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Philosopher A.C. Grayling in the Most Mind-Expanding Episode of the Year · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get A Humans Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
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  Today, a delightful and scintillating and inspiring and disconcerting and thought-provoking
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  and discombobulating and many other multicellabic words in romp with one of the most celebrated
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  philosophers in the English-speaking world, AC Grayling is a British philosopher who has
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  written more than 30 books on everything from the nature of consciousness to the history
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  of freedom to what it means to live well.
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  Now he is warning about the fragility of liberal democracy, the possibility that we might
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  slide into what has been the norm for humankind throughout most of history in most places,
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  a chaotic and uncertain world in which the powerful do what they want.
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  But he also has a message of hope and he has some solutions.
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  From a speaking tour of Australia, he was kind enough to swing by the uncomfortable
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  conversation studio and sit down with me to discuss the crisis of meaning in the West,
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  the rise of authoritarianism around the world and what remains of the self when the machines
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  get too smart.
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  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one the only philosopher extraordinaire, AC Grayling.
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  It's an amazing time to talk to someone like you because you've done so much work
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  about war and peace and the justifications for war and I don't feel there's been a
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  moment in my life where I've been more uncertain about what exactly are the rules of the game
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  are when it comes to war.
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  What do you make of living in this world at this moment?
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  It's terribly disappointing.
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  You know, I think probably everybody at any point in history has thought they've lived
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  in bad times, but I think we live in particularly bad times now because we've got a whole, you
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  know, kind of super storm.
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  We've got climate.
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  We've got AI.
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  We've got Trump.
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  We've got the rise of authoritarianism largely to do with Trump because he's empowering
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  people to think that it's okay to act that way and be that way.
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  So we've got a whole lot of things kind of coming together and destabilizing everything.
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  Indeed, lots of bets are off, you know, because Trump has just absolutely torn down the
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  fabric of trade and treaties and international relations, which very, very imperfectly but
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  have nevertheless kept some kind of stability in the fabric and that's torn to pieces now.
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  So it's very difficult to imagine how we're going to go on.
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  It's interesting that you say that people always think they're living in bad times, but
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  we are living in particularly bad times because bad is a harsh choice of word.
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  I always try to sort of think, you know, I think it's actually bad or are they challenging?
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  Are they complicated?
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  The data they life of most people who are listening to this, if they actually got
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  offline and stopped focusing on, you know, bombs in Iran and what's going on abroad
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  is probably good, probably better than it's been.
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  Maybe not, maybe.
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  Great philosophical answer coming up here.
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  Yes and no.
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  So I'm with you on thinking that if you're going to be positive, if you're going to think,
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  look at times of chaos and complexity and also times of opportunity, we might be learning
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  something from this.
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  We might recognize that too many lines have been crossed and we want to get back and put things
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  in order.
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  You know, that is a well possibility.
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  It's not only imaginable, for example, in the United States, that people recognize that
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  the constitutional order, which they treat as sort of holy wit because the founding fathers
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  had all established it and so on, actually need some modification because it hasn't worked.
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  It's let through the net an idiot and Trump in the White House and he's making a massive
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  of things, not just in the US, but well, right.
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  And so they're going to have to think, well, if we go back to the original idea, Hamilton
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  for example, now a musical star, of course, he set up this electoral college in order and
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  I practically quote him here to ensure that no unfit person would become the chief magistrates
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  of the land.
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  And you know, by any object of standard, well, whatever else you think about Donald Trump,
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  he is a manifestly unfit person to be in the White House and he's gathered around him
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  in the second presidency, a lot of unfit people who just, you know, lick his boots and
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  other parts of his anatomy and as a result, we're seeing a terrific mess.
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  You know, it seems to me unquestionable that the intelligence services and the military
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  and the US said to him, don't do what you're doing in Iran.
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  But because the radius of his attention is very, very short and also be followed by
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  bachismo and narcissism and, you know, thinking that Iran would be like Venezuela and so on,
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  he's just gone ahead and done something.
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  I think really at the bidding of that Nyahu who's been longing for this happen, he's
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  gone ahead and done this and the results are near catastrophic and may even be because
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  you see a man with his degree of pride and his thinness of skin cannot face what he is
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  facing which is defeat, he's being defeated in this conflict with Iran at the moment.
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  Iran has got everybody by the uncomfortable part of their anatomy.
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  Well right, I mean, if you think about the fuel crisis here in Australia and you think
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  about the anxieties in South Asia and East Asia, where all there sort of energy or most
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  of it comes from, you know, really it's a very bad situation.
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  So I think bad is the most used for where we are at the moment.
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  But you know, I quite like the optimistic tinge to challenge and complexity.
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  Yeah.
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  Well, I mean, I think there are two components to my pushback.
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  One is the one that you identified which is in every challenge.
