TRIGGERnometry - David Starkey: Can the West Survive?

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

SPONSORED BY: Manscaped. Receive 20% off Manscaped products when you use the code Trigger20. Check out their products: https://www.manscaped.com David Starkey CBE is an English historian and radio and television presenter. He is the author of more than 25 books and is regularly called upon as a political and social commentator. David's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@davidstarkeytalks/featured David's first interview with TRIGGERnometry: https://youtu.be/dSLZHnpt-RQ David's second interview with TRIGGERnometry: https://youtu.be/NP_yTdVUcz8 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get started today at IPvanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVANish. British opinion has hardened hugely against Harry and Megan and in favour of the monarchy. Harry has had a religious conversion. He's been converted to this. The woman... The woman will do that too. Yeah.

Well, exactly, he's got a priestess. The religion has got a priestess with she's Meghan. But she believes in this stuff. What does he do? He found as the Invictus Games for badly injured soldiers. Do you know what Invictus means? Not victim. Wow.

Isn't it interesting? It means not victim. It means unconquered. It's from the Latin to conquer. He really doesn't see it. He doesn't see it? I'm sure he managed to go through six years at Eton and not learn a single word of latter. I mean, I think that they're doing profound damage to themselves. He's an exile. He's become To use, I think, an appropriate word because he's been treacherous. He has become a traitor. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our fantastic and returning guest today is one of this country's most prominent historians, Dr. David Starkey. Welcome back to Trigonometry. Thank you. It's so good to have you on the show. We've got lots to talk about, particularly the Royals.

We want to get your take on that, and I'm sure it's going to be very interesting. 50 minutes is not in that, is it? We'll have to stretch it out then, David. But before we do, one of the things I'm pleased to see is that you've recovered. So if there was any recovery needed from the attempted cancellation, you're back, you are speaking at Oxford Union shortly. You've been welcomed back into the fold of society. Is that broadly speaking, right?

I'm not sure that I was ever driven out of the fold of society. There's this strange little world, this tiny world of smug, self-satisfied people, centering on places like The Guardian, the BBC, some university common rooms, certain charities, the civil service that think they are the world. They are, of course, not. They're a little group of self-satisfied people. Now, those self-satisfied people can do terrible, terrible things because they control employment. In many ways they control, they used to control, BBC have virtually monopoly on the dissemination of information. The one thing they didn't control is real society, save in so far as people are frightened. And yes, there was fear. There was fear in not me. I've never been frightened.

I lost only one semi-friend, one. and he was the kind of person who buys friends. To give you an idea of the quality of the man, I once visited his garden, I complimented him on the white fox gloves. He said, yes, yesterday I had 10,000 planted. That tells you all you need to know, somebody who buys fox gloves and friends.

Real friends were absolutely stalwart. What they were hesitant about doing, a lot of them was putting head above parapet. There was much support behind the, oh yes, absolutely disgrace. It was shocking. Not actually much muscle, but then I decided that no one has ever shocked me up before. Many have tried, beginning with my mother. That explains a lot.

As always, mothers get you half right. She said to your tongue will be the ruin of you. Well, it very nearly was. It's also been the making of me. And it's this, again, we've seen the same thing with Clarkson. You know, those of us who walk tightrobes can fall. Those of us who parade on knife edges can get cut. But above all, you need a degree of courage.

You need a degree of honest self-judgment, admitting you were fool yourself. is a start. But equally, in my sense, in my case, one of outraged injustice, an outraged sense of justice, that the sheer disproportion, and of course, above all, the fact I wasn't employed. If I depended on university salary, I would have been lost. It's why JK Rowling can get away with it.

She's too rich to cancel. The retired, have you noticed, the most outspoken academics, are the retired academics? You look now at, for example, History Reclaimed, David Abolafia, Robert Frost. Retirement is not only given them a new lease of life, it's given them a new lease of freedom. You can't be cancelled. You can't, or rather, the whole, as it were, enforcement, machinery, dismissal, professional restriction and whatever doesn't apply. It's those who are in employment.

It's those those are the ones who are so vulnerable. And then again, as we've been talking about, so that's the fact that the constructions apply in a very, very uneven way. I mean, I think, again, you look at so many of those who are making the running in the revival, because there's undoubtedly a very serious revival of free speech, many of them are the elderly. They're those somewhat outside, those standing away from... He's talking about us, mate.

The elderly. No, but you're of a different kind. You are the world of the new media. But then equally, the new media were precisely one of the means by which the worst aspects, through Twitter and whatever, of... cancellation was enforced. In other words, we're in a world of margins, aren't we, in which mass society enforces rules,

but equally there are so many bits that you fall off the edge in most interesting ways. I mean, I've always argued that if you wanted to do really big pseudo-history stuff on freedom in the West, You'd said that freedom is a little bit like the mammals in the age of the dinosaurs, the tiny little creatures scurrying around between these things. And in the West, above all, I think it's the fact that you have the war between church and state, between papacy and empire. And there's this little bit of space. And the world that we're in now with these gigantic forces, oddly enough, it leaves little bits of space. And people like us, the smart, clever little mammals can run around these gigantic snorting, posturing dinosaurs and laugh at them. And occasionally, you're underneath so you can do horrible things to their tender of bits.

But David, we need those people. We need the people on the knife. Descent is essential. All progress. I mean, all new ideas depend on heresy. The heretic is the key figure. The person who says, to pick a crass and crude example, no, the sun does not revolve around the earth. Somebody has got to break the obvious.

Somebody has got to say what everybody thinks is untrue. And again, my dear mother came in very useful. I come from a background of minority religion, Quakerism. And my mother, in many ways, a profoundly conventional woman in one sense over things like morality and whatever. But equally, she had a remarkably powerful sense that public opinion is often wrong. Just because everybody says something, she would say, it's not necessarily right. I was also brought up. She was fiercely opposed to corporal punishment.

