TRIGGERnometry - August 02, 2020


Neil Oliver： ＂We Must Learn the Lessons of History＂

Topics
pandemic lessons from history
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Neil Oliver Francis Hutchison Manchester E.O. Wilson Mesolithic Harari Alexander Solzhenitsyn John Witherspoon Kenneth Clark Donald Trump Henry VIII Constance COVID-19 Glasgow Mary
＂The WHO is Corrupt＂ - Matt Ridley ＂Anti-Racism Training Doesn't Work＂ - Dr Karlyn Borysenko

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 1 minute

Words per minute

167.87

Word count

10,276

Sentence count

306

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Neil Oliver is an archaeologist, historian, former journalist, TV presenter and all sorts of troublemaker. In this episode of Trigonometry, Francis and Constantine talk to him about the challenges our ancestors faced, and how we can learn from them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
00:00:08.920 I'm Constantine Kisson.
00:00:10.740 And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:17.060 Our fantastic guest today is an archaeologist, historian, former journalist, TV presenter and all sorts of troublemaker.
00:00:24.140 Neil Oliver, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:00:26.380 Oh, thanks guys. Thanks very much for making me welcome.
00:00:29.540 It's good to have you here. I hope that introduction does make you welcome.
00:00:33.020 For anyone who's not familiar with what you do, just give us a little overview of your life story so far.
00:00:40.220 How are you, where you are?
00:00:41.680 Sure. I'm mostly, I suppose, a TV presenter and author.
00:00:48.060 I've spent the last 20 years making television documentaries of various sorts.
00:00:52.320 Famous last year it's called Coast, which did what it sounds like.
00:00:55.700 We followed the coastline of Britain and other places.
00:00:59.020 Lots of history, lots of archaeology.
00:01:01.340 My background is, well, I have a degree in archaeology from Glasgow University about
00:01:06.280 1,000 years ago, and I have dodged around ever since.
00:01:10.440 I retrained for a while as a journalist.
00:01:11.980 I worked in weekly papers, did some stuff on the national press as well.
00:01:17.660 But about 20 years ago, I accidentally got into television, and I've been trying my best
00:01:22.660 to get away with that ever since, and here we are today.
00:01:27.660 Fantastic.
00:01:28.660 And so you've got a passion for history, Neil,
00:01:31.560 and I think what we're seeing right now is a world going slowly tomto.
00:01:37.080 Can you see patterns in history being repeated now?
00:01:41.020 Absolutely.
00:01:41.820 I'm an archaeologist, but I love history.
00:01:44.940 I call myself an amateur historian or an enthusiast.
00:01:48.340 I just love the stories and the storytelling of it.
00:01:51.540 And part of what I love about it is how accessible it is to anyone.
00:01:54.400 If you can read a book, you can read history.
00:01:58.180 And for as long as they last, the libraries and bookshops are full of history.
00:02:02.820 And as long as you read widely and make a point of reading things that you don't agree with or like,
00:02:09.040 as well as things that you do like and agree with, then you can give yourself a good background in history without any outside help.
00:02:15.020 You don't need to go to college or university to get an understanding of the past.
00:02:18.860 And if you do persevere and you read widely and you read back into as far back as you can go and come forward towards the present,
00:02:26.380 you see patterns without a shadow of a doubt.
00:02:29.280 And I think that's where a lot of the reassurance comes,
00:02:31.820 the reassurance that I find is available in history and archaeology.
00:02:35.400 You see that our ancestors have dealt with all of it before.
00:02:40.140 War, famine, disease, invasion, religious intolerance,
00:02:45.140 climate change, natural disaster.
00:02:47.480 Anything and everything that we are going through
00:02:49.600 or still have to go through, our ancestors went through.
00:02:52.600 And fundamental to why I find it reassuring is that
00:02:55.580 Without a shadow of a doubt, they had to face it with not a fraction of the technology and the understanding and the acquired wisdom that we have on account of them having gone through it before.
00:03:07.440 And so knowing that our ancestors have had to deal with the same sorts of challenges, we're in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown world pandemic.
00:03:16.700 Well, pandemics have come before, as has every other big challenge for humankind.
00:03:21.980 And I think what I'm aware of, more than anything else at the moment, is you mentioned a world gone tonto, people sort of losing the plot.
00:03:32.080 And I say, well, of course we are. It's so much to ask people to cope with.
00:03:39.140 And is it any surprise that all sorts of internecine and inter-community strife has been a collateral damage of all that we've expected ourselves and each other to go through for the last months on end?
00:03:53.460 And for me, other people would find a different antidote to all the trouble.
00:03:58.000 But for me, I keep reading my history books and I keep thinking, you know, yes, this has happened before and this too shall pass.
00:04:06.520 Well, it's a reassuring message that this too shall pass.
00:04:09.260 And you talk about the fact that humanity has faced these sort of challenges before.
00:04:13.420 And actually, it's a thing that Francis and I frequently argue about because he feels
00:04:17.820 like a lot of the events of the recent months are largely the product of the pandemic and
00:04:23.700 people being locked up and so on in their homes.
00:04:26.720 But I also feel that there's another part to it, which is a longer term civilizational
00:04:32.380 transformation, where the United States, the West more generally has gone from a kind of confident,
00:04:39.020 bold civilization that sought to be powerful in the world, sought to expand, sought to control
00:04:44.780 as much as possible, whereas now it's turned inward and it looks into itself. And I would
00:04:50.580 say there's probably some historical precedent for that as well. How do you see the interplay
00:04:55.020 between those two things? Yeah, I mean, amongst others, an English, a British historian, Kenneth
00:05:00.860 Clark, a liberal arts historian, art critic, he wrote a book called Civilization a number
00:05:06.760 of years ago, and then it became an iconic television series.
00:05:10.840 And part of his assertion within that thesis was that civilizations get exhausted.
00:05:18.700 And he pointed to, for example, Rome and the Roman Empire.
00:05:23.160 And yes, it was coming under pressure by then from all sorts of external challenges, the
00:05:29.340 barbarians at the gates and all the rest of it but he said that that was really um a symptom of
00:05:36.160 something internal that the roman empire had just lasted for so long that it had become it had lost
00:05:42.300 confidence in itself and he said that that's how civilizations finally are undone not because the
00:05:49.340 barbarians get through the gates before that it's this loss of sense of self and i think yes it's
00:05:56.040 So that has happened before, and there are more examples
00:05:58.960 than just all of the empires that we've ever –
00:06:01.940 they've always gone extinct, if you like.
00:06:04.860 By definition, there's been a sequence of empires
00:06:07.620 and kingdoms through history, and they've all gone.
00:06:11.280 And now, you know, for a long time it has been
00:06:13.420 this Western civilization that has been predominant
00:06:16.340 on the planet, but perhaps we've lost confidence.
