Latest / Thinking Class / #057 - Ed West & Paul Morland - Why Rediscovering Our Cultural Heritage Can Save The West

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#057 - Ed West & Paul Morland - Why Rediscovering Our Cultural Heritage Can Save The West · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Ed West and Paul Morland.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Ed is a British author, journalist, and blogger.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: He writes The Wrong Side of History on Substack and was previously the deputy editor of Unheard, Deputy Editor of The Catholic Herald, and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: He's the author of several books, including Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, The Diversity Illusion, 1066 and All That, and Tory Boy, Memoirs of the Last Conservative.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Paul Morland has been described as the UK's and one of the world's leading demographers.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Paul writes broadcasts and podcasts about how great population trends have shaped our past and are shaping our future.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: He has been an associate research fellow at Bertbeck, University of London, and a senior member of St Anthony's College, University of Oxford.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Paul is the author of four books, including Demographic Engineering, Population Strategies in Ethnic Conflict, The Human Tide, How Population Shapes the Modern World, Tomorrow's People, The Future of Humanity and Ten Numbers, and No One Left, Why the World Needs More Children.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Together, Ed and Paul are the hosts of the podcast The Canon Club.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Ed, Paul, and I think out loud about whether there are demographic reasons for Westerners to wish to hold on to the Western canon, why the canon is essential to understanding our cultural heritage, the impact of technology on artistic expression today, whether it's possible to produce enduring works of art in a distracted modern world, changing interests in art, music and literature, whether we can be culturally optimistic or culturally pessimistic, the role of elites in shaping culture, why the BBC in Britain is now very low brow, why great art should be accessible without being a boffin, and much, much more.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Ed's and Paul are excellent value.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: I really, really love speaking to them, and I enjoyed both of our one-on-one conversations in previous episodes.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: And this three way was even more fun.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: They're great fronts, you can see that they uh really do complement each other very nicely, keeping the ear out for some of our uh differing views.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we cover a lot of ground and offer a lot of personal reflections on well, the state of culture.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I implore you to check out their Canon Club series.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: You can expect to learn about Macbeth with Mima Parvini, Tolstoy's Anan Karenina, Caravaggio, and even some unheralded composers and architectural styles.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, as always, let's grow the show together.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like, subscribe, share, follow, and enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Ed West, Paul Morland, welcome to Think Team Class.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining me as a as a duet this time.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having us.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: Is it your first is it your first one?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: No, Ed's Ed is um Ed has also been on the show.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: He was on the show about 10 episodes before you, I think, Paul.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe nine.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but is it your first time with two guests?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, no, it's not.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's my second time.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I've had um a couple of uh well, a historian um on before with his development economist pal.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I spoke to Peter Heather and John Rapley about why empires fall.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: So they were bringing a different hypothesis as to why empires fall instead of just the Gibbonian barbarians into the Roman Empire, they were talking about debt cycles and all of those things.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone go and check that out.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's a plug from a previous episode.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: What we'll do.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've spoken to you both about your various fields of interest in the past.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: Paul as a demographer and Ed as a historian, and you two have joined forces to produce something called the Canon Club, an excellent podcast, which is giving people uh a real um a real uh introduction to various key figures within the Western canon and also those who have I would say quite unheralded and perhaps not considered to be a part of it.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, Paul, as a demographer, how did you end up deciding that it was important for people to understand why the Western canon is our birthright?
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't know that it really relates to my demography very directly.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I suppose they are my two main interests, uh, are our demography and generally culture, whatever that means.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: And and and um I suppose I do have a sense though, if there is a link between the two of them, of the tide going out of something we're losing uh in the West.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: Now, as I always say in demography, the problems of lay fertility rates, aging and declining populations are not a specifically Western thing.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: The West was the first into them.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: In many ways, they're worse in East Asia.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and in parts of Latin America, so this is a very much human problem, but the West was first into it and first out of the demographic transition in a way.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: And in the same sense, I feel there is some loss of uh Western civilization, whatever that means.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll probably come on to that in due course.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that has two aspects.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: One is what's being produced today, is it better or worse than in the past?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that I don't really feel qualified to opine on.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think a lot of novels that are coming out today are probably as good as things that were written in the 19th century.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, art is challenging and very different, but I don't feel very qualified to talk about that.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: But if I think about someone like Beethoven, clearly ahead of his time, clearly a bit mad and got on people's nerves.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, you know, he had a serious audience.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and earlier composers were definitely writing for their uh contemporaries, and you know, people like Bruckner and Maler and Shostakovich were hugely appreciated in their day, it's very difficult to think of composers today who are appreciated that widely, whether that's to do with uh the the nature of what they're writing or the nature of the audiences.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: But apart from that, so what's the quality of the output today, which I've got absolutely no ability to do anything about anyway?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I do think there's a loss of appreciation.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: And the example I always think of this, and funnily enough, I was listening to a podcast I did with Louise Perry.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I'm afraid, unlike Ed, I do like listening to my own podcast.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: If I don't like it, I do it because I think I learn about what I do well and what I don't do well, and therefore I improve.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: So um actually I was saying this on a podcast I did with Louise Perry, but it was recorded a long time ago and only came out last week.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I said it there, but I'll say it again.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: It very much struck me when I was a child.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: My parents had a shop, and they had a shop assistant called Celia, very charming, uh, very good with the customers, never wanted any kind of responsibility.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, she did what she did, and her husband was a shop worker similarly.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Both had left school, I doubt they even were there at the age of 14, both came from working-class London families, both were of the age that they went off to fight in the war.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: They both had very active wars in different ways, came home to real poverty.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but they were absolutely enraptured by art and culture, music.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember that for my birthday, I was very fond of this uh lady who helped in my parents' shop for decades.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: And she always bought me a birthday present, and she bought me amazing things.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: I remember one year the Cebades Violin Concerto, just to take a piece at random.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: Another year the Borodin Second Symphony, pieces I absolutely love.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: And look, they weren't super educated, they weren't really educated at all, and they weren't um they didn't have a deep or what we'd call in any way intellectual understanding of Western civilization, but they knew it was something that it was worth aspiring to.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: They aspired to it, and it gave them huge amounts of enjoyment and gratification in their lives.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: And then I compare that to when I started working, actually in my late 20s, I ended up working in a consultancy where almost everyone had been to Oxford or Cambridge.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: And they'd all come, not necessarily from superprivileged families, but they'd had years of education and they'd gone to the best universities, and they were really, really clever.