Latest / Thinking Class / #148 - Marie Kawthar Daouda - They Told Her She Was A Victim Of The West. She Became Its Greatest Defender.

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#148 - Marie Kawthar Daouda - They Told Her She Was A Victim Of The West. She Became Its Greatest Defender. · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Marie Cawthar Daouda.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Marie is a French Moroccan scholar at the University of Oxford and the author of Not Your Victim.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: In this conversation, Marie and I think out loud about why she, as someone raised between two civilizations, chose to defend the West and Britain specifically.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: We talk about Alistair McIntyre's question of what story do I find myself a part, and what happens to people when they are told that the story they are a part of is one of shame.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: The French Revolution as a spiritual catastrophe with a two-century tale, how victimhood became a form of cultural capital in the modern West, Jean-Paul Sartre's destruction of human nature and its arrival in classrooms across the West, Islamic anaconism and the unique curiosity of the European eye, Tolkien, Lewis and the civilizational importance of loving home, and the Oxford students of 1917, those that went to war, and what this generation owes them.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: This episode is brought to you by Aquinas Tuition, which provides bespoke academic tutoring informed by classical liberal arts principles.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: And whether your child needs support with GCSEs, A levels, or university entrance, Aquinas will pair every student with a tutor who cares about formation and not just grades, but they care about grades too.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Visit AquinasTuition.co.uk.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm also the founder of the Albion Institute.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: This is an institution for the formation of nationally minded leaders and an informed public through the preservation, transmission, and renewal of the intellectual and cultural inheritance of the English speaking people.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Lord Nigel Bigger has joined Albion as advisory board chair, and if you would like to learn more or register your interest, visit Albion Institute.org.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my six-part documentary series following H.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: V.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Morton's 1927 journey through England.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: The link is in the description.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: And now, Marie Corthardoda.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: There is a woman at the University of Oxford raised between her home nation of Morocco and France.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: She was educated at the Lycee Henri IV, and she has written a book that tells young British people in particular that their inheritance is actually worth loving, that it shouldn't be hated, it shouldn't be repudiated, and it shouldn't be thought of as a source of shame.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that actually British people aren't the villains of history.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Marie goes on to say that the real act of colonization is convincing the inheritors of a civilization to despise itself, to resent itself.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Marie Corthar Daouda joins me today.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Marie, thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for having me, Jean.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's my pleasure.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Marie, as I mentioned in the opening, you're French Moroccan.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: You were educated at the apex of French intellectual life.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: And notwithstanding those origins, you chose to write a book telling British people to love their country and their history.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Why did you decide to do that?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: What did you see that British people themselves have stopped seeing?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what prompted me to write the book was quite topically the question of the toppling of statues.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: So my doctoral thesis was roughly about the representations of good and evil.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was about benevolent femininity.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it led me to see how quickly people can change their minds about what is considered good, what is considered bad, how to represent someone as positive, how to represent that person as negative.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing that struck me is that in the peak of 2020, during the lockdowns and everything, all the uh great British philanthropists who were celebrated through a statue were considered as bad and had to be toppled.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: That, of course, was in the aftermath of George Floyd's death and the huge matters, Black Lives Matter movements in the US.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so the way that echoed in Britain was through the toppling of statues of philanthropists, that's to say, people who used their money to do good in a specific time.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now it so happened that uh that money was linked either to slavery in the case of Colston or to colonization in the case of Rhodes.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: But one thing that struck me is how decontextualized all that movement was, because of course, when the Victorians or the Edwardians put up these statues, they were not celebrating slavery or colonization.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: On the contrary, there were many people already at that time who were fiercely vocal against both slavery and colonization.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: But what was celebrated was that people like Rhodes or Colston used their money to do good.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: So Rhodes used his money to provide endowments for people to study in Oxford, regardless of race, which was extremely progressive for his time.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Colston uh had some connection to the slave trade, but the reason why there was a statue celebrating him was because of all the good he did by founding orphanages, almshouses, all these things that were meant to uh help the people in the area where he himself was living and active.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I decided to write that book uh in order to provide another perspective on these things, that it is historically erroneous to present the British Empire as guilty of all the evils in the world.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you look closer at history, uh Britain was at the forefront of fighting against all these, well, the these things are concretely evil, slavery and colonization.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at other empires, the French Empire, for instance, it did far worse.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at other colonizers, other slave traders, notoriously, the Arab Empire, no one challenges that, although there had been 800 years of colonization of, well, the Iberic Peninsula by the Arabs.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And although the slave trade was largely organized by uh people from the Arabic peninsula uh trading slaves for gold and having that triangular slave trade going on.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: So the purpose of the book, in fact, is to show that a lot of what we consider today as decolonization, in fact, only consolidates racial and colonial prejudice.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's to say that there is one strong, powerful group of people, which is white men, and that all the others are just victims.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's to say, if you happen to be neither white nor a man, you're de facto a victim of history and you have no place, no agency as a creator of your own narrative.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to provide, especially young people, another way of looking at things at things, a way that can be critical of other civilizations than the Western civilization, and also a way to appreciate uh Western and other civilizations for what they did of good and of evil, just having uh an honest view on these things instead of casting some as the good ones, some as the bad ones.