David Starkey: The cultural forces that undermine our progress || The Human Progress Podcast Ep. 5

[Music] hello david starkey lovely to see you lovely to see you um david stark is of course a historian of note primarily of the tudor period in england but a man of uh many other insights into other periods of english and british history um he's a dear friend of many years and recently we exchanged a few emails about human progress and some very interesting differences between us and our outlook on human progress have emerged so i thought why not do a podcast about the things that we agree on the things that we just disagree on uh the importance of free speech the importance of studying history and that sort of thing so uh thanks for uh having me where are you uh i am in i'm outside london uh in a tiny village in fact outside canterbury so i'm to the southeast of london in kent which is known as the garden of england and i look outside and there's a very beautiful garden which is my bit of the garden of kent and it's uh it's an early 18th century house in america it you would call it colonial and it's a kind of house that you will find in georgetown and its exact contemporaries you will find this kind of version which has got relatively low ceilings and originally had very big fireplaces in other words built for cold climate as america was you'll find it in country districts like this it's called the red house because it's built out of very bright red brick very good now presumably presumably the ceilings are so low because people used to be much shorter in the past well that's not true i mean people were very wide variations of height then as now um henry viii we were talking about my expertise in the tudors henry viii is six foot one inches tall and edward iv where who is his grandfather when they married his when they married when they measured his skeleton in the 18th century after of course as the the the post-mortem shrinkage and whatever his skeleton was still six feet four inches tall right but on average on average people were shorter probably which and you're now going to talk about progress do you see how you see how i introduced yeah i can see how you think the degree of primitivism is astonishing because of course what happens is that people get shorter after the 16th century people are probably in their west at their shortest at their shortest in the industrial towns of the 19th century with wretched diet appalling accommodation filthy atmosphere those in country districts tended to be much bigger and stronger which is why the army recruits there in other words these things are not linear at all and of course they vary with class they vary they vary with genetic history so for example um i mentioned henry viii on one side of his family they're giants the english royal house most of them are massive on the other hand on his grandmother's side and on lady margaret beaufort's side and she is small petite quite wizard um and a very very different sort of facial structure um the main royal house but it looks a bit like prince harry but imagine harry as a real rugby player with muscles and broad shoulders and but that same sort of strawberry and cream complexion reddish hair and and appetites and temper to go with the red hair and and the build so these things in other words the past the past is is not a simple pattern it's intensely variable yes i think it's yeah it's a very idea of progress let's see let's let's let's demarcate the differences between us well um so human progress is uh really retrospective um the way that i look at it i compare today with the past i don't compare progress with some sort of a utopian future that some college kid has imagined where there are no problems and everybody is satisfied the i'm making a very simple point that compared to human history on most aspects of human well-being people are much better off today than they were in the past do you disagree with that not for one second it is self-evidently true if you look at the whole of our control of the material world in that old biblical phrase man is the master the man is the master of nature man as the sovereign of the animal universe we have never established such control so completely with such effect never ever if you look in me in the history of medicine if you look in in in the history of transportation if you look in the history of food supply all of these things manifestly what you say is true if you look at the objective world in other words the world outside man now this progress and i think it's really very important to uh you were talking about the past the non-utopian version what i think is very important is to understand how recent and how dramatic it is in other words there hasn't been a gradual improvement there there is as you know the kunian theory of scientific change which is that it tends to be cataclysmic as you shift from one paradigm to another i think the this this control of the material environment has been similarly in terms of human history it's the last five minutes we're rea although the the standard view of the middle ages is primitive and all the rest of it won't do and if you look for example at the middle ages in terms of engineering it's much more sophisticated than rome the middle ages had the wheeled plow which the romans didn't made slaves it made it easier and the middle ages if you compare for example the engineering skill will keep on coming back to the tudors the engineering skill of something like the vault of kings cottage chapel this vast structure of stone that is actually held in place by the way in other words it's kept up there by the knowledge of engineering that it's pulled down there and the lateral thrusts of this vast weight controlled by elegant flying buttresses at the side and it's all in stone of course and these huge windows and compare that with the primitivism of the pantheon it's a magnificent structure but it's just a lump of cast concrete um or compare the and paul's with the dome of the pantheon the dome of the pantheon is just solid it's it it's just concrete and tired the doomless pause is a staggering confection of wood of concrete of stone of held together because of lateral thrust again by a huge iron chain so the extraordinary technological surface and the middle ages had clocks mechanical clocks um rome didn't but nevertheless in almost all always the change we are talking about begins at a perfectly identifiable moment of time it starts really in the 15th century and it accelerates from there it's what we call the renaissance of reformation the scientific revolution and that change seems to me to be due which is the origin of our idea of progress remember earlier civilized the idea of progress itself is a piece of progress right it's a new idea right the first proper book on it um is by the previous generation of my teachers at cambridge um in the either late 1920s or early 1930s called the idea of progress yeah i have it yeah yeah of course you do most earlier civilizations had notions of either decline things getting worse or cyclical the classical so he see it he see it has his uh uh periods from gold to silver to bronze and it's a decline that's a classic that's