Political Correctness and Religion with Stephen Fry | YIP Podcast

[Music] welcome back to youth in podcast the podcast where we discuss political happenings current day events and more i'm your host alexander smith and i'm joined here today by the exceptional stephen fry steven is an award-winning actor comedian writer and activist alongside hugh laurie he made up the renowned comedy double fry and lorry besides working in television he's a prolific writer having written written over four novels and three volumes of autobiography fry is a brilliant debater and intellectual who is best known for his views on religion political correctness and liberalism today we will be taking a deep dive on his beliefs in each of those realms uh mr fry it's a pleasure to have you on it's a real delight to be here but you must call me stephen from now on and i i appreciate your politeness it only makes me feel older and i'm also joined here today by my co-host elia hi steven so our non-profit youth and policy is a non-partisan youth-led organization and our goal is actually ending the toxic political climate that's really threatening civil discourse so you said that our country was founded upon the principles of the enlightenment and respect for free thinking and these are the values of and the lifeblood of a liberal society and i do believe they're becoming more constricted each day so i'm curious to know why you think america is in this current state and do you think these are values that are completely lost now or can be recovered it's it's such a good question and of course if i felt i had an immediate and comprehensive and convincing answer i would be the most valuable person on the planet naturally i don't have an answer and the different ways of looking at it one which always appeals to me is the historical which people often think he's looking backwards but of course in order to understand history you have to look backwards to some degree but it's a way of looking forwards as well because it reminds us of the things that are permanent and things that are temporary it's very easy when you live in a particular if you imagine that uh history is all our past and future is a long dark corridor and there's a spotlight shining on the period we're alive now and the past that we've been through is dark and the future that we're going to is dark and we we tend to think of this area that's spotlighted this modern era this early 21st century its problems and its issues we think must be unique because we're unique and uh technology and science and society and globalism and all the things that are happening in the world have contrived to make this period exceptional and therefore looking backwards is kind of american when i'm talking to now and i spent plenty of time here um [Music] it is an exceptional country last century is often called the american century there's lots of talk about how this coming century is clearly going to belong elsewhere in terms of primacy economical and military uh obviously china and india and russia and so on are leading candidates for taking over the the poison chalice of being world leader but nonetheless america culturally and in every other sense is still an enormous force in the world particularly for people who speak english and live in the west like me so australians and britons and canadians we're all enthrall of america and america yes was founded on principles of harmony and enlightenment and free thought and a bold new experiment in which the old hierarchies the hierarchies of ecclesiastical power bishops and popes and right down through the parishes that held sway over every soul in christendom and the aristocrats and the kings and the new arriving class of of um industrial you know industrial leaders as it were employers managers this new experiment was going to make sure that individuals were equal and that they were regarded and respected as absolute parts of the democracy no less valuable than even the president of the new country uh and in but what's worth remembering is that this noble experiment which is expressed in the language which is so similar to the architecture of washington elegant white columns of perfect harmonious thinking uh setting out something beautifully elegantly you know almost as if the words were made of marble and carved into the constitution what could go wrong it was such a mighty experiment but what was interesting is it didn't take a long time it was instant the moment virtually america was formed it started to fracture and it it puzzled americans by the time oscar wilde was visiting in the 1870s or early 80s the civil war was just over and people said to him americans as if they were as baffled as anyone else why do you think this is such a violent country mr wilde because in an incredibly short time this noble experiment had wiped out the plains indians in an act of genocide for which america is still not really come to terms you know the the handing out of smallpox infested blankets deliberately to the sioux people for example i mean there are lots of examples of quite monstrous violence towards indians as they were called there was violence in the workplace there was the rise of gangsterism and murder rates were incredibly high death of children starvation uh all the violence of the carpetbaggers after the civil war and the civil war itself which was the bloodiest war that mankind had ever seen how could this happen to a country that was founded on principles of peace and to this day this legacy exists america is simultaneously known for the noble nature of its ideals and the expression of those ideals in its declaration of independence and its constitution and the extraordinary violence of it as a country the the murder rate the guns the imprisonment the uh the the fact that health is not as good as it as it is in most neighboring countries i mean cuba has higher rates of literacy and and health outcome than the united states um so there's always been a problem about america for all that we can agree that it's a magnificent country and has contributed to the world in culture and in in so many ways that it can be proud of and has been a leading example of what democracy can be it has also been a leading example of what democracy mustn't be and it is it's as if from the very beginning it's torn itself apart and i'm giving you a very long answer and i'm sorry this is terrible it's not a conversation at all i'm just starting to lecture i will finish in a second by saying that i suppose what i've been thinking about a lot is that america has never really decided on the fundamental difference between living politically as a society or adhering as a country as lots of individuals there's individualism atomism you might call it which believes that the individual has primacy that no states no no capital no county no no federal government has any business prescribing the limits of individual freedom and that is a very strong american idea um you know new hampshire has as its slogan live free or die to which i always want to go oh okay that's really so there's the only two choices i suppose i would better die then haven't we certainly when it comes to covid live free or dies exactly right but you know this idea that uh and there is another way of looking at the world which is that by grouping together and as a society not just as a society but as common interests together um by race by outlook by sexuality by religion by you know all kinds of tribal clannish qualities that that we can see we can clump together in groups and this idea of group living or individual living has never been resolved especially in america and i think if you look at all the problems with uh the right-wing nativism of america at the moment and its uh obsessions with things like guns and at the moment not wearing masks for example these all to do with this cult of individualism um and and and how no group whether it's the police the army doctors um scientists people with knowledge special uh special knowledge of some kind of training has any right to tell me how to behave or what to do and anybody who does is an elitist is a snob is is beating me with their so-called learning um and and those on the other side think of i am not you know i'm not an individual i'm a member of a class and it's the class black or it's the class gay or it's the class jewish or it's the you know what i mean it's it's all about that and it's this strange problem of identitarianism um and each side thinks the other is the identitarian in a way so if you're on the left you think of the right and white separatists as being identitarians they're obsessed with being white they're obsessed with the rights of being white and of being so-called american they're all identity groups but if you're on that side you look at the left and all you see are gays and blacks and black lives matter and me too and and so on so each it's each side thinks the other is guilty of the of a crime which it must be guilty of itself so it's really there is no difference in liar i suppose is what i'm saying ironically there is a huge amount of similarity on the extremes that they're both obsessed with the value of their own identity over and above what it is to be generally human and i suppose that's what most upsets me and what most toxifies the culture i will now shut up sorry you've probably got lots of things to say oh no of course and i'd certainly agree with you in what you said before that you know america's always had problems like this and it's certainly not the first time we're seeing issues like this but i want to go back and dive a little deeper something you just said and ask why free speech is an issue that the right wing in america the self-proclaimed right wing is much more concerned with protecting um uh i think i think there are you know there are two things to say one is freedom is immensely important to uh to to the right and they would think well surely it should be important to everybody but for some the purpose of of government the purpose of coming together and living as a society or a country or a group or a community is to make life fairer and easier and happier so the end points to the left are fairness justice happiness equality lack of poverty freedom itself is not an end point you can't do anything with