A.C. Grayling - The Good Book [2011]

[Music] this is big ideas from the ABC good morning ladies and gentlemen true believers people of faith of faith in humanism thank you very much for coming this morning my name is chip Rowley I'm artistic director of Sydney brothers festival and it's my immense privilege this morning to introduce AC Grayland you'll see I'm carrying my Bible it's called the Good Book a secular Bible by ac grayling this is a phenomenal achievement this is a work that Professor grayling has been working on he tells me backstage for 30 years when I met Anthony two years ago he very nicely took me out to lunch in London and we had a I had a wonderful chat Justin and what was interesting for me was about his his about his writing life he has two books on the go at any one time for most of us who ride were try to write in my case a me for one book is enough he's got two books on the go all the time but also in the background he's had this book for 30 years and a lot of those books that he's been publishing over the years he has drawn out of the work that's come from this book so this is a life-size opus that we're about to hear about this morning and how lucky are we that it is happening here at Sydney writers festival on its publication newly published now I'll tell you what I did backstage before I even had a chat with him I bought this at Glee books in the foyer and I got it signed by the man himself you're gonna have that opportunity right after this session I encourage you to do it this is a phenomenal moment and you'll be able to get it signed in the Ruth Cracknell room so I do encourage you to do that ac grayling I may give you a more formal introduction to him what's interesting you also see when you get the book you know find out what who is this man I love the bio in the book it's the best bio of an author in the flat of a book ac grayling is a professor of philosophy at London University and the author of many books clearly the publisher looked at a CV or thought this is just too hard we're going there's only so much space on this and I know that when I invited AC grayling to come to the festival I thought well even if festival as big as this one went 313 events I still could program I need another week to program him as fully as I would love to do because there's so much to offer across a variety of topics we had him last night in town hall speaking about China and speaking about the preservation and our need to remember our values and where we've come from as a society in our engagement with China as China grows in political power and it's a commensurate with its economic growth he can speak across a number of issues but today he's gonna be talking about the good book and I will give you a little bit more than what the publisher gets you in the book and that is to say he's a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London a multi-talented author he has been a regular contributor to The Times the Financial Times The Observer the independence Sunday he is one of those people that doesn't believe in that division between town and gown he's somebody who comes out of it out of the ivory tower to talk to all of us and to have an impact on all of us he's got as I said so much to offer beyond the walls of the University he is he offers some of those books that he's written Liberty in the age of terror dick heart toward the light of Liberty and among the dead cities this is his latest work ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming thank you very much well we're all still here so I'd like to tell you a bit about the why and the how of of this book this rather ambitious book some people think rather hubristic book which leads me on to the second topic I'd like to talk about which is some of the response that the book has received and it's received a very interesting response in the Chinese sense of interesting you know the Chinese saying may you not live in interesting times so it has been quite quite an interesting ride um but to begin as chip says some time ago now about thirty years ago when I was doing research at Oxford and I was looking at the normative ethical systems around the world that means those ethical systems which address themselves to to guidance or suggestion or or direction on the great question of how we should live our lives or what values we should live by and I noticed them a very marked contrast between those that premise themselves on a religious and traditional religious outlook and on the all on the other hand what I very broadly describe as a humanist that book which is one that starts from our best understandings very often our most sympathetic and generous understanding of human nature and the human condition and in fact that that second group of traditions looking at this great question of how we should live happens to be perhaps the the set of defining traditions about great civilizations so for example in classical antiquity in ancient Greece in the Hellenic world and the Roman world Socrates Plato Aristotle the post Aristotelian schools there / curious and the Stoics or all of them humanist in their outlook they didn't regard our ethical imperatives as having been offered by a deity that they didn't claim that they were conveying a message from from beyond their premise was their only experience of life and their observation of what it is to be human and the same is true of the great Chinese tradition through Confucius yes more juicy the great thinkers of ancient China right up through the legalists and near Confucian schools and indeed there is a strand of development of thinking that runs from these antiquities of our great civilizations through to the modern era you might see a sort of repetition of enlightenment in the Renaissance in the 18th century enlightenment itself where there is a return to the sources and resources of those thoughts which are vey marked in their contrast in the premises on which they rest themselves from the religious traditions now the religious traditions in the world today in the three great religions really of Judaism Christianity in Islam in the Indian subcontinent the word Hinduism collects a number of religious traditions that word was coined by by colonists really trying to make sense of the great variety of thinking about the spiritual and the transcendent in India but but these traditions all of them have at their root the idea of a relationship between God and mankind between the creator