TRIGGERnometry - August 30, 2020


Should We Be Ashamed of Our History？ - Nigel Biggar

Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Nigel Biggar
Mentioned
Nigel Bigger Charlie Hebdo Genghis Khan Prophet Muhammad Bruce Gilley Adolf Hitler Cromwell Louis Richard Beautiful Noise Douglas Murray Edward Colston Common Ground Oxford Bricks Rule Britannia Neil Diamond Paul Collier Tutankha Roy Noah Kyle Paul Pott Churchill and 8 more
＂The Left Should Concentrate on What Matters To Ordinary People＂ - David Swift Douglas Murray： ＂We Are Standing on the Precipice＂

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 10 minutes

Words per minute

140.59

Word count

9,964

Sentence count

427

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

18

sentences flagged

Hate speech

28

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Nigel Bigger is a moral and Pastoral Theological professor at the University of Oxford, and a writer for The Times. In this episode, he tells us about his journey through life that led him to a chair at Oxford, how he got there, and the moment that changed his life.

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 .
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. I'm Constantine Kishin.
00:00:09.680 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:15.340 Our brilliant and fantastic guest today is a Regis Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology,
00:00:21.300 Nigel Bigger. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks very much.
00:00:23.700 It's so great to have you. We're here at Oxford University. It's a pleasure to be here and
00:00:27.540 speaking with you, which is, of course, where you work. Before we get into a very interesting
00:00:32.340 background and story, just tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you,
00:00:36.760 where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to this very strange place
00:00:40.200 sitting in this chair on YouTube? Okay, well, I wasn't born in Oxford. I was born in Scotland,
00:00:44.720 but my Scottish accent got drained from me when I came south to Scotland at the age of 13,
00:00:50.180 except when I'm slightly drunk or when I'm in the pulpit, I can get quite Scottish.
00:00:57.540 otherwise not. So I've developed an academic career. I spent about seven years in Canada
00:01:04.860 and the States, collected my wife there, brought her back about 30 years ago, and have taught
00:01:11.600 here in Oxford in Leeds, in Dublin, and then for the last 11 years have taught back here
00:01:18.140 in Oxford. And my field, I have this rather bizarre title, Professor of Moral and Pastoral
00:01:26.280 theology. What's that? Basically, it's ethics, but it's ethics done from a religious Christian 1.00
00:01:33.160 point of view. So I teach that, and I've done research on, I've written on things like the
00:01:41.480 ethics of euthanasia, published a book on the ethics of war. I also do peace. I've done stuff
00:01:51.140 on making peace and doing justice after civil conflict,
00:01:55.520 Northern Ireland, South Africa, and just about to bring out a book on rights.
00:02:01.940 So it's fair to say, in summary, that you've had a distinguished academic career,
00:02:05.620 but I think people who will be aware of you, us included,
00:02:09.040 first became aware of you in November 2017.
00:02:13.960 That laugh is a joke.
00:02:15.220 Sorry, I remember that.
00:02:17.160 I'm sure you do see it into the memory, no doubt.
00:02:20.180 When you wrote a piece for The Times, which was entitled Don't Feel Guilty About Our Colonial Past, which was a defense of your colleague Bruce Gilley, who'd written something about, you know, the empire and colonialism not being all bad.
00:02:33.980 So tell us briefly about that and what happened and how that went.
00:02:38.380 okay so um you you've described the article appeared in the times in late november 2017
00:02:44.960 and by the way um as you'll know when people write for newspapers um they don't have control
00:02:52.220 over the of the title what i said my article was we brits we have reason uh for pride as well as
00:02:59.520 shame over the imperial past so our imperial past is mixed there were awful things and there 0.88
00:03:04.020 were some great things. All I was saying was both, which is a pretty, I thought was a pretty
00:03:09.200 unobjectionable, moderate position that no one really could disagree with. More fool me.
00:03:17.580 So the title was a bit misrepresentative, but that was published in late November.
00:03:24.620 And then about a week later, I got round after six months delay publishing online
00:03:34.020 a description of a research project that I had launched in July of 2017 called Ethics and Empire.
00:03:43.060 And this brings together a group of ethicists and historians to survey empire from ancient China
00:03:52.240 to the modern period and consider the ways in which contemporaries thought about the empires
00:03:58.580 they lived in, in moral terms.
00:04:01.080 I mean, how did they see things morally?
00:04:05.140 But I finally got around to publishing
00:04:06.800 a description of that online.
00:04:09.760 And then a few days after that,
00:04:12.120 second week of December,
00:04:13.940 my wife and I were in the fancy lounge
00:04:16.960 at Heathrow Airport.
00:04:17.940 We were going off to celebrate
00:04:19.960 our wedding anniversary in Nuremberg.
00:04:22.380 Not everyone's choice.
00:04:24.460 Trading doesn't help the ending stuff.
00:04:26.720 I know.
00:04:26.980 I like history. She likes Christmas markets.
00:04:31.860 And, you know, as you do, I just had to check my email one last time before getting in the plane.
00:04:36.820 And there was an email from the public relations people here in Oxford informing me that a group of students calling themselves Common Ground had published an online denunciation of my Ethics in Empire project.
00:04:55.500 so that I've never experienced that before but that that was told me and the good news was that
00:05:05.120 the the university said that it was entirely behind my right to run such a thing so I didn't
00:05:11.700 think any more of it but that was on a Thursday on on the Sunday I got news from my main historical
00:05:21.440 collaborator that he was resigning for the project, and in the next four days, there
00:05:28.540 were two more online denunciations, these last two by academics of this project that
00:05:36.920 I was running.
00:05:38.720 So all of that together in that week was a bit of a shock, and I'd really not been expecting
00:05:45.980 it at all.
00:05:46.460 Clearly, looking back, I was naive.
00:05:51.920 Is this sort of thing, just to interrupt very briefly,
00:05:54.420 is this sort of thing standard practice in academia
00:05:56.800 where people take exception to a particular topic of research
00:06:00.300 and then there's a student campaign and then academics resign
00:06:03.400 and withdraw from participation?
00:06:05.700 Is that normal or is this unusual?
00:06:08.140 That's a good question.
00:06:09.540 It wasn't normal.
00:06:10.860 I mean, I'd never experienced it before.
00:06:13.320 But I think it's become much more normal.
00:06:16.260 Certainly, we're all aware of cases in the last three or four years
00:06:20.740 where that's happened to people.
00:06:24.020 And, of course, social media enables that kind of thing.
00:06:27.800 It enables an individual to write a protest
00:06:31.500 and then send it round to all their mates all over the world.
00:06:34.360 And within a matter of hours,
00:06:37.920 you may have collected several hundred signatures,
00:06:39.960 which looks really powerful.
00:06:41.740 um um i mean in in in the months in the weeks and months that i i spent trying to come to terms with
00:06:52.200 what was going on uh i did come to the view that this was not an appropriate way for
00:06:57.820 academic colleagues to behave um because uh when i complained about these online denunciations from
00:07:07.400 in one case 58 Oxford colleagues and then in the third protest there were I think about 200
00:07:17.540 academics worldwide I mean they said oh we were simply trying to stimulate a conversation I said
00:07:26.880 well you know if you if you want a conversation I mean some of the people who signed these letters
