TRIGGERnometry - Tom Holland on the Great Awokening

Episode Date: September 27, 2020

Award-winning author, historian and broadcaster Tom Holland joins us in the studio. Check out his latest bestselling title Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.  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 (@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.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 (@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

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is an author, historian and presenter. Tom Holland, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much for having me. It is great to have you here. We're delighted that you've come. But for anyone who doesn't know, you just give us a little overview of who are you, how are you where you are. What is the journey that brings you to this chair sitting here on the podcast? And we know you don't listen to podcasts. So it must be a very special experience.

Yeah, yeah. It's a journey of discovery for me. Yes. I'm a historian. I focus very much on antiquity, early Middle Ages. And that might seem to make me wildly unsuitable for a topical podcast. But the degree that I have anything topical to say, it's because I'm interested in the way that things that happened in the deep past,

continue to reverberate into the present. So my most recent book, Dominion, is a book in which I look at Christianity as the most radical and transformative product of the Roman Empire. And I think that the trace elements of that revolution continue to shape the way that we think and behave today. And that's why we're so delighted to have you on the show, because whenever we spoke into historians, you know, the idea that history operates in cycles, it's obviously not a new thing, it's sort of a dogma almost. And it does seem like the current moment, it's not the first time these sort of things have happened. So where are we on the spiral of history, Tom? Well, that's a huge question to kick off with. That's what we've got an hour. Yeah, okay.

Well, so, so I think that, I mean, I don't think that there are kind of hard and fast rules of history that you can extrapolate. But I think that if you look at, that if you look at, you look at, you at certain cultures, certain ways of behaving, you can kind of extrapolate rules in which those distinctive cultures behave. And I think that the culture that we live in is one such. And I think that the rhythms that it moved to were laid down essentially by Christianity. And at the heart of Christianity is the idea, well, it's the idea of baptism, really. It's the idea of cleansing yourself. And that obviously operates on the individual level. So the individual washes away, and is welcomed into the order of light.

But what happened in the western half of what had been in the Roman Empire, so Latin Christendom, as it's called, is that this becomes politicised. And in the 11th century, the idea that the whole of society can be cleansed, can be washed, can be awakened to a new understanding, kind of becomes institutionalised. And we may be tempted to think of the Middle Ages as a kind of hidebound reactionary age.

But in fact, it's the first great revolutionary age in European history. Because the radicals, the revolutionaries, are the people who will establish the papacy as the great revolutionary order. And the cadres of people, so whether it's people who are emerging in these radical new institutions

that emerge in the 12th century called universities, whether it's the warriors convinced of their own rectitude, who take the cross to the ends of the earth, Jerusalem, the Baltic, whatever, people we now call crusaders, whether it's the people who compile whole new understandings of what law should be, institutionalising radical new ideas such as human rights, all of these are expressive of a desire to set the whole of society on a new and moral footing that will be pleasing to God. and it sets in chain a process by which this happens again and again.

Because of course what inevitably happens over the course of medieval history is that what in the 11th century had seemed radical and new and fresh by the 16th century when Luther pops up seems hidebound and reactionary. And so the Protestant Reformation, although it casts itself as a reaction against the medieval papacy, in fact is just another reiteration of this disaster. to cleanse and purify society. And the same thing happens in the 18th century with the Enlightenment. Protestants had turned against the Catholic Church. In the Enlightenment,

you get philosoph and French revolutionaries who turn against Christianity. And I think that these cycles of people feeling that society needs to be cleansed, it needs to be washed, it needs to be baptized in you, has continued and continued and continued. And it's so much a part of the West's cultural DNA that actually you don't need doctrinal Christianity to fuel it. And I think that what's happening at the moment, therefore, is just another iteration of these fundamentally very Christian kind of impulses. And it's interesting that you say that we've got these fundamentally Christian impulses, because when you look at certain things like the woke movement, it does appear to be a sort of religion, doesn't it? Where you have believers, you have non-believers. And the people who

our non-believers will tend to criticize it, get treated like apostates, don't they? Well, yes, American religiosity is quite culturally specific. It's one that that, you know, originates in England. So there's a kind of Anglo-American model of Protestantism, which places a huge emphasis on the role of the spirit, kind of illuminating the soul and allowing you to see what previously you hadn't seen. And these are called, you know, they, again, they happen in cycles because you get awakened and then you fall to sleep

and then you get awakened and you fall to sleep. So they're called the Great Awakening. And historians of American religion trace them over, you know, over a course of American history. And so that's why people have called what's happening now the Great Awakening. But, you know, it's a pun, but it's not entirely a joke because that's exactly what it is.

It's exactly the same kind of idea that you have to look into your soul, recognize your sin, and awaken to a new order. Specifically, what is happening, I think, is bred of what happened in the 50s and 60s, which was the last great, overtly, doctrinally Christian period of revolution and kind of moral reformation in America, which was a civil rights movement. And the civil rights movement was very clearly drew on the inheritance of, American Christianity. It's very biblically based. So it's black Christians doing as they had done since the beginnings of American Protestant society and looking at the stories of Exodus

where God favors the slaves and rescues the slaves and liberates them and leads them out of bondage to a promised land. And the resonance of that for black Americans in the 50s, particularly in the South, was immense and believed, you know, literally. And it fuels the kind of, you know, the music, which then feeds into the music for 60s. So it's, you know, it's deriving from these kind of hymns, these traditions, this language of liberation. But of course, particularly the Reverend Martin Luther King, he's a, he's a clergyman, he's a Baptist clergyman, and he is drawing absolutely on the kind of fundamental Christian teaching that all human beings are created equally in the image of God and therefore are endowed with a divine sense of dignity.