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: But most of them wouldn't know.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if I said to them, oh, you know, it's quite interesting to compare Mozart and Haydn's Fringo-tets, for example.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: Or, I mean, never mind the difference between Shostakovich and Schirmbo.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they would not have had a clue, and they would have thought I was being a terrible snob, even talking in these terms.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: But really, what it boils down to is my sense that we have an amazing heritage and legacy, however, you define what Western civilization is.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: I don't mean to rubbish or disparage any other civilization.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to say it's better or worse, although it is interesting that the appeal that classical music has in Asia, for example.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: I did go to a concert when I was in Singapore and the performers and the, you know, that's it, it seems to be truly transnational, and maybe that means it's better or but whatever, whether it's superior, inferior, or equal to other civilizations.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: I feel we are we live in a time of mass education, people spend years and years learning, and they're not really appreciating and imbibing this stuff.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: And this stuff, I suppose, after my family relations, after my marriage and my children.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: So again, a link to demography maybe, is the thing that's most important to me in uh in the world.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll just close with one anecdote.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna say who it is, but I knew a very, very senior, well-known clergy person, let's put it that way, who said to me, um, I was listening to the Schubert Quintet the other day, and I have to admit, it moved me more than any prayer ever has, although I'm not supposed to say that.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's just something that's incredibly life-enhancing.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: And if I can encourage others to have their lives enhanced by it, so much the better.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, that you mentioned at the end how that the musical experience you had was uh transcendent transcendental in a way that um uh prayers haven't moved you toward is interesting because I think those who do attend church, they sometimes can't get on board with the sermon.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: It can either be too theological or a little bit too bland.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: But when it comes to the hymns, if it's uh a really, really good hymn, it's rousing, people understand the message, they get it through the feeling.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's something about music that can bring a message home that word uh on its own, perhaps can't.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And why do you think that the appreciation of the canon has diminished uh in recent generations?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I suppose I'm like Paul, I'm uh I think he described himself as a techno optimist but conf pessimist.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm of the same brand.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think we'll probably all end up living to 300 but spend our time watching TikTok reels and all.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um I don't know, I have to admit, I have a I have a sort of ingrained uh tendency towards pessimism about um about at least on these cultural issues.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I've also found that there is a kind of there is also a particular British aversion to uh high culture and intellectualism, which I think has also always been there and is in some ways quite protective, um in that we sort of tend to not take continental ideas too seriously.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean this for me this started um well I originally wrote a a sort of article about it about why aren't there sort of um sort of canon class, you know, why aren't there kind of salons where people talk about these things?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and we end up hosting with a with a friend, three of them, um, before this.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: My basic uh fear was kind of personal one, is that I felt like I wasn't educated enough.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that was my entirely my own fault, especially classical music.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not so into it, and it's but it's I find as an outsider it's very hard to to sort of get to grips with it.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like a language to start off once once you have that background, it's different.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I also felt there was I I sort of fear that we aren't passing on these traditions, that our children aren't gonna know about them, and that all these um they're they're sort of gonna end up like dusty books and libraries, which you know are still there and no one's stopping them and no one's burning them, but we're just no one's taking an interest anymore.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, there is there is obviously an argument that technology just offers so many different opportunities to people.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's just so much easier to watch television than to read, for example, and that's been a complaint for some time.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I I do think the general culture in Britain has become quite moronic.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if I mean my main gripe with BBC, for example, is that if you just turn on any television BBC and I just don't watch it for this reason or anything, it's so incredibly lowbrow.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: And even documentaries that try to look at culture or history, for example, just take it as assume that everyone watching it is a complete moron and it has to be at the very, very lowest level.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I you know, my hope is that there can be within this kind of mix a sort of you know, an enlightened media which tries to assume that everyone has an actual interest in in high culture and would like to learn more.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we're in our own small little way doing that to sort of create that is my my hope anyway.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, whether whether actually whether people are actually interested, maybe people just want to watch TikTok reels about baby grunk for the rest of their lives, I don't know.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh your your your point about BBC being incredibly lowbrow.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's true to say that it wasn't always the case.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And uh back in the 70s, and I know you you chaps sort of what watched this, I'm sure.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: In fact I had I'm sure I've seen you write about it, but Kenneth Clark's Civilization series the richest news ever.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's it's it's quite unbelievable.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I think he opens with what is civilization, and he tries to ask the question and uh and and answer it indeed, answer the question.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: And what's really sad about the BBC now is that they on iPlayer you can't even go and find things like civilization, they've removed them, and you've got to go on YouTube.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna refract that into a demographic question, actually, Paul, because as as you write about, and as you well know, the the West has gone through a demographic transition.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's um some could point towards inevitable collapse, however, it is that you want to look look toward it.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: And we live in a cultural and political landscape which sees new terminology thrown up, usually uh with a progressive bank, which is in some way to diminish the West and Western peoples, and you'll hear terms like global majority to try and point towards the legitimacy of non-Western peoples who have settled in the West.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think there is, and I don't know if you're alluding to it earlier on, do you think that in this world of growing diasporas, and I can see a rising sense of Anglo identity, particularly in our Zuma generation, is is this a way um in which to hold on to something of substance for that, this culture and its admirers, should that demographic collapse come to pass?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, well, that's a huge, a huge question.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: I think when we were planning this, one of the strap lines I wanted to use somehow, and I don't think we have, is um, when it comes to the culture wars, we need more culture and less war.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I don't think we don't need war.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's Ed who said um when you're in accused of engaging in the culture wars, it normally means you're just not waving the right white flag, right?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I do agree though that I do think we need culture wars when um certain ideas are being uh suggested and then imposed, it's perfectly legitimate to push back on them.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: Ideas that have been um historically completely contrary to what people believe.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: Now, that doesn't mean they're wrong, and it's perfectly legitimate to disgust them, but neither does it mean, because an idea is is new and would have shocked and horrified previous generations, that it's right and that it's an outrage.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I think in this venture, there's something about culture wars and at least putting a bit of culture into the culture war and and um not just war.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that sort of comes to remembering what it is that if we believe in a Western civilization, it's not it's three things I always think.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Essentially, it's first of all the amazing scientific and technological advances we've made, which I mean the techno-optimism which Ed was talking about, which I do hold to, which has allowed us to lead these comfortable lives.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: Here we are on Zoom, sitting in December in warm rooms in England and Scotland, uh, with full stomachs.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, a whole range of things which uh go back eight or nine generations, um, and many people three or four generations, that would not have been the case.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: So the technological brilliance of science, which allows us to understand the world and to control it and to live much better life.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: The second thing is the political settlement, imperfect though it is, that allows us to sit here broadly for now and have conversations about all sorts of things and have some contribution to the political uh situation in the country, somehow have a sense of being in a legitimate political order.