TRIGGERnometry - Dr David Starkey： Where Woke Culture Comes From

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:08.860 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:14.140 Our brilliant guest this week is an author, broadcaster, and eminent historian,

00:00:18.160 Dr. David Starkey. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:20.540 Hello, both of you.

00:00:22.320 Thank you very much. All our guests...

00:00:23.940 So Trigonometry is the three of us. I get it.

00:00:26.940 But mostly you.

00:00:28.440 Mostly me.

00:00:29.220 We are going to count on you.

00:00:30.100 So I'm at the top of the hypotenuse.

00:00:32.200 Exactly, and doing most of the triggering.

00:00:35.480 We normally like to get our guests to introduce themselves,

00:00:38.000 but you're someone who needs very little introduction,

00:00:39.900 so why don't we just crack on with it?

00:00:41.980 We're delighted to have you on the show

00:00:43.580 because I think the historical perspective,

00:00:46.040 and we talked about this before we started,

00:00:47.900 is fascinating because we have such short memories nowadays,

00:00:51.560 and I think it's very tempting.

00:00:53.420 If memory at all.

00:00:54.160 If memory at all, exactly.

00:00:55.920 Nemetode world.

00:00:56.940 And so many things that are happening in society now, the trends, whether it's woke culture, whether all of these things, it's very tempting, I think, for us, particularly younger people, to assume that none of this has ever happened before, this excessive introspection, this navel-gazing obsession with ourselves and with individualism.

00:01:16.900 But give us a historical perspective.

00:01:18.640 As a historian looking at modern society, what do you see and what do you think back to in history when you look at what's happening now?

00:01:27.840 Can I do a little plug?

00:01:29.260 On my way in here, I was reading the proof for my latest article for this brilliant new magazine of which I am a columnist, The Critic.

00:01:39.420 And it's looking centrally at this extraordinary man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 0.95

00:01:45.860 And if we want a single source of why we are completely fucked up, it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 0.96

00:01:54.640 Inevitably, of course, he's French, at least. 1.00

00:01:56.940 Every bad idea is French because they take the subject of ideas and reason so seriously. 1.00

00:02:04.920 And they, as it were, tear it from the roots of experience and good sense and general Anglo-Saxon ploddery, which we are so very good at on this side.

00:02:15.180 And Rousseau, I think, is the beginning of virtually the list of nouns that you gave, the introspection, the profound sense of solipsism, of self, the absurd belief in our own absolute importance and that the thing that matters most of all is what I feel.

00:02:40.700 I mean, the whole origin of Dianification.

00:02:45.220 Do you remember this ancient figure, Princess Diana?

00:02:47.640 You're all probably too young.

00:02:49.120 All of that is pure, pure Rousseau.

00:02:53.000 But what I think we've got to understand,

00:02:54.760 your introduction was really interesting about history.

00:02:59.780 What I think strikes me,

00:03:02.680 and again I've been writing about this in the context of politics,

00:03:06.200 is, from the point of view of when I was taught,

00:03:11.340 and I was a young man roughly at the time of Noah's Ark,

00:03:16.200 we were taught very definitely that history is then and we are now

00:03:22.420 and the drawing of the parallels between the two of them is dangerous and whatever.

00:03:26.840 But as I've got older, and I think it's partly,

00:03:28.980 you come to have a history yourself.

00:03:31.420 So you become very, very aware of your own change,

00:03:34.580 the changes in your end times, your physical aches and pains and all this kind of thing.

00:03:39.580 But what I can now see is the extent of patterns and the repetition of patterns.

00:03:46.820 And what I think we can do if we put Rousseau in, let's put Rousseau in context.

00:03:53.620 He is the immediate run up to the French Revolution.

00:03:57.460 And if we look at the French Revolution, although you remember there's a famous, I suppose,

00:04:03.240 remark of Chao Enlai when he was asked, had the French Revolution been a good thing or

00:04:08.420 a bad thing? And he supposedly responded, it was too soon to judge. I think he's wrong

00:04:12.960 because we could see immediately the French Revolution was an exceedingly bad thing from 0.72

00:04:18.860 which France has never recovered. What was it? It's the beginning of our modern politics.

00:04:25.880 The split between, if you like, the liberal and the conservative is the direct product

00:04:32.160 of the French Revolution. Because what the French Revolution does, led above all by Rousseau,

00:04:38.740 though he's not the only one, he's got sort of partners in arms and people like Voltaire,

00:04:43.340 although of course they hated each other. The left always hated each other. You can just look

00:04:47.480 at the Guardian at the moment and you get the idea, or the Labour Party, the idea of the bear pit.

00:04:52.180 It is. What they begin by doing is deciding, a bit like Tony Blair in the second or third stage

00:05:00.020 of this process, that history was a mistake, a bad thing. We needed to start from scratch.

00:05:08.480 And what the French Revolution tries to do is to invent society, human relations, the world

00:05:15.300 from scratch, starting now, at this particular moment. And we all simply rethink everything.

00:05:23.560 We tried it in Russia a couple of centuries later.

00:05:26.080 You did exactly the same with even worse consequences.

00:05:32.400 Starkey's rule of revolutions is very simple.

00:05:34.740 All they do is reproduce the worst features of the Ancien Régime.

00:05:39.340 So you've just got a particularly unpleasant – you've had a succession of deeply unpleasant Tsars. 1.00

00:05:44.980 China is run by a mad emperor. 0.99

00:05:47.380 China is always run by mad emperors. 0.99

00:05:49.340 And the Communist Party has just replaced the mandarinate. 0.52

00:05:51.660 But the French Revolution is the key start of this process.

00:05:57.880 I mean, are you aware, for example, it's not just that they tried to change politics.

00:06:02.000 You can understand if you look at Ancien Régime France why you want serious political change.

00:06:08.100 Do you know they tried to change the calendar?

00:06:11.280 That they decide – we all know they invent the metric system.

00:06:14.300 Well, it's sort of sensible except it's been made completely redundant by computers, which is why the Americans still use feet and inches.

00:06:21.660 but they decide not simply to have 10 for measuring or 10 for quantities. They decide

00:06:29.860 there shall be 10 hours in the day, 10 days in the week, 10 months in the year. Everything is

00:06:36.340 given the new name. They decide that every geographical area in France shall be obliterated

00:06:42.120 and you shall cover France with a network of neat squares, each one of which is roughly the same

00:06:47.080 size. So you simply tear the world apart, you reconceive human relations, you abandon religion, 0.88

00:06:54.460 you celebrate the worship of pure reason, and you finish up with one of the great moments of

00:07:00.380 blasphemy in human history where you have an actress who is no better than she should be, 0.71

00:07:05.080 as my mother would have said, from the Comédie Française enacting the part of the goddess of

00:07:09.880 reason barely clad on the high altar of Notre Dame. The world goes completely mad and it goes

00:07:16.840 up its own bottom and the revolutionaries tear themselves apart. Now, what does that sound like?

00:07:22.900 Twitter. It sounds like Twitter, but it sounds like something else. It sounds like what's going

00:07:29.420 on on the far left now. Have you just noticed this moment in which that ghastly woman, Suzanne 0.75

00:07:35.320 Moore, you know, the one who wears a kind of Chinese sort of shark's fin soup as hair,

00:07:41.160 has been ostracized for saying that being a woman is a biological fact.

