.200 miasma theory. Um, and other people just said it was God or other people said that it was some moral

00:21:41.500 quality on the part of the women. Um, and, but a man called Semmelweis in, in Hungary, Igna Semmelweis,

00:21:49.440 um, tried lots of different experiments. He, he, he, he chose a certain number of people to do

00:21:56.760 different things on what we'd now call cohort testing, you know, or not quite random double

00:22:02.080 blind testing, such as used as in med in medicine to prove the efficacy of something. But eventually he,

00:22:08.400 he, he got a group of medical students who were attending on these births to wash their hands before

00:22:13.500 doing it. It was an almost random thing to do. And suddenly the death rate dropped. I mean,

00:22:19.580 absolutely plummeted. And the reward for Semmelweis? He was sent to a madhouse because nobody believed

00:22:26.000 where he died. Because the rationalist said, there's no reason that that could be, that could be right.

00:22:31.180 But a true empiricist would say it almost doesn't matter what the reason is. The fact is it's repeatable

00:22:36.840 and verifiable and, and even not understanding because it took later till Koch and Pasteur and

00:22:43.240 microscopes could show what the process was. He, he actually did end up in a, you know, and he's a

00:22:49.320 hero man. I actually went to Budapest to go to the Igna Semmelweis Museum in, in Buddha, uh, just to

00:22:56.040 sort of pay homage to this remarkable man. And I mean, it's a bit unfair on the doctors. They had no

00:23:01.400 reason to know if you like, but that's the point. They had no reason to know, uh, uh, an example we

00:23:07.720 all deal with of empiricism, which can be very annoying is in insurance. Uh, what's called

00:23:12.760 actuarial tables or actuaries are people in insurance companies who look at the statistics.

00:23:19.240 And if they discovered that when your name is Jordan, you are 10% more likely to have a car crash,

00:23:25.640 you would pay 10% more of premium on your insurance. And it's no good you saying, but why?

00:23:31.080 They would just say, those are the odds. That's the empirical truth. That's the epidemiology of

00:23:37.720 accidents. If you like is, uh, that people call Jordan or more famously, of course, actors pay

00:23:43.480 more and you can then try and look for a reason. And that's a very valuable thing to do. Of course,

00:23:48.520 we all want to know the reason, but, um, sometimes I think there is a beauty in testing and looking and

00:23:56.920 seeing and trying things out and experimenting. It's not to discard reason that the two go together

00:24:02.520 in finding out the truth. So, so how do you associate that with your interest in, in literature

00:24:09.480 and your clear recognition that the dramatic end of existence is valuable?

00:24:15.960 Well, I suppose it's, I mean, in an obvious way, uh, all literature people, literature snobs,

00:24:23.320 I might say, uh, will look at politics. I mean, all through my life, I've looked at people like,

00:24:27.960 I don't know, Margaret Thatcher or indeed, um, on the other side, uh, Gordon Brown and thought,

00:24:32.280 if only they read Shakespeare, why, why, why, why do, why do people read books of political philosophy and,

00:24:38.600 and, and, and, and, and books on this being a good idea on, you know, how parliamentary history without actually

00:24:45.800 reading about how humans behave and seeing how evil and good are played out in, in drama. Because I think

00:24:54.280 not just literature, but ceremony and ritual are extremely important in, in understanding, uh, everything. Um, and you

00:25:03.160 don't have to be religious to, to believe in ritual. I love liturgy. I love church liturgy. I'm

00:25:09.160 absolutely passionate about hymns and, and psalms and, and the Eucharist and, and, and the language of

00:25:15.240 it. You know, the, the, um, the outward and visible sign of an inward and visible grace is, is one of the

00:25:21.400 most beautiful phrases, uh, I think ever written in the, in the, in the, in the book of the Eucharist of the

00:25:26.520 Episcopalian Church, as Americans call it, or the Anglican Church, as we call it. And, and there are

00:25:31.400 magnificent, um, shortcuts available if, if you look at ceremony and the dramatization of, of human

00:25:41.080 issues, rather than attempting to abstract some essence from them, some truth that you can say

00:25:49.240 that is applicable to all. It's, in a sense, we're all children who have to be shown puppets

00:25:55.000 before we understand. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah.

00:25:59.240 I've stopped. No, no, no, no. I'm well, it's just, it's just stopped and made me think. I mean,

00:26:08.680 um, the reason I got in interested in religious thinking, I went down the pathway that you're

00:26:15.160 describing. I mean, that's why I got interested in religious thinking, because from a psychological

00:26:21.520 perspective, I mean, the first thing that I realized, and I believe this is what you just pointed out, is

00:26:27.300 that there are truths embedded in fiction, for example, or in spectacle, ritual, drama. And

00:26:40.940 well, then you ask, well, what is it? Those are attractive, and they're entertaining, and they,

00:26:46.860 they automatically engage our interest. And, but way more than that, they're also that which culture

00:26:52.500 centers itself around. Yeah. Greek tragedy, for example, which seemed to be integrally associated

00:26:58.740 with the Eleusinian Greek mysteries, something that we, we know very little about, unfortunately. But

00:27:08.180 for me, and, and I was influenced by Carl Jung in this mode of thinking, culture is nested inside a

00:27:14.020 narrative structure. By net, by necessity, I even believe that science is nested inside an,

00:27:20.820 a narrative structure, because the narrative structure is what makes the science practically

00:27:25.780 applicable and useful. Yes, what else is the standard model, but another way of saying a narrative

00:27:32.340 structure, the standard model is just that. And that is the basis of physics today, isn't it? It's a story.

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00:30:28.500 Well, and the idea that we have that science is a useful endeavor, the fact that we're looking to

00:30:33.700 the material world for redemption, that's all part of a narrative. And I was absolutely staggered by

00:30:40.020 Jung's analysis of the emergence of science out of alchemy. And his notion was that the alchemical

00:30:45.700 tradition was a 2,000-year-old dream, a narrative dream, a counterposition to Christianity with its

00:30:52.900 emphasis on abstracted spirituality, suggesting that what we lacked could be found in the depths

00:30:59.780 of the material world. And so there was this motivational dream that if we paid enough attention

00:31:07.540 to the transformations of matter, we could find that which would confer upon us eternal life,

00:31:14.580 infinite health, and wealth. And Jung's point was, well, until that dream was in place,

00:31:20.500 there would be no motivation to undertake the process of the painstaking analysis of the material

00:31:26.100 world that didn't produce any immediate gratification. And it took thousands of years for that

00:31:31.940 idea to assemble itself with enough force so that we could start to have scientists.

00:31:36.900 So the narrative was operative thousands of years before the technical process was instituted,

00:31:43.380 and it laid the groundwork for it. I found that highly credible.

00:31:46.500 And maybe it also took that time for the brain of humans, if you believe Julian Jaynes,

00:31:54.980 and I kind of do in a metaphorical way. I don't know if you know his book.

00:31:59.780 Yes, I do.

00:32:00.660 I'm sure you do. Yeah. That maybe, you know, our brains weren't even capable of processing in that way

00:32:07.300 around the time between language and writing, you know, that sort of time. We were finding ways of

00:32:18.260 describing the world. To the Egyptian, I believe I'm right in saying this is the derivation,

00:32:22.580 the magic became alchemy, which then became chemistry. And it became drilled down into an

00:32:32.900 investigation. But first, you had to believe that there was a magic inside everything, inside

00:32:39.620 substance, to which we could be tuned. Yes, right. A redemptive magic. Yes, if you like. And

00:32:49.300 this is not to repudiate science and numbers. And, you know, a very good friend of mine who was a

00:32:56.660 priest said, you know, physics is a theology that makes machines work. And there's some sort of truth

00:33:05.460 in that. And I love, for example, the story, I tell this in a footnote in Mythos, but it's very,

00:33:10.260 very, very early on in Greek mythology, when the first, the primal, the primal entities, the primal

00:33:17.300 deities are Uranus, the sky or Uranus, as children we love to call him, and Gaia, the earth, who mate,

00:33:24.660 the sky and the earth. Mate is a common theme in what they call a mytheme in lots of different myths,

00:33:31.780 as you can imagine. The sky and the earth mate, and they produce whatever is in between the zone which

00:33:37.140 we inhabit between sky and earth. And that next generation are called the Titans, of course.

00:33:43.140 But, and there's the famous story of the birth of Zeus. His father, the Titan, eats all his children.

00:33:50.900 And the mother, Rhea, is determined that the last child, Zeus, shouldn't be eaten. So she goes and gets

00:33:56.740 a rock from close by where she lives on Mount Orthris. And she covers it in swaddling and hides it under

00:34:05.060 her legs and then makes the child, makes the noise of childbirth. And Kronos, the Titan comes,

00:34:11.300 thinks it's a new baby, swallows it whole. And the actual baby is then born on Crete and becomes Zeus,

00:34:17.940 the leader of the next generation of gods. But the stone she takes is from Magnesium in Greece,

00:34:24.020 which is near Thessaly. And it's a stone that the Greeks had noticed had a very extraordinary property,

00:34:30.580 which is the most interesting property that any object can have on earth and is very rare,

00:34:35.540 and that it can attract things remotely from a distance. That without there being a physical

00:34:41.540 force connecting them, apparently, a piece of fluff or paper could fly towards this stone from Magnesium.

