TRIGGERnometry - The Rise of the Right is the Left's Fault - Stephen Fry

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Stephen Fry is an English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, narrator and writer. Sponsor: Protect your home with 60% off any new SimpliSafe system. Go to https://SIMPLISAFE.COM/TRIGGER Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Start selling on Deepop, where Taste recognizes taste. There is something deeply, deeply rotten in the state of Denmark. What you stand for here on Trigonometry is correct. Almost everything that I dislike about the rise of the right in America and here and in Europe, I can say is probably the fault of the left. The left's greatest sin seems to be, and I speak as a sort of leftist, is that would rather be right than effective. There's not even a Wizard of Oz operating the levers in the background.

There's just nobody. You must be very uncomfortable with police enforcing speech. Oh, absolutely. It's absurd. To start to get afraid of a word is a very bad, it's a very bad thing psychologically. Why? Because you're not facing the truth behind the word. Stephen Frye? It's a dream come true for us. Shush.

It's so great to have you on the show. You were one of our absolute, you know, favorite guest to get on seven years ago now when we started the show. So it's a real honor for us. Thank you so much for being here. I want to read you a quote. I don't normally do this. From a man Francis and I both greatly respect, it's this. It's now very common to hear people say, I'm rather offended by that, as if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more than a wine. I find that offensive. It has no meaning. It has no purpose. It has no reason to be respected as a phrase. I'm offended by that. Well, so fucking what? That was me, wasn't it? That was Stephen Frye. Yes, I remember right now. That was a good, close to 20 years ago now. It's become one of those internet postcards that you usually. you know, there's a sunrise or a dew on the end of a blade of grass and the wet nose of a fallow deer.

But yes, I mean, I kind of mean it, and I mean it as one always should for these things directed inwards. I mean, that's to say, I have to accept that if I'm offended, it doesn't really mean anything. It's sad to be offended if I'm offended on the base. of my looks, my race, my sexuality, my manner, my work, almost anything. That can be slightly offended if someone is rude about it, but that's because it's rude. But rudeness is not a crime, it's just a solacism, if you like. And I think one of the, I was thinking as I walked here, what are we going to talk about? Do I believe in free speech?

Well, how can one say one doesn't believe in free speech? But is free speech the acme of everything that we have to aim for in life? Why is free speech important? Why do we value it? We value it because it's just. It's fair. It's reasonable and it's fair, and it makes for a fairer world. And that tells us that justice and fairness are actually the end point.

Freedom of speech is not an end point. You don't say, I want a society where everyone can speak freely. You say, I want a society where everyone can speak freely because it leads to a society where people are happier and there is more equity and justice in the world. I don't mean necessarily I'm going to say that free speech is the aim of every social justice warrior, as they used to be called. You know, back in the dark days of Twitter, SJWs, libitards and all the insults that used to be directed at people like me. And probably rightly. But, and I think that's best shown in the difference between Europe and America. In America, it really is the most important thing, free speech.

Or at least it's put forward as the most important thing. Free speech is the shining summit to which a nation must, you know, end its efforts and to which we must all climb. And finally we've got there. Our speech is entirely free. Is that really the golden point? I don't think it is. The golden point is something else.

Comity, amity, happiness, joy, friendship, all the things that are really very difficult to achieve. And free speech is one of the roots that you get to, isn't it? I mean, I'm suggesting this. No, I think you're making really good points in some ways. And some, I disagree. And here's why. I think that what you're talking about is that free speech in and of itself does not produce a good society.

I think that's true. The question, though, is you said offense is not a crime, but in a society that tries to regulate through the law, as ours increasingly does, I would put it to you, what people say to produce friendliness and amity and all these other things, you end up with a sort of situation that we have in this country, with the police routinely knocking on people's doors for a tweet. And I think the reason free speech has become such a calling card for a lot of people, especially in America, is that contrast. And they're going, well, if this is the choice, if I get to live either in a society where the police will knock on my door

or in a society where everyone says what they want, and it's pretty ugly, I'd rather the ugly but free world than the artificial, cozy conformity enforced by the state. I agree. I wonder if that's a false choice, though. It's a bit like saying either you don't allow arms or you allow arms, you know, the gun laws in America. Well, yes, but you don't allow individual citizens to own belt-fed mortars and nuclear weapons. So there is a limit you put on the arms they can own. There is a, you know, that's what lawmaking is about.

It's about saying thus far and no farther. And unfortunately, people tend to come out with slippery slope arguments which are fallacies and, or at least it always were fallacies. It's one of the primary Aristotelian logical fallacies, the slippery slope. Yet people use it all, oh, once you go down that path, well, we're human beings and we have will. Once we go down that path, we stop, or the path bifocates, or we make another choice. We rethink. It's very easy for the rhetoric to run away with itself when it comes to these extremes. But what I'm saying is, I don't think in the UK now, we are in the realm of,

retrican. No, I agree. You must be very uncomfortable with police enforcing speech. Oh, absolutely. It's absurd. Absolutely absurd. And I spent, I'm not wishing to paint myself as a hero, but there was a case. I went to say what it was because I, you know, I insisted on it being private, but I intervened and paid for somebody's legal fees all the way to a judge and a high court because they were threatened with prison for a tweet, an innocent joke. It was ridiculous. And I said, look, I got in touch with his lawyer and said, I'll fund his case because I really thought it was absurd. But then at the same time, I didn't want to do it publicly because it looked like a gesture and posting and so on.

