Latest / Thinking Class / #146 - Lola Salem - You Can Win Every Election In The West But If The Whole Of Culture Is Against You Nothing Will Change

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#146 - Lola Salem - You Can Win Every Election In The West But If The Whole Of Culture Is Against You Nothing Will Change · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Dr.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_02: Lola Salem.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Lola is a musicologist and cultural critic, and a former professional child singer with the Maîtrise de Radio in France.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: She holds degrees from the École Normale Supérieure, the Sorbonne, and a D Phil from Oxford.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: She is the author of the forthcoming Artless with Polity Press and writes for The Critic and the Catholic Herald.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: Lola believes we are living in a post-cultural state.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: And in this conversation, Lola and I think out loud about the boycott crisis, why you can win every election in the West and still lose a civilization if the whole of culture is against you, why the left treats culture as a weapon and the right treats it as a hobby, the collapse of the managerial elite, and whether the recovery of civilization requires the recovery of faith.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: This episode is supported by Aquinas Tuition, bespoke academic tutoring for children who deserve to be stretched and not managed.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: If your child needs more than their school is giving them, visit AquinasTuition.co.uk.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: And if you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my documentary series retracing H.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: V.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: Morton's 1927 journey to find out what is left of the old country and to see the evidence of the new England that has emerged since that time.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: Episodes 1 and 2 are live now on YouTube.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Dr.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: Lola Salem.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Western cities are replete with wonderful galleries, theatres, and concert halls, and all of these are generously funded by the state, private individuals, funding bodies.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yet it is becoming apparent to anyone who wishes to look that there is no one inside them anymore who believes that art is supposed to be good rather than something that must be approved as socially acceptable.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: Today I'm joined by one of the sharpest cultural critics in Britain, Lola Salem, Oxford scholar, Catholic, trained singer, many more things to say.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: And Lola, you say we're living in a post-cultural state, and we'll explore what that means today.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_02: But first, welcome to the show and thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, John, for having me.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Lola, you have written that right now we are living through something you term as the boycott crisis.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: What do you mean by that and how does it work in practice?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the expression of the boycott crisis is actually taken from the work, the amazing work that Dunis Famille and Rosie K are doing with the campaign Freedom in the Arts.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the bo the new boycott crisis is the is the name of their second report, which is also written with uh Professor Joe Phoenix, also wonderful.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea was to sort of look um beyond the obvious sort of cultural debates thing where you know people are getting cancelled.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh boycott often happen with the pressure on venues, for example, institutions to then remove and/or cancel and/or completely, you know, um more than just uh temporary removal fire some people from the art sector.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they looked at the mechanisms of it, they looked at how the different stakeholders from individual artists to then venues and then sort of intermediary agents, whether those are publishers and so on and so forth, um act under this pressure.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, on top of just doing the diagnosis and doing a lot of you know quantitative data, they've amazingly proposed a set of solutions.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the first ever, as far as I know, in the world, definitely in Britain, set of concrete solutions that you can just look online on their website to if you are ever, again, whatever your position is, either within an institution, an organization, as um a professional agent, professional manager, or as an artist or collective of artists, can just click on, you know, what is your problem?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Here are resources, legal advice that helps you navigate the immediate crisis and then long-term sort of responses to protect yourself, rebuild yourself.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that all comes from this amazing report and the great campaign Freedom in the Art.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: But as far as I understand things in this, you know, um gonna do some placement very quickly.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've just produced the third report for Freedom in the Art that tries to go a bit deeper, not yet published, but soon.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm looking at the whole creative, dynamic, creative sort of process at work in the world of art.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And where beyond just the visible boycott, what are all of the forms at whatever point in the life of an artist, from very early exposure up to, you know, you're already a celebrity and you're still being cancelled, where things happen.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so boycott has, I guess, in people's minds, in sort of mainstream um um perspective of it, they say of something very visible, very noisy and loud.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, most of those attrition um effects happen much more in the shadows where no one actually talks about it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's often very preemptive as well.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so there is more to boycott than just someone is upset about you and very publicly tries to cancel you.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Most of what's happening happens in the shadows.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: So these institutions, let's refer to them as cultural institutions by which there is a boycott crisis.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, do you think that it is reversible, or do you think the infrastructure of these cultural institutions have been permanently damaged?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is a large part of, again, the report that I can't share right now, but hopefully will be will be um up uh in in the next few weeks or months.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um the whole infrastructure is gangrene.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously, I don't want to speak too much in generalizations, although it's inevitable that we'll we'll have to do so.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But as far as things go, things are in a very, very bad place.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's been my experience talking to people who either are stakeholders, actors in the field, often as artists themselves.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And for that report, I spent more than 100 hours talking one-on-one with artists about their lives and about their experiences, but also to people who actually can do things, whether they are financially powerful or have political status and so on and so forth.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Most people actually who can do something about those issues fail to understand the scale of the problem.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: The whole infrastructure across the arts is in a very bad shape.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, again, trying to avoid as much as I can generalizations.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: There are obviously some art forms that do better than others.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think actually theatre has a lot of bad things, but also a lot of good things.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: We can talk about this if you want.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, some things that are not quite into the art as in high art world, but still into the sort of creative entertainment sphere, like video games, for example, or even films, I'm not doing too bad either.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: But it's uneven, even in those fields.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And for the rest of especially high art stuff, it's in very, very bad shape, very bad condition.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: So whether things are reversible or not depends a lot on people understanding the scale of the problem and how horrible it is.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think because Culture Wars sort of discourse, again, very mainstream, has been going on and on for a very long time.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: People feel that they have some sort of understanding.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm afraid to say that this is still very far from the truth.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And often that discourse has always been about, again, very sort of surface-level type of commentary analysis or even just events and facts.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: So typically very recently, the fourth plinth has been again, you know, on the radar of everyone because another statue that we don't think is very good has replaced yet another statue that also wasn't very good either, anyway.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of that discourse has also conveniently been, you know, around universities because it is easier for people to understand the problem of the cultural industry or the not just industry in that case, the cultural institutions of which universities are a part of through that lens, because most people, at least the people who do discuss those issues, have gone to university.