I'm the attorney first CFI and I'm the person privileged to sit here between these two gentlemen and provide a brief introduction before the conversation and I fully appreciate none of you are here to listen to me and so What struck my mind is it's very interesting that you have three English people sat here on the stage in What is quite possibly the least English place? We in England we have Blackpool we have Skegness and you have Atlantic City in Las Vegas And there's an impression that Americans have of the British and the people you think of tends to be it tends to be Churchill and the royal family and then the the cast of Downton Abbey and Benny Hill and are you being served in that? So a Monty Python and that's Britain to you? But Britain etre and Britain and England, they these are countries with a deep history both of science and in the arts It's it's the country of Sir Isaac Newton of Charles Darwin of a Faraday and on the outside It's the country of Shakespeare of the Bronte sisters more money of Stanley Kubrick of the rolling stones of JK Rowling And what we've got here are two of them bought most for most people from our country in those two fields in the field of science and in the field of the Arts on the one hand we have Richard Dawkins, who as you know, the premier evolutionary biologist of his time a science educator Second to none the former Oxford University professor for the public understanding of science The author of such books that have changed lives as The Selfish Gene the blind watchmaker and The God Delusion And then we have Stephen Fry who described earlier and I have never heard a person who fits this better of the Renaissance man The actor on film on TV on stage the author the playwright the radio The quiz show host and if you have not watched Qi Start watching TOI The director of Norwich City Football Club But more than that this is a man who has educated us a man who's educated us in humanism and in humanity who's educated us in history in LGBT rights and those issues in mental health concerns and In the effortless superiority that comes with being English This is wonderful and and I am privileged My mother has said she will never speak to me again because I am sat here between these two gentlemen So I'm gonna pass this over to dr. Dawkins now that phrase effortless superiority Actually, you never it really comes from it comes from Bailey or College Oxford Oh The effortless superiority that marks the Bailey. Oh man well Steven is not a Bailey. Oh, man. I happen to be But um, I did worry a little bit about the same thing Nick was talking about she's got to be a terribly English party and I worry but about that Not only are we both for Oxbridge, but all three of us, I think but Steven and I both went to very similar schools as well. In fact neighbouring schools I was wrongfully word up in these our rival schools and I looked up upping among the web and it's exactly like our depressingly so And you talk about it in your autobiography and brought back horrible memories. Not that I was there, but very similar Memories, but I also got the feeling that you you back on it even though you were expelled You look back on it with a certain nostalgia I do I do and I picked up on a few things that Nick said and you mentioned also about Englishness and yes I am considered by many to be quintessentially English phrase that's often used and and I find it interesting Too of the 20th century's figures of whom you would most use that phrase are probably Winston Churchill and I Christie Who was absolutely typify everything it is to be English and in both cases like me They had foreign parents. They were only half English Churchill was half American as you probably know his mother was an American woman Agatha Christie's father was an American My parent parents my father's very English, but my mother's family was little European Jewish and I think sometimes not belonging to a culture especially one is established and as Naturally replete with its iconography of oak trees and Robin Hood Shakespeare and cricket and castles and royalty and so on but having a family who had embarrassingly foreign and swooped in from Israel and New York bearing presents and doing that thing that no Englishman could possibly abide which is talking about food and The bunch of eat we should eat what you dirty? I don't talk about eating. It's like talking about going to the lavatory You can't possibly do it so I was filled with the embarrassment of the part of me that wanted to be totally English and say, you know pretend my foreign family didn't exist and a Great self-consciousness about what it was to be Asian To move that on to our subject that begins I was sent away to boarding school when I was seven So it was like 200 miles from home which in English terms is the entire length of the country So my parents seemed to send me away very early to go and stay there and the day was marked out by religious services as they are in these schools and then it was in the public school after that again, and and I became immensely interested and immensely moved by the music the architecture the liturgy and everything to do with Religion and I wanted to be a priest an Anglican priest but high Anglican I liked it. I liked the music I liked the smells I liked Ritual I liked the feeling of belonging. I loved everything about it and it got to the stage where I Actually went to see the suffrage and Bishop of Lynne in Norfolk I didn't quite know what to suffer Gunn Bishop is it's one of those words. It's only ever applied to Bishop you never meet a suffrage and teacher or a brain surgeon something but anyway It was a suffragan digit bishop and he chatted to me and when we talked about theology and so on and then and then he asked a question about God and I said, oh, well, that's That's my one problem He said go on I said, you know, I am I never been spoken to by God or spoken to God or have any real sense that there could be such a thing that Because the beauty of the church is it's made by man The anchored Church in particular was constructed in a very short