00:07:49.660 So the entire – and 333 people.

00:07:53.580 Well, who would have thought that The Guardian had 333 people working for it?

00:07:58.440 I thought that was bigger than its readership.

00:08:01.380 This is what you – the only reason The Guardian can do what it does

00:08:05.180 is that it doesn't matter if it doesn't sell a single paper.

00:08:07.780 It's run exquisitely by an offshore trust, tax-free offshore trust.

00:08:14.360 How progressive.

00:08:15.280 And how deep.

00:08:16.140 You can only be progressive if you're rich.

00:08:19.140 It's the corporate equivalent of a trustafarian.

00:08:22.080 Anyway, but it's disappearing up its own bottom because it's not a bottom, of course.

00:08:27.080 That would be if it were gay rights, one imagines. 0.97

00:08:29.680 Because it's trans rights, presumably. 1.00

00:08:32.200 It's a cul-de-sac vagina. 1.00

00:08:34.440 And the left is just going up itself. 0.99

00:08:36.580 But it does it as a cycle and it's really striking.

00:08:41.600 So you have that first cycle of liberalism in the 1790s.

00:08:45.920 Then you've got a second one in the 1840s with here in Britain, which is the second great revolution, which is the Industrial Revolution, which again dissolves human relations in exactly the same way.

00:09:00.780 I mean, come on.

00:09:01.580 You two, have you read Marx's Communist Manifesto?

00:09:05.260 Oh, believe me, I have.

00:09:06.580 Tell me the great bit in which he says what the bourgeois do. 0.69

00:09:12.200 What does the new bourgeois sensibility do?

00:09:15.260 I feel like I'm in a history tutorial at university and I haven't done the preparation.

00:09:19.520 Think of me as a KGB.

00:09:22.820 Suddenly I'm more scared than I have been. 0.97

00:09:25.080 At some means, a sort of a rat torturer waiting for you. 0.87

00:09:29.000 Yeah. 0.92

00:09:29.640 So the question is...

00:09:31.200 What does Marx in the Communist Manifesto say the bourgeoisie do?

00:09:35.780 They take advantage of the working class. 1.00

00:09:38.780 Yeah, but there's a wonderful passage in which he describes them tearing off the draperies that have made life acceptable, the holiness of the church, the dignity of chivalry, that they strip everything of tradition, of respect, of value.

00:09:59.320 In other words, it's a new way of starting the world from scratch.

00:10:03.840 And that, of course, creates our modern politics in Britain.

00:10:07.180 It's from the outcome of that that you get the Liberal Party on the one hand and the Conservative Party on the other.

00:10:13.580 And then you're a globalization and the increased madness of the left is the third wave of that.

00:10:20.280 So we're just going through this sequence of waves and they all end the same way.

00:10:25.200 They all go up themselves.

00:10:27.500 Do you think we're in quite a dangerous place, David, because we don't have a coherent

00:10:34.640 opposition to our present government? And isn't that quite a dangerous thing for societies?

00:10:40.400 I don't think the government, in that sense, much matters in this story at the moment. I mean,

00:10:45.220 we're in a very strange position that you've got, on the one hand, in terms of the formal

00:10:50.900 political process, as you say, you've got a government that in one sense just occupies the

00:10:56.080 field. You've got a useless opposition, worse than useless opposition. On the other hand, 0.98

00:11:02.740 you've got, so there's a dominance of a supposed conservatism. It's a very funny sort of

00:11:08.280 conservatism that's just spent about a trillion pounds without thinking about it. But never mind,

00:11:13.880 it calls itself conservative. But then if you look at virtually every other important institution

00:11:19.760 from the BBC to most of the press to the universities,

00:11:25.260 you get a very, very different picture,

00:11:28.500 which is the dominance to a large extent of this insane woke culture,

00:11:34.180 which is there, of course, not necessarily because people believe it, some do,

00:11:38.320 but above all because of corporate vanity and indulgence.

00:11:42.740 I mean, the reason my own University of Cambridge is overrun with this sort of stuff 0.97

00:11:47.320 is you have an absolutely useless vice-chancellor. 0.99

00:11:50.220 Needless to say, he's Canadian. 1.00

00:11:52.800 There's a kind of iron rule on the whole

00:11:57.020 that when Canadians...

00:11:58.020 How much time does he spend in blackface?

00:12:00.680 That's right.

00:12:01.500 But Stephen Toope, so appropriately named,

00:12:04.380 Stoop, you know, has only got to see a woke cause 0.97

00:12:07.540 to prostrate himself before it.

00:12:09.560 And you see this with CEOs and whatever.

00:12:12.220 And, you know, you just...

00:12:13.180 I mean, the Guardian incident is a fascinating one.

00:12:15.560 One employee who apparently is trans, who has already resigned once, then writes to the Guardian to say that because of Suzanne Moore's wicked column in stating that on the whole women tend not to have beards and penises and occasionally to menstruate, that he felt he or she or ze felt oppressed and therefore threatened to resign.

00:12:40.560 Then immediately, 333 people coming along as well.

00:12:44.040 So there is this peculiar – we've got a world in which there is no opposition to the left culturally and there's no opposition to the right politically.

00:12:55.320 And the two groups just continue walking past each other.

00:12:57.960 It's completely extraordinary.

00:12:59.580 But with this work mentality and the fact that, as you say, even though the far left is not in power, they have power.

00:13:07.900 Well, they're in social – sorry, there are different forms of power.

00:13:10.800 Yeah, exactly.

00:13:11.400 There are different forms of power.

00:13:13.800 And again, you know, the power of – if you look at the various forms of cultural Marxism, the argument was always control education.

00:13:25.020 You know, going back to the Jesuit, give me the child for six years and I've got them for life. 1.00

00:13:29.540 The argument, well, education is outside the public schools and to an extent even in those is controlled by these values.

00:13:39.320 And again, what is really, really striking, both of you, is the origin.

00:13:43.640 Where does child-centered learning come from?

00:13:46.300 Oh, it's Rousseau.

00:13:47.080 I mean, Catherine Burble is saying.

00:13:48.440 It's Rousseau.

00:13:49.460 It is just extraordinary.

00:13:51.960 Again, the, you know, our politics driven by celebrity.

00:13:57.480 I better shut up because I suppose I'm one in a minor way.

00:14:00.820 But our politics, our culture driven by celebrity.

00:14:04.500 Rousseau is one of the first celebrities.

00:14:07.380 Rousseau pioneers in the confession.

00:14:10.400 I mean, he pioneers the tell-all.

00:14:13.480 You know, he's a Kardashian and whatever.

00:14:15.620 I mean, you know, the revelation of all, you know, one's, I mean, not simply washing one's dirty underwear in public,

00:14:23.800 but actually soiling it and holding it up for admiration.

00:14:28.420 So he's there.

00:14:29.460 He's at the heart of all of this stuff.

00:14:32.140 But let me ask you this question, David,

00:14:33.540 because it's an apt metaphor for the current moment.

00:14:37.840 As we know with a virus, you are likely to catch it if it's around,

00:14:43.960 but your immune system has to be compromised somewhat to be susceptible to it.

00:14:48.240 So what is it about the cultural moment that we're in?

