Latest / Thinking Class / #024 - Sebastian Milbank - We Think We Know What Freedom Is But We Don't

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#024 - Sebastian Milbank - We Think We Know What Freedom Is But We Don't · Thinking Class

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome back to the show.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Dr.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian Milbank.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian is the executive editor of the Chrysic magazine and a journalist, writer, and academic with a special interest in political theology.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Sebastian and I talk about why the changing media landscape is due to dissident energy, why liberalism has a dark side, and why the concept of freedom itself is about more than just free choice, how the Liberty won in the French Revolution continues to have an impact today, why the centre-right has been losing so much over the years and the left has been winning, why Britain's governance and infrastructure is suffering grave issues, what self-governance is, why it's important, and whether we can get it back in a world obsessed with central government and outsourcing responsibility, and the necessity for modern Britain to rediscover its history and culture through stories, and why leaders are failing because they have fallen into the habit of following rather than leading.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you are listening to or watching on.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: The more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian Milbank, welcome to Thinking Class.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for joining me.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for having me.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: I came across you with your work at The Critic.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: So you write um lots of incisive pieces, I would say, on society and culture, as does as do most of the contributors at The Critic, of whom I've had a few on the show.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: We've had Esme Partridge and we've had Tom Jones as well.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: And um both of them served up a treat, and I've no doubt that that you will as well, Sebastian.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: Um before we get into uh the various things that are occupying you and um and your contributors and the things that we're seeing out in the culture, I thought we could start with the media.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: We've seen a huge changing media landscape in recent years.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: When I was growing up, it was you know not quite just the we've got a TV set and there's there's one channel or three channels on it.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: You know, we did we did start get the sat get satellite TV, but didn't get it until much later in life.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: And so there was certainly this sense of here's a few channels and people still read digital papers.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: And since then we've seen new media explode, and I dare say you've also seen um a collapsing trust in legacy media institutions.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: And so I wanted to know what drives the critic.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: You know, what did the founders of the critic, or what are its motivations, um, what did it see in the media landscape that sort thought that needs to be said in the face of everything that we've seen changing?
2:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so just I mean, for those who don't know The Critics, um, a monthly um magazine of arts and ideas with a sort of conservative philosophy behind it.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: Um and I mean um it partly came out of um for those who have heard of it, Standpoint, which was a small but very influential sort of conservative journal.
3:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, and just to kind of give you a sense of like what's what's happened, you know, Standpointed, I think it's hype was only, I think, two or three thousand subscribers.
3:22
SPEAKER_01: Um, we've got a circulation around sort of nine or ten times that.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, we're and I think that sort of reflects um the sense that all this kind of dissident energy, which once either had nowhere to go or blogged on the left, um, there's been some kind of like, you know, the table has been flipped over, it's been tipped, and it's all flowed unexpectedly to the right, um, which doesn't always know what to do with it.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think the critic's part of the answer to that.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, it's sort of you can call it what you want, like a changing of the Overton window, um you know, a shift in political culture, but I mean, you know, you look at what lost sort of decade or so of Tory governments look like, and I think despite some of the hyperbole, I mean, on the facts, I mean, you know, the sheer number of like liberalizing measures that have come through on that what on the watch of conservative leaders have been proud of them, you know.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, um uh and you might say, well, that's what people want, but that's a huge change, you know, and and the Conservative Party that was in opposition under Blair was nothing like this.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's and this isn't you know a local trend, it's not just Britain.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, this is something that's happening worldwide.
4:37
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that you've seen centre-right parties very become very liberalized, um, and there's been a huge change as well as stage attitudes.
4:47
SPEAKER_01: And and I think the sort of in that in that sort of context, the critic is absorbing a lot of the sort of absorbing a lot of the kind of I mean, call it bohemian, call it dissident, um, energy that isn't that suddenly has nowhere to go.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is often said um that people find it quite ironic that the to to be edgy and a dissident these days, you're a conservative.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it is hard to argue that that is that is where the countercultural force is coming from at the moment.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, so new media landscape, we've got loads of podcasts, lots of personal substacks, lots of online mags and papers, we've gained lots of readership and listenership.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh I hope to be there with a lot of readership and listenership one day, but with some of the comments I do get, sometimes people will pick up on the sentiment of a clip and they will challenge that sentiment.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: So, for example, I was speaking to Paul Embury about the rapid cultural change that is currently taking place uh across the UK, and a few people commented saying, you're going on as though uh the um that that everyone's against you.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: And then they they out they out they typically outline the media landscape and say, look, on the right, you've got so many more outlets.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: You've got the mail, the telegraph, spectator, talk TV, express sun, gb news, and and a whole bunch of others that outnumber B, Mirror, New Statesman, Guardian.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: Um however, there seems to be a prevailing view that the those latter publications and thus the people in the Labour, Labour Party, Conservatives generally are the establishment view.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: And whilst there might be a lot more of those other publications, at least in number, that might lean in that direction, it's still not carrying through into the governing philosophy.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Why why do you think that the the media is a is a problem in Britain with its its current setup?
6:56
SPEAKER_00: And and would you have anything to say back to those those commenters?
7:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I mean I think the problem is it's a fundamental confusion.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: So people say, I mean, if you mean as a force, the political right has huge amounts of power in the in in the British media space.
7:15
SPEAKER_01: Indeed, it's dominant in print, as you say.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: But the problem is that the political right in this country has converged hugely on the same values as the political left, on like so many issues which were once a point of division, you know, from sexuality to immigration.