So she made them, and dear me, talk about making a rod for her own back. she thought the right way to deal with the child, just to reason with them. Can you imagine trying to reason with me? She nearly broke herself. But it gave me that sense that finally the truth is there, that it can be argued for, it can be defended. Again, I was immensely, bearing it my age, I'm born in 45, I was immensely fortunate, both in my primary school, and more particularly in my little grammar school, 300, a boys' grammar, which had been taken over by an astonishing reforming headmaster.

I think he was one of the youngest in the countries, only in his early 30s, a man called James Boyes. And he'd essentially abolished corporal punishment. I was going to say capital punishment. That had been the previous decade. But he'd essentially abolished corporal punishment, and the school operated as far as it could on a principle of argument and reason.

Oh, that's... Of course, you always find yourself coming up against the fact that people may say that they believe in reason, but when it touches things really tightly, my mother again, her favorite word, she was such a bundle of contradiction, was, you know, oh, it's a matter of principle. And this little boy learned very quickly that a principle is something that people believe in so strongly that they won't listen to reason on the subject. Again, at Cambridge, with my great teacher, with Geoffrey Elton, always, you know, I've got the view, you know, you should be contemptuous of your elders,

harsh to your equals and generous to those below you. Apply that to me, which I did, and at which point then came. Surprisingly, you know, suddenly, you know, you've rebelled. against your intellectual father. But I've tried not to fall into that trap. I'm sure I sometimes have. David, and speaking of dissent,

I mean, one of the things that I found, and I don't use this word lightly, but genuinely shocking was to do with the royal family, which is one of the reasons we wanted to have you back, but at the tail end of last year, where you had this incident with Ngozi-Falani.

Yeah. And it just seemed to me that we've become deranged in the way that we talk about these things. I mean, the way that story was covered showed me that that bubble that you talked about earlier, I mean, their view of reality is so distorted now that they are so brought into the idea that the royal family is just one racist enterprise, etc., etc. What did you make of all that? I was profoundly shocked by the way in which the entire case was reported. I mean, I was listening that evening when Fulani went public. She was interviewed on virtually every channel.

I was in a car when my friend Ian Dale interviewed her. I have never heard a more shameful, and I say this, and I'm deeply fond of. I've never heard a more shameful and sycophantic piece of broadcasting in my life. That there was simply this prostration before this woman who clearly had to be the voice of absolute truth because of who she was, what she was, what colour she was. And I thought that was shameful. It was clear that the story was a complex one. I was again profoundly shocked at the response of the household of the Prince of Wales immediately.

of Wales immediately, implicitly accusing his godmother, Lady Susan Hussie, of racism. That I thought was shocking too. The dialogue was a very strange one, but then so when you actually looked at Naguzevulani was she. Here was a woman with an extraordinary conflation of names. Hussi knew Africa. Hussie was a church, Gather as a member of a church with larger numbers of African members of the congregation. She was clearly profoundly puzzled by the union of two wildly different tribal names.

Here was a woman who was wearing, come on say, it was almost a carnival version of African dress. It really was. I mean, it was a sort of outfit that, in the old days, a Victorian travelling circus would have used to exhibit an African queen. She was wearing as much leopard skin print as you normally only find on a barstool in Las Vegas. And is it any wonder that a woman who traveled with the queen to Africa had seen the real thing was completely puzzled. okay, the interrogation probably went too far. But here again, if I, do you know what, I could hear myself as Susan Hussey. I really could.

You have the sense of, I'm puzzled by you. I don't understand you. I don't understand what you're claiming to be. And of course, you know, the whole game was played to, as it were, get maximum, maximum. traction for, again, this view that British society, particularly upper-class, British society, is fundamentally racist, that she was challenging this woman's right to be British, etc., etc., etc. But isn't it striking? Fulani goes out of her way to emphasize not her British identity, but her Pan-African identity,

which again, very many black commentators were saying is something they find profoundly problematic because, of course, it places skin colour above culture, which again gets us into, to associate identity with skin colour, surely is racist. So we are in a cul-de-sac of absurdities and paradoxes. David, the thing that really struck me, and you use your own example, and I think about this in that context as well is the amount of bad faith that was so obvious in that engagement that was not critically analyzed by the media at all. I mean, if you and I were to have a conversation,

as we might have done when we first met, and you said to me, oh, you're for, and where are you from? And I gave you some obfuscatory answer, and you went on a, but where you really from? I'd be like, I know what David's asking. He's asking where I was born. Why don't I just tell him, and then we can have a conversation about that, and that's how human beings connect.

It was very clear from this engagement that this woman was deliberately making this into a big deal, and nobody had the balls to stand up and say it. That's right. Again, I mean, I had a remarkable conversation, and I wish I could remember his name. It was a history-reclamed party. And he was from, I think, I think in the Balkans. He completely anglicised to a level that I would say for the fact that he used, he used an original version of his surname, I would have had no awareness, whatever. And what we were then talking about, what was I supposed to call him?

And I wanted to call him English, because he seemed to me to have everything that I regard as English in the sense of the use of language, the sensibility, the colour. And he was saying, no, I can't be. I have to be British. And I found my, it was really odd, I found myself arguing that finally Englishness has become a matter of culture. It is, it is in the same way that you, despite, you know, spelling constant time of the K, and whatever, whatever, in so many ways are almost as English as you. And I think we're going to, see, I think this is the way forward. I have got this sense. Again, England increasingly is becoming a

place of the mind in exactly the same way that Rome was. And for all the same sorts of reasons, a dominant culture which was the centre of a vast empire, which itself is being transformed ethnically, precisely because of the empire coming back home and so on. But the idea of Romaness survived as a mental and cultural identity. And one, of course, that was capable of being revived hundreds, thousand years after Rome had fallen. I wonder if... We might be going that way. I'm wondering, but it seems to me that rather than just

sticking to the brief, it's worth exploring that thought. But to return, because you want to talk about... We were wanting to talk about the royalty, the royal family, and I think my question, and the question that I really want to ask you, before we get into anything to do with Harry, etc., is, why does a royal family matter?