00:34:47.940 And so stones that have this property are named after that part of the world. They're called magnetites. And from

00:34:54.580 magnetites, we get magnets. And the story of magnets, and how magnets were then joined

00:35:03.220 by Thompson and Faraday and others to make, and Maxwell, to make the electromotive force that

00:35:11.380 allows you and me to talk the way we do. And to use that action at a distance, which science is brilliant

00:35:20.180 at turning into extraordinary magical machines. The Greek for at a distance is tele. So it's

00:35:26.180 telecommunication, telephone, television, and teleporting, anything that goes from one

00:35:32.420 place to telegrams and so on, telegraphs. And gravity is the same thing. Something moves,

00:35:42.580 and there's nothing between it. And it makes us thrill. And science can do that.

00:35:48.420 And what we've never found a way to do is, or at least what we try to find a way, is to do the same

00:35:55.140 with our fellow people. But our fellow people are, you know, the world is surprisingly stable.

00:36:02.180 There's magnets around the place, and there's gold and there's stuff, and you dig it up, and

00:36:06.180 you can do terrible damage to it, as we have. But we have moved from small groups, to clans, to tribes, to

00:36:14.580 nations, to this strange myth of a nation, and so on. And the individuals within it are much less

00:36:22.500 controllable than the objects around us. And yet we can control those objects so superbly that it gives

00:36:28.340 us an idea that we have a special place and a special power. And it's, I suppose, really,

00:36:38.900 what we want to do is to reconnect ourselves to the same motive forces that are thrilling,

00:36:45.780 like magnetism and electricity, that exist also all throughout nature, that we look at them. You know,

00:36:52.340 which of us can't honestly almost sob with joy when spring happens? And you see that once again,

00:36:58.260 these leaves are being pushed out of dead branches and blossoms there, and insects are flying towards

00:37:04.660 them. There's this fantastic process going on. And somehow we've allowed ourselves to feel outside

00:37:12.020 it, as if we are special. We've given ourselves a godlike status, which is very dangerous,

00:37:17.860 I think, and very foolish. And the more I look back, the more confidence I have in looking forward.

00:37:26.820 I suppose that's one of the other reasons I love myth so much.

00:37:29.780 So, okay. So, all right. So, you described yourself as an empiricist, and then you talked about,

00:37:37.540 you started to talk about the attraction that the mythological and narrative world has for you,

00:37:42.580 and some of the reasons for that. And then, but you also differentiated between you and Dawkins to

00:37:48.580 some degree. And so, well, I'm curious about why.

00:37:52.020 Oh, I mean, he's, I mean, I'm, as I said, I can't speak for him, but you used the word rationalist

00:37:58.180 And I understand that.

00:37:59.620 And I don't have any particular points of disagreement with him. I'm really fond of him. He's a friend.

00:38:05.620 And I only feel sorry sometimes that, and this is a cheap point. It's, you know,

00:38:14.580 but most of us are a bit fed up with this attitude that it's all about presentation.

00:38:18.340 And I could argue that Richard's presentation, his passion is real. His love of science is real.

00:38:24.420 His love of the joy and the wonder of discovery is real. He's written books on wonder, which is a huge

00:38:31.140 and marvelous and much under explored human quality. And a primary religious instinct.

00:38:37.540 Yes. And, and yet science has shown us, and it really can just can't be contested that we are part

00:38:44.340 of a continuum of life. DNA demonstrates this, the DNA we share, not just with our close

00:38:52.660 ape-like and other mammals, but also with plants and flowers that also have DNA. And as we know,

00:38:59.780 so do viruses. And, and, and yet, or RNA. And, and yet, I don't think, I think it's fair to say

00:39:12.980 that blackbirds don't look at the sunset and go, my God, that's so beautiful. Did you see that?

00:39:18.660 I want to paint it. I want to remember it. How is it? You know, this, this sense of literally of

00:39:24.580 marvelling. It's the only world we know. When we're born, we don't think, of course, there are

00:39:32.020 70,000 other globes with much better sunsets. This is the only thing we've ever seen. And yet it

00:39:38.660 staggers us. It surprises us. We're surprised by what is the case, to use the phrase that Wittgenstein

00:39:46.340 loved. You know, the case is everything around us. And we don't know another one. And yet we go,

00:39:56.340 wow. Why should we go wow at what is absolutely ordinary? There, there must be a reason, I suspect,

00:40:04.020 that we are astonished by the everyday, by the fact of what we see when we look out of the window,

00:40:10.580 or when we go for a walk, we're astonished by buds and grass and rabbits and sky and clouds.

00:40:16.340 And these things are we're astonished. We're astonished by what we want to imitate.

00:40:21.700 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I've thought about that idea for a long time. It's not a casual

00:40:26.980 response to your question. Well, the sun is a hero. The sun is the hero that fights the darkness at night

00:40:35.780 and rises anew in the morning. The sun is associated with consciousness. And we have to imitate the hero.

00:40:43.700 And we see what we have to imitate everywhere. And it reduces us to a state of, of awe. And awe is an

00:40:50.580 invitation to imitate. And, and imagine, so you, you see what you are not yet, but what you could be.

00:40:58.660 And you need to see that because you need to turn into what you could be because what you are is not

00:41:03.780 sufficient to redeem you. Well, I see that from a Jungian point of view, but I'm a Joseph Camberley

00:41:11.220 sort of way too. But in terms of the way myths and then religions developed, the idea of imitating

00:41:18.180 these symbols of this, of complete power and creation, like the sun, whether it's Ra or whether

00:41:24.260 it's Apollo or any other deity or sense of solar greatness, you are supposed to supplicate or

00:41:32.020 sacrifice to, or acknowledge your weakness to, but not imitate.

00:41:36.180 But we could look at sacrifice, look at sacrifice. That's a great, that's a great inward point.

00:41:41.220 So I ask my students, especially the children of first generation immigrants,

00:41:45.700 what did your parents sacrifice to put you here? And they can answer that instantly.

00:41:53.540 And sacrifice, like we look at ancient sacrifice and we think about, about it as something

00:41:59.140 primordial or even detestable, especially in its more extreme forms and no wonder.

00:42:04.580 But we had to act out sacrifice before we could psychologize it and understand it.

00:42:11.540 And what we learned, and this is absolutely crucial, this issue of sacrifice, what we learned

00:42:15.460 was that if we gave up something that we valued in the present, and so that could be a false idol,

00:42:20.660 that's one way of thinking about it. If we gave up something in the present that we valued,

00:42:25.780 the future would improve. We learned that we could bargain with reality itself by sacrificing

00:42:34.100 counterproductive values to move ahead. And so we acted that out long before we could

00:42:40.100 make it into a psychological truism. And so it's, there is that supplication element, but it's also

00:42:47.540 the case that you should be prostrate in some sense in front of what's ultimately ideal, because

00:42:54.260 otherwise you don't have the proper humility.

00:42:57.780 Yes. I mean, I see what you're saying. It makes rational sense, but then the empiricist in me says,

00:43:03.860 well, okay, I'm the mother of some of those children in Mexico who are being slaughtered

00:43:09.300 to the gods in order to make the harvest better. And lo and behold, it doesn't work.

00:43:14.420 Because there is no causal relation between sacrificing children on a pyramid in Texacoatl and the harvest

00:43:22.100 improving. In fact, there may well be an earthquake the next day and more people die. That very often did

00:43:26.580 happen in whole civilizations, Mayan and Mexican and others, disappeared. And the more they were

00:43:32.260 threatened, the more they sacrificed and the less use it was. So there was no, it may have had a

00:43:38.580 psychological purpose that I don't know. I mean, it seems to me the psychology of sacrificing your

00:43:43.540 children or even your very rare cattle upon which you may depend for a year to eat to gods who will

00:43:51.540 apparently placate you by making a better harvest or not send a tidal wave this year that will destroy

00:43:56.900 the port and all the other things that our ancestors found in the contingent world in which they, an

00:44:02.020 unstable world in which they lived. So I can understand why a 19th century figure like Frazier or, you know,

00:44:08.180 in the Golden Bough or like Mary McCarthy or Jung or Joseph Campbell can make wonderful myths out of myths.

00:44:18.100 They're telling a story about stories and telling us what they mean. Well, I don't refute it. I repudiate.