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Very few of them have gone through a conservatoire, through a theater school, through the quarto, and so on and so forth.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so although there are a lot of overlapping issues with a lot of overlapping themes and or even people replicating the same problems, those are different systems.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think that if it is reversible, which I still do believe to some extent, especially on you know certain fields or certain art forms than others, we need to first have an actual understanding of just mapping how things are, which very few people are doing.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Pierre and I, Perdon Gasses, who you had on your podcast and I are doing this.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then once this mapping is being done, we need people to then have the courage, of course, to do something.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it is yet another problem in the matrix, which is for lots of people, especially on the right and among conservatives, it's been it's been easier to lament the state of things rather than actually try to do something.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And again, it's probably a generalization.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I do know some people personally uh who do give a damn and are trying to do good things, but it's not enough in sort of critical masses yet.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'd quite like to explore how we got here.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: So I know it's easy to talk about an organic um mental and ideological revolution that led to lots of different people being across all of these institutions thinking the same things and ultimately looking for the same level of approbation amongst one another.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you wrote in the Catholic Herald a piece where you said these cultural institutions used to be the location in which people would gather and have very serious conversation, and they even that would happen in modest project spaces and people's living rooms.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: And uh then it became more likely that art and culture would happen in these big public venues that were underwritten by funding from the state or big funding sources, and uh as in your words, you you you say, you know, the culture of lanyardism really took place, but you referred to the role of vibes checkers.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: Is is that the mechanism by which all of this started to come apart, or was it the public funding itself that created those conditions or or something else?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um that's an again a very good uh transition to something not yet published but seems to be published by me, uh, which is a book um which analyzes a lot in in in large sections this issue of the genealogy of what some people might say decline.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think it is I mean, everything you're pointing towards to are true, but I think the the the problem that I also describe in the concept of the the post-cultural state is that and it it's something that I write slightly against some right-wing trends in terms of explaining a lot of things through um cultural Marxism, for example.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Don't get me wrong, there were such people in the 20th century who were definitely the type of cultural Marxist that I described, but and they were important and influential, but they were they were acting within a framework that had already changed.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that framework is first and foremost administrative and then of course ideological.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: The shift there that is becoming much more prominent as in even just in the public eye, visible, is the the pathway towards what is you know in in the 80s in France and in the 90s in in Britain, um understood as the creative industries motor moto um New Labour being a big proponent of this, where not only art has to be measured in ways such as KPI sort of criteria, but also it is good for the economy, it will create growth absolutely for sure, no problem at all.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: This creates a void by which if you think that you have to measure art by things that are absolutely extrinsic to it, and only those things really, because the internal criteria of you know value, of form, of beauty, of aesthetics, you're too uncomfortable to touch on for various reasons, um, then it means that you need to find those other metrics that will help you to sort of tick the boxes that you've set for yourself.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that around the same time of this movement from you know 50s, more 60s onwards, you have people typically like Pierre Bourdieu in France who arrive and are the sort of precursors of post you know, post-structuralism, um, sorry, post-modernism, and are telling you more and more, actually you need to look at things such as race and gender, such as you know, class issues and so on and so forth.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And they they pave the way towards what in more mod contemporary times we we've talked about as work or whatever, by using those categories as ways to assess art, which actually are, I think, a complete fallacy.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, as those things evolve and as they reshape entirely the way that the institutions are being funded, are being ruled, directed, administered, and the way that more and more generations of people come out of those things with all of those metrics in mind, it becomes like again the sort of culture of the art world itself, where it is very hard to think differently about how art creation is supposed to go about.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: There were a few moments, sort of 80s, 90s, and I've I've talked to many people who were either in training at the time or already artists, um, who could sort of see the change happening, but it was in the margins often.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Or if it was happening, it was something you could still escape in one way or another, again, depending on the art form where you were more active.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's definitely something that's been accelerated with a sort of new labor creative industries motto.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think, you know, after 2001 and 2008, in terms of financial crisis, as the financial bubble recedes and you know, you just don't have enough money to do things, those problems have become even more prominent because we've just kept those criteria instead of just allowing for the rest to continue to be creative and mature.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So this is part of what I think has been going on, and I think it it helps also answering the other question about are those problems solvable or not?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we've been now generations after generations in that sphere, in that sort of structure.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: It will, it will, you know, require a lot of tact and a lot of sort of complex thought process to be able to, if not reverse it, at least change pathways.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that means changing the incentives in terms of law, in terms of administrative culture, in terms of leadership as well, and in terms of just what a country wants to have for itself.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think an important thing that I describe in the in the postcultural state is the fact that the state is post-cultural, and I'm using state not just as the state, as a sort of polity, as an ensemble of actors and institutions and people who just have given up on any theory of culture, have given up on the idea that you need to describe this in very positive terms instead of just saying, oh, it's going to be good for something else.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: No, culture is gone in itself, and you need to describe what this is.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I'm I'm very worried to see that this has been almost entirely excluded from the conversation.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's been the sort of five British values sort of thing, and those are horrendous.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: They just like don't really give us an actual account of what a nation ought to be, what civil society ought to be, and what the state place and all of this ought to be.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: You you cited Chesterton in that that article uh as you word writing for the Catholic Herald, um and you you you mentioned that the conditions that we're living under have been created by people who um have a commitment to, in Chesterton's words, words, theoretical libertinism paired with practical tyranny.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: And um that that appears to be the the ultimate the ultimate value, and then it becomes the filter by which everything else is is applied.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um you make a very good point that lots of complex thought is required to be able to turn this round, and you pointed to law and you pointed to funding structures.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I know that there are people out there who have for many years said we need to win the battle of ideas, and I don't disagree that that is a part of it.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: But the further I've gotten down the garden path on these topics, the more I realize that you don't win the battle of ideas with people whose egos and sense of self and the identity are wrapped up with this ideological framework and indeed their own status is that they're just ever more entrenched.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: So you can sit there and you can have all the debates or or your triggered discussions online, but no one's actually shifting any position.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: So it when you think about how power works, if we're going to adopt that framework, you really do need to think about law.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: You do need to think about funding structures, both having it diverted towards your own ends and trying to figure out a way of strangling it towards the ends that you think aren't producing good.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I don't know if that's caught up with everyone yet.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: People think just by saying it's time to do away with bloody woke and it's all so silly, that that's just gonna put it away.