00:14:53.160 And again, the historical perspective here is interesting

00:14:55.720 because again, it's not the first time

00:14:57.200 that a civilization has been tempted to disappear

00:15:00.020 up its own bottom, as you say.

00:15:02.040 What is it about the cultural moment now

00:15:04.540 that as a society we seem to be susceptible

00:15:07.360 to some of these far-left ideas?

00:15:10.280 How is it that we've come to a place 0.96

00:15:12.320 where outrageously ridiculous concepts 0.87

00:15:15.960 seem to be just regurgitated on the BBC 0.86

00:15:18.880 without any question?

00:15:20.900 It's a very good question.

00:15:22.540 I think that the 20th century was right from the beginning.

00:15:30.220 If you go back to the First World War, the whole beginning of modernism in art,

00:15:36.680 of Dada and whatever, it was a kind of spitting in the face of the past.

00:15:43.500 It was intended to be the belief that the First World War represented the death

00:15:49.880 of an old wicked world and you spat on something even nastier upon it, which is what Dada and

00:15:57.920 all the rest of it was about.

00:15:59.000 And that has run as a general theme through the 20th century, through the anti-art, the

00:16:05.720 brutality in architecture, and again, the way in which the 60s consciously revive that

00:16:17.040 immediate atmosphere of the late First World War, the early 1920s. So you get Warhol rediscovering

00:16:26.420 Dada, the liberation of the 60s, the liberation movements of the 60s, consciously picking up 0.67

00:16:34.040 from, again, that immediate post-revolutionary period in Russia. It's picking up. And you have

00:16:42.880 this, again, it's this cycle of liberalism. The 60s, I'm notoriously gay. Of course, much 0.93

00:16:51.700 that was attacked needed attacking. Much that needed changing was changed. But once you

00:17:00.000 start that ball rolling, that everything's got to be changed, that the past has got to

00:17:07.060 be discarded, that all that matters is the individual, all that matters are my feelings,

00:17:12.520 All that matters is what I feel is right.

00:17:15.600 All that matters is that I feel hurt.

00:17:17.840 Do you see what I mean?

00:17:18.880 It just rolls and rolls and rolls.

00:17:22.080 And we can get away your question.

00:17:24.000 I'm thinking about talking my way to an answer as I often do.

00:17:27.800 I think one of the reasons we can do this and get away with it is, of course, in every other way, our lives are better, securer, less threatened than we've ever been.

00:17:38.980 If you had a civilization where people had to work harder, where there were deeper – I don't mean what we call work nowadays.

00:17:47.640 Oh, I've been hours in the office.

00:17:51.200 Look at what you've actually done.

00:17:53.520 Slurp, slurp, slurp, gabble, gabble, gabble. 0.91

00:17:56.220 Think of what the backbreaking labor of a peasant or a coal miner was.

00:18:01.260 So we've got a society which protects and indulges.

00:18:04.860 It's a society because we lead such safe lives that we can get ourselves, dare I say it, into the current hysteria that we are about the coronavirus in which, can I gently say, at the moment of speaking, 10 people out of a population of 65 million in Britain have died.

00:18:27.840 10 people.

00:18:30.040 I have to say by the time this recording goes out, we could all be dead.

00:18:34.420 Well, the one thing that is pretty clear, Constantine, is that this is not the bubonic plague.

00:18:43.080 Yes.

00:18:43.740 It really isn't.

00:18:45.060 The bubonic plague was real, you know.

00:18:47.640 A third of a – if you look in England at the onset of the plague in the 14th century, roughly a third of the population died at the first blow.

00:18:57.680 And then it rose on and on and on.

00:19:00.120 And by the end of the 14th century, the population of England has halved.

00:19:06.280 And it takes centuries.

00:19:07.860 We're not seeing that.

00:19:09.760 And do you think that that's what we're seeing, the self-indulgence,

00:19:14.300 the concentration on their feelings,

00:19:16.500 don't you think that's very dangerous for a society?

00:19:18.660 Of course.

00:19:19.420 Because it shows that there's a lack of moral,

00:19:22.680 a sort of lack of character, a lack of fibre.

00:19:25.120 Oh, what old-fashioned was it?

00:19:26.800 Oh, you make me feel so young and radical.

00:19:29.300 I haven't felt so young.

00:19:31.320 That's it, your values are rather 1920s.

00:19:33.660 Come on, man, sit up, sit up straight, get rid of those tattoos,

00:19:37.180 find a tie from somewhere.

00:19:39.340 But you see, isn't it interesting playing the, of course you're right,

00:19:42.860 but we can get away with it for the moment

00:19:45.700 because virtually every other Western society is the same.

00:19:50.360 But, of course, over there, there are societies that are not.

00:19:55.020 That ain't true in Iran.

00:19:56.860 That is not true in China.

00:19:59.300 And who knows? I mean, we are – it's very, very easy. And again, you know, as Constantin made the point, civilizations disappear.

00:20:12.580 And we were talking before we went on air about that extraordinary moment of the late 18th century, which again, of course, is Rousseau or whatever.

00:20:22.880 One of the very, very great figures of that period is Edward Gibbon, the historian who writes about the death of a civilization, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

00:20:32.600 And what he blames it on is Christianity, essentially.

00:20:35.800 He sees a change of values and, of course, he sees Christianity as being individualistic, pacific, indulgent, self-centered, rejecting a notion of military value.

00:20:53.340 Well, it sounds pretty similar to where we are now and societies can turn in on themselves.

00:21:00.960 And clearly, one of the remarkable things about Rome is that having achieved this astonishing power and dominance through, and you know, Roman civilization really is pretty horrible, but it suddenly turns against itself.

00:21:18.160 It turns into something radically different and falls.

00:21:22.300 Well, we are confronted with a radical Islam on the one hand and a radically different vision in China of a regulated state-controlled capitalism run not by floppy classicists like Boris Johnson but by ruthless, properly trained engineers in which the human being is seen merely as a cog in the wheel, not the creature like us. 0.87

00:21:51.700 to be indulged in every whim, fantasy, and hurt feeling.

00:21:56.120 Not much indulgence happening in China.

00:21:58.500 But again, you look at how the thing was handled in China.

00:22:02.940 You are just ordered what you do.

00:22:06.080 And if you step out of line, how many years in jail is it?

00:22:10.720 Yeah, if that.

00:22:12.460 But this is the thing that you talk about the threats,

00:22:15.900 you know, radical Islam, the rise of China 0.98

00:22:18.200 with its very different mentality.

00:22:19.580 And I think threats have always existed and a strong, healthy civilization like a strong, healthy body is able to deal with external challenges.

00:22:29.720 The thing that troubles me –

00:22:30.560 But what if you decide –

00:22:31.800 But this is my point.

00:22:33.240 The thing that troubles me is that if we weaken our own sense of ourselves, of the value of our civilization –

00:22:40.900 In fact, we've done more than weaken it.

00:22:42.360 In fact, what is peculiar, and it's striking, I think here again, England is from England.

00:22:49.860 I'm going to talk about England.

00:22:51.200 England has been the country that's led the way in virtually everything.

00:22:54.720 We invented modernity in the late 17th century, the Industrial Revolution, and all the rest of it.

00:22:59.580 And one of the very peculiar features about England, which I think has become a kind of disease which has spread to the rest of the West, is the self-hatred of the English intellectual.