Why is it so important to this country, David? It is the one continuous thread in our history. I try to explain to people why, there are several ways in which you can understand it, but essentially, and it's this utter paradox of English history, it's not British history, it's English history, this utter paradox of English history, that all the things that we think of as our freedoms, the security of property, the forms of representative government, the rigorous enforcement of law, all happen under monarchy, are finally a creation of it, and it is their guarantor. In other words, we are that most paradoxical of things. We are a royal republic. As in fact, Prince Charles, very clearly understood in what I thought was a remarkably good speech. which he gave the sort of invented, like so much of the accession, the invented speech when he met both houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall, and emphasised the fact, we are a parliamentary monarchy.

Now, many people think that that's a sort of creation of democracy in the 20th century. It's not. It goes back to the very latest, the beginning of the 14th century. In 1308, in a ritual that will shortly be reenacted, that's the coronation and the taking of the coronation oath, in 1308, Edward II was forced to swear an oath that he would obey and enforce the laws that should be chosen by my people. Shall be chosen. That's, it is unique in the history of the English monarchy. In other words, what I think is important about the monarchy is that it shows that freedom can be historically rooted,

that it's part of a tradition, that it is not a product of the 19th century, that it is not a product of democracy, that it is not a product of revolution, that it's not a product of a bill of rights, although all of those things at certain points enter into the story. The thing that finally guarantees freedom in Britain, extraordinarily, isn't the revolution of the 17th century. It is the restoration of a monarchy. This is the wonderful paradox of English history. Do you think, though... In other words, I'm saying our history is the monarchy.

It's the way I wrote a book called Crown and Country, which is a history of England through the monarchy. It is the institution which reflects us to ourselves. Now, what the relationship of that is to Charles and Harry and the soap opera of all of that is anybody's guess. But I'm giving you the high intellectual view of market. And I think it's one that is, I mean, I'm being desperately serious about it. Because remember, particularly this whole new laborish, new leftish university college constitution unit view of political freedom and whatever, that it's all to do with the Enlightenment, that it's all to do with written constitutions, that it's all to do with bills of right and sort of doing what, more or less,

a newly enfranchised Eastern European country would set up as its structure of government. I've always gently tried to remind people that the average age of a written constitution is about 10 years. They last no longer. that, for example, America was able to create a constitution which has endured is utterly unique. There is no other example that compares with that. And of course, it has an enormous downside, as we can actually see at the moment. You cement a rigidity, you get over the right to bear arms and whatever, You get absurd doctrinal rigidity.

Whereas a living and constantly revivifying tradition such as we have or had and should have, I think is the right way to handle human relations. David, you talked about England being this idea. Do you think we can have England without the monarchy? Do you think it could exist as a republic, or are those two things incompatible? It was tried.

It was tried in the 17th century. That's exactly what happened. We did abolish the monarchy and we lasted for 21 years and clamoured to have it back. Repeatedly, the obvious thing was for Cromwell to have... There was a clamour to make Cromwell king. The sense was that the norm couldn't work without the monarchy. Now I suspect that's probably no longer true. I think that the monarchy has become so much of a formality that you could, I'm afraid, very easily see it vanish.

I think it would be a profound error. I think if we did do what we did again in the 17th century, we would discover our absolute vulnerability. We have a All the things you and I talk about the world of woke, the awful cesspit of race relations or whatever,

these are forces which press very, very heavily on the whole of the Western polity. It seems to me your only resource against these things is finally tradition. And I now

arguing against my younger self. It may be just that I'm getting old. It may just be that my mind is no longer as sharp as it used to be. But I don't think reason is any defense against these horrors. I really don't. In fact, the horrors, in my view, demonstrably arise from the reason gone wrong. the very fact that so much it's called critical theory.

It's a kind of reason become cancerist. It's a whole series of intellectual movements that as it were have turned against the metabolism of the mind and of society. And finally, the anchor against them are traditions of decency, of good sense, of the way in which we do things. And this is what is so shocking, for example, places like Oxford,

and particularly my own University of Cambridge. Once upon a time, the sheer notion of collegiality, the sheer notion of the relationship between teacher and taught, would have the sheer reverence for learning itself would have acted as a barrier and a bulwark. But the deliberate attack on these traditions, the destruction within my own lifetime of a sense of collegiality, the absence any longer of common dining, of dons who live in, of unmarried dons who give their whole lives to their institution. It means that the barriers of tradition have largely vanished.

There is nothing but reason, self-advancement or whatever, and we can see how totally inadequate they are. You go back to my own case, a college for a mere moment of thinking, oh, this is a bit of a problem, throws somebody who has been involved in it at a very high level and doing a great deal of good for it for 50 odd years, simply aside like a soil tissue. Now, that represents, in my view, moral corruption. That represents the abandonment of decency, the things on which we really depend. Reason, reason, I'm sorry, isn't much of protection. Look at the French Revolution itself and the absurdity of the goddess of reason,

who's some half-naked actress from the Comedie Francais performing on the altar of Notre Dame, is why Burke pushes reason to one side. Reason can very easily go mad. It's a rootedness of behaviour. and rootedness of political institutions. And one of the things that most worries me about what's happening in Britain is the increasing contempt for our political process, which in many ways I share, the Parliament which used to be the thing of genuine, okay, everybody laughs at Parliament and individual parliamentarians,

but broadly that sense of pride in the thing seems to me to have warned. dangerously, dangerously thin. And that worries me, because are you familiar with that extraordinary story of Churchill at the beginning of the First World War? He takes a young man late at night. They're wandering around the Palace of Westminster, as indeed I was last week, in small hours.

And they wander into the chamber of the House of Commons, dark, to lights flickering, I suppose, maybe electricity, maybe gas at that point. And Churchill invites this young man to look. He says, going into the empty house of commons, this is why we're going to win. Now would anybody be confident about doing that now? That confidence in the tradition of, we were talking about the Oxford Union, which of course models its debating, like the Cambridge Union, on Parliament. Does anybody any longer have confidence that what goes on in Parliament represents a genuine discussion by debate? And I think this is an

utter, utter tragedy. And it leaves us profoundly vulnerable. That without that security of tradition, you have very little. IP Vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart, If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP Vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi. And with no device limits, one account covers everything. Stream with added privacy.

