00:00:56.940And 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.
00:01:29.260On 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.
00:01:39.420And it's looking centrally at this extraordinary man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
00:01:45.860And if we want a single source of why we are completely fucked up, it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
00:01:54.640Inevitably, of course, he's French, at least.
00:01:56.940Every bad idea is French because they take the subject of ideas and reason so seriously.
00:02:04.920And 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.
00:02:15.180And 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.
00:02:40.700I mean, the whole origin of Dianification.
00:02:45.220Do you remember this ancient figure, Princess Diana?
00:08:36.580But it does it as a cycle and it's really striking.
00:08:41.600So you have that first cycle of liberalism in the 1790s.
00:08:45.920Then 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.
00:09:31.200What does Marx in the Communist Manifesto say the bourgeoisie do?
00:09:35.780They take advantage of the working class.
00:09:38.780Yeah, 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.
00:09:59.320In other words, it's a new way of starting the world from scratch.
00:10:03.840And that, of course, creates our modern politics in Britain.
00:10:07.180It's from the outcome of that that you get the Liberal Party on the one hand and the Conservative Party on the other.
00:10:13.580And then you're a globalization and the increased madness of the left is the third wave of that.
00:10:20.280So we're just going through this sequence of waves and they all end the same way.
00:12:13.180I mean, the Guardian incident is a fascinating one.
00:12:15.560One 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.
00:12:40.560Then immediately, 333 people coming along as well.
00:12:44.040So 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.
00:12:55.320And the two groups just continue walking past each other.
00:17:24.000I'm thinking about talking my way to an answer as I often do.
00:17:27.800I 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.
00:17:38.980If you had a civilization where people had to work harder, where there were deeper – I don't mean what we call work nowadays.
00:17:56.220Think of what the backbreaking labor of a peasant or a coal miner was.
00:18:01.260So we've got a society which protects and indulges.
00:18:04.860It'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.
00:18:45.060The bubonic plague was real, you know.
00:18:47.640A 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.
00:19:59.300And who knows? I mean, we are – it's very, very easy. And again, you know, as Constantin made the point, civilizations disappear.
00:20:12.580And 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.
00:20:22.880One 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.
00:20:32.600And what he blames it on is Christianity, essentially.
00:20:35.800He sees a change of values and, of course, he sees Christianity as being individualistic, pacific, indulgent, self-centered, rejecting a notion of military value.
00:20:53.340Well, it sounds pretty similar to where we are now and societies can turn in on themselves.
00:21:00.960And 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.
00:21:18.160It turns into something radically different and falls.
00:21:22.300Well, 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.
00:21:51.700to be indulged in every whim, fantasy, and hurt feeling.
00:21:56.120Not much indulgence happening in China.
00:21:58.500But again, you look at how the thing was handled in China.
00:22:19.580And I think threats have always existed and a strong, healthy civilization like a strong, healthy body is able to deal with external challenges.
00:22:51.200England has been the country that's led the way in virtually everything.
00:22:54.720We invented modernity in the late 17th century, the Industrial Revolution, and all the rest of it.
00:22:59.580And 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.
00:23:10.440I 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.
00:23:38.000And that, again, it goes back to the late 19th century.
00:23:41.700You've got in the Mikado's, in Coco's song in the Mikado of all the people that he hated,
00:23:48.380it's those who sing the praises of every century but this and every country but their own.
00:23:56.680And this has become profoundly deep-rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture.
00:24:02.480It was, I think, essentially snobbery.
00:24:04.380I mean, English foods are utterly disgusting.
00:24:07.160You know, you really, really must eat French.
00:24:09.180The English have got absolutely, you give an example,
00:24:11.960absolutely no sense of style or dress.
00:24:33.580And so it now shifts from snobbery to something else.
00:24:37.160which is that we, of course, as imperialists, are responsible for absolutely all the ills in the world.
00:24:43.760And then, of course, not only did we have an empire, we had slavery.
00:24:48.640So every other culture in the world, including China, did not have slavery.
00:24:55.320And in fact, the peculiar thing about the British Empire is that it may be built on slavery,
00:24:59.360but it then actually spends more money on eradicating than it ever made from it.
00:25:03.420And 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.
00:25:15.520But 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.
00:25:43.140So 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.
00:25:59.160Whereas 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.