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's not.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: You are actually gonna have to strangle it in its cot, and that's gonna require law and funding.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think there is um there's a lot of misconceptions, in particular in, you know, in the sort of right-wing political circles slash conservatives.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: No, those are not always the proper Venn diagram, but we see the dual app of actually what culture is for, what is art for, and how to go about it.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, your question is very rich, so I'm gonna try to, in fragmented ways, try to answer it from different points of view.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: But there is, for example, a fallacy on the right, which is, oh, we're just going to replace woke art with commercial arts.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's not going to work.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not how creation works.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Again, in sort of the creative process of things, you need to be able to sustain for in in a period of time that are long enough the creativity of someone and the training of that person, then the training that that person can provide to another mentee and so on and so forth.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Which means not only sustain support with little return of investment, at the very least at the start, maybe even for a much longer period of time.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it also means that you need to allow them to fail.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if you just want to replace work art with commercial art, it means that you just want to replace something that you deem to be bad, probably for good reasons, maybe not, but you know, we're gonna assume it's for good reasons, with something that is instantly going to be like, you know, bringing tens of millions of people into cinemas or whatever.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Most likely it's not going to happen, it's not going to work.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: So already the the economic vision of what art is there, I think is wrong.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Don't get me wrong, if um something extremely um successful that was generating lots of revenue were to happen, it would be a good thing.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not against that.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the chances are that it's it's not quite how most likely things are going to work.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: Another problem is that some people, and I I see this in academia as well, where you think that you can just throw a bit of money somewhere and something will happen because people need money and therefore they might be acquired to throw that.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, no, like artists, if anything, are a type of class of people who you just can't buy just like that.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, don't get me wrong, again, there will be some people who will do anything for money and so on and so forth.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: But most of those people are not running on money only.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a good thing if it happens, but actually, it is also much more driven by stages, about your capacity to own a little territory of, you know, loyal people that then just you know acclaim your art for whatever reason.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: So thinking that you can just throw money there when a lot of that self-taught mythology is around blaming other people on moral grounds, having the higher ground on moral grounds as well, is just not going to work.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: So there's again a sort of you need to sustain attention to those people in a radically different way than what we see maybe in other circles, whether politics or just finance in economic trades and so on and so forth.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and one of the things related to that that have experienced over the course of the last few years doing quite a lot of development for different structures and projects, is that there is definitely a crisis among right-wing slash conservative elites in terms of associating again all of those things together.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think I've mentioned before, you know, the diagnosis of it, the actual understanding of the problem, which I think lots of people are very far from, and then the understanding of a strategy, all strategies, and the will to do this and the will paired with actual action of like funding and so on and so forth.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I don't want to make too many theorizations.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: I do know people who do great things, who fund, who support, and that is wonderful.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: And those people, I think, are heroes and need to be celebrated as such.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, however, it's very few of them.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the things it betrays is this again, this idea that at the end of the day, culture and art are a bit frivolous on there.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, it's nice to have them, it's nice to have a yacht, it's nice to have a like a nice painting, or it's nice for other people to have them and enjoy them.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: But really, who cares, right?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: I care about my political um influence there, I care about well, actually, if the whole of culture is against you, you can win as many political elections as you want.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Society is very likely not going to change.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And by society, you can I use a collective of things.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: The institutions, the one that set the mood, the one that actually still teach generations after generations of people within universities.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, within those universities, there are lots of art degrees and art courses being uh absorbed.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: I know this happened in Britain around the sort of turn of the century when the technological uh institutes were absorbed by universities, those are not going to change.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you can just, you know, hope for people to have nice things, but ultimately it's not.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: That you're not going to be able to have nice things that you'll be cancelled straightforwardly once and for all, and you won't be able to have any thoughts whatsoever.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the people on the right, not all of them again, but lots of them I see, and I'm saying this with a lot of love for them, uh obviously, but it has to be said, and I have written about it quite a few times, and I will write about it in my book.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them looking at this through the lens of something a bit frivolous, a bit nice, or whatever, are a bit like um people who uh see wine as a nice hobby, right?
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, uh, it is maybe nice to have a sip here and there.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is maybe nice to have a little, you know, encountering with a vignard and a sort of you know type of rape and a terroir or whatever, but ultimately that's nice from time to time, and that's just a nice thing to splurge yourself um with.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: The opponents are drunkards.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: The opponents can't have enough of this stuff.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: They drink and drink and drink, and they will drink some more.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And they're very good at this, they are very high-functioning alcoholics.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do we do?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Do we become alcoholics ourselves?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Debate.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm agnostic on the question.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Do we regulate the what the the play field uh differently?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: Probably.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to be able to say this is not just a pastime, this is not just a hobby.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Someone has to do something, hopefully, more than just one person, but someone has to step up to the game.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And in the last few years, I think the field of creation has been a bit droopy, um, to say the least.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: I will be one of those people on the right who will tell you that there is very good art being done still today.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: There are very good artists that are still alive today, for sure.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: But those feel more like either by luck, serendipity, or almost aberration than as an intended consequence of a project.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And again, for all of the lamentations we've had on the right of, you know, where is beauty?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: We want beauty like, yeah, go for it.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me what beauty looks like.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just in the abstract tell me beauty with a capital B suits me, but actually, I'm gonna let someone else decide for me what it sounds like, looks like, uh, tastes like, smells like, whatever.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: You need to have your say.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: There needs to be the revival of a form of discussion, not just amongst uh uh private entrepreneurs and investors, although that is definitely lacking.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, in the country that was, when I compare it with France, a bit bit better ended when it came to philanthropic endeavours, but also with the state.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: The state is not agnostic when it comes to what a good life is, what a good culture is.