Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins in Conversation

I am the first CFI lawyer and I am the privileged person to sit here between these two gentlemen and give a brief introduction before the

conversation

and I fully appreciate that neither of you are here to listen to me, so what struck me is that It is very interesting that you have three English people sitting here on stage in what is possibly the least English place? We in England have Blackpool, we have Skegness and you have Atlantic City in Las Vegas. And there's an impression that Americans have of the British and the people you think of tend to be Churchill and the royal family and then the cast. from Downton Abbey and Benny Hill and are they serving you in that?

So a Monty Python and that's Britain for you? But Britain etre, Britain and England, are countries with a deep history in both science and the arts. It is the country of Sir Isaac Newton of Charles Darwin of Faraday and on the outside it is the country of Shakespeare of the Brontë sisters. more money from Stanley Kubrick from the Rolling Stones from JK Rowling And what we have here are two of them that the majority of the people of our country bought the most in those two fields in the field of sciences and in the field of arts for a side.

On the one hand, we have Richard Dawkins, who, as you know, was the leading evolutionary biologist of his time, a science educator. Unsurpassed, the former Oxford University professor for the public understanding of science. The author of books that have changed lives like The Selfish Gene of the Blind. watchmaker and The God Delusion And then we have Stephen Fry, who described him above, and I've never heard a person who fits this Renaissance man thing better. The actor in a film on television on stage the author the playwright the radio The game show host and if I haven't seen Qi I started watching TOI The director of Norwich City Football Club But more than that, this is a man who has educated, a man who has educated us in humanism and humanity, who has educated us in history, in LGBT rights and those mental health problems. concerns and In the natural superiority that comes with being English.

This is wonderful and I am privileged. My mother has said that she will never speak to me again because I am sitting here between these two gentlemen. So I'll pass this on to dr. Dawkins now that phrase effortless superiority actually never really comes from Bailey or College Oxford Oh. The effortless superiority that marks Bailey. Oh man, well, Steven is no Bailey. Oh man. Turns out she is, but um, I got a little worried about the same thing Nick was talking about, she has to be a terribly English party and it worries me, but that not only are we both pro-Oxbridge, but all three of us, I.

I think Steven and I also went to very similar schools. In fact, I was misinformed by neighboring schools about these our rival schools and I searched the web and it is exactly the same as our depressing one. And you talk about it in your autobiography and it brings back horrible memories. Not that I was there, but very similar memories, but I also have the feeling that you come back even though you were expelled. You remember it with a certain nostalgia. I do, I do and I picked up some things that Nick said and you mentioned also about English and yes, many consider me to be a quintessentially English phrase that is used frequently and I find it interesting.

Also the 20th century figures you would use that phrase the most about are probably Winston Churchill and me, Christie. Who typifies absolutely everything it is to be English and in both cases like me they had foreign parents. They were only half English. Churchill was half American, as you probably know, his mother was an American woman. Agatha Christie's father was American. My parents are very English, but my mother's family was a bit European Jewish and I think sometimes they didn't belong to a culture. especially one that is established and naturally replete with its iconography of oak trees and Robin Hood and Shakespeare and cricket and castles and royalty and so on, but which has a family that was embarrassingly foreign and came from Israel and New York bringing gifts and doing those things That No Englishman could stand the talk about food and Should the eat group eat what you dirty?

I'm not talking about eating. It's like talking about going to the bathroom. It's not possible to do it, so I was filled with shame for the part of me that wanted to be totally English and say, you know, pretend my foreign family doesn't exist and a big me. -awareness about what it was like to be Asian. To move on to the topic at hand, I was sent to boarding school when I was seven years old. So I was about 200 miles from home, which in English terms is the entire length of the country. So my parents seemed to see me off very early so that I could stay there and the day was marked by religious services like in these schools and then again in the public school, and I felt immensely interested and immensely moved by the music, the architecture, the liturgy. and everything to do with religion and I wanted to be an Anglican priest, but I liked high Anglican.

I liked the music I liked the smells I liked Ritual I liked the feeling of belonging. I loved it all and it got to the point where I actually went to see the suffrage and the Bishop of Lynne in Norfolk didn't quite know what to suffer Gunn Bishop is one of those words. It only applies to the bishop, you never meet a suffragette, a teacher or a neurosurgeon, but anyway he was a suffragan bishop and he chatted with me and when we talked about theology and so on, and then he asked me a question about God. and I said, oh, well, that's my only problem.

