The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - A.C. Grayling

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

Lawrence joins philosopher Anthony Grayling in his office at the New College of the Humanities in London.  Together, they discuss the Brexit crisis, Humanism as an alternative to religion, the current state of democracy around the world, and much more. (Note: This episode was recorded in April of 2019, prior to the appointment of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister.) See the exclusive, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

The Origins Podcast is supported by listeners like you. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting it on Patreon. Subscribers also get access to full video of each episode, as well as bonus content and exclusive perks, science and culture. Together, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast. Hello, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. I first got to know Anthony Grayling when we were both writing biweekly columns for

for New Scientist magazine on alternate weeks. When we first met, we conspired to write each other's pieces one week to see if anyone would notice. But alas, new scientists did away with that column format just before we could. The moment I met Anthony, I was immediately taken not only by his charming manner, but by his vast scholarship and his knowledge of history, and more importantly, by how he used his field of philosophy to help better understand the world.

He was a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College at the University of London, before becoming headmaster of the new College of Humanities, where I also teach as a visiting professor. His view of philosophy as an amalgam of critical thinking and questioning meshes with my own, and his lack of jargon makes him one of the most accessible philosophers writing today. Most recently, he's written two books motivated by events over the past five years around the world, and I took advantage of this opportunity to discuss current issues from Brexit and the UK, where he's been quite vocal to Trump and the U.S.

and to get his take on the historical perspective associated with the challenges of democracy, free speech, and the relevance of philosophy. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program and all our programs immediately upon their release at patreon.com slash origins podcast. I hope you enjoy the show. Well, Anthony, it's a delight to be with you

in your lovely college here in London and have a chance to chat about. about so many things, and as always, be illuminated by you. I wanted to actually ask you a question. I've never asked you, I don't think, which is, what got you interested in philosophy? Oh, this started really early. You know, I was brought up in Africa, in Central Africa.

My dad and my parents were British, but my father was working abroad. And in those days, we had no television. It was very difficult to get BBC on the radio, even. You couldn't go for walks in the country. You get eaten by lions. So, you know, it was kind of stuck reading. We had a set of encyclopedia at home. When I was a kid, I used to lie on my stomach on the floor,

paging through it. Looking at these pictures of these great iconic figures like Socrates and Plato and so on, and I really wanted to know what that was all about. I tried to make sense of the articles in the encyclopedia, but, you know, I was eight or nine or something. Yeah. But when I got a ticket for the grown-up part of the library when I was about 12, what did I find?

I found the complete works of Plato in the... the Benjamin Joe translation. And I was so excited. And I took down one volume and I opened it at the beginning of a dialogue called the Carmides, which is a very early dialogue of pages. And it's very accessible. It's a very easy weed. And I read it and I thought, this is fantastic.

If this is what these great guys devoted their lives to, I'm going to do the same. And I discovered a really interesting thing. And that is that if you're interested in philosophy, seriously interested, it's a kind of license to stick your nose into everything. find out about history, about science, about society, about politics. And it's been true, you know, ever since then I've just stuck my nose into all those things. It's an intellectual menagerie. In fact, that's one of the characteristics.

One of the reasons I think I enjoy you so much, both as a friend and a colleague and someone to read, is the fact that for you, philosophy, isn't something that's just sort of strictly academic and done in the classroom and logic. and it's as applied to the real world. Why don't you define what you think philosophy is? And I'll tell you what I think I've learned philosophy is from reading you. Well, I always describe it as rational inquiry, thoughtful inquiry. And that's what it meant in antiquity.

So, you know, the philosophers of ancient times were interested in everything. The very first philosophers were interested in the structural properties of the natural world. And they were, in effect, proto-scientists. Yeah. And they were also interested in human nature and in human. in society and in questions about the best kind of life that we could live and how we should organize our communities so that those best lives can flourish. So, you know, these questions are very general, but also very deep and very central. So I see philosophy as rational inquiry.

And one has to distinguish between philosophy conceived in that very, very broad way, that license to be sticking your nose into stuff, on the one hand, and on the other hand, academic philosophy. So in the academy, in the university, we tend to just look under the bottom of the car and tinker with the engine. We don't ever get in the car and drive anywhere. And that's part of the problem in a way. But also it's part of the necessary discipline to get people to know what the basic questions are, to learn how to explore them with some depth and clarity and acuity. And also, if you know something about the historical tradition of philosophy,

you're not going to keep on reinventing the wheel as a triangle or something. Sure. As you know, I've had, I've been quoted or misquoted about philosophy a variety of times, but I view the connection clearly between philosophy and science is intimate. And there's no, there's a real reason science was called natural philosophy. But I also think of science as essentially rational thinking. The difference with science is experimentation, that you're testing ideas. But basically, I think of science as skeptical thinking, rational thinking, testing experimentally and returning to, and I think of philosophy as the part of science that one does, when, trying to critically examine the world using rational thinking. And I don't really distinguish,

in that sense, science from philosophy. Scientists are doing philosophy. We are all doing philosophy. I think that's an important thing to think about. But I guess the training is to do it rigorously. And I tend to think of your philosophy, what I wrote down what I would think it was. It was just critical thinking applied to all real world problems. Yeah, I'll buy that. Is that right? It's about right. Yeah. Now, I've heard you being skeptical, about philosophy in lectures and other places plenty of times. But I know what your target is, because there is one branch of philosophy,

which is highly relativistic and is skeptical about science, and doesn't believe in what they call grand narratives and so on. And this tends to be what sometimes called continental philosophy, or some aspect of it anyway, and where the idea that we can achieve truth, that there is some objectivity in our inquiries about, reality, that all these things are questioned by them. And naturally enough, that's going to irritate an experimentary scientist.

So I can sympathise with that. But, you know, those sorts of questions themselves are interesting because they give us an opportunity to rub up them. So we've got a target that we can really sharpen our teeth on a bit and say, look, if we're going to have a chance of being able to communicate with one another at all, we've got to have common ground with. There's got to be some objectivity out there. And truth, getting to the truth, is an ideal of inquiry.

It's a target that organizes and disciplines all our efforts to make sense of our world. Well, exactly. But I think it's clearly objective truth and people who sort of question it annoying me. But philosophy of science is a real discipline within philosophy. And I respect that people do that. What's interesting to me is as a science, when I'm told that I can't do science unless I study philosophy of science. And that's just, it's not a pejorative thing to say that it's just not true.

As I often say, most scientists can't spell philosophy much less. But, I mean, it seems to me the other thing philosophy can really do is frame questions. Especially when you really don't know what the good questions are. And that's why in physics, we know what the good questions are. And early on, philosophy is quite important. I now think in neuroscience or in cognitive science or in consciousness, we really don't understand anything, that philosophers can play a key role in trying to keep us rigorous and trying to ask what kind of questions might be answerable, what or not, and that sort of thing. I don't know how

you... Yeah, no, no, I think that's right. Very often a characterization of philosophy is that it is the effort to try to find what the right questions are so that you can find some way of answering them. And I mean, actually, science itself provides a brilliant example, because the sorts of questions asked and the way they were answered up until, let's say, Copernicus and Galileo and so on, but just the wrong questions and the wrong ways of answering them. So as soon as you've identified that, suddenly you can make a huge amount of progress. But I'll give you an example. I mean, look, this is a division of labour situation in a way.

A practicing scientist is just going to get on with it. They're going to theorize or they've got to construct good experiments and so on. And that's great. and look at the immense achievement that's come out of science. It's one of humanity's greatest ever achievements. But you could also sit back and you could reflect on the following kind of situation. Supposing somebody says all ravens are black. You probably know this example.

All ravens are black. So all non-black things are non-ravens. Anything white is not a raven, anything brown is not a raven and so on. And this raises a question. about relevance. So what counts as relevant evidence? If I wanted to support the ornithological claim that all ravens are black, and I pointed at my shirt and said, look, see, this is evidence that all ravens are black. It wouldn't work, okay? So there is a question here about the nature of relevance. This is just one very, very small example. When you're conducting

an experiment, what counts as supporting the hypothesis as being tested, what counts as infirming the hypothesis. Obviously, you've got to be able to distinguish between the evidence that the counts and the evidence that doesn't. And that's just an interesting question. So it's one that a practicing scientists might speculate on. It's certainly one that a philosopher of science might speculate on, but it's just an interesting, and perhaps in some ways, a significant question. And I think that's the point, that there are deep questions that some people need to think about, but for most scientists, they just get on with it. And quantum, we still may, we still don't understand quantum mechanics, but it hasn't stopped us building semiconductors and computers and

changing the world. And so that's okay. No, I agree. And look, you know, there are some very important lessons that can be drawn from the great success of science. And that is this, I mean, I mean, supposing I ask you whether you really know something, whether you've absolutely got the final truth about something in science. Okay. Well, there may be one or two things that you feel very, very confident about, but on the whole you might say, no, no, the point about science is that it's defeasible. Some new evidence might come along or a better argument or more refined experimentation, which shows that we have to adjust the theory or maybe even have to have a whole new one. And that's really significant because that means that the ideals of truth, final, absolute

truth and of knowledge, kind of missed the point in a way. The point really is much more about about rationality, where you think that word is really important. The first bit of that word is ratio, proportion. So your beliefs and your actions are proportioned to the evidence that you have for them. And what you believe, what you think, and this applies across the board, politics and religion and everything else, should be proportional to your evidence. And that means that the great endeavor of investigation,

of getting evidence, of thinking about it, applying it, but being open to changing your mind about it is crucial. And it runs against all the dogmatism. All those people who swear blind, they want the answer and then they're not going to listen to anything else. So one of the most valuable things that comes out of science is that you can have this incredible triumphant achievement, which is science. We fly in airplanes, we use computers and stuff.