and creation and it is a feature of this relationship especially in the judeo-christian and Islamic traditions but it is one of dependency of mankind on God and that what God does is to impose a set of requirements of obligations in that relationship a requirement for that dependency to be realized by the creation and a response made to those demands so the very word Islam means submission in the Christian tradition one of the great sins is the sin of pride the sin of thinking that you can stand on your own two feet and make decisions for yourself the very first sin recorded in the Bible the religious Bible book of Genesis is the sin of disobedience and indeed sin means disobedience and so that that represents a very different view about the nature of the moral life that the moral life is a response to Adam and it is in obedience to a requirement and in it's way quite a stringent requirement quite a demanding view of should live which involves having to deny some aspects anyway of the animal part of our nature our appetites have to be governed and constrained and directed in ways which are forced to be appropriate for the life but will if well lived issue finally in acceptance into a Fela civic dispensation heaven or the rapture and this world is a preparation for that world so it's a very different focus the humanist tradition focuses on this life in the here and now and it asks the question how should one live in the here and now and it attempts to give answers to that question tends to give some insight into the variety of human experience and some suggestion about how people might try best to live it and when I noticed this contrast I thought to myself well we know a great deal about how the religious Bible was made biblical scholarship of the last couple of centuries has been very very revealing indeed about about the process by which the Old Testament and New Testament evolved and did so by the work of many hands taking many documents and putting them together by an editorial process known as redaction which is a process where tech source texts are taken their bits are selected from them they're woven together other text might be interpolated in them there will be modification and arrangement of the texts very occasionally I imagine inconvenient occurrences of the word not were deleted and you get or or indeed inserted occasionally but things were going in the wrong direction and the result is a text which has a certain tendency tells a certain story paints a certain picture and that this this work of editorial creation takes place in antiquity and the early first millennium of the Common Era over a period of about eight hundred years the first books of the Old Testament the Pentateuch which we think of of course is the oldest books the Old Testament when actually put together between the sixth and four centuries BC by at least three editors or three groups of editors one of whom always refers to Elohim which is a plural word meaning the gods early Judaism wasn't a monotheism although it did say that the the god of the chosen people was they're jealous and very particular God but there was an assumption that there were other gods and one of the instructions was that the the Jewish people should not go in pursuit of them so these these documents were woven together edited together and you can look and I suppose you were reading the book of Genesis in the religious Bible in the bath last night and you will have noticed that there are a number of sort of fractures in it in a way which reveal how that the text was put together there are two versions of the of the story of the creation for example and there are a number of stories that particularly in Genesis 38 we can all even the devil does you name quit Scripture chapter 38 of the book of Genesis it's just dropped in with no relation to what comes before what comes after that's the story of Tamar and Judah so you can see the joints you can see where then the text will cobble together and it's very interesting to note for example in the case of New Testament scholarship how some passages are in a Greek which a couple of centuries later than the Greek in the surrounding text so there again you can see the joint so you see this editorial process the evolution the emergence of a very distinctive work out of a long process of selection adaptation modification and editing so I thought well supposing supposing somebody or some group of people did the same thing to the texts of the non religious traditions went to them and chose from them documents which addressed this very very important central question of how we should choose our values and how we should pursue them how we should form really good relationships other people how we should exercise our responsibilities to others into ourselves so basically people have gone to Aristotle to Cicero to Seneca Pliny Plutarch Epictetus have gone to Maude's had gone to the great non-religious traditions of India there are several very ancient deep atheist traditions of thought in in the Indian tradition had gone to the writers of the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the 18th century enlightenment and Beyond had really gone to the literature of the world which focused on the the inspirations the insights the consolations that came out of human experience took those documents and did the same thing to them as had produced the Bible exactly the same process and of course the Mesha fee I had that thought the next thought occurred which was I thought I might try this was as cheap went about 30 years ago I started to do that to to gather text every time I came across something I thought would be very useful I know division pulled it together and over time began to do that work of redaction of arrangement and modification contributing introductory passages and linking passages here and there and one or two others but you know 99 percent 98 percent of this book is drawn from these extraordinary rich resources there's a treasure-house of insight and inspiration in these great great traditions of thought by these great minds and these people by the way who wrote these books their life and their experience of life is very different from ours there's much more like what it must be to live in Benghazi or Kabul or Baghdad today you know a much more precarious kind of life a shorter life a life where pressed and pressured by experiences that that we don't ordinarily if we're lucky have in our in our safe