He said, go on, I said, you know, I've never had God talk to me or talk to God or have any real sense that something like that could exist. Because the beauty of the church is that it is man-made. The anchor church in particular was built in a very short time by Archbishop Cranmer and 10 to 8 to some extent and I liked it. I liked what it stood for, I liked its encouragement and kind of tolerance as a church, but the idea of ​​there being a God just seemed absurd to me, and in my enthusiastic affection for the Merkin Church, I had forgotten that actually believing in God It was still a small part in the case of the Anglicans but necessary And he advised me to come back when God had spoken to me, and I'm still waiting But but I really don't know how you feel about Richard, I know that sometimes they accuse you of not knowing what enough about religion, which is silly because I know you know a lot about the history of Christianity and other religions and sometimes people who told me, but you love box masses, you know that.

I love its mass in B minor. You love the dough. You know it's in Matthew and this is John. You love so much. We can't artists you love Mozart's Requiem, you know, whatever you love Michelangelo and you love yeah. Who wouldn't, but there are several things you can say about that. One is, obviously, the church was the big employer and the Renaissance era and then they had artists and they didn't have anyone else to paint for, but the other thing he said was that the fact that religious art can be beautiful doesn't makes religion true. For example, without slavery, we would never have had what is called black spiritual or gospel music.

But I think that means you have to believe in slavery. It's just that sometimes, you know, there are certain ways that humanity organizes itself that artists can produce great art and it's one of those peculiar ideas, I mean, after all, most of Renaissance art after 1520 was more likely. be based on Greek mythology and you don't ask whether or not you know what and and another office like that believed in Apollo Yeah, yeah Speaking of Greek mythology, of course, you'll let your latest book I think it's on at Miss Awesome and just sign up. I enjoyed it a lot.

Don't you learn more lessons from that? Do you know that they are very unlikely to be top-notch commodities? Don't Aesop's fables exist? I definitely agree. I mean, there's no doubt. You can look at many Greek myths and say that they have tropes, what is known in the business is the Eames myth, which will be a first familiar form of words for you and which is repeated both within Greek mythology and indeed in other mythologies. but particularly in Greek mythology again. And again, you have like the myth of Phaethon. You know, who was the son of Apollo, he hit Helios, the Sun God, who demanded from his father that he would be an absentee father and felt guilty.

He demanded to be allowed to mount the charity of his son and having granted it. Anyway, he couldn't turn back and Phaethon gets on the chariot. And, of course, he approaches the Sun and the earth freezes at the poles. He dives too deep and deserts form as he burns the earth and eventually Zeus. he sees that he is destroying the planet by moving the Sun up and that's it and he takes it out with a lightning bolt and you probably know the story of Icarus, also, of course, the son of the dangerous inventor who made the wings.

In it, he told his son. Icarus that he shouldn't get too close to the sea or you know the tips of his wings would get caught and they would get soaked and soaked and he would drown or he shouldn't fly too close to this because the feathers were attached. with wax that melted and he collapsed and, of course, collapsed. And there are a lot of Greek myths along those lines, that if you exhibit what you might call arrogance, a people who stretch themselves too thin, in fact, the Greeks for stretching themselves too thin are arrested and the Titans were the race of a sort of second race of divine beings. , the Titans overextended themselves and I think the Greeks were aware that they were the first civilization through all sorts of accidents, including the arrival of the alphabet and, you know, richly linear.

B. And then the Greek alphabet, they were the first nation to believe in progress, to believe that, so to speak, a father should surpass a son, a child should surpass his parents and And that's why I believe that the myths Greeks are full of things like Phaethon and the Young people tried to fly too close to the Sun because the Greeks had Egypt as an example. They looked across the Mediterranean and for three and a half thousand years the Egyptians had invented nothing new. Three and a half thousand years and an extremely prosperous civilization had basically remained the same as other civilizations as far as we know around the world.

They had settled down. This is how we built a pylon. This is how we make a lintel and an entablature. This is how we worship. That's how we move the food, that's all Mm-hmm. Now we have a viable life and it could last four thousand years, but the Greeks with incredible speed changed everything, they changed the way they carried out their politics to the deems or city-states. They changed the way they used voting and they changed the way they had juries. and a system of justice, mathematics, algebra and logic, even Pythagorean rules about music and harmony, all these things appeared at an incredible speed and the arrival of a literature and it was better, but by Browning, I think in summary.

This Greek is stretching. This constant feeling that there is more you can discover, more, everything is there to be discovered and ignored, this is the word for you to discover from within your own experience as human beings and through experiments with the world and Browning, as he said Browning, that the body of a man. the reach must exceed his reach or what is the sky for? And I think Plato and the Greeks understood the idea of ​​heaven, even though they talked about God in heaven. They knew them exactly as a model, as an idea. There is an ideal for which we strive and Greeks constantly strive for something better.