a classic roman and greek view and um and of course even christianity which is often described as you know introducing this notion of direction in history of course it does the idea of redemption and all the rest of it christianity is in no way about an idea of progress and certainly it's got nothing to do with this world you remember and the last days which uh so many people in america seem to think come around every tuesday poor criminal people in america coming around every tuesday and is is in fact armageddon it's total destruction it's the disintegration right civilization here who has uh who has the cyclical view is that uh is that in the far east i mean most of most of the ancient historians or almost again if you look at the classic accounts of politics we need to look at politics separately obviously if you look at the classic accounts of politics and in both plato and aristotle the to the the two people you know who give us our entire vocabulary of monarchy aristocracy republic and democracy and all the rest of it they saw politics as a series of successions of types of government naturally falling over and lapsing into each other and they're recognized and i think this will come up in our discussions probably the most fragile form of government is the democratic republic and the great miracle and here i'm going to be polite about america is that america has survived as long as it has it is um it's the only proper long-surviving republic um uh i mean obviously one thinks of venison whatever but that's a narrow elitist aristocratic state and the the survival of america which owes i think everything to those reviled figures the founding it goes everything to two things can't hold everything to two things it's got two two tributes one is the skill of the founding fathers the other is your great good fortune in having been a british colony and not a french one and in other words we'll get we'll get we'll we'll get to colonism in a second but yeah the inheritance the inheritance of one of several of the key elements of progress a relatively free society and a a structure of uh profoundly well established property law um the inheritance of common law and the fact that your revolution leaves all those things intact all of those things intact as well as your great good fortune that it happens at the right moment of the enlightenment before the enlightenment goes mad at the end of the 18th century right so the key here is that the constitution is written at a time when the enlightenment where the mainstream enlightenment embodies a certain set of values which then america enshrines in its constitution and i can't um um i can't resist saying this joke i heard many years ago about you know you said how it was america's fortunate it was colonized by the british not by the french and the joke is that an englishman walks into a french national library and asks to see the constitution and the librarian says it's over there under periodicals because indeed because i've i mean they've been five republicans look at the history of france since the revolution five republics no two two empires three monarchies three monarchies um and and and uh two or three depending on how you how how you count charles the tenth um uh and and and five republics in 200 years and it's you know a record is staggering formal instability although of course i would always say that france has never really changed very much since louis the 14th and and all you all you get all you get you know um are would be louis the 14th be napoleon albee president mcconnell playing this bizarre bizarre combination of of napoleon and the 14th anyway just coming back to the business of progress we agree on the question of material progress what i think we've then got to do is then to distinguish it from where we would disagree which is progress in man's mastery of himself i think we've developed pretty well absolute insofar as one can absolute mastery of the external world i think we have failed to do anything very much with ourselves and in fact i would argue in some ways that our mastery of the external world has made our mastery of ourselves worse so i want to just i want to draw a very very sharp distinction between where i think we can simply shake hands and we can stop talking about it because we actually agree which is material progress and then to look at the much what i think is the much more difficult question which is the idea of if you like political social human actual the progress of of mankind humankind um as as an entity because here um uh to come up with you know a nice little phrase you've you you produced a nice little joke about the french constitution let me tell you what i think of your progress project you are presenting it as a tay dale the thanks be to god on the whole thing it's not it's a requiem you are a requiem you are the last generation i predict that will say these kind of things there's a very important article in this week's british spectator the london spectator by neil fergus by my friend neil ferguson and saying effectively that we are becoming china so let's have another phrase and this i think encapsulates much though not all of what i want to talk about um at the beginning of last year at the beginning of 2020 we caught a chinese virus i think the consequences of that chinese virus are that we will finish up with a chinese society china not simply exported from wuhan which undoubtedly undoubtedly did and let's thought you know trump was absolutely right it is the chinese right let's stop footing around and whether it came from bats or from a laboratory there's no doubt about it and it's also it's also with deadly effect exporting the chinese society and we are falling over and letting it happen and the big question we now want to debate is why is this happening what has gone wrong so let me interject that for a second so i agree that that should be the essence of our discussion i think i was reading a lot of articles by your former chief uh justice uh lord sumption he's not uh he's a member of the supreme court he was never president right he had a monstrous woman who was president in his days and who was who was known as judicial spider the really key important thing about jonathan is he is fundamentally a historian he's a great medieval historian as well as a great lawyer and and and and the one thing that i learned from him his big concern is that this is the first time in generations certainly since the second world war that the government in western societies has learned that if they can create enough of a sense of crisis and impending disaster that can then shut down the society and basically control it and his concern is that what are the future crises real or imagined where the government could simply exercise this kind of control if it can for example convince the majority of the people in england or in the united states that climate is quote unquote an emergency then any sorry existential problem existential threat then obviously uh you know an existential threat means that anything to avoid the destruction of human existence must be permissible right it's nice in other words what we're dealing with and again it's all of this dare i say it was even better expressed because uh jonathan uh is is a great mind he's not a particularly good writer all of this was put together patronizingly all of this was put together much more brilliantly by george orwell george orwell is about a society based on fear and the combination of fear and the human reaction to it needs natural leads naturally to illiberalism it need leads naturally to 1984. 