00:26:41.120No, no, no, come on, this is a serious, this is a proper,
00:26:44.220we're all being joshing, but it's a serious conversation.
00:26:46.660You see, I think one of the things we've got to understand
00:26:49.360is how so much of what we're talking about now is displaced religion.
00:26:54.060This is something else which is utterly fundamental.
00:26:57.920You know, G.K. Chesterton, awful, fat, farting, fascist, that's good, fat, farting, fat, farting, fascist and Roman Catholic,
00:27:07.360that he was a brilliant, brilliant writer and very considerable poet,
00:27:11.520has this wonderful phrase about what happens when people lose belief in God.
00:27:16.360And the phrase is, you don't believe in nothing, you believe in anything.
00:27:21.520And what I think has happened is in area after area, what were religious positions have been translated into political positions.
00:27:31.260I 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.
00:27:41.340And 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.
00:27:53.180And, you know, if you actually look at when you get a twitter basting, if those people could burn you, they would.
00:28:01.240They would actually, in other words, that far from a liberalization of culture, we're enforcing a new orthodoxy of religious word.
00:28:37.520Because all of this liberalism that we are talking about now in England and America latches onto the back of Puritanism and nonconformity.
00:28:49.900That immense self-righteousness, that belief that you are the elect, that belief that most of the rest of human beings are deplorable people.
00:29:17.840And 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.
00:29:33.420Thank God we export most of them to America,
00:29:36.640and the worst ones are Northern Ireland.
00:29:40.240Right, so we've lost our Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and American viewers.
00:29:44.740So for those of you who are still here,
00:29:46.300how do you feel about Australia, and French as well,
00:29:47.960how do you feel about Australia, David, and New Zealand?
00:29:50.240Well, they're, of course, undergoing exactly the same thing
00:29:52.900because they inherit, they're part of us.
00:29:55.560You see, again, and I love all these countries.
00:29:59.420I have a house in America. I adore New Zealand. I've never been to New Zealand, but I adore
00:30:04.960Australia. Again, it's because of the uniqueness and completely remarkable quality of the British
00:30:11.840Empire, which is after the catastrophe. Remember, Britain has only ever had one defeat in the last
00:30:19.040300 years, and that is the loss of the American colonies. The loss of the American colonies
00:30:24.540made everybody in Britain rethink, and the rethinking is led by the man who leads the
00:30:31.040reaction to the French Revolution, invents modern conservatism by Edmund Burke.
00:30:35.640And Burke argues that the reason that things went wrong in America was that we didn't recognize,
00:30:44.160we the British, the king, the prime minister, didn't recognize the need that's built into
00:30:51.280being English especially, which is a sense of self-government. The right going back to our
00:30:58.660Reformation, going back to Henry VIII's break with the Roman Church, the thing that's dinned into you
00:31:04.120or used to be dinned into you about being English was the right to run your own affairs. And of
00:31:10.880course, if you send a colony overseas, people who believe in their right to run their own affairs,
00:31:16.940By 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.
00:31:44.640So 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.
00:32:08.400And the empire consciously fosters increasing self-government.
00:32:14.200And 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.
00:36:24.280And 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.
00:36:37.660Again, that wonderful phrase describing the French nobility in the years before the revolution, that they were walking on an abyss strewn with flowers.
00:36:52.160Yes, but you see, in other areas, I think we are engaged in what I would call diversionary panic.
00:36:58.440I 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.
00:38:07.560That sort of thing seems to me to be just utterly absurd.
00:38:11.000And at the same time, the much more real threats are being ignored.
00:38:17.020It's also that all sorts of academic disciplines, I don't think, have caught up or they're part of the problem.
00:38:26.880I think history has become very much part of the problem,
00:38:29.820that the kind of discussion that I'm having with you now would be regarded with absolute horror by 99% of my historical colleagues.
00:38:41.000If 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.
00:39:01.540It absolutely refuses to use what should be the profound knowledge of these people of earlier societies to address the problems of our own.
00:39:13.720And again, okay, nobody really expects normally, though we always used to.
00:39:18.460We always used to think that studying history was the best possible preparation for running politics.
00:39:26.140I 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.
00:39:47.240It is, of course, what we call the Renaissance.
00:39:49.820And 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.
00:40:04.820And because it coincided with the technological revolution of printing, it succeeded and did something astonishingly remarkable.