And as Paul famously says, you know, there is no dual Greek. So therefore there is no black or white. So what Martin Luther King is doing is summoning white Americans. to a consciousness that their black brothers and sisters should probably be their equal. And the success of the civil rights movement is precisely that a majority of white American Christians accept the justice of what he's saying. I mean, that's why the civil rights movement succeeds. But what then happens in the 60s is that other groups of people kind of pick up on the success of what the civil rights movement has done. gay rights movement would be an obvious one,

feminism would be another, and they're drawing on the same kind of impulses, the same assumption that is kind of hardwired into Christian discourse that the first will be last, that those who are oppressed have a value and a virtue, by virtue of being oppressed. All of these are kind of drawn upon, and that's why over the course of the decades that have followed,

by and large, people have accepted the justice of what feminists or gay rights campaign was saying in the 60s, but for American Christians, it was problematic because there were huge, very, very deep traditions within doctrinal Christianity that opposed the idea of same-sex relations were very committed to the idea that the man should be the head, that the man is Christ, the woman is the church. And so what's happened since the same-since-the-shaired? And so what's happened since the 60s really is that American evangelicals have come to identify ever more strongly as Christians. And those who, even though they are drawing on very, very Christian traditions, have come to see

themselves as opposed to Christianity. And so you get the situation now where you have campaigners who are very overtly, see themselves as being very overtly anti-Christian. But I think that that's kind of an illusion. I mean, these, what's happening at the moment is a civil war within Christianity. It's a civil war within different factions of the kind that that has plagued Christianity over the course of its existence. So I think that to that extent, what we're witnessing is nothing particularly new.

And it's fascinating that you say that. It seems to be a war within Christianity because one of the things that I've seemed to notice, and lots of people have said this as well, is that these people, although they may be avertly Christian in some of their values, they don't tend to believe in forgiveness all that much, do they?

Well, there are certain, there are certainly things that have followed on from the fact that, well, what should we say, the awoke, the awoken, do not see themselves as Christian,

see themselves as having emancipated themselves from Christianity. because there are certain impulses, I think, within human nature that Christianity has served to kind of bit and bridle. And one of them actually is the category of original sin, which I think ties into what you were alluding to. Original sin is absolutely the category that people in the 60s, you know, who came to reject Christianity really hated.

You know, it was everything the hippies were not about, the idea that we're all infected by sin, because Adam and Eve fell, you know, absolute no-no. And so it came to seem, you know, in the tune of the 60s spirit, progressive spirit, that we're all born free. We're not born with original sin. And that seems, you know, I mean, who wouldn't want to sign up to that? But I think that we now see the implications of that,

because it turns out that original sin is a very democratic, doctrine because it means that we're all sinners. We've all got fault. And one of the issues I think with what's happening is that there are large numbers of people who don't feel that they're sinners, who feel that they're liberated. And ultimately this goes back to, and you see this is why I love ancient history. It goes back to the 5th century AD. Of course it does.

And it goes back to an argument between two theologians. Pelagius, who was this great Burley Britain, the very first British intellectual that we know of, who argued that it was possible for Christians to become perfect through their own agency. So you could, you know, if you're sufficiently virtuous, you can attain heaven through your own agency. And against this, you have Augustine, this kind of glowering, brilliant, North African bishop, who says, no, we are all saturated in sin. We're steeped in sin. We cannot get to heaven through our own agency.

We depend on the grace of God because we're all sinners. And it's Augustine's doctrine that wins out. Plagius becomes a heretic. And the 60s is a Pelagian movement because it's saying, no, we can become perfect. This is the age of equerathes. We can become virtuous through our own agency. And I think that the great awokening is a Pelagian movement.

It feels that it is possible for people to become virtuous and to become perfect. But the problem with that is that if you are convinced of your own virtue, if you're convinced of your own retitude, and you are convinced that it is possible to become perfect, then that means that you are in a position to sit in moral judgment on those you haven't. And I think that that is what That's what a lot of people Who find a certain quality of

Of moral self-satisfaction In The Awoken I think that that's what they feel And I think that what they're feeling What they're reacting to is the Pelagian quality of it They're Augustinian without knowing it Well the other problem of course And you make a great point

The other problem of course with that mindset Is that anyone who has failed to become perfect, is therefore not ordinarily human, but actually is morally deficient in some way. Yes, that's another factor. But look, Francis and I have expressed a lot of concerns about what we've described here as the work movement. Woke people might say that being described as woke as a sort of slanderous term that

it's inappropriately applied. And I wanted to put the counterpoint to playing devil's avocas somewhat. You've charted the historical context of all of this all the way. from the papacy in the 11th century, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and so on. These are all great strides in human history. Even the French Revolution, massive bloodbath, does end feudalism and we move into a sort of new world that we're all happy to live in. So are we sort of, are me, Francis, and everyone else who sort of opposes the woke stuff?

