00:00:30.000hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a show
00:00:40.660for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our brilliant guest today
00:00:46.660is an author historian and presenter tom holland welcome to trigonometry thank you very much for
00:00:51.260having me it is great to have you here uh we're delighted that you've come but for anyone who
00:00:55.460doesn't know you just give us a little overview of who are you how are you where you are what is
00:01:00.020the journey that brings you to this chair uh sitting here on the podcast and we know you don't
00:01:04.780listen to podcasts so it must be a very special experience yeah yeah it's a it's a journey of
00:01:09.900discovery for me yes um i'm a historian i focus um very much on um antiquity early middle ages
00:01:17.320and and that might seem to make me wildly unsuitable for a topical podcast but the degree
00:01:23.480that I have anything topical to say. It's because I'm interested in the way that things that happened
00:01:28.120in the deep past continue to reverberate into the present. So my most recent book, Dominion,
00:01:36.180is a book in which I look at Christianity as the most radical and transformative product
00:01:42.700of the Roman Empire. And I think that the trace elements of that revolution continue to shape
00:01:50.920the way that we think and behave today. And that's why we're so delighted to have you on
00:01:56.660the show, because whenever we've spoken to historians, you know, the idea that history
00:02:01.100operates in cycles is obviously not a new thing. It's sort of a dogma almost. And it does seem like
00:02:06.380the current moment, it's not the first time these sort of things have happened. So where are we on
00:02:13.100the spiral of history, Tom? Well, that's a huge question to kick off with. That's why we've got
00:02:18.800an hour. Yeah, okay. Well, so I think that, I mean, I don't think that there are kind of hard
00:02:24.300and fast rules of history that you can extrapolate. But I think that if you look at certain cultures,
00:02:29.920certain ways of behaving, you can kind of extrapolate rules in which those distinctive
00:02:34.380cultures behave. And I think that the culture that we live in is one such. And I think that
00:02:39.520the rhythms that it moved to were laid down essentially by Christianity. And at the heart
00:02:46.420of Christianity is the idea, well, it's the idea of baptism, really. It's the idea of cleansing
00:02:51.080yourself. And that obviously operates on the individual level. So the individual washes away
00:02:58.060sin and is welcomed into the order of light. But what happened in the Western half of what had
00:03:06.400been the Roman Empire, so Latin Christendom, as it's called, is that this becomes politicized.
00:03:12.100And 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.
00:03:24.340And we may be tempted to think of the Middle Ages as a kind of hidebound reactionary age.
00:03:28.560But 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.
00:03:45.720So 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.
00:04:13.240all of these are expressive of a desire to set the whole of society on a new and moral footing
00:04:21.760that will be pleasing to God and it sets in chain a process by which this happens again and again
00:04:29.040because of course what inevitably happens over the course of medieval history is that what in
00:04:33.080the 11th century had seemed radical and new and fresh by the 16th century when Luther pops up
00:04:39.500seems hidebound and reactionary. And so the Protestant Reformation, although it casts itself
00:04:46.780as a reaction against the medieval papacy, in fact, is just another iteration of this desire
00:04:53.600to cleanse and purify society. And the same thing happens in the 18th century with the Enlightenment.
00:05:00.000Protestants had turned against the Catholic Church. In the Enlightenment, you get philosophes
00:05:04.260French revolutionaries who turn against Christianity. And I think that these cycles
00:05:09.500of people feeling that society needs to be cleansed, it needs to be washed, it needs to
00:05:15.760be baptised anew has continued and continued and continued. And it's so much a part of the West's
00:05:22.740cultural DNA that actually you don't need doctrinal Christianity to fuel it. And I think that what's
00:05:30.240happening at the moment, therefore is just another iteration of these fundamentally very Christian
00:05:36.520kind of impulses. And it's interesting that you say that we've got these fundamentally Christian
00:05:41.860impulses, because when you look at certain things like the woke movement, it does appear to be a
00:05:47.240sort of religion, doesn't it, where you have believers, you have non-believers, and the people
00:05:51.500who are non-believers who tend to criticise it get treated like apostates, don't they?
00:05:55.740Well, 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.
00:06:23.120And 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.
00:06:32.460So they're called the Great Awakening.