Browse securely. Connect with confidence. Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVanish. We talk about tradition and we talk about being profoundly vulnerable. To me, the royal family are profoundly vulnerable without Queen Elizabeth. Because even people who identify as Republicans who would openly question or even mock the monarchy,

practically everyone I speak to in this country had the utmost respect for our queen. But the moment that she passed away, it seems that they're up for debate. and it seems that they can be challenged and they can be... I mean, do you know what? I think you reflect that the very last phase of the Queen's reign. Okay. That this, you know, this unchallenged respect was very much a product of, I think, really, only post...

Well, I've thought the last 10 years or so. I mean, if you actually think at the deeply challenged unrespect that was directed at the queen at Diana's death. When you actually had Blair seeing himself as having to protect the monarchy against itself. She was accused of being cruel, unfeeling, not sharing the marvellous openness of Princess Diana. I mean, the, no, I think that what I was surprised by was the, remarkable warmth of the reception given to King Charles. I was actually very impressed by the confidence with which he acted at the beginning of the reign. I'd been less impressed by, of course, the current who-hah. But then equally, if you look at opinion polls, British opinion has

hardened hugely against Harry and Megan and in favour of the monarchy. And what again, of course, is striking is, well, it's not even striking. The patterns of support, if you want to call them, sides, they correspond to that other great, great divide in British life. In general, you will find Harry and Megan supporters were invariably remained voters. And, you know, monarchists are in very, die-hard monarchists are invariably leave voters. I mean, there's a, it's a very, it's a very, now the overlap between the groups, two groups in other words, not, not every, not every remainer is a supporter of Harry and Meghan,

but all supporters of Harry and Megan are on the remain side and so on. But what is striking about those people is, of course, the die-hard supporters of Harry and Megan, by definition of fundamentally anti-monochist. And the kind of sources, the kind of groups that they're appealing to, particularly. That extraordinary trio of people who appeared in the Netflix series, you know, when we were talking about the Susan Hussie and the Noghuzzi-Fulani business, the business when the race, the essential, alleged essential racism of the monarchy was being discussed.

Look at who they were. David Olusoga, Kehinde Andrews and Afwa Hirsch. Every one of them, a profound anti-monochist. So you think it's an anti-monicay thing, but the damage they're doing to the royal family is... I'm not sure. I'm not, I really don't think so. I mean, I think that they're doing profound damage to themselves. I mean, the Harry is an exile.

He's an exile. He's become, to use, I think, an appropriate word because he's been treacherous. He has become a traitor. I mean, what I've said earlier on, it seems to me, Harry is undergone. We talk, don't we, increasingly, about woke, about critical. race theory as either religions or heresies. Harry has had a religious conversion. He's been converted to this. The woman... A beautiful woman will do that to you. I said a beautiful woman will do that to you. Well, exactly. He's got a priestess. The religion has got a priestess with Megan,

but she believes in this stuff. So what you have with Harry, and it's only with poor Harry, because he's not terribly bright and he doesn't really understand all of this. It's a very partial conversion. But you see this poor man straddling between two worldviews. The worldviews were not terribly bright. Hooré Henry went in the army, which traditionally rescues them, gives them a purpose, gives them a sense of direction, and he behaved admirably.

He also did things that were really very striking. And again, one wonders now, quite how much he was responsible. I mean, what does he do? He found what I thought was something astonishing, which was the Invictus games for badly injured soldiers. Do you know what Invictus means? Not victim.

Wow. Isn't it interesting? Isn't it interesting? It means not victim. It means unconquered. It's from the Latin to conquer. He doesn't see it. I'm sure he managed to go through.

six years at Eaton and not learn a single word of black. I think, I'm afraid that really, that really is the level of dead city. You got the point instantly. What he has done, he created a set of games which is designed to say to these men who've been a, I mean, you look, I was born with club feet. I find I've got a very awkward relationship with disability. I can't look at those men without wanting to cry. You look at their courage, their refusal to be victims. Okay, they're the kind of men who express themselves normally, simply physically.

But here they are saying, right, I may be shot up, but I can still do, I can still pull a weight, I can still, I can still row, I can still do whatever, refusing to be victims. And here is this man who creates a non-victims game, playing the perpetual role of victim, but about things are so petty, so trivial, so absurd. I mean, it's always been the problem with monarchy, but on the one hand you've got an institution, which, you know, it is it is freighted with 1,200 years. I'm not sure what it must feel like.

I love, I've got a sort of inkling, what it must be like to sit in that chair. That chair made Fredbro the First with, the conquest of Scotland in form of the stone beneath it, to sit in that chair in that building that he has built a century earlier for the specific purpose of a coronation with a text which hasn't changed very much since the coronation of Edgar in the 9th century. That extraordinary, in front of all the great medieval kings,

a raid behind you in that great arc, a kind of audience of your ancestors, as well as an audience of your subjects. And that institution finishes up in producing Harry. You know, the sense of the weight on the one hand and the feather froth on the other. David, that's the nature of humanity. Well, this is what I was going to say. Give us a historical perspective because... I thought I've been doing that all the time.

And very well, of course, as always. But on this particular issue, I mean, primogeniture, the idea that the eldest son inherits titles and lands and so on and the rest get nothing. It's quite a long-running thing in human history. Yeah, of course. Touch, too-say, too-shaue. As a lad born in the council house, I do feel, I do feel, I do feel, I do sympathize with me. Too-Say. grinding poverty of Nottingham Cottage, you know.