Are we these crusty old, you know, minor nobles in. pre-revolution in France who are sort of about to witness our own demise and that's why we hate it. Is that where we are? I mean, looking behind this is the idea of progress and moral progress. So progressivism. And people very rarely stop to think, well, you know, why do we have this idea? Why do we assume that there's some kind of moral arc that's going forwards? It's very hardwired.

Well, because of, well, I would say, and you'll correct me, no doubt, very shortly, but I would say it's because as we look into the last millennium, that's what we've seen. As we look into the last two millennia, broadly speaking, that's what we've seen. But, I mean, we can talk about technical progress, but the idea of moral progress, you know, where does that come from? Why do we now think that, say, slavery is wrong or whatever? And again, it's fundamentally comes down to Christian theology. And this is the weird thing that I can't, you know, I really didn't begin with any particular interest in Christianity. I had no particular interest in theology. And the kind of dawning realization, looking at the classical world, the pre-Christian world, contemplating how different it was, how strange, how many assumptions they had that seemed totally alien to me.

And I think, where do these ideas come from? And always, it's kind of like, you know, trying to find an itch on your back and then you get to it and you scratch it. It's so good. That's kind of what is that. is that strange theological ideas that cropped up, you know, centuries often millennia ago, continue to reverberate through. It's like, I think it was at Keynes who said that people who think they have got radical new ideas that are always in hock to some defunct economist. Well, our society, we're in hock to some defunct theologian invariably.

And the idea of progress lies in the notion that is basically goes all the way back to Paul, that there is a law of God. And for the Jews, the law of God is written on the tablets that got given to Moses, that in turn got given to the children of Israel. Paul says, no, actually the law of God is written on the heart. And how do we know what that law of God is? Well, the spirit illumines it and enables us to read it. And the further corollary of that is that the more we read it,

the better we become at understanding what it is. And in turn, unlike, say, Islam, which inherits from the Jews, the idea that you have a mass body of law that comes directly from God and therefore kind of is eternally expand. Christians have always thought that the law is illumined by the spirit. Therefore, humans can legitimately author that. And law itself will become progressive because over the course of time, human under the world. understanding of what God's law is will become better and better and better. The rules can change. Yeah.

And improve is the point. Yeah, exactly. Improve is the point. Yes. So slavery is the obvious example. So people always say, well, you know, why did it take so long for Christians to decide to get rid of slavery, that slavery was wrong? I mean, Christians always thought slavery was wrong, but in the same way that they thought

kind of disease or poverty was wrong. But they just kind of assumed that it was part of what it is to be mortal. It's part of the inheritance of the fall. But what happened in the 18th century was that, again, we talked about these very distinctive Protestant idea, understanding of the spirit, which is that you read the text of scripture, the spirit illumines you, and your understanding of what is written there will transcend the kind of the base meaning. So the Bible nowhere says to get rid of slavery.

Nowhere says slavery as an institution should be abolished. But Christians from that Protestant tradition read the scriptures and came to the conclusion that slavery was evil. And they did that chiefly because they were living in societies that had pushed the institution of slavery to a kind of hideously mechanized degree. So you could put up with slavery where it was two or three people You know In a village or something But where you've got Institutionalized mass torture and

And transportation The horror of it began to percolate through And to stimulate the consciences of people who were witnessing it And furthermore on top of that It became racialised Because slavery previously hadn't been racialised You know there were there were lots of white slaves in the early days of the colonies in America,

but increasingly because slaves came to be exclusively from African, that also served to unsettle the consciences of white Christians because they knew that, you know, they tried to kind of manufacture reasons why Africans should be enslaved and Europeans should be the masters, but they couldn't really do it. And so the strain of that ultimately enabled first Quakers and then evangelicals to convince themselves that God was against slavery.

And then having done that to agitate and push for its abolition. And the abolitionist movement really is the model for every socially concerned progressive movement that has followed since. It kind of, you know, in 1814, mass agitation across Britain forced the Foreign Secretary, Castle Ray, the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, to go there. And even though he didn't want to do it, it was kind of like Theresa May having to go and argue for Brexit, even though she didn't want to do it. She had to, same way Castleray had to, because he had this mass agitation going on behind him in London and across the country, to go and ask all the other powers, we've got to get rid of slavery.

You know, you've got to sign up to it. And, you know, that's kind of the model. And which of us would want to live in a world where slavery was morally acceptable? So, you know, it's, but at the same time, there is a kind of temptation, I suppose, where you can end up being in love with your own feeling of virtue. And that is also, you know, that's a temptation, I think, that people who are are pushing progressive causes always have to be alert to. And that's something that Christians historically have always been aware.

