TRIGGERnometry - September 27, 2020


Tom Holland on the Great Awokening

Topics
America's moral convulsions and cultural impact witch craze
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Francis Martin Luther King Thomas Guy Charles III Beautiful Noise Bloody Mary Augustine Colston Brexit Babbel Hitler Cathar Margaret Atwood Sweet Caroline Thomas Moore Tom Holland Castlereagh Smithfields Churchill Elizabeth and 10 more
＂Masculinity Isn't Toxic, Our View of Men Is＂ - Peter Lloyd ＂We Need to Move Beyond Race＂ - Iona Italia

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 4 minutes

Words per minute

153.84

Word count

9,901

Sentence count

413

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

34

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Our brilliant guest today is an author, historian, and presenter, Tom Holland. In this episode, we talk with Tom about his new book, Dominion, and why the Middle Ages were the most radical and transformative period in human history.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a show
00:00:40.660 for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our brilliant guest today
00:00:46.660 is an author historian and presenter tom holland welcome to trigonometry thank you very much for
00:00:51.260 having me it is great to have you here uh we're delighted that you've come but for anyone who
00:00:55.460 doesn't know you just give us a little overview of who are you how are you where you are what is
00:01:00.020 the journey that brings you to this chair uh sitting here on the podcast and we know you don't
00:01:04.780 listen to podcasts so it must be a very special experience yeah yeah it's a it's a journey of
00:01:09.900 discovery for me yes um i'm a historian i focus um very much on um antiquity early middle ages
00:01:17.320 and and that might seem to make me wildly unsuitable for a topical podcast but the degree
00:01:23.480 that I have anything topical to say. It's because I'm interested in the way that things that happened
00:01:28.120 in the deep past continue to reverberate into the present. So my most recent book, Dominion,
00:01:36.180 is a book in which I look at Christianity as the most radical and transformative product
00:01:42.700 of the Roman Empire. And I think that the trace elements of that revolution continue to shape
00:01:50.920 the way that we think and behave today. And that's why we're so delighted to have you on
00:01:56.660 the show, because whenever we've spoken to historians, you know, the idea that history
00:02:01.100 operates in cycles is obviously not a new thing. It's sort of a dogma almost. And it does seem like
00:02:06.380 the current moment, it's not the first time these sort of things have happened. So where are we on
00:02:13.100 the spiral of history, Tom? Well, that's a huge question to kick off with. That's why we've got
00:02:18.800 an hour. Yeah, okay. Well, so I think that, I mean, I don't think that there are kind of hard
00:02:24.300 and fast rules of history that you can extrapolate. But I think that if you look at certain cultures,
00:02:29.920 certain ways of behaving, you can kind of extrapolate rules in which those distinctive
00:02:34.380 cultures behave. And I think that the culture that we live in is one such. And I think that
00:02:39.520 the rhythms that it moved to were laid down essentially by Christianity. And at the heart
00:02:46.420 of Christianity is the idea, well, it's the idea of baptism, really. It's the idea of cleansing 1.00
00:02:51.080 yourself. And that obviously operates on the individual level. So the individual washes away
00:02:58.060 sin and is welcomed into the order of light. But what happened in the Western half of what had
00:03:06.400 been the Roman Empire, so Latin Christendom, as it's called, is that this becomes politicized.
00:03:12.100 And in the 11th century, the idea that the whole of society can be cleansed, can be washed, can be awakened to a new understanding, kind of becomes institutionalized.
00:03:24.340 And we may be tempted to think of the Middle Ages as a kind of hidebound reactionary age.
00:03:28.560 But in fact, it's the first great revolutionary age in European history, because the radicals, the revolutionaries are the people who will establish the papacy as the great revolutionary order and the cadres of people.
00:03:45.720 So whether it's people who are emerging in these radical new institutions that emerge in the 12th century called universities, whether it's the warriors convinced of their own rectitude who take the cross to the ends of the earth, Jerusalem, the Baltic, whatever people we now call crusaders, whether it's the people who compile whole new understandings of what law should be, institutionalizing radical new ideas such as human rights.
00:04:13.240 all of these are expressive of a desire to set the whole of society on a new and moral footing
00:04:21.760 that will be pleasing to God and it sets in chain a process by which this happens again and again
00:04:29.040 because of course what inevitably happens over the course of medieval history is that what in
00:04:33.080 the 11th century had seemed radical and new and fresh by the 16th century when Luther pops up 0.90
00:04:39.500 seems hidebound and reactionary. And so the Protestant Reformation, although it casts itself
00:04:46.780 as a reaction against the medieval papacy, in fact, is just another iteration of this desire
00:04:53.600 to cleanse and purify society. And the same thing happens in the 18th century with the Enlightenment.
00:05:00.000 Protestants had turned against the Catholic Church. In the Enlightenment, you get philosophes
00:05:04.260 French revolutionaries who turn against Christianity. And I think that these cycles
00:05:09.500 of people feeling that society needs to be cleansed, it needs to be washed, it needs to
00:05:15.760 be baptised anew has continued and continued and continued. And it's so much a part of the West's
00:05:22.740 cultural DNA that actually you don't need doctrinal Christianity to fuel it. And I think that what's
00:05:30.240 happening at the moment, therefore is just another iteration of these fundamentally very Christian 1.00
00:05:36.520 kind of impulses. And it's interesting that you say that we've got these fundamentally Christian
00:05:41.860 impulses, because when you look at certain things like the woke movement, it does appear to be a
00:05:47.240 sort of religion, doesn't it, where you have believers, you have non-believers, and the people
00:05:51.500 who are non-believers who tend to criticise it get treated like apostates, don't they?
00:05:55.740 Well, yes, American religiosity is quite culturally specific. It's one that originates in England. So there's a kind of Anglo-American model of Protestantism, which places a huge emphasis on the role of the spirit, kind of illuminating the soul and allowing you to see what previously you hadn't seen.
00:06:23.120 And these are called, again, they happen in cycles because you get awakened and then you fall to sleep and then you get awakened and you fall asleep.
00:06:32.460 So they're called the Great Awakening.
00:06:33.780 And historians of American religion trace them over a course of American history.
00:06:39.520 And so that's why people have called what's happening now the Great Awakening.
00:06:43.100 But it's a pun, but it's not entirely a joke because that's exactly what it is.
00:06:47.340 It's exactly the same kind of idea that you have to look into your soul,
00:06:51.940 recognize your sin, and awaken to a new order.
00:06:57.320 Specifically, what is happening, I think,
00:07:00.440 is bred of what happened in the 50s and 60s,
00:07:03.000 which was the last great overtly, doctrinally Christian period
00:07:07.240 of revolution and kind of moral reformation in America,
00:07:11.740 which was the civil rights movement.
00:07:12.960 And the civil rights movement was...