00:23:10.440 I mean, it's written about very, very interestingly by George Orwell, you'll remember, just immediately before, on either side of the Second World War, in which there's that wonderful passage describing the kind of people who read The Guardian, you know, the sandal wearing Quakerish classes, or invariably vegetarian or vegan, as the kind of people who would rather steal from the poor box than stand to sing the national anthem.

00:23:38.000 And that, again, it goes back to the late 19th century.

00:23:41.700 You've got in the Mikado's, in Coco's song in the Mikado of all the people that he hated,

00:23:48.380 it's those who sing the praises of every century but this and every country but their own.

00:23:56.680 And this has become profoundly deep-rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture.

00:24:02.480 It was, I think, essentially snobbery. 0.90

00:24:04.380 I mean, English foods are utterly disgusting.

00:24:07.160 You know, you really, really must eat French. 0.99

00:24:09.180 The English have got absolutely, you give an example, 0.53

00:24:11.960 absolutely no sense of style or dress. 1.00

00:24:15.320 The English men are just so ugly. 1.00

00:24:17.300 Please keep going, Dana, please. 0.99

00:24:18.680 You again illustrate.

00:24:19.840 This is the best moment of this episode.

00:24:21.780 Please, carry on.

00:24:22.840 You illustrate the point perfectly and so on.

00:24:26.120 And then, of course, it becomes given an extra crank and edge

00:24:29.960 by race sensitivity.

00:24:33.580 And so it now shifts from snobbery to something else.

00:24:37.160 which is that we, of course, as imperialists, are responsible for absolutely all the ills in the world.

00:24:43.760 And then, of course, not only did we have an empire, we had slavery.

00:24:48.640 So every other culture in the world, including China, did not have slavery.

00:24:55.320 And in fact, the peculiar thing about the British Empire is that it may be built on slavery,

00:24:59.360 but it then actually spends more money on eradicating than it ever made from it.

00:25:03.420 And then, of course, the slavery, you can then turn across the Atlantic because until very recently, what was very striking about America was right or left, a passionate patriotism.

00:25:15.520 But suddenly in America, with race politics and slavery, you're using these things to discredit even the American ideal, even the American Revolution, even the American Declaration of Independence, because, of course, the American Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self-evident that men are born free and equal with, you know, certain rights given by the divinity and whatever, by the creator, and you have slavery.

00:25:43.140 So there is indeed a fundamental hypocrisy and you're using that and the left is using that to devastating effect to lead to a rejection of your own civilization and to see it as being responsible for all the ill in the world.

00:25:59.160 Whereas the plain truth is that the West and capitalism, if you value health, if you value education, if you value security of life, have created a civilization which offers incomparably more of these things to an incomparably larger percentage of the population than has ever, ever been the case before.

00:26:22.980 But then, do you know what?

00:26:24.500 We take it for granted.

00:26:26.380 And it's like a religion because the way you talk about it,

00:26:29.400 it's almost as if by being English we're born into original sin.

00:26:33.680 That is a brilliant point.

00:26:35.880 No one has ever said that to Francis on this program ever before.

00:26:39.760 No, no, that is a brilliant point.

00:26:41.120 No, no, no, come on, this is a serious, this is a proper,

00:26:44.220 we're all being joshing, but it's a serious conversation.

00:26:46.660 You see, I think one of the things we've got to understand

00:26:49.360 is how so much of what we're talking about now is displaced religion.

00:26:54.060 This is something else which is utterly fundamental. 0.99

00:26:57.920 You know, G.K. Chesterton, awful, fat, farting, fascist, that's good, fat, farting, fat, farting, fascist and Roman Catholic, 0.99

00:27:07.360 that he was a brilliant, brilliant writer and very considerable poet, 0.98

00:27:11.520 has this wonderful phrase about what happens when people lose belief in God.

00:27:16.360 And the phrase is, you don't believe in nothing, you believe in anything.

00:27:21.520 And what I think has happened is in area after area, what were religious positions have been translated into political positions.

00:27:31.260 I mean, one of the reasons why we're talking about Twitter, one of the reasons why Twitter is so horrible, of course, is that woke culture has now become a new orthodoxy.

00:27:41.340 And the woke, you know, the wokeerati, the twitterati, enforce it just as though they were Dominican friars, you know, as though they were Dominican inquisitors.

00:27:53.180 And, you know, if you actually look at when you get a twitter basting, if those people could burn you, they would.

00:28:01.240 They would actually, in other words, that far from a liberalization of culture, we're enforcing a new orthodoxy of religious word.

00:28:11.080 These are new articles of faith.

00:28:13.880 And again, I think that one of the reasons why wokery, you don't find much wokery in France.

00:28:21.240 Women in France are desperately trying to get French men woke. 0.80

00:28:24.640 They're having a real uphill struggle.

00:28:26.940 And I've noticed no wokery whatever in Italy.

00:28:30.420 Berlusconi doesn't seem to me to have learned too many lessons from Me Too and all the rest of it.

00:28:36.620 Why is that?

00:28:37.520 Because all of this liberalism that we are talking about now in England and America latches onto the back of Puritanism and nonconformity.

00:28:49.900 That immense self-righteousness, that belief that you are the elect, that belief that most of the rest of human beings are deplorable people.

00:28:58.920 It's a sale in witch trials. 0.65

00:29:00.300 They've got to be whipped into line because they're fundamentally wicked.

00:29:03.600 I mean, the left believes, doesn't it, that people with political opinions like mine are fundamentally wicked.

00:29:10.620 We don't just disagree.

00:29:12.300 We are morally wrong.

00:29:13.940 And now these are religious positions.

00:29:15.880 Are you seeing what I'm trying to get at?

00:29:17.200 No, absolutely.

00:29:17.840 And I think, again, this is why, as it were, the two cradles of Western civilization, Britain and America, are undergoing the extent of the crisis that we are now.

00:29:30.580 We invent Puritanism in this country. 0.81

00:29:33.420 Thank God we export most of them to America, 1.00

00:29:36.640 and the worst ones are Northern Ireland.

00:29:40.240 Right, so we've lost our Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and American viewers.

00:29:44.740 So for those of you who are still here,

00:29:46.300 how do you feel about Australia, and French as well,

00:29:47.960 how do you feel about Australia, David, and New Zealand?

00:29:50.240 Well, they're, of course, undergoing exactly the same thing

00:29:52.900 because they inherit, they're part of us.

00:29:55.560 You see, again, and I love all these countries.

00:29:59.420 I have a house in America. I adore New Zealand. I've never been to New Zealand, but I adore

00:30:04.960 Australia. Again, it's because of the uniqueness and completely remarkable quality of the British

00:30:11.840 Empire, which is after the catastrophe. Remember, Britain has only ever had one defeat in the last

00:30:19.040 300 years, and that is the loss of the American colonies. The loss of the American colonies

00:30:24.540 made everybody in Britain rethink, and the rethinking is led by the man who leads the

00:30:31.040 reaction to the French Revolution, invents modern conservatism by Edmund Burke.