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  There is also an opportunity, but the other is also the recognition that a sort of almost
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  a Stephen Pinkery kind of approach to, you know, if you look at the metrics of the way
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  we're actually living, we are living a long time and we are healthy and we are, you
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  know, we avail ourselves with consumer devices, the likes of which previous generations
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  would have been amazed by.
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  And so I'm just sort of averse to my generation and younger being so miserable all the time
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  because there's so much stuff thrown in our faces about how terrible everything is.
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  When in actual fact, if you go outside and you touch the glass and you smell the air
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  and you, you know, there is a lot to still like.
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  But let's just park that quibble because no, no, let's hang on to that because I mean,
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  I like very much your take on this and very much want to be able to agree with it.
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  The problem that I have is that it seems to me that those of us who have lived in the
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  West and the more advanced economies of the West over the course of the last several decades,
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  in fact to any of us who've been around since the Second World War, have lived in what
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  might be an unusual time in history because we've seen generally speaking a lot of peace
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  in the West anyway, a lot of progress, a lot of material comfort, we've seen even capitalism
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  which has, you know, very big question marks all around it has lifted one and a half
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  billion people out of absolute poverty which is a tremendous success.
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  And Stephen is right, Stephen Pinker is right that the proportion of people who have died
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  in violence since the Second World War anyway and indeed increasingly over the last few centuries
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  maybe even did he, he's right over the last couple of millennia has, has reduced.
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  So in all those ways, there are things, there are positives to accentuate, I agree.
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  But as I say, this might be an unusual time in history.
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  Most people, most places have been where we seem to be at the moment, which is in a time of uncertainty, chaos,
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  imponder abilities, overpowerful people with overpower, overpowerful militaries,
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  trying to bully people into line and to get their way not by exercising restraint and principle,
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  not by discussion and diplomacy, but by just crashing about.
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  And that is what Trump is doing.
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  And if you put an idiot in charge of a huge economy and a huge military,
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  you know, this is going to be the result.
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  It's going to damage things in a way that might take a long time to restore.
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  Yeah, I mean, I certainly worry that we're coming to the end of an unusual,
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  a normal spirit in human history and your recent writings don't encourage me in that way either.
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  But the, so the pro Trump retort to that would be that we've been sitting on our hands.
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  It was since the end of the Cold War and not really doing much and forgetting about both the forgotten people
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  economically in the rich countries, the, you know, the industrial towns of Northern England,
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  the Appalachian towns in the United States.
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  We've done a lot of jaw jaw and talk talk with some of the worst actors in the world.
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  And we've been hoodwinked again and again by them.
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  And there was no evidence that the Iranians were genuinely committed to giving up their capacity
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  to at least get close to breaking out to a nuclear weapon and that that sort of naive faith
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  in the post war liberal order had exhausted itself a bit and it was worth throwing a few things at the wall
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  and shaking, shaking the snow globe and see what happens at the end of it because it's preferable to the status quo.
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  Good points. I think that's right and everyone digs into it a little bit.
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  I think the fault lies with us in a way for being complacent and thinking everything's okay
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  for accepting the Fukuyama thesis that history has come to an end
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  because we found the right way to organize things so we can stop bothering about it.
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  But then we're reminded very forcibly about what's happened.
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  Plato's remark, you know, that if you stop paying attention to politics because politics never stops being attention to you,
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  a bit like war, you know, you're, you're going to loosen your grip.
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  That old saying that our liberties, our security, the tenor of a life which is good for individuals to live
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  in a good society which is well organized and which tries to be decent and inclusive.
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  That takes vigilance, it takes constant work. You've got to keep baiting the ship because the ship is always full of holes.
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  The holes in question are individual appetites and power seeking and hunger and resentment and historical problems
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  that linger on into the present like stones in the shoe, you know, so you have to be vigilant and you have to be working always.
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  You've got to keep, you've got to keep peddling.
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  And I think to your point, what we've done is we've stopped peddling and we've been complacent about it and here's the result.
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  In fact, if you look across the landscape of politics everywhere, we see the rise of far-right parties.
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  And the far-right parties in question have, they've got smart, they've recognized that there are real weaknesses in democracy that they can exploit.
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  Those weaknesses are, you know, Janus faced. I mean, they have positives.
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  The fact that we get together and discuss and agree and try to reach consensus and take a bit of time to think about things
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  is a very good thing in its own right. But on the other hand, it doesn't contrast very well with an autocracy where decisions can be made quickly
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  and where things can change quickly as a result.
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  China is the wonderful example of how well an authoritarianism works on the economic front at least.
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  But at a huge cost, the cost of individual liberties. Anyway, one could go on and on.
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  So we're talking about the pluses and minuses and the way they interact with one another.
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  But I mean, again, to go back to your point, because I mean, I do think you make a very important point, which is that
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  there's still a lot of good things around a good possibilities.