00:06:21.420 And we've also had, I suppose really since the end
00:06:25.420 of the second world war perhaps we've lived so many people in much of the west have lived in
00:06:30.280 increasingly peaceful tolerant times and we've begun to take for granted uh prosperity and peace
00:06:36.940 and tolerance and and uh you know the chance of a good life and our children are taken care of
00:06:42.280 and we're well educated and all the rest of it and you can come to think of that as being in the
00:06:46.300 natural order of things as though you know you can just uh leave people to their to their natural
00:06:52.200 inclinations and devices and you'll get this kind of civilization. And I think it's because we've
00:06:56.480 had so long without facing big, scary, real challenge. You know, we haven't had to endure
00:07:03.120 our children or ourselves going off to war, you know, and facing the bayonet or the bullet.
00:07:08.240 And we haven't been challenged by, you know, an epidemic or a disease. And I think we've
00:07:14.900 we've lost touch with some of the realities of life and I think at the moment I think this
00:07:22.840 this pandemic and then the ever-present threat that's been there for for years now of climate
00:07:28.260 change and all sorts of predictions of the end of the world I think people are rattled
00:07:32.720 to some extent this this pandemic has been one of if not the last straw that has finally
00:07:40.800 destabilized people and we need to you know it's not the end of the world but i think we need to
00:07:46.540 pull back and take some sort of collective breath and and appreciate that we need to give each other
00:07:54.500 and ourselves more slack because we can cope with this challenge but we have to accept that there
00:08:03.000 there may be some pain there will be some pain there will be there will be dying there will be
00:08:07.560 There will be blood and strife, but that's in the natural order of things.
00:08:13.100 Every generation or so many generations before ours had to face these realities that people, some people die and some people are overwhelmed by circumstances, but civilization can persevere.
00:08:24.700 And we get that encouragement, that reassurance that all of that is possible by looking at the past and seeing the ancestors with far more limited equipment than our own found a way through and sought to overcome and did so.
00:08:42.140 And Neil, do you think part of the problem is that we've got access to history, we've got this great wealth of knowledge, but the reality is we're simply not learning the lessons from the past?
00:08:53.100 Yes, I think we're, I mean, I know for a fact that, you know, I've got kids at school and history is not one of those subjects that's at the forefront.
00:09:05.360 It's very much kind of a luxury option.
00:09:08.600 And even though I'm, you know, I've forced our kids from one castle to another and from one battlefield to another over the years, none of them has opted to take history.
00:09:18.340 You know, they've all gone in different directions.
00:09:21.420 But it's not a subject that's to the fore.
00:09:24.920 And I do very much lament that.
00:09:27.960 And I also, as well as considering what people rightly describe as history,
00:09:34.700 which is to say the written word.
00:09:36.300 You know, we've had the written word for about 5,000 years, let's say.
00:09:40.640 And so we've had documents and letters and diaries and all the stuff of history.
00:09:44.780 But I look back even further.
00:09:47.220 You know, I look back into the evidence that's revealed by archaeologists, you know, going back thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years into the past.
00:09:57.280 Because I think there are fundamental understandings that we need to be reminded of about the nature of our species.
00:10:04.640 You know, Homo sapiens, the wise people, which we, you know, vainly call ourselves, we're only about 200,000 years old.
00:10:12.640 We're relatively recent arrivals on the planet.
00:10:16.320 And there's an American biologist scientist called Edward Osborne Wilson, usually cited as E.O. Wilson.
00:10:23.760 And there's a great quote from him, which is that humanity's predicament is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, but God-like technology.
00:10:35.820 And all of those three statements are absolutely correct.
00:10:39.320 and it's so important to remember that we are essentially the same animals cognitively and
00:10:45.200 physiologically as the ancestors who hunted mammoths and rhinos and we lived as hunters for
00:10:51.660 90 percent of our time on earth and only 10 000 years ago did we did some of us become farmers
00:10:57.180 start domesticating plants and animals and after 10 000 years believe it or not we're still
00:11:03.680 psychologically coming to terms with that change after 10 000 years you know we still talk about
00:11:09.620 the daily grind which is to say the repetitive chores without end well that comes from literally
00:11:14.740 grinding wheat into flour rising at dawn working till sundown knowing that tomorrow is going to
00:11:20.920 be exactly the same and that your diet is going to be this repetitive bread and porridge with the
00:11:25.640 occasional meat you know uh you know humdrum existence we're still coming to terms with that
00:11:31.640 And in the last few hundred years, we've had, you know, enlightenment and the coming of reason, industrial revolution.
00:11:42.080 And in the last few decades, even just in the last few years, the technological advances that we've had to try and cope with, even the smartest of us struggle to cope with what's going on.
00:11:53.040 And I certainly don't put myself even in the top half.
00:11:57.460 And I know I am struggling.
00:11:59.200 And even the sharpest of the sharp,
00:12:01.040 the most cognitively enabled to deal with modern technology
00:12:04.060 are finding some of it a struggle.
00:12:06.260 And it's important to look back and remember
00:12:08.340 that our brains are still processing about four bits a second.
00:12:12.440 Compared to the technology that we've surrounded ourselves with,
00:12:15.820 we're incredibly slow.
00:12:19.160 Our machines that we have created are digital,
00:12:21.780 but we are still analog for the time being.
00:12:24.100 And we have to allow for our own, we have to remind ourselves of our own potential and of our own reality.
00:12:32.160 And we get that not just from studying history, but from looking back into the deepest time we can reach.
00:12:37.480 And it's interesting that you mentioned that, Neil, because one of the things that I would say troubles me a lot about what's happening in modern society is the sense that I remember, you know, growing up as a student,
00:12:49.160 I read so many books about human psychology, evolutionary psychology, how our past shapes our present and our behavior and so on.
00:12:58.840 And it seems to me like some of the movements that we've seen come in the last 10, 15 years, they almost reject the idea that anything from the past can teach us anything about the present, anything about ourselves and so on.
00:13:12.080 Is that something that you notice as well or am I imagining that?
00:13:16.240 No, I think that's right.
00:13:18.160 I think, you know, to continue my previous thought, you know, we've asked a lot of ourselves and in the last maybe 500 years at the very most, although in reality, less than that.
00:13:31.000 Some of us, some tiny percentage of us have trained themselves to be scientists, to think as scientists.
00:13:38.460 And it's very, very difficult even for trained scientists to think like that, to use brains in that way.
00:13:46.160 And even trained scientists can only really do it for short spans of time.
00:13:50.480 It's like 100-meter runners that they just have this burst of activity that they've trained for.
00:13:55.120 And the rest of the time, they just think like the rest of us do.
00:13:58.440 And our hunter selves, you know, we're running this hunter software from the past.
00:14:03.540 And we have a constant, I think, desire to not be scientists and we have a void within ourselves that needs to be filled by something else.
00:14:13.580 It's like belief, it's stories and it's myth, you know, which served for thousands of years to do the job of science.
00:14:22.820 We understood our place in the cosmos and the nature of reality through stories and myth and belief.
00:14:28.980 And it's almost as if it's like a, you know, something that's still pulling us down below the surface.
00:14:37.080 that science now is being, I think, undermined
00:14:41.980 by our natural tendency to want to believe in something.
00:14:46.200 And I noticed the way in which, in relation to, say, the pandemic,
00:14:49.520 there's this talk about the science, as though science has become fixed,
00:14:55.260 as though it has become something that is solid and permanent,
00:14:58.440 like a stone with permanent words graven in it.