00:07:32.860 two of them work across the road from me they know my door is in fact two of them were in the
00:07:40.140 same college as me in this college they know my door is they could have come and spoken to me
00:07:43.900 they didn't and they haven't since um and so so the notion this was a kind of invitation to
00:07:50.980 conversation uh is complete baloney i can only interpret it as of course it's an aggressive
00:07:59.660 thing to do, but it was designed perhaps to intimidate me or also to persuade university
00:08:12.000 authorities to act against me in some way by pulling funding or some other kind of sanction.
00:08:21.700 And why do you think this is happening more and more, that we have this emboldened minority
00:08:25.620 Do you feel that they have the right not to criticise,
00:08:28.720 because it is absolutely their right to criticise your work
00:08:31.580 or your views or whatever else it may be,
00:08:34.040 but they feel that they have the right to cancel something?
00:08:38.520 That's a really good question, and I continue to puzzle over it.
00:08:45.960 People have always had strong political opinions within universities.
00:08:51.160 There have been people on the far left and the further right,
00:08:55.620 That's always been the case.
00:09:00.760 I can only speculate that the kind of people who think they have that right
00:09:10.520 are people who have spent a long time talking to people of their own kind.
00:09:16.760 And so it really appears to them as if there is only one view of these things.
00:09:22.900 That's one possibility.
00:09:23.760 The other possibility is that not only are they convinced
00:09:30.760 that a certain view of the world is right, and they have it,
00:09:35.880 but that the contrary view of the world is absolutely unacceptable.
00:09:42.760 I mean, the word fascist is thrown out all over the place. 0.94
00:09:48.560 If you utter a conservative right-wing opinion, you're fascist.
00:09:54.680 So immediately you're pushed into the extreme.
00:09:58.820 So it's not just, as it were, people operating in a kind of intellectual bubble
00:10:03.120 where they never really hear a contradiction
00:10:06.020 and they're constantly confirming what they and their mates think.
00:10:11.860 It's also that there's a tendency somehow to demonize the opposition
00:10:15.380 in ways that quite how they come to that view,
00:10:23.860 I just don't understand.
00:10:25.660 Although, to be honest, I mean, I see a lot of it
00:10:28.380 in the pages of The Guardian now.
00:10:30.820 Surely not.
00:10:31.960 Yeah, well, it didn't used to be that way.
00:10:34.860 There was a time, I will confess, when I think in the 90s
00:10:38.500 The Guardian was the only paper I read.
00:10:40.140 but it's become more and more
00:10:44.720 fixated with identity politics
00:10:49.080 and that kind of politics
00:10:52.700 doesn't seem to
00:10:53.820 it's not into compromise
00:10:56.660 and it does tend to
00:11:01.060 demonize the opposition
00:11:03.860 in ways that the left hasn't always done
00:11:06.040 and
00:11:07.420 I don't quite understand
00:11:11.920 why that's the case
00:11:13.260 I mean
00:11:13.580 let's be clear
00:11:16.120 in the past
00:11:17.360 the far right has done that
00:11:19.180 we all know that
00:11:20.160 from 20th century history
00:11:22.440 from real fascism
00:11:24.660 in France and Germany and Italy
00:11:26.820 but it's not
00:11:29.760 that kind of
00:11:31.560 othering and demonization
00:11:33.540 does at the moment seem to come from certain parts of the left.
00:11:38.600 And it's very interesting that you say that.
00:11:41.160 And we were talking about academia, what happened to you.
00:11:43.760 Do you think there's a problem with free speech on campus?
00:11:47.260 Yes, I do.
00:11:51.060 The left will disagree.
00:11:54.520 Again, if you read The Guardian, you'll find a number of people
00:11:56.840 in recent years saying,
00:11:58.260 our concern about freedom of speech is really a fabrication
00:12:03.480 by people like me, male, white, elderly,
00:12:09.180 who are alarmed at having our accustomed authority
00:12:12.700 drained away from us, so no one listens to us,
00:12:16.200 and so we're upset, and so we complain about our freedom of speech being suppressed.
00:12:22.340 And that is just not true.
00:12:23.640 and I know it partly from my own direct experience
00:12:28.760 and partly through recent
00:12:32.600 social scientific surveys
00:12:37.220 one published a couple of weeks ago
00:12:39.260 but just in terms of my own experience
00:12:41.300 I mean I'm coming toward the end of my career
00:12:44.800 I'm in a prestigious position
00:12:46.880 it's quite hard to get to me
00:12:49.020 at least that's clear now
00:12:52.700 It wasn't clear to me in December 2017, but I'm secure.
00:12:57.960 So did you think at the time that you were likely to lose your job?
00:13:01.520 I had no idea, but I lost night's sleep over it.
00:13:04.940 Yeah, partly because...
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00:13:37.960 yes because at least initially i felt alone um um one of my oldest friends
00:13:50.840 who I still respect and love actually told me to abandon my project straight away because he said
00:13:58.400 it's just too toxic toxic and then the fact that my my senior collaborator in the project resigned
00:14:08.700 within four days giving an implausible explanation for his abrupt resignation and then
00:14:17.700 And yes, from colleagues here, on the whole, silence.
00:14:29.640 So you do, you know, I did begin to wonder, you know, am I crazy? 0.96
00:14:32.960 Am I daft?
00:14:34.800 And although the university had indicated from the beginning 0.91
00:14:39.120 that it would back me up.
00:14:41.980 um yes i i guess i i did feel quite vulnerable and not quite sure where this was going to go
00:14:51.540 um fortunately you you survived let's say yeah but your concern is that you know you are in a
00:14:59.480 prestigious position as you say coming towards the end of your career a younger colleague
00:15:03.360 yeah absolutely so that's that's that's the concern um and i have plenty of experience of
00:15:10.280 younger colleagues who are conservative in their views, who have said to me,
00:15:19.520 no, really pleased that you are saying what you're saying, Nigel. I just couldn't dare to say it
00:15:27.040 myself. And I've actually said to them, in fact, they've said, you know, I feel guilty that I'm not
00:15:30.680 saying the same thing. And I said to them, well, nor should you at this point, you need to wait
00:15:36.260 until you get tenure and then then you can start to say what you think when you're secure but right
00:15:41.340 now you need to play the long game um but there was one one um one instance of a very junior
00:15:52.700 academic a junior research fellow who's an academic who hasn't got a permanent job yet
00:15:57.500 he's got the he had his phd he's got a kind of three-year research post and then has to look
00:16:03.240 for a permanent job. So it's quite insecure. And in, in May 2018, you're talking about Noah
00:16:10.920 Kyle? No, I'm not. No, no. He will, this guy must remain nameless for reasons that will come
00:16:16.660 clear. No, this, this was, this was an historian. And I, you mentioned Bruce Gilley, who published
00:16:27.380 this provocative, but in my view, intelligent article called The Case for Colonialism.
00:16:36.320 I had Gilly come here in May 2018, and we held in this room a small conference with
00:16:44.240 some historians, Paul Collier, the development economist, Tutankha Roy, the historian of
00:16:54.680 colonial economics in India and others, because I wanted to generate a kind of intelligent,
00:17:07.280 reflective discussion about what Gilly was saying about colonialism. But because I didn't want to
00:17:13.860 invite heckling, and also because, frankly, small gatherings are much better in terms of
00:17:23.520 conversation than large ones and we can only fit 30 people in this room i didn't advertise it i just
00:17:28.740 invited people i thought would be good to have part of the conversation and one of them was this
00:17:33.460 young uh junior research fellow whom i i i we'd had a clandestine conversation uh um in a distant
00:17:42.080 part of the university where he he revealed that he actually liked what i had to say um