00:40:12.840But 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.
00:40:40.520because, you know, I'd be semi-serious.
00:40:42.620He's a good classicist, though he didn't get a first.
00:41:02.840I discussed this with my economics friends,
00:41:05.200but they, you know, I used to be a DLSC.
00:41:07.240They don't seem quite to have caught on yet.
00:41:09.580Economics has stopped working because economics, if you think, why was it called the dismal science in the 19th century when it's largely invented?
00:41:18.240Because it was all about managing scarcity.
00:41:51.000And the moment then you're in a world of superfluity, it's as though economics has gone through the looking glass.
00:41:56.740And 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.
00:42:10.040But he can imagine that world in which you sort of reverse values.
00:42:15.180I don't think we've yet realized that that's what we've done.
00:42:18.940the astonishing successes of modern capitalism, create a world in which all sorts of rules
00:42:26.960just don't work anymore. But we haven't yet had a Maynard Keynes. We haven't yet had Einstein,
00:42:34.840those extraordinary figures. And what I think is most striking is we're in this age of,
00:42:41.080I think, a concentration of greater change probably than for centuries.
00:42:49.040And normally those periods do produce extraordinary figures.
00:42:54.160You know, you look at the clusters of talent in Italy in the Renaissance or something like that.
00:42:58.780I don't feel we have that at the moment.
00:43:09.720I don't see a figure, as it were, grasping the changes in economy, international relations.
00:43:18.120Have you not been following the Lady Liebesh's election?
00:43:22.160Oh, for me to say, yeah, Ms. Long-Bailey, you know, yeah, the Luisa Nande, I mean, these really...
00:43:31.940Keith Starmer, I mean, these figures of, I mean, either silly, I mean, how do you find somebody as boring as Starmer?
00:43:39.720I mean, just, I mean, there's sheer degree of serious tedium.
00:43:47.020Yeah, it's not quite the assembly of great thinkers that you might otherwise hope for.
00:43:50.580But one thing that I wanted to talk to you about, David, is we've discussed the work, we've discussed the left.
00:43:57.760But 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.
00:44:08.280Why has that suddenly arisen in us, do you think, that desire for that?
00:44:13.800Well, for all the reasons we've been talking about, if you get a dissolution of certainty.
00:44:20.860I mean, I think we're sort of programmed.
00:44:22.880I mean, remember, if I go back to my original historical work, it's on royal courts.
00:45:30.700There's a boss figure that nearly always –
00:45:33.920And 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.
00:45:52.980But 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.
00:46:02.460And again, with all our caring, sharing, lovey-dovey, oh, you mustn't border people around.
00:46:07.860Oh, no, you mustn't tell people what to do.
00:46:22.460I love the way David looked at you when he said that.
00:46:27.340So, I mean, I'm not sure I necessarily see it as a problem.
00:46:32.460I 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.
00:46:56.040But people, I think, leap to and make absurd comparisons.
00:47:04.180I don't think Trump in America and I don't certainly think that Boris Johnson here are remotely of that order.
00:47:14.360But what is striking in Britain is exactly as happened in the second world in the earlier 20th century.
00:47:21.260In Britain, the centre has held the two broad political parties, even despite the catastrophe of the management of the labour, they hold together.
00:47:34.120And the result of that is, of course, they include the extremes, which are defanged.
00:47:40.840Again, people constantly – the left denounce the wickedness of first past the post, the wickedness of the traditional British constitution.
00:47:49.880But it stops the development of extremist parties and you look at the complete failure of UKIP to do anything.
00:48:02.040Okay, it colored some aspects of Tory policy but you can see how the fangs are drawn.
00:48:07.220Whereas 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.
00:48:35.100So, 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.
00:48:58.240Okay, the Japanese empire is longer, but the constitution of the Japanese empire ain't continuous.
00:49:04.300Ours is a broadly continuous constitution.
00:49:07.660And save for that brief episode of the 17th century, it has managed to control and contain this.
00:49:15.480And we're the country at the same time that has modernized most and changed most.
00:49:19.980And yet we've managed to have a political structure which has contained it and held it together.
00:49:25.520And if there's a historical lesson to be learned, I think that's it.
00:49:30.540And you mentioned the Renaissance, which I think is an important question here,
00:49:36.360because I feel like very often when we have these conversations with people like yourself,
00:49:41.560there's a temptation to kind of go doom and gloom.