1984 is a war permanent war society in other words if you want war on the virus we constantly use this phrase war on and war on the virus war on drugs and that of course then just justifies any possible suppression of freedom of course it does and or it was put you know and even better by benjamin franklin that great greatest of the phrase makers uh of of the founding fathers that wonderful line about you know those who will sacrifice for a little security freedom end up by losing both i mean this is and what we do what we did with with covid in the name of a false security we have committed the absolute sacrifice of freedom now why is this so important it is because i would argue if we go back to the founding fathers if we go back to the constitution if we go back to this astonishing four or five hundred year run that we've had in the west remember progress is a specifically western phenomenon can we get this absolutely right no other society has ever been founded on an idea of progress let me give you an illustration uh think of china which we constantly go on about isn't it wonderfully technical wasn't it wonderfully technologically sophisticated yes it was i had the great privilege of going around the first emperor exhibition at the british museum with one of our great sort of media personalities jeremy paxman and we've ever encountered sure always always grumpy bad tempered and you asked the same question 14 times and still doesn't get the answer that he wants and we were going around this exhibition and there were two things that struck both as well one of them struck me because i'm bright and the other one struck paxton because he's not um and the the the first thing that struck me was there was the chariot of the first emperor right this is when 800 whatever it is 880 whenever the empire is founded that chariot is more technologically sophisticated with its springing and whatever than anything that is made in western europe until the 1800s until the phaetons of the of the regency but china was still making that chariot in the early 20th century rather than motor cars right in other words a technological progress had simply frozen and the other thing that paxman got excited by there was a very interesting exquisite little um pen and ink or a brush brush and ink sketch that was labeled the control of public opinion how do you freeze the society label the control of public opinion but it showed you how you control public opinion it showed intellectuals being buried alive in the pit at the end of a pitchfork and in comment to that and paxman said this man that's the first emperor was a loom wasn't he well he was but he also creates this staggering stable society ancient egypt is the same and it's it's often very difficult to tell whether an egyptian antiquity is real in other words 2000 years bc or whatever or it's been forged a thousand or two thousand years later right and because the society changes so astonishingly little in that right why this is why why why freedom is i would argue but of course china is going to test this idea the the this astonishing explosion of the mind is due to two ideas what has happened is the mind explodes and learns to control nature how is it done it's through an idea of freedom on the one hand which we've seen we've thrown away and the other idea and this i think is at least as important is an idea of objectivity that there is such a thing as truth and that it is testable and that it is outside yourself and that you the first thing you have to do is to learn to accept that there is that thing outside yourself which is unchangeable and this is what of course is meant by the experimental method by the empiricism that we traditionally attribute to francis bacon at the beginning of the 17th century and that process of experimentation which has led to the in other words results can be falsifiable they can be demonstrated to be untrue that's one part of this vast revolution over nature the other is the even more astonishing discovery remember we're very peculiar creatures and all most creatures are pattern making birds nests you know um what one of the thing called um um spiders webs of whatever we are unique in the number of different patterns we make and one of our most peculiar sets of patterns are the patterns of mathematics and through that process of experimentation in the 17th and 18th century it was discovered and nobody quite understands why maybe there really is a god and that would mean god was a mathematician that there is a correspondence between this extraordinary complex set of mental patterns that we call mathematics and this outside world is absolutely given outside world that we can establish by the processes of experimentation and again bacon has this wonderful phrase about the process of experimentation he calls it putting nature to the question now that slightly lost its entrenched meaning what it means is torturing nature the question is the french for we were talking about the difference between england and france in france the use of torture in criminal law until the revolution was so common that it was simply referred to as la question and all the examining magistrate needed to do was to note one two and three in the margin of the sheet that was the instruction as to the number of wedges that were to be driven uh to your lower leg whether you confused it whether you broke it or whether you shattered it so submitting nature to the question torturing nature through the experiment which most recent triumph of course is the covid vaccine and but it depends on the acknowledgement of that outward nature and the difference between man subjective man objective the objective world outside now we've not only thrown away by imitating china on the abolition freedom lock down quite deliberately imitating china i mean our scientists here the the neil ferguson not the real neil ferguson but this awful mathematician at imperial college who happily spells his christian name differently actually said we got the idea from china we actually saw the italians borrowing it and then we realized we could do it and it's monstrous but the other thing we've got from china we've had a cultural revolution what woke is woke is a version of a cultural revolution we'll get to that in a second we'll get to it just so that we put the two ideas very clearly there was the idea of freedom and there is the idea of of objectivity and what i would argue is both of them with astonishingly close to each other and i think there are reasons for why both have happened together and have come under acute attack and that immediately undercuts not simply and our political progress not simply our social progress it threatens utterly fundamentally the continuance of our mastery of the universe as well you know was the entire