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  Also, a lot of good structures too, which wouldn't take that much actually to amend to get us back on track a little bit.
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  And it seems to me, and things I've been writing in the last few years, are all being about how if we would adjust certain things in the way we run our politics and government,
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  we might be able to get back on track. We might be able to cleave to those ambitions that we had for a good society.
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  Like what?
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  Well, I think, for example, the electoral systems and constitutional orders are trying to get party political campaigning out of government.
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  Because if you, you know, we have to have a political discussion in society. We've got to discuss with ourselves what our direction of travel is,
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  what our public policy headline issues are, and what we're going to do about them. Yes.
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  So that should be vigorous. You know, democracy should be noisy. There should be a lot of dissent and contradiction and so on.
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  But once there's a decision made about who's going to be operating believers of power, those people have to do so under very strict constraints.
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  And there, there has to be a, a sense of just exactly what the duties and responsibilities are of people who are either elected or appointed to office it in government.
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  And that the purpose of government itself should be for all the people, not just for the people who voted for you or denated money to your political party.
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  And that the processes of government are trying to reach really good, sensual, common sense solutions to the problems that always come up in a society.
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  Should be as bipartisan as possible. There should be as consensual as possible.
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  Because they should be directed not at winning the next election, but at doing what's best by our best lights now.
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  I mean, sounds nice. And every time you hear a Republican on a talk show, they say, let's put an end to this partisan bickering and work across the aisle.
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  And you know, let's pull together in the direction of a greater America. And every time you hear a Democrat on a talk show, they say, let's end this partisan bickering.
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  Let's all pull in the same direction. And I want to work with my friends across the aisle. What's stopping it?
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  Well, of course, they have the merit of being right, OK? And what's stopping it is the fact that as a result of the extension of the franchise over the last couple of centuries, as more and more people have got the vote,
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  so political parties have had to become more and more organized and disciplined.
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  With the result that representatives in legislatures tend to be representatives not so much of their constituencies or the country's interests, but of their parties' interests.
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  And so you get partisanship. Now, this is something that was foreseen and warned against a long time ago by James Madison.
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  In the 10th Federalist paper, he said, factionalism, party politics, party divisions would ruin democratic government because it would turn into a squabble over who's going to run things.
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  And if you look even at what happens in so-called liberal democracies, what tends to happen is that between elections, you have effectively one party rule.
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  Whereas in places which have really proportional representation systems, like most of the European countries, for example, what you get is a lot of parties in the legislature, a lot of horse trading about coalition government.
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  And then in the end, you get pretty centrist kind of policies being enacted as a result of the fact that support for a government is always contingent upon some big issue for that particular party getting some attention.
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  And that seems to me to be a good thing. Most people think it's a bad thing. For example, they look at the Netherlands.
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  The Netherlands has an election. Nine months later, they get a government after all the bickering and talking time. And people say, my God, that's terrible.
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  I say it's great because what's happening is that all the diverse voices, desires, attitudes, interests in the society are kind of warming their way through into something which is admittedly an uneasy patchwork of consensus.
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  But better that because it drags in from the extremes of both wings to something which has a chance at any rate of being better for the country than if one highly partisan, highly ideological group have managed to get into power.
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  So suppose that you don't have the luxury of living in a Dutch system and you live in the United States or to a lesser extent the UK.
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  I think Australia is a little bit better placed because we have an actual democratic senate that is a real bit stronger than the House of Lords.
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  And so you do sometimes have to get that horse trading even despite the fact that you might have two political parties who are vying for power in the lower house.
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  Although with the rise of the far right, who knows if now we have a third player as you do in the States in the UK as well.
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  But suppose you've got a system where it's basically we're going to crown a king for three or four years.
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  There is an argument that I hear sometimes from people on the left like Ezra Klein in the States which is the actually America system is so hamstrung by rules and checks and balances that what you get is feckless presidents who can't really do very much.
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  They can declare war and go they can do foreign policy which is the one thing they can do but domestically it's hard to get legislation through they usually don't control the House and the Senate.
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  They then have to bump up into all of these other regulatory and bureaucratic restrictions.
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  There's such an aggressive legal system that people can challenge everything all over the joint and nothing gets done.
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  It's impossible to build ice beat rail. It's impossible to do things a million ways from Sunday because there are so many throttle points and choke points in the American system.
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  The argument there is actually it would be better if you could just elect a party they do whatever they want for their term and the public judges them on whether or not they like it and then they can boot them out.
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  But at the moment people feel paralyzed by a system that doesn't seem responsive and doesn't seem to actually be able to win at the will of the people because there are too many it's too clogged up.
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  Well this is another yes and there is a situation in a way because the system is built to be like that. I mean the whole tracks of balance and it's piety of course is absolutely foundational to the idea of the structure in the US until you get to a situation where there are majorities in both houses of Congress and a packed Supreme Court which is the situation at the moment.