00:06:33.780And historians of American religion trace them over a course of American history.
00:06:39.520And so that's why people have called what's happening now the Great Awakening.
00:06:43.100But it's a pun, but it's not entirely a joke because that's exactly what it is.
00:06:47.340It's exactly the same kind of idea that you have to look into your soul,
00:06:51.940recognize your sin, and awaken to a new order.
00:06:57.320Specifically, what is happening, I think,
00:07:00.440is bred of what happened in the 50s and 60s,
00:07:03.000which was the last great overtly, doctrinally Christian period
00:07:07.240of revolution and kind of moral reformation in America,
00:07:24.560So it's black Christians doing as they had done since the beginnings of American Protestant society
00:07:35.720and looking at the stories of Exodus where God favours the slaves and rescues the slaves
00:07:41.780and liberates them and leads them out of bondage to a promised land.
00:07:46.800And the resonance of that for black Americans in the 50s, particularly in the South, was immense and believed literally.
00:07:56.600And it fuels the kind of music, which then feeds into the music of the 60s.
00:08:02.460So it's deriving from these kind of hymns, these traditions, this language of liberation.
00:08:09.820but of course you know particularly the reverend Martin Luther King he's a he's a he's a clergyman
00:08:16.220he's a Baptist clergyman and he is drawing absolutely on the kind of fundamental Christian
00:08:22.940teaching that all human beings are created equally in the image of God and therefore are endowed with
00:08:29.580a divine sense of dignity and that as Paul famously says you know there is no Jew or Greek
00:08:35.960So therefore, there is no black or white.
00:08:37.980So what Martin Luther King is doing is summoning white Americans to a consciousness that their black brothers and sisters should properly be their equal.
00:08:46.080And the success of the civil rights movement is precisely that a majority of white American Christians accept the justice of what he's saying.
00:08:54.960I mean, that's why the civil rights movement succeeds.
00:08:59.060But 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.
00:09:10.600Gay rights movement would be an obvious one. Feminism would be another.
00:09:14.440And they're drawing on the same kind of impulses, the same assumption that is kind of hardwired into Christian discourse,
00:09:19.580that the first will be last, that those who are oppressed have a value and a virtue by virtue of being oppressed.
00:09:28.100All 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.
00:09:40.520But 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.
00:10:06.060And so what's happened since the 60s, really, is that American evangelicals have come to identify ever more strongly as Christians.
00:10:19.400And those who, even though they are drawing on very, very Christian traditions, have come to see themselves as opposed to Christianity.
00:10:27.540And so you get the situation now where you have campaigners who are very overtly see themselves as being very overtly anti-Christian.
00:10:36.060But I think that that's kind of an illusion.
00:10:38.360I mean, what's happening at the moment is a civil war within Christianity.
00:10:43.840It's a civil war within different factions of the kind that has plagued Christianity over the course of its existence.
00:10:53.700So I think that to that extent, what we're witnessing is nothing particularly new.
00:15:24.800And 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.
00:15:42.600Even 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.
00:15:51.200So are we sort of, are me, Francis, and everyone else who sort of opposes the woke stuff,
00:15:56.300are 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?
00:16:26.320Well, 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.
00:16:36.400As we look at the last two millennia, broadly speaking, that's what we've seen.
00:16:41.440But, I mean, we can talk about technical progress, but the idea of moral progress, you know, where does that come from?
00:16:49.140Why do we now think that, say, slavery is wrong or whatever?
00:16:55.220And again, it fundamentally comes down to Christian theology.
00:17:02.220You know, I really didn't begin with any particular interest in Christianity.
00:17:05.120I 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.
00:17:18.840And I said, where do these ideas come from?
00:17:21.020And 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.
00:17:26.840That's kind of what it's like, is that strange theological ideas that cropped up centuries, often millennia ago, continue to reverberate through.
00:17:38.500It'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.
00:17:45.880Well, our society, we're in hock to some defunct theologian, invariably.