But yes, it does matter to me that things have become absurd. But what it's the equivalent of, it seems to me, is the Victorians arresting someone. for saying arse in the theatre. Things they did. Because the Victorians had their own political correctness. We just wasn't called that, their own wokeness, whatever. They called it decency. And it was, at its most extreme,

we know we laugh at the fact they covered up piano legs. But people weren't allowed to say certain things. They just weren't. They couldn't say them in the theatre. They couldn't say them in the theatre. public they couldn't say them in print, they'd be arrested for either sexual usually references that the Victorians found utterly distasteful and wrong, morally wrong to them, or occasionally political ones, you know, political sedition and pamphleting and so on was

punished very, very severely, indeed. There was no free speech in this particular area. And it loosened. It loosened after the First World War in particular. But nonetheless, it carried over to my youth. If I was in the company of a great aunt, there's certain things I wouldn't say. I wouldn't say, fuck and cunt. I just wouldn't.

It should be absolutely horrified. It would be so rude and so unpleasant. And I sometimes think the same when I'm in a taxi And the driver says, Oh, Stephen, you can't say anything these days, can you? And I want to say to him, here you're in a safe space, as people like to say. You're in a cab with me.

You can say anything. What is there that you wanted to say in the past, in the last month, the last year, that you haven't been able to say? No, but you know what I mean? No, tell me. Say it, because it's absolutely safe. It will go no further.

Well, and they won't say. Yeah. Because they know what they want. want to say is actually disgusting probably to most people. It's a joke of some sexual nature or racial nature that is actually the equivalent of saying come to your great aunt. It's just bad manners. It really is that simple. It's terrible manners. It's inconsiderate to speak like that to people who are going to be. And yes, I say this. So what if you're offended? But at the same time, you recognize it. And a decent person doesn't want to offend people. Why would you need to do

that? So can I just push back there? You don't want to offend people, but sometimes, Stephen, the truth is offensive. Yes, it can be. And the offence is just a byproduct of you being honest. Yes, I agree. I agree. But most of the time you're able to temper your speech according to the person you're speaking to in the same way that you dress according to, you know, the situation. We've both failed on that front. You happen to have done. Exactly. But, you know, you go for a job interview or you go into a club where they insist on wearing you a tie, which I've got to lunch here later. And you accept.

Those are the, that's the, the regla de jr, the rules of the game are, and without it, then the game won't work. But that is the everyday experience of most people. They just, they're not going to be rude for any, just for the sake of it, because I can be and I've got the right to be. So I'm going to say this about Jews or this about Islamic people or this about gay people. I'm going to say this. Well, right, if you must, fine.

But it's, I'm going to think, very poorly, obvious. I'm going to think you're an utter asshole behaving like that. But if you've got important things to say, as much as I don't follow or agree with, almost everything he stands for, if Nigel Farage wants to talk about immigration in certain ways. He's got every right to as a politician, and he probably has a point for millions of people. And the left is miserable at countering that.

They just go on about, you know, they call it racism. Well, I don't know. I don't know that it would. I don't know how helped. that is most of the time the left the left's greatest sin seems to me and I speak as a sort of leftist is that would rather be right than effective and that to me is I'm I'm very English in that regard I come from the empirical tradition and things should work things should have an effect they should and and if it's if it's simply just the usual screams of racism and so on, and that's not going to help. It's not going to help stop the rise and rise of reform. It's not going to stop the terrible deaths of immigrant families coming in on rickety boats

across the channel. It's not going to help anything. And almost everything that I dislike about the rise of the right in America and here and in Europe, I can say is probably the fault of the left. There was a period not that long ago, which you were both old enough to remember, when at the top of the wheel of fortune were Clinton and Blair and the third way

and a kind of social democratic politics that looked set fair. And then now at the bottom of the wheel, and they screwed up. They screwed up in all, kinds of ways. They had the wind of economic fortune at their backs. They had everything really to make the 90s and early 2000s a very prosperous time for the West and the, you know, the fall of Russia and the Soviet bloc and the melting of the ice of that extraordinary hegemony.