time by Archbishop Cranmer and 10 to the 8th to some extent And I liked it. I liked what it stood for I liked its breath and it's sort of tolerance as a church but the idea of there being a God just struck me as being preposterous and and in my excitement of Fondness for the a merkin Church I had forgotten that really believing in God was still a small in the case of Anglican but necessary part And he advised me to come back when God had spoken to me, and I'm still waiting for But but I I'm really I don't know how you feel about Richard I know you're sometimes accused not knowing enough about religion which is nonsense because I know you do know a lot about the history of Christianity and other religions and and Sometimes people who said to me but you love box masses the you know You love his the b-minor mass You love the you you know that it's in Matthew and this is John you you you love so much. We can't artists you love Mozart's requiem' you know, whatever you love Michelangelo and you love yes Who doesn't but there are number of things you can say about that one is obviously the church was the great employer and the time of the Renaissance and So they had artists had no one else to paint for but the other thing he said that the fact that Religious art can be beautiful doesn't make religion true. For example Without slavery, we would never have had what was called the Negro spiritual or gospel music But I thing that means you have to believe in slavery. It's it's just that sometimes, you know, there are certain ways of Mankind organizing themselves that can that artists will produce great art from and and it is one of those peculiar ideas, I mean after all most of Renaissance art after some 1520's was more likely to be based on Greek mythology and You don't ask whether or not You know whatto and and another office like that believed in Apollo Yes, yes Talking about of Greek mythology, of course, you'll let your latest book I think is on on is Miss awesome and Just register greatly enjoyed it Do you take you don't take more lessons from that? Do you know it's very unlikely top staples is there not Aesop's fables? I absolutely agree. I mean, there's no question. You can look at quite a lot of Greek myth and say that it has tropes what are known in the business is myth Eames, which will be a familiar first form of words to you and Which repeat both within Greek mythology and indeed in other mythologies, but particularly in Greek mythology again And again, you have like the Phaeton myth You know, who was the son of Apollo stroke Helios the Sun God who who demanded of his father it would be an absent father And felt guilty. He demanded that he be allowed to ride the charity of the son And having granted him. Anyway, he couldn't back off and Phaeton gets on the chariot And of course he goes to to near the Sun and the the earth freezes at the poles He plunges too deep and the the deserts get formed as he burns the earth and eventually Zeus sees that he's destroying the planet by moving the Sun up and done and and he Thunderbolt him out of existence and and You probably know the story of Icarus, too of course the son of dangerous the inventor who made the wings In the he told his son Icarus that he mustn't go too near the sea or you know the wingtips will be caught in and be made sodden and waterlogged and he'd be drowned or he mustn't fly too close to this because Because the the feathers were held on with wax which would melt and he would plummet and of course he plummeted And there are there are lots of Greek myths along those lines, which if you exhibit what you might call hubris a people overstretching indeed that the Greek for stretching too far is detainees and the Titans were the race of the sort of second race of Divine beings the Titans stretched too far and and the Greeks I think were aware that they were the first civilization through all kinds of accidents including the arrival of the alphabet and and you know Richly linear B. And then the Greek alphabet they were the first nation to believe in progress to believe that as it were a father should outdo a son a child should outdo a parent and And that's why I think Greek myths full of things like Phaeton And the the young trying to fly too close to the Sun because the Greeks had as an example Egypt you they looked across the Mediterranean and for three and a half thousand years the Egyptians hadn't invented anything new three and a half thousand years and Extremely prosperous civilization had basically stayed the same as had other Civilizations as far as we know around the world. They had established themselves. This is how we build a pylon This is how we do a lintel and entablature. This is how we worship. This is how we move food about that's it Mm-hmm. We now have a viable life and it could last for four thousand years but the Greeks with incredible speed changed everything change the way they ran their politics into deems or or city-states Changed the way they used voting and and change the way they had juries and a justice system mathematics and algebra and logic even Pythagorean rules about music and harmony all these things appeared at incredible speed and the arrival of a literature and and and It was best but by Browning I think Summing up. This Greek is stretching out. This constant feeling that there is more you can discover more it's all there to be discovered and Ignores, this is word for that they discover from within their own experience as human beings and through experiment with the world and Browning as browning put it that a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for? And I think Plato and the Greeks understood the idea of heaven, although they talked about God in heaven They knew them exactly as a model as an idea There is an ideal to which we strive and the Greeks are constantly striving towards something better. They don't believe you know that as Simon Raven the novelist put it the genius of the Greeks lay in this understanding of eschatology of you know, the idea of a life after death and It was put by sinon I think the Greek who said