00:15:02.260 And as a non-scientist, I understand science to be the opposite of that.
00:15:06.400 Science is never finished, never complete.
00:15:09.460 There's never scientific consensus.
00:15:11.700 I mean, there should always be doubting voices.
00:15:13.520 But I think there's increasingly in these troubled times, there's been a desire to treat science as another kind of religion.
00:15:22.620 And to just believe it, not to challenge it.
00:15:27.100 You know, biology, some aspects of biology that I certainly took for granted, having done higher biology at school,
00:15:32.320 are some of those things that I took for granted as scientific fact
00:15:37.400 are being dismissed now as not science.
00:15:43.540 And I think that was the first step.
00:15:47.180 But then this tradition of, not this tradition, but this idea of woke.
00:15:51.700 Woke has become, that has become a set of dogmatic statements
00:15:56.840 that people have to believe and not challenge.
00:16:01.520 and you know we were supposed to have got beyond all of that this the world of reason the world
00:16:07.620 of science was supposed to have replaced the world of belief and the world of dogma but it
00:16:12.840 turns out that it hasn't and it doesn't and that given enough time plenty of us are now trying to
00:16:18.660 treat science and other ideas as a dogma that must be revered in the same way that a religion is
00:16:26.420 that there are certain unviolable truths that you certainly have to accept,
00:16:31.920 that there are sacred texts that must never be challenged,
00:16:35.480 and that there are sinners and heretics that must be punished and driven out. 0.88
00:16:42.640 And so I think it's a reminder, and the explanation for why we might be doing that
00:16:49.520 is because we struggle at all times to apply reason and science.
00:16:54.860 and if we if we take our eye off the ball we start to drift back towards belief and dogma
00:17:01.300 and we should be aware of that and the warning of that is there in in history neil and uh you're
00:17:07.900 talking about you know heretics and you know casting them out and as a good catholic boy i 0.71
00:17:12.720 approve of all of that that's why i was raised to that's what i was told to believe but joking
00:17:17.480 aside don't you think a lot of our problems come from the fact that in the west we no longer think
00:17:22.400 that we need religion we don't believe in it anymore by and large and we think that we're
00:17:26.740 above it but the reality is isn't there something within us that needs that kind of belief system
00:17:33.180 I think yes I think as it turns out we are hardwired I think there's I think there's some
00:17:38.400 part of read-only memory you know in our motherboards that we can't get at and can't
00:17:44.860 unprogram or reprogram that in spite of everything else is still hungry for something like belief
00:17:53.020 you know and and and there's a tendency towards having wanting to have faith in something
00:17:59.340 um and religions you know evolved to fill that void for the longest time
00:18:06.880 and people in the 21st century the 20th century are wary about the supernatural aspect of believing
00:18:13.940 in a, you know, an invisible omniscient deity, you know, for all sorts of perfectly valid
00:18:18.680 reasons, you know, they harbour these doubts. But that's to throw out the baby with the 0.94
00:18:23.460 bathwater. And I think, you know, the Judeo-Christian tradition, apart from expecting belief in 0.54
00:18:30.240 an invisible deity, it also gave people a framework by which to live their lives. And
00:18:35.260 I don't think there's any arguing with the fact that the value system that evolved as
00:18:41.320 these religions served
00:18:43.320 better than what we've been
00:18:45.320 being offered in the much more recent past.
00:18:48.160 You know, we got
00:18:49.220 beyond religion, as it were, in the West
00:18:51.160 in the 19th century.
00:18:53.620 And other, as
00:18:55.160 people have said before, you know,
00:18:56.680 when you take up a religion, people don't believe
00:18:59.300 in nothing. They believe in anything.
00:19:01.520 And ideologies emerged
00:19:03.140 in the 19th and 20th centuries
00:19:05.300 that were supposed to give a superior
00:19:07.360 set of values by which
00:19:09.260 to live. But what did those
00:19:11.300 sets of values actually do well they harvested hundreds of millions of people you know even the
00:19:16.380 worst of the crusaders in the pomp couldn't even have dreamt of notching up death tolls like that
00:19:22.420 like those which were achieved in the in the 20th century and so we've got to be mindful of the fact
00:19:28.120 that we need values by which to live and it's useful we shouldn't be embarrassed or bashful
00:19:35.000 about looking back and acknowledging that the old lessons learned even thousands of years ago are
00:19:40.280 still valid. You know, things like don't kill, don't judge lest you be judged. Be kind to your
00:19:47.140 neighbours and treat them as you would yourself. You know, look after your mum and dad. These are
00:19:52.740 realisations that people came to thousands of years ago and are every bit as valid. And we
00:20:00.140 shouldn't be wary of reminding ourselves of those essential values. Well, speaking of reminding
00:20:07.340 ourselves of values, Neil, one of the things that wasn't on your list, but I imagine you feel
00:20:13.200 strongly about it, as I do, is that whatever replacement we seem to have been offered for
00:20:20.260 the religions of the past, the one thing that almost every major religion has had in the past
00:20:25.360 is the idea of redemption and forgiveness. And that seems to be the one thing that some of these
00:20:32.080 new ways of thinking don't seem to include and you you alluded to it by saying judge not least
00:20:37.700 you be judged but i think we've gone way beyond that you know in terms of encouraging judgment
00:20:42.740 encouraging mobbing of people encouraging punishment for heretics as you say i think i 0.99
00:20:48.640 think something that you know whether whether or not a person believes in a you know a deity or
00:20:54.920 some invisible force there's no doubting that there was a value in in accepting that there
00:21:01.440 There are certain powers that oughtn't to be human that should be transcendent.
00:21:07.260 You know, the idea that there are certain godlike, you know, to go back to E.O. Wilson's quote, godlike powers belong somewhere else and we shouldn't take them for ourselves.
00:21:19.260 and maybe at the moment we're in one of those dangerous areas
00:21:22.600 that have happened before where we as human beings
00:21:24.880 are almost indulging ourselves with the right to have
00:21:29.100 God-like powers of destruction of fellow human beings.
00:21:34.780 And for a long, long ago, a lot of people realised
00:21:37.720 that that wasn't a good idea, that operating in that way
00:21:42.100 is ultimately going to burn us all.
00:21:44.960 But this culture around woke, a cancel culture, we are behaving in old-time religion.
00:21:55.380 And the total destruction that is being sought in the case of the new heretics is a red-light warning. 0.96
00:22:06.260 Back in the 16th century in England, when Henry VIII famously broke away from the Catholic Church
00:22:12.680 and established what became the Church of England.
00:22:16.360 It unleashed, obviously, centuries of strife between Catholic and Protestant.
00:22:21.200 And then when his daughter, Mary, became Queen Mary I,
00:22:26.440 she returned to the Catholic, or she was Catholic,
00:22:29.660 and she famously saw to the burning alive,
00:22:32.420 the burning at the stake of more than 300 Protestant heretics.
00:22:38.680 And that was a deliberate choice of punishment,
00:22:41.140 because the idea was that by burning the body, nothing of it would remain.
00:22:45.960 There wouldn't be so much as a finger bone that could be revered as a relic of a martyr.
