TRIGGERnometry - Dr David Starkey: Where Woke Culture Comes From

Episode Date: March 29, 2020

Eminent historian, author and broadcaster Dr David Starkey joins us. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod 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 (@failinghuman) 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

As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal.

And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 362326, participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kitten. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest this week is an author, broadcaster, and eminent historian, Dr. David Starkey. Welcome to Trigonometry. Hello. Both of you. Thank you very much. All I guess. So Trigonometry is the three of us. Yes, I get it.

But mostly you. Mostly me. We are going to count on YouTube. So I'm at the top of the hypotenuse. Exactly. Exactly. And doing most of the triggering. We normally like to get our guests to introduce themselves, but you're someone who needs very little introduction, so why don't we just crack on with it? We're delighted to have you on the show because I think the historical perspective, and we talked about this before we started, is fascinating because we have such short memories nowadays.

And I think it's very tempting. If memory at all. If memory at all, exactly. Nematode worlds. And so many things that are happening in society now, the trends, whether it's one, woke culture, whether all of these things. It's very tempting, I think, for us, particularly younger people, to assume that this, none of this has ever happened before, this excessive introspection, this naval gazing

obsession with ourselves and with individualism. But give us a historical perspective. As a historian looking at modern society, what do you see and what do you think back to in history when you look at what's happening? Can I do a little plug? Oh, my way in here. I was reading the proof for my latest article for this brilliant new magazine, of which I am a columnist, the critic. And it's looking centrally at this extraordinary man, Jean-Jacques Cousteau.

And if we want a single source of why we are completely fucked up, it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ine. Inevitably, of course, he's French, or at least. Every bad idea is French. because they take the subject of ideas and reason so seriously and they, as it were, tear it from the roots of experience and good sense and general Anglo-Saxon ploddery, which we are so very good at on this side. And also, I think, is the beginning of virtually the list of nouns that you gave,

the introspection, the profound sense of solipsism, of sense. the absurd belief in our own absolute importance and that the thing that matters most of all is what I feel. I mean the whole origin of dianification. Do you remember this ancient figure, Princess Diana? You're all probably too young. All of that is pure, pure Rousseau. But what I think we've got to understand, your introduction was really interesting about history. What I think strikes me, and again I've been writing about this in the context of politics,

is from a point of view of when I was taught, you know, and I was a young man roughly at the time of Noah's Ark, we were taught very definitely that history is then and we're now and the drawing of the parallels between the two of them is dangerous and whatever. But as I've got older, and I think it's partly, you come to have a history yourself. So you've become very, very aware of your own change, the changes in your own times, your physical aches and pains and all this kind of thing. But what I can now see is the extent of patterns and the repetition of patterns. And what I think we can do if we put Rousseau in, let's put Rousseau in context. He is the immediate run-up to the French Revolution. And if we look at the French Revolution, although you remember there's a famous, suppose,

remark of Chowin Lai when he was asked, had the French Revolution been a good thing or a bad thing? And he supposedly responded it was too soon to judge. I think he's wrong because we could see immediately the French Revolution was an exceedingly bad thing from which France has never recovered. What was it? It's the beginning of our modern politics. The split between, if you like, the liberal and the conservative is the direct product of the

French Revolution. Because what the French Revolution does, led above all by Housseau, though he's not the only one, he's got sort of partners in arms and people like Voltaire, although of course they hated each other. The left always hate each other. You can just look at the Guardian at the moment and you get the idea of the Labor Party, The idea of the bear pit it is. What they begin by doing is deciding, a bit like Tony Blair, in the second or third stage

of this process, that history was a mistake, a bad thing. We needed to start from scratch. What the French Revolution tries to do is to invent society, human relations, the world from scratch, starting now. this particular moment and we'll simply rethink everything and we tried it in Russia a couple of centuries later you did exactly the same with precise even more even worse consequences Stark's rule of revolutions is very simple all they do is reproduce the worst features of the Ancien regime so you've just got a particularly unpleasant but you've had a

succession of deeply unpleasant czars you know China is run by a mad emperor China's always run by mad empress and the Communist Party has just replaced the mandarinate. But the French Revolution is the key start of this process. I mean, are you aware, for example? It's not just that they try to change politics. You can understand if you look at Ancien regime, France, why you want serious political change. Do you know they try to change the calendar, that they decide, we all know they invent the metric system, well, sort of sensible, except it's been made completely redundant by computer

which why the Americans still use feet and inches. But they decide not simply to have 10 for measuring or 10 for quantities. They decide there shall be 10 hours in the day, 10 days in the week, 10 months in the year. Everything is given the new name. They decide that every geographical area in France shall be obliterated and you shall cover France with a network of neat squares, each one of which is roughly the same size. So you simply tear the world apart. You reconceive human relations.

You abandon religion. You celebrate the worship of pure reason. And you finish up with one of the great moments of blasphemy in human history where you have an actress who is no better than she should be, as my mother would have said, from the Comedie de France's enacting the part of the goddess of reason barely clad on the high altar of Notre Dame. The world goes completely mad. and it goes up its own bottom and the revolutionaries

tear themselves apart. Now what does that sound like? Twitter. Twitter? It sounds like Twitter, but it sounds like something else. It sounds like what's going on on the far left now.

