Latest / Thinking Class / #130 - Iain McGilchrist - The Industrialisation Of Man, The Loss Of Faith, And What The Western Mind Has Done To Itself

Transcript

#130 - Iain McGilchrist - The Industrialisation Of Man, The Loss Of Faith, And What The Western Mind Has Done To Itself · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm joined by one of the most important and original thinkers in the English-speaking world, Dr.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Ian McGilchrist.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, philosopher, and former Oxford literary scholar.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: He is a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a former research fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins, a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and since September 2025, the Chancellor of Ralston College, successor to Jordan Peterson in that role.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: McGilchrist lives on the Isle of Sky and is the author of The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain in the Making of the Western World, and the Matter with Things, our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Dr.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: McGilchrist and I think out loud about the difference between the actions and thoughts produced by the left and right hemispheres of the brain, the most visible symptoms of civilizational decay in Britain and the West, the key inflection points in history that set the West on a road to ruin, having previously defined the path to greatness, what the romantics were longing for in the industrial era, and why the nostal and why nostalgia is not a bad thing, but necessary, why we need more new romantics to show us how to live more fully human lives in the machine age, what the industrialization of man has done to our souls, what the world we have built is doing to our minds, and why mental health diagnoses are so prevalent amongst the young, the mistakes made by the West in becoming post-Christian.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: The mistake made by the West in becoming post-Christian, why Ian would rather die than set his relationship with the faith, and what Ian has not changed his mind on.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: This was a conversation I have wanted to have since I began the podcast.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Ian McGillchrist is an intellectual hero of mine, and I found this to be a nourishing conversation, and I think it will help deepen people's understanding of what they see in the world around them.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you find this conversation valuable, please subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack and share it with all of those who need to hear it.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Dr.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Ian McGilchrist.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Delight to be here.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's a delight to be here in this digital ethereal realm with you.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'd like to talk to today is about what I think is becoming quite clear now that something has gone wrong with the Western mind.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not only recently, it's not simply due to any particular government policy, but rather at a deep structural level.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Something that's happened over centuries, Ian, and that you've spent your career as variously as a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, and a literary scholar that trying to articulate its pathologies.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And your answer is that the left hemisphere of the brain that's built for narrow instrumental attention, it grasps, it manipulates, it controls, has colonized our experience, our civilization.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so this isn't just a medical observation, this is a civilizational diagnosis.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps before I ask the first question, I should say that I grew up in Northumberland.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: I left for the big cities of the north and London.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: I found myself working in the financial world, which is perhaps one of the great examples of left hemisphere dominance in modern British life.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then I returned to my home region in the lockdowns.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and following a couple of years of developing thinking classes and intellectual forum, uh, I recently went on a journey through England recording a six-part travel log, trying to find what remains of the old country before hypermodernity and and seeing what has been lost first hand.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what I've found were uh confirmed much of what you've written uh over the years from the ground up and not just through abstract argumentation and newspaper articles.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Ian, you you you've frequently cited William Offels' immoderate greatness, this observation that civilizations that are in their final stages are characterized by moral and practical failures of the ruling classes.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've I've seen that first hand, as I mentioned.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: What what do you think this this decay that we're seeing um is primarily due to?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um a good question, and not an easy one to answer.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And the first thing I think I ought to say is that um uh it's possible to misunderstand uh what you said uh as my believing that somehow the brain drives all these changes.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I I don't think that uh at all.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um when I say the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere characterize the various periods in in in Western history.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm not suggesting that the prime mover for this is the brain somehow.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's that what makes sense of these movements wherever they come from in the history of ideas, uh what makes sense of them is to see how they are reflected in different ways in which we can use the brain.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the problems is that one of these two ways of seeing is broader and is therefore capable of taking into its purview the narrow view as well.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: The left hemisphere's narrow detail oriented attention um is important and it can be taken under the the umbrella, the aegis of the broad open sustained vigilance of the right hemisphere.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: So when the right hemisphere is, as I put it in the title of the uh 2009 book, The Master and His Embassy, when it is the master, when it is in control, as it were, o oversight, rather, or a a better way of putting it, of the whole, um then both hemispheres get to be properly represented and to work together.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: But when uh the the upstart usurping um n know it all but actually ignorant left hemisphere um takes charge, then the picture of the right hemisphere the all important guiding uh oversight of the right hemisphere is lost.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's in one of those periods that we we now reside where the the the far more insightful, far more intelligent, uh in many ways healing ability of the right hemisphere to see the whole picture has been sacrificed because of an excessive locking into the world picture of the left hemisphere.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: The difficulty is that because it is narrow and self-referential, it's a very hard thing to break out of once you're stuck in it.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: And usually it needs either a very long period of time to elapse, uh for example the period that we used to know as the Dark Ages between the decline of uh the Roman Empire and the beginnings of the Renaissance, or some cataclysm that shakes things up to such an extent that we're forced to see things differently for the right hemisphere to regain its rightful um position as the overseer.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I guess what you're asking me though is i it's something else, is it?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I think so.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not necessarily.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: You did say that the the the primary the primary causes of what we're seeing around us is because of that left hemisphere dominance uh characterizing the age and I think specifically about Britain and and what we see, whether it's um I don't know, uh civic decline, um the the urbanization of uh not just cities but um small towns, uh the obsession with uh technology, machine life and all the rest of it, is um I suppose I was trying to understand um what we think the the primary causes were behind that which I think you've you've described.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well I I suppose um to to speak about something that needs to be um unpacked at greater length and and uh rather more subtly.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean one could say that a couple of important events in the history of ideas in the West seem important as part of the genesis of what we're looking at.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and one of them is uh no prizes for this, is the Enlightenment, um a hubristic movement which if I had been alive at the time I would undoubtedly have embraced wholeheartedly, because it seems to be a very intelligent um position that um I would have um embraced because it did away with a lot of um uh obfuscation and superstition and so forth, um and aimed for clarity, and of course clarity is a wonderful thing, but you you mustn't push clarity to the point where uh what you do is actually travesty something that cannot be made clear in that simple way.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise you lose uh what is of primary importance.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: I do believe that all the things that really matter to us cannot be made explicit.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, love, friendship, religious faith, our sense of nature, music, poetry, art, architecture, myth, all these things are the things that convey meaning.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: But if you if you go, okay, so what's the meaning?