00:02:47.480Anything and everything that we are going through
00:02:49.600or still have to go through, our ancestors went through.
00:02:52.600And fundamental to why I find it reassuring is that
00:02:55.580Without 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.
00:03:07.440And 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.
00:03:16.700Well, pandemics have come before, as has every other big challenge for humankind.
00:03:21.980And 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.
00:03:32.080And I say, well, of course we are. It's so much to ask people to cope with.
00:03:39.140And 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?
00:03:53.460And for me, other people would find a different antidote to all the trouble.
00:03:58.000But for me, I keep reading my history books and I keep thinking, you know, yes, this has happened before and this too shall pass.
00:04:06.520Well, it's a reassuring message that this too shall pass.
00:04:09.260And you talk about the fact that humanity has faced these sort of challenges before.
00:04:13.420And actually, it's a thing that Francis and I frequently argue about because he feels
00:04:17.820like a lot of the events of the recent months are largely the product of the pandemic and
00:04:23.700people being locked up and so on in their homes.
00:04:26.720But I also feel that there's another part to it, which is a longer term civilizational
00:04:32.380transformation, where the United States, the West more generally has gone from a kind of confident,
00:04:39.020bold civilization that sought to be powerful in the world, sought to expand, sought to control
00:04:44.780as much as possible, whereas now it's turned inward and it looks into itself. And I would
00:04:50.580say there's probably some historical precedent for that as well. How do you see the interplay
00:04:55.020between those two things? Yeah, I mean, amongst others, an English, a British historian, Kenneth
00:05:00.860Clark, a liberal arts historian, art critic, he wrote a book called Civilization a number
00:05:06.760of years ago, and then it became an iconic television series.
00:05:10.840And part of his assertion within that thesis was that civilizations get exhausted.
00:05:18.700And he pointed to, for example, Rome and the Roman Empire.
00:05:23.160And yes, it was coming under pressure by then from all sorts of external challenges, the
00:05:29.340barbarians at the gates and all the rest of it but he said that that was really um a symptom of
00:05:36.160something internal that the roman empire had just lasted for so long that it had become it had lost
00:05:42.300confidence in itself and he said that that's how civilizations finally are undone not because the
00:05:49.340barbarians get through the gates before that it's this loss of sense of self and i think yes it's
00:05:56.040So that has happened before, and there are more examples
00:05:58.960than just all of the empires that we've ever –
00:06:01.940they've always gone extinct, if you like.
00:06:04.860By definition, there's been a sequence of empires
00:06:07.620and kingdoms through history, and they've all gone.
00:06:11.280And now, you know, for a long time it has been
00:06:13.420this Western civilization that has been predominant
00:06:16.340on the planet, but perhaps we've lost confidence.
00:06:21.420And we've also had, I suppose really since the end
00:06:25.420of the second world war perhaps we've lived so many people in much of the west have lived in
00:06:30.280increasingly peaceful tolerant times and we've begun to take for granted uh prosperity and peace
00:06:36.940and tolerance and and uh you know the chance of a good life and our children are taken care of
00:06:42.280and we're well educated and all the rest of it and you can come to think of that as being in the
00:06:46.300natural order of things as though you know you can just uh leave people to their to their natural
00:06:52.200inclinations and devices and you'll get this kind of civilization. And I think it's because we've
00:06:56.480had so long without facing big, scary, real challenge. You know, we haven't had to endure
00:07:03.120our children or ourselves going off to war, you know, and facing the bayonet or the bullet.
00:07:08.240And we haven't been challenged by, you know, an epidemic or a disease. And I think we've
00:07:14.900we've lost touch with some of the realities of life and I think at the moment I think this
00:07:22.840this pandemic and then the ever-present threat that's been there for for years now of climate
00:07:28.260change and all sorts of predictions of the end of the world I think people are rattled
00:07:32.720to some extent this this pandemic has been one of if not the last straw that has finally
00:07:40.800destabilized people and we need to you know it's not the end of the world but i think we need to
00:07:46.540pull back and take some sort of collective breath and and appreciate that we need to give each other
00:07:54.500and ourselves more slack because we can cope with this challenge but we have to accept that there
00:08:03.000there may be some pain there will be some pain there will be there will be dying there will be
00:08:07.560There will be blood and strife, but that's in the natural order of things.