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: I know we'll get onto it later on in the conversation when we start to explore the history of colonization, how former colonial subjects see themselves uh in the nations that once uh ruled over their ancestral homelands.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: But one uh very original insight within your book uh was besides ceasing encouraging people to see themselves as victims, is actually we all need to see those people who have arrived on whoever's shores, that pretty much all of them to a man or a woman are actually descended from a fallen empire themselves, that they are they were themselves, uh or are themselves the descendants of former imperialists.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh perhaps it took a different expression, but it is true that uh that they also have skeletons in their ancestors' closets, and you know, if we're if the Sins of the Fathers game is to be played, well, it can be played everywhere if we're in a period of radical egalitarianism after all.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um Marie, you you you you also cite quite early in your book Alistair McIntyre, a very famous uh English-speaking philosopher, uh or philosopher of the English-speaking world, and much of his work was focused on the dissolution of stories, uh the moral substructure that um uh has held the West together and that has accreted over time and all of those things.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: But he he himself is a huge proponent, or was a huge proponent, of um of people understanding the importance of narrative, that humans are storytelling creatures.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And he says that the only way you can answer the question, what am I to do, is if we can first answer the question of what story do I find myself a part.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what do you suppose happens to a people who understand their story to be one of unbridled shame?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much for um noticing that I do refer to Alistair McIntyre.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: He writes from the perspective of virtue ethics, that's to say that his philosophy is about how to be good today in one's own context.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a fascinating perspective because everyone talks about uh how to be good.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have this pressure, be kind, and everything at all costs.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: But what is often disregarded is the broader narrative.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: So if we go back to Alistair McIntyre's um uh to the importance he places on having a narrative, well, he uses various examples.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Even Jane Austen for him is one of the foundational examples of virtue and creating a narrative that shows what virtue is about.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we we have to be honest about history and we have to uh bear in mind that as you were saying earlier, everyone who's alive today is indebted to people who have done terrible things.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And our ancestors have all done dreadful things.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: If we're alive today, it doesn't mean that we have to celebrate these things as having as all of a sudden becoming good.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: But it is about at least acknowledging that none of us has a perfect past, which means that the people who are upheld as victims of history today, if you look closer at where they come from, well, dreadful things have happened there too.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: So in Britain we talk a lot about ethnic minorities, but these minorities are majorities in their countries of origin.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And these countries are often places where dreadful things happen and dreadful things are still happening.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to be honest about that, about acknowledging that uh if we try to summarize the history of humanity as white people have done dreadful things, in fact, it is a form of white supremacy because we deny other civilizations the right to a history with dreadful pages in it as well.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I was mentioning the Arab Empire earlier on.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one of the great cultural shocks that happened in Europe was the discovery of Mesoamerica and the human sacrifices that were going on there.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: So nowadays we tend to minimize all these things and pretend that other cultures are just noble savages, that everything is just uh everything that they have done or they can do is acceptable because you know it's another civilization, that's what they do, that's what they were doing there, that's what they w were doing then.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh first, we never we would never have the same sort of tolerance towards uh the the average Victorian man.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And also we would never dare to uh criticize these things on the ground of absolute morality.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, human sacrifice is objectively wrong.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there are civilizations that are not Western and are still doing things that are dreadful in terms of human rights, uh either regarding communities or regarding individuals.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: The noble savage uh just uh jogged a memory of reading your book, which uh feels prescient uh given the conversations uh that are on ongoing about scientific racism.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you have a passage in your book where you talk about how Charles Dickens skewers uh through his novel Mrs.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Jellybee the the peoples that are starting to promulgate the noble savage myth, this idea that people did live in a a prelapsarian world before they had uh contact with the uh errant Westerners and modernity.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: And um uh you you uh point out that actually it was considered amongst parts of high society that the noble savage myth was actually a form of scientific racism.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason why that piqued my interest is right now we we see scientific racism as only those people who are pursuing hereditarian science.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Are there traits that certain groups carry at the population level uh and that you can measure?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And any looking into that is seen as scientific racism how day you look at the differences between groups.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I find it very, very interesting that at some point there was actually an elite argument about scientific racism being, oh, these guys couldn't have known any better.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh why why is it that you were drawn specifically to the noble savage myth and wanting to make a point of that within the book?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'd say uh because it's somehow somehow at the at the crossroads between my interests in French philosophy and um English literature.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: So as you were saying, Dickens uh well it has quite a quite a brilliant way of um criticizing that position through Mrs.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Jellyby, who ends up, well, letting go of the Boreobola guar when when the king decides to sell all his people uh to the most offering tribe.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what what brilliant plot list Dickens brings in, but then she turns her interests to uh women's suffrage.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's so emblematic of how today that narrative of the noble savage just shifted from one group to another, uh, ascribing a form of genuine absolute innocence to some people just because they happen to be either a minority in the West or because they happen to be very distant.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: So the way the noble savage appears in French philosophy, francophone philosophy, is through Rousseau, uh Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who sees that uh of course a state of initial innocence is uh it's it's mythical.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: He he starts uh the social contract by by saying that the state has never existed.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And yet through a wonderful Rousseau twist, he lures the reader into imagining how beautiful it would have been, and then all of that is transposed to uh groups who have not been uh contaminated, touched by civilization.