Have you just noticed this moment in which that ghastly woman, Suzanne Moore, you know, the one who wears a kind of Chinese sort of Sharksfin's soup as hair has been ostracized for saying that women are being a woman as a biological fact.

So the entire, and 333 people would have thought that the Guardian had 333 people working for it. I thought that was bigger than its readership. This is what you, this is, you know, the only reason the Guardian can do what it does is that it doesn't matter if it doesn't sell a single paper. It's run exquisitely by an offshore trust, you know,

tax-free offshore trust. How progressive. And how deeper. You can only be progressive if you're rich, you know. It's a corporate equivalent of a trust ofarian. Anyway, but it's disappearing up its own bottom. Or because it's not a bottom, of course, that would be if it were gay rights, one imagines. It's because it's trans rights, I presumably, you know, it's a cul-de-sac vagina.

And the left is just going up itself. But it does it as a cycle. And it's really striking. So you have that first cycle of liberalism. in the 1790s. Then you've got a second one in the 1840s with here in Britain, which is the second great revolution, which is the industrial revolution, which again dissolves human relations in exactly the same way. I mean, come on, you two, have you read Marx's Communist Manifesto? Well, believe me, I have. Tell me the great bit in which he says what the bourgeois do.

What does the new bourgeois sensibility do? I feel like I'm in a history of tutorial university, and I haven't done the preparations. Think of me as a KGB. Come on, you wouldn't know. Suddenly I'm more scared than I have it. I have some means of sort of a rat torture waiting for you. Yeah. So what the question is?

What does Marx in the Communist manifesto say the bourgeoisie do? Do they take advantage of the working class? Yeah, but there's a much, there's a wonderful passage. in which he describes them, tearing off the draperies that have made life acceptable, the relation, the holiness of the church, the dignity of chivalry, that they strip everything of of tradition, of respect, of value. In other words, it's a new way of starting the world from scratch. And that, of course, creates our modern politics in Britain. It's from the outcome of that, that you get the Liberal Party on the one hand, and the country.

conservative party on the other. And then you're a globalization and the increased madness of the left is the third wave of that. So we're just going through this sequence of waves. And they all end the same way. They all go up themselves. Do you think we're in quite a dangerous place, David, because we don't have a coherent opposition to our present government. And isn't that quite a dangerous thing for societies? I don't think the government, in that sense, much matters in this story at the moment. I mean, we're in a very strange position that you've got, on the one hand, in terms of the formal political process, as you say, you've got a government that in one sense just occupies

the field. You've got a useless opposition, worse than useless opposition. On the other hand, you've got, so there's a dominance of a supposed conservatism. It's a very funny sort of conservatism that's just spent about a trillion pounds without thinking about it. But never mind, it calls itself conservative. But then if you look at virtually every other important institution from the BBC to most of the press to the universities, you get a very, very different picture, which is the dominance to a large extent of this insane woke culture, which is there, of course, not necessarily because people believe it, some do, but above all, because of corporate vanity and indulgence.

I mean, the reason in my own University of Cambridge is overrun with this sort of stuff is you have an absolutely useless vice-chancellor. Needless, he's Canadian. There's a kind of iron rule on the whole when Canadian... How much time does he spend in blackface? That's right. But Stephen Toop, they're so appropriately named. stoop, you know, has only got to see a woke cause to prostrate himself before it. And you see this with CEOs and whatever.

And, you know, you just, I mean, the Guardian incident is a fascinating one. One employee who apparently is trans, who was already resigned once, then writes to the Guardian to say that because of Suzanne Moore's wicked column in stating that on the whole women tend not to have beards and penises and occasionally to menstruate, that he felt. you know, he or she or Z, felt oppressed and therefore threatened to resign, then immediately 333 people coming along as well. So there is this peculiar, we've got a world in which there is no opposition to the left culturally and there's no opposition to the right politically. And the two groups just continue walking past each other. It's completely extraordinary.

But with this work mentality and the fact that, as you say, even though the far left is not in power, they have power. Well, they're in social, sorry, there are different forms of power. Exactly, exactly. That's what I meant. And again, you know, the power of, if you look at the various forms of cultural Marxism, the argument was always control education, you know, going back to the Jesuit, give me the trial for six years and I've got them for life.

The argument, well, education is outside the place. public schools and to an extent even in those is controlled by these values. And again, what is really, really striking both of you is the origin, where does child-centered learning come from? Oh, it's Rousseau. I mean, Catherine Burbill is saying, it's Rousseau. It is just extraordinary. Again, our politics driven by celebrity, I better shut up because I suppose I'm on in a minor

way. But our politics, our culture driven by celebrity, Russo is one of the first celebrities. Rousseau pioneers in the Confessian. I mean, he pioneers the tell all. You know, he's a Kardashian and whatever. I mean, you know, the revelation of all, you know, one's, I mean, not simply washing ones dirtywear, underwear in public, but actually soiling it and holding it up for admiration.