00:08:13.100Every 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.
00:08:24.700And 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.
00:08:42.140And 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?
00:08:53.100Yes, 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.
00:09:05.360It's very much kind of a luxury option.
00:09:08.600And 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.
00:09:18.340You know, they've all gone in different directions.
00:09:21.420But it's not a subject that's to the fore.
00:09:47.220You 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.
00:09:57.280Because I think there are fundamental understandings that we need to be reminded of about the nature of our species.
00:10:04.640You know, Homo sapiens, the wise people, which we, you know, vainly call ourselves, we're only about 200,000 years old.
00:10:12.640We're relatively recent arrivals on the planet.
00:10:16.320And there's an American biologist scientist called Edward Osborne Wilson, usually cited as E.O. Wilson.
00:10:23.760And 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.
00:10:35.820And all of those three statements are absolutely correct.
00:10:39.320and it's so important to remember that we are essentially the same animals cognitively and
00:10:45.200physiologically as the ancestors who hunted mammoths and rhinos and we lived as hunters for
00:10:51.66090 percent of our time on earth and only 10 000 years ago did we did some of us become farmers
00:10:57.180start domesticating plants and animals and after 10 000 years believe it or not we're still
00:11:03.680psychologically coming to terms with that change after 10 000 years you know we still talk about
00:11:09.620the daily grind which is to say the repetitive chores without end well that comes from literally
00:11:14.740grinding wheat into flour rising at dawn working till sundown knowing that tomorrow is going to
00:11:20.920be exactly the same and that your diet is going to be this repetitive bread and porridge with the
00:11:25.640occasional meat you know uh you know humdrum existence we're still coming to terms with that
00:11:31.640And in the last few hundred years, we've had, you know, enlightenment and the coming of reason, industrial revolution.
00:11:42.080And 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.
00:11:53.040And I certainly don't put myself even in the top half.
00:12:19.160Our machines that we have created are digital,
00:12:21.780but we are still analog for the time being.
00:12:24.100And we have to allow for our own, we have to remind ourselves of our own potential and of our own reality.
00:12:32.160And we get that not just from studying history, but from looking back into the deepest time we can reach.
00:12:37.480And 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,
00:12:49.160I read so many books about human psychology, evolutionary psychology, how our past shapes our present and our behavior and so on.
00:12:58.840And 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.
00:13:12.080Is that something that you notice as well or am I imagining that?
00:13:18.160I 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.
00:13:31.000Some of us, some tiny percentage of us have trained themselves to be scientists, to think as scientists.
00:13:38.460And it's very, very difficult even for trained scientists to think like that, to use brains in that way.
00:13:46.160And even trained scientists can only really do it for short spans of time.
00:13:50.480It's like 100-meter runners that they just have this burst of activity that they've trained for.
00:13:55.120And the rest of the time, they just think like the rest of us do.
00:13:58.440And our hunter selves, you know, we're running this hunter software from the past.
00:14:03.540And 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.
00:14:13.580It's like belief, it's stories and it's myth, you know, which served for thousands of years to do the job of science.
00:14:22.820We understood our place in the cosmos and the nature of reality through stories and myth and belief.
00:14:28.980And it's almost as if it's like a, you know, something that's still pulling us down below the surface.
00:14:37.080that science now is being, I think, undermined
00:14:41.980by our natural tendency to want to believe in something.
00:14:46.200And I noticed the way in which, in relation to, say, the pandemic,
00:14:49.520there's this talk about the science, as though science has become fixed,
00:14:55.260as though it has become something that is solid and permanent,
00:14:58.440like a stone with permanent words graven in it.
00:15:02.260And as a non-scientist, I understand science to be the opposite of that.
00:15:06.400Science is never finished, never complete.