They don't think you know that, as the novelist Simon Raven said, the genius of the Greeks was in this understanding of eschatology, you know, the idea of ​​a life after death and it was put forward by Sinon, I think the Greek who said anything. A single person who tells you that he knows what happens to a human being after he has died is a liar or a fool. It's a simple and obvious thing to say, but the Greeks had that and it's mysterious to us because we did it tribally and for hundreds of years. For almost a thousand and a half years I have struggled to have an idea so simple, honest and open to anyone who tells you what happens after your death.

It's hotter or it's alive, reads Stephen. I have read you saying somewhere that we must believe that there is no life after death. Oh yeah. And because we really live a very bad life unless we believe it. Because if we think that this is this. It's just a preparation. Yes. Yes, I remember Mel Gibson surprising me before he surprised us for other reasons. Well, I know. But they were interviewing him, this is in the '80s, at the height of his young stardom, when he was virtually the coolest man on the planet and I had no idea that he belonged to this particularly stern Catholic section in Australia that his father was a member.

But with the interview said, I think I read somewhere Mel that you believe in life after death and in and Mel Gibson said well, I know, I know one thing for sure. There has to be more than this. What, even if you were a regular guy? To say oh, yeah, this is America, this is Australia, this is Europe. There is the Lake District. There are the poles, there are the deserts, there are the tropics. There are the bushes, yes there are units in the galaxy, but there has to be more than that, surely, but not only that you are a star that can have as much sex as you can eat andas much money as you can demand, and you feel like it's somehow not enough, you know, and this idea that, of course, we have all kinds of obvious ways of knowing that religion, you know, uses the afterlife and the threat of something better as a way of allowing people to force people to put up with what they have.

But yeah, I think even on its own terms, if you believe in an afterlife, its limits are this life. You know that you have to, as Oscar Wilde said, taste the fruit of every tree in every orchard in the world. and some will be bitter and some will be too addictive and so on, but if you and I often say to religious people, I said, you know, I would say well, suppose, you know, a Calvinist appears through the pearly gates. and a certain Pedro says then what did you do with them? Cannabis sativa, the plant there.

Oh, I never tried that. No no. The idea of ​​how much effort went into making this plant so special. I'm not saying you shouldn't have anything, but you didn't even try. What about wine or not, no, no wine, touch my lips, motherfucker? Do you know how complex the grape is, unique among all fruits? You don't have to add sugar to make it so extraordinary and you didn't even bother to try it, it's such an extraordinary idea. I mean, you know, Pete, you should be on your deathbed, you should go, damn it. I never. I drank milk from the armpits of a Nepalese virgin or whatever.

Never, I don't know, that wouldn't be my particular thing. Some people. You know, I never climbed Kilimanjaro. You never know, there are so many things. That is so beautiful. I once asked the professor of ancient history at Oxford if the Greeks really believed in their gods and, to my surprise, he said yes. They definitely believed it. It's very interesting. I mean there are gods that are so colorful. I am referring to the twelve Olympian gods and there were many others. I think they used names of primordial gods that had no personality and believed in them as abstract words.

Aristotle uses the Greek words a lot for the cause of necessity and guilt, for example necessity Ananka. It is a very strong idea in Greek philosophy and Morris Doom. Those who do and literally means that it is not a word that is used in English, but it used to be used in the portion assigned to it. Yes, and they were the first that we know of because they were the first to have writings. But approaching the question of free will in very sophisticated ways, which is a very hot topic right now, as you probably know, very few philosophers now believe all scientists.

There is something called free and in a way they don't talk about it because it has been embarrassing because if you have to explain it to people that doesn't mean that Responsibility doesn't exist and it doesn't mean that We don't try to live a good and virtuous life according to our lights and others, but it's kind of an intellectual point about being pretty clear. There is no such thing as a free well or store and as poor as we are, we can. We will do what we do But we cannot will what we will do there is a very important point and the Greeks were very interested in that and that is why they had this idea of ​​the destiny and the need of Europe, their portion, to which they gave a kind of divine permanence that these were things that were there that were out of our control and I think that most of human history and most of myths and religions has been a matter of refining our understanding of things that we cannot control, so that when our ancestors were really alone and without any buildings or agriculture yet as an idea We were hunter-gatherers like the Frazee.

Their children looked at the mothers and fathers and said why is it that pushes the leaves off the trees? It is something that is out of our control. I know that if I pick up a stone The stone is collected, but how does it happen every year? What is this fire that comes out of a mountain? What is water that falls from the sky? These are things we have no control over. And so it is very natural that our ancestors gave them personality. It's the first thing we do. It is as much art and literature as religion to make a story out of these forces.