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I've got it in a few sentences, you've got it wrong.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that made me realize I didn't want to spend my life um teaching literature to people as I did in Oxford um in my twenties, was that I felt that the whole process uh involved taking something that was implicit and needed to remain implicit, something that was embodied and needed to remain embodied, something that was deeply contextual and needed to remain in that context and make it decontextualized, disembodied, abstract, general in nature, and effectively lose all its power.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: So um so the enlightenment is one thing, and then following in the heel on the heels of that, uh of course is that movement described as the Industrial Revolution, which really unfortunately did begin in Britain.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um not a prize I particularly um relish but uh there it is.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, uh the Industrial Revolution involved many things.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: First and foremost, it involved the an assault on nature and an assault on people and place.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: So people were uprooted from the places where for thousands of years their ancestors had lived and where they were buried in the churchyard and so on, and taken off and rehoused in something like battery farm buildings um on the outskirts of smoky cities, w operating machineries indoors, a complete um disjunction from their lives that were governed by the movement of the seasons, uh and by the sense of oneness with those that came before and those who were to come after.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so I see that as certainly the beginnings of many of the things that we now see.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Deracination, a sense of atomism, of the meaninglessness of uh life, because all the things that used to give life meaning, closeness to um uh a group of people with whom you shared a way of life and shared beliefs and and and looked out for one another, closeness to nature and closeness to uh a sacred vision of the cosmos.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh all of these things were suddenly ripped up uh and had to be reinvented if they possibly could in a completely alien landscape, that of the the burgeoning um industrial cities.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: So uh uh what I suppose I'm I'm trying to avoid saying is that any one thing caused everything else.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: So uh a point I want to make clear is that the brain is in constant evolution, it is true, and that evolution is uh one in which it is both responding to the environment and helping to mould that environment.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it is a reciprocal relation in which both the brain and the environment are moulding one another.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that environment, of course, includes uh history, philosophy, science, uh things like the Industrial Revolution and so on.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: So all of this is multifactorial, but one way that seems to me to explain so much and to make sense of it is that for whatever reason we have started to use our brains in a very, very unusual way, much to our disadvantage, excluding what the right hemisphere can tell us.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this is not just one hemisphere, the right hemisphere.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just like, well we've got two, does it matter?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: It matters hugely because they have different ways of attending to the world, different ways of bringing into being the world for us.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: And one of those sees far more than the other, and it is the right hemisphere.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: It is literally it attends better, it perceives better, it makes better judgments on the basis of what it perceives and attends to.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: It has a greater emotional and social intelligence and get this, greater cognitive intelligence than the left hemisphere is far more important for IQ.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it is basically the one that is enabled to fit things together, make sense of them, and deliver the world to us as a meaningful whole.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: When we neglect it, the world becomes a heap of fragments with no meaning in themselves bumping into one another idly and and purposelessly and meaninglessly.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And this, of course, is the picture that is portrayed not by the best scientists, but I'm afraid by the most vociferous um public voices of science these days.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Whilst I did not grow up in industrial England, growing up in a post-industrial England and then in a uh uh an information technology inflected industrial England, I um my days have been spent since I got into uh the professional managerial class um almost 15 years ago uh tapping away at a laptop, uh my life uh dictated to by Outlook calendar entries, hour-long slots here, half an hour slots long long there.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh I grew up very much a child of the cultural revolution post-war.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um all of the the old things were disregarded, really.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, once I left my hometown of of Hexham and I moved to the cities, I was an early school leaver.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually a pretty normal provincial kid, just normal ideas about the world, a sense of regional identity, but it did all start to dissipate the more I rubbed shoulders with the university class and started to see myself as a global citizen and um Britain being you know not particularly unique and perhaps uniquely bad, and my region being boring, nothing to be known about it.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: But what was interesting was um despite never having received any of these stories, inherited anything, um, any tradition in which to inculcate myself into, is I I was yearning for something to make sense of the world, but also to bring a bit of dignity to my own existence, I was drifting.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until I did two things really.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: One, discover classical philosophy and then Christianity, but then returning to Northumberland from having lived in London and the big cities, and it was the lockdowns, bizarrely enough, that led me to um start to encounter the world in a way that I wasn't able to before because I re-engaged with the people around me, the culture, the history, but also just spend so much time outdoors.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever I wasn't on the laptop, I was out in Northumberland National Park.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it led to this total flowering, I think, internally, a a deep connection to um parts of my mind and the world that I'd never experienced before.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: But by my own admission, uh since starting the podcast, and that becomes something that has become busier, it's more outlook calendar events and spending more time on the computer, is I know that I'm fighting against something.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: I know that I'm trying my best to reconnect to those things I was able to experience before once I broke out of the shackles of just abstract thought.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so my question to you, Ian, is what what is you the the psychological impact on modern man uh of the world that we live in, um, and perhaps the impact on the soul as well.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yes, well there's quite a lot to say about that, but I'll try and be focused about it.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um we know, first of all, that the three things that uh most profoundly lead to a sense of a fulfilling life and a fulfilled life and incidentally probably a happy life and certainly a healthy life.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Closeness to a group of people with whom you share your life, with whom you share your meals, with whom you perhaps worship together, um who you know will uh help you in need stand up for you and you for them.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that of course has been profoundly eroded partly by mobility, immigration and emigration, um the problematizing of a single culture in this concept I don't think anybody really understands about s you know, sort of um multiple points of view in a society.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it's good to have discourse, but you really do need to have a sense of cohesion.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing is closeness to nature and you know, a as I as I mentioned, since the Industrial Revolution, um most of us have been uprooted to some degree, uh at least in the West.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I think in about eighteen hundred, probably ninety-nine point nine per cent of the inhabitants of this earth lived in close proximity to nature.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: And even indeed at that point a big city like London had um more parks and wo trees and you know m much more of a feel of a uh um an inhabitable city um than than it would now be the case.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the third thing is the third thing that makes a huge difference to the sense of a fulfilled and fulfilling life is closeness to whatever you like to call it.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: I call it the sacred cosmos.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: A sense of that seems incredibly important to human thriving.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I'm not suggesting that you should espouse any of these things instrumentally because they'll they'll lower your blood pressure and decrease your risk of having a heart attack or a stroke.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: But incidentally they do do those things.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: But they are, as it were, the natural the natural ways in which we are equipped to live.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Aristotle called us Zoonpolitikon, which means the political animal apparently, but doesn't mean that.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: It means the social element from polis, th the city, the town.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: So we are social animals, and we come out of nature and return to nature.