It seemed to lead to the famous, you know, remarks Fugiaama and the end of history. and all that. But, you know, as we know, it failed. And part of the reason it failed is that it only spoke to itself. And its language became more and more and more alien to most people, I think. And I think that's a very profound point, because you see a lot of what is happening on the left, and I say as someone who comes from the left, and you see these kind of speech codes. And now in Parliament, you see a Labour MP to hear Ali talking openly about blasphemy laws. And you go, and I find that, as somebody who has experienced a communist country, I find that utterly terrifying. You look at Scotland, a left-wing government,

criminalising public performance. This is terrifying, Stephen. It is, it is. It's monstrous, and it must be opposed, and it must be opposed loudly. and in, you know, it is in a strange way up to people like you and me who are supposedly from the left. I'm not saying your voice isn't powerful too, Constantine, because it is obviously. But, yeah, it's extraordinary to think we've come so quickly from a time when the blasphemy laws were being lifted to a time when they're about to be, you know, pushed down our throats again. I got involved with the blasphemy laws being lifted in Ireland, funnily enough, because I did an interview with, do you remember Gabe Byrne? Yes, I remember Gabe, yeah. Very famous talk shards.

Yeah. And when he stepped down from the late, late show in Dublin and started to do this very personal interview show about what people believed. And I did one, rather pleasingly in number one, Marion Square, which is where Oscar Wilde grew up as a boy. And he talked about my atheism and so on, because it was a Sunday program for Ireland. So it was basically a spiritual, religious slot that he was occupying for the television. And he said, now, suppose Stephen's, suppose you die and you open your eyes and there's God. What do you say to him? If you're wrong, there he is. So I came out with a very standard theodicy, as it's called, the argument of the argument from evil. I said, I'd say to him, how fucking dare you?

Bone cancer and children, what were you thinking of? You made this cosmos and this world, and you were allowed for this absolutely undeserved pain and so on. And I went on and on like that. Anyway, it went viral, this thing I said on his program, and somebody went to the police and said, he is breaking Ireland's blasphemy laws, which hadn't changed since the days when the church basically ran the country. And he should be taken to court.

And it was all very Irish because I said, yes, I suddenly pictured myself pale but resolute, gripping the dock and speaking up for my right to offend the religious. And it turned out, of course, that the man had gone to the police was actually an Irish barrister who did it in order to test the blasphemy laws and to prove that they were ridiculous and to force them to be changed, which they then were. So Ireland got rid of them.

And that was only, I don't know, eight years ago. Well, I remember this. Yes. I remember that video that you did, the interview that you did, and I remember that clip, which is, I think, exactly what we've been talking about on the show this and the entire time since we started it, which is when I was growing up, the people that I looked up to were the people who were challenging the orthodoxy and saying the restrictions around humor, the restrictions around speech, whether it was the life of Brian or any of this other stuff. And, you know, Bill Hicks and George Carlin, people like that in America,

challenging the people who were saying, no, you can't say that, you can't do this, you can't joke about that. And then, without me changing my position or Francis changing here, so I assume you changing yours, suddenly the restrictions around speech were coming from an entirely different place. This is what's happened, and this is why a lot of people, you know, you say, well, I'm a kind of, and that's why people don't really know where they are anymore. No, they don't.

You're right. these cozy little partitions no longer apply, do they? But it's interesting you mention someone like Bill Hicks, who, you know, I hope people remember or look for on YouTube or whatever else his work is available, because unlike Dave Chappelle say, not that Dave Chappelle has no right to say whatever he wants to say as a comedian, I'm not going to argue with that,

but it's a pity that in order to show that they are supremely free in their speech, a lot of comedians today will punch low. they'll go for, I mean, does no one have sympathy for some poor child who believes that they're born into the wrong body as far as gender is concerned and is trying very hard to live a life that they believe that somehow they're, you know, this has happened in history for thousands of years. There have been a certain proportion of people born like that. Now, you know, to go into the whole transgender argument, it will take us down some very dark and smelly alleys, I know. But essentially, whatever one's view about real biological sex and gender, not to have sympathy or indeed some admiration for the bravery of children who turn up at school in different clothing and argue their feelings. You know, we can say that there are all kinds of reasons why they should wait before puberty blockers come or whatever it is that, you know, we disagree with in terms of the transgender wokeness, if we want to call it that. but nonetheless, not to have any sympathy for it,

and to use them as the butt of your humor, Bill Hicks used himself as the butt, and you as the butt, not some poor minority group that is already mocked enough in life. And that seems to me the shame is that free speech champions should be championing free speech, which makes people feel deeply uncomfortable about who they are,

because that's what satire is. No, he's not the problem, she's not the problem, they're not the problem, you are the fucking problem, and I am the fucking problem. Don't you get that? It's our fault. If the world is going to shit, it's because of me and it's because of you. It's not because of them. And that seems to me to be so important. And that's what Jonathan Swift and all the great satirists understood is the revolting nature of the individual human being and their hypocrisy and their inability to,

to face the blame for, you know, and necessity cause and blame, the Aristotelian qualities that we have to think about, where, you know, where the problems in the world come from. And I do think, you know, Chesterton, who was a great hero of mine, and a great hero of the right, you know, Chesterton's hedge, I'm sure it's something you've talked about

in this world of disruption and so on, and he's like a sort of Burkean figure in old conservatism, if you like. and he wrote a letter to the newspapers when they said, he said, I noticed you have been publishing a lot of correspondence about the nature of the world and it's having gone to the dogs, everything being wrong with it, and a lot of things have been blamed, but I'm in a happy position to explain to you why the world has gone to the dogs.