And then you name a mountain god. that roars fire? Do you name a cloud god? And the Thunder and you have a God of nature and of growth and of the harvest and one of decay and you do rituals of that and well, then little by little you begin to understand them and each one that you understand the God disappears. But this is what enemies do and they and I understand it but believing that Zeus turned into an eagle to oh no I don't think Aristotle Plato believed Oh I'm sure they didn't but they did the ordinary The Athenians in The street believes that and I suspect they don't, but I don't think they did.

I think they conveniently said as much as we know as much as children's fairy tales do. There was a time when men and women walked with elves and fairies, we say, you know, and there was a time when men and women associated with gods, the Greeks said that when the gods would cut, the gods would come down in the form of an eagle or whatever. or they would turn human beings into flowers. And many of these etiological myths are poorly described to describe the causes of things and some of them have deep insight and some of them are just sweet stories like, for example, when Zeus and Hera got married.

Had Zeus said that someone or any creature could find the best food for the wedding? They would be granted a wish and then you imagined this kind of Gordon Ramsay situation in these You know, the TV chef things were all these trestle tables and all these doubles, you know, a young Haran had created a kind of jelly to They ate and they try that and then all the other animals and they come to this little pot and Hiro tried this, it's delicious and Zeus tried. So this is very good. What is it about the little creature called Melissa that has done it?

He says there, please. I've done this. It is a very special process that I have invented. I go from flower to flower and pick up all the little pieces. of nectar and then I put them together. But it requires a lot of effort. But anyway, I've made this pot of it, I call it honey and Zeus is here and I say, well, you've won the prize. There is no doubt about your desire and Melissa says well, it takes a lot of effort and days and days and days to make the smallest amount of my honey and one swipe of Foxy's Pour and one lick of a bear's tongue and all my work can be undone And you have given the scorpion a weapon and the snake a poisonous bite, but I have no weapon So can you give me a deadly sting so that anyone who tries? stealing stealing my honey is fatal and Zeus is furious and there is a little sound of thunder because he thinks it is such a selfish desire.

This is very good, it says that you will have a fatal sting. She screeches in effervescent triumph, but it will be fatal for you and as you know a wasp can sting as many times as it wants but but a bee sting has barbs a bee sting that is melissa is bee honey, of course, and that is why they have They have to take it out and take out its guts after it has stung you and they kill themselves and that was a punishment for their selfishness. But, to please you, as Richard will know, the order of 2 to which bees and wasps belong is known as Hymenoptera - - entomologists which means bridal wings Anyway, that's just a sweet story.

That is the typical mythical story. But I think there are also profound ideas. So I'm sure you've all heard about the muses that the nine sisters lived through. And who represented one of the arts to each of them? Chapstick or to dance and a clear victory and so on. But what's so interesting is that his mother, my father, was used, of course, because he was bitten correctly with his seed, but his mother was one of the original Titans, she is one of the first twelve of the Titans whose name It is Mnemosyne, a man called Watson.

Hey, that's a hard word to say and it's just the Greek word for memory as in mnemonic and So the Greeks are saying what Joseph Campbell would call myths. He called them public dreams. Which I think is pretty bro, you know, you called them the collective unconscious, but whatever it is, whether it's the public dream of the Greek people or their collective unconscious. They said that all arts are daughters of memory. And I think that is extremely true. It is a compressed poetic idea that artists reassemble. Recompose the learned experience. The felt emotions. The true memory of what it is to be alive.

If you like the beauty of human culture, by chance a people can come up with a myth, a way of personifying complex ideas, abstract ideas, but let me ask you about this. I've always been fascinated by where they come from. It's as if we believe that somehow these things emerge from the annual coordination or struggle and the collective unconscious, or someone must have sat down and invented it in the first place. It just emerges. You have a joke, right? Where did the joke come from? Having told that joke and the campfire or something that some read means that one is supposed to be around a campfire.

Yes. I have an I am because one of my best is language too. I think it's very, I think it's, you know, it's clear that around the fire You know, it's cold there are animals, wolves howl and children who can't sleep and have a full stomach and you want to tell stories and everything is mysterious and as I say you want to explain the things that the Greeks had this advantage that, oh, no other myth until that time and many later did not have it and that is that, as I say, they had established themselves as a people like the Doric people Iommi and people, the different people of the peninsula of Greece, etc., and writing had come so that Hesiod and Homer could write so they could have pedigrees and family histories and chronologies of the gods that had never happened. before, but who first came up with them and their names?