00:17:47.720 i kid you not we actually had to find a place where he didn't think he'd be recognized
00:17:52.520 um and he said yes i'd love to come but but in two conditions um my name must not appear in the
00:18:01.020 list of participants and if you're taking photographs my face must not appear because
00:18:06.700 he said um i i work in the same office as two senior colleagues uh two of whom sign one of
00:18:14.800 the letters against you if they find out that um i've been associated with you i fear for my
00:18:21.020 my career
00:18:23.200 but Nigel
00:18:24.620 don't you find that 0.88
00:18:25.280 rather ridiculous 0.92
00:18:26.160 that somebody can have 0.64
00:18:27.260 right of centre opinions
00:18:28.560 or even opinions
00:18:29.360 on the right
00:18:29.940 and all of a sudden
00:18:30.960 their career
00:18:31.560 that you know
00:18:32.420 is curtailed
00:18:33.440 stunted
00:18:34.340 fired
00:18:35.780 all the rest of it
00:18:36.580 I mean isn't 0.99
00:18:37.380 that's pathetic isn't it 0.99
00:18:39.640 it's pathetic 1.00
00:18:40.160 and it's alarming 0.99
00:18:40.940 because you know
00:18:41.920 this is Oxford
00:18:42.860 not Oxford Bricks
00:18:46.100 we've listened to that
00:18:47.200 yes
00:18:47.540 Oxford
00:18:48.300 I didn't
00:18:49.060 but just to make that
00:18:50.960 point perhaps for people who haven't been to Oxford who haven't been in the in the in this
00:18:55.080 place it is you know Francis lives in London I live just outside coming here there there is a
00:19:00.280 sense of history to this place there is a sense that this is one of the great places of learning
00:19:04.460 in human history and as you walk around in these buildings in these holes that feeling that this
00:19:11.260 is a place of learning is very strong here and to hear that sort of attitude being spread in in this
00:19:20.140 place is alarming at a very different level than if it was happening at Oxbrook's.
00:19:24.480 Do you know what I mean?
00:19:25.180 Yeah, well, I don't want to say anything about Oxbrook's. 0.61
00:19:29.300 You said that, not me.
00:19:31.800 But yes, I mean, Oxford and Cambridge are, according to world rankings, regularly in
00:19:39.480 the top ten in the world.
00:19:40.520 So this is a serious research university.
00:19:43.280 as you say, Constantine, it has a long history of serious, perhaps not terribly exciting,
00:19:52.480 but serious scholarship, careful, fastidious. Yeah, so the fact that a colleague here fears
00:20:02.480 for his career because he might be known to be associated with such as me is really alarming,
00:20:12.220 actually. Now, let me be clear. I'm not saying that political censorship in Oxford is widespread.
00:20:26.900 I have no idea. I'm sure that many colleagues don't censor, don't apply political criteria
00:20:40.720 when they're making appointments or when they're writing references for junior scholars.
00:20:45.440 I'm sure many don't do that.
00:20:48.620 So it may only be a minority who are so politically convinced of their own views
00:20:54.840 that they will penalize a colleague, a junior colleague, a vulnerable junior colleague,
00:21:02.160 by writing them a poor reference because of his political views.
00:21:07.040 But here's the thing.
00:21:10.720 Even if it's only 1 in 10, or even 1 in 20, if you know some people do that, the effect
00:21:17.680 on the general, once that becomes known, the effect on the general atmosphere is to make
00:21:22.080 everyone look over their shoulders and just wonder, who's listening to me?
00:21:25.340 What will the effect be?
00:21:27.620 And that's really bad news.
00:21:29.820 Really bad news.
00:21:31.480 And Nigel, don't you think it's an abdication of responsibility on behalf of the universities?
00:21:35.500 Because they should absolutely crack down on this type of behavior and say that it is
00:21:39.240 not acceptable.
00:21:40.720 Yeah, I do. I do. So here's one point. In this university, our Vice-Chancellor, Louise Richardson, has been consistent in affirming free speech within universities and its importance.
00:21:57.120 And that is important because the leader of an institution does set the tone, and that just reminds people that this is an important value.
00:22:07.660 But what that doesn't do is change the behavior of my junior colleagues, senior colleagues in their office.
00:22:15.880 It doesn't change the, as it were, undercover operation of political criteria.
00:22:24.040 um and so um something does need to be done about that now what could universities do about that
00:22:32.880 uh basically i think the university has to recognize that it is a problem and i've i've
00:22:41.400 i've i've written about this in in the press over the last three years there's a an in-house
00:22:47.860 magazine called
00:22:49.760 the Oxford Magazine
00:22:50.640 and I published an article
00:22:52.560 on this point
00:22:54.060 in early 2018
00:22:56.160 and the article ended
00:22:59.020 diversity is good
00:23:01.820 political diversity is good too
00:23:04.180 isn't it
00:23:05.720 since then
00:23:08.100 certainly in response to that article
00:23:10.000 and in general conversation
00:23:12.120 I've heard no one talk about it
00:23:15.140 so some people know about it
00:23:16.980 Some people have read about it.
00:23:18.000 No one talks about it.
00:23:20.820 But I think we do need to talk about it.
00:23:22.460 Now, it's difficult to talk about, because we all have political views.
00:23:28.100 And that's not the issue, of course.
00:23:29.900 The issue is being aware of when you are unfairly applying political criteria
00:23:37.720 to appointments or admissions or whatever.
00:23:42.900 So in the same way that we all now need to be careful, if we weren't careful before,
00:23:49.520 to make sure that prejudices about social class or race don't influence unfairly the judgments we make.
00:23:55.640 And that's utterly, that's entirely acceptable and important.
00:23:59.340 We now need to do the same with political views.
00:24:02.860 And at the moment, that's just not an issue that has risen up the agenda.
00:24:07.720 And I think university leaders need to start doing that.
00:24:12.060 i mean maybe the government could problem maybe the office for students can start
00:24:17.540 rattling their cages and saying folks you need to take this seriously and that i think that may
00:24:22.200 happen um but it'd be good to see universities take the initiative rather than being pushed by
00:24:28.440 government when we interviewed douglas murray for our first interview he was of the opinion that if
00:24:33.220 a university did not support free speech on campus that uh they should be defunded which is
00:24:39.380 quite an extreme position i think would you be in agreement with you know the government taking a
00:24:44.780 stronger hand and actually saying to universities if you don't do your job in supporting different
00:24:49.540 viewpoints then there are going to be some sanctions put in place yes i do i do i i think
00:24:55.680 um um government does need to remind universities of their commitment to academic freedom most
00:25:02.980 universities have formal commitments to free speech uh although there's a distinction here
00:25:09.740 it's one thing to um to guarantee free speech academic freedom is slightly different because
00:25:15.780 it has to do with what professors can teach in their classes what books they can assign to their
00:25:21.540 students what research they do and i i think free speech is better protected than academic freedom
00:25:27.820 So academic freedom also needs to be protected.
00:25:31.620 And I think government should communicate to university leaders
00:25:36.440 that it regards this matter as a really serious one.
00:25:42.600 If I can just, I want to come back to that point,
00:25:45.420 and I might lose it, so bring me back in a moment.
00:25:46.860 But just on that, I think there's a really important point to be made
00:25:51.620 about what's at issue, what's at stake here.
00:25:53.620 um to some extent what's at stake is is um the right of minorities in this case political
00:26:03.260 minorities and conservatives are reckoned to be i don't know about 15 percent of the university
00:26:09.820 professoriate um the right of political minorities to be able to speak freely without fear of