So he's there. he's at the heart of all of this stuff. But let me ask you this question, David, because as, you know, it's an apt metaphor for the current moment. As we know with a virus, you are likely to catch it if it's around, but your immune system has to be compromised somewhat to be susceptible to it. So what is it about the cultural moment that we're in? And again, the historical perspective here is interesting

because, again, it's not the first time that a civilization has been tempted to disappear up its own bottom, as you say. What is it about the cultural moment now that as a society we seem to be susceptible to some of these far left ideas? How is it that we've come to a place where outrageously ridiculous concepts seem to be just regurgitated on the BBC

without any question? Without any question. It's a very good question. I think that the 20th century was right, from the beginning. If you go back to the First World War, the whole beginning of modernism in art of Dada and whatever, it was a kind of spitting in the face of the past. It was intended to be the belief that the First World War represented the death of an old, wicked world, and you know, you spat on it, something even nastier upon it, which is what Dada and all the rest

it was about. And that has run as a general theme through the 20th century, through the anti-art, the brutality and architecture. And again, the way in which the 60s consciously revive that immediate atmosphere of the late First World War, the early 1920s. So, you know, you get Warhol, rediscovering Dada, the liberal. of the 60s, the liberation movements of the 60s, consciously picking up from, again, the Russian, that immediate post-revolutionary period in Russia is picking up. And you have this, again, it's this cycle of liberalism. The 60s, I'm notoriously gay.

Of course, much that was attacked, needed attacking. Much that needed changing was changed. change. But once you start that ball rolling, that everything's got to be changed, that the past has got to be discarded, that all that matters is the individual, all that matters are my feelings, all that matters is what I feel is right, all that matters is that I feel hurt. Do you see what I mean? It just rolls and rolls and rolls. And we can get away your question. I'm thinking, talking my way to an answer, as I often do. I think one of the reasons we can do this and get away with it

is, of course, in every other way, our lives are better, secure, less threatened than we've ever been. If you had a civilisation where people had to work harder, where there were deep as, I don't mean what we call work nowadays. Oh, I've been hours in the office. Look at what. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, So let me tell you about something that's actually right.

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or a coal miner was. So we've got a society which protects and indulges. It's a society because we lead such safe lives that we can get ourselves, dare I say it, into the current hysteria that we are about the coronavirus in which can I gently say at the moment of speaking, 10 people out of a population of 65 million in Britain have died. people. I have to say by the time this recording goes out, those things we could all be dead.

The one thing that is pretty clear, Constantine, is that this is not the bubonic thing. Yes. It really isn't. The bubonic plague was real, you know. A third of a pop... If you look in England at the onset of the plague in the 14th century, roughly a third of the population die at the first blow.

And then it rolls on and on and on. And by the end of the 14th century, the population of England has halved. And it takes centuries. We're not seeing that. And do you think that that's what we're seeing, the self-indulgence, the concentration on their feelings, don't you think that's very dangerous for a society?

Of course. Because it shows that there's a lack of moral, a sort of lack of character, a lack of fibre. Oh, what old-fashioned was it in a form? Oh, you make me feel so young. I haven't I'm so young. Your values are rather than 1920s. Come on, man, sit up straight.

Get rid of those tattoos. Get a find a tie from somewhere. But you see, isn't it interesting playing the, of course you're right. But we can get away with it for the moment because virtually every other Western society is the same. But of course, over there, there are societies that are not. That ain't true in Iran. That is not true in China. And who knows?

I mean, we are, it's very, very easy. And again, you know, civilists constantly made the point. Civilizations disappear. And we were talking before we went on air about that extraordinary moment of the late 18th century, which again, of course, is Russo or whatever. One of the very, very great figures of that period is Edward Gibbon, the historian who writes about the death of a civilization, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And what he blames it on is Christianity, essentially.

He sees a change of values. And of course, he sees Christianity as being individualistic, Pacific, indulgent, self-centered, rejecting a notion of military value. Well, it sounds pretty similar to where we are. are now. And, you know, societies can turn in on themselves. And clearly, one of the remarkable things about Rome is that having achieved this astonishing power and dominance through, and, you know, Roma civilisation really is pretty horrible, but it suddenly turns against itself. It turns into something radically different and falls. Well, we are confronted with a radical. his alarm on the one hand and a radically different vision in China of a regulated state-controlled

capitalism run not by floppy classicists like Boris Johnson but by ruthless, properly trained engineers in which the human being is seen merely as a cog in the wheel, not the creature like us to be indulged in every whim, fantasy and hurt feeling. Not much indulgence happening in China. But again, you look at how the thing was handled in China. And you are just ordered what you do. And if you step out of line, how many years in jail is it, you know? Yeah, if that.

But this is the thing that you talk about the threats, you know, radical Islam, the rise of China with its very different mentality. And I think threats have always existed and a strong, healthy civilization like a strong, healthy body is able to deal with external challenges. The thing that troubles me... But what if you decide, you see... But this is my point. The thing that troubles me is that if we weaken our own sense of ourselves,

of the value of our civilization... In fact, we've done more than weaken it. In fact, what is peculiar, and it's a very, it's striking... I think here again, England is from England, I'm going to talk about England. England has been the country that's led the way in virtually everything. We invented modernity in the late 17th century, the Industrial Revolution and all the rest of it. And one of the very peculiar features about England, which I think has become a kind of disease which has spread to the rest of the West, is the self-hatred of the English intellectual.