00:44:27.540 I allow myself to believe, no, actually, yes, it's all very well. And you can build a very nice theory

00:44:36.500 about what these myths mean and who these heroes are and what these quests are and how they're only seven

00:44:41.940 stories. And yes, but again, the stand up comedian type empiricist in me says, OK, so I'm a small Roman

00:44:51.940 person under those circumstances. And what is this really meaning to me? I'm sorry. No, I've got, as

00:44:59.940 Wordsworth put it, it's getting and spending and doing and having children and looking and hoping life

00:45:05.220 gets better and enjoying life with my friends. But to erect it into a spiritual language and a theater of

00:45:17.380 human meaning is delightful. And I think we have to recognize that it's a game to some extent. It may

00:45:28.180 indeed be true. I mean, you know, I'm not saying this to demolish your argument, but I'm saying it's

00:45:35.140 yes, but, you know, in terms of sacrifice. The buts are important. The buts are important.

00:45:40.020 And the skepticism is necessary because you don't want to leave anything standing except that which

00:45:45.620 can't survive the onslaught. And there's no doubt that there's no doubt that the sacrificial idea can go

00:45:52.420 dreadfully wrong. And I but I would say that that's in the nature of of the attempt, because

00:45:59.140 it's obviously the case that sometimes you make sacrifices towards a certain end, which is

00:46:04.980 clearly an attempt to bargain with the future as if it's something that can be bargained with. Yes.

00:46:10.900 But sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. And later, after that, the the cultures of sacrifice

00:46:16.820 around the world came a new system where it was the gods who sacrificed themselves, which is like

00:46:24.100 the Christian myth or the many of the dying and reborn kings in various myths that that that James

00:46:31.060 Fraser in particular wrote about. And there, Christ ransomed himself as it was. So so so suddenly it's it's

00:46:41.060 it's as if humans said this sacrifice is getting us nowhere. If God really loves us, he would sacrifice

00:46:48.180 himself or herself for us. And that is one of the one of the meanings of the the incarnation and the

00:46:58.340 the the the Christian story, is it not? And it's not unique in any way. There are many other stories of of

00:47:05.220 divine divine divine figures being sacrificed to save the society that they in which they they make

00:47:12.820 themselves flesh. You sacrifice your short term impulses for the long term good. I suppose that's

00:47:22.100 one way of thinking about the discovery of the future. That speaks very well to your books. That

00:47:26.500 speaks very well to your books, because, you know, underlying both your excellent books of rules of

00:47:31.780 behaviour is that I don't mean this in a bad way. The simple truth of of deferred pleasure being

00:47:38.420 something that seems to be or deferred advantage being something that seems to have gone out of

00:47:43.780 human culture lately, that we you know, we're all a bit Veruca salt. I want it. I want it now, you know.

00:47:50.740 And as you as you said about sacrifices, you you you suffer or you you find, you know, in some way, you

00:48:01.700 you defer what what what pleasure might positively be yours now in order to have a future advantage.

00:48:10.020 Yeah, right. And then we have an immense discussion that lasts forever about what that optimal future

00:48:16.340 advantage is. And that that's part of this religious investigation, because you might say,

00:48:20.820 and this is something that's manifesting itself in Christianity, which is, well, we're trying to

00:48:26.020 produce something better in the future. And so then you ask yourself, what does better mean?

00:48:31.540 That's the first question. And what the what does the future mean? Those need to be answered. And then

00:48:36.820 the net the final question is, well, what's the most appropriate sacrifice? And so you get an extreme

00:48:43.140 version of that in Christianity, hence its narrative power, which is, well, you sacrifice the most

00:48:48.740 valuable possible thing for what's of ultimate eternal value. That's the underlying structure. And

00:48:57.780 in some sense, it hits a limit, because it's God himself who sacrificed. And the purpose of the

00:49:03.460 sacrifice is the is the establishment, the redemption of humanity and the establishment of of the kingdom of

00:49:09.860 heaven eternally. So that there isn't anything better than that, by definition. Although I know, if I

00:49:17.060 was to raise out to Sarah or a Marxist view of this, and say that it's about the power over the people, which

00:49:22.900 basically denies them any kind of pleasure now on a promise, which is unprovable of a future

00:49:29.700 glorification in some kind or another, either for their children or for themselves in a heaven, whose direction they

00:49:36.580 can't point to. And not just Altusser and Marxists, of course, many, many secularists and atheists like

00:49:44.260 myself have said, you know, there is a there is a story to be told about religion, basically stopping

00:49:51.300 ordinary citizens from having any say in in in their life and their world. They are told what the truth is,

00:50:00.580 they are told where power comes from and where it resides, and they are told that their poverty

00:50:06.180 and their subservience and their sacrifice are for the greater good. And they they must take that

00:50:12.820 authority on its word. And the meaning of the Enlightenment was the throwing off of those shackles of

00:50:21.380 Aristotelian ecclesiasticism, which constantly laid down these these categories of authority.

00:50:28.260 And people began to question and say, I wonder, because a thing we might just talk about,

00:50:35.860 because I know it interests you, and there are people who have written quite a few books about

00:50:39.540 it lately, is the distinction between a hierarchy and the network in terms of how you order society that

00:50:47.780 and these religions and these sacrifices all came in hierarchical societies rather, it seems,

00:50:52.340 in in in in ones that might be called networked nodal or some other word. I know Neil Ferguson has written about this,

00:51:00.900 isn't he, in a book that I can't remember its title. It's got the word tower in it. But

00:51:07.220 it's one of the objections people have to the modern liberally produced world is that morality is

00:51:13.940 relative, and that hierarchies are toppled, and that power and authority are no longer seen to reside

00:51:22.580 in something in some agreed, you know, that the curtain is pulled away and the Wizard of Oz is revealed

00:51:27.780 to be nothing, a silly foolish snake oil salesman. And the answer lies within ourselves.

00:51:35.940 Okay, so I have to stop you there, because I can't answer, I won't be able to ask this question,

00:51:40.420 because there's so many things that you're saying that I want to ask about. Okay, so

00:51:49.380 with regards to the idea of the opiate of the masses. Okay, well, the first thing we might note,

00:51:55.780 I think reasonably, is that Marxism is the methamphetamine of the masses, and whatever flaws

00:52:02.820 Judeo-Christianity might have had, in terms of its corruption, was certainly matched by the

00:52:09.300 instantaneous corruption. Yes, but the fact that a Marxist has a critique of religion does not mean

00:52:14.020 that it falls, because Marxism itself falls. No, I agree. Okay, so that there's a second question

00:52:21.300 there. And so the second question would be something like, is the corruption of the church that you

00:52:27.060 described, intrinsic to the nature of the church and its doctrine, or is it the corruption of something

00:52:33.940 that's valuable? Now, let me make two arguments for that. One is that the corruption is intrinsic,

00:52:40.420 and the whole thing should be just dispensed with. And I would say that that's the perspective of the

00:52:45.540 four horsemen, fundamentally. Yeah. And of religious people themselves. I mean,

00:52:52.260 Thomas Cranmer, who wrote the prayer book during the Reformation, there's a great phrase in it,

00:52:58.100 there was not anything by the wit of man devised that hath not been in time in part or in whole

00:53:04.100 corrupted. Absolutely. And I think that's also an existential truth. I mean, you just talked about

00:53:12.420 Kronos. Yeah. Kronos devours his sons. Well, Kronos is the archetypal tyrant, and he's also time.

00:53:20.340 And both time and the archetypal tyrant devour their own sons. So if you're a tyrannical father,

00:53:26.260 or a tyrannical statesman, instead of encouraging the development of the young people in your charge,

00:53:32.820 you'll crush them and destroy them. He also castrated his own father.

00:53:39.220 So that's a, I would say that that's something like demolition of the utility of tradition.

00:53:45.860 I mean, in the Egyptian, in Egyptian mythology, you see Horus, who's the son fundamentally,

00:53:52.340 both the actual son, the heavenly son and the son, and Osiris. And for the Egyptians,

00:53:57.220 Horus and Osiris had to rule simultaneously. So Horus didn't castrate Osiris, he rescued him from the

00:54:03.140 underworld and joined with him. So that the tradition, which was represented by Osiris,

00:54:08.580 which had a Kronos-like element, because it was tyrannical and destructive,

00:54:11.860 had to be allied with Horus, who was essentially something like, I would say something like

00:54:19.060 empirical attention. It's something because the symbol is the eye. And so it was like alert

00:54:24.580 tradition. And that's different than the castration of the father, that's the rescuing of the father

00:54:29.700 from the underworld, when he becomes corrupt and senile. Now, when you just published Mythos, we

00:54:35.140 refer to this Mythos, Heroes and Troy. And so I would say, and you tell me if I'm wrong, but from

00:54:40.820 the outside, it looks to me like you're involved in a philosophical, archaeological expedition to find

00:54:48.340 things of value in the past, and to bring them forward into the future. And that's what I am trying

00:54:54.740 to do, at least for me, I would say, with regards to Christianity. It's like, I know the critiques,

00:55:00.980 and I understand the critiques, and it's not like I'm not, what would you call, sensitive to their

00:55:07.220 finer points. It is an open question, right? How much of the tradition... Look, I know in Britain

00:55:13.460 right now, there are people who say that flying the flag is an imperialist act. And so what are they

00:55:20.420 asking? They're saying, well, is our tradition so irredeemably corrupt that we have to abandon it

00:55:24.820 wholeheartedly? I can speak to this very directly because it's something I find very,

00:55:31.300 very interesting. Again, so much of it is historical ignorance. For those who are obsessed with the flag

00:55:40.900 and the politicians who want to fly the flag, I would urge them to read Rudyard Kipling, who is

00:55:46.500 supposed to be, in some people's eyes, the poet and bard of British Empire, of the Raj, that the

00:55:54.740 spokesman for this very thing. There is a scene in one of his masterpieces, Storky and Co., a book set in

00:56:01.540 a school, where a politician comes to the school to give a speech, and he has a flag, and he...