00:50:23.940I 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.
00:50:32.760There is absolutely no sign of this in the West at all, not even in America, where you have this gigantic military complex.
00:50:39.940The generals, not even with Trump, show any sign of wishing to do that.
00:50:44.120We have constitutional processes and I think they are profoundly important.
00:50:52.160My anxiety at the moment in the West is this – it is the obverse of the Renaissance.
00:51:01.860The Renaissance was that moment of astonishing intellectual confidence.
00:55:12.680People like Marcus Brigstone, why does anybody think that people like that are funny?
00:55:18.220Why, 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?
00:55:25.640I mean, it's just, there is no wit, there is no lightness, there's no fertility.
00:55:32.300But do you think this mania that we seem to have descended into for taking a joke and then taking it literally
00:55:38.940and then using that to attack people is a sign of a problem within our culture,
00:55:44.200that we have lost the sense of lightness, the sense to laugh at ourselves, to ridicule ourselves,
00:55:49.160and ultimately to admit that we're human?
00:55:51.360No. I don't think it's been generally lost.
00:55:56.740I mean, you listen to the banter on a bus or in a pub, it's what it's always been.
00:56:02.160But we have enabled the creation of a public discourse of offense, victimhood, and so on.
00:56:10.680You cannot have a culture in which, again, Voltaire, in which, oh, my feelings have been hurt.
00:56:18.680We don't have a duty to respect each other's feelings in that sense.
00:56:23.460We have a duty, clearly, to an extent, to care and look after each other.
00:56:29.260But that doesn't mean that every sort of degree of snowflake fragility has got to be recognized.
00:56:37.520There needs to be a robustness, but equally, I suppose it's a question of a mutual confidence.
00:56:45.840i i've it is i think it is essentially the cult of victimhood um uh which is so i think this is
00:57:01.080where things have gone so appallingly wrong uh and again the deification of language um that
00:57:08.760uh you know the whole business of what what is the appropriate word to describe somebody who is
00:57:13.700black, and you actually look at the sheer sensitivity of that issue. I mean, for some
00:57:19.900people, calling someone black is almost akin to calling the N-word. For other people, in fact,
00:57:25.720it's out and proud, and that's what I am. But these are like the worst disputes of medieval
00:57:33.120schoolmen. It's fetishism. It's a fetishism of language. And if you fetishize language in this
00:57:40.680kind of way you can't have humor and you can't even really use words we we actually we really
00:57:46.520do stop talking to each other well you don't know what the right thing is to say i mean
00:57:51.320the the difference between a person of color and a colored person
00:57:55.920the end the new c word well 20 years ago i mean i remember one of i used to run a comedy club and
00:58:59.820But as I said, I think this is fetishism of language.
00:59:02.220And 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.
00:59:24.280And again, it's this fetishization of language.
00:59:28.280I mean, quite literally, the city, Constantinople, was half burned down in the riots on this subject.
00:59:36.620And what we do about it, I don't know.
00:59:41.200You see, there was a prophet in all of this and we're not allowed to talk about him.
00:59:46.480And 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.
01:00:01.220That the moment you started entrenching this notion of, as it were, a protected species, then it will become an instrument of power.
01:01:29.920On that note, David, we've got time for one final question for you.
01:01:34.240Which is always, what's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
01:01:40.140I'm going to repeat what I've said, because I think it is what is really important.
01:01:44.700The importance of the past, not as something to be fetishized, not as something to be national trustized,
01:01:53.300not as something to be sentimentalized or novelized like Hilary Mantel,
01:01:58.140but as something that we genuinely try to understand, to enjoy, to confront, to use.
01:02:07.820And I think the wisest figure in English politics and English political history is Edmund Burke.
01:02:15.800And the central lesson of Burke is that society is a profoundly organic thing.
01:02:23.460He talks about it as being a contract.
01:02:26.120Well, 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.
01:02:38.880And our absurd, this momentism, breaks that contract.
01:02:45.760And 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,
01:02:50.680we're both incredibly jealous of someone who understands history because it gives so many
01:02:55.480so many perspectives about what's happening now and what may yet come so thank you very much for
01:03:00.900coming on the show David thank you for watching and we'll see you again in a week's time with
01:03:04.680another brilliant episode take care see you next week guys