edifice that you're talking about rather than standing you know like some magnificent egyptian temple on these great pillars turns out like egyptian temples to be floating on mud well that was a wonderful opening and i agree with some of that let me start with the whole business about a requiem to human progress human progress the project and my writings are uh i think they are written in terms of gratitude for what came before an appreciation of where we are but i'm not pullianish in a sense of thinking that this is the best world that we could possibly live in and also i'm not uh i'm not determinist i do not believe that uh there is some higher power that ensures that you know 100 years from now or even 50 years from now things will be better than they are today in other words i fully accept that the world 50 years from now will be a reflection of decisions made by individual people and whether they continue to embrace what you and i actually agree are the primary drivers or the primary driver behind human progress which was the flourishing of human freedom sometime in the second half of the uh second millennium first in western europe and then in the european offshoot so the the the the the essence of freedom is absolutely vital i would i understand what you mean by objectivity um the the the understanding that there is a physical objective world out there but to simplify it for our audience could be to say free speech in other words the ability the ability yeah you disagree the point let me just explain what i mean just in case i'm i've said something that may happen to be true but but i misspoke in a sense the essence or the the fundamental reason why freedom has to be accompanied by free speech is for intellectuals academic scientists inventors to be able to interact with the physical world and come to the truth the the point being that you need people to be able to say the sun is in the center of the solar system and the world revolves around it so it's the interaction between the objective world and the ability to explore it free of uh inquisition that is the key if that's what happened free and free of dogma so that's what i meant when i said yes but you see i think it is i still think that freedom of speech in itself doesn't explain the process that that that what was that my argument about objectivity about a test for truth and you can come up with all sorts of vague guff about the truth will act you know we have this this conventional notion that the truth the truth will win the overwhelming evidence of human history is that the truth doesn't win the easiest thing is to be lies and and you know the whole of we can if we want to be polite we can call them myths myths of religion myths of virgin births merciful myths of what some multi-armed indian god is supposed to have done um and these these are myths and they can have immense let's also give them credit they can have immense social utility they can also do vast damage they frequently create astonishing beauty they belong in a realm of poetry much of the christian bible the christian judeo-christian bible is some of the most staggering poetry and imagery that has ever been created and has produced you know astonishing uh traditions of beauty we've left beauty by the way completely out of it because it's manifestly clear if you look at modern art that there's been no progress in beauty whatsoever but that's that's that's that's completely different i can't i can't disagree with that yeah yeah that's that's a completely different matter but i think this this notion of the putting nature to the inquisition the that in other words merely people debating in itself doesn't necessarily get you very far you need because that wonderful phrase of tsl mankind i'm sorry he was terribly sexist mankind cannot stand too much reality is true you need something that forces people to confront it dr johnson has that marvelous phrase when he was dealing with the guff of bishop berkeley who denied the existence of material reality he said kick a stone you need that test that kick the stone test that sense of the of of the world that resists you um and one of the things that that that i think is frightening uh and this is this is the big one of the big paragraph there's much of what we're talking about now marian is paradox right in other words the progress itself has turned out to be its own undoing please explain on that um because what it seems to me to be is the idea of reality we have lost a sense of reality and we've lost it for two reasons the first is the staggering nature of technological progress when i was a boy um the standard way in which um most most middle-class men only middle-class men in europe had motor cars the way they spent their sunday afternoons was dressed in healthy overalls and covered in oil crawling underneath a car which had half broken down the previous week in other words everybody sort of understood how a car worked now a car is driven by a computer and it even unlocks itself if you raise an eyebrow now this is a world which no ordinary person comprehends at all the new technology might just as well be a miracle a handful of people actually understand how it works now this divorce from as it were causing what we've done the old idea the old idea of objectivity depends very powerfully on cause and defect dr johnson you kick a stone action how cause and effect what we have done is virtually to remove the notion of causation you press the button you press a button and what you do or you don't even press a button now you you you glance or do do that on your iphone the lights come on in your house the central heating turns itself up the air conditioning cuts decide you know and and you sort of know what's going on but you actually don't and the most devastating area of this is the idea of virtual reality of what we are doing now the fact that we can be talking to each other across 4 000 miles and that we could as it were simultaneously that we can maintain a conversation that we have you asked me where i was the illusion of our shared space and whatever which equally of course you could be replaced by a bot and i will be very little the wiser except i'd occasionally wonder why it was being cleverer than usual you know okay but why is that why is that why is that bad why is the fact that because i don't know how to fix a car but i can spend my time doing something else like talking to you why is that a bad thing no the the it all it does as i said it means that people live and believe in miracles modern technology is nearer to a miracle a religious miracle to an old fashioned motor car and the belief in miracles is catastrophic i agree if you believe in miracles you believe you will do anything you will do anything that that god tells you to and the other thing the other great problem is this world of virtual reality that we are creating the virtual friend uh the uh the virtual unfriending all of this is it's catastrophic consequences again one of the things we don't do enough marion we don't teach people the great classics the the great texts thought and we mentioned some of the figures we've talked about plato we've talked about aristotle and we've we've talked