I mean, it's written about very, very interestingly, by George Orwell, you'll remember. Just immediately before, on either side of the Second World War, in which there's that wonderful passage describing the kind of people who read the guard. You know, the sandal wearing Quakerish classes, or invariably vegetarian or vegan, as the kind of people who would rather steal from a poor box than stand to sing the national anthem. And that, again, it goes back to the late 19th century. You've got in the mikado's, one of, in Coco's song in the mikado of all the people that he hated. It's those who, it's those who sing the praises of every century but this and every, country but their own.

And this has become profoundly deep rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture. It was, I think, essentially, snobbery. I mean, English foods are utterly disgusting. You really, really must eat fredge. You know, you give an example. Absolutely no sense of style or dress. English men are just so ugly. Please keep going, David.

Please. This is the best moment of this episode, please. Carry on. You illustrate the point. And so on. And then, of course, it becomes given an extra crank and edge by race sensitivity. And so it now shifts from snobbery to something else, which is that we, of course, as imperialists, are responsible for absolutely all the ills in the world. And then, of course, not only did we have an empire, we had slavery.

So every other culture in the world, including China, had – did not have – slavery and in fact the peculiar thing about the British Empire is that it may be built on slavery but it then actually spends more money on eradicating that it ever made from it. And then of course the slavery, you can then turn across the Atlantic because until very recently what was very striking about America was right or left, a passionate patriotism. But suddenly in America with race politics and slavery you're using these things to discredit even the American ideal, even the American Revolution, even the American Declaration of Independence,

because of course the American Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths of itself evident that men are born free and equal with you, no certain rights given by the divinity and whatever, by the creator, and you have slavery. So there is indeed a fundamental hypocrisy, and you're using that, and the left is using that, to devastating effect, to lead to a rejection of your own civilization and to see it as being responsible for all the ill in the world, whereas the plain truth is that the West and capitalism, if you value health, if you value education, if you value security of life, have created a civilization which offers incomparably more of these things to an incomparably larger percentage of the population

than has ever, ever been the case before. But then, you know what? We take it for granted. And it's like a religion, because the way you talk about it, it's almost as if by being English, we're born into original sin. That is a brilliant point. No one has ever said that to Francis on this program ever before. No, no, come on, this is a serious, this is a proper,

we're all being joshing, but it's a serious conversation. See, I think one of the things we've got to understand, is how so much of what we're talking about now is displaced religion. This is something else which is utterly fundamental. You know, G.K. Chesterton, awful, fat, farting fascist. That's good. Fat farting fascist and Roman Catholic, that he was, but brilliant, brilliant writer and very considerable poet,

has this wonderful phrase about what happens when people lose belief in God. And the phrase is, you don't believe in nothing, you believe in anything. And what I think has happened is in area after area, what were religious positions have been translated into political positions. I mean, one of the reasons why we were talking about Twitter, one of the reasons why Twitter is so horrible, of course, is that woke culture has now become a new orthodoxy. And the woke, you know, the wokeerati, the Twitterati enforce it just as though they were

Dominican friars, you know, as as though they were Dominican inquisitors. And you know, if you actually look at when you get a Twitter basting, if those people could burn you, they would. They would actually, in other words, that far from a liberalization of culture, we're enforcing a new orthodox is a religious word. These are new articles of faith. And again, I think that one of the reasons why wokeery, you don't find much wokeery in France. Women in France are desperately trying to get French men woke.

They're having a real uphill struggle. And I've noticed no wokeery whatever in Italy. Berlusconi doesn't seem to me to have learned too many lessons from the At Me Too and all the rest of it. Why is that? Because all of this liberalism that we are talking about now, in England and a moment, America latches onto the back of Puritanism and nonconformity, that immense self-righteousness, that belief that you are the elect, that belief that most of the rest of human beings are deplorable people.

It's a sale in witch trials. They've got to be whipped into line because they're fundamentally wicked. I mean, the left believes, doesn't it, that people with political opinions like mine are fundamentally wicked. We don't just disagree. we are morally wrong. And now these are religious positions. Are you seeing what I'm trying to get at?

No, absolutely. And I think, again, this is why, why, as it were, the two cradles of Western civilization, Britain and America, are undergoing the extent of the crisis that we are now. We invent puritanism in this country. Thank God we export most of them to America and the worst ones on Northern Ireland.

Right, so we've lost our Scottish. Welsh, Irish and American viewers. So for those of you who are still here, how do you feel about French as well? How do you feel about Australia, David, and New Zealand? Well, they're, of course, undergoing exactly the same thing because they inherit. They're part of ours.

You see, again, and I love all these countries. I have a house in America. I adore New Zealand. I've never been to New Zealand, but I adore Australia. Again, it's because of the uniqueness and completely remarkable quality of the British Empire, which is after the catastrophe, remember, Britain has only ever had one defeat in the last 300 years, and that is the loss of the American colonies. The loss of the American colonies

made everybody in Britain rethink, and the rethinking is led by the man who leads the reaction to the French Revolution, invents modern conservatism by Edmund Burke. And Burke argues that the way that the reason that things went wrong in America was that we didn't recognize, we the British, the king, the prime minister, didn't recognize the need that's built into being English especially, which is a sense of self-government. The right going back to our reformation, going back to Henry the 8th's break with the Roman church, the thing that's dinned into you or used to be dined into you about being English was the right to run your own affairs.

