TRIGGERnometry - Neil Oliver: "We Must Learn the Lessons of History"

Episode Date: August 2, 2020

Neil Oliver is an archaeologist, conservationist, TV presenter and author. 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

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Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVANFish. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is the show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. A fantastic guest today is an archaeologist, historian, former journalist, TV presenter and all sorts of troublemaker. Neil Oliver, welcome to Trigonometry. Oh, thanks guys. Thanks very much for making me welcome. It's good to have you here. I hope that introduction does make you welcome.

anyone who's not familiar with what you do and kind of just give us a little overview of your life story so far, how are you where you are? Sure. I'm mostly, I suppose, a TV presenter and author. I've spent the last 20 years making television documentaries of various sorts, famous lessees called Coast, which did what it sounds like. We followed the coastline of Britain and other places. Lots of history, lots of archaeology.

My background is, well, I have a degree in archaeology from Glasgow University about a thousand years ago, and I have dodged around ever since. I retrained for a while as a journalist. I worked in weekly papers, did some stuff on the national press as well. But about 20 years ago, I accidentally got into television, and I've been trying my best to get away with that ever since. And here we are today. Fantastic.

And so you've got a passion for it. for history, Neil, and I think what we're seeing right now is a world going slowly tomtoe. Can you see patterns in history being repeated now? Absolutely. I'm an archaeologist, but I love history. I call myself an amateur historian or an enthusiast. I just love the stories and the storytelling of it. And part of what I love about it is how accessible it is to anyone.

If you can read, if you can read a book, you can read history. And for as long as they last, the libraries and the books, bookshops are full of history. And as long as you read widely and make a point of reading things that you don't agree with or like as well as things that you do like and agree with, then you can give yourself a good background in history without any outside health. You don't need to go to college or university to get an understanding of the past. And if you do persevere and you read widely and you read back into as far back as you can

go and come forward towards the present, you see patterns without a shadow of a doubt. And I think that's where a lot of the reassurance comes, the reassurance that I find is available in history and archaeology. You see that our ancestors have dealt with all of it before. War, famine, disease, invasion, religious intolerance, climate change, natural disaster. Anything and everything that we are going through or still have to go through, our ancestors went through it. And fundamental to why I find it reassuring is that without a shadow of a doubt, they had to face it with not a fraction of the technology and the understanding and the acquired wisdom that we have on account of them having gone through it before. And so knowing that our ancestors have had to deal with the same sorts of challenges, we're in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown world pandemic.

Well, pandemics have come before, as has every other big challenge for humankind. And I think what I'm aware of, more than anything else at the moment, is you mentioned it of a, of a, of a, a world gone tonto, people sort of losing the plot. And I say, well, of course we are. It's so much to ask people to cope with. And is it any surprise that all sorts of internecine and intercommunity strife has been a collateral damage of all that we've expected ourselves

and each other to go through for the last months on end? And for me, other people would find a different antidote to all the trouble. But for me, I keep reading my history books and I keep thinking, you know, yes, this has happened before and this two shall pass. Well, it's a reassuring message that this two shall pass and you talk about the fact that humanity has faced these sort of challenges before. And actually, it's a thing that Francis and I frequently argue about because he feels like a lot of the events of the recent months are largely the product of the pandemic and people being locked up and so on in their homes.

But I also feel that there's another part to it, which is a longer term civilization or transformation, where the United States, the West more generally, has gone from a kind of confident, bold civilization that's sought to be powerful in the world, so to expand, sort of control as much as possible. Whereas now it's turned inward and it looks into itself. And I would say there's probably some historical precedent for that as well. How do you see the interplay between those two things? Yeah, I mean, amongst others, an English, a British historian, Kenneth Clark, Leverland art, historian, art critic. He wrote a book called Civilisation a number of years ago, and it became an iconic television series.

And part of his assertion within that thesis was that civilizations get exhausted. And he pointed to, for example, Rome and the Roman Empire. And yes, it was coming under pressure by the end of the end. from all sorts of external challenges, the barbarians at the gates and all the rest of it. But he said that that was really a symptom of something internal, that the Roman Empire had just lasted for so long that it had become, it had lost confidence in itself. And he said that that's how civilizations finally are undone,

not because the barbarians get through the gates before that. It's this loss of sense of self. And I think, yes, it's, so that's. has happened before, and there are more examples than just all of the empires that we've ever, they've always gone extinct, if you like, by definition, there's been a sequence of empires and kingdoms through history, and they've all gone. And now, you know, for a long time, it has been this Western civilization that has been predominant on the planet, but perhaps we've lost confidence. And we've also had, since the, I suppose really, since the end of the