about the founding fathers you know the greatest some of the greatest essays on politics ever written are are the federalist papers i mean there are astonishing achievements of the human spirit well one of the great i and often the ideas themselves are put with a brilliant compression one of the most brilliant pieces of compression is plato in the republic when he talks about the image of the cave and he describes when he describes people who are not as it were fully adult he talks of them as not grasping reality this phrase again the same phrase as elliot and he uses this wonderful similitude this wonderful model in which what he's really doing with obviously the very limited technological capacity of ancient greece he's talking about a modern cinema he says imagine people in held inside a dark darkened cave um and they've never seen the outside world and so they've got no idea and they're not allowed to look at each other all they can do is to look at this screen and on the screen there are projected the images of puppets which are enlarged with the flame behind them well this is a description of what we are doing now it's a description of the cinema it's a description of the social media and it is virtual reality is the destruction of everything that's really real it breaks down that relationship of causation and cause and effect it leaves the world open to neo-religion neo-miracles neo-persecution neo-martyrdom and um it seems to me that the the the the what technology is doing in other words so this is this is the last big problem the last big starkey idea there so more may come up it's taking us back bizarrely to the middle ages what is really striking about the patterns of modern culture is how very similar they are to the middle ages far from being progressive i mean again if you look at something like steve pinker you'll be very familiar with this and steve argues very interestingly you know isn't it wonderful how much we progressed as humanity even into the last century people are executed by public torture people would never do that now this is absolutely shocking and then five minutes later he was almost subject to cancellation which is the modern equivalent of burning alive i know i've been through it and uh and this seems to me to illustrate that we are at least as wicked as we ever were given half the chance and given the neo-religious element and woke is a neo-religion it's a cultural revolution exactly like the monstrousness of mount st tong's china so in other words we've got two viruses from with three viruses we've got the wuhan virus with flu we've got chinese flu we've got the destruction of freedom in the name of security and we finally got the destruction of of the whole of this enlightenment scientific revolution world of cause and effect of objectivity in the name of this new religion of feeling social justice the moment i would say you put an adjective an adjective in front of justice you destroy it there is justice and justice is justice the moment you call it social justice you've turned it into a monstrous version yes i think that was uh hayek's observation that the word social is meant to precede the word it's meant to negate that absolutely have you have you by the way have you met him i didn't meet hayek no no hayek was um hayek was really out of it long before i got involved in all this kind of thing i knew his disciples uh and there was profound impact uh on circles in which i moved in from time to time even in lse you know my academic post was at the london school of economics and there there were there were extraordinary it was in many ways were all a wonderful place because there were two completely several traditions but there are those who are the inheritors of the webs of bernard shaw the standard fabian socialist tradition there which of course is very much this managed society that we are talking about and they have nobody no belief in freedom whatsoever and and indeed the webs you know adore soviet communism i mean there is the famous uh two volume i actually have have the i shouldn't have it but somehow finished up on my shelves i have the first of the presentation set from the webs to lse uh volume um in which it's the famous it's a famous second edition and in the first edition had soviet communism a new civilization question mark and then when they went back and should have seen you know the the purges and the gulags and all the rest they eliminated the question mark and what is so interesting about that talking again about religion and all of this is that they actually specifically describe the nomenclature of the communist party as being like the jesuits they see it as a religious force and they see it as a you know as as as a new as it were a purified uh purified elite there was that tradition but there was also the wildly different um tradition at lse uh which was a hayekian tradition uh there was a tradition of serious monetarism and the uh and it's you know no accident whatever that the economics department of lse supplied at least you know succession of major officials of the bank of england and so on and there was also in the government department um a direct inheritance from hayek so it was a remarkable remarkable remarkable way so i'm going to take a few minutes um to push back against some of the things that you have said um i was trying to keep notes uh and i'll do it in the most loving way i'm capable of doing one of the most obvious ways that one could say starkey or wrong is that you are that you are potentially exhibiting what every generation exhibits which is to say uh we were preceded by heroes but we are in the midst and followed by dwarfs say that anymore that's why i stopped challenged lessons get this one vertically challenged first and um and that every generation sees itself as standing on the cusp of history um but you know the romans felt like that cato the elder kept on talking about you know the effeminacy of his contemporaries and how rome was threatened by the lack of morals and martial virtue and this was you know this was hundreds of years before rome reached its peak so i i think that there is there is the issue that we need to discuss about whether whether this is really something different or whether we are simply exhibiting a typical human impulse which again is a decline in perspective i mean thomas babington macaulay famously said why should we predict nothing but destruction ahead of us with nothing but improvement behind us so that's one topic that we need to look at secondly i would say it goes without saying that what they tried to do to pinker and what they did do to you was absolutely vile and horrific and it is also true in my mind that it's very different from burning somebody on the cross in other words if the best that the new religious fanatics can do is to cancel somebody as opposed to actually burn them alive that in itself is a certain degree of progress a progress a progress that we see in other areas men in western societies no longer slap their wives left and right uh we no longer torture people by and large in uh there were some rumors about tortures in the early 2000s as a result of 9 11 but you know we no longer require torture