any single person who tells you that they know what happens to a human being After they have died is either a liar or a fool simple an obvious thing to say, but the Greeks had that and it's mysterious to us because We tribally and for hundreds of years almost thousand and a half years Struggled to have such a simple honest open idea anybody who tells you what happens after you die. It's hotter or alive read Stephen I've read you saying somewhere that we must believe there is no life after death Oh, yes And and because we we really live a very bad life unless we do believe It because if we think we this is this is just a preparation. Yes. Yeah I remember being shocked before he shocked us for other reasons by Mel Gibson Well, I know But he was being interviewed this is in the 80s at the very height of his young stardom when he was the coolest man on the planet virtually and I had no idea that he was belonged to this particularly severe Catholic section in Australia that his father was there was a member of But with the interview said, I believe I've read somewhere Mel that you're You you believe in life after death and in and Mel Gibson said well I know I know one thing for a fact There's got to be more to it than this What What even if you were just an ordinary guy? To say oh, yeah, this is America Australia this Europe. There's the Lake District. There's the poles there's the deserts There's the tropics. There's the bushes this if the galaxy there are units but there's gotta be more than that surely but not only that you are a star who can have as much sex as you can eat and and as much money as you could possibly demand and you feel it's somehow not enough, you know, and this idea that Of course we're all kinds of obvious ways of knowing that religion, you know uses Uses the afterlife and the threat of something better as a way of allowing people Forcing people to put up with what they've got But yes, I do believe that even on its own terms if you believe in an afterlife its limits this life You know you've got to as Oscar Wilde said try the fruit of every tree of every orchard in the world and some will be bitter and some will be a too addictive and And so on but but if you and and so I often say to religious people I said, you know It would say well suppose, you know a Calvinist Appears of the gates of heaven and some Peter says so what did you make of them? Cannabis sativa, the the plant there. Oh, I never tried that. No, no The idea how much effort went into making this very special plant I'm not saying you should have nothing, but but you didn't even try it What about wine or no, no no wine touch my lips you fucker do you know Do you know how complex the grape is unique of all fruits? You don't have to add sugar For it to turn into this remarkable and you didn't even bother to try it that's such an extraordinary idea I mean now, you know Pete you should on your deathbed you should be going damn it I I never drank milk from the armpits of a Nepalese virgin or whatever it is I never I don't know that wouldn't be my particular one that some people You know, I never climbed Kilimanjaro. I never you know, there's so much. That's so beautiful I Once asked the professor of ancient history at Oxford whether the Greeks really believed in their gods and to my surprise, he said yes Definitely did it's very interesting. I mean there's The the gods are so colored. I mean the twelve Olympian gods and there were many others I think they used the names of primal gods that had no personality and they did believe in them as abstract words Aristotle uses them a lot the Greek words for necessity cause and blame for example necessity Ananka is very strong idea in Greek philosophy and Morris Doom The ones do and literally means it's not a word you use in English, but it used to be used portion What is allotted to you? Yeah And they were the first we know of again because of their first to have writing But to go and very sophisticated ways into the question of free will Which is a very hot issue at the moment as you probably know very few philosophers now all scientists believe there is such a thing as free well and they kind of don't speak about it because it's been embarrassing because if you have to explain to people that that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as Responsibility and it doesn't mean that we don't try and live a good virtuous life According to our lights and so on but that it's a sort of intellectual point about being fairly clear There is no such thing as free well or as shop and how poor did we we we can we'll what we do But we can't will what we will there's a very important point and the Greeks were very interested in that and so they they had this idea of fate and necessity Europe your portion which they gave a kind of divine permanence that these were things that were there that were Outside our control and I think most of human history And most of myth and religion is a has been a question of refining Our understanding of things we can't control so when our ancestors were really were alone and without any Building or farming yet as being an idea We were hunter-gatherers as the Frazee's Their children looked at the mothers and fathers and they said why does what is it that pushes leaves out of trees? It's something that's beyond our control. I know if I pick a stone up The stone is picked up, but how it what is the power behind the leaf coming out of a tree happens every year? What is this fire that comes out of a mountain? What is the water that drops out of the sky? These are things over which we have no control. And so it's very natural that our ancestors gave them personality It's the first thing we do it's it's it's as much art and literature as it is religion to to to make a story out of these forces And so you you you name a god of the mountain that roars fire? You name a god of the clouds? And the Thunder and you have a God of nature and of growth and the harvest and and one of decay and you make rituals Out of it and well, then slowly you begin to understand them and each one that you understand