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the state seems to have given up on navigating any of those questions.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, get involved or just visit galleries with more unmade beds and urinals in the middle of the room.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um but that does lead me on to where we're at with regards to our own um abilities of discernment, taste, judgment.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: So, in your opinion, what does it say about our civilizational status when it appears that it's quite hard to tell the difference between what's good rather than what has been approved as a socially acceptable thing to say and think and do?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, and this is again something where Pierre Delancases will be even much greater than I am on this, but the some of the issues are are very again structural and and and fairly basic, not in a bad way, but fundamental, where the idea of taste as a very specific exercise of reason, judgment, and actually philosophy.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, someone like Giorgio Agamben, for example, I think it's it's one of the best um books on the on the question of taste, written by the Italian thinker Agamben.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: He describes it as a as knowledge that fills and feeling that no.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it's in this sort of grey zone area where it is related to the intellect and there is an element of objectivity to it.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, there is something that doesn't quite just just escape or doesn't quite just transcend, but is also of a different plane, which is that sort of feeling emotional attachment to something.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: And both can be regulated together and separately and inform one another.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like we haven't had a form of just basic training, whether through schools and you know, the the normal pathway that everyone in society is supposed to take anywhere, at least to some extent, to some age and to some level.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: But also it is something that has escaped the home.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, um, not so long ago, even still in the 20th century, definitely in the 19th century, we were, I think, at a sort of peak golden age of people, even among working classes, people who just would read a lot of, you know, classical canonical text, who would take some interest going to theatre.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying that all of the place would be great, but because you know, there is an exercise and then an appetite to go and see things.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And today this has receded.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, although, you know, that now maybe is not the time, but I do have some caveats to say about the whole thesis at the moment of the sort of post-liter uh post-literal literacy society and so on.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't share all of the gloom and doom on this, but I understand that there is a crisis.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: That crisis is also related to the elites.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I spent uh now I'm stopping, but I've spent almost 10 years teaching in Oxford, and I can tell you that lots of students in Oxford are not reading at all.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: And they they recognize it to me.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're just they're not they're not particularly driven by it because they don't even understand, not all of them, some of them, why it matters in the first place.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this is part of the decay of things where those important aptitudes that were fairly basic aptitudes in a liberal democracy have been eroded by the system of education, but also in lots of private homes.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: So where do you start again?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the one of the interesting things that Pierre is doing with Verdurin is just not to, you know, we're not crazy, we're not reinventing the world, but you go back to the basics of, okay, let's bring people who are interesting and serious and want to talk seriously about those questions together.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see what happens when they meet, and let's see what happens when they all read the same text together, and then they rediscover this attitude of, oh, this is the thing that is called aesthetics.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: It has rules.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: I need to navigate those rules.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm disagreeing with those rules, I need to be, you know, clear with myself and others.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that I disagree and how is it that I want to propose something else?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Those discussions have dried out in academia.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: Again, this is a generalization, but it is true.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen it in action because during my, you know, I've done a doctorate in Oxford, I've spent uh many, many years there, and even more years in France, in the top universities and in the country, where you used to have the sort of basic framing of, okay, here is a reading group.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna like read a book together, and actually, this is the best thing you can do of commentary on the same artifact, the same object.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Those have become not the norm anymore.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: There are more exceptions than the norm, and that's not okay.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's not, you know.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't think there is a lot of um maybe all of this is very um very much of a truism or whatever, but we need to be able to have some of those mechanisms back into civil society or back into the institutions, and it's not happening.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, there will be people who are privileged in one way or another, not using the word negatively, and have been able to equip themselves, sometimes even in solitary mode, by themselves or through others, through their family, through friends, of those skills, and it is great, but we need to make sure that this is not left to luck.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: But we can replicate those experiment experiences, and we can hopefully even make them grow at the very least organically.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: Verdurin is doing this, a few other circles that I know, not always really in the art and culture as Pierre does, but more sort of academic things are doing that.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's still very much uh underpowered because again, going back to the funding question, we did more to upscale.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm glad you brought up the quality of the elite class I know they get referred to as, and then people with much consternation say, could we stop referring to them as the elites, please?
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: There doesn't seem to be much elite about them.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I must say, as someone who I'm an early school leaver, I left without A levels, the AS levels I did have were good for you, that's were rock bottom.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh my G G S E's were pretty bad, and I then just found my way through working life, and then I studied later on, late 20s, early 30s, open university, all distance learning stuff, then distance learning with uh the University of Leeds.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: So all of that stuff has literally just been me sitting around with books just reading.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I am definitely not uh really on the scale of anything, that uh much of an intellectual compared to anyone who's come before.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: But what I notice is when I speak to people who've been to really, really good universities and who are now occupying top positions in the public and private sector, and they've been to great schools, is just how um shallow their internal lives seem to be with regards to what they actually um surround themselves with and what they throw themselves into, their hobbies.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_02: Almost none of it has anything really tangibly uh to do with culture, with the exception of the odd visit to the National Gallery or or whatever, or a few of the popular books at the time, like everyone should go and read sapiens or or whatever.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't really extend further than that.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so it isn't just the problem of um most of us hoy poloy who can't turn off Netflix and put our phones down, but literally everyone's going through it.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, even surveys have suggested that actually some of the most impacted uh by this technological revolution uh have chosen to just be distracted rather than to read.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it does make you wonder when your whole managerial class is built by all of these people who've been to some of these really august universities and who are now just outsourcing all of their work to AI, um how much longer this system might have, this governing philosophy, because it's clear, and I know this seems like a jump to some people, but all the things we've been talking about, it is it is clear that if people are not well versed in the civilization that they are uh charged with maintaining in somehow, then how much longer can they retain legitimacy, how much longer can their competency be unquestioned?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so if the managerial class is about to lose its grip um on whatever this is, I should quite like to know what might come after that.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: Please tell me that there is an alternative to what we've got.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of layered things.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: So if I don't answer the end of the question, do let me know so that I can come back to it.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: But um you were asking earlier about, you know, what about the survival of civilization?
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: But a civilization needs to want to survive in order to do so, right?