And of course, if you send a colony overseas, people who believe in their right to run their own affairs by the time that you've... Sorry, coronavirus. Which we now all have. Would you like to drink? By the time you've got to the 1770s and you've got a city like Philadelphia,

which is about to overtake Dublin in size, which at that point is a second city of empire, and of course they want to run their own affairs. And you get London trying to run it for them. So from that point onwards, and you see it particularly with the Durham report in Canada, the British government comes up with this astonishing notion, which is unique in the history of empire, that we should see all of these former colonies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the white ones, and moving towards self-government, and the empire consciously fosters increasing self-government. And so we are, you know, the British Empire is unique in spawning this series of mirror states, not the kind of fragments that are torn to pieces of the Roman Empire or has happened after, you know, the fall of the Soviet Empire or the Tsarist Empire, but these consciously replicating elements.

So have you ever been to Ottawa? No, I've never been. On Ottawa is totally fascinating. You look at the Canadian Parliament building. What architectural style is it in this, you know, is in this new world? It's Gothic. It's a Gothic fantasy. And because the original one of the 1860s burnt out, it's actually rebuilt in Gothic after

the First World War. Because it's saying we are part of this same world. It's very difficult to believe with Mr Trudeau, but really it is part of this Anglo-Saxon world. And looking at the way our society... Which, of course, then curse... Sorry. Just to connect and then we'll stop. Which again means that we cede the virus of Puritanism and we seed the virus of woke in it.

So alongside the good bits, there are the bad bits, which is why, as I said, wokeery is essentially Anglo-Saxon. It's Australia, it's New Zealand, it's Canada, supremely Canada. American. And being historian, you can see and identify patterns, looking at the past and seeing the patterns in the present. Have we reached the end, or do we have somewhere to go? And is a destination particularly unpleasant? No historian. And any historian, you've got to be Neil Ferguson to pretend to do that kind of whom I deeply adore, but I'm not paid enough to take this kind of risk. We don't know.

People thought they did. I mean, if you remember, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was one of the most famous and sidest essays of all time. The end of history. Right. Francis Fukuyama, taking his title from Hegel, the end of history, the triumph of the West, the triumph of liberal capitalism, the liberal values on the one hand and the capitalist system on the other, hand in hand, social and economic freedom, would march into a, you know, a bit like Russian realist art, you know, all of these heroic

figures against the rising, well, it didn't quite turn up like that too much. So how do we know? But I do think we should have learned one thing from the collapse of that dream, from the rise of radicalism arm, from the rise of China and so on, we should remember vulnerability. And again, we've been able to behave in the absurd fashions that we are behaving now, simply because our world, it seems so knowable, it seems so manageable, it seems so controllable, it seems so safe. And one of the things that I hope is now happening in this 20th century in which every five

years, it's as though another time bomb, another bomb goes off, blowing apart this certainty, we will become a little more aware of vulnerability. Again, maybe there's just me getting old. No, I don't think it is. I'm not saying you're not getting old. I'm saying, I don't think it's just that. That is too obvious, isn't it? There goes a chance of a second interview.

Well, we all are. But my point is that I think what's happening now with the coronavirus, and I understand that you don't think, you know, I think... No, I've just raised a question. Yes. I just raised a question. But my point is, I think we are starting to... become aware that this illusion of permanent safety, of permanent stability, this is a point

I've been trying to make to people for a long time. If you want to remake society from the ground up, you've got to remember it's going to be different. You're not going to be able to keep all those things that you like and keep them and take them for granted. Society will be different. I think one of the things that people are becoming aware of just a little bit with the coronavirus is this force stability and the force security is only for. It's only fake. It's only temporary. It's only impan.

Again, that wonderful phrase describing the French nobility in the years before the revolution, that they were walking on an abyss strewn with flowers. Yeah. Wow. Isn't that rather great? Yes. But you see, in other areas, I think we are engaged in what I would call diversionary panic. I mean, I think much environmentalism.

What I'm afraid in my course of moments I call eco-wank, of which, you know, the great purveyors like David Attenborough and greater and whatever, is this again is the false end of the world, but you see again it's religious. Yes. That essentially, I mean you look at the figures involved. I mean, David Attenborough is manifestly a kind of New Testament prophet, white strewn her bringing down holy tablets from on eyes and new Moses and greater

well she's just a mad child saint the middle ages was filled with mad child saints but that again the end of the world you see it's a new form it's a new form it's a new Christian heresy it's a belief that we're being punished for wickedness

the wickedness of leading comfortable lives that again it's the belief that man is sinning against nature you turn nature into a god it's another In this case now we're reverting to medieval pantheism or pagan nature worship or whatever. All these things are utter. That sort of thing seems to me to be just utterly absurd.