the God disappears But this is what enemies do and them and I I get that but To believe that Zeus turned himself into an eagle in order to oh, I don't I I don't think Aristotle Plato believed Oh, I'm sure they didn't but did the ordinary Athenian in the street believe that and I suspect not but I don't think they did. I think they they Conveniently said much as we you know much as children's fairy stories do that. There was a time when men and women walked with pixies and fairies we say, you know and there was a time when men and women consorted with gods the Greek said when the gods would cut gods would come down in the form of an eagle or Whatever or they would turn human beings into flowers And a lot of these etiological myths there misdescribed to describe the causes of things and and and some of them are some of them have profound insight and some of them are just sweet stories like for example when Zeus and Hera got married Zeus had said that any any any One who or anything any creature that could come up with the best food for the for the wedding? Would be granted a wish and so you imagined this kind of Gordon Ramsay situation on these You know TV chef things were all these trestle tables and all these double, you know a young Haran had created a little sort of jelly for them to eat and they try that and then all the other animals and they come to this tiny little pot and Hiro Tasted this is delicious and Zeus tasted. So this is very good What is it in the little creature called Melissa who has made it says there if you please I've made this It's a very special process I've invented I go from flower to flower and I collect all the little bits of nectar, and I then put them together But it takes a huge amount of effort. But anyway, I've made this pot of it I call it honey and Zeus in here and say well you've won the prize. There's no question named your wish and Melissa says well, it takes so much effort and Days and days and days to make the smallest amount of my honey And and one swipe of a Foxy's Pour and one lick of a bear's tongue and all my work can be undone And you've given the scorpion a weapon and the snake of venomous bite, but I don't have any weapon So, can you give me a fatal sting so that anyone who tries to? steal steal my honey its fatal and Zeus is furious and there's a bit sound of thunder because he thinks it's such a selfish Wish this is very well says you will have a fatal sting. She squeaks in triumph fizzes, but but it will be fatal to you and as you know a wasp can sting as many times as it likes them but but a But a bee sting is barbed a honey bee sting which is melissa is honey Bee, of course And and and so they have to pull her and guts out after they've stung you and they kill themselves and that was uses punishment for her selfishness But pleasingly as Richard will know the the order of 2 which bees and wasps belong is known as Hymenoptera - - entomologists which means wedding wings Anyway, so that's just a sweet story. That's the typical mythic story But then there are I think profound insights. So I'm sure you've all heard of the muses the nine sisters who lived in And who represented each one of them one of the arts? Chapstick or a for dance and clear victory and so on and so forth But what's so interesting is that their mother my father was used of course because he was properly bit with his seed but their mother was one of the original Titan s is one of the first twelve of the Titans whose name is Mnemosyne a Man named Watson. Hey, that's difficult word to say and it simply the Greek word for memory as in mnemonic and So there the Greeks are saying there what Joseph Campbell would he called myths? He called them public dreams Which I think is a rather brother, you know, you called them the collective unconscious but whatever it is Whether it's the public dream of the Greek people or their collective unconscious They said the arts are all daughters of memory. And I think that is extremely true It's a compressed poetic idea that artists reassemble Put back together again learned experience felt emotions truthful recall of what it is to be alive and that therefore all artists are summoning that memory muses are the daughters of memory and that's an accident if you like of the beauty of human culture that a people can come up with a myth a way of Personifying I complex ideas abstract ideas, but let me ask about this I've always been fascinated by where they come from. It's it's as though we believe that somehow these things emerge from you coordinate or fight yearly and collective unconscious or but Somebody must actually have sat down and made it up in the first place. Just emerge You have a jokes, isn't it? Where did the joke? Told that joke and the campfire or something some read means one assumes around a fire. Yes. I have a I I'm because of one of my greatest is language as well. I think it's very I think it's you know, it's Clear that around a fire You know, it's cold there are animals wolves are howling and the children that can't get sleep and Full tummies and you want to tell stories and everything's mysterious and as I say you want to explain things the Greeks had this advantage that oh, No other myths up until that time and many after didn't have and that is as I say they had they had settled down as a people as the Doric people Iommi and people the various different people of the of the of the of the peninsula of Greece and so on and writing had arrived so Hesiod and Homer were able to put down and so you could have pedigrees and family histories and Chronologies of the gods which had never happened before but who first came up with them and their names? Well, you can be You know, you can be sure that they all came from further east They follow the development of mankind and civilization as we currently understand it which as you know Really seem to spring up in what they call the Fertile Crescent the Greek for between rivers the Tigris and the Euphrates and the Greek for between rivers is Mesopotamia so it's that area that what is now Iraq? huge irony being the very place