Within Reason - #64 Rory Stewart - We Are Addicted to a Sense of Crisis

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

Rory Stewart is a former UK Government minister, MP, and deputy governor in Iraq following the western invasion. He walked on foot for two years across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal in 2002. He was a private tutor to both Prince William and Prince Harry. He now co-hosts The Rest is Politics with Alastair Campbell, one of the UK's most popular shows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rory Stewart, welcome to Within Reason. Thank you for having me. Nice to see you. How are you feeling post two rounds with Sam Harris? That was extraordinary. And the problem is last time I grumbled about it, he insisted I did a second podcast. So the risk is if I grumble about it a third time, I'm going to be on for the third podcast. I felt it was interesting to do two rounds of what felt to me like 19. minutes, but I'm sure 90 minutes each, so probably three hours, but I'm sure Sam's supporters

will tell me that I've exaggerated that, and there was nothing like that amount of time at all. I mean, Sam Harris, as I sure, almost all your listeners will know, is an American neuroscientist, philosopher, and very prominent atheist. And I just did two episodes of his podcast, where Sam Harris was trying to get in, particularly in the second session, into his view that Islam is a... uniquely, I think, dangerous religion, and that it poses, felt like he seemed to be saying a kind of existential threat to British society, and this was the big danger lurking in plain sight, and I wasn't really acknowledging how much of a threat this posed to Britain, and I was trying

to defend it. The main point that I wish I'd emphasise more, though, when we talk about podcast discussing this kind of thing, and I mentioned it, but I didn't lean into it hard enough, is that neither Sam nor I are Muslims, neither of us read the Quran in Arabic, neither of us are actually fully up to speed with Islamic theology, and it's therefore a bit weird, I felt, for us to spend quite so much time with me defending Islam and him questioning Islam from that point of view. But actually, I'd be interesting here, what you thought?

Did you catch up on this podcast? I did. I listened to them both. Yeah, viewers might have seen that, you have one conversation where you speak a little bit about, I think you're talking about the war in Afghanistan, and Sam asks something about

whether failure there was inevitable because of the influence of religious thinking. And it's only afterwards, you made a comment to Hamsa Yusif on a separate. podcast saying that he was, he wouldn't let it go. Yeah. And I know you later said you regretted that and apologized to Sam, but it was clear that

there was a disagreement there, but it was only on that second one that you really, really cashed out. And the interesting thing for me was that given that you were talking originally in the context of the war in Afghanistan, you have Sam Harris on one side who has some study of theology. I mean, I don't know how deep it goes, but he certainly spent a lot of time thinking about religion, thinking about Islam as a religion, thinking about theology, the philosophy, the philosophy behind the religion. As far as I know, he's never been to Afghanistan. And then

Rory Stewart, on the other hand, who I don't know if you have any interest or training in theology, but you certainly have the travel under your belt in a way that Sam doesn't. And the thing that I found interesting was trying to work out whose expertise was more relevant to that conversation. And I wonder what you think of that. Like, what do you think is more relevant to discussing the question of the influence and potential threat that some people are saying that Islam or Islamism poses to the UK, do you think it's more helpful to know about the theology of Islam or to have travelled to the Muslim world? Well, I think that, I mean, let's take this question of what kind of threat Muslims pose to the United

Kingdom. I think it's really important to be immersed in the British context to answer that. I mean, I think the answers to these questions are not theoretical. They're very local in particular. And I think, you know, it's not so much that Sam hasn't spent so much time in Afghanistan. I just don't think he understands Britain as well as I do. And, you know, I'm British. I've worked in British politics for a long time, and being a politician's a strange thing.

I mean, you do, for better or worse, spend a lot of time knocking on doors, engaging with people, receiving emails, going on television, being challenged, being questioned. And my sense is that the really defining. aspects of Britain, the problems we face, are poverty, European Union, our inability to build infrastructure, sort out planning, care for the elderly, housing, and the question of a few, or I don't even a few. I mean, I didn't get into a few. The question of radical Islam is very, very far down on the list of my sense of what the major problems facing Britain are. And the only reason I get to that is I'm interested in your view on this, Alex, that I think that each of us, in different ways, particularly kind of intellectuals, get bees in our bonnet about one particular thing.

and we decide that that particular thing is an existential crisis that defines our entire civilization. So for Sam, you get a sense that that is Islam. For me, it might be, I convinced myself that Boris Johnson was an existential threat to Britain or a particular vision of hard Brexit. For J.K. Rowling, it could be transgender is the thing that defines it. If you're a particular type of Anglo-Catholic priest, it could be women bishops, could be the thing, right? If you're somebody who is involved in universities, it could be free speech in universities

is the number one thing. And each of us takes this one thing, and interestingly, in each case it's a different one thing, and imagines that this is the defining issue of our age, and that every sign of decay and problem is driven by this one thing. And when, of course, we try to talk about it, we can come across slightly as a crank because nobody else has invested quite as much emotional and intellectual energy into this issue as we have. So, you know, I feel this slightly. Somebody tries to talk to me about Boris Johnson. They quite quickly are like, oh, what's going on?

This guy's obsessed with Boris Johnson. Why does he keep telling me how evil Boris Johnson is, right? This is Matt. And I feel the same, you know, if you watch, I'll finish on this, but you feel, you know, when I listen to J.K. Rowling talking about her fear. of transgender people going to bathrooms. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, why is she talking so much about why is this so important to her? I mean, it's almost as though with all these things, it's not really the question of whether someone agrees or disagrees. People might actually have no views on these things at all and just be completely mystified by why this dominates

your life. I think there are maybe two reasons that that can happen. One would be ideology. if, I'm speaking broadly here, if you are a traditional feminist, you might start to see everything through the lens of patriarchy. If you're a socialist, you might start to see everything through the lens of class. Everything becomes about it. I think that does tend to happen, but another is so-called lived experience. That is, I'm sure that something isn't going to seem like an immediate and an immediate threat and an emergency to you. If it's not something that you're personally involved with. I imagine that Sam probably on a daily, if not hourly basis, gets emails and messages that are worrying enough that if they weren't so regular, you know,

he would send to the police on a regular basis. Now, it's difficult to know what that's exactly like, and it's certainly difficult to know what that does to someone's psychology, but it's maybe difficult to say that it's irrational to have that experience and not think that this is a unique problem, if not the only unique problem. And also, it's so difficult. It's so to empathize and have compassion for people who are going through that lived experience while also working out how one puts it in proportion. Of course. Well, that's the key here, isn't it?