Second World War, perhaps we've lived, so many people in much of the West have lived in increasingly peaceful, tolerant times. And we've begun to take for granted prosperity and peace and tolerance and, you know, the chance of a good life. Our children are taking care of and we're well educated and all the rest of it. And you can come to think of that as being in the natural order of things, as though, you know, you can just leave people to their natural inclinations and devices and you'll get this kind of civilization. And it, I think it's because we've had so long without facing big, scary, real challenge. You know, we haven't had to endure our children or ourselves going off to war, you know,

and facing the bayon or the bullet. And we haven't been challenged by, you know, an epidemic or a disease. And I think we've lost touch with some of the realities of life. And I think at the moment, I think this pandemic and then the ever-present threat, that's been there for years now of climate change and all sorts of predictions of the end of the world, I think people are rattled. To some extent, this pandemic has been one of,

if not the last straw that has finally destabilised people. And we need to, you know, it's not the end of the world, but I think we need to pull back and take some sort of collective breath and appreciate that we need to give each other and ourselves more slack. Because we can cope with this challenge,

but we have to accept that there may be some pain, there will be some pain, there will be dying, there will be blood and strife. But that's in the natural order of things. Every generation, or so many generations before ours, had to face these realities that people, some people die.

And some people are overwhelmed by circumstances, but civilization can persecuting. and we get that encouragement, that reassurance that all of that is possible by looking at the past and seeing the ancestors with far more limited equipment than our own found a way through and sought to overcome and did so. And Neil, do you think part of the problem is that we've got access to history, we've got this great wealth of knowledge, but the reality is we're simply not learning the lessons from the past.

Yes, I know for a fact that I've got kids at school and history is not one of those subjects that's at the forefront. It's very much a kind of a luxury option. And even though I'm, you know, I've forced our kids from one castle to another and from one battlefield to another over the years, none of them has opted to take history. You know, they've all gone in different direction. but it's not a subject that's to the fore. And I do very much lament that. And I also, as well as considering what people rightly describe as history, which is to say the written word, you know,

we've had the written word for about 5,000 years, let's say, and so we've had documents and letters and diaries and all the stuff of history. But I look back even further. You know, I look back into the evidence that's revealed by archaeologists. going back thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years into the past. Because I think there are fundamental understandings that we need to be reminded of about the nature of our species. Homo sapiens, the wise people, which we vainly call ourselves,

we're only about 200,000 years old. We're relatively recent arrivals on the planet. it. And there's an American biologist, scientist called Edward Osborne Wilson, usually cited as E.O. Wilson. And there's a great quote from him, which is that humanity's predicament is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, but godlike technology. And all of those three statements are absolutely correct. And it's so important to remember that we are essentially the same animals, cognitively and physiologically, as the ancestors who hunted mammoths and rhinos. And we lived as hunters for 90% of our time on earth. And only 10,000 years ago did some of us

become farmers, start domesticating plants and animals. And after 10,000 years, believe it or not, we're still psychologically coming to terms with that change. After 10,000 years, we still talk about the daily grind, which is to say the repetitive chores without end. comes from literally grinding wheat into flour, rising at dawn, work until sundown, knowing that tomorrow is going to be exactly the same and that your diet is going to be this repetitive bread and porridge with the occasional meat, you know, humdrum existence. We're still coming to terms with that. And in the last few hundred years, we've had, you know, enlightenment and the coming

of reason, industrial revolution. and in the last few decades, even just in the last few years, the technological advances that we've had to try and cope with, even the smartest of us struggle to cope with what's going on. And I certainly don't put myself even in the top half. And I know I am struggling. And even the sharpest of the sharp, the most cognitively enabled to deal with modern technology,

are finding some of it a struggle. And it's important to look back and remember that our brains are still processing about four. bits a second. You know, compared to the technology that we've surrounded ourselves with, we're incredibly, we're incredibly slow. You know, our machines that we have created are digital, but we are still analog for the time being. And we have to allow for our own, we have to remind ourselves of our own potential and of our own reality. And we get that, not just from studying history, but from looking back into the deepest time we can reach.

And it's interesting that you mentioned, Anil, because one of the things that, I would say troubles me a lot about what's happening in model society is the sense that I remember, you know, growing up as a student, I read so many books about human psychology, evolutionary psychology, how our past shapes are present and our behavior and so on. And it seems to me like some of the movements that we've seen come in in the last 10, 15 years, they almost reject the idea that anything from the past can teach us anything about the present, anything about our and so on. Is that something that you notice as well, or am I imagining that? No, I think that's, I think that's right. I think, you know, to continue my previous thought,

you know, we've asked a lot of ourselves, and in the last, maybe 500 years at the very most, although in reality less than that, some of us, some tiny percentage of us have trained themselves to be scientists, to think as scientists. And it's very, very difficult, even for trained scientists to think like that, to use brains in that way. And even trained scientists can only really do it for short spans of time. It's like 100-meter runners that they just have this burst of activity that have trained for. The rest of the time they just think like the rest of us do. And our hunter cells, you know, we're running this hunter software from the past.

And we have a constant, I think, desire to not be scientists and to and to, and we have a void within ourselves that needs to be filled by something else. It's like belief, it's stories, and its myth, you know, which served for thousands of years to do the job of science. We understood our place in the cosmos

and the nature of reality through stories and myth and belief. And it's almost as if it's like a, it's like a, you know, something that's still pulling us down below the surface. That science now, is being, I think, undermined by our natural tendency to want to believe in something.