and and developed Western world today and so their commentary on the human condition and what they say what they suggest in the way of advice to us about how we might respond to things and think about things is deeply valuable because it was squeezed out of them by my reality and I took these these wonderful resources and I worked on them and of course I came up with something which is greatly longer than the result my publishers very wisely demanded of me that I tried to be economical took a leaf after they sent exuberance and a soupery both of the little prince he said art is not what you get when there's nothing more to add but when there's nothing more to take away so the discipline of economizing cutting down really making serious choices about what should remain then I went through that process also and the result is this book now if there is one one overarching theme in the book it is that in the end we have to think for ourselves we have to be responsible for our own choices we have to own the decisions that we make about how we're to live we have to see clearly what it is that we are capable of and and how best we can relate to other people because good relationships lie at the very heart of good lives and in the end it's our decision and our choice and that's very very important and it's a very important fact about the book itself because whereas other books of this kind tell people what to do what to think what to believe how to behave this book doesn't that is the only injunction think for yourself and all the rest is materials resources suggestions and insights that people might take and use in the process of their own thinking about these things and thinking about these things is of the most vital importance there's no question I'm sure some of you would have heard me said because I've said it so often I repeated it every opportunity that I can it's the remark that so long the great lawgiver of Athens made to King Croesus of Lydia when he when he met him on that famous occasion he pointed out decrees us that a human life really is very short it's less than a thousand months long if you do the maths twelve times seventy it's less than a thousand months long and we remember when we reflect on that that a third of those months were asleep the other third were in traffic jams and supermarkets and so there is a very short time when this urgent matter of what do I value what really is important what's important in life and what's important to me and and how am I to live that and how am I to think of fresh and again about my my bonds with other people and and their significance so there is a short time and there is the surge in question and the question of course is Socrates question now Socrates lived at a time when there was a great switch from one way of thinking about the right organization of society and and and how we should comport ourselves to others really a time governed by what were known as the warrior virtues it's very interesting that the word virtue as its first syllable the the Latin word for man ver or we are some people of a weirdly caught a but ver meaning man and the warrior virtues were the virtues of courage in battle fortitude ferocity preparedness to defend the tribe or the city those were what virtues were but at Socrates time the time of poetry in Athens and afterwards when society developed mature society in the Greek context we're beginning to think a little bit about civic virtues about how we live together how we cooperate how we share things how we learn from one another the civic virtues very different from the warrior virtues because they're about peace and construction as against war and destruction and Socrates went around asking people how should we live how do you think we should live our lives what what what values should we be seeking to realize in our lives that's a very very very important question Socrates also said the unconsidered life the one that hasn't been thought about from chosen is not really worth living because it's somebody else's life if we don't think about our values and how we're going to realize them then we're living somebody else's choices we're like a football that they're kicking but if we own our own choices and we have this idea that we're moving in a certain important direction then and we are in to that extent anyway we are not perhaps in control but certainly we're trying to take responsibility for it and that counts now very interesting implications of this challenge posed by Socrates to everybody is that each individual is capable of doing that thinking and each individual is capable of making certain choices that when acted upon will make a life that is good and worthwhile and he didn't claim to know the answer and he certainly didn't claim to be in a position to impose on everybody a sort of one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how we should live and yet that is what the great absolute isms of history have done not just it's not just the religions of that which have done this it was Stalin in the Soviet Union for example any totalizing monolithic ideology any any mindset any outlook on life which says there is one great truth one right way one correct answer and everybody has to believe it or agree to it or to the nine that view that we're all dragoon door should be dragooned into into an orderly queue of belief and obedience and of course throughout history has mainly been the religions that have done this but as I say it's it's the the structure rather than the belief system which is the important thing here but that is what history has imposed on humanity for most of its course and the implication of Socrates challenge to people was that that's not true it isn't the case that there's one correct answer or one great truth instead there is the answer and the truth that we each of us make or find or have a talent for in our own lives now I don't mean by this a kind of relativism I don't mean that that what's true for me is false for you what's right for me it was wrong for you I don't mean it in that sense at all what I mean is that the diversity and plurality of human nature and human experience is such that each one of us should be able and is able to find a way of living which is genuinely rich and satisfying worthwhile and in which the relationships are there for good and flourishing relationships commensurate with our own individual talents for doing that our own capacities and the the result of our