Modern Wisdom - #107 - Graeme Garrard - How To Think Politically

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

Graeme Garrard is a Teacher at Cardiff University & Harvard Summer School and an author. Why do we need politics? And who are the individuals that have most shaped the world of political thought? Today we get to find out about some of the most influential thinkers in history from Marx to Plato, Nietzsche to Machiavelli and Plato to Locke. Extra Stuff: Buy How To Think Politically - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1472961781/ Follow Graeme on Twitter - https://twitter.com/GarrardGraeme Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. As you may be able to hear, I am suffering the depths of Freshers' Flu right now. After 13 Freshers, it's not got any easier to deal with them, but the show goes on and the guests keep on coming. We've had a number of episodes recently that have been to do with history or politics, and the theme continues today, with Graham Garard talking about how to think politically his new book which I have to say as someone who isn't that bothered about history or politics, I found really interesting. So yeah, today we get to learn about the history of politics,

where it came from, why it's needed and we get to talk about some really interesting writers and thinkers over the years Aristotle, Karl Marx, Machiavelli, Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche. So yeah, if you've heard of these names but you haven't got to clue what they're about, then you're going to get to find out the cliff notes of them today. Also, massive thank you to everyone who has been liking and sharing the podcast over the last few weeks. We are closing in very rapidly on one million downloads, which is going gonna be very exciting. We've got some awesome episodes coming up. Lifehacks 110, Christophe, popping in to talk about mental health

and what it's like being a world famous DJ, touring all around the globe. So yeah, we've got some big ones coming in, but for now, please welcome Graham Garard. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Graham Garard and we're going to learn how to think politically today, right? That's correct? Yes indeed, yes. Well, give it a shot. How are you today? Thank you very much. Yes, I'm glad to be here. Yeah, it's going to be interesting. We've been delving into politics and history a little bit recently on the show, so the listeners should be in the mood for it, at least appetites have been wet.

So to begin the discussion in its purest form, what is politics and why do we need it? Well, politics is a way of managing human societies that uses argument, debate, rhetoric, persuasion, but doesn't resort to use of force. It's uniquely a human thing because we have language. When shooting breaks out, then politics ends and you have war. Not everyone accepts that view, though there are lots of different conceptions of what politics is, but really generally, that's what it is. Some of your viewers may be familiar with the quotation that's often used by a German theorist of war named Klausfits, who said that war is just politics by other means.

So that's a view of politics that I'm rejecting. My view is that when war begins, politics ends. It's not always clear where the boundary is between the two. But that's a view of politics that I have. So politics is obviously important if you want to resolve differences in a way that doesn't resort to force. So all human societies involve some element of agreement and some element of disagreement. If you didn't agree on anything, you wouldn't have a political community at all to start with, right? But if you agreed on

everything, you wouldn't need politics. So politics lie somewhere between those two extremes. politics. So, politics lie somewhere between those two extremes. People agree and disagree, and so politics is really about how you manage those disagreements. So, it takes all kinds of different forms. So, the one we're most familiar with is democracy, although even that takes different forms. But there are other forms of politics that aren't democratic, indeed. Most of human history has been characterized by forms of politics that are not democratic. In fact, the greatest democracy of them all perhaps was ancient Athens. And then for almost 2,500 years, there really wasn't any democracy to speak of. Then it was reborn in 18th century, 19th century, and now it's the dominant form in large parts of the world. But, you know,

there are other forms. So in the particular form of democracy that we know best in the West, in the modern West, we have institutions that we use to manage society, to allow us to cooperate, to pursue our common ends, but also allow us to manage conflict and difference when we disagree so that we're not to kill each other. But you know, there are other forms as well. So, you know, there's authoritarian forms of politics and aristocratic forms, etc., etc. But in the general terms, as I said, it's really about managing societies in a way that avoids actual violence. I can't remember the first person who I heard said it, but the comment that you made about, you've got discussion and you've got conflict,

you have words and you have fighting, words and tests, I suppose. There's really the only two ways that we can communicate with each other, right? It's either by talking about something and then when that doesn't happen, it goes into fighting about something. There's not really many other mechanisms

