Latest / Thinking Class / #113 - Bijan Omrani & Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert - Britain’s Cultural Inheritance Is Being Squandered And We’re Living With the Consequences

Transcript

#113 - Bijan Omrani & Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert - Britain’s Cultural Inheritance Is Being Squandered And We’re Living With the Consequences · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm joined by Bijan Almrani and Alka Sigal Cuthbert.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Bijan is a classicist, historian, and Oxford-educated barrister.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: His research explores questions of religious history and cultural identity spanning from ancient Roman Greece to Afghanistan and the Silk Road.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: He has taught classics at Eton College and Westminster School, is a former editor of Asian Affairs, and currently serves as a research fellow at the University of Exeter.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: He is also a church warden.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Alka is the director of the organization Don't Divide Us.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: She is an educator, academic, author, and campaigner who believes passionately in the essential importance of impartiality.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: For centuries, England's institutions, churches, schools, charities, civic bodies, and industries were shaped by a Christian understanding of stewardship, the belief that what we inherit is held in trust, not owned outright, that culture, faith, and place impose obligations as well as rights.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Bijan, Alka, and I examine how far Britain has drifted from that inheritance and what the consequences have been for its institutions, culture, and public life.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: We think out loud about the concept of stewardship in the Christian and classical worlds, the disappearance of cultural knowledge that was once taken for granted, whether in scripture, song, manners, dress, and shared moral reference points, how stewardship historically shaped the governance of England's public institutions, and how these same institutions are now breaking with that inheritance, the Church of England and its reparations agenda, how today's political and cultural elites compare with earlier generations of stewards, the decline of civic responsibility and the erosion of the little platoons of society, why fewer people now see themselves as custodians of what they have inherited, and what, if anything, might be done to recover a culture of stewardship.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is a conversation about inheritance, obligation, continuity, about what is lost when a civilization forgets that it is something to be kept and not endlessly reinvented.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you value serious, historically grounded conversations about Britain, its institutions, and its civilizational inheritance, please subscribe to Thinking Class, like the episode, and share it with others who want to think more deeply about what we have inherited and what we owe to the future.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: You can also find Thinking Class on YouTube, Substack, and all major podcast platforms.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's my pleasure to have you both back.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is going to be uh quite quite the duet we're going to see today because we're going to examine a problem that I think explains much of what feels disordered in Britain and perhaps across Western Europe, the collapse of stewardship.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is the stewardship of institutions, of culture, and inheritance.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's fair to say that for centuries, public life here in the country that we we live and are from, Britain, it was shaped by a Christian idea that what we inherit is is not ours.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not ours to use up or give away, but to hold in trust and to pass on, and whether that's the faith, customs, buildings, institutions.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this idea used to shape everything in our culture.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And today the inheritance seems to be getting unpicked day by day, either actively or passively.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: We see it in the Church of England's reparations agenda, we see it in cultural institutions defacing their own foundations in the name of relevance, and in the replacement of inherited obligation with a culture of self-expression.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So to think through this, I'm joined by you two, Bijan and Alke, who've spent years of your lives in some ways grappling with the concept of stewardship, uh maintaining order, uh, respecting the inheritance of Britain.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, welcome.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um perhaps we begin with what stewardship is, because it's a term that probably sounds like an abstract concept to those who haven't encountered it, but Bijan, as I'm sure you will explain, it has uh deep roots and you can see it throughout Britain's history.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I mean I i as a concept, I don't think it's a very complicated concept, this idea that um what you have, um the valuable things that you have should be um harnessed and uh garnered and increased and passed on so that they aren't squandered for your own particular benefit in your own generation on you yourself or the immediate people around you, but the um the the the mass of them is passed on so that future generations can also uh enjoy them.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that they aren't squandered and it it is um it's not just a Christian idea, we do see it in classical philosophers as well.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Aristotle, for example, it's expressed in Cicero, the the importance of um hanging on to um the wealth and the goods um of a generation and passing them on safely, because that is a means and and not just material wealth, but also intellectual and spiritual wealth, because that is a means of ensuring uh one's own um autonomy ultimately.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: If you squander your material wealth, your spiritual wealth, your intellectual wealth, your patrimony, um it means that you yourself and the generations after you become vulnerable to manipulation.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that I mean that's certainly uh an idea that uh uh has uh its uh basis in the classical world, but also it's a very Christian idea.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And um I I suppose Christianity comes to it from a slightly different uh direction.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, firstly you have an idea in Genesis of um the world and the creation belongs to God, and Adam and Eve and their successors are put in creation as stewards of the creation for God, and ultimately there has to be a return of what they have to God, and the importance of looking after both the material and the spiritual Trinity uh is heard again and again, I mean, both throughout the Old and the New Testament.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the uh importance of guarding passing on uh the word of um God, the laws of God in the Old Testament, passing them on to youth, the importance of teaching, um uh sort of from the moment of one's youth, engaging with uh the scripture.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then the idea of the lament over Jerusalem, because um you know think of the lamentations of Jeremiah, which we're starting to sing in our choir at the moment, preparing for Palm Sunday, even though it's uh about three months away, um, Talis' Lamentations of Jeremiah, um the the misery of uh realizing the loss of um the city of Jerusalem and everything that went with it, because you had not been faithful to the duty to preserve that patrimony.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then it um is also expressed in the New Testament.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, most obviously in Paul's letters of the Corinthians, where there is a very open talk about stewardship.