where Isis has pulled down so many of those archaeological reminders of where Mankind first started to civilize itself in as much as we ever have I to settle and have roots and cities so on and and that that's where it began the first of those gods as far as we can tell they then moved west from tyre and the Lebanon The Cadmus myth which comes from the beginning of the alphabet comes from there was the Phoenicians It was Cadmus his brother, Phoenix Who had founded the Phoenician Empire and it's I know I mean, you know You will never really know because so much that we need to know comes before writing or even carving it But we can guess let's move to the modern world now you've said in defense of the royal family and Surprisingly you've Met said that you're a monarchist of a sword over and one of the points you made was that well, there's a queen has no power Officially, it's somehow good for the Prime Minister. They have to go every week. Yeah, and as it were explained herself To the monitor and if only Trump had to go to Uncle Sam, yeah, that's right Exactly. I I did I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times Which I said exactly that a couple of fourth of July ago I said you know if there if Uncle Sam was a living person this embodiment of The US and it only occurred to me when I was writing the article that Uncle Sam his initials were u.s.a did so obvious So there with his bony knees and his wispy beard and his stripy top hat and in his waistcoat with the stripes and the stars and everything all over it and and He is an embodiment a personification of what America is supposed to be Barely a real human being at all more an idea and that's what a queen is That's what a monarchy is not I mean, of course somewhere there's some real DNA real person who sits on a laboratory and all the rest of it but the Queen as far as we're concerned is an image in imago a Sort of you know a Constant a constant embodiment of an idea not a not a person and that's why when people meet Queen Anne actually a great friends of this festival and of the great amazing Randi are Penn Jillette and Teller you know Penn & Teller who kind of earned this town as magicians and great skeptics and rationalists and I was Emceeing of this is literally 20 years ago now Because I'm doing the same thing in three days time with for his 70th birthday But it was the 50th birthday of the Prince of Wales and I was M seeing the show we did at the London Palladium and Penn & Teller did some magic at it and After that curtain came down The Penn was next to me said oh no what happens now? We've got to meet the princess up right? That's it Yeah, he just comes along So later everybody and pen doctor said well, I gotta call me your majesty I said well no, he's not the monarch you technically it would be your royal highness if you wanted to come anything But don't bother just I haven't called you pen once since we've been chatting in the last day and you don't call people by their Name do you Nick do you Richard? You know, it's so just don't bother don't think about it good and do I have to bow because I'm American we don't bow He knows you're American he's heard your voice you may not know that l is American so doesn't speak but he knows you're American Honestly, it's fine. Well, I'm gonna get put in the Tower of London Oh for heaven's sake I assure you it's fine Anyway, Prince was in love. Did you see? Oh, how do you do? Thank you for coming do appreciate it He gets to Penn who fools your royal majesty Highness The Prince looks a little baffled, but he's used to it. It happens all the time he moves along and again and then of course Penton Smith said I betrayed my country Why did how do what power do they have And it is that power that exists and it's not the same as a pretend religious thing It's something we understand in minor ways we know what the power of a brand is in court in the corporate world and and in a much more concentrated an extraordinary an almost mystical way the power of a brand like a monarch is such that I have seen people who are furiously Anti-monarchist II who in the presence of the cream will melt slightly and if president Trump were not the head of state But were the servant of his people like a prime minister who? has a head of state who would be Uncle Sam and if light the Prime Minister has to every single week come what may Prime Minister has to go to back in Palace and have an audience with the Queen You'll probably remember if you ever saw the series the crown When the cream first ascended to the throne her first Prime Minister having to be Winston Churchill who had to come in to her presence And stand an old man, not that physically well Stand in her presence and explain himself to this young girl Who was the symbol of her country and she took the mantle on and she's been doing it ever since? Now if Trump had to do that had to go to some colonial mansion on the hill Where this this figure our Uncle Sam was well now well now young young young. Mr. Trump. What have you been doing this week? And And Trump had to bow his head and he's bowing He said not because he believes in monarchy or some trumped-up nonsense to do with the divinity of Kings But because he is the basing himself in front of the idea of the country He is there to serve. I think that's mentally helpful. And that's where I think myth ritual and ceremony Have real place as long as you know what they are because if you actually believed as a god or you know If you you know, as long as you understand that the most it's the Wizard of Oz operating the levers but then nonetheless the power it has over us is it we are you know as evolutionary Biology and and and so which is is, you know a hugely growing field we're beginning to understand a little more about how he evolved in terms of our feelings as well as our cognition and I'm sure many of you have read some of the popular books that have been around in the last dozen years dealing with the subject of our that the contingency of our understanding of anything at exactly the time when the world is disintegrating and the Power