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: I have a uh a a private war on the word environment because of its grotesque implication that whatever nature is, it's something that just surrounds us.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas actually, of course, it's in us, and we are in it, and we will return to it one day.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um you know, w we're told that our education uh increasingly de emphasizes anything to do with religion.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Once again, of course, is one of the problems of multiculturalism is that, well, should we be um talking about the culture out of which Western Europe and Britain um emerged and which has always been central to our culture?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because should we not be doing a sort of supermarket view of the various religions, which of course in itself undercuts their power to um uh be not just abstract ideas, but something that we inhabit and that inhabits us.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: So all these things have been either dispensed with, damaged, or problematized in such ways that we no longer embrace them.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this goes a very long way to to explain the alienation of of modern man.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think also like you, that it was an eye-opener to me when COVID came along because um I mean of course I wouldn't wish it on our society again.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: It had damaging consequences for many people, particularly those who couldn't get out and couldn't meet e even people at a a a distance really.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um but for me it who am naturally a rather um uh sort of aromatic uh individual, um it it offered what I needed, which was uh large open spaces of time, of silence.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh this island, the Isle of Skye where I live, um i was quiet.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it should always be quiet and peaceful, that's what people come here for.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: But so many people come here for its wildness and its peace and its silence that the very fact destroys the thing they came for.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it then recovered it for a while, and it was magical.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I still remember the walks and things that I did during those those years.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it wasn't all all negative, it reminded us, you and me, of things that had perhaps got a bit driven out of our lives and needed to be brought back.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the things that has struck me just in in recent months is that although I recommend a life that is engaged and I myself partly by temperament and partly by the need to read and think and spend long solitary hours uh in a kind of thought and contemplation, I don't actually do the thing that I know would be healthier, which is to be involved in hands-on tasks.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, w what has happened to physical embodied skills making something beautiful?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um even carrying out ordinary daily routines, if you do them beautifully, as in that wonderful poem of George Herbert's, you know, um uh who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um that sense that just actually doing those tasks that involve making things beautiful, clean, orderly, uh they are creative tasks and they bring pleasure.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you allow yourself to to be there for them and don't think, oh, this is this is taking me away from I should be online doing all kinds of uh uh accounting things for my firm.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: And well, God, let us not think that that is what life is for, as they uh often say, you know, nobody on their deathbed thinks I wish I'd spent more time in the office.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely right.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I had an experience um uh five years ago in the the Ridgeway in the the southwest of England, where there's a uh w one of the uh only ancient forests left in in England that are there, but you can hear an A road in the distance.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I was meeting um a chap who former army officer um learned bushcraft through Ray Mears, and he did bushcraft courses.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I I wanted to be able to learn how to make my own fire, yeah, all those things that you'd need to do if you were cut adrift from the modern world and and spend the night in my own shelter.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: And what became grossly apparent was just how unbelievably ineffective I am at almost anything, because I spent all my years tapping on keyboards and uh like you, um, though certainly not to your your extent, developing an intellectual uh life, which is brings me great um um sustenance for sure.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: But those two days that I spent out there, despite having rough sleep, because I'm uh you know sleeping in a bug-infested shelter, but next to my makeshift fire, is um having gutted and and filleted a pheasant and tried to make um uh a fire and made the uh the implements that I was going to then um cook fish on, which I was filleting, all of those things and being surrounded only by forest um was one of the most um rejuvenating things I think I've ever done in my life.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I came back telling myself I'm going to learn all of those things.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't carry it on, but I have a yearning to.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, you know, um what you experience uh at at such a time is infinitely harder than it would become uh if you got into the way of living like that.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean you're you're you're confronting the worst aspects of it immediately, um, and yet you still felt that it was something that you you wished to have more of and that brought you joy, I think you said, which is absolutely wonderful.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, uh my friend in yours, um Martin Shaw, spent a long time living in uh I mean, I'm not sure it was quite that primitive, but something like that, um, in order to become one again with the the world, the the real world on which our feet are standing and in which we're in touch with um it's life.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and even even uh when you're living a more modern life, I have a friend who um um uh I I don't I don't like envy, but I am envious of him insofar as he is uh he's a he's a joiner and carpenter, and he makes the most wonderful bespoke windows and doors in this traditions, traditional style.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he spends it amongst other artisans that he's trained, and there's a there's a brotherhood there as well.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: And um and and off I go into my uh office job and uh connected to lots of people by digital calls and pushing out documents and bureaucracy and all the rest of it.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, this is a segue into the environmental conversation.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: So for a time I decided to scratch the itch of curiosity about an ideological spasm that took place in the corporate world during COVID ESG, environmental social governance, and so this was about bringing sustainability into finance.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh I will let you do the talking on this one, but my question to you is why should we be sceptical that cosmopolitan bureaucrats might be able to set um uh uh a a wise uh policy of sustainability for uh an industry or for a nation?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think the the key to it is perhaps summarized in that short word wise.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um when I talk about how we live now and and think now, um people say it seems to me that what you're saying is that we lack wisdom.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: How can we get wisdom back into our lives?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I have this horrible image that people go, yes, what we need is is wisdom.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now let's see.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um let's first of all define our terms, let's operationalize it into steps that can be taken.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and let's set up a committee that meets once a fortnight or once a month and and uh submits a report and after six months we look at how we've scored on our various outcomes and we you know and of course this is the opposite of wisdom.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: So and it I mean i in a simpler way, it's it reminds me of the the um sorry to speak disrespectfully of uh the city, but you know, a a trader who um is told that he will think more clearly if he's able to empty his mind and so takes up meditation instrumentally in order to become a a better trader and make more money.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so in itself you would not really be truly meditating, you would be embracing a practice for um for another purpose.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that that's the difficulty is that there is a difference between it's very obvious to me as a doctor, between those who whose job it is to develop systems about say medicine and those like me doctors or nurses who have spent years in training.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just to become a psychiatrist required fourteen years of of extremely hard work in training.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and that time is spent in in in the presence of suffering human beings, in relationships with them, in the task of trying to alleviate their suffering.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a humbling process, and it's one which rids you of all ideas that there are simple, clean, arithmetic, uh algorithmically codifiable answers.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um in other words, you have in a way you need to be broken, you need to have suffered, you need to have failed in order to succeed at this sort of task, if that's not too paradoxical.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I often think of this because I think you know, we we we may or may not want to go there later, but um I think of myself as a very poor Christian, but I do you know that there are a couple of things that uh I think you are a Christian, am I right?