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: And then the third thing is Western civilization and the canon and the classics and the absolute genius, transcendental, I think was the word you used, and that is a word I think that absolutely uh hits the nail on the head.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in many ways, in fact, it kind of became the religion of Europe as religion waned in the late 19th century among intellectuals, anyway, art for art's sake and so on.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think that contribution is extraordinary.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I don't know about, I haven't really thought about it as in terms of a sort of demographically declining group of people holding on to something as they as they diminish.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think that in the wokeness, there is a degree of um hostility to um classical civilization, uh to Western civilization.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: So that I remember I went to uh I think it was a singer sergeant exhibition and and I uh last year, and I also went to the Wrights Museum, and I think in both occasions I ended up taking a photo of the of the clip, uh the sort of explanatory clip, and sending it to Ed.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: It was just, you know, it was politically correct, blah blah, you know, unless it was talking about slavery or something, it just wasn't worth it.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: I I almost can't bear to go into the British Museum um and you just because I can't bear to read the explanatory uh plaques, everything has to be refracted through uh some kind of post-colonial lens.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: And again, I've got no problem with that as a literature and a way of thought, but it seems to have become the case that if it's not universal, if that is not the lens through which you are seeing him interpreting something, um, then uh there there is really no other lens through which you should be seeing it.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I think it was the um head of the South Bank Centre, uh, there was some major cultural figure or sort of manager who who said, ooh, classical music's not cool.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: And you see that in the decline of orchestral music, certainly.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Wig Warhol, for example, is is still wonderful.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: But you get less and less classical orchestral music outside the promise in London.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: So I think there is, I mean, maybe it's not really answering your question, but along with the culture wars, I think there is an extent to which there is a war on uh Western culture, however defined.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: And it and if Western culture is to be appreciated, it can only be appreciated through the lens of a post-colonial narrative.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: Now, again, let's look at it through a post-colonial lens five, but can that be one of many lenses to look through it rather than the only one that is legitimate?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: And it that it it seems particularly at exhibitions, that's the case.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the choice of music on radio three, for example, it seems that if you don't have a composer from a minority background or a woman every so often, someone at Radio 3 has has said you have to do that.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: Now, again, there may be wonderful um composers from from many different backgrounds we haven't appreciated, and there may be many great women composers.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't mind, I think that's wonderful to expose us to some new new folks.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but on the whole, I'm afraid the dead white man still has the quality when it comes to music.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I, you know, it feels like substandard music's being imposed, and that music's being imposed, not hugely, but to an extent on, say, Radio 3, because of the identity of the composer rather than the quality of the music.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I could name you, I'm not going to compose as I hear of Radio 3, where I say if that weren't an X or a Y by some kind of category or class, uh, that music would not be on the radio.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I think one could be say that fairly objectively.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Into um this well, being culturally pessimistic, techno-optimistic.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that cultural pessimism, I think, ties into uh, I wouldn't necessarily say just a general feeling, but something that I know one of your uh guests who came on to speak about, Macbeth on the Canon Club, Nima Parvini, he's a Shakespeare scholar, he's also written lots about uh cycles of history.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he wrote a book called The Prophets of Doom, where he he brought out 11 um historians and other various cultural commentators and literatures from history that put their own um theories forward as to why the West was facing into civilizational decline and bringing out lots of examples of of how that has happened to every civilization in the past.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if we are moving uh through this uh declining period, this it's coming up to the end of whatever was Western civilization and we're going into something new.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: People often say that as you go into something new, it is ceded from the old.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: If that's the case, what's worth saving from the past?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I mean so much.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I I mean I'm not a I'm not a total doommonger.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think Western civilization is is falling in any kind of immediate sense.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we have reached a sort of level of takeoff where it would take an immense destruction to actually ruin it.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: I uh but I I uh I can there are certain you know metrices and indices that do suggest that there is a you know a sort of exhaustion, which is what Kenneth Clark um talked about, and also a sort of level of I suppose cultural cringe or unwillingness to uh to kind of continue the uh civilization in many ways.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean we uh you know Paul was talking about we're just about the sort of West how Western Western civilization is is kind of unusual in that it aspires to be uh global and it succeeds in being global just as Western medicine aims to be.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it really is something that is um open to everyone.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And even if the civilization does start to decline, there you know the the Western tradition is something that others will probably adopt.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, even if the West fell tomorrow, Beethoven would still be loved around the world, and Mozart would still be loved around the world.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um and those things would continue.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think one thing we haven't mentioned so far is um, or we're kind of alluded to, is the religious aspect of it, which is you know, there is a feeling that you know, Western civilization is so linked to the Christian tradition in particular, that when the knowledge and understanding of that tradition starts to decline and becomes irrelevant to people, then the kind of under the sort of fundamental civilization behind it will also start to collapse too.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of the things that made me think about this is when I heard someone explain how in their office, again, as Paul says, these were kind of like you know, highly educated, high-power people, or someone visitor from Africa had started meant talking about the um the prodigal son, and everyone just looked at him, said, and literally didn't understand what that meant.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think once that kind of religious literacy starts to fall, then a lot of the things around it start to collapse as well, especially with classical music.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's so hard to uh really understand the history of classical music without the religious influence.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now I know that starts to decline over time, um, but it really is the sort of foundation, similarly with art.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's um you know, we we we had you know, we discussed Caravaggio, and it's just it's impossible to understand Caravaggio without the you know the importance of religion.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that is the is a kind of fundamental aspect of it.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I suppose in a kind of post-religious age, certain aspects of the of the civilization will remain, but they will just they will evolve into something different.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I I almost wonder if you know Western society now is so different to what it was 70 years ago in its moral values.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's arguably almost more different than that era was to the medieval period.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: But those were recognizably the same civilization, and now we're into something sort of different.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: And once civilization has changed, so many of the things from the past civilization will just be forgotten.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they won't literally be lost, like you know, probably 99% of the writing in antiquity was literally lost because there just wasn't technology to keep it, it was just fell to pieces.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um a lot of the aspects of the old civilization will still be there, there'll still be an archive somewhere, and they'll still be on the internet, but just no one will read them.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean no one will listen to them in many cases.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not the same kind of collapse, but it's similar.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Have either of you ever read Alistair McIntyre's philosophical work after virtue?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: You ever come across that before?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: I've read it twice, and I remember it as rather different books.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: I probably read it about 20 and about 40, like but uh it it uh it's much cited, but more cited, I think, than probably read or understood.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the the introduction to that book is uh encapsulates what we've just spoken about quite nicely, which was he um postulates some kind of thought experiment, which is imagine that uh there um are these uh citizens who uh come upon um an archival repository that had shreds of the um in this case it's about scientific experiments, it's scientific understanding.