00:07:17.340 very clearly drew on the inheritance of American Christianity.
00:07:22.620 It's very biblically based.
00:07:24.560 So it's black Christians doing as they had done since the beginnings of American Protestant society 1.00
00:07:35.720 and looking at the stories of Exodus where God favours the slaves and rescues the slaves
00:07:41.780 and liberates them and leads them out of bondage to a promised land.
00:07:46.800 And the resonance of that for black Americans in the 50s, particularly in the South, was immense and believed literally.
00:07:56.600 And it fuels the kind of music, which then feeds into the music of the 60s.
00:08:02.460 So it's deriving from these kind of hymns, these traditions, this language of liberation.
00:08:09.820 but of course you know particularly the reverend Martin Luther King he's a he's a he's a clergyman
00:08:16.220 he's a Baptist clergyman and he is drawing absolutely on the kind of fundamental Christian
00:08:22.940 teaching that all human beings are created equally in the image of God and therefore are endowed with
00:08:29.580 a divine sense of dignity and that as Paul famously says you know there is no Jew or Greek
00:08:35.960 So therefore, there is no black or white.
00:08:37.980 So what Martin Luther King is doing is summoning white Americans to a consciousness that their black brothers and sisters should properly be their equal.
00:08:46.080 And the success of the civil rights movement is precisely that a majority of white American Christians accept the justice of what he's saying.
00:08:54.960 I mean, that's why the civil rights movement succeeds.
00:08:59.060 But what then happens in the 60s is that other groups of people kind of pick up on the success of what the civil rights movement has done.
00:09:10.600 Gay rights movement would be an obvious one. Feminism would be another. 0.98
00:09:14.440 And they're drawing on the same kind of impulses, the same assumption that is kind of hardwired into Christian discourse,
00:09:19.580 that the first will be last, that those who are oppressed have a value and a virtue by virtue of being oppressed.
00:09:28.100 All of these are kind of drawn upon. And that's why over the course of the decades that have followed, by and large, people have accepted the justice of what feminists or gay rights campaigners were saying in the 60s.
00:09:40.520 But for American Christians, it was problematic because there were huge, very, very deep traditions within doctrinal Christianity that opposed the idea of same-sex relations, were very committed to the idea that the man should be the head, that the man is Christ, the woman is the church.
00:10:06.060 And so what's happened since the 60s, really, is that American evangelicals have come to identify ever more strongly as Christians.
00:10:19.400 And those who, even though they are drawing on very, very Christian traditions, have come to see themselves as opposed to Christianity.
00:10:27.540 And so you get the situation now where you have campaigners who are very overtly see themselves as being very overtly anti-Christian.
00:10:36.060 But I think that that's kind of an illusion.
00:10:38.360 I mean, what's happening at the moment is a civil war within Christianity.
00:10:43.840 It's a civil war within different factions of the kind that has plagued Christianity over the course of its existence.
00:10:53.700 So I think that to that extent, what we're witnessing is nothing particularly new.
00:11:00.920 It is fascinating that you say that.
00:11:02.540 It seems to be a war within Christianity
00:11:03.980 because one of the things that I've seemed to notice,
00:11:07.040 and lots of people have said this as well,
00:11:08.760 is that these people, although they may be overtly Christian
00:11:11.940 in some of their values,
00:11:12.920 they don't tend to believe in forgiveness all that much, do they?
00:11:16.860 Well, there are certainly things that have followed on
00:11:23.500 from the fact that, well, what should we say, the woke,
00:11:28.460 the awoken, do not see themselves as Christian,
00:11:32.260 see themselves as having emancipated themselves from Christianity. 0.98
00:11:36.000 Because there are certain impulses, I think, within human nature
00:11:42.120 that Christianity has served to kind of bit and bridle. 0.95
00:11:45.500 And one of them actually is the category of original sin,
00:11:50.420 which I think ties into what you were alluding to.
00:11:53.080 Original sin is absolutely the category that people in the 60s,
00:11:56.760 you know who who came to reject christianity really hated you know it was everything the
00:12:01.520 hippies were not about the idea that we're all infected by sin because adam and eve fell
00:12:05.740 you know absolute no no and so it came to seem you know in the tune with the the 60s spirit
00:12:14.420 progressive spirit um that we're all born free um we're not born with original sin and and that
00:12:21.900 seems, you know, I mean, who wouldn't want to sign up to that? But I think that we now see
00:12:27.540 the implications of that, because it turns out that original sin is a very democratic
00:12:33.540 doctrine, because it means that we're all sinners. We've all got fault. And one of the issues,
00:12:40.560 I think, with what's happening is that there are large numbers of people who don't feel that
00:12:46.620 they're sinners, who feel that they're liberated. And ultimately, this goes back to, and you
00:12:53.160 see, this is why I love ancient history. It goes back to the fifth century AD. Of course
00:12:59.540 it does. And it goes back to an argument between two theologians, Pelagius, who was this great
00:13:05.760 burly Briton, the very first British intellectual that we know of, who argued that it was possible
00:13:13.400 for Christians to become perfect through their own agency. So you could, you know, if you're 0.77
00:13:19.420 sufficiently virtuous, you can attain heaven through your own agency. And against this,
00:13:26.160 you have Augustine, this kind of glowering, brilliant North African bishop who says,
00:13:33.840 no, we are all saturated in sin. We're steeped in sin. We cannot get to heaven through our own
00:13:39.580 agency. We depend on the grace of God because we're all sinners. And it's Augustine's doctrine
00:13:45.300 that wins out. Pelagius becomes a heretic. And the 60s is a Pelagian movement because it's saying,
00:13:54.420 we can become perfect. This is the age of Aquarius. We can become virtuous through our
00:14:01.720 own agency. And I think that the Great Awakening is a Pelagian movement. It feels that it is
00:14:09.480 possible for people to become virtuous and become perfect but the the problem with that for for is
00:14:15.640 that if you are convinced of your own virtue if you're convinced of your own rectitude and you
00:14:21.600 are convinced that it is possible to become perfect then that means that you are in a position
00:14:27.000 to sit in moral judgment on those who haven't and i think that that that is what um
00:14:33.420 And that's what a lot of people who find a certain quality of moral self-satisfaction in the awokened,
00:14:49.020 I think that that's what they feel.
00:14:50.220 And I think that what they're feeling, what they're reacting to is the Pelagian quality of it. 0.64
00:14:54.400 They're Augustinian without knowing it. 0.93
00:14:56.240 Well, the other problem, of course, and you make a great point,
00:14:58.740 And the other problem, of course, with that mindset is that anyone who has failed to become
00:15:03.400 perfect is therefore not ordinarily human, but actually is morally deficient in some
00:15:09.560 way.
00:15:10.020 Yes, absolutely.
00:15:10.320 That's another factor.