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  And then executive power becomes unbridled and well and that's what we're seeing with Trump at the moment. I think the founders probably thought that if you had enough quarreling enough checks and balances enough hampering that the outcome that squeezed from this you know strangle whole situation would generally speaking be better than having a dictator and having a tyrant yes that having a king yes I mean after all that they were reacting to a situation where a king had to
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  tried by fiat to you know say what needs to be done and what the colonists in North America were subjected to it didn't want that so they wanted to build a system where it would be impossible for anybody to have that role.
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  But as we see the structure if populated by too many people on one side of the argument can lead to the situation we've got now.
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  Overweening well I would argue it's not just too many people on one side of the argument it's the fact that a whole bunch of people in the legislative branch have failed to act as legislators and have acted as essentially like easily executive branch and the founders created three co-equal branches for a reason expecting that the legislative branch would be a check on the on the executive and it's just not doing any of that.
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  In fact the problems kind of go down into the roots here because if you think about the house representatives in the U.S. it's it's it faces elections every two years and so the representatives are eternally in the campaign and fundraising cycle which is very distracting obviously.
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  And also because of gerrymandering and the way that having just two political parties who take up all the political oxygen in the state between them can as a result end up in the situation they in fact have in the U.S. which is that over 90% of house representative seats never change hands.
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  Whenever there is a change of majority in the low house it's marginal it's just a just a few people so that the two parties get this grip and when you have that you get polarization you get an abyss opening between the two parties and their attitudes and for all the fine talk about reaching across the aisle and being bipartisan party constraints the fact that you're representing your party line means that it becomes.
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  Yes we see this with budgets in the U.S. they cannot agree a budget for this that the other because you know that the divisions are too deep for any kind of reaching and as you say because of gerrymandering and because of the way the primaries are in the states those people when you know they have to answer to their base when they go back to the next election and they they can be primary from a more extreme you know a person who is more devout and pious in their in their cataclysm of party loyalty than they are.
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  Quite interesting you know to look at the contrast or comparison between the U.S. and the U.K. today so we have a labor government in the U.K. with a substantial majority in the House of Commons which is these sovereign House I mean no other body in the Constitution can overall the House of Commons it is an absolute sovereign body it can it is the locus of power in in the state the people are not what the people do with their.
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  Vote in the kind of voting system we have is to rather feebly give their consent you know between elections but here you have a big majority in the House of Commons on 35% of actual votes cast now by no stretch of imagination is this democracy it's the artifact of an electoral system which over magnifies a number of seats in the comments on very very small shifts of opinion in the House of Commons.
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  The country depending where those shifts happen in which constituencies so on you get this inflated kind of effect and it's the result of our plurality voting system the first pass the post voting system which the two major parties labor and Tory like to hang on to in the hopes that they can have these inflated comments majorities.
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  Explain this for American listens because it gets a little bit in the weeds American listens will have heard of what are they what are they call a preferential voting in the states they call it rank choice voting which is what we have in Australia so people might be familiar with that you give a number next to each one and then if the if your first choice doesn't get across then your second choice will go towards so you you end up with them slightly more prefer your voting for the party that ends up getting in is the one that people hate the least rather.
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  And the one that people like the most was in the UK first pass the post means you're not numbering anything is just whoever gets the largest first number of votes the largest number of votes goes through whereas here in Australia you could have a party that gets the largest number of votes but if they are at the bottom of the list for everybody who didn't vote for them then the rank choice voting could actually elevate the other party because it's the number two.
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  Like for more people that sort of makes sense is that a system that you prefer yes I do I prefer to I mean I think the single transferable vote actually is is probably an even better system how does that one work right or so here you actually limits that the preferences that you display and then your vote can be transferred to an alternative choice if your first choice doesn't so it's just a one of us who basically yeah it can be one or two.