00:56:07.060 And the school children are outraged, absolutely horrified. This takes place in the second year

00:56:18.900 of Gladstone's five-year premiership at the absolute height of the British Empire. The Queen is on the

00:56:25.620 throne. She's, you know, her crown and her flag are fluttering all over the world. And these boys are

00:56:32.580 at this special school, which is actually a kind of feeder for the British Empire. They'll all be

00:56:37.780 sent out to fight in Afghan wars and in India and in the Boer War later on. And Kipling describes how

00:56:43.380 they die. But the idea to them that anybody would dare to wave a flag and ask them to value it was so

00:56:51.060 disgusting, they could barely speak. It's a very extraordinary passage where he describes their

00:56:57.620 horror at this politician using the flag and claiming to own it. He makes the point that

00:57:04.820 one's relationship to one's country is intensely private. And it may be that one has great love for

00:57:11.300 it, but that it's a love that is complex and confounded with all kinds of disappointment and

00:57:16.260 hatred and fear and shame, as well as love. And it is one's own thing. But to fly it and to wave it and to

00:57:24.820 say that it means this is a lie and an imposition on the personal experience of those boys in that

00:57:32.660 story. And I would urge everyone to read that because it comes from a surprising source. It's

00:57:37.380 no accident that the best writers... Would you say the same about burning it?

00:57:42.100 Is it the same kind of... Because you just offered a balanced account because you said, well,

00:57:47.620 if you're sensible, let's say, and that your feelings for your country, so let's say your

00:57:53.700 feelings for your tradition or your regard for your tradition is a complex mix of emotions from

00:58:00.500 abhorrence and shame and contempt to love, that entire distribution. Okay, that seems to me to be

00:58:06.260 appropriate. And my sense is that that's expressed mythologically by two figures of tradition, one,

00:58:13.460 the wise king and the evil tyrant. And all cultures are a meld of both, although to a greater or lesser

00:58:22.020 degree, because you get pure forms of tyranny and pure forms of benevolent rule. Okay, hopefully.

00:58:28.980 I think that's a reasonable proposition. Okay, so it's complex. But you're willing to accept that

00:58:35.700 complexity. But what I see, and maybe this will tie us back into the political discussion that we

00:58:41.940 sort of started this off with, is that in radical movements, radical critical movements, and I think

00:58:49.620 I place the atheist horseman in that category. There's no... The love is not there. The respect is

00:58:56.980 not there. The pointing out of the flaws is there and the contempt is there. But the attempt, that's not

00:59:03.380 good enough. Look, if you read a piece of literature, you want to dismiss that which is no longer relevant and

00:59:10.260 extract out that which is crucial. Yeah. That's critical reading. Yeah. It's... But the purpose isn't to

00:59:16.820 dismiss. No. Fundamentally, the purpose is to mine. No. And I would say another very central piece of

00:59:24.340 literature for me, higher literature than Kipling, most people would say, is one of Flaubert's

00:59:31.060 short stories. A simple heart, which is about this poor peasant woman, Felicite, I think her name is.

00:59:42.020 And there's a scene in which she kneels in front of a stained glass window. And this is where the parrot

00:59:48.900 comes from that Julian Barnes wrote about so brilliantly in Flaubert's parrot. But she's incredibly

00:59:54.020 simple and incredibly ignorant and uneducated, but also incredibly devout. And she kneels there with

01:00:01.540 her knees in desperate pain because she spends her whole life on them scrubbing floors.

01:00:07.380 And she sees this extraordinary stained glass. And Flaubert is able to describe the incredible

01:00:15.780 corruption and venality that went into the spending of the money on this stained glass and the lives of the

01:00:22.900 corrupt priests who did it, but also showed the light coming from her rather than from behind the

01:00:30.260 glass. It's a very holy moment. And it's anybody who dismisses religion would be well to remember

01:00:37.460 that devotion and piety can be wonderful things as well as terribly brutal things.

01:00:44.420 OK, so I want to understand the difference. Right. OK, I'm going to read something and forgive me,

01:00:50.500 but I want to go here. You're face to face with God.

01:00:58.660 Bone cancer in children. What's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world where there is such

01:01:05.380 misery? That's not our fault. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious,

01:01:12.180 mean minded, stupid God who creates a world so full of injustice and pain? And then one more.

01:01:19.700 Because the God who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac,

01:01:24.340 utter maniac. Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov. Yeah. Right. Right. Now it's OK. So what happens in The Brothers

01:01:31.620 Karamazov is that Ivan wins the argument. Yeah. But Elosia is the better person. Completely so.

01:01:38.660 And we love him. Yeah. It's a book everyone should read. Right. So it's very interesting.

01:01:42.260 I would urge everyone to read The Brothers Karamazov because I do think it's a work of genius.

01:01:46.420 There's a lot about Dostoevsky I really dislike because of his influences. Again, people who don't

01:01:52.180 understand Dostoevsky think he's a champion of right wing religiosity without understanding that he went

01:01:58.820 through an extraordinary life experience to come to where he did come and that his novels show his full

01:02:05.140 understanding of all kinds of different points of view. But in terms of the dialectic of of that issue

01:02:11.220 about how how there can be a God. I mean, I was answering a question that I was asked.

01:02:16.580 I know. And I'm not trying. I'm not really not trying to put you on the spot.

01:02:19.700 My point is, I don't believe there is such a being. But if there were and he were the kind of being that has been

01:02:27.380 worshipped and described by various religions around the world and monotheistic religions,

01:02:32.580 then I would have many bones to pick with him. But of course, I don't believe there is such a thing.

01:02:37.940 But the the argument from evil, as it's known, is a is a very old one. And it goes back through

01:02:44.980 medieval religious figures, as well as later humanists, that this idea that it is it is very hard to square

01:02:53.540 this loving God who has knowledge of every hair on our head and adores us and adores little kittens.

01:03:01.620 But he also, as I say, bone cancer in in in children, but also life cycles of insects that whose whole aim

01:03:08.900 is to burrow into the eyes of children in Africa and and lay their eggs there and cause blindness for those

01:03:15.700 children. I mean, you could quite easily picture a universe in which there weren't such an animal and in which

01:03:21.620 children were not sent blind with pain and horror by the various bugs and fungi, fungi and insects and viruses in the world.

01:03:29.860 There's a worm. There's a worm in Africa that burrows under the skin and it's long worm.

01:03:36.340 And if you you can pull it out with a pencil and wrap it, but it breaks, it's fragile and then it gets infected.

01:03:42.500 It's a terrible thing. And a doctor recently made it his life's work to eradicate that and did it successfully.

01:03:48.340 Yeah. And so then I would so I read what you wrote. And I mean, I take it very seriously. And and

01:03:54.980 it wasn't I wasn't throwing it in your face. I brought it up actually because of what you said about

01:04:00.660 Flaubert's attitude, you know, because what that lacks, what your statement lacks is

01:04:07.140 exactly what Flaubert highlighted in that woman on her knees. And and I'm not saying this is a simple

01:04:11.940 solution. Right. And then and I would say, so let's take the argument you made there.

01:04:17.540 And there's a there's a direction that goes in that's nihilistic and resentful and vengeful and

01:04:23.380 angry and all understandable. But to me counter it doesn't look to me like there's anything good in

01:04:30.660 it. It looks like it's entirely counterproductive. It makes the problem it purports to have been generated

01:04:38.820 by worse. And so then the question is, what's the appropriate attitude, given that the argument

01:04:46.500 you make is actually an extraordinarily powerful argument. And I don't know the answer to that.

01:04:50.900 But I but I do know, I think that resentment and anger and even the motive that would make you want

01:04:57.140 to say that to God himself, I think that's probably not helpful, even though it's so well.

01:05:03.380 Well, I came to that with great difficulty. I mean, I've had my reasons to be resentful and angry,

01:05:11.620 especially recently. And because I'm suffering a lot of pain. And it makes me resentful and angry

01:05:19.300 and wanting to shake my fist. But I found upon intense consideration that there was nothing in that

01:05:27.060 that didn't make it worse. And that therefore, that must be wrong, even though it's justifiable.

01:05:33.300 Right. Jordan, I completely understand. And you must remember that my response was to a question

01:05:38.180 I didn't see coming. And it was amused. It was because I don't believe in this God. It's not an

01:05:43.620 issue. I'm not really resentful and angry about the fact that there's evil in the world. I'm sorrowful,

01:05:48.900 very often. And I'm united in my admiration for the fact and the real belief I have that most people,

01:05:57.860 fundamentally, given this dysfunction or this deep trauma, most people are so good, are so anxious to be

01:06:07.860 good, are deontically good, have a sense of obligation and drive in them to be better than they are.