They've always contemplated that they might be sinners themselves, that to be overly convinced of your own virtue is in itself, you know, to cease to be virtuous. And I think that the collapse of doctrinal Christianity, the retreat of overt belief, the collapse of doctrines like original sin have kind of bred perhaps a degree of moral overconfidence on the part of people who feel that they are furthering progressive periods. 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. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality,

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And we're not going to explain how to spell the word trigger, because that would be patronizing. I guess what I'm really getting at, Tom, when I said, are we opposing this great progressive movement that's going to change the world for the better, is, is there such a thing as too much progress? I mean, I would argue that in the Soviet Union, the, the creation of the Soviet Union was in some ways inspired by very progressive ideas about equality, about emancipation of women. Actually, it was very progressive on that front for its time. But it ended up being, we know what. So can you have too much progress? Well, it depends what your starting assumptions are. I mean, to the Romans, the idea that, you know, many,

shouldn't be dominant over women, that Romans shouldn't rule and barbarians be subordinate, would have seemed grotesque. We are the heirs of very different moral assumptions. But by and large, the things that we tend to take for granted, that we just assume are right because it seems self-evident that they're right is because we are the airs of 2,000. years of Christian teachings on this. And this was kind of famously notoriously pointed out by Nietzsche, who detested Christianity because he, you know, unlike most atheists today, who tend to identify themselves with progressive causes, Nietzsche detested Christianity because of its moral teachings. He thought that Christianity had

kind of gelded and impaired the blonde beast, that the power and the beauty and the strength and the potency of the strong had been neutered by Christianity, that by elevating the weak, by kind of putting the slave above the master, society had been ruined and destroyed. And that was a perspective that enabled Nietzsche to see

that socialists, communists, humanists, progressives, all of them, basically, even though they may say that they were reacting against Christianity, in their fundamentals were deeply Christian. And Tom, we seem to have got into this habit. I mean, you touched on it when you were speaking there, of judging historical figures on present-day values. And I would just like to explore with you, why is that? Why do we suddenly feel the need to look at people like Churchill or Gandhi and go, you know, he's racist,

even though they lived 60, 70, 80 years ago? And obviously society at that point was completely different. Well, because we have a progressive sense of morality, we have a sense that things move forwards. And so our sense of what is right feels different to the moral standards that people held. you know i mean not just kind of you know 80 years ago but kind of like two years ago in many cases um and i think that um on top of that um there is there that there's a there's a kind of um well again it goes back to the the the the the the the reluctance to accept that everyone has imperfections you know no one is perfect and there is no one who is going to be morally impeachable.

And I think that it's kind of those two impulses have kind of snarled up and mean that there's a huge temptation to sit in moral judgment of people of previous generations. And it's something that really kind of, again, kicked in in the 60s where, you know, the long-haired teenagers would sit in moral judgment on the parents who'd won the Second World War. I mean, and we've all done that.

You know, that's what becoming a teenager was. Teenagers like that didn't really exist before the 60s. So we've all been teenagers in that society. We know what fun it is to sit in judgment on our parents and to regard them as, you know, square and whatever. And it's just the kind of acceleration of that process. But isn't it, doesn't it belize certain kind of arrogance? Because the reality is that in 100, 200 years time,

you know, future generations will look at what, we do in abject horror, you know, the fact that a lot of our clothes are made in the third world, made by people who have paid an absolute pittance, we factory farmed meat and all the rest of it? Yes, I think that the risk of hypocrisy is enormous. And again, that's always been, that's always been the problem with Christianity, is that, is that the threat of hypocrisy is always there. So, you know, there's, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a campaign to get rid of the statue of Thomas Guy, who founded Guy's hospital. Sounds like an absolutely dreadful human being.

Yes. So he plowed his money into a hospital. He was very committed to the idea of public health at a time when, obviously, there wasn't a national health service or anything like that. But he had investments that were in the South Sea Company, and the South Sea Company, in turn, invested money in slavery. So there are today, and I know because I've seen them, people who, when statues get toppled, take photos on their iPhones or film it on their iPhones. And Apple has been accused of benefiting from the slavery of the Uighurs in China. It seems to me exactly the same. the risk is, it seems, you know, the nature of the world that we live in, the insidious character of capitalism,

means that it's almost impossible to do something that is not in some way complicit in the oppression and the enslavement of people who are less fortunate than us, which is exactly what Thomas Guy did. Thomas Guy made money indisputably from a form of capitalism that we would now regard as, as moral. morally unacceptable, but he plowed it back into something that continues to benefit people to this day. And I think that we should allow his statute to stand because in a way, his example, the example of someone who was complicit in capitalism gives us the reassurance that you can do that but still achieve noble things that continue to echo into the present day. I think that that not to do that risks blinding our eyes

to the way that we are all you know we are all we live in a first world country we are unbelievably privileged by the standards of Uyghurs of people whose lives are being

turned up by the need to mine obscure metals or products in Africa or wherever we are all therefore We know, the comfortable lives that we lead. We are implicated in the exploitation and the oppression that enables us to lead our lives

and to go on our phones and to send out campaigning tweets going on about how virtuous we are. We need to remember. And I think that that is, you know, that's what I find in a way. You know, I've become a big fan of the idea of original sin. I think the idea that we are all morally complicit. We're all morally stained. We're all got to be aware of that. It's an incredible, powerful idea.