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's right, yes.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well uh there are a couple of things that I often think of.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: One of them is um that r remarkable saying of the man whose whose son was cured of epilepsy, was it, who, you know, Lord I believe help thou my unbelief.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: And the the words that were in the s the prayer book at the beginning of uh the service of communion, um there were certain um sayings that could be said at the beginning, and one of them is um and it's from the Psalms, uh I think it's I can't remember for Psalm forty-six.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um The sacrifices of the Lord are a broken heart, a broken and a contrite heart, O Lord, wilt thou not despise.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I I uh that you know, that focus on yes, you have to embrace your brokenness, you have to lose all your certainties.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: And they need to be sh you need to be shaken into an awakening um if you're lucky, that will be the path to wisdom that is never fully acquired, but uh but better to be on that path than not.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I think of the the concept uh of Jan Patochka, a Czech dissident uh when Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet Union uh and a philosopher, he m developed this philosophy of shakenness, that we needed to be shaken.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: We needed not to feel uh the solid ground was all too familiar under our feet.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: We needed to to to be made to see things differently.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's how we are now, that we need to be you know, nothing except something that will really shake us into um a sense of humility and a sense of awe will bring back um a degree of of wisdom to our ways.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Building on that thread, thinking about various uh ruptures uh that that have taken place in European history, which uh hopefully elucidates the point.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: But um you you you wrote that the the the the Reformation replaced uh metaphysically divine authority and embodied practice with a human bureaucratic authority that was driven by status and power.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then the Enlightenment continued this movement as we've spoken about.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh then the French Revolution w was focused on replacing a a supposedly uh corrupt religion with a secular state, and all of this was uh ended up falling into a kind of singleness and purity uh and and losing all of this uh interconnected um uh qualia, I suppose, um, that we've felt through the ages.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then the industrial period came, and as you talked about, that that uh had a huge psychological impact on on man and and his soul.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then you wrote very movingly in the Master and His Emissary about um the the romantics, how they were ultimately longing for a pre-Reformation world that was no longer existing, it was a there was these shadows of the past.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose what I'd quite like to get into is what specifically they were longing for, what have been lost, that they could no longer access or were trying to.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: And are we seeing through this huge mechanisation of life, development of artificial intelligence, smartphones, and all the rest of it, uh a rise of a new romantic r new romanticism, Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, Freya India, as a as a rebellion almost against the further deepening of a left hemispheric world.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, of course that is that is our best hope.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um whether whether that comes about I don't know, but I uh I am sustained by the knowledge that it is very hard to predict the future.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: So people, you know, say, Are you a pessimist or are you an optimist?
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I say I'm a hopeful pessimist because the way things look is not good, but I always maintain hope, partly because it is a duty, but also because the track record of those who thought they could predict what was going to happen next has been very poor.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: And there must have been many times in history when people thought, well, you know, this is it, the writing's on the wall, um this is the end.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: So and in in perhaps even quite a short um space of time, um thinking radically altered, and it takes something pretty cataclysmic to do this.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that we are now I'm glad to say, most of us, not all of us, some people in a sort of autistic dream carry on imagining that um the second coming will be fulfilled by um uh replacing uh humans with with uh robots, AI.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I think most of us who've still got any kind of emotional intelligence and understanding realize that what's happening is enormously damaging.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's at these moments when you realise what it is that you've lost that you're enabled to move on to something positive.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: We we're so frightened of looking backwards, because we swallowed this enlightenment vision that um there will be eternal progress.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was a crazy idea.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: No civilization absolutely no civilization anywhere in the world ever has had an idea of of simple linear progress.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: It has always brought into its um vision uh some a degree of circular progress.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: I I I don't like the idea of going back to the past because you never can.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think that we are always on a spiral.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, if you come back to a place on the spiral where you see where you were on a lower term of the spiral, so in that sense you're closer to where you were, but you've now moved on.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that the you know the great strength of the Renaissance was that they rediscovered the ancient writers and they saw what it was that they had lost.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's in the seeing of what we have lost and that what we might have again, that people are inspired to work imaginatively towards recreating it.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now that is what I hope for us, is that we will be in not overcome with a f a sense of of hopelessness, uh a defeatism, but we'll be filled with a sense of urgent desire to bring about something genuinely beautiful and genuinely good and genuinely true again in the world.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean that that was why I I hosted this recent um event in Oxford at the Sheldonian on on the true, the good and the beautiful, because I think they are the things that still we're aware of how much we've lost them, and I think they still well they always will call to us.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: So um lovely bird coming over the line to me from your end, I think.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I I only mentioned the true, the good and the beautiful, and immediately a bird sings to us.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: So and so yes, I think that's right.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean w the the trouble with the word romantic is that it's overlaid with an unfortunate sense that it's um i it's somehow easy and fantastical.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in fact the romantic period was not only a period of almost unequalled greatness in the genesis of art and literature and so forth, but also was um uh a period of intellectual rigour, not of intellectual um sort of laissez faire.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: So behind the the famous sort of figures such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, there are the great German idealists, particularly Schelling, but also to some extent Hegel and so forth, um and Schleiermacher and so forth.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: And these these people um w were not easy to read and have been sometimes neglected by people because of that, but their message is actually not you know, with a degree of intelligent application is not difficult to follow, and it is extraordinarily important and speaks to us today.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that that that was a great step forward, and it was the Industrial Revolution that also both spurred it onwards, but in the end helped to extinguish it or make it feel cut off from its roots, and and helped it to uh I'm afraid over the period of the you know, late Victorians to to sort of begin to wither into a sort of sentimentality.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it is there to be rediscovered.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you see here's another reason for hope is that people think that what I'm saying is that you know the brain has changed.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yes, of course the brain has changed, because every single organ of the body and the body as a whole changes all the time.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is evolution, it never stops.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: That is true.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: But the kind of that kind of evolution is over much, much longer periods.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: The brain that we have now is not significantly different, obviously, from the brain that we had in the seventeenth century or even in the first century.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um what is different is the way we use it, and the analogy I like to give is that of say um owning um a new radio set and being very excited by the fact.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can tune in to different um stations.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: This has probably already dates me as somebody who is completely out of touch with modern technology, but let that aside.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: And you to begin with, you you tune into a couple of channels, say BBC three, BBC four, radio three four, and you you like to listen to those.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: And after a while you simply tune into one of them.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not that the other channel isn't there to tune into.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: Anytime you like you can tune into it again and recapture it.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that you've decided not to.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: And that is, you know, we've just decided not to exercise our brains to remotely their full extent.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, they're they're chugging along on uh on a very low level.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because as I you know, I really need to emphasize the left hemisphere, which is in control here, is not reliable in touch with reality, intelligent, but a little bit rationalistic in the way that it used to be said.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: It is unreasonable, it is deluded, it is unintelligent.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: And like r you know, the the the least intelligent people that you and I have met, because they know so little, they think they know everything.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, knowing thinking you know everything is a sure sign that you know diddly squat.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that is that is the situation we're in.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're listening to this left hand, we've got the answers, we know everything.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: And uh very soon, you know, in ten years' time we'll be able to control everything, which is well maybe true, but that's it that's extremely dangerous if you don't know what it is you're doing.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, not to have the wisdom that's required to know how to use the power we have is like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: Very clippable uh qu uh sentence in.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yes, uh it is it strikes me that many of our governing classes, cultural, political elites do seem to be simultaneously utterly incurious about the world beyond their immediate tasks and their immediate pleasures and comforts in in many ways.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um they they project their view of the world um onto the rest of the world.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: We believe that everyone just sees it the same as them.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: And um I um I I I I've been struck recently reading um and and I've cited this a few times on on the show, uh, a book by Jonathan Rose 25 years ago, The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Classes, and it and it showed this organic autodidact tradition uh that no one had told them to do uh that flourished everywhere, um genuinely had freedom of expression.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't you can't talk about these politics or this religion.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh and yet these points in the past where people had dialed into the civilizational inheritance, indeed used it as a means for their own uh the the expansion of their own dignity in undignifying jobs, um i is is proof that it's there, and that also people who are lower than us in the social order are actually deeply more impressive than a great many of us who are supposedly educated today, and yet the same people who run the show typically tend to refer to anyone who looks at the past with any kind of reverence as being nostalgic and romantic as a pejorative.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: Wha why do you think they do that?