that we have to play with. Not really. I mean, let's say that it's a sort of continuum and it's not always clear where one ends in the other begins, when it really starts hard to say sometimes, but not with standing that, I think you're right. I think that basically it's one or the other. You can talk about it or you can fight about it. That's right. And of course there are lots of different ways to talk about it. You can have a rational discussion, an argument,

try and persuade someone. But politics is also about other forms of language, rhetoric, and manipulation manipulation propaganda. So those are ways of trying to get people to take your view without actually using force. Yeah, it's not as if words can't be weaponized as well, right? It's just that it doesn't involve punching so in the face with them. That's right, exactly, exactly right. Yeah, it can be, it can be, it can be words can be highly manipulative and can involve elements of a threat as well. So that's why the boundary is as unclear.

But to give maybe one example, let's say, in this country in Britain, when in the 17th century at the time of Thomas Hobbes, a philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Parliament was at odds with the King, King Charles I, and they attempted to convince each other of their respective views and they used every manner of means, but in eventually it didn't work and they

resorted to civil war. And when civil war begins, as it did in this country in the 1640s, then you know, you're no longer really in politics. You're into a different realm where you're not trying to persuade anyone, you're trying to coerce them through fighting. But of course, that has to end at some point, and politics has to resume. So that would be an example, examples all through history, where politics breaks down and war begins. It could be civil war, it could be war between states as well. So how do politics and power relate to each other? Right, so power is an aspect of politics. It's a key aspect, a fundamental aspect. Power is always present in politics. It's present in other realms as well.

Always present in politics, it's present in other realms as well. It's not unique to politics. All politics involves power, but not all power involves politics. So politics is, as I said, as a way of dealing with power. And so people have conflicting interests. They have conflicting values. They have conflicting values, they have conflicting ways of approaching things. And in a world of scarcity where not everyone can have everything they want, they have to resolve these differences.

And so this is what Paul thinks essentially about. So obviously to achieve things, you need power. As I say, where people disagree, then they want access to power so they can achieve their own ends. The ends they prefer. A large part of politics is struggle over power because power is the means to attain these ends, but not everyone agrees on the ends, and so they disagree about, you know, they fight over power. So that's a sort of key part of politics, but one of the points I make in this book, my co-author and I, is that that isn't the whole story, and indeed that's one of our main objectives in the book, is to show that power is key to politics, but it isn't everything.

And there is a certain view of politics, which we reject, which says that it is just about power. And there is another dimension that's missing from that view. You could call that view, the Francis Eurkert view view or the Frank Underwood view, the House of Cards view, maybe the Macchi-Vellian view that is just a struggle for power. But we think that leaves out a huge dimension. And so there is a way of talking about politics in addition to that, because of course that's all true. That's a key part of an understanding politics, but this other dimension is missing from that

view. And that dimension has to do with concepts of justice, ideas, values, and that sort of thing. And we think that a proper and complete view of politics has to include both. We refer to both power and to justice, to might and to right. And I think that's a more complete view and a really more human view of politics. Why do you think that power is a term which is thrown around so much at the moment in relation to politics. Well, because I think when people really diverge and there's always divergence in politics

between people, what they want, their values and beliefs, but there are sometimes moments in history when the divergence becomes very acute and fundamental differences open up. And I think when that happens, the intensity of the struggle for power may increase because there's so much at stake. When there's a sort of lot of broad consensus, then there's still some amount of conflict, not, you know, nonviolent conflict, but when the stakes go up, when there's major disagreement about fundamentals, then I think the contest becomes more intense, passions are inflamed,

and even people sense of identity becomes a matter of debate as we've seen with Brexit. I was hoping I wouldn't mention Brexit this quickly. See, like you've already had to do it. And so I think that may account for some of the reason that, and also there is a view now that people don't trust politicians as much as they haven't passed and no one's ever really trusted them that much But I think levels levels of trust have gone way down. This is born out by by surveys and things and