And isn't it the problem as well? It's that a lot of people in this country, because of our education system, also, you know, places like the United States, we are historically illiterate. We don't know enough about these subjects that we talk about. So we talk about slavery, and it tends to be, oh, it was a British who invented slavery. You know, oh, it was a British empire. They were the only ones that did slavery. When the reality is, is that I've said this before on the podcast, but if you wanted to get an done at one point, you needed slaves. Yes. I mean, I think that there's, there's a kind of,

it's not so much historical literacy as solipsism. It's an absolute preoccupation with, with us, with our society. So nobody, nobody doubts that an innocent man dying at the hands of a policeman is a crime. But is it so terrible that the response it generates should necessarily be greater than say the sufferings of a people like the Yazidis. And I went to Iraq in

2016 and visited sites where men had been crucified, where women had been enslaved or shot, and went to a refugee camp and spoke to a guy who had been away when ISIS turned up and took two of his sons, two of his daughters and his wife. And he said, you know, his daughters were still owned at that time, enslaved. You know, they were kind of not. You know, they were kind of nine and 11, I think. So he knew that they were kind of being raped every day. His sons had been indoctrinated.

So again, they were very young. They would grow up convinced that it was right to exterminate him, to shoot him. So he'd lost them completely. His wife had been raped by her owner. Then the owner had shot her through the head. It hadn't killed her, but had left her, you know, terribly damaged. So through a series of middlemen,

he'd managed to buy her back. And as I was talking to him, his wife was behind a curtain, moaning and beating her head against the concrete floor. Now, that's a level of suffering. You know, I had never experienced. I'd never been up close against anyone who'd suffered anything like that.

And I said to him, we were making a film about it. And I thought that maybe the film would have an impact raise the profile of this. And I said, I really hope that this film will have an impact. And he said, I don't think anyone's going to care. And I said, I really think it will because what you've been through, what your people have been through is just shocking, terrible. And I just don't think that people know. He said they don't know because they don't care. You know, you've got Muslims in Britain and Muslims will make the case for Muslim suffering, Muslim suffering in the Middle East. But there are no Yazidis. Nobody cares. And Muslims will make the case for the suffering of Christians in the Middle East. But there are no Yazidis. Nobody cares. about us. And he was right. He was right. We don't really care. We can't bear too much reality. We can cope with the suffering of people who are basically like us. So this is what we're really talking about then is self-flagellation on a national scale. I think that I guess that we that Black Lives Matter kicked in as with Me Too movement because these are things that

that we in our society perhaps can affect. So that's the, but, but the risk is, is that we, um, we come to see them somehow as being, um, more terrible than they are, more significant than they are, because in a way that then dignifies us. It, it keeps us center stage. It keeps us as the focus. It's all about us. And that's, I think, particularly true with America.

because America is, you know, it's the great cultural hub of the world. So what happens in America reverberates in a way that it doesn't with other countries. So there's a kind of, there's a kind of moral imperialism about it. You know, a dead American matters a million times more than a dead Yazidi. And why do you think that is? Is it just the fact that we connect with them because they're very similar to us? the same language, et cetera, et cetera. Or is it also as well because when we look at America,

we're instantly reminded of our own childhood experiences, the films, you know, the clothing, the propaganda, whatever else it may be? Yeah, I think that, I mean, I think a crucial part of it, I think all that's true. And I think that speaking English means that you are always being kind of tugged along in the wake of America's psychodramas. And a huge part of the impact of America's moral convulsions, you know, from the 60s right the way up to the present day,

is a kind of cultural cringe on the part of Britain. You know, we kind of want to be like America. So, you know, you'll get people here talking about the feds. I mean, it's, and it's kind of embarrassing. It's kind of embarrassing. And, you know, we, you know, and here when we talk about the police, you know, there seems almost a kind of disappointment that there are more armed police in the streets of Britain. And it's kind of the difference between, you know, Route 66 and the A303.

You know, British life is somehow less glamorous. It's smaller. it's and the moral causes in America are kind of more dramatic and I think that that means that ironically considering how how how very opposed to American cultural imperialism people on the left are at the moment they seem the most colonized by America and what does if we look through history which is your job. What does history tell us about not only the present, but also the future of where we are?

Well, it doesn't tell us because... Great question, Mike. Because there are kind of hard and fast rules that we follow through. Of course. Have you ever read Asimov's Foundation series? Yes, science fiction series where this guy is able to extrapolate hard and fast rules and work out exactly what's going to happen. And even then it gets messed up because you get this mutant

who turns up and screws everything up. But obviously, you can trace patterns. And so what I would say about the present is that looking specifically at the awakened, do we have an awoken future or will the forces of reaction kick in? What's going to happen? I think that helpfully or unhelpfully, there are two possible paradigms there.

One is the process that happened in the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation. Because what happened in the Protestant Reformation was that various, by the standards of early 16th century Catholic England, various radicals seized control of the commanding heights of power in government. and particularly in the universities. And although there was indeed a kind of incredible force of reaction, say Mary's reign, Bloody Mary, where Protestants got burnt at Smithfields and so on, that got overturned.