Well, you can be. You can be sure they all came from further east. They follow the development of humanity and civilization as we currently understand it and, as you know, they really seem to arise in what they call the Fertile Crescent of the Greeks. because between the rivers the Tigris and the Euphrates and the Greek between the rivers is Mesopotamia so is that area what is now Iraq? It is a great irony that the same place where Isis has taken down so many of those archaeological reminders of where humanity began to become civilized to the extent that it could ever settle down and have roots and cities etc., and that that is where the first of those gods, as far as we know, then moved west from Tire and Lebanon.

The myth of Cadmus that comes from the beginning of the alphabet comes from there, it was the Phoenicians. It was Cadmus's brother, Phoenix, who founded the Phoenician Empire and it's I know, I mean, you know, you'll never really know because a lot of what we need to know comes before we write it down or even carve it. But we can guess, let's move on to the modern world now that you've said it in defense of the royal family and Surprisingly, you've said that you're a staunch monarchist and one of the points you made was that, well, there's a queen who has no power.

Officially, in some ways it's good for the Prime Minister. They have to go every week. Yes, and as she explained herself to the monitor and if only Trump had to go to Uncle Sam, yes, it's true. Exact. I did, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that I said exactly that a couple Fourths of July ago I said, you know, if Uncle Sam was a living person, this incarnation of the United States, and it just occurred to me. When I was writing the article that Uncle Sam's initials were USA, he made it so obvious.

So there with his knobby knees and his wispy beard and his striped top hat and his vest with the stars and stripes and everything for everywhere and and He is an embodiment, a personification of what America is supposed to be. He's hardly a real human being, more of an idea, and that's what a queen is. That's what a monarchy is not. I mean, of course, somewhere there's a real person with real DNA sitting in a lab and everything else, except the Queen, as far as we're concerned, is an imago image, sort of you know, a constant, a constant embodiment of an idea, not a person, and that's why when people meet Queen Anne, they are actually great friends. of this festival and the incredible Randi are Penn Jillette and Teller, you know Penn & Teller, who won this town over as magicians and great skeptics and rationalists, and I was the emcee of this literally 20 years ago because I'm doing the Same thing in three days for his 70th birthday.

But it was the Prince of Wales's 50th birthday and he was watching the show we did at the London Palladium and Penn & Teller did some magic and then the curtain came down. The Penn next to me said oh no, what happens now? We have to meet the princess, right? That's it Yes, he just comes Then later everyone and the doctor said well, I have to call myself his majesty. I said well, no, he's not the monarch. Technically, it would be his royal highness if he wanted to come. But don't do it. Annoying, I just haven't called you by pen once since we were chatting the last day and you don't call people by their first name, right, Nick, right, Richard?

You know, it's like, don't bother, don't think it through and I have to bow because I'm an American, we don't bow. He knows you're American, haheard your voice, you may not know I am. The American doesn't speak but he knows you're American. Honestly, it's fine. Well, they're going to put me in the Tower of London. Oh, for God's sake, I assure you it's okay. Anyway, Prince was in love. You've seen? Ah how are you? Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. He reaches Penn, who tricks the Royal Majesty of him. High King. The Prince seems a little taken aback, but he's used to it.

It happens all the time it goes on and on and then of course Penton Smith said, I betrayed my country. Why? How did they do it? What power do they have? And it is that power that exists and is not the same as a pretended religious thing. It's something we understand in smaller ways. We know what the power of a brand is in the courts, in the corporate world and in a much more concentrated, extraordinary, almost mystical way, the power of a brand like a monarch is such that I have seen furiously anti-monarchist people II who in the presence of the cream would melt a little and if President Trump wasn't the head. of the State But, he was the servant of the people like a prime minister who?

He has a head of state who would be Uncle Sam and, if there is light, the Prime Minister has to come every week no matter what. The Prime Minister has to return to the Palace and have an audience with the Queen. You'll probably remember this if you've ever watched the Crown series. When the cream first ascended the throne, his first Prime Minister had to be Winston Churchill, who had to appear in his presence and introduce himself as an old man, not very well physically, introduce himself. in her presence and explain to this young woman that she was the symbol of her country and she took charge and has been doing it ever since?

Now, if Trump had to do that, he had to go to some colonial mansion on the hill where this figure is, our Uncle Sam was well now well now young young young. Mr. Trump. What have you been doing this week? And And Trump had to bow his head and he bows. He said not because he believes in monarchy or some invented nonsense that has to do with the divinity of Kings, but because he is basing himself on the idea of ​​a country. He is there. serve. I think that's mentally helpful. And that's where I think myth and ritual and ceremony have a real place as long as you know what they are, because if you really believe you're a god or you know it.

Yes you know, as long as you understand that the most important thing is that it is the Wizard of Oz operating. the levers but nonetheless the power that it has over us is what we know as evolutionary biology and so it's a hugely growing field that we're starting to understand a little bit more about how it evolved in terms of our feelings as well as our cognition and I'm sure many of you have read some of the popular books that have been around in the last twelve years that deal with the issue of our contingency of our understanding of anything at exactly the moment when the world is disintegrating and the power of the UN or the EU or other groups, however, fails to unite people.

Everyone is being pushed against it and even today I realize that Trump has gotten rid of 1986 or 87, right? Strategic arms treaty with Russia. He just announced it today. He's putting an end to it. He said it while all this is happening and as it happens less and less authority and understanding of our world. We are beginning to understand how little we really know, so while skeptics and rationalists are very interested in reminding people how we should always examine the truth and look at the truth, we are the first to understand it thanks to Daniel Kahneman and thanks to several others.

How little we know and how much our cognition and how much our understanding is colored and changed is transformed by both what we desire and what we have experienced, what our body expects us to feel or our eyes expect us to see and can. I don't necessarily trust everything, but that's exciting. That doesn't mean we stop trying to know things. It means we try even harder to realize how you know, just how our emotions play a huge role in everything we do. We are immensely emotional and being skeptical and rational is without denying that it is understanding the role played by emotions, ritual, ceremony, metaphor and symbol, which are the substance of art, etc.

Also the substance of many ways humans behave. I mean, even you, the comedy of me not knowing who would take the award they gave me. I almost wanted to say, well, the only thing the church does well is rehearse. The bishop the bishop has told the old world that we don't know what he has told the older boy. But you know, there's a way to keep it here. Set it here. This goes here and I'm sure many humanists in the room have come across this issue of where we find the poetry and the romance, the ritual, the glamor that the church has achieved over hundreds of years. to find to get people away from the world and still be able to attend a really good humanist funeral or wedding and some of them.

A friend, a concert pianist, asked me to be the humanist preacher as if it were his wedding and I did it. to the best of your ability and one can raid and plunder the pantry of poetry and music that exists without having to present a creator for someone's wedding or funeral, but we must learn from the fact that the church was obviously not present in that agreement of wedding. I absolutely know that you did much better than anyone else who ever suffered at Bishop. I mean, and I think they don't agree with you about funerals either.

I have been to several humanist funerals and they have worked well, I have no doubt about that. Religious people do not adapt to the individual, they are a formula, an algorithm. Which is in the Book of Common Prayer and they just read it as if it were anyone. Humanists refer to the person who has died. Yes, the person who died, his favorite poetry, who read music. You have praise talking about them. There's so much more, I'm drooling, I see writing it down, adapting it and being personal rather than, as you say, being general, but on the other hand, it's a good combination because if you're married in a traditional service and you get a dramatic Vicar or bishop and they say that after the bride and groom have kissed those whom God has joined together, let no man separate.

Yeah, you think wow, that's good. That's good. You know, you should really turn ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Yes, I think I'm joining my community in that. Yes, that's OK. But there are some good phrases that you should admit. They turned out well, but we can match them. Yes, Shakespeare or a week, we can do it, but it's also a bit cultural. You know, I suddenly remembered. I was filming in the north of Spain and they have this amazing Basque tradition, the chakra where the men cook and they had these men's cooking clubs and all the wives and families and friends come and the men do this feeling. outside often or if it's winter inside and we were invited to this and it was amazing to see.

And it was great to be a part of it and when it was over people got up and started singing Basque songs and there were about seven of us in English. Starting with the film, David Suchet used to play Poirot so successfully that he played Polian. I was playing Wellington and there were a few of us and they turned to us and said, "Sing now. We think we're going to sing. We're all going to sing. We all live in a yellow submarine. You've been watching these Basque songs from the mountains that are 300 years old and I said, I don't know any songs in English other than pop songs, I mean, it's an early morning while the sun was rising and maybe that's the problem, maybe the problem with being English and empire and all that.

We don't have our own culture, we have simply stolen it. Many have the worst national anthem in the world. Yes, we have quite a bit of grog. Yes, you said Stephen that the Trump and Brexit catastrophe is more of a triumph of. the right than a failure of the left. Yes. Do you recognize the phrase regressive left that I think was coined by Margit? Do you know more? Yes. I came across that. Yes, yes, you have a vision of what I am. part of me that just wants to be naughty and say look, you know, this Grand Canyon near where we are.