00:15:11.520 But look, Francis and I have expressed a lot of concerns about what we've described here
00:15:16.560 as the woke movement.
00:15:17.780 Woke people might say that being described as woke is a sort of slanderous term that
00:15:23.300 it's inappropriately applied.
00:15:24.800 And I wanted to put the counterpoint to playing devil's advocate somewhat. You've charted the historical context of all of this all the way from the papacy in the 11th century, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and so on. These are all, you know, great strides in human history.
00:15:42.600 Even the French Revolution, massive bloodbath, does end feudalism and we move into a sort of new world that we're all happy to live in.
00:15:51.200 So are we sort of, are me, Francis, and everyone else who sort of opposes the woke stuff,
00:15:56.300 are we these crusty old, you know, minor nobles in pre-revolutionary France who are sort of about to witness our own demise and that's why we hate it?
00:16:07.520 Is that where we are?
00:16:08.220 I mean, lurking behind this is the idea of progress and moral progress, so progressivism.
00:16:16.660 And people very rarely stop to think, well, you know, why do we have this idea?
00:16:21.380 Why do we assume that there's some kind of moral arc that's going forwards?
00:16:25.340 It's very hardwired.
00:16:26.320 Well, I would say, and you'll correct me, no doubt, very shortly, but I would say it's because as we look into the last millennium, that's what we've seen.
00:16:36.400 As we look at the last two millennia, broadly speaking, that's what we've seen.
00:16:41.440 But, I mean, we can talk about technical progress, but the idea of moral progress, you know, where does that come from?
00:16:49.140 Why do we now think that, say, slavery is wrong or whatever?
00:16:55.220 And again, it fundamentally comes down to Christian theology.
00:17:00.900 And this is the weird thing.
00:17:02.220 You know, I really didn't begin with any particular interest in Christianity.
00:17:05.120 I had no particular interest in theology, and the kind of dawning realisation, looking at the classical world, the pre-Christian world, contemplating how different it was, how strange, how many assumptions they had that seemed totally alien to me.
00:17:18.840 And I said, where do these ideas come from?
00:17:21.020 And always, it's kind of like trying to find an itch on your back, and then you get to it and you scratch it, it's so good.
00:17:26.840 That's kind of what it's like, is that strange theological ideas that cropped up centuries, often millennia ago, continue to reverberate through.
00:17:38.500 It's like, I think it was at Keynes who said that people who think they've got radical new ideas are always in hock to some defunct economist.
00:17:45.880 Well, our society, we're in hock to some defunct theologian, invariably.
00:17:50.920 and and the idea of progress lies in the notion that is um basically goes all the way back to
00:17:56.720 paul that there is a law of god and for the jews the law of god is written you know on the tablets
00:18:02.480 uh that got given to moses that in turn got given to the children of israel paul says no actually
00:18:08.040 the law of god is written on the heart and how do we know what that law of god is well the spirit
00:18:13.760 illumines it and enables us to read it and the further corollary of that is that the more we read
00:18:19.440 it, the better we become at understanding what it is. And in turn, unlike, say, Islam, which inherits 1.00
00:18:29.840 from the Jews the idea that you have a mass body of law that comes directly from God and therefore 0.77
00:18:37.860 kind of is eternally expand. Christians have always thought that the law is illumined by the
00:18:44.260 spirit therefore humans can legitimately author that and law itself will become progressive
00:18:50.400 because over the course of time human understanding of um of of what god's law is will become better
00:18:57.600 and better and better the rules can change yeah and improve and improve is the point yeah it's
00:19:03.020 improve is the point yes so so slavery is the obvious example so people always say well you
00:19:09.180 You know, why did it take so long for Christians to decide to get rid of slavery, that slavery was wrong?
00:19:15.780 I mean, Christians always thought slavery was wrong, but in the same way that they thought kind of disease or poverty was wrong.
00:19:22.180 But they just kind of assumed that it was part of what it is to be mortal.
00:19:26.640 It's part of the inheritance of the fall.
00:19:29.700 But what happened in the 18th century was that, again, we talked about these very distinctive Protestant idea,
00:19:35.220 understanding of the spirit, which is that you read the text of scripture, the spirit illumines
00:19:40.800 you, and your understanding of what is written there will transcend the kind of the base meaning.
00:19:49.960 So the Bible nowhere says get rid of slavery, nowhere says slavery as an institution should
00:19:55.940 be abolished. But Christians from that Protestant tradition read the scriptures and came to the 0.98
00:20:03.060 conclusion that slavery was evil. And they did that chiefly because they were living in societies
00:20:09.700 that had pushed the institution of slavery to a kind of hideously mechanised degree.
00:20:17.640 So you could put up with slavery where it was two or three people in a village or something,
00:20:25.220 But where you've got institutionalized mass torture and transportation, the horror of it began to percolate through and to stimulate the consciences of people who were witnessing it.
00:20:39.740 And furthermore, on top of that, it became racialized because slavery previously hadn't been racialized.
00:20:45.980 You know, there were lots of white slaves in the early days of the colonies in America.
00:20:49.280 But increasingly, because slaves came to be exclusively from African, that also served to unsettle the consciences of white Christians, because they knew that, you know, they tried to kind of manufacture reasons why Africans should be enslaved and Europeans should be the masters, but they couldn't really do it.
00:21:10.660 And so the strain of that ultimately enabled first Quakers and then evangelicals to convince themselves that God was against slavery, and then having done that, to agitate and push for its abolition.
00:21:27.520 And the abolitionist movement really is the model for every socially concerned progressive movement that has followed since.
00:21:36.120 It kind of, you know, in 1814, mass agitation across Britain forced the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, at the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, to go there.
00:21:50.260 And even though he didn't want to do it, it was kind of like Theresa May having to go and argue for Brexit, even though she didn't want to do it.
00:21:55.380 She had to, same way Castlereagh had to, because he had this mass agitation going on behind him in London and across the country, to go and ask all the other powers, we've got to get rid of slavery. 0.98
00:22:05.460 You know, you've got to sign up to it. And, you know, that's kind of the model.
00:22:11.440 And which of us would want to live in a world where slavery was morally acceptable?
00:22:15.440 So, you know, it's... But at the same time, there is a kind of temptation, I suppose,
00:22:23.300 where you can end up being in love with your own feeling of virtue.
00:22:28.080 And that is also, you know, that's a temptation, I think, that people who are pushing progressive causes always have to be alert to.
00:22:37.100 And that's something that Christians historically have always been aware.
00:22:40.720 They've always contemplated that they might be sinners themselves, that to be overly convinced of your own virtue is in itself, you know, to cease to be virtuous.
00:22:51.100 And I think that the collapse of doctrinal Christianity, the retreat of overt belief, the collapse of doctrines like original sin, have kind of bred perhaps a degree of moral overconfidence on the part of people who feel that they are furthering progressive causes.