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: Why why why is nostalgia and romanticism uh dismissed as something that should be junked?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that it's not a strategy.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they're terms that are cheap dismissals of a uh a very positive attraction to and reverence for things that we have thrown away.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's uh because we um have lost them and uh lost them because of the sort of mindset of those very people who dismissively talk of nostalgia and so forth, um they they want to discredit all that and not have to think about what it is that their way of thinking has forfeited us.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: And what you've just said really means a lot to me because I think there's um there's a misconception um about me personally um that that I must come from a very privileged background.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: But what you know, w both my grandfathers were the seventh of seven and both of them lost their father before they were ten years old.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in those days there was very little provision for mothers with families like that.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was all a very, very different world in which self-reliance was enormously important.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: And they didn't have the time or the luxury to go, oh I feel hopeless, I can't do anything.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: They had to get on and do things.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: And um one of them I mean they were both very successful uh in in scientific ways.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: My one of my fathers was I think the the the youngest um doctor to to be uh um trained by St Andrews University.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and another one became uh a famous scientist uh in his own sphere, a chemist.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um they got there by sheer hard work.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean my my the chemist grandfather um did work during the days, studied at night, you know, I don't know w how he managed it all.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um but they were inspired by books and I've inherited my grandfather's that father, my mother's father, maternal grandfather's books, which include quite a lot of interesting ones about Japan, because one of the things that happened to him was he was picked up by Lord Lieberhume, um spotted as a very bright young man, and um he said uh Kenyon, which was my my mother's maiden name, Kenyon, you will go to Japan.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: And and at the age of twenty-three or something, he was sent out to Japan where he was for four or five years, having got married uh engaged to my um grandmother before he left, and there's a story from its era when he came back.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: There she still was, and they got married very happily.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you know, he um what I'm really getting at is that he was interested in everything.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I have lithographs on my wall.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: He trained himself, he taught himself how to do lithography and make plates, and he was a very good draftsman.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um he learnt Japanese, he also learnt German while he was out in Japan, because the only other Westerner with whom he had uh any contact was in fact a German, and he taught the German English, and the German taught him German.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh he I have all these books and I have them in a bookcase that he made.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh a beautiful uh arts and crafts bookcase.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't know what will happen to it when I I die.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: It'll probably be in unceremonally junk to burnt.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: But what I'm really saying is there was a cohesiveness and an immersion in skills of various kinds, intellectual skills, a passion for learning, learning about the past, uh re rediscovering techniques from the past.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: And this made them what they were.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't sort of have this dismissive attitude.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very new thing.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: And really importantly was you know, they belonged to societies in which they would meet and teach one another about things.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: Where has this gone?
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, in an era in which people spend most of their time, you know, stuck in front of a screen, they didn't have time to meet one another, to talk to one another, to set one another's minds on fire in the way that this used to happen.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: So you can talk all you like about you know nostalgia for the past, but there's so much there that was rich and good and creative and that was lost.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and sorry, since I started this by saying, and I've never talked about this before actually in public, but um you know, okay, yes, I did I did go to a uh a a a wonderful school, Winchester College, it is an ancient school, and I did go to Oxford and I did, you know, get to all souls.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: But I did every single one of those on scholarships and prizes.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean and and it m my parents didn't stump up for anything.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: So i i it slightly galls me when people um you know cast in my teeth the idea that I might be some sort of privileged kind of tough.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: As though it didn't work.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: I can tell you, mates, I worked my ass off.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I just I just don't don't have time for for the the resentment that people uh uh display w when when there are uh well um uh you know well accredited people, people who have a list of achievements behind them and um uh and and regardless of whether someone's been been bankrolled through them, but the the the thing that people always seem to forget is that there is a generational accumulation of this as well.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like privilege just dropped out of the sky, you know, your your your grandparents grafted uh and then you've put your own faculties to to good use, but as you say, you're you know it's not even that you were born with a a silver spoon in your mouth.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um but but I would even defend them, is that even those people who have a silver spoon in their mouth and go on and want to achieve all of the things you did, well, good on them.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: They are putting the God-given gift to the best use that they can, uh, and doing something with them.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we should we should take our hats off to that and take inspiration from it.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: But but yes, those who don't come from that, uh even even more so.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and actually that that brings me on to the the modern student of today.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_00: So so in theory, we've probably never been more educated when it comes to the number of degrees, masters, a-level results being handed out.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I was speaking to Rob Henderson recently, the the US-based psychologist.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: He he was Cambridge trained.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: He came from the bottom, he uh was foster homes n nine times before he was nine years old.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um a drug addict mother, uh, joined the Navy, sorry, the military in the US, uh, and that got his life in order.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: He was there for eight years, ended up at Yale, suddenly surrounded by lots of people with a totally distorted view of how the world worked, and he couldn't quite believe who he's rubbing shoulders with.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then he went to Cambridge and continued his psychological studies.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, he's become a rather big, a big name in that field now, at least within pop psychology.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: And um, he told me that uh in some of the Ivy League universities, they're a reporting that 40% of the student body have diagnoses for ADHD and autism.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and um I am sure, and we can get on to both avenues of this, that the modern world probably does precipitate those kind of conditions in people.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: But that's also true that there is an ideological strain that you've picked up on, or at least a cultural, an anti-cultural strain that is prevalent of people who have a victim mindset, those who um think that the world is against them, that perhaps they're owed something because of that, and that if they can say there's something wrong with them, it makes them special and they can get dispensation.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I I'm not necessarily asking you to pass the two, but what what this this world that we've built, um both ideologically and and civilizationally, what what is it that we're doing to the minds of the young to be leading to actual diagnoses of ADHD and autism, whatever they look like, I'm not an expert, and those who are being picked up as a as a signal to the world for whatever reason.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, i it's a fact that um autism and ADHD are related to uh an imbalance between the hemispheres in favour of the left hemisphere.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: I need to qualify that a little in the case of autism because I always say there are there's not just one autism, but there are autisms.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: And um the common form of classical autism is rather like um a a brain in which the right hemisphere is not properly functioning and the left hemisphere is trying to um um uh do the job uh in a completely different way to which it is it alone is suited, um and is therefore in overdrive.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um so people with autism find, I mean, a whole host of things difficult.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_01: They um th they can't understand social interaction, they can't read faces, they can't read body languages, they don't understand the implicit, they take everything literally.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh all of this very typical of the left hemisphere, and there's very much more I detail it in in um particularly in the Master things, where I have a whole chapter on what schizophrenia and autism can tell us.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: So autism uh an increase in autism would be um a coherent outcome of an excessive reliance on the left hemisphere.