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they're trying to figure out how to build this thing back up.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: I can't quite remember what it was, and he uses it as a metaphor to say this is our inheritance from the past, and he mentioned it and I read his lots of writing was must he talks about how Aristotle, what we've come to know of as being one of the greatest philosophers allowed for, is that was a fraction of what we know he wrote.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: He it was all in Alexandria before it was uh destroyed, and so there are all these little fragments that we pick up on, and we we've based our civilization upon those, and and now I suppose what we're talking about is an even bigger break from whatever those fragments were, uh, and and in some cases these long traditions, the Christian tradition.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: And we've we've gone, as you say, uh in these last 70 years, you've written a very good post about this, actually, as if someone was to have been put in a uh you know cryogenic chamber before that that point 70 years ago and then woken up today and saw the streetscape and all the various new um uh cultural references, like the various flags that are being waved here and there, um, and the things that people said and believed, they would think they've woken up on a on another planet.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: And and I suppose the question that I I uh downstream from those, you've talked about Caravaggio and that Catholic worldview, which endured for so long, and of course was picked up in the Protestant era as well.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: It produced great art and great buildings, there's great inventions in that, you know, in in these eras where there've been lots of self-restraint and self-governance, uh in the Victorian era, people like to look back on it as being prudish and and snobbish, but um, it also produced all the railways, the London underground, the great town halls, great buildings that we all look back on and go, that was wonderful.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: And yet in today's era where we have you know desire maximization, we've got rid of all these shards of uh civilization that we once had.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, can we uh can we actually imagine producing anything else worthy of the canon when our our museums are full of unmade beds, uh these art galleries, and we've got um glass and steel box buildings instead.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is uh is there anything that we can imagine uh being produced of such uh enduring stature like the works that we've spoken about so far?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Is this to me or well an open question?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think it's so I mean some areas of art continue to improve, I think, and continue to um produce great works.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean music, the kid the music my kids listen to is some of it's great.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, um I know Paul and I have different views on which type of music it is best, but um there is there is still an immense amount of talent out there, and we also we just have huge agglomeration advantages as well in in certain areas because the internet allows people to collaborate in so much other ways, you know, like podcasts, for example, that's the that is an art form of the 21st century, and it continues to get better.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: Television, you know, in the first decade of the 21st century, it was absolutely at its peak.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it's got a bit worse now, but I mean television drama making, for example.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when there aren't, I think when there aren't constraints um on things, then things do tend to get better.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: But if you compare that with documentary making, so obviously documentary making in the 70s was just obviously so much better in Britain.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just Kenneth Lart, but you know, Robert Hughes, uh, the World of War, the Ascent of Man.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: These are all very highbrow things that just couldn't be made.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that is obviously shows that where there is a cultural cringe at work, um, that does have an impact on artistic outputs.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Architecture, uh, and to a certain extent modern art have perverse incentives that encourage bad things to be made, and the mechanisms aren't really there to reverse that.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in the past, you might have had uh you might have had wealthy patrons to to fund good things.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't know if there's enough you know, I don't know if billionaires still do that to a certain extent in in terms of art.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, doesn't seem to be the same things, and often elites tend to have pretty bad taste in all of stuff.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: But that you know, there are areas uh which tend to be, I suppose, more free market where where things do continue to get better.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it is possible.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean the downside, the sort of the pessimistic view of the documentary decline is just that there aren't enough people interested in it, which is what would worry me more.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe just people have lost interest in actually knowing stuff.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's quite important for our podcast that we don't come over, and I think Ed Ed is not coming over as a fogey in any way.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what we're saying.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, I'm very down with the kids.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's very important that what we're saying is this is a wonderful legacy, we're all better off enjoying it, appreciating it.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't mean that we're trashing other civilizations, and it doesn't mean that we're trashing what's happening today.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: So um, to say that the past is is rich and worth understanding is not to say that it's better or worse than other pasts or than the present.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I agree with Ed, I think you have to be fairly um selective in what's got some things have got better, some things have got worse.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I agree that that the early 21st century television was definitely better.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: Some of the Netflix type series that I watched.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a don't spend a lot of time watching it, but I have got through a few of those classics, and I think they are absolutely fantastic and far better than what we were watching on our black and white sets.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I was watching on my black and white set in the 70s, I don't think Ed was.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, when we had, I remember the day that Channel 4 started, you we had three channels, and now I can instead of listening to sometimes I do listen to Radio 4 and my breakfast and still like, oh, I'll finish off that podcast I started listening to uh the other day.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: So that's how technology, uh which is actually more interesting if the news is not interesting that day.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: So the technology is amazing and it can help spread um and and give access to uh better uh forms of of culture.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the other thing is I think it's really difficult to judge the culture of your day.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, everybody knows that going back to the days of the Romans and perhaps the Greeks, each generation saw decline, and it's very easy to get into that mindset.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: And the great thing about the camera is um that over time, um however the process works, there is a process which um sibs out the gold, actually.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: And whenever um, you know, I've been listening to classical music seriously now since I was about seven, and I'm 60.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I've listened to an awful lot.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that's not to say there aren't amazing pieces and even amazing composers that I come across from time to time.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: But as I get older, less and less, and I think that's not because my chase is getting more conservative, I think there just is only so much really, really good stuff.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if you haven't heard of it, it's probably because it's not, or if I haven't heard of it, it's probably because that's it's not that amazing.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and actually, the um there's a sifting process that goes on, and that in a way is what the canon is.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's that strange sifting process which changes over time and different people contribute to, but ultimately um what comes cut what comes out the other end is the goal.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: The trouble is that when you're living in the present and the water hasn't sifted through that, see if that's a good analogy.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's difficult to say what the canon of today will be.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, I saw Ed the other day and someone asked him, How many books have you written?
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, Well, too, and whatever.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: And and then I thought I was I should have said to him then, um, you you know, the that the Ed West canon has not yet been canonized.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: We don't know what will come through as the great Ed West works.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_02: There's quite a lot out there, some may be not.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the trouble with so I first of all, just to reiterate, I don't want to be fake, you should say, Oh, it's all getting to hell on a hand cut, something's getting better, something's getting worse.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: But secondly, in the present, really difficult for any individual to know.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the test of time when it comes to art, music, and literature is a great test.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: And when things turn up that got forgotten, which they do, it's it's a fallible process.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: And uh thank goodness the god, you the odd bit of gold gets found sort of discarded.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: But on the whole, uh you need to go through the process to know what's really worth what.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: Dear classmate, John here.