And at the same time, the much more real threats are being ignored. It's also that all sorts of academic disciplines I don't think have caught up or they're part of the problem. I think history has become very much part of the problem. problem, that the kind of discussion that I'm having with you now would be regarded with absolute horror by 99% of my historical colleagues. If you actually look at what goes on in university history departments now, it is more and more minute little analyses of little tiny problems on the one hand or on the other

hand, engaging with fashionable theories about identity, representation, feminism or whatever. It absolutely refuses to use what should be the profound knowledge of these people of earlier societies to address the problems of our own. And again, nobody really expects normally, though we always used to. We always used to think that studying history was the best possible preparation. for running politics. I mean, if you think of the, again, looking at bigger patterns, the enormous transformation of the West, this revolution that in which if you go back to a particular moment of time

from which in virtually every way the world gets better, we know more, we understand more, the sciences, the arts develop, it is of course what we call the Renaissance. And what that was, it was a historical movement, which consciousness. just to look back to the previous great civilization, that of Roman Greece, and tried to learn the lessons from it and apply them to its own time. Because it coincided with the technological revolution of printing, it succeeded and did something astonishingly remarkable. But if we look at more what we would now regard as more, and by the way, just taking that

point of about history, if you look at the great political leaders of the world, the great political leaders of the 16th century and the great administrators, people like William Cicill in this country, they self-consciously see the training that they've received in the classics as fundamental to what they're doing with their contemporary politics, which may give us a bit of ground with hope with Boris, because, you know, I'd be semi-series. He's a good classicist, though he didn't get a first, and he's never forgiven for the world for the fact that his contemporary David Cameron did. But you see, if we shift ground to a subject where we actually look and treat with seriousness

as running the world, economics, modern economics has stopped working. Why is it stopped working? I discussed this with my economics friends, but they, you know, I used to be a delisee, they don't seem quite to have caught on yet. Economics has stopped working because economics, if you think, why was it called the dismal science in the 19th century when it's largely invented? because it was all about managing scarcity. But things aren't scarce anymore.

Except toilet paper. Except toilet paper. But, you know, money ain't scarce, which is why we can find the odd trillion. Isn't it wonderful, you know, the odd trillion is so in the back drawer? In other words, once you, we're in a world in which there's too much capital, hence interest rates of a quarter, or indeed, if you're in continental Europe, negative interest rates, So banks charge you to deposit money. They don't pay you for it.

They charge you for doing it. And the moment then you're in a world of superfluity, it's as though economics has gone through the looking glass. And it's no accident, by the way, that the man who writes Alice in Wonderland is a very important mathematician, Charles Lutfi, Dodgson, whatever, and otherwise known as Lewis Carroll. But he can imagine that world in which you sort of reverse values. I don't think we've yet realized that that's what we've done, the astonishing successes of modern capitalism, create a world in which all sorts of rules just don't work anymore.

But we haven't yet had a Maynard Keynes. We haven't yet had that Einstein, those extraordinary figures. And what I think is most striking is we are in this age of, I think, a concentration of great. to change, probably than for centuries. And normally those periods do produce extraordinary figures. You know, you look at the clusters of talent in Italy, in the Renaissance or something like that. I don't feel we have that at the moment. I don't feel there's anybody appreciating understanding, explaining what's going on.

I don't see a figure, as it were, grasping the changes in economy, international relation. Have you not been following the Lady Libish interaction? Oh, oh, to me to say, yeah, Ms. Long Bailey, you know, yeah, the Louise Anande, I mean, these... Keith Starma, I mean, these figures have, I mean, either silly, I mean, how do you find somebody as boring the Starma? I mean, just, I mean, the sheer degree of serious tea. Yeah, it's not quite the assembly of great thinkers that you might otherwise hope for. But one thing that I wanted to talk to you about, David, is we've discussed the work, we've discussed the left. But on the right, there seems to be this craving, not just in the US, but right across the world for the strong man, the powerful man, the populist leader.

why has that suddenly arisen in us, do you think, that desire for that someone to commentate? For all the reasons we've been talking about if you get a dissolution of certainty. I mean, we, I think we're sort of programmed. I mean, remember, if I go back

to my original historical work, it's on royal courts, it's on monarchy. The reason that I've been a rebel, remember, I'm talking about 1960s. When I was a young man, about to do research at Cambridge. We all knew what you had to study. You'd to study the working class of the Labour Party or leftish movements.

And what does Starkey do? He comes along and says, I believe that the only thing that really matters is aristocracy and monarchy. And you can look at the expressions on my teacher's faces. And I still believe that. I think that societies are run from the top, not the bottom. All that happens is you create new aristocracies. Russia is very, very China. These are very interesting examples of this phenomenon.

And that essentially we are normally led by bosses. Human beings have a monarchical instinct. We may disapprove of it, but it's there. And companies, schools. We evolved to live in hierarchies. We can't get away from it. But it's not simply hierarchy. There's a boss figure that nearly always...

And what you're looking at is, ways in which that boss figure is informed, controlled, chosen, the media through which he is usually he, or even worse when it's kind of, you know, great she elephant like Margaret Thatcher, happily, not Theresa May. But again, you see, Theresa May illustrates what happens when the boss figure goes wrong, when you have somebody who doesn't have this ability to command. Again, with all our caring, sharing, lovey-dovey, oh, you mustn't board people around. Oh, no, you mustn't tell people what to do. Oh, you're bullying. You're bullying.