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, Paul is not the one who is being worshipped, Paul is not the Messiah, Paul is not the object of the religion, but everyone um is responsible for planting and stewardship, and God gives the increase.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and uh it it's sort of uh I always find it striking that I mean that the little verse from uh Corinthians, Dat Deus Incrementum, God gives the increase, is the motto of um Westminster School where I used to teach.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: So that idea of stewardship is very much deep in the sort of founding uh ideal uh of the school.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and indeed um uh it's very interesting, uh Christ himself um sees himself as a steward, um, and uh he's a steward of even the the apostles around him, he has to take care for them.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um so uh of the uh of of those that thou gavest me have I lost none.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: He speaks about that in John's Gospels.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: The disciples are looked after, he pays the price on the cross, but he has not lost any of them in that whole endeavour.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: So even that very ethic is is expressed by Christ um towards the time of the crucifixion.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: So that ethic of um preservation of of the spiritual and material treasure is something that is just seems to me to be writ throughout scripture, and it passes deeply into um English and British life, which is influenced by uh the the ethic of stewardship, and I'm sure that's something we we can explore next.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you were talking about a teaching institution that you were once uh employed in, Bijan, and Alka, perhaps switching over to you, you you've also got a background in in education, and as Bijan has just laid out there, is uh those who are educators, and w we we will go on to talk about our governors, are responsible for a stewardship, a passing on of the inheritance.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in in your estimation, as a as a a former educator and now a campaigner, uh how uh effective a job uh do you think the modern education system does in stewarding the cultural and spiritual inheritance of our nation?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think um our educational institutions, from nursery school to universities and the political authorities who uh you know, um whose jurisdiction it is to take care of those places uh uh are really uh hamstrung by two very pernicious destructive cultural beliefs which prevent which really will prevent which are really getting in the way of them doing any job of stewardship in the way Bijan has described, which by the way can map onto a kind of classical secular way of looking at the world as well, if we think about classic Enlightenment liberal thinking.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: However, coming back to your question, um those two but those two beliefs, you know, it's kind of i i one of them is a real antipathy towards the past, everything about the past.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: Hist uh of Britain's past I'm talking about.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: And that is that is intertwined with a more political aspect of being very anti-national.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: And this is anti-nation, and we see this very clearly in the arguments for from the pro the people who are in support of, for example, reparations, because at the end of the day, no historical facts will cut ice, they just do not like Britain, right?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um and they do not like uh Britain, usually because of one or two selected episodes from history that are then invested with such moral significance that really belongs to Scripture and the Bible, that kind of weighty moralness.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um but they've just transferred it on to, you know, their own political preference.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: So the those two things are kind of um the sense that the the past, and that would include in educational terms past canonical knowledge and past traditional methods of teaching.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: So um uh yeah, even Shakespeare and the teacher standing in front of the class, um, the teacher telling a child that they have done badly, the teacher telling the child that they must sit in a certain way for a certain length of time and not chat to the friend Johnny across the class.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, all those kinds of little things and big things that together make up the teacher's authority, the authority of education, are deeply undermined by that um uh rejection or antipathy, and even if they don't reject it explicitly, they feel uncomfortable with it.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: So they can't exert authority in the classroom properly and then have to rely on games and psychological manipulation and all sorts of other things.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then the antipathy to the nation really means that they have no, you know, our you know, our culture is develop I mean, culture, high culture is both universal and particular in in a way that everyday culture is is not.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: Everyday culture tends to be more rooted and grounded in within geographical boundaries, but high culture isn't, and and that's a good thing.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well for a start there's a confusion between high and low culture today.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: You go, that that's thanks largely to cultural studies, thank you.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not blaming it all on Raymond Williams because he was actually very good in a lot of ways, but his subsequent interpreters have you know really dismantled that boundary, and that makes it very difficult for then for teachers to make proper educational judgments on the uh the aesthetic worth, say, of of this book rather than that book.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because if it's British, it will be seen through the post-colonial political lens and then has to be either replaced or reframed or heavily caveatted.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: So those things mean that unless you have a cohort of teachers with a with a very strong kind of intellectual and ethical commitment to engage with those ideas, understand where they're coming from, and offer a positive alternative, not just slag them off as Marxist, whatever.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they may be, they may not be, but that's not the point.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: If we haven't got anything better to offer, we won't be able to educate.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think we're in a position where we're able to educate yet.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: And John, I just wonder if I might offer something that's um very practically illustrates um some of the things that Al Alke was talking about.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is rather like the boy who comes into assembly with something to show.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um what I have here, I'm gonna go and hold it up to the camera.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is the logbook of um my children's local primary school.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: The school was founded in 1877, and this logbook is a diary, a chronicle of what the school got up to from day to day from from its founding.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: And uh if you look at what they did, uh and bear in mind these are this would be in a place where there was no school beforehand.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: There might have been a vicar teaching a couple of children here or there.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what did they do?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of it was about cultural transmission to these children who have had no access to sort of any of that sort of thing before, except maybe I don't know, folk songs at home.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: So this is this is this is the first couple of weeks of the school's life.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: What do they do?