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: So for from a Rousseauvian perspective, civilization society is what causes people to do bad things.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if you if you let people in an uncivilized state without a sense of property, of individual ownership, they will behave well, which is completely deluded because any any any society shows that everyone has that impulse to own, to familiarize oneself with something and that then claim it claiming it at as oneself.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And Simone Vey has beautiful pages about how the sense of ownership is almost natural, and she writes that as someone who has more than strong sympathies for uh left-wing ideologies.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but for Rousseau, if someone ever does something bad, it's not because of that person's own moral flaws, it's always because of the circumstances.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, uh someone who has done something bad is neither guilty nor responsible.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's something quite corrosive in that uh attitude, especially when ascribed to entire groups of the population, because it means that if these people do something bad, well, they cannot be held as legally responsible, which is the meaning of a permanent infancy.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: It means that they will never reach a stage of maturity at which they can be held accountable.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is the worst form of moral racism that we could see today.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: So when you have dreadful things like the rape gangs that are uh minimized as well, it's just different cultural norms.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's not just different cultural norms, it's objectively evil.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or when the attitude of certain Muslim groups towards women becomes m even worse in the West than in Muslim countries, it's minimized as, well, it's just a culture.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a culture, it's it's deeply nefarious for an entire group of the population.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: So uh either we consider that everyone is equal in front of the law, or we create subcategories in which people who belong to a different race can be considered as legally innocent just because of their skin colour, or because of their pr they they practice, or because of the fact that they do not happen to belong to the West.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: Both this this statement I'll make is true both of how we apply uh moral standards uh to more recently arrived groups because of the noble savage myth, but also that general lowering and decline in standards amongst people who are descended from those in the West, so to speak.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: But it is true that in this age of hyper-tolerance, we've come to tolerate the intolerable.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that very quickly needs to be gotten a grip of because, as we can see, when you start to do that, and when you couple it with the noble savage myth, or um, I was speaking to um a woman earlier on today, Bella D'Abrera, former director of the Institute of Public Affairs in Sydney.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she writes a lot about Paolo Frere's pedagogy of the oppressed, the the text and the worldview which took a hold of the educational system, which very much builds on the noble savage myth and turns people to be resentful of, distrustful of anyone who is a promoter of Western civilization and all of those things, uh, because it is nothing but a history of oppression.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: And now we see the practical consequences of all of those things mixing together on the streets of your country, France.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we see we see people um walking alongside those that have been seen as noble savages, who are calling out their victimhood in the eyes of uh the well, their communities, uh as in opposed to the French state or the French Republic, um, but also quite openly promulgating their own national and ethnic identities, their own religious identities, but standing alongside them, they have people who are wanting to be avid protectors of the noble savage.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: They've also come to believe the uh myth of oppression, or uh um they have also come to tear down society, burn down schools um with these people, and as I mentioned to Bella, uh the video that I saw that was rather shocking in a French cathedral was of um a group of children.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: They were they were mixed, so you had some some of the white French and you had some North African French there, uh, and they were, as they were desecrating a cathedral, the Catholic Church, they um were rapping along to uh a North African rapper who was valorizing the the massacre at the Baticlan.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um all of this that we're talking about, this allowing victimhood and toleration above all else, whilst just seeing the uh impact of both our educational standards, our moral standards, but quite literally our society, as people are quite willing to tear it down, shows that this isn't just an abstract thought experiment.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Is this something that uh also motivates you with trying to win the battle of ideas?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the the mention of tolerance is an extremely important point.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the the the word tolerance, I I like how it is translated, well, with the the the word in Arabic means mutual forgiveness, which implies that there is something to forgive, which implies that actually if you tolerate something, it doesn't mean that it is good.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: It means that it is bad, but you have the strength to take it in in the medical sense of tolerance.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can tolerate a bacteria because your gut flora is strong enough to cope with it.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that it's not harmful, it means it's not harmful to you because you're strong enough to deal with it.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd say there was a time when the West was culturally strong enough to be able to tolerate quite a broad range of ideas, and that was wonderful.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was the moment when it was, in fact, possible to be uh open enough to different cultures to have all these intellectual leaps, you know, the 12th century, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, all of these have brought beautiful things through.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Through uh, I'd say uh an openness that is typical of the West, which is the interest in other cultures, in other civilizations, and bringing what is positive in there in a way that does not harm one's own civilization.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And now we've come to understand tolerance in a completely different way, which is anything goes.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this anything goes uh narrative was quite the well, it was the the almost the mantra of the um May 68, May 68 revolutionaries in France.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what is going on today really reminds me of what was going on then, because you have the same alignment of the youth and the idea of um opposing the contact of France with its former colonies.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we see a lot of Algerian flags today, and many people think that it is a new thing.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's not.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in May 68, that was the first time when the student protests were also aligned with the idea of defending the Algerian cause uh by supporting the FLN, the Front de Libération Nationale, which was one of the most murderous groups in Algeria.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: The FLN killed more Algerians than France ever did, just so that the records are clear here.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: And today we have this same idea that uh France is bad, whatever is originally French, is has to be torn down.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: And this has to be done for the sake of these uh former colonies.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: So there are two things to bear in mind in the protests today.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: One is that the French education system is in crisis.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: It has been going on dreadfully for many, many years now, because anytime a new government happens, and that's pretty much every 15 minutes in France, the first uh place where they want to create new things is the education system.