in uh prisons things like that we no longer expose children on the hillside come on come on come on this really works so look look at the right let look at the the pre-trial treatment of somebody who is not an admirable human being but of chilean maxwell that is a scandal and a disgrace and a blot on the face of american justice it's monstrous that somebody was never being tried and condemned is treated like that and subject to that degree of psychological torture and public humiliation i mean you're the i'm sorry i really do disagree radically on this the motives of those who tried to do to pinker and did to me is exactly the same as the mob that burned and of course i'm fortunate and pinker is fortunate we're financially secure people's livelihoods are destroyed those who are foolish enough to live in the social media are subject to the the most hideous forms of of social pressure and moral abuse i see very little evidence that relations within marriage have much improved apart from the fact now that women are rather better at beating up men than they used to be though of course they're always warrior wives you know read read and again so to go back to the whole business of declinism um i am in no sense to decline this i'm sure as i illustrated what i was saying there and what is new about work it is ex it is telling you what it is it is explicitly an attack on the enlightenment okay it is explicitly attack so when i am not imagining i believe you know i'm re i'm a very oh we're talking about history i believe in historical evidence and i believe in listening very seriously when people tell me why they are doing something and the proponents of woke and black lives matter and whatever tell me very clearly what they are doing they tell me that western civilization is a monstrous perversion that the source of all the world's ills comes from being white that the notion that there is a thing called objective truth is a peculiar perversion of this white western civilization and must be destroyed i do them the credit of believing them and i think that they probably in their own bizarre twilight minds think they're even doing good but it corresponds it corresponds precisely to earlier movements of destruction in many ways i would argue that uh it corresponds to the burning of the library of alexandria or we're talking about rome the introduction of a kind of social virus which destroys a society i think what we're on this is why i found the whole notion of covid and what's going on now so interesting they've been we're talking about the roman empire the roman empire is the subject probably the greatest piece of psycho history ever written which is gibbons decline and fall i read it i enjoyed it very much amazing book and uh what does he see as the essential reason for the fall of rome christianity a new system of thought that destroys the values of the old the old roman the old roman values the ones you were talking about cato the elder with the aggressive militarism uh the uh the the furious assertion of of moral political intellectual military force are suddenly destroyed by what nietzsche correctly in my view describes as a religion for slaves that's christianity christianity is the source of so much of what's gone wrong in particular it's elevation of the idea of the victim suddenly in the new world of woke the important thing is not to be in control it's not to be somebody capable of controlling your emotions it's not somebody who's important of being successful it is a victim and the order of priority in woke is the order of victimhood there was a magnificent joke in the old world of irish politics about the irish being the most depressed people ever the competition to be the most victimized called mope the world of mope um and what what woke is about is about mope it is victimhood well of course the ultimate victim is a god who dies in agony upon a cross and and the idea that you know that becomes the model of what you're supposed to do why need to call it the religion of slaves and and of course once christianity was like it was rome absorbed and it only absorbs it very very partially but that if you like destroys the res on death of a society and i think that we are going through something very very similar at the moment and so and i think again it is perfectly clear that the chinese understand this the you know what we're dealing with now isn't the world of mount saitong it's the world of leaders of china who were studied at american and british universities are distinguished intellectually have spent time in our society and understand its profound weakness and i think how it's destroying itself and are taking calculated measures to bring about that destruction and you know until we begin to realize this is what is happening that the the the the the again the that astonishing efflorescence of the west and is of course and that's what it is western europe the only there used to be the paper at cambridge uh they just they called it the expansion of western europe because the history of the world the history of it or an idea of the world history is simply the british empire the american empire and globalization that's that's what it is and but it was precisely because there were no rivals because we had that effortless technological superiority but which begins in begins actually with the conquest of latin america um and you know whatever it is a couple of hundred sluggish spanish troops um and and the entire might of the incas and the aztecs collapsing before them or the british in india in the 18th century where these vast armies of tens hundreds of thousands collapsed before two or three thousand european troops but suddenly we have an alternative okay a country that embodies that it is the deliberate antithesis it is let me let me try to see where we agree and disagree after the second round i agree with you about the importance of the enlightenment uh objectivity in the rise of the west i also agree with you that right now we are experiencing a bit of a retreat from the enlightenment we are questioning well well i mean the objective you know we are experiencing a retreat from the agenda with an entire generation is being perverted there is also as i said this astonishing devastating alliance between a sophisticated technology and the rot of the mind right so we are experiencing retreat from the enlightenment um which is problematic obviously part of post-modernism is trying to undermine the concept of objectivity that sort of thing i get that um uh with regard to technology and any and it worries me i mean part of the reason why i thought we we would have this conversation and part of the reason why i'm writing more about the dangers to human progress is precisely because i think it is rooted in the enlightenment values and object and and objective truth objective truth it drives me crazy it drives me crazy when i hear people on tv say things like my truth i completely reject that there is either truth or falsehood and all that jazz and we are in agreement on technology let me posit to you and this goes again to how a conservatively minded person may just about every technology i can think of has been seen as a major threat