And I noticed the way in which, you know, in relation to say the pandemic, there's talk about the science, as though science has become fixed, as though it has become something that is solid and permanent, like a stone with permanent words graven in it. And as a non-scientist, I understand science to be the opposite of that. Science is never finished, never complete. And there's never scientific consensus. I mean, there should always be doubting voices.

But I think there's increasingly, in these troubled times, there's been a desire to treat science as another kind of religion. And to just believe it, not to challenge it. You know, biology, some aspects of biology that I certainly took for granted, having done higher biology at school, some of those things that I took for granted as scientific fact are being dismissed now as not science. And I think that was the first step.

But then this tradition of, not this tradition, but this idea of woke, woke has become, that has become a set of dogmatic statements that people have to believe and not challenge. And we were supposed to have got beyond all of that. the world of reason, the world of science was supposed to have replaced the world of belief and the world of dogma. But it turns out that it hasn't and it doesn't, and that given enough time, plenty of us are now trying to treat science and other ideas as dogma that must be revered in the same way that a religion is, that there are certain unviable truths that you certainly have to accept, that there are sacred texts that must never be challenged.

and that there are sinners and heretics that, you know, that must be punished and driven out. And so I think it's a reminder, and the explanation for we might be doing, for why we might be doing that, is because we struggle at all times to apply reason and science. And if we take our eye off the ball, we start to drift back towards belief and dogma. And we should be aware of that. and the warning of that is there in history. 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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That's what I was taught to believe. But joking aside, don't you think a lot of our problems come from the fact that in the West, we no longer think that we need religion. We don't believe in it anymore, by and large, and we think that we're above it. But the reality is, isn't there something within us that needs that kind of belief system? I think, yes, I think as it turns out, we are. hardwired. I think there's some part of read-only memory in our motherboards that we can't get at and can't unprogram or reprogram that in spite of everything else is still hungry for something like

belief. And there's a tendency towards wanting to have faith in something. And religions evolved to fill that void for the longest time. And people in the 21st century, the 20th century, are wary about the supernatural aspect of believing in an invisible omniscient deity, you know, for all sorts of perfectly valid reasons, you know, they harbour these doubts.

But that's to throw out the baby with the bathwater. And I think, you know, the Judeo-Christian tradition, apart from expecting belief in an invisible deity, it also gave people a framework by which to live their lives. And I don't think there's any arguing with the fact that the value system that evolved as these religions served better than what we've been being offered in the much more recent past. You know, we got beyond religion, as it were, in the West in this 19th century. And other, as people have said before, you know, when you take about religion, people don't believe in nothing. they believe in anything.

And ideologies emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries that were supposed to give a superior set of values by which to live. But what did those sets of values actually do? Well, they harvested hundreds of millions of people. You know, even the worst of the crusaders in the pomp couldn't even have dreamt of notching up death tolls like those which were achieved in the 20th century. And so we've got to be mindful of the fact that we need values

by which to live. And it's useful. We shouldn't be embarrassed or bashful about looking back and acknowledging that the old lessons learned even thousands of years ago are still valid. You know, things like don't kill,

don't judge lest you be judged, be kind to your neighbours and treat them as you would yourself. You know, look after your mum and dad. These are realisations that people came to thousands of years ago and they're every bit and that every bit is valid.

And we shouldn't be wary of reminding ourselves of those essential values. Well, speaking of reminding ourselves of values, Neil, one of the things that wasn't on your list, but I imagine you feel strongly about it as I do, is that whatever replacement we seem to have been offered for the religions of the past, the one thing that almost every major religion has had in the past is the idea of redemption and forgiveness.

And that seems to be the one thing that some of these new ways of thinking don't seem to include. And you alluded to her by saying, judge, not least you be judged. But I think we've gone way beyond that, you know, in terms of encouraging judgment, encouraging mobbing of people, encouraging punishment for heretics, as you say. I think something that, you know, whether or not a person believes in a, you know, a deity or some invisible force, there's no doubting that there was a value in accepting that there were certain powers that oughtn't to be human that should be transcendent. You know, the idea that there are certain godlike, you know, to go back to E.O. Wilson's

quote, godlike powers belong somewhere else and we shouldn't take them for ourselves. And maybe at the moment we're in one of those dangerous areas that have happened before where we as human beings are almost indulging ourselves with the right to have, you know, godlike powers of destruction of fellow human beings. And for a long, long ago, a lot of people realized that that wasn't a good idea, that operating in that way is ultimately going to burn us all.

But this culture around woke, a cancel culture, we are behaving in like old times. religion. And the total destruction that is being sought in the case of the new heretics is a red light warning. You know, back in the, you know, back in the 16th century in England, when Henry VIII famously broke away from the Catholic Church and established what became the Church of England, it unleashed, obviously, you know, centuries of strife between Catholic and Protestant. And then when his daughter, Mary, became Queen Mary the First, she was, she returned to the Catholic, or she was Catholic, and she famously saw to the burning alive, the burning at the

stake of more than 300 Protestant heretics. And that was a deliberate choice of punishment, because the idea was that by burning the body, nothing of it would remain. There wouldn't be so much as a finger bone that could become, be revered as a relic of a martyr. And so it was burned to ashes, and then the ashes were scooped up and dumped in the river. So there was nothing, nothing left behind. That was a very specific punishment.