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um taught the children a song, soft music is stealing.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh I mean, for example, um taught the children uh God bless the boys of England, and then um taught the children England and her queen, another song.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then before long you have the vicar and the diocese and inspectors coming to check scripture knowledge.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh their the lessons uh commendable, extremely well instructed, and and well and they're very well behaved.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so you see, you see all of these things as all records of the diocese and inspectors.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that's that's visible.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: But they're learning we can see what they're they're doing.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: They're learning songs, they're they're taking on a culture and they're learning things by heart.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And lots of these songs, they're a variety of hymns, a variety of folk songs.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: They're between 50 to 100 years old, but they're also um very pastoral about the love of place.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're about uh the love of place, but also in the context of the Christian religion and uh sort of God creating the beauty of the earth.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so they're encouraged to know scripture, they're encouraged to start taking on a culture which, even though some of the songs would have been relatively new, 50 to 100 years old, they're in a longer genre of um, I suppose, pastoral poetry, a longer genre of um hymn singing.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: So they're they're connecting into a culture, and there is the interest of the teachers in getting the children from an early age, maybe seven, eight or nine, to be singing three-part harmony uh poetry.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they want to pass this knowledge on.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: I look at schools now and I look at what they're doing, and that isn't there.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: So just just I mean, just looking from a practical thing, children are not being taught the scripture in the way that that was being passed on now.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: They wouldn't be taught their prayers, they wouldn't be taught to recite those prayers, they're not being taught a corpus of song um which which has been passed down, which has endured over a long period of time.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is hyper-contemporary.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of the ethics which um are inculcated in those sorts of songs, uh the love of place, pastoral, love of country, um and also I I suppose pleasure in the symbol, pleasure in the in the the local lot.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one of the songs is the poor man's garden.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I looked up the lyrics, is great joy to me, this little piece of ground before his daughter C.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean you you contrast that with contemporary pop lyrics, um, which are sort of lusting for wealth, hypersexualized even for primary school children, uh in their aesthetic.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um what an extraordinary change.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh this is a vivid illustration of how things have changed in in the context of that idea of the stewardship and the handing down of ideas, language, genre, body of knowledge, um the authority of passing something down.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: W what what do you, and this is an open question to both of you, but uh think has been the impact on the wider culture, society writ large since this this loss of stewardship.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean that from an institutional perspective, because clearly what you've just outlined there is we had people who were um uh committed to the ideals of the nation.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: There was a pride in the nation's fruits, its civilizational fruits.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I know having read uh several books now, and I think Bijan, you even reference this in in God as an Englishman, that working class children of the 19th century used to read voraciously Dickens and Defoe, and uh they they they read even more than most of our current cultural elite read, including our own Prime Minister, it seems, and I don't mean that as some sideswipe.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: He, by his own admission, has no favourite book.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I work with lots of graduates uh of of Red Brick universities who spend most of their evenings watching Netflix and on Chat GPT.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: So clearly there's been a uh a disconnection from, a breaking of that thread, uh, and we could all hypothesize when that was, but what do we think the impact of this has been on the mores of society and how we live our lives on an on an individual level?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well sorry, shall I jump can I jump in?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: I um I I don't think we can underestimate no, overestimate, um what the loss of a common culture that has been transmitted you know, w intentionally in part, but also spontaneously in part over generations, decades, centuries uh really uh what what its effects are.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we are seeing the effects of it um in our society as we speak.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: Now I don't want to be, you know, an a I I'm not a pessimist and I'm not an a a apocalypse person.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: I've forgotten, can't say the word.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but you know, this is because I can know, you know, low at a local level, there's an element where this still continues.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, where I live, there are uh local people, there's a beautiful church that has um medieval frescoes that are in disrepair, and they've just been awarded, I'm so glad, just been awarded a grant from the national lottery, the first tranche of it, to look into a plan to restore the medieval frescoes.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, how beautiful is that?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: I really hope they get the rest of the money.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: So that's but that's at a very local level.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: At a national level, it's a very different picture, or even at a regional institutional level, because there we have we have people we have museums like the Brighton and Hove Museum, which has uh uh instituted a programme called our culture, our culture change project.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: And and you can see what I was talking about, the thing about the past, you can see it everywhere, the language always it's new, change, transformative.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: These are the markers that thread through cultural museums, schools, teacher education departments.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: You I cannot tell you how many researchers there are in education departments that uh are funding and encouraging and supporting individuals to research students to research change, how to change this, change that, change.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: And usually what they mean is they want to change us.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: They want to change our attitudes and our values.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: And if they can't change them, they want to morally stigmatise them to a point where we feel in unable to speak out or defend them.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, if we don't align to a set of fake values which have really come out of bureaucratic enclaves, right?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's incredibly anti-democratic.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: As a daughter of immigrants that came to Britain, when you're talking about hymn singing, I can still remember the words of all things bright and beautiful and the Lord's Prayer.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: We were, you know, we weren't Christians then, and my um we weren't particularly religious at all, but the language was so beautiful, the melodies so beautiful, the faith and confidence that we didn't need they didn't need support, they didn't need to be explained, they didn't need to have trigger warnings, they didn't mean to, they didn't need anybody to say, well, you know, we're gonna sing this today, but if you're not from this culture and you don't know all things bright and beautiful, or you're a different religion, then, you know, we'll sing another song next week of your religion, or go to that room over there and you can, you know, read something from your own religion.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't need that.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: There was just a quiet confidence that the beauty and richness and moral substance would would would be there for people that wanted to be op children who wanted to be open to it.