• 36:50
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• 36:53
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• 37:02
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• 37:05
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• 37:17
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• 37:20
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• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: As we were talking there and it got me thinking about how the way we live now perhaps won't be conducive to producing these really deep, enduring works of art.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: And this was brought to mind when last month my fiance and I went to Wordsworth's house in Grassbere, and uh there was a wonderful VT before we went into his house, which um had voiceovers of various um parts of his poetry, and it was explaining he his and his sister's motivations for moving back to their native lake district.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I think he in particular had been taken with the ideas of the French Revolution, gone over there, and then realized oh, this abstract ideal hasn't quite worked out in practice, and I've gotten dispirited and he and he returned home.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: And there was this there was this poetry that his his sister wrote, which elucidates the point I'm trying to make, which is she wrote a line zone, we have a boat upon the lake in a small orchard and a smaller garden, which is which, as it is the work of our own hands, we regard with pride and partiality.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I noticed as as there were little um excerpts of commentary about how they lived around the house, they were all being turned into these modern self-help phrases.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: For example, you know, the reason why they were so uh prolific was plain living and high thinking.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: And we can relate to that only in by way of an of an abstraction.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: But if we look at it, these were people who they they were part of that republic of letters, they were friends with all of these other elites.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the elites of that time were very well read, both of each other's works of of of high literature and poetry, they knew the music, they all were steeped in, as you've already talked about, Ed, that worldview.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, if you compare it to the way we live today, I mean, even myself, I mean, when I'm doing my day job, I'm just bouncing around an outlook calendar, I'm jumping on various email apps, it's the messaging apps.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: I have to purposefully carve out some time in the day in which my attention is is not um is not disturbed in any way so that I can think about how to make the connections between things, what I might speak to people about and and pay attention to that book.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: But uh the most people that that that live today, just as we talked about, they'll go to Netflix.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's easier to watch a TV programme.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: And we have such a a life busy of distraction that I I can't see how, even with a unifying worldview, how that can lead to that depth.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed, when I speak to friends, I know Paul, you said you can get novels today that can be as good as back in the 19th century, but there are there are people who say there's something missing, it doesn't quite capture what it means to be human, and indeed we spend most of our time in these disembodied forms anyway.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think there's anything to that, Ed?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: You mean about the the lack of time or the distractions?
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yeah, a combination of the two.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do you find it impacts even yourself and what what it is you seem to produce?
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I suppose uh amongst I suppose amongst the sort of upper middle class go-getting types, especially in the US, but also to an extent in Western Europe, um, there is a a time poverty thing.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I I mean, if you look at the data, most people actually work less now than they did sort of 50 years ago.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not sure that that's really a reason for a lot of it.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: I I think the distractions are much more there are just you know, there are easier options than sitting around reading a book or composing poetry.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I'm I remember when lockdown started, uh and we were all stuck in the house together, and I said to my kids, okay, we're all gonna write short stories um like Boccaccio after the plague, and you know, this is what and this will be our little thing, and I'm going to go through a session, I'm gonna teach you English history every two days, and all these things just fell away within two days.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: They're just really hard, and I was just busy with my what with work.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: They uh they had some homework to do, but everyone just got distracted, and everyone had a million things to do.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: I do think uh in as a general trend, society's probably just become a bit more dispersed in that more people are uh doing a variety of things in their lives.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: So there are there are people sort of focusing non-stop on the arts of classics, but they're just a sort of very small niche subculture.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um and there are lots more people who just spend all their time watching television.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's just a you know, liberal society means that most more people tend to uh have choice in what they want to do in their lives.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: And uh studying, you know, poetry, for example, is very much in decline.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if we can want to talk about, you know, some things have got better, some things got worse.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: There is there is a small sort of subculture of people into it, but it just it's just gonna remain a small thing on the long tail of society.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think to a certain extent with novel writing, that probably is also in decline as well.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, the the uh the the growing arts are are the popular arts, you know, and it has been television recently.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, I know Paul might think this is the very lowest brow, but you know, like gaming and stuff, game design is where I mean, that's where the incentives are, that's where the kind of developments are happening.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: And even stuff with you know, like film scores and gaming music is is like a huge growth there, and some of it is actually very good.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, whether that's as kind of meaningful as poetry in the long term, I mean, would I uh I just think generally society is just much more dispersed, everyone's got their own niche interests.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: Some people working really long hours, some people working no hours.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's just much more variety in our lives than it's interesting.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: There is actually a poem by Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much With Us.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_02: We've just made exactly the same point that we getting and spending, you know, we spend our time running around.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it may be a question of perspective.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think the other thing I was going to say is, of course, in his day, the vast majority of people were uh across the world, and even in England, um, although decreasingly they were agricultural laborers, uh, literacy was very low.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_02: So not everybody was um Dorothy.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: And William Wordsworth in the late uh 18th century.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: So we do have to accept that um certain things, certain art forms, certain um parts of the culture are more going to be more accessible.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: It just gets back to the point I made about the shop worker I was mentioning, that it should be much wider than it is, it doesn't need to be tiny.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the last thing I was going to say on that subject is that that um there is a problem today with um people short attention spans.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: I do think that's an issue.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: And what it's giving rise to is these bite-sized, TikTok size pieces of output.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_02: Now, they may be very good, and an individual song may be very good.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: But if you think about a symphony, um a Bruckner symphony, Bruckner's one of the composers that we uh that we talked about, and and Bruckner and and Marla, who's a later generation, but he knew Bruckner and was influenced by him, they wrote symphonies that when I was buying records back when I was uh in my late teens, um, were two uh long players.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_02: So they went on for about an hour and a half.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: And um whilst a song is a wonderful thing, I think rather like the ability to build a cathedral versus a hut or a little house, it's a sign of a great civilization when things can be done on scale.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_02: To write a symphony is not just one damn tune after another.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_02: It has a structure, it has a form, it has development, it has recapitulation.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I won't bore you with the theory of sonata form, but it's like a great piece of architecture.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_02: It couldn't hang together without a certain level of precedent and design and thought.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: And the same can be said for the novel, but these are great structures that are great, that their size and their scope, that doesn't mean a song isn't wonderful or a string quartet, which may also be quite long, but for much smaller resources.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: But the the idea that you could put together a symphony with all those people and all that time, all those instruments, the space that's required, the number of people needed to appreciate it and come and listen to the concert, and the the interior design, the structure.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if we are not able to um appreciate those things anymore, then that does seem to me like genuine civilizational decline, which is maybe analogous to um people in the sixth century not being able to build on the scale what the Romans could build and old Roman buildings falling apart.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I think that is one thing that does worry me uh with all the technology, wonderful though it is, uh, the shortening of attention spans and the sense that maybe our civilizational output now is is bite, little bite chunks, and we can't sustain, we don't have the attention to sustain the grand structures.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_02: And that does seem to be to me to be a measurable um indication of of possibly a decline of the civilization.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: I do think the attention span issue is is definitely real.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I I think I've got worse over the years, uh, and iPhones probably do play a part.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can what I mean, television, I said television's got better, but also it's become much quicker.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I I tried making my daughter watch the original Sherlock Holmes, not the original one, the 1980s Sherlock Holmes.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because they watched Sherlock, and you know, each scene, the opening scene was about five minutes, and she said, I can't believe, I can't believe how long this is my Zoomer brain can't handle this.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I do think where there are incentives and when there are financial incentives, people will engage in complex things.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, even people do still read uh like genre fiction, which can be incredibly complex.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the television, the great television shows of the noughties were also compared to sort of uh novels in a sense that they were much more they're much more complicated than films, uh, and they can go on and they and the structurally they they are hugely complex.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in a way films aren't.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think is I don't know what to do about the attention span thing, because that technology is there with us and there's just no way of getting rid of it.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and whether we will I don't know, whether we'll have some sort of a Zenpic, you know, for attention span or widespread thing, I suppose that's kind of already happened with ADHD uh medication.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: U But I do think if there was a m you know, if there was a market for these classical compositions, and if there was money to be made from them, if someone was prepared to give loads of money to to be to people to compose them, then I think they would they could still be possible in the way that's uh you know complex television is is is obviously money making.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, when you were talking about uh um great pieces of music hanging together, you can't just look at one note in isolation or a couple of notes in isolation and and get the measure of the whole thing, is but there's this there's a there's a motivation and the worldview and all these other things imbued within the design, and that's what gives it the sense of whatever it is that you you're listening to.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: There was uh a section within the conversation you were having with Nima Parvini, the pair of you, on um Macbeth.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: And Nima was mentioning how there was uh so many cultural references and literary references being made quite implicitly within there, but specifically for uh the monarch for whom he was he'd been commissioned to write it for.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: And um, that's a great example of a work of art, which we now look at it back as this a key part of the canon, indeed, most of what Shakespeare wrote.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we go, God, look at that.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: How did you know how did he come up with that?