freedom exactly wander around you're in an open field there are no hedges so you can walk for miles that's good but the reason freedom is good is because confinement and imprisonment and control are bad but i'm always amazed as a european that freedom of speech in cases of law is more important than the justice of the case in other words a lawyer can appear on the nightly news talking about his case which can prejudice the case can is listened to by family members of juries and i and i find that extraordinary and americans will say but it's the first amendment freedom of speech is the most important thing in the world and i think well is it surely the only reason freedom of speech is important is because disallowing it is so disastrous but it is not the end point to have everybody's saying whatever they want all the time it's not that's not the definition of a happy society i i mean i i do think it's incredibly important that people be allowed to say what they want but i also think it's important for them to be told to shut up under certain circumstances like in the court case and in the famous example that people always give when discussing freedom of speech you can't shout fire in a crowded theater when it's a lie because you can kill people they can stampede it's not freedom of speech to broadcast lies that are dangerous for example obviously it seems to me and similarly um restrictions controls guidelines regulation in industry and safety in the environment aren't a particular problem to me i because you know one can presumably legislate against this control or not but for some people it is an absolute red line the very word regulation means interference and is a bad thing and i suppose you have to impute a weird motive to those who are laying down laws say for the regulation of movement of capital in and out of countries or um you know not allowing insider trading in in the in the stock exchanges in the share markets i mean they're so obvious you've got to have rules like that and similarly you can't allow an individual citizen to own nuclear weapons so and that's obvious and no one doubts it but all this is a reminder of the obvious philosophical truth that there are lines we draw we draw lines we say yes you can earn a gun but that gun has to be described if it gets to above a certain size and becomes some enormous thing that can only be held on a lorry so that it's a military device it's a gun that shoots huge shells 300 you know yards or a mile away you can't earn that so you've drawn a lion so this idea that freedom is indivisible is obvious nonsense it's always divisible you say you can go this far but no further you can earn let's say you can own a small gun a handgun but you can't earn a nuclear weapon we can all understand that so you you can say things that are irresponsible flagrantly disgraceful and nobody minds but if you say something that's dangerous that hurts other people and can cause violence then people do mind so it does mean that in the culture you have to you have to if you are a responsible boring middle-of-the-road centrist kind of person you have to accept that the world is bound in treaties and rules and regulations and laws which are complex and difficult and they have to be justified and it's terribly bureaucracy um it's kafkaesque it's red tape it's all there done to to to bind up the poor innocent john q citizen um and to read motives into those who are trying to organize it but once once you undo the mechanisms of the state to the extent that you claim a purity of ideological outlook to do with freedom in which anything that gets in the way of it isn't is is the enemy once you do that then essentially everything collapses and this is what's in danger of happening is that people are beginning to doubt the need for structures um for boring logistical bureaucratic systemic structures that hold society up that organize things that that have rules about the size of a bridge or a tunnel that are very very dull and very technical but without which society literally falls apart i mean the the bridges fall down the roads the potholes collapse you know things don't get paid for things aren't safe things things go wrong because there's no law and it's it looks how do you how do you romanticize a belief in something as dull as a as a as a well-working as a good state you know a country that has civil servants that get on with their jobs quietly and without threat and do their best and everybody trusts that they're there to do their best the moment that gene is out of the bottle in which everybody who has anything to do with the state his deep state is an enemy of this enemy of the people is doing it for their own nefarious ends whether they're jewish ends or lizard ends or vaccinating ends or implanting things in you and once you start imputing motives to people like that there's there's no way you can go there's just no way you can go and unfortunately what won't do is for the left to say oh well we have to understand the right when they talk nonsense like this when they when when they um when they spread these uh conspiracy theories and uh uh you know talk about the world in those absolute lights and so on we must understand them well yes but if we stop believing in things that are true and evidence-based empirically demonstrable if we start to say just so that we don't seem elitist snobs you know so we don't commit the hillbilly elegy mistakes of thinking that you know that that's all just white trash and they're all stupid they're all well educated and therefore we must just mock them uh instead we have to understand them and say yes you've got a point of view well there is no point of view to anti-vaxxing except ignorance foolishness or malevolence it's spiteful or it's stupid there's no in-between no there just isn't and and it's unfortunate that your generation are the ones who are going to have to stand up for things that matter and mean something there's my phone going um and i i won't do that grievously awful thing besides turn that phone off that awful thing of uh which people of my generation do which is simply apologize for having screwed the world up and saying i do i do appreciate that it's very difficult for you young people but there is a strong feeling that um uh that it is up to you that that's why i'm very happy to do this podcast because it's so wonderful to think there are young people who are serious by which i don't mean pompous or uh you know take themselves too seriously as individuals but who who who have a real passion and zeal for looking at how the world is and how it might be and what's going wrong with it and not being satisfied uh to to sit on the sidelines so maybe you can tell me where you stand on these things do you think that we're just all going to have to be very polite and understanding to each other or that that we are allowed to have a real contest of ideas uh oh oh of course not and i i really agree with you in that we have to you know stand for truth against just blatant ignorance and again these are principles of the enlightenment you know speech but as a liberal who believes that both sides should be embodying these principles i do feel like it's more than just drawing a line where free speech becomes dangerous for the left it's drawing a line where free speech becomes uncomfortable at all so i'd like to ask do you feel like it's just drawing a line for free speech being uncomfortable or principally are we just restricting what can and can't be said i i mean i i'd always rather that free speech was was not restricted but i think there are you know and i go back to i mean it goes back to john stuart mill and on liberty doesn't it and on trying to establish these uh first principles of how uh how free speech can work in a complex society of interconnected clashing groups of people and interests and um you know the the that hoary uh ethicists example of shouting fire in a crowded room is it it's expressing this idea that um speech is is is uh it can be loaded it it it can language can be an arsenal of weapons and uh in the same way that it's it's fine to let people use language amongst each other in circumstances where they kind of know what's going on but to use it to coerce to encourage violence to shame and humiliate disgrace people is it it's very difficult because it's a question of scale um teasing someone in a in a schoolyard um that child can be very upset but a teacher can intervene and the teacher can see that what's going on in the schoolyard and separate them but where someone a child is humiliated and shamed and bullied by thousands or in the view in their mind of tens of thousands they then go and hang themselves there is clearly a difference that has to be understood about different kinds of speech um because we understand that printing a headline in a mass-market newspaper is not the same as speaking in a bar one of them is a message to a mass of people which has power which can affect people can make people move as is a radio broadcast so when the hutus and the tutsis start shouting at each other to kill uh and calling each other cockroaches using the same language that goebbels and striker used in the 1930s to whip up anti-semitism to dehumanize when language and media broadcasting media are used to do that then regulation is clearly necessary because it's being it's being used not as speech it's being used as weaponry it is just a form of weapon and that was the radio in the days of goebbels and striker well it's now facebook and twitter and everything else and so i think it's inevitable that facebook in the next year and a half will be treated as a publishing uh entity a platform not as a purely distributive platform that has no responsibility for the texts that go forward so i think they'll be able to do it but i think yeah i mean the problem is i've written this before is there aren't any grown-ups do you know that there's a there's a whole world of british and and american and indeed world fiction and fantasy like the wizard of oz and things like that which is all about the fact that behind the curtain sometimes there isn't a grown-up um that the wizard of oz is all about that there's who is this wizard who's going to see him he will solve all our problems and it turns out it's just a fake it's a con there's