It was carefully thought out, almost scientifically. And what's happening at the moment is, although the zealots of cancel culture haven't actually burned anyone alive yet, and not yet, the nature of their punishment is such that the person be utterly destroyed in everything but the corporal sense. You know, so loss of career, loss of livelihood, loss of good name, reputation built up over decades. Hopefully they would say loss of family, you know, love of family, love of relationship,

so that nothing is left of the heretic in an empty husk. But don't you think, Neil, that's part, sorry to me too, but don't you think, Neil, this goes, back to human nature in that we have a light side to us and there's a darkness to us. And this cancel culture, this we're wishing to destroy people because they have the wrong opinions, is something deeply ingrained within us, within our DNA, as it were, and you can see it right the way through history, the stocks and all the rest of it. And the reality is we're never going to get away from it, are we? Well, it's certainly, we can't really confidently point back to a time when it wasn't there.

You know, that all the Zoroastrianism, you know, is arguably, some people say it could have its roots in the second millennium BC. You know, so it's, but in any event, it's a lot older than Christianity. And it was fun, it was dualist, it was fundamentally about the reality was split between good and evil, light and dark. So right back in the roots of what became religion was this idea of, you know, good and evil, light and dark. And we see it all, you know, in the symbol of yin and yang, that idea of the black and the white tadpole curled together, you know, light and dark, you know, the two opposing forces, but coiled together in each with a,

the white has black within it and the black has white within it. And there's a way between the two that you're supposed to straddle. So we've had this understanding. And then as recently, and as fundamentally important, Alexander Soljeunitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago, you know, wrote about how the line separating good and evil passes not between states or political parties or nations, it passes through the centre of every human heart.

And if I could have everyone given that permanent reminder of the reality of human nature, it's that. It's that each one of us has to accept that we have within us, the concentration camp guard, the torture, the murderer, the murderer. That's us. You know, the monster isn't other people. It's within us. each one of us has the potential.

And furthermore, I think, you know, you see, when you see people that are happily leaping on to cancel culture and joining in the mob attacks, and it's very often, it seems to be people that have previously regarded and publicised themselves as being loving and kind. And yet they can be some of the most aggressive in the pylons that happen with this kind of cancel culture.

And it's in that behavior that you get an early warning of the kind of people who would be, who would be the ones who would phone the secret police about their neighbours and watch from behind the neck curtains as their doors were kicked in, or be the guards and the gulags. That's the early warning of the people who would behave in that way. And if you don't accept that each one of us has the potential to be like that, then you're an exceptionally dangerous creature.

But as long as you do realize that the monster is in you, then that's why you accept ideas like judge not less you be judged because you have to think, well, I could be extremely inhumane and judgmental if I was let loose with absolute power. You know, it's that like from the little Caligula movie. You know, if you had life and death power over every man, woman and child, what would you have done? I make the world a better place, mate.

You have to remind yourself. If you were in charge, I would burn myself for the mistake. I'm going to be honest with you. But that is the point. And you can take a light view or a dark view of this realization. For me, accepting that we are each of us, you know, 50-50 good and evil, that we have the monster within us, I take that on board and accept it and I find comfort in it.

And it's an extension of the fact that I find comfort in the fact that we are still the paleolithic hunters that we have been for 200, 250,000 years. Some people contemplating that might find it discouraging, but I find a comfort in it that we are just what we have always been. And in a sense, all it's required is that we accept, kind of internalize the reality of ourselves.

And that's where you find the induced, the encouragement to not judge because if you know what you are like then you know what everybody else is like if you know the things that would hurt you then you know how to hurt everybody else and that's as long as you've internalized that that aspect of human nature then you become much less of a threat but but don't you think neil that the problem is we when it comes to things like social media is that it dehumanizes people so they're not a person anymore they're an avatar They're just a little picture. So when you actually destroy them, it takes away the human element of them

because you don't then see what the person is going through emotionally and all the rest of it. Yes, without a shadow of a doubt, I think we're a long way from understanding psychologically what we've done to ourselves with social media and the rest of it. Thousands of years ago, if you were a farmer and you had a farmer over the stonewall from you tending his fields. If he was doing something better than you, you know, find a better way to grind wheat into flour or whatever,

you might be, you know, unsettled by that. But because he was in your world and he was really there and you could see him, you could seek to emulate whatever it was that he had done. You know, you could copy what he was doing, elevate yourself, and then the feeling of inadequacy and being threatened by him would go away. But because we've got these screens now in our pockets, and on our desks, let us see lives thousands of miles away, perhaps. Lives by definition, because they're on screen,

we can't even be confident that they're actually real. You know, we could actually be being tricked by a fiction. But nonetheless, we're unsettled by those distant lives in different climates, in different parts of the world, lived by people in different circumstances. And so we can't do the same thing. We can't seek to meaningfully emulate or copy them. It's not realistic.