But on the other hand, the people who know about aerodynamics and who built the planes, they say, oh, well, we could be wrong. And that's good. Absolutely. In fact, probably one of, I'm always interested in people talk about truth because I wrote about this one of my books, but one of the most unheralded developments of physics in the last century, although won a Nobel Prize, was a sort of a redefinition. The realization there is no such thing as absolute scientific proof. They're literally truth. There isn't, there, there isn't that all scientific theories apply in a limited domain. Even the very best theories

we have, we know, we know are wrong at a certain scale. But they're absolutely right for the scale they describe and we don't mind that they're what we call effective. We've given up. When I was a young person, I certainly I thought, oh yeah, there's absolute truth. There may be absolute truth. It's an interesting question we can talk about. But in science, at least, there's no evidence of that. And, you know, I'm skeptical. Yeah, so the good thing about that is that it teaches us that in the quest for absolute truth. I'm sure there are something. Yeah, we're trying to figure out how the world do.

But in the quest for it, the thing that counts is truthfulness, honesty, probity, integrity, you know, using styles of reasoning and thought which are genuinely cleave to the very best standards that we can apply. So in the quest for truth, we haven't found it, but we can be truthful in our investigation of it. I love that. Okay. Well, look, you know, you've written about so many topics. and we've discussed together many things.

But it's clear lately that there's some things that are concerning you. If we talk about philosophy as critical theory applied to real-world problems, there are some real-world problems that have been concerning you. So I thought there are the two last books of years I know, at least in the United States. One is called The Challenge of Things, which series of essays about disturbing things about the world and not so disturbing things about the world. And then one that's even more bold in its title, democracy and its crises. I wanted to talk a little bit about both of those. And let's start with

democracy because I think we're both agreed that there's a huge challenge to democracy right now in both our countries and elsewhere around the world. I assume that's probably why you were motivated to think about this. And this book begins with Plato, which I'm a great fan of, so that's okay. I'm not such a great plan of Aristotle, although you keep telling me that I should be more of a fan of Aristotle. But you talked about Plato, of course, wasn't a big fan of democracy. And in the very beginning of chapter one, you say the two things that he really was concerned about was one of the dilemmas of democracy, the danger in his view, the inevitability of democracy, in fact, being, or at least rapidly collapsing into, rule by the least well-equipped to rule. As Plato put it

on the basis of how such a process could occur in ancient Greek city-state mob rule, which the term oklocrassy i never heard it before um was coined okay that would be undesirable in its own right but he said there was another problem and it's it's the further inevitability uh to to create a tyrant basically to be unstable and create a tyrant so first mob rule second to create retirement and when i read that of course i can't help but resonate without thinking because of of course the modern world seems to me has both of those huge dangers associated with it so maybe you could talk about the motivation for that book and we'll explore some of the ideas in a little more. Sure. Well, the trigger for writing the book was the Brexit referendum in the UK and the Trump

election in the US. And I should say for the Americans, you've been an extremely vocal opponent of Brexit here in England. But anyway, sure I have, yeah. Well, so the, those two events suggested to me that the advent of social media and the difference made to the whole political process and the process of political debate in particular, had exposed something, a time bomb ticking away at the very heart of our democracies. Because there had been a huge effort made by thinkers all the way from John Locke, right the way through the tradition with Baron de Montesquieu and the founders of the US and the thinkers, another thinker in France, actually got to call Benjamin Constant, John Stuart Mill

here in the UK, people thinking about how you solve a problem that Plato had identified. Now, Plato, in a very, very condescending kind of way, in a very arrogant way, thought that if you put final political authority in the hands of the people, because the people are not well-informed that they're short-term, they're self-interested, they're prejudiced, they're given to envy and rivalry, that if you put political power into their hands, this is just going to be mess, it's going to degenerate into anarchy. You're going to get mob rule. Oclocracy is. And their mob rule is insufferable. You just can't get anything done. People very, very quickly get exhausted. So they welcome with open arms a tyrant. Somebody, a strong man will come in

and sort things out. So he was very skeptical about democracy. And his strictures on it meant that nobody was in favor of democracy for the next 2,000 years. People just didn't talk about it. until at the middle of the 17th century. In fact, in the English Civil War, which one historian Christopher Hill described as the first of the great revolutions that swept across the European and Eurocentric world, so it includes North America over the next couple of centuries, that really reconfigured the way that politics and society work. But in that revolution in the English Civil War,

there was a moment when soldiers of the new model army of Cromwell said, they wanted universal adult male suffrage, they wanted regular parliaments, they wanted an independent judiciary, they wanted to abolish the House of Lords, all that, you know, things that we would nowadays regard as reasonable claims that a Democrat might make. And of course, they got very short shrift. But it started to make people think, how if on the one hand you have this problem identified by Plato, that the people, are they really, you know, well equipped to be the source of authority. And the answer that was worked out by all those guys I mentioned from Locke to John Stuart Mill was, yes, you can put confidence in the people and say, you know,

it's up to you to give consent to government. If you can devise institutions and practices that will parlay all the variety of preferences and desires and interests into something that counts as good enough government for everybody and everybody's interest. And this idea they worked out was the idea of representative democracy. And representative democracy requires that the people elect representatives who are not messenger boys and girls, they're not delegates, okay, they go to do a job of work on behalf of the people, get the facts, get the information, listen to discussion, listen to their experts, form some judgment, and then act on that judgment. And if they don't do a good job, then the people

can recall them, can sack them next time and put somebody in their place. So this is the fundamental idea of a representative democracy. And of course it matters that the way they're elected, the electoral system should be good enough. It matters that the institutions should be such that a government can't just keep itself in power indefinitely. There must be limits and constraints on the degree of their power. There must be some transparency and answerability on the part of the people in the institutions, et cetera, et cetera. So these are all reasonably familiar ideas in a constitutional arrangement. But then it turns out that if you're the people who get themselves, put themselves forward to be representatives and they get into these institutions, if they start to find ways of moving the levers of power a bit which are just in the interests of their party or themselves, if they find ways of pretending that they're responding to the democratic interests of the people out there, but not really, it's the kind of factional interest that, by the way, the writers of the Federalist papers were very,

keen to try to guard against. Madison and Hamilton were very against this idea that you would get partisanship. And so they created a set of institutions with these checks and balances, you know, very familiarly in the states. You've got the legislature, you've got the executive, got judiciary. And the powers of these bodies are meant to be separate from one another. Yes. Well, it turns out that, firstly, that the electoral system that we have in the UK and in the US,

which is just so-called plurality voting, first-past-to-post voting, it's very undemocratic. Yes. It also turns out that things like gerrymandering, you know, organizing the congressional districts and so on, you can keep a congressional district in the hands of one party forever, if you've got the right arrangement. Moreover, the idea of separation of powers, you certainly have it between Congress and presidency, but you don't have it between the political process and the judiciary. You only have to mention the most recent Supreme Court appointment to see that it's an entirely political. matter. Yeah, yes.

And it's kind of under the radar because in the last couple of years of the Obama administration, any number of appeal court seats around the various appeal court districts in the U.S., when they fell vacant, the appointments that Obama wanted to make to them were blocked by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was under Republican control. And the minute that Trump came into power, Mitch McConnell and his cronies in their ensign, they started to fill them up with young Republican appeal court judges are going to be there forever. and they're going to change the character of American society. So, I mean, I'm just giving you now one practical example of how this brilliant idea

of representative democracy has kind of been polluted. But I mentioned that the very worst pollution of it is social media. So by the use of Twitter and Facebook and robots and, you know, putting massive amount of misinformation into social media, what had been a commonplace of politics, which is proper. Spend false information, misleading information. That's always been in politics. Yeah, sure. But now it's been...

Hard of politics. Yeah, it's now been weaponized by social media. Of course, we've picked up on it pretty damn quickly, but it really made a big difference in 2016. That was a kind of crucial year in a way. And it needs to be explained to people how this works. Just very, very briefly, okay? No, go on, go on.

You've got in any election or any referendum, you've got the yes, no, Clinton, Trump, in-out, whatever it might be. Okay, so you've got two blocks of people who've pretty well made up their minds, and very probably they're going to tune out of the campaigns, bores them, then how they're going to vote. But in between those two blocks, there's a group of people who maybe haven't made up their minds, or who could have their minds changed,

or who could be acted upon in some way. And if you can get just enough of those people, you didn't even have to get all of them, but just get enough of them to move one direction or the other. Because remember, all referendums, all elections, are one on very small margins. So if you can target those people, if you can lie enough to those people,

if you can spend enough money on adverts that you know will really hit with those people. And we know, we know that, you know, all these social media platforms are expert at micro-targeting people. They monitor all our activity. They know what interests us and bothers us. So they can micro-target little groups of people

and aggregate them more with the right kind of advertising. So this has undermined the democratic process now. And it's vital that in going back to how we organize our democratic processes, and we've got to find a way of dealing with that, and we've got to refresh our democracies. Otherwise, we're just going to fall into the hands of cliques or groups who have happened to have had the most effect through these means. Well, okay, that's a great summary.

And let's pick apart some of the issues, because, as I say, you've gone everywhere I wanted to go. But first, actually, I agree with you, but I should have perhaps asked you to elaborate. When you say that our voting system isn't democratic, maybe you can explain what you mean by that. Because I know what you, I think I know what you're talking about. Sure. Okay, so for the House of Representatives in the U.S. and for House of Commons in the UK, we use what's called a plurality system or first-past-the-post system. Yeah.