00:26:15.240 sanction. Now, that's important. But what to take is even more important is this. In
00:26:25.380 universities, we are forming future citizens. Our graduates, particularly in this university,
00:26:37.700 with their prestigious university degree, will go on to run companies, run the BBC,
00:26:42.320 become journalists, become editors.
00:26:46.060 And we are training them in ways of dealing with points of view
00:26:51.080 they really don't like,
00:26:54.400 how to handle a debate or a discussion or a controversy
00:27:01.740 on matters that get people very excited.
00:27:07.180 And we can train them rather badly.
00:27:10.300 We can train them only to see one point of view.
00:27:14.080 We can train them to, instead of treating what an alternative point of view has to say
00:27:22.260 and considering what reasons it might have, you can train them instead to say,
00:27:27.200 well, because he's a conservative, because he's a capitalist, because he speaks up for empire,
00:27:32.980 it's only because he's trying to
00:27:36.280 protect his own economic interests
00:27:38.240 or his social status or whatever
00:27:40.180 so don't take what he says seriously
00:27:42.280 just try and
00:27:44.000 undermine
00:27:44.960 the kind of
00:27:46.880 the moral integrity of
00:27:49.840 his position
00:27:50.780 now you can do that
00:27:52.720 but when those graduates go out
00:27:55.940 into the professions
00:27:57.880 into institutions, into public
00:28:00.260 into the media
00:28:01.380 if they start behaving that way the whole of public discourse is going to be infected
00:28:07.320 by polarization aggression a refusal to hear and that's just one step away from bloodshed
00:28:16.740 because when people are no longer trying to argue they're fighting and fierce verbal fighting is
00:28:26.040 only a step away from the real stuff so what's at stake really is not just the protection of
00:28:31.040 minority opinions. It's really the public good of a citizenry who know how to restrain
00:28:39.480 themselves when they hear things they don't like, feel obliged to do justice to what other
00:28:46.360 people say. So when someone says something you don't like, you don't then distort it
00:28:51.360 before you address it. You take it as it stands. And then to give credit where credit
00:28:59.700 is due then to come up with the reasons you think this is bloody wrong.
00:29:03.700 Now, that's a responsible, rational way to conduct
00:29:07.000 the many, many, many controversies
00:29:13.440 over issues we all get excited about.
00:29:17.260 And we need citizens and journalists and editors
00:29:20.260 and institutional leaders who know how to do that and model it,
00:29:26.020 because otherwise the whole public life
00:29:27.760 is going to become much more fractious, polarized, as we see it has done in the USA.
00:29:34.120 Well, and increasingly here, too, I think it's fair to say.
00:29:37.140 And I think you make that point very well, Nigel.
00:29:39.680 But speaking about some of the issues on which it's very difficult to have these conversations,
00:29:43.660 now, it's the one we started with, which is, of course, empire and colonialism.
00:29:47.740 That is something that has become very heated.
00:29:50.960 The conversation around that has become with a very particular worldview, let's say.
00:29:55.800 uh are people wrong to to be so uh critical of the of the our imperial history i mean some terrible
00:30:03.620 things were done during imperial times uh you know whether it's the invention of concentration
00:30:07.980 camps during the boer war by the british or many many other atrocities on the indian subcontinent
00:30:13.320 and around the world should we not be ashamed of our history my view as a as a someone who
00:30:20.860 identifies himself strongly as British. I care about this country. I identify with its history.
00:30:27.720 And my view is if you love something, you are therefore capable of shame. And looking back at
00:30:33.500 my British history, yes, there are things I'm deeply ashamed about. And the classic case would 0.99
00:30:39.280 be slavery, which we engaged in for 200 years. So as I said at the beginning, pride is well a shame,
00:30:47.980 right? So certainly shame. But my view is that the British Empire, in that respect,
00:30:56.300 containing moments of awfulness, as well as moments of greatness, is no different from any
00:31:03.380 nation-state, and no different from any other empire. Any nation-state that's been around for
00:31:10.280 a long time, in the course of time, will get to do some awful things. Well, the Mongols committed 1.00
00:31:16.780 some seriously big microaggressions of the Genghis Khan, didn't they? But do you think
00:31:21.520 perhaps Britain, as someone, I'm not British, so while I feel, well, I say I'm not British,
00:31:27.200 I think at this point I sort of am. No, you're not. No, you're not. But you know what I mean,
00:31:33.040 I come from a different place, but I've integrated into this country, but I probably feel less of an
00:31:37.720 affinity with British history than you would. Do you think that Britain is essentially being
00:31:44.740 punished for its historical success. Because if it had been less successful, if it had been a Sweden 0.86
00:31:52.200 or a Norway or whatever, that engaged in some of these things on a much smaller scale or not at all,
00:31:58.020 simply by virtue of not being a powerful player in the world stage, then we wouldn't be having
00:32:03.740 this conversation. Now, you're exactly right. So you would have noticed that no one is interested
00:32:09.260 in beating up the French Empire or the Russian or the Chinese or the Zulu or the Comanche Empire 0.90
00:32:18.820 in the States. They're interested mainly in the British Empire. Why is that? It's because
00:32:25.420 the British Empire, even as it declined, it morphed into the American Empire, or at least
00:32:33.200 morphed into American global power. And the British Empire was supportive of a lot of the
00:32:43.160 post-Second World War, post-1945 international institutions. So the kind of international order
00:32:50.160 we have, the kind of international order against which China is presently chafing, and Russia,
00:32:57.180 uh that liberal international order um uh owes it was a lot to the british empire and and and
00:33:05.800 subsequent american power so you're absolutely right the reason that the british empire is
00:33:11.620 getting beaten up on is not the it's not about the past at all it's about the present it's about
00:33:17.620 hostility
00:33:19.900 toward Anglo-American
00:33:22.180 liberal
00:33:23.400 capitalism.
00:33:27.800 That's why
00:33:29.440 my interest in
00:33:31.200 British Empire
00:33:32.500 is not primarily
00:33:35.420 antiquarian. It's 0.99
00:33:37.740 not really about the past, except
00:33:39.520 insofar as
00:33:40.420 what we think about the past
00:33:42.980 shapes how we think about ourselves
00:33:45.640 now and it shapes the decisions we make in the future. So one of the things that stimulated
00:33:54.720 me to get stuck into British Empire is Scottish nationalism. Now I'm, as I said, I'm Scottish
00:34:02.700 born, my mother's English, I'm Anglo-Scot, I'm a Brit. I belong to a multi, a multinational
00:34:09.040 state. And I really value that. And so I'm strongly against Scottish separation. But
00:34:21.840 there's a story being told by some Scottish nationalists, which is, if I can distill it,
00:34:28.740 Britain equals empire equals evil, and therefore to break up Britain, to separate Scotland from
00:34:38.240 the rest of the UK is an act of national self-purification yeah now you know if Britain
00:34:48.960 you know if Britain equaled Nazism equal evil separation I'm quite a good idea but but I happen 1.00
00:34:56.860 to know enough about the British Empire to know it just wasn't of that kind at all and
00:35:01.960 And I don't think that the British Empire was radically, at its heart, at its root, racist.
00:35:12.040 I don't think it was radically, at its heart, exploitative.
00:35:16.700 It included moments of racism and moments of exploitation.
00:35:21.400 But when you, we were talking earlier about what school kids do and don't know about slavery,
00:35:28.480 And you were saying that, you know, in your experience as a teacher, school kids do know about slavery.