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: And children can't really m necessarily be cognitively open to it, but familiar with it.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: You know, those things, right?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: None of those things stop me becoming very radical later, very anti-British later, very anti-imperialist later.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: But they allowed me to, when I've gone through that phase, to then appreciate something much deeper and stronger.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: We're not providing that.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: So the effects are uh pretty dramatic politically, socially, culturally, and morally.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: I I also wonder whether thinking about the f successor ideology to the the Christian tradition, this this country, y you could make arguments for many, I suppose.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: But I I had Peter Hitchens on here and he said, you know, I wouldn't say it was Marxism, I wouldn't even necessarily say it was atheism that was the governing philosophy, but more like a a selfism where you self-create and the only thing that really matters is is now.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I've got sympathy with that.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can't escape the fact that uh an atheistic worldview has prevailed and that we think of ourselves once more as material finite beings that once we're gone, we're gone, we're just worm food, nothing more than that.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I I do think if you look at some of these videos and images from the past, whether it's the 19th century, the 20th century, you can see a harmony within our cityscapes, both in the architecture, whether it's uh a gothic or what have you, um, but also amongst the the dress.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the what people wore, uh, no matter their social status.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: You can see you can see um workers in mills in Preston who have just finished the day wearing their tweeds.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's there's a harmony between people and the buildings, but also an uprightness.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's a dignity, a quiet dignity in the way people are going about their lives.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not to say that things are perfect by any stretch, it's not what I'm suggesting.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: But it struck me when I was in Edinburgh recently, one of the most magnificent cities on these British Isles, that as you looked at the residents as they walked around, you would find those who were probably undergraduates or recent graduates from the University of Edinburgh and and beyond, living in this magnificent city, walking around in tracksuit bottoms, scuffed trainers.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh there was an incongruity uh with how people were uh dressing and presenting themselves in public to um what would have been there, I I wouldn't even go back as far as the 1980s, the 1970s in some respects.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can find old videos of London from that time where people are, you know, all wearing suits and ties and all the rest of it.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I'm sure you'll have views on this, Bijan, but I guess what what I'm trying to get to is this loss of the Christian view of the world, which clearly is imbued with dignity in all of creation, including humanity and all of us, regardless of social status, now that's gone.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, even amongst our elite, you know, they'll wear they'll wear athletes as they're delivering some kind of call on a really high podcast and their CEOs of businesses or whatever, is there's this signal that kind of doesn't none of this stuff really matters in the end, and you do you and all the rest of it.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh am I am I going off on one out of nowhere here, or do you think, Bijan, there's a link in what I'm saying, this this sense of stewardship being lost at the institutional and elite level and the way that these social mores have developed over time?
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think all of these things are deeply interlinked, actually.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they they may seem superficial like dress, uh, but actually dress is extremely important.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: It conveys so many messages of uh ideas of belonging and ideas of aspiration and ideas of how you treat each other and uh the public realm.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I think one of the ideas of um stewardship and inheritance is that a regard paid to the achievements of the past was often seen as a provocation to not just emulate them but become even better.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I I think we see with the ideas of the the Renaissance, I mean, going back to Petrarch, where they started to rediscover uh the old uh letters and writings of Cicero, and they suddenly decided that the Latin that they wrote and the culture that they produced was was deeply inferior, and they had um that they were in a dark age which had to um they had to recover the glory of the ancient past.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a great spur for scholars, um Petrarch and poets in generations to come, to see if they could do better.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and that that's one of the sparks of the new creativity of the um 14th, uh 15th centuries, un undoubtedly.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I mean strange to say, actually, I mean, with with the ideas of dress, uh and the ideas of um the the way that uh the three-piece suit developed, for example, Bo Brummel um was uh uh one of the great influences of English um men's dress, and uh the ideas of proportion and beauty of the classical statue uh were were picked from him and transferred onto the ideas of modern tailoring.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it was something that was very pared down, very um elegant, very interested in good proportion, uh and something that sort of beautified the public sphere, uh interestingly enough.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now I suppose that I mean coming to what you said about um sort of Peter Hitchens take as the idea of it's it's selfism, I I think I think broadly that's right, but I think that what has happened is a uh is a coming together of of two political intentions.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one is selfism, which I think was provoked by um new technologies.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: As I mean, I've mentioned this idea before of the 1950s and 1960s, which um shattered uh the uh integration of societies and clubs through which um ethics were passed on, where people felt that they had to invest heavily in the public sphere and be active in culture.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that turns into a uh into a passive consuming, fractured individualistic culture.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't go and sing single songs anymore like the kids at the school.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you're now listening to the LP.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't have to be active to make culture, and you don't have to do it with other people.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: And add to that the new psychological ideas of um West Coast of the States, where they say that you have to cherish your own deep desires in order to be mentally healthy.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: So forget about the public sphere, forget about service.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I think you add to that the um Marxist ideas means Sartre didn't well, he claimed he wasn't a Marxist, but he was a great propounder of Marxist and communist ideas.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um putting forward notions with him and uh Fanons of the Wretched of the Earth and so on, that um you should culture essentially should be purely political, and that you have to uh use a generation of culture to destroy um uh the old Western ideals uh in order to put forward uh the possibility of a sort of Marxist levelling of society.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: And a part of that was the destruction um of um inherited cultural knowledge and the destruction of the stewardship, destruction of old culture, old habits, old ways of even.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: And uh as I was saying earlier, what the classical uh scholars knew was that um the the ideas of inherited culture and inherited order give one a sense of political autonomy.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: So the the fact that we where the three-piece use, the the fact that we try to dress nicely is a sign that we are invested in the public realm, we believe in ideas of order, we believe in ideas of good judgment, um that um there should be a reward for for doing good and so on.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: And uh if you get rid of that, if you go around in all tracks who sort of scuffed trainers, it means that I don't really care about the public realm, I'm only interested in my own comfort, you know, what can what can be given to me?