And that's so difficult, right? So, you know, as an MP, I would receive a lot of abusive messages. My female colleagues receive even more abusive messages. Female colleagues who are black receive even more abusive messages. The question, though, for all of us is how we view that. how we view that. Do we see these things as representing some enormous problem in our society? Or do we say a few cranks are sending me messages? And actually most of these people who are threatening me, probably not going to do anything about it. It's a difficult thing to process.

Sam wanted to ask you about the case of Mike Freer, who the listeners may be aware, recently announced that he was standing down from parliament because of the threats that he received. Also, you were speaking recently on an episode of The Restis Politics about the Lindsay Hoyle saga, breaking parliamentary convention, causing huge scandal. And it seems at least because there were concerns that had MPs voted on this motion, they would have been put in danger or at least been open to these kinds of threats that we're talking about. Now, I'm sure that these threats come from all over the place, but I suppose what I'm asking is, can you understand someone who is a critic of Islam,

like Sam Harris, experiencing that? Do you think it's irrational to see that as something that's really important to talk about? I think irrational is a really freighted word, and particularly with someone like Sam, who puts a lot of emphasis on reason. I think it would be very dangerous to accuse him being irrational. But it's so important setting context and getting things in proportion. And not, you know, for example, I mean, look, what's at the heart of the debates around Islam at the moment? Why is it so raw in Britain at the moment, largely because of the Hamas attack on the Israeli response in Gaza

and marches in the streets. So let's take the marches in the streets. Is it irrational for people to feel that those marches are anti-Semitic or not? I don't know. I mean, I was talking to Ed Kessler, who's a Jewish scholar of interfaith dialogue, and he observed that he had Jewish friends

who went on those marks. marches and said I saw no signs of anti-Semitism at all, and other Jewish friends who saw the same marches and said, I experienced it as an anti-Semitic threat. And I think what he was trying to point to there is that this really isn't about a sort of an objective quantification or a debate about, you know, one example he'd give, he'd say, the, Ed would say, the placard, Palestine will be free from the river to the sea. He would say it's nothing anti-Semitic about it. But if somebody drives right through the middle of a Jewish neighborhood, waving the flag, honking a horn, screaming at people out of window, then maybe the sign does become anti-Semitic.

So I think part of the problem here is that we're not really dealing, and this is where the irrational, rational question comes in, really dealing with something that's sort of objectively quantifiable, we're dealing with tonal things. Do I think that Britain is facing an existential crisis? Absolutely not. I think this is, in historical terms, despite challenges, Britain basically has never been so peaceful, never been so healthy, never been so educated, and people are talking about it as though we're on the verge of some sort of civil war or societal collapse, which I think is ridiculous. Well, where's that idea coming from if it's so patently absurd? Why is it that people are

talking in that way? Well, I think I'm, you know, I'm guilty of doing this occasionally, too, in other things. It's to do with what you're obsessed with. Yeah. You know, I'm perfectly capable of implying that Boris Johnson represents an existential threat to the British Constitution, because he's proroged parliament, because he's broken the ministerial code. And of course, many of my friends will be very close to suggesting that Donald Trump represents kind of out-of-hit. Now, of course, step back for a moment, obviously Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler, right? Obviously, Boris Johnson is not enacting some version of the English Civil War.

So this is partly hyperbole, it's partly paranoia, it's partly emotion, it's partly the way in which we construct our world. And it seems to me looking at almost any newspaper over the last 100 years, we are addicted. to a sense of crisis. You know, I tell myself a nice story that, you know, in the 1990s and early 2000s, we were in a lovely age of a liberal global order and sort of Fukuyama, the end of history. But actually, if you were to read the newspapers in the period, people are absolutely terrified about umpteen different sorts of things. Yeah, there's always something that's about to end the world.

Yeah. It's either some religious fervor, maybe it's Y2K, maybe it's AI, maybe it's the environment. It's always something. Nuclear annihilation. Nuclear annihilation. Yeah, yeah. You know, in the 70s and 80s, lots of people really found it difficult to sleep. And not irrationally is the thing to point out, I think.

I don't think it's, I think it would be unfair to, I mean, we can look historically and say that, okay, it makes sense to be scared of these things. But on the whole, maybe our fears in each individual instance were slightly exaggerated. But I think if you spoke to one of those people, especially if they were. in that world and said to them, you know, like, I just think you're putting too much emphasis on this. I don't think it's causing the threat that you think it is. I guess it would be a hard sell and maybe that's why it's a hard sell to Sam Harris as well. Yeah, it's a very hard sell. And I mean, climate is a really good example at the moment. So there are a number of energy economists and engineers out there at the moment, ranging from Dieter Helm to Bathsafsmeil,

who are essentially saying that the notion that we're going to be able, technically, financially, to make a transition to net zero by 2030 is for the birds. And yet, if you were to say that to somebody for whom climate is the existential issue of our age, they would find that profoundly offensive. And they wouldn't be placated by figures. I mean, you couldn't say, yes, but this is the transmission capacity. This is the battery capacity. This is the intermittency of the renewables. This is the projected cost. These are the steps that would be required to achieve net zero by 2030. So it's not going to happen, is it? Because they will feel that this is something that is so important,

that all that talk is read by them as just being in bad faith. And the same will be true for people listening to me and Sam. I mean, I got a few responses on social media to my interview, in which people said fundamentally, you know, Rory Stewart just doesn't like Jews or Rory Stewart is compassionate,

everything except Israel. Now, I don't know whether I even mentioned those subjects. I might have done in passing, maybe in the context of giving other analogies. Certainly not significantly, yeah, that I remember. But that is how it's read. And that was how it's read by, you know, the first three or four comments, I think, on Twitter. And other people will say, I was very disappointed that Sam put this guy on the show because, obviously, Rory Stewart's not very smart, and he's not very good at arguing,

whereas Sam is obviously a much more logical, it's all over. What's going on there? I don't know. I mean, you know, maybe an element of truth in this, but it may also be that actually we are perpetually fooling ourselves, particularly people who listen to these kinds of podcasts, into thinking that we are these hyper-rational kind of, I don't know, we're all sort of doctor Spock, and the whole thing is going to, yeah.