of the UN or the EU or other groups, however, flawed to bring people together Everyone's being propelled against and even today I noticed Trump has got rid of the 1986 or 87 is it? strategic arms Treaty with Russia. He just announced today. He's he's Terminating it. He said so as all of this happens and as Less and less Authority and understanding of our in the world happens. We are beginning to understand how little we actually know so that while Skeptics and rationalists are very keen to remind people of how we should always examine the truth and look at the truth We are the first to understand thanks to Daniel Kahneman and thanks to various others how little we know and how how how much our cognition and how much our understanding is colored and changed is Transmogrified by both what we wish and what we have experienced what our body expects us to feel or our eyes expect us to see and and we can't necessarily trust in in in everything but That's an excitement. That doesn't mean we give up trying to know things It means we try even harder to realize how you know, just how How our emotions have a huge part to play in everything we do we are immensely Emotional and being skeptical and being rational is not denying that it's understanding it it's understanding the the part emotions have to play and and ritual and ceremony and Metaphor and symbol which are the substance of art and so on Also the substance of a lot of ways humans behave. I mean, even you the comedy of me not knowing who was to take the The the award that I was given I I almost wanted to say well the one thing the church gets right is they rehearse? The bishop the bishop has told the old world we don't know what he's told the older boy But You know, there's a way you hold it here. You put it down here This goes here and and I'm sure many humanists in the room have have come across this issue of where we find the poetry and the Romance the ritual the glamour That the church has over the over hundreds of years has managed to find in order to send people away from the world and yet to come to a really good humanists funeral or wedding and some of them I was asked by a friend a concert pianist to To be the humanist preacher as it were his wedding and I did my best and one can raid and ransack the larder of of poetry and music that exists without having to adduce a creator for someone's wedding or someone's funeral but But we should learn from the fact that the church's obviously I was not present of that weddings deal But I absolutely know you did it a lot better than any Or suffered in Bishop. I Mean and I think they disagree with you about funerals, too I've been to a number of humanist funerals and they've work well have a no question about it The religious ones are not tailored to the individual they are a formula an algorithm Which is in the Book of Common Prayer and they just read out as though it was anybody The humanist ones are about the person who's died. Yes, the person who's died their favorite poetry that they read music You got eulogies Speaking about them. There's so much more is drooling I'm see writing and tailoring it and being personal rather than as you say being a being general but on the other hand this it's a good mixture because If you are married in a traditional service and you get a really dramatic Vicar or bishop and they say after the bride and groom have kissed those whom God hath joined Let no man put asunder. Yes, you think wow, that's good. That is good there You know, you really ought similarly ashes to ashes dust to dust. Yes, I think Wow I am joining in with my community in that. Yeah, that's good. But there are a few good phrases that you have gotta admit They came out Good, but we can we can match them. Yeah Shakespeare or week we can do it, but it's also it's a bit cultural You know, I I just just suddenly remembered. I was doing a filming in northern Spain and they have this amazing tradition the Basque the the chakra where the the the men cook and And and they had these male cooking clubs and all the wives and families and friends come and and the men do this Feeling outside often or if it's in winter inside and we were invited to this and it was astonishing to see And a great thing to be a part of and when it finished people got up and started singing Basque songs and there were about seven of us have English on from in the film David Suchet used to be played Poirot so successfully he was playing the Polian I was playing Wellington and there were a few of us and they turned to us and said to Sing now We thought we're gonna sing we're gonna sing we all live in a yellow submarine they've been seeing these basque songs of the mountains that are 300 years old and I said I don't know any English songs apart from pop songs I mean there is sort of early one morning just as the Sun was rising. There are few and maybe that's the problem maybe the problem with being English and Empire and everything like that is that we have no culture of our own we've just stolen so many has the world's worst national anthem Yeah, we do have pretty grog pretty grim one of those do we yeah you've said Stephen that The catastrophe of Trump and brexit is more less a triumph of the right as a failure of the left. Yes Do you recognize the phrase regressive left which I think was coined by Margit know else? Yes. I've come across it. Yeah Yeah, you have a view on that I am That there's a part of me that just wants to be mischievous and say look, you know This Grand Canyon close to where we are. Now, this Grand Canyon is opened up in America and really across the World and certainly the developed world did the chattering world if you like And it's getting wider every day and therefore P on each side of the divide they have to shout louder and gesticulate more horribly to be heard by the other side and they're not being heard by the other side and they're just making noises and screaming and hating each other deeply and thinking the other vile and and destructive and inhuman and I like to think of myself and Right-thinking people as cowering in the ravine at