00:19:11.300sets of values actually do well they harvested hundreds of millions of people you know even the
00:19:16.380worst of the crusaders in the pomp couldn't even have dreamt of notching up death tolls like that
00:19:22.420like those which were achieved in the in the 20th century and so we've got to be mindful of the fact
00:19:28.120that we need values by which to live and it's useful we shouldn't be embarrassed or bashful
00:19:35.000about looking back and acknowledging that the old lessons learned even thousands of years ago are
00:19:40.280still valid. You know, things like don't kill, don't judge lest you be judged. Be kind to your
00:19:47.140neighbours and treat them as you would yourself. You know, look after your mum and dad. These are
00:19:52.740realisations that people came to thousands of years ago and are every bit as valid. And we
00:20:00.140shouldn't be wary of reminding ourselves of those essential values. Well, speaking of reminding
00:20:07.340ourselves of values, Neil, one of the things that wasn't on your list, but I imagine you feel
00:20:13.200strongly about it, as I do, is that whatever replacement we seem to have been offered for
00:20:20.260the religions of the past, the one thing that almost every major religion has had in the past
00:20:25.360is the idea of redemption and forgiveness. And that seems to be the one thing that some of these
00:20:32.080new ways of thinking don't seem to include and you you alluded to it by saying judge not least
00:20:37.700you be judged but i think we've gone way beyond that you know in terms of encouraging judgment
00:20:42.740encouraging mobbing of people encouraging punishment for heretics as you say i think i
00:20:48.640think something that you know whether whether or not a person believes in a you know a deity or
00:20:54.920some invisible force there's no doubting that there was a value in in accepting that there
00:21:01.440There are certain powers that oughtn't to be human that should be transcendent.
00:21:07.260You 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.
00:21:19.260and maybe at the moment we're in one of those dangerous areas
00:21:22.600that have happened before where we as human beings
00:21:24.880are almost indulging ourselves with the right to have
00:21:29.100God-like powers of destruction of fellow human beings.
00:21:34.780And for a long, long ago, a lot of people realised
00:21:37.720that that wasn't a good idea, that operating in that way
00:21:44.960But this culture around woke, a cancel culture, we are behaving in old-time religion.
00:21:55.380And the total destruction that is being sought in the case of the new heretics is a red-light warning.
00:22:06.260Back in the 16th century in England, when Henry VIII famously broke away from the Catholic Church
00:22:12.680and established what became the Church of England.
00:22:16.360It unleashed, obviously, centuries of strife between Catholic and Protestant.
00:22:21.200And then when his daughter, Mary, became Queen Mary I,
00:22:26.440she returned to the Catholic, or she was Catholic,
00:22:29.660and she famously saw to the burning alive,
00:22:32.420the burning at the stake of more than 300 Protestant heretics.
00:22:38.680And that was a deliberate choice of punishment,
00:22:41.140because the idea was that by burning the body, nothing of it would remain.
00:22:45.960There wouldn't be so much as a finger bone that could be revered as a relic of a martyr.
00:22:52.540And so it was burned to ashes, and then the ashes were scooped up and dumped in the river.
00:22:57.100So there was nothing, nothing left behind.
00:22:59.480That was a very specific punishment that was carefully thought out, almost scientifically.
00:23:04.120And 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.
00:23:23.480You know, so loss of career, loss of livelihood, loss of good name, reputation built up over decades.