and a major problem when it emerged my question is what makes you think that twitter and facebook and things like that are going to be around in let's say 20 years time is it possible that some of us like myself will realize oh man people like myself will realize that actually twitter and facebook are detrimental to your well-being and will believe i left facebook and i never had a twitter account maybe other people will do that too um so you know it takes time for people to get accustomed to new technology and figure out whether it's actually a net contributor to their well-being or not who knows maybe we are just living through a particularly um uh unsettling period but that too will come to an end once we know how to interact with this virtual world it will be lovely that may be true coming the last thing i would ever do is to pretend to be a prophet there is nothing sillier than i've learned that yeah i've learned that in my own life yeah there's nothing sillier than a historian pretending to be a prophet as you said history is purely retrospective and you you cannot know the result until it's happened now you know the again t.s eliot the wonderful phrase only in retrospection selection can we say that was the day or the famous one in hegel the isle of minerva flying the dust you know it happens once it's over so of course i can't prophesy all i can say is that signs at the moment are peculiarly bad i never got very excited about television and so on and because it didn't seem to me every television is a box sitting out there and it in a it's in a living room it was usually watched communally and so on and it was a quaint form of social experience i mean my first experience of television indeed the very first time i'd seen it was actually the coronation of 1953 i'd never seen it before and that was a that was an extraordinary collective experience and television in many ways i think was the antithesis of what we're talking about television was a very collect in in the certainly in britain very few television channels everybody watched the same things it was a collective experience what's going on now is a form of the social media or a form of acute atomization and it's no it's no accident that the chinese love it because of course what you've always had in china is a profoundly atomistic society and which it in turn lends itself to easy dictatorship and as burke constantly points out it is the creation and leaders of founding fathers well understood it's the creation of the small platoons the median groups of of association of friendship of family of trade of industry of locality that act as the barriers of of tyranny it's why again talking about the ancient greeks the ancient greeks saw a very close connection between democracy and dictatorship because the frag mass fragmentation of a society lends very easily you know as you see with the french revolution on the one hand and napoleon on the other or the british revolution and and and and and cromwell so i think there's there's there is there are very very peculiar and very peculiarly alarming features of the current wave of technology and in that same article uh so in that same edition of the british spectator i am not a shareholder i have anybody spectator there's another very impressive article by lionel shriver who is another i like her very much yes talking about virtual currency and saying that you know we're in this extraordinary world in which our financial management is is again savoring of pure fantasy the the the the the the the the the the the the trillions and trillions and trillions that that are that are being thrown on an already uh rapidly expanding economy in america or in indeed in my own country and in which governments seem to be adopting with quantitative easing something like a cyber currency you know there are cyber currencies uh uh um the the the the the the fiat currencies and the the uh the the record of all fiat currencies um without anchor is a very frightening one so all sorts of phenomena seem to me to coincide but the thing that's the thing that's worrying again it's the argument of rome um it is that that we've got this series of internal problems in which you know our very technological strength may be turning against us which is the equivalent of christianity let's let's just say the equivalent of the internal virus combined with the equipment of the barbarian at the gates that's china except that what is terrifying about china is that we've given china the best of our technology the insanity of the west's policy in particular america in farming out it's sophisticated technologically the fact apple manufactures china which means the chinese can simply unpick everything well the question whether the chinese who are very good at duplicating and mimicking western technology can also produce their own at a step higher in an atmosphere of no free speech in atmosphere of no free inquiry that's something that the future will show but i want to i want to see you see i think you put your finger on it i desperately hope were right you and i are right that that that will mean that they can't do it but you see they are not fools these are not mount saitong mount said tongue was a poet right with the it was hitler the hitlers and they're all artists you know they want to remake society in the same way you would a clay pot or a temple the modern leaders of china are not they're brilliant engineers they know how things work and what i suspect is going on in china is the in the same way it is in some aspects of chinese commerce you know things like alibaba wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been within the interstate with when this this corset of of absolute control huge areas of commercial freedom right and i think that what the chinese may be learning to do is to give as it were sufficient space technology within areas of technology that people are allowed to be creative and again why is the chinese elite sending its brightest people to the west and so you know the the the the what what would be the most terrifying thing marion will be a managed freedom that is in other words we're not really talking and i'm not talking about and i'm not talking about orwell's nightmare vision i'm not talking about a boot put on the face of mankind forever i'm talking about something much more frightening for the first time we have the first time probably since the flavian emperors we have the prospect of intelligent dictatorship jonah goldberg likes to say that when dictatorship comes to america it will not be wearing a jack boot but a smiley face which is very interesting so one thing which is very interesting i never heard you being so um so in love with freedom in any of your of our previous encounters and that pleases me very much because that's where we certainly meet uh on that subject now you started at the beginning of this podcast by saying that what you want to talk about was uh human progress in terms of politics social society and then uh human progress so i think i disagree with you in large part on human progress or other humanities progress i think that we are actually on average gentler than our ancestors even when we do terrible things