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00:23:26.940 It can feel really awkward, a little bit like Francis talking to a woman. 0.95
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00:24:35.140 I guess what I'm really getting at, Tom,
00:24:37.980 when I said,
00:24:39.360 are we opposing this great progressive movement
00:24:42.200 that's going to change the world for the better,
00:24:43.820 is is there such a thing as too much progress i mean i would argue that in the soviet union
00:24:50.900 the the creation of the soviet union was in some ways inspired by very progressive ideas
00:24:57.420 about equality about emancipation of women actually it was very progressive on that front
00:25:02.780 for uh for its time but it ended up being we know what right so can you have too much progress
00:25:10.880 Well, it depends what your starting assumptions are.
00:25:14.860 I mean, to the Romans, the idea that men shouldn't be dominant over women, that Romans shouldn't rule and barbarians be subordinate would have seemed grotesque.
00:25:31.060 We are the heirs of very different moral assumptions.
00:25:36.200 but by and large the things that we tend to take for granted
00:25:43.920 that we just assume are right because it seems self-evident that they're right
00:25:48.020 is because we are the heirs of 2,000 years of Christian teachings on this
00:25:54.540 and this was kind of famously, notoriously pointed out by Nietzsche
00:25:59.040 who detested Christianity because he, you know, unlike most atheists today 1.00
00:26:06.600 who tend to identify themselves with progressive causes,
00:26:13.180 Nietzsche detested Christianity because of its moral teachings.
00:26:18.360 He thought that Christianity had kind of gelded and impaired the blonde beast, 0.99
00:26:25.280 that the power and the beauty and the strength and the potency of the strong had been neutered by Christianity,
00:26:35.840 that by elevating the weak, by kind of putting the slave above the master, society had been ruined and destroyed.
00:26:45.680 And that was a perspective that enabled Nietzsche to see that socialists, communists, humanists, progressives, all of them, basically, even though they may say that they were reacting against Christianity, in their fundamentals were deeply Christian.
00:27:05.580 And Tom, we seem to have got into this habit, I mean, you touched on it when you were speaking
00:27:10.320 there, of judging historical figures on present-day values. And I would just like to explore with
00:27:17.700 you, why is that? Why do we suddenly feel the need to look at people like Churchill or Gandhi
00:27:22.720 and go, you know, he's racist, even though they lived 60, 70, 80 years ago, and obviously society
00:27:29.160 at that point was completely different because well because we have a progressive sense of
00:27:34.820 morality we have a sense that that things move forwards and so our sense of what is right
00:27:40.020 feels different to to the moral standards that people held you know i mean not just kind of
00:27:46.160 you know 80 years ago but kind of like two years ago in many cases um and i think that um
00:27:53.440 And on top of that, there is there that there's a there's a kind of again, it goes back to the the the kind of the the the reluctance to accept that everyone has imperfections.
00:28:11.260 You know, no one is perfect and there is no one who is who is going to be morally impeachable.
00:28:19.040 And I think that it's kind of those two impulses have kind of snarled up and mean that there's a huge temptation to sit in moral judgment of people of previous generations.
00:28:30.560 And it's something that really kind of, again, kicked in in the 60s, where, you know, the long haired teenagers would sit in moral judgment on the parents who'd won the Second World War.
00:28:41.680 you know i mean and and and we you know we've all done that you know that's that's what becoming a
00:28:47.060 teenager was teenagers like that didn't really exist before the 60s so we've all been teenagers
00:28:51.980 in that society we know what fun it is to sit in judgment on our parents and to regard them as you
00:28:58.100 know square and whatever uh and it's just the kind of acceleration of that process but isn't it
00:29:04.720 doesn't it belie a certain kind of arrogance because the reality is that in 100 200 years
00:29:08.980 time that you know future generations will look at what we do in abject horror you know the fact
00:29:13.720 that a lot of our clothes are made in the third world made by people who have paid an absolute 0.99
00:29:18.580 pittance we factory farmed meat and all the rest of it yes i think that the risk of hypocrisy
00:29:25.340 is enormous and again that's always been that's always been the problem with christianity is that
00:29:32.420 is that the threat of hypocrisy is always there.
00:29:37.800 So, you know, there's a campaign to get rid of the statue of Thomas Guy,
00:29:44.620 who founded Guy's Hospital.
00:29:46.640 Sounds like an absolutely dreadful human being. 0.94
00:29:48.940 Yes.
00:29:49.580 So he ploughed his money into a hospital.
00:29:54.520 He was very committed to the idea of public health at a time
00:29:56.960 when obviously there wasn't a National Health Service or anything like that.
00:29:59.460 But he had investments that were in the South Sea Company and the South Sea Company in turn invested money in slavery.
00:30:09.220 So. There are today, and I know because I've seen them, people who, when statues get toppled, take photos on their iPhones or film it on their iPhones.
00:30:24.380 And Apple has been accused of benefiting from the slavery of the Uyghurs in China. 1.00
00:30:34.820 It seems to me exactly the same.
00:30:37.020 The risk is, it seems, you know, the nature of the world that we live in, the insidious character of capitalism,
00:30:45.440 means that it's almost impossible to do something that is not in some way complicit in the oppression
00:30:53.020 and the enslavement of people who are less fortunate than us, which is exactly what Thomas Guy did.
00:30:59.760 Thomas Guy made money indisputably from a form of capitalism that we would now regard as morally
00:31:07.060 unacceptable, but he plowed it back into something that continues to benefit people to this day.
00:31:13.260 And I think that we should allow his statue to stand because, in a way, his example, the example of someone who was complicit in capitalism, gives us the reassurance that you can do that but still achieve noble things that continue to echo into the present day.
00:31:35.660 I think that not to do that risks blinding our eyes to the way that we are all. We live in a first world country. We are unbelievably privileged by the standards of Uyghurs, of people whose lives are being turned up by the need to mine obscure metals or products in Africa or wherever.
00:32:02.600 we are all therefore complicit we know the comfortable lives that we lead we are implicated
00:32:10.520 in the exploitation and the oppression that enables us to lead our lives and to go on our
00:32:17.340 phones and to send out campaigning tweets going on about how virtuous we are we need to remember
00:32:23.320 and i think that that is you know that's what i find uh in a way you know i've become a big
00:32:29.460 I've become a big fan of the idea of original sin.
00:32:32.460 I think the idea that we are all morally complicit,
00:32:35.180 we're all morally stained, we've all got to be aware of that,
00:32:38.340 is an incredible, powerful idea.
00:32:41.300 And isn't it the problem as well, is that a lot of people in this country,
00:32:44.940 because of our education system, also in places like the United States,
00:32:48.480 we are historically illiterate.
00:32:50.660 We don't know enough about these subjects that we talk about.
00:32:53.100 So we talk about slavery, and it tends to be,
00:32:55.740 oh, it was the British who invented slavery. 1.00
00:32:58.380 You know, oh, it was a British empire.