00:22:52.540 And so it was burned to ashes, and then the ashes were scooped up and dumped in the river.
00:22:57.100 So there was nothing, nothing left behind.
00:22:59.480 That was a very specific punishment that was carefully thought out, almost scientifically.
00:23:04.120 And what's happening at the moment is, although the zealots of cancel culture haven't actually burned anyone alive yet, and not yet, the nature of the punishment is such that the person be utterly destroyed in everything but the corporal sense.
00:23:23.480 You know, so loss of career, loss of livelihood, loss of good name, reputation built up over decades.
00:23:30.960 Hopefully they would say loss of family, you know, love of family,
00:23:34.760 love of relationship, so that nothing is left of the heritage
00:23:38.060 from an empty husk.
00:23:40.560 But don't you think, Neil, this goes back to human nature
00:23:46.700 in that we have a light side to us and that there's a darkness to us?
00:23:50.460 And this cancel culture, this wishing to destroy people 0.98
00:23:55.060 because they have the wrong opinions, is something deeply ingrained
00:23:58.840 within us within our dna as it were and you can see it right the way through history the stocks
00:24:03.680 and all the rest of it and the reality is we're never going to get away from it are we well it's
00:24:09.140 certainly we can't we can't really confidently point back to a time when it wasn't there
00:24:12.840 you know the zoroastrianism you know is arguably some people say it could have its roots in the
00:24:19.480 second millennium bc you know so it's but in any event it's a lot older than than than christianity
00:24:26.040 and it was fun it was dualist it was fundamentally about the the reality was split between good and
00:24:32.420 evil light and dark so right back in the roots of what became religion was this idea of you know
00:24:38.140 good and evil light and dark and we see all you know in the in the in the symbol of yin and yang
00:24:43.700 that the idea of the the black and the white tadpole curled together you know light and dark
00:24:48.400 you know the two opposing forces but coiled together and each with a the white has black 0.80
00:24:53.880 within it and the black is white within it and there's a way between the two that you're supposed
00:24:58.080 to straddle. So we've had this understanding and then as recently and as fundamentally important
00:25:03.600 Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago you know wrote about how the line separating
00:25:09.480 good and evil passes not between states or political parties or nations it passes through
00:25:16.540 the centre of every human heart. And if I could have everyone given that permanent reminder
00:25:23.840 of the reality of human nature, it's that. It's that each one of us has to accept that
00:25:30.620 we have within us the concentration camp guard, the torturer, the murderer. That's us. The
00:25:36.160 monster isn't other people. It's within us. Each one of us has the potential. And further
00:25:41.720 where I think you see people that are happily leaping
00:25:46.220 onto cancel culture and joining in the mob attacks.
00:25:50.940 And it's very often, it seems to be people
00:25:52.940 that have previously regarded and publicised themselves
00:25:56.480 as being loving and kind.
00:25:58.320 And yet they can be some of the most aggressive
00:26:00.340 in the pylons that happen with this kind of cancel culture.
00:26:05.380 And it's in that behaviour that you get an early warning
00:26:07.660 of the kind of people who would be the ones
00:26:10.480 who would phone the secret police
00:26:12.460 about their neighbours
00:26:13.200 and watch from behind the neck curtains
00:26:15.280 as their doors were kicked in
00:26:16.260 or be the guards and the gulags.
00:26:19.500 That's the early warning of the people
00:26:21.420 who would behave in that way.
00:26:23.940 And if you don't accept
00:26:25.620 that each one of us
00:26:26.920 has the potential to be like that,
00:26:28.720 then you're an exceptionally dangerous creature.
00:26:32.120 You know?
00:26:32.780 But as long as you do realise
00:26:34.560 that the monster is in you,
00:26:36.940 then that's why you accept ideas
00:26:39.700 like judge not lest you be judged because you have to think well i could be extremely inhumane
00:26:45.800 and judgmental if i was let loose with absolute power you know it's that line from like the
00:26:51.720 caligula movie you know if you had life and death power over every man woman and child what would 1.00
00:26:55.860 you have done i'd make the world a better place mate you have to remind yourself mate if you were
00:27:03.760 in charge i would burn myself at the stake i'm going to be honest with you um but that's that
00:27:08.780 is the that is the point and we it's it's it's you can take a light view or a dark view of this
00:27:15.020 realization for me uh accepting that uh that we're we are each of us you know 50 50 good and evil
00:27:24.020 that we have them that we have the monster within us i take that on board and accept and i i find
00:27:30.120 comfort in it and it's an extension of the fact that i find comfort in the fact that we are still
00:27:35.280 the paleolithic hunters that we have been for 200 250 000 years some people contemplating that
00:27:45.780 might find it discouraging but i find a comfort in it that we are just what we have always been
00:27:52.020 and in a sense all that's required is that we accept kind of internalize the reality of
00:27:59.500 ourselves and that's where you find the the induce you know the encouragement to not judge
00:28:07.540 because you know if you know what you are like then you know what everybody else is like
00:28:12.500 if you know the things that would hurt you then you know how to hurt everybody else
00:28:17.500 and that's as long as you've internalized that that aspect of human nature then you become much
00:28:23.300 less of a threat but but don't you think neil that the problem is when it comes to things like
00:28:28.160 social media is that it dehumanizes people so they're not a person anymore they're an avatar
00:28:33.160 they're just a little picture so when you actually destroy them it doesn't it takes away the human
00:28:37.740 element of them because you don't then see what the person is going through emotionally and all
00:28:42.260 the rest of it oh yeah yes without without a shadow of a doubt i think we're a long way from
00:28:47.880 from understanding psychologically what we've done to ourselves with with social media and the rest
00:28:54.620 of it you know if you know thousands of years ago if you were a farmer and you had a farmer over the
00:29:01.900 stone wall from you you know tending his fields uh if he was doing something better than you
00:29:08.040 you know i'd find a better way to grind wheat into flour or whatever you might be you know sort of
00:29:13.620 unsettled by that but because he was in your world and he was really there and you could see him
00:29:17.460 you could seek to emulate whatever it was that he had done you know you could you could copy
00:29:21.640 what he was doing elevate yourself and then and then the feeling of inadequacy and being threatened
00:29:28.540 by him would go away but because we've got these screens now in our pockets and on our desks
00:29:34.000 let us see lives thousands of miles away perhaps lives that by definition because they're on screen
00:29:41.140 we can't even be confident that they're actually real you know we could actually be being tricked
00:29:45.740 by a fiction but nonetheless we're unsettled by those distant lives in different climates in
00:29:51.800 different parts of the world lived by people in different circumstances and so we can't do the 0.98
00:29:56.780 same thing we can't seek to meaningfully emulate or copy them it's not realistic and so all you're
00:30:02.720 left with is this triggered unsettled threatened feeling that you get well and we also watch you
00:30:09.500 know threat dangerous events unsettling events thousands of miles away and we still feel the
00:30:14.580 threat as though it was happening right there in the room with us you know we're still being we're
00:30:18.780 being triggered by by the fear of things that are that are a great distance and so we're in these
00:30:23.920 we are like you say we're in these hamster balls we're in these these little plastic balls that
00:30:28.320 keep us at a distance from one another and then when we and then when we watch people being torn
00:30:34.360 limb from limb metaphorically speaking by the by the twitter mob or whatever we don't see we don't
00:30:40.180 seem to see it as happening to a real person it just seems to be the consequences that unfold for
00:30:47.540 as you say an avatar in a video game it does feel that way neil let me ask you something else because
00:30:53.240 you know you all know harari writes very well about yes how it is that homo sapiens became
00:31:00.720 the dominant species of humans eventually becoming the only species of humans that are left and and
00:31:05.900 what he talks about is we were able to overcome the fact that physically we're quite puny compared
00:31:11.580 to say neanderthals or obviously you know while other types of wild animals um but but we overcame
00:31:18.560 it by being able to organize beyond our small tribal groups and the way we did that is by having
00:31:23.740 some sort of overarching idea uh the nation the religion god whatever it might have been and we
00:31:30.420 were able to unite into large groups, large tribes. And it seems to me that what's happening
00:31:35.640 now is a lot of the things that used to be a unifying force, we talked about religion already,
00:31:41.120 but perhaps the idea of the nation state, all of these things seem to be either being eroded or
00:31:47.720 entirely under attack. What do we have that we can unite around to come together as we need to?