01:06:16.020 I think that's one of the key things I love about humanity is not just that we are dissatisfied with

01:06:24.020 things that are wrong and can be improved, but with ourselves, we are dissatisfied and that most of us

01:06:29.700 want to be better. I know that's true of me. Every time I go off to sleep, I think,

01:06:35.300 how did I screw up today? How can I be better tomorrow? Why am I so bad at this? If only I could

01:06:41.300 manage that in moral terms, genuine moral terms. Yes, I think that's an extraordinarily common

01:06:47.140 experience and very much under-noticed. And part of the reason, as far as I can tell, that the talks

01:06:54.420 that I've been giving, let's say, have had the effect that they've had is because I do point out

01:06:59.700 that that's an extraordinarily common experience, that self-torture by conscience. And it does indicate

01:07:07.300 this striving towards a higher mode of being. The other question I have when I look at the

01:07:13.060 response that I just read is that the amount of the world's evil that's a consequence of our

01:07:20.820 voluntary moral insufficiencies is indeterminate. You know, so you might say, hypothetically speaking,

01:07:27.300 that as part of God's creation, we actually have important work to do. And if we shirk it,

01:07:32.980 the consequences are real. And you might say, well, that's just an apology for God. And perhaps

01:07:38.180 that's the case. And perhaps there's no God at all. And so what the hell are we talking about? But

01:07:43.780 I do think it's an important issue. I mean, your life is characterized by a stellar level of constant

01:07:50.500 productive creativity. That's you. And you're offering that to the world. And that seems necessary.

01:07:57.780 And maybe it's because the problems are real and important. And the role we have to play ethically

01:08:04.020 is of paramount importance, truly. Yeah.

01:08:07.380 Why else would we torture ourselves with conscience? And I would say that's the flowering

01:08:12.500 of the religious instinct within you. Well, you could describe it as that. But then,

01:08:17.940 you know, there are phrases... I mean, you used a phrase earlier that I wanted to say, whoa,

01:08:21.780 hang on, I'm not sure I know what that means, a higher mode of existence. I don't see... I remember

01:08:28.500 having this argument with John Cleese, of all people, some years ago. He was a great lover of the

01:08:35.060 Tibetan Book of the Dead and Gilbran and people like that. And I've always found them slightly hard

01:08:41.780 to take. And he talked about... I think the phrase he used was a higher level of consciousness. And I said,

01:08:47.300 I don't... And again, this is my empiricist thing. It sounds cynical and sceptical. It's not meant to

01:08:52.900 be. But what level? Who's a... Describe a level. What is a higher mode? Why higher? What's higher than

01:09:00.660 another? Are you saying it in terms of animals? It's a view. It's an old-fashioned Huxleyan view of

01:09:07.460 evolution that most modern... Richard Dawkins, for example, most modern evolutionary scientists and so on,

01:09:13.380 and the ethologists would deprecate to say that there is a higher level of being, a higher mode

01:09:19.700 of consciousness. Is it just like saying, well, you're better educated, you've read more, you know

01:09:24.500 more? Is it you've somehow been enlightened? A fair clown's effect, as the Germans would say, which is

01:09:31.460 not necessarily intellectual, but is somehow spiritual? And if so, show me an example of it. Show me someone

01:09:41.460 who has a higher mode of existence than I do. Or the... I can answer that, I think, to some degree.

01:09:47.700 Yeah. Three ways. Three ways. One, that higher mode of existence is what your conscience tortures

01:09:54.340 you for not attaining. Right. OK. OK. I think what my conscience tortures me for not attaining is that

01:10:00.420 I was rude to someone yesterday and I shouldn't have been. Right. But it's the shouldn't part of it.

01:10:05.060 Yes. The obligation. It's the T. Exactly. David Hume, the problem of ought. Yeah. Well, and then you

01:10:11.300 think, you think, you think about how it manifests itself. Hmm. You don't, this is why Nietzsche was

01:10:16.980 wrong. You cannot create your own values. Right. The values impose themselves on you, independent of your

01:10:24.180 will. Now, maybe you, well, that's what your conscience does and good luck trying to control it.

01:10:30.260 This is very anti-Nietzsche, isn't it? Well, I'm a great admirer of Nietzsche.

01:10:34.740 I know you are. That's why I made the point. Very opposite to his philosophy.

01:10:39.780 But it's, well, so Jung embarked on a lengthy critique of Nietzsche and it's part of his work

01:10:45.140 that isn't well known, I would say. But we'll leave that be, except to say that the psychoanalysts,

01:10:52.980 starting with Freud, well, not really, but popularized by Freud and systematized, showed that

01:10:58.900 we weren't masters in our own psychological house. Right.

01:11:02.500 There were, there were autonomous entities. Yes.

01:11:04.660 And those would be the Greek gods to some degree that operated within us. And we were.

01:11:09.540 Which is Julian Jaynes's point. Exactly. Yes.

01:11:11.940 We're in. Yes. Yes. I have my problems with Jaynes, but as a overarching idea, there's interest in it.

01:11:18.820 Okay. So there are things happening with us and to us in the moral domain that we cannot control.

01:11:23.780 Yeah. And that's a, that, that stunned me when I first learned it as a proposition. It's, oh yes,

01:11:29.380 look at that. Here's one. What are you interested in? Yeah. Well, that grips you. Okay. Number two,

01:11:37.700 what does your conscience bother you about? Okay. That's your inadequate by your own standards. Now,

01:11:44.260 what adequate would mean? That's a different question, but it's defined negatively by conscience. Yes.

01:11:50.420 Yes. And then better. There's one that I said, I would lay out three. You can look at Jean Piaget's

01:11:57.780 work on developmental psychology. On the development of the subject. Yes.

01:12:01.540 He was a genetic epistemologist. Yes. He wanted to do was, this is what he wanted to do. He wanted

01:12:06.580 to unite science and religion. That was his goal. And he wanted to look at the empirical development of

01:12:12.020 values. And what he concluded, at least in part, was that a moral stance that's better than a previous

01:12:18.420 moral stance does all the things that the previous moral stance does plus something else. Yes. Yes.

01:12:25.140 And you can say the same thing as a scientific theory. I remember I had a great, I loved Piaget and I,

01:12:30.980 I, his observations were so empirical, of course, of the development of the child and the,

01:12:39.940 not quite the theory of mind, that wasn't his thing, but, but, but similar developments and signposts

01:12:46.340 where people become aware of self. Okay. So, so now Piaget looked specifically at the development of

01:12:52.980 morality. And he was one of the first people to emphasize the importance of games. Yeah. And what

01:12:59.300 he showed, what he showed was that at two years old, let's say a child can only play a game with

01:13:04.580 him or herself. Yeah. But at three, both children can identify and aim and then share it in a fictional

01:13:11.460 world. And so that's partly pretend play and the beginnings of drama and then cooperate and compete

01:13:16.980 within that domain. Yeah. And then what happens in the game theorists have shown this is that

01:13:23.540 games out of games morality emerges. Yeah. There's a reset. So I'll give you an example,

01:13:29.300 and this is a crucial example. So if you pair juvenile rats together, the males, they have to play,

01:13:36.180 they have to rough and tumble play because their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly if they

01:13:40.260 don't. Anyways, they have to play. You pair a big rat and a little rat, teenage rats together,

01:13:45.860 and the big rat will stomp the little rat. Yeah. First, first encounter. So then you say power

01:13:51.780 determines hierarchy. Yeah. Okay. But then you pair the rats multiple times, like 50. Yeah.

01:13:59.940 Then if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time, the little rat will stop inviting

01:14:05.620 him to play. And so you get an emergent reciprocity, even at the level of the rat. Yeah. And it's

01:14:13.540 fascinating, isn't it? And it's not dissimilar to the theory of mind games that were devised by

01:14:21.060 Simon Baron Cohen and others in the question of showing how neurodivergence develops in the

01:14:28.740 autistic spectrum, for example. But one of the things that so interests me at the moment, because of the

01:14:34.420 pandemic, which is slightly close to this, that you might be able to help me with, is I've been very

01:14:39.620 interested in, as I have been over the years, at how completely out of favour B.F. Skinner and the

01:14:45.700 behaviouralists have become since, I guess, since a man you probably don't admire that much, since

01:14:52.580 Noam Chomsky rather demolished B.F. Skinner, famously. On the language front. On the language

01:14:59.060 front. But also the whole nature of behaviouralism and looking at rats and their behaviour has...