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to invest my time in trying to make the public realm look better, and I'm certainly not going to invest my time in trying to pass anything on to the future generations because I'm the ultimate culmination of everything.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, why why does it matter to pass anything on?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why should I put in the effort to learn poetry or to become good at music or to become good at uh beautiful writing or put up beautiful buildings?
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm comfortable.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so you you get this levelling down that comes from this coming together of the selfism, but also that m Marxist desire.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that desire, I mean, even if they don't understand its source, it has entered into the um cultural reflex of the great institutions, like the museums, uh Bryce and Hovelt were saying, like the National Trust.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think in terms of the educational policy of the governments, they they can't confidently say we need to pass on culture.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: We need to make sure that children do know um and understand ideas of inherited culture, a body of a canonical body of things that people in England should know.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like King Alfred said in it, books needful for all people to know.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um sorry, have you Are you done, Dijan?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: Is that is that sorry, I think no, no, no.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think the idea I think that's a very important thing.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: The idea of the public realm, I would see it I mean, I think probably our institutional and political elites may be more influenced by left-wing thinkers.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um Fannon I think is more complex and better than Sartre.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um in his earlier work, certainly.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um however, that aside, I think there's something else that needs to be added to this, which is that the public realm requires a belief in trans something transcendental.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: It requires a belief that as an individual you are willing to self-legislate, if we want to refer to Kant, although we're willing to put our own um individual immediate interests on hold for a greater good.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: That is the that is the ethical and ideological presupposition, precondition for a public sphere.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: Now we still have rhetorically a public sphere today, but it is not governed by that principle.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: It is governed by the principle of it has become an arena for competing group interests.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: So in that sense, we no longer have a public sphere of old.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, we have more like a gladiatorial arena.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh and and that is not really conducive to um uh building things to last a long time, right?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I think and this uh the the kind of the transcendental moral, if you like, aspect, um, as I said, rooted in theology, rooted in scripture, but also rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, even up to 1975, when Raymond Williams could say, I've got a quote here, I do not this is from his um The Country and the City, I do not say there is your city, your great bourgeois monument, your towering structure of this still precarious civilization.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: Or I do not only say that, I say also that this is what men have built so magnificently, and is not everything then possible?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what that points, what that suggests is that you know there's a lot, a lot been written about the decline of religion, not necessarily its institutions, but of of of practising faith.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: And and maybe that for a while, for a holding period, was was uh was covered through a kind of secularism, but that was humanist.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: And humanist in a positive, you know, they kind of like people, they had a positive view of humans, as we could see in the Raymond Williams things.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: But everything about today suggests a very different animus is motivating um our elites way of understanding us, which is not as capable of building these magnificent things, but of is capable of wreaking huge damage, uh huge destruction, and therefore needing curbing and curtailing.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, in all sorts of ways, everything is coming at us to make make ourselves unfree, or or in the case of tweets, they make us unfree when they send the police round if we say something wrong.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, it's not just at the it's not just at the level of physical coercion or even legal coercion.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: There's a kind of psychological cultural restriction going on, I think.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm were you going to say something there, Bijan?
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think that th there is uh a modern reflex um in the cultural elites.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: If originally, and in say a renaissance mould, um the past and the excellent things from the past were a spur to um improve and to compete and to be even better and to improve the public sphere.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it's all based on an idea that we did have a shared sense of absolute good and something to strive towards.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: It seems that the current response of the contemporary cultural elites to past excellence is actually is it's not just pure indifference, i i it is a hostility to it.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and they want to find every way of uh suggesting that there is no excellence in the book, or the excellence was so terribly flawed that there is no point in trying to emulate that.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: Now, w again, whether that's an idea of pure destruction, whether it's almost a sense of uh psychological fright, feeling that we cannot do anything that is good now, so therefore we should try to belittle the genuine achievements of the past.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I I do wonder if it is in part um something to do with that.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean we are so distracted, we lack the concentration to achieve great things.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: But also, again, coming back to what Alka says, because we've lost that deep confidence and belief in the transcendental, we cannot sh sort of motivate ourselves to create anything great or to make any great expression of beauty that we should be doing.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: I I do wonder if it's something to do with that, that the the sort of i deep spiritual um rot uh means that we we are just frightened of the past, not just indifferent, but frightened.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a segue perhaps into some modern day examples of those who are charged with the stewardship of our most important institutions.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we will we will swiftly move on to the Church of England.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: So as we've been talking about beauty, about transcendentalism, about building as though you're going to build forever, uh the John Ruskin quote, um, sacred because our hands had touched them.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: People, our future descendants will thank us for it.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: We might have lost the sense of the sacred, but there's a reason why the biggest tourist sites in all of our towns and cities typically tend to be cathedrals and abbeys and even the ruins thereof.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: People are drawn to them, and I can't imagine it's just because of the gift shops.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: So there's clearly something important there that people can sense, even if it's not passed on to them.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: But back to the point of those who are stewarding that organization, um I think this seems quite prescient given that we've just been talking about a loss of confidence, um, an uh inadequacy compared to uh an a sense of inadequacy felt by our institutional uh elites um and being uh dismissive and hostile toward the past, not even recognising the good that's that's gone there.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: So let's let's move on to a very topical moment within at least the the Church of England's history, where£100 million has been put aside by the Archbishop of Canterbury for reparations.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, which by my estimation has been accounted for in various ways, uh not least through the Church of England itself and uh previous evangelicals like William Wilberforce and all the rest of it who fought for the abolition of slavery, and then the British Navy spent 60 to 70 years and uh more of its GDP than it ever earned through slavery, policing the world's oceans to make sure people other people would or other peoples would abolish slavery.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: But despite all of that, there is this project called Project Spire to pay£100 million in the reparations for transatlantic slavery.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think some would say, those who are less versed with history and with the past, and know that what is taught about British history is that the Brits were involved in the slave trade, would go, well, why is there some sort of reaction toward this?