I think in that case people become more jaded and more cynical and tend to see Just the power aspects of politics and more cynical and tend to see just the power aspects of politics. It's interesting what you say about the identity thing. So I've had a number of political commentators on recently Andrew Doyle, who is the man behind the titanium agraft-twitter account, discussing that. He was actually a band, she's on a seven-day band at the moment. I can't remember what for something else this time. And yeah, the fact that you can no longer have a political ideology, which isn't a comment on you as a person, it's not that you have, you are a small business owner, therefore

you're looking after your interests. It's, oh no, hang on, you voted, you lean right, therefore you are this sort of a person. And has it always been that way, has it always been that your political leaning has then been taken as the foundation upon which the rest of your person is built? That has been more than norm in history, I think. Okay. Then what we've been used to until recently,

which is more of an aberration. I think, I mean, sad is it is to say, I think that what you're referring to now, which is becoming more dominant, is something of a return to the normal in history where people have been less tolerant, perhaps, of differences of opinion, where people's political views have been more closely linked to fundamental things like religion, identity, and that sort of thing.

I think if you look at history, you'll find that that's more than norm, and that we've sort of gotten used to in recent history that not being the case, but I think we're going back to that to some degree and that's maybe what's causing the the temperature to go up in political debate and the reluctant increasing reluctance in some quarters to tolerate differences of opinion. So in general, in years a little bit of a step backwards? I think it is myself. We tend to take it for granted because it's what we're used to if you're beyond a certain age anyway, like me.

But I think if you put it in the bigger perspective, you see that the abnormality is the kind of tolerance and civility that we had until fairly recently, which is now seems to be declining. And I think evidence for this, I mean, there's lots of evidence for it, but I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the themes in the book is the risks that political thinkers have taken through history in propounding their views, often controversial views. So it starts with Socrates who was executed by the Athenians, which was a democracy after all,

fairly by the status of the time, fairly open society relatively speaking, and yet they put him to death, they forced him to drink hemlock for his political views, not for anything he did, but for what he said in public. And from that point on, you see almost every major political thinker, right up until the 19th century, suffering some kind of consequence for propounding their views. They either were killed or they were tortured, like Machia Valley was tortured, or they were forced into exile, like John Locke, for example, or Karl Marx, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So that gives you some idea of how intolerant the public sphere has

tended to be in history to the people-propounding views that are considered heterodox and unconventional. And so it's really only from around the time of the Enlightenment and onwards that people have taken a more relaxed view in the West towards this sort of thing. But so that one view is that that period, which of greater tolerance, of difference, a differences of opinion, is declining and we may be entering a period when we're going back to the way it used to be. That's debatable, it's a controversial point, but there's certainly some evidence for that. It's bizarre, isn't it, that we're currently framing a slightly more conflict-centered environment for politics, up against a unrepresentedly placid period that we went

through just before, but are taken with a slightly broader range view over the last 2,500 years or so. This is just part of the course, or more representative of what we've been used to. One of the things that you mentioned there, Socrates dying, the story that you put in the book which I absolutely loved was when he got convicted by the court, he convicted and before he was sentenced, he said, okay, that's great, thank you for convicting me now, where's my reward? He considered himself the a reward, hadn't he, for the thing to come up with. And I just thought, like, I mean, it's such a ballsy move, like a crazy ballsy move. And also did you say he was grotesquely ugly as well?

Well, reports said he was grotesquely. Yeah, I've never heard that before. Well, we have no real way of knowing other than through accounts, but he's reputed to have been outwardly ugly, but had a beautiful soul. And in the contrast is with his friend and lover, Al-Sovieties, who was a bad boy of the ancient world and came to a sticky end as well, but he was famously externally beautiful, handsome, but inwardly had a corrupt soul. And so the way that the two have been presented as sort of contrasts in the writings of, say, Plato,

then, yeah, that's, but whether that's just a kind of dramatization on Plato's part, hard to say. But yes, that's how he's often been seen. And he's making, Plato's making a point there and emphasizing this because he wants us to see that what really matters is the beauty of your soul, the purity of your soul, the goodness of your soul, not outward things. It's one of Plato's major themes. It's a theme that comes out in a lot of ancient thought, like stoicism and things. So he's whether, socrates really was all that, I think, or not. We'll