00:33:00.080 They were the only ones that did slavery.
00:33:02.060 When the reality is, is that, I've said this before on the podcast,
00:33:05.160 but if you wanted to get anything done at one point, you needed slaves.
00:33:09.000 Yes.
00:33:09.700 I mean, I think that there's a kind of, it's not so much historical literacy as solipsism.
00:33:18.460 It's an absolute preoccupation with us, with our society.
00:33:23.460 Um, so nobody, um, nobody doubts that, um, an innocent man dying at the hands of a policeman is a crime.
00:33:37.540 um but is it as is it so terrible that the response it generates should necessarily be
00:33:50.300 greater than say the sufferings of a people like the azidis and i i went to to iraq in um
00:34:00.100 2016 and visited sites where men had been crucified, where women had been enslaved or shot
00:34:12.140 and went to a refugee camp and spoke to a guy who had been away when ISIS turned up and took
00:34:20.660 two of his sons, two of his daughters and his wife. And he said, you know, his daughters were
00:34:28.300 still owned at that time and slave you know they were kind of nine and eleven i think so he knew
00:34:35.600 that they were kind of being raped every day um his sons had had been indoctrinated so again they 0.87
00:34:43.900 were very young they would grow up um convinced that it was right to exterminate him to shoot him 0.96
00:34:49.820 you know so he'd lost them completely um his wife had been raped um by her owner uh then the owner 0.94
00:34:58.100 had shot her through the head, hadn't killed her, but had left her terribly damaged. So through a 0.57
00:35:07.220 series of middlemen, he'd managed to buy her back. And as I was talking to him, his wife was behind
00:35:11.860 a curtain moaning and beating her head against the concrete floor. Now that's a level of suffering. 0.74
00:35:16.500 I had never experienced, I'd never been up close against anyone who'd suffered anything like that.
00:35:26.080 And I said to him, we were making a film about it,
00:35:30.360 and I thought that maybe the film would have an impact,
00:35:33.240 raise the profile of this.
00:35:34.280 And I said, I really hope that this film will have an impact.
00:35:37.700 And he said, I don't think anyone's going to care.
00:35:39.600 And I said, I really think it will,
00:35:41.100 because what you've been through, what your people have been through,
00:35:43.420 is just shocking and terrible.
00:35:45.340 And I just don't think that people know.
00:35:47.100 He said they don't know because they don't care.
00:35:48.760 You've got Muslims in Britain, 1.00
00:35:51.380 and Muslims will make the case for Muslim suffering. 1.00
00:35:55.040 You have Christians in Britain and Christians in Britain 1.00
00:35:58.220 will make the case for the suffering of Christians in the Middle East.
00:36:00.940 But there are no Yazidis.
00:36:02.420 Nobody cares about us.
00:36:03.920 And he was right.
00:36:05.640 He was right.
00:36:06.320 We don't really care.
00:36:07.500 We can't bear too much reality.
00:36:09.260 We can cope with the suffering of people who are basically like us.
00:36:13.860 So this is what we're really talking about then
00:36:16.700 is self-flagellation on a national scale.
00:36:21.660 I think that...
00:36:25.040 I guess that Black Lives Matter kicked in, as with Me Too movement, because these are things that we in our society perhaps can affect.
00:36:38.020 so so that's the but but the risk is is that we um
00:36:43.500 we come to see them somehow as being um more terrible than they are more significant than
00:36:55.340 they are because in a way that then dignifies us it keeps us center stage it keeps us as the focus
00:37:02.500 It's all about us. And that's, I think, particularly true with America, because America is, you know, it's the great cultural hub of the world. So what happens in America reverberates in a way that it doesn't with other countries. So there's a kind of moral imperialism about it. You know, a dead American matters a million times more than a dead Yazidi. 0.71
00:37:29.300 and and why do you think that is is it just the fact that we connect with them because
00:37:35.880 they're very similar to us they speak the same language etc etc or is it also as well because
00:37:41.040 when we look at america we're instantly reminded of our own childhood experiences the films
00:37:47.040 you know the clothing the propaganda whatever it whatever else it may be yeah i think i think that
00:37:52.940 um i mean i think a crucial part of it i think i think all that's true and i think that
00:37:59.280 that speaking English means that you are always being kind of tugged along
00:38:08.600 in the wake of America's psychodramas.
00:38:12.280 And a huge part of the impact of America's moral convulsions,
00:38:21.180 you know, from the 60s right the way up to the present day,
00:38:23.900 is a kind of cultural cringe on the part of Britain.
00:38:27.140 You know, we kind of want to be like America.
00:38:30.760 So, you know, you'll get people here talking about the feds.
00:38:34.720 I mean, it's kind of embarrassing.
00:38:37.880 It's kind of embarrassing.
00:38:40.220 And, you know, and here when we talk about the police, you know,
00:38:45.620 there seems almost a kind of disappointment that there are more armed police
00:38:53.380 in the streets of Britain.
00:38:55.480 And it's kind of the difference between Route 66 and the A303. British life is somehow less glamorous. It's smaller. And the moral causes in America are kind of more dramatic.
00:39:11.280 And I think that that means that ironically, considering how very opposed to American cultural imperialism people on the left are, at the moment, they seem the most colonized by America.
00:39:30.840 Yeah. And what does, if we look through history, which is your job, what does history tell us about not only the present, but also the future of where we are?
00:39:45.920 Well, it doesn't tell us because there are kind of hard and fast rules that we follow through.
00:39:55.280 Have you ever read Asimov's Foundation series, science fiction series, where this guy is able to extrapolate hard and fast rules and work out exactly what's going to happen?
00:40:06.940 And even then it gets messed up because you get this mutant who turns up and screws everything up.
00:40:12.380 But obviously you can trace patterns.
00:40:15.300 And so what I would say about the present is that looking specifically at the awoken, you know, do we have an awoken future or will the forces of reaction kick in?
00:40:34.300 You know, what's going to happen?
00:40:37.880 I think that helpfully or unhelpfully, there are two possible paradigms there.
00:40:42.800 And one is the process that happened in the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation, because what happened in the Protestant Reformation was that various, by the standards of early 16th century Catholic England, various radicals seized control of the commanding heights of power in government and particularly in the universities.
00:41:08.480 And although there was indeed a kind of incredible force of reaction, say Mary's reign, Bloody Mary, where Protestants got burnt at Smithfields and so on, that got overturned.
00:41:20.960 And by the end of the 16th century, the end of Elizabeth's reign, Protestantism had completely bedded in.
00:41:27.660 The universities were completely, everyone in the university essentially was Protestant.