It's my fault. It's because of me. I'm very surprised that other readers haven't written a similar letter yet. Stephen, but just to dig into that a little bit. I don't, look, what you've just said is 100% true and not enough of us look inwards enough and improve ourselves first before trying to reflect the world. I completely agree with this.

But I also think that there's a little bit of nuance to add to your analysis of Chappelle and Hicks and so on because, look, Bill Hicks was very openly mocking of Christians, for example. He wasn't saying, I'm the problem. He was saying, you guys are stupid. Yeah, absolutely. He was doing that. And when it comes to Chappelle, he's perfectly capable of defending himself.

But just the ideas level analysis, I would argue, is it's perfectly possible to have both things in your head at once. On the one hand, you can have compassion with anyone who feels that they are in the wrong body, or frankly their sexuality is different to the majority of people for which they are attacked and mock and bullied in school and all those things. And at the same time also recognize that some of the people who are now or have been, maybe not now anymore, but have been in charge or at the forefront of telling comedians, you can't joke about this, telling people you can't say about this, saying to people, you can't have the opinion about biology that you do

because that's transphobic, when it's simply. an opinion about biology. You can't have this opinion about a child's ability to make decisions about long-term medical interventions. Right. To mock that while holding the compassion and empathy for the child, we can do both of those, can't we? Yeah, we can. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. And on the other hand, the only times I remember being told what I can say on television were in the past when you would sit with a journalist and not journalist, sorry, I don't know if that's Freudian or what it is, you would sit with a lawyer. Maybe journalists are, as Shelley called poets, the unacknowledged legislators of the world,

maybe that's journalist. But anyway, you'd sit with a lawyer, BBC lawyer, ITV lawyer, and he'd say, you can say, you can say two wanks or one fuck. You can't say, I'm sorry, absolutely. not. Yeah, shit, you can, I'll allow you three shits in the half hour, but no more, and please base them out. Literally, right? That was, that's being told what to say. I've never been told what to say in, you know, I'm aware of cancellation, the things that happen as a result of people apparently saying things, but I've never been aware of someone saying you can't say that.

But do you think that's because of the views that you have which align not entirely, but largely with the orthodoxy that exists in that world now? To some extent, I suppose. And yes, I've never wanted to say, you know, you fucking X, Y or Z about some racial minority or anything else. I'll give you a different example. Sorry to interrupt. For example, during the pandemic, there were people who were saying COVID probably came from a lab in China. And this was banned on YouTube.

If we had said it on our channel, our channel would have been. been taken down. The U.S. Congress just did a report saying, lo and behold, it came from a lab. It came from a large. Surprise. Yeah, I know. That was just extraordinary and so destructive to everything that that, you know, whether YouTube should be like that. But yes, YouTube as a platform or whatever it likes to call itself, it is extraordinary. You couldn't, you couldn't say that. I don't know what they were reacting against or why. I suppose it was the Yeah, it was Fauci and his gang, or it was the politicians who were trying to be, I don't know, trying to keep China on side. I don't know what their excuse would be for laying down such a bizarre and absurd dictat.

I mean, it's very, very odd. Yeah, those things are, you know. What I'm getting at, Stephen, is censorship. This idea, a lot of people position the conversation about freedom of expression as in a way that you sort of did there, which is I've never wanted to say these. No, I agree. That's not really what we're talking about. We're talking about the ability of people to express very legitimate concerns that you may disagree with, but nonetheless, as you said, with Nigel Farage, about immigration or about where COVID came from, or about medicalization of transgender kids, all sorts of things like that. it's a substantive debate.

Yes, it is. It's just a debate about what's true. And surely we've got to be able to have that debate without people jumping in and saying, you can't say this. Because I'd much rather they were telling us not to say cunt, and you fuck only twice per interview, but we could actually have the debate.

Yes. Do you see what I'm saying? I do understand. I do understand what you're saying. And it is very important. And it is also, there's something deeply patronizing about the fact that it's really saying,

it's okay for intelligent, educated people to have the debate in a debaty sort of way, but the problem is it leads to all kinds of ordinary people. The can I will bark all kinds of ugly things, and that's what we're stopping. Because that is no way to legislate for anything, or it's no way to run a welk stall as the old phrase goes. Yeah, I mean, you are right.

You know, what you stand for here on trigonometry is correct. There is something deeply, deeply rotten in the state of Denmark, how many put it? There is something amiss in our polity that we have to face and that people, I was going to say people who have influence, but then that means influences. I'm not sure it does. No, it probably doesn't.