never know, as I say, but it serves a point that Plato's trying to make. What do you think, what do you think Donald Trump would, how would his speeches go if he started talking about the beauty of people's souls? Well, hard to imagine that kind of speech, if he was making it. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that Trump would be able to reflect on that level about such things. That said, I don't think very many politicians would be, and I think point would probably be lost in most of them. So the big question, you've covered 30 individuals in this book. Yeah. You're out for dinner and you need to choose five of the individuals

that you researched to be sat around the dinner table with you. Who are you going to choose and why? Right. Okay. That's tricky one. That's a hard choice to make. This is like choosing your favorite child, isn't it? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Sophie's choice. Yeah. Sophie's choice for philosophers. Okay. Well, I mean, there would be a personal aspect to it. One of them would have to be Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss philosopher of the 18th century, who lived during the French enlightenment and who inspired a lot of the French revolutionaries.

He was one of their biggest heroes, mainly because I've written about him and studied him so closely. So I have a personal interest in that. Plus, it was a very inherently strange and interesting man. What was strange about him? He didn't fit into society, the polite society that he inhabited in 18th century Paris, the world of Voltaire and the other philosoph. And he rejected that whole world and he preferred to live a life of austerity. He also may have had some mental problems. He had the tendency toward fantasy toward paranoia. And he was a difficult man in most respects, both on principle and by virtue of his personality. Right, who else would I be interested in? Well, Socrates.

I mean, Socrates features in the book, but of course Socrates didn't write anything, so it would really be Plato. So I would have to include Plato as well, I think, just because of this year range and depth of his thought. He just wrote about everything and he did it all brilliantly. I'm not really a plate, I'm not a plateenist, but I mean, five minutes with Plato, I'd give a lot of, I sacrifice a lot to spend. If the table wouldn't get bored, would they? You know, if Plato sat on the table, there's always going to be something else to have a discussion about. Absolutely, absolutely.

It would be inexor- he's almost inexorcible. Yeah. So, that would certainly keep the conversation going. I don't think Rousseau would be a good conversationalist, but- I was going to say, what role do you think Russo would play? He'd probably be smoking, wouldn't he? He'd be smoking over the far side complaining about the service or something. Yeah, he'd be complaining about something anyway.

Yeah, okay. We'd be disagreeing with people at least. So who else would I include there? Well, I think Thomas Hobbes would probably be on my short list of five. Again, for the power of his mind and his originality, he had a very acute and analytical mind, and had a very clear, if rather stark view of the world. I think that would be really interesting. He had a huge range, I mean, he was famous initially for writing about mathematics and geometry and things like that. So he was really what we would call Renaissance Man in terms of the range of his thought.

And so I think he would be fascinating person. And I think he would have a lot to say about the contemporary world as well. What do you think he would think? I think he'd feel a lot of vindication. Because he lived during the English Civil War and he wrote his masterpiece Leviathan in response to the English Civil War as sort of traumatized masterpiece, Leviathan, in response to the English Civil War as sort of traumatized him, and that's what prompted him. So he's a man who really saw conflict as the human norm, and thought that that was the

most urgent and pressing issue. So I think he would look around the world today and see that he had been proven right. It would just be a big, I told you so. I think it would be a lot of that, yeah. I think to a large extent it would be, of course people, you know, see what they want to see, what they call confirmation bias involved, but he would certainly be someone I think,

I'd like to spend time with chat to. That's three fingers. I think Karl Marx would have to be on that list as well. I'd be interested to meet him personally. It was a sort of larger than life figure and the gregarious and bearish sort of man in many ways, larger than life. But I think what is he actually like as a personality? Because I know a very shallow amount of his work. I don't actually know what he was like as an individual. Could you tell us about that? Yeah, he was a formidable intelligent, vastly well-read, extremely broad ranging as a mind.