Human beings need occasionally a kick-up the ass. Very often they need it very frequently. Some people enjoy it, of course. I love the way David looked at you when you said that. So, I mean, I'm not sure I necessarily see it as a problem. I mean, I think that, again, the horrors of what some people would claim is the last episode of this, of the interwar period, again, that great period of instability in Europe, which, of course, you know, produces the horrors of Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini and whatever. But people, I think, leap to and make absurd comparisons.

I don't think Trump in America, and I don't certainly think that Boris Johnson here, are remotely of that order. They share some similarities with it. But what is striking in Britain is exactly as happened in the second world in the earlier 20th century. In Britain, the centre has held. two broad political parties, even despite the catastrophe of the management of the labor, they hold together. And the result of that is, of course, they include the extremes, which are defanged. Again, people constantly, the left denounce the wickedness of first past the post,

then wickedness of the traditional British constitution. But it stops the development of extremist parties. And you look at the complete failure of UKIP to do anything. Okay, it coloured some aspects of Tory bodice. But you can see how the fangs are drawn. Whereas the great risk in Germany is that, and I think it's a profound risk in Germany, when you've had a politics which has been dominated by the equivalent of a Tory Labour coalition. Of course, the exercise.

extremes benefit, because people get fed up, particularly when it's managed by somebody with as few political talents as I think Angela Merkel is turning out to have. So I think that we should be looking much more at the reality and nature of political constitutions. And here it seems to me, and I could be, you know, just revealing my limitations as essentially an English historian, we have benefited from this extraordinary. constitutional stability, 800 years. It's utterly unique.

Okay, the Japanese empire is longer, but the constitution of the Japanese empire ain't continuous. Ours is a broadly continuous constitution. And save for that brief episode of the 17th century, it has managed to control and contain this, and we've the country at the same time that has modernized most and changed most.

And yet we've managed to have a political structure which is contained it and held it together. If there's a historical lesson to be learned, I think that's it. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with their crumudgeonly, Marcellus,

whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend, only on Netflix May 8th. And you mentioned the Renaissance, which I think is an important question here, because I feel like very often when we have these conversations with people like yourself, there's a temptation to kind of go doom and gloom. This is the fall of the Roman Empire. We're living through the last days. But it sounds like what you're saying, we have the capacity to recover for. from this what might be a temporary malaise of a lack of self-confidence, self-hatred,

which you've talked about. It would be, yeah. It would be, yeah. It would be nice to think so. But again, you see, I think the comparison with the Roman Empire is utterly false. I mean, it has, you know, it's nice and flashy and is easy to play with.

But remember, the reason the Roman Empire, well, the reason the empire is created, the reason the Republic falls, is the intervention of the army. Now, what is striking? I mean, the Roman Empire is really the army taking over the state and the boss of the army, you know, Caesar and then Augustus taking over the state. There is absolutely no sign of this in the West at all.

Not even in America where you have this gigantic military complex. The generals, not even with Trump, show any sign of wishing to do that. We have constitutional processes. And I think they are profoundly important. And my anxiety at the moment in the West is this, it is the obverse of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was that moment of astonishing intellectual confidence, of course, torment also. And again, one that was prepared consciously to draw upon the past, to transform the future. It's at a very early point, it's phrased wonderfully by Jeffrey Chaucer, who has this line,

old books from which new learning springs, this wonderful notion of the connection between old and new. And for me, it's that loss of that fructifying, fertile quality of history. the, as it were, you have on the one hand, the mere conservator, the kind of old-fashioned national trust, keep it all in Aspic, which separates history from the present in that direction. And on the other, the neologists, the people who only believe that's new. What you need in a healthy culture is that dialogue of the two. If you like, the impossible figure of the person who's both a liberal and a conservative. But the real worry is that we're losing that ability to have dialogue. Well, we've certainly, I mean, how well you put it.

I mean, the moment that you get the sort of Twitter style, or indeed increasingly general political discourse, but enormously, enormously accelerated by the web. And I think that one of the great problems is the way in which the web has destroyed, the web and social media have disres. distorted, the very notion of conversation and the very notion again of a proper conversation in which there will be different people with different values. I have no idea what either of you two thought. You had more idea of what I thought.

But each one of us has been coming into this with bringing what he has. as shouted at the other, neither has got indignant, nobody has denounced. And this is the model, this is what I always believed in passionately when I was teaching. I believe it's what universities should be. I believe there should be no authorities. And there are experts, but experts aren't always right. Experts are only justified by evidence. And that what we need is it's this dialogue of civility that we are having.

It's this willingness to learn, to engage, to tease. We've been teasing. The importance of humor, the importance of the smile, the realization that the most important issues are often illuminated by that. And the awful side-taking, the polarization, the shouting, the screaming. And do you see... Are we really saying we just need a recovery of good manners? I mean, it may be...

But I think the religious... Sorry, on this point, I think that one of the reasons that, and again, tell me if I'm wrong, but one of the reasons that we have become so shouty and so attached to our own sides is there is a religiosity to our politics now. Yes, yes, absolutely. And therefore, when I disagree with you, I am not disagreeing with Dr. David Starkey. I am. Disagreeing with. I'm blasphemying.