00:35:35.460 I suspect they probably know less about the more than a century that the British spent suppressing slavery,
00:35:45.560 the slave trade across the Atlantic, the slave trade across the Indian Ocean, in Africa, in India, in the Middle East,
00:35:52.540 for about, well, from 1807 onwards until the end of the empire.
00:35:57.260 one of the main preoccupations of the empire was the suppression of slavery.
00:36:01.320 And I think that's wonderful.
00:36:03.520 How many kids know about that?
00:36:04.960 Francis, let me just follow up on one thing, if you don't mind.
00:36:08.160 This is a really interesting point you made about that it's about the present,
00:36:12.740 not about the past.
00:36:13.720 And if I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is
00:36:16.820 there is an agenda to undermine the American liberal capitalism of the world
00:36:22.080 that dominates the world.
00:36:23.640 It's anti-West.
00:36:24.340 anti-west agreed completely certainly i see that and the british empire is like the founding
00:36:30.340 cornerstone of that so if you can pull that out you can make the whole pyramid fall yeah and you
00:36:35.460 and so what you do is you you undermine by undermining the record the historical record
00:36:39.880 you undermine as it were the moral authority of the whole thing yeah go ahead francis and the
00:36:45.280 question i wanted to ask was we do learn about the british empire at schools but we don't learn
00:36:51.000 about other empires.
00:36:52.480 So is it part of the problem,
00:36:54.560 the fact they see British Empire,
00:36:55.840 they see slavery,
00:36:56.920 without realising that,
00:36:58.360 essentially,
00:36:58.980 if you wanted anything done in history,
00:37:00.560 you needed slaves? 0.98
00:37:02.780 We're just going to clip that
00:37:04.160 and put it out
00:37:05.300 as the slogan of trigonometry.
00:37:07.220 If you want anything done,
00:37:08.560 you need an Anton.
00:37:09.500 That's what you need.
00:37:10.840 I think you want to say,
00:37:11.440 in the past.
00:37:12.020 Yes, in the past.
00:37:13.120 You're not recommending this.
00:37:14.460 I mean, well, you see,
00:37:15.640 certainly...
00:37:16.560 Shut your gun.
00:37:17.040 uh let me save yourself um that's absolutely right so so one of the really interesting things
00:37:26.580 that we've discovered in in this ethics and empire project which as i said
00:37:31.020 is looking at empires from into china to the modern period so far we've got up to about 1600
00:37:36.700 and uh um when i was asking around uh colleagues who know about let's say arab empires or islamic
00:37:46.720 empire, saying, you know, can you find me a contemporary critic? And they said, well,
00:37:53.480 no, not really. And it turns out that, and the same happened in the case of ancient Chinese
00:38:01.760 empire. And the conclusion I've drawn is that at those times in those places, empire was
00:38:11.840 a fact of life uh um you might you might not like particular emperors you may not like particular
00:38:18.020 governments the way in which the empire was governed but empire as such was completely
00:38:22.560 unremarkable and um um the fact is that most of the world has been has been ruled by empires
00:38:30.280 even today
00:38:34.920 China
00:38:37.820 is a kind of empire
00:38:39.900 certainly
00:38:42.600 Tibetans would think so 1.00
00:38:43.740 certainly Hong Kong feels that way
00:38:46.920 right now
00:38:47.420 so it's still going on
00:38:50.140 so empire is a kind of fact of life
00:38:52.320 and as for slavery, yeah you're right
00:38:54.400 everyone was into slavery
00:38:56.880 not all slavery was as nasty
00:38:58.960 as what went on in the sugar plantations of the West Indies
00:39:02.380 or the Southern American colonies.
00:39:05.940 But some of it was quite nasty.
00:39:07.420 I mean, some of those who were carted off,
00:39:12.680 the slaves who were sold by West African kings
00:39:14.900 to European traders and taken off to the Caribbean,
00:39:18.880 had they stayed, they might have had the fate
00:39:20.680 of joining several hundred others
00:39:23.940 upon the death of a king
00:39:27.480 or being buried alive to join their master on his heavenly journey.
00:39:32.540 There are reports of up to 1,500 slaves being sacrificed
00:39:40.760 by being buried alive to mark the funerals of African princes in 1790.
00:39:50.200 um so you know slavery and long before before african kings started selling their uh their
00:40:01.900 slaves and the slaves were normally would have been uh prisoners of war um captured from other
00:40:07.740 tribes before they sold them to europeans they were selling to the arabs for centuries so yeah 0.99
00:40:13.840 I mean, this doesn't excuse the cruelty of a lot of slavery in the West Indies,
00:40:26.980 which the British were involved in, but it does put it in context.
00:40:31.280 So if we sinned, there were lots of other sinners too,
00:40:35.380 and many of them had black skins.
00:40:39.460 Well, that is a very controversial point.
00:40:42.000 But it's absolutely true.
00:40:44.340 And the thing that it seems to me is that what we have nowadays are narratives.
00:40:48.760 Like you talked about, you know, the British being evil, 1.00
00:40:51.780 and then certain white supremacy would no doubt be thrown in as well.
00:40:55.400 And if you contravene that narrative, even if you've got facts
00:40:59.900 and, you know, you can make a cogent argument, it doesn't matter.
00:41:04.180 Yeah, that's really strange.
00:41:08.100 But I've become more confident and more heartened
00:41:11.360 the more I've got stuck into these issues
00:41:14.820 because when I first suffered grief in December 2017,
00:41:25.120 I'd only begun to work on making moral sense of British Empire,
00:41:32.200 and I've done a lot more reading since.
00:41:34.960 And the thing I'm most struck about is how the people who behave in that way don't know what they're talking about.
00:41:44.100 They really don't know what they're talking about.
00:41:45.680 And there are some academics who behave that way, and they just don't know what they're talking about.
00:41:52.260 And my sense is, well, it's my hope, but my sense is that the more this kind of behavior gets exposed and contradicted,
00:42:01.560 the great british public out there become more and more appalled uh and that's my hope um and i and
00:42:10.520 and uh i also think and i've certainly seen here how um really self-persuaded self-convinced
00:42:22.240 zealous minorities of students or even of professors uh can have can acquire a kind of
00:42:30.520 dominance over a more uncertain majority who don't particularly want to get involved in this
00:42:38.300 fight. So my sense is out there, and even within universities, a majority of people
00:42:45.960 are not very impressed by the kind of behavior you've described. And the more people who speak
00:42:54.040 up and out against it, and the more outrageous this behaviour becomes, I think there's reason
00:43:00.960 to hope that the stronger a reaction will be. So I'm not gloomy about this at all.
00:43:08.360 It's a good point that you make, that you're not gloomy about it, and there seems to be
00:43:11.820 a strong reaction. I think things came to a head a great deal during the Black Lives 1.00
00:43:15.960 Matter demonstrations, riots, whatever you want to call them, the tearing down of the 0.65
00:43:21.400 statues. Where do you stand on that? You have the famous example is Edward Colston, the slave
00:43:26.540 trader, and then it got torn down. Do you agree with that? Or do you think that we actually should
00:43:31.700 have those statues in a permanent place? I didn't agree with it being torn down that way. So first
00:43:40.380 of all, there's an issue of process. And for a mob, however passionate they are, to take it upon
00:43:47.720 themselves to pull public stuff down
00:43:49.780 is not acceptable, because if
00:43:51.600 the left can do that, the right can start doing it
00:43:53.720 too, folks. We don't want that. 0.99
00:43:55.580 So that was just wrong.
00:43:57.660 As for Colson himself,
00:44:01.640 my view in statues
00:44:05.640 is this.
00:44:09.040 There are some people in history whose record
00:44:11.780 is pretty irredeemable.
00:44:14.740 To take the obvious examples,