red, extremely broad ranging as a mind. He was, say, reputation as being a somewhat bearish and contancress as a personality, but also quite gregarious disorderly. He liked to drink in Carouse with his mates. He used to go on pub crawls and get up to no good in that respect. He was extremely unconventional, he was fearless, he sacrificed enormous amount for his views and his family. He's lived in great poverty in exile in London. So therefore did his family. So he's a very courageous man, he had the courage of his convictions. So a very big complex personality that would be, I'm sure, filler

room and it would probably dominate it too. And it could be really fierce, I think, as well. He'd probably be good at partnering with the waitress to get the check down down. Imagine he'd probably be at once like the foods come at the end. He'd have a reason as to why the dish shouldn't be so expensive and this shouldn't be the way it works. We are, right. Well, he had a tendency actually to be quite profligate with money. His friend, yeah, his friend, Friedrich Engels kept him afloat financially, so it could be an intellectual, full-time intellectual. And he ended up spending quite a lot of money on Karl Marx, who was very free in spending it. For someone who didn't have much, he spent it quite freely. But so I wonder if he would, but I mean he was argumentative, so he would probably have

put up a fight. He once applied for a job with railway, this is before British Rail existed, when the railways were private and he was turned down for the job, but one imagines if he had been accepted for that as a conductor on a train, what that might have been like. We might not have had, the 20th century might not have looked the way it did, but one could imagine him trying to collect the tickets of the well to do bourgeoisie on the trains and telling them, your ticket to please you, bourgeois pig or something. So he was a sort of angry man but he thought he had good reason to be. Thank you. So we've got four. Who's your final guest going to be?

Right. Well that's now it gets really tough. Let's say, Let's say, let's say Friedrich Nietzsche. Okay. That's difficult, you know, to choose, but yeah, I would say Friedrich Nietzsche. A lot of Nietzsche is very, very popular now. He wasn't in his own lifetime. It's very good. It wasn't very well circulated when he was alive. Not in the least.

His books didn't sell. He had to publish them himself. He had to finance the publishing of his own books in his own lifetime. Books that now sell in the hundreds of thousands. He couldn't get published often and had to finance the publishing himself. His response to that was, he said that, you know,

my books don't sell, don't blame me if they're no fish in the sea. He said, you know, people weren't ready for them yet. And in a sense, he was right. He was sort of ahead of his time. So that's all changed. And now he looms very large, you go to sort of find his books in in airport bookshops now, libraries and bookshops grown under the weight of his books. So he he touches a cord in a way he resonates with readers now in a way that he never did in his lifetime. Why do you think that is now? Really a good question and a very hard one to answer. I think he offered a diagnosis about the malaise of modernity, about the crisis of Western civilization as he saw it, that centers around the idea of the death of God, the loss of belief, the beliefs that really sustained

Western civilization for 2000 years. We're starting to be really question a serious way in his own lifetime and that induced a sense of angst and he expressed that very well, very powerfully, in way that a lot of others didn't. And I think that his sense of the problem was very cute, a very profound and interesting. The problem with Nietzsche is that the cure that he prescribed was much worse than the illness. The cure he prescribed was really quite a disaster. It appealed to the Nazis, for example.

But so I mean, there's not much to be learned from his cure, but from his diagnosis. I think he's one of the supreme diagnosticians of the problems, the malaise and problems of sort of late modern civilization. Yeah, I've got Douglas Murray in a couple of weeks. Right. Talking about his new book, which I need to hurry up reading, which is over there.

And he's delivering the books hilarious in a very hard-hitting way. But one of the things that he brings up is exactly the fact that this breakdown of the previous institutions that gave a social cohesion that made us work together, that gave people a great sense of purpose. I also recently went to go and see Alan DeBotten, the guy behind the School of Life, who, if anybody who is listening has the opportunity to go and see him live, unbelievably compelling public speaker. Absolutely fantastic. I saw Jordan Peterson last year and I would be prepared to say that

Alan was more engaging live, which is a real credit to him. Alan did what was talking about the same thing he talked about, the crisis of a meritocracy, the fact that we're disconnected from nature and from a sense of grandeur and all of these sorts of things. And it is interesting that as society modernizes and we have more convenience, better healthcare people are living longer, we're not dying of diseases, there are these unpredictable and expected side effects that come with that. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I was

discussing a little while ago about Mazel's hierarchy of needs. I said was that a paleolithic ancestor who was out on the plains, who was struggling to fulfill the bottom of that, the foundation of that particular pyramid, probably isn't too concerned about self-actualization or about the existential dread of whether or not he is spending his life in the service of the greatest purpose that he can. But as soon as we flipped that particular pyramid on its head and all of those bottom things have been taken care of, I think that's where a lot of the existential dread comes in, that there is so much convenience at the bottom, the problem is now of abundance, not of scarcity.