own attempt to educate ourselves to do that well that's a very very important point doesn't mean it doesn't mean relativism it doesn't mean that there aren't very many commonalities shared things between human beings which make us all members of one family this is why we're able to say but we all need privacy we all need certain rights freedom of expression and the ability to choose where we live and what kind of work we do and who we are going to associate with these are very important of fundamental rights that we all share so there is a great deal of commonality but at the same time there's also a great deal of individuality and that individuality has to be expressed because if we're not allowed to be individuals then our natures are distorted and our possibilities are limited and the quickest way to explain this is to remind you of what George Bernard Shaw said about the golden rule the golden rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you George Bernard Shaw said under no circumstances should you do to other people what you'd like them to do to you because they may not like it and it's a very very profound insider you have to remember that people's tastes differ people in people's interests differ and if you make yourself the benchmark the standard of how everybody else should be treated everybody treated the way you like to be treated then that's a very distorting view you have to recognize and accept and honor those differences of course up to the limit of the harm principle as John Stuart Mill called it at Ostia Mills said there should be a great variety of experiments in human living and people should be given the freedom to develop themselves in their lives in ways that seem good and unsuitable to them always remembering if each one of us has the responsibility not to harm others not to limit other people in their endeavor to do that that is a bottom line that every one of us must observe and that means that we must be tolerant we've got to respect the differences between us and others and tolerance is very difficult we all think we're tolerant it's really because we don't mind when we do mind we find it jolly hard to accept what other people do and things I remember and some of you will remember mrs. Mary Whitehouse do you remember her the only woman in the world who had a television set with that North button so she had to watch everything all the nudity and so on that she disapproved of and because her television didn't have an off button she wanted the television you know companies not to put these programs out I don't like it that were you not allowed to watch it that was her attitude the attitude of the moralist and the Puritan who wants to impose her decisions and tastes on everybody else and that is utterly wrong as you can see that if you respect plurality diversity difference between people you respect their right to to the endeavor to create something good for themselves and they're those they care about again under that command of the harm principle they are not allowed to harm other people you've got to be open-minded and open-hearted not so open-minded that our brains fall out obviously we need standards and we need to talk to one another negotiate and have a conversation about what we can agree on and accept but that agreement should be a very generous one because we should recognize that people are different and that you remember the Monty Python thing where Brian shouts out to the crowd you're all different and they all shout back we're all different except for the one person who says I'm not you know in anything in fact in a way the gift to us of the 18th century enlightenment was the final clear clarion call assertion of this fact about our individuality about the need for for rights and civil liberties which would respect that and at last free people to do this work the work that Socrates demanded we do which is to think about the good life so what I did was I went to these resources I gathered together these texts I worked on them and and redacted them and put them together in such a way as to provide materials the materials of of insight and suggestion and inspiration and conservation that might help people who are doing this work of thinking for themselves about how altom utley they're going to live and what choices ultimately they're going to make there's nothing in there of the nature of a commandment other than think we there's nothing in there which says do this do that believe this believe that and if you do you'll get a reward and if you don't you're in big trouble none of that it just respects the autonomy of the individual and deed makes a demand on that Ratana me which is to exercise it because of course one of the hardest things in the world is to do this you know most people would rather not have to think they want other people to do the thinking for them already they'd like to pop along to the frozen warehouse of ideas and just take out a sort of a pizza which says this is how you live this is what you believe this is right and consume it and defrost it to some extent and consume it and you know because it is quite hard again my favorite jokes is what Bertrand Russell said those people would rather die than think and most people do and so this is a serious problem for the world because if people are unreflective and they just accept teachings that accept ancient traditions I mean without realizing it viewing the world through the lens of ideas that were first developed by illiterate goatherds who lived 3,000 years ago then without unless they're challenged to think that through and think it afresh that they're not going to become to something which belongs to them which is autonomous to them and it is quite hard work doing that thinking it really is and I very often and have conversations with cloud drivers in London you know what they're like they're all professional philosophers and pessimists and they ask me what I do I don't say I'm a philosopher by the way Aristotle and Socrates and people like that were philosophers so it's a big tall order to claim that you are one but I say I teach philosophy and write about it and they and then assume that I am one you know the capital F so they asked me the question what what's the meaning of life then all right governor what's the meaning of life anything and I say I know the answer to that question much to their surprise I do I know the answer to that question the answer is the meaning of life is what