Its rateable value would have paid, I would have thought, for my entire education. A very successful counterstrike there, David. I'm wounded deeply by the appropriateness of your response. But you know what I mean? I do. Throughout history, you have had these spares, as he's called himself, right? And that is the way that it's been. But is it, how common is what's happening now where the spare, so to speak,

seizes the microphone. Whether we like it or not, he's got a huge book deal that millions and millions and people, if not a billion people around the world, they're going to read at least bits of it. And this is a guy who is, you know, getting his story out, quote unquote, and maybe not destroying the royal family, as you say, I think you're right. The injustice of the way that he's behaving is actually galvanizing a lot of support for the monarchy. But he is tarnishing them. that he's slinging mud at least. No, you're certainly trying to. He's trying to.

How is this common? Has this happened before? Have we seen this? In fact, the problem of spare brothers is so acute that the Ottomans, the Ottoman Empire, the sublime port, that's, say, the rulers of Turkey, had a very simple way of dealing with brothers. You succeed as Sultan. You invite your brothers to a wonderful feast. the following morning they are strangled with the silken court. That's what the Ottoman Empire did.

I mean, that would solve the harry problem. We would solve the harry problem. And we have had a... It might not actually, because the books might already be written. He's got a full book here. So they might still be released. You think there's a clause, an activation clause. An activation clause when I'm hanged with a silken,

when I'm strangled with a silken court. And again, you look repeatedly in English history when you were fighting about real things, not about, you know, my bedroom were smaller. You look, for example, or indeed being pushed into a dogbow. Well, the younger brother of Edward V, the Duke of Clarence, was pushed into a butt of marmsy wine and drowned. And it was the relationship between the three brothers of the House of York, between Edward, between George and between George and between Richard is a kind of, you know, on steroids version of what seems to be the case with Harry. It's frustrated ambition, it's anger at being overlooked. There's even a struggle about wives.

Of course there is. And you would expect that to be the case. One of the great successes of the English monarchy for much of its history was it didn't have too many spare children. One of the great problems, actually, was King Edward III. King Edward III, I forget how many sons, it's something like eight. And he actually boasts in Parliament about, you know, my marvelous proclivity at generating sons. But, of course, that leads pretty well directly to the Wars of the Roses, that you've got too many rival royal branches. And what happens when one of them fails, or you get an absence?

of the usual kingly qualities. You've got all too many other branches ready to step up and to claim the throne. Again, one of the reasons that the monarchy survives all the torments of the 17th century is that until the very end, until 1688, the royal house doesn't split. That younger sons do not, as it were,

take up the line of opposition. Normally, that's what happens. Again, in 1688, in 1689, the solution to the great crisis of the Stuart Monarchy was that you had daughters who were prepared to rebel against their father. David, what I'm getting at, though, this is, I mean, fascinating what you're saying, but what I'm getting at is it seems to me, and again, give us a historical perspective, because you're much more knowledgeable, of course, in this area, is, is it not unprecedented for the spare to have this level of, I mean, you want to call a power or influence,

or this is not. No, no, no. Again, Harry has carried out the equivalent of a modern rebellion. I mean, what the Duke, what the man I was talking about, the one who finishes up in a butt of marmsy wine. What he does, he twice rebels against his brother. And unlike, unlike Harry, who is, you know, merely slinging mud at William, and more than that, he actually, once he drives his elder brother from the throne, twice. the throne, twice.

Right. And it's finally bumped off when it's perfectly clear that he's dabbling with another coup. And then what happens with the younger brother still, Richard, he murders his nephews. You get this perpetual... The crown is seductive. Of course it's seductive. You look at that thing. You look at how it holds you.

You look at those extraordinary images of the queen wearing the crown, either the coronation, or particularly at the state opening of parliament, the imperial state crown, that mass of diamond. As the lights come up and watching that, you can see why people fight, die, kill, murder of the thing. And I mean, Harry has that. he also, of course, has the extraordinary sense of white knighthood with his mother and assumed with Megan. But all he's doing, really, is using modern devices. Harper Collins is the equivalent of going into alliance with the Lancastrians against the Gorkis. You're deploying modern means to get even.

David, isn't this just what happens when you live a life of our own? purpose? No. Many people, on the contrary, the struggles were much more vicious when the monique had a profound purpose. It's just called, it's called humanity, brothers quarrel. Human nature. It's called human nature, brothers quarrel. In many ways, it's highly creative thing, the male competition. No, I don't think it's, I mean, in Harry's case, it is, but equally, you can see, I mean, one of the paradoxes, I mean, let's now just quickly turn the thing around. The whole notion of King Charles is saying, oh, we want to slim down monarchy.

Now, in one sense, that is exactly what might have dealt with Harry. You know, say, right, you're the younger son. You enjoy rights and royal privileges until Denmark shows exactly the case that's happened. Queen Margaret has decided that her younger son and his children shall, as it were, be disroyal. because there is now a secure succession with her elder son, right? And you could imagine that erected into a rule. That until the succession is secure, you will retain everything and whatever. But once two, three children, sorry, we give you dignity, we give you a pension,

we give you every encouragement to go off and do things, but no longer royal. The trouble is, isn't it, that we've got to be. very different view of monarchy. Have you noticed these extraordinary ancient people, even older than me, like the Duke of Kent and Princess Alexandra, these people in their 80s. I mean, the Duke of Kent looks as though he's going to drop dead any moment. But he's being wheeled out the whole of the time, because of course, all sorts of things have royal patronage. You were talking about not having a purpose. One of the things that the monarchy has become in the 20th century is the essential patron of voluntary activity. Organization after organization rejoices in royal patronage and the royals do something.

Now, that needs a lot of people. You look at the number of engagements of the Princess Anne or of the Queen or of King Charles. Now, you need spares. You need hyperspairs, you need pre-generation spares, but of course you need those who are prepared for that subordinate role. And again, one just marvels the problems of Harry's education. Apparently, it took Megan to instruct him that monarchy was hierarchical. Concenton, can you imagine the spelling exercise? No, the I can you imagine the spelling exercise?