Yeah, that's very much Nietzsche's view. So Nietzsche attacked his own civilization for being a world of comfortable self-preservation, a really narrow, sheepish world where most people's lives involved – they had a world of comfortable self-preservation, a really narrow, sheepish world where most people's lives involved, they had no tension in them. He used the analogy of a bow and arrow. He said that the bow of life in modern Western decadent civilization was flabby, it wasn't taught. There was no tension in the bow. Because as you say, a lot of the things

that had preoccupied humans through much of history, just getting by, having enough food to eat, shelter, those basic things had by the 19th century, by the late 19th century, for a lot of people, has been satisfied, perhaps not completely, and for lots not. But for those for whom it had been satisfied, their minds, as you say, turned to other things. What's the purpose of life, the meaning of life? And Nietzsche was very contemptuous of the English in general. And John Stuart Mill, who is also features in the book,

who was a utilitarian, who believed that happiness was the purpose of life. And Nietzsche said, no, it's not. Life has other purposes. And one of his inspirations was the Greek tragic poets of the ancient world. So Nietzsche thought that one of his inspirations was the Greek tragic poets of the ancient world. So, Nietzsche thought that one of the prices that we pay as a civilization for having satisfied so many of these more basic needs is a loss of that tension, a loss of tragedy,

a loss of drama, a loss of struggle. And in the absence of those, we can't achieve anything great. and in the absence of those, we can't achieve anything great. And our civilization won't produce, it's just a civilization of mediocrity of, as I said, comfortable self-preservation, and that he thought that was an ignoble form of life. I think that me and Nietzsche would probably have quite a bit to agree on. Everything, even if you look at the individual level rather than a societal-wide level or a nation-state-wide level, a lot of the things that make us feel good involve periods of some sort of stress. So acupuncture maps, I was

discussing this the other day, acupuncture maps, I don't really have seen them, it's like a yoga map but it's got little spikes on it and you lie on it. And I asked one of my friends because there's all sorts of different claims that are touted around on the internet about these sorts of things. And one of my friends, I said, well, what mechanism do you think it's working on? Because he's a doctor,

but he also thinks that they're effective. And I was like, what do you think it's doing? And he said, it's the same as everything else. It's the same as doing high intensity workout. It's the same as having a cold shower. It's the same as going for a difficult run. It is a brief period of stress, which allows the body to reset its equilibrium to a better state. Also, it allows you to feel discomfort on your own terms. And that discomfort on

your own terms then reframes other levels of discomfort. If you've run a half marathon last weekend, what is a minor disagreement with your colleague at work this week? You're now seeing things within this new frame and it's interesting that life of comfort, that flabby life of comfort, I think it encourages people to look at small problems with such fidelity that they then begin to grow and grow and grow and then this has been enabled by always on communication and then this has been exacerbated by echo chambers online which are delivered by social media and frictionalists. You know, it, when you look at it through this lens of history, it really isn't that

much of a surprise that we are coming up against these problems and the fact that Nietzsche was able to see this with such in so much advance is pretty impressive. Yeah, I mean, he was talking, I think, about the pathologies of a, as he saw it, decadent civilization, a rich, flabby, indulgent, decadent civilization, and he quarreled against that. But, you know, there's a concept in psychology known as contrast effect, which says that that the human mind functions to some to to considerable degree on the basis of contrast that to some, to, to considerable degree on the basis of contrast that, and they've done experiments to support this in, in social psychology, that, you know, we understand things and we experience things by means of contrast. So if you only lived in an, an environment that had one temperature,

you, you wouldn't really understand the concept of those different temperatures. It's the contrast between them that gives meaning and definition to the experiences. And I think that's part of what Nietzsche was getting at. The basic insight here being that a life lived only one way is missing some key element to understanding and appreciating what's good about that life as well as what's missing. And so I think is a really fundamental insight in nature at a psychological level, not just at the level of civilization, but he was a really acute psychologist, better psychologist

than philosopher in my opinion. He was a pretty sloppy philosopher, a very self-indulgent philosopher, but he was a very brilliant psychologist. Sigma Freud was a believer that Nietzsche was a great psychologist. And I think he understood this. I think he was expressing the same idea that you really need tension, contrast, drama to really achieve things in life and also to understand and give meaning to things and even to experience them fully and properly. You mentioned that Machiavelli was suffered through his thoughts.