00:30:35.640 And Burke argues that the reason that things went wrong in America was that we didn't recognize,

00:30:44.160 we the British, the king, the prime minister, didn't recognize the need that's built into

00:30:51.280 being English especially, which is a sense of self-government. The right going back to our 0.68

00:30:58.660 Reformation, going back to Henry VIII's break with the Roman Church, the thing that's dinned into you 0.54

00:31:04.120 or used to be dinned into you about being English was the right to run your own affairs. And of

00:31:10.880 course, if you send a colony overseas, people who believe in their right to run their own affairs,

00:31:16.940 By the time you've got to the 1770s and you've got a city like Philadelphia, which is about to overtake Dublin in size, which at that point is a second city of empire, of course they want to run their own affairs and you get London trying to run it for them.

00:31:44.640 So from that point onwards, and you see particularly with the Durham report in Canada, the British government comes up with this astonishing notion, which is unique in the history of empire, that we should see all of these former colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the white ones, moving towards self-government. 0.87

00:32:08.400 And the empire consciously fosters increasing self-government.

00:32:14.200 And so we are, you know, the British Empire is unique in spawning this series of mirror states, not the kind of fragments that are torn to pieces of the Roman Empire or has happened after, you know, the fall of the Soviet Empire or the Tsarist Empire, but these consciously replicating elements.

00:32:33.260 So have you ever been to Ottawa?

00:32:35.700 No, I've never been.

00:32:36.400 Ottawa is totally fascinating.

00:32:38.400 You look at the Canadian Parliament building.

00:32:41.100 What architectural style is it in?

00:32:43.240 This, you know, is in this new world.

00:32:45.740 It's gothic.

00:32:47.440 It's a gothic fantasy.

00:32:49.260 And because the original one of the 1860s burnt out,

00:32:54.560 it's actually rebuilt in gothic after the First World War.

00:32:59.220 Because it's saying we are part of this same world.

00:33:03.540 It's very difficult to believe with Mr. Trudeau.

00:33:06.180 But really, it is part of this Anglo-Saxon world.

00:33:11.240 And looking at the way our society...

00:33:13.780 Which, of course, then curse...

00:33:15.160 Sorry, just to connect and then we'll stop.

00:33:17.620 Which then, again, means that we see the virus of Puritanism

00:33:21.920 and we see the virus of woke in it.

00:33:24.340 So alongside the good bits, there are the bad bits,

00:33:26.980 which is why, as I said, wokeery is essentially Anglo-Saxon.

00:33:30.480 It's Australia, it's New Zealand, it's Canada,

00:33:32.820 supremely Canada, America.

00:33:34.440 And being a historian, you can see and identify patterns,

00:33:39.980 looking at the past and seeing the patterns in the present.

00:33:44.240 Have we reached the end or do we have somewhere to go?

00:33:47.380 And is the destination particularly unpleasant?

00:33:51.040 No historian.

00:33:52.020 And any historian, you've got to be Neil Ferguson to pretend to do that kind of thing,

00:33:56.440 whom I deeply adore, but I'm not paid enough to take this kind of risk.

00:34:00.940 we don't know

00:34:05.660 people thought they did

00:34:08.040 I mean if you remember

00:34:09.200 after the fall of the Berlin Wall

00:34:11.560 there was one of the most famous

00:34:13.340 and silliest essays of all time

00:34:15.340 by Francis Fukuyama

00:34:17.620 taking his title from Hegel

00:34:19.420 the end of history

00:34:20.540 the triumph of the West

00:34:22.060 the triumph of liberal capitalism

00:34:24.300 the liberal values on the one hand

00:34:28.140 and the capitalist system on the other

00:34:30.120 Hand in hand, a social and economic freedom would march into a bit like Russian realist art.

00:34:38.840 All of these heroic figures against the rising world.

00:34:42.280 It didn't quite turn out like that.

00:34:44.180 So how do we know?

00:34:46.700 But I do think we should have learned one thing from the collapse of that dream,

00:34:54.080 from the rise of radical Islam, from the rise of China.

00:35:00.120 and so on, we should remember vulnerability. And again, we've been able to behave in the

00:35:08.020 absurd fashions that we are behaving now, simply because our world, it seems so knowable,

00:35:14.940 it seems so manageable, it seems so controllable, it seems so safe. And one of the things that I

00:35:22.040 hope is now happening in this 20th century, in which every five years, it's as though another

00:35:28.820 time bomb another bomb goes off blowing apart this certainty that we will become a little more

00:35:34.940 aware of vulnerability then again maybe this is just me getting old no i don't think it is

00:35:39.740 i'm not saying you're not getting old i'm saying i don't think it's just that

00:35:44.120 there goes a chance of a second into yeah well we all are but but my point is that um i think

00:35:52.900 what's happening now with the coronavirus and i understand that you don't think you know i think

00:35:56.840 No, I've just raised a question.

00:35:58.960 Yes, okay.

00:35:59.520 I've just raised a question.

00:36:00.720 But my point is I think we are starting to become aware that this illusion of permanent safety, of permanent stability,

00:36:09.060 this is a point I've been trying to make to people for a long time.

00:36:12.220 If you want to remake society from the ground up, you've got to remember it's going to be different.

00:36:17.740 You're not going to be able to keep all those things that you like and keep them and take them for granted.

00:36:23.260 Society will be different.

00:36:24.280 And I think one of the things that people are becoming aware of just a little bit with the coronavirus is this forced ability and this forced security is only for, it's only fake, it's only temporary, it's only impermanent.

00:36:37.660 Again, that wonderful phrase describing the French nobility in the years before the revolution, that they were walking on an abyss strewn with flowers.

00:36:49.240 Yeah.

00:36:49.460 Wow.

00:36:49.720 Isn't that rather great?

00:36:52.160 Yes, but you see, in other areas, I think we are engaged in what I would call diversionary panic.

00:36:58.440 I mean, I think much environmentalism, what I'm afraid in my coarser moments I call eco-wank, of which the great purveyors like David Attenborough and Greta and whatever, is this again is the false end of the world.

00:37:17.180 But you see, again, it's religious.

00:37:18.600 that essentially, I mean, you look at the figures involved.

00:37:23.800 I mean, David Attenborough is manifestly a kind of New Testament prophet,

00:37:28.400 white strewn hair, bringing down holy tablets from on high.

00:37:32.420 He's a new Moses and greater. 0.99

00:37:34.080 Well, she's just a mad child saint. 0.99

00:37:36.060 The Middle Ages was filled with mad child saints. 0.83

00:37:39.660 But that again, the end of the world, you see, it's a new form.

00:37:43.680 It's a new form.

00:37:44.800 It's a new Christian heresy. 1.00

00:37:46.300 It's a belief that we're being punished for wickedness, the wickedness of leading comfortable lives.

00:37:52.300 Again, it's the belief that man is sinning against nature.

00:37:56.840 You turn nature into a god.

00:37:59.240 It's another, in this case now, we're reverting to medieval pantheism or pagan nature worship or whatever.

00:38:05.780 It's all these things.

00:38:07.560 That sort of thing seems to me to be just utterly absurd.

00:38:11.000 And at the same time, the much more real threats are being ignored.

00:38:17.020 It's also that all sorts of academic disciplines, I don't think, have caught up or they're part of the problem.

00:38:26.880 I think history has become very much part of the problem,

00:38:29.820 that the kind of discussion that I'm having with you now would be regarded with absolute horror by 99% of my historical colleagues.