Okay, so just to give an example, suppose you've got a congressional district with 100 voters, and 10 people stand for election and 8 of them get 10 votes each and one gets 9 votes and the last gets 11 votes he's the guy who goes to Congress representing 11 people out of 100 the other 89 are completely unrepresented

there's no representation there and from this simple fact which shows that our systems of election are undemocratic and by the way elections to the Senate are proportional to the number of states not the number of people in them Then the electoral college, which exists, you know, to stop some idiot, ignorant, bloviating.

Yeah, it didn't work very well. Yeah, okay. So you can see that all the other institutions of the U.S. are even more remote than that. But right there in the system of representation, you've got a very distorting voting system, leave aside even the fact of gerrymandering. To get a more proportional system of election, which really does reflect the variety of. of preferences and choices will probably result in the failure of the two-party system. And almost all countries that have the first-past-the-post voting system have a two-party system and power swings between the two parties.

And the result of that is that whoever happens to control the party, the clique, the group at the top of that party or the activists in the country who, you know, determine party policy, are the people who run the country. Whereas if you have proportional representation, you tend to get a lot of the country. coalition governments. So you can look at places like Germany and others where they have good systems of proportional representation, or you look at places like Italy and Israel where they're bad ones. So in the bad ones, you get very small minorities over-influencing policy. But where you've got the right kind of system and it really works, what tends to happen is

that it drains politics out of government. Instead of government being highly politicized, all the politics happens in elections and then in the negotiations between the different parties, who are going to constitute the coalition. And then you get a kind of consensus emerging, and then there's government. And government should be for all the people, not just the people who voted for a particular party. That's what it says, yeah.

Yeah, so, you know, that's what it says in the preamble to the US Constitution, you know, the people, the whole people. So it's incredibly important that we should look at the way that a system has, in fact, evolved, de facto, in practice evolved, and how recent events have kind of ripped the cover of it and said, look, it's just dysfunctional. Well, it is. Clearly, it seems to be. And I noticed in the book, I mean, we're both sympathetic because we've spent time in Australia,

but there's two aspects of elections in Australia that I admire. One, you mentioned the book, which is that you're required to vote. You find if you don't vote because it's an obligation as a citizen-like, paying taxes like anything else. It's part of the social contract, as Rousseau would have said. Right now in the United States, a highly competitive election, one that generates a lot of voting may have 40% of the population, actually voting, 60% not voting, speaking of your example of 100 people. So even if you run a vast plurality of that 40%, you're still not necessarily representing the population. But the other is a system that I took me a while to understand.

but I don't know, I'd like to hear what you think about it. It's not a first-past-the-post system. You vote for something, but you also say who you want your votes to go to if that person isn't leading. And it's sort of basically you give a series of what happens to your vote. So it's not wasted. In the United States, for example, when there's a close election, you know, if Ralph Nader's running and Al Gore's running,

and people who may be very sympathetic to Ralph Nader don't want to vote for them because they're taking a vote away and potentially handing the election to someone else. But in the Australian system, you could vote for Ralph Navey saying this is the person I like the best, but if he only gets 5% of the vote, I want my vote to go to Al Gore. And that seems to me to be a more rational system. I don't know whether, what... Oh, I agree with you. Absolutely.

I mean, you talk about it being a rational system. Of course, it's a rational system. It's called the alternative vote system. So you rank your preferences. You don't have it in England, do you? Well, no, we don't have it for elections to the House of Commons. But we have all sorts of different proportional representation systems, including the alternative vote system for all sorts of different other areas of our democracy.

So, for example, the devolved assemblies of Scotland and Wales, Northern Ireland, they're on that kind of system. Elections for the European Union, they're on that kind of system. Even in the House of Commons itself, elections for chairman of House committees are on a proportional system. So it's crazy. I mean, it's not as our politicians don't know it exists, but it's in their interests of course. They hang on to the other one because they can get big majorities in the House of Commons

on very small minorities of the popular vote. And then gerrymandar things or manipulate the media to maintain that. It's certainly an incumbent. I assume it's the same in England, but just being an incumbent automatically gives you a great advantage in the United States. So that tends to push that forward. Now, there's another aspect of that, well, you know, I was reading as you go from Plato to Locke to Hobbes,

were so and and the whole different definitions of what democracy is and and this notion that ultimately you know power crops and absolute power crops absolutely is reflected as you say in the separation of powers which isn't very effective especially if it becomes political when because it becomes disabling you just can't do anything it's what's happening in the United States at least you know you know I mean look in fact the problem is even worse in a way because many over 50 democracies around the world derive from what's called the Westminster model. Actually, the United States

arrangement is itself a version of the Westminster model, although it's closer to the original Lockean conception than happened later. It's an interesting little a little bit of history. So what happened here was that

until 1688, the idea was that a king ruled by divine right. God who had appointed who was going to be the king. So because of what happened with the Catholics and the Protestants and the abdication of James II from the English throne, Parliament took over and said, no, we're going to be God here, we're going to appoint the king.

So they invited William of Orange to come and be King William of England. And the idea was that there's the king and the king is the executive power. Then there's the House of Lords and the House of Commons and these are the legislative power and then there's a judiciary. So you've got four institutions which, Montesquieu was a great admirer of, and as a result, both of Locke and of Montesquieu, the founders of the United States said, yeah, we've got to have these four separate institutions, so we've got to have an executive president, you've got to have a Senate,

you're going to have a House of Representatives, you've got to have a judiciary. So they're the four, and they're going to check and balance one another. Unfortunately, if you have bipartisan politics, that'll work. But unfortunately, if you don't, if you have two parties which are deeply opposed to one another. These four institutions are just going to paralyze one another and you get paralysis in the US. Every single time a budget has to be agreed, you come to the 11th hour and so on. You can see where it all goes wrong. So the... And you're getting... I certainly am more aware of that in the United States. I was never as aware of it in Britain, but I guess I assume right now we're seeing with Brexit,

more or less paralysis happen. Well, yeah, sure, that's paralysis, but only because there's no majority in the House of Commons. If they were, they wouldn't be it. It would just be waywarded. true. So here's the problem. When this arrangement was instituted after 1688, all looked fine and dandy until 1715 when a new king came. He happened to be a German who didn't speak English. This is George the first. And because he didn't speak English, he didn't attend cabinet. He didn't act as an executive. So the executive started to be whoever could command a majority in the House of Commons. This meant that the supposed separation of powers between the executive and the legislature collapsed, and the legislature became the creature of the executive.

If the executive is drawn from the majority, the majority belongs to you. So you as the executive can do what the hell you like. And that's the situation which is obtained, not just in England and Britain in the UK as it evolved over the next couple of centuries, but in every polity, New Zealand, Australia, India, Canada, South Africa, any way you can think of which used to be part of the British Empire. And all of them have this failure of the separation of powers. And it's a time bomb because in 1865,

John Stuart Mill published a book called Representative Government. And in it he said, recognizing that the constitution of Britain was pretty dodgy that the executive could do what they had it like. He said, we have, fortunately, we have what's called constitutional morality. This is the self-restraint of people in power who behave like gentlemen. They won't do the wrong thing, okay? Well, when you stop getting gentlemen in power,

when you start getting the people we've got in Parliament today in the UK or people like Trump and so on, they're not going to be restrained. They're going to use every constitutional lever available to them. And if these levers are incredibly powerful, because there's ultimately no check, you know, the executive is meant to be answerable to the legislature. But if it owns the legislature, then it's not advanced. So this is the problem that exists, and it exists in all those different countries I've mentioned, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc. And it's a time bomb. So, you know, there's got to be deep reform. And so far as the United States of America is concerned, yes, you do have separation between the presidency and Congress, but you've got that problem of a failure of separation between the political process and the judiciary. And that's very serious.

Well, yeah, it's interesting that you, it's interesting from your perspective because, well, I grew up in Canada, so I grew up in a parliamentary system and then I moved the United States. And there's something about the parliamentary system that just seems more sensible to me inherently. You know, in the United States, we spent two years, waste two years and billions of dollars electing a president. Where in parliamentary democracies, you really, you never vote for the prime minister. You vote for your local representative. And things, it's the sense I always got growing up. and then experiencing the United States, is that the United States was based on a distrust of government, a sense that government was not, that could not be trusted, and it would not act in your favor. And you have to put checks and balances everywhere to assure that government wouldn't intrude on your freedom,

and it probably is a legacy of course of their experience of Britain. Whereas parliamentary democracies, at least in my experience, are based on the idea, well, government is really there to take care of you, and we'll kind of trust, we'll trust the politicians, we'll elect these people, they'll elect their own prime minister, and they'll work on our behalf. So you've got this trust system and this distrust system. And I used to think that the trust systems work better, except for what I'm seeing now. But I don't know if you want to reflect.

Well, you wonderfully articulate the attitude that I think most people have had most of the time about our parliamentary democracies in the UK and Canada and places like that. You know, we've been sold and we've bought and we've believed. the fact that it is a pretty benign system. Turns out, as you're looking at recent events, there is not that benign. And my feeling really is that what's happened in the UK in 2016 and since is a big red flag for all those Westminster model democracies around the world because they should all be saying to themselves, could that happen here?

Yeah. You know, look, and they've got to think about this, okay? So activists, party political activists out there in the country, are very, very few, but very vocal and very influential, because they're the ones who choose who's going to be a representative, who's going to stand for Parliament. Then in the political party itself, when it gets into Parliament, so there may be, say, 300 of them or 250 of them, very few of them are going to be at the very top. Who are they? They are going to be the ones who are the most effective operators, who have the most support among the activists or the smartest.