Well, one thing I notice is that, that sometimes I do debates or whether they be in front of an audience or maybe just in a sort of podcast environment. And a lot of the time you share the footage. So you'll, you and your opponent will both have access to the footage and you'll both uploaded on your respective channels. And it is amazing to look at the comment section on either. Because if all you had, if you were a historian trying to discover what happened at this, you know, this great event. And all you had was the comments. Depending on which one you read, you would think that it was a complete steamroll.

And I think that that happens not just on these big debates. It also now just happens on a Twitter argument. Yeah. And in such a way that sometimes the footage actually only goes out on one of the platforms. So that's all you get to see. Yeah. And I think there's also something interesting, which you will benefit from, Sam will benefit from, and I will benefit from my own podcast, which is that you end up with sort of super fans who really, really want to back their. person and believe the best about that person and anyone who's questioning that person

or has annoyed that person is the enemy and needs to be destroyed. And that's also interesting. I mean, how is it that in an age which appears to be in many ways, kind of skeptical of authorities, so maybe the idea of is that Twitter and Facebook destroyed the old hierarchies and authorities, the television news anchor and the newsman. How is it at the same time, you sometimes see things that feel almost cult-like, where figures begin to develop immense sort of authority and followings. Well, people talk about social media as if it's the new public square,

and I think maybe that was true and is true in a sense, but because of the way the social media algorithms work, it's less like walking out into a public square and being suddenly in front of all of these voices, it's more like walking into some kind of walled garden that has been designed to keep out people who, it's not necessarily people who disagree with you, but people who you aren't going to engage with. Because a lot of people pride themselves on, I'm constantly engaging with people I disagree with. I'm constantly watching podcasts that I disagree with. But there are different dimensions of disagreement, right? And there are certain kinds of disagreement. You hear it all the time when

people say things like, well, I'm from the left, but even I think this free speech stuff has gone too far. Right. And it sounds like this great aisle-reaching attempt to bridge a great political divide. But really, they probably agree on almost everything else. And it's unclear what the word left even means in that context anymore. I think a lot of that's going on. So people can fall themselves. I mean, some people are just happily in their echo chamber and will admit it. Some people believe that they have cultivated a space for themselves in which they're constantly are considering alternative ideas, but they don't realize that that itself is cultivated by algorithms which are more complicated than we could even hope to understand. That's right. And I think,

I mean, just as an observation on human nature, we may say to ourselves that we are really good of being challenged but actually most of us find it unbelievably different to really listen and to really have our minds changed about any issue um you know it would have been rather wonderful if in this conversation that you began this podcast with this sam harris conversation if i the samurai had actually come out with our minds changed but in fact what happens is you get 90 minutes of quite a courteous dance uh in which neither of us actually comes out to saying, you know, I fundamentally reconsidered my position. Yes.

You're right. I'm wrong. But then having said that, you'd probably be, you might still have the conversation with Sam Harris, but you'd probably be less enthusiastic to do so if you weren't aware that there's an audience listening, and that's who you're trying to convince. I mean, I looked at some of the social media reaction as well, and I did see, I saw a post somebody saying that they think, and it was on Sam's own, like, Reddit, I think. And it was somebody saying, you know what, I think, I think Rory's actually right here.

And it was really interesting how, when I went to read that post, at the beginning they'd done a little edit where it had said something like I didn't realize that this was going to cause such a scandal here so they'd obviously posted this thing and then whatever the comments said I didn't read that far

they felt they need to go back and be like whoa whoa whoa everybody you know everybody calmed down and it is fascinating especially because like you say there are communities which pride themselves on let's challenge ourselves you know let's put ourselves in front of ideas

that we don't like I think there are people who are good at doing that and people who are good at seeming like they do it. I also think it's healthy as a public figure to just occasionally sprinkle in a truly unexpected viewpoint, just to make sure your audience aren't in complete agreement. Sometimes somebody will come up to me and say,

I agree with everything you say, it's great, and I will start listing off things in the hope that we can find something that they disagree about. So what would be a common thing that you think somebody might disagree with who generally agrees for 99% of what you say. With me? Yeah, yeah. It depends who I'm talking to.

So sometimes I'll say, if I'm talking to like my atheist audience, I'll say that I think there are good arguments to the existence of God. I think that they're not all completely, you know, ridiculous. Some of them are actually genuine challenges and don't have good responses. And it's not that, you know, they just obviously fail. It's that we have good arguments in both directions, something like that. Sometimes talking about the non-existence of free will, as I see at these philosophical points people are made a little bit uncomfortable with. but there are so many different areas that you can usually find something.

I wonder, I want to ask you the same thing. Are your sort of regular listeners? What would they be surprised to learn that you think? There's a problem, I think, which is that we self-censor. So I think one of the things that is interesting in the engagement between Alistair and me.

It says two of us. And the complaint at the moment is that we agree on too much. But what you're missing there is the unspoken, profound kind of cultural disagreement that underscores the whole thing, that my listeners are focusing on the sort of surface statements, which are often that we share relatively progressive liberal views. we want to see what we can do for poor, we're interested in local government, we're interested in citizens' assemblies, compulsory voting, partial representation. So it sounds like we're agreeing on everything, and we all think Boris Johnson is terrible.