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: And to to know that it was, as you both mentioned, commissioned by the elite of the time, and he was just so um stewed in all of this literary thought and this worldview, and um Ed tangentially linking it to your point about attention span.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um it makes me wonder um what anything that we might deem great, not in comparison to the past, but great from our age, um, might speak to.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because we talked about how it hangs together because of you know the religious aspect or the cultural aspect of the time.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, in a recent post, you you wrote Ed, you are on the Macbeth.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it made me wonder whether we'll keep the vernacular that we've become so used to in the English language.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: So Macbeth gave the English language one fell swoop, the milk of human kindness.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is this the a dagger which I see before me?
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: And now the cultural miliac, elites and non-elites alike alike, are all on the internet, and we speak in memes, and there's wording and uh phraseology that we all share in the Anglosphere, indeed beyond that.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um so uh it'll be interesting for historians of the future to look back and go, what was the thing that's making it all hang together?
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I dare say they might find slightly less highbrow things sitting behind it, the you know, frog memes and what have you.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it will seem very ephemeral, a lot of it.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I suppose, yeah, the kind of cultural churn will be um will be so so quick that um we won't actually know.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, everything is just sort of niche-based and sort of you know within sort of small sort of social circles and minorities now.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure there is an overhanging culture in the same eight.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, on the Macbeth thing, it's worth pointing out that I think the Macbeth we now know is a kind of cut-down version, isn't it?
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was formed for the king, most likely.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: And um he wanted it short.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean that kind of so we we're not the only ones with bad attention span design, but even the great and the goods are the I think a great work of art should not require you to get all the references, and then as you get into it, if you just decide to spend the time examining it, examining it, um, the layers will peel away and you'll understand more.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_02: But if it's good, you shouldn't need.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: I feel it's true of a poem, it's true of a piece of music, uh, an art.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if you look at a piece of Caravaggio, for example, and you don't know the biblical story, I think it still hits you with a wow factor because it's really great art.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then you can choose to delve into it and understand it better.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that's something that we're doing, I hope.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but um it shouldn't be essential.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_02: You should be able to appreciate the piece of work for itself and not just um in reference to to other things, interesting though those may be.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's also something else which is at work, and it kind of goes back to what I was saying about um the world of people who grew up in the 1940s or grew up in the 1970s, or the different generations.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um the 1940s was a very egalitarian era, but um materially, um, uh particularly with planning and the war and and and so on.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_02: But culturally, there was a sense of hierarchy, great things to aspire to that could be opened up to everyone.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, that was very much the philosophy of the Soviet Union once it's gone through its proletarian culture and various other phases, and it had its various crazinesses with inventing something called formalism and then persecuting people who were supposed to be formalists.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: But but essentially, by the end in the last decades, it did say the great works of civilization are should be the property of everybody.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_02: And what I feel we live in now is an era of extreme material inequality and a sort of faux cultural inequality, where the amit, maybe this is a bit conspiratorial, but maybe the elites as a way of holding on to their um totally disproportionate and huge wealth, um, do sort of dumb themselves down and and uh and and and decline.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_02: I remember when um John not John uh it was it was Gordon Brown went on um on uh was it when he went on um Desert Island Disc?
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he's just talking about the Arctic monkeys, whoever they are or were.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um and you know whether he really liked them or it was all a pose, um, whereas Enoch Powell, remember Enoch Powell going on uh Desert Island discs, and he chose one Beethoven and however all the rest was all Wagner, and he he spoke sort of with great enthusiasm about where we were in the ring cycle.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so and I think there's almost a sense, um, and as I said, maybe this is a bit conspiratorial, that in an era of extreme material inequality, the elites, I our bounces off our friend Matt Goodwin and see if he likes it.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because you know the question of the elites is definitely something he's interested in, that the elites pose as um culturally egalitarian.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's I mean, I think those two things are definitely linked, and I've I've long thought it.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, that is probably the the sort of broadly socialist case for encouraging culture, is it's a sort of it kind of acts as a kind of secret password into higher echelon society.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and this is what it does annoy me when there is a kind of uh a kind of cultural cringe about oh, you know, we must have got to dumb things down because kids from working class backgrounds won't understand art or culture.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if if they are able to even, you know, if you're from a poor background and you will get a basic grasp of some of these cultural things, it's such a door opener to life.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because lots of people who've who would have gone to good schools will still know a fair bit about it.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: Not as much as they might have, but I mean, I remember this years ago, was speaking to one of my wife's friends who'd gone to Edinburgh University, it was quite posh, and he meant made it a reference to Piers Gavison as if to me, as if and he didn't know me, as if like anyone would know who he is.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: So there's not one in a hundred people in many schools who would know who that is.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact that you have that kind of common historical reference is such a source of secret door pass to to elite status.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: Do they not cover him in Pride Week?
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think?
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm I'm sure maybe well a lot.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, those those, you know, there is the argument that elites do kind of keep you know traditional classical culture to themselves as sort of as their own little thing while pretending to sort of be down with the public.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, all politicians do that, don't they?