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: So basically the teachers cannot even capitalize on their own training in order to apply the new things that have been uh implemented.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's a world of uh permanent makeshifts, just trying to follow whatever the ministry has just dictated.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, of course, there are many, many reasons to be critical of the French national education system today.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and also, well, the fact of having blocage and all these things, that's not new.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: When I arrived in France, we we had a lot of these.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the students who were busy working did not really indulge in the whole protest thing.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: So now it's as though the whole left-wing political class led by Mélenchon found the perfect uh allies in order to be visible on the streets in a way that goes way beyond protesting against the failure of the national education system.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's not about the education system, it's about the whole country.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's about destroying everything that makes it French because many people uh from, well, we're at the fourth generation now of uh coming from the immigration are French.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: They do not have any other passport, they don't have any other claim to another citizenship, but they have not inherited the French culture because it has been considered an oppressive thing to educate these children into loving France and French heritage.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that explains a lot of the tensions that we see today, but also the hatred that these people who are French do not uh do feel towards that country that they do not belong to.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you mentioned uh uh one of the revolutions that have taken place in in France, uh the 1968 revolution.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you could you could argue that whilst it was put down, is it ended up successful in the end, and in fact it was so successful it spread across the Anglosphere too.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um but going back further to the revolutions that people know so well, of which there are several, I know we talk about the French Revolution, but it it happened across several years and several flashpoints, is you you you there were um lines in the sand at that point drawn about uh a new moral settlement, and uh it is one that at the time Britain um fought furiously to make sure did not make its way across the Channel.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's fair to say that it it has, but you you you in your book trace so much of what has gone wrong to the French Revolution, and it wasn't just a political event, it was a spiritual catastrophe as well, because there's this idea that you can tear everything down, rebuild from reason alone.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: But not only that, is that um actually the heads that are taller than others take them off.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um how far do you think the French the shadow of the French Revolution reaches into the modern university and indeed into society at large?
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it is it it it is the great catastrophe in in the in the theatrical sense that explains everything in French politics today.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: But since though you had two groups, those who believe that the French Revolution was a dreadful mistake, it should never have happened.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And historically there are ways of understanding that, uh, because well, the death of the king was almost a dérapage of whatever was in motion, and all of a sudden it went too far because the king was about to agree to signing a constitution.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the 1791 French constitution that never got implemented.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Then uh after Louis XVI was executed, there were several attempts at restoring the French monarchy, the latest being 1870, and none of these worked.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but on the other hand, you have people who believe that the French Revolution is that through which all the good things that France benefits from today happened.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: So if it is the founding stone of modern French society with the positive things that it has, it's very hard to step out of the mindset that you need a revolution, you need to cut heads off in order to achieve good things.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's always, as you were saying, the tallest heads that fall down.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it was the aristocracy then.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Today, those who are considered aristocrats, believe it or not, it's just people who are ethnically French and who have inherited that French culture, they are the ones who are considered the bad ones.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it leads to dreadful situations, dreadful tensions in schools where uh you'd have either people from ethnic minorities acting against those who are uh ethnically French or those who are ethnically French aping this May 68 noble sav uh white savior uh attitude of uh siding with whoever is oppressed.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: So today you'd have the Algerian flags and the Palestinian flags.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: You have this strange coalition of the two on the streets of Paris as though there was no way of being good today if it were not for siding for these groups.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in a way, uh Britain has withheld its youth from that influence for a while, but I think nowadays it's lost because it's mainly uh through the way the I'd say the the way American intellectuals have swallowed up the French deconstruction ideas that you have to destroy everything in order to uh bring better better things to life.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: So through the US, the Anglosphere as a whole is now uh imbibing this idea that uh the old is bad, you know, the sort of Maoist idea of destroying the four olds.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think now we're quite deeply into it.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it is now coming back to France in a way that you can see through the the slogans tagged in English on the walls of Paris.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: We used to tag our slogans in proper French, you know, sous les pavés la plage, uh all these all all these typical Mesocentuit slogans, and now it's hashtag free Gaza.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I think if there is one empire that as that has one, it is the uh the American-shaped left-wing mindset, much more than uh the typical grassroots French left-wing ideas.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that American influence left-wing mindset is closely linked to what we've been speaking about, what you've written about, and that is victimhoods now as a form of cultural capital.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh something once derided, uh seen as a source of shame, no one would really want to wear that label, is now worn proudly.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone's scrabbling around for the thing they can apply to themselves to get favorable treatment.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what do you think this actually does to the people that it claims to help becoming a victim?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, back when I was a teenager and until when I was teaching in France, uh, you're a victim was basically a slur.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Calling someone a victim meant uh saying that this person cannot stand in front of whatever bullying might happen.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't mean to say that bullying was a good thing, but now we have reached the point where everyone on the country tries to claim victimhood points, and that has become a matter of identity.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: So identifying as a minority group has become the best way of being labeled a victim and therefore deserving special treatment.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason why I object so strongly to that in the book is that it it goes against our natural human drive to care for one another as persons, not as belonging to a specific group.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it it's uh and it's an emotional hijacking, so to speak.