No, the I comes before the E, and there's an R there, yeah, and hierarchy. But you can imagine it would take a very, very long time. But how have you been a royal prince? How have you been in the army? How have you been at Eton? Eaton is not exactly a democratic institution. And not understood there's a thing called hierarchy. David, do you not think this speaks to very much the issue that we've,

discussed with you in the past and we speak often about on the show. I think the unwillingness to recognize the existence, whether you like it or not, the existence of hierarchy, is part of this new world view which seeks to make everybody equal. And that's the solution, as if that ever would happen, as if that would ever work. As I always say, no sillier statement has ever been uttered than we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are born free and equal. It is the silliest statement. I mean, even women aren't born free and equal.

Let me free myself immediately from the charge of misogyny. A baby is born, a human baby, is the most dependent creature in existence. It is absolutely incapable of sustaining itself, not for a week or two, not for a month or two, but for years. Now, that seems to me to be a fundamental fact about human beings. And the profound inequality of humankind, and these are the things that we should be raised. Inequal in strength, unequal in strength, unequal in mental strength, unequal in endurance, unequal in every quality you can think of. Which of course is why we're so wonderful.

And so standardized. If we want to standardize world, we need to be turned into ants, which is exactly, of course, what regimes like communism and to an extent Nazism endeavored to do. What Chinese communism in particular, its aspiration is to turn you into a human ant in a functioning ante. The wonderful thing about being human is precisely the diversity, the separateness. But I think the great curse, I think the great curse of the West is, in fact, the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. I think the thing that's held up. You're going to get some hate metal out of this. No, no, no, I'm fully aware.

I think the opening, I'm joking, I am. We have a big American audience who, by the way, love you, so they'll be interested to hear your point. But I'm being really, really serious. I mean, I think Jefferson is the disaster of the founding fathers. This is the language of the extreme enlightenment. This is the language that leads to the catastrophe in France. And what is very striking is, of course, that those notions of equality figure nowhere in the Constitution at all.

When you come to draw the serious document that gives America its extraordinary tensile strength, this brilliant, brilliant balancing. between federalism and, in other words, the power of the states, and the creation of an acceptable machinery of federal, of central government. Astonishing the way in which the Senate becomes this kind of tensile bond, this idea of the equal representation of states, whatever their size, whatever their population. It is an extraordinary document. But it is merely a very lightly amended version of the 18th century English Constitution.

This is exactly what John Adams says. Interestingly enough, it's Tom Payne, who also says to Washington, I think it's his second, third letter, I lose track of these things, I'm not an American historian, that says to Washington, that we began with, you know, the Asper, allegedly, I don't think Washington never did, begin with the Asper, to have a real revolution. And what we finish up instead is merely the very lightly amended version of the English Constitution. John Adams, again, that point about royal republic. I think in the 1760s said that it's unquestionable. This is George the 3rd. It's unquestionable that England is a republic. It just happens to have a crowned head. It's ruled by law. The king is under law and so on.

So I think the disaster is that opening phrase, which is very, very effectively buried, that notion of equality. It's very effectively buried until Lincoln and Gettysburg speech, that we are a nation founded on new principles, the principle of equality. Tell me where is equality in 19th century America? Tell me where is equality in the America of the Gilded Age? The quality of America is besides its wild inequality. It's astonishing chaotic creativity

held together by this miracle of words. And is this a story as all this time again, David? And then, of course, the catastrophe is that it's propagated by Eleanor Roosevelt

principally through the machinery of 1945, the United Nations, and particularly the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. And I mean, have you, have you, I never know how you pronounce his name. What is the chap with the African-sounding name, the wonderful Dane, who's written about freedom of speech? Natchangama, what do you?

I don't know him. You really, I'm sorry, my memory is so bad. You ought to have him on the show. But what he points out, what he shows is that the whole campaign for the limitation of freedom of speech to protect the right. right of minorities has been driven using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the Soviets. In other words, all the notions about discrimination and whatever, as we know, have been used to undo freedom of speech, actually derive from the negotiations in the 50s and 60s to translate

the Universal Declaration into, from merely a declaration. into a binding statement with the Soviet Union satellites coming up with this whole idea that we've got to protect minorities. The protection of minorities is the thing that has always been used to destroy the freedoms and to destroy bills of rights. Remember, the original purpose of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is to protect the individual against the state. The moment you say that the essential purpose of human rights is to protect,

minorities against majorities, you then have to turn the state into the machinery that protects the minority against the majority. You invert Natchangama, isn't it? You invert the process. And it is this worship of this silly word equality, forcing people into something that they're not. This is what I want to get at with you, because this is a struggle as old as time. Right? Who has how much power based on what and who gets what and how do we divide the assets that generate that are generated in society? And humanity has struggled for millennia to answer that question. And communism and Nazism and all these other things were attempts to re-engineer humanity. What have we learned through our human history about those attempts? I mean, I know the answer is nothing. Yes. The fact that we keep on having to repeat them would suggest to me merely as a matter of empirical observation. In many ways, we've learned enormous amounts.

We accidentally, I would argue, remember, the notion of representative government that we have now, which is pretty, works pretty well. We stumbled on accidentally in Britain, England. It really doesn't, you don't find. anything quite like it elsewhere. And it was, there was this, again, sorry, I'm answering the question very arsi-versy, but there are no great conservative thinkers, I would argue. Conservatism doesn't lend itself to thought.

In fact, I don't think thinking is a very conservative activity. That's the thing that's going to be so much. I really don't think... You like lobbing grenades in every direction, don't you think. It's very important. One who should particularly lob grenades at oneself on one's own side and see if they stand it. I don't think thinking as a conservative activity, what is, is slow growth of the tradition of a way of doing things.

And the idea of representative government in England, the idea of government grounded in law and the limitations of law, there's no one individual. There's no, there's not even, well, the sort of Magna Carta, but Magna Carta is a kind of tiny germ. What then happens is a whole series of things come together, particular attitude to law, particular kings come along. One of the ways in which you develop the idea most strongly, paradoxically, is because the English are addicted to fighting. The kings love war, and they discover, oddly enough, that you can actually raise taxation if you ask nicely. But you actually get consent for it. So it's actually the very strong kings who build up this machinery and so on.