01:15:04.340 But when it came to this pandemic, one of the things that was hidden from the public

01:15:11.060 was that every country had its scientific committees, which were mainly composed, of

01:15:16.180 course, of virologists and epidemiologists and immunologists, but always behaviourologists too,

01:15:24.260 because the secret to getting out of the pandemic wasn't just following science and tracking

01:15:29.940 a microbe, an invisible virus in the air. It was how people would take it. And Sherlock Holmes,

01:15:39.940 in the second Sherlock Holmes book, which is called The Sign of Four, says to Watson, I remember this,

01:15:45.140 it's very interesting. He says, you know, Watson, the statistician has shown that we can predict to an

01:15:53.940 extraordinary order of accuracy, the behaviour of the average man, he uses the word man, where it was

01:16:00.020 now we would have to say human or man or woman, but you know what I mean, the average man, we can

01:16:04.900 absolutely predict how they will behave. But no one has yet, and probably never will be able to

01:16:12.180 predict how an individual will behave. So we can be talked about as a mass and advertisers and politicians

01:16:20.820 and sophologists and all kinds of other people are very good at knowing how we behave as a group.

01:16:28.020 But as individuals, we are unknowable, without face to face conversations and the history and so on.

01:16:35.940 So that was one. And the other one, which I think is connected was, I believe it was a BF Skinner

01:16:40.900 experiment. And it's one I absolutely love, because it makes me wonder whether all these kinds of

01:16:46.900 conversations are maybe ultimately a waste of time. But he said, if you take a load of mice and

01:16:51.700 put them on a perspex tray and float them on the water, because they are unaware of the risk they're

01:16:59.220 in, they move around randomly. And their random movement makes the tray even, they're just randomly

01:17:06.420 moving around. If you scale it up and put humans on it, they sink within seconds, because they think,

01:17:13.380 oh, we're tipping, we must run to this end. And of course, they all run to that end. And so it tips

01:17:18.180 over. In other words, consciousness of the problem, attempting to deal with it, being aware of it,

01:17:24.980 is the biggest problem of all. And that's something new to us, because in the old days, we lived in

01:17:30.420 small groups who just didn't know how awful humanity was, what sins we were committing, how dreadful

01:17:40.260 we were making the world. It was only through the telecommunication and through the, you know,

01:17:45.940 the recent development of the global village, or whatever you want to call it, your countryman

01:17:51.300 McLuhan, that we have actually become aware and are now likely to be running around in that tank

01:17:58.580 and causing it to fall over. Whereas really, we should just be unconscious and get on with living

01:18:04.500 and randomly run about in our tank, and then we'll never sink. Does that make sense?

01:18:11.140 I want to answer the behaviorist question. It's transformed into behavioral neuroscience and

01:18:18.980 affective neuroscience and being taken over primarily by the biologists. And part of the reason it's

01:18:24.980 vanished is because it's become more and more difficult to do animal experimental work for all

01:18:28.820 sorts of reasons. And because it requires a tremendous amount of technical expertise.

01:18:33.540 Right.

01:18:34.420 So that's...

01:18:35.460 But the theory of conditioning has also vanished with it.

01:18:38.660 No, it's transmuted and become more sophisticated and been incorporated into all sorts of theories.

01:18:44.500 The most outstanding behaviorist was Jeffrey Gray, and he wrote a book called The Neuropsychology

01:18:48.580 of Anxiety, which is an absolute work of genius. And it's very heavily influenced by the Skinnerian

01:18:53.620 tradition. So I want to tell you something back again, and I've been poking you about this,

01:19:00.180 and I don't want to stop yet. Back to the distinction between you and Dawkins. Because I see you as a

01:19:08.420 border figure. You've got one foot in the rationalist, humanist, atheist, empiricist world, firmly planted.

01:19:18.820 But then there's the artist in you, which is a major part of your personality. And obviously a part

01:19:27.140 that's incredibly productive and very well received, and that has an intellectual end as well.

01:19:35.140 That domain, that second domain that you occupy, isn't formalized. The investigation of that isn't

01:19:43.380 formalized as well by the atheist community. They lose what's there, and they don't value it properly.

01:19:51.380 And that's a problem. Like with Dawkins, for example, I get letters from lots of people,

01:19:57.780 lots and lots of people. And lots of them are nihilistic. And because they're nihilistic,

01:20:03.540 they're suicidal. I had a friend, I went for a walk with him the other week, and he was a communist,

01:20:09.300 atheist when he was a kid. He grew up in Poland, and he had criticized his family for celebrating

01:20:13.940 Christmas because it was irrational. And then he realized at one point, he said, I could kill

01:20:19.620 Christmas and we just have another week, weekend. That wouldn't actually, right, right. Because,

01:20:27.060 right, there's a magic there that rationalism can destroy.

01:20:31.860 I have exactly that problem politically with the royal family, which on the face of it is,

01:20:39.540 of course, preposterous, more preposterous, even than Christmas. And religion is the idea that we

01:20:46.020 still have a royal family. But part of my belief in ceremony and ritual and symbolism is I look at

01:20:54.180 America and I think if only Donald Trump and now Biden, if every week they had to walk up the hill and

01:21:01.060 go into a mansion in Washington, and there was Uncle Sam in a top hat and striped trousers,

01:21:07.460 a living embodiment of their nation, more important than they were. That's the key. He,

01:21:13.780 Uncle Sam, is America. The president is a fly-by-night politician, voted for by less than half the

01:21:19.780 population. And he has to bow in front of this personification of his country every week. And that

01:21:27.460 personification, Uncle Sam can't tell him what to do. Uncle Sam can't say, no, pass this act and don't

01:21:32.420 pass that act and free these people, give them a pardon. All he can do is say, tell me, young fella,

01:21:37.940 what you done this week? And he'll bow and say, well, Uncle Sam, say, oh, you think that's the right

01:21:43.060 thing for my country? Well, that's what a constitutional monarchy is. And of course, it's absurd. But the fact

01:21:50.740 that Churchill and Thatcher and everyone had to bow every week in front of this...

01:21:55.700 There's something. There's something. And also, empirically, look at the happiest countries in the

01:22:02.180 world. That's all you need do. And they happen to be constitutional monarchies. Norway, Sweden,

01:22:08.900 Benelux, Japan, they're always right up there on the list. Now, it may be that we can't find the causal

01:22:15.140 link between the constitutional monarchy, but it might just be something to do with that. And

01:22:20.740 that's, it's a way of answering your question in the same with religion, is that I can see the

01:22:27.140 absurdities of the claims of many religions. And I can see the history of the wickedness and

01:22:33.300 oppression and suppression, particularly in my own instance, you know, being gay, growing up gay,

01:22:38.340 and there's a long history of religion in particular being intolerant. And to this day,

01:22:42.820 even this Pope Francis, whom I had some hopes for, seems to be beginning to add to an ancient

01:22:49.860 slander and nonsensical attitude towards sexuality, which is extremely annoying and upsetting. But,

01:22:57.140 you know, I kind of, that doesn't mean I throw the whole baby out with the bathwater. I can see

01:23:04.260 in the same way that I don't believe in Greek mythology, in actual fact, I don't believe that on

01:23:10.420 Olympus Zeus lived there with his wife Hera, but I do believe Hermes and Hera and Zeus live within us.

01:23:17.220 There is a Hermes inside me. There is a trickster, a liar, a joker, a cute, funny side, as well as a

01:23:25.140 harmonic Apollonian and a bestial Dionysian side with his appetitive and addictive and frenzied. And I see

01:23:35.380 the value and the truth in those religious manifestations, those principles, those elements

01:23:42.500 of my character and the character of the human family.

01:23:48.580 In Mesopotamia, the god who became supreme was Marduk. He had 50 different names.

01:23:56.340 And one of them was he who makes ingenious things as a consequence of the combat with Tiamat,

01:24:03.380 chaos, essentially, which is a brilliant, brilliant name. But so Marduk was the aggregation of 50 gods.

01:24:11.300 So imagine that each of those gods was the representative of a tribe at one point.

01:24:15.300 Yes.

01:24:16.180 And that would be the value system of the tribe personified, something like that.

01:24:20.020 And indeed, the Greek gods derived from those Mesopotamian gods. They came across...

01:24:24.340 Yeah, exactly. A fundamental development in the history of religious thinking and dramatic

01:24:30.980 thinking. Well, let's say each god is a manifestation of a value structure.

01:24:36.260 Yeah.

01:24:36.740 And we say, well, value structures have some commonalities across them, just like games have

01:24:43.060 some commonalities across them, or languages have some commonalities across them. So then you start to

01:24:48.580 aggregate gods. Yeah.

01:24:50.900 And you produce a metagod, and the metagod is Marduk, and he's all eyes, because he pays attention,

01:24:56.820 like an empiricist, let's say, and speech. Yeah.

01:25:00.900 And so the Mesopotamians had already figured out that attention and speech were the key elements of

01:25:05.620 proper sovereignty. Yes.

01:25:08.180 Right. Brilliant. And the Egyptians, right, they worshiped the eye. Same idea. And it was the eye in

01:25:15.380 part that the Egyptians associated with the immortal soul, and they associated that with

01:25:19.860 the proper locale of sovereignty. Yeah.

01:25:22.420 Because they started to abstract out the idea of sovereignty from the sovereign.