00:17:50.920and and the idea of progress lies in the notion that is um basically goes all the way back to
00:17:56.720paul that there is a law of god and for the jews the law of god is written you know on the tablets
00:18:02.480uh that got given to moses that in turn got given to the children of israel paul says no actually
00:18:08.040the law of god is written on the heart and how do we know what that law of god is well the spirit
00:18:13.760illumines it and enables us to read it and the further corollary of that is that the more we read
00:18:19.440it, the better we become at understanding what it is. And in turn, unlike, say, Islam, which inherits
00:18:29.840from the Jews the idea that you have a mass body of law that comes directly from God and therefore
00:18:37.860kind of is eternally expand. Christians have always thought that the law is illumined by the
00:18:44.260spirit therefore humans can legitimately author that and law itself will become progressive
00:18:50.400because over the course of time human understanding of um of of what god's law is will become better
00:18:57.600and better and better the rules can change yeah and improve and improve is the point yeah it's
00:19:03.020improve is the point yes so so slavery is the obvious example so people always say well you
00:19:09.180You know, why did it take so long for Christians to decide to get rid of slavery, that slavery was wrong?
00:19:15.780I mean, Christians always thought slavery was wrong, but in the same way that they thought kind of disease or poverty was wrong.
00:19:22.180But they just kind of assumed that it was part of what it is to be mortal.
00:19:26.640It's part of the inheritance of the fall.
00:19:29.700But what happened in the 18th century was that, again, we talked about these very distinctive Protestant idea,
00:19:35.220understanding of the spirit, which is that you read the text of scripture, the spirit illumines
00:19:40.800you, and your understanding of what is written there will transcend the kind of the base meaning.
00:19:49.960So the Bible nowhere says get rid of slavery, nowhere says slavery as an institution should
00:19:55.940be abolished. But Christians from that Protestant tradition read the scriptures and came to the
00:20:03.060conclusion that slavery was evil. And they did that chiefly because they were living in societies
00:20:09.700that had pushed the institution of slavery to a kind of hideously mechanised degree.
00:20:17.640So you could put up with slavery where it was two or three people in a village or something,
00:20:25.220But 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.
00:20:39.740And furthermore, on top of that, it became racialized because slavery previously hadn't been racialized.
00:20:45.980You know, there were lots of white slaves in the early days of the colonies in America.
00:20:49.280But 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.
00:21:10.660And 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.
00:21:27.520And the abolitionist movement really is the model for every socially concerned progressive movement that has followed since.
00:21:36.120It 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.
00:21:50.260And 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.
00:21:55.380She 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.
00:22:05.460You know, you've got to sign up to it. And, you know, that's kind of the model.
00:22:11.440And which of us would want to live in a world where slavery was morally acceptable?
00:22:15.440So, you know, it's... But at the same time, there is a kind of temptation, I suppose,
00:22:23.300where you can end up being in love with your own feeling of virtue.
00:22:28.080And that is also, you know, that's a temptation, I think, that people who are pushing progressive causes always have to be alert to.
00:22:37.100And that's something that Christians historically have always been aware.
00:22:40.720They'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.
00:22:51.100And 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.
00:23:15.700Have you ever been abroad and felt out of place because you didn't speak the language?
00:23:19.660No, because I voted Brexit, mate. Brexit means Brexit.
00:23:23.580I know that when you go on holiday, sometimes you don't speak the language.
00:23:26.940It can feel really awkward, a little bit like Francis talking to a woman.
00:23:30.760Do you want to learn another language?
00:24:39.360are we opposing this great progressive movement
00:24:42.200that's going to change the world for the better,
00:24:43.820is is there such a thing as too much progress i mean i would argue that in the soviet union
00:24:50.900the the creation of the soviet union was in some ways inspired by very progressive ideas
00:24:57.420about equality about emancipation of women actually it was very progressive on that front
00:25:02.780for uh for its time but it ended up being we know what right so can you have too much progress
00:25:10.880Well, it depends what your starting assumptions are.
00:25:14.860I 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.
00:25:31.060We are the heirs of very different moral assumptions.
00:25:36.200but by and large the things that we tend to take for granted
00:25:43.920that we just assume are right because it seems self-evident that they're right
00:25:48.020is because we are the heirs of 2,000 years of Christian teachings on this
00:25:54.540and this was kind of famously, notoriously pointed out by Nietzsche
00:25:59.040who detested Christianity because he, you know, unlike most atheists today
00:26:06.600who tend to identify themselves with progressive causes,
00:26:13.180Nietzsche detested Christianity because of its moral teachings.