7:32
SPEAKER_01: You know, your average spectator reader is not very far from a guardian reader on anything other than maybe economics and the environment.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: Um, and even on those issues, there's a lot more convergence than is sometimes apparent.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: Uh, I don't think we're gonna see, for example, Keir Starmer come in and do something drastically different than Rushi Sunak, at least on the evidence of what he's promising.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: So I think people who are unhappy with what the centre ground of British politics look like all end up weirdly kind of stuck in the same place because there's such a kind of convergence in the centre.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: So despite the rhetoric, I think it it there's there's there are very few options if you're a voter.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: I don't think you you you can really like vote for one of the main parties and get a change.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: Well, you've you've mentioned the left, you've mentioned the centre.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: When when you bring up those terms, let's pivot towards the concept of liberalism.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: Liberalism as a governing philosophy.
8:29
SPEAKER_00: Most people would go, right, liberalism was typically the governing philosophy.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, it seems to now, if we look around at the evidence, be falling by the wayside as a governing philosophy.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: We can look at events in in Brussels just this week in April um of 2024, where we've seen the National Conservative Conservatism Conference um almost be shut down at the third attempt, uh having been rushed by police sent by Belgian authorities, um, uh a socialist mayor with Turkish Islamist links.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: And um we've seen Unheard um exposing uh what they call the global disinformation industry, and um effectively finding out that there are advertising analytic companies which are uh sending messages to these um clandestine companies at the top of this chain who rate companies based on whether they think they um are peddlers of adversarial narratives, which is now the definition of disinformation, it's not even about falsehood, and then they reduce the amount of money that they receive.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: That is clearly very worrying and is something that you can find amongst lots of people in the establishment.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: US government, uh the UK government is a is a funder of of these types of companies, as is the German government, EU.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: So liberalism isn't looking particularly um isn't looking like it's particularly in ascendancy or or even there anymore.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: And there are lots of people who mourn that, Sebastian.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: That that some who want to keep it alive, but but is it is it all sunny?
10:08
SPEAKER_00: Because I know you've written um about its dark side uh of late.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: What what is liberalism's dark side?
10:15
SPEAKER_01: Well, yes, I mean people talk a lot about liberalism, and I think end up getting very confused.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna massively oversimplify and simp and say you can think of liberalism as having kind of two traditions.
10:28
SPEAKER_01: So one tradition, and I think this is often the one people think of when they see something like this and say, oh, that's illiberal, um, is sort of the humanistic side of liberalism.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: It it it it so if you think about you know the idea of sympathy that you see in someone like Locke or Hume, it's it's much more this idea where they're looking, they're trying to go back to um a kind of rational basis, trying to create a rational basis for politics, and they're going back to the classics, and they're looking at things like the Roman Republic and they're looking at Stoicism, but they're not completely happy with it.
10:57
SPEAKER_01: Because, of course, the thing that to remember is most of the Enlightenment founders were either Christians, either culturally or in their faith, and they felt that you know Roman Stoicism was too cold, too um unemotional, we didn't have charity as its focus.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: So that they were drawing on various people, both the the Christian political tradition, but also Cicero in particular, and looking at this idea of a kind of a stoic republican vision which was based on mutual love and sympathy.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: So it's very much like a virtue ethics model, and it's very much and it's also the strong idea of the state in the classical sense, as bound together by common sentiment, by the common good.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: Um and it's imagining that, and it's very reliant on the virtual rulers and the participation of ordinary citizens in government.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: So that's a big part of the Enlightenment tradition.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: But there's another Enlightenment tradition, which, and it's important to understand, these traditions are not perfectly separated, they get confused, and different parts get integrated.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: So the other the other tradition you could see is embodied by someone like Hobbes and then taken up by by later thinkers like Herbert Spencer.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: Um, and this tradition much more thinks about it's also trying to find a rational basis for human for human politics.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: But it's it's much more materialistic and it's much more based on the idea that virtue is impossible.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: So you see this in Adam Smith.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: Um he says, you know, it's not by virtue, that it's not out of goodwill that the baker makes bread for you.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: It's because it's because of his self-interest.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: And it's the same thing with Hobbes.
12:27
SPEAKER_01: It's the war of all against all.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: Every person acts in his own interest naturally.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: So but civilization happens when, you know, a basically a dictator comes along, forces people to start fighting, and then through they pursue their self-interest through peaceful means.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: And you have to create a rational system, either the state or the market, or in fact, in the case of liberalism, both, in collaboration, which basically kind of coordinate human desires to prevent conflict.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: And the important thing about that is that if you all have noticed, we've gone from the idea of a self-governing republic to the idea of a distant state or market, for in human forces, in other words, that govern people's lives in their own interests or supposedly, but not with their participation.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: So you also see this idea on the so if the if the there's a kind of there's a political side to this, which you see in Russo, the idea of a general will, which is again, doesn't it's not it's not embodied in individuals, it's just the aggregate desires of the people.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, or in the case of the market, the invisible hand, the idea that through the price system people's desires are kind of reflected, and then you have to kind of protect that from interference, so you get an accurate idea.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm putting it very again crudely, but so I so the the so that I think what we've seen now is that that dark liberalism that it is now the domain is now increasingly the dominant force.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: So if you think about the scales went in different directions, you know, liberal states were doing, you know, they were sterilizing the unfit in the 1920s and 30s.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: Um World War II threw the balance right back in the other direction, you had Christian democracy, you had a return to that more humanistic enlightenment legacy, but it's but the balance is, I think, shifting in the other direction.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: So the stuff that you're talking about, yeah, mass surveillance, the idea about the market and state collaborating to control and manipulate citizens.
14:20
SPEAKER_01: This is the legacy of you know the darkest side of the French Revolution.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: It's the it's the legacy of kind of the worst kind of like Victorian liberalism that said, well, let the Irish starve.
14:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, that that's what the price system demands.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: The the French Revolution point um is is interesting.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: I was I was reading uh the debate that Constantine Kisson had been hosting on his substat between James Orr, taking the side of conservatism, Stephen Hicks on liberalism, and uh and James Orr, in his critique of liberalism, outlines that um ultimately it didn't just come out of anywhere.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: It was the final fruition of centuries of social practices and a common religious life in Europe, which weren't all simply about freedom.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: And in the essay, he raises the uh at one of those dark moments in the French Revolution you mentioned, which was uh uh Madame Roland of revolutionary France, uh, who and whose nation raised egalitarian freedom above all else, and yet found herself guillotined.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: And before that fateful moment, she cried, Oh liberty, what crimes are done in your name?