Of course, that's right. I mean, it is, again, it's why I particular the politics of the left. And isn't it interesting, the politics of the left with the increasing fragmentation? Of course, replicate precisely what happened to Protestantism, that it splits into smaller and smaller and smaller groups, all of whom you like the people's front of Judean and the Judean people fight, all of whom hate each other, and you get this immense vanity of small difference.

The one thing that I think to use a metaphor is the canary in the mind is humor. and when you see humour start to be attacked. That is so unfunny. People like Marcus Briggs. Why does anybody think that people like that are funny? Why, or even I think most of Ben Elton, why is putting fuck and Margaret Thatcher into the same sentence something that we've got to laugh about?

I mean, it's just, there is no wit, there is no lightness, there's no fertility. But do you think this mania that we seem to have descended into for taking a joke and then taking it literally and then using that to attack people as a sign of a problem within our culture that we have lost the sense of lightness, the sense to laugh at ourselves,

to ridicule ourselves, and ultimately to admit that we're human. Yeah, I mean, I don't think we've, I don't think, I don't think it's been generally lost. I mean, you listen to the banter on a bus or in a pub, it's what it's always been. But we have, we have enabled the creation of a public discourse,

of offense, victimhood, and so on. You cannot have a culture in which, again, Voltaire, in which, oh, my feelings have been hurt. We don't have a duty to respect each other's feelings in that sense. We have a duty, clearly, to an extent, to care and look after each other. But that doesn't mean that every sort of degree of snowflake fragility has got to be recognized. There needs to be a robustness but equally, I suppose it's a question of a mutual confidence. I think it is essentially the cult of victimhood which is so, I think this is

where things have gone so appallingly wrong. And again, the deification of language. that, you know, the whole business of what is the appropriate word to describe somebody who is black. And you actually look at the sheer sensitivity of that issue. I mean, for some people calling someone black is almost akin to calling the N word. For other people, in fact, it's out and proud and that's what I am. But these are like the worst disputes of medieval schoolmen. It's fetishism.

It's a fetishism of language. And if you fetishize language in this kind of way, you can't have humor. You can't even really use words. We really do stop talking to each other. Well, you don't know what the right thing is to say. I mean, the difference between a person of color and a colored person. Oh, oh, oh, the end, the new C word is it?

Well, 20 years ago, I mean, I remember one of one of the words. I used to run a comedy club, and I had an act on who was black, and an audience member came up to me afterwards, and he was so happy about having seen this act, and said, I don't remember his name, the colored chap. And clearly to this person, this term was just a term that they used to using. But my point is, there was absolutely no malintent in that statement whatsoever. And yet, if you had taken that conversation,

recorded it and then played it on 9 a.m. BBC morning breakfast show. The complaints would have fallen like the rain from them. They'd have fallen like storm whatever it was, wouldn't they? And this is where this distinction between ill intent and prejudice and bigotry and simply failing to use the current... The fashionable term. Exactly. But as I said, I think this is fetishism of language.

And the last time you could see this. kind of thing. And again, it's wonderfully satirized by Gibbon in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire when Byzantium was torn apart by the dispute between Homo Ucian and Homo Iusian, which are different views of the deity. And again, it's this fetishization of language. I mean, quite literally, the city, Constantinople, was half burned down in the riots on this subject. And what we do about it, I don't know. You see, there was a profit in all of this and we're not allowed to talk about him and

that's Enoch Powell. And Enoch Powell in his wicked speech, you know, the one that is always denounced reacting to the Race Relations Act, pointed out virtually everything that we are now saying that the moment you started entrenching this. notion of as it were a protected species, then it will become an instrument of power. He talks about language to an extent, but not enough. And I think that we are, if we are to recover, and the fate of Trevor Phillips, the man who in a sense started all of this, who was the most successful president of whatever used to be

or the race relations thing that became equal, whatever, that he should now, as it were, be pilloried for heresy. It's rather like the Middle Ages where, you know, a Pope is finally accused of heresy. We have to realize, surely, that that is the moment at which we stop. And if we don't, think about it. This is the, again, forgive me, the. attack on Trevor Phillips seems to me to be the moment at which the revolution wants to guillotine or obsphere. And the French at least had the good sense to pause at that point.

We, we, the left, the guardianista, if they cannot understand that, well then certainly they are lost. Perhaps the rest of us needn't follow them. On that note, David, we've got time for one final question for you. Which is always what's a one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be. I'm going to repeat what I've said because I think it is what is really important. The importance of the past, not as something to be fetishized, not as something to be national trustized, not as something to be sentimentalized or novelized like Hillary Mantel, but as something that we genuinely try to understand, to enjoy,

to confront, to use. And I think the wisest figure in English politics and English political history is Edmund Burke. And the central lesson of Burke is that society is a profoundly organic thing. He talks about it as being a contract. Well, that's the common, commonplace term of the social contract. But he formulates it in an extraordinary way that it's, It's a contract of past, present, and future. And our absurd, this momentism breaks that contract.

And that is precisely why it's been such a pleasure to have you on the show, because, as I said to you before we started, we're both incredibly jealous of someone who understands history because it gives so many perspectives about what's happening now and what may yet come. So thank you very much for coming on the show, David. Thank you for watching. and we'll see you again in the week's time with another brilliant episode. Take care, see you next week, guys.