But what you do, you create a political tradition. And what we've got so badly wrong in the West is to think that this political tradition which gives us the right to do what we are doing now, that gives us modern, even the right is the wrong word. We just think we're entitled to do it. We occasionally talk about that as a right when we want to invest it with solemnity. In the same way, we tend to call things that we think we ought to have universal human rights. Has there ever been a sillier phrase?

Again, Jeremy Bentham describes universal rights as nonsense on stiltson. You can only have a right with an enforcing body, with an enforcing body of law. But the thing that we need to understand is that a particular way of doing things arose. In other words, it's rooted in a particular society. But if you actually look at belief in what we can loosely call representative law-bound government, it's profoundly shallow outside the anglosphere. It really is. In other words, these things are not universal.

These things are not logically deducible. These things do not arise from a fixed human nature. They arise from specific localized historical experience. Now, this, of course, cuts absolutely against what is virtually universally assumed. I'm saying it quite deliberately. As I said, I think the great disaster of the 20th century is the 1945 settlement. I think we can see in retrospect that the 1945 settlement is as catastrophic as that at the end of the First World War.

Tell us more about that. Well, I've been trying to explain to you. But it seems to me that with the creation, of the notion of universal human rights and a universal, therefore, a universal man. That is, remember, if you've got universal human rights, that assumes there's a thing called a universal man. That is, again, so far from human experience. But was it such a bad idea after seeing the horrors of World War I and then the horrors

of the Holocaust to go, maybe all humans should have a right to life, lack of torture, you know, not have to have medical procedures enforced on them? Was that such a terrible idea? Of course not. And in one sense, you can see, of course you can see its immediate profound attractiveness. The trouble is you root it in the wrong argument. In other words, the idea of human universality. I mean, again, let's just go back to how this idea arose.

One common notion about how this idea, how the idea of human universality arose, and Tom Holland advances this very strongly in Dominion, is that it arises essentially through Pauline Christianity. I don't know whether you're familiar with, particularly the epistle to the Galatians. And there what Paul says is, it's really worth repeating, that there is neither, listen carefully, there is neither Jew nor Greek. bond that slave nor free, man nor woman in Christ. In other words, that Christ abolishes human distinction. But that doesn't mean that human distinction is abolished. Nobody assumed that Christianity until woke came along was about abolishing the difference between man and woman.

And what it's saying is that there is in a particular form of religion. and spirituality, a transcendence of human difference. Now, I think that the only way which we can all get on is, and again, so I am taking this right back to the beginning of our conversation, is recognizing human diversity and difference. And the last way you can do that is if you start producing universalized doctrines. You, I can understand, right, I can understand, and now I'm thinking aloud. I'm thinking aloud. I can understand, as it were, the negative, thou shalt not do. Yes.

That seems, but that's not a universal human value. I can understand the negative. In the same way, I don't believe at all in do as you would be done by. I do believe don't do what you wouldn't have done to you. In other words, the golden rule seems to me to be, it works much better in the negative than in the positive. Because of course, do as you would be done by means I can enforce my values on you if you both think about it. We're back to the ten commandments, David.

Again, we're back to your point about how do we cope with the extraordinary diversity of human beings? And it seems to me that, yes, in one sense, we've learned nothing in the abstract. In other ways, I think we've learned profoundly. the development of traditions of language, of culture, of thought, of manners, the behavioral patterns of human beings have changed, have improved in many ways. I think, and this again is a reflection of age, I think my sense is that we've sort of gone a little bit off the top in our own civilization, maybe rather a lot off the top, that the cultivation of a civilization is, and I make it sound like a plant, and I think it is. In other words, you can over crop, you can overprone, you can over fertilize. It goes right back to the beginning of our civilization, which is the invention of the English language, which is Chaucer.

And Chaucer has this astonishing phrase. Chaucer's, again, an extraordinary man, he's a product of this strange island on the fringe of Europe, which didn't really have a language. You're at the stage, you've killed the native language of Anglo-Saxon. It's got completely mixed up with the language of an alien ruling class French. And Chaucer, in some ways, not quite single-handed, of course not. but shapes it into a language. We forget, you know, English is the most extraordinary recent of languages. English really is only, well, it's after the beginning of Parliament.

That oath that I was talking about of Edward II in 1308, that's sworn in Latin and French. But Chaucer, towards the end of that century, begins to formulate English, but he formulates it against a background of Latin and against a background of Italian and his travels in Italy and one of the things of course that's shaping this world is the world of Rome

that dead great civilization which is still a living civilization through its books and its literature and its buildings which Chaucer encounters particularly in Italy and in one of his poems he writes about his experience of reading one of the most important surviving works of Cicero,

the dream of Scipio in which Cicero reflects on the greatness of Rome and Roman history. And it's very wonderful. He goes to sleep. He's bored stiff. And he dreams not of a parliament, not of a senate of human beings, but birds all making love to each other. It's a wonderful poem. And then there's a couplet in which he's reflecting on this new,

discovered world of Roman literature and whatever. And the phrase goes as follows. Just in the same way, the point that I made about a civilization as a kind of culture, as a kind of agriculture, just he says in the same way that from the old earth, each year there springs new corn, so from old books, new learning comes. And that's, it's that extraordinary, and again it's what Burke is talking about when he talks about society as a cross-generational contract, when he talks about it as if it is a contract, it's a contract between those who are living,

those who were dead and those who were yet to be born. And it's this fertilization across time. And that's why the American Revolution is a success, and the French Revolution is a catastrophe. The French Revolution tries to restart time. It tries to do what the Chinese, what the Russian does. The American Revolution effectively is just a group of Englishmen deciding actually they can run their affairs better. David, we've got to wrap up shortly, but you raise, I think, within that a question that a lot of people actually deeply, I think deep down, want to hear an

answer to, which is you talk about our civilization, you talk about it as a plant, is it dying? Well, I think we're doing our best to kill it. I mean, remember, fundamentally, a civilization depends on one generation handing on to the next. IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV, if it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP Vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi. And with no device limits, one account covers everything.