00:23:30.960Hopefully they would say loss of family, you know, love of family,
00:23:34.760love of relationship, so that nothing is left of the heritage
00:26:39.700like judge not lest you be judged because you have to think well i could be extremely inhumane
00:26:45.800and judgmental if i was let loose with absolute power you know it's that line from like the
00:26:51.720caligula movie you know if you had life and death power over every man woman and child what would
00:26:55.860you have done i'd make the world a better place mate you have to remind yourself mate if you were
00:27:03.760in charge i would burn myself at the stake i'm going to be honest with you um but that's that
00:27:08.780is 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
00:27:15.020realization for me uh accepting that uh that we're we are each of us you know 50 50 good and evil
00:27:24.020that we have them that we have the monster within us i take that on board and accept and i i find
00:27:30.120comfort in it and it's an extension of the fact that i find comfort in the fact that we are still
00:27:35.280the paleolithic hunters that we have been for 200 250 000 years some people contemplating that
00:27:45.780might find it discouraging but i find a comfort in it that we are just what we have always been
00:27:52.020and in a sense all that's required is that we accept kind of internalize the reality of
00:27:59.500ourselves and that's where you find the the induce you know the encouragement to not judge
00:28:07.540because you know if you know what you are like then you know what everybody else is like
00:28:12.500if you know the things that would hurt you then you know how to hurt everybody else
00:28:17.500and that's as long as you've internalized that that aspect of human nature then you become much
00:28:23.300less of a threat but but don't you think neil that the problem is when it comes to things like
00:28:28.160social media is that it dehumanizes people so they're not a person anymore they're an avatar
00:28:33.160they're just a little picture so when you actually destroy them it doesn't it takes away the human
00:28:37.740element of them because you don't then see what the person is going through emotionally and all
00:28:42.260the rest of it oh yeah yes without without a shadow of a doubt i think we're a long way from
00:28:47.880from understanding psychologically what we've done to ourselves with with social media and the rest
00:28:54.620of it you know if you know thousands of years ago if you were a farmer and you had a farmer over the
00:29:01.900stone wall from you you know tending his fields uh if he was doing something better than you
00:29:08.040you know i'd find a better way to grind wheat into flour or whatever you might be you know sort of
00:29:13.620unsettled by that but because he was in your world and he was really there and you could see him
00:29:17.460you could seek to emulate whatever it was that he had done you know you could you could copy
00:29:21.640what he was doing elevate yourself and then and then the feeling of inadequacy and being threatened
00:29:28.540by him would go away but because we've got these screens now in our pockets and on our desks
00:29:34.000let us see lives thousands of miles away perhaps lives that by definition because they're on screen
00:29:41.140we can't even be confident that they're actually real you know we could actually be being tricked
00:29:45.740by a fiction but nonetheless we're unsettled by those distant lives in different climates in
00:29:51.800different parts of the world lived by people in different circumstances and so we can't do the
00:29:56.780same thing we can't seek to meaningfully emulate or copy them it's not realistic and so all you're
00:30:02.720left with is this triggered unsettled threatened feeling that you get well and we also watch you
00:30:09.500know threat dangerous events unsettling events thousands of miles away and we still feel the
00:30:14.580threat as though it was happening right there in the room with us you know we're still being we're
00:30:18.780being triggered by by the fear of things that are that are a great distance and so we're in these
00:30:23.920we are like you say we're in these hamster balls we're in these these little plastic balls that
00:30:28.320keep us at a distance from one another and then when we and then when we watch people being torn
00:30:34.360limb from limb metaphorically speaking by the by the twitter mob or whatever we don't see we don't
00:30:40.180seem to see it as happening to a real person it just seems to be the consequences that unfold for
00:30:47.540as you say an avatar in a video game it does feel that way neil let me ask you something else because
00:30:53.240you know you all know harari writes very well about yes how it is that homo sapiens became
00:31:00.720the dominant species of humans eventually becoming the only species of humans that are left and and
00:31:05.900what he talks about is we were able to overcome the fact that physically we're quite puny compared
00:31:11.580to say neanderthals or obviously you know while other types of wild animals um but but we overcame
00:31:18.560it by being able to organize beyond our small tribal groups and the way we did that is by having
00:31:23.740some sort of overarching idea uh the nation the religion god whatever it might have been and we
00:31:30.420were able to unite into large groups, large tribes. And it seems to me that what's happening
00:31:35.640now is a lot of the things that used to be a unifying force, we talked about religion already,
00:31:41.120but perhaps the idea of the nation state, all of these things seem to be either being eroded or
00:31:47.720entirely under attack. What do we have that we can unite around to come together as we need to?
00:31:54.960you're right I mean Harari writes you know brilliantly and and so illuminatingly uh about
00:32:02.380this idea that um you know say for example Manchester doesn't uh exist in any absolute
00:32:10.620sense so it's a shared dream or a concept uh it's a set of buildings and streets and all the rest of
00:32:18.980it for the people of Manchester I'd like to say Neil's not attacking Manchester he's talking about
00:32:22.960As 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.
00:32:38.740So, 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.
00:32:52.960And so the people could, it could be rebuilt and it would still be Manchester.
00:32:56.960And it would never have been, it would never actually have disappeared at any moment,
00:33:00.000even when the grass had grown over the site, Manchester would still have existed.
00:33:03.460So Harari writes in this brilliant way about how you can unite people.
00:33:06.980We have the cognitive abilities to share an idea.
00:33:10.620And when it becomes something like a religion, it's great because it means that you can,
00:33:15.460even though you've never met someone else, if you know that they share your religious beliefs,
00:33:19.680you can predict how they're going to behave in a given set of circumstances.
00:33:22.960because you've been sort of trained and briefed
00:33:25.980in how to behave in exactly the same way
00:33:29.060in exactly the same set of circumstances.
00:38:21.660But yes, when you say that, I can see that maybe perhaps
00:38:25.700some of that idea is being corrupted a bit in an unhelpful way and it has been and it has morphed
00:38:31.980unhappily into you know identity politics and intersectionality and all and all the rest of it
00:38:38.460but i would still i would still maintain that we're it's almost like you know the statue of
00:38:43.740justice outside the obeying blindfold on i think that idea of being judged blindly is a good one
00:38:50.300The 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.
00:39:01.420It's just that you make your declaration, the evidence is stated, and a judgment comes down based on those facts.
00:39:07.600But 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.
00:39:20.940I 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.
00:39:35.800And 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.
00:40:03.880There's nothing that binds you in common with others.
00:40:06.240I think that's really where some of the problems are coming from.
00:40:09.160Yes, I think I, you know, in researching for a television series
00:40:17.040and a book that I did a few years ago about the history of Scotland,
00:40:20.800I ran across a character, Francis Hutchison,
00:40:25.680who had the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University
00:40:31.380in the 1730s onwards for a number of years.
00:40:36.640And he quite controversially at the time
00:40:40.280taught that happiness was something to be worked for.
00:40:44.960There was a sort of a prevailing belief around at the time
00:40:48.440that happiness was almost like manna from heaven,
00:42:02.540and that is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence
00:42:04.540is a product of Francis Hutchison's teaching
00:42:07.200that happiness was something that you could pursue
00:42:10.940actively with every shred of your being
00:42:14.300as long as you dedicated it to helping others.
00:42:18.100So 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.
00:42:28.700And that our needs and our identity is paramount and everybody else must also sort of worship our individuality.
00:42:38.340And I think it's better to go with the Francis Hutchison line, which is, yes, you are an individual.
00:42:43.040Your soul weighs the same as every other soul from highest to lowest.
00:42:46.640but the the best and perhaps the only meaningful contribution you can make to reality and to the
00:42:53.760future is to slog your guts out absolutely and to do something for others i mean one of the
00:43:00.140i can speak for myself you know with us doing this show i've never been happier than doing it now
00:43:06.600and that's because you're with me mate well that that you could say i'm happier in spite of that
00:43:13.000But 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.
00:43:24.880There's a feeling of us creating something that is for the benefit of other people, and that gives us, I think, tremendous fulfillment.
00:43:32.500And 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.
00:43:57.520And 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.
00:44:18.280Yes. 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.