00:31:54.960 you're right I mean Harari writes you know brilliantly and and so illuminatingly uh about
00:32:02.380 this idea that um you know say for example Manchester doesn't uh exist in any absolute
00:32:10.620 sense so it's a shared dream or a concept uh it's a set of buildings and streets and all the rest of
00:32:18.980 it for the people of Manchester I'd like to say Neil's not attacking Manchester he's talking about
00:32:22.960 As an example, Glasgow or Edinburgh, or the United Kingdom, it only exists, it's a space on the map, obviously, it's a geographical territory, but the United Kingdom doesn't exist in any absolute sense, and neither does a city.
00:32:38.740 So, for the sake of, let's say, Manchester is a shared idea, to the extent that if you were to flatten it to rubble and then take away all the rubble and let the grass grow, Manchester would still exist in the minds of the people.
00:32:52.960 And so the people could, it could be rebuilt and it would still be Manchester.
00:32:56.960 And it would never have been, it would never actually have disappeared at any moment,
00:33:00.000 even when the grass had grown over the site, Manchester would still have existed.
00:33:03.460 So Harari writes in this brilliant way about how you can unite people.
00:33:06.980 We have the cognitive abilities to share an idea.
00:33:10.620 And when it becomes something like a religion, it's great because it means that you can,
00:33:15.460 even though you've never met someone else, if you know that they share your religious beliefs,
00:33:19.680 you can predict how they're going to behave in a given set of circumstances.
00:33:22.960 because you've been sort of trained and briefed
00:33:25.980 in how to behave in exactly the same way
00:33:29.060 in exactly the same set of circumstances.
00:33:31.940 And so in answer to your question,
00:33:35.200 if it's no longer going to be belief in an invisible deity
00:33:40.020 or a sacred rock or a mountain or whatever,
00:33:43.560 I think we have to have the ability to have shared dreams,
00:33:51.160 shared aspirations
00:33:53.700 you know that the United
00:33:55.800 Kingdom obviously at the
00:33:58.020 moment is in a kind of a
00:33:59.300 is in an uncertain state
00:34:02.040 because there's a big pull from
00:34:03.500 Scotland you know to
00:34:05.780 break that union between Scotland
00:34:07.900 and England and so
00:34:09.500 you know so that the existential nature
00:34:11.960 of the United Kingdom is
00:34:13.580 under threat at the moment
00:34:15.360 but it's
00:34:17.660 that would be transcended as long as
00:34:19.960 would not be a threat as long as enough people continued
00:34:22.320 to believe in the existence of the United Kingdom.
00:34:26.060 You know, you can't do away with that.
00:34:27.660 I think in answer to your question, we have to unite
00:34:31.600 around a shared ideal and a shared aspiration.
00:34:37.700 And the kind of, quite frankly, the kind of civilisation
00:34:40.700 that we have had in our part of the West for quite a long time now
00:34:45.860 is the best aspiration, I think, that the human species has had so far.
00:34:52.600 It's imperfect, of course it is, and there's room for improvement,
00:34:55.760 but the potential for a good life that has been available
00:34:59.140 in this part of the West and in North America
00:35:02.120 is the best idea that anyone has ever had.
00:35:06.260 Even the idea of the United States of America,
00:35:09.280 I often think, is the best idea ever written down
00:35:14.260 about what a civilisation ought to be.
00:35:16.680 And to summarise it as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
00:35:21.280 Whoever had a better idea than that as the foundation of a society?
00:35:26.960 And the point is that it has never been realised.
00:35:30.860 It has never happened yet.
00:35:32.560 But that's not a bad thing.
00:35:34.660 I sometimes think, you know, Donald Trump's idea
00:35:37.080 about make America great again would have been better
00:35:40.700 if he had just stopped it at make America great.
00:35:43.040 because, you know, to say make America great again
00:35:47.260 is to stick a finger in the eye to people
00:35:49.620 and to say, you know, we were great before,
00:35:51.740 we're going to do it again.
00:35:53.040 It's better to have it as an aspiration
00:35:55.640 and likewise to think that the ideas
00:35:59.920 that underpin the United Kingdom of Great Britain,
00:36:02.780 you see things that are in Magna Carta
00:36:04.200 and in other documents,
00:36:06.080 they are and remain aspirational.
00:36:08.960 You know, you might say that Great Britain
00:36:10.940 has never happened yet in the same way that the idea
00:36:15.480 that make America great is really the aspiration.
00:36:20.320 You know, man's reach must always exceed his grasp.
00:36:23.960 And I think if we just have the confidence to remind ourselves
00:36:28.640 that what has been sought in the West is the best idea
00:36:33.580 for a civilisation anyone's ever had, and it's an unfinished work.
00:36:38.100 We never got there.
00:36:39.040 This idea that greatness is in the past, that's fatal,
00:36:45.020 as though it's gone, as though it's behind us.
00:36:47.620 I think in answer to your question, it's the idea that people come together
00:36:52.040 in their thousands and in their millions in the shared belief
00:36:55.720 that greatness is possible, but just not quite reached yet.
00:37:02.200 And Neil, do you think one of the major problems our society is facing
00:37:06.160 is this sort of advent of hyper-liberalism which says that we are all individuals which you know
00:37:11.520 once you put on the layer of identity politics we're all different from one another we all have
00:37:15.720 different privilege we all have different right whatever it may be and that is increasingly
00:37:20.580 encouraging us to see us ourselves as individuals therefore not a collective and is therefore
00:37:25.800 fragmenting society that's difficult because i hear what you're saying and i'm thinking about it
00:37:32.700 but the great you know part of the success in the west has been the the respect for and almost
00:37:40.460 the sanctity of the individual you know the idea that you know it's there in the uh in the in the
00:37:46.000 national covenant of scotland you know which which was a contract self-consciously written
00:37:52.060 out by lawyers in the in the in the 17th century in which and which scottish people were invited
00:37:56.900 to sign a contract with God.