15:28
SPEAKER_00: And so then he argues, look, the the obsession with freedom will in the end lead to tyranny.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh what what do you what do you make of that?
15:36
SPEAKER_00: Do you think that's what we're seeing now?
15:40
SPEAKER_01: See, I think what we're seeing is um there's a difference, I think, between freedom in the sense of an embodied responsible freedom.
15:50
SPEAKER_01: So the idea of citizen freedom is very much every right comes with a duty.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: There's a reciprocity in relate in the relations and in your relation with government.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: Um and I think the problem comes particularly this idea of either uh of either the abstraction of government away from individuals, or with the idea of the reduction of liberty down to also again the le to the level of individ the individuals.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: That's you could call it negative liberty, you could call it individualism.
16:18
SPEAKER_01: It's this idea that of liberty being reduced to pure choice.
16:22
SPEAKER_01: And I think these things are related because once you you take out the individual, um, what you and you can aggregate human beings, what you create is the strongest shared forces that often are not controllable, will take hold.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: So what we see in France is that it's the rule of appetite, it's the rule of the passions in the classical sense.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: Um so you know, all of our darkest impulses um take hold in a kind of system of purely collective rule.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: And that's what happens in, you know, with you know, you have endless committees um hanging each other as fast as they can they can.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: And very quickly, you go from even the most even even the most sort of darkly principled idea of we're gonna purge these people to produce the optimistic society, the uh the you know the optimist society quickly thighs into I'd better report my neighbour before he reports me.
17:14
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it's the irony is that it's the Hobbesian vision, as it were, is self-fulfilling.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: You know, you create Leviathan and it's promptly easy.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I suppose we're we're seeing some some examples of that with the um the Scottish uh hate speech law that came at the beginning of the month, where um there are um so many I don't I can't even remember how many complaints have been logged so far, but a lot.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: And um as Humza Yusuf's commentary seems to be is um that they're rather vexatious and than the police are going, we just don't have time to look at anything else but but these at the moment.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: So, yes, we're we're we're we're headed down the the road that you have um you you've outlined there.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: Um we live in the age of the culture war, as you know.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: I suppose there are always culture wars going on throughout history, but uh we're we're certainly living through one.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: And when when people think of it, they frequently characterize it as a battle between the left and the right, or liberals and conservatives, as people will will call them.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: Um you you have a different idea about the nature of the culture war, Sebastian, and you you argue that actually it's more about an inter-Nacine rivalry on the left.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: What's that about?
18:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I mean as as as you're as you're pointing towards um I I think if you look at the the only effective sort of cases of a cult uh of cut of the culture war being successfully waged by the dissident side of things.
18:42
SPEAKER_01: So if you think about think about, for example, I don't I I don't know if you know in in Cambridge um Arif Ahmed was able to lead an effort to secure free speech, or if you think about things like the recent cast review, that's based on years of campaigning um by especially gender critical feminists on um trans issues, that those are examples of successful culture wars.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: Um and I think the most successful, the most hotly fought culture wars are very much between old guard liberals, the old left, and the new lip new liberal left.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: So again, they're both liberal left on on both sides.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: And uh and I don't think actual conservatism, especially in this country, gets much of a look in, um, or even you know, socialism or anything like that.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's it's things only seem to work if they're fought on liberal lines.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: And um and I don't raise these efforts to in a slighting way at all, because I think they're both very important issues, and I think the people who are fighting these efforts are in a way they're doing a lot better than those of us um who aren't left liberals.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: So and I mean if you see if you look at um the sort of rad femmes, sorry, the radical feminists um who've pushed back on trans issues.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you look at the level of solidarity, the enthusiasm, and a kind of religious zeal.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: And I think that sort of zeal, you really only see it on the left now.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: I don't think you see it um I don't think you see it amongst conservatives.
20:13
SPEAKER_01: Why do you think that is?
20:16
SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, I think part of the problem is that it's exactly the dominance of the centre right.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: Is that this is not a group of people who I mean, I think you could almost define the centre someone at the centre right as being people who don't like ideology and don't like passion and don't like um fanaticism.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: Um in the way that can be admirable, you know, sort of enlightened, tolerant sort of attitude, but I think what it it lacks a kind of strong-rootedness, as I think old liberals had, um, especially, you know, if you think about sort of the root of liberal Christianity in this country, you know, Methodism, that kind of thing.
20:53
SPEAKER_01: It's very you know, very rooted in a passionate sense of what the human life should be.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: And I think people on the left have an idea of what the human life should be.
21:03
SPEAKER_01: You may not agree with it, but they've got one and they're willing to fight for it.
21:06
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a real lesson for those people who don't like who people who, either on the left or the right, who don't consider themselves liberals, they need to think very strongly about what they're willing to sort of fight for, what they're willing to articulate.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: Because I think if you just fight negative battles, you you you end up losing.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you you mentioned earlier when you were talking about the French Revolution, the um how people were ignited by their passions.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: And I can't remember who it was.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't that it wasn't their research, but I can't remember who it was that I'd read it secondhand from, whether it was Rob Henderson or Jonathan Haidt, but they they talk about um the different psychological profile of those who uh typically on the left and those who are on the right.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: And those who are on the right basically don't hate their opponents, they don't see them as evil people, they they see them as um misconducted.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Guided or mistaken, and they get annoyed about things like God, here we go.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh, whereas um, and this isn't everyone on the left, clearly, but you can see the uh othering of the the uh their political opponents who they see as enemies and as evil people and beyond the pale, and you see that language coming through.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if that's if that's partly it as well, is because of the nature of the psychological profile, you're just way less likely to go and pick up your placards and going standing out of a building if you're if you're uh uh to right of the center.
22:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, there may be something in it because I'm you know I I'm I'm very much of the I'm cheerfully judgmental and moralistic, and I'm of course a man of the left, at least at least I I kind of I would, you know, there's a universe in which I'll be editing a left-wing publication, but it's not the one we live in.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: Um and I and I think one of the reasons I've ended up where I've ended up is because you know, I'm I like ideas, I like I like the ideology, I like passion.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: I don't I I think I I I agree I think it's possible to have political passion and a kind of religious sense of politics without having without hating your opponents.
23:19
SPEAKER_01: But I think it's very hard to do that if you're not religious.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: So I think part of the problem is that it's easy to be a Christian socialist and and love your enemy.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: I think it's a lot harder to be a secular socialist and love your enemy.
23:30
SPEAKER_01: Um especially if you know you're you're expecting an imminent paradise in the way that a lot of Marxists do.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's sort of where we get into trouble.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: You need a more concern in politics, you need an ideal, but you also need a healthy sense of that ideal is always going to rely beyond politics ultimately.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you you touched uh uh a bit on the these ideals that are typically held by by those on the left or left liberals.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: You you've talked about they they have this vision of what a human life is, and I suppose some of those are self-expression, um the uh um the achievement of your own uh desire above all else.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: So that's the main that's the main thing.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: Um and um uh trying to think of what what else there is.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: Um but what's the I think we typically know what what drives those people that uh are on the left.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: And if you're thinking about what is it that's going to animate those people who don't occupy that worldview, what what do you think would have been the the vision of the human life and what's important for those who are typically more of a conservative mindset that you think we've lost and and aren't part of the conversation because they're they're dismissed and that they should be part of the conversation?
24:54
SPEAKER_01: Well, again, I think it it's sort of quite important.
24:57
SPEAKER_01: I I think in the past, when there's been political vision in this country, there's been a division over shared goods and ideals.
25:03
SPEAKER_01: So I think obviously that the left's what it wants is social justice, equality, liberty, all of these really quite important things.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: But I think in the past they would have been they would have known that to get those things, you need things like duty, personal responsibility, reciprocity, um, you know, sort of conservative values and left you if you want to call them one a left value and one a conservative value, that you sort of mean both to get it.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: And you might disagree about where the emphasis should be, um, and whether perhaps it's better to have a situation which we leave more to personal responsibility or you leave more to the state, or more to you know, you you can have your differences of emphasis, but what we're seeing is a situation, and I I think at least when it comes to sort of a of a radical progressive left, where they think you can have equality without duty or responsibility.
25:58
SPEAKER_01: They think you can have social justice without policing.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: Um it's a you know, and I and I don't think the result of that kind of politics is going to be police out or prison abolition, but it could easily be a situation in which we run the police in the prisons very badly.
26:14
SPEAKER_01: Um and it could be a situation in which you can't speak honestly about social problems.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: Um and I think that that and I think almost that's the biggest problem of it all.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: It's the inability to speak clearly, honestly, and critically and be friends at the end and be friends afterwards.
26:32
SPEAKER_01: Um and I and I think that sort of thing relies on a sort of trust and a shared values that we've lost.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: I don't know how we get back to them.
26:40
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26:45
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26:53
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26:57
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27:09
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27:12
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27:15
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, yeah, well, uh a perfect segue almost into um the state of Britain.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh I I've I've had numerous people uh this is I think by accident, but perhaps not, but perhaps it was by design.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: Numerous people on here, Paul Embry, Lionel Shriver, Ed West, Momus Najmi, they've they've all they're all from different um political backgrounds and have different concerns.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: They all converge on the the state of Britain and the issues that that it's facing.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: Um so for specifically things like impact of mass immigration on British people and jobs, a loss of cultural stability, the ahistorical nature of our leaders, and and also the impact of Islamism or even Islam on the national life.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: And and you've written quite a bit about this the state of Britain's governance and economy.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: So let's begin with the the governance stuff first, and then move on to the economy.
28:20
SPEAKER_00: Um what's the what's the state of the nation on things like infrastructure, law and order, and and how do you think we got here?
28:28
SPEAKER_00: It's bad.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: That's why I think of a beef sag earlier.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, I could I mean I could give you hours worth of like how um crap things are, but let's let's keep things specific and useful.
28:43
SPEAKER_01: Um I think the problem is let's not let's not resort to hyperbole.
28:46
SPEAKER_01: Britain British infrastructure is not collapsing, it's just not very good and it's not getting any better.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a feeling about a lot of these things from housing to law and order to all these policies.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: It's not that you feel things are about to fall apart tomorrow.
29:01
SPEAKER_01: It's that it's the sense of slightly managed relative decline.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: Like things things that once would have been regularly updated or improved and now just left where they are, the holes full of roads are full of potholes, the potholes eventually get fixed, the trains are delayed, they eventually get where they're going.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: And the problem the thing I worry about isn't that this can't keep going on, it's that I worry that it can keep going on, maybe for decades.
29:26
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, you think about you know the Soviet bloc, economically a lot of the major progress stopped around 1960.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh in as much even that very flawed progress with huge human costs, and what you had the next 20 years or more was, you know, nada.
29:45
SPEAKER_01: Like people just there wasn't a dynamic political or social life in many instances because people couldn't have one.
29:52
SPEAKER_01: Um, the economy sort of rattled along.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: Um, it was very dysfunctional in a lot of places, but life continued.
29:59
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what I worry about with Britain, that I think it can I think we can keep going this way.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, excellent.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: And and what about the state of the economy?
30:08
SPEAKER_00: Um, because I suppose now let's get let's give a a kind of brief summary of where we're at.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: I think it's probably fair to say that we're we're heavily reliant on a services industry, both financial and professional, and hospitality and and retail.