nobody there um and and the message is you have to sort your own problems out well we're used to having figures to look up to whether they're nelson mandela or gandhi or einstein or um albert schweitzer or you know there's there's usually been a selection of people on the planet who are a locust of authority um and who whom we can respect and whom we listen to when we listen and there were organizations flawed like the you know unesco and unicef and all the various organs and agencies of the uh of the united nations and other global bodies you know nato if you're in the west and so on and they they were not perfect but there was a sense when they met that yeah these were the grown-ups and they could fix stuff and we'd read about it and we'd sort of give our opinions and so on and it's not that we knew our place but but we we deliberately voted and lived in a democracy in order to give that responsibility to people we could entrust and there is no longer a feeling that you can entrust politicians or any class to run things on the other hand we don't run them ourselves we merely pull them down destroy them uh make fun of them and do all the things that are very easy to do to to undermine the dignity and respect of our public servants so no one is going to want to be a public servant i mean if i don't know if you were low or you alexander if you want to be um uh public servants when you when you're a little bit older you know are you going to go do the american thing is to get a law degree and then and then to go to the southern law poverty center or to the southern poverty law center or or to the uh aclu or to depending on your politics to some other group and then you find somebody and she's going to become the next big congresswoman in your district and you you become their chief of staff and then slowly you you become a politician yourself but i maybe you don't want that maybe you still have enough belief in the system to think that that's something you can do and make a difference in do you is that your plan well um or alex you can start because i'm actually only 15 so are you really my goodness you have got a way to go wow by the way and i'm i'm only 17 myself good gracious yeah i know uh we both definitely look a little older than we are um i plan to go fbi get my 20 years in and then go into pub go into politics um i definitely see thank you i appreciate it um a lot of people definitely ask do you still have faith in the system and i said it's a really good question um there's a lot of factors at play and just because you don't have faith in the system doesn't mean that you can't fix it and a lot of people think of that no that's right i mean i i occasionally take some sort of solace from from the environment which is a an even wider problem and one that seems even more disastrous in uh uh in the fatal nature of the direction it's traveling in the it seems likely that there will hardly be an environment in 80 years time say but i i've done quite a few things in involving fauna and flora international and groups that that help around the world and i i remember about 10 years ago there was this plan to conserve a small area in the caribbean sea um which had become totally bleached and basically desertified and no one was allowed to fish in it and the idea was that in 10 or 15 years it would slowly become re-greened what was fascinating was that within a year of it being left alone it roared back to its original state and it was fine everything found its balance with amazing speed when it was left alone and nature's a bit like that now we can't rely on the fact that our our institutions and systems for government and for the protection of individual rights and for the advancement of those rights and so on we can't assume that they're going to survive whatever happens however dangerously they're tinkered about with or neglected but i do think it is also true the speed with which humans can recover is akin to the speed with its nature can recover a good example is to look at any movie made in the mid 40s in europe films like the third man is a masterpiece of a film set in vienna and a couple of billy wilder films set in berlin for example and if you look at the location of if you look at berlin in 1945 it is just rubble the place was absolutely trashed the russians from one end came in and destroyed everything the british and americans had carpet bombed the city every street every avenue was just piles of rubble you look at the film of it and you think that that is that's it that's there's no more berlin but within five years there was the you know the brandenburg gate was back to its original pristine state and another in 10 years and then in 50 and 20 years north paris and and it was a you know things can and this was a a polity that had gone from the the flight of the kaiser in 1918 uh to the weimar republic the the and rose luxembourg and the the the small communist experiment to nazism uh to being split between communists and westerners you know it had undergone every conceivable agony that a country could go in and within 15 years less than that germany had you know gone from being the sick monster of europe destroyed and humiliated to bring the leading democracy in the entire in the entire area i mean both both economically and socially and culturally it had recovered incredibly so these are important things to remember when things you know look grotesque um human beings will find a way to um to bring about what they need to to even things up the reason i paused there was i was thinking maybe part of the problem with social media is nothing more than self-consciousness is that we are so aware of our role as individuals in the whole nature of democracy we know because we have a voice in instagram and twitter and whatever other uh platform it might be or service it might be that somehow we're all very self-aware and and i was thinking that because there was um an experiment that was done in the 60s that i loved by by those behavioralists who ran rampant in those days indeed famously at stanford um and this is if you put a load of mice on a tray on the water choppy water reasonably choppy water and they're on a perspex tray a little clear plastic tray and then they run around at random on the tray and the tray stays afloat because they run around randomly so they're you know it's perfectly happy it'll stay afloat for hours if you scale it up to humans and put humans in such a tray it sinks immediately because the humans think they can control it they see that it's tipping one way so they all run in the opposite direction and immediately think it so self-consciousness is very often the thing that brings around the destruction of stability that nature works because it unself-consciously gets about everything finds its level in the same way as water does it just goes down to the sea but once you start trying to control it like trying to control nature you know you you you're constant that's whack-a-mole you're playing whack-a-mole with with with the nature of uh the nature of nature you know with the fact you you think you're helping this species but it will destroy that one oh you go over there and help that one you destroy this one and the same in our politics if we troop if we think we can control and i'm not saying everything should be laissez-faire in economics and everything just let it all you know go wild but but maybe part of the problem with the present age is that everybody has a stake in it so everybody's rushing towards one end to help things and it tips it up over the other end there's just too much self-awareness and that if we just got on with living kept our heads down and lived kept our nose to the wind and our eye to the skyline as the man says in the film um anyway sorry i'm babbling again uh what was that in an answer to who knows you mentioned a little bit about social media and how we're talking about facebook and twitter and instagram and a lot of people say that with the evolution of social media we're seeing an evolution of discourse but it feels like the opposite because on twitter alone you get what 280 characters per tweet something like that so you have a very limited response in your conversations and eventually somebody's going to stop responding and then people are going to get more angry about it um and so in reality it feels like we're having this shift in this divide um and we're seeing the realms of positive allowed opinions not only expand but kind of form a a hole in the middle where you're not allowed to have that opinion but um one definite way that people are splitting is in the the ideas of theism um in america alone from 2007 to 2014 the group people who identified as atheists doubled yes you know that's just in america alone um yeah we're also saying though a lot of people go to a kind of the religious extreme where they're saying you know i need to i can't wear a mask as we talked about cove i can't wear a mask because god's green air or you know this is god if god wants me to die i'll die or something like that on the very extreme end um do you think that as you say social media is kind of a weapon um in free speech and political correctness do you think religion is kind of a another weapon that people use in order to push the ideas of dangerously free speech i i think there's i mean there's no question that that that can happen and um i i have very little quarrel with individually devout pious people i mean that's their business it's nothing to do with me if they go to chapel church mosque temple whatever any time of day and fall to their knees and talk to some spirit they imagine to have created the world and they makes them happy who am i to tell them otherwise or to mock them even it's it's cruel and stupid on the other hand the moment uh their assertions uh are pushed into the public space and used to control others like to control education and how children are taught about the world then obviously i do get a bit angsty and a bit a bit worried and that has always be i say always that's certainly been the case for the last hundred so years and in my lifetime yes there was a general sense that religion was a sort of large amorphous pressure that bore down on on children in schools and things in europe where we don't have the separation of church