00:37:59.380 And the kind of central tenet of it was that every soul
00:38:03.060 counted the same in the eyes of God, whether you were the king
00:38:05.980 or a ploughman or a fishwife or whatever, every soul weighed the same.
00:38:11.440 And that element of the unique value of every individual
00:38:15.280 has been a central plank of what has been achieved
00:38:19.960 in the West, I think.
00:38:21.660 But yes, when you say that, I can see that maybe perhaps
00:38:25.700 some of that idea is being corrupted a bit in an unhelpful way and it has been and it has morphed
00:38:31.980 unhappily into you know identity politics and intersectionality and all and all the rest of it
00:38:38.460 but i would still i would still maintain that we're it's almost like you know the statue of
00:38:43.740 justice outside the obeying blindfold on i think that idea of being judged blindly is a good one
00:38:50.300 The idea that justice or the judge isn't looking at you and seeing you as black, white, male or female, gay or straight, whatever nationality.
00:39:01.420 It's just that you make your declaration, the evidence is stated, and a judgment comes down based on those facts.
00:39:07.600 But I think I would still, ultimately, I think there has to be some respect for the importance of seeing each one of us as an individual.
00:39:20.940 I think if we can do that, I think if we are able to see each other just almost with our eyes closed, just accept each individual presence as being of equal value, I do think that is a fundamental plank of a civilised society.
00:39:35.800 And actually quite a revolutionary idea for human history. And I do think it's important. I guess what Francis is getting at is where do you draw the line between going too far down the route of individualism, particularly when you have some of these kind of very divisive narratives, as we do now, which seek to not just tell you that you as an individual are valuable and you have significance, but that you as an individual are uniquely different from everybody else.
00:40:03.880 There's nothing that binds you in common with others.
00:40:06.240 I think that's really where some of the problems are coming from.
00:40:09.160 Yes, I think I, you know, in researching for a television series
00:40:17.040 and a book that I did a few years ago about the history of Scotland,
00:40:20.800 I ran across a character, Francis Hutchison,
00:40:25.680 who had the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University
00:40:31.380 in the 1730s onwards for a number of years.
00:40:36.640 And he quite controversially at the time
00:40:40.280 taught that happiness was something to be worked for.
00:40:44.960 There was a sort of a prevailing belief around at the time
00:40:48.440 that happiness was almost like manna from heaven,
00:40:50.460 that God scattered almost at random,
00:40:52.980 and you either got it or you didn't.
00:40:54.760 It was God's will.
00:40:56.960 But Francis Hutchison taught that
00:40:59.120 if you dedicated your life as an individual, as a mindful, thoughtful, responsible individual to
00:41:06.680 making the world a better place for all those around you, it wasn't about you, it was about
00:41:12.680 working as hard as you could for the betterment of others, then he prophesied that the collateral
00:41:18.700 benefit of behaving in that way would be your own happiness. And in fact, he said that the best,
00:41:23.780 if not the only way to be happy, was to dedicate your life
00:41:27.500 to everyone else around you.
00:41:29.780 And so there's that idea of each one of us, he was saying each one
00:41:33.400 of us is an individual, but our best hope of happiness is to dedicate
00:41:37.340 all of our effort to everybody else.
00:41:40.420 And in due course, one of his students, who was John Witherspoon,
00:41:44.120 emigrated to North America and became the second president
00:41:47.800 of what is now Princeton University.
00:41:49.980 and he was one of the signatories
00:41:52.600 of the Declaration of Independence
00:41:53.940 and it's believed by many
00:41:57.620 that the very idea of the pursuit of happiness
00:42:01.120 that I've already mentioned
00:42:02.540 and that is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence
00:42:04.540 is a product of Francis Hutchison's teaching
00:42:07.200 that happiness was something that you could pursue
00:42:10.940 actively with every shred of your being
00:42:14.300 as long as you dedicated it to helping others.
00:42:18.100 So I think the dangerous split that you're describing there is when we think that not only are we individuals, but we're the most important and the only thing that matters.
00:42:28.700 And that our needs and our identity is paramount and everybody else must also sort of worship our individuality.
00:42:36.680 I think that's a dangerous inversion.
00:42:38.340 And I think it's better to go with the Francis Hutchison line, which is, yes, you are an individual.
00:42:43.040 Your soul weighs the same as every other soul from highest to lowest.
00:42:46.640 but the the best and perhaps the only meaningful contribution you can make to reality and to the
00:42:53.760 future is to slog your guts out absolutely and to do something for others i mean one of the
00:43:00.140 i can speak for myself you know with us doing this show i've never been happier than doing it now
00:43:06.600 and that's because you're with me mate well that that you could say i'm happier in spite of that
00:43:13.000 But seriously, we get so many people who contact us and say that it's giving them reassurance, as you talked about, or it's giving them a sense that they're not alone.
00:43:24.880 There's a feeling of us creating something that is for the benefit of other people, and that gives us, I think, tremendous fulfillment.
00:43:32.500 And that's probably the conflict that we're all three of us trying to hone in on, which is where's that line between you being an individual who only cares about themselves, which is one extreme, or being someone who doesn't have any identity at all and is just a cog in the machine, which would be the kind of Chinese model at the moment, for example.
00:43:57.520 And there's got to be a point somewhere in between those where we recognize the sanctity of every human being, while also recognizing that it's not possible for me to be happy and fulfilled and wealthy and whatever else it might be for any of those things to be a reality in my life, unless I'm creating something that is of value to other people.
00:44:18.280 Yes. I mean, I couldn't, I don't see how any, I don't see how any thinking reasonable, rational person could, could dispute that as a premise. I think we are being strangely, I think there's a, there's a, there's a sad poignant irony in the fact that, you know, that the internet, you know, in its, you know, in its earliest, you know, iteration back in the 60s and 70s when it was being developed as ARPANET and it was this nodal thing that was going to happen.
00:44:48.280 going to be proof against you know you know nuclear war and computers would keep on talking
00:44:52.920 to one another and that was the the aspiration for it by the u.s military who funded the research
00:44:58.600 but the kind of sandal wearing long-haired you know hippie scientists in mit and whatever that
00:45:04.520 got behind it they they had this utopian fantasy that by bringing everyone together
00:45:10.380 via the internet that that that free sharing of information uh would enable each individual to
00:45:17.800 make a contribution and that we would all be we would all be brought together by the by the
00:45:22.380 internet and I think it's so poignant that in its present iteration it seems to be atomizing us
00:45:27.580 in a strange way we're almost being driven apart until eventually the only sort of logical end
00:45:34.620 game is for us all just to be you know isolated individuals in our echo chambers you know
00:45:42.500 shouting like mad people uh at the wider world um and i'm not well i think i do have luddite
00:45:50.540 tendencies i'm quite honest i'm not proposing i'm not proposing that we that we do away with
00:45:55.860 with all of this interconnectivity that we have but i think it has to be countered by something
00:46:02.020 else i in the last few years i i began uh doing um you know of a live show you know i had written
00:46:09.140 a book and I took it out as a stage presentation.
00:46:13.200 It was going for theatres up and down the country.