30:24
SPEAKER_00: And we've basically got no other industries to speak of.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: We've we've sold the family silver.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: So I think both you know, small c conservatives and both those on the the old left de Paul Embries of this world would be deeply concerned about this, and yet we we um find ourselves always in the grip of how do we um export more services and then import everything else.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: So what what what was it that we we lost uh before this this way of uh this model came along?
30:55
SPEAKER_00: You know, what was good uh about what came before and and and what was bad about it and uh what yeah, what what what does it what did it look like?
31:04
SPEAKER_01: This actually follows on my point of managed decline.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: I think part of the problem with Britain is it wasn't bombed hard enough and it wasn't occupied.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: So let me expand on this.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: If you look at like Germany or Japan, where trains run absolutely on time and um industry is still exporting, they're still exporting uh industrial goods and not just services, um, you'll notice these are countries where they had to start from scratch.
31:33
SPEAKER_01: So their their trains and their cities were devastated.
31:37
SPEAKER_01: They didn't, they had to do, they had to do it, they had to do everything all over again.
31:41
SPEAKER_01: And I think that the problem is Britain is both politically and economically, we never had to hit the reset switch in that way.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: And I and it didn't obviously there are other ways of doing it.
31:51
SPEAKER_01: You can still upgrade.
31:52
SPEAKER_01: It's just it's much harder to do so politically.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: And it's also obvious that you should do so.
31:58
SPEAKER_01: So I think I think the big thing that went wrong with Britain and deindustrialization is the problem was well before someone like Fatcher.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: It goes back to the simple fact that the British industry started lagging in terms of productivity, and it started lagging partly because we were not quick enough to modernise uh machinery or um shift what we built and produced.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: We were not an agile enough or modern enough industrial economy, and I think part of that was the unions, um, which had a huge amount of power, and the government also saw industry as a source of employment rather than a source of um economic growth and innovation, and that uh became a big problem.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: Um so that that's why you see you saw countries like Germany and Japan overtaking Britain, which used to be you know the world's greatest uh industrial economy next to America.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: Um so I mean and that's I mean that's at least that's part of the that's part of the story.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I mean what was good about what we used to do was that the world, I mean, not to use the sort of rather tired language of skills, but a huge amount of human capital.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: We had people who need to make and build and repair things, and those skills are going to be useful no matter what.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: Um you know, you don't you don't have to have old the old mass industries of the past for those to be useful.
33:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, but if you don't replace the old mass industries of the past with something else, those skills don't get passed on.
33:24
SPEAKER_01: Institutional knowledge doesn't get passed on, and you become a country where someone wanted to come and set up, if you wanted to restart um an industrial economy, it'd be very hard to do so.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: That that point about trade trades and skills um and and how that they'll always be useful.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: I was thinking about this, I think about it a lot, but I uh I I grew up in uh Northumberland, and one of my very good friends who I grew up with, he went on to be a carpenter and a joiner, and he's got his own business now.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: He's an artisanal, uh kind of makes bespoke windows and doors, and that they're beautiful.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: And he he employs a bunch of uh lads from the local area, and one of them he he joined a couple of years ago as a 16-year-old.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: He's mega, mega bright.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: And um my friend Jimmy had spoken to him and said, How come you just didn't didn't do your A levels or go to university?
34:20
SPEAKER_00: And he basically had been watching those a few years above him and been keeping a I mean, clever lads.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: He'd been thinking about what was going on with regards to jobs and what people were getting in their degrees and what careers they had to look forward to, and basically just didn't fancy it, didn't fancy the graduate schemes um or attempting to get on them, didn't fancy that whole rigmarole.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: So he went and learned a trade, and he's an absolutely amazing journey, he'll go on to have his own business, he'll always have work.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean unfortunately, we don't we don't necessarily pay enough for those kind of things.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not like my my my my friend is um is is making the kind of money that you would make if you went and jumped into a management consultancy or an investment bank.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, but the number of people who actually get into those jobs are so infinitesimally small, and the jobs they end up getting instead, they end up, I think, quite resentful that they've ended up in those.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I mean, I certainly know as as a as a keyboard warrior that I wish I had paid more attention in something like design and technology, uh, I could have had a probably more interesting day-to-day.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, and and I guess that takes me a little bit onto the concept of um self-governance.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh we've talked a lot about the failures of our governing classes, and that we're we seem to be on the way for managed decline.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: And now we've just talked a little bit about how people can um live more fulfilling lives if they're able to uh have a kind of semblance of control over the kind of work they do and they can see the finished product and all those things.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: But let's get on to the idea of self-governance.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: You've you've touched on it already, this idea of the the the um the kind of uh the the trying to get your appetites to be um fed, as it were, your your desires, no guardrails going for it.
36:17
SPEAKER_00: Um and I guess you could also say that we've from an economic perspective, we've we've seen lots of um authority power control be centralized, whether it's um to local government or to big business.
36:34
SPEAKER_00: Um what why do you think that we need to learn more and more how to govern ourselves once more?
36:41
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I mean, so I mean just I mean to say one more about the the differing experiences, someone like Germany and Japan, which are not ideal countries in every way, but they have industrial bases, and we don't.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: And one of the reasons for that is that we drew opposite lessons from the Second World War.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: So Britain, so you know, someone like Germany, they came out of the Second World War, and we we, amongst other countries, basically decided for Germany, we cannot have this all-powerful centralized German state.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: We need to federalize Germany heavily.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, Germany has a very strong federal government.
37:11
SPEAKER_01: Similar thing happens in a lot of European countries where they draw similar lessons, and they're also it supports the idea of subsidiarity, that's a big part of the Christian democratic tradition.
37:20
SPEAKER_01: Um, and there's also an element of which um, you know, there's a sort of corporatist tradition is also living on in these countries, and that's taken up.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: So what Britain Whereas Britain is a very different way, could we conclude um from the Second World War that the effectiveness of the central state, you know, that the government centralized everything on World War II, it turned everything towards arms production, it won the war, it got us through.