and state quite so self-consciously as you do in your constitution you know you the first thing you do at school there'd be hymns and prayers and so on and of course counter-intuitively that is why i think britain is so completely irreligious a country because we have an established church so nobody takes any notice of it whereas in america you have thousands of churches all tax exempt all jostling in an ecosystem which is akin to an economy for you know corporate status and for for the big bucks and uh and to reach the most people to get the most uh nowadays we'd say clicks that's religious clicks and and and with it becomes money and power and a lot of it is simply snake oil it's for money and uh and you can laugh at that or hope that people expose it and that it gets shown up for what it is the faith healing and the nonsense of sending in money and so on and saying god wants you to to give up your money or all that stuff but then when it comes to what it really upsets me is when it comes to influence on the school curriculums and on what is taught and on what books are allowed in states on literally book burning in texas of whatever it is i mean it's comical it's you know harry potter or something as satanic literature i mean it's so preposterous that you you kind of ought to laugh but it's unfortunately the case that there are still lots of children who are brought up to feel guilty and ashamed of who they are uh through not just their sexuality or anything it could just simply be their desires generally their sense of being a frothing fizzing expectant young person trying to engage with a frightening and an astonishing world a world where they've oh yesterday i discovered the poems of emily dickinson or john keats and and then i discovered this music oh this jimi hendrix this sydney bechet this uh beethoven whatever it is something has moved me profoundly in the world and made me extraordinarily excited about being alive and apparently there's no place for it because it's more important than i read the bible and this is the truth and what i just read about you know newton or wallace or einstein or um you know darwin or whatever i must put aside and that that that worries me a great deal it would worry me if um a child in a scientific household was told he wasn't around allowed to read the bible uh that would be peculiar and i don't think it's likely that it would happen um i mean there may be some atheistic scientists who are so friggish and uh tyrannical that they wouldn't let their children discover about but nearly always it is unfortunately religion that makes these extraordinary statements about the future of the world the beginning of the world and the nature of morality and human behavior that is acceptable and unacceptable and the only way the exciting thing i mean if they made those assertions and said now let's discuss them then fabulous and some splendid religious people do do that they will go to a class of children and say this is what christianity says it says it absolutely and it says it's with conviction but is it right let's have a look let's think about it what do you think then that's fine if it's all but when it comes from parents or teachers or faith schools or you know certain institutions in churches so on and it comes down as a word that cannot be challenged i i find that deeply distressing and it's strange that that fundamentalism in religion still exists and is associated with the with the political fringe that supposedly hates being told what to do they make an exception when it comes to religion they don't want an elected government telling them about taxes or um about having to pay for hospitals or defense forces and the military they they'd rather go you know they'd rather go into some strange dugout hideaway in the hills than submit to such statehood but they're perfectly happy to be told by a pastor or a priest of some kind what to wear whether or not they're allowed to have tattoos if they can have a full skin or not i mean all sorts of utterly bizarre assertions made by people on the basis with no evidence except the precedent of folk memory and uh texts which is an absurd way to go about things um but unquestionably it has huge power and there's money behind it and that's part of the problem isn't it it's it's the huge amount of money behind it it's um the power it has over the republican party and to to some extent um american culture in terms of things like network tv and so on you know that i can remember having done practice where you couldn't say oh god or something as a as an expression on network tv i was thinking well that is very peculiar but yeah so it's a it's a tricky one uh religion i i think my own view with all questions of progress uh political progress whether you're talking about it as progressivism is that it's probably not two steps forward and one back it's probably more like three steps forward and two back or four steps forward and three back but progress is made it's painful and it inches along um i mean a very good example is one that obviously matters to me a bit because it's you know i've lived it but sort of um same-sex marriage it was inconceivable when i was your age that i could ever marry someone of my own gender uh publicly and openly and you know introduce him as my husband and he'd introduce him you know and people wouldn't bat an eyelid and do you get them on on jeopardy you'd get a couple of men or a couple of women though uh can i wave to my wife a woman would say and alex trobecca go yeah hi and just completely normal but if you go back 15 years when these things were being fought state by state the language that was used was so extreme in their opposition to it people would would would uh you know crucify themselves rather than allow such abominations in their state and now they'd look at idiot if they fussed about it i mean there may still be people who do and of course we can never be sure that the you know you won't go backwards on these things but generally speaking nobody gives a cuss anymore and that's just as it should be and thing and you know the legalization of cannabis you may stand on another side for that but in another example of something that was inconceivable and has been liberalized in um in quite a lot of states now set in california where we are colorado the whole of canada portugal other countries and and as always the world didn't come to an end the mountains didn't slide into the sea and it wasn't the end of all decency and uh family values and coherence and uh far from it um the crime rates went down with in and and in terms of family values with gay marriage um you know children have said um in fact rather than worse and uh that there is you know just nothing nothing to see here as the old cliche has it we could all move along and look at some other area that needs to be looked at and that's the way progressive politics works um and i'm i'm here speaking on behalf of progressive politics because it's all very well for me to call myself a centrist which i suppose i am i don't extremity of language on the on the left when it comes to uh you know when it when it comes to tactics more than really strategy the strategy is fine i understand they want justice here justice there equality there but the tactics very often are bruising and alienating and and i worry that i just want the left to be a bit smarter in the way that it uh in the way that it argues for things that shouldn't need much argument for really for uh you know reductions in poverty and unhappiness and pain and and and squalor and pollution and you know all these things shouldn't really need much explaining um and nor should they be screamed in people's faces if somebody screams in my face it's very illogical but i will want to do the opposite of what they want me to do even if what they're screaming in my face is sensible the act of screaming is so unpleasant that it actually turns you off and i think this is a huge side to the political debate that is completely overlooked and that's and it makes me sound very squalid when i say it's the pr side of it it's simply the bad pr the left should be smarter at communication it should be more self denigrating it should it should realize how dumb we all are that you know actors in particular people in my profession act tall as as they're called um they should know how bad it sounds when someone who is paid you know 12 million dollars a movie uh starts you know talking in barely literate english about about how they want to change the world and and i'm not saying you should ban actors from speaking like that why should you they've got every right and it's charming that they want the world to be better but just a bit of self-knowledge um and i'm probably an example of this i'm sure i come across as a total you know self-righteous dick as we as you might say um and but but i try always to be friendly and polite in these debates and not to be too dismissive um and and and that's at all levels i think um i think everybody that almost everybody i met unless they're sociopathic psychopathic in some way you know uh dysfunctional in in in the brain literally everybody wants to love and be loved and act to accept and be accepted and then things in their life history and their makeup have pushed them into uh and pushed us into uh attitudes of fragility aggression defensiveness unhappiness misery anger resentment all kinds of negative feelings come out uh when we look at the world and then and then we spray our those feelings but but deep down we actually we don't want to make enemies of everybody in the world and to be an enemy and to be misunderstood and if there it's just so much pride keeps us from from doing it i mean i i was saying a year ago the only thing that will save the culture is an attack from martians no because because then suddenly we won't have any differences we'll only have the commonality of being earthlings and we'll be defending earth so the fact that you're black and you're you know indian or you're russian is of absolutely no importance they're the enemy those are the martians we're the earthlings will come together but i realized even that was rubbish because isn't i mean curvy 19 is essentially an alien invasion and far from bringing us all together it is only exacerbated the mutual enmity and distrust that exists around the world so so i i as usual i'm completely wrong and and i i think that the thing you have to bear in mind with anybody you talk to especially someone in my generation is that we never saw any of this coming almost nobody has predicted the way the world is now you can look at bits of cyberpunk and bits of this science fiction or this novel and say yeah they kind of go but not really not the particular way that we are [ __ ] and it's a very particular way is something that um nobody has foreseen so the same people who didn't foresee how we were going to be a year ago are not necessarily to be trusted when they started speciating on how we're going to be in a year we just don't know and i i guess the most the best you can do is to say it's an adventure we don't know what's going to happen in a year's time we don't know what america will be like when there's been enough vaccination to have 58 to 60 herd immunity and the economies come back online what will the taxes be like will the proud boys have have a 24 hours you know um 24 7 vigil against biden and his uh presidency will there be insurrection in the streets at all times or will we have settled down will we will we just be getting on with gosh i can now have a flat white or a latte in the street and i can walk without a mask between these two offices or will we actually have become completely destroyed by the false hope of the vaccinations because the world will still be so screwed in terms of the economics the employment outlook and indeed the continued social distancing that would be necessary because the disease will have mutated and there'll still be other problems and and our patients will have run out by that time because we just won't be able to take it anymore because of the three sciences that have controlled this pandemic virology and epidemiology the third is in a sense the most fascinating and that's behaviorology is how we respond to orders given by government on things like seclusion and sheltering in place and wearing masks and not seeing other people we can do it for a while but the time's gonna come isn't it when when i'm gonna look out of the window and there'll be a vehicle coming up the hill that will be straight out of mad max and there'll be groups of bandanas maniacs on it you know shooting killing raping and destroying because hey they can who's going to stop them you know that this business of there being no grown-ups and known authority it it filters down and in this you know animals if you leave a house unlived in for six months the birds the insects know that they sense there's no one there they start to nest in it and they get bolder and bolder and they start to eat the wood and they start to move in well why wouldn't they and and it's the same the same with with criminals and the board and the unemployed is hey there's no real police force around there's no one keeping control they're all scared of us we can do what we like let's go up the hill and uh go into that house and take take everything they've got they've probably got a cellar full of wine i mean i i hope i'm wrong but it it's it's perfectly possible that far from thinking about i mean there's an old phrase that is used in reference to um to the titanic disaster which is you know it's no good arranging the deck chairs when there's a an iceberg coming you don't just arrange the seating on the deck it's it's you've got to realize how big the crisis is and maybe your talk of um uh an example of you know going into the fbi will there be an fbi in five years time will or maybe there will be something uh which is more like out of a wesley snipes or john travolta movie of the 80s and 90s in which the future was you know robocops and things like that sorry i'm speaking it off i'm sure you've got another question tonight sorry oh no of course um and i want to go a little back to your criticism of the the tactics that the left is kind of using now because physically exactly my critique the the polarizing rhetoric and the decisive the divisive i'm sorry slogans that we're kind of using take social justice issues in the past six months you have the slogan of black lives matter is all cops are bastards yeah but it's not all cops it's the system right and how is that going to work you know because the first response is well not all cops are bastards exactly no it's failed um so i want to ask you specifically on social justice issues like this obama said a couple weeks ago that when you use slogans like this you're always going to lose people always and he was attacked for this by a lot of the left-wing but also you know people who consider themselves centrists and liberals as well so would you agree with this and slogans like this as well being harmful to absolutely a hundred percent um i think a thing i came to a view on a a couple of years ago as it suddenly occurred to me how many people there are in the world who would rather be right than effective you know if if they they care more about the purity of their soul as it were than the effectiveness of their actions and and i think that's a disaster and obama of course having been in a position of of trying to get things done for eight years usually with you know the hill not on his side politically so having to work very doubly hard to get anything done it naturally understands that that the ease with which you can come up with slogans and express an ideologically pure idea which is you know marvelous but which can have very little traction in the real world and and do no more than as you say alienate and antagonize those for whom it seems like an insult there are policemen working in places in america who are saving lives who are helping young drug addicts get off drugs and going around to see their parents and making a difference and of course there are policemen who are brutal corrupt thugs but you know if just simply painting them all as that is a disaster for for the culture i think and yeah i i remember seeing obama as an event in new york i was at it was for the united nations and he was giving a talk to this uh group we were doing this thing about the sustainable goals of the united nations and uh someone said how he had not managed to do this and this and this when he was a president and how did he think he said no there were so many things i didn't manage to do he said um i wanted everything not just to be good or better but to be the best i wanted the best healthcare i wanted the best but you know what better is still better than good and good is better than bad and anything you can do that is better is better and it may not be the perfect thing he wanted to do but it's still better i mean it's it's so obvious that the the the usual phrase to describe that is don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good you know if you're constantly focusing on the perfect outcome for society uh then uh you then you're turning down chances of things that are good because they aren't perfect and that's a an arrogant attitude and one that actually allows you to stand back and do nothing because your fingers will always be clean you'll always be pure because you weren't responsible for the compromise the fudge the attempt to make it better you were only interested in making it perfect so you did nothing well that's no good to anybody it really isn't it's much better to get in there and get mucky and try and do things even if they aren't 100 the answer they they don't do everything you wanted them to do are they better than than having done nothing and if you can do things that are better than nothing then you're on the way that's that's the the you know the in a way the most you can expect of someone they've made a small difference a tiny difference they just made it a little bit better not hugely not perfect there were still systemic faults there was still racism in the world there was still sexism there was still transphobia in the world after they're done their little bit but there was a bit less of this and a bit less of that and that's good enough because if everybody is involved in making things a little better things get a lot better like cleaning up a beach you know it's you know if everybody said there's too much the beach is too filthy we'll never clean it then it will stay dirty but if thousands of people just do a tiny bit of picking up it's clean in seconds and and it's the power of numbers and of course we've been turned off the power of numbers because of our disaffection with social media and the internet now having been pandora's box that was going to make the world perfect it's now pandora's box that has released all the ills of the world and we are uh we now feel that everything to do with social media and everything to do with the internet is dark and tainted and actually that's probably not right it's still a powerful force for people to connect with each other across before and all it requires is for those who control social media to make a decision which would be a very exciting one when mark zuckerberg was at harvard he made the decision to try and write a piece of code to create a a program as they were called weren't even called apps in those days they were called programs to write a program a computer program that people would use that would be popular and as he did and saw that he was successful he got more ambitious and thought he could do one that would be amazing and he did and he got more amazing he found a financial model for advertising that allowed it not only to grow but to to to make his corporation and himself one of the richest people the world had ever seen now all he has to do now is say okay i've done that now can i make facebook the most benign force for good that the world has ever seen i'm mark zuckerberg i can go in to a board meeting and say we're going to drop advertising we're going to become a subscription model like netflix we're not going to use advertising so there'll be no data mining no data shadowing of people none of that because it's not part of who we are anymore instead people just have to pay tuppence a month or whatever you know nothing you know because there's so many billions and that will be our that will be our subscription base and we will make sure we can afford it to monitor it in such a way that it is neither left-wing nor right-wing but what it doesn't allow are lies and dangerous aggressive pieces of unpleasantness and we'll fix it as we go slowly but we will make sure that this will be the most thrillingly benign and superb organization that the world has yet seen we can do it it's a question of willpower and he has no excuse not to do and wouldn't that be exciting can you imagine saying this is day one of facebook a new facebook and everything we do now is is is aimed towards not our share price and and and profit because we're all richer than we could ever need to be but we're going to get nobel prizes out of this we are going to get nobel [ __ ] prizes because we are going to make the world so great we're going to use all our power and muscle and reach to mend everything that's broken that we can and it'll it'll take time and we'll make mistakes along the way but that is our aim wouldn't you love to do that he could do it what's this jeff bezos could do the same his wife's given away 4.2 billion in a week for god's sake you know there's nothing to stop these people from switching and turning themselves into humanitarians of remarkable kind now that sort of again i suppose i've said on the one hand it takes thousands of us on a beach to clean up the beach and then i say we just need the heads of these companies to clean up the beach as it were well the fact is it can be both we put the pressure on them and we are you know we are people who want to make the world better just because around that we want our own nests to be tidy and to be happy um but we also want the people who we enrich with our customer to have some bloody sense of responsibility anyway sorry that's my answer to that one i i'd agree you know i it sadly it feels optimistic seeing a figure like you know bezos or the mark zuckerberg actually given you know the statements and decisions he made recently having this you know change in vision and deciding he's going to use his platform as a force for good but anyway i know you're right but it is a mystery just as on a human level i can't i can't understand can you be such a person who wouldn't want to make everything right but sorry carry on but i want to ask in terms of you know doing a little better or you know better being more than good or is someone who i see as you know a little better joe biden you know you talked about how you feel about obama but with biden taking office in january despite what you know a significantly large portion of our country still thinks you know do you feel that biden is no a little better or do you see his presidency as being uh progressive or do you see this as you know unproductive or returning to some kind of old administration as many afraid well i mean the the truest aphorism about politics is that all politics ends in failure there's you know there's no question there will be disasters and scandals awaiting biden that he and we have no knowledge of we can't imagine you know let's invent a name um what's this this is a lens clean so there will be a piece of paper that comes across across his desk one day that says the the lens clean affair and he'll look at the go what's this lens cleaner oh it was a small thing i was oh forget about it and then a couple of days later the journalists will say mr president the lens clean effect yeah that's uh that's sort of there's no problem and what's going on well we we did make the mistake well just pretend we didn't and then there's been a cover-up of the lens cleaner and suddenly the lens clean affair is the story of the year nobody talks about anything else he never saw it coming it's disrupted and tripped up all his progress and all this a lot of his political credit is used up this will happen what that that particular affair or scandal or problem will be as by definition we can't know but it will happen there will be in a year's time uh you can just guarantee there will be this story that will that will have done damage to the presidency but yes he's a little better obviously he's better in terms of the respect and pride that america can have in itself not not to be controlled by this you know gibbering malignant narcissist is obviously a good thing it was beyond a joke to have to have the endless insanity of of poor trump i mean i say poor trump obviously it's hard to feel sorry for him really uh because but when someone is so devoid of any moral compass i mean it's disturbing that they can be leader of the free world as the phrase has it and it will be a relief to see him go on and i hope that the journalists will be wise enough not to cover every tweet he tweets in which he attacks biden because he he'll do it certainly until he gets bored and he'll get bored if people don't cover it but everything biden does he will attack um and say i would have done it better when i did it you know and all that and and if journalists repeat that and and print it because it's obviously it gets eyeballs and clicks it would be a a big shame um but no he'll be a disappointment oh i mean even obama was a disappointment in the sense you know he couldn't do it all clinton was obviously a disappointment in his way too uh it's you know there's you just hope for um stability is important both globally and within the country some element of stability and i have admired the fact that biden has barely referenced trump's uh temper tantrums and refusals to play ball he's done it on a couple of occasions just to just to make sure that people know that he's still around and that he's noticing but he hasn't harped on about it and sort of spoken every day he hasn't whined himself and that's kind of graceful and dignified and the correct attitude and if he can have an administration that is graceful and dignified and doesn't speak too much and gets on with it and is a bit dull you know he has sort of dull news conferences and dull you know press events and and doesn't get over excited about itself and doesn't blow its own trumpet and just you know takes the all the pressure and the heat or not all but most of the pressure and heat out of the daily business of politics just calms it down a bit i think that would have an immense effect even irrespective of the politics that would be true if it was a i don't know a republican uh who took over from trump's uh i can't think of many but you know a few of them might at least have have been well they would have been better certainly yeah so biden's filled his administration with a lot of so-called interventionists figures like nira tandem and and uh tony blinken who say uh supported invading iraq libya and you associate yourself with the labor party in britain and imagine oppose the war in iraq so what would your response be to these kinds of interventionist policies um i yeah well interventionist is used in two ways of course in the economic terms interventionism is is all about the the state helping uh guide economics through through its fiscal policy uh uh hands-on um which is a more progressive way of running the economy but you mean interventionist around the world in terms of uh uh yeah involving itself in in global events and obviously i worry about that and and i would hate to see any more adventures like iraq and i would hate to see the uh situation with iran being um escalated because that's that's it you know could be in danger of exploding that there is uh an ironic truth about international relations that it is hardline right-wing leaders who have historically most often brought around brought about peaceful settlements um that so it it's it was menachem begin and it was it was nixon who came to terms with china first for example um and it was thatcher and reagan who came to terms with gorbachev and and russia and and and they were on the the further right of things so it is an annoying fact of uh progressive politics that they tend to screw up the international side royally um there's an old phrase that you forgive a left-wing administration for being inefficient but you'd never forgive it for being corrupt you'd forgive a right-wing administration for being corrupt but you wouldn't forgive it for being inefficient and i think that's it's obviously completely uh over the top as an absolute answer to these things but generally speaking yes biden is not you know he's not aoc he's not he's not the absolute uh progressive end of the democratic party he's not bernie sanders he is a pragmatist and he has laid down with figures whose politics i would certainly inquire with and and many on the progressive side of politics would be uncomfortable with but i think um it's again an example of let's let's try and get better things done and not moan about the fact that we haven't brought about the golden time in one swift election um because to believe that we could or to be so pernickety and so oh what is the word or phrase but you know so above the fray that we refuse to dirty our hands in compromise and the business of getting on with sorting out things like medicare and and and and the whole welfare issues that are going to uh be a huge problem for the government for the next for the next years i mean uh to to pay for the trillions of dollars that have gone into uh covid relief to pay for that to get some sense of fairness out of it for the for the millions who've been thrown into unemployment and poverty who are using food banks you know all these things uh um i should hope frankly that that there is almost no foreign policy to think about what in the next two years you know let's i you know i never liked america first but but for once i might actually think yes america first sweden first lithuania first russia first every individual country has just got to get on with sorting out its own mess economically and uh let's just hope that china and russia aren't so malevolent that they would use the opportunity of the world crisis to uh to do something utterly disastrous uh because that that obviously would uh i don't like the idea of joe biden having to face off against the chinese navy on some island in the pacific or suddenly coming face to face with uh such an egregious breach of cyber security from russia that there was no response other than either a response in kind with an attack on russia's cyber security that was blatant or indeed some something even more escalating because no i i i don't i don't see biden as a world statesman in that way but um [Music] i don't see trump as that either or any other figure particularly that i know of in in politics who is a world statesman who one could say though they'll calm it all down but yeah i mean who knows so more on foreign policy hey i wanna shift to a close friend of yours and one who i admire as well christopher hitchens here's your view on religion and obviously you he baited alongside you know defended to an extent the iraq warren i do believe he was unfairly castigated by the the left wing for supporting the iraq war but how did you two specifically differ on this yes i mean i i you couldn't but respect any opinion that uh christopher had because it came backed up with such ferocious learning and such extraordinary rhetoric that you were always at a disadvantage if you disagreed because he could make you look so foolish um but because we were friends i could you know i could i could have digs at him and uh and obviously it was a puzzle to his friends that he should have been so immediately and aggressively for uh a military response to 9 11. um a lot of it goes back to his visceral hatred of the clintons i mean that is a deep part of of of christopher's makeup over that over the period of the clinton presidency he he learned to distrust and dislike clinton and of course if someone comes from roughly the same side of of politics as as you do and then the betrayal is real and hurtful you can't be portrayed by somebody you disagree with that it you know so it's the fact that he he had thought more highly of clinton and just was revolted by what he saw as his corruption and paltering and his lack of good faith and all these things so he he was truly and and he always claimed he knew something about the clintons that he couldn't tell me and that oh if you knew and so on and but he i said yes but look at what you've said about vietnam look at what you've said about so many of the flare-ups over the 60s and 70s that you covered you went to physically as a as a foreign correspondent and a war journalist on many occasions and your ability to describe the absurdity of american foreign policy in in guatemala and el salvador nico aguero and honduras and in cuba and in you know in everywhere you know and obviously in in the indo china in in vietnam and cambodia and somehow everything's different here and he would then talk about the ideology of islamic fascism and i'd say i agree but is it that is that the reason because islamofascism is so much worth worse of philosophy than than the communism of of ho chi minh and castro uh because they were pretty filthy you know they they tortured and they killed and they murdered and they bombed and they supported bombers they supported people who put bombs on airplanes they paid for those bombs to be put on airplanes so you know and that's what i couldn't really you know it's a very tricky one isn't it um is the fact of terrorism itself the evil or is it that the justification isn't quite good enough because you know i'm jewish say so i grew up hearing from some elements of my family about the heroism of the stern gang and ergutz who were two terrorist organizations in jerusalem in the 1940s who put bombs in the king david hotel and bond and killed and assassinated british soldiers who were running the so-called palestinian mandate and so on and uh and then a more obvious case is the british government and the americans paid french resistance activists to put bombs in parisian restaurants where there were nazis dining and did we think that was terrorism no it was the french resistance it was freedom fighting these questions are still as thorny as ever they were so the act of the bomb is not always unforgivable is that what's being said it's a really tricky one to accept but it seems it is because we gave medals to members of the french resistance who put bombs in her in hotels and restaurants and killed innocent people and some of whom were yes collaborators but many of whom were bystanders so it is just about oh this terrorism is bad because i don't think their case is strong enough well that's no way to live in the world is it that terrorism is okay as long as you've got a good cause i mean that can't be right a bomb on a plane is a bomb on a plane isn't it and if it's being put there by someone from a communist cell or a islamic islamic cell it's same thing the flesh and the bones are being torn apart by the explosion in the same way and children are being denied parents and parents denied children as a result of it and it's a pity and a scandal and a shame and a horror and i know it's feeble it's the liberal mimsy oh i can't it's all so sad i wish we were nicer to each other kind of thing but there was a brutality no not a brutality there was a strength a commitment to christopher that i couldn't share and it was the same with religion and we did a debate in the way festival and why festival um years ago um it was the one of the first times we did a debate together and it was i don't think it was recorded on camera um but it was it was about offending religious people essentially and i said well i said to you a bit earlier that i have no interest in offending religious people you know if they fall to their knees and believe that god is watching them it's none of my business and it's it's cruel to mock someone for what they believe and it's and chris should just just laugh and say you are so you just don't want anyone to dislike you do you and i said no and he said that means everybody will dislike you i said i know i know it's terrible i am far too determined not to be offended offensive and that in itself is a bit offensive but when it comes to when it comes to things like supporting a war i you know if you're a member of a country that has a nuclear capability uh vast resources and is part of an alliance which is you know the biggest force on earth uh nato together with america and everything you your power is so great that it's it's it's no good talking about here's right and here's wrong um it is a bit like the the metoo debate it's about harvey weinstein is not the same as a boyfriend in a in a flat he's a man of power that's why everyone was so angry because of the enormous power he had over life and death in hollywood and so when america decides to involve itself it's not the same as as as a neighbor a neighboring country it it's it's a huge act of might mocked as the germans call it and and might is a is a very frightening thing in the world in a sense you might argue that might again you might argue that the history of the enlightenment is is a history of the loosening of screws on organisms and institutions and systems that exerted pressure and might over people and that those screws are loosened whether it's the church or the state or the army that the free thinking in the in the 18th and early 19th centuries and then onwards uh that that sort of allowed the democrat democratization and the the involvement of universal suffrage and universal education and all those things that that um all that was about reducing the power that was put in the hands of the state and we're now in the situation where we're worried about the fact that all that power is now in individuals hands in social media and maybe it should go back to being in the state and i of course i'm as confused as i ever was about which is which is better i think in the end of course it's right to of um that everything the power is brought to account and that the levers of power are are loosened all literally the nuts and the bolts are loosened so it's much harder for anybody to destroy the world with one one act of madness at least one hopes it is anywhere i'm babbling carry on i agree on foreign policy but of course hitchens was absolutely unrivaled in his skills as a debater so i can imagine it must be it was and it was funny because he he was the thing that always mitigated he was he was so witty you know he could just it's very hard to be truly offended extraordinary man i would i wish you could have met him i would you know he would have uh he would have had so much use in this current situation wouldn't he just involving himself in podcasts like this and in zooms and various other events it's just a voice that we no longer have except in memory but i would urge anybody listening who may say who is this christopher hickens of which we speak it's just go to youtube and devote a day to hitch slaps and other moments in which you'll see christopher hitchens being interviewed on ms and cbn and this and that and the other all the tv channels all the uh various different things and you will see a spirit uh of a kind that comes around once every two or three hundred years and you'll think damn i wish i paid attention when he was alive right and there there was one debate um that i know elia has seen i have seen um where you kind of debated with him on the catholic church and i believe the exact words you said uh was at one point was the idea that the catholic church served to disseminate the word of the lord is nonsense right yes and um it seems that the catholic church is kind of for lack of a better word grasping at straws a little bit we've seen a statement come out from the pope that was that was saying was okay for um people of the same sex to to be in civil unions which was surprising um what exactly are your opinions on the catholic church just to clarify for the viewers and listeners who aren't exactly aware well at the time of that debate they were they were pretty negative um the the the motion for the debate was this house believes that the catholic church is a force for good in the world and christopher hitchens and i opposed that motion it was it was put forward by uh an archbishop an african archbishop and by a british politician called anne whitticum who was a a member of the catholic church and this was at the time when ratzinger was the uh was pope benedict and they were still really not coming to terms with the enormous legacy of child abuse that uh that had been uncovered over the years by various people and um they had not really apologized for it they had not really uh uh you know as i said sort of manned up as we might say fessed up um and uh nor and at the same time nor had they in any way modified their