the bottom Unsure what to do because on the one hand you have a nativist alt right? Bringing up all kinds of nasty and unacceptable and horrifying racist thoughts and divisions, but also you have a preposterous a liberal liberal left shouting out these jargon istic and nonsense from the universities if I have to hear about the patriarchy and cisgendered white privilege Again, I did it, you know My heart has always been with the left and that makes it all the more difficult for me to think that I just cannot And I want this is at the heart of I think all we talk about being English too dramatic Spurn JK Rowling and Isaac Newton everything the one thing they all have in common is empiricism. It's not about Knowing anything. It's not about having a point of view, which is your Strict view of things. It's about finding out experimenting and trying things out and seeing what works and I think the left has a terrible problem in rhetoric and expresses itself in a way that is Precisely, it seems designed to alienate even soft right people even ordinary Republicans who? are Maddened by what they see is the nonsense of political correctness Most left people are not you know, prey to it. But unfortunately that mouthpieces on either side are so loud And you're supposed to take a stand. I'm supposed to be on one side or the other. Well, I I just Repudiate that I wouldn't be on either side. Neither means anything to me and and so we have to run I Was thinking a lot about my friend Christopher Hitchens whose spirit is occasions like this, of course It was much stronger than I was and his great hero As a political writer and thinker was George Orwell who was much stronger and more forceful about these things than as Christopher was more strong and more forceful about these things than I am. My hero really was probably em4 Stowe's better known as a novelist but as an essayist, he had a lot to say and His attitude it's probably best summed up by one of his essays which is called two cheers for democracy he was I can't quite bring myself to Sound three. Cheers He said but two cheers is about right and he and his friend Bertrand Russell and the mayor made the point about how we live in the world that Those who are stupider are so full of certainty and and those who are wise are so unsure a WB Yeats would put it most famously in the you know, the ceremony of innocence is drowned and The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Well, not home The center will not hold exactly and that's the problem being in the center, which will not hold the best Which you hope you're part of the best lack all conviction. We're not certain. We're not convinced We're not sure how the world should go forward But we see we recognize ugliness when we see it And graceless honest and unkindness and brute force and and clamouring kind of binary tearing away of everything so that you know this constant you're either with us or against us attitude and and the stuck here in the middle People say well, you know That's all very well. But that's you just being a liberal You know Squashy soft, you know, there are people dying out there They'll say you know, and yes, there are and one does you know? Look at the row hinges being massacred in and Disrupted and destroyed in Burma and and and look at you know Look at what's going on in them or all over the Yemen and Syria and places like that There's all kinds of terrible things happening But I don't I don't hear the the regressive left or the liberal liberals as I gone all the right making any fuss about that and and I I'm Desperate to know what to think I really am unsure because part of me says yes, of course all my life I fought for gay rights I fought for you know, I thought for to listen To sighs even fought at all. I've sat at a desk and tapped into keyboard Done the odd interview on the subject of gay rights, so I haven't fought at all But I have at least expressed an opinion and and and you know My heart is with you know with with people being given a fair shake of the source bottle as australians put it You know and a fair shake is it seems to be good? But we now Aren't allowed really much room for conversations of any nuance or any any doubt you have to be on one side or the other and and the world I'm convinced of it America certainly Britain and Europe are crying out for something in between and unfortunately what we've had in between in the past and it's too recent to be Forgotten in America is Bill Clinton. And in Britain was Tony Blair Both of them very impressive people in terms of their grasp of history And the mechanics and process of power and all the rest of it, but who are slightly kind of I? know disreputable in our eyes in case Britain in the case of Blair because he took us into an Iraq war which most of us think is a mistake The case of Clinton all kinds of reasons have to do with his own behavior as well And so that third way that they represented a very self-conscious Third Way is its treated with suspicion My feeling is that a true satirist and some of a true insider Jonathan Swift would actually be saying to you all and I should be saying to myself Don't look to blame politicians don't look to blame the the slogan ears on either side of the culture wars. It's not their fault It's your fault We are the ones who say oh Look at politicians. They're always just disagreeing with each other and then the moment there's a third way politician You say well, they're all the same Well mark, you can have it both ways. Do you want them all the same or do you want them all different? It's actually you are the problem you and I are the problem We want to drive around in cars and we want a green clean world where you can't have both You can't square that circle there are lots and lots of circles that can't be squared in squares that can't be circled but we lay off all our guilt or our own self discussed at our greed and our rapacity as Creatures on this earth we lay off that burden on Politicians who we pay to take our disgusting filth. That should be ended us And before we finish up and move over to the book