I haven't heard that story. Would you be able to tell us about that? Yes, he suffered quite horribly. It wasn't, well, it was less for his thoughts than simply for his involvement in politics. He was a diplomat and civil servant in his working life, until, you know, in the Renaissance, in Renaissance Florence where he lived, politics was an nasty game. And if you back the wrong side, you suffered consequences if you were side lost, and his side did lose.

And he was kicked out of office because he was on the losing side, and then he was arrested, and then he was tortured, and then he was exiled, and nearly killed, in fact. It's a big laundry list of nasty things to have happened to you, isn't it? Well, he took it really well. He wrote some amusing sonnets about his being tortured. The bit that he found the most difficult of all those things was being exiled, being removed from politics, because he was a really political animal. He loved politics. He loved being in the fray in the center of the storm of politics, the vortex of politics.

And he took the torture reasonably well, but he didn't take the exile very well, the exile from politics. Then it was only after that that he wrote the books for which he's most famous, the Prince, for example. But these weren't published in his lifetime. And they became notorious later on. But that's where politics was played. The game of politics was played back then. He understood that, he knew the rules of the game, and he took it well.

That's fun. So, one of the things that you've been a consistent thing throughout this discussion is a lot of the political thinkers, the scholars, or the statesmen that we've been discussing have been real intellectual powerhouses. A lot of them have had been able to draw from multiple different subject areas, Nietzsche, not only doing philosophy, also doing psychology, Aristotle, Socrates, these sort of got, you've got people that were economists, master economists, and they then funneled this ability into politics.

One of the things that you brought up at the very beginning in the book, which I really loved, was talking about the difference between knowledge understanding in wisdom, I think, which were the three different levels that you had to the way that people put knowledge into action and the highest version of its delivery to reality being that of wisdom. Is that something that politicians should strive for? Because to me, now politics

and a lot of the people that are listening will think, well, it all sounds well and good, but this is kind of an archaic romantic view of what politicians were. There were these armchair philosophers who didn't actually have to deliver things, and now politicians to me appear much more like kings would have done perhaps in the past. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense. I understand that criticism, they're wrong. So So in the introduction to this book, we make a distinction between what we call naive idealists and naive realists, and we try to position ourselves somewhere between the two. So a naive idealist would be someone of the type you've just described who hasn't got a lot of experience, a real experience in politics, whose bit are the worldly, has their both feet firmly planted in the clouds, as it were,

and just sort of prescribes things with no real sense of reality. So that's one extreme, and we don't think that's the right view. And the other extreme is what we call naive realism, the kind that I started with at the beginning, the Frank Underwood, the Francis Eurkert view, that ideas and values have really no part to play at all, that politics is simply about power and interest. So we try to show that politics is both aspects, it's the power, but the idea that you can understand or be effective in political life without considering that there are other things involved

in just power and interest, things like ideas and values and beliefs. I don't think it makes people very effective politicians. And that's particularly the case when they come up against big problems. And if I can give a concrete example, I think, a recent example. I think David Cameron is a good example of a kind of politician. He's in the juice now for his memoirs, who didn't really have as far as I could see, any really clear conception of the role that ideas and values play in politics, a kind of very pragmatic politician. Now that's fine in good times, but when you're confronted with really deep divisions and

problems of the kind that Brexit has opened up, let's say, or the rise of populism in the West, let's say. Then I think you need to be able to understand that people are interested in issues of identity, of goals and ends, and that these necessarily play a part in life. They may not always play the same part or a big part, but they're always there. There's no way around it. And I think that the ideal view of politics combines an appreciation of both. It's a mixed form of activity.

It involves power and interest on one side, and ideas and values and conceptions of justice and ends as well, means and ends. And so people who say, well, it's just naive to try and move politics in the direction of the latter of ideas and conceptions of justice, the ends and purposes of life. I think that's wrong.