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you can't force people to be part of a civilization if they don't want to.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: You don't you can't force people to be part of a culture if they don't want to.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when your own people are giving up, you know, maybe, maybe indeed, you know, there's there's a very, very, very, very important crisis that needs to be engaged with and addressed and settled.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um but again, you know, you just said a very, very important thing, which is lots of people actually willingly choose, we willingly choose to become, you know, part of another feudal, feudal system where we're very happy to become slaves to the machine.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um again, I've seen this a lot in Oxis, for example.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, even people on the right, again, I'm saying this with a lot of love for them, but um people on the right also will use AI to create a lot of what's called now um very commonly AI slot and think this is beauty.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: Very recently I had a a friend on Twitter who's a big account, but he was uh he was reposing something from uh, I think André Rieuve, which is a it's something that comes back um very often on Twitter as a as a symbol of what white culture produces as beauty and and you know um cultural beauty.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: And is the most sort of kitsch pastish thing where you have this sort of music with a massive orchestra, sort of very um uh teary type of strings and then uh you know a young, young girl singing some.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit lame, it's a bit kitsch, it's a bit pastish.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, is this the best that white culture in the world of some people um can produce?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: So many people on the right who are jumping on the bank because, oh yes, it makes me cry.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: So really is that the best?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, at some point if we are too willing to just accept those standards, indeed, what can we say?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I Pierre and I and some other people do believe there is still something to be saved, and maybe this is part of it's an uncomfortable um conversation to have, but like part of art is actually not made to be like for as wide an audience as possible.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, this has been part of the problem in the 20th century of sort of recalibrating cultural policy towards the greater number and accessibility, which ultimately goes towards the lowest common denominator denominator in terms of value and interest, uh, instead of reaching higher and higher.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that does give me hope, and maybe moving forward at the end of your question, is that when I hear Pierre talk about Vertual, when I go there and I see the people being gathered there, those people are very serious.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: And they have, in some cases, everything to lose to go there to sort of engage on some topics that maybe are deemed to be controversial or not.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and actually they are very serious and they do want to sort of be challenged seriously.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Pierre never dumbs down what he talks about, and yet people are crazy about it.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, even his own video with you got tens of thousands of views because it is important what he's saying, because no one else is really doing it.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: We we both share a sense of civic duty towards that, which is you know what, if no one else is going to do it, we will do it.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if more people want to join the bandwagon, the more the merrier, but someone has to start somewhere.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the the thing with the the the professional managerial class, something that Catherine Yu describes very well in a little pamphlet um a few years ago, is that they are drunk on their own power.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: They are drunk on their own power and they will not go willingly because they have everything to lose by doing that.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, the way that, again, as I've described before, some people, especially on the right, maybe not so not only, um, have to go after those things, that they misunderstand them entirely, they misunderstand what they are doing, what they are manipulating as power, and how that power then trickles down in the rest of society.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of the things that we have um identified with Pierre now for quite some time, and we are now moving into practical phases.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: Again, if anyone listening to this wants to support us, uh please do so, is creating modules of training.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: We need to train the new cadres, we need to train those new people, uh, whether people who will become art critics and people active as creators within the field of art, but also the people who want to sort of be in these decisions as politicians, as civil servants, as managers who do love the arts, do love culture, but can recognize that something has gone away, that the system is not producing enough at the very least, if not systematically good art.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that if we do want civilization to continue flourishing, at the very least, survive a bit better, something has to be done.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's it's very much a pain to think of, for example, obviously the conservatives when in power did a lot of you know um damaging things, um sort of perpetuating the uh the new labor motto, but but without even the I would say the only nice upside of the creative industry thing, which was it had still a theory of culture, it still was saying, cool, Britannia is a thing.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now you might disagree with cool Britannia, but it was a thing, and people were very enthusiastic about it.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Even that got out of the window, and we just got the sort of administrative machinery that was very fertile ground for like a lot of identity politics kind of stuff.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, even those people just wouldn't be able to find when in power, wouldn't be able to find the sort of very basic critical mass of like like-minded people and friends and allies who, you know, wanted to do good things in the artwater to populate those institutions.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: They they they they were like so finding it so difficult to find the right trustees, to find the to appoint the right directors and so on and so forth.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: Something is bad in terms of how the personnel exists, especially on the right.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, either too many of those people are disinterested or uninterested, um, because they're too risk-averse, uh, because also some of them don't have taste anymore, don't have appetite to cultivate this for their own inner private life.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that is hopefully what we can address with Pierre through training, not only, but through training in particular, for both the policy side and the creative side of things.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we've we've talked about how whether it's the uh progressive, culturally relative, uh cultural artifacts which are uh devoid of the the the truth, the beauty, the goodness.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that's leading the likes of you and Pierre to be out there saying, right, okay, let's build outside the institutions.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: And we've talked about how the right doesn't quite get culture.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps if they do think about cultural artifacts, they're trying to use it just as tools for the propagation of their own conservative values rather than pursuing beauty and truth for their own sake.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but what I'd quite like to know is we know the institutions are in a bad place, as you have pointed out, whether it's just my conversation with Pierre, whether it's Verderin getting people to come every night of the week for totally different things that they just don't get anywhere else.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there is clearly still a hunger for something outside of what's being served up by the institutions.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I suppose my question is, is that because there is just an intrinsic human appetite for beauty, for the sacred, um, people who still want to encounter all of those things, and it doesn't matter how much bureaucracy seems to extinguish it, or um the approved uh cultural morals of the time uh serve up something different.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: People are always going to go looking for the beautiful, the goods.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think?
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about this.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I I I tend to be slightly more, if not pessimistic, and maybe thus the French in me speaking, at least pragmatical, which is we should never assume that things that have been happening before happen just because there is a natural appetite for this.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I know this is something that a lot of sort of Scretonians have been saying of beauty very naturally, and also of course Plato has a lot of you know um um weight into this debate and Platinum Platonists.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: But it's um I maybe it is true.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I guess I'm just or maybe I'm not so good as a philosopher, but I just tend to go into these questions as I'm agnostic to this.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, beauty talks to me, and I like to think that maybe my ego is speaking that I have good taste.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but also I don't think this is always innate, and if innate at all.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we can discuss this maybe in another podcast, but that's a fascinating discussion.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think someone like Nina, for example, would be great on this.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I just tend or maybe that's my nature of um, I assume the worst, which is actually we don't know, or I'm not sure, and therefore would rather um prepare for the worst option rather than the good one, which is oh, but naturally people will go and listen to things.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, my experience of contemporary art has shown me the opposite, which is a large and large swath of people on the right have completely left, and maybe you are one of them, you know, left the field entirely because there's nothing of value that no, there is, there really is.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to be able to scout for them.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: So typically the role of someone like Pierre is to go to see an exhibition and to report on it and to you know cut your waiting time basically.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't know where to go, you look at his notes and notices and you just go to things that he rates at four stars or five, the highest uh ranking.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've done art criticism for many, many years, now not as much, but I was an art critic for four to five years full-time, uh doing mostly theatre and loved it.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I would see things from you know, um sometimes premiers and creators being live that were incredible.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: But this system of this ecosystem of cultural criticism and artistic criticism has in itself decayed alongside the rest of the creative um art world anyway.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: But also people need to change their habits.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: It has, again, I'm repeating myself, but it has become a very comfortable place for many people, especially the ones whose who the entire economy comes out of the cultural wars type of debate, to state the same thing over and over, which is nothing's being done that is of good quality since Marcel Duchamp, uh you know, nothing is of interest since whatever.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then people just move the goalpost, uh whatever, whenever suits them.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes it is after the Second World War, sometimes later, sometimes it'll be earlier, can also depend on the art form.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: No, there is still good things being done, and it is our duty again to scout for them.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if we don't think there is enough, it is also our duty to then provide the different, you know, structure and and support for more of this beautiful art to stand up.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think I'm I'm I'm forgetting your question now, but I think this is, for example, something that is of a sort of uncomfortable truth.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I I think people who come to Verdurin or to come to other events are maybe for some of them are naturally you know interested in beauty and that is good, but we should never just assume the fact that we'll keep having those people.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Again, we've talked about this before.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: Lots and lots of people willingly give up their freedom, willingly give up their right to have critical taste and judgment, the almost Kantian sense of the term.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: Aesthetics is part of it because AI will, you know, present to you something ready-made that you think is sort of pretty, you're not going to think more critically about is that really the best I can do?