37:45
SPEAKER_01: We we need to now turn this machine that we built to win the war to win the peace.
37:50
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna and you know, for a while it worked, you know, we had mass employment, we had you know, we built we had the we had the NHS, the expansion of welfare, and in a in a society which was full of people who were you know used to strong community strong community bonds, trust, um, a strong sense of personal virtue, people would have been ashamed to be overly dependent on their neighbours.
38:18
SPEAKER_01: It sort of worked, this national level community.
38:21
SPEAKER_01: But it just I don't think it's proved sustainable, especially under the kind of headwinds of globalization.
38:27
SPEAKER_01: And what what that sort of resulted in is a very individualistic country with a very dysfunctional central state that doesn't really work for most people.
38:36
SPEAKER_01: So I think the importance of self-governance, you know, whether that takes the form of local democracy, whether that takes the form of industrial democracy, um, it's all about people both getting something, in as much as they're kind of maybe participating perhaps in the profit of the industry they're part of, participating in the decisions made in the local area, um, but they're also giving something.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: They're taking responsibility.
38:59
SPEAKER_01: They're saying, well, this belongs, I'm not just an employee, um, I'm part of this company.
39:04
SPEAKER_01: I'm not just um have I'm not just renting in this area, I am a citizen, local local of this neighborhood, um, I have an investment in what happens here.
39:13
SPEAKER_01: But I think it's very hard to persuade people to care or to participate in things if they don't get a sense of something back, and also if there isn't a sense of the present power there.
39:23
SPEAKER_01: So human beings, at the end of the day, it we are hierarchical creatures, we respond to authority and power and symbols.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: And if all everything about local government's a bit crap, a bit irrelevant, a bit marginal, no one's gonna take it seriously.
39:37
SPEAKER_01: And if you look at countries which have successfully federal, whether it's America or Germany, just look at the regional buildings.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, look at the grand town halls and the courthouses and the schools, like the the the sense of like grand whereas any any British building built after World War II in in a city, it it it sends the opposite message.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: It sends this is this is an administrative centre for somewhere else.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: The the the point you're talking about local uh democratic in involvement.
40:07
SPEAKER_00: Uh do you think that because at some point Britain used to have what I think Burke and Ben Scruton popularized called little platoons.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: So lots of people out busying themselves with things that they're concerned about in their local areas, and it is that which um they derive both a sense of meaning, they figured out how they would relate to one another, they would sort out their own problems without having to necessarily go to a third-party arbiter of justice, and uh they they they had a modicum of uh control uh because of all this responsibility they took for their local areas.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh I I'd I just wonder if um because we've seen a very successful subversion of religion and the religious life, I suppose there used to be lots of people attached to the the the parish church at some point in the past and all the various spin-offs that you had there, and uh has has led to that decrease in in and involvement in local life as those economic things we've talked about have have come um have come to the fore.
41:16
SPEAKER_00: You know, this uh what what Michael Lind, I think, the the American um political uh philosopher calls you know technocratic neoliberalism, this idea of you know you've got an expert class that is focused on borderless global economy, uh, quite happily decentralized things, will manage things based on metrics, targets, plans, and people don't really have a say as to um how things are run in their local area.
41:43
SPEAKER_00: And he believes that actually if you want to stop waves and waves of of um of votes that are revolting against these uh the the kind of the dominant order, as it were, then actually opening up a space for democratic um pluralism, as he calls it, these local, more local community control.
42:04
SPEAKER_00: Now, you you asked the question openly before how do you get that back?
42:09
SPEAKER_00: Um do you do do what prospect of getting that back?
42:14
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it's very hard work because I think it's it's it's a lot easier to start with a pattern of settlement and community that goes back to the Iron Age and build on it than it is to rebuild it once it's been disrupted.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: And the other thing I'll say is that the the the the the the seductions of the other side shouldn't be dismissed.
42:32
SPEAKER_01: Like sitting being able to sit in your flat and not have to deal with any other people in ordering delivery.
42:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean you can make it sound depressing, but for the introverts among us, it has is you know, it's like sometimes I'd rather not deal with the world.
42:45
SPEAKER_01: Um and once you get stuck in not having to deal with the world, it's quite tempting.
42:50
SPEAKER_01: And it's again it's it's like a lot of these things, it's a bit like um it's a bit like the um what am I thinking of?
42:57
SPEAKER_01: It's a bit like the game theory thing of the prisoner's dilemma.
43:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you if you're looking purely at the collective amount of time you're gonna spend in prison, you should neither of you betray each other, the common good, that's the common good.
43:11
SPEAKER_01: But if you're doing it on a calculating basis, you're even you're better off even if the other person betrays you, if you both portray each other.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: So that's that's the sort of that's the so that's the so from a mathematical level, it always makes sense to to be and to be an individualist.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: So there's a sort of the problem that uh if you just act in your own interest, it is i i is it's once you're uh reduced to an individual, it's very hard to then go back to not being an individual because once trust is lost, it can't be easily rebuilt.
43:42
SPEAKER_01: So uh I think it it only happens very slowly, and I think it only happens if you you if you sort of give people back institutions that force them to start thinking as a collective rather than individual.
43:55
SPEAKER_01: And I think that also has to happen at a very local level.
43:57
SPEAKER_01: It can't just you can't just come and impose it from the top.
44:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, well, well, I think about where you might go to rebuild that social fabric which we've talked about as having been lost.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: I saw you speak um regrettably not in person at the National Conservative Conservatism Conference last year, and and you made the case that amidst all this talk of a new Britain, which you hear constantly spoken about amongst British politicians, that it must be built on the matter of Britain.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: And you've touched on it at the moment, which is that that that that settled history that goes back to the Iron Age.
44:38
SPEAKER_00: And um and within that, you know, to summarize it, you're effectively saying you can't really avoid the religious origins of the country.