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: So would ADHD.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: There is a broad popular misconception that ADHD is somehow related to being more imaginative or right hemispheric, but it isn't.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh uh all the evidence points in the the other direction that it is actually about um you see the left hemisphere tends to be caught, its attention is caught by whatever it is that's uh prominent at the moment.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh y you must remember that the the reason that the two hemispheres diverged um in in the course of evolution, why indeed we have this separation, is so that a creature can be uh attracted to a target, something that it wants to lock onto to get.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um where um the the the right hemisphere is looking out at the whole sustained picture.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: So the left hemisphere is going, yes it's that, it's that.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's that.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: There.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: So it ends up with a fragmented um worldview.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, um whether or not there really are more people with autism and ADHD and a range of other disorders um uh that get uh bunged in there along with them, uh or whether it's just um that we are diagnosing it more them more readily um is a matter of dispute.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there's some truth for in both.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think that certainly we are diagnosing these things very, very much too frequently in my view.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's pressure from parents to get their child a diagnosis which buys them extra time in exams, special tuition, more understanding, more leeway, and so forth.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and they say, Oh, he's very, very gifted, you know, he's a dreamer and he does you know, so on anyway.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: But it it it makes them feel good about their child, and and so that's one of the drivers.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um but one of the drivers may well be that um th these things are on the on the increase.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it seems it seems clear as to the the reasons when we have uh uh as we've talked about it, uh lives that are increasingly mediated through screens.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um I only need to open my internet browser.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: I can go and leave my my phone somewhere else in the house, but if I open the internet browser, the fact there can be multiple tabs open at once and you can just cycle through them.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, most people spend their time just scrolling constantly, they're just getting little uh titbits of information largely disconnected from one another.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um those who are into short videos uh uh constantly having things assailed.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: You you often see it on public transport, people uh not even spending two seconds on something, just flipping and just being assailed, yeah, being assailed by uh all of this sensory overload all of the time.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_00: And and I actually there are days when if I have to spend it a a long time on computers, jumping between calls for work and outside of work, um, is that when I get outside to go and walk the dog, I I can often feel like I have split my mind from my body that I'm feeling quite disembodied somehow.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: My eyes are glazed over, I can't concentrate, I feel like there's a a haze uh between myself and the world.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I and it it strikes me that as someone who tries to be conscientious about technology use and not have screen time, you know, don't watch television, any of those things, um that that's the impact that it can have on me.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think about everyone else spending all of their many hours uh not in prayer and contemplation or even just work or or an intellectual life, but just constant entertainment and distraction, and how it's almost like we are dehumanising in some way.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um do do do Do you think that world that we've built and indeed the loss of the Christian worldview, which in arguably has or or arguably contains the the best conception of human dignity than any other mythos uh that has been created?
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think these two twin elements is is leading actually to a dehumanizing of man?
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yes, I think I think absolutely that that it is.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: I one of the things that um I was thinking of when you were talking about the need for constant stimulation is I don't know you may already know about this research, but there is research in which people were asked in a laboratory setting simply to empty their minds and to allow their minds to be empty spaces.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, one of the first if you like, exercises on the path towards um being able to meditate.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um but they were also given a little device that would administer an electric shock.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: Didn't you know this?
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well I'll finish anyway.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um please do.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: And uh this little device would administer an electric shock.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh uh um uh a great proportion and uh more than half of the people needed to use this device during the fifteen minutes because they were so um disturbed by not having any stimulation.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_01: And one person used it, I think, around a hundred times during the fifteen minute period.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we we are desperately hooked on stimulation.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_01: And stimulation, of course, you know, is famous and um the man on the Clapham omnibus knows it now about dopamine hits and so on.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean what we're really doing is um allowing our minds to go wherever we will get a little reward signal.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um but actually nothing good will ever be um achieved by us, and no peace of mind will ever be achieved by us if we are constantly on this hiding to nothing really.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um we need to stop all this, allow ourselves to be present to the world.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because actually when you're away in your head, you're not in this world anymore.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_01: You and you only have one chance at it, and you only have a finite amount of time, and whatever you do, it's ticking past and going away.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's one of the things that I think about inspired very much recently by Nate Hagen's um uh recent broadcasts.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I was on his show recently and he's sent me links to a couple of things he's he's put up, um which are about this very problem that we're we're so much i in a state of constant dread about the future and doom scrolling and getting messages about what's coming, that we we live in not the here and now, but in a doom-filled future which hasn't even arrived yet, and which may not actually come about in the form that we think of it.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he he shows also that in another experiment which I didn't know about, that um if people uh are given the option of um an unpleasant shock uh almost immediately, or an immediate or a a somewhat delayed but much milder shock, they will tend to choose the immediate one because the thought of Waiting for this shock is worse than the shock itself will be.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, w one way or another, I am not a good example of somebody who doesn't spend a lot of time thinking, reading and and writing it in my head.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's counterbalanced or used to be counterbalanced um for me more by getting out and and walking.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the reasons I am where I am is that I I'm absolutely uh um fulfilled every day by the beauty and the wildness of the landscape around me and of my garden.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that's very important.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_01: To come to your other point really about the loss of any more um more sacred sen the sacred canopy.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think it was Anthony Giddens who talked about that sacred canopy that used to uh overarch society without people really needing to reflect on it um explicitly.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_01: That that has gone, has changed the way we think about ourselves um in in a damaging way.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are there are two quite distinct things I I want to differentiate.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: One of them is um self-esteem, and the other is self-respect.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there was a cult of self-esteem, and notably it was um uh furthered in the nineteen eighties by uh a a brilliant uh psychologist called Roy Baumeister, and um i after about fifteen to twenty years he uh he washed his hands of the whole thing and um said that actually uh people who have you know had high self-esteem were insufferable, and that that this did no good for anybody.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um but but it we shouldn't um we shouldn't lose self-respect.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think self-respect is something that we've lost.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: Self-respect is not an inflated sense of who we are, it's a just sense of what a human being can be, of what we are in essence, what we are in potential, and what we need to fulfil in terms of that potential.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_01: Without it, people become lazy, disaffected, embittered, um more selfish, um more likely to be uh prey to addiction and generally unhappy.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_01: So as you rightly say, I think the Christian mythos is to me the deepest, richest, most complex mythos that I've encountered, and I'm I'm not in any sense dismissing any of the other great world religions that all have very much to to offer.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_01: And i uh I also I'm a Christian, but I'm also a Taoist, and there's no no uh a Buddhist.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's no uh contradiction in in those uh two things.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_01: But what I think it does uh one of the things that it does um uh embody is the idea of humanity as so intimately connected with the divine that God incarnates himself in his creation.
• 1:09:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think it is an amazing idea, I think it's a powerful idea, I believe it is a true idea, it strikes me as true.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so I think the l the loss of the Christian mythos is very, very serious.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I I I've always had a a a a difficult to articulate relationship with Christianity, and recently I've talked about it more um uh because I was uh on one particular podcast I was um discussing with my friend Annal Seth, who is a neuroscientist but an atheist, um and uh about religion.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I sort of said, Well, you know, perhaps I ought to just confess that I'm a Christian.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and that that's been sort of taken up as a headline, you know, sort of uh Dodgery and Miguel Chris confesses he is a Christian.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yes, it's not a sin to be a Christian, so I'm confess it in the old-fashioned w um meaning of that word.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I also would need to to to gloss what it is I mean by that.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_01: What I mean by that is that all my life Christianity has called to me.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now I d uh when I say all my life, not in my childhood, because my parents were not religious, never took me to church.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_01: But when I encountered it in a very um rich and and intellectually and uh aesthetically satisfying way as a teenager, it spoke to me very deeply.
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, I use that word aesthetically rather um with scare quotes around it really, because um it th the sheer beauty of it spoke of something very true.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_01: So the beauty of particularly the music of the Renaissance of Talus and Byrd and and their European counterparts spoke to me about something that seemed to me powerful and powerfully true and couldn't be summed up as just intellectual or just emotional.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_01: It spoke to my soul.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so did the liturgy and so did much of the um the the the business of the the Christian culture.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that has remained with me, and I I've never lost it, and uh i in my late teens I indeed thought that I would devote my life to it by going into a monastery.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh no doubt much for the best that I didn't.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the you know, if you if I had to lose something from my life and you said, Well would you would you discard whatever it is, the relationship you have with Christianity, I'd say I'd rather lose my life.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_01: It means that much to me.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_01: But am I a signed up Christian?
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't even go to church.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: I I my relationship with it is a complicated one, not a satisfactory one.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a poor Christian, but I'd like to say I think I am one.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_01: So for me w very urgent it's is it enough for people to be spiritual but not religious?
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and you know, so it's it's much better that people have a spiritual practice that they meditate uh on their own or with others, um, preferably with others.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh I'm sure that is very valuable, but I'm not sure that this society, this civilization will uh survive um without uh a re-embracing at its heart of the Christian mythos.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it should be the Christian mythos because it is it is it's almost like the the the lifeblood of the whole culture.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_01: It has been historically, whether you like it or not.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so much of its art and its history and so on don't really make much sense except in the light of Christianity.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_01: So with all its failings, and it does have failings, um it needs to be we need to find a way of reincorporating it into our lives.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things I like very much um w is a saying of um uh Pope Benedict the Sixteenth.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um he said something like the the only what was the word he used?
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_01: The i the only vindication it was a word like that.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_01: The only vindication of the Christian church is the the saints that it nourished and the extraordinary beauty of the art that was born in its bosom.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's something like that.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I I agree with that wholeheartedly.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I do think it's very important, it's not a trivial issue, and I don't think having a sort of supermarket vision of of of religions that you can take one off the shelf.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um having one is better than having none.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that for the sake of uh society and civilization, for us to re-embrace Christianity would be a wonderful, wonderful step forward.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it might happen if things actually get worse.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean one way of looking at things is the worse things get, the better they get.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_01: In that that produces a crisis, and in that crisis, I mean the the word of course comes from the Greek concept of judgment, that we are we feel ourselves to be judged, and we we need something that answers to that.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we might return to to something that makes sense of that um that judgment upon us.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as a Northumbrian, I can fully agree with the uh the fruits of Christian civilization being not twenty miles away from where the Lindisfarne Gospels are written, St.
• 1:15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Cuthbert, my name saint, and uh there is um uh there is there is so much sustenance in any direction we look within the fabric of our our countries of the British Isles uh should we choose to get them.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And and I know you are not for laying out explicit policy programmes, so I won't ask you to do it, but what I've always appreciated about you, Ian, is that you always drop these breadcrumbs throughout conversations.
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_00: What people need to do and the inspiration that they can take is implicit.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it is my view that we are in the ruins of a civilization.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes it's it's hard to argue with that, I think, if you look clearly.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I think we need to all see ourselves as a Saint Benedict or an Alfred in Athelney and realise that we we have to build out from somewhere.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_00: We may not see it in our own lifetimes, we can only do what's right for our own souls, uh to the people around us, and to try to leave some kind of a legacy without thinking about status and grandeur, uh, but something beyond ourselves.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's I think that's uh that's the the task before us all.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you've been very, very generous with your time today, Ian.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And just before I let you go, I do have one question that I ask all of my guests, and I don't know if I gave you the primer for this, but I I've got every faith you'll you'll answer fluently.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps it was a moral absolute, maybe it was something more day-to-day, but you thought it was pretty unshakable.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_00: And what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I'm about to disappoint you, I'm afraid.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um you did give me warning of this, and I did think about it a lot.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and though there have been eye-opening moments, there have been moments I can think about in my life where s suddenly something was open to me.
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_01: They have never been of the kind that was not in keeping with what it was that I had previously thought.
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_01: It would in other words, it was an un unfolding, an unpacking of something that was there that then suddenly was open to me and m uh it had flowered.
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there is an uncanny an uncannily consistent thread through my thinking from my teens up to the present.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um which includes something I won't say any more about because I've said enough about that, but my my perhaps strange but nonetheless important and and for me powerful relationship with um with the life of the spirit and with the Christian mythos with nature, um, you know, all my life I have uh uh you know, when I discovered Wordsworth, I mean it wasn't like it was like this is this is he is saying all the things that I feel.
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_01: This is how my soul responds to things.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_01: So those things to me have been consistently important and there is a thread that leads through from effectively my interest in ideas, which is the most consistent lifelong thing for me.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_01: I I I see myself as a sort of maverick philosopher, basically, who's always been trying to find answers to to questions um and through the literary um world to to medicine, to being a doctor, to research on the brain and neuroscience, and going backwards and forwards between philosophy, literature and science.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean that of course inevitably arouses suspicion and uh uh amongst some kinds of I think rather narrowly uh focused scientists who think that um that science is just something that takes place in the lab and can't have wider meaning um for us.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_01: But I I I don't think that there's anything that falls into the category that doesn't have wider meaning.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_01: Science used to be called natural philosophy until about eighteen thirty.
• 1:20:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it is a kind of philosophy, and the divorce between science and philosophy is a disaster.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um as uh Whitehead said, it is like m all family disputes a disaster for both parties.
• 1:20:26
  SPEAKER_01: So um I'm hoping to see that healed.
• 1:20:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I can't think of a I can't think of a sort of vault fuss moment when I thought, oh right, so I shouldn't really think like that.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's always been an like, oh, now I see a deeper, wider context in which all of this is enriched and makes sense.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_01: So you know, I really have scratched my head in the last 24 hours um thinking, what can I say?
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_01: And other than making something up, which I don't think you want, I can't really think of what that what that moment would have been.
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, top marks for the most original advances, so even it hats off to you.
• 1:21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hats off to you.
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um Ian, it has been a great pleasure of mine, and I sincerely hope we can meet uh in person.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_00: I hope we can do this again.
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I also would like to extend an analogy that Tom Holland made when he talked about the impact of Saint Paul on what became the West.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_00: He referred to St.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Paul as being a depth charge uh that we are still feeling the ripples of since his writings, since his evangelisation.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_00: I believe, if it's not too much to say, that your impact with the master of his emissary and then the matter with things is not yet fully understood, but so many people have started to grapple with it because they've seen it as showing how we've taken so many wrong directions, and I think now it has inspired so many people to try to start living in a different way to try to restore something that we has have lost.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_00: That I think, whilst I I I do not have the power to invest you in sainthood, I I I I think your influence is huge and will be felt through the ages once you're gone, once I'm gone.
• 1:22:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I can only thank you.
• 1:22:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you really did um create an earthquake in my own mind when I I first read you and um and and I think about your work and its implications for my own life and how I understand the world every day.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for for coming on.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_00: And um I know you've written many, many pages on this, and so I'm not trying to force you into another book, but what can we expect from you next, Ian?
• 1:22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And where can we find your work?
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm overwhelmed by your kind words.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um I um Yes, uh there are two or three things, but none of them is at the moment motoring along very satisfactorily.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_01: I have an un an uneasy relationship with creativity.
• 1:23:14
  SPEAKER_01: It it often takes me a very long time to get underway with a book, and then when I'm underway I I'm almost incapable of being torn away from it, and it drives me.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it's rather like um I feel it's rather like a car that's stuck in a ditch.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_01: It takes an incredible effort, if at all, to stop the wheel spinning and get it out of the ditch.
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_01: But once it's on the on the road it runs and runs.
• 1:23:44
  SPEAKER_01: I have difficulty keeping up with it.
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it um at the moment there are two or three things.
• 1:23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh none of them are terrifically original, I'm afraid.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one is I I've had a contract for a very long time with uh OUP, Oxford University Press, um for what is called an intellectual autobiography, which was something suggested to me by um a colleague.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I don't really know what an intellectual autobiography is, and so I I um something like ten or twelve years on from the contract, I I still haven't delivered it.
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_01: But I I now have been approached entirely independently um by a uh a scholar from Turkey actually, who seems to know a very great deal about my life and thinking and wants to follow that with me in interviews.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that might be one way of doing that.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it might be a useful exercise for me, for others.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um who knows?
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see.
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_01: I have assembled over my working life um as a psychiatrist quite a lot of very interesting art made by patients with major mental illnesses.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they exemplify things that are intellectually interesting.
• 1:25:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think they're imaginatively um stimulating, and I think they're also uh things that will absolutely fascinate people.
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd like to write a shortish book drawing together those illustrations and uh in a commentary.
• 1:25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um and who knows I might republish uh Gan's criticism because it's interesting that it's um it i it this was a book I I published in my twenties.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_01: I uh I was fortunate enough to get Faber to publish it.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_01: And um I think it I don't know, sold four hundred copies or something and then was unceremoniously remaindered.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um with the result that if you can find a copy on the internet, there hardly are any, um i i it sells for colossal sums, I mean a couple of thousand pounds.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm thinking of um taking the um the wind out of that particular market by by by by republishing it possibly.
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it wouldn't be a difficult uh thing.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think it is interesting in the way I was thinking at the time.
• 1:26:11
  SPEAKER_01: I I just worry that people will go, oh, have you heard Ian McGuck has published a new book?
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then they find um the the thoughts of a twenty-year-old about literary criticism.
• 1:26:21
  SPEAKER_01: However, I do have to go back to literature because I've agreed to give the I don't know if you know the Clark lectures in Cambridge in 2028.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and these were given by people like T.
• 1:26:35
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 1:26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Eliot and DM Foster and and so on in the past.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so having taken it on the onus of this is weighing heavily on me, I will have to get back to my literary um self.
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_01: But uh but I you know, during COVID I I did this thing of r reading poems uh and recording them, and they're all up on the internet every day for 365 days, and some days I did several poems.
• 1:27:01
  SPEAKER_01: I never enjoyed myself so much in my life.
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it was absolutely wonderful.
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_01: So getting back to that will be um a delight for me.
• 1:27:09
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much inviting me along.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're you're you're very welcome.
• 1:27:14
  SPEAKER_00: It is a great honour of mine, Ian, and good luck with your many, many um endeavours.
• 1:27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I look forward to them coming to fruition.
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Keep fighting a good fight.
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for coming on the show.
• 1:27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much, John.