That's a separate. It's a separate thing. But, you know, people like you and people, people in politics and people who, I mean, isn't the problem also that there is no locus of authority anymore, who whom we can admire and respect, you know, I used to say as a sort of joke, when the Queen and David Attenborough died, then there's nothing left for us to look up to in the world if you're British. in terms of just sort of, oh, bless, you know, someone, because there's certainly no one, there's no, I don't know how you put it, there's not even a Wizard of Oz operating the levers in the background. There's just nobody. And. But isn't that their fault, Steve?

Oh, yes, it is their fault, yeah. Because they've betrayed our trust. Absolutely, I'm saying it is the failure of the left. It's the failure of authority. It's the failure of the establishment or whatever wants to call it. And of course, media, we still, you and I probably still look at newspapers. Nobody else does that. They are completely irrelevant, really.

And so you have this peculiar situation that newspapers are to some extent constrained by their responsibilities as publishers, whereas the enormous platforms like Facebook and Instagram, TikTok and the YouTube and the X, have no responsibility in that regard at all. They are platforms and they take no responsibility. And they are beacons of free speech, apparently. Elon Musk and have a loud haler the size of whales and you stand in a public square where everybody else is this big. That's free speech, apparently.

But let's call the channels of communication that we have, rivers. And they flow, and there used to be mighty rivers with grand bridges and structures. And there were the Times newspaper and the BBC. And the river was something you could swim in and you could. occasionally find it, you know, the little turd would float along. And you'd think, oh, that's unpleasant. But generally speaking, the rivers of discourse were, you could live with them. You could swim and splash about and see other people and wave at them.

And some would be the other bank and you thought they were a bit odd and they thought you were a bit odd. But now all those rivers are contaminated just as British rivers are. They're absolutely full of nothing but raw sewage. And everybody else who's swimming in the river is the enemy and you hate them and they hate you. And there is no clean water anymore anywhere. Everything is polluted. And this is true where it upsets me more in a strange kind of way

is in art, if you like, or at least the creative industries of whatever we like to call. that if you tried to write a play or a novel that was set here today in Britain or in the West now, it would be impossible not to address the discourse. In other words, every character in the book represents a point of view in the discourse, the cultural discourse that we all sort of understand but can't quite name. this world of wokeness but also anti-wokeness and all the terrors and embarrassments that it invokes and and that's i mean that's why i have the last four books i've written have been

set in the world of greek mythology because as wagnernev points it out you know if you if you set a drama in the present day uh it is about the bourgeois and the aristocracy and the working class he was writing in the 1880s. It's about the death of kings. It's about now, where we are. And so you look at it and it dates instantly. But if you set it in the world of myth, it's pure humanity, it's father-daughter, it's revenge, it's loyalty, its honor, its betrayal, it's faithfulness. It's all the pure elements of what it is to be human can be discussed without the fucking discourse, without the horror of having to say, is he, Is he straight? Is she this?

Is she that? What do they stand for? Where do they, you know, what do they believe in the, in terms of now? Because now is, you know, again, to have the river, now is just one little moment of a moving river. And morality is not a permanent thing. It's manners in mores. It is custom.

And it was the custom for it to be perfectly okay to stir sugar into tea in our ancestors would do that, knowing that they'd both been plucked by slaves. And it was fine. Sorry, that's all I'm saying. But now it isn't. It's now immoral. But because the river moves. Do you think, Stephen, part of the problem is the way that language has been changed.

Now, of course, language always changes. But if you look at words like safety, for instance, safety on a university campus, a safe space, effectively means that I don't want to hear certain viewpoints because they make me feel uncomfortable. You talk to the older generation, safety means prevention of physical harm. Yes. Do you think part of the problem is that we're now having conversations where we're using words, but for different people on different ends of the political spectrum, these words have totally different meanings. So it's a fundamental problem because if we can't agree on the meaning of language,

How can we possibly have any type of productive conversation? This has always been the case. I mean, I remember Margaret Thatcher saying quite astonishingly when she banned a program by Thames TV, a documentary about the IRA figures being assassinated in Gibraltar called Death on the Rock. I don't even remember. Anyway, it was a Tems TV. And she had sort of said that the program prejudged something.

and that it broke the national security. And she said, if something like that happens, then freedom dies, she said. I remember thinking your interpretation of the word freedom is very different from mine, Prime Minister. And this is the problem. I mean, you know, you go back to philosophers like T.E. Hume, the philosopher poet, who talked about capital letter moralists, you know, who use words like justice, mercy, with capital letters.

But he said that that's like presenting someone with a currency note that says three and a half pounds. We don't recognize it. It's not legal tender to just to use words in that manner that aren't an agreed exchange. And you can't agree the exchange of word freedom. It obviously freedom from or freedom too. and it's similar, justice, mercy, decency. So I remember precisely the same thing, what safety meant to Mrs. White House

was not saying these disgusting things on television that children would be exposed to and it was unsafe for children to hear and see sexual references on television. I mean, this was a massive thing. And things were censored as a result all the time. And as you say, to us now, that's easy. Well, who cares?

I would rather live in a world in which, as you say, you can't say fucking cut on television than one in which you can't debate an issue openly and so on. And I generally agree with you. But it'd be nice to live in society. Be free to do both, obviously. It's always been the case that worked. have had different meanings to different people.