And by the end of the 16th century, the end of Elizabeth's reign, Protestantism had completely bedded in. The universities were completely, everyone in the university essentially was Protestant. You know, the poets, the thinkers, the politicians, the commanding heights were completely Protestant. And from that point on, England was basically irrevocably Protestant. The commanding heights had been captured. Against that, Protestantism in England had its extremes. And the extreme that the people always know is the Puritans. And Puritans ended up feeling that,

you know, it was a movement that ended up peaking and then fading and kind of dissolving into the cultural mainstream. There aren't any Puritans now. There are Puritan elements, perhaps. So I suppose the question is, you know, is the movements that we've seen over this decade, is it an equivalent to the Protestant Reformation, in which case the whole of society will be reconfigured and we're just at the start of it? And people who grumble about the woke are the equivalent of, you know, Thomas Moore, you know, or are they the equivalent of the Puritans? Are they a kind of spike of something that is more broadly a trend that will peak and then fade down? And I don't know the answer to that.

And Tom, you mentioned the Puritans and obviously, you know, you said there's no more Puritans, but amongst this new awoken movement, as you call it, surely there's shades of Puritanism in there. Completely, yes. And I think that's another reason why Britain is particularly susceptible to the kind of moral impulses in America, the moral revolutions in America, because ultimately the American moral perspectives, dramas, mythology, if you like, is ultimately comes from England. And there are two kind of main sources. One of them is the Quakers in Pennsylvania. And the other is Puritans in New England. And those are, you know, they still reverberate very, very strongly.

And it leads to all kinds of paradoxes. So there's much to admire about Puritanism. It's become a dirty word, but there's much to admire about it. And for instance, something we haven't talked about quite as much as Black Lysmer. matter, but the Me Too movement. The Me Too movement is founded on the idea that every woman has the right to control her body, that her body is hers to do it as she wishes, and that no man has the right to kind of use it as a physical object. And that in turn requires men to exercise self-control. And this is something that Puritans were very into. Pyryrgy

Britons were not opposed to sex. They were very into marital sex. I mean, very into it. So they were against sex? Absolutely. Absolutely not. I mean, they were very keen on finding ways to keep the juices flowing to long and happy married life.

Oh, really? Yes. In ways that, you know, we're often quite, you know, look at Paradise Lost and Milton's account of Adam and Eve in that. It's, you know, it's quite juicy. And, but what they were against was the idea that the predatory men should have the right to, you know, essentially use women as they wanted. And in the wake of the protectorate, defeat of Cromwell, you know, death of Cromwell, the overthrow of the protectorate, return of Charles II. Charles II, is a merry monarch.

He comes with the Cavaliers. The whole thing about Charles II is he has sex with everyone. And all the cavaliers have sex with everyone. and it's a kind of rape culture. And Puritanism stands against that. Now, what happened in the 60s was a kind of repudiation of that Christian idea that men should necessarily not touch women.

And so you have this great festival of sex, of which, you know, so you have groupies, you have Rolling Stone sleeping with underage groupies, and it's all tremendously cool. and there's a kind of licensing, a kind of sexual license. But the Me Too movement was a massive reaction against that, and it was a slamming of the brakes, and it was a return essentially to the Puritan idea

that men should properly exercise continents and self-control when it came to their relations with women. And what was fascinating about that was that America and indeed England remained sufficiently Puritan that most men accepted the justice of that. It kind of got enshrined as, you know, it got the whole reason that it had resonance wasn't just that women brought into it. Men did as well. Now, the brilliant, the kind of the moibious strip that we inhabit at the moment in our

relationship with this Christian inheritance is exemplified by the fact that when you had all the women's marches, I think in the kind of the first, was it, 26th, 2016, 2017, it was the kind of first... Post-Trump. Yeah, so it was after Trump's inauguration. The most dramatic demonstrators, the ones that really stuck out, kind of blaze of colour,

were women wearing red robes and white headdresses, like handmaids, from the drama series of Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale, which was a kind of riff on New England Puritanism. So they were dressing up in the costumes of characters from a parody of Puritanism to demand that Puritanism be reinstated. And that's kind of where we are in the moment, is that we, as societally, we have an incredibly conflicted relationship to this.

I think because we've forgotten the theological underpinnings of what it is and why it is that we think the way we do. So there's a kind of a kind of moral free-for-all. So let's say you flick a switch, you, Tom Holland, flick the great switch of human civilization and everyone suddenly becomes aware of this inheritance. What would happen? And how would that, what would that look like? I think, what is it that we need to learn? Okay, so I think, I think that, you know, another interesting question is why do we no longer need, why do we think we no longer need this Christian inheritance? You know,

Christianity's doctrinal Christianity has fallen off a cliff, particularly, you know, first in Europe, now increasingly in America. And it happened in the 60s, very precipitately. Suddenly people stopped going to church. People stop believing this stuff. And the decline has gone on, not in the rest of the world, but in Europe and increasingly in America. People just aren't interested in Christianity at all.

And I think that one of the major reasons for this is that it happens in the wake of the Second World War and the Nazis and the discovery of the Holocaust. And again, the question that perhaps is not often asked is, and I'm aware that this could be cut out and used what was so wrong about the Nazis? That's the title of the episode, guys. There you go. I was going to say, the only way this could have been worse, if he'd said the Kuala course, which some people say happened. So the Nazis, unlike, say, the French revolutionaries or the Russian revolutionaries, they were the first, the fascists, so muslim, but particularly Hitler, were the first

European regimes to repudiate not just doctrinal Christianity, but the moral fundamentals of Christianity. And the Nazis trampled down two kind of the the two animating, moral animating principles of Christianity. The first, the idea that the weak have a purchase on the strong,

exemplified by the figure of Christ on the cross. The cross is an emblem of Roman imperial power, but it's not the torturer, it's the man who's getting tortured. It's not the master, it's the slave. And so this idea that the weak, the oppressed, the suffering, kind of are closer to God than the powerful, is something very fundamental Christianity. It's there very clearly in the French Revolution. It's there very clearly in the Russian Revolution. Nazis completely repudiate that. They're like, they're with Nietzsche. They think this is contemptible and terrible. And the other thing, of course, is this Pauline teaching that there is no Jew or Greek. Nazis completely think that Jews and Greeks are very, very different.

indeed that the Jews have to be destroyed so that they can't infect the Greeks. So just to pause you there, to convert that into simple language, the core tenets of Christianity is that all men are created equal, more or less. Yeah. And that you want to overthrow the structures of oppression to use modern language, as opposed to creating a structure of oppression that is meritocratic, quote, unquote, where the strong have the whip hand over the whip. Exactly.

Whereas the Nazis, they overthrow both of those. They say some people are better than others, and those that are better should rule over the week. Yeah, and the Nazis don't do this because they wake up and think, let's be evil. They do this because they think it's the right thing to do. Yeah. For the German people, for the Nordic people, the Aryan people. This is the right thing to do.

Now, so that experiment implodes horribly, and the Western world has to live with the shock, which reverberates because of the discovery. of what they'd been doing in the death camps. And the impact of this, which really starts to kick in in the 60s again, and everything happens in the 60s, it's the great fulcrum point. It's the great revolutionary turning point. What happens is that whereas previously people would say, well, what would Jesus do and then do it?

We didn't need that anymore because now we ask what would Hitler do and we do the opposite. So it's still Christian. Because we regard Hitler as Satan. We regard the Nazis as the devils for Christian reasons because they trampled down Christian moral codes. But we don't need Christianity anymore. We've got Hitler. We've got the Nazis. And that has been a constant really since the 60s that, you know, fascist, Hitler, Nazi is the ultimate insult.

And so it remains to this day. So essentially, I think that, say, what's happening in America at the moment, there's a moral panic on the part of the right. And people can recognize that as moral panic because we know the Christians do moral panic. That's what they always do. But there's a moral panic on the left as well. And it's basically it's the same because their moral panic is that everyone is a Nazi. And what's the rights moral panic? What's the rights moral panic?

Well, the rights moral panic is that, you know, order is going down the pan and people aren't doing what they should do. The revolution is upon us. Yeah, the revolution is upon us. And, you know, we need to retrench and everything, you know, it's all terrible. But the left's moral panic,

or the hard left's moral panic, is that literally Nazis are waiting to take over the country. I mean, it's the same here. I mean, people saying Boris Johnson is a Nazi. You know, he's not, he's awful in all kinds of ways, but he's clearly not a Nazi. And, you know, you've got, you've got, you've got people roaming American streets and people are dying and people are celebrating, say, I'm not going to mourn the death of a fascist. There are no fascists, exactly as there were no witches.

Yeah. Exactly as, as, actually, there weren't any kind of, there weren't cathar heretics. the whole thing was kind of manufactured. And you get these, again and again through Christian history, you get this conviction that you get kind of university-educated progressive elites who get ahead of the vast mass of the people. So it happens in the 13th century. University-educated clerics have a progressive intellectually demanding understanding of what being a Christian should be about.

And they come to see the left behind, the peasants, the people who live out in the kind of the country around Albi, as deplorables. And they come to think that these are people who are worshipping some dualist God. They construct it completely. You know, there was no cathar heresy. It was complete invention of the inquisitors. But, you know, you look for it and you find it. Same with the witch craze. You know, there were no witches, but brilliantly educated, highly educated people, progressive Protestants looked around, saw that there were people who were still clinging on to kind of what they saw as antiquated practice modes of behavior and said, well, they're in league with the devil. You know,

these are people who, it's not, it's not just, you know, it's not that they are simply not as clever or educated as us. It's they're going out and they're kissing the, you know, the ass of the devil and swallowing his ice-cold seaman and therefore we would burn them. And essentially, I think what's happening now is exactly the same, that we don't have devils anymore. And so we can laugh at, you know, Christian inquisitors or Puritan divines who thought that devils actually existed or heretics existed. But I think that the idea that there's some enormous Nazi conspiracy in Western countries and that the Nazis are just waiting to take over is quite as much a fantasy. And it reflects the fact that for us, Hitler and the Nazis have replaced Satan

and the legions of hell. You mentioned the right, Tom. I just want to finish off this point before we move on. You said there was a moral panic on the right. The revolution is upon us all of this thing. Is there no, I mean, we've talked about the historical equivalent of the Protestant Reformation, this great change against whatever system had been in place before. Would the right not be right to be concerned about what's happening now as a sort of attempt to, certainly if you were to take some of the hard left of their word, they want to overthrow everything, don't they? Well, so the toppling of statutes, for instance, people say they're trying to erase history. Yeah, I think that's an exaggeration.

But to a degree, I mean, you know, the idea that you, that you purify society and you improve society by getting rid of symbols of what you're rejecting, again, is something that that has happened through Christian history. I mean, personally, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I wouldn't legislate for mobs to go around tearing down the statues of slavers, because I think in many ways the impact was greater for the fact that, um, that, um, that it was illegal. Um, but, you know, I, I, I, I, I'm perfectly happy to see that statue go, Colston statue go. Yeah. I'm perfectly happy to see Confederate statues go. I don't, you know, they were put up at a time where people well knew, you know, you know,

statue was put up at a time where people knew that slavery was wrong. It was put up at the end of the 19th century. The Confederate statues were put up, clearly in a kind of, I think, with a racist intent. So I don't have a problem with that. And so to that extent, I think that the toppling of statues does, is the expression of an attempt to rewrite history. And it's an attempt to rewrite history in a progressive way.

Yeah. I'm not talking about the statue. But it's also complicated by the, well, so, He was devastated by the way when the statue came down. I really wasn't. My concern is the same as yours, which is, is it done democratically or not? That's the only thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We have, so I was born in 1968, and I have lived through a period of moral and ethical change that I think is unprecedented in human history, the speed and totality of it. So I was born just after homosexuality had been legalized. And now, essentially, to think that homosexuality should be illegal is illegal. And the speed and transformation of that is enormous. And there were people on the right who were horrified by it and appalled by it. And it still causes problems for churches, for instance. But I think that one of the triumphs of, the triumphs of, of the spirit of the progressive is that there are now very few people on the right who would be opposed, say, to, I mean, I think, I think that the idea of gay marriage is completely pretty much universally. People on the right, you know, as a conservative prime minister who, who, who, who, who legislated for it. And I think a huge part of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the social issue is, is precisely a kind of, of societal shame that, that,

that society did what it did to gay people when, you know, there seems now, from our perspective, to have been no reason for it. It seems a terrible thing to have done. But equally, so I think to that extent, if you define people on the right as being people who want to defend tradition, no matter what, and I think that's a very old-fashioned nation of the right.

I mean, you know, I don't think conservatives conserve at all. Conservatives are often the most revolutionary people you need. But I think that kind of old-fashioned conservative, you know, the reactionary, if you want to say, I think reactionary is a right. You know, this has been a period of change like no other. And what a fascinating place to end the interview. We end our interviews with the same question every time. And of course it is.

Take it away, Constantine. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Well, I mentioned conservatives don't conserve. and recording this in the week when Extinction Rebellion have returned to the streets and I think that extinction rebellion

isn't adequately a rebellion against extinction because I think both on the left and the right we are ignoring the detail of what is happening

in this country's country, this Britain's countryside which is that we are as a people the most nature-loving people anywhere, if you judge it by a number of people who belong to wildlife conservation charities and yet we have the most ecologically denuded landscape in Europe.

We cannot lecture people much poorer countries on their need to conserve wildlife when we are allowing hedgehogs to plummet towards extinction when our rivers are being poisoned when songbirds are vanishing and this was a topic that people briefly woke up to you during the lockdown when suddenly there was no traffic and people could hear birdsong and people realized they valued and wanted it but now that blood is returned to the limbs of the economy that sense that we share this country with other species and that in a sense we're trust holders for them is fading again and I think that that's what we should be talking about I think that there is an extinction crisis,

but I think that talking about it in the broad brush terms that extinction rebellion do misses the fact that we need to concentrate on specifics. Do you're talking about conservationism? Yeah, I'm talking about the need for a mass national effort to say, for instance, to stop hedgehogs from going extinct. If I were prime minister, I would write it into law that there's an obligation on the government, to reverse the decline in hedgehog numbers.

And hedgehogs are bellwether species. If you reverse them, then you reverse other things as well. You have to put in, you know, you have to improve the environment for hedgehogs to survive. You have to make sure they're insects. Everything follows from that. That's what I would do. That to me is a terrible pressing issue that we don't talk about nearly enough. And it seemed like a kind of, you know, gimmicky thing that doesn't really matter.

But to me, it's fundamental. Well, the way the internet works, you shall henceforth be known as the hedgehog man. The Hedgehog historian is how you'll be known forever. But Tom, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to buy a book, it's called Dominion. And if they want to follow your many musings on Twitter, where do they go for that? They go to at Holland underscore Tom.

And is there anywhere else they should go? They should, you should all head to bookshops and buy Dominion. I was going to say, I expected you to say something about hedgehogs, but you did well to avoid it. Tom, thank you. you very much again and thank you for watching we'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode which go out on wednesdays and sundays or live soon francis which goes out on tuesday thursday friday and saturday and they're all at 7 p m uk time take care and see you soon guys