Stream with added privacy. Browse securely. Connect with confidence. Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVanish. And many of my generation decided they didn't want to do that. and quite a lot of yours decide they didn't want to receive it.

And modernism, to a very significant extent, began as destruction. We really do need to understand this. I mean, you look at what we call modern art, which begins with Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp did not think he was inventing art. Duchamp, you know, he's the person with the urinal, which is then labeled La Fontaine and all the... and with a fictitious signature in New York. Marcel Duchamp does not think he's inventing a new art.

Duchamp is trying to destroy art. He says Rembrandt should be used as ironing doors. He says absolutely specifically, I am an artist, in the same way as an anarchist. I am absolutely opposed to art. All that stuff, the art of surrealism and whatever and Dadaism, is only reinvented as art in the Warhol circle in New York, in the 1960s, and above all, by a group of money-grubbing Germans in Italy who persuade Douchon to reissue his various works.

And it's only in the 1960s that you decide this stuff is art. Again, the modern movement in architecture is a deliberate attempt at destroying the previous patterns of artistic endeavor, which, again, I was thinking this today, being driven in from Islington to the wonders of King's Cross and St. Pancras to catch the trains that get me here. taxi took me down through the squares of Islington, crossed over Richmond Avenue, Hemingford Road and whatever, and then it turned towards Caledonian Road. And these elegant terraces and pretty villas suddenly turn into block after block. It is decaying, litter-strewn, paint-pealing, pissed upon council flats. You look at a sense of a civilization having committed visual suicide. The sheer and redeemed hideous ugliness.

And again, it's so much of the city, the preening, pruning swish, my cocks bigger than your skyscraper, vanity of it. There really is this. You look at that deliberate visual chaos. You contrast it. with the instinctive elegance and I'm sounding like Prince Charles, I apologize, King Charles, elegance and human scale. And there is, again, when people talk about, everybody laughs when they say we've got to build a beautiful, but you look at the sheer ugliness of so much modern has, the sheer ugliness of the spaces we create,

the absolute indifference to the human scale, to beauty, to even elementary convenience. And it is this extraordinary paradox that we've created levels of health, of security, of comfort, and at the same time, how can I put this bluntly shat upon a tradition of civility? But it's above all, in other words, we've forgotten that things really do have to be transmitted, that a culture is a delicate thing. Again, all the bloom stuff about the closing of the American mind about this is true. That if generations are not taught, they're sure, you don't absorb Shakespeare by accident. I mean, and again, it's very, but look at look at, look,

But the role in the book that seems to me to be the prophecy of what's happening to us is Brave New World. Brave New World, that society which Huxley sees, to an extent, experiences in 20s, California, in which the only person who reads Shakespeare is the savage. that world of absolute valuelessness there is a risk there is a risk and the more we decide that the Western tradition is a disaster

that whiteness is a disaster then I'm afraid we are signing our own death world you see there is a very we were talking quite lightly about cancel culture. Andrew Doyle's written brilliantly on this, about cancel culture and all the rest of it, being quasi-religious.

But there is an example of a civilization which got religion very badly and a religion that was profoundly opposed to its central values. It's called the Roman Empire and Christianity. And the classic account of the fall of Rome, that's to say, Gibbon, seize the absorption

of Christianity, which is a religion which in Rome embraced power, it embraced dignity, it embraced honour. Christianity is religion which embraces submission, unity, forgiveness. Meekness. Meekness, as Nietzsche says, the religion of the slave. Who knows? And on that note, David, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you. on. Thank you so much for coming on. Before we do our questions for locals, we always ask the same question to end our interviews, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I think this discussion has covered absolutely anything. Seriously, it went

in wildly different directions from what I was expecting. And I'm sorry, I probably wandered into far too many strange corners, but it does seem important to say these things. It is. I mean, I am aware, and again, it is terrible age. One becomes very aware of fragility. You become particularly aware when like me, you're childless. I never thought I would say that. You certainly never say it publicly.

But the only thing that someone like me could have as a legacy, and again, isn't it awful, one starts thinking of these things, is that process of transmission. There used to be the notion of, in a sense, master handing on to pupil. It's very difficult to preserve. And wherever you look, really, that's what's needed. The trouble is that we've tended to see it as strangling creativity. Again, we were joking before, weren't we? That you need rebellion, you were saying. But you also need order.

In some ways, I suppose it is right to burn heretics. There is this awful paradox. We've got a pie ready just outside. Far ready outside. Far ready outside. It was getting a little warm. David, if I may pay you a compliment before we let you go, I think in terms of passing things on, this is quite the discussion in which you've been able to do that. And previous conversations we have with you.

We have a lot of young people who watch the show. Some of them are even as young as being in their 40s. Some even younger than you. Some even younger than me. Very difficult to do that. No. But I think, as we've seen with the growth of our channel, we joked earlier about when you first came on the show, it was in a dingy, smelly pub, and look at us now we're doing very well. I think there's a hunger out there in the world.

I'm sure. No, I'm sure, sure there is. But, of course, there is a conspiracy not to feed that hunger. Well, we're conspiring to feed it. There's a conspiracy to deliberately starve it or to do what's even worse to feed it rubbish food. Yes. But we run a small restaurant here that focuses on high-quality game, and you've been that today. The press on Molesi today.

David, absolute pleasure. I recommend everybody check out your YouTube channel where you put out a lot of great stuff. We're going to ask you a couple of questions that are paying supporters have submitted from locals. But for now, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for being with us. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one, or a show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys.

Are civilizations always destined to fall apart? Could a sufficient degree of robustness ever be built into one? IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi. And with no device limits, one account covers everything. Stream with added privacy.

Brow securely. Connect with confidence. Right now, save 83% off the two-year plan. Get started today at IPvanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVanish.