The Holyoake Lecture 2017, with Douglas Murray | Towards a humanist politics

well thank you very much thank you Andrew thank you to humanists UK and thank you all of you for turning out I can't by the way tell you that joy that gives me to come to mantis that are not the attending a party physical conference one of the great pleasures of life I think is not going to party conferences but I managed to get out of it anyhow it's a great pleasure to be here thank you all for showing up I wanted to leave much time as possible for QA argument whatever you like after my opening remarks and also I just wanted to say what a great honor it is to be asked to give the Holyoke lecture not least because the Hollyoaks own and we just alluded to involvement in the blasphemy wars of of his age which some of us are slightly engaged in to much lesser extent in our own and yes it's a great pleasure to follow Owen Jones Owen and I have quite a lot of things in common but politics is not among them but I did read it with great interest is his remarks of last year I'm not going to but anyway I wanted to start whether before getting into the meat of it by making an apology is it well I'm a great admirer of humanist thought hunger in my humanist edition I'm a rather bad humanist nice I think if I am indeed one but the the problem I come to it is one which I think is the definitional one and it's one which mahalo Xandra cottons written about in his excellent book which is the definitional problem that humanism has as liberalism has those of you familiar with the work of John Gray for instance and his work two phases of liberalism will know this central conundrum within the liberal tradition is liberalism the beginnings of a method of living and indeed of organizing in politics or is it an ongoing campaign to a great extent I think that same debate can exist within the humanist tradition is humanism Cinthia a place to start from or does it go on from there are there as it were further further steps along the way if we could agree on anything the central tenets of humanism I'm sure we would that whether you take the first or the second of those two approaches if we agree that this is the only life we get and we agree that we have to use it wisely and well not mention carefully but from there on it would seem to me it's very unclear what a humanist politics could or would life look like now there are those on the Left who would like to make humanist politics campaign and coincidentally a campaign that fits in with their own political views and an existing narrative and I have some sympathy with that it's it's it's obvious that it can be achieved it can be done it can be for instance it has been in recent years by some people pursued as a pursuit of minority rights for instance which is a fine tradition of its own there are see very significant arguments against parts of that campaign but it could easily be seen within a certain humanist tradition I have to say that I become wary beyond that not least where you the using of humanism and a humanist tradition to for instance take part in identity politics it seems to me to be one of the most regressive regrettable movements of our age that it has become presumed that because of certain aspects of your character a whole set of political views would of course follow on from them it doesn't seem at all clear to me for instance that because of skin pigmentation you would have a particular type of politics it doesn't seem at all obvious to me that depending on your chromosomes you might vote for one presidential candidate or you might vote for another and equally it seems very unlikely to me that if somebody is gay or straight they would necessarily have a whole closet full of views political and otherwise that follow on from it I by the way particularly dislike the moving of intersectional ISM and identity politics into the mainstream in things like the film pride which came out a few years ago it suggested that if you're gay you should also make a fetish of the extraction of fossil fuels and a sentimental ization of their extraction as well but but this is this is a view now and identity politics has found I think a very interesting worrying but worth refuting a new form which started the universities are now moved outwards which is this thing of intersectionality which a lot of conservatives don't even pronounce but which is I think one of the most important movements art I'm the one which does need to have answers against it this is picking up of identity politics which moves on from mine are he writes and a belief that if we can basically nix the formula of who speaks where and in which order with which precedents depending on certain pre attributed characteristics you have find yourself in that order and find yourself in a political order which can make sense by by the way fine is particularly interesting because there is a form of politics and I'll come back to this later there is a form of politics which always finds a crusading instinct to be deeply attractive I have to say I don't and a lot of people are as small seeking surfers like myself a slightly suspicious of the crusading instinct that is the instinct that seeks to find a meaning in life from political activism it can of course be a noble endeavor but one of the things that are notices is that very often that there are people who remain on the barricades even after the battle has been won and this is a particular problem I'll argue minority rights for suits at the moment where among other things people who remain on the barricades the ones without homes to go to and they they continue to fight almost as though a situation has never been so bad when in fact on any ordinary view the situation has rarely looked so good it's a strange thing this but as I say it is a particular political preference to wish to continue crusading to continue fighting to always find the next struggle it's what the late political philosopher Ken Minogue identified as George in retirement syndrome ken described Assessors of what what happened was that it was as if after sin George slayed the dragon he then staggered around the land with his sword looking for more dragons to slay and eventually as the dragons were no large number started looking for smaller and more animals to slay and eventually is swinging his sword at Finnair there is a certain amount of sin George and retirement syndrome in the in the air at the moment my only preference by the way forum the humanists politics of such a thing could be said to exist would be a very very minimalist one it isn't one which seeks to find endless campaigns or endless meaning through political activism but would agree on a bare minimalist approach and if I were to hone that down to a single thing it would be this it would be simply to police the boundaries of secularism now the whole business of secularism today is obviously itself a complicated one the complex one just as it always has been and again we get on to a major difference in political outlook some on the political left believe that secularism must be pursued by effectively clearing all the bracken in the public space that remains religious some of us as I say all of the more conservative men whew that is a slight mistake except that we've inherited certain anomalies just like the monarchy or just like bishops in the House of Lords may not particularly think it would be the best thing if you were starting from scratch but recognize that we're not starting from scratch it isn't year 0 that is in Cambodia and that we have to find some kind of acceptance towards these things now I think by the way that there is a major major problem and I suppose it was never to get on to this world and try to do it as briefly as possible but it seems to me to be a major problem for sex tourists today and it it involves the one of the subjects I've spent a lot of my career writing about and speaking about and that is that that is the subject which if it hadn't arisen would have made issues like sexual ism vaguely more and uninteresting in a country like ours but it is of course a problem that comes from a religion which we've been very unused to here and which I deal with a bit in my recent book Islam has presented a challenge because we were fairly clear until recent years on what would be demanded of secularists we were fairly clear on where the banners would be and my own view is that we got slightly flabby in some of our arguments I hear this all the time by the way it's the the flabbiness continues it's the flabbiness that you see on show when for instance after 130 people are murdered in Paris in November 2015 one response is that's why we've got closed faith schools now I think there are all sorts of arguments for and against trade schools and I myself are not particularly in favor of the creation of more but it seems to me a very strange thing indeed to the respond or flawed slaughter 130 people by radical Islamists by punishing the Church of England others of course think otherwise but I think this is a very bad or grief for the years ahead there are very reasonable by the way reasons to to worry about this and the main worry of boundary policing on this one is the simple and I think understandable worry but you're not dealing with for instance bishops in the House of Lords are not dealing with people who ostensibly have great power but you're dealing with a minority and potentially beleaguered minority of that this does present a problem and I don't I don't denying it but nevertheless I think that it is in part a problem of perception the idea that the radical figures in the Islamic world present a merely a cringing minority it seems to me not to be the case they have significant state support across the Middle and Far East both Sunni and Shia sects find major backers both state backers and non-state backers a country like this one has had to put up with his like Saudi Arabia pumping their own versions of religion into our country and I think it's a misreading of the situation to think that for instance the House of Saud is a beleaguered minority group we shouldn't be rude - it does and it does come out in very strange ways I was watching on Sunday night for the documentary about Boris Johnson which I had accidentally a tiny role because of question the British press put mr. Johnson in Ankara last year I encouraged the general player to insult the Turkish president as vigorously and as violently as possible in the name of free speech after a German comedian was threatened with prosecution for making a joke about the president specifically the joke involved the claim that president air demands relationship with the animal kingdom was not entirely platonic I thought that the the joke was based not particularly worth defending good as always with these things you you never get to choose your fight and they never do end up banning the best model in the world or the funniest cartoon or killing the wisest person and so you have to make your stands where you can and on that occasion of course when I invited the general public around the world four thousand pound cash reward to insult the Turkish president in the form of a limerick making it by the way the highest paid poetry prize in the world and sadly no didn't get the entry from Carolyn Daphne I've been seeking mr. Johnson of course did did and albeit slightly involuntarily contribution Limerick which we promptly published The Spectator and announced to be the winning entry anyhow Boris Johnson of course sir and it was regarded as being something of diplomatic gaffe once he was made foreign secretary myself I think that it's the best possible thing that showing that no foreign potentate or in that case dictator nor a German judge especially not a German judge should be able to tell us what we find funny or what we can or cannot say however I mentioned this episode which they say the British press brought up when mrs. Johnston went to Ankara and met the naughty mr. Eyre de Rome I mentioned that the British press raised this matter again as if it had been Boris Johnson who had made some terrible gaffe and this goes partly back to this thing if if Boris Johnson had said something related to to a figure where there had