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is this not just a fair thing to do?
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: Is this right wing reactionary thought?
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I will I'll open up to both of you because I know you both have strong views on this.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: And Alka, you've made the first noise, so you take it away.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um so Project Spire was uh it it's not the Archbishop of Canterbury that's decided this, by the way, it's the Church Commission, which is a charity that is tasked with the stewardship, if you like, of um endowment funds that go back centuries, um to tend, you know, to maintain uh the material and spiritual resources of parishes, right?
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: What whatever they may be.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: So um they have at some in I think at some point, maybe around 2019, they conducted a study um by which they commissioned particular academics, um historians, but historians with a particular political view who would see history through a social justice political lens, to look into their links, you know, and they were they were they were um uh uh spurred on by this by previous action, by actions of universities and other businesses.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: So red flag number one, why is the church taking its lead from secular institutions on something like this?
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, they do this report, um, and they it so they also hire some, I think, accountants or or some a firm dealing with monies to look into the the monies, the endowment monies, and they come up with this um since.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: proven spurious link of what of uh investment that the Church of England England made in the South Sea company that that dealt with slave that was involved in slave trading.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: When confronted with uh evidence, historical archive-based evidence that this was not the case, they didn't really engage in in in a good faith discussion on that.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_02: All they said was, well, the company existed at that time, it was part of the it would have paid money to the British state.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: The British state was involved in slavery, therefore guilty.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: So in other words, just by existing at a time before slavery had been abolished makes you guilty.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: Now if this passes, the implications for other institutions are enormous.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: But morally and ethically it is absolutely atrocious.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_02: They're saying it's not reparations, they're saying it's going to be ethical investment into, and this I think is Malali's words or a close paraphrase, it's going to be ethical investment for public projects and businesses that are black-led or for black people.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: Now excuse me, if that is not segregation, if that is not apartheid, I don't know what it is.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: So why the church is now two s two centuries on after having been involved with abolishing slavery, and by the way, can I just add a shout out to all the ordinary people and mill workers of Lancashire at the time who also supported the anti-abolition movement to, you know, centuries on the church is now going back to to supporting a racialized policy.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: This is outrageous.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely outrageous.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: Bijan I'm sure you've got something to say here but as a as another topical note I can't help but notice how frequently this notion of uh overtly supporting or of the promotion the overt support of promoting black-led businesses is and it's certainly an American thing and uh I have seen several clips of Michelle Obama former First Lady of the United States of America on podcasts saying she makes conscious decisions not to buy from white owned businesses and that everyone who has the money to do so to buy Chanel or whatever should actually think that they should support those who are not not white people.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: So this this racialization which has certainly been an American import being pushed even by the biggest elites on on the planet and uh it clearly makes its way across here because you know we we share internet cables, speak the same language and everyone gets exercised by the American issues of the day.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: But clearly it's about to cost one of our most august institutions uh a lot of money a lot of capital uh social capital in the meantime and uh as you've just rightly pointed out Elka have ramifications for the public and private sector beyond.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: But Bijan have you got anything you would you would add on the project spire topic?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yes well it was it was an excellent uh I mean excellent summary from Elker I mean the the the the this point being that you had the South Sea Company and they had some investments which went into slave trading but they were also like the post office.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: They were just a big administrative factotum and they also dealt with the administration of uh government securities and the church's money essentially went into the government securities end of it.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't draw money from any slave trading part of it.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was a sort of separate matter just happened to be administered by the same office.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: But um I mean yes Alka's quite right it was the it is a church commissioner's initiative though the new or the Archbishop elect uh Sarah Mulalee has just said that she will support the initiative but uh both her response the recent response of the Church Commissioners it pays no attention to the manifold sacrifices and work of the church to suppress slavery, its missionaries, uh the work of the West Africa Squadron, uh the essential sort of huge sacrifices that were made by Britain in the 19th century, the debt has been paid.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea that again I mean I I I tend to think of the the this issue in a sort of loyalty way, not necessarily even a moral way but loyalty way.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you are bringing an action in tort uh in the English law you have to satisfy some very simple things.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know can you show causation?
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: Can you show that the suffering or or lack of people is directly connected to the act or omission you can't.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean sort of scat scan investments in black business businesses what's the connection uh and then the the question of for example uh quantum and people are throwing around figures anything between one billion and seventeen trillion pounds as far as I can see I mean that's that's sort of vast variation that suggests that there is no um real um quantum involved is is manufactured um i in order to suit um uh ideological in even sort of predatory ends uh quite frankly and uh again the idea that um you should support black lead businesses on the idea that they are oppressed there is a market there is an open market which uh should be uh led by ideas of merit um you make good products then we will buy them um we shouldn't privilege uh w one section of the community on the grounds of um their skin colour and disprivilege another on the same grounds um if there is no merit in the product or services that is offered.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean that way just leads to a d decline uh in what is offered i in the public sphere um that it will be a race to the bottom anyway my my um my wedding suit I bought of a black tailor it was a good suit I liked it I didn't care whether it was black or white uh but that the that's where the suit came from it was a it was a good high quality product offered by a person who who could make it um that's how we should be choosing things and and and the capacity to offer merit uh should spur people to be of merit.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: Can I just add something John?