00:26:18.360He thought that Christianity had kind of gelded and impaired the blonde beast,
00:26:25.280that the power and the beauty and the strength and the potency of the strong had been neutered by Christianity,
00:26:35.840that by elevating the weak, by kind of putting the slave above the master, society had been ruined and destroyed.
00:26:45.680And 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.
00:27:05.580And Tom, we seem to have got into this habit, I mean, you touched on it when you were speaking
00:27:10.320there, of judging historical figures on present-day values. And I would just like to explore with
00:27:17.700you, why is that? Why do we suddenly feel the need to look at people like Churchill or Gandhi
00:27:22.720and go, you know, he's racist, even though they lived 60, 70, 80 years ago, and obviously society
00:27:29.160at that point was completely different because well because we have a progressive sense of
00:27:34.820morality we have a sense that that things move forwards and so our sense of what is right
00:27:40.020feels different to to the moral standards that people held you know i mean not just kind of
00:27:46.160you know 80 years ago but kind of like two years ago in many cases um and i think that um
00:27:53.440And 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.
00:28:11.260You know, no one is perfect and there is no one who is who is going to be morally impeachable.
00:28:19.040And 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.
00:28:30.560And 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.
00:28:41.680you know i mean and and and we you know we've all done that you know that's that's what becoming a
00:28:47.060teenager was teenagers like that didn't really exist before the 60s so we've all been teenagers
00:28:51.980in that society we know what fun it is to sit in judgment on our parents and to regard them as you
00:28:58.100know square and whatever uh and it's just the kind of acceleration of that process but isn't it
00:29:04.720doesn't it belie a certain kind of arrogance because the reality is that in 100 200 years
00:29:08.980time that you know future generations will look at what we do in abject horror you know the fact
00:29:13.720that a lot of our clothes are made in the third world made by people who have paid an absolute
00:29:18.580pittance we factory farmed meat and all the rest of it yes i think that the risk of hypocrisy
00:29:25.340is enormous and again that's always been that's always been the problem with christianity is that
00:29:32.420is that the threat of hypocrisy is always there.
00:29:37.800So, you know, there's a campaign to get rid of the statue of Thomas Guy,
00:29:49.580So he ploughed his money into a hospital.
00:29:54.520He was very committed to the idea of public health at a time
00:29:56.960when obviously there wasn't a National Health Service or anything like that.
00:29:59.460But he had investments that were in the South Sea Company and the South Sea Company in turn invested money in slavery.
00:30:09.220So. 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.
00:30:24.380And Apple has been accused of benefiting from the slavery of the Uyghurs in China.
00:30:37.020The risk is, it seems, you know, the nature of the world that we live in, the insidious character of capitalism,
00:30:45.440means that it's almost impossible to do something that is not in some way complicit in the oppression
00:30:53.020and the enslavement of people who are less fortunate than us, which is exactly what Thomas Guy did.
00:30:59.760Thomas Guy made money indisputably from a form of capitalism that we would now regard as morally
00:31:07.060unacceptable, but he plowed it back into something that continues to benefit people to this day.
00:31:13.260And 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.
00:31:35.660I 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.
00:32:02.600we are all therefore complicit we know the comfortable lives that we lead we are implicated
00:32:10.520in the exploitation and the oppression that enables us to lead our lives and to go on our
00:32:17.340phones and to send out campaigning tweets going on about how virtuous we are we need to remember
00:32:23.320and i think that that is you know that's what i find uh in a way you know i've become a big
00:32:29.460I've become a big fan of the idea of original sin.
00:32:32.460I think the idea that we are all morally complicit,
00:32:35.180we're all morally stained, we've all got to be aware of that,
00:36:25.040I guess that Black Lives Matter kicked in, as with Me Too movement, because these are things that we in our society perhaps can affect.
00:36:38.020so so that's the but but the risk is is that we um
00:36:43.500we come to see them somehow as being um more terrible than they are more significant than
00:36:55.340they are because in a way that then dignifies us it keeps us center stage it keeps us as the focus
00:37:02.500It'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.
00:37:29.300and and why do you think that is is it just the fact that we connect with them because
00:37:35.880they're very similar to us they speak the same language etc etc or is it also as well because
00:37:41.040when we look at america we're instantly reminded of our own childhood experiences the films
00:37:47.040you know the clothing the propaganda whatever it whatever else it may be yeah i think i think that
00:37:52.940um i mean i think a crucial part of it i think i think all that's true and i think that
00:37:59.280that speaking English means that you are always being kind of tugged along
00:38:08.600in the wake of America's psychodramas.
00:38:12.280And a huge part of the impact of America's moral convulsions,
00:38:21.180you know, from the 60s right the way up to the present day,
00:38:23.900is a kind of cultural cringe on the part of Britain.
00:38:27.140You know, we kind of want to be like America.
00:38:30.760So, you know, you'll get people here talking about the feds.
00:38:55.480And 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.
00:39:11.280And 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.
00:39:30.840Yeah. 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?
00:39:45.920Well, it doesn't tell us because there are kind of hard and fast rules that we follow through.
00:39:55.280Have 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?
00:40:06.940And even then it gets messed up because you get this mutant who turns up and screws everything up.
00:40:15.300And 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?
00:40:37.880I think that helpfully or unhelpfully, there are two possible paradigms there.
00:40:42.800And 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.
00:41:08.480And 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.
00:41:20.960And by the end of the 16th century, the end of Elizabeth's reign, Protestantism had completely bedded in.
00:41:27.660The universities were completely, everyone in the university essentially was Protestant.
00:41:33.740um you know the poets the thinkers um the politicians um the commanding heights were
00:41:41.420completely protestant and from that point on england was basically irrevocably protestant
00:41:46.220the commanding heights had been captured against that protestantism in england had its extremes
00:41:53.900and the extreme that the people always know is the puritans and puritans ended up feeling that you
00:42:02.520You know, it was a movement that ended up peaking and then fading and kind of dissolving into the cultural mainstream.
00:42:11.820There aren't any Puritans now. There are Puritan elements, perhaps.
00:42:15.520So I suppose the question is, you know, is the movements that we've seen over this decade,
00:42:22.820is it an equivalent of the Protestant Reformation, in which case the whole of society will be reconfigured?
00:42:28.040And 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?
00:42:39.340Are 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.
00:42:47.560And Tom, you mentioned the Puritans, and obviously you said there's no more Puritans,
00:42:53.540but amongst this new awoken movement, as you call it,
00:42:56.680surely there's shades of Puritanism in there.
00:48:34.340And the decline has gone on, not in the rest of the world,
00:48:37.660But in Europe and increasingly in America, people just aren't interested in Christianity at all.
00:48:43.180And 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.
00:48:55.920and again the question that that that perhaps is not often asked is and i'm aware that this
00:49:06.140could be cut out and used what was so wrong about the nazis that's the title of the episode guys
00:49:12.660i was gonna i was gonna say the only way this could have been worse if you'd said
00:49:16.200the call of course which some people say happened so so so the the essentially so the nazis um unlike
00:49:25.960say the french revolutionaries or the russian revolutionaries that they were the first the
00:49:31.040fascists so muslimian but particularly hitler were the first um european regimes to repudiate not
00:49:39.120just doctrinal christianity but the moral fundamentals of christianity and the nazis
00:49:43.960trampled down two kind of the the the two animating moral animating principles of christianity
00:49:52.060the first the idea that um the weak have a purchase on the strong you know exemplified by
00:50:00.020the figure of christ on the cross the cross is an emblem of roman imperial power but it's it's not
00:50:05.900the the torturer it's the man who's getting tortured it's not the master it's the slave
00:50:11.240And so this idea that the weak, the oppressed, the suffering kind of are closer to God than the powerful is something very fundamental Christianity.
00:50:21.500It's there very clearly in the French Revolution. It's there very clearly in the Russian Revolution.
00:50:25.260Nazis completely repudiate that. They're with Nietzsche. They think this is contemptible and terrible.
00:50:31.480And the other thing, of course, is this Pauline teaching that there is no Jew or Greek.
00:50:35.140Nazis completely think that Jews and Greeks are very very different and indeed that the Jews have
00:50:41.440to be destroyed so that they can't infect the Greeks so just to just to pause you there to
00:50:45.940convert that into simple language the core tenets of Christianity is that all men are created equal
00:50:51.320more or less yeah and that the you you want to overthrow the structures of oppression to use
00:50:58.080modern language as yeah as opposed to creating a structure of oppression that is meritocratic
00:51:03.540Like, quote, unquote, I'm putting in quotes.
00:51:04.820Where the strong have the whip hand over the weak.
00:51:26.320Now, so that experiment implodes horribly.
00:51:29.600um and the western world has to live with the shock which which reverberates because of the
00:51:39.160discovery of what they've been doing in the death camps and the impact of this which really starts
00:51:45.740to kick in in the 60s again and everything happens in the 60s it's the great fulcrum point it's the
00:51:50.860great revolutionary turning point um what what what happens is that um whereas previously people
00:51:58.860would say well what would jesus do and then do it they we don't need that anymore because now we
00:52:04.040ask what would hitler do and we do the opposite so it's still christian that's because we we regard
00:52:10.600hitler as satan we regard the nazis as the devils for christian reasons because they trample down
00:52:17.580christian moral codes but we don't need christianity anymore we've got hitler we've got
00:52:22.660the Nazis. And that has been a constant, really since the 60s, that, you know, fascist, Hitler,
00:52:32.500Nazi, is the ultimate insult. And so it remains to this day. You know, so essentially, I think
00:52:46.480that, say, what's happening in America at the moment, there's a moral panic on the part of
00:52:56.300the right. And people can recognize that as moral panic, because we know that Christians do moral
00:53:01.660panic. That's what they always do. But there's a moral panic on the left as well. And it's basically
00:53:07.560it's the same, because their moral panic is that everyone is a Nazi. So what's the right's moral
00:53:14.680panic well the right's moral panic is that you know um order is going down the pan and um people
00:53:20.480aren't doing what they should the revolution is upon us yeah the revolution is upon us and you
00:53:24.500know we need to retrench and everything you know it's all terrible but but but the left's moral
00:53:28.960panic or the hard left's moral panic is that um is is is that literally nazis are waiting to take
00:53:36.120over the country i mean it's the same here i mean people saying boris johnson is a nazi
00:53:41.040you know he's not he's you know he's awful in all kinds of ways but he's clearly not a nazi
00:53:46.380and you know you've got you've got you've got people roaming american streets and people are
00:53:52.840dying and people are celebrating say i'm not going to mourn the death of a fascist um there are no
00:53:59.460fascists exactly as there were no witches yeah exactly as as actually there weren't any kind of
00:54:07.640They weren't Cathar heretics. The whole thing was kind of manufactured.
00:54:13.300And 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.
00:54:31.840So it happens in the 13th century. University-educated clerics have a progressive, intellectually demanding understanding of what being a Christian should be about.
00:54:45.400And they come to see the left behind, the peasants, the people who live out in the country around Albie, as deplorables.
00:54:56.900And they come to think that these are people who are worshipping some dualist god.
00:55:11.940You know, there were no witches, but brilliantly educated, highly educated people, progressive Protestants looked around,
00:55:19.380saw that there were people who were still clinging on to kind of what they saw as antiquated modes of behaviour,
00:55:25.660and said, well, they're in league with the devil.
00:55:27.200You know, these are people who, it's not that they are simply not as clever or educated as us.
00:55:34.720It'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.
00:55:43.920And essentially, I think what's happening now is exactly the same, that we don't have devils anymore.
00:55:49.580And so we can laugh at Christian inquisitors or Puritan divines who thought that devils actually existed or heretics existed.
00:55:59.440But 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.
00:56:09.460And it reflects the fact that for us, Hitler and the Nazis have replaced Satan and the legions of hell.
00:56:15.780You mentioned the right, Tom. I just want to finish off this point before we move on.
00:56:19.580you said there was a moral panic on the right.
00:56:22.500The revolution is upon us, all of this thing.
00:56:25.160Is there no, I mean, we've talked about the historical equivalent
00:56:28.860of the Protestant Reformation, this great change
00:56:32.240against whatever system had been in place before.