So in the end, it turns out that these democracies, which seem so benign, and we seem like democracies, despite the lousy electoral system and so on, are actually run by oligarchies. They're really hidden oligarchies. And the lack of transparency about them is precisely what has made people feel, just as you've articulated it. Oh, it's okay. It's kind of benign.

It works all right. Well, we'll get to, I know that you've, the good thing about this pretty good book and discussions is you don't just present the problems. I think you try and talk about some solutions, which we'll get to. but I was taken, when you talked about the Tockville and others, about this dilemma of democracy, achieving democracy while ensuring stable government. And I was interested when you said,

is representative democracy a success? And you said the answer is slightly qualified no. And apparently, and I forget which of the philosophers or deep thinkers you were talking about, talked about this issue of populism versus demagoguery. And of course, in the United States, we're seeing exactly that, the combination of populism leading to a potential tyrant or someone who wishes or acts like he was a tyrant.

I mean, the thing about the relationship between populism and demagoguery is that they need one another. It's a mutually parasitic care. There's a wonderful phrase I wrote down to yours. He said, populist sentiments is an element in which demagogues swim. That's right. Because, you know, look, if you're poor, if you're out of work, if you're disenfranchised by society,

you're not really fully participating, you can't get access to all the social goods that are important in society. You're in a very enfeebled position. So to imagine the masses getting together and rising up as a populist whole is a bit of a myth. It takes a demagogue to come along and say to these people, you're in trouble and I know the answer to it.

If you will vote for me or follow me or rise up with me, then I'm going to solve all your priorities. problems for you. This is the nemagogue. This is not the person who is going to, you know, solve their problems easily because nobody can, but he's going to promise that he can do it. And this is where you get populism really depending upon the demagogue to get itself going and to make a big difference. And that can really rock the boat a lot. I talked about the two groups and the, you know, the portion in between. When you get populism upsurging as we're getting in in Europe today, that really does shift things in that center ground in a way which is very destabilizing.

The trouble is the lack of depth in the discussion, the lack of information. Part of the problem is that our press, you know, the more responsible newspapers, newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian newspaper, independent newspaper here, who try to discuss the issues and explore them a little bit and get the facts out there for people. They're read by very, very few people, relatively speaking. It's social media and it's popular programming that gets out slogans. So instead of analysis, you get slogans. Instead of proper policies worked out, you just get tweets.

You just get tweets. Yeah, exactly. And this is very corrupting of the process and very easy to capture by anybody who has a knack for getting the right tweets or the word slogans out there. Populism, for me, didn't have a negative connotation. I mean, pure populism sounds good. And you mentioned, I mean, the Arab Spring was an example of populism. And that, at least from external observer, the idea of the Arabs of populism rising in Arab countries seemed like a very good thing.

So it's just if it's exploited, and maybe there are counter examples you know of, but at least the ones you list are not counter examples. Populism inevitably, as you say, leads to someone who can exploit and tap into that popular sentiment. It doesn't seem to lead to a representative democracy. See, I don't see what happened in Arab Spring is a case of populist uprisings. Take Egypt as an example. The people who appeared in Tahrir Square

and complained about Mubarak, who was in power at the time, were middle class educated younger people. And the people who were in the vanguard of a revolution of that kind are not the people who inherit the revolution. Because Egypt is in the worst place now that it was before then. What they do is they topple a tyrant

and then, you know, there's a kind of anarchy ensues. This is Plato at work here. And then you get an even stronger guy who comes in and takes over. So they lose out. So in Egypt, you have a classic example of how a move against tyranny, a move for democracy, a move for greater freedom, which is what those sort of educated types wanted, can unseat a tyrant and can destabilize a situation. situation in a way that makes an even worse tyranny come into play.

But isn't that sad? Because, I mean, one of the things that I find attractive when I try and be optimistic about what's happening now is that I see young people being, if not radicalized, beginning to protest about everything from climate change to other things. And having grown up in the 60s, to me, that just seems like getting young people involved in the system, especially since they're going to grow up and become part of it, and be willing to protest and be willing to complain. is a good thing. But is it, should we say no, we shouldn't encourage that because it will lead to,

it will lead to destabilizing tyrants? No, no, I think it is a great thing. I think it is a great thing. In situations like the one obtaining in Egypt, it's, it's more difficult for those people, the young people to get where they want to go because the forces against them are so great. In our situation, the U.S. or in the UK or anywhere in Europe, I think the young people of our countries are absolutely the hope for the future. They should absolutely be out there on the streets. They should be as active politically as they possibly can be because there are hope for the future. There's no question about that. But it brings me back to a point. You mentioned, you said that I'd written that I gave a qualified no to the question, is representative democracy?

I say it's a representative democracy working. In fact, I believe in representative democracy. If you could get it right, if you could make sure that those electoral systems, systems of representation, the kind of people, the quality of people we elect and put them in those institutions, the transparency of those institutions. If we could get those things right, and in fact, I don't think it would take too much to do that. It would take relatively minor reforms to get those things right. Then we could get what I describe in the book as good enough government. I mean, I use that phrase because it's never going to be perfect. There's always going to be problems and so on. Well, the perfect should never be the enemy or whatever the word.

Exactly. Perfect. Should not be the enemy of the good. Yeah. So we can get good enough government. Actually, going back to Aristotle, you don't like and the one I do like it. I agree with you, by the way,

on Aristotle's science is, you know, pretty crap. Yeah, he got a bad name, especially when Galileo made fun. He did, his teeth and so on, yeah. And in fact, it was his science that people were really fed up with. But there are so many other things about Aristotle because he was so universal. But he, in writing about politics, one thing he said that it was good was he said, government should be sufficient.

And by that he meant that it really should answer to the needs of the community as a whole. It should be something which is not just a function of party or of a class or a money or of one religion or something, you know, dominating everybody else. But the idea of sufficient or what I call good enough government, and I'm sure you can get that out of the system. But you can only get it out of the system if you do those sort of minor reforms that I was talking about. but also make people alert to the fact that if you don't participate, you know, and our first past the post system stops people participating because they don't think their vote's going to count, and they're dead right.

If you vote for the losing candidate, it doesn't count for a damn thing. It means zero. So that stops people from participating. But if you felt that your vote made a difference, you would take more of an interest. You would read the paper, you would listen to the news, you would turn up at the voting booth. It's a scandal that in a country,

like the United States of America, the turnout should be 40%. That's just a scandal. And that's a good election. Yeah, yeah. That's a scandal. It should be 60, 70 more percent, you know. Because when you mentioned Australia with compulsory participation, by the way, there's a bit of a nuance there.

One is you don't actually have to vote. You have to turn up. You have to show up. Yeah, no, that's right. So you can destroy your paper and stuff. If you don't turn up, the fine is not really all that big. It should be bigger. It should be like you're fine for not paying your taxes.

Because, as you say, it's a civic obligation and a really important one of the most important. But people don't put any energy into it. Yeah, what really gets me is people died to get the vote. I mean, for centuries, the struggle to be able to participate, to be able to have a voice in choosing the government and the laws under which you will live. And now people just take it so far granted or they don't even bother. Once you have something, you know, you take it for granted. It's like getting your PhD.

It seems so important until you. So you have it. But yeah, no, or anything. I think it is perhaps the least appreciated freedom that people have in a democracy. And, you know, you talked about ways to make it better. One of the things you point out, which is, and I wanted to ask you about Britain because I know what's the situation in the United States, but I think you referred to as pay to sway. The interesting thing is, and you made the point quite clear that elections, be it Brexit

or for president or for Congress even usually are, one by plurality. that are very minor and that you can manipulate a few people, and it's been recognized, if you put money into it and focus it, as little as $400,000 will make the difference in election. And that's a very small investment for a very big payoff down the road if you then can manipulate laws for any number of reasons. One of the biggest concerns or tragedies, at least many of us think in the United States, is the Supreme Court judgments that basically took away limits on spending on campaigns so that while there are pro-formal limits on what you can spend on a candidate, you can create an organization

that basically supports the candidate and put any amount of money into it, which a number of people do, literally put billions of. Super PACs, right? Yeah, super PACs and the Koch brothers. Are in the UK, are there, right now, just money is what determines. And it's well known. You can demonstrate it clearly the empirical evidence. The more it's spent, the more likely you're going to win. And what is it like in England? Is it? Well, I mean, you raise a very sore point here because we have an electoral commission

which imposes limits on how much can be spent in an election, and they have to be transparent. You've got to declare all the money that you're spending on the election, and there's a ceiling. And in fact, in the 2016 referendum, that ceiling was breached big time by the people on the side, they were prosecuted by the electoral commission and they were found guilty. And yet, and yet the result stands. You know why? Because the referendum was technically speaking only advisory. If it had been binding, it would have been voided by now. So I mean, you know, this is the kind of crazy situation where the people who want Brexit, and there's a cabal of them. And, you know, they're on the right wing of the Conservative Party. And for quite different reasons, they're on the far left

wing of the Labour Party. So the far right and the far left both want this. And it's in neither of their interests to really push on the fact that there were these illegalities in the Leave vote. So this is another example of, you see, a constitution, a good constitution, a good political order would have clarity and consistency and transparency. Every referendum which has been held in this country, the UK, since 1975, has been held on a different basis. Some have had a threshold requirement, some haven't. Some have said they're going to be binding some, not. You know, that just shows you that whoever is going to run the referendum has got choices about how they can run it to make sure that the outcome they are.