And so all you're left with is this triggered, unsettled, threatened feeling that you get. And we also watch, you know, threat, dangerous events, unsettling events, thousands of miles away. And we still feel the threat as though it was happening right there in the room with us. You know, we're still being triggered by the fear of things that are at a great distance. And so we're in these, we are, like you say, we're in these hamster balls. We're in these little plastic balls that keep us at a distance from one another. And then when we watch people being torn limb from limb, metaphorically speaking by the Twitter mob or whatever, we don't seem to see it as happening to a real person. It just seems to be the consequences that unfold for, as you say, an avatar in a video game.

It does feel that way, Neil. Let me ask you something else, because you all know, Harari writes very well about how it is that Homo sapiens became the dominance. species of humans eventually becoming the only species of humans that are left. And what he talks about is we were able to overcome the fact that physically we're quite puny compared to, say, Neanderthals or obviously, you know, other types of wild animals. But we overcame it by being able to organize beyond our small tribal groups. And the way we did that is by having some sort of overarching idea, the nation, religion, God, whatever it might have been. And we were able to unite into large groups, large tribes. And it seems to me that what's happening now is a lot of the

things that used to be a unifying force, we talked about religion already, but perhaps the idea of the nation state, all of these things seem to be either being eroded or entirely under attack. What do we have that we can unite around to come together as we need to? You're right. I mean, Harari writes, you know, brilliantly and so illuminatingly about this idea that, you know, say, for example, Manchester doesn't exist in any absolute sense. It's a shared dream or a concept. It's a set of buildings and streets and all the rest of it. For the people of Manchester, I'd like to say, Neil's not attacking Manchester. It's talking about any city. As an example, as a Glasgow or Edinburgh or the United Kingdom, it only exists. It's a space on the map, obviously. It's a geographical territory.

But the United Kingdom doesn't exist in any absolute sense and neither does a city. So, you know, for the sake of it, you know, let's say, you know, Manchester is a shared idea. To the extent that if you were to flatten it, to rubble and then take away all the rubble and let the grass grow, Manchester would still exist in the minds of the people. And so the people could, it could be rebuilt and it would still be Manchester. And it would never have been, it would never actually have disappeared at any moment, even when the grass had grown over the site. Manchester would still have existed.

So Harari writes in this brilliant way about how you can unite people. We have the cognitive abilities to share an idea. And when it becomes something like a religion, it's great because it means that you can, even though you've never met someone else, if you know that they share your religious beliefs, you can predict how they're going to behave in a given set of circumstances because you've been sort of trained and briefed in how to behave

in exactly the same way in exactly the same set of circumstances. And so in answer to your question, if it's no longer going to be belief in an invisible deity or a sacred rock or a mountain or whatever, I think we have to have the ability to have shared

dreams, shared aspirations. You know, the United Kingdom, obviously, at the moment, is in an uncertain state because there's a big pool from Scotland, you know, to break that union between Scotland and England. And so, you know, so that the existential nature of the United Kingdom is under threat at the moment. But it's, that would be transcended. as long as, and would not be a threat, as long as enough people continued to believe

in the existence of the United Kingdom. You know, you can't do away with that. I think in answer to your question, we have to unite around a shared ideal and a shared aspiration. And the kind of, quite frankly, the kind of civilization that we have had in our part of the West for quite a long time now

is the best aspiration, I think that the human species has had so far. It's imperfect, of course it is, and there's room for improvement, but the potential for a good life that has been available in this part of the West and in North America is the best idea that anyone has ever had. Even the idea of the United States of America, I often think, is the best idea ever written down

about what a civilization ought to be. and to summarize it as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, whoever had a better idea than that as the foundation of a society. And the point is that it has never been realized. It has never happened yet, but that's not a bad thing. I sometimes think, you know, Donald Trump's idea about make America great again would have been better if he had just stopped it at make America great. because to say make America great again

is to stick a finger in the eye to people and to say, you know, we were great before we're going to do it again. It's better to have it as an aspiration and likewise to think that the ideas that underpin the United Kingdom of Great Britain and say things that are in Magna Carta and in other documents they are and remain aspirational. You might say that Great Britain has never happened yet.

in the same way that the idea that make America great is really the aspiration. You know, man's reach must always exceed his grasp. And I think if we just have the confidence to remind ourselves that what has been sought in the West is the best idea for a civilization anyone's ever had. And it's an unfinished work. We never got there. This idea that greatness is in the past, that's fatal, you know, as though it's gone, as though it's behind us.

I think in answer to your question, it's the idea that people come together in their thousands and in their millions in the shared belief that greatness is possible, but just not quite reached yet. And Neil, do you think one of the major problems our society is facing is this sort of advent of hyper-liberalism, which says that we are all individuals, which are, you know, know, once you put on the layer of identity politics, we're all different from one another. We all have different privilege. We all have different, right, whatever it may be. And that is increasingly encouraging us to see ourselves as individuals, therefore not a collective and is therefore fragmenting society.