And I think the safety is a good example, but it's not new. And you want to protect children. Was always the thing about sexual references on television. And it still is for most people. A lot of people are still very prudish about all kinds of things appearing on television. And there are warnings, trigger warnings we call them now. And of course, that kind of makes the hackles rise when you... when you hear that. But in fact, there always were trigger warnings, but they were just of a

different nature and they didn't use the word trigger. So that being the case, so let's take another word, kindness. Because a lot of time when people talk about kindness, it actually means don't challenge me. Don't make me feel uncomfortable. It's not kind for you to say these things or to challenge me or to disagree with me. And to me, that's not the meaning of the word. No, no, I agree and the word empathy has been raped in the same. Well, we're all now cancelled.

The world rape has also had an evolution. Yeah, it's a good word. It means to seize. By the way, this video has been demonetised about 73 times by now. Stephen Fry's our dream guest and we will make zero money from the same. Thank you.

Yeah, no, I'm sorry about that. No, yeah. I mean, you have to I'm always very keen when I'm in America to say, Died, when someone says, I hear so-and-so passed. Oh, you mean dying? Very important to get that across, you know, because there is the euphemistic element.

And rape is an important word, but it means to seize. And obviously, we use words like raptor to describe birds that seize, you know, raptors and velociraptors and so on. and rapine and so on. And to start to get afraid of a word is a very, it's a very bad, I think, very bad thing psychologically.

Why? Why is it? Because I don't think, because you're not facing the truth behind the word. Think of God. And it's really essential, you know, when one does. It's, you know, things like death and difficulty. and poverty and distress and the real truth of the agonies and the things that can happen to human beings can't be covered up and brushed over and they're difficult for people to hear and to handle

and so as you say they'd rather just everything get smothered in empathy and kindness and I agree I mean, it's the awful pedantic figure in me loves the word kind because it is a really interesting word. In Chaucer's day it meant nature. Nature. And it still does, to some extent,

their own kind. Their kind is related to kin. Your kin, your kind. Mankind, you know, human kind, fish kind, if you wanted to put it, way is is and and so when you're talking about being kind it is sort of being connected to to to the nature of things to to to to who we all are it's not just patting people on the head and saying it's

all right there there it's okay um obviously a lot of it is personal and selfish we talk about abstract things all the time, ideas. But our human lives are about meeting the eyes of other people you see in the street, in the pub, down the road, or people you work with people in the office and so on and how you deal with them and how you relate to them. And most of us want to see in the eyes of others something that reflects well on us. We are basically narcissistic. We look at for our reflection in someone else's pupils and we want to see back that we're liked and we're valued and we're understood and we're appreciated and we're not you know subject to the contempt and dislike of other people with you know popularity well like when your children oh my god I'm unpopular

it's the worst feeling in the world we want I mean some people are very good at saying I don't give a fuck what people think of me and I'm very impressed if they really believe that but most of us want that feeling of reciprocal appreciation and being liked and liking and so on in a very simple way. And so I suppose the trouble is you have to get into some sort of psychological, which can often be very important suggestion that when people ask others to be kind, what they really need is to be kind to themselves and forgive themselves for whatever it is that they feel bad about. Because mostly we do feel bad about things. I mean, I don't know about you.

It's when I try and get to sleep at night, I spend a fair amount of time thinking, oh, God, why did I say that? Well, I made such a fool of myself. Why did I do that? Why didn't I try a bit harder? Why was I lazy here? Why was, you know, I mean, I don't know. overstated as if I'm some kind of trying to be a saint all the time. But there is this

impulse. There is Jiminy Cricket on our shoulder whispering saying you fucked up. You know, you're bad. You're a bad person. Why are you like this? Come on. You can be better. This deontic, if you like, sense of an obligation to be better than one is, of a duty, of a kind of moral need to be good, to be virtuous in some way. And I think to get dragged into abstract ideas of what is right and wrong in politics or in culture or in society. I mean, I think these are all important, but I tend to I suppose it's because in literature and novels and plays and art, to me, are mankind's supreme way of expressing all these things, not political writing, not history, although those are interesting. I mean, we know more about the First World War because of the few poems of Wilfrid Owen than of every single history book written about the First World War.

Because we know what it's like to be there. and we can feel and smell and hear the entire experience. And again, to Chesterton, the thing that I always return to is his refusal to respect abstract statements, and he makes it funny. So here's a very good example. He begins an essay. I read the other day the following statement, at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw,

modern woman rises to take her place in society. And I thought to myself, well, that's very good news. Who do I know who's a modern woman? Mrs. Button, she comes in from Clapham every day to scrub the floors and clean the house and beat the carpets. And she's 38. She has five children.