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: Is that you see I think um I agree with with with with with that then the but the point is is that this isn't they present it as it as an am you know a charitable or ameliorative case for people suffering disadvantage but this is not true because the investment that they're going to do will be to will be to people who are black but who are actually likely to be you know have access to be entrepreneurs who will be historians within academia so they may not be you know at the top of the wage level but in terms of cultural status they're up there with you know it you they're certainly not at the bottom.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: But my and and then a second point related and perhaps Bijan you can correct me if I'm wrong because I'm fairly new to um well Christianity and scriptures but you see and it goes back to what you asked John about the loss of confidence amongst leadership you see there is a job of spiritual repair and moral leadership to be done by the church but that is attending to the spiritual health of our country right and a culture that has Lily Phillips is debating assisted dying it seems to me to be a culture that is in very dire need of you know moral conversations at least that should be the church should be playing a leading role in instead of which in my view they have actually breached something really important in the Bible which is when which is when Jesus says um to um I don't know where it is in when to Caesar give his due to God give his due and in that was established the basis for secularism and the autonomy of moral of of of moral world from the secular world of humanity right and what what they've done now is now saying no our moral leadership we're forgetting about the spiritual and we're getting involved in social justice right so they've actually breached a very important boundary set by Jesus no less.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_02: So and this is the church.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean to and just to be fair to Sarah Mulali on that point, I mean she certainly has um been a vocal advocate against the assisted suicide bill.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: That certainly is to um to her credit but I mean your wider point stands um in that there is a huge job of um the cure of souls and the cultural repair that makes it easier for the advance of Christianity in the state to take place.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed I mean the the whole question of the assets of the church and their their own stewardship is a debate which has actually lasted for has lasted for centuries and the whole question of why we should have an established church with assets.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean in the 19th century I think um when they were looking at reform of the church and its assets, I mean Gladstone identified the idea of what an established church it should be.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not necessarily that everyone is expected to be a part of the established church but it is important that the state offers an established church as a means of a allowing people access regardless of who they are what their background is to the Christian message and to spiritual sustenance.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's it's it's like a sort of universal service and that the goods of the church which have accumulated over generations which belong to the church have to be applied to that evangelical and spiritual office.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that and as some people started to argue it should be the case like John Stuart Mill said, you know, you should take the goods and just apply them to general intellectual and s and moral advancement, not necessarily within Christianity no, so Gladstone and others say you um Peel you have to use them for that specific purpose.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why we you know that's why the the sort of material wealth of the church was saved in the 19th century.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to me that um I mean what is happening what Project Spire is essentially is almost disestablishment through the back door.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's trying to take that um accumulated wealth of the church which is meant to be applied to the advancement of Christianity and to the cure of souls to alienate it to other nice seeming projects which makes the church hierarchy look good in a contemporary sense, but it's actually nothing to do morally, ethically or spiritually with what their mission is and what the purpose of those goods are.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: It is a failure of stewardship.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: I can anticipate some of the comments from my YouTube viewers at which typically go like this for these deep episodes of cultural analysis because everyone whether we like it or not does seek hierarchy and they want leadership and they want uh a signal as to what to do and people go, so what do we do about this?
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh clearly this is not the work that can be done off the the back of a PowerPoint document and you know roll that out and before you know it we've got a a a cultural restoration on the way but uh it does seem to me that many of the issues that we're discussing these these nested problems which have had really deleterious impacts on uh on our public life we've talked about now assisted suicide in the last week we know that one in three um pregnancies are aborted in this country uh nothing as far as I can tell from the Church of England on that at the moment um or anyone else really um kind of sh looking at that with any particular worry but everything we've discussed today is this is the product of what seems to have been a mental revolution something that shook the foundations of uh you know in England a 1500 year civilization um and and Britain less than that but how you get how how you have a a restoration is anyone's guess.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean typically it's got to come from elites right but you know elites typically lead the charge on these things.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the reasons why we've had this mental revolution that have led us here is because of the trendy ideas taken on by the elites and then propagated through all the institutional methods that we've talked about.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: So there seems to be a tendency towards disestablishment disestablishmentarianism or whatever you want to call it um how you how you get back that I back to that I'm not sure but what I would say is through all of the people I interview of various ages but even amongst the young uh is certainly not all of the young but there is a section of them that are starting to react to this thinking well this world we've inherited seems to be in ruins both spiritually and materially and I don't want that anymore so how do I get my life in order and they're finding themselves drawn to the classical tradition the Christian tradition and um I wonder if this is going to be one of those pendulum swings in human history where ultimately people look at this the ruins around them and go, this isn't really serving me anymore.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_00: What do I do for the best for me and for my own family and the community in which I live and it will see them drawn back to these questions.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I say that even amongst the elite but you you two engage with the institutional elite probably more than I do at least specifically with regards to the public institutions.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: What what prospect do you see of uh a um a conscientious and moral stewardship um taking root once more in the tradition of uh Britain's history um okay so well okay I think the thing about any elite right is that it doesn't exist in a vacuum um it gets its power from it well it has power by virtue of being an elite but authority is something a bit different you know the kind of the the ability to make people obey you without resorting to coercion physical coercion or force really depends on your authority which is different to power because I probably have some authority on some issues but I don't have any power right but um uh and and the kind of authority will depend on which sphere you're working in education, politics religion whatever so I think the thing and the political elites their authority comes from the people from the demos right democracy it's in the will it's in the label.