00:41:33.740 um you know the poets the thinkers um the politicians um the commanding heights were
00:41:41.420 completely protestant and from that point on england was basically irrevocably protestant
00:41:46.220 the commanding heights had been captured against that protestantism in england had its extremes
00:41:53.900 and the extreme that the people always know is the puritans and puritans ended up feeling that you
00:42:02.520 You know, it was a movement that ended up peaking and then fading and kind of dissolving into the cultural mainstream.
00:42:11.820 There aren't any Puritans now. There are Puritan elements, perhaps.
00:42:15.520 So I suppose the question is, you know, is the movements that we've seen over this decade,
00:42:22.820 is it an equivalent of the Protestant Reformation, in which case the whole of society will be reconfigured?
00:42:28.040 And we're just at the start of it. And people who grumble about the woke are the equivalent of, you know, Thomas More, you know, or are they the equivalent of the Puritans?
00:42:39.340 Are they a kind of spike of something that is more broadly a trend that will peak and then fade down? And I don't know the answer to that.
00:42:47.560 And Tom, you mentioned the Puritans, and obviously you said there's no more Puritans,
00:42:53.540 but amongst this new awoken movement, as you call it,
00:42:56.680 surely there's shades of Puritanism in there.
00:42:59.460 Completely, yes.
00:43:00.620 And I think that's another reason why Britain is particularly susceptible
00:43:05.760 to the kind of moral impulses in America, the moral revolutions in America,
00:43:12.220 Because ultimately, the American moral perspectives, dramas, mythology, if you like, is ultimately comes from England.
00:43:24.280 And there are two kind of main sources. One of them is the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the other is the Puritans in New England.
00:43:34.280 And those are, you know, they still reverberate very, very strongly. And it leads to all kinds of paradoxes.
00:43:41.040 so that um there's much to admire about puritanism it's become a dirty word but there's much to
00:43:49.300 to admire about it and for instance um something we haven't talked about quite as much as black
00:43:55.080 lives matter but the me too movement um the me too movement is founded on the idea that um
00:44:01.960 every woman has the right to control her body that her body is hers to do with as she wishes 1.00
00:44:08.940 and that no man has the right to kind of use it as a physical object.
00:44:14.860 And that, in turn, requires men to exercise self-control.
00:44:21.680 And this is something that Puritans were very into.
00:44:25.180 Puritans were not opposed to sex.
00:44:27.280 They were very into marital sex.
00:44:30.000 I mean, very into it.
00:44:31.520 So they were against sex?
00:44:34.440 No, absolutely not.
00:44:37.640 I mean, they were very keen on finding ways to keep the juices flowing to a long and happy married life.
00:44:46.320 Oh, really?
00:44:46.920 Yes. In ways that, you know, are often quite, you know, look at Paradise Lost and Milton's account of Adam and Eve in that.
00:44:54.560 It's, you know, it's quite juicy.
00:44:59.420 But what they were against was the idea that predatory men should have the right to, you know, essentially use women as they wanted.
00:45:07.100 And in the wake of the protectorate, defeat of Cromwell, death of Cromwell, overthrow of the protectorate, return of Charles II.
00:45:17.180 Charles II is a merry monarch. He comes with the Cavaliers.
00:45:19.640 The whole thing about Charles II is he has sex with everyone and all the Cavaliers have sex with everyone. 1.00
00:45:24.000 And it's a kind of rape culture. And Puritanism stands against that. 0.99
00:45:28.860 um now what happened in the 60s was a kind of repudiation of of that christian idea that that
00:45:38.780 that um that men should necessarily not touch women and so you have this great festival of sex 0.87
00:45:45.860 of which you know so you have groupies you have rolling stone sleeping with underage groupies and
00:45:49.880 it's all tremendously cool um and it it there's a kind of licensing a kind of sexual license
00:45:57.920 but the me too movement was a massive reaction against that and it was a slamming of the brakes
00:46:04.160 and it was a return essentially to the puritan idea that men should properly exercise continence
00:46:10.340 and and self-control when it came to their relations with women and what was fascinating
00:46:14.740 about that was that america and indeed england remained sufficiently puritan that most men
00:46:21.740 accepted the justice of that it kind of got enshrined as you know got the whole reason that
00:46:26.840 it had resonance was it wasn't just that women bought into it men did as well now the the brilliant
00:46:33.340 the kind of the moebius strip that we inhabit at the moment in our relationship with this this
00:46:37.940 christian inheritance is exemplified by the fact that when you had all the women's marches 0.97
00:46:42.500 i think in the kind of the first was it um 26 2016 2017 it was the kind of the first
00:46:50.440 post trump yeah so it's trump's after trump's inauguration um the most dramatic uh demonstrators
00:46:58.900 the ones that really stuck out kind of blaze of color were women wearing red robes and white 1.00
00:47:06.200 headdresses like handmaids from the drama series of margaret atwood's novel the handmaid's tale
00:47:13.980 which was a kind of riff on New England Puritanism.
00:47:20.400 So they were dressing up in the costumes of characters
00:47:26.140 from a parody of Puritanism to demand that Puritanism be reinstated.
00:47:31.440 And that's kind of where we are at the moment,
00:47:34.840 is that we, societally, we have an incredibly conflicted relationship to this.
00:47:39.000 I think because we've forgotten the theological underpinnings of what it is and why it is that we think the way we do.
00:47:48.060 So there's a kind of moral free-for-all.
00:47:51.460 So let's say you flick a switch, you, Tom Holland, flick the great switch of human civilization,
00:47:58.200 and everyone suddenly becomes aware of this inheritance.
00:48:02.260 What would happen, and what would that look like?
00:48:07.020 What is it that we need to learn?
00:48:08.700 Okay, so I think that, you know, another interesting question is
00:48:13.760 why do we no longer need, why do we think we no longer need
00:48:17.040 this Christian inheritance?
00:48:18.900 You know, doctrinal Christianity has fallen off a cliff,
00:48:24.080 first in Europe, now increasingly in America.
00:48:26.920 And it happened in the 60s, very precipitately.
00:48:29.980 Suddenly people stopped going to church.
00:48:31.420 People stopped believing this stuff.
00:48:34.340 And the decline has gone on, not in the rest of the world,
00:48:37.660 But in Europe and increasingly in America, people just aren't interested in Christianity at all.
00:48:43.180 And I think that one of the major reasons for this is that it happens in the wake of the Second World War and the Nazis and the discovery of the Holocaust. 0.62
00:48:55.920 and again the question that that that perhaps is not often asked is and i'm aware that this
00:49:06.140 could be cut out and used what was so wrong about the nazis that's the title of the episode guys
00:49:12.660 i was gonna i was gonna say the only way this could have been worse if you'd said
00:49:16.200 the call of course which some people say happened so so so the the essentially so the nazis um unlike
00:49:25.960 say the french revolutionaries or the russian revolutionaries that they were the first the
00:49:31.040 fascists so muslimian but particularly hitler were the first um european regimes to repudiate not 0.65
00:49:39.120 just doctrinal christianity but the moral fundamentals of christianity and the nazis
00:49:43.960 trampled down two kind of the the the two animating moral animating principles of christianity
00:49:52.060 the first the idea that um the weak have a purchase on the strong you know exemplified by
00:50:00.020 the figure of christ on the cross the cross is an emblem of roman imperial power but it's it's not
00:50:05.900 the the torturer it's the man who's getting tortured it's not the master it's the slave
00:50:11.240 And so this idea that the weak, the oppressed, the suffering kind of are closer to God than the powerful is something very fundamental Christianity.