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  Or I mean there are versions of it which are very like the preferential system or the the rank choice system and that the mathematics of it of course tend to be contested because people say are but this actually distorts the well preferences of the people and then you get the kind of result that you just described which is that the majority preference in the country in fact is not represented in government I don't hate that I don't hate having the the
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  party that is the least reviled being the party that is that wins power rather than the party that a narrow plurality of people are really keen on if other people hate it well it's certainly a lot better than a straight forward first place system because if you think about it suppose you have a constituency of 100 voters and 10 people put themselves forward for election and each of them get 10 votes each one gets nine and the last one gets 11 well the person with 11 votes goes to the House of
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  Commons representing 11 people out of 100 yes and all the rest you know I compete even if even if 89 of the 100 people thought that that person was the worst possible candidate which is the way that the Australian rank choice system would rule that person out but anyway let's not get to down the weeds because you're too brilliant to spend too much time talking about the details of electoral politics the rise of you mentioned the rise of the far right you know farage could well be an ex prime minister of the United Kingdom one nation in Australia is now outranking the mainstream
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  conservative party we're seeing the alternative for Deutschland in Germany we're seeing that you know the national rally in France rather than the politics of this what is it what does it tell you about I'm thinking about your work about on a happiness and what it means to lead a good life and be fulfilled and to be a flourishing person what does it mean about how we feel about ourselves
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  that this mood exists so again you know nothing is unique causal I mean there's not just one cause for anything so it's a complicated picture in which different reveal its influence have joined together into into a flood
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  since the 1970s since Reaganomics since the rise of neoliberal economics there's been a huge growth in the inequality gap all around the world but in the advanced economies it's particularly noticeable in that period median middle class wages have risen
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  just in rather small measure whereas wealth has accumulated in fewer and fewer hands but vastly I mean vastly we talk nowadays about people being billionaires and having hundreds of billions of dollars in net worth and you know people tend to not really to be able to conceptualize what that actually means
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  now often say to people well here's a way of thinking about it the million seconds on your watch is two weeks a billion seconds is 32 years so this is a huge difference and these people with very very very large net worth figures are able to do things like influence public policy in the direction of preserving their hold on that wealth
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  and that's very distorting for the process overall one effective it is that when there are cost of living pressures as there have been over the last few years you know it's very very disturbing it's very grinding for people who are struggling in the U.S. there are people working two and three jobs you know who are trying to make ends meet and in a in a polity where all the the real goods like education and health access to
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  having a place in that society which is valued by the metric that that society operates namely how well off you are and how much money you have and what you own and then it becomes very difficult if you feel that you're falling behind and that you're comparison with people who are very wealthy is great
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  we get a situation which as a result of actual choice decision there are people living in a conspicuous luxury and there are people sleeping on the street and looking for food in bins and I mean in any society that is an outrage that's incredibly immoral
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  again nothing I say is that I don't mind people being rich at all I'd like to be rich actually and I often dream about winning the lottery and when I do I think well you know a million bucks would be okay
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  and I think no it wouldn't it has to be five no ten no actually in the end I'm saying 50 million would be all right
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  so I wouldn't mind being being rich or even very rich just so long as the society itself has not made the decision
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  to let the people at the very bottom of the people who struggle the people who can't cope with the complexity of our modern societies
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  and just let them you know drift downstream so so it's a result of the way that inequalities have grown so that creates tensions
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  disaffection poverty in advanced economies is a relative thing because it's about
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  place and access in in society and access to those goods of health and education which tend to sort of level the playing field
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  the bits of the people have some opportunities and that's very grinding it causes resentment and causes
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  disaffection and that is something that populists and especially white wing populists who defend private
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  property and the sequestering of great amounts of wealth unlike left wing you know sort of far left
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  wing which is says only the party is going to be the private owner of everything but on the far right
• 30:54
  okay so they back up they back that that policy trend and that causes resentment too now in any
• 31:02