And she's as modern a woman as I can think of. She takes the bus or the train and she comes here. So I say to myself, at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, Mrs. Button rises to take her place in society. And I realize the statement is not only nonsense, but it's pernicious nonsense. Because, of course, what he was responding to was some airy article by some Bloomsbury idiot saying that Ibson and Shaw had changed the world. But as a model of thinking, I think it's superb, just don't trust these abstract statements about people feel that, well, okay, I think of a person.

Mrs. Button or Mr. Button. And is that really true what you're saying? I don't think it is. You're talking about this very small narrow band of what used to be called in the 90s, the chattering classes and then became the Wokharati or some other hideous name for us. The elite, of course, is the one that people like to use now.

Mostly billionaires call people the elite. And I think we should really remember that we don't speak for here. humanity. We don't, you know, the abstract statements we make about truth and freedom and so on are very interesting and they make a good essay, whether it's an oral essay like a podcast or a conversation, but the experience of the individual, I sort of come back to this empirical way of thinking, you know, and that's what comedians do, you know. You know, is this Woody Allen sort of thing. Not only am I not sure that there's a god,

I'm pretty sure that you can't get a dentist on Saturdays. It's the real world where things are messy and confusing is it doesn't follow the lines of argument that journalists and podcasters with all respect necessarily feel are the vital kind of currents of human discourse because I think for most people these things are. You know, in the same way that most people are not monstrous in Hungary or in some other country whose leader we may distrust.

And it's only when you're reading and it's the problem of, you know, the Facebook thing. a two-word algorithm that when, you know, it started to get 100 million, 300 million, 500 million, a billion users from 2006, 7, 8, 9 as it was growing out of only Ivy League universities, then into all universities, then into world universities, then into ordinary people. Suddenly, all this server expense in those days, you know, Moore's Law hadn't made servers quite as reliable and cheap as they are now, they had to pay for itself. So they had to have advertising, and that's all reasonable. And in order to get advertising, this was a whole new model for advertising, Facebook. They asked a very simple question of their electronic circuits by putting in an algorithm that said, quite reasonably, maximize engagement. That as long as Facebook maximized engagement, it would get eyeballs and clicks for the advertisers,

which is what the advertisers wanted. And to give, you know, all possible allowances to Zuckerberg, whatever one may think of him, he probably didn't realize, as nobody else did at the time, that if you say maximize engagement to a little robotic algorithm, it will discover almost instantly. That means maximize hatred, outrage, fury, you know, misery, envy, resentment. basically entire Pandora's box. And that's what leapt out in, you know, you can say when it was almost 2012, 13, 14, it started to happen, which was also at the time most children got phones, there were smartphones.

Suddenly the majority of children have them by then. So we are living in a world in which engagement has been maximised, in other words, fury has been maximised, and people have been, so in the same way that people say, kindness is just protect me and be nice to me, please, and make me feel warm and cozy. In a way, people also saying, privilege my outrage, allow me to be disgusted and outraged by everybody else,

allow me to be furious, allow me to express my absolute hatred of everything. And yes, you're allowed to. But that's like saying, let me, you know, forget laboratories, let me shit in the corner. The results will not be pleasant. It's a very good point, and particularly the point you made about getting carried away with ideas that sound good, but actually increasingly don't apply to real people. I gratefully accept the rebuke.

It wasn't a rebuke. I'm as guilty as anybody else. We all are. Absolutely. Stephen, we've got to wrap up because we want to respect your time. But before we ask you our last question and go to Substac and ask you questions from our supporters, the one thing that strikes me most about you as we sit across from each other is I think you're incredibly and given your family background this might sound strange but you're incredibly British in the most amazing way and I think you'd be recognized around the world is actually being

incredibly British so the question I want to ask you is what does it mean to be British? It's an excellent question and you know one's mind travels backwards and forwards over various you know, the famous George Orwell, you know, vicar on the bicycle and the warm beer and the cricket. And there's an element of that. And I think I'll start off with, as you say, given my family background, I think growing up in a very traditional English way in a country house, sent away to school with other English boys, but being, coming from a Jewish family, at least half Jewish,

and realizing quite early on that I was gay in a world in which, you know, I was interested enough in literature and reading around it to know that meant prison and exile and disgrace and stigma and shame. So it's almost as if I adopted, overdid it. I mean, I look at myself psychologically. I'm a member of the Garrick Club. I'm actually wearing his tie at the moment. The MCC, the beefsteak, the Atheneum, the Saville Club. I mean, it's unbelievable.

The Oxford and Cambridge Club, the Arts Club, the Chelsea Arts Club as well. He's just showing off. You are the liberal elite. It's more than showing off. It's actually revealing something deeply tragic, this absolute, desperate need to be accepted and to feel that the doors of society are open to me. Of course they're open to me.

I mean, I don't know why I keep needing, but for some reason I have this sense. I mean, I wrote about it in an autobiography, The way I put it was that, like a lot of adolescence, but unfortunately, as an adult, I've still taken it. I was pulled apart by this tension, these contradictory impulses. One was to stand alone, to be, you know, the Ibsen hero, the stand strongest who stands most alone, you know, that thing of being the individual, different, apart. but at the same time yearning to belong. So to be a part from and to be a part of

with my two things that pulled me. So I wanted to look down on people who were there, they're playing their rugby and doing their thinking ordinary thoughts, being conventional, imagining a life with mortgages and owning garden hoses and law nurse. And I wanted to be apart from that.