What would be more troubling for listeners is to understand that I am in many ways a conservative. And what that means for me is I have a huge, a passionate, complicated, deep, rich, weird attachment to the Church of England, the monarchy, the House of Lords, the Unwritten Constitution, weird bits of the 18th and 19th century landscape, whole elements of British literature, that my sense of what my culture is, of what makes life worth living, the kind of man that I'm trying to be, will be radically alien to people. And it's hidden from them because we're talking about what we agree on,

which is, you know, we think the NHS is a good thing. And we, you know, want to reform the NHS. The stuff I've just mentioned is almost incomprehensible to Alastair. And literally he would hear that and he'd be, well, what are you talking about? I don't even, what do you mean you've got some weird attachment to the Church of England and the monarchy? I don't even get my head around that, right? But in some sense, I am much more than him, you know, better understood, yeah, I don't know, maybe not, but in some small ways, more like a 19th century figure, right?

He would need to have an entire historical imagination to understand my form of nationalism, my form of commitments, my form of imagination. And how much of that, that attachment that you have is an emotional attachment and how much of it is down to a sort of reasoned analysis of how you think government should be run, talking there about, you know, the monarchy, the Church of England, the House of Lords, Constitution. I guess it's sentiment creeping in. It's so difficult to know because, of course, the great thing about being the air to that kind of a tradition is a whole scaffolding of intellectual thought has been put up around it to justify it. So, you know, any number of very, very serious thinkers from Edmund Burke onwards have put a lot of energy into explaining why this sort of bizarre inherited constitution is the best

of all forms of government. And so, you know, I'm very fluent with those arguments. But it would be a bit like you engaging with me on theology if I had a previous faith. Yeah. You know, I could have the faith, but then when talking to you, I could provide incredibly beautiful, well-sought-through arguments for Christianity. But the question is, if you then said to me, well, is that really an intellectual commitment or is that an emotional commitment, how could I really answer it? Because I have, you know, 2,000 years of Christian theology that I can deploy from St. Paul

through Augustine to kind of create. Yeah. And there's so much of it. It's sort of impossible to say. that you'd never get to the bottom of it, right? And the same is true, you know. So I parse it out. You know, I'd say, for example, the House of Lords, look, the last thing we need is another chamber of elected politicians. House of Commons is what it is. But look at the US, gridlock between Senate and Congress.

You would challenge the legitimacy of the main house. The answer to the House of Lords is precisely to have higher quality appointed people who scrutinize legislation. And my problem with it, is that Boris Johnson keeps putting in completely unsuitable people, right? So the answer to it is not to elect it. The answer is to clean them out and appointed on merit. And what I want to see is distinguished university professors, astronomer royals, Nobel Prize winners, great judges, generals, community activists.

I can expand and provide a richer, more modern account of who might be in it. But in the end, it is a group of exceptional individuals drawn from different areas of life who are there to provide a check to the elected politicians. But how do I distinguish that from the fact that I also quite like the fact that they all wear funny robes and live in a room with stained glass? There is something to be said. It is a bit ridiculous. There's no getting away from the fact that it's all a bit ridiculous.

I watched a bit of the coronation, and I must say my experience of seeing Charles take up the orb and the robes was a bit like to me, because most of, for most of my life, I've seen Prince Charles wearing suits. Yeah. You know, I see him going around doing his engagements. It would be as if I suddenly saw Rishi Sunnet, though I'm used to just seeing on TV in a suit, suddenly dawn, adorn these robes. That's sort of how it felt. It feels a bit ridiculous. But at the same time, I recognize that there is something to be said for these psychological cues that you're doing something serious and thought out and traditional that connects you to history. And of course, you've put your fingernails on something really important, which is it only can remain alive so long as there are enough people in the culture who are prepared to give it the space.

We're getting close to a world in which you can imagine you and an entire generation beginning to get so far away from this stuff that it looks more and more bizarre. For me, the king moving behind a screen, stripping off his golden robes, putting on a very simple white surplus, actually the clothes of a kind of Byzantine farmer, a very very simple course clothes and being anointed out of sight has incredible meaning for me. I love its incongruity, the strangeness of it, that you get a sense that ritual at that point stretches into metaphor. You know, I know you've been a few people on the show who've talked about the murder

of the Canaanites in the Old Testament. I think the Old Testament also has that quality, where so often what's happening is so bizarre and out of keeping and inexplicable. You know, why does, how can one venerate Jacob when he treats his brother in this fashion? How can one take David seriously when he sends Bathsheba's wife off to be killed so that he can sleep with her? I mean, for me, of course, it's precisely those moments. which seem most plausible, most attractive because they're so obviously at one level indefensible. I will agree with you on the weirdness and perhaps even the indefensible quality of many of the things that we're talking about. But I think where we part company is what

this means. It seems like you're happy to accept that mystery and just swallow it wholesale And that's that. I suppose I predict that the monarchy will become a serious national question. And I think that right now, if you go out into the street and you ask people, what do you think of the monarchy? Most of them say, yeah, sounds great. Whatever. Yeah, I like the king, sure. But I would imagine that if you went in the street in 2011 and asked people what they thought of the EU,

most people would sort of go, oh, yeah, sure. I mean, sounds great. Yeah, I like traveling. Awesome. It's only when it becomes a national conversation when it's put into mainstream debate, that people begin to actually debate the merits. And I predict that when that happens, because monarchy relies on this, this mystery and this incongruency, and its very existence is almost defined by how strange and abnormal it is in a modern political world, do you see in that environment where that debate erupts onto the national scene. Any hope for the future of the monarchy? Well, I think you've put your finger on something very important, and I think there are two things there. One of them is the way

in which by suddenly making something central to the political debate like Brexit, you can make something a problem that wasn't a problem before. And revolutions happen very quickly in countries, and they happen very quickly because within a matter of weeks, something that Nobody thought mattered, suddenly matters much more. I think the second thing you're pointing to is the particular traditions of argument and rationality in our culture, which make it quite difficult to explain or defend things that don't fit into those categories. I mean, I love a line of Yates where he's praising the conservative tradition in Ireland, and he says, Burke, Goldsmith, Barclay of Clyne, all hated wiggery, that levelling, rancorous, rational

sort of mind that never looked out of the eye of a saint or out of a drunkard's eye, all's wiggery now and we old men amassed against the world. And I think what Yates is pointing to there is a danger in the modern world of that leveling, rank or rational sort of mind, that it's, there's a, our great flaw is, and it's partly to do with the domination of money, a very sort of quantifiable, you know, and giving example from civil service maybe, to give you sort of practically example. One of the things that we've been struggling to do is to appoint ambassadors who are, really good at getting out of the embassy, building strong relationships with people from other

people's countries, and developing deep linguistic and cultural expertise. Why? We used to be able to do it 40 years ago. We can't do it now. Why can't we do it? It's because we have now become absolutely obsessed with transparent, accountable, predictable promotion processes within the civil service. And we've struggled to be able to objectively quantify, the skill set that's involved in being able to do that part of the job. You know, we're very good at making people sit an IQ test, which we can mark objectively and explain, you know, you've got 130, and unfortunately the other person got 135,

so they're going to be ambassador to Saudi Arabia. What we can't do is say, well, actually, to be honest, Alex, you're great, you're really bright, but I don't think you're going to be a brilliant ambassador, because I just don't think you've got the people skills to do that. You would then say, well, prove it. Now, how do you measure people's skills? How do you, and there we struggle. Yeah.

And generally what we then do is we just give up on the unmeasurable, and we fall back onto, again, to go back to Yates' essentially, this leveling concept, which is to... And I... I'm trying, you know, let's look at the biggest issue probably in Gross and Britain today, if we get onto politics, which is planning reform, right? We can't build HS2, we can't get attempts tunnel built, we can't get any houses built, you know, we're supposed to be building 700,000, house the year was building 100,000.

Why? Because we've got these very complicated planning rules. So from the point of view of an economist, this is ridiculous, get rid of the planning rule. build the houses. We'll have a lot of growth. Everyone get a house. What's the problem with it? The problem is, if we get rid of our planning laws, we're going to end up with really ugly buildings destroying our landscape that we will regret in 200 years' time. Our cities will look like American cities, which are often in many parts of the United States are horrible. But can I quantify that? Can I explain to this generation that wants to challenge the monarchy?

the idea of beauty right the idea of the sanctity of a landscape can I define why I think Boston has been destroyed and London hasn't why I think Paris has not been destroyed but Chicago is a catastrophe no we don't have the shared values we don't have the shared language we don't have the shared experience

to discuss that stuff anymore it makes me think that this is why the concept of the ineffable evolves in the human psychology. I mean, it seems quite strange that it's only relatively recently in the course of human history that it's become virtuous to begin criticizing that which is believed without evidence, that which is treated as sacred. It's now sort of to the popular mind, the idea of believing something because it's sacred is anathema to what the mind ought to be doing. It seems like we've we've shifted from the virtue being dogma and ineffable at the cost of our reason. And now the virtue is reason to the end at the cost of

what inevitably is going to tug us out our dogma and our emotions and our that ineffable feeling that something's off. I'm sure that I think CS Lewis wrote in changing his mind towards your side of things on this, that he realized he was being asked to deny that which was most real to him, beauty, meaning, that kind of stuff. That's what he was being asked to deny in order to accept what was least real to him, numbers, arithmetic, and logical laws and scientific laws. And it just seems so unnatural to human nature. And I guess rationalists pride themselves on overcoming their animalistic human nature to be rational in this way. But That's another area where I think, since we were talking about what my followers might,

or my listeners, I should say, might disagree with me on, I suppose my openness to the view that, yes, there are important truths that cannot be syllogized, that cannot be known fully rationally. I just don't know if the monarchy can be one of them. You know what it reminds me of? I've spent some time with people who advocate for the traditional Latin mass. And this is experiencing, I think, an increase in popularity. A lot of young people in particular are attracted to this old-fashioned mass, said in Latin, and...

Which they barely understand. But that's kind of the point, because you're not supposed to understand it, because you're supposed to be in the presence of mystery, you're supposed to be in war. And that's kind of the point. And it does seem to me that part of the attraction of this is just that when you go to one of these churches, you know they're taking it seriously. You know, they respect the tradition, they respect the liturgy, whereas you go to some other churches that are playing fast and loose with it, and it just doesn't feel like you're participating in something meaningful. Now, I completely understand that. And every time I've spoken to someone, they say, look, I'm saying the same mass that Thomas Aquinas said. Brilliant.

And I understand that. But at the same time, I cannot shake the fact that it is a historical contingency that Latin is the language. Why not Greek? Sure. The language is a New Testament. Why not Aramaic? The language of Jews. Latin, because the Roman Empire was dominated.

And although I completely understand all of these arguments, it just seems like a interrupt for a second. So for a conservative like me, contingency is absolutely central. We're not denying contingency. We're celebrating the accidental, the contention, the particular, the historical. Sure. There's a, there's a, you know, let, I don't know how much this room. your viewers can see. But I love this room. And one of the things I can imagine if you lived

in this space that we're sitting in is that you could become very taken with, for example, the stains on the ceiling, the decaying curtain, slightly bleached floorboards, the sense of things crumbling and decaying. Now, this crumbling and decaying is completely contingent. It's accidental. It's not been planned. There's no justification for it. I can't provide any rational justification why I like that curtain. And you could come along and say, I am a curtain and I have objectively got a more beautiful curtain. And I could say, well, actually, I've been living with that curtain for 50 years. Yeah. And it got profound meaning to me. And you'd be like, well, this is ridiculous. It's just a bit of stupid cloth that you never managed to get

fixed. It's a moths got at it. Right. And anyway, you know, it's not what you thought it was. You thought it was a curtain that your grandmother was given by the Grand Duke of Romania. But in fact, it turns out that your mum got in a secondhand shop. And it was made in the 1950s in, you know, wherever, right? So it's not even what you think it is. But I can still feel these things. So I think, you know, to some extent, I would say on the Latin mass, or the monarchy, that as a conservative, I have any problem with the fact that it's completely random that it's Latin, just happens that Thomas Aquinas spoke Latin, and people were speaking Latin and Latin mass 50 years ago, and therefore I'm part of that tradition. And you can be right, could be Aramaic,

could be Greek, meaning at all, right? But the point is, the tradition, the same as my regiment in the army, right? We go around wearing kilts. Somebody can say, well, the kilt's invented. Your tartan's invented. It doesn't go back to the early middle ages. And the fact that, you know, you get punished for cutting rather than scooping the Stilton at lunch is just stupid, right? Yeah. But of course, with us, it becomes kind of important that during the First World War and the Blackwatch is being bombed in the trenches, people are still really focused on the fact that they're cutting knots.

scooping the stiltern. So you exist in this kind of absurd tradition. So I think that this is part of the problem that conservatives struggle to communicate the sense of absurdity, incongruity, contingency, and humor that's part of tradition. Do you think that that is part of what it means to be a conservative, is to sort of lean into this slightly absurd, slightly intangible element to... This is why Yates says, you know, all-hated wiggery, leveling ranker's rational sort of mind, never looked out of the eye of a saint or out of a drunkard's eye.

I mean, he's deliberately choosing the drunkard. Who is the drunkard? The drunkard is sort of grotesquely a responsible figure who's wumbling around inebriated and is seeing the world through these sort of beer goggles. And that's part of the conservative tradition too. But what I suppose he's finding is the saint in the drunkhood represent human virtue, human villainy, human self-sacrifice, human ill-discipline, against which you have the kind of computator, the kind of modern economist, the tech world is full of this. I mean, I think one of the problems when I engage with people in the West Coast of the United States, because they often come from an engine.

engineering background. I sort of feel that they haven't really, some of them worked out how to live. They've worked out how to run very successful businesses. They've worked out how to make an incredible amount of money. They've even worked out how to develop technologies which are literally changing the whole world. But I'm not sure that there is comfortable living as to take a grotesque example. I'm going to take a deliberately grotesque example. A headman in an Afghan village. A headman in Afghans is offensive to every aspect of modern liberal culture. Chauvinistic, probably illiterate, unhealthy, living in a mud hut, existing in a pseudo-feudal

environment, totally cut off from the world. And yet, the lived experience is that that individual has a degree of dignity, confidence, generosity, courage, which is almost unimaginable in some of the most successful people in our civilization. Because we've sacrificed what we naturally care about for what we've rationalized that we should care about. Things like technology, progress, money. I don't know. I mean, I think it's partly that the... The man in the Afghan village has three advantages we normally lack and maybe can't recover. Very profound relationship to a very particular static community of people,

people that you see every day and that you've grown up with, a very, very close connection with nature, because these are rural communities where you are out in the fields all the time. And in addition to the very close commitment to nature, a very close connection to God. So, this individual is finding their mental health and their meaning through friendships, relationships, through engagement with the natural world, and through their relationship with God.

And on the basis of that, they can find things that go beyond themselves. I mean, what makes the extremes of generosity and the extremes of courage that I encounter in Afghanistan is a sense that some things are more important than their life. Some things are more important than their material well-being. Now, some of that's quite screwed up, right? Some of that is kind of tribal honor culture. Some of it is completely self-defeating, some of it's pseudo-suicidal, some of it's quite violent, lots of things are very disturbing about it.

But it's also profoundly impressive. I mean, to see somebody basically willing to give their last money, their last food when they're starving to show that they care about a stranger. Yeah. I wanted to see if I can find a discord here because we were talking about tradition and connection to the past and historical contingency and I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense. I think it's incredibly compelling. I do think there are areas where it works in areas that it doesn't though. So what people can do is, you know, is, you know, you know, They can lean in to a certain kind of architecture or a certain system of government because

maybe they just have some respect for the tradition. Maybe they think that it's likely to work. It's like Chesterton's fence. Let's just knock it down. What I think people generally can't do is just make pretend. It is quite explicitly pretend to believe something that they just know ain't so, as Mark Twain says, was the real danger. and that's kind of why I wanted to bring you back to the monarchy because it seems to me

I can understand that we could convince a generation of young people because I asked before whether there's any hope you think for the future of the monarchy and I want to dig into that a little bit because like I mean I don't know I feel that you could explain to a generation of people the value of having a representative figurehead the value of tradition the connection to the past But in the same breath, they're asked to believe that this person has the right to rule, has the right to be the head of state as uniquely now.

I mean, it seems like monarchy is very much the strange system of government, where democracy used to be the experiment. You'd have to get people to actually believe that, surely, to keep the monarchy going. You couldn't just appeal to this beauty and tradition. Maybe this is the sort of third possibility. I agree with you. You can't do a make-believe, right? You can't do a situation in which... And forgive me, but when a man is having chrism oil rubbed on his chest,

and I'm supposed to believe that that endowls him with some right to rule... Well, I don't think you... I just can't believe it. I don't think you could possibly believe that, no. So I think this is difficult ground, because on the one hand, I... You know, a huge admirer of the individual that's the king. I think King Charles is a very serious, does a very good job, represents very good things. And, you know, maybe I've got personal blind spots because of my admiration for him.

But my guess is the monarchy isn't quite like religion. It doesn't actually require you to... make-believe or pretend something that ain't so. I can imagine a world in which in 50 or 100 years' time the monarchy persists without anyone feeling that the chrism is anything other than a traditional gesture. That with no more meaning than, you know, first footing in Scotland at Hogmanet,

where a black stranger turns up with a blackhead stranger, up with a coal on your doorstep. Or a bit like what Protestants did with the Eucharist. No longer literal transubstantiation, but they still do it. Yeah. Yeah. So you might just say our shtick is, this funny family, will continue to be our head of state. We're not going to, this is me imagining 50 hundred years time. We're not going to make any claims at all as the legitimacy of it. But of all the possible solutions we might have, an elected president, having a kind of, you know,

a Biden or a Joe Trump, a Biden or a Donald Trump figure, or having a strange descendant of medieval aristocrats presiding and not getting involved in politics because they're not a politician, they're not an elected politician, what they're really doing most of the time, if you look at their day, is going to visit towns, visiting charities, opening things, giving medals to community activists. I mean, they're enacting and taking on a role of, but it's a sort of, I think you'd move to a world in 500 years ago,

was this is a kind of role that the public has outsourced to a particular group. And the reason why that's possible is that they don't actually have daily power. They're not intervening in the politics of our lives. I mean, that's why I think it's incredibly, the reason the monarchy survived in Britain is that it's retreated totally from politics, that it has these, theoretical powers, which it can't actually really exercise anymore, because if it were to say, oh, no, I think on the statute book, I'm allowed to declare war on someone, then it would be over.

What do you think would happen in practice if, say, the king refuses to sign off on a bill? Because I don't like the look at this. This is the problem that the queen faced when Boris Johnson wanted to paroch parliament. So she will have received advice saying that what Boris Johnson was trying to do was probably unconstitutional. And ultimately the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional. So she would have been very, very reluctant to sign that off. But she did sign it off. Why did she sign it off?

Probably because at some level she judged that she just cannot challenge the elected prime minister, that basically the prime minister has the power. and that the question of the right or wrongness of what he did is between the prime minister and supreme court and that in the end i'm afraid the monarch but i mean again you know this is sensitive ground of people like me who great release the monarchy but the truth the matter is that a monarch has not in our knowledge refused to sign off at any piece of legislation in living memory which which means that what is their signature you know what one one hesitates to say a rubber stamp

But you might hesitate to say that, but to me it seems like there's no other description. Yeah, exactly. So then what is the head estate? The head of state is a formality? It's a ceremonial function. It does a lot of things. It brings a lot of joy to people. It moves around the country.

You know, I saw this in Cumbria. When David Cameron would turn up to my constituency, I struggled to get 10 or 15 people in the streets. When Prince Charles turned up. 1,500 people are there waving flags and people cared much more about him visiting if there was a flood than David Cameron. Now, why? I don't know. But do I need to worry about it very much? If he is providing a consoling experience to people who've been through a flood, you might think, well, that's not right. People should have more respect for the prime minister because they voted for the prime minister. Sure.

But they don't. But they don't. Because 70% of people think, I didn't vote for this guy. or if I don't vote for him, he's not doing a good job. And anyway, he's not. Yeah. So that was the politician who I don't really want to have in my house. I guess it's more difficult to just wholesale, be happy to see someone represent the country. If they have political views, because suddenly if they do something you don't like, you're unable to just say, yeah, you know, there's our symbol. But I think priests sometimes maybe play this role now.

I mean, when people get married in the church or have a funeral, or, you know, or. the local vicar potters up and knocks on your door. I mean, do you not see there much in the way that you might see a king, that you might think, well, actually, I don't really believe in God, but I'll give the guy a cup of tea, and he's probably quite well-intentioned, and I don't mind him opening this. Well, sorry, some people do, right? I mean, you could be a very, very rational atheist.

You could be like, I am outraged that this vicar is opening the sum of fate. You know, what right has this person to do this? You know, this is all a lie. There is no God. This person a white collar has no right to turn up on my village lawn and give prizes to children. I think if I started to see a priest being given the, being assumed that that priest represents the country and therefore me. I mean, I think American listeners will be simultaneously, completely understanding and yet baffled by the monarchy because Americans love the monarchy. They think it's this wonderful, this quaint part of British culture that, I mean, we're told it's, it drives a great deal of our tourism.

I think that's a dubious notion. But, you know, I understand, like, they're obsessed with it. But at the same time, when you start talking in terms of reminding people that this is our head of state, that they perform ceremonial functions, that they sign off, that bills do not pass into law unless they're signed up by this person. I think Americans are often baffled by this. But that's completely right. I'm married to an American. And so what I mean says that priests, if they started enacting similarly, similar roles, I think I'd look at it with a similar battlement.

I think America finds it completely incomprehensible. I mean, you can only see the New York Times reporting how desperate they were to see the British monarchy brought down when the last queen died. Anybody they could find on the street who was a Republican would immediately be written up because they assumed this must be the dominant view. And if they discover that 85% of people in the United States, and Britain are relatively happy with the monarchy, they conclude there's something wrong with the British people, that we're actually demented in some way. But that's, of course, because

Americans are completely unable to see their own blind spots, their own weirdnesses, of which one of the most obvious is the vision of themselves as this unique shining city on a hill, uniquely embodying liberty, equality, democracy, bringing order and justice and freedom to the world. And just how oddly that sits with sort of everything we know about American history domestically and internationally. And, you know, we can look at that, right? I go to New Mexico. And I think about what, you know, white Americans did to Native American communities or indeed

what they did to the Spanish community that was there, right? And then I hear the same Americans talking about the great replacement. They're very worried about Hispanic people coming into the United States, right? When probably the same people saying that may actually be in a territory that was Spanish, right? But can they see those incongruity? No. Because it's not actually part. I mean, this is again where the whole thing becomes a bit weird.

doesn't it? Because why is it the American often doesn't want to acknowledge that or see that? It's because our nations are, we grow up with them. They have an aspect of family. They're things we take for granted. We don't really ever look on ourselves as others see us. I mean, what is the French presidency? The French president is kind of playing out of a kind of fantasy of Napoleon. It's every country when we step back, you know, what's bullfighting in Spain? And again, I agree, there are Spanish people who are against bullfighting. But the rest of the world is completely against bullfighting, right?

99.9% of us think this is the most... Baffled by it. Yeah, completely horrifying thing. Whereas even if you're against it, you might not be baffled by it in the same way if you're tied to that culture. And I suppose that I'm rationally baffled by the monies. monarchy, but at the same time, I get it in the sense that I've spent so much time in this country and so much time with people that do like the monarchy that I get it on that level. I was wondering to finish here. I mean, we've spoken about the monarchy, and we've spoken a tiny little bit about Boris Johnson as sort of an embodiment of a bad politician. But I wonder, not talking about the monarchy here, but talking about a prime minister. What sort of person are we looking for?

Because you talked about the house of lords and the potential for appointing, a wide variety of thoughtful and specialized people. Talk about the monarch as a apolitical representative of the country. Prime Minister has a unique role in having to be the person with the real power. What kind of person are we looking for here? Are we looking for someone more representative? Are we looking for someone with a specialized interest? We're looking for a philosopher king. What do we want as prime minister?

I think what we're missing is seriousness and integrity. And that needs to be balanced. I mean, it's imbalanced with the fact that you've got to get elected and you've got to cut deals. So this person won't be a saint. They won't be a philosopher king. You know, they could feel like Gordon Brown or Theresa May, right? But they need some sense of vocation. They need to be able to say, where do I want the country to be in 10 or 20 years' time?

really, where do I want it to be? Am I prepared to really listen to people? This is where Liz Truss was terrible. She might say, you know, in 10 years' time, I wanted to look like Singapore, but she wasn't really interested in a thoughtful conversation with people saying, this is why this won't work, this is why that won't work, it's a daft thing to do. Boris Johnson, again, had a form of optimism, which was actually a form of pessimism. I don't make Britain great again, right?

but there's no detail, there's no content. You can't talk him through any steps because he's not engaged with reality in that way. He's engaged in the fantasy. So what you want is seriousness and what goes with that, which is a form of radical humility. I mean, it's a form of being able to

see the limit. of your power, firstly, and secondly, most important of all, define the things for which you would be prepared to sacrifice power. You know, what are the things that you would never do, even if it cost you an election to refuse to do them? And that's what I feel is lacking. I mean, I feel we've commodified everything so much that the only thing that matters for so many politicians is winning an election, and that I have colleagues I feel in the Conservative Party

who literally, if they thought it would guarantee their seat, would bring Nigel Farage in as the head of the Conservative Party tomorrow. Or God knows, Tommy Robinson, the leader of this far right party, come in. Because all they care about is winning, right? And I feel this when I talk to Republican, Congress, people, and senators who say to me, yeah, I'm personally, I agree with you on Donald Trump. I think he's terrible. But 85% of my votersite Donald Trump, so I'm going to support Donald Trump.

I'm going to endorse the big lie. This is not good enough. We talk about politicians being corrupt, being dishonest all the time, and I think, you know, truthfully so, do you think it is that politics corrupts people, or do you think it is that politics attracts corrupt people? I think it's more that it corrupts people, and the way in which politics corrupts it is our whole culture corrupts it, our voters corrupt it, the newspapers corrupt it, the way you and I respond to politicians actually undermines them. it's very difficult for them to be serious, very difficult for them to be brave, very difficult for them to be merciful, very difficult for them to be truthful, because we don't really reward those things. We reward the list trusses, the Boris Johnson's. Look at the Labour Party. The Labour Party's probably about to be the next, not probably certainly going to be the next

government's country, but they're not telling us what they're going to do. Why? Because they've calculated, it's too dangerous to talk about any ideas or any policy at all. Or they're electics, it might lose a relation. Yeah. But it's an outrage. I'm asked to vote for them, and I literally cannot see what is your economic policy? How are you going to do any of these? I want to be able to judge you, and you won't tell me.

And somehow we sort of accept this. Oh, it's all kind of clever game, isn't it? Oh, you know, it's in brilliant of Kyr. He's got a, you know, Ming Vars strategy. He's not to take any risks. He's going to win the elections. He's cunningly not telling us what he's going to do. Yeah.

But it's not good enough. I mean, they need to have a sense of democracy and their vocation. They need to say, listen, I'm standing for election to be prime minister. If you vote for me, this is what I'm going to do. Not not I believe in justice and equality and rights and the Tories are a bunch of horrible people who introduced austerity and it's all going to be better under me. Literally, what are you going to go? going to do about the NHS? What are you going to do about planning? Are you going to build HS2, aren't you? Do you want the fastest growth in the G7 or not? Why do you want it? Do you really

believe in this green growth stuff or not? I mean, what's the deal here? Who am I voting for? Transparency, directness. Integrity. Integrity. It's the relationship between words and action. The consistency between what you say you're going to do and what you do. Now, look, I When I talk like this, I sound like a massive hypocrite because I'm, you know, somebody's been a working politician, so I understand how messy and crappy it is. But everything has become instrumentalized. Let me try to give an example, right? In contemporary politics, if I were to do this podcast with you, I would have literally only two things in my mind. I would be trying to sell my book, you know, I would be saying politics on the edge or how not to be a politician in the United States, links in the description.

Links in description box every two minutes. So I would keep saying, in politics in the edge, I say this. Because I'd be thinking, okay, Alex has got some people who follow them, maybe they'll buy my book. Success will be I flog, you know, 500 copies of my book. Or I would be thinking, what am I trying to get out of this? You know, what is my, what message am I trying to land? How is this going to change public perception? How is it going to define me?

What's the one takeaway line that people listening are going to take from? And if I approach your podcast like that, I miss everything that's valuable in it. I miss any chance to listen to you. I have missed any chance to think. And it miss any chance to say anything. And I ruin my afternoon, right? instead of coming and having a really enjoyable, interesting conversation, which actually energizes me for the day, I come out shattered thinking, oh my goodness, you know, maybe I didn't talk

about my book enough, oh dear, maybe that thing that I said about Israel is going to get me in trouble, or maybe am I going to be in trouble with the king because I didn't defend the monarchy energetically enough? Or maybe his lesson is so horrified to hear a conservative, maybe I should have been more kind of... Yeah. You die, and every politician is encouraged by our context of voters' media to die inside. We become these completely instrumentalized human beings who are living every minute of their life thinking about what am I going to get out of this?

How do I get a vote out of this? How do I get money out of this donor? How do I lamb my message? How do I get another eighth of a percent in the opinion polls to make it of it? Well, I'm glad I caught you. while you're not a politician, because it has been a thoroughly enjoyable conversation. You've mentioned it already. The book is Politics on the Edge if you're in the UK, How Not to Be a Politician in the United

States, and links really are in the description. Rory Stewart, thanks. It's been fun. Thank you very much. Lovely to see you. Thank you.