00:50:21.500 It's there very clearly in the French Revolution. It's there very clearly in the Russian Revolution.
00:50:25.260 Nazis completely repudiate that. They're with Nietzsche. They think this is contemptible and terrible.
00:50:31.480 And the other thing, of course, is this Pauline teaching that there is no Jew or Greek.
00:50:35.140 Nazis completely think that Jews and Greeks are very very different and indeed that the Jews have
00:50:41.440 to be destroyed so that they can't infect the Greeks so just to just to pause you there to 1.00
00:50:45.940 convert that into simple language the core tenets of Christianity is that all men are created equal
00:50:51.320 more or less yeah and that the you you want to overthrow the structures of oppression to use
00:50:58.080 modern language as yeah as opposed to creating a structure of oppression that is meritocratic
00:51:03.540 Like, quote, unquote, I'm putting in quotes.
00:51:04.820 Where the strong have the whip hand over the weak.
00:51:06.040 Exactly.
00:51:06.840 Whereas the Nazis, they overthrow both of those.
00:51:09.560 They say some people are better than others,
00:51:11.580 and those that are better should rule over the weak.
00:51:14.640 Yeah, and the Nazis don't do this because they wake up and think,
00:51:17.640 let's be evil.
00:51:18.760 They do this because they think it's the right thing to do.
00:51:20.280 Yeah.
00:51:20.700 For the German people, for the Nordic people, the Aryan people.
00:51:24.560 This is the right thing to do.
00:51:26.320 Now, so that experiment implodes horribly.
00:51:29.600 um and the western world has to live with the shock which which reverberates because of the
00:51:39.160 discovery of what they've been doing in the death camps and the impact of this which really starts
00:51:45.740 to kick in in the 60s again and everything happens in the 60s it's the great fulcrum point it's the
00:51:50.860 great revolutionary turning point um what what what happens is that um whereas previously people
00:51:58.860 would say well what would jesus do and then do it they we don't need that anymore because now we
00:52:04.040 ask what would hitler do and we do the opposite so it's still christian that's because we we regard
00:52:10.600 hitler as satan we regard the nazis as the devils for christian reasons because they trample down
00:52:17.580 christian moral codes but we don't need christianity anymore we've got hitler we've got 0.98
00:52:22.660 the Nazis. And that has been a constant, really since the 60s, that, you know, fascist, Hitler, 0.88
00:52:32.500 Nazi, is the ultimate insult. And so it remains to this day. You know, so essentially, I think 0.52
00:52:46.480 that, say, what's happening in America at the moment, there's a moral panic on the part of
00:52:56.300 the right. And people can recognize that as moral panic, because we know that Christians do moral
00:53:01.660 panic. That's what they always do. But there's a moral panic on the left as well. And it's basically
00:53:07.560 it's the same, because their moral panic is that everyone is a Nazi. So what's the right's moral
00:53:14.680 panic well the right's moral panic is that you know um order is going down the pan and um people
00:53:20.480 aren't doing what they should the revolution is upon us yeah the revolution is upon us and you
00:53:24.500 know we need to retrench and everything you know it's all terrible but but but the left's moral
00:53:28.960 panic or the hard left's moral panic is that um is is is that literally nazis are waiting to take
00:53:36.120 over the country i mean it's the same here i mean people saying boris johnson is a nazi
00:53:41.040 you know he's not he's you know he's awful in all kinds of ways but he's clearly not a nazi
00:53:46.380 and you know you've got you've got you've got people roaming american streets and people are
00:53:52.840 dying and people are celebrating say i'm not going to mourn the death of a fascist um there are no
00:53:59.460 fascists exactly as there were no witches yeah exactly as as actually there weren't any kind of
00:54:07.640 They weren't Cathar heretics. The whole thing was kind of manufactured. 0.96
00:54:13.300 And you get these again and again through Christian history, you get this conviction that you get kind of university educated progressive elites who get ahead of the vast mass of the people.
00:54:31.840 So it happens in the 13th century. University-educated clerics have a progressive, intellectually demanding understanding of what being a Christian should be about.
00:54:45.400 And they come to see the left behind, the peasants, the people who live out in the country around Albie, as deplorables.
00:54:56.900 And they come to think that these are people who are worshipping some dualist god.
00:55:01.840 They construct it completely.
00:55:03.200 You know, there was no Cathar heresy.
00:55:05.100 It was complete invention of the Inquisitors.
00:55:08.680 But, you know, you look for it and you find it.
00:55:10.800 Same with the witch craze. 0.83
00:55:11.940 You know, there were no witches, but brilliantly educated, highly educated people, progressive Protestants looked around,
00:55:19.380 saw that there were people who were still clinging on to kind of what they saw as antiquated modes of behaviour,
00:55:25.660 and said, well, they're in league with the devil.
00:55:27.200 You know, these are people who, it's not that they are simply not as clever or educated as us. 1.00
00:55:34.720 It's they're going out and they're kissing the ass of the devil and swallowing his ice-cold semen, and therefore we must burn them. 1.00
00:55:43.920 And essentially, I think what's happening now is exactly the same, that we don't have devils anymore. 1.00
00:55:49.580 And so we can laugh at Christian inquisitors or Puritan divines who thought that devils actually existed or heretics existed.
00:55:59.440 But I think that the idea that there's some enormous Nazi conspiracy in Western countries and that the Nazis are just waiting to take over is quite as much a fantasy.
00:56:09.460 And it reflects the fact that for us, Hitler and the Nazis have replaced Satan and the legions of hell. 0.87
00:56:15.780 You mentioned the right, Tom. I just want to finish off this point before we move on.
00:56:19.580 you said there was a moral panic on the right.
00:56:22.500 The revolution is upon us, all of this thing.
00:56:25.160 Is there no, I mean, we've talked about the historical equivalent
00:56:28.860 of the Protestant Reformation, this great change
00:56:32.240 against whatever system had been in place before.
00:56:34.840 Would the right not be right to be concerned about what's happening now
00:56:38.760 as a sort of attempt to, certainly if you were to take some of the hard left
00:56:42.700 of their word, they want to overthrow everything, don't they?
00:56:46.640 Well, say the toppling of statues, for instance.
00:56:49.580 People say they're trying to erase history.