But another element will be just so wanted to be embraced by the world and to belong. And I think that is a strangely English thing, or at least a certain kind of Britain, has that. This need to stand apart. And I'm not, I don't belong to any of that nonsense. I don't believe in this. And I'm different. But also to join. But what it is to be British, I mean, we used to.

I grew up believing that it was fair play. And I think that is still part of, you know, British and the Anglo-Saxon tradition, because the Australians call it a fair shake. You've got to have a fair shake, you know, decent, you know, equity in that sense, not social justice warrior equity, but just, you know, something's not fair. And that's as a child. We all know children scream when things aren't fair. And we are enraged by injustice and we should be.

We shouldn't ever lose that. I'm sure. And I think a certain... This is impossible to say, because it sounds the opposite. But a certain modesty is important. A certain sense that one isn't quite good enough and that one should be better

is an important part of being British and disliking showing off and braggatism and general sort of braggadocio, if you like. And that's why we find Trump so incomprehensible. I mean, a lot of what he says of what he stands for, we can completely understand why people vote for him, but just at a simple personal human level, the idea that a British person could ever vote for someone who was so full of themselves. It's just so, oh my God, you cannot talk. You heard him saying he's so good

at this and he's the best at that. No one would be acceptable in British society. In a pub if someone said, I'm the best that ever. You can, excuse me, in the same way that we couldn't I have a prime minister who said, let us pray, or God will, you know, Tony Blair is probably the most religious prime minister we've had for a while. But we just would not accept that. There's a fantastic moment. Here's what it is to be British. Kippley, great, great writer, no accident, Nobel Prize winner, obviously, unfortunately

associated with empire and the Raj in ways that have made him a little bit unacceptable to some people. But if you read him, you think this is a truly great writer. And T.S. Eliot and many others were, you know, built up his reputation when it had fallen down of it. There's a scene in one of his novels, a kind of almost comic novel of School Days called Stalky and Co. He's hugely popular book. And it was kind of based on his own childhood. He represents himself as a character called Beetle. He was very short-sighted because Kippling was almost blind.

And there's a moment when a politician comes to the school. And we know that what happens to Storky and his friends, they're wonderfully naughty children. I mean, they're very disrespectful, you know, they're absolute renegates as children, Storky and Co. at their school. But we know that they then join the army and that they, two of them are killed and that they're, you know, kind of soldiers. and that they probably are patriotic.

They believe in their country and therefore, I suppose, empire. Anyway, a politician comes and speaks to them at speech day as they do at these schools. And he points to the flag and says the flag, my boys. And Storky and his friends start to hiss. They hiss him down. They cannot bear that someone should. talk in that way, sentimental way about country. It's a private thing. You may have feelings about your country. You may have pride and something. But for someone to talk about it is just bad taste.

And that sense of English bad taste that you don't parade such feelings like patriotism. And to this day, I think if a politician went on about the glory of the country, like when Michael Petillo in a very short period when he was Defence Secretary did that, wrapped himself in the flag. And to people right and left, it was just distasteful. And I think that is a problem for the British, because whatever the British values may be, they are under threat, as they are Western values generally are under threat, deeply under threat.

And to defend them means to speak in a very un-British way. And that makes us uncomfortable. In America, they don't have that problem. They talk about freedom and America and the flag, and they're very happy to do it. But we find that fairly preposterous. But maybe it's time for me to change and to be less British and to wave the flag not in terms of empire

and past greatness and silly things, but in terms of values, values which include free speech, which include respect and affection for the underdog, that includes self-mockery and an ability to consider other people from inside, if you can, I suppose. Stephen, it's been... I don't know if that helps. No, it's a wonderful way to finish the interview. the final question is always the same what's one thing we're not talking about that we really should be ha well i mean that's really it's almost like being in the cab saying go on you're free to say

absolutely what haven't you spoken about um uh i suppose i would say um and it's a special pleading to some extent uh art literature creativity what people say create in music. It can be lyrics of songs, it can be anything, that the way we speak to each other, the way we uncover the truth about who we are, about the fact that we die, we live, that there's pain and there's betrayal,

and there's dishonor and there's honor. All these difficult things are very hard to talk about in an abstract way. But art reifies and embodies these things through people and through ideas or images and remind us that we die, which is very important. So I suppose art probably should come into your conversation more. And it's difficult because it sounds elitist. But it's important.

Art and literature and popular culture, if you like, just the discourse, the fact that the discourse is so constipated by self-consciousness and inability to express, perhaps. Head on over to Substat. Well, we'll carry on the conversation with Stephen. I'd be fascinated to have Stephen's take on Jordan Peterson with whom who took part in a 2018-month debate.