00:44:16.080 Adolf Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Paul Pott, you name them, Genghis Khan, unless my reading
00:44:24.660 of Genghis Khan is a lot different from most people's.
00:44:27.360 I guess he wasn't a particularly pleasant guy.
00:44:30.400 But if we start to choose to those kind of people, you know, take them down, because
00:44:39.200 there's nothing really positive to be said about them.
00:44:42.620 The residents of Ulaanbaatar are not going to be happy.
00:44:45.680 They've got a massive statue of Genghis Khan.
00:44:48.400 Do they really?
00:44:48.900 Oh, yeah, absolutely.
00:44:49.900 It's humongous.
00:44:51.120 They're very proud.
00:44:52.020 Can I just take Genghis Khan off the list?
00:44:54.420 But then surely it isn't a counterpoint to this, Nigel,
00:44:57.060 what you've just said.
00:44:58.040 So, for instance, Cromwell we have in front of Parliament.
00:45:00.660 Now I have a few Irish friends,
00:45:02.920 and they would get very upset at the thought of Cromwell being celebrated.
00:45:07.120 Okay, but no.
00:45:08.660 So my point was, at the extremes, you've got these nasty guys.
00:45:11.740 But most other people are a mixed bag. 0.97
00:45:15.980 So, yeah, for the Irish, Cromwell means drochardet, 0.95
00:45:18.180 means disproportionate slaughter.
00:45:21.440 But that's not why he's in front of Parliament.
00:45:23.640 He's in front of Parliament because he stood up to an absolutist king.
00:45:30.660 And I mean, Cromwell is a complicated character.
00:45:35.640 But in the kind of liberal, whiggy story, 0.88
00:45:39.740 He represents, he's standing there because he represents successful opposition to unaccountable absolutist monarchy, right?
00:45:50.440 So he got rid of that.
00:45:51.280 So that's why he's there.
00:45:54.440 And there's another interesting point about British public statuary.
00:46:01.860 Apparently, you've got Cromwell outside of the House of Commons.
00:46:07.200 but somewhere else in the square
00:46:09.960 you've got some
00:46:11.000 I forget who he is now
00:46:12.380 there's some Irish patriot
00:46:14.200 or someone who stood up for Irish home rule
00:46:16.220 in the same square
00:46:17.360 and you've got Churchill
00:46:19.020 but then you've got Gandhi
00:46:20.300 and you've got Lincoln
00:46:21.640 so in a sense
00:46:22.480 the public structure represents
00:46:25.860 a kind of
00:46:27.040 it's eclectic
00:46:28.340 it's not a one particular point of view
00:46:30.660 it is plural
00:46:31.580 it's liberal
00:46:32.160 it engenders a kind of
00:46:34.240 conversation and dialogue
00:46:35.780 across the public square.
00:46:37.860 I think that's really healthy
00:46:39.100 because most people
00:46:42.100 who did bad things
00:46:43.720 have something good
00:46:44.240 to be said for them.
00:46:45.600 And most good people
00:46:47.620 who did good things
00:46:48.360 have something bad
00:46:48.860 to be said for them.
00:46:50.540 And if we're going to have
00:46:51.300 any statuary at all,
00:46:52.200 we've got to put up
00:46:52.800 with people whose records
00:46:54.680 were mixed.
00:46:55.480 And Cromwell was certainly
00:46:56.540 one of those.
00:46:57.500 I just don't think
00:46:58.180 that Adolf's record
00:47:00.420 was quite so mixed.
00:47:01.820 It's rather heavier
00:47:02.800 one side than the other.
00:47:04.160 You know,
00:47:04.380 if he did get the trains
00:47:05.400 around time um the problem was the problem was where the trains were going yes well well put
00:47:12.820 but i i think the point you're really making is the tapestry of an individual's history and our
00:47:19.420 human history is never woven just from one fiber from one color it's always multifaceted and
00:47:25.140 multicolored and to pretend otherwise is very naive and i think we're going through a bit of
00:47:29.620 period where there's a sort of puritanism about everything. Yeah, there is. I find that
00:47:38.020 the phenomenon of this puritanism really strange, the extremity of it.
00:47:46.780 I mean, I'm a religious person. I'm a Christian. So I do believe in good and evil. 0.99
00:47:51.260 um but um part of my world view is that um good and evil the dividing line isn't here
00:48:02.540 i'm good and you're bad the dividing line is here it's here
00:48:06.020 right so so that you know knowing knowing constantine that you're you know you're you're
00:48:15.060 you you may be wicked but you're not that wicked besides i'm wicked too it means that
00:48:20.840 But even if I dislike what you're saying, there's a certain kind of self-restraint.
00:48:27.480 I can't bin you or demonize you.
00:48:31.440 And so I find the extremism of this, it's almost, and I've said this before,
00:48:38.680 it's as if the social justice warriors, the woke folk,
00:48:43.860 you know they've got the the um the ire of the biblical prophets who are railing against various
00:48:51.560 forms of injustice what they don't have um is the notion of of the wickedness that is within
00:48:59.620 and requires forgiveness so it's kind of lopsided biblical religion and the the certainty of it
00:49:06.360 the extremity of it does give it a kind of religious a kind of scary religious quality
00:49:12.040 that deserves a bit of analysis, actually.
00:49:15.600 But doesn't it also reflect a lack of humility?
00:49:18.260 And the realisation that we're all flawed, we're all broken,
00:49:21.340 none of us is perfect.
00:49:22.780 And this desire to find faults with others
00:49:26.240 and fling them up on the metaphorical pyre is...
00:49:29.280 Yeah. Oh, for sure.
00:49:31.220 No, humility is lacking big time,
00:49:34.600 and the notion...
00:49:36.600 It's not just other people who have to ask for forgiveness.
00:49:42.040 And quite how we got there, I do find, although I've read a bit about, what is it, I've forgotten the source now,
00:49:58.740 But there is this attitude, or this view that, I guess it's a Marxist view, that points of
00:50:11.560 view, particularly points of view held by bourgeois people, these are not to be taken
00:50:19.500 at face value, these are just rationalizations for unjust interests.
00:50:24.460 And therefore, you don't take the ideas seriously.
00:50:26.820 what you do is you attack
00:50:28.840 the person and the social standing
00:50:30.600 and that seems to be
00:50:33.260 behind a lot
00:50:35.220 of the attitudes of
00:50:36.320 these
00:50:40.180 zealous
00:50:41.340 uncompromising
00:50:43.820 new Puritans 0.99
00:50:46.080 the problem is
00:50:49.140 if you think about it
00:50:51.460 if you take that view
00:50:52.620 of course it applies to yourself too
00:50:55.020 it's not why is it just their view that is is rooted in illegitimate economic interests
00:51:01.760 how about your own views that don't you have interest too that you're rationalizing whatever
00:51:06.760 uh actually i think in the case of blm i think yes there are interests here i mean it's victimhood
00:51:15.400 is a political tool now it wins you power so there's everyone who can has an interest in
00:51:24.340 playing victim big time uh because um particularly because of the way in which uh well-meaning
00:51:32.000 um sensitive liberal people react which is normally to say yes we're guilty
00:51:38.340 it gives you a lot of power so i think the the the the kind of um marxist analysis can be turned
00:51:47.100 back onto them to say well what are the interests that are driving you so that you simply can't
00:51:51.960 listen what why and and do you see that as a more prevalent attitude amongst uh the students that
00:51:58.920 you see here well none of my my students uh you know they know who i am they come to me for a
00:52:07.660 reason um uh but but i'm i have asked that i have asked my students about their peers
00:52:13.580 and yes the kind of uh the kind of puritan extreme uncompromising attitudes
00:52:23.220 yes it seemed to be quite prevalent among their peers
00:52:27.920 Nigel there's one other topic i want to cover before we wrap up but just on that point are we
00:52:32.760 not three crusty old men that are just reminiscing about the good i mean we're not quite uh old but
00:52:39.760 But crusty enough, who are lamenting the loss of our ease with which we could spew our white supremacist beliefs unchecked, uncontrolled, unquestioned.