we make it each one of us can make our lives meaningful by our choices our goals the aims that we set ourselves and how we live them how we think about them there's not one meaning which which everybody could discover or be told about or commanded to believe there are lots and lots of meanings lots of good meanings in each one of us can make that meaning in our own lives from our own talents for it but when did I say that - dude - my cab driver the next thing the cab driver thinks I sort of hear the thought going on is what does a philosopher do when he gets up in the morning you know what a plumber or a carpenter does or a cab driver for that matter what is it what is it philosopher do does he get himself into that into the position and have thoughts oddly enough the answer is yes either about the position but the thinking anyway and I like to remind my students I tell them you know I say to them got to remember the story of the two old ladies on the Glasgow bus overheard talking one saying to the other idea you must be for the Safa kill about this don't give it another thought they never forget that story so you do get up in the morning and try to think but what is easy to think and people you never and people say in a come away from a lecture or they read a book of velocity I'm gonna think I'm number a we think about my values now I'm going to do it on Thursday afternoon four o'clock and they get themselves into the position and they gonna think about their values and then after a few long blank seconds I forgot to get such at the supermarket pops into the mind sort of obvious and easy in a waiter to get involved in this process but here's how you do it you do it by talking to others listening to other people's opinions by reading that's the great resource and even more to the point reflecting on reading a good reader is a thoughtful responsive reader we know who thinks and discusses what is read it was somebody who said I think it might have been La Rochefoucauld said you can't expect if an ass looks into a mirror that an angel will look back well it's the same as the reader of a text if an ass looks into the text you can expect an evil to speak to him back because your passage of that process so reading discussing asking people their opinions and testing and evaluating those opinions forming them of your own trying them out being prepared to change your mind we're better arguments and better evidence has come forward it's a process it's a dynamic the quest to find the good to find your own particular line your own talent or capacity for to make something really meaningful out of your life in in your life and in your relationships that is itself the quest itself the journey towards that ideal is itself the good and well lived life cliches to that effect that it is the journey not the arrival of the matters and it couldn't be more true than in this connection the connection of how trying to discern how we should live and and what our value should be the endless tireless energetic vigorous self demanding quest to seek things that are good and to make things that are good in our lives that is the good life and by the way it's not the goody two-shoes life it's not conventional morality it's not you know being also prissy about adultery and things like that that's not to the point in a way oddly it's it's very very odd that a lot of conventional morality concerns itself with things that are although they have their significance of course and they can involve things which are harmful and hurtful to people and trying not to hurt others trying to be a constructive a good neighbor to others and understanding the affray of these and difficulties that others have as we ourselves do but that generous attitude to to others that preparedness as Emerson said to give them what we give a good paint painting namely the advantage of a good light that that work that endeavor is really important and central to this development of a good life but it is not a moralizing one it's not refusing to accept other people's choices and condemning them for it unless it their choices are very harmful to others it's not about you know worrying about nudity on television when just down the road there's an arms factory exporting Kalashnikovs to fuel you know terrible conflicts in the Horn of Africa one's got to get one's values right and once proportions correct in order to see what really does matter and what really does do harm in this world and to see instead how some of the things that people have traditionally looked down upon are actually part of the great pleasure of life and but Oberon war son of evil and war editor of the Lefevre view in London said of all the of all that the the courtesans in the world said just think how much joy they've added to human history and that gives you a different perspective on things somewhat although of course there are other aspects to that that might be somewhat less positive but it's a thought anyway that gives you a little adjustment to the chiller a little little corrective to our normal instincts about what counts as right and wrong we shouldn't be conventional and moralistic we should be generous and sort of capacious in our understanding of human variety so the good book is an attempt to draw together resources that would the might be of some help to people who are thinking this through again the process that is the process of thinking and making decisions about these matters now when I was putting it the book together I made some decisions important decisions about how to do it about how I should present all this material and I decided to model it on the King James version of the Bible published four hundred years ago this year it's an entire coincidence by the way that my 30 year journey to produce this book happened to land on the in the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible serendipitous and rather a lucky coincidence in a way because it meant among other things that I was able to have a babe collegial and warm discussion with Rowan Williams dance Bishop of Canterbury in London last week about the Good Book and about its relation with the King James Bible now the King James Bible published in 1611 is laid out in in a way that we've become familiar with and we think is the standard biblical format that is double-column chapter and verse and one reason for the success of the King James Bible apart from the great beauty of the language because it is a very very