00:38:41.000 If you actually look at what goes on in university history departments now, it is more and more minute little analyses of little tiny problems on the one hand or on the other hand, engaging with fashionable theories about identity, representation, feminism or whatever.

00:39:01.540 It absolutely refuses to use what should be the profound knowledge of these people of earlier societies to address the problems of our own.

00:39:13.720 And again, okay, nobody really expects normally, though we always used to.

00:39:18.460 We always used to think that studying history was the best possible preparation for running politics.

00:39:26.140 I mean, if you think of the, again, looking at bigger patterns, the enormous transformation of the West, this revolution in which if you go back to a particular moment of time from which in virtually every way the world gets better, we know more, we understand more, the sciences, the arts develop.

00:39:47.240 It is, of course, what we call the Renaissance.

00:39:49.820 And what that was, it was a historical movement which consciously looked back to the previous great civilization, that of Rome and Greece, and tried to learn the lessons from it and apply them to its own time.

00:40:04.820 And because it coincided with the technological revolution of printing, it succeeded and did something astonishingly remarkable.

00:40:12.840 But if we look at more what we would now regard as more, and by the way, just taking that point up about history, if you look at the great political leaders of the 16th century and the great administrators, people like William Sissel in this country, they self-consciously see the training that they've received in the classics as fundamental to what they're doing with their contemporary politics, which may give us a bit of ground with hope with Boris.

00:40:40.520 because, you know, I'd be semi-serious.

00:40:42.620 He's a good classicist, though he didn't get a first.

00:40:46.220 And he's never forgiven for the world

00:40:48.140 for the fact that his contemporary David Cameron did.

00:40:50.920 But you see, if we shift ground to a subject

00:40:52.920 where we actually look and treat with seriousness

00:40:55.720 as running the world, economics,

00:40:59.000 modern economics has stopped working.

00:41:01.380 Why has it stopped working?

00:41:02.840 I discussed this with my economics friends,

00:41:05.200 but they, you know, I used to be a DLSC.

00:41:07.240 They don't seem quite to have caught on yet.

00:41:09.580 Economics has stopped working because economics, if you think, why was it called the dismal science in the 19th century when it's largely invented?

00:41:18.240 Because it was all about managing scarcity.

00:41:21.320 But things aren't scarce anymore.

00:41:24.020 Except toilet paper.

00:41:25.120 Except toilet paper.

00:41:26.520 But money ain't scarce, which is why we can find the odd trillion.

00:41:30.680 Isn't it wonderful?

00:41:31.820 The odd trillion is so in the back drawer.

00:41:33.540 In other words, we're in a world in which there's too much capital, hence interest rates of a quarter.

00:41:41.080 Or indeed, if you're in continental Europe, negative interest rates.

00:41:44.940 So banks charge you to deposit money.

00:41:48.380 They don't pay you for it.

00:41:49.620 They charge you for doing it.

00:41:51.000 And the moment then you're in a world of superfluity, it's as though economics has gone through the looking glass.

00:41:56.740 And it's no accident, by the way, that the man who writes Alice in Wonderland is a very important mathematician, Charles Ludwig Dodgson, whatever, and otherwise known as Lewis Carroll.

00:42:10.040 But he can imagine that world in which you sort of reverse values.

00:42:15.180 I don't think we've yet realized that that's what we've done.

00:42:18.940 the astonishing successes of modern capitalism, create a world in which all sorts of rules

00:42:26.960 just don't work anymore. But we haven't yet had a Maynard Keynes. We haven't yet had Einstein,

00:42:34.840 those extraordinary figures. And what I think is most striking is we're in this age of,

00:42:41.080 I think, a concentration of greater change probably than for centuries.

00:42:49.040 And normally those periods do produce extraordinary figures.

00:42:54.160 You know, you look at the clusters of talent in Italy in the Renaissance or something like that.

00:42:58.780 I don't feel we have that at the moment.

00:43:03.080 I don't feel there's anybody appreciating, understanding, explaining what's going on.

00:43:09.720 I don't see a figure, as it were, grasping the changes in economy, international relations.

00:43:18.120 Have you not been following the Lady Liebesh's election?

00:43:22.160 Oh, for me to say, yeah, Ms. Long-Bailey, you know, yeah, the Luisa Nande, I mean, these really...

00:43:31.940 Keith Starmer, I mean, these figures of, I mean, either silly, I mean, how do you find somebody as boring as Starmer?

00:43:39.720 I mean, just, I mean, there's sheer degree of serious tedium.

00:43:47.020 Yeah, it's not quite the assembly of great thinkers that you might otherwise hope for.

00:43:50.580 But one thing that I wanted to talk to you about, David, is we've discussed the work, we've discussed the left.

00:43:57.760 But on the right, there seems to be this craving, not just in the US, but right across the world for the strong man, the powerful man, the populist leader.

00:44:08.280 Why has that suddenly arisen in us, do you think, that desire for that?

00:44:13.800 Well, for all the reasons we've been talking about, if you get a dissolution of certainty.

00:44:20.860 I mean, I think we're sort of programmed.

00:44:22.880 I mean, remember, if I go back to my original historical work, it's on royal courts.

00:44:29.980 It's on monarchy.

00:44:31.020 The reason that I've been a rebel, remember, I'm talking about 1960s.

00:44:35.820 When I was a young man about to do research at Cambridge, we all knew what you had to study.

00:44:41.200 You had to study the working class of the Labour Party or leftish movements.

00:44:46.060 And what does Starkey do?

00:44:47.180 He comes along and says, I believe that the only thing that really matters is aristocracy and monarchy.

00:44:52.140 And you can look at the expressions on my teachers' faces.

00:44:55.880 And I still believe that.

00:44:57.980 I think that societies are run from the top, not the bottom.

00:45:01.740 All that happens is you create new aristocracies.

00:45:04.520 Russia is a very – China, these are very interesting examples of this phenomenon.

00:45:10.220 And that essentially we are normally led by bosses.

00:45:16.440 Human beings have a monarchical instinct.

00:45:19.420 We may disapprove of it, but it's there.

00:45:22.520 And companies, schools –

00:45:26.840 We evolved to live in hierarchies.

00:45:28.360 We can't get away from it.

00:45:29.480 But it's not simply hierarchy.

00:45:30.700 There's a boss figure that nearly always –

00:45:33.920 And what you're looking at is ways in which that boss figure is informed, controlled, chosen, the media through which he is usually he, or even worse when it's kind of, you know, a great she-elephant like Margaret Thatcher.

00:45:50.160 Happily, not Theresa May.

00:45:52.980 But again, you see, Theresa May illustrates what happens when the boss figure goes wrong, when you have somebody who doesn't have this ability to command.

00:46:02.460 And again, with all our caring, sharing, lovey-dovey, oh, you mustn't border people around. 0.99

00:46:07.860 Oh, no, you mustn't tell people what to do.

00:46:09.980 Oh, you're bullying.

00:46:11.440 You're bullying. 1.00

00:46:15.120 Human beings need occasionally a kick up the arse. 0.99

00:46:19.140 Very often they need it very frequently. 0.99

00:46:20.980 Some people enjoy it.

00:46:22.460 I love the way David looked at you when he said that.

00:46:27.340 So, I mean, I'm not sure I necessarily see it as a problem.