00:52:53.700 And now we're, as you pointed out earlier in the interview, we're very upset about the loss of this former tyrannical oppression and power over others.
00:53:02.020 Are we not troubled by the fact that there are some brown faces at Oxford now? 1.00
00:53:06.060 Isn't that really what this is all about?
00:53:07.600 uh yeah so right so that's that's what they say um that's what they say so the answer is
00:53:13.480 no um because i first speak for myself i guess others will have to judge this but uh speaking
00:53:21.340 for myself it's not it's not criticism that bothers me it's not contrary views that bothers
00:53:27.700 me. It's not the presence of brown skins that bother me. It is the refusal to engage rationally 1.00
00:53:44.140 with what I say. It's the tendency instead to attack my person. And let's be clear here.
00:53:57.700 And you say it might be the case that I'm just bothered by the fact that there are more women and more people of non-white skin who inhabit these cloisters, these colleges, our universities. 1.00
00:54:14.160 It might be that.
00:54:15.660 But here's the thing.
00:54:17.080 Not every brown person thinks as they do.
00:54:21.780 A lot of people of non-white skin agree with me.
00:54:25.240 So I couldn't care less what skin color people have. 1.00
00:54:30.660 I really couldn't.
00:54:32.580 All I care about is whether they can behave and argue
00:54:39.020 in a civil fashion and a reasonable one
00:54:44.420 in which we respect each other enough
00:54:46.840 to take each other's reasons seriously
00:54:48.500 and by all means show me where I'm wrong.
00:54:51.760 You're talking about good faith conversation.
00:54:53.340 I'm talking about good face conversations.
00:54:55.300 You should go on Twitter.
00:54:57.420 I have.
00:55:00.420 It's not good for conversation.
00:55:03.580 Oddly enough.
00:55:05.140 But Nigel, you brought up a point which I think is fundamental to the current cultural moment.
00:55:11.600 It's something I've been thinking about for some time and it's been worrying me for some time.
00:55:16.540 And what I'm talking about is the fact that all of these things that we are alluding to and talking about throughout this interview are fundamentally anti-West.
00:55:26.180 It's about the tearing down of the liberal, the kind of the traditional world order, the capitalist liberal in our time, American world order.
00:55:37.500 Why do we feel this way about ourselves?
00:55:42.920 Why do we have to remove or think about removing Rue Britannia from the last night of the proms?
00:55:51.420 Why have we come to this point where a healthy self-criticism has turned into a sort of self-loathing?
00:55:59.860 Another excellent question which needs a lot of thinking about.
00:56:07.080 So here's one answer to that question.
00:56:12.920 And it goes back to something I said earlier.
00:56:17.840 A lot of those who feel instinctively embarrassed about Britain's past
00:56:24.720 don't know very much about it.
00:56:29.180 What they do know is, and they've learned this from other people,
00:56:35.560 they know that talking up empire doesn't win you friends.
00:56:42.920 So so they picked up that the notion that to talk positively about
00:56:53.800 Empire but colonialism is as my my very old friend said toxic and
00:57:01.600 Unless you want to fight unless you want to risk losing friends and colleagues
00:57:08.040 You won't do it
00:57:09.800 therefore
00:57:11.240 the impression that empire equals evil
00:57:14.500 becomes more and more embedded
00:57:16.740 because no one contradicts it
00:57:18.500 and everyone repeats it.
00:57:20.340 So it's kind of self-confirming
00:57:21.800 and it kind of gains a momentum.
00:57:24.120 So it becomes like common sense.
00:57:26.360 And so when people like me start to say,
00:57:29.860 well, no, not just shame, also pride,
00:57:33.360 people are shocked
00:57:34.100 because it's almost as if you said something really rude.
00:57:38.740 so I think it's partly
00:57:41.160 that over time
00:57:42.580 a common sense
00:57:45.500 about empire and colonialism
00:57:47.520 has grown up among us
00:57:48.780 that is
00:57:50.700 not all wrong
00:57:52.500 but in significant parts
00:57:55.340 it is wrong, it's just incorrect
00:57:57.080 it's not historically true
00:57:58.560 and so
00:58:01.900 but I think
00:58:02.840 we are seeing
00:58:04.400 certainly over the prom's
00:58:07.260 decision to
00:58:08.040 take the words out of
00:58:11.020 Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia
00:58:12.900 we're seeing
00:58:14.540 quite a strong popular reaction
00:58:16.180 that may have made sense to BBC people
00:58:18.380 talking to
00:58:20.100 musicians from Finland
00:58:23.040 it doesn't make so much sense
00:58:26.600 to
00:58:27.120 well I'm guessing here
00:58:29.700 judging by the Times newspaper
00:58:32.460 and the Telegraph and I imagine the Sun isn't terribly
00:58:34.520 happy about it
00:58:35.680 to most British people that this just
00:58:37.940 doesn't make sense. So when you talk about how do we get to this position, well, who are we here?
00:58:47.140 And I think we are talking about the elite, people who run our institutions, people educated in
00:58:52.420 universities in this place. But we are, as over Brexit, we're discovering that what the elite
00:59:01.020 assumes and what the rest of the population thinks are not the same thing. So again, I'm
00:59:07.220 quite hopeful that that um you know the bbc has suddenly discovered that not everyone is happy
00:59:12.640 with this policy and it's it's offered some explanations that uh i think don't make much
00:59:18.240 good sense and i think it's true that the bbc caved in to uh the um the movement to decolonize
00:59:26.820 um and now it's having to think again because people have spoken up
00:59:31.220 um so so it it's to be hoped that um we in the elite i'm part of it um having been confronted
00:59:43.420 with country views we'll start to think again um and i'll certainly do my part to help that happen
00:59:49.920 fantastic we've got time for one last question yeah and the question that we always end with
00:59:56.520 is what is the one thing that we're not talking about
00:59:59.000 but we really should be?
01:00:00.760 That's a very good question.
01:00:01.920 I'm so glad you warned me about it at the beginning.
01:00:04.320 Don't give away the secrets of the show, Nigel.
01:00:07.820 You could have got so much more credit
01:00:09.680 if you just pretended that your no-doubt forthcoming
01:00:12.580 brilliant answer came to you just in the moment.
01:00:15.220 Well, I suggest you edit this bit out.
01:00:16.780 Fantastic, that's what we'll do.
01:00:19.260 We're all about authenticity here.
01:00:20.960 Yeah, straight away, I would have said, and I will say, virtue is what we don't talk about.
01:00:31.120 So we talk a lot about rights.
01:00:32.580 We know all about rights, claiming my rights.
01:00:35.620 We don't talk about virtue, and I've talked about it in answer to your questions.
01:00:39.980 because I talked about the importance of universities forming students
01:00:47.080 so that they can manage a discussion of controversial topics in a civil fashion
01:00:53.520 so they can do justice to what other people are saying.
01:00:57.640 Doing justice is a virtue. It's a habit. You do or you don't.
01:00:59.940 I could have also said treating alien points of view with charity,
01:01:05.920 meaning you know if you hear someone saying something you don't like well an easy thing
01:01:13.200 to do is to caricature it and knock it down a more courageous generous charitable thing to do
01:01:21.560 is okay give it its best construction now what's the best thing that can be said in favor of this
01:01:26.940 ridiculous point of view then take it down that means two things it means first of all you've
01:01:32.700 been generous to the other side they might actually listen to what you forgot to say because 0.95
01:01:35.420 you've been generous. The other thing is that when you take it down, it's all the stronger,
01:01:39.980 because you have taken its best construction and taken it apart. And there's, of course,
01:01:43.960 a third possibility, which is you might, by giving it that charitable interpretation,
01:01:48.320 recognize the truth in some of it. Absolutely right. Good. Back to my point.