like cancel perfectly legitimate uh opinions and perfectly legitimate scholars at least thank god we don't uh you know put them in dungeons and make them starve to death secondly we talked about social aspect of human freedom human progress that's nearly a technological detail that's not really it it's it's a technological but but really the grand scheme of things it is a mere technological detail um the second thing was we we talked about society and how it is being pulled apart by um social media very important i think it's driving a tremendous wedge between the races certainly in this country which has a much more checkered uh racial history than than great britain and it is a potential uh threat uh in the future especially since vocalism is now being introduced into schools in the united states and in congress and and and to that is attached to this new idea of equity basis which is basically a proportional representation uh when it comes to in successful social and economic fields which has its own problems and with which i obviously fundamentally disagree with but i want to end uh and and that should and that is where we we have accomplished something we have identified problems which are threatening human freedom and and for that i'm grateful i want to finish by talking about democracy or politics which is the last aspect you identified that you wanted to talk about um in our conversation about human progress and what is happening to our democracies and to the political system what do you think one thing i keep thinking about is that when it comes to technology when it comes to information and so on you know there are so many ways in which i think that we could progress there is almost infinite number of ways in which we can um create materially better world but when it comes to politics we are really still stuck on that on that general aristotelian model of tyranny at one end and anarchy on the other so that so talk to me about that for this there's a reason for this it's called humanity and you you you you seem to see this as something to which there could be a sort of technological fix it's not it's the brute stuff of being human and you see i would argue something else and it you said you you made the point about me and freedom one of the reasons i haven't necessarily talked about freedom very much of course my historical expertise um which was a deliberate reaction against the atmosphere of my own time when i was you know a young man in the 1960s i'm a specialist in the history of monarchies and aristocracies and freedom for one freedom for a few but what is really striking is it seems to me we are now learning an absolutely fundamental lesson which i've been trying to preach for a very long period of time democracy unless it's of that extraordinary thorough going form which was briefly practicable in the context of the quasi-agrarian societies of america around about 1800 um but vanishes in the in in the vast process of industrialization and urbanization and is that we're learning that democracy is essentially purely formal the way we are ruled is by courts we elect monarchs and if you actually look at how america is governed america is governed by that choice you know a knife edge choice in both with both trump and and and with biden and you then elect a monarch for a period of time and remember elected monarchies are very common um the roman empire in many ways was elective when it wasn't a military coup um the papas is an elective monarchy yours is an elective monarchy we oddly enough have an elective monarchy in britain because of course we've got two monarchs we've got the queen poor thing and we've got the prime minister who just as in japan with the with the the with with the mercado and the shogun you have these two centers of power one traditionalist and the other actually executive but they're both monarchies they're courts with the whole process of the role of women as mysteries of favorites of factions and so on we are we have i think that the the the bigger our societies get the more complicated they get the more we medievalize i mean if you if you look at the prevalence of public irrational irrationalism the belief in ufos the belief um in uh in in um well very many forms of environmentalism uh the the um extraordinary importance of astrology uh the the fact that public literature is largely rubbish like harry potter we've remedialized if you compare the the contents of a newspaper now with even a mass circulation newspaper of the 1920s and 30s you were struck by this astonishing collapse of literacy uh by the uh the fact that you know what would have been a relatively small section on showbiz is now virtually the entire paper uh the fact that politics is merely that wonderful remark about politics being show business for ugly people never has the truth of it being more manifest than now and i think this idea of remedialization is one that i am more and more convinced of woke ism is a perverted religion and and that that we know with the collapse of serious political affiliation and the um the um the the increasing commercialization of policies all of these sorts of things well so is so is extremist environmentalism the the religious studies the religious impulse in in the human mind yeah the religious impulse in the human mind and a desire to be part of something greater and find meaning in some sort of a heroic pursuit uh or or all the worship the worship of rather silly young people like greater thurnberg you know child saints or ancient sages like attenborough uh you know praising on likes and simon spideity's if only his column will go up his ass i would be very pleased just just absurd and but they're medieval nature that's the retreat that's the retreat from the enlightenment it's a great danger i mean i but you see what i mean in the area after area that you look at there is this this is a kind of re-clouding it's as though it's as though a cloud has suddenly come across a bright sky and that's where we are now shadow well david i can't say that's the most optimistic uh or positive uh ending to a podcast i ever had however i have decided some weeks ago that um the the the problems that are facing human progress the future of human progress that the retreat from the enlightenment is real enough for me to start having conversations with uh uh great scholars such as yourself who have identified these problems understand them help me think through them and also inform our audience so perhaps we can agree on the following human progress is real we have accomplished tremendous amount in the last 500 years if you want certainly since uh the enlightenment in the 18th century but there is no guarantee that things will work out and the fundamental need in our society right now is to understand and be able to talk about objective reality in an atmosphere of freedom if we lose that we are finished well lost thank you very much david and thank you for giving me the freedom to speak my pleasure [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: HumanProgress

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Id: tMXBEtFfRGQ

Length: 72min 2sec (4322 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021