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: Many people are completely fine with it.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: We also need to accept this as truth.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think on the point of the post-literal society, that again we maybe don't have enough time to explore why you think there are some issues with it.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think someone very good to read on it is um Alastair Benn from uh Engelsberg Ideas.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: He has a few articles um why he thinks there are some limits to the argument that I think I highly, highly recommend.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: But when I look at the past, right, I won't talk so much about the past from a write wing perspective, but you know, let's look at 12th century.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Italy.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: In the 12th century, Italy, most people, definitely most men, but also lots of women, were literate.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: They could read.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: Guess what?
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because Italy was the center of the world at the time.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: You had a lot of trade, and of course, to do trade you needed to know very minimum how to read, if not how to write.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: So lots of people were able to read.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: Were they reading as well, you know, sort of whatever Twankist or Dante's poetry?
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: Probably not.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: Do we still think that their society was not moral?
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, obviously, there were lots of problems as of today, but they were not less moral.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: They were not less interesting and virtuous and whatever.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: So again, the sort of rates of what a mass of people want to do, ought to do, or strive for is not always a good indicator.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, again, I think unfortunately the crisis not just happening as masses of people are less and less interested in things such as beauty, but as elites themselves aren't anymore.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think until until not too long ago, it was possible for politicians to tell them about what they like, for them to go to the opera, to the theater, to the ballet to sort of talk about their favorite books and so on and so forth.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: We've had literally until recently a man, Keir Starmer, who had no dreams, who had no inner life, who just couldn't even tell you his most favorite film.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: Don't get me wrong, you know, Rishi.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: I like Rishi, but Rishi, when he was uh uh uh Prime Minister, his favorite films as like Star Wars or something, you know, not Rishi, but also is that the best culturally that we can say, especially to a wide audience?
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: Probably not.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh of course, things went much, much more wrong wrong with uh Kirstama, but the fact that he could not even be compelled to talk about one book whatsoever, is very telling.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really care about Andy Burnham for that matter, but like I don't feel that Andy Burnham is particularly enriched with sort of better in a life.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: Talks a lot about being Catholic, but uh how much of this is just again for the vibes and for for the pose, I don't know.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: I just find it very sad that we don't even know what our elites, whether top prime minister or minister, secretary of state, or even civil servants, actually like to read.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, more than just reading, going to the theatre and so on and so forth.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that the fact that there are musicals all over London and that there are being London is being praised for this kind of entertainment industry is a bit lame.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think someone ought to do better than this if they were to be to become Mayor of London.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_02: Burnham certainly appears to have the pastiche tastes uh that you would expect someone who wants to advertise the uh Mancunian and Liverpudlian bona fides.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm a very proud Northumbrian, and I I can I never tire of telling people that Newcastle upon Tyne, uh, whilst it is known for hedonism and football now, is that was once basically the most literate place in the country, and that was about 100 to 200 years ago.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_02: Within that period, it had more weekly periodic calls than London did.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that was at the height of the the coal trade and uh and the shipbuilding trade.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_02: And as you've mentioned, it actually matters when you have that because when people are working in it and they have to uh be effective and they need to be able to communicate, it actually makes sense to be literate.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so actually it makes it makes um a very, very good point about our post and de-industrialization of outsourcing all of this stuff and having just a service economy, which is just about buying things and receiving things and consuming things, that actually it doesn't even really incentivize uh the the uh learning of the humanities and all the rest of it.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um there are there are certainly loads of different paths we can go down there, Laura, and we'll certainly have another conversation about it.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um you've you've you mentioned Burnham's Catholicism.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um you're Catholic.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_02: How how does your Catholicism inform your cultural criticism?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: Anything non-Catholics are missing?
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's that's a very good question, actually.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: So um so I I was raised you know in France um by I love my parents, by two people who are profoundly my father in particular completely atheist, um, and my mother sort of mild agnostic, but definitely in this sort of bath of French liberalism where the very idea of the very categories of thought of faith, religion, the sacred and that religious way either do not even exist.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: So talking about it is like, what are you what are the what is what is this word?
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh or when they are invoked are always encountering a reception that is always sort of very negative or even aggressively negative.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um so when I was you know growing up, um religion was just not a thing I would even think of, especially not as things are in this country where you have an established you know um head of the church, etc.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I was I became a professional singer around the age of 10, or even nine question, 10-ish, um, and remained so until the end of my um secondary studies.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I when I did my baccalaureate, I was 16 and then went to uh university level stuff.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so I was a professional throughout those years and then continued at very, very high level to perform whilst doing my academic path at the same time.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's first through actually the practice of art that I just realized that there was a a hole in my knowledge on even literature, anything cultural and and artistic, there was a whole that had the more and more I was thinking about it, probably the shape of God in it.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I remember actually more through well, first literature and then of course singing, because a lot of the music that we're singing, which were actually a lot of contemporary music, as in often very new creations, was sacred music, liturgical music or liturgical adjacent music.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: And either through reading or music, and then I as I went, you know, developed naturally or through my family a taste for artistic things, painting and so on.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's like there's a key for my understanding of what this person is saying to me, what this music is saying to me, that I know like it must exist because otherwise there's something that doesn't just quite make sense.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I remember reading when I was very young um uh medieval authors like Chrétien de Troyes, and thinking, gosh, like what's this thing about the Grail and everything?
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's obviously talking about something super important, but no one will tell me what it is because no one will care.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I came to Oxford um the very first time, so before my doctorate I did um an exchange yeah, I went to Oxford and then I just realized what it meant because you know I was surrounded by philosophers and theologians, in particular, even theology in itself, right?