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you have someone who might be going through dreadful things at a personal, individual level, but instead of uh wanting to be seen for that, will claim to be uh part of one specific group.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I am part of this or that gender minority, I am part of this or that ethnic minority, and this is why I deserve to be loved.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the saddest thing in the world because each and every one of us deserves to be loved, but not because of uh a specific tiny little box where we fit in.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: We deserve to be loved because we're all human and valuable and in need of that love that one another can give uh to each other, especially to support uh people through that dreadful period of you know late teenage, early adulthood.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: And now instead of uh having the the open vulnerability of saying, well, this is what is going on in my life, I feel weak, I need love.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh people say I deserve support because I am in that tiny little box that the internet has just revealed to me.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it it it saddens me so much to see young people falling to that because it it's the it's the easiest thing to recycle politically.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone can show up and say, I will speak for this specific group of the oppressed, this other group of the oppressed.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it ends up just lumping together things that do not belong together.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you can uh suffer from racism.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: Racism does exist.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you can suffer of sexism, you can suffer of homophobia, but all these things should not be weaponized by political parties or even by you know companies who decide that they'll be putting up a specific flag just to make more money, just to attract a specific group of clients.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: So uh yes, I'd say scale down on boxes of victimhood and bring back just actual human vulnerability.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we'd help one another a lot more doing that.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I hope this isn't too much of a clunky segue, but you made a few references within there that speak very loudly to the inheritance of Western civilization.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: You spoke about being loved for a very nature as humans, it's a very Christian concept, so is that of being fallible.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then you have also um spoken of uh elsewhere in the book the um nature of Western curiosity, which you um can see through the art, the literature, and that um this is all driven by both not just the biblical worldview but the humanities that came from that uh Greco-Roman civilization.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: But you you draw a distinction, um a comparison between the Islamic world, one that is focused on the prohibition of images, and you do so because you grew up in an Islamic country.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um perhaps for those who don't consider this on a day-to-day basis, you could unpack that a little.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: The the nature of what it's like to live in a Western society and its cultural artifacts versus that of living in an Islamic one, which it seems has a dearth of them.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, one of the things I point out in the book is that uh the connection to images varies depending on the Muslim schools, but because uh I'd say that the the prevailing one is the in the West is the uh the the one that is against iconic representation, this is what we think the most of in the Muslim world, uh about the Muslim world.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: And having grown up in Morocco myself, it's one of the countries where uh statues are not present because of many centuries of upholding this view that icons are uh against Islamic faith as it is practiced there in the Sunite Malachite branch.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that meant that when I would travel to Europe, one of the first things that would catch my eyes is the statues, statues everywhere.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought they were beautiful.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that there's something fascinating about the accurate three-dimension representation of the human body.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I believe Westerners are somehow vaccinated against that.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: You you grow up in it, you don't know how rare it is.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: But uh it is specifically Western.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have quite the same connection to statues in in other cultural spheres.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd say the connection to the the representation of the body, there's something specifically Western about it that we fail to appreciate.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: We don't even have it, you know, I'd say in Eastern Christianity because of the icons, because of the different aesthetic traditions, but there is something in Western Europe about uh glorifying the human body, which I think goes against the entire prejudice about uh the Western mindset that has hated the body for so long and been oppressive or uh has demonized the body during the medieval period.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's not true.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: The body has been seen as uh one of the many gifts of God, you know, reason, the body, faith, all of these lumped together are part of the of what human beings have received from God.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the the Christian tradition has kept that up.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Rémi Bragg, one of the living philosophers I admire the most, talks a lot about the um the eccentric nature of Western thought.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: You have these two poles, Athens and Jerusalem, and neither of these is technically in the West.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yet Western culture owes them so much, and the West always acknowledges it's always uh it you know, it it's not like we woke up one day and realized that, hey, we have things that come from other countries.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: We have you know words, uh ways of counting, ways of depicting that are borrowed from other civilizations and we know it in the West.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you contrast that, and I I I say that well lovingly, I I uh I'm very indebted to my Moroccan roots too, but if you ask a Moroccan, Morocco has invented everything.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: Everything comes from Morocco, and uh no one else ever came up with anything good.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's it's quite an interesting contrast between the two attitudes: uh a way of seeing oneself as the the creator, the source of everything, and a way of going out, going away from one's center to bring good things back.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, if if there's anything the West should be proud of, it's of having brought in all these good things.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it it's uh it's a very good point, and one that is continually uh raised and re raised uh both by you and your book, also a colleague of yours, uh a mutual uh colleague and friend, or Lord Nigel Bigger, that actually it's very easy to say the imperial European powers were out there bringing statues back home and lumping them in their museums and and uh scraping these cultural artifacts.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: But um actually a closer reading of the history shows that um many of these people, uh people, products of European civilization, looked at the world, they drew it, they mapped it, they preserved histories of people, they even uh documented the languages of some indigenous peoples of various parts of the world.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: I believe Sanskrit was um uh actually documented by um the British colonial um um officials because they they were always at risk of being wiped away by a rival people, or that they just weren't um that that culture didn't prize the the documentation of things in the way that Westerners did.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it is also true that even even conservatives, conservatives are often seen as uh being inward-looking, um, but actually one of the key components of conservatism, certainly in the the British tradition, is an admiration of other cultures.