00:46:32.460 I mean, I think that, again, the horrors of what some people would claim is the last episode of this, of the interwar period, again, that great period of instability in Europe, which of course, you know, produces the horrors of Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini and whatever.

00:46:56.040 But people, I think, leap to and make absurd comparisons.

00:47:04.180 I don't think Trump in America and I don't certainly think that Boris Johnson here are remotely of that order.

00:47:11.900 They share some similarities with it.

00:47:14.360 But what is striking in Britain is exactly as happened in the second world in the earlier 20th century.

00:47:21.260 In Britain, the centre has held the two broad political parties, even despite the catastrophe of the management of the labour, they hold together.

00:47:34.120 And the result of that is, of course, they include the extremes, which are defanged.

00:47:40.840 Again, people constantly – the left denounce the wickedness of first past the post, the wickedness of the traditional British constitution.

00:47:49.880 But it stops the development of extremist parties and you look at the complete failure of UKIP to do anything.

00:48:02.040 Okay, it colored some aspects of Tory policy but you can see how the fangs are drawn.

00:48:07.220 Whereas the great risk in Germany is that, and I think it's a profound risk in Germany, when you've had a politics which has been dominated by the equivalent of a Tory-Labor coalition, of course the extremes benefit because people get fed up, particularly when it's managed by somebody with a few political talents as I think Angela Merkel is turning out to have.

00:48:35.100 So, I think that we should be looking much more at the reality and nature of political constitutions. And here it seems to me, and I could be just revealing my limitations as essentially an English historian, we benefit from this extraordinary constitutional stability, 800 years. It's utterly unique.

00:48:58.240 Okay, the Japanese empire is longer, but the constitution of the Japanese empire ain't continuous.

00:49:04.300 Ours is a broadly continuous constitution.

00:49:07.660 And save for that brief episode of the 17th century, it has managed to control and contain this.

00:49:15.480 And we're the country at the same time that has modernized most and changed most.

00:49:19.980 And yet we've managed to have a political structure which has contained it and held it together.

00:49:25.520 And if there's a historical lesson to be learned, I think that's it.

00:49:30.540 And you mentioned the Renaissance, which I think is an important question here,

00:49:36.360 because I feel like very often when we have these conversations with people like yourself,

00:49:41.560 there's a temptation to kind of go doom and gloom.

00:49:44.840 This is the fall of the Roman Empire.

00:49:46.680 We're living through the last days.

00:49:48.280 but it sounds like what you're saying

00:49:50.760 we have the capacity to recover from this

00:49:54.280 what might be a temporary malaise

00:49:56.700 of a lack of self-confidence, self-hatred

00:49:58.880 which you've talked about.

00:49:59.360 It would be nice to think so.

00:50:00.820 It would be, yeah.

00:50:01.980 It would be nice to think so.

00:50:03.380 But again, you see, I think the comparison

00:50:05.740 with the Roman Empire is utterly false.

00:50:08.600 I mean, it has, you know, it's nice and flashy

00:50:11.860 and is easy to play with.

00:50:14.600 But remember, the reason the Roman Empire,

00:50:16.960 Well, the reason the empire is created, the reason the republic falls, is the intervention of the army.

00:50:22.340 Now, what is striking?

00:50:23.940 I mean, the Roman Empire is really the army taking over the state and the boss of the army, you know, Caesar and then Augustus taking over the state.

00:50:32.760 There is absolutely no sign of this in the West at all, not even in America, where you have this gigantic military complex.

00:50:39.940 The generals, not even with Trump, show any sign of wishing to do that.

00:50:44.120 We have constitutional processes and I think they are profoundly important.

00:50:52.160 My anxiety at the moment in the West is this – it is the obverse of the Renaissance.

00:51:01.860 The Renaissance was that moment of astonishing intellectual confidence.

00:51:07.600 Of course, torment also.

00:51:08.960 and again one that was

00:51:11.140 prepared consciously

00:51:12.760 to draw upon the past

00:51:14.700 to transform the future

00:51:16.580 it's at a very early point

00:51:18.400 it's phrased wonderfully by Geoffrey Chaucer

00:51:21.360 who has this line

00:51:22.800 old books

00:51:26.360 from which new learning springs

00:51:29.100 this wonderful

00:51:30.440 notion of the connection

00:51:32.620 between old and new

00:51:34.340 and for me

00:51:35.460 it's that loss of that

00:51:38.960 fructifying, fertile quality of history, as it were, you have on the one hand the mere conservator,

00:51:49.600 the kind of old-fashioned national trust, keep it all in aspic, which separates history from the

00:51:55.560 present in that direction, and on the other, the neologists, the people who only believe that's new.

00:52:00.260 What you need in a healthy culture is that dialogue of the two. If you like,

00:52:07.760 the impossible figure of the person who's both a liberal and a conservative.

00:52:13.140 But the real worry is that we're losing that ability to have dialogue.

00:52:17.380 Well, we certainly, I mean, how well you put it. I mean, the moment that you get the sort of

00:52:25.140 Twitter style, or indeed, increasingly, general political discourse, but enormously, enormously

00:52:31.520 accelerated by the web. And I think that one of the great problems is the way in which

00:52:38.680 the web and social media have distorted the very notion of conversation and the very notion

00:52:47.740 again of a proper conversation in which there will be different people with different values.

00:52:55.960 I mean, I have no idea what either of you two thought. You had more idea of what I thought.

00:53:01.520 But each one of us has been coming into this with bringing what he has.

00:53:09.600 Neither of us has shouted at the other.

00:53:12.200 Neither of us has got indignant.

00:53:14.120 Nobody has denounced.

00:53:16.460 And this is the model.

00:53:18.100 This is what I always believed in passionately when I was teaching.

00:53:22.540 I believe it's what universities should be.

00:53:25.700 I believe there should be no authorities.

00:53:27.540 And there are experts, but experts aren't always right.

00:53:31.520 Experts are only justified by evidence.

00:53:33.580 And what we need is this dialogue of civility that we are having.

00:53:40.880 It's this willingness to learn, to engage, to tease.

00:53:45.020 We've been teasing.

00:53:46.040 The importance of humor, the importance of the smile,

00:53:49.740 the realization that the most important issues are often illuminated by that.

00:53:54.440 And the awful side-taking, the polarization, the shouting, the screaming.

00:54:02.340 And do you see?

00:54:03.240 Are we really saying we just need a recovery of good manners?

00:54:06.600 I mean, it may be.

00:54:07.600 But I think the religious, sorry, Francis, just on this point,

00:54:11.020 I think that one of the reasons, and again, tell me if I'm wrong,

00:54:15.020 but one of the reasons that we have become so shouty

00:54:18.440 and so attached to our own sides is there is a religiosity to our politics now.

00:54:23.900 Yes, yes, absolutely.

00:54:24.760 And therefore, when I disagree with you,

00:54:27.640 I am not disagreeing with Dr. David Starkey.

00:54:30.000 I am…

00:54:31.000 Disagreeing with…

00:54:32.000 I'm blaspheming.

00:54:33.000 I'm blaspheming.

00:54:34.000 Of course.

00:54:35.000 That's right.

00:54:36.000 I mean, again, it's why I predicted the politics of the left.

00:54:39.000 And isn't it interesting, the politics of the left with the increasing fragmentation,

00:54:43.000 of course, replicate precisely what happened to Protestantism.