44:46
SPEAKER_00: Um and if you're gonna and if you are going to um create any sense of shared home and settlement with each other, you need to share the same stories, have a shared sentiment, sing the same songs.
44:59
SPEAKER_00: And um you said that liberal modernity denies us a common life, and that a borderless egalitarianism won't give us that either.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: So this is this has given you free range to delve into uh delve into the things that that that make you passionate about about the the history of these isles.
45:19
SPEAKER_00: What what could our shared stories and songs be?
45:25
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know one thing that's very striking is that British people are still very intuitively attached to landscape, local history, um walking walking nature.
45:38
SPEAKER_01: Like this is, you know, we we uh this is does feel like an un unshakeable kind of foundation that you can take anything else away, but people will still feel an emotional resonance with this kind of like deep, encrusted compost of tradition and common life, even if it's muted because they've been cut off through its stories and traditions, uh, otherwise.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: And I think um I don't think you're going to sort of suddenly rebuild that through a kind of king and country, wave the flag, sort of like tweedy kind of revivalism.
46:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean that's gonna work for some people, no doubt.
46:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm not not necessarily denouncing it, but it's but I think the thing that that really it it works is more the sort of David Jones thing.
46:26
SPEAKER_01: So if you know David Jones, the Welsh um poet and painter, he he did he wrote this one of the great World War I poems that's sadly not taught in schools, which would be a good start for this sort of thing, uh in parenthesis.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: And that's all about this kind of mythic psychic landscape um in which sort of history is kind of myth are blended together into a kind of a living whole.
46:48
SPEAKER_01: And that's I know that sounds very abstract, but at the same time I think it's also in some ways the least abstract thing, because it's actually what we encounter.
46:56
SPEAKER_01: We don't we can rationalise and abstract thing uh all we like, our country and our history and our culture, but you go out into Britain and you and you encounter it all at once.
47:06
SPEAKER_01: You know, the Middle Ages is there in a church right next to the 18th century town hall, right next to the 17th century pub, right next to the kind of 20th century tenement housing.
47:18
SPEAKER_01: It's all running together, and the ideas and the poetry and the lives that have touch those are all there.
47:24
SPEAKER_01: And you can ignore them, you can refuse to represent them in education and culture and the BBC, um, as some people seem keen to do, and you can try and replace them with Ursat's stories you've sort of gleaned from America or something, but it it doesn't it's gonna skate off ultimately, and it that Britain will still be there waiting for you, and I think it's always there to be rediscovered.
47:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's that's a lovely sentiment, and it's uh it reminds me of um uh a Substacker that I spoke to recently.
47:58
SPEAKER_00: He's he goes by brother Alexander and he writes a Substack called The Tower of Adam, but he's actually just started one called The Institute of England, and um and effectively what he's trying to do uh with some fellow um some fellow concerned uh people is um revive a love of England because England uh you know there are lots of people who say this, you know, Paul Kingsnorth being one of them, the Orthodox Um Christian writer, that England is one of the only places that won't know any folk songs of its own.
48:31
SPEAKER_00: It's lost any sense of its heritage because of the the scale of modernizing in the late the latter half of the 20th century.
48:38
SPEAKER_00: And anyway, what what what what what Alex is trying to do is he's inviting people to come and write about the things that make them love England.
48:48
SPEAKER_00: And interestingly, when we spoke about it, he was talking about the um the landscapes, you know, what people feel when they're out there.
48:57
SPEAKER_00: And some of the people who've written for it so far have been um, you know, the tip such a typically English hobby, actually.
49:02
SPEAKER_00: You've got bird watchers there, and the description of it, you know, even if you hadn't set foot in England yet, and then you read the the article, you can get this vivid feel as to what the place is.
49:14
SPEAKER_00: And and you're right, is that actually forget the abstract ideals, is as this, you know, as as any place on this earth, there's a there's a there's a feel and there's an atmosphere.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, go go and engage with it, go and participate in it.
49:30
SPEAKER_00: So I thought that was a I think that's a lovely project, and I and um it's only been going since the beginning of the month, I think.
49:36
SPEAKER_00: And it's uh and I wish it all the best because it's one of those things which is trying to be.
49:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to be political.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: I just want to talk about what we love about this place that we share together.
49:46
SPEAKER_00: That's that's nice.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: Um but let's get on back onto some some some harder stuff.
49:52
SPEAKER_00: There's not harder stuff, but but just say before we get on to the hard stuff, uh just really good.
49:58
SPEAKER_01: I just think that I you said about it, it's not being political.
50:02
SPEAKER_01: I think it is, yeah.
50:03
SPEAKER_01: But I think it is political because it's not.
50:06
SPEAKER_01: So like I was gonna this is something I thought when you when I saw the questions you sent me, which is that um, you know, so the critic, obviously it's got a political brand in the rest of it, but more than half of what we publish uh in print and online is not political.
50:20
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, especially the physical mag, it's mostly art and culture.
50:24
SPEAKER_01: Um, and then we've got a few features, and uh but I think something like just I was watching Kenneth Clark Civilization lately, and I don't know if you know this, but it got put on the prevent list of like in-text, a forbidden text or whatever, you know, well, dodgy things written by, you know, because I think because it had attracted conservative and even reactionary sort of interest, and I the sort of distant right thing.
50:47
SPEAKER_01: And I think the reason, you know, Kenneth Clark is clearly not a reactionary or even probably conservative, he's giving a fairly straight liberal middle of the century account of history.
50:59
SPEAKER_01: But the the thing is because it simply presents this civilizational scale idea, there's no without any nods towards like culture, towards sort of, oh, but of course it was very oppressive.
51:14
SPEAKER_01: Like because he just sort of treats it in this clear-lighted, clear-eyed, very critical but not moralistic way.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: And he just opens the door to it and he doesn't and he lets you pass through.