00:46:14.920 I did about 70 theatres and a terrifying prospect it was.
00:46:20.600 You know, being in your line of, in your other line of work,
00:46:23.940 you know, standing on a stage is a terrible, lonely thing.
00:46:26.840 But once I had done a few performances, that sense of connection
00:46:33.600 to real, actual, breathing human beings in the same room as me
00:46:37.560 meant that I felt it was the best thing.
00:46:41.340 I do think it's the best thing I've ever done,
00:46:43.800 having reached out to people via television,
00:46:46.420 having reached out to people via books
00:46:48.280 and newspaper journalism.
00:46:50.420 And now it's, you know, there's podcasts
00:46:52.300 and various other ways of reaching out.
00:46:54.500 But that simple act of standing alone on a stage
00:46:59.200 in a room with 500 or 600 people in it
00:47:02.080 and hearing, feeling their expectation
00:47:05.000 about what you were going to say
00:47:06.520 and then responding to that and getting their live feedback in real time.
00:47:11.920 I think we need to be reminded of ourselves as much as possible
00:47:17.480 as made of meat and not made of the silica that's in our computers.
00:47:23.000 You know, we respond to one another physically in real spaces, in real time.
00:47:29.960 And I think the antidote to a lot of the antagonism
00:47:32.640 and the aggression that's there at the moment
00:47:34.680 is just by people being brought physically together.
00:47:38.220 It's like when you drive your car
00:47:39.360 and you feel free to shout and scream at other people
00:47:41.580 inside their little glass boxes,
00:47:43.680 glass and steel boxes.
00:47:45.200 If you were to wind down the window
00:47:46.280 and be confronted with the reality of them,
00:47:47.960 you would behave altogether differently
00:47:49.360 because all of your instinctive human responses
00:47:52.240 would kick back in effortlessly.
00:47:55.080 And I think the way in which we start to value one another
00:47:58.860 properly again is by as much as possible
00:48:03.240 being, you know, in face-to-face contact.
00:48:05.520 And it sounds like such a, you know,
00:48:06.980 a cliche, oversimplified thing to say.
00:48:10.580 But I think we have to make contact again
00:48:14.180 with what we are as animals.
00:48:17.600 You know, I was, I did a bit of filming
00:48:20.080 a couple of years ago now in Australia.
00:48:24.100 And we were with an indigenous group in Arnhem Land.
00:48:28.800 And they took us out crocodile hunting at night.
00:48:33.240 And I've never hunted, I had never hunted anything, done a bit of fishing, and I was on a boat on a river in the dark in Arnhem Land, and we were using torches to find crocodiles, their eyes light up like amber in the darkness, and the boat slid without any power, just drifted on the current until it was right alongside a crocodile, and one of the hunters threw a harpoon and got it just behind its head.
00:48:57.880 and these things, these metres of thrashing, angry muscle
00:49:01.520 were hauled aboard the boat.
00:49:03.640 And then it was taken to a riverbank and it was a legal hunt.
00:49:09.320 You know, the indigenous people of Arnhem Land have gone 1.00
00:49:11.360 through the high courts and have regained the right
00:49:13.560 to hunt the saltwater crocodiles in that way.
00:49:16.300 And then we stood around and watched as one of the hunters
00:49:19.040 used a boning knife, you know, to kill the crop, 0.93
00:49:22.440 cut its head off, and then it was cooked.
00:49:25.240 and we all shared the meat of it and I cannot tell you what a profound experience it was to be
00:49:32.860 beside something quite large as it was as it was killed and then butchered and then it became
00:49:39.980 the meat that we ate and in our 21st century western world we couldn't be more removed from
00:49:47.180 the reality of that you know you buy these shrimp wrap portions of unrecognizable meat and take them
00:49:53.600 home and cook them and you're invited to think that they're just some sort of you know magical
00:49:57.180 product that involves no life and death and we've been because we've distanced ourselves from the
00:50:02.740 reality of of the animals we've become less in awe of life and death and if you're not in awe
00:50:10.720 of death and life then you don't properly appreciate in fact you don't appreciate at all
00:50:17.000 what it is to be alive don't you think neil as well that and and i'm really glad because i wanted
00:50:23.140 to ask you this question and we're touching on it now that in the west death has become a taboo
00:50:28.160 subject and we don't like to accept the fact no not like we don't want to accept the fact that
00:50:33.840 life is finite and we are going to die well it's a strange thing yeah we've done a way because
00:50:39.660 you know during the long centuries of religion where people one way or another were being
00:50:44.400 reassured of something other than life you know for the last couple of hundred years people have
00:50:50.620 increasingly accepted or had to accept that this is all there is and so for a lot of people
00:50:55.640 naturally the only the only objective now is to stretch out as long as possible and to still have
00:51:00.880 ripped abs and all your own teeth when you're 90 because this is all there is and and and because
00:51:07.840 death is now is now regarded as this full-stop void abyss of nothingness you know people just
00:51:14.020 won't contemplate its existence at all.
00:51:18.820 And now comes along something like a pandemic
00:51:21.480 where everyone's been made to contemplate
00:51:24.020 the possibility of their unexpected death.
00:51:27.640 It's unlikely given the nature of COVID-19,
00:51:31.660 but nonetheless, it's brought it back into people's minds,
00:51:35.000 perhaps in a real way that we haven't thought about for a while.
00:51:39.480 And I think this is what I mean,
00:51:41.900 this is what I'm saying all the way through this.
00:51:43.140 I hope, this idea that, you know, for 99% of the existence of any form of humanity on
00:51:51.180 planet Earth for 4 million years or longer, death was right there.
00:51:55.680 You know, they were experiencing injury and death and responding to it.
00:52:03.180 And yet they weren't living in terror of it and they were respectful in the face of it.
00:52:08.380 But, you know, there's a Mesolithic cemetery in Vedbeck
00:52:13.940 outside modern-day Copenhagen in Denmark,
00:52:17.500 and it was excavated in the 1980s.
00:52:19.080 There's many, many burials there,
00:52:23.600 and they're 6,000 or 7,000 years old.
00:52:26.500 And one of them famously is a mother and baby,
00:52:28.640 a woman and a baby lying side by side, buried together,
00:52:31.360 presumed to have died in childbirth and both been buried.
00:52:34.220 And the woman has a necklace of red deer teeth with her
00:52:37.800 and other items and the baby was laid on a white swan's wing
00:52:41.460 either because the people thought that by associating the spirit
00:52:45.840 of the baby with the migratory birds that leave and then return
00:52:48.900 that perhaps the spirit of the baby would be gone for a while
00:52:52.140 and then the birds would come back.
00:52:53.920 Or it might be no more than simply a father or a grandfather
00:52:56.580 wanting to put something comforting in the ground
00:52:59.820 rather than lay the baby down on the cold clay.
00:53:02.220 But in any event, you look at that and what you see,
00:53:05.700 what the archaeologists excavated along with everything else
00:53:08.280 are the human emotions of grief and love.
00:53:11.060 Without a shadow of a doubt, you're seeing grief and love
00:53:13.300 preserved in the ground after thousands of years,
00:53:15.620 the most ephemeral of human emotions.