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: They sort of pretend to done down.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, it's very tiny.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, Theodore De Rympel said that in Who's Who, every member of the cabinet listed football as their interests.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he said he didn't know what was worse, whether like if they were pretending to, or if they actually all like football that much, that you know, he was a tremendous cultural snob, and he is so.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he's yeah, he's correct about it.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is I think it is important for elites to sort of lead the way on culture.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think actually, in terms of politicians, I think they'd actually get rewarded if they honestly were asked what their things are, and they said, I don't actually care about whatever the artsy monkeys, I'm actually I'm actually in the Wagner.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think people would actually like it.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_02: And it does rather remind me, I mean, going back to that generation that I was talking about earlier, my father arrived in this country as a penniless refugee.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_02: And by the time I knew him, culture wasn't particularly important to him.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_02: But I do remember one of his friends saying, when we were, you know, you're all penniless refugees together in Birmingham, they they were um living in a in a um hostel.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_02: My father used to drag them off to see Shakespeare.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_02: They probably banned, you know, their English was extremely rudimentary, a thousand page.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_02: But it was just like that's what we should be doing.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's how we get entry into this country, that's the culture we now have to enter, and we have to go through this and figure it out and appreciate it because that's how we join this this culture, this civilization, this nation.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's rather admirable.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, Ed.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I've suggested before the life in the UK test, which I've done for an article, which is all about you know what percentage of people in Britain are living on benefits, all these kind of pointless questions of no interest.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_00: It it should literally just be a Shakespeare quiz.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a hundred questions about Shakespeare.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if you know enough about Shakespeare, you know, you know enough enough about English civilization that you know you're you're halfway there at least.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's the Catherine Burl-Sing model, isn't it?
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: She is introducing this to a great many different peoples who've recently come to the island and they all really get into it.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: She sees it as uh her duty to um in this world which has gone for the the multiculturalism uh model, which I guess is just downstream of having lots of different people who want to champion their own culture, it's probably not a policy goal in and of itself, it's probably just an effect of that cause.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: But she says, look, if you if you want people to feel British, if you want to feel part of something, show them what it is that this country is and was built upon, and don't treat them and burn them down.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: And you can make that case for um Edgie making that point before, you know, poorer kids from from um working class backgrounds.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Roger Scruton was one of those people, you know, whether you you're into conservative um philosophy or not, I mean he he was just a philosopher with conservative inclinations, but he got to Oxford's on a scholarship, went through the grammar school system and said, Look, if that wasn't there, and indeed this is the point that Peter Hitchens makes all the time about having abolished that, is that I would never have gotten to this.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_01: I would never have been given a chance because I would have just been, I wouldn't have been anywhere near the grammar schools because we couldn't afford to be around that that area.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: But my working man father, who was a Labour supporter and thought all of this stuff was guff, I think Rubb just couldn't effectively refer to it as, is something that I found great joy in.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he ended up being one of the the biggest contributors to British national life, or at least on the cultural conversation in the 20th and early 21st centuries, and indeed beyond into Europe with all of those, um all of those countries that were under under the Iron Curtain, he he helped get some of this stuff we've been talking about today, the Western canon, through through the back door of these, you know, authoritarian uh dictatorships.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: So um, yeah, there's there's there's a lot there's a lot that hangs on this kind of stuff.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I know we've talked a lot about our own personal relationship with it and worries about it, but actually, there's um there's a there's a whole lot of stuff around human self-realization going on here too, and getting to the depths of humanity.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we've spoken about a whole range of topics today, and before I'll let you go, I'm gonna ask you both a question which I started to ask the guests after you'd both been on.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: And that question is I'll start with you, Paul, is what have you changed your mind on in the course of your life?
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: And what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think for me, it's very much a generational question because um I was a politically precocious 14-year-old when Margaret Thatcher came to power.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_02: I was very um struck by the sad state of the nation when I was at that age, and I thought I wished her well in what she was doing, and I still believe what she did was absolutely essential.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and as a result of that, I suppose I went through a kind of libertarian, um, I was never a sort of fanatical libertarian, but I did think the small state would um be the best solution.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I also thought that a very small state would emerge, people got more educated and wealthier, they would want to take more responsibility for themselves, and the state would kind of wither in a way, and um, and that would be a good thing.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I've realized that was wrong.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of people of my generation have realized that, and others have um uh still hold those prejudices.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's not to say I don't think free markets uh and so on are very important to the economy, um, but I do think that we need some kind of leadership, if you like, uh, at the cultural level, at the national level, uh, you can't just leave everything to the market.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_02: And that you do need institutions uh that set a gold standard of excellence.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, you talked about the BBC back in the 70s.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_02: I would add to that um Brian McGee's series on philosophy, which is all available on YouTube.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's fantastic.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think you know, if you just leave it to the market, you will end up with excellent stuff.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_02: There will be really good things out there for a small number of people, but I think society and culture needs a guiding hand.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I suppose I've become a bit more paternalistic in my cultural attitudes, and maybe that's a little bit what's behind this podcast.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think that call is growing amongst the Zoomers, and you might have come across him, but previous guest Charlie Downs, he's only 23, uh very, very adept with delivering messages, very of his age, he's able to get quite a lot of content in and feeling in a short period of time.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_01: But he has conservative inclinations, but ultimately believes that having seen the cultural um elite and uh the various institutions be taken over by this um socially left leading, economically right leading worldview, is he said, look, conservatism's not gonna cut it.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we actually need to have some kind of a counter-revolution.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's very Christopher Ruffo, the American chap who who wrote about this stuff, which is if you want to if you want to have cultural change in the direction towards maintaining anything from the past, then you're gonna have to employ similar similar tactics.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I know that's not the point necessary you're making, Paul, but you can see this growing sentiment about maybe we do need some paternalism to retain things of value, um, even if it isn't you know valuable on a spreadsheet, as it were.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I see it in demography as well.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_02: So um I, you know, I would not have, and I think few fewer people thought about pronativism, but I would have thought, well, the market will sort it out.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_02: Now I strongly believe that we need um government and state-led.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's not the only thing, but but it needs to be cultural and it needs to be financial.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_02: But I think our demographic woes need to be taken in hand by the establishment.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_02: We can't just let the thing drift and assume that somehow the um hidden hand will sort it all out.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_01: Podcast in itself.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_01: Eds, what about you?