51:27
SPEAKER_01: I think that I don't want to say apolitical, but that that sort of generous, almostocratic way of approaching culture, I think has become a radical political act just because of where place institutions like the BBC, where the national curriculum's gone, where you know your average English faculty is can't help us, you know, just like teaching Shakespeare straight in an English faculty now would be a political act, not because it should be, but because of where we are.
51:57
SPEAKER_00: That's a fascinating point.
51:59
SPEAKER_00: And anyone who hasn't seen Civilization by Kenneth Clark should do.
52:02
SPEAKER_00: I think you can only watch it on YouTube now.
52:04
SPEAKER_00: You can't find it on the BBC iPlayer.
52:07
SPEAKER_00: Um I got it I got it on DVD.
52:09
SPEAKER_00: Uh, do you?
52:10
SPEAKER_00: Very good, very good.
52:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, it seems seems bizarre that one of the one of the most um popular, uh probably the most popular show of that decade, and watched by everyone, I would have thought of all political stripes.
52:22
SPEAKER_00: I suppose again, there were there are there were very few channels, but uh I I I having watched it, it's definitely not a propaganda exercise uh at all.
52:33
SPEAKER_00: Um I we we've talked a little bit about the disconnect between uh governing classes, public and private, um, and the common sentiment of of people, perhaps.
52:47
SPEAKER_00: Um and we talked about that the ahistorical uh nature that they have, that their characters.
52:53
SPEAKER_00: I once wrote in a book that that basically never saw the light of day.
52:56
SPEAKER_00: Um it was a bit of a pandemic um project that never saw the light of day, that that corporate leaders should spend more time dedicating themselves to understanding the country, its traditions, or even just the local area that they they do business in than seeking to only be proficient in on-trend business management speak and global ideas and the global good, because uh I feel as though it makes sense to be literate in that because it situates you and it helps you be a little bit like we've spoken about today, um have a more communal atmosphere um with those that you are actually living amongst, working amongst.
53:38
SPEAKER_00: Um and and I suppose it helps bring that concept of duty through instead of it just being about just straight business and know what the FT's saying.
53:49
SPEAKER_00: So that's that's on the business side.
53:52
SPEAKER_00: Um you could probably make the argument about you know public public uh leaders too.
53:58
SPEAKER_00: What what do you think would be you know if you're if you had to advise public and private leaders uh a route as to how to reconnect to you know a kind of a shared uh kind of understanding amongst most people, it's probably about 80% of people.
54:17
SPEAKER_00: What would you what do you what would you tell them to focus on to you know actually become real and likable?
54:28
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know.
54:29
SPEAKER_01: I mean I want to answer your question, but I I sort of want not I'm not sure that there is this 80% of people who have a clear idea of what they want.
54:38
SPEAKER_01: Um I sort of think that's I mean I I I think we're all sort of in it together, not quite knowing what we're supposed to do.
54:49
SPEAKER_01: I mean, um I don't I don't think I think the sort of condition of the modern world is it's really quite confusing.
54:56
SPEAKER_01: Um and I think people have some general sentiments, um, which you can usually predict.
55:01
SPEAKER_01: You know, people don't like harm coming to animals or children, and they like nice things, and they don't like not nice things, um, and they probably find the more extreme ends of progressive language alienating, but all of those things one can arrive at by common sense.
55:16
SPEAKER_01: Um I think if I had to advise public leaders on what they should be doing, it should be to lead rather than to fall, you know.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's this great line in um about I think who were, I can't remember who it was in the French Revolution.
55:28
SPEAKER_01: They said, There are my people, let me follow them.
55:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, stop doing that.
55:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, is by advice.
55:33
SPEAKER_01: You're you're a leader, you're a man in or woman in public life, you've got a vocation to make um your country better, to to give something.
55:44
SPEAKER_01: And I think don't find out what you can do to be liked.
55:48
SPEAKER_01: Um ask yourself what can I do that would be good.
55:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's hope that's hope they're listening.
55:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh Sebastian, I know you you busy yourself with uh the critic uh predominantly.
56:02
SPEAKER_00: Um where else can people find you and your work uh that isn't at the critic?
56:11
SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, go and subscribe to the critic is great, we've got a very good deal.
56:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, and you can also be found online.
56:17
SPEAKER_01: Um I write regularly for a number of publications, um, written for including the including first times uh first times uh first things um the telegraph and um tablet, which is why it was my former employer.
56:34
SPEAKER_01: Um I can also I can also be found on Twitter, as people know, to their cost, because they had to see my tweets.
56:42
SPEAKER_00: Well, Sebastian, I hope people go and one subscribe to the critic because I think people will find something forever on there.
56:49
SPEAKER_00: So whilst you say it's it's um it's conservative, it um definitely has people from across the political aisle.
56:57
SPEAKER_00: And like you say, they are making largely apolitical points.
57:00
SPEAKER_00: You can find some really wonderful things on there, and it is very different to what you can find in lots of places.
57:06
SPEAKER_00: So keep fighting the good fight, keep tweeting funny things and uh anodyne things, very good.
57:12
SPEAKER_00: And uh it's been an absolute pleasure getting into the big ideas in under an hour.
57:17
SPEAKER_00: So that's a big pat on the back for two people who can clearly talk.
57:21
SPEAKER_00: But I hope to be able to have you back again.
57:24
SPEAKER_00: And uh I'm very glad this is a video so people can go on YouTube and see Sebastian patting himself on the back.
57:32
SPEAKER_00: I thought that was off camera.
57:34
SPEAKER_00: No, not at all, not at all.
57:36
SPEAKER_00: You've you've been caught on handed, camera.
57:39
SPEAKER_00: Sebastian, it's been an it's been a pleasure, and we will speak again, I hope.
57:44
SPEAKER_00: No, it's been a pleasure, John.
57:45
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
57:46
SPEAKER_00: Take good care.
57:52
SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
58:02
SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
58:08
SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
58:17
SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X, or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
58:26
SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.