01:25:26.660 And so the sovereignty could be something that was now not embodied in any specific person,

01:25:30.980 sort of like the Uncle Sam figure that you described. Yes.

01:25:34.660 Wouldn't be the... I often thought with presidents they'd have a much easier job if the symbolic weight

01:25:40.420 was lifted from their shoulders. A fourth branch of government, right? Symbolic.

01:25:44.980 Which is what a constitutional monarchy exactly is, by accident of history, certainly not by design,

01:25:51.860 but it just somehow the bits of the sovereign that were inimical to human development, the tyranny,

01:26:00.980 the autocracy, the whimsical caprice, all these were sort of chipped away because of the human failings

01:26:07.380 of different sovereigns, until by 1688, what we call in British history, the Glorious Revolution,

01:26:13.620 when the Bill of Rights was written and so on, which was the same as the American Bill of Rights

01:26:18.020 hundred years later, essentially. And it became a constitutional monarchy, and that was slowly refined

01:26:23.460 as well. And of course, I know many people find it absurd and outrageous, and they live in palaces,

01:26:28.900 and they've got all this money, and it's unjust. And of course, all that is true. And I wouldn't

01:26:33.060 defend it on any rational grounds, but I would on empirical grounds. And maybe that's a good

01:26:41.940 difference between rationalism and empiricism. So you were talking about the gods within.

01:26:50.100 Okay. And you said, well, you believe that the gods are within. And I understand the claim that you're

01:26:56.260 making, and the limits of that claim. But I want to explore that. Okay, so as humanity advances,

01:27:05.220 we'll say advancement is the aggregation of larger societies, our more sophisticated view of the world,

01:27:10.500 more technological power, that sort of thing, more ability to predict and control.

01:27:14.500 And indeed a longer lifetime.

01:27:16.500 Yes, yes. And the things that come along with that, and more peace by the looks of things,

01:27:20.740 and more food. And the Steven Pinker things.

01:27:24.180 Yeah. Right, right. Exactly that. So the gods aggregate and unify.

01:27:30.820 That happens across as cultures collide and integrate. The gods integrate and unify.

01:27:35.780 It's the battle between the gods in heaven. That's the parallel development to the battle between tribes

01:27:42.820 for dominance on earth. But it's an integrative process as well as a submission process.

01:27:47.700 Yeah. Okay. So those are within. Now you have an integrated god within.

01:27:52.500 Yes. That's what torches you with your conscience.

01:27:56.340 Yes. That's your Jiminy Cricket. It's what philosophers call your deontic or deontological

01:28:02.500 voice. Okay. So then you ask yourself, and this is a dead serious question. So imagine that people

01:28:10.580 are exploring the moral domain, whose reality is blatantly obvious, but difficult to formalize,

01:28:19.140 let's say. We're exploring the nature of the moral realm, tentatively. And we develop more

01:28:26.820 powerful and more integrated theories as we progress. And you end up with a unified god,

01:28:31.860 so it's a monotheism. There's a god within. Then the question is, well, what exactly is that god within?

01:28:38.500 Does it correspond to something that's real? Or is it just a figure of the imagination? But then you

01:28:44.020 say, well, if it's just a figure of the imagination, what exactly is the imagination?

01:28:50.500 I think, partly, Christianity insists that this integrated god figure

01:28:56.580 also had a real existence. That's how Christianity tries to solve this particular problem.

01:29:06.420 Yes.

01:29:06.980 And people like C.S. Lewis and Jung, to some degree as well, would say, well, once in history,

01:29:13.540 someone acted out that unified god so completely that something happened. That's the proposition.

01:29:21.700 Okay, well, that's the limit of the proposition. And then the question is, well,

01:29:27.620 how real is this moral striving? It's real enough so you torture yourself when you don't engage in it

01:29:33.540 properly. It's real enough so you can't avoid its call. It's real enough so that

01:29:38.820 you can make moral errors that are so severe that you can doubt the validity of your own existence.

01:29:49.780 It's real enough for that.

01:29:50.900 And this is an honest question. It's like, I don't know. I certainly see how much good is done when

01:30:00.420 people are good and how much evil is done when they're evil.

01:30:03.140 Yes. But it's very hard, I think, empirically, to be really boring and use the word again. It's

01:30:08.500 quite, you know, to build up a list and show that there is more morality on the side of those who

01:30:14.180 followed a particular faith, a particular systematic religion, than those who didn't.

01:30:22.020 I mean, you know, it's...

01:30:24.020 Well, that's really the question.

01:30:26.020 That's the question.

01:30:26.980 You certainly have morality without religion. That is...

01:30:29.300 Okay. Okay. Let's take that for a second. Move back to the political.

01:30:32.340 Yeah.

01:30:32.900 Okay. Because that's the key issue.

01:30:34.420 Yes.

01:30:34.820 So let's say we're going to defend the values of the West

01:30:39.300 to the degree that they're worth defending. Then we are making a claim that the inheritors

01:30:44.180 of a particular tradition have something valued, valid morally on their side, or we cannot defend

01:30:50.180 that position. And we can't defend the position. I mean, look, I know this is bothering

01:30:56.100 you what's happening in the broader public landscape.

01:30:58.020 Yeah.

01:30:58.420 You got tangled up, for example, with J.K. Rowling, right?

01:31:02.100 With what's happening around her.

01:31:03.700 Yeah. She's a friend and will remain a friend.

01:31:06.020 Yes.

01:31:06.100 But I'm also sorry that people are upset. You know, the two things are not incompatible. I

01:31:10.980 don't have to break links with J.K. Rowling to say that I have a huge sympathy and I endorse

01:31:18.180 the efforts of trans people everywhere to live the lives that they feel they want to lead. And

01:31:23.940 and I hate how they they are often, you know, treated. And and I recognize the courage it takes

01:31:30.100 to to to to.

01:31:31.540 Yes. And you've put your money where your mouth is on that front over the course of your whole life.

01:31:36.420 I've tried to. Yes.

01:31:37.860 So it's not just a claim. You can look at your biography and see that.

01:31:41.060 Yeah. But but but you're disturbed nonetheless at what's let's say there's something that's

01:31:49.780 happening in our culture that's not sitting right with you. OK, how do you defend the damn culture

01:31:54.340 against it without making the claim that we do have something of, let's say, higher value that

01:31:59.700 is the consequence of following a particular tradition?

01:32:02.100 Yes. Because without that, you lost you lose the argument instantly.

01:32:07.220 Mm hmm. I mean, I think a lot of it is to do with the the necessity that we we all have of

01:32:13.620 redefining it. We have to remember that morality is is a question of manners. It is literally what

01:32:19.700 morality means that our parents and grandparents had a very, very different and very firm sense of

01:32:27.060 what was immoral. If the word immoral was used in a newspaper or by a person, then that person's

01:32:33.220 immoral. It would have a sexual meaning. It would mean that they lived with someone with whom they

01:32:37.620 weren't married or they lived with someone of the same sex or that in some way they they were

01:32:42.900 philanderers or loose in their morals meant entirely to do with the bedroom. These were the unforgivable

01:32:50.660 behaviors of a generation that close to us. We can still hug them if we're allowed to in the garden.

01:32:56.980 In covid times that that's how quickly morality changes. So the idea of the culture is a false

01:33:05.220 one. There is no the culture that there. You know, it's not like a human version of a biosphere,

01:33:12.660 even I don't think that there is the state of things as now exist. But like when when you were

01:33:20.100 talking about religion and saying this, you know, this God that what religion has been brilliant at and

01:33:26.340 it's needed to be. But so has science is redefining what God is, what God was in 1400.

01:33:34.580 God was capable of doing remarkable things. He was answerable for everything. And we worshipped him

01:33:42.180 for it. A couple of hundred years later, a few things had been taken away from him and we could

01:33:46.100 answer for traveling the world and knowing it and discovering how the stars actually were not holes in a

01:33:52.340 black cloth, but maybe were celestial objects with, you know, and then a few hundred years later.

01:33:58.580 And similarly, science, we use the word cosmos. Well, cosmos used to mean a very small sphere of the,

01:34:05.220 the, you know, section of the of the of the solar system. And now it's some infinite thing. And there may

01:34:10.820 indeed be dozens of them, millions of them. Who knows, according to string theory and quantum theory and all

01:34:16.260 kinds of shredding as number and all the rest of it. Everything is redefined in each generation.

01:34:22.580 So what is left that is absolute? And this is where religion has an argument with intellectual progress,

01:34:28.260 because it wants to hang on to something that it believes is eternal and and and permanent and utterly

01:34:37.220 always true. But there is no such thing. The morality, you know, I mean, I did a debate with

01:34:43.220 Christopher Hitchens, actually, about the Catholic Church and and the people defending it when we

01:34:48.580 attacked the their attitude towards child sex scandal said, well, but in the 1960s, it wasn't such a big

01:34:55.140 sin. And what that is actually true. But it's not true coming from a Catholic whose whole point is that

01:35:04.980 they are eternally true, that their morality is as true now as it was when St. Peter founded the church,

01:35:11.380 that their enemy is people like me who are relativists, who say that there is no absolute

01:35:17.860 morality, but that things change according to situation, circumstance and knowledge.