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: What what what previously was something you thought this is this is a good thing or this is a something I believe is sat in stone, but then over time you've you've changed your mind about.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean I I think I changed my mind quite a lot, uh, maybe too much.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of things.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you mentioned grammar schools is one thing, for example.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I used to be pro, um, now I'm quite anti.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I do think um one of the fundamental uh problems we have with a meritocracy, I'm pro-meritocracy in the sense that it's the the least bad way of ordering society, but I think the the decline of local elites has um been a big factor in in a lot of the social problems.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that when you take away um the kind of top 10% of any group or any town or anything like that, the the the rest kind of falls to pieces a little bit.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think grammar schools kind of mirror that a little bit.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: there there's obviously people feel very great gratitude for their own experiences in education um and it's helped to kind of sort society along kind of levels of education and intelligence but the downsides of that have become quite apparent as well um I I think there needs you know there needs to be some way of making uh in an I say making failure less brutal.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, re reading a couple of years ago Michael Young's book about meritopsy the idea that if in a in a kind of free and liberal society if you don't succeed and you fail it's all the more crushing for you than it is in a kind of more kind of stultified society because you know your place and you might not be happy about it but you accept it while in ours to kind of cost the failure especially for kind of low status men is very very crushing indeed.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I think a lot of that comes down to a uh in some ways a more paternalistic society but I don't know I I mean I'm a bit of a doomer in some sense and I think a lot of these problems are just they're just intractable.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're just they're just the way it is.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know it's with like the loss of manufacturing jobs.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's just no way it's sad that it happened I just can't see if industries aren't making a profit compared to competition from elsewhere there's almost nothing we can do about it.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: Stuff with like the the birth rate thing I've become maybe it's the Morland influence in me but I know I don't mean I mean I pulled more you know Paul your latest book is about trying to reverse it but I the more I look at the data I just think there's just nothing that anyone's doing that's really going to reverse it.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: All the sort of Central European countries they're all you know Poland's now at the absolute basement level facility and I just wonder if that's just the price for a free liberal society.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_00: People people have different options and and lots of people choosing not to have kids in many cases they're choosing lifestyles which make it much harder for them to have children if they even if they want to just as the opportunities provided by technology just means more people want to watch rubbish TV or you know look at TikTok reels.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_00: So what you change your mind on Ed is reasons for pessimism right yeah kind of unsolvable I mean there's lots that is there's lots that's great and and um I would never want to live in a in a in a pastime even if there are much to benefit.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know the overall technological improvements are so much greater that um it's worth you know so much of our problems are just to do with things with to do with choice and abundance and those are kind of you know those are good problems rather than the problems that a lot of people have in the world which are to do with hunger and political instability.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_00: And high infant mortality rates right I mean you know high infant mortality and dentistry those two things that just make it you know there's no there's no competition between today and the past um a lot of things is that humans are a lot of people are just not well suited to the lifestyle we now have.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: It makes them too anxious.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that that is obviously a problem but again it's a kind of good problem anxiety levels increase as society gets better uh people you know who having to struggle to survive for the very safe survival of their children don't suffer from anxiety existential despair because they have other things to worry about.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah these just things as happened there's there's not really much we can do about them except so tape around the edges.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I hope I hope there is a sort of a reversal of the fertility crisis but I just don't see around me anymore.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway on that cheery note I guess indeed well we ought to talk about what we could expect from the pair of you so you've embarked on this project with Canon Club how far do you see it going and is there anything else coming out from either of you uh independently or together that we ought to keep an eye out for we've got one more episode uh about to do aren't we which is just gonna be the two of us well there are there are a total of seven done on on I think Macbeth Bruckner and Anna Kreminer have come out and there are episodes to come on Thomas Mann, Romanesque architecture Van Golf oh Karavaggio's come out um and we're planning to do one on um I Ed wanted to do one just the two of us without a guest so what would what did I know enough about so um I put my hand up on Shostakovich which is interesting because um I thought Ed would enjoy that because his life is very much intertwined with the um Soviet Union and particularly I love Russian history and the history of Russian communism.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah just endlessly fascinating and full of so much bleak humor that um yeah and actually that does remind me sorry I'll come back to a question it does remind me um you know there's this is it synesthesia when people have this problem they they think Tuesday afternoon is red right so I have that for music what I was gonna say is you know I don't think I couldn't possibly imagine thinking about um George in London without knowing Handel or um Fanta Secla Vienna without knowing Marler or indeed um the Stalin era I mean if you what if you think you understand the Stalin era but you don't know Shostakovich's 10th symphony so I mean maybe or indeed Edward in England and Elgar.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I've so for me music's a great insight into history and I think that's why that will be an interesting episode.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_02: In terms of things I'm other things I'm and so where we go with this in the long term I don't know we'll have made we've made seven we'll have made eight uh we'll see what the reception is I think these are podcasts that need to come out weekly they're not contemporary or um um topical so uh you know hopefully they'll sound the test of time be worth listening to down the road in years and and so you know we we may well make a second episode a second series at some point um you know just remains to be seen what our other priorities are um other things we're doing um I am trying to get together the thoughts on a book on um the economics of demographic decline so my basic idea is I'm working with an economist um Philip Pilkington on which is I think you've interviewed him haven't you have I yeah um and we've written a paper together and we're about to produce another one but but really the idea is economics is um informed by a view of demography that is it it it doesn't really express it but economics assumes reasonably young population growing working age population and and if our demography is going to be radically different in the future then we need to rethink everything about economics.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_02: So that's an idea um and may end up being a book and then another book um I've always got endless ideas for books but another idea of a book I would really like to write which very much sort of ties in with this um with this idea this idea of this podcast in a way is what I'm kind of currently calling peak Europe the idea that there was a time when European demography peaked and and use that the 1880s the 1890s look at the culture um look at the economy look at a whole range of things and then see uh true you know both quantit quantity quantifiable and non-quantifiable um was that really in some sense the peak of civilization how how would you argue that and and look at the music and the art and the literature etc so it's a very um it's not a very well not a very coherent idea for a book but I I might get around to writing that one day.
• 1:14:02
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you do what about you Eds besides your prolific rising on the wrong side of history substack what what else is happening in your world in the process of writing a book which I'm very late for which I'm supposed to send things to the publishers this week so hopefully um which is sort of which is also about the the elites really um about the ruling class and the kind of paradoxes of them being progressive but also sort of more inegalitarian than previous elites so it's not really it's it's not an anti-elitist book because I'm not really I'm not really anti-elitist and you know I grew up in pretty comfortable circumstances even I came grew up in Holland Park so I can hardly uh pretend to be you know from like a mining village um but it is about uh yeah that kind of contradiction why why are elites sort of sort of notionally more left-wing um than the public and and kind of what the reason for this is and not just self-interested financial reasons but also kind of sort of quasi religious reasons.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's um you know it's it's kind of slightly difficult because you know I don't know which way the wind is blowing at the moment.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't you know it kind of radical progressivism we've had the last 10 years wokeness I hate the word but um I don't know if it's getting better or getting worse I mean it's hard to tell isn't it's time for a poem on Dave the Beach about wokeness.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_01: When could we expect to see it hitting the shelves?
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Late next year or even 26 I don't know uh it's supposed to be ages ago but uh it's it's uh it's trying to get all the ideas into my head and um and also doing the Zub stack at the same time uh so yeah a lot of words yes well on that note you both of you have quite a lot on so I am very grateful that you joined me once more on the podcast been a pleasure and look forward to speaking to you about both of your projects when they start coming to fruition and indeed other things that you're working on in the meantime.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So Paul Ed thanks so much for coming on again.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you been a pleasure good luck with everything to keep up to date with all that I am doing please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Here I seek to explore the ideas values and culture that made our civilization those that are unmaking it and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_01: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey