https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bzNu-PeBulM
Obviously, I’ve spent some time pointing out what I regard as the excesses of the radical left. I’ve certainly spent no shortage of time pointing out the excesses of the radical right in my classes, particularly. But I’m not publicly known for that specifically. It’s my resistance to certain manoeuvres on the side of the radical left that propelled me into the public eye. I’ve thought for a long while that the only people who can probably control the excesses of the radical left are people who are in the moderate left, not people on the right or on the extreme right. They’re out of the argument to begin with, and this is associated in some sense, the difficulty of this is in some sense the difficulty that you just described. If people have an affiliation with you, then it’s much more difficult to differentiate perhaps where you should. And so perhaps you see on the left, the moderate leftists and then the more extreme leftists, but the extreme leftists are also on the left and they’re friends of a type. And drawing that line is extraordinarily difficult. And that’s actually why, at least part of the reason why I’m leery of any attempts to restrict free speech, because in those cases of difficult differentiation, the only possible solution we have is dialogue about the problem, about exactly where to draw the line. Because otherwise we can’t. No one knows how. And I guess it’s because extremism also exists in degrees. And so you say, where do you stop? And well, that’s very, very difficult to say, especially among those who think like you, except for certain exceptions. Yes, this is very true. And it’s a sort of basic philosophical point, isn’t it? That you can draw lines between what is reasonable and they can be very narrow lines. But if you keep drawing them out, they become extreme. So, for example, you can have a what some people might regard as a reasonable age for the termination of a pregnancy due to some, you know, some issue. But if you keep adding days to it, it then becomes a serious problem. And anything in that nature of of differentiating and drawing lines is bound to is bound to cause that to be a problem. I, however, I’m less confident than you are that the left would be persuaded by someone like me, the hard left, the one wants to call it extreme left or the radical left, wherever it is. And this may sound a bit like a bit of boohooing, which is very easy to do. But if you’re a soft liberal, as I think of myself, I can’t find any other designation. But that sort of thing, a centrist, these are insults to the left. I mean, in English politics recently, for example, centrist was the boo word of the Corbynistas, the the the more socialist end of the Labour Party, a party I’ve been a member of since since I could vote. And I felt very, very, very much buffeted about and despised for my oh, dear, but really, and oh, must we, you know, it’s very, you know, I do think of myself as a sort of cardigan, beslippered old fool who is loathed on both sides. And it is, of course, historically true that in the 1930s, which is the decade we always go back to when we were very worried about the direction we’re traveling in now, the communists and the Nazis, both were absolutely a one mind when it came to people like me, Jewish, semi intellectual, soft liberals, you know, who went, oh, no, but shush, because we didn’t have any positivity, any certainty. We didn’t, we didn’t, you know, it’s. And as I say, I know it sounds like I’m sort of taking on a victim status here that, oh, poor liberals, because after all, we’ve ruled the world for 200 years. Part of the political and cultural argument in the world at the moment is that the liberal project, the enlightenment project, if you want to call it that, has failed. I would say we’ve cooperatively guided the world because I think ruled is the wrong term. Well, it’s a really important distinction because that power is grounded in the sovereignty of the people and imperfect as that may be. It’s more grounded in the sovereignty of the people than any other system we’ve ever managed to whip up. So, I mean, it’s it’s difficult also because it’s difficult to make centrism dramatic and romantic. And it’s much easier to make extremism dramatic and romantic. And that’s one of its primary attractions. And that attraction should not be underestimated. And it’s partly why I’m so interested in talking to you, because you are this incredible dramatist. You have this unbelievable talent that manifests itself in a manner that I thought I was reading your Wikipedia biography in some detail. And it requires that. I thought if you want to give yourself an inferiority complex quickly, going through your Wikipedia entry is a very good way of doing that. I mean, you have 50 films and like 40 TV shows and five novels and seven autobiographies and a career in comedy that was absolutely outstanding. That would have been a lifetime achievement in and of itself and a whole variety of honoree doctorates. And you have an intellectual end that’s not trivial as well, because you were involved with Hitchens and Dawkins and the horsemen of the of the atheist movement. Yeah. And I want to really want to talk to you about that too, because I especially am interested in your opinions because of all those people, You’re the one that has the most connection with you with with with drama and literature and fiction and you you you just published a couple of books myth, mythos, heroism, heroes, heroes. And there’s there’s a third one in that trilogy. It just escapes my mind. Troy, Troy. And so you’re obviously extraordinarily sensitive to the power and necessity of literary accounts. But then you’re also a humanistic atheist and that’s very I’m very curious about that. I mean someone like Dawkins, he’s so rational that I think for him and I don’t know if this is fair and it might be a bit of a of a stereotype, but it’ll do for rhetorical purposes. I’m gripped by drama in the same way you are and there’s a truth in drama that’s not trivial and that truth is allied with religious truth. So I want to go there too. I can’t speak for Richard. It is just been his 80th birthday. So we wish him happy birthday and he’s not the the shrill beast of atheism that some people regard him as but I won’t speak for him obviously. But what I would say is that yes, you’re right. He’s a rationalist and I don’t think I am. I think I’m an empiricist and I think that’s part of my love of drama and myth and story and literature and history even is these are all to do with experience with human experience. The register of human experience of testing an idea against what actually happens and how people actually behave rather than devising a system of reason. And it’s not the reason when empiricism are always absolutely opposed, but they sometimes are and in the in the history of science, they have been, you know, you could argue that Pascal was a rationalist and and Newton was an empiricist for all his great mathematics and so on. He actually took a piece of cardboard and punched a hole in it, which is something that a rationalist probably wouldn’t wouldn’t do. So it’s experimenting in the crucible of human activity and observing what people say and hear. These are the things comedians do all the time. It’s the comic. It’s it’s the comic mode is to hear somebody say something grand and then say yes. But GK Chesterton is the perfect example of that. Now he was he was certainly no atheist. He was a very religious man indeed and and a great hero of the Catholic Church and some people even believe he should be if not be atified even sanctified. But he he was a huge influence on me as a teenager growing up because I read his essays. And here’s an example. He read the he opens an essay by saying I read in the newspaper the other day this following sentence at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw. Modern woman rises to take her place in society. And I thought to myself, this is very good news. Very encouraging. I wonder if it’s true. Let’s see now who’s a modern woman. Oh, Mrs. Buttons. She comes in to clean every Tuesday and every Thursday. She lives in Clapham. She comes on the omnibus and she scrubs the floors and she has three children. And if I say to myself at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, Mrs. Buttons rises to take her place in society. I realize the sentence is not only nonsense, it’s pernicious nonsense. And and that’s a sort of almost comical example really of saying you don’t trust an abstract statement. You do not trust someone saying a plus a equals to a because there is no such thing in the universe as a and although we’re all capable of doing substitution or metaphorizing or algebra as it were with ideas. The fact is it’s much better to say one thing of something that is real that we know plus another thing of something that is real that we know and have experienced is two of those things. Once you start abstracting and and and that’s what rationalism often is. It’s it’s going off on an algebraic journey, which can produce beautiful thoughts and ideas and beautiful schemes. But for me, it is beating that out on the anvil of human experience is the absolute key and it’s a long intellectual tradition empiricism. And I think we’re in danger of losing it.