00:56:51.600 Yeah, I think that's an exaggeration.
00:56:52.840 But to a degree, I mean, you know, the idea that you purify society
00:56:59.540 and you improve society by getting rid of the symbols of what you're rejecting,
00:57:03.580 again, is something that has happened through Christian history.
00:57:08.960 I mean, personally, I wouldn't legislate for mobs to go around tearing down
00:57:14.920 the statues of slavers, because I think in many ways the impact was greater
00:57:19.300 for the fact that it was illegal.
00:57:23.200 But, you know, I'm perfectly happy to see that statue go,
00:57:27.880 the Colston statue go.
00:57:28.960 I'm perfectly happy to see Confederate statues go.
00:57:31.120 I don't, you know, they were put up at a time
00:57:33.340 where people well knew, you know,
00:57:34.820 Colston statue was put up at a time
00:57:36.120 where people knew that slavery was wrong.
00:57:38.920 It was put up at the end of the 19th century.
00:57:40.160 The Confederate statues were put up,
00:57:41.700 clearly in a kind of, I think, with a racist intent.
00:57:45.780 So I don't have a problem with that.
00:57:50.180 And so to that extent, I think that the toppling of statues
00:57:53.300 is the expression of an attempt to rewrite history.
00:57:56.060 And it's an attempt to rewrite history in a progressive way.
00:57:58.820 Yeah.
00:57:59.320 I'm not talking about the statue issue, but more broadly.
00:58:02.440 But it's also complicated by the...
00:58:03.400 Well, so...
00:58:04.780 He was devastated, by the way, when the statue came down.
00:58:07.460 I really wasn't.
00:58:08.760 My concern is the same as yours, which is,
00:58:10.940 is it done democratically or not?
00:58:12.580 That's the only thing.
00:58:12.980 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:58:15.780 We have...
00:58:17.440 So I was born in 1968, and I have lived through a period of moral and ethical change
00:58:27.100 that I think is unprecedented in human history, the speed and totality of it.
00:58:33.140 So I was born just after homosexuality had been legalized.
00:58:40.660 And now, essentially, to think that homosexuality should be illegal is illegal.
00:58:46.140 And the speed and transformation of that is enormous. And there were people on the right who were horrified by it and appalled by it. And it still causes problems for churches, for instance.
00:58:58.160 But I think that one of the triumphs of the spirit of the progressive is that there are now very few people on the right who would be opposed, say, to...
00:59:16.020 I mean, I think that the idea of gay marriage is completely pretty much universally.
00:59:21.040 People on the right, you know, it was a conservative prime minister who legislated for it.
00:59:25.520 And I think a huge part of the snarl up over trans issues is precisely a kind of feeling of societal shame that society did what it did to gay people when, you know, there seems now from our perspective to have been no reason for it.
00:59:45.140 It seems a terrible thing to have done.
00:59:46.560 um but but but equally so so i think to that extent people are if you define people on the
00:59:54.920 right as being people who want to defend um uh tradition no matter what and i think that's a
01:00:00.480 very old-fashioned notion of the right i mean you know i don't think conservatives conserve at all
01:00:04.240 um conservatives are often the most revolutionary people you meet um but i think that kind of old
01:00:10.040 fashion conservative because you know the reactionary if you want to say i think reactions
01:00:14.140 reactionaries are right you know we've this this has been a period of change like no other
01:00:19.000 and what a fascinating place to end the interview we end our interviews with the same question every
01:00:26.780 time and of course it is take it away constantly what's the one thing we're not talking about
01:00:30.840 that we really should be well i mentioned conservatives don't conserve um and uh recording
01:00:37.460 this in the week when uh extinction rebellion have returned to the streets and i think that
01:00:41.480 Extinction Rebellion isn't adequately a rebellion against extinction because I think both on the left
01:00:48.180 and the right we are ignoring the the detail of what is happening in this country's country this
01:00:55.700 Britain's countryside which is that we are as a people the most nature-loving people anywhere
01:01:01.900 if you judge it by the number of people who belong to wildlife conservation charities and yet we have
01:01:08.660 the most ecologically denuded landscape in Europe. We cannot lecture people, much poorer
01:01:17.780 countries, on their need to conserve wildlife when we are allowing hedgehogs to plummet
01:01:25.880 towards extinction, when our rivers are being poisoned, when songbirds are vanishing. And
01:01:31.560 this was a topic that people briefly woke up to during the lockdown, when suddenly there
01:01:36.240 was no traffic and people could hear birdsong and people realized they valued and wanted it
01:01:40.940 um but now that um uh blood has returned to the limbs of the economy that sense that we share
01:01:50.860 this country with other species and that in a sense we're trust holders for them is fading again
01:01:56.340 and i think that that's what we should be talking about i think that that there is an extinction
01:02:02.300 crisis but i think that talking about it in the broad brush terms that extinction rebellion do
01:02:07.080 misses the fact that we need to concentrate on specifics you're talking about conservationism
01:02:12.100 yeah i'm talking about um the need for a mass national effort
01:02:16.840 to say for instance to stop hedgehogs from going extinct
01:02:20.280 the way if i if i if i if i were prime minister i would write it into law that um there's an
01:02:28.200 an obligation on the government to reverse the decline in hedgehog numbers and hedgehogs are
01:02:32.140 bellwether species if you reverse them then you reverse the other things as well you have to put
01:02:36.700 in you know you have to improve the environment for hedgehogs to survive you have to make sure
01:02:41.940 they're insects everything follows from that that's what i would do that to me is a terrible
01:02:46.660 pressing issue that we don't talk about nearly enough and it seemed like a kind of you know
01:02:50.700 gimmicky thing that doesn't really matter but to me it's fundamental well the way the internet
01:02:56.520 works you shall henceforth be known as the hedgehog man the hedgehog historian is how
01:03:01.420 you'll be known forever but tom it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for coming
01:03:05.840 on the show if people want to buy a book it's called dominion uh and if what they want to follow
01:03:11.140 your many musings on twitter where do they go for that they go to at holland underscore tom
01:03:16.700 and is there any anywhere else they should go they should you should all head to uh bookshops
01:03:21.620 and buy Dominion.
01:03:23.500 I was going to say,
01:03:24.520 I expected you to say something about hedgehogs,
01:03:26.720 but you did well to avoid it.
01:03:28.720 Tom, thank you very much again
01:03:29.960 and thank you for watching.
01:03:31.120 We'll see you very soon
01:03:32.200 with another brilliant episode,
01:03:33.980 which go out on Wednesdays and Sundays
01:03:35.920 for a live stream, Francis.
01:03:37.600 Which goes out on Tuesday, Thursday,
01:03:40.060 Friday and Saturday
01:03:40.880 and they're all at 7pm UK time.
01:03:43.780 Take care and see you soon, guys.
01:03:51.620 We'll be right back.