been no claim as there inevitably was on this occasion that he was being insulted only because he was a Muslim and so on and I think it would be much easier but people are very worried about this area that they're worried they're worried that maybe an even president erawan is a sort of cringing minority figure rather than the finger will extraordinary power that he is with the ability to do enormous damage which he does in any case just - and I won't dwell on this but it seems to me that on the policing of the boundaries of fairly minimal policing the boundaries on this the news is not especially good I'm occasionally accused of being a pessimistic in this regard but I I offer you two two examples demonstrations of my pessimism on this regard the first relates to the arena bombing here in Manchester in a matter of months ago when Terry to young people lost their lives I think we could all be in agreement that if the if the bomber of that night had come from a millenarian Christian sect we would have no problem scouring the churches of the land to find the people who from the pulpit told him to do such an act as it happens still we're very very reluctant to carry out the same exercise within the particular minority of religion which that young man came from and again it's understandable in one way nobody certainly nobody should seek to demonize an entire community but when you look not very far away to a university like the University of Salford and you find that on that campus the vice-chancellor and everybody else in charge was among other things campaigning against the only counter extremism policy that this country has the preventive policy when you see the head of a student union got a position by campaigning against the only counter extremism policy we have a preventive policy you start to wonder whether or not societal antibodies are that strong when it comes to this particular religious problem I often once one other cause for gloom which is as I saw him my friend sam Harris in London last night and we're reflecting on this that even now after all these years of this has gone round and even after a year like we've had with four very significant terrorist attacks in this country alone it remains the case that I can count on one hand the number of prominent reformers in this country that have emerged and not only can I count them on one hand I don't need all the fingers on that hand this is a very very bad sign with one writer which is that I know that all those people and they say say a few in this country whew and others a few in America a few in France are all without exception the most beleaguered members of their community and this is a very very serious problem I think for the years ahead there's a I mentioned somebody over there was a young man who not far from here runs an organization called the Ramadan foundation it seems to consist of him and he claimed some years ago that he in fact he became some national attention because he spoke out in in opposition to the the grooming gang scandal that has slowly slowly ever doubt and suppressed in recent years and the Daily Mail and The Times and many other papers that wanted to have a hero understandably wanted to have a hero from that community I found this young man who was brave enough to speak out against the gang rape of children and I said to him that last time I met him that seemed to me the most worrying possible thing this was regarded as an act of bravery he claimed to have death threats on the back of that stand but as I pointed out to him if I condemned the crimes of Jimmy Savile and nobody perhaps me on the back and applause my bravery it's the bare minimum that's that's accepted that so that's normal so these are all it seems to me the beginnings of very worrying signs and a sign I think that societally we are very wearing about policing this boundary sector is at a time when we should be maybe slightly bolder now going beyond that and on to happier subjects the beyond beyond this minimalist approach I have to say I'm very suspicious of what humanist politics would be and for a reason which those of you who are conservatives in the audience might appreciate it's quite easy on almost any issue to take what is at the moment the what is regardless the progressive view in almost any discussion I could tell you the direction of travel that is easy having spent a certain amount of my life in you in television studios being around by politicians and often the general public I know exactly how it worked take University Entrance numbers who on earth but a monster would not call for ever more people to attend University who but a monster would not say that we need to spend more money on a whole range of things who but a monster wouldn't say that we need to pour endlessly more money into for instance the NHS or any number of other things that come up now this to my mind is like the open borders issue simply one of the directions of travel of our time rather they say at a small conservative small C conservative rather I worry about this part of the debate that we have arrived at a very very de based public debate in this country and it almost always goes along the lines either vocalize or implied that I am Churchill you are Hitler hear me roar I am you are a Nazi you are a fascist you are a racist I am therefore an anti-fascist it is 1940 and I am fighting the British in the Battle of Britain and you are constructing the death camps this I needn't say to you seems to me not to be a healthy debate but it is almost overwhelming on every airing of our politics and I wanted to mention one way by the way out of this which both left and right and goodness knows I think the terms are slightly overused and the division some sometimes over exaggerated but there is another way out of this and a better way to have these debates which seems to me who was captured a long time ago indeed by Aristotle who urges that there is in political debate a much better way to do this which is to recognize that not all debates are all debates whether they're about identity politics or about welfare or about economy are about good