I think that we need to rebalance our understanding of politics so that it involves both. The quality of public debate would be improved. The understanding of political life would be improved. I think we've moved too far into the frank, underward view, the sort of extreme, cynical view of politics. I couldn't agree more there, the fact that politicians, you know, I've given you the opportunity to sit down with five people who were involved in politics. You've struggled to choose those five, right? Because you're spoiled for choice. You've got these people who are unbelievable thinkers and polymaths across all different areas of thought. Now, my conception of politicians isn't that of someone that I look up to as a paragon of wisdom. I don't think,

oh my god, I can't wait to sit down with Boris Johnson. I bet he's got such an unbelievable understanding of the inner nuances of the human mind. I don't think that. I think that that lack of aspiration equates to a lack of respect on an individual level for a lot of people who look up at these politicians and Yeah, that's definitely a mechanism that I can see working Interestingly you mentioned about David Cameron's memoirs. Did you see this morning routine? Have you seen this? No, I haven't so we're big fans of morning routines on the show and we work quite hard to come up with something that we enjoy on a morning So presumably it's something that he enjoyed

But he spoke about he would wake up on a morning and he would have MacRill on toast and then sit in a room for two hours and just think, David, I'm not, I don't, I don't want to critique it too much, right? You know, you did, you've got yourself certainly further in the House of Commons than I have, but You know, you did, you got yourself certainly further in the House of Commons than I ever have, but Macroll on toast and sitting in a room on your own for two hours. I'm not convinced that sets you up for a fantastic day of politics, but... No, it's very fell off. Maybe it was the Macroll. Yeah, right. Well, I don't know about that.

Maybe he should spend time reading rather than thinking. It doesn't seem to have produced a great result in his case, but just to your original question, I mean, we're not saying, I'm not saying that I want philosophers to be kings, rulers to be thinkers. I just think it's not that I would expect the Prime Minister to be well versed, although in the classics of political thought, although Boris Johnson presumably has read of these because he's a classicist himself. But it's rather that I think that the tone and language of public debate that surrounds

politicians could be raised and should be raised. And that's one of the purposes of the book to try and maybe to some tiny little degree show that we can discuss these things in different terms and use different language. And I'm not naive enough to think for one second that these active politicians can themselves become political thinkers in any sense, but rather that the overall context within which politics happens could be elevated to some degree, as I say, rebalanced a little bit in favor of trying to think a slightly deeper level, maybe talking more general terms, and not always be obsessed and preoccupied with the horse race of politics. Well, certainly reading through how to think politically, I was struck by the fact that

I have, Bizarre, I have more respect now, four politicians overall, I have more hope, I have a little bit more hope, because there's some really good examples, right? People of people who you would want to lead your nation or you would want to be at least contributing to the discourse. You know, it's just a hope that we get some more characters that would make it into the pages of this book at some point in the not-too-distant future. Yeah, I mean, with surprisingly few exceptions of those 30 thinkers we profile, with surprisingly few exceptions, they all were involved to a greater lesser extent in actual politics, you know, from Confucius right on to the present, very, very few of them were pure intellectuals surprisingly. They all

were lived in inhabited worlds where politics and ideas did overlap. And as I say, most of them paid some kind of price for that. So, you know, they weren't just completely isolated from reality. They had a direct involvement in most cases, and that's part of where they derived their views about politics. And so, as I say, I think it's realistic to expect that people like that should have some role to play in public life in shaping the debate, in reflecting upon it, and moving us, as you said, from information to knowledge to wisdom. Now, I don't realistically expect to ever get there in the actual practice of politics, but I do think there's scope for improving and elevating the tone of debate somewhat.

Yeah, I hope so too. Well anyway, Graeme, it's been absolutely fantastic to speak to you. Thank you so much for your time. The link to how to think politically will be in the show notes below. Anybody who is interested to go and check it out, it will be linked there, plus any other resources that we've gone through today. Gra Graham, it's been a real interesting insight into the past of politics. I hope that we've opened some people's eyes to a world of thinkers that are a little bit different to what they're seeing at the moment. If only that then that was well with the time, and I really enjoyed it. Thank you.