beautiful document it was produced at a time in 16th and early 17th century when the English language was at one of its poetic heights so it is a very beautiful document but also the way it's physically laid out makes it a very inviting a very attractive and accessible read you can read just one or two verses the chapters are short so you could read the chapter if you want to do you could read the long long long tracks of Chronicles and Kings and Samuel the great history books of the Old Testament for example and a very unedifying read in some respects you may remember there's an example set there think of King David seeing Bathsheba in her bath on her rooftop fancying her sending her husband after the war with instructions that he'd be put in the front line inviting Bathsheba to come round and making her his mistress well they're full of edifying tales in the Old Testament very very accessible and attractive layout so I chose the layout I also respected a decision that the King James makers made about the language that they used this beautiful language of their version of the Bible they decided that their language should be old-fashioned in fact the language of the King James Bible was a hundred years out-of-date when it was published in 1611 and it's contemporary readers would have recognized it as such because it's mainly the language of of Tyndale they the translator a century beforehand of the Bible into English the King James makers used scindia's translation they claimed in their letter dedicatory epistle to King James that they newly translated the Bible they hadn't they taken Tyndale's version they had collated it with the Hebrew and Greek texts of course to check it they had made some changes but their age was an age of editorial genius because the reason why the King James Version of the Bible is so beautiful even more beautiful than the Tyndale version which has great virtues or of its own is that the little tweaks and touches here and there the little editorial modifications but the King James makers adduced on to thee Tyndale text turn something good into something brilliant those little touches were touches of magic interestingly Shakespeare did the same thing you know Shakespeare never made up a story or wrote a play from scratch all Shakespeare's works are adaptations from earlier texts from other other plays other sources he uses long tracks from Holland sheds cronic Chronicles to the history of England but again by the genius of editorial modification he turned something good and something ordinary into something transcendently wonderful and just like there are contemporaries in other art forms Peter Paul Rubens the the great poet of female flesh for example most of his paintings were painted by his workshop by his assistants and then he would come along and he would add a touch of colour he would do a face he would do the hands so expressive in his paintings and bye-bye those means he returned something good into something brilliant it was an age of editors if you like of adapters and the King James Version of the Bible was an adaptation of an adaptation I talked to you about how the Bible was originally made for the King James makers of the bat version of the Bible added another layer of adaptation and produced this beautiful book beautiful in manner again the matter is another matter but beautiful in man a beautiful language so I chose to to adapt their layer because of its accessibility and its readability then I also chose to recognize the value of their decision about the language you use a form of language which is not quite of today the language of the good book is not the wire in Baltimore or you know good a Sydney today nobody has a B I love that fact that beer has ceased to have a beer diphthong in Sydney and therefore it stands it as a bit apart from from today or 20 years ago or 20 years time and has something of that character that other other translations of other holy writings have of saying this is this stuff is quite significant in a way this is quite important these quite important ideas which are being offered for your consideration so let's put it in a way that has its own special character but the more important reason even than all that is that the good book is often very respectfully to the same space of conversation as all the other great ethical works and the other great religious works since they all address themselves to the question of life I think that what Aristotle had to say in Cicero and David Hume and John Stuart Mill and what they had to say belongs in that same space of conversation and so it's offered to it it's a book that belongs on the same bookshelf as they and there and this is something that it says about itself by the way I've laid it out under and presented it so that's how it was made that's why it was made as it was and I now turn do a question of the responses that I've received to it and these responses have been extremely polarized I've had some wonderfully warm responses both in reviews and from people who've written and emailed and so on and for different composers one in Germany one in the Netherlands two in the United Kingdom setting parts of it to music parts of it are already been turned into a children's version with lovely illustrations and being translated into about ten languages now it's being made into an audio book it's number one on the religion in the Amazon both in the US and the UK and tiny be worried about that by the way I do have a slight anxiety actually just a little footnote remark here that in five hundred years time I'll be a god and my anxiety about it is that in fact that I'd be an extremely bad one not that the bar has been set very high in history but also I really don't want to be one I think it would be rather difficult to be one I remember Jim Carrey in that movie and I remember that the poor old Buddha said to his disciples when he was in his last illness he said the police that make me a god don't turn this into a religion Buddhism as you know is the philosophy was never intended to be a religion and it's become one because of the natural inclinations to superstition that human beings have alas and so in various parts of the world even in Tibet Chan Buddhism in China and the various schools of Buddhism in Japan have accretions of superstition and some religious elements to them but Buddhism in its origin is is a philosophy and in Buddha didn't want to be a God everybody does really apart from the Roman