opposition to gay rights and uh and uh abortion rights and uh you know they were still you know there were still nuns in africa uh putting out black propaganda about about condoms causing aids i mean it really was that that bad and it wasn't that long ago so i was pretty uh extreme i suppose you might say in my uh enmity of the the church and its power because the catholic church is a special case when it comes to sects and uh and uh and types of christianity uh let alone other religions in in that it is it is considered the mother church and it has its greatest reach the the tentacles of of the octopus may you know reach out from all the way from rome to south america and specifically to the poorest it's always to the poorest and least educated the catholic church has been against science and against education and against poor relief because the poor and the ignorant are their fuel are their that's what their cash that's what they live on it's what they feast on it's what they need they're never going to survive as this giant edifice if they appeal to people who whom they convert in the way that the the uh the you know baptists and the uh what used to be used to be called the dissenting churches the non-catholic churches they're the fundamentalist churches and they uh they are evangelical their their aim is to convert that's never really been quite what the catholic church was about it was not quite to convert or to bring about being born again or one of these protestant things like the election that calvinists believe in but that it was always about being a membership of the church being embraced into the folds of the church and being obedient to the church's teachings the church has teachings and whatever one things about protestantism and evangelicalism it believes that the bible has teachings and that you can personally have a relationship with god yourself on your knees with that bible uh and the word of god and you don't need the intercession of a bishop or a priest the catholic church insists on that intercession and i'm dwelling on this theology and historical difference because it it's the reason the catholic church is different and and it has therefore always been against any any loosening of the those shackles in which the working class and the peasant class in particular are held um and so the vicious relationship the catholic church has had with fascists and militaristic hunters um who and and in suppressing communism not just communism to a sexual democracy there was a liberation theology this theology which was young catholic priests would go in and bring about social change uh inspired by teachings of christ they would bring about social change in their countries the catholic church excommunicated them banned them from from the priesthood literally threw them out because um the the generals and the you know who gave so much money to the church and the the you know franco and people like that in spain uh of course in absolutely insisted that this had nothing to do with catholicism which was all about hierarchy there was christ the king at the top and the only way to him was through a priest and the only way the priest had was through another priest through a cardinal through a monsignor through through through through the pope himself it was this structure that still exists and is so powerful that makes the catholic church so particularly strong in its uh adherence and its its insistence of obedience but having said that and it's ironic i should be saying it as a non-christian i do believe in redemption and i do believe things can can improve that the real problem of the catholic church is that it is stuck between and it knows it is two impossible truths they can't both be true one is that it believes it stands as a bastion for all truth and for absolute truth against the relativism of the post-enlightenment scientific world which believes in moral relativism and the church will not accept that so that's one view the church is abstinent but the other view is when you when you talk to them about their relationship to slavery and to nazism and to fascism they will say oh yes but yeah we have changed we have learned well how how did you need to learn if you were the source of all moral good who taught you why i tell you who taught you the post-enlightenment culture taught you that slavery was bad and that um and that all these these you know and that it was okay to be gay and that it was all right you know to under circumstances if you've been raped maybe to determinate your your pregnancy and and and that you know things aren't as clear-cut as they appeared to be 300 years ago so in fact maybe there is a little bit of relativism to the morality of this world and so i mean for example i've heard catholic priests excusing child abuse by saying it wasn't such a big deal 100 years ago well if it wasn't such a big deal 100 years ago where were you you were the arbiter of all morality a hundred years ago so you saying morality has changed and if your same reality has changed you have immediately destroyed this idea that you stand for something eternal you actually stand like all human uh institutions as a slowly evolving thing that accrues wisdom by experience and learning not through the bible or through the word of god but through man discovering how things are and of course that is the state of the church it has been taught about human rights by people from outside the church it hasn't come to the view that human rights are important and should be valued and understood it hasn't come to that view that women are as deserving of education as men it hasn't come to that view from inside it's been taught it from outside and it knows that and it drives it mad because by admitting that they're admitting that the church is not what they've always said it was do you see what i mean there is an inbuilt misfortune in being a catholic peace you in order to admit that things have improved you have to admit that the church learnt from the secular world and the secular world is what teaches us is what gives us the authority to understand slowly making mistakes along the way new thoughts about the environment and nature and children and women and different races and sexuality and gender all these complicated things that were once thought to be absolute we now understand our relative i'm not saying everything is fluid and there's no such thing as good no such thing as bad that's nonsense but it is that it's only by working through issues of morality and ethics by looking at them afresh by looking at them empirically by seeing what works and what doesn't work that you can come to new ways of living and new ways of granting the supreme gift of the right to be who they feel they're born to be to citizens of the world and not to interfere with them or to buffet them or tamp them down tamp their spirit and their self-belief you know it's they you know priests in my lifetime i have friends who are at schools in ireland who are beaten for writing with their left hands these children you know you will be right-handed yes you will you know that and that's the least of the wickednesses that these fathers and brothers uh inflicted on children so you know they're the church has to understand and admit and francis is kind of doing that that it is learnt from the rest of the world that it hasn't taught us how to behave there is no element of catholic teaching which you go oh yes thank goodness the catholics have taught us that now we know at least to do this nothing anything they say that you'll say well no that's socrates was there before you want that one or no that was scrawled on a cave 5 000 years ago what are you saying no buddha said that before you did you know there are all kinds of all kinds of you know ways you can show that the catholic church has offered nothing except fabulous rich architecture but if you took the carpenter of bethlehem at jesus and led him by the hand to rome and stood him outside from peter's room with the marble was this what you had in mind jesus i think he'd go what the [ __ ] have you done what is that cathedral doing there oh i thought that's what you meant isn't it by saying uh follow me and drop everything and uh you know love your neighbor as yourself didn't you mean build an enormous palace for rich priests who could call themselves princes of the church it's just such nonsense isn't it i mean it's kind of hardly worth saying anyone has to and unfortunately it is such a cult of identity catholicism that people who are born into it feel they are especially somehow oh i was born a catholic you see i'm a lapsed catholic well you know they it's um there's this kind of hold that it has over people for decades after they've last been to confession they will still say some catholics about i still feel awful about and you think but what what is it hmm anyway thank you again for uh for joining us stephen this is a real pleasure and i want to congratulate you and thank you uh for asking me um but above all to encourage you this is great work you're doing and to all who are listening remember that uh politicians are not another class of person they are you and me deciding to go to that meeting and putting our hand up when someone says oh can we have someone to help with dot dot dot oh yeah i'll do that and then maybe in a few months time you'll be standing and making a speech and or maybe you'll still be in the background handing out flyers at meetings or whatever but politics is you it's not other people and and it's only as when we recognize that we are all politicians that will stop saying god don't you hate politicians because we'll be saying don't you hate yourself and that's ridiculous anyway sorry well thank you so much for joining us mr cry and it's steven that is a real pleasure [Music] thank you for listening to today's episode if you enjoyed this episode and would like to continue to support us you can do so by checking out our instagram pages at yip institute and at watch verbum you can also look at our website at www.yipinstitute.com make sure to follow our page as we upload have a good day

Channel: Verbum

Views: 16,783

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Id: YdrlO69bbgI

Length: 101min 55sec (6115 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021