That's difficult because I hear what you're saying and I'm thinking about it. But the great, you know, part of the success in the West has been the respect for and almost the sanctity of the individual, you know, the idea that, you know, it's there in the, in the national covenant of Scotland, you know, which was a contract self-consciously written out by lawyers in the 17th century in which Scottish people were invited to sign a contract with God. And the kind of central tenet of it was that every soul counted the same in the eyes of God, whether you were the king or a ploughman or a fishwife or whatever, every soul weighed the same. And that element of the unique value of every individual has been a central plank of what has been achieved in the West, I think.

But yes, when you say that, I can see that maybe perhaps some of that ideas being corrupted a bit in an unhelpful way. And it has morphed unhappily into identity politics and intersectionality and all the rest of it. But I would still maintain that it's almost like, you know, the Statue of Justice outside of the Obey, blindfold on. I think that idea of being judged blindly is a good one, the idea that you're not, that justice or the judge isn't looking at you and seeing you as black, white, male or female, gay or straight, whatever nationality. You know, it's just that you make your declaration, the evidence is stated and a judgment comes down based on those facts. But I think I would still, ultimately, I think there has to be some respect for the importance of seeing each one of us as an individual. I think if we can do that, I think if we are able to see each other just almost with our eyes closed, but just accept each individual presence as being of equal value.

I do think that is a fundamental plank of a civilised society. And actually quite a revolutionary idea for human history. And I do think it's important. I guess what Francis is getting out is where do you draw the line between going too far down the root of individuals? And particularly when you have some of these kind of very divisive narratives, as we do now, which seek to not just tell you that you as an individual are valuable and you have significance, but that you as an individual are uniquely different from everybody else is nothing that binds you in common. with others. I think that's really why some of the problems are coming from.

Yes, I think I, you know, in researching for a television series and a book that I did a few years ago about the history of Scotland, I ran across a character, Francis Hutchison, who had the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University in the 1730s onwards for a number of years. and he quite controversial at the time taught that happiness was something to be worked for. There was a sort of a prevailing belief around at the time that happiness was almost like manna from heaven, that God scattered almost at random and you either got it or you didn't. It was God's will. But Francis Hutchison taught that if you dedicated your life as an individual,

as a mindful, thoughtful, responsible individual to making the world a better place for all those around you. It wasn't about you, it was about working as hard as you could for the betterment of others. Then he prophesied that the collateral benefit of behaving in that way would be your own happiness. And in fact, he said that the best, if not the only way to be happy was to dedicate your life to everyone else around you.

So there's that idea of each one, of us, he was saying each one of us as an individual, but our best hope of happiness is to dedicate all of our effort to everybody else. And in due course, one of his students, who was John Witherspoon, emigrated to North America and became the second president of what is now at Princeton University. And he became, he was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. And it's believed by many that the very idea of the pursuit of happiness that I've already mentioned and that is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence

is a product of Francis Hutchison's teacher that happiness was something that would be that you could pursue actively with every shred of your being as long as you dedicated it to helping others. So I think the dangerous split that you're describing there is when we think that not only are we individuals

but we're the most important and the only thing that matters and that our needs and our identity is paramount and everybody else must also sort of worship our individuality, I think that's a dangerous inversion. I think it's better to go with the Francis Hutchison language is, yes, you are an individual, your soul weighs the same as every other soul from highest to lowest, but the best and perhaps the only meaningful contribution you can make to reality and to the future is to slog your guts out. Absolutely. And to do something for others. I mean, one of the, I can

speak for myself, you know, with us doing this show, I've never been happier than doing it now. That's because you're with me, mate. Well, you could say I'm happier in spite of that. But, no, but seriously, I mean, you know, we get so many people who contact us and say that it's giving them reassurance, as you talked about, or it's giving them a sense that they're not alone. You know, there's a feeling of us creating something that is for the benefit of other people. And that gives us, I think, tremendous fulfillment.

And that's probably the conflict that we're all three of us trying to hone in on, which is, where's that line between you being an individual who only cares about themselves, which is one extreme, or being someone who doesn't have any identity at all, and it's just a cog in a machine, which would be the kind of Chinese model at the moment, for example. And there's got to be a point somewhere in between those where we recognize the sanctity of every human being, while also recognizing that it's not possible for me to be happy and fulfilled and wealthy and whatever else it might be, for any of those things to be a reality in my life, unless I'm creating something that is of value to other people. Yes. I mean, I don't see how any thinking, reasonable, rational person could dispute that,

as a premise. I think we are being strangely, I think there's a sad, poignant irony in the fact that, you know, the internet, you know, in its earliest, iteration back in the 60s and 70s when it was being developed as ARPANET and it was this nodal thing

that was going to be proof against, you know, nuclear war and computers would keep on talking to one another. And that was the aspiration for it by the US military, funded the research, but the kind of sandal wearing long-haired, you know, hippie scientists in MIT and whatever that got behind it, they had this utopian fantasy that by bringing everyone together via the internet, that that free sharing of information would enable each

individual to make a contribution and that we would all be brought together by the internet. I think it's so poignant that in its present iteration, it seems to be atomizing us. in a strange way, we're almost being driven apart until eventually the only sort of logical endgame as far as all just to be, you know, isolated individuals in our echo chambers, you know, shouting like mad people at the wider world. And I'm not, well, I think I do have Luddite tendencies,

I'm quite honest. I'm not proposing that we do away with all of this interconnectivity that we have. But I think it has to be countered by something else. I, in the last few years, I began doing, you know, of a live show. You know, I had written a book and I took it out as a stage presentation. It was going for theatres up and down the country. I did about 70 theatres.