00:56:34.840Would the right not be right to be concerned about what's happening now
00:56:38.760as a sort of attempt to, certainly if you were to take some of the hard left
00:56:42.700of their word, they want to overthrow everything, don't they?
00:56:46.640Well, say the toppling of statues, for instance.
00:56:49.580People say they're trying to erase history.
00:58:17.440So I was born in 1968, and I have lived through a period of moral and ethical change
00:58:27.100that I think is unprecedented in human history, the speed and totality of it.
00:58:33.140So I was born just after homosexuality had been legalized.
00:58:40.660And now, essentially, to think that homosexuality should be illegal is illegal.
00:58:46.140And 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.
00:58:58.160But 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...
00:59:16.020I mean, I think that the idea of gay marriage is completely pretty much universally.
00:59:21.040People on the right, you know, it was a conservative prime minister who legislated for it.
00:59:25.520And 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.
00:59:45.140It seems a terrible thing to have done.
00:59:46.560um but but but equally so so i think to that extent people are if you define people on the
00:59:54.920right as being people who want to defend um uh tradition no matter what and i think that's a
01:00:00.480very old-fashioned notion of the right i mean you know i don't think conservatives conserve at all
01:00:04.240um conservatives are often the most revolutionary people you meet um but i think that kind of old
01:00:10.040fashion conservative because you know the reactionary if you want to say i think reactions
01:00:14.140reactionaries are right you know we've this this has been a period of change like no other
01:00:19.000and what a fascinating place to end the interview we end our interviews with the same question every
01:00:26.780time and of course it is take it away constantly what's the one thing we're not talking about
01:00:30.840that we really should be well i mentioned conservatives don't conserve um and uh recording
01:00:37.460this in the week when uh extinction rebellion have returned to the streets and i think that
01:00:41.480Extinction Rebellion isn't adequately a rebellion against extinction because I think both on the left
01:00:48.180and the right we are ignoring the the detail of what is happening in this country's country this
01:00:55.700Britain's countryside which is that we are as a people the most nature-loving people anywhere
01:01:01.900if you judge it by the number of people who belong to wildlife conservation charities and yet we have
01:01:08.660the most ecologically denuded landscape in Europe. We cannot lecture people, much poorer
01:01:17.780countries, on their need to conserve wildlife when we are allowing hedgehogs to plummet
01:01:25.880towards extinction, when our rivers are being poisoned, when songbirds are vanishing. And
01:01:31.560this was a topic that people briefly woke up to during the lockdown, when suddenly there
01:01:36.240was no traffic and people could hear birdsong and people realized they valued and wanted it
01:01:40.940um but now that um uh blood has returned to the limbs of the economy that sense that we share
01:01:50.860this country with other species and that in a sense we're trust holders for them is fading again
01:01:56.340and i think that that's what we should be talking about i think that that there is an extinction
01:02:02.300crisis but i think that talking about it in the broad brush terms that extinction rebellion do
01:02:07.080misses the fact that we need to concentrate on specifics you're talking about conservationism
01:02:12.100yeah i'm talking about um the need for a mass national effort
01:02:16.840to say for instance to stop hedgehogs from going extinct
01:02:20.280the way if i if i if i if i were prime minister i would write it into law that um there's an
01:02:28.200an obligation on the government to reverse the decline in hedgehog numbers and hedgehogs are
01:02:32.140bellwether species if you reverse them then you reverse the other things as well you have to put
01:02:36.700in you know you have to improve the environment for hedgehogs to survive you have to make sure
01:02:41.940they're insects everything follows from that that's what i would do that to me is a terrible
01:02:46.660pressing issue that we don't talk about nearly enough and it seemed like a kind of you know
01:02:50.700gimmicky thing that doesn't really matter but to me it's fundamental well the way the internet
01:02:56.520works you shall henceforth be known as the hedgehog man the hedgehog historian is how
01:03:01.420you'll be known forever but tom it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for coming
01:03:05.840on the show if people want to buy a book it's called dominion uh and if what they want to follow
01:03:11.140your many musings on twitter where do they go for that they go to at holland underscore tom
01:03:16.700and is there any anywhere else they should go they should you should all head to uh bookshops