00:53:17.540 There they are, as vivid as in those moments
00:53:21.140 when they were being experienced by other living people.
00:53:24.120 And those Mesolithic hunters were living in circumstances 0.86
00:53:26.580 utterly unrecognisable to ours,
00:53:28.840 where death was an ever-present threat,
00:53:30.700 where every day had to be a preoccupation
00:53:32.860 with finding enough food to feed yourself and your family
00:53:35.860 and dealing with threat and danger and the unknown.
00:53:39.220 And yet they still found it within themselves,
00:53:41.320 the capacity to express love and emotion
00:53:43.840 in a way that survived in the ground for thousands of years
00:53:47.340 and is there like a message in a bottle for us to discover
00:53:50.940 and to be struck by.
00:53:54.000 And these are people who we would think of as being primitive.
00:53:58.620 And then even other species,
00:54:00.040 you know, there's Neanderthal burials in Shanidar.
00:54:02.860 In Turkey, not even our own species, and one of those, one of the burials inside that cave hadn't been backfilled with soil, but with cut flowers.
00:54:13.840 A Neanderthal body had been laid down in a grave and then covered over with fresh flowers.
00:54:18.480 And another burial was of a man who had lived into his 40s, which would make him ancient by the standards of the day.
00:54:24.120 But he was missing one arm. He had been blind because of an injury to one eye.
00:54:28.060 It would have been a burden, you would say, to his tribe, and yet they kept him with them and looked after him and fed him until he died of old age.
00:54:35.220 So that we see that people in unimaginably difficult circumstances confronted the reality of what it is to live and to die and found these elegant expressions of everything that they were feeling.
00:54:47.600 and for us with all that we have in the 21st century so important perhaps more important
00:54:54.120 than at any other time I would say we should look back and acknowledge the wisdom of those people
00:54:59.080 who had for whom death was a daily possibility a daily reality and yet they they responded to it
00:55:07.500 in such an upright and elegant fashion that we should hang our heads in shame about the way in
00:55:12.960 which we we hide away from the realities of life and death well speaking of learning the lessons
00:55:18.600 of the past as we wrap up uh what what should we consider the primary lesson of the past that we
00:55:26.620 should be attempting to learn because as we know you know the lesson of the past is no one learns
00:55:32.080 the lessons of the past but what if we were to transcend that for the first time in human history
00:55:37.520 in a significant way, what would we look to now to say
00:55:41.560 this is the inspiration we must take as a society
00:55:44.540 to overcome the strife and the discord and the division
00:55:48.100 that we seem to be experiencing in this current moment?
00:55:51.440 I think that's a hard question, Constance.
00:55:56.740 I would say if we could find it, if we could just accept ourselves
00:56:03.080 and each other for what we are, which is blessedly flawed
00:56:06.520 individuals with you know each of us with the capacity for great good and great kindness
00:56:13.340 living side by side in the same body with the capacity for great cruelty and and and wrongdoing
00:56:20.660 that for all that we have demonstrated time and time again over thousands of years the ability
00:56:29.560 to come together and share a dream and an idea and an aspiration
00:56:34.680 and to reach for it, and in some cases to come extremely close
00:56:39.460 to making it real and to actually realise in hopes and dreams
00:56:45.100 that those feats have been accomplished by flawed, weak human beings,
00:56:50.420 you know, naked of fur or feather, without claws and big teeth,
00:56:55.720 you know, with frail internal organs behind a basket of bones
00:56:59.360 and, you know, three pounds of rosy pink meat
00:57:02.000 under a cap of bone, such a fragile creation.
00:57:05.700 And yet we have demonstrated again and again
00:57:08.440 in sometimes impossibly difficult circumstances
00:57:10.980 that potential for unlimited reach,
00:57:17.120 even though man's reach must always exceed his grasp.
00:57:20.140 You know, we have that within us.
00:57:21.340 And if we could just respect that about each
00:57:24.500 and every one of us, then that's the foundation
00:57:27.960 for everything
00:57:30.000 and what a wonderful note to end the interview on
00:57:35.320 but the last question that we always ask Neil is
00:57:37.980 what's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society
00:57:41.340 that we really should be
00:57:42.960 I think it's maybe been woven through some of what we've been talking about
00:57:46.700 but I think we've completely lost touch
00:57:48.920 lost any meaningful concept of what it means to be happy
00:57:52.920 and the very idea
00:57:56.180 I think we're pursuing faster and faster, harder and harder
00:58:00.160 with every ounce of our being, happiness down a road
00:58:03.820 where we won't find it.
00:58:07.000 And we need to have a major corrective and a major rethink
00:58:12.340 and to look back into the past, into the wisdom of the ancestors
00:58:17.500 and relearn, rediscover what it even means to be happy.
00:58:23.060 And if we understand what it means to be happy,
00:58:25.060 we might have half a chance of getting there that's a really good point neil that's a really
00:58:30.320 really interesting point thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us before we let
00:58:35.020 you go tell everybody where they can get your books where they can follow you on the evil social
00:58:40.420 media that we've been discussing and where else they can check out more of your work and more
00:58:45.240 about you on twitter i am there as the coast guy i have a book coming out in september called the
00:58:52.760 wisdom of the ancients which deals with a lot of these ideas that i've been you know that we've
00:58:57.320 been chatting about and my last book was called the story of the british isles in 100 places and
00:59:02.680 it's a kind of a love letter to the to this landscape i have a podcast called neil oliver's
00:59:09.180 love letter to the british isles uh so there's there's there's various uh formats and platforms
00:59:15.620 out there through which i'm trying to communicate some ideas that i'm happy to share and have
00:59:20.480 challenged by any reasonable listeners or viewers but i honestly thank so much that you know the
00:59:28.200 opportunity to be on uh on your the podcast and the chance to have these long free-flowing
00:59:33.840 conversations to have unexpected questions and just have to answer them on the hoof is uh is a
00:59:41.200 great experience so thanks very much for having me it's our absolute pleasure and you i have no doubt
00:59:46.340 that our viewers and listeners have enjoyed it as much as we have. Thank you very much for tuning
00:59:51.200 in. Make sure you get Neil's books and his latest when it comes out. Check out his work, follow him
00:59:56.400 on Twitter. And we'll see you in a couple of days with another live stream or another brilliant
01:00:01.560 episode like this one. Absolutely, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. And please remember
01:00:06.380 all our episodes and live streams go out at 7pm. That's 7pm. Take care and see you soon.
01:00:12.760 that's 7pm
01:00:13.900 UK time 0.66
01:00:14.880 you bigot
01:00:15.360 there's a whole world
01:00:17.200 out there
01:00:17.700 no there's not mate
01:00:19.000 there's just England
01:00:19.820 just South London
01:00:21.000 in your head
01:00:21.640 can't believe I said that
01:00:23.420 in front of a Scot
01:00:24.140 oh well
01:00:24.680 Neil isn't going to
01:00:26.760 come back on
01:00:27.400 doesn't matter
01:00:28.180 I will
01:00:29.940 we'll see
01:00:30.540 alright guys
01:00:32.680 take care
01:00:33.140 we'll see you soon
01:00:42.760 We'll be right back.