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, even those those those who were seen as uh the the foot soldiers, not the foot soldiers, I suppose the the the guards of Empire like Rudyard Kipling was incredibly curious about and willing to defend the culture of Indians.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't there lording it up over them, he may have had status, but he genuinely appreciated who they were.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I think in some ways you could argue that modern Britain, the way it's governed, the multicultural Britain, which is obviously comes with many issues, which we've talked about on the podcast, but uh it also seems to come from this sense of admiration for interest in the cultures of other people.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's quite a short-sighted way to look at it.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: How how do you you yourself, you write about this very beautifully in your book.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: You have a very multilayered identity, born in Morocco, raised in Morocco, came to France, clearly a defender of French civilization, love the teacups and red phone boxes of Britain now.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: But how would you how do you describe that moving through these totally different civilizations and and and um and what that journey looked like?
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well going back to what you were saying about um the the the Western skill for uh just being interested in others, I was mentioning earlier that the the Arab Empire extended to Iberia, so it was 800 years of Arab and Berber presence in Spain.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: And uh when when the Reconquista happened and everyone went back to Morocco, they didn't bring back anything.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't bring back a single statue.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I wish they had, you know, just but just as a sort of little keepsake, but uh but of course uh this is not what happened.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: And if you compare that to the uh the enthusiasm of the English for the their empire, it's quite different.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the the way, for instance, uh the languages were preserved and transmitted, many would say, oh, it is just to defend the interests of the empire because you have to talk to these people.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, of course, but you know, piggybacking on the uh imperial officers, you had all these quirky intellectuals compiling dictionaries and traveling miles and miles through the jungle just to meet that uh forgotten tribe or whatever.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you have you do have wonderful stories of adventurers who were just out and about trying to keep these records of uh of people who had no records and not to minimize oral history, but written history works a lot better.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can you can share it, you can extend it to others.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's one of the things that I appreciated the most uh going well from Morocco to France to Britain.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's the openness, the the the amount of um well, the potential discoveries that happen just from living in one country, then another, then another.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: In well, my my I'd say my mind in is French.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: I moved to France when I was 17.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_00: I do not know how to operate like a functional adult in Morocco.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: I never paid my bills there.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: So most of my standards are French.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: I uh I complain often about the lack of proper yogurts in uh British supermarkets.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, it's just one of these things that makes you appreciate that immigrating is not an easy thing.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Dries Ghali calls it an extreme sport, I think.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: So um one of the one of the things I've I've noticed, you know, being someone who did not immigrate, I'd say, as part of mass immigration, is actually how hard it is to immigrate, landing in a country and realizing actually you don't have the codes, you don't have the social cues.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: People are talking about something and your understanding is lagging because although you know the language, you don't know all the puns, you don't know all the little slangish ways of doing things.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I experienced that twice.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: In France, I well, I had perfect command of the language.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Which of course I speak French better than I speak Arabic, but I did not have the same sense of humor.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: I I was still culturally to a certain extent a foreigner.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then in Britain, I I am still experiencing the wonderful exoticism of this island.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've been here for nine years now, and and it is such a strange and fascinating place.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd like it to remain so.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't move to Britain to see it becoming a sort of mini version of the entire world.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: I want Britain to be Britain.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: I want England to be England with all the quirky things and uh well all the the people that make it England.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: I I just love the the the small talk that you know uh calling someone you've seen for about five seconds love at first I was what's what's what's but yes you you end up liking that and then uh what when you end up interacting with people who do not share this, there's something lacking.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I was uh telling a friend earlier, I I don't want a random generic global Uber driver.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want a black cab driver named Gary, who's who teaches soccer to his son that's uh in Sunday practice, and his wife leads the chapel choir and makes jam and you know, all the the typical quintessential English life.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I I like to be exposed to.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: So uh yes, keep keep England English, keep Britain British with its singularity and also its wonderful openness.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: I was speaking to a friend the other day, and we were talking about many of these key thinkers that have led to the ferment we're seeing across the West, one of them being Edward Saeed and Orientalism.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, he's also an Englishman.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: He said, perhaps we ought to claim the concept of Orientalism for ourselves because we are incredibly unique.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh maybe we just ham up our Englishman, uh Englishness, and just absolutely wear it.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh he he met another another um foreigner, and uh they said the way they see the English is like they see the Japanese, this uh this um, as you say, this curious people off the coast of this big continental mass and you know, small amount of water and totally huge amount of cultural difference.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe that's what you'll see amongst the right, a neo-orientalism, but for the English, uh, and indeed the the Celtic fringe.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um Marie, there's probably much more we could talk about, but I will I'll I'll hone in on a few other points.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: You've talked about colonisation in reverse, uh, not specifically about demography, although Driscali, who you've mentioned, also Franco-Moroccan, believes, France, for example, and many places in the West, are suffering from reverse colonization demographically, that people arriving even with French passports a few generations later don't see themselves as French, even with a passport, and they're acting, in his words, like colonizers.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: But you made the point about it being about ideas.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I suppose my question to you is do you agree with Driss's assessment?