emperors so and afoot although I should just add to that footnote that my wife did send me a car which had honor to Robert self-satisfied working individuals saying I used to be an atheist until I realized I am God so some wonderful warm responses really lovely emails from people the book was published less than two months ago and already I've had photographs sent to me from humanist weddings in America where some very fat people getting married and they they used the parts of the good book as their observance and I'm I'm tremendously heartened by that and I think that's completely lovely somebody asked me when I was on my book tour in America whether I would mind people burning the good book and I said that I'd be delighted especially if they bought a replacement copy but there have also been very hostile responses as you could imagine I mean some of the of the reviews are the very worst reviews I've ever had for anything some of the reviews have been sort of hysterically hostile and the the less encumbered the reviewer has been by actual acquaintance with the book the more hysterical they've been in their response to and you can see why I think it's rather an interesting commentary on this very bad-tempered quarrel that's been going on between religion and non-religion I'm very proud indeed to be associated with my friends Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens with whom I agree on on everything and people people say that Richard can sometimes seem very rhubarb at a very aggressive and confrontational can offend people and it's mainly of course because Richard many many many decades has been trying to explain evolutionary biology and when people pop up saying that the world was created six thousand years ago it annoys him and you can understand why it's very interesting you know every year thousands thousands not hundreds but quite literally thousands of books are published of a religious nature about that about prayer or about religious stories the best-selling book in America recently has been a little boy who went to heaven and come back and told everybody what it's like that and that's the best-selling book that having thousands of such books exist and yet half a dozen books by Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris and Daniel Dennett have really got the the doves in the dog got fluttering you know really upset everybody and worried everybody and I think it's an interesting fact I think most of the reaction from some some people to the to the good book if they expecting it that it's an attack on religion or a satire on the Bible or a claim that is fair to displace the Bible of course it isn't any of those things I mean in others of my things I've written other books I've written I've been very frank and blunt in my opposition to religion yes but this book is not an attack on religion at all I mean any open-minded person that religion could look into it and see what Cicero Aristotle of human Spinoza has to say about something and find the resources of tremendous value these are very very profound insights and and beautiful responses to life and all its difficulties it's a book for everybody it's not an empty religious book or a book only for atheists and by the way some of my critics have been fellow atheists they put their hands on the hips and say atheist don't need a Bible what are you up to date they renamed you're making it seem as though we think we're religion we can think for ourselves we don't need it it's not a necessity and I say in response to them you're right you don't need it it's not a necessity but it might be of some use to some people even atheists sometimes we know they might have to have some kind of you know suggestions which might help them along with with their thinking and that's fine by the way I also get critics who say how annoyed they are that there are no references no footnotes they come across some really rather wonderful insight a neighbor who said that who read that and this is a great instinct that we all have especially more educated that you are the more footnotes you want and and they and they desperately annoyed that there aren't any book needs a my response to that is to say next time you're in an art gallery look at the people going around at that gallery you'll notice they spend miles more time reading the little plaque next to the painting than looking at the painting and we make this mistake with what's written Oh Aristotle said that oh that's pretty good Fred Smith said it over who's here if the right said the author the source of a saying comes between you and the saying if you don't just focus on the idea or the insight which is what I want which is why I took the texts away from their sources I don't repeat them to anybody there they are the ideas by themselves and my justification for it is this that anything wise anything true belongs to everybody it doesn't matter who said it if it's wise or true it's our own anybody can take possession of it and make use of it in their lives you can't say oh gosh that's such a wonderful insight what a pity I can't use it because there is poeple said it well I mean that would be a travesty also of course the book would have been three times as long because there would be so many footnotes you couldn't read the text and then there would be massive thing of references at the back so people say to me well you could have put it online couldn't you you heard about all the footnotes and all the all the stuff online that would be true too but yet again they would have spent all their time on the computer instead of thinking about the insights they would have been looking up who said it and that would be a distraction so it was quite deliberate to take them away from their sources and say here are ideas insights attitudes lessons learned by our forebears in the human story distilled and collected and brought together offered to anybody who will read and think as a resource for thinking about life well I feel when I read the hostile reviews the hysterical reviews rather I'm strangely but wonderfully impervious because the other thing you were reading in the bath last night was Homer's Iliad you remember the story in there - sir the archer who hid behind the shield of the giant Ajax would pop out every now and then to fire his arrows at the Trojans well I'm like - sir hiding behind the shields of all these great thinkers I've brought together in this book so when the hostile reviewers moan