01:01:55.820 So the disposition to do justice and to be charitable, these are not technical skills,
01:02:02.920 the virtues and that they're taught by i think mainly by example so professors and ceos um can
01:02:13.000 can teach their people this is the way we behave um but these are virtues we don't talk about
01:02:19.860 virtues we only talk about rights and we need to learn to talk about virtues do we have time can i
01:02:25.820 give another example?
01:02:27.040 So here's
01:02:29.840 an example of why
01:02:31.100 virtue is important and why
01:02:32.960 we need to talk about it.
01:02:37.140 When was it?
01:02:37.960 Was it five years ago when
01:02:39.520 the 0.99
01:02:41.360 Islamic terrorists burst 1.00
01:02:43.760 into the offices 0.97
01:02:45.180 of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and
01:02:47.580 slaughtered the people 0.95
01:02:49.060 in 2015 thereabouts?
01:02:51.860 It was in January, I think.
01:02:54.760 And
01:02:55.040 And this is because Charlie Hebdo had published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad.
01:03:02.700 And I think one of them had, you know, had Muhammad with a turban and a bomb in it. 1.00
01:03:07.160 So, you know, Islam equals terrorism, that kind of thing. 1.00
01:03:11.080 And the murders were terrible. 0.97
01:03:14.560 They made me clear, completely unjustified.
01:03:17.800 And in the aftermath of that, you know, a lot of people were talking up, you know, freedom of speech.
01:03:22.100 I mean, Charlie Hebdo should have been allowed to do whatever they damn well please.
01:03:26.240 And if they want to publish stuff that Muslims find offensive, then let them do it. 1.00
01:03:34.260 And my reaction was, well, yes, but my view is that it's never right to say something or do something just to be offensive.
01:03:48.060 I mean, if there's a truth you want to speak
01:03:51.440 speak it
01:03:53.300 if it happens to be offensive, too bad
01:03:55.080 but it's the speaking of the truth
01:03:56.920 that's really what's important
01:03:58.200 you shouldn't, you know
01:04:00.200 getting people upset shouldn't be the point
01:04:02.100 and
01:04:04.240 so my view is
01:04:07.000 you know, spitting on other people's
01:04:09.500 sacred cows for the sake of seeing them
01:04:11.400 get upset is not something we should do
01:04:13.940 what did Charlie Hebdo think it was going to achieve
01:04:18.000 in publishing these cartoons.
01:04:20.400 Now, Charlie Hebdo is read by people of the left
01:04:24.060 who like iconograsm, particularly if it's anti-religious,
01:04:27.640 so it would please their customers.
01:04:31.040 But in terms of what's it going to achieve that's worthwhile,
01:04:36.000 it wasn't clear to me there was anything to be achieved,
01:04:39.000 particularly in the context where you know you're going to get Muslims upset. 1.00
01:04:43.740 Now, even if you don't agree with me on that,
01:04:45.560 the point is this.
01:04:47.380 Having the legal freedom to say something is one thing, and that's important.
01:04:52.860 The question of whether you should use that freedom or not is another question.
01:04:58.740 And to use that freedom responsibly, you have to have certain qualities of self-restraint.
01:05:07.380 You have to have certain qualities of intention.
01:05:09.540 I mean, what am I trying to achieve?
01:05:12.000 and we want citizens who are
01:05:16.700 capable of restraining themselves
01:05:18.760 from the temptation we all have
01:05:20.640 just to push in the other person's sensitive spot
01:05:23.340 because we like to hurt them and irritate them
01:05:25.600 we know, I enjoy that occasionally
01:05:27.640 but it doesn't really help folks
01:05:31.740 but we need citizens who are capable of self-restraint
01:05:35.500 and that's a matter of virtue
01:05:36.960 not a matter of rights
01:05:38.240 and we need training in that
01:05:41.000 We need institutions and heroes and parents who train us in those virtues.
01:05:49.780 So I'd say, in response to your question, we need to talk about virtue more.
01:05:52.720 Now, let me be clear.
01:05:54.640 I think all the qualities I've mentioned, I don't need to explain to them what they are or why they're good.
01:06:01.420 You recognize them.
01:06:02.960 So we all recognize these qualities are important, but we don't name them.
01:06:08.680 They're not skills.
01:06:09.660 They're virtues.
01:06:10.820 And I think the fact we don't talk about them means that we're not as self-conscious about cultivating them.
01:06:17.280 So it's not as if they're absent, but we're kind of tongue-tied.
01:06:21.300 And we need to stop being tongue-tied about virtue, I think.
01:06:23.660 So it sounds to me, Nigel, what you're really talking about there is morality, as is your job and your want to talk about.
01:06:31.580 And essentially what I'm hearing is for a healthy society, it's not enough for us just to have laws and to prosecute our rights under those laws.
01:06:39.480 we have to have a sense of what is the appropriate thing to do as well as what is the legal thing to
01:06:45.320 do yeah yeah yeah noticed notice that you use the word appropriate not right and again that's
01:06:52.940 something we we tend to talk about things being appropriate rather than or inappropriate rather
01:06:56.580 than right or wrong so that's that's part of the symptom of our kind of nervousness about talking
01:07:00.860 about moral things or virtues or duties but but just to get to your to your point um yeah the the
01:07:09.760 problem with depending more and more on law to keep us in order and i do think we're doing this
01:07:16.960 more and more uh is um uh partly that um
01:07:23.600 if the police are going to keep us in in in order then they have to become ever more intrusive
01:07:31.460 um and that means that our failure to discipline ourselves our need for the law to discipline us
01:07:38.440 means an ever growing state intrusiveness which is not a good idea at all um so i do think that
01:07:46.260 And civil society fostering moral virtues of self-restraint, of justice, of charity, humility, is enormously important.
01:08:00.240 And the state can't do that.
01:08:02.180 I mean, maybe it can through national curricula or whatever.
01:08:06.100 But in the end, these things are taught not by books or in classrooms.
01:08:11.940 They're taught by examples.
01:08:12.940 maybe they are taught in classrooms by the example of the teacher but it's the example
01:08:17.700 that is is attractive an honest courageous just charitable person is attractive and and kids and
01:08:27.300 employees see that and i think respond to it so we need to be be uh doing that more deliberately
01:08:34.900 and in order to be more deliberate about it we need to be willing to talk about it but at the
01:08:39.800 moment whereas we we talk very freely about rights we find it very difficult to talk about
01:08:44.540 virtues uh for reasons and i think historically we could find reasons for that uh and and as i
01:08:52.340 may have said earlier um you know we we think that because we're a plural society
01:08:58.320 we've got you know we've got conservatives and and and left-wingers we've got muslims and jews
01:09:06.140 and Christians, we've got atheists, because we're a plural society, we can't agree on 0.96
01:09:10.000 moral things. My view on that is, you know, we may not agree about abortion or about going
01:09:18.300 to war in Iraq, lots of things we don't agree about, but there are many things we do agree
01:09:22.560 about, and we all recognize what's necessary for comfortable, peaceful, non-conflictual
01:09:33.240 social life. And when I talk about these virtues to you, you don't need me to explain what they
01:09:40.200 are or why they're valuable. So I think, in fact, we agree with a whole lot more. We just think we
01:09:44.720 don't. So we just don't talk about it. And I think we do need to talk about it. So let's talk more
01:09:50.600 about virtue. Sounds great, Nigel. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate
01:09:55.500 it. I've enjoyed it. And I hope you've enjoyed it at home as well. And we'll see you very soon
01:09:59.760 with another brilliant episode or a live stream which are always at 7 p.m uk time thank you very
01:10:05.400 much and see you soon guys
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