  country any state in the world there is a 20 or 25% of the population who are you know worried
• 31:12
  about the situation that they're in angry frustrated resentful and who will not really think about
• 31:20
  longer consequences than just giving a kick to the anchor of the people who happen to be in government
• 31:25
  at the moment I think for example in the Brexit vote in the UK back in 2016 a lot of people were not
• 31:31
  voting to leave Europe they were voting to put the middle finger up at the then government so so
• 31:37
  they're not thinking beyond what they feel to be the immediate consequence of the act that they
• 31:43
  perform and populists can can can take this 20 25% base and they can use that to kind of leverage
• 31:52
  the situation in their to their benefit as follows in the last election presidential election in
• 31:59
  the United States of America all those people who did not want a woman as president and who do not
• 32:05
  want another person of color as president and who definitely do not want a woman of color as president
• 32:11
  voted against Kamala Harris with the 25% maggot types and that is how Trump got in
• 32:19
  is that situation which is rather cunningly exploited by populists especially far right populists
• 32:27
  who see an opportunity and who try to move the the overton window so that all you can see through
• 32:35
  it is the things that really disaffect people or trouble them those people who worry about immigrants
• 32:41
  for example so they're all these foreigners who are ahead of you in the queue at the hospital
• 32:46
  all whose kids are getting into school you can't get your own kids into school in time you
• 32:49
  will exploit that you know forget all about the fact that a lot of the silent seek is the sound
• 32:55
  of suffering terribly in the countries they come from and they're just sheer humanity should
• 33:00
  encourage us to invite them in and share all the prosperity we have no no not that we're just
• 33:06
  going to look at all the negatives and we're going to be able to put together a coalition
• 33:11
  for that vote that gets us into power which maybe the last vote that anybody has I hope not
• 33:19
  I don't know as much as you do about philosophy I know quite a lot about American politics used to
• 33:23
  live in the States I would quibble with the just as an aside the articulation of the the
• 33:29
  Tamala and 20 25% coalition in this in this sense only anyone who is so motivated by sexism that
• 33:38
  they will not vote for any woman as president is already voting is already not voting for the
• 33:43
  Democrat anyone who is sufficiently racist to rule out voting for a person of color is already
• 33:49
  not voting for the Democrat so those are you can sort of ignore essentially that portion of the
• 33:57
  population like they're not winnable by the Democrats and I think it's been too easy for we on the
• 34:03
  left to absolve ourselves of responsibility for really connecting with economic hardship with
• 34:09
  questions of economic justice with questions of globalization with questions of immigration with
• 34:16
  questions of multiculturalism with questions of the integration of regressive migrant communities
• 34:20
  into the mainstream with questions of demographic anxiety from traditionalists who don't want their
• 34:27
  towns to suddenly look completely different than they have for centuries um demographically
• 34:33
  and to just say well the people who didn't vote for us just don't want don't like women and
• 34:38
  people of color you know what I mean so just I mean just add one thing to that which is
• 34:44
  you want in many of your other writings and speaking you want the demos to be able to
• 34:49
  to articulate it will better you know a lot of you'll talk about the problems with politics the
• 34:55
  way it currently is is their disengagement and you know the takeover of put more politics by partisanship
• 35:01
  um and it strikes me as inconsistent with that concern to wave away the immigration concerns
• 35:09
  if there are if you actually asked Farage voters and one nation voters they don't talk about
• 35:14
  they're being billionaires and you know them being left behind so it's sort of a slightly elitist
• 35:20
  way to sort of say that they have a false consciousness if they're mistakenly thinking that what
• 35:25
  they actually care about is the fact that their country is unrecognizable to them anymore because of
• 35:29
  the pace of immigration okay good good okay well you make some very forceable points there so
• 35:35
  three aspects in in what you say on the first one or on the sexism one and I'm not sure that I
• 35:40
  agree with you are on that point actually because um a lot of attitudes uh sexist and racist and
• 35:47
  homophobic and other kinds of attitudes come at us in different grades okay so there are people
• 35:52
  who claim not to be racists who nevertheless there's a tincture of something in some of their
• 35:57
  attitudes and some of the choices they make that are affected by by by that so there will be plenty
• 36:02
  of people who might vote for a democratic candidate if he's a man who may respect but who will be
• 36:09
  uh you know less keen about voting for a woman because they think they have justifications oh
• 36:14
  women are too soft and blah blah they weren't they weren't want to go to war when we need to and
• 36:19
  and so that that kind of of attitude could be uh I think rather more present in the minds of people
• 36:27
  who would vote for a democratic man but would not vote for a democratic woman okay so so I mean
• 36:32
  I think that there are lots of shades of of the coloration there uh and that might be in you know
• 36:37
  the apt term the the the second point you make is um I mean I think the a failure in a way of the
• 36:48
  conversation that a society has with itself and the failure of people who lead that conversation
• 36:53
  so this is not just politicians but all of us really to sort of educate ourselves and one
• 36:59
  another and to talk about things like immigration or what immigrants are and what they bring to a
• 37:05
  society you know if you point out to people that uh immigrants are actually net benefit to a
• 37:11
  society they actually add to the GDP they don't take away from it you know that and this is
• 37:17
  something which empirical data will help to support us they bring variety color diversity
• 37:24
  you know Vietnamese restaurants Chinese restaurants are all the rest of they bring
• 37:28
  into the society things that really add a lot those things tend to get forgotten
• 37:33