And a terrifying prospect it was. You know, you, you know, being, you know, in your line of, in your other line of work, you know, standing on a stage is a terrible lonely thing. But once I had done a few performances, that sense of connection to real actual breathing human beings in the same room as me meant that I felt it was the best thing. I do think it's the best thing I've ever done, having reached out to people via television, having reached out to people via books and newspaper journalism. And now it's, you know, there's podcasts and various other ways of reaching out. but that simple act of standing alone on a stage in a room with five or six hundred people in it and hearing, feeling their expectation about what you were going to say,

and then responding to that, getting their live feedback in real time. I think we need to be reminded of ourselves as much as possible as made of meat and not made of the silica that's in our computers. you know, we respond to one another physically in real spaces in real time. And I think the antidote to a lot of the antagonism and the aggression that's there at the moment is just by people being brought physically together. It's like when you drive your car and you feel free to shout and scream at other people inside their little glass boxes, with glass and steel boxes.

But if you were to wind down the window and be confronted with the reality of them, you would behave altogether differently. because all of your instinctive human responses would kick back in effortlessly and I think the way in which we start to value one another properly again is by as much as possible being in face-to-face contact and it seems like such a cliche,

oversimplified thing to say but I think we have to make contact again with what we are as animals I did a bit of filming a couple of years ago now in Australia and we were with an indigenous group in Arnhem Land and they took us out crocodile hunting at night and I've never hunted, I had never hunted anything, done a bit of fishing and I was on a boat on a river in the dark in Arnhem Land

and we were using torches to find crocodiles that ice light up like amber in the darkness and the boat slid without any power just drifted on the current until it was right alongside a crocodile and one of the hunters through a harpoon got it just behind its head

and these meters of thrashing angry muscle were hauled aboard the boat and then it was taken to a riverbank and it was a legal hunt you know the indigenous people of Arnhem Land have gone through the high courts and have regained the right to hunt the saltwater crocodiles in that way

and then we stood around and watched as one of the hunters used a boning knife to kill the crop, cut its head off, and then it was cooked, and we all shared the meat of it. And I cannot tell you what a profound experience it was to be beside something quite large as it was killed and then butchered,

and then it became the meat that we ate. And in our 21st century Western world, We couldn't be more removed from the reality of that. You know, you buy these shrimp-wrapped portions of unrecognisable meat and take them home and cook them. You're invited to think that they're just some sort of, you know, magical product that involves no life and death. And we've been, because we've distanced ourselves from the reality of the animals,

we've become less in awe of life and death. And if you're not in awe of death and life, then you don't properly appreciate. In fact, you don't appreciate at all what it is to be alive. Don't you think, Neil, as well, and I'm really glad because I wanted to ask you this question, and we're touching on it now that in the West, death has become a taboo subject, and we don't like to accept the fact, no, not like, we don't want to accept the fight that life is finite and we are going to die.

It's a strange thing, yeah. We've done away because, you know, during the long centuries of religion, where people one way or another were being reassured of something other than life. You know, for the last couple of hundred years, people have increasingly accepted or had to accept that this is all there is. And so for a lot of people naturally, the only objective now is to stretch out as long as possible and to still have ripped abs and all your own teeth when you're 90,

because this is all there is. And because death is now regarded as this full-stop, void, abyss of nothing, this, you know, people just won't contemplate its existence at all. And now comes along something like a pandemic where everyone's been made to contemplate the possibility of their unexpected death. It's unlikely, given the nature of COVID-19. But nonetheless, it's brought it back into people's minds, perhaps, in a real way that we haven't thought about for a while. And I think we, this is what I mean, this is what I'm saying all the way through this, I hope, this idea that, you know, for 99% of the existence of any form of humanity on planet Earth for four million

years or longer, death was right there. You know, they were, they were, they had, you know, they were experiencing injury and death and responding to it. And, and yet they weren't, they weren't living in terror of it and they were respectful in the face of it. You know, there's, you can, there's a mesolithic cemetery in Vedbek outside modern day Copenhagen in Denmark, and it was excavated in 1980s. There's many, many burials there, and they're six or seven thousand years old. And one of them famously is a mother and baby, a woman and a baby lying side by side, buried together, presumed to have died in childbirth and both being buried.