Yeah, exactly. And this is unhealthy in our society, and it's yet another example of the way we've got to have another look at our systems. I think this is your quote, but no form of democracy can protect itself from oglocracy or being hijacked by a tyrant unless the franchise, the ones who are in franchise, are informed and reflective. So ultimately, I think you're saying something that is very important, and it seems to me I've argued in print too, that democracy fails in the presence of ignorance, that we need an informed electorate, otherwise the whole thing collapses. And that's the heart of this.

But now the question, that's nice to say and it's easy to say. The question is, how do you, what can you do to ensure an informed electorate? What can we do? What can you and I do? What can others do to try and ensure an informed electorate? Okay, so when I said, digging into this just a little bit. Firstly, the idea that the electorate is uninformed or ill-informed, only partially informed, relates to the point that very many people busy with their lives, their careers, their families,

I've got time to dig into the details. So to say of them that they are not very well informed about the details of some kind of policy issue, it's just to say something true. It's not to say something negative or critical about them. But one can also mention, and it's a significant point this, that quite a lot of the choices and preferences that people have, are predicated on how they feel about things. So the sort of emotional motivations that they have for voting one way rather than another

are also quite important as well. So let's just grow up about this and accept that people are going to have only partial information and also they're going to have certain attitudes or outlooks that are going to influence the way they behave. This is precisely the point of a representative democracy. So we've got all the different feelings and all different patchiness of information out there.

You know, if nevertheless the people who are sent to do the job of government, are people who are going to get the facts and be responsible, be rational, think, reflect, listen to our argument, really take on board what people with some expertise have to say about things. You know, one of the worst moments of the Brexit campaign in this country was when one of the Brexitists said, oh, we've had too much of experts. And the experts have been saying, if you do this thing, you're going to tank our economy,

you're going to crash it, you know, which is kind of what's happened already, even though Brexit itself hasn't yet happened, they probably won't. But this idea that representatives are sent by us and paid by us to do a job of work on our behalf is no different from the idea of making sure your airline pilot is properly trained or your surgeon knows his job or her job. You know, these are really important points. And if you fail to recognize the importance of having these structures, these institutions which are meant to be working in our interest, And if you allow those institutions to be hijacked in the way that they have, then the people out there are going to be very ill-served.

And I think what's happening in the United States today, what's happening in the UK today, and what could easily happen in so many of our fellow democracies in the world today is illuminated by this. Yeah, well, absolutely. It's the same thing happens in the United States, of course, you see the effort to exclude experts. sued people who can not make the decisions, but can provide the data that the representatives should use to make the decisions. And that they're typically excluded. You know, one of the first things that Trump government did was to remove scientists from

advisory boards in the case of climate change and put in lobbyists. And if you make your decisions based on dogma or bias, as we'll get to in a bit, you can't help but make decisions that are poor decisions. because they don't reflect. As you point out, the wonder about science in some ways is that it can produce things, but it also makes predictions that we can test that work. And if you go against that evidence,

we can predict that you're going to make bad decisions. And it's a sad thing. And that's why it's important to have dialogues like ours, but I think more generally to think about ways, especially in a world governed by an internet that doesn't filter. And for an educational system that doesn't yet teach children how to filter in the internet, then we have this problem because...

You know, there's a really important point there, because there are moves of foot that have been for some time already, but they're kind of gaining strength to put those filters on the internet. Governments, you know, wanting to limit what people can get access to the internet. People do it in China and all that already. Yeah, I know, but I worry about that because someone's going to filter it. Yeah, sure, sure. So this is an anxiety to me because I think...

it would be better if the internet would just, you know, allowed to be an anarchy. We should approach it from the other end. Yeah. That is, our education system should make people very good at discriminating and being critical and being selective and knowing how to deal with information, check it and so on. Maybe may be trained in philosophy.

Yeah, absolutely. By the way, apropos what you were saying about the administration getting rid of expertise and replacing them the lobbyists. You know, that's the usual trend. I remember years and years ago, I had a boss who was a, retired Royal Air Force officer, and he told me that in the RAF, they had a saying, which was, have the experts on tap, but not on top. That's a very good way of putting it. Yeah, exactly. And that's the way it should be. But I think ultimately, you know, there's an old

saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And as an educator, I guess I've always said this, but it seems to me ultimately the solution of these problems is education. We have to figure out a better way. And we have to figure out a better way. I don't think we're doing it. I don't think we're designing an educational system right now that is appropriate for the 21st century dominated by an internet. We're not, we're teaching a bunch of facts. We're not teaching kids how to discern carefully what they read and how to test it internally, both for internal consistency and then to check, because that's going to be much more important to them than, I mean, they'll always, you have your iPhone or whatever to any facts you need are there.

So you don't have to remember as many things as you did before. But the ability to discern whether facts and what's nonsense, that's the real problem. No, absolutely. And that's the problem of democracy. How to evaluate, where to go and get, where to find what will help you to check what you've been told or what's been claimed or something. These are skills and abilities that lie at the very heart of what an educational process should produce. Now, when people are trained as scientists, you know, this is just part of the equipment. They've got to be able to do this.

They've got to be able to look at the oscilloscope or the outcome. experiment or something and make sense of it in the right kind of way. But this applies generally in life. It applies to absolutely everything. You know, who you're going to marry and who you're going to vote for. I mean, all of this requires evaluation and no more so than in the internet. Because I describe the internet as the biggest washroom wall in history. Okay, people can scribble their graffiti on it. They can say anything. There's a load of rubbish on it. There's a load of ugliness on it. There's racism. There's hatred. There's also a lot of good stuff. And the point is that the hatred and the racism and the bad stuff

always threatens to drive out the good stuff, the thing which is valuable about the internet, the instant access to information, opinion, debate, and so on, which is so important. So rather than close down the internet or stop putting filters on it, let's empower people to be really good at making good use of the internet.

Absolutely. And to be fair, it was nice to you to talk about science, hate to do that, but to return the favor, it's science doesn't have a monopoly on that. that, philosophy, history. Any, I mean, part of what we teach in any academic discipline is this ability, in some sense, to discern, to distinguish, to critically examine. And that's why I view all of education is really, you choose what resonates with you as an individual and what you enjoy. But the lessons you learn from that are very similar, no matter whether you choose

philosophy or physics or literature or history or chemistry. It's to be able to refer. reflect accurately about the world and make decisions that are appropriate ones. And by the way, that's why I will say we're sitting here in New College Humanities. And what's one of the reasons why I'm very happy to be a visiting professor here periodically because you make a point of all the humanity students here have a course in sort of scientific analysis so that they're exposed to this other way of thinking, that I think we should all, we all need to be literate and responsible citizens in a democracy. Oh, there's no question about that.

Scientific literacy is key. It's got to be part of the central component of what an educated person is, what it means to be educated. But on the other hand, thinking about the humanities, so as you say, we're in the new college of the humanities here. The thing that I believe about the humanities is that it constitutes a great conversation, that humankind has had with itself for a couple of thousand years and more. And the things that are of value, the things that have survived and have been significant in that great conversation,

are things that respect incredibly high standards of thought, of insight, of creativity. And every single one of us who studies the humanities, all my students here, for example, are inheritors of this. They inherit this great tradition where these standards really matter. They're given a key, a key to a gate that lets them into a country where they become citizens of a universal order with these people in it. It's just a fabulous idea when you think about it. And anybody who takes it seriously who really reads and thinks and debates with attention, with focuses their mind on it, asks themselves really good questions about it, they're going to get out of it things that help to shape them and shape their responses. We're not in the business of teaching people what to think about anything.

We're here to help them become those good evaluators, those really good acute, critical inspectors of what other people claim. They're going to become, I hope, very good at being able to make a case which is persuasive for something that they really believe in and think is right. You know, these things matter. Well, so not to teach typically what to think, but rather how to think. How to think. And that leads me nicely to, to,

to a quote, I think, from George Bernard Shaw, that I got from you, which relates to one of the problems of democracy and allow us to move into another topic. Many people would rather die than think, and most people do. That's Bertrand Russell. Yes, Bertrand Russell. It was one of those British people. It's a really good remark that, isn't it? Yeah. And in fact, I have a portrait of Russell hanging in the hallway of my college to remind people of that saying. Nobody's going to step into this college and die without thinking. Yeah, and when I read that, when I read that, when I, when I, was reminded of that quote, which I'd heard before,

most people would rather die than think, and most people do. I couldn't help but think of religion. Because it seems to me ultimately, that's exactly what people do. They die without thinking and call it religion. So maybe we can make a segue to that, from democracy to an area where we both written about. And in fact, when I look at your other book, which was written earlier, before Brexit and Trump, the challenges of things, you're looking at issues. you were concerned, as was rightly the case then, before these most recent crises, the big crises

was the clash of cultures, the rise of fundamentalism, and its potential challenges around the world, which certainly arose and continues to be an issue. And you write about it there, but I thought we could talk about that a little bit. You wrote a, you talked a lot about religion and education. And there was a quote from the Archbishop Canterbury, which boy, I found chilling, which is something like teaching children is like engraving in stone. And doesn't that really get the point of why, for many of us, religious education is child abuse? If it weren't for indoctrination of young defenseless, uncritical minds, religion just couldn't survive. I mean, anybody who came to any of the scriptures of the world untainted by religion

at the age of 20, let's say, just read them, can you imagine everybody saying, wow, this is really good stuff I'm going to believe. I mean, it's just not on, you know. So that's not going to happen unless you can get in there really early and have that effect, and grave on staying. Yeah, no, it's, it's, well, and it's well, and it's well known, and I think that's, for many people who intellectually recognize the ridiculousness of the world's scriptures, but when it's been forced down your throat as a child, it's very hard to give that up. And it, it is remarkable, and we will be pillory for saying it's nonsense by some. groups. But just simply questioning, and this is the real problem in my mind. I don't, you know,

there's fundamentalism and extremism. And of course, many sensible people say that's nonsense. But they'll still talk about a militant atheist and they'll call you and me militant atheists. And, you know, as I say, I don't know what a militant is someone who throws pamphlets at people or something. But you're called militant just for asking the question. Is this sensible? Well, look, there are a couple of things to say about this. I mean, we agree. Okay. If it weren't for, young kids being indoctrinated, then very unlikely indeed that religions would survive. But it's also the case that the people need, we have a psychological need for explanations which are cast in the form of stories, of narratives.