versus evil they are more usually a debate between two people arriving at the discussion of competing ideas of virtue and very very often two people with different virtues which they place at different levels in the in the pecking order let me give you an obvious example my recent book partly addresses the easiest argument to make in recent years on issues to do with Borden's is to say elect them calm and I've seen this as I say first-hand experience from traveling around to the places where people have come into Europe in recent years and speaking to many of the policy makers they find it exceptionally difficult not to say when put on camera let them come I think this is a mistake for a particular reason which is that I think with it it places the virtue of mercy above all others and I think the virtue of mercy by the way is an exceptionally important value to have but it cannot be the only one in our politics because after all there are other virtues that must exist in such a debate the virtue for instance of justice not just justice for people coming but justice for the people already here justice for people in the country this justice for people in Europe and this is this is the same on almost every single one of the the three things I just listed off whether University Entrance numbers national debt the NHS and so on the easiest thing in any situation and a zeitgeist at the time is to stress the virtue of mercy but there are so many other things that we forget in the process of course a conservative like me has a slightly different view of this and one thing in particular stands out to me and that is the famous pact that Edmund Burke described and which many of you will be familiar with I was recently at the discussion where they are some dare word name on the left when having privately a disagreement on something said to me well in the end it doesn't matter because we'll both be dead and it remains one of the most shocking things I hear ever and shocking not just because of its selfishness but because it runs over what I view as a virtuous Society Edmund Burke's pact of course famously was to describe society being not just an arrangement set up for our benefit here and now but a very important indeed almost sacred pact between the dead the living and those yet to be born and I mentioned that partly to come back to those issues I mentioned it may look like the most caring thing imaginable to for instance explain that more government money more that his tax payers money should be given to more and more virtuous causes but for those of us who believe in that Berkey impact of the virtue of it isn't absolutely obvious to my mind it doesn't seem moral indeed it seems positively a more that we should continue to run up debt that some body is going to have to pay down in the future I think it a very unwise thing to endlessly for your short-term personal benefit a rack up debt that your children or grandchildren buddy is going to have to see through now and this as I say in the short term and it's the one that all our politics engages in is still a very hard argument to make but it seems to me it needs to be made anyway just likely issues of openness generosity and tolerance and so on all of these things must have some kind of response on the other side tolerance must have limits generosity must have limit openness must have limits but it remains for the time being very difficult at least in the public square to argue for where those limits might be or where they should be now and a lecture of the four humanists UK it might be strange to mention this but on personal matters and indeed on matters of morality in the public square it seems to me that the greatest invention all to help us has been Augustine's insight into original sin I happen to think that original sin is one of the great inventions which if it hadn't been invented should have been anyway and that is because it seems to me to better describe the state that we find ourselves in than the idea of perfection or perfect ability which particularly as I say on the political left remains an aspiration if you don't like Augustine or don't like the reference to the Christian version of Genesis then there's another way to get to a similar position and that's in Plato's allegory of the chariot in phaedra some of you will be familiar with this this is this presents human existence as being in part a chariot driver riding two horses one the white horse of reason the other the dark horse of appetite this is a divine which it seems to me exists in our politics as much as through ourselves that that we have to find a way to wrestle with these two beasts the desire for reason and the knowledge of our appetites and the the easiest thing of all is to pretend that the dark horse doesn't exist or that we don't need to tame it or that we are already tamed beings and yet always always the suggestions seems to me to be going the other way the left in particular with the invention most recently of the intersectionality which if you hadn't have heard of before you can hear a lot more of in the years ahead as a brilliant a brilliant advantage in this regard because it suggests that human beings are solvable that if we just get the combination right we can get society right and we can make ourselves so I think this is a fundamental misapprehension of one the Conservatives are rightly suspicious of now as I was reading reading among others Andrew cops and on humanism before preparing for this talk I was very struck by one thing that a number of humanist writers have written about the search for truth as being a purpose in life and this seems to me to be a very very important thing to linger on from moment there is a problem with presenting search for truth as a purpose which is that for a lot of people it can sound like a such a highfalutin exercise that surely it would only be pursued by a small number of philosophers sitting in their famous ivory towers and a few well-known universities I've heard that myself there was I remember our late friend Christopher Hitchens often mentioned that the purpose of life as it were was