00:44:48.280going to be proof against you know you know nuclear war and computers would keep on talking
00:44:52.920to one another and that was the the aspiration for it by the u.s military who funded the research
00:44:58.600but the kind of sandal wearing long-haired you know hippie scientists in mit and whatever that
00:45:04.520got behind it they they had this utopian fantasy that by bringing everyone together
00:45:10.380via the internet that that that free sharing of information uh would enable each individual to
00:45:17.800make a contribution and that we would all be we would all be brought together by the by the
00:45:22.380internet and I think it's so poignant that in its present iteration it seems to be atomizing us
00:45:27.580in a strange way we're almost being driven apart until eventually the only sort of logical end
00:45:34.620game is for us all just to be you know isolated individuals in our echo chambers you know
00:45:42.500shouting like mad people uh at the wider world um and i'm not well i think i do have luddite
00:45:50.540tendencies i'm quite honest i'm not proposing i'm not proposing that we that we do away with
00:45:55.860with all of this interconnectivity that we have but i think it has to be countered by something
00:46:02.020else i in the last few years i i began uh doing um you know of a live show you know i had written
00:46:09.140a book and I took it out as a stage presentation.
00:46:13.200It was going for theatres up and down the country.
00:46:14.920I did about 70 theatres and a terrifying prospect it was.
00:46:20.600You know, being in your line of, in your other line of work,
00:46:23.940you know, standing on a stage is a terrible, lonely thing.
00:46:26.840But once I had done a few performances, that sense of connection
00:46:33.600to real, actual, breathing human beings in the same room as me
00:46:37.560meant that I felt it was the best thing.
00:46:41.340I do think it's the best thing I've ever done,
00:46:43.800having reached out to people via television,
00:46:46.420having reached out to people via books
00:48:17.600You know, I was, I did a bit of filming
00:48:20.080a couple of years ago now in Australia.
00:48:24.100And we were with an indigenous group in Arnhem Land.
00:48:28.800And they took us out crocodile hunting at night.
00:48:33.240And 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.
00:48:57.880and these things, these metres of thrashing, angry muscle
00:54:00.040you know, there's Neanderthal burials in Shanidar.
00:54:02.860In 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.
00:54:13.840A Neanderthal body had been laid down in a grave and then covered over with fresh flowers.
00:54:18.480And another burial was of a man who had lived into his 40s, which would make him ancient by the standards of the day.
00:54:24.120But he was missing one arm. He had been blind because of an injury to one eye.
00:54:28.060It 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.
00:54:35.220So 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.
00:54:47.600and for us with all that we have in the 21st century so important perhaps more important
00:54:54.120than at any other time I would say we should look back and acknowledge the wisdom of those people
00:54:59.080who had for whom death was a daily possibility a daily reality and yet they they responded to it
00:55:07.500in such an upright and elegant fashion that we should hang our heads in shame about the way in
00:55:12.960which we we hide away from the realities of life and death well speaking of learning the lessons
00:55:18.600of the past as we wrap up uh what what should we consider the primary lesson of the past that we
00:55:26.620should be attempting to learn because as we know you know the lesson of the past is no one learns
00:55:32.080the lessons of the past but what if we were to transcend that for the first time in human history
00:55:37.520in a significant way, what would we look to now to say
00:55:41.560this is the inspiration we must take as a society
00:55:44.540to overcome the strife and the discord and the division
00:55:48.100that we seem to be experiencing in this current moment?
00:55:51.440I think that's a hard question, Constance.
00:55:56.740I would say if we could find it, if we could just accept ourselves
00:56:03.080and each other for what we are, which is blessedly flawed
00:56:06.520individuals with you know each of us with the capacity for great good and great kindness
00:56:13.340living side by side in the same body with the capacity for great cruelty and and and wrongdoing
00:56:20.660that for all that we have demonstrated time and time again over thousands of years the ability
00:56:29.560to come together and share a dream and an idea and an aspiration
00:56:34.680and to reach for it, and in some cases to come extremely close
00:56:39.460to making it real and to actually realise in hopes and dreams
00:56:45.100that those feats have been accomplished by flawed, weak human beings,
00:56:50.420you know, naked of fur or feather, without claws and big teeth,
00:56:55.720you know, with frail internal organs behind a basket of bones
00:56:59.360and, you know, three pounds of rosy pink meat
00:57:02.000under a cap of bone, such a fragile creation.
00:57:05.700And yet we have demonstrated again and again
00:57:08.440in sometimes impossibly difficult circumstances