and groan about it that they are moaning and groaning about Aristotle and Cicero and Spinoza you little though they know it they sort of know it but they forget it and in their criticisms they think they criticize me and I'm unscathed well I offered this to you into and to anybody who could make use it's not a necessity you don't have to have it if you're one of these people you think that it's not necessary if and you know I would urge this if you think forget this book go to the original sources go and read the Nicomachean ethics go and read Spinoza's great work go and read Hume on the inquiry concerning the principles and morals I'd be the very very first person to urge you to do it those great works of philosophy by the way are very accessible I know that a lot of you have gone to the bookshop you've taken down a book of philosophy you've looked at it you've turned it upside down you've put it back on the shelf and haven't had a cup of coffee thinking to yourself heck you know all these long words marmalade and corrugated iron I mean they they they push people away those books that contemporary philosophy which is very very technical very jargon laid and you need to know a lot before you can get a lot out of them there's a lot of very valuable work there but and I think philosophy belongs to everybody and for most of its history it was written for everybody Andres tatl didn't write for professors there weren't any he was writing for his educated fellows in society so was Cicero so it was Erasmus so was Milton so as Hume so it was John Stuart Mill belongs to everybody and their checks are accessible if you will go to them but I imagine that as times go time goes by and we get more longer thumbs and shorter attention spans so we will lose sight of this great treasure trove of wisdom that exists in all our civilized traditions and by the way it was a wonderful discovery as I worked on this book that an ancient Greek and an ancient Chinese philosopher felt so much the same way and said such the same things about how we should be and what we should value that was the wonderful discovery the great convergence of good and wise people on what the right thing for us to think a so that was a valuable lesson that I got from it and we're in danger of losing that because of course in the last couple of thousand years especially the last 1500 years when the monotheistic religions have been dominant in the world they have sequestered all this insight into a little corner it's only studied and only then in part in philosophy departments in universities this this list casket of jewels hidden away from all of us and it belongs to all of us and we don't get access to it and what I've tried to bring this is some of that back for people to enjoy and profit from thank you very much [Applause] overcome in order to have access to this way of thinking about the morality of your life in your behavior on the contrary I was very fortunate the way to be brought up in a family which didn't have much interested in religion at all so I came across the content of the religions a little bit later on when you're taken by surprised by them and also and in fact my very dear brother is here in the audience today and he will remember that when we were a prep school together he once caught me looking in another boy's locker actually I've been sent but by this other boy to fetch his cricket bat but there was a very strict rule at the school that you weren't allowed to go in to other boys lockers because they were you know there was some theft going on so he caught me doing it and he had under his arm a present that my grandmother had just sent me which was a book of Greek mythology and he said to me your punishment is that you've got to learn by heart the first two pages of this book of Greek mythology and by the next day and by the next day I could have quoted the whole book to him I was so fascinated by the absolutely loved it you know and and there were the there was God in the form of Zeus making mortal maidens pregnant all over the place these immortal maidens were giving birth to egregious characters who went to the underworld and came out again and so when I came across the story of God Mary and Jesus in the underworld and whatever what I've seen the story before I was very puzzled as to why anybody thought it was a particularly special story so I was kind of inoculated by my ignorance and a lot of people bring their children up in in religion I'm bringing up my youngest daughter as an atheist she's a very proud atheist the Atheist badge she said to me when she was eight daddy I don't believe in God but I do believe in the Tooth Fairy and I said to obeying wise there's much more empirical evidence for that [Applause] yes absolutely riveting um I just had a question regarding the sources as to if you could just give us a vague indication of what fraction would be from women yes it's a very good question that and a very important question very little unless I mean from Sappho and you know some of the things that we hear about Hypatia and various others true through the course of history you know history has suppressed the voices of women and not given them opportunities I mean right from the bay fact of not allowing them an education not allowing them access to opportunities to write and to speak so that the voices of women in history are mute largely and it is a great tragedy and I can't help thinking we all know now that the empowerment and enfranchisement of women in our contemporary world especially in the developing world you know education access to the economic process access to the political process is vital for the future of the world if you know we don't have the Equality if we don't have just human beings instead of men and women the future of the world is in some some risky but the whole of history in the last two or three thousand years it's a history of suppression and an mutinous and so when you go to these sources even though I'm pretty sure that most of the blokes who wrote those things learned them from their wives and mistresses you don't hear you don't get it directly from that unless there is and gentlemen I'm afraid that's all we have time for this morning [Applause] this is big ideas from the ABC

Channel: CaNANDian

Views: 42,986

Rating: 4.8769231 out of 5

Keywords: A.C., Grayling, The, Good, Book, 2011

Id: iuuIGRGtV1o

Length: 54min 39sec (3279 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 26 2012