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: And secondly, what do you mean about colonization in reverse with regards to ideas?
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, I th I think to a certain extent I would agree with Driss's point because uh we we both believe that immigration should remain an elite thing.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm strongly opposed to mass immigration as we've seen today, with no demands at all for well on on for those who are uh immigrating.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh however, one one nuance that I'd like to develop more is the idea of uh erasing one's own identity.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the the the more harmful part of colonization in reverse.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're trying to uh remove everything that makes a country what it is in order to pretend that it is diverse and inclusive.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: So a friend of mine was saying that you can welcome someone into a home, you don't welcome someone into a house.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm seeing both France and Britain becoming more and more not just like a house, but a bland random airport hall, you know, nothing singular, nothing specific about it, nothing, nothing vernacular.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the difference between mass immigration and elite immigration, I'd say, aside from matters of cultural linguistic competence, is that some immigrants do move to these countries because they actually love them as they are.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: They love these countries for their singularity, not because they are accommodating or offer good financial support for immigrants or refugees or whatever.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: And uh nowadays we we see these two lumped together in a way that needs to be detangled.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not to say, well, I'm a good one, they are bad ones.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: But uh yes, in a certain sense, it's hard to it's hard to um talk of immigration as one single reality when there are so many uh different individual stories behind it.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: But uh I'd say to those who are native from these countries that receive immigration today, that this is not America.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a place that has been built, constructed by various different waves of immigration.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: This part of Europe, or including Britain, uh used to have a very strong history, a very strong national identity that is now diminished in order to accommodate for newcomers.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what about the newcomers who do not want the country to accommodate?
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: So for the sake of immigrants like me, I'd say, yes, please uh stop decolonizing yourselves and just be proudly members of your own nation.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's a there's a wonderful quote.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: There are a great many uh within your book um of of your own writing where you say that discarding heritage and culture is as uncouth, as impious as throwing away a meal carefully prepared by a loving mother without even tasting it.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that was following a paragraph you'd quoted of um of C.S.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis recording a conversation he had with Tolkien.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the passage goes, Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: They were not mistaken, for there was, in a sense, a real, not metaphorical, connection between them and the countryside.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: What had been on earth and air and later corn and later still bread really was in them.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: We, of course, who live on a standardized international diet, you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, and Australian wine today are really artificial beings and have no connection, save in sentiment, with any place on earth.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: We are synthetic men, uprooted.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: The strength of the hills is not ours.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that so much of that speaks to what you're talking about, that we're that each of these nations are losing the singularity, the thing that makes them themselves.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it is this globalized world, uh, the machine world, one in which everything is is easy, we are detached from uh the ground upon which we stand, usually quite literally.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: And when we jump in cars, we move at such a pace that we barely even know what the landscape looks like around us.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so, uh, to a certain extent, um, it's hard to see how we can put a lot of this back in the box with technology.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, people don't people can live on a territory but still be connected mentally and digitally uh via WhatsApp and FaceTime and never actually have to live in the culture.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: And uh hearing you make the point about elite immigration and how there are some people who are actually just in love with the civilization they're moving to, so it's very important we do try and find a way of maximising that because for the most part, people are somewhere people, and those those people tend they they will have a strong national attachment.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder my question to you, I suppose, Marie, you're highly educated, you're from a uh a background of some illustrious people as well in the in the past from the book I picked up.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder whether the idea of loving a civilization, and I think you've already answered this, is actually possible en masse, or whether if you just have you're importing a people from a place, is that you'll find that on average they're just going to keep those connections that actually they they have more love for the place that they're from than curiosity about and brotherhood towards the place that they're moving to.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: So do you do you think it would be possible in this mass immigration world to run a kind of mass civics program and convert people civilizationally?
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you think actually the distinction just has to be made with elite immigration and Jefferson the rest?
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you look at what happened in France for the first wave of immigration, this was an immigration that was promoted by the French because they needed people to uh reconstruct the country after the Second World War.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you had lots of Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Senegalese workers uh settling in France and also marrying there, starting their families.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: Everything started going wrong when instead of uh blending in, there there was this uh regroupement familial.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the law that allowed you to bring a spouse from your country of origin.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this is when the banlieu became dingy instead of being sort of a platform toward social mobility and uh allowing people to settle in before they acquire more uh financial independence and of course the recession of the 80s hit bad and made everything worse.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: But if you see what is going on in Britain now, so for instance, removing Churchill from the banknotes, seriously, who would do that?