  when people see a lot a lot of immigrants moving it to their community what are they thinking
• 37:39
  is being lost or changed well some small see conservative view about a national identity or a
• 37:46
  uh a culture that to that point you generate they've only been half conscious of but they're now
• 37:52
  afraid that it's been threatened in some way well to feel that it's threatened and not to see the
• 37:57
  positives that might accrue is the result of this failure to self-educate about these matters
• 38:03
  and when you think about sort of great figures um you know I'm very much of the Carlisle versus Tolstoy
• 38:10
  view here that individuals charismatic individuals can make differences Nelson Mandela
• 38:16
  um really became first uh president of a poster party at South Africa for example
• 38:23
  by his attitude by his energetic endeavor to try to get a rainbow nation and not resentment and
• 38:34
  reprisals and you know revenge actually made made something of a difference not a lot of big enough
• 38:40
  differences it turns out but it made something of a difference in that very crucial period so you
• 38:45
  could get people you know leaders social leaders uh thought leaders and political leaders and so on
• 38:51
  who stand up and say look this is the wrong way to think about it there are better ways to think
• 38:55
  about it and it's a failure of of a society uh and that the people who conduct help to conduct
• 39:02
  its conversation not to try to do that it's not done enough actually I completely agree in fact
• 39:07
  when you said that Brexit was a middle finger to the ruling party uh to the ruling government I mean
• 39:12
  I thought and it was more than that it was a rule it was a middle finger to the government and it
• 39:16
  was a middle finger to me and to you and to the newspapers and to the bureaucrats and to Brussels
• 39:23
  and to the international order until like everything that people felt was um culpable in signing off
• 39:32
  on a world that people didn't feel like they had a say and I think that's the thing isn't it that's
• 39:37
  that's why immigration is such a sticking point it's because there's been a bipartisan consensus
• 39:42
  in these countries to maintain high rates of immigration and we're not even talking about refugees
• 39:47
  necessarily we're just talking about you know uh voluntary immigration and people don't feel like
• 39:53
  they were ever consulted about this and that there's no way for them to express their concerns however
• 39:58
  silly we might think those concerns might be about retaining some sense of Britishness it's also
• 40:04
  maybe the case that the benefits are unevenly dispersed and the hardships are unevenly dispersed
• 40:09
  I mean I love living I'm a xenophile I like living in a big you know cosmopolitan urban city I've
• 40:15
  spent all my life in New York and Sydney uh that's great because I have the privilege and the luxury
• 40:20
  to have the disposable income to insulate myself from people who I don't want to be near when I
• 40:27
  want to and to parachute into their great Vietnamese restaurants when I do um you know if I was
• 40:32
  living in a small town in England which was down on its luck and all of a sudden everybody in
• 40:38
  the street was a young person of color with a black mask over their face and knife crime was on
• 40:44
  the rise and I didn't know what was what was going on I might have a different attitude towards
• 40:47
  the benefit of Vietnamese restaurants in the city of London sure okay again good boys but actually
• 40:55
  what you've just said uh uh uh so it goes back to the first point that you made about the
• 41:00
  wealth gap not by itself being the thing that people are concentrating on um one has to
• 41:06
  generalize there because the point about the wealth gap is that's just simply one way of signaling
• 41:11
  what um people think of as the elites running things and having the choices and doing things
• 41:17
  their way and allowing things to happen that they don't like what they feel uncomfortable about
• 41:21
  so in a way the wealth gap is a kind of metaphor for everything that you've just said people
• 41:26
  have put their fingers up to you know this talk about elites I mean we're one of the extraordinary
• 41:31
  facets of the current political scene everywhere is that populists on the right most of whom
• 41:38
  you know public school or in the English sense of public educated and well off yeah exactly
• 41:44
  are saying to their potential constituency the elites are doing things their way and and and
• 41:51
  so actually you just made my first point for me there it's that is that sense of
• 41:56
  of a of a of a of a dislocation in society where people in that kind of base of of 20 25 percent
• 42:04
  who are really feeling disaffected who cannot articulate all the exact reasons why they do because
• 42:10
  this is an emotional response not an intellectual one particularly they just feel the difficulties
• 42:16
  they've got to have something to blame they they pointed in the direction of people to blame
• 42:21
  so immigrants and the elite and and the rest of it and given an opportunity to you know kick
• 42:27
  an ankle they will do it but kicking that ankle of course is a very short term measure
• 42:33
  and it's an an expression multi choice it's a you know yes it's an emotional thing and as well
• 42:38
  especially if the if the anti-oletists who they're voting for are actually elites in disguise I mean
• 42:45
  I had Stephen Frye here you know and he was I put a similar question to him about sort of the way
• 42:51
  that you know people of and he was like but who am I I mean what how are we elites he was like I'm
• 42:57
  a rich person talking on a podcast like that I don't control anything I don't have any you know
• 43:03
  Trump is a rich person who controls everything but he's the elite I'm not an elite I'm just a
• 43:08
  person who does television shows and writes comedy and I have both sympathy for that and also
• 43:15
  no look at I'm sorry but a little bit and all my bullshit detector goes off a little bit because
• 43:20
  we all know that I mean people like you and Stephen Frye are control what people feel is the narrative
• 43:29
  conversation right is an illusion that there's this this milieu that's creating a phony consensus
• 43:36
  that we're all supposed to be dragged along in the wake of yes yeah you're dead right I mean Stephen
• 43:42
  is just wrong about that because you know very here he is on on a on a broadcast platform
• 43:49
  but putting his point of view he has no opportunity to do that and just by being you know just by