And the woman has a necklace of red deer teeth with her and other items. and the baby was laid on a white swan's wing, either because the people thought that by associating the spirit of the baby with the migratory birds that leave and then return, that perhaps the spirit of the baby would be gone for a while and then like the birds would come back. Or it might have been no more than simply a father or a grandfather wanting to put something comforting in the ground

rather than lay the baby down on the cold clay. But in any event, you look at that, and what you see, what the archaeologists excavated along with everything else, are the human emotions of grief and love. Without a shadow of a doubt, you're seeing grief and love preserved in the ground after thousands of years, the most ephemeral of human emotions,

there they are, as vivid as in those moments when they were being experienced by other living people. And those mesolithic hunters were living in circumstances utterly unrecognisable to ours, where death was an ever-present threat, where every day had to be a preoccupation with finding enough food to feed yourself and your family, and dealing with threat and danger

and the unknown. And yet they still found it within themselves the capacity to express love and emotion in a way that survived in the ground for thousands of years and is there like a message in a bottle for us to discover and to be struck by? And these are people who we would think of

as being primitive. And then even other species. You know, there's Neanderthal burials in Shannada in Turkey. Not even our own species. and one of the burials inside that cave hadn't been back filled with soil but with cut flowers and Neanderthal body had been laid down in a grave

and then covered over with fresh flowers. And another burial was of a man who had lived in his 40s which would make him ancient by the standards of the day but he was missing one arm and he had been blind because of an injury to one eye. He would have been a burdened, you would say to his tribe and yet they kept him with them and looked after him and fed him until he died of old age.

So that we see that people in unimaginably difficult circumstances confronted the reality of what it is to live and to die and found these elegant expressions of everything that they were feeling. And for us, with all that we have in the 21st century, so important, perhaps more important than any other time, I would say we should look back and acknowledge the wisdom of those people who had, for whom death was a daily possibility, a daily reality. And yet they, they were. responded to in such an upright and elegant fashion that we should hang our heads in shame about the way in which we hide away from the realities of life and death.

Well, speaking of learning the lessons of the past, as we wrap up, what should we consider the primary lesson of the past that we should be attempting to learn? Because as we know, you know, the lesson of the past, as no one learns the lessons of the past. But if we were to transcend that for the first time in human history in a significant way, what would we look to now to say this is the inspiration we must take as a society to overcome the strife and the discord and the division that we seem to be experiencing in this current moment? I think that's a hard question, Constance. I would say if we could find it, if we could just accept ourselves and each other for what we are, which is blessedly flawed individuals with, you know, each of us

with the capacity for great good and great kindness, living side by side in the same body with the capacity for great cruelty and wrongdoing. For all that, we have demonstrated time and time again over thousands of years the ability to come together and share a dream and an idea and an aspiration and to reach for it and in some cases to come extremely close to making it real and to actually realising hopes and dreams that those feats have been accomplished by flawed, weak human beings, you know, naked of fur or feather without claws and big teeth, you know, frail internal organs behind a basket of bones and, you know, three pounds of rosy-pink meat under a cap of bone, such a fragile creation.

And yet we have demonstrated again and again in sometimes impossibly difficult circumstances that potential for unlimited reach, even though man's reach must always exceed his grasp. You know, we have that within us. And if we could just respect that each and every one of us, then that's the foundation for everything. And what a wonderful note to end the interview on. But the last question that we always ask, Neil, is what's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I think it's maybe been woven through some of what we've been talking about.

But I think we've completely lost touch, lost any meaningful concept of what it means to be happy. And the very idea, I think we're pursuing faster and faster, harder and harder with every ounce of our being. happiness down a road where we won't find it. And we need to have a major corrective and a major rethink and to look back into the past, into the wisdom of the ancestors and relearn, rediscover what it even means to be happy. And if we understand what it means to be happy, we might have half a chance of getting there. That's a really good point, Neil.

That's a really, really interesting point. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. Before we let you go, tell everybody where they can get your books, where they can follow you on the evil social media that we've been discussing, and where else they can check out more of your work and more about you. On Twitter, I am there as The Coast Guy. I have a book coming out in September called The Wisdom of the Ancients, which deals with a lot of these ideas that we've been chatting about.

My last book was called The Story of the British Isles in 100. hundred places and it's a kind of a love letter to this landscape. I have a podcast called Neil Oliver's Love Letter to the British Isles. So there's various formats and platforms out there through which I'm trying to communicate some ideas that I'm happy to share and have challenged by any reasonable listeners. I honestly, thanks so much. You know, the opportunity to be on the podcast and the chance. to have these long, free-flowing conversations,

to have unexpected questions and just have to answer them on the hoof is a great experience. So thanks very much for having me. It's our absolute pleasure, and you have no doubt that our viewers and listeners have enjoyed it as much as we have. Thank you very much for tuning. Make sure you get Neil's books and his latest one. It comes out.

Check out his work. Follow him on Twitter. And we'll see you in a couple of days with another live stream or another brilliant event. episode like this one. Absolutely, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. And please remember all our episodes and live streams go out at 7pm. That's 7pm. Take care and see you soon. That's 7pm UK time, you bigot. There's a whole world out there with people who are different times. No, there's not, mate. There's just England. Just South London in your head.

Can't believe I said that in front of a Scott. Oh, well. I think there isn't going to come back on. It doesn't matter. All right guys, take care. We'll see you soon.