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh Churchill is is a national monument, such well Jane Austen and her late majesty are too.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: But with Winston Churchill, we had the emblem of a Britain that paid the price of blood, not just for its own freedom, but also for the rest of Europe.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the moment you rem remove these elements of national identity, it's I'd say it's the reverse of what you're describing, a sort of massive program of uh deculturation.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because someone might land and be told of Churchill and realize, hey, that was a good guy, actually.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have a hedgehog, what will you think?
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this hedgehog saved the nation and defended it against the Nazis.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, that is not how it works.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_00: So um a program like what like what you described might work, except for the fact that now we're seeing the exact opposite.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing a Britain that is uh trying to erase its glorious past of Europe, the country that uh abolished slavery, the country that uh defended Europe in the second world war, the country that uh lost so much of its blood in the first world war, we don't talk about that war enough, but it was it it was uh the first moment when uh Europe had to well face with these divisions, and and if you forget how many people have shed their blood, uh you you consider this place like any other interchangeable one, and uh it's it it becomes impossible to have the sort of cherishing love, the sort of family kind of love that you might have if you realize how many people have suffered so that Britain would be Britain today.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna ask you a penultimate question uh to get your immediate response to it before I ask you the question I ask all of my guests.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it's linked to the history of sacrifice, loss, bloodshed.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: You close your book, and I won't ruin the closing passage by quoting it at length, with a pretty devastating image of Oxford University students in 1917 going off to the trenches, and you wonder on the page as to what they might have been thinking about as they were trudging through the mud, whether they thought of the the city of dreaming spires.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: What would you say we should ask of this generation today, in the wake of everything that we've spoken about, what should we ask of them for what they're facing today?
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say l look look around them the look look at what is surrounding them.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard to say that when the architecture is becoming so bland, when the culture is becoming so global, homogeneous.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: But just try and find something old and beautiful to look at and think of all the people who have cherished it before you did.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm currently in my teaching room, it's a wonderfully shabby room, but uh I'd like to think that a student lived here and had to leave leave in 1917 as soon as he matriculated for the call to arms.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the the the way we easily forget about the the price of all these old things is uh well we we can't just move on from one thing to other to through another, uh like we scroll through TikTok videos to perhaps just find uh a few minutes to sit quietly in an old beautiful place.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to be an expensive place.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_00: It can be, you know, a village corner, it can be an old church, but just uh try and embrace the fact that other people have walked where you're walking, have breathed the air you're breathing, and recognize that you owe them something.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: We did not none of us was created out of thin air.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: We we all are enmeshed in a complex network of people who have tried their best.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if England can boast so many beautiful places today, it is because people have taken the time to make things beautiful for the next generations.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps step out of the disposable, scroll-down mindset and embrace things that last a little longer.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: And for that, what we need is a little more uh silence, no screen, uh downtime, just looking at old stones and old buildings, maybe that would help.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, a beautiful call to arms for stewardship uh in the modern day.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: The question that I ask all of my guests, Marie, is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps it was a moral absolute, maybe it was something more uh quotidian and daily, daily concern, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, believe it or not, I used to believe that uh protests were always rightful and that there was something good about the uh the youthful impulse to destroy things and make things new.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: I have changed my mind about that.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps it was it's what happens when you uh become a mother and have things to lose and have things to transmit as well.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: But uh yes, I think uh 17-year-old me would have been very surprised at the book I've written, which is why I would encourage young readers to have a look at it, because uh it it takes time to become a full grown person, and it is alright to change one's mind about many, many things.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: But what matters is uh to believe that there will be other people after us, and they too will look at us and think that we're completely silly and stupid and bigoted.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_00: So let's at least try our best to transmit them a world worth loving, with beautiful places to walk through, uh with uh loving and really genuinely kindly kind, loving gaze towards one another, not through victimhood glasses, but a real love for the person you have in front of you.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, it is it is alright to change one's mind.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing wrong about that.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: Here, here.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh a very, very inspiring end to our conversation.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: And Marie, you've written this wonderful book.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'll include the link in the show notes, and I exhort everyone to go and read it.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's wonderfully written.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh where can people find your work online and where are you residing in the digital ether?
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: And what can we expect from you next?
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I have I have left or uh been sacked off uh Twitter, now known as Ix.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_00: I can't get myself to call it Ix.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds a bit gross.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: But uh I I well I'm not there anymore.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: I I had some wonderful tweets, but they're all gone.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: So uh there's there's my Substack where I post random musings.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: It goes from uh Paris protests to my view on the Devil Wars product too.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_00: So if you sign in to that, you might get my views on very, very random things, but it's always uh well written with uh you, dear reader, in mind.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: And otherwise, well, uh my my email is actually available and I'm always happy to discuss things with everyone.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, please do get in touch.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: Never had that one before.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: Inviting emails.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's been an absolute pleasure, Marie.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: Keep fighting the good fight, and I hope to speak again.