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_02: So they they're what how what how they will how they will re and we're a very interesting time I think politically at the moment with with people talk about a new realignment but I don't think it can kind of like say oh the old world world orders collapsed and now we have a new realignment.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't quite work like that.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_02: Realignments can take a long time and be quite messy and uh frequently quite bloody as well although hopefully we can avoid that but the question will be the balance of forces of power and that will be it's up to us right it's up to every individual um maybe 20 30 years ago I would have said to get political maybe still true but there's more to life than politics and there's more to changing things.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_02: The kind of problems we face I think are not merely political they're much more they're kind of prior fundamental.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I would just say you know to everybody just think about what you really love.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_02: Think about what the problems are and find ways around you look out for organizations.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's how Don't Divide Us was set up you know when people were worrying about the re-racialising of their kids in schools you know getting ridiculous kind of tasks to do um and uh and and you know or write a great book like Bijan has, you know, a fantastic book that's having influence and rippling down.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know books books don't always have an effect straight away.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes they can, you know, it takes centuries not centuries sorry but you know after the person's died before they but right you know I think that's I would certainly say that as a first point and think think for yourself because you know you said people are looking to answers John but you know some of the answers around at the minute are not that great right I'm not a fan of ethno nationalism and some people are heading down that route.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_02: That is to me a very backward step.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to be thinking thinking loving and thinking and doing I think on to pick up on that idea of doing um all of this stuff have been like those songs they're they're all around us and it's not too much to do very simple things like get together, re-engage with those old songs, re-engage with the old poems I mean I mean it's again you can get these in your secondhand bookshop you know the Scottish Student Songbook a terrible advocate for these um all the old songs are all there.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: Tens, hundreds of thousands of copies of these things um all around you know the Oxford songbook this is what people used to do.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I no no no no no no there are there there are plenty to go around I promise you but I'm slightly upset at getting the my hands on these old things but expressed in them is um a sense of cultural community a sense of inheritance of hundreds of years worth of song poetry ideas vision and then in those are the transcendent ideas which should feed us and we can reconnect with those we just have to you know we don't have to completely abandon our phones we don't have to completely switch off the telly but we have to re-embibe them and share them again and build up a sense of community that is attractive based around active cultural expression and you know once you start singing these songs and have things to share then you'll be creative in response to them.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: You will sort of play with them you'll create new ideas and new songs in the tradition so I I think in many ways, I mean yes we have to deal with the idea of the re-education of the elites sort of re-engaging them with these important ideas but that's not actually going to happen until we reacquaint ourselves day to day with um that cultural inheritance.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: So we we we have to be sort of practical workers in that and not spurn simple stuff like let's see if we can set up a little choir let's see if we can go to the pub and get people singing round a piano or just standing round together.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: So they they have a consciousness of being part of a long tradition which they should share.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it it should be something that is made attractive to newcomers to Britain because you know we've been so so busy deculturalising ourselves and doing down our old cultural inheritance we don't share it with ourselves we don't share it with other people and then there's no sense of community at all because we don't think there's anything about England that even exists let alone that's worth sharing well I think there's some homework for everyone there have been lots of books mentioned within this conversation and held up to the camera you know what to do everyone get out there get reading but uh thank you very much both of you for such an engaging uh discussion I I think I think this uh goes deeper I I think you know without blowing this podcast's own trumpet I think it does tend to go deeper these conversations when you allow people the space to unpack the things that actually motivates them about the civilizational uh predicament that we find ourselves in.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you both very much for uh your own personal views on it your own uh very deeply thought out intellectual uh insights on the the the civilizational moment so to speak and before I let you go uh I'd like to give you the opportunity to tell us where we can find you in the dark corners of the internet and whether you're working on anything that the viewers and listeners might find interesting.
• 1:05:17
  unknown: Yep.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_02: Alka Okay so um thank you John thank you very much and thank you Bijan it's uh been a very enjoyable conversation um so I would say please do look at our website don'tdivideus.com that's the campaign I I uh um I'm director of but I'm also involved in working with other people Bijan included on challenging the assumptions of Project Spire um and I am uh also working with a colleague at Don't Divide Us on taking further some aspects of our last report on the Equality Act that is an a a piece of legislation that is quite unique and is having um is a driver the legal driver For a lot of the pernicious trends we've been talking about today.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm sure there'll be plenty watching who'll be interested to see how that develops.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: Bijan.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_01: Alka, thank you so much, and John, thank you so much for hosting the podcast.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think God is an Englishman, my latest book is fairly well known to your your uh viewers.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm going to start working on um a new book, a short book called Against Informality, which will actually touch a lot on the things we've discussed um today.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh as I said, rather rather than looking for me, I would again say to your viewers, go and look for the songs, go and start a choir, go and sing with your friends in the pub, go and read some poems.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's that's more important, ultimately.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's my that's my um great commandment, if I might appropriate such a grand uh grand phase.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I shall I shall go and learn calligraphy and uh and and some kind of masonry and uh knock it into a tablet of stone and present that great commandment and have it hanging behind me.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be certainly more interesting than the background I've got at the moment.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_00: Vijan Alke, it's been a great pleasure.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_00: Keep fighting the good fight, and I hope to be able to speak to you both again on the podcast.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, John.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: Bye bye.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.