to pursue criticism and inquiry and so on and I also heard often people saying well that's all very well for you if you have a regular column and books and his reputation in public places but the rest of us are doing our jobs our work returning to our families and partners trying to arrange dinner and that this seems somehow to be a let's say a distant objective I don't think it is and I wish absolutely photon is later but I wish it were and possible to as it were democratize more the sense of this notion of the search for truth and that it isn't an academic pursuit but a personal one available to everyone Andrew mentioned elsewhere by the way I quote the welfare of all human beings should be the end of our morality and I agree but I agree in the form of bracken clearing and we could agree that we can clear the bracken of false hopes and false consolations but all of the rest of our decision-making and all the rest of our political organizing starts from there what our morality should be how we achieve the welfare of all human beings what are we seeking for hal winces should we arrive at a foreign policy with such an arrangement the ongoing pain of trying to work out a foreign policy in our age can be summed up precisely by this not by nefarious aims and not by lies and not by wanton evil of the kind that some people seem to see but rather by different versions and different interpretations of how to achieve that thing of the welfare of all human beings it is merely the beginning of a starting point to seek for that after all some of us thought rightly or wrongly that the welfare of Iraqis was least served by the Saddam Hussein dictatorship others perfectly understandably thought that the welfare of all human beings necessarily relied on allowing a very evil dictator to remain in power in a strange almost dosey doe movement in recent years many of the people who disliked the attempt to topple the same regime ask why toppling of the Assad regime cannot now happen in order to prevent human suffering in Syria and others say that the only way in which human suffering can be alleviated now in Syria is to allow a brutal dictator to remain in power even after being responsible for death of hundreds of thousands of his citizens these are as I say very understandable differences of opinion to have and we could all agree that we are on different sides or can be on different sides in that debate whilst having that same objective for the welfare of all human beings at the end of our morality as our basic starting point and desire I mentioned two things by the way about this this issue of arriving at that state justice as it were warning signs sirens rather I have two caveats that that I might put out with there was am there was one humanist writer I was reading recently who said and so far as possible the concern of humanists should extend beyond the national or professional groups of which they happen to be members to mankind as a whole and this this I regret to say adding endless caveats is is one which I think is is very much open to contesting the last year's the deliver of last year's address of course would not but even whilst having an aspiration I put out to potential problems the first is that is the one that eminent sociologists such as Robert Putnam in America have written about in recent years the phenomenon of decreasing levels of trust the more the more that one attempts to as it were extend your own levels of human interaction beyond the borders of your own country beyond the borders of your own social realm to involve the entire world the more possible it is that those levels of trust within human communities that are so vital start to wear down partner of course as the left-wing thinker was surprised to discover this in his work as others have been it seems to me to be automatically obvious that that the further out to extend your sympathy the filler it might end up running and second I suppose is just to warn about the inevitable that the trans-border plan is nationalist progressive on this may just have a hint of what Dickens shows in Bleak House with the person of mrs. jela be I don't know how many of you know mrs. jela D but when we first need to employ house she is and she is collecting for a very impoverished African nation which she herself has never been to but she feels enormous and understandable sympathy with unfortunately when we first meet her she is working away in her basement flat to arrange donations for this far-off country and her youngest child has his head stuck in the railings of the house where he's been stuck all day gennadiy ISM is quite a common pursuit for these days it is as PJ O'Rourke said elsewhere the phenomenon of our times that everyone wants to solve the world and save the world but nobody will help them out and do the dishes anyhow with this with these warnings I just reiterate that it seems to me that one can have a deeply minimalist approach to this to not arrive at a campaigning end point but to agree that we have some basic points in common and from there everything will be disagreement political disagreement personal disagreement it seems to me that we may start off as humanists but beyond that we will simply see pluralism at work there will be people on the Left who will think many things and do many right things and many people on the right will disagree with the many people who have for both terms these days if there's one thing then can unite us it isn't a political mission and it certainly isn't a party mission it's a recognition that what we have is the only thing we have and that is one of my favorite poets Rilke writes in the do we know elegy he writes at one point in the ninth of those elegy simply because being here means so much and [Applause]

Channel: Humanists UK

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Keywords: BHA, Humanism, Secularism, Atheism, Agnosticism, Education, Talks, Lectures, BritishHumanistAssociation, Non-religious, Science, Philosophy

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Length: 37min 13sec (2233 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 08 2018