01:35:23.220 And so that is true of God. God alters every day. He adds a little bit of a quality here,

01:35:31.460 or she does and takes away another bit now, no longer responsible for disease and no longer

01:35:36.740 responsible for earthquakes, but may be responsible for something else. But it's a shrinking kingdom.

01:35:43.700 And so the idea of there being an absolute and an eternal, it just doesn't seem to square with the

01:35:50.340 way we have developed over the certainly over history, which is to say over the last 5000 years,

01:35:55.540 since we've been able to write things down. Before that, we can only judge how and who we were

01:36:01.380 according to objects and artifacts and architecture. But since we've been able to write, it's pretty

01:36:07.860 clear that the instability of, and I'm not saying this in a Derrida way of instability of meaning,

01:36:14.340 although I do think you've misunderstood Derrida. I hope you've read Peter Salmon's biography,

01:36:18.500 by the way, it might change your mind about him. But that's a whole other subject.

01:36:22.180 But yeah, so I'm with you on this. Okay, so let's go after the eternal verities idea.

01:36:33.700 Clearly religious conceptions shift, although there's a core tradition that remains intact.

01:36:41.060 Well, a tradition by definition stays intact. There's something that identifies it as the

01:36:45.940 same entity across time. Yes, right. Maybe that's even mutable. But I've looked for

01:36:50.500 what might be regarded as eternal verities in the moral domain. So let me put a few forward.

01:36:58.740 The beautiful is more valuable than the ugly. Yeah. Truth. Truth is to be sought after

01:37:07.540 in opposition to falsehood. Yeah. That's particularly true in relationship to the spoken word.

01:37:15.700 The spoken word brings about remarkable transformations of reality itself. And

01:37:26.020 it's for that reason that verbal truth is constitutive, but also of vital ethical significance.

01:37:35.780 Doesn't that make it all the more important to look at the discourse beneath verbal speech to,

01:37:40.740 to, I hesitate to use the word, but to deconstruct it, to, or at least to attempt to look at the

01:37:48.740 currents that run through speech, to see, and they're not all Derridarian or, you know,

01:37:54.260 Lacanian or Foucaultian or whatever the adjective of Foucault is. They're not all about power.

01:37:59.540 They're not all necessarily Marxist. The project, you know, the Caesarian project and the others of

01:38:05.460 looking at where language comes from, not just in a philological sense of derivation, but in the sense of

01:38:10.980 where the discourses come from is paramount, therefore. And so to say verbal, you know,

01:38:18.420 it's not just an utterance is in and of itself transformative, or if it is transformative,

01:38:23.700 it might be wickedly so, or it might be negatively so at least. Well, with regards to your point about

01:38:30.740 the analysis of the, of the narratives and even the deconstruction, I would say it depends

01:38:38.260 on the motive and it's the motive. And this is, I suppose, to some degree, why I'm skeptical,

01:38:45.140 let's say of the atheist skepticism. It, it's, it's destructive. There's a destructive element

01:38:52.100 to it. There's not a, there's, there's no archaeological redemption. But that's nothing

01:38:56.340 to do with motive. You said it was all about the motive. Well, that's not necessarily the case,

01:39:00.260 that it has nothing to do with motive. Motive, motive's a tough one. Yeah, it is. I mean,

01:39:04.980 if my motive is to make money and I make a great discovery, it's as valuable as if my motive was to

01:39:10.660 make a great discovery and I made a great discovery, the great discovery is made. How is the motive

01:39:16.100 relevant? Well, because your motives determine the decisions you make along the way. Yeah.

01:39:23.540 So if I'm fundamentally motivated by the belief that being is worth preserving, let's say,

01:39:28.820 because on the whole, it's a good, I'm going to react and think much differently than if I'm

01:39:34.420 ambivalent about that, or if I feel at the bottom of my soul that the whole bloody project is

01:39:39.460 of questionable utility and might as well be shelved. And that, that, that dichotomy that

01:39:45.700 characterizes us, you know, we have Cain and Abel inhabiting us. There's no doubt about that.

01:39:51.380 That's, that's a fundamental truth. And if Cain has the upper hand, even if it's in the scientific

01:39:56.500 endeavor, the consequences of that manifest themselves and they manifest themselves destructively.

01:40:03.460 That's why, that's why it's interesting that you have to say Cain and Abel, because I think this

01:40:07.540 brings us back to the very beginning is, is, is the importance of myth and, and also of parable.

01:40:13.300 And, and I'd like to end because we're getting towards a bit where I have to move away. But

01:40:21.060 Oscar Wilde is known as an, you know, a master of epigrams and wit and people mistakenly think of

01:40:27.380 him as shallow or trivial or facetious or vain or peacocky or something, but he was very profound,

01:40:33.460 in fact, and of course he could be peacocky too, but there's a story.

01:40:38.100 That isn't necessarily at odds with this.

01:40:40.020 No, they don't rule each other out. But here's an example of a great parable,

01:40:44.580 which is, which is why, again, it's why I love literature and, and, and the art of, of wit,

01:40:54.500 because it, it zooms to the truth so much more quickly, it seems to me, than so many other

01:41:00.500 attempts to describe or rationalize truth. And here's one where Wilde was at a, at a dinner and

01:41:07.700 uh, someone was being rather kind of, uh, envious of someone and being rather unpleasant. And Wilde

01:41:15.300 suddenly said, the devil was walking one day in the Libyan desert and he saw a monk being tormented

01:41:25.620 by some of his demons. And he approached and the demons bowed in front of him and said,

01:41:30.980 Master. And he said, what, what goes on here? They said, Master, for 39 days and 39 nights,

01:41:36.100 we have tried to tempt this holy monk away from his God and his religion, but he has stayed steadfast

01:41:44.020 and holy to his God and his religion. We have offered him powers and principalities. We have

01:41:48.980 offered him the joys of the flesh. We have offered him wine and food and riches, but he has turned us

01:41:55.300 down. There's nothing that we can do to win this holy man to our cause. And the devil said, out of my

01:42:02.340 way. And he whispered in the monk's ear. And instantly the monk took the petrol cross around

01:42:08.660 his neck and snapped it and filled the air with hideous curses against his God and his church and

01:42:14.740 his religion and swore he would never follow Christ again. And the demons fell down and in front of the

01:42:22.500 devil and said, Master, what can you have said in one second that we could not? What did you say to him?

01:42:27.700 And the devil said, oh, it was very simple. I just told him his brother had been made bishop

01:42:31.140 of Alexandria. Now, that seems to me, A, it's very funny, but B, it is profoundly truthful.

01:42:38.180 And it is, this is the way we show people how envy and resentment are so much a part of who we are,

01:42:49.060 that if, you know, I mean, it seems like a trivial example, but it just, it's a model to me,

01:42:55.300 that if you want to say something and you want to change minds and you want to, you know, to

01:43:02.740 burn people with the flame of love and hope and connection that we all secretly believe in that,

01:43:10.180 that, you know, that makes us gasp when we read poetry or makes us feel what love is and joy and

01:43:17.540 all the things that we're mostly too embarrassed to talk about because they're a bit soppy, but

01:43:22.180 truly they matter more than anything else. We displace them on kittens and so on, but we really,

01:43:27.380 really, we care about these things. And the way I think to bond people to it is not to talk

01:43:36.660 abstractly about ideas necessarily, unless you're talking to someone who has the same reading as you,

01:43:43.620 and that sounds a snobbish point, but unless you're talking to someone who's also read the same books or

01:43:47.060 at least has the same ideas as you or is open to them, it just becomes a bit lectury. Whereas if you can

01:43:55.060 tell a story instead or a parable that's, especially if it's funny or it's sexy or it's, you know,

01:44:01.700 got some quality that just tickles, you know, that strokes us, then you bring people to a connection.

01:44:13.220 And unfortunately, most of the world who use the art of rhetoric and persuasion and

01:44:18.900 and do it for nefarious purposes. And maybe that's the key is to try and

01:44:27.540 to try and build up as you are doing, and I hope I'm doing in my own way, the value of story and

01:44:35.140 looking deeply into the nature of characters within stories that even though it's just a story, it might

01:44:41.940 actually be a portal to something really profound that will touch you and change your life.

01:44:52.900 That's just exactly the right place to stop.

01:44:55.620 Yeah, good. I'm sorry it has to stop, but it's been one of us.

01:44:58.260 Me too.

01:44:58.580 It's been an hour and three quarters.

01:44:59.460 I knew that we would, I was primarily worried about this conversation because there were so

01:45:04.740 many things that I wanted to talk to you about, I didn't know what I would talk to you about.

01:45:08.340 Well, we may have to have a, we may have to have a second one in a few months.

01:45:12.100 Yes. Well, after we digest this one.

169. An Atheist in the Realm of Myth ｜ Stephen Fry

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