signing there was one question I wanted just would address to both of you on this and and yesterday unfortunately You were stuck somewhere on Delta When we heard Steven Pinker speak and very optimistic that we are, you know The world is getting wealthier poverty is going down Malnutrition is going down The the economy is moving forward yet on the other hand we see Not just the political catastrophes that are happening, but also the potential environmental disasters that the UN is talking of Unfolding are you both both short-term and long-term. Are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? Where are we going as a world? well Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley both my friends are sort of the - optimists in the world at the moment And They make they both make a persuasive case that Science can do all sorts of things and we may be in trouble in all sorts of ways but science will will find a way And if you look at the broad sweep of history things are getting better. I desperately want to believe them I Would like to try to put the optimistic case say we we are in a temporary Reversal at the moment things are not going. Well at the moment. These are going extremely badly at the moment both in Britain and America But if you do take the long view of history III think it's possible to be optimistic. So Unrealistic as it sounds I'm gonna sort of slightly set aside with Pinker and Ridley. Yeah. That's very good I agree with you Richard and I think you know a lot of Human progress has been three steps forward to back or two steps forward one back whatever, but it has been forward but this may be a step back moment where things are bad, but I think there's a lot to Think about I do some work occasionally for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who are particularly strong on the SDGs as they're called the sustainable Development goals now is one of these dull bureaucratic phrases that it began with the Millennial goals in the year 2000 where all the countries the United Nations signed up to certain aims and these were refined in the year 2010 Into these sustainable goals 27 of them a lot to do with the female education, for example And things that people know will transform the way that the the poorest and the most disease ridden in the world those with the fewest Opportunities in the world that can most be taken out of poverty and the results there have been a standing I mean truly amazing in that period 2002 now which many people think of as the post 9/11 period the period of fear of terrorism and and so on which of course it has been but in that period 66 66 percent greater increase in women having education around the world 66% 2/3. I mean that's pretty astonishing and the results against HIV and and even the You know More resistive strains of TB and other diseases these are being controlled in ways That would have seemed impossible 15 years ago. And so in that respect things are going very well but I would agree the threat to the to the climate into the world that's being offered is it's a desperate while and also as I said that lunch today and all this is ignoring the technological transformations that are coming in the next 20 or 30 years with AI and biotech and by augmentation and Gene editing and stem cell work and I mean There's so much of it each one of these technologies on its own would be transformative But together they represent what I call it tsunami that is approaching us and a lot of that will be helpful to health Extraordinarily helpful to health will create great economies of scale the data Which become the new currency rather than petrol or the dollar data is the currency will allow all kinds of medical advances I'm convinced and I hope a more rational view of You know genetic modification of crops will allow for the immense promise they offer people are very superstitious about them as if there's a monstrous as if they're new even so I think there are all kinds of scientific possibilities that will help but I We just have to be alert and it's this is what you know, skepticism really means alertness being alive to an idea That's seeing an idea as a living thing and and in honor of my rival University Oxford For which you both come and it's a carriage man that as a great admirer of Oscar Wilde I will and just by quoting and I think this is what conventions like this do and should foster and When Oscar wrote his letter to to his old lover Posey from prison it's called De Profundis from the depths and he accuses him of a lot of betrayals and things but he's also very Complimentary to him but he says when you were at Oxford you didn't get a degree That's perfectly understandable. Many fine brains have never managed to get their degree But what I find inexcusable is that you never acquired what used to be called The Oxford manner said I know that sounds a terrible phrase But I take to mean this the ability to play gracefully with ideas Is that a wonderful thing the ability to play gracefully with ideas and I think it's very important that the skeptical rationalist a secularist atheist movement remembers to be graceful Remembers that playing with these ideas is what enlightens us Individually and fulfills us as humans as well as fulfilling I hope much more of the of the public culture that you know The understanding that ideas are to be embraced and hugged and played with and licked Enjoyed and have the juice sucked out of them and you know that there's pleasure in this it's not an earnest endeavor It's not a grim piece of work. It's it's an excitement And I think that's that will that will ensure the better future being alert and playing gracefully with ideas Thanks for watching if you liked this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and share it with your friends Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and ring that bell to be notified about new videos You can follow us on social media And if you really love what we do consider supporting us with a donation links to all that good stuff is in the description below
Both have been guests on the podcast.