And it's not just that people don't think, it's that in a way they can't think, because it's a really hard thing to think about the origin of the universe, the nature of the universe, the meaning of what happens in the universe, where we're all going to go when we die, you know, all those are really, really big questions. So to, to deal with the apparent impossibility of getting any answers off your own bat, anyway, you're going to turn to something. Now, any religion, any religion can be explained. It's doctrines, its tenets, its promises, the story about the universe, its origins, and so on. Any religion can be explained in less than half an hour. It takes a bit longer to learn physics,

So you can see why that narrative, that encapsulation of a thing which has explanation and meaning all packaged into it is very attractive to people. And they don't hang on to it for intellectual reasons. They hang on to it for profound emotional reasons. And that leads me onto my second point, which is this. A couple of years before that Challenger Things book, I wrote a book called The God Argument. Now, this was a kind of follow-up to stuff that all our friends in the movement have written about. the late demanded Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins himself and Dan Nett and Steve Binker and others. All our mates have written about these things.

I wanted to agree with them on everything central to what they said, but I wanted to add something, which is this. A lot of people will say to you, well, if you take religion away, then what are people left with? What do they believe in? What gives them their morality and their sense of meaning in life? And I say to them, look, there is a fantastic. a much better alternative. And this is humanism.

Humanism has its roots in the philosophical thinking of Socrates, Aristotle, and others in the classical tradition. It doesn't predicate the existence of a god. Our morality is not something dictated from outside human experience. Instead, humanism says this. Let's think for ourselves. Let's take responsibility for thinking for ourselves about how we are going to treat other people, how are we going to relate to them? How are we going to live together in communities?

How are we going to do the things that we know? I mean, because we know that the vast majority of people don't like to be cold and lonely and hungry and in pain and deprived of possibilities and so on. We know. We've got, we just have this, you know, basis of knowledge about what conduces to human flourishing. Let's work for that.

Let's work for that together. You know, it's not about brownie points getting into heaven or something. It's because we're human beings and we have sympathies. That is the basis of humanism. And when you start to think about the sorts of things that people have said, when you read, I don't know, again, Aristotle or Senegal, you know, anybody in the great tradition of thought over the last couple of thousand years who've addressed this question of how we can make lives meaningful and significant,

how we can foster relationships, how things like our intimacies, our love, our family lives, our community engagements and so on, can really make life feel good and rich for us. When we understand how art, music, learning, endeavor are meaningful, then we can understand that it's all here in life between the cradle and the grave. You don't have to reach outside it for something that's going to give you meaning because you can create meaning if you will do it, if you will take that effort.

I mean, one good example of this is the so-called existentialist tradition. You know, people like to wave their arms and say, Jean-Baud Sartre and Albert Camus and so. But you know, they had a couple of good points to make. Oh, I'm a big fan. Yeah, Camus wouldn't describe himself as an existentialist because he fell out with Sartre. He would say he was an absurdist.

What they both agree on is this. You know, we don't get born for a reason. There's no purpose here. We're not sent into the world by some great headmaster in the sky who's given us a job to do or anything. We just find ourselves in the world and in a set of historical and social conditions. And it's up to.

us to accept the fact that we have to make certain kinds of choices for ourselves and that meaning is possible for us if we create it. Camus has this marvelous essay, I'm sure most of the people listening to this know it, an essay called the Myth of Sisyphus, where he says, okay, so think about that myth, that Greek myth about Sisyphus who has to roll the boulder up a hill and he's never going to get to the top, and this is going to go on for eternity. Can his existence be meaningful to him. And he gives the answer, yes. Now, that is powerful. That's pretty damn deep. It totally affected me. And in fact, I ended one of my books with referring back to that, my book about Allen, because as a young person, the realization that you can make the meaning

in your own world, in a world that's absurd in a general sense, is profoundly important, I think. Sure. Well, let's say that's that resource. So humanism, which is about, you know, our relationships, but also about our individual responsibilities, to respect the meanings that other people are creating in their lives. Obviously, you know, there is a question of where we draw our lines. You know, they say an open mind is a great thing. Well, not so open that your brains fall out, okay? So, all right, in the case of our ethical lives,

we've got to think about the sorts of lines that we don't regard as being crossable. You know, people who are cruel, who are harmful, who are greedy or selfish, you do bad things to other people, we're not going to accept that. But what we are going to accept is that there are as many ways that lives can be good or meaningful to people as there are people to live them. And none of us has a right to say to anybody else, no, you're not allowed to do that or see that or think that or feel that or act that way. That's their business if they don't cross that line. But we can be guided. I think that's the point of much of what you would do. We can be guided in our own personal search. You actually put this to work and you put your

pen where your mouth is and wrote a book, a version. You know, many people think of the Bible as the guide for life, and the Bible is an awful. No one would ever want to guide them lives by the Bible, not literally, because of the violence and misogyny and everything else that's in the Bible. But you were a book, I think it was called The Good Book or something, which was a humanist version of the Bible. It was basically stealing from the ideas and traditions and beautiful poetry and thought throughout the world, written in verse as the Bible, as a potential guide that people could use to think about how to live their lives. Oh, yeah.

Well, you know, this was a long time ago, more than 35 years ago now. In fact, when I was a graduate at Oxford, and I was thinking to myself, ethical systems fall into two broad categories. On the one hand, there are the divine command types of morality is where some deity says, this is how you've got to live, otherwise you're going to fry, you know? and the other of fundamentally humanist moralities, which start from the question of our human nature and experience. And I thought to myself, if only people had gone to that second resource,

to the historians and the poets and the philosophers and the letter writers and so on, no mention of gods or religion or afterlife or anything else, and just noticed that in that resource, there is an enormous amount of insight, consolation, inspiration. And if they put together, you know, texts from that into a Biblos, a book that could have been a resource for people to give them guidance and insight and so on, instead of the Bible of all its stuff about God and hell and heaven, what a different world it would be. And I thought, you know, somebody ought to do it. And then I thought, oh, damn. Because, you know, when you think that, you realize it has to be you.

So anyway, it took a long, long, long time to do it because I plunded all the literatures of the world. world to cull these texts and to do to them exactly what had been done to the Bible. Because we know from scholarship how the Bible was made. It was made out of, you know, abstracting texts and paraphrasing them and joining them together and editing them and so on. So I did the same with all these to put together this book, the good book. And I don't know, you know, people might think it was an act of temerity or of madness or something. But I can imagine that in a couple hundred years time, maybe I'll be a gone. You never know. Exactly.

I better register right now. I'll be a really bad one. Even though the bar hasn't been set very high in history, I'll be even worse than that. Yeah, yeah, that's the problem. That book that designed itself to not have any divine will become in the long run. Yeah, that's the problem of history, I suppose. But in talking about the, look, certainly humanism and what philosophers and poets have written about are the same things that have inspired many, much of many religious writing. And I think

you're, well, it's not profound to say you're right in the sense that there's no doubt that religion as it's carried out fulfills a need for many people. As you say, there's an innate need to find purpose in things, even when there isn't purpose, first of all, that's maybe not such a productive thing. But there's innate need for community and many, many things that religious experiences provide. And so I think when, we talk about moving past religion, it is absolutely true that we need to be able to meet those human needs in a way that's maybe more productive, less divisive, and more true to the real world. You know, I can tell you an interesting little anecdote about this. So some years before I did

the good book, the person who was then the Archbishop of Canterbury, a very nice guy called Rhone Williams. He had written a book about Dostoevsky's ethics, and he invited me to come and do a kind of double-heder with him discussion about Dostoevsky and ethics and stuff, which we did at the Pushkin Institute. It was really great fun. So when the good book was being published, I got in touch to him, and I said, look, you owe me, you've got to come and do a double-hatter with me about this. So we did this double-hatter at the Royal Festival Hall here in London in front of a big audience. Ten hours' discussion between the two of us. And we talked for 55 minutes without any reference whatever to God or religion because we agreed about so much.

And there was so much of the stuff that was in the good book, which is common to anybody who is sincere about the idea of trying to think, how can one live productively, meaningfully, how can one create good relationships in the world? How can we try to make the world a better place? There's so much agreement there. And it was only in the last five minutes that he kind of remembered, you know, he's officially He's going to say something about God, which he did. But that was right at the very end.