• 43:55
  being a presence in the in in society um he does exert a certain kind of influence so people
• 44:02
  like very much what he doesn't says other people who won't but at any rate it will be you know
• 44:07
  that butterfly wing flapping that causes the currents that has an effect so so he's right about that
• 44:13
  I mean people who are in this fortunate position do do have an impact which is all the more
• 44:19
  reason why they should try to use it responsibly if they can and to understand it now look just just
• 44:25
  to get back to your your very good points about what people feel um when when they're in that
• 44:32
  you know itchy situation and then things happen like immigrants come into their community
• 44:37
  they're in a poor town looks as if you know other people are coming in and getting a
• 44:42
  getting a bit ahead in the queue uh and stand all that but but that is that is a failure to prepare
• 44:49
  let me give you an example climate change in the next um you know three to five decades
• 44:55
  is going to cause even larger scale migrations than we've seen in the past so back at the end of
• 45:03
  the northeast beginning of the second decade of this century as a result of conflict in the
• 45:09
  Middle East there were lots of people refugees leaving from Syria for example and elsewhere
• 45:14
  after the Arab Spring in fact just to tie climate into that you're aware that there was a big
• 45:20
  crop failure just before the Syrian revolution and civil war in the Arab Spring that made
• 45:27
  like the price and grain go up a lot and so a lot of people don't connect climate necessarily
• 45:32
  with the instability in the Middle East in that region but it actually was I mean yeah it did
• 45:39
  the course of climate change yeah disruptions that was also causing the unrest that gave
• 45:43
  right to the Arab Spring there you go there you go that's a good point but that that is a picnic
• 45:49
  in comparison to some of what might happen as a result of climate change and the big question we
• 45:55
  have to ask ourselves is are we are we preparing ourselves mentally for that are we are we talking to
• 46:01
  one another about how we're going to cope when there are tens maybe hundreds of millions of
• 46:07
  desperate people hungry and thirsty scared out of their wits about their kids futures and someone
• 46:15
  you know banging on the door and wanting help what wanting to come in and share with us
• 46:21
  what we might feel to be strange resources by that point too no is the answer I mean no preparation
• 46:27
  is being made for that we're always looking backwards we were looking over our shoulders as some
• 46:32
  preferred status quo to the extent that we want to build wars and fences the middle what's happened
• 46:38
  on the border of Mexico what's happened with all barn in in Hungary so we're not we're not preparing
• 46:45
  for that and the lack of preparation expresses itself already now in disaffection about migration
• 46:54
  in in our current countries somebody said to me that Germany with an aging population
• 47:02
  needs something like a net immigration of about a million people a year just to keep the GDP
• 47:07
  at the level that it is well that that's a sizable number in a country of eight million people
• 47:14
  and slower pressure on communities and while these attitudes remain as they are
• 47:21
  it it causes political dislocations and difficulties and it gives an opening to the people who
• 47:26
  can use it we can exploit it in order to get themselves into government and and this is a really
• 47:33
  worrying feature of a multi causal situation where there are lots of different pressures and
• 47:39
  which expresses itself therefore in the rise of the far right as we see everywhere and the
• 47:46
  correlative threat to the things that democracy whatever form it takes I mean even in a very imperfect
• 47:52
  democracy like United Kingdom civil liberties they're being eroded you know I mean fancy making
• 48:02
  the protests about Gaza into a terrorism issue I mean you know which is extraordinary in a country
• 48:09
  like the UK which once upon a time prided itself of being a place of tolerance and liberty and
• 48:14
  so forth so our civil liberties and crucially the rule of law now we've seen the rule of law fail
• 48:21
  in the United States every authoritarian regime is such that the people in charge have been above
• 48:26
  the law or have made laws that resulting rule by law like the Nuremberg laws and so on rather
• 48:34
  than rule of law which is impartially intended to protect people's civil liberties so those two
• 48:40
  things civil liberties and the rule of law are the other precious gems of democracy whatever form
• 48:46
  it takes and there are the ones that are directly under threat when you get more authoritarian
• 48:52
  sentiment in government and the actual authoritarian government I mean not not only are we not
• 48:57
  preparing for the rise in migration but I mean there's so many things that we're not preparing for
• 49:02
  that is crazy which is part of the point of your new book as well we need to be preparing for AI
• 49:07
  we need to be preparing for I mean even pandemics it's amazing that we're not you know we literally
• 49:12
  just had a trial run of something that is definitely going to happen again at some point and we're
• 49:19
  not testing the wastewater in all major cities for new pathogens that might be in people's poo or
• 49:26
  wee we're not stockpiling masks we're not doing you know all the obvious things that pandemic
• 49:31
  epidemiologists experts say we should be doing anyway um the the crisis of sort of meaning
• 49:39
  that we're touching on when we're talking about things like the way that people feel like they're
• 49:43
  disenfranchised and that they're not able to articulate their views into the mainstream and so
• 49:50
  they have these sort of perverted and dysfunctional ways of expressing themselves by sticking up the
• 49:54
  middle finger to the elites or voting for the far right we just had Easter and the religious person
• 50:00
  will say that part of what's going on in Western civilization is that where we've lost our
• 50:08
  our meaning and purpose essentially and that we're all just sort of self-interested individualized
• 50:15
  nodes bumping into each other listlessly and that religion provided an anchor that we've now
• 50:23
  lost as a famed secular humanist yourself and not a great fan of scripture do they have a point?
• 50:54
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