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: A discipline that just doesn't quite exist in France, apart from maybe Strasbourg, sort of you know, a Zaran thing because they have a special status or whatever, but the rest of France is not really doing any of this, really.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: Again, maybe a generalization uh that's a generalization.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so not only I would be surrounded by people who had access to this sort of knowledge I was increasingly thriving, you know, thirsty for, but also the practice of music in that context within the chapels gave me a sense of embodiment of the thing I knew I was missing, and then the more I understood it, the the thing that I just realized I was very thirsty for.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so I converted actually in Oxford during during COVID actually, um because the questions I had around the sort of, you know, what is what is truth, what is what is what is a sort of key.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, those are massive questions, but what do I know that is true in the world during COVID?
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I was extremely depressed during COVID, it's a horrible, horrible time.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um I just realized that it was Christ, that it was just it it never happened as a sort of massive uh Eureka moment or sort of illumination or whatever, but sort of slow sedimentation of things, especially through the embodiment as a singer and as a very avid breeder of like something is happening there, something has inhabited the minds of those people, and I I need to know what that is, and then it just transformed into I think I have faith.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think I just don't have the same questions that were preventing me before from um achieving, you know, my my path towards Christ.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: So to be fair, you were asking me as a Catholic, but in Oxford in particular, you know, the the Anglo, the Anglo uh um sort of high church Anglicans are sometimes more Catholics than the Catholics, and the Anglican Church has had a massive role in my path towards conversion, actually, especially not just as you know a singer in chapels that were Anglicans, but also at PewZie House, where obviously the Anglican church and the people there are just wonderful.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: But obviously, I chose Catholicism because there were elements of doctrines that were speaking to me and I thought were just objectively more true than others.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess this is back to your point about culture.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is well, so there was something cultural there that didn't make as much sense to me as a non-English person, which is I love England uh and I feel like I'm a very welcome guest, and I'm so grateful for it.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, I see the civilization context thing as you know, the whole continent.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, the best place to to live that truth is to be part of the church, the church that has been there since the beginning, uh, which unfortunately is not the Indian church, uh, but it's is the Catholic one.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I could spend hours speaking to you about this.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I've been through a similar arc, though not one as given I'm not a classically trained singer, but I totally empathise with the idea of choosing the church that is there continentally, that's been there since the beginning.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: I did the same, found it very hard being an Englishman to do so.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but what one thing we should uh plant a flag in, and it's really just for people to recognise, and I would say cultural conservatives in England particularly, because much of what people I think are trying to hang on to are the vestige of the Anglo-Protestant order, which there's there is much to hang on to from that.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_02: I I I won't I won't disagree, but the reality is it is over, and that there was a thousand years of a different order before that.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_02: That took various different phases, and so the question is is what comes next.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I've heard Pierre say this before, is everything is to be contested now, and I think what we all need to get our heads around is what is the order we all wish to bring into being.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: We can squabble over things that are barely there anymore, that even those people who steward those institutions that are the last prestigious of that order don't even want to carry it on.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_02: So, what do we do with that?
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so it really is all up for discussion.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: We need well, we need to also stop romanticising things just because they are aesthetically pleasing to us.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_00: So um I know some people, some priests in some churches, or I know of some priests who have, I'm gonna use a terrible word, although it's not it's not quite desecrated, but have have sort of scorned a bit the beauty of their churches because they I remember one person telling me about they used a sort of golden paint spray thing because they were just sort of renovating something in in in a church in London that is like a very good church, by the way.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I'm not talking about the oratory, just if anyone uh uh is doubting me, it's not the oratory, it's a small church, but it's a true story, and sort of sort of painting like this.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, the first thinking of this like, are you mad?
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_00: Are you crazy?
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're the custodian of this, and you're just like sort of, you know, golden pain spread.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: So even the people who on the right in particular, although again, I don't want to make too too many generalizations, it's it can be across the political spectrum, feel, oh well, naturally those people know what the good is, know what beauty is, and so and so forth.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: They will not make those kind of mics.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: They also do because they're human.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we all make mistakes and so and so forth.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to stop making those sort of um, I think at least that's how I that's how I live with things, sort of um prejudices just because, again, aesthetically things please us and things are comfortable.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um But it's again, it's true that now that we've said all of this, um, we need to build, rebuild, or sort of move forward.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: And and I don't think that the I don't think the solutions to it have to be crazy revolutionary.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, going back to the basics is exactly what we need.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, there will be a lot of things that will be creative in different ways, and you know, the kind of policy work that I'm preparing with PR support is um, you know, it has not really been done for quite some time.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure that there will be a way to use even AI to sort of disseminate those findings and so on and so forth.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to we need to go back to first principles and we need to go back to the just the basic ideas that humans are fallible.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think, you know, sorry, I'm I'm I'm distracting myself, but going back to Provide's questions about how my faith has informed also my my attachment to culture and art, there's an element of we are fallible, we are in a fallen world, and people will make mistakes.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: God knows that I did, and I know and love lots of people who have.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, part of a culture and part of a theory of culture is understanding how we deal with that fallenness.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, um, if we are unable to forgive people and to, you know, make sure that within the culture things can be resolved with at the very least some form of like neutral state or even better happy ending, then we also don't create the structure for, again, any creativity to happen.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_00: It used to be in the past that those systems of the the culture in itself being able to resolve its own tensions happened and it yet, you know, was able to lead towards more creation and originity and novelty.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, throughout the 16th and especially then 17th and 18th century, the type of aesthetic orals I have in mind had to do with opera and theatre, about you know what to put first, the word or the harmony, in what way, or what did you have to put on stage for a perspective to come to life.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_00: Those were very, very vicious quarrels.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, there were the culture wars of their times.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: But they never they never then just gave birth to a sort of completely schizophrenic culture where there is like one clan thinking like this, another one thinking like this, even maybe a third one.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: People would just sort of assume that a question is broadly resolved and we move on, and maybe we can come back to it or whatever.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's a fruitful debate rather than something that is cancelling people in the way, at least that things are happening now.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: Don't get me wrong, people in the past lost their jobs or whatever, also, to be fair.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and nowadays it feels like we haven't even had this system of forgiveness and being able to work even with people that we don't like.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think again, the right for all of its talk about snowflakes or whatever, is not very good at settling its own disagreement within itself or with the rest of culture.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: The example I gave earlier of like, you know, people in right-wing circles using AI because they don't see any problem with this kind of aesthetic slop or whatever.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, no, like this is really bad, and we need to be able to have a disagreement about it, not because I'm against you, on the contrary, I'd I'd like, you know, we we share some common ideals and goals, and I do want some of them to, you know, come to fruition.