00:54:48.000 That it splits into smaller and smaller and smaller groups, all of whom you like, like

00:54:52.000 the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front, all of whom hate each other.

00:54:57.000 And you get this immense vanity of small difference.

00:55:00.000 The one thing that I think, to use a metaphor, is the canary in the mine is humour.

00:55:06.800 And when you see humour start to be attacked...

00:55:09.400 That is so unfunny.

00:55:12.680 People like Marcus Brigstone, why does anybody think that people like that are funny? 0.97

00:55:18.220 Why, or even I think most of Ben Elton, why is putting fuck and Margaret Thatcher into the same sentence something that we've got to laugh about? 0.97

00:55:25.640 I mean, it's just, there is no wit, there is no lightness, there's no fertility. 0.92

00:55:32.300 But do you think this mania that we seem to have descended into for taking a joke and then taking it literally

00:55:38.940 and then using that to attack people is a sign of a problem within our culture,

00:55:44.200 that we have lost the sense of lightness, the sense to laugh at ourselves, to ridicule ourselves,

00:55:49.160 and ultimately to admit that we're human?

00:55:51.360 No. I don't think it's been generally lost.

00:55:56.740 I mean, you listen to the banter on a bus or in a pub, it's what it's always been.

00:56:02.160 But we have enabled the creation of a public discourse of offense, victimhood, and so on.

00:56:10.680 You cannot have a culture in which, again, Voltaire, in which, oh, my feelings have been hurt.

00:56:18.680 We don't have a duty to respect each other's feelings in that sense.

00:56:23.460 We have a duty, clearly, to an extent, to care and look after each other.

00:56:29.260 But that doesn't mean that every sort of degree of snowflake fragility has got to be recognized.

00:56:37.520 There needs to be a robustness, but equally, I suppose it's a question of a mutual confidence.

00:56:45.840 i i've it is i think it is essentially the cult of victimhood um uh which is so i think this is

00:57:01.080 where things have gone so appallingly wrong uh and again the deification of language um that

00:57:08.760 uh you know the whole business of what what is the appropriate word to describe somebody who is

00:57:13.700 black, and you actually look at the sheer sensitivity of that issue. I mean, for some

00:57:19.900 people, calling someone black is almost akin to calling the N-word. For other people, in fact,

00:57:25.720 it's out and proud, and that's what I am. But these are like the worst disputes of medieval

00:57:33.120 schoolmen. It's fetishism. It's a fetishism of language. And if you fetishize language in this

00:57:40.680 kind of way you can't have humor and you can't even really use words we we actually we really

00:57:46.520 do stop talking to each other well you don't know what the right thing is to say i mean

00:57:51.320 the the difference between a person of color and a colored person

00:57:55.920 the end the new c word well 20 years ago i mean i remember one of i used to run a comedy club and

00:58:08.060 I had an act on who was black

00:58:10.340 and an audience member came up to me afterwards

00:58:13.080 and he was so happy about having seen this act

00:58:17.080 and said, I don't remember his name, the colored chap.

00:58:20.400 And clearly to this person,

00:58:22.480 this term was just a term that they were used to using.

00:58:25.600 But my point is, there was absolutely no malintent

00:58:29.520 in that statement whatsoever.

00:58:32.500 And yet, if you had taken that conversation,

00:58:35.580 recorded it, and then played it on 9 a.m. BBC morning breakfast show.

00:58:41.840 The complaints would have fallen like the rain from heaven.

00:58:45.520 They'd have fallen like storm whatever it was, wouldn't they?

00:58:48.440 And this is where this distinction between ill intent and prejudice and bigotry

00:58:54.320 and simply using, failing to use the current author.

00:58:58.320 The fashionable term.

00:58:59.360 Exactly.

00:58:59.820 But as I said, I think this is fetishism of language.

00:59:02.220 And the last time you could see this kind of thing, and again, it's wonderfully satirized by Gibbon in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire when Byzantium was torn apart by the dispute between Homo usion and Homo eusion, which are different views of the deity.

00:59:24.280 And again, it's this fetishization of language.

00:59:28.280 I mean, quite literally, the city, Constantinople, was half burned down in the riots on this subject.

00:59:36.620 And what we do about it, I don't know.

00:59:41.200 You see, there was a prophet in all of this and we're not allowed to talk about him.

00:59:45.400 And that's Enoch Powell.

00:59:46.480 And Enoch Powell, in his wicked speech, the one that is always denounced reacting to the Race Relations Act, pointed out virtually everything that we are now saying.

01:00:01.220 That the moment you started entrenching this notion of, as it were, a protected species, then it will become an instrument of power.

01:00:11.840 he doesn't talk about

01:00:14.680 he talks about language to an extent

01:00:17.080 but not enough

01:00:18.120 and I think that we are

01:00:20.860 if we are to recover

01:00:22.580 and you know

01:00:24.360 the fate of Trevor Phillips

01:00:26.360 the man who in a sense started

01:00:28.820 all of this who was the

01:00:30.380 most successful

01:00:31.860 president of whatever

01:00:34.540 used to be called the race relations thing that became

01:00:36.580 equal whatever

01:00:38.380 that he

01:00:40.620 should now, as it were, be pilloried for heresy. It's rather like the Middle Ages where, you know, 0.65

01:00:45.620 a pope is finally accused of heresy. We have to realize, surely, that that is the moment at which

01:00:52.260 we stop. And if we don't, think about it. This is the, again, forgive me, the attack on Trevor

01:01:05.680 Phillips, seems to me to be the moment at which the revolution wants to guillotine or

01:01:10.860 obscure. And the French at least had the good sense to pause at that point. We, the left, 1.00

01:01:20.700 the guardianister, if they cannot understand that, well then certainly they are lost. Perhaps

01:01:26.840 the rest of us needn't follow them.

01:01:29.920 On that note, David, we've got time for one final question for you.

01:01:34.240 Which is always, what's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

01:01:40.140 I'm going to repeat what I've said, because I think it is what is really important.

01:01:44.700 The importance of the past, not as something to be fetishized, not as something to be national trustized,

01:01:53.300 not as something to be sentimentalized or novelized like Hilary Mantel,

01:01:58.140 but as something that we genuinely try to understand, to enjoy, to confront, to use.

01:02:07.820 And I think the wisest figure in English politics and English political history is Edmund Burke.

01:02:15.800 And the central lesson of Burke is that society is a profoundly organic thing.

01:02:23.460 He talks about it as being a contract.

01:02:26.120 Well, that's the commonplace term of the social contract, but he formulates it in an extraordinary way that it's a contract of past, present, and future.

01:02:38.880 And our absurd, this momentism, breaks that contract.

01:02:45.760 And that is precisely why it's been such a pleasure to have you on the show because, as I said to you before we started,

01:02:50.680 we're both incredibly jealous of someone who understands history because it gives so many

01:02:55.480 so many perspectives about what's happening now and what may yet come so thank you very much for

01:03:00.900 coming on the show David thank you for watching and we'll see you again in a week's time with

01:03:04.680 another brilliant episode take care see you next week guys

01:03:20.680 We'll be right back.

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TRIGGERnometry - March 29, 2020

Dr David Starkey： Where Woke Culture Comes From

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