Now, this Grand Canyon is open in the United States and really all over the world and certainly the developed world made the world chatter, if you will. And it is widening every day and therefore, on each side of the divide they have to shout louder and gesticulate more. It's horrible to be heard on the other side and not be heard on the other side and they're just making noises and shouting and hating each other deeply and thinking that the other is vile and destructive and inhuman and I like to think of myself. and right-thinking people huddled in the ravine at the bottom.

They're not sure what to do because, on the one hand, you have a nativist alternative right. They bring up all kinds of nasty, unacceptable, horrifying racist thoughts and divisions, but we also have an absurdist liberal left shouting this slang and nonsense from universities if I have to hear about patriarchy and cisgender white privilege. I did it, you know. My heart has always been with the left and that makes it even harder for me to think that I just can't. And I want this to be at the heart of I think everything we talk about being English is too dramatic.

Reject JK. Rowling and Isaac Newton, the only thing they have in common is empiricism. It's not about knowing anything. It's not about having a point of view, which is your strict view of things. It's about discovering, experimenting, trying things and seeing what works, and I think the left has a terrible rhetoric problem and expresses itself in a way that precisely seems designed to alienate even soft-right people, even ordinary Republicans. and currents, who? They are crazed by what they consider political correctness nonsense. Most people on the left are not, you know, prey to it. But unfortunately the spokespersons on both sides are so loud and you're supposed to take a stand.

I'm supposed to be on one side or the other. Well, I simply repudiate that I would not be on any side. Neither of them means anything to me and that's why we have to run away. I was thinking a lot about my friend Christopher Hitchens, whose spirit is there on occasions like this, of course. He was much stronger than me and I was a great hero. As a writer and political thinker he was George. Orwell, who was much stronger and more forceful about these things than Christopher, was stronger and more forceful about these things than I was.

My hero really was probably Em4 Stowe, better known as a novelist, but as an essayist he had a lot to say and his attitude is probably best summed up in one of his essays called Two Cheers for Democracy. I arrived at Sound Three. Regards He said, but two cheers is the right thing to do and he, his friend Bertrand Russell and the mayor pointed out how we live in the world that those who are stupider are so full of certainty and those who are wise are as insecure as WB. Yeats would say it most famously: you know, the ceremony of innocence is stifled and the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Well, not at home, the center will not exactly hold up and that is the problem with being in the center, that it will not hold up to the best, that you expect to be part of the best, they lack all conviction. We are not sure. We're not convinced We're not sure how the world should move forward But we see that we know ugliness when we see it And graceless honesty and cruelty and brute force and some kind of clamorous binary tearing everything apart so you know this constant Or are you with us or against our attitude and you're stuck here in the middle.

People say well, you know. That's very good. But you're just a liberal. You know, Squashy soft, you know, there are people dying out there. They will say that you know it, and yes, there are and one, do you know that? Look at the hinges that are being massacred and disrupted and destroyed in Burma and look, you know, look at what's happening in them or all over Yemen and Syria and places like that. There are all kinds of terrible things happening, but I'm not. I don't listen to the regressive left or liberal liberals, since I went right, making a fuss about it, and I'm desperate to know what to think.

I'm really not sure because part of me says yes, of course. All my life I fought for gay rights. I struggled to you know, I thought about hearing the sighs, I even struggled at all. I sat at a desk and clicked on the keyboard. I did the odd interview on the topic of gay rights, so I haven't fought at all. But at least I've expressed an opinion and and and you know. My heart is with you, you know? with people getting a fair shake of the original bottle, as the Aussies say. Know? And a fair shake seems to be good.

But now we are not allowed much room for

conversation

s of any nuance or any doubt that we have to be on one side or the other and the world, I am convinced of that. America, certainly, Britain and Europe are clamoring for something in between and unfortunately what we have had in the past in between and is too recent to be forgotten in America is Bill Clinton. And in Britain there was Tony Blair. Both very impressive people in terms of their understanding of the history and the mechanics and the process of power and everything.others, but who are a little like me?

We know it is disreputable in our eyes in the case of Britain in the case of Blair because it led us into an Iraq war, which most of us consider a mistake. In Clinton's case, all kinds of reasons also have to do with her own behavior. And that third The way they represented a very self-aware Third Way is that it is treated with suspicion. My feeling is that a true satirist and insider, Jonathan Swift, would actually be saying to all of you and I should be saying to myself: Don't look. Politicians don't blame either side's slogans for the culture wars.

It's not their fault It's your fault We are the ones who say oh Look at the politicians. They are always at odds with each other and then the moment there is a third way politician. You say, well, they're all the same. Well, remember, you can have it both ways. Do you want them all the same or do you want them all different? Actually, you are the problem, you and I are the problem. We want to drive cars and we want a green, clean world where you can't have both. You can't square that circle, there are many circles that can.