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: But also if you don't allow me to engage with you seriously friendly on that issue, and you only take this as, are you against me, or you know, you are you are a political enemy, whatever, you're playing the exact same game as the other political camps that you otherwise, you know, you are very happy to characterize as snowflakes or whatever.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the this is part of what I think needs to happen on both sides of the political spectrum and all across it.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we're very, very far from this at least becoming systematic.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: But again, we know places like Verduran show that it can happen, and in you definitely, I definitely hope that it will it will happen more and more.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, fingers crossed, I know there are lots of uh pockets of resistance, uh small, serious, uncompromising.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, Vedera's one of them, some your colleagues, uh Morgan Watkins, Oliver Bennett at the base are another.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_02: And these are not isolated.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think people are beginning to join forces in some way.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_02: So, so here, here, let's uh have more of that.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_02: Lola, this has been a fascinatingly rich discussion.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_02: But before I let you go, I do need to ask you the question ask all of my guests, and that is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it was a moral absolute.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_02: I know you have just given your conversion story, uh, not just a moral absolute.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, or it could be something more quotidian and concern, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think I've I've already touched on those things.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: So sorry that the answer is going to be tedious because it's going to be a lot of what she said, uh, which is just me in the past few minutes, but obviously in terms of massive moral absolute um faith and and and the church and being being uh an active participant in it.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think what I've I've touched upon a tiny bit and I'm happy to develop slightly more, but is is this idea of having to expect in people the best as much as of course we need to be prepared to expect the worst.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: So um I think it's very easy to give up on good as a moral absolute because life is made of massive hurdles all the time, happens like right, left, and center, whether it is in your personal life, um, in your love life, in your in your health or whatever.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact is that without being naive, and if anything I've said before, you know, disclaimer, I'm more naturally pessimistic than anything else.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to be able to see in other people the capacity for redemption and change, as much as some people can change, which is not always the case, uh, definitely not for some people.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to be able to say, okay, we are re-entering a debate with one another on sound grounds, and even if there's been sort of, you know, bad blood before, whatever, let's be able to be mature about it and dull about it and reassess the worst the the worst for and slip the best in our discussion and in one another.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because if we don't, how much can we expect ourselves or the other to change their mind?
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this this has been something put to the test a tiny bit recently with the assisted suicide bill, for example, where it's been beautiful to see lots of MPs changing their minds and and sort of allowing themselves to do so on moral grounds, but also almost on aesthetic grounds.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: One of the questions that is fascinating to me is how people aesthetically associate themselves to things, which is a tiny bit sort of oblique thing to what um Jonathan Hayde might talk in The Righteous Mind, for example, where we have those irrational ways to look at problems or whatever and to settle our moral order.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think there is an aesthetic dimension to this, which again can be the discussion for another podcast.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't often enter the realm of politics like this, but very obviously lots of people, and I think for the best in the House of Commons change their mind.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it is possible, and we need to be able to make this more fec and more fruitful.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so that leads me to then whenever I am discussing a deal, whenever I'm discussing something complicated, I try to assume first that the person in front of me is equipped with a piece of knowledge that I do not know and a sense of redemption or sense of being able to see the best in something that I maybe I'm incapacitated myself.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I need to raise myself to that level.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think when younger, you just don't have the same attention, curiosity, or sensibility to achieve this kind of thing.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying I'm perfect at all.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, I'm I'm thriving to this sort of level of, you know, accepting, you know, sort of epistemological humility as well, which is I don't know everything.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the person I'm talking to might know something, and therefore I might change my mind, but also that person might change their mind.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it's something I don't see a lot in in politics in particular, but again, that's a generalization I do lot do know a lot of people who have changed their mind, definitely on culture, for example.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: I know lots of friends who are a bit more libertarian than I am, who have started changing their minds about those things.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think, again, you know, instead of um telling them, I told you so, and being petty about it, on the contrary, let's be, let's, let's rejoice, let's be merry and let's work together.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this is typically something that is a problem when it comes to some of the big cultural issues of our time when it comes typically to immigration or to questions like transgenderism, for example, where the effect of the differences of opinion have had enormous impact and realities in our lives.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so it is too complicated for the people who've been on the wrong end of all of this to accept that they've had a part of to play in all of this.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be able to rescue some of those people.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: I know lots of people on the right will disagree, that's fine, but we need to be charitable and Christian about it so that we don't make more enemies of them as they used to be.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_00: We need to make them allies, we need to work with them.
• 1:05:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a truism, but we live in a society, right?
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: We need to sort of, without saying, cumbaya, my lord, of course not, uh, but we need to be able like to have a sort of entente cordiale also among each other.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if anything, sectarianism has been one of the good examples of this being a very, very difficult thing to do in contemporary, contemporary years.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you've certainly given me much to chew on intellectually and look forward to putting a pin in it for the next time and pick up the mics.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_02: Lola, before I let you go, time to plug where people can find you online.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_02: You've already done uh a mini plug of an upcoming book.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'd love to hear more about that.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: Where can we find it?
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_02: When's it coming out?
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_02: And what else can we expect from you?
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I I'm I curate uh a substack which is free and will remain free for the end of days, uh, which is called Art Attacks.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um I write regularly for different newspapers, but at the moment, because I have this book which is with the publisher Polity, uh Pretty Books, and it's called Artless, uh, on questions of the post-cultural state, about how cultural policy came to become a thing and came to be uh um you know developed, uh, and then going back to sort of art from first principles of what is art for, what is culture for, what is the place of the state in all of this, and then looking at current affairs in terms of yes, the left have done a lot of bad things, but have you seen what the right has done as well?
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not so much better.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that will be a manuscript that I'm George May Dita, if you see this, I promise to you that I will deliver by the end of the year, please believe me.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so hopefully by next year that will be published.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and otherwise, you know, I'm on podcasts like this one, and it's been such an incredible discussion.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: I will be very shortly at the Battle of Ideas, as I do most years.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so if you want to come and chat, I will definitely be talking on different panels, including one on the arts, and that is around the sort of 17th of October or something like this.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it goes without saying.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think people can hear from my intro and the conversation that I'm a big uh supporter of yours, so people must go and do all of those things.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_02: Buy the book, subscribe to the Substack, go to Battle of Ideas, all of those things.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_02: Lola, thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_02: Keep fighting the good fight until next time.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, John.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.