Now, that illustrates the fact that you don't need all the God stuff. Somehow or other, the connection between good lives and godly lives has become inextricable in many people's minds. And it's also the case that we've lost a sense that what we think of as the, you know, spiritual replenishment. Now, whenever people use the word spiritual, they may. mean something to do with transcendence and deity. I say, if I could use the word in an entirely secular sense, just to mean the complex of my emotions and my intellectual attitudes and so on, then I think the spiritual side of our lives is the most important fact about us,

enjoying things like beauty and love and music. Yeah, I think so, although it's semantics. This word spiritual just resonates with me personally the wrong way. Yeah, it does with me too, yeah, yeah, sure. But, you know, and I often think, well, people go to church every Sunday or synagogue or whatever they do. And we could replace that with something else would be a sense of community, rock concerts or poetry readings or whatever you want. But, you know, it was actually an interesting, a very intelligent man who was actually a TV host in the United States. And I never realized how intelligent it was until I met him, a guy named Hugh Downs, who was a news correspondent.

also a game show host. But he was in his 80s, and he said to me something I never thought of before. He said, you know why people have to go to church every Sunday? The stories are so silly that you need to go be reinforced every week. And I thought about it. We don't have quantum mechanics classes every Sunday to reinforce, even as crazy it is, you learn it once. You don't need to be reminded of it every Sunday with a bunch of other people going,

oh, yes, that's right. And he argued that that was a way of sort of communal, I guess he would talk about communal brainwashing in the sense that you feel this community and it just doesn't seem so silly when you see all these other people being involved. Yeah, I'd never, I never thought. Well, you know, there was a guy back in the 19th century about called August Compt, who was responsible for his version of positivism, who set up a whole atheist church, you know, with services and people get together on Sunday to be atheists together and so.

And that is so misconceived because, you know, the kind of lives. that we want to live, going for a walk, having dinner with friends, reading a good book, doing an experiment, you know, thinking about something. Those are the things that we enforce for us, the value of our existence. We don't have to get together with a bunch of other people and say, we don't believe in God. Yeah, yeah, not believing is not a belief system. And that actually, there was, the Templeton Foundation, which we both agree is kind of nonsensical, or at least I actually think it's insidious and a little bit evil myself. But they give these prize, basically to any scientist who says good things about God to voluntarily win it.

And it was someone this year who said something that I just found unbelievably facile, which was that atheism was unscientific. And in fact, as you point out, that it's not a belief system, it's a truth, not belief. So in fact, he was arguing in favor of agnosticism, but agnosticism is a form of atheism, is just simply saying the evidence isn't sufficient for me to believe, as what a, you know, as what many people who would say they're agnostic would say. But that is a, not believing is just a form of atheism. So it's just...

Well, look, this takes us back to the point we made much earlier about rationality. You know, sometimes people say, will you come on a radio program and discuss religion? And I say, no, I'm fed up with discussing that. But what I will discuss is whether or not there are fairies at the bottom of the garden. And they say, oh, you're being trivial. I say, no, I'm not, because the arguments against there being fairies are just the same as the arguments against there being gods and goddesses. And I want to dramatize the point that this is about rational belief. Yes.

This is about having, you know, the kind of evidence to which you proportion your thoughts about what the world is like and how you act. So I make the point to people. I say, look, you know about induction, right? You know that no inductive inference is ever guaranteed. So, look, you've been wet every time you've been in the rain. without an umbrella in the past, but maybe the next time you won't get away. So would it be rational to not take an umbrella the next time it rains? The answer is no.

So it's that degree of strength. It's that what's the expression of approaching zero, you know, asymptotic. Asymptotic approach to zero, yeah, of probability that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden or gods in the sky. That's the kind of thing. Yeah, and in fact, in science, that's the point is we never, in fact, I never used, I try not to use the word believe because that's not a good one. word. So things are likely or unlikely, very likely or very unlikely. And when they reach a certain

level of being very unlikely, they're not the case. And when it becomes literally irrational to believe them or to act on them. Exactly. It becomes literally irrational to act upon something it's so extremely unlikely as to, yeah, okay, we agree. Well, I was very pleased that you trashed someone who I like to trash because, you know, everyone talks about the kindler, gentler religion and they refer to Buddhism and they love this guy, the Dalai Lama, who I find also, well, by comparison, of course, he seems, many things he says seem reasonable. And you make great fun in one of your book about a statement about many faiths, one truth. I love, I think I wrote it down here because I just love you said, various religions are mutually exclusive, mutually blaspheming,

mutually hostile, bitterly and deeply divisive, and thus a rash of open sores in the flesh of humanity. And so maybe we could just trash the Dalai Lama together for a little bit and just make sure we've covered all our bases. Well, I think what the Dalai Lama illustrates is that if you get people who are, you talked about people who are charismatic earlier and who become great celebrities because they have charm and they're obviously very nice and they're very careful about how they put their point. And they provide a kind of mask for a whole range of things behind them, which get more and more and more absurd, and in some cases, more and more and more dangerous.

Yeah. As we can see in the effects that they have, distorting lives, you know, being against women, being against control of fertility, even indeed prompting people to commit mass murder. Yeah. So, you know, you have the reasonable and the nice people, and then they make it more difficult in a way to say,

actually the things that even these very, very nice people believe are connected with things that it's, it just brings a lot of bad stuff into play. And so that, I think, is the difficulty with them. Now, I take the view that you should be respectful and kind to every human individual, no matter what their beliefs and so on, so long as they're not doing harmful things. But you should not be respectful and polite about beliefs that you think are wrong or dangerous.

Yeah, so people you can respect, but the beliefs you don't have any need to respect. So I have plenty of time for the Dalai Lama. as a person. Yeah, sure. He seems to be a perfectly nice chap and so on. But on the other hand, you know, he's the frontman for a belief system and an organization which really doesn't stack up when you start looking at what they say. Well, his position is due to something that's openly ludicrous for reincarnation,

which is not as much nonsense as anything else. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And but, you know, and actually, I've been amused because at some point he said, look, if the tenets of science disagree with Buddhism, of course we'll dispense with them. And I feel like saying, okay, resign. With them, there's been any science or them in Buddhism? No, Buddhism. He just says that, you know, because he likes to make common ground with science.

And I admire that, of course. But he literally says if ever happens that a result of science just agrees with one of the tettits of Buddhism, as we discussed it, then, of course, we will dispense with that. And I can't help but think that, okay, well, then the whole point of being Dalai Lama, you should just, you know, become a philosopher and do something useful. Sure. Yeah, yeah, now I agree. Okay, well, now I want to round up here with coming back to science and the humanities, actually, a little bit.

You wrote an essay about basically saying science isn't the end. There's somehow this notion that science is the enemy of humanities, which has also been reoccurring, or is concerned to both of us, and I know Steve Pinker's written a lot about it as well, but that somehow science takes away the meaning of life, and maybe I wanted to chat with you a little bit about that, and then return ultimately democracy at the end in the context of science. Right, well, let's put this into a context, an historical context that a lot of people will relate to. So the Enlightenment, in the 17th century, there were people who said, let's apply standards of scientific rationality to a much wider range of subjects.

Let's do history on scientific principles. Let's think about society and political organization on scientific principles. Let's try and understand human nature in that way. And so this was trying to think in an orderly and disciplined way about things. And it had tremendous consequences. I mean, you think of the outcome of the Enlightenment in the great changes politically and socially that followed it. The advent, for example, of democracy and of human rights and civil liberties and the much wider spread of education and the refutation of the claims of absolute monarchy and of religions.

So these were good things. And there were, of course, people much later, people like Hawkeimer and Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School who said, ah, the Enlightenment was to blame for Nazism and Stalinism because it privileged kind of organized bureaucracy, and bureaucracy goes rotten after retirement, blah, blah, blah. They're wrong about that, but anyway, that's a different story. But the people who objected to Enlightenment rationality

were the Romantics who said, if you have reason dominating life, then it desiccates life. It just takes all the color and all the magic and music out of it. And we think, we romantics, we think that it should all be about how we feel and it should be about our connection with the soil or the land or the people or the folk or this, that and the other. Now, I like to point out that we would not for one minute like to dispense with the poetry and the music of romanticism, but we could certainly do without the politics and sociology and anthropology of romanticism. because that's where nationalism and Nazism and racism and all that stuff come from.

I mean, talking about our adherence to the land or to the blood or to our ancestors or, you know, the race or something, all that is pernicious, and we've seen the effect of that. So the anti-rationalist reaction to the Enlightenment produced all these evils, which really, you know, caused so many deaths. I'm thinking of the first, especially the Second World War. And it illustrates, gives you this marvelous historical illustration of how if you are just irrationally and irrational and you're going to privilege all sorts of other things that dominate the way you act and think about the world, you're going to get into trouble.

Because the rationalism of the Enlightenment itself never ever claimed that reason should operate at the expense of emotion or at the expense of those things in life that give it its sense of value and sentiment. In fact, it's so interesting to notice that in the Enlightenment itself, the idea of sentiment, the idea of the importance of romance in life, the idea that our emotions are important motivators for our choices in life. David Hume, one of the great figures in the Enlightenment. Reason is a slave of passion. Exactly. You know, in other words, the result was that the Enlightenment drive to think more rationally, not of the expense of our emotions, but just, just more, actually, actually, was read by those who were frightened of what reason might expose

about the inadequacies of absolute monarchy and religious tourney to do this black and white thing. Oh, all reason is bad. But now you see this encapsulated in something, which again, actually I saw, it was in talking about the Timberland Prize recently, but this term, which is invented, which as far as I can see is meaningless, but scientism, that somehow, that's that, that, that's it, that where scientists are accused. of scientism, which just somehow demeans the humanities and also demeans anything but science at all, that scientific reasoning is everything. And it invents a straw man that as far as I can tell, not only doesn't exist, but in fact, there's nothing wrong with at some point saying that if you

call science what I think you and I would call science, which is really like philosophy, rational thought, reason applied to experience, reanalysis. That is the basis of much writing and poetry and music and art. There's nothing, there's no, that separation is artificial. Well, I agree. Well, you know, the great problem with people who talk about scientism is that they want to reserve something, some part of the explanation for what they do or think in the shadows, in mystery, in obfuscation, in something which is inarticulable.

This is why when you discuss with people who have a deep commitment to a religion, that if you push them and push them and push them, eventually you get to the position where they say, look, God is infinite and we're finite, so it's ineffable, we can't explain or understand it and so on, and then anything follows from that. You know, it's that recourse to something that can't be explained and saying that it explains something.

You know, you and I might say, if it can't be explained, then it can't be explained. So that's the motivation for trying to explain it. Whereas they say, the fact that it can't be explained is an explanation by itself.

And it also involves an incredibly, it involves incredible hubris, because how do you know it can't be explained until you try and explain it? That's what it always bothers me. We'll never understand love. We'll never understand this. We'll never understand.

Well, that implies you know, enough to know, that we'll never understand it. It really kind of amazes me because and and and, and, and, and they say that, you know, scientists are, are arrogant and not humble, but it seems even much less humble to say we know that we can never know. And, and it's such, it's, it's, it's, it's, unfortunately created an artificial antagonism that I see too often, rightly in the humanities for, for arguing that science is encroaching on, in different domains. And it's not, as you say, it's not that at all. But it's an interesting, it's a debate that's happening that...

Well, look, it's certainly true that there are people. Look, Wittgenstein, for example, in both his earlier in his late philosophy, was quite keen, really, to stop certain areas of thought from being explained by psychology or sociology or something. Religion, you know, he wanted, he didn't really talk very much about it, but he certainly wanted to protect it from the debunking encroachments of any kind of empirical inquiry. Are there psychological reasons why people cleave to religious beliefs? Answer, yes, but then people who have religious beliefs don't want that to be how you go. So, you know, that's part of the motivation that people have for saying

that they want to try somehow to put a cap on what science can claim to be able to do or to explain. But I think that intellectual honesty, so we go back to the whole business about the kind of intellectual honesty and integrity that we need to apply, says that nothing should be immune to question from any direction. Exactly. And, you know, and I'm not only guilty of that, but proudly guilty of that. I mean, part of what I've done in the last few of my books is say, look, there are questions that science, that you say science is supposed to address, like, why is there something rather nothing, or why are we here? And my point is that we've learned a lot, and science has informed that discussion tremendously, like it or not.

not, we've actually changed what it means to say wise or something rather than nothing. And people do object that, that how dare science address this question that it can never possibly address? And you're absolutely right. Anytime you say that questioning is wrong of any sort, by anyone, then that's problematic. And that allows us to return to where we began, actually. You wrote an essay about science and democracy. And you have argued, as I've often was sympathetic to the notion that science may not be causal, but it's very difficult to imagine democracy without science or science without democracy in the sense that science ultimately leads you to say everything is subject to question. And that, of course, is difficult in a system

that isn't democratic. So maybe you can elaborate a little bit on that. Yeah, sure. You know, it's part of the foundations of a democratic order. And remember, a democracy is not just about period of elections. Sure. It's about a situation where people can discuss, debate, ask questions, challenge, put forward ideas, have them shot down and stuff. You know, I remember some years ago being invited by the UN Development Agency to go to Bhutan, which had just reconstituted itself as a democracy.

It was really interesting. The former king had decided that he had enough, had enough of being a tyrant. So he said, right, we're going to have a democracy. And he imposed democracy on his people against the will of the people. They didn't want it, but anyway, they had it. So there was this conference there, and it was absolutely delightful, because it's a delightful country, and the people are great. And it's the little government that had eight ministers and the prime minister,

and so discussing the idea of what a democratic order is like. And there's a very minor contribution that I made to the discussion, was to say, look, the sound of democracy is noise, noisy, because there's discussion and debate and disagreement and so on. The sound of tyranny is silence. that's because nobody gets a chance to put a point of view or to ask a question or to disagree. So it's only in the noisy bits of the world where when people can ask and investigate where they can do stuff, find out how things work, that you get the possibility of any kind of

discovery, might be historical discovery or psychological or scientific discovery in general. So there's a very natural connection between allowing people to think and question and explore and a democratic order. In fact, the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th century has really started after the Reformation, not because Protestants were more interested in science than Catholics. It's not true. Galileo was a Catholic, and he was interested in science.

So it wasn't a Protestant Catholic thing, except in the following sense that in the Protestant parts of Europe, the religious authorities were not powerful enough to stop people from thinking. And that's what allowed science. science to start getting. Of course, it started with Kabbalah and magicism and astrology and stuff. But out of all that, the fact that people

could think and discuss was a really powerful impetus for people who were serious-minded and who wanted to do serious minds. Yes, yes. And not just Kabbalah, but I mean, Newton spent most of his time in religious thinking. He was a part-time physicist for science. He did pretty well. But when I was reading that, and I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because you also in that book are sympathetic to something I am too. which is that concerns about freedom of speech in China, for example, which is undoubtedly, as you point out, and I think it's clear,

it's going to be most likely the dominant economic force in the world in the latter part of the century. But this is an interesting question, because China is working extremely hard to become a scientific leader. At the same time as it has a system where dissent is certainly not easily allowed. And it's a different kind of thing that, you know, this former Soviet Union, used to have, well, it had very bad science, but it also had very good scientists. I kind of think

that the difference was there. In the Soviet Union, everyone knew the government was lying. It just sort of, well, we understood that, but, you know, everyone was skeptical on the side and they all talk, and maybe it bred that kind of interception. Whereas it used to be, as a physicist, I would get very good students from China at the undergraduate level and beginning graduate level, because they do very well in their exams. The problem became after that, partly, which was their training to respect their teachers too much, never to want to disagree, which of course is anathema to any emerging scientist. But nevertheless, China is proceeding by leaps and bounds in science.

And so I wanted to ask you about that potential tension and where you see it going. Yeah, sure. So this is really interesting and needs some sort of digging into. Firstly, I spent a bit of time living and teaching in China, actually. So this, I have first-hand experience of this. I can't disagree with the teacher. business, which is, of course, the diametric opposite of what should be happening. If you dig a little bit into what's going on, you will see that there's a particular application

of a general truth about any sort of tyrannical regime. Tyrannical regimes are much, much more efficient than democratic ones. Sure. Because they don't waste time and energy on discussing stuff. Yeah, yeah. And they don't change policy every few years because it's been an election. They just go for it. So the particular application of this is that they will encourage and fund, you know, up to the hilt,

scientific research projects which are going to bake bread for them. So on alternative energy sources and high-speed transport and, you know, all the technologies or space. And also those areas of science, which have very high status. So they want to, you know, get the Nobel Prizes and publish more than anybody else and, you know, make the discoveries. In those areas of science, which happen to be, at the moment, the ones that are really hot. Yeah. Okay. So there are two areas of science there, the ones that are going to be technologically and economically

very productive, and the ones that are going to be very high status. How much completely open blue sky scientific research and thinking there is in China, I wonder. The situation in the Soviet Union is actually a kind of 1950s black and white version of what's happening now in China. which is that you had all the spurious stuff about how you can increase production and so on, a million-fold in impossible ways. But you also had a huge amount of time, energy, effort and resource going into building nuclear weapons. Yeah, yeah. So that kind of tells you how in a regime like that, like the Stalinist or Soviet regime or like the Chinese regime,

they're going to direct what happens in science for a very particular strategic reasons. It's not like science in the U.S. or in Europe. Well, but I'll tell you, and maybe this is the cause for hope, is that I see changes in scientists and students from China. I see them in my own field, which is, after all, a very abstract and esoteric field, but also high statusness in particle physics and fundamental science. I'm beginning to, I see changes taking place in a culture of questioning,

a culture, and you can't help it because they're interacting with scientists from around the rest of the world. And the scientific culture is far as I can see in Mountfield is growing in China. And maybe whether that will have an impact politically, I don't know. Well, you know, back in the 17th, 18th centuries, when people published stuff of a politically inflammatory nature, even though the authorities did from time to time crack down, they sometimes didn't bother because not very many people could read. So, you know, the situation in China would be that if somebody is working in a very Eastern Area of astrophysics or something, not going to be too bothered about it

because the great majority of the population are not really going to cotton on to any implications that it might have. So, you know, it's kind of protected in that way. It's like the fact that when I first walked into the Second Language Institute in Beijing back in 1982, and there on the shelf was John Stuart Millen, Liberty, in Tom Payne, the rights of man. I thought, blimey, these should be very incendiary texts in the Chinese context. And then I clocked it.

Nobody could read English, so it didn't matter that they were there. So it's a bit like that. You can think that there has to be some agenda, but behind why China would be putting tremendous resources into developing in areas of science, as they are, because they are becoming an incredibly big player. You know, they are now more advanced than a lot of other people. people in a number of areas, including renewable energy, for example. Spending a tremendous amount.

This is because they need to be. Yeah, sure. And, well, the interesting question will be, to what extent the rise of scientific enlightenment can, if you look at the European example, was tied to the creation of democracy. You put your finger on it, okay, because the whole point about the Enlightenment is that people, firstly, had access to some of the results of what was going on in the sciences, and then thought that they would apply it more generally, and in doing so, began to ask some extremely hard questions

about the prevailing system. Is that going to be possible in China? I hope it is, because if it is, it will be transformative. Well, and I hope it is not just in China, but in England and the United Kingdom and the United States, and let's hope, therefore, go back to where it began, that the importance of informed questions, which is really at the heart of philosophy,

that we can celebrate it, and we can hope it will have a positive impact. and thank you for having a positive impact on my day by spending time talking to me. Thanks a lot. It's great to talk to you, Lawrence. Great. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss, Nancy Dahl, Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, and Rob Zeps. Directed and edited by Gus and Luke Holwurda.

Audio by Thomas Amison. Web design by Redmond Media Lab. Animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects and music by Riccolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon. slash origins podcast.