We may not be squares that cannot be surrounded, but we get rid of all our guilt or self disputed by our greed and our rapacity as creatures on this earth, we take that burden off the politicians we pay to take away our disgusting filth. That should end us. And before we wrap up and move on to the book signing, there was a question I wanted to ask you two about this and yesterday, unfortunately, you were stuck somewhere in Delta when we heard Steven Pinker speak and very optimistic that we are, you know The world is getting richer poverty is decreasing Malnutrition is decreasing The economy is advancing but on the other hand we see not only the political catastrophes that are occurring but also the potential environmental disasters that the UN is talking about Deployment both in the short and long term.

Are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? Where are we going as a world? Well, Steven Pinker and Matt Ridley, both my friends, are kind of optimists in the world right now and they both argue persuasively that science can do all kinds of things and that we can get into trouble in all sorts of ways, but science will find a way. And if you look at the broad spectrum of history, things are getting better. I desperately want to believe them. I would like to try to put the optimistic case and say that we are in a temporary reversal right now things are not going.

Good for now. The situation is extremely bad at the moment in both Britain and the United States. But if you look at history in the long term, I think it is possible to be optimistic. As unrealistic as it may seem, I'm going to leave out Pinker and Ridley. Yes. That's very good. I agree with you, Richard, and I think you know that a lot of human progress has been three steps forward and back or two steps forward and one step back, whatever, but it has been forward, but this one can be a step back moment when things go wrong. , but I think there is a lot to think about.

I occasionally work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who are particularly strong on the SDGs, as they are called sustainable development goals. Now it's one of those boring bureaucratic phrases you started with. The Millennium Goals in the year 2000, where all the countries of the United Nations signed certain goals and these were refined in the year 2010. In these sustainable goals, 27 of them have a lot to do with female education, for example. And things that people know. will transform the way that the poorest and most affected by disease in the world, those with the least opportunity in the world, who can lift the most out of poverty and the results have been, I mean, a truly astonishing situation in that period from 2002 now, which Many people think that the period after 9/11 was the period of fear of terrorism, etc., which of course it has been, but in that period 66 66 percent greater increase in educated women in everyone 66% 2/3.

I mean it's pretty amazing and the results against HIV and even the more resistant strains of tuberculosis and other diseases are being controlled in ways that would have seemed impossible 15 years ago. And in that sense, things are going very well, but I agree that the threat that is being offered to the climate in the world is that it is a desperate time and also, as I said at lunch today and all this, it is ignoring the technological transformations that are In the next 20 or 30 years will come AI and biotechnology and through augmentation, gene editing and working with stem cells, and I mean, there is a lot of that, each of these technologies on their own It would be transformative, but together they represent what I call a tsunami. that is coming closer to us and much of it will be useful for health.

Extraordinarily useful for health, it will create great economies of scale. Data will become the new currency instead of oil or the dollar. Data is the currency that will enable all types of medical advances. I am convinced and I hope that a more rational view of You know, genetic modification of crops will allow for the immense promise that they offer. People are very superstitious about them, like they're monstrous, like they're new, yet I think there are all kinds of scientific possibilities that will help, but we just have to be alert and this is what you know, skepticism really means be alert, be alive to an idea.

That is to see an idea as a living being and in honor of my rival, the University of Oxford, for which they both come and it is a coachman that, as a great admirer of Oscar Wilde, I will do and simply quoting and I think this is what conventions like this do and should encourage and When Oscar wrote his letter to his former lover Posey from prison, it is called De Profundis from the depths and he accuses him of many betrayals and things like that, but he is also very complimentary of him, but He says that when you were at Oxford you didn't get a degree.

That is perfectly understandable. Many excellent brains have never managed to obtain their degree. But what I find unforgivable is that you never acquired what it used to be called. The Oxford way he said. I know that sounds like a terrible phrase. But I understand that it means the ability to play gracefully with ideas. that the ability to play gracefully with ideas is a wonderful thing, and I think it's very important for the skeptical rationalist and secularist atheist movement to remember to be graceful. Remember that playing with these ideas is what enlightens us individually and fulfills us as humans, in addition to satisfying us.

I expect much more from the public culture you know. The understanding that ideas are to be embraced, embraced, played with and licked, enjoyed and the juice sucked out of them, and you know that there is pleasure in this, is not a serious endeavor. It is not a gloomy job. It's exciting and I think that will ensure a better future: being alert and playing gracefully with ideas. Thanks for watching, if you liked this video be sure to like and share it with your friends. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell to receive notifications about new videos.

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