- há 39 minutos
John Gray is one of Britain’s most eminent and controversial philosophers. Known for his critiques of liberalism and the Enlightenment, Gray forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about civilisation, morality, and the illusion of progress. In this IAI interview, hear how his life experiences and career as a philosopher led him to become one of the most original and provocative voices in the contemporary Western world. From attacking humanism as a religion in disguise to authoring groundbreaking books such as Straw Dogs and The New Leviathans, John Gray is a thinker whose influence many believe will endure for decades to come. Interviewed by Andy Owen.
The Panel
John Gray is one of Britain’s leading philosophers and public intellectuals, renowned for his penetrating critiques of liberalism, humanism, and the Enlightenment faith in progress. A former professor at the London School of Economics, Gray is the author of numerous acclaimed works including Straw Dogs, The Silence of Animals, and The New Leviathans. His writing challenges our most cherished assumptions about morality, politics, and what it means to be human.
Andy Owen is a writer and former British Army officer whose work explores morality, leadership, and the human experience in conflict.
The Panel
John Gray is one of Britain’s leading philosophers and public intellectuals, renowned for his penetrating critiques of liberalism, humanism, and the Enlightenment faith in progress. A former professor at the London School of Economics, Gray is the author of numerous acclaimed works including Straw Dogs, The Silence of Animals, and The New Leviathans. His writing challenges our most cherished assumptions about morality, politics, and what it means to be human.
Andy Owen is a writer and former British Army officer whose work explores morality, leadership, and the human experience in conflict.
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AprendizadoTranscrição
00:00Thank you. John Gray is one of the most eminent and sometimes most controversial philosophers in
00:09Britain. After an academic career that took him from Oxford to Yale, Harvard and LSE in 2008,
00:16he dedicated himself full-time to writing, producing a series of fascinating, thought-provoking
00:22and highly accessible books, from straw dogs to feline philosophy and his latest book New
00:28Leviathans. Known for his critiques of liberalism and the Enlightenment, John forces us to confront
00:34uncomfortable truths about politics, morality and the illusion of progress. John, welcome.
00:40Thank you very much, Andy. Thank you for all coming.
00:47To start off with, John, if you had to distill the central thread running through your work,
00:52what would it be? And were there any sort of early experiences, especially growing up in the
00:57Northeast at the end of the 50s and the early 60s that inform this thread?
01:02It's a very good and a very large question. I'll answer it as best I can, but I just came across
01:08a quote from General de Gaulle, who I, someone I admire very much, who, when he was walking through
01:15the university area of Paris during the student upheavals of 1968, came across a graffiti which said,
01:27roughly translated, kill all the fools. And he turned to a reporter and said, a vast project.
01:36So I'm not attempting to kill all the fools. I don't want to kill anybody, actually. But it's true that I have
01:45spent a large part of my work, especially since I left academic life in 2008,
01:52criticising the idea, or as I would call it, the myth of progress. And I think the essence of that myth,
01:59science or one of its central elements is that a fact, the growth of knowledge in science is a fact.
02:07Whatever you think about the way the COVID epidemic was administered, vaccines pretty much work. They
02:15may have more side effects that are allowed, but they work. There are just over 8 billion human
02:22beings alive on the planet because of intensive farming, refrigerators, global transport systems,
02:30and so on. I don't share the view that science is just a tissue of cultural constructions with no
02:38connections at all with an external reality. We can never be sure what that reality is. We can never
02:46be sure that our theories and hypotheses are latching on to that reality. But there must be some fit,
02:54or otherwise there would not have been the huge transformation, the huge growth of human power
02:58that there has been. Where I think the Enlightenment went wrong, and not only the Enlightenment, but even
03:05the Socratic Greek philosophy, which it renewed in early modern times, is in thinking that something
03:12like that was possible in ethics and politics or, if you like, the way we live. And I think that's what I have always
03:20rejected, or at least wanted to pour, to subject to critical doubt. Because I think what this supposes is that
03:32humans can learn from their mistakes and improve themselves over time, over the generations, in a kind of
03:40continuous cumulative fashion. So that in one generation, I mean, this is the way people think
03:47of progress as a kind of escalator. In one generation, you might deal with slavery or cruel punishments
03:54in penal systems. The next generation, you can expand democracy. A further generation, you can
04:01have more humane treatment of non-human animals, and so on and so forth. But actually, history isn't like
04:07that. Human events aren't like that. In my writings, I say, if anyone doubts progress, think of
04:13anaesthetic dentistry. Not much downside to anaesthetic dentistry. I had a cataract operation. That's
04:22progress. So there are some areas where there's a real improvement in human life, which doesn't have a
04:31shadow. But they're rare. Nearly all big advances in science and technology can be used for destructive
04:40as well as constructive purposes. And what this relates to is the fact that the transmission of
04:48moral knowledge, moral sentiment, moral judgment, is very easily disrupted. Hardly ever do you get a high
04:58level of freedom and peace and concord in society for more than two or three generations?
05:05Even when improvement is real, there's normally a shadow. And it's almost always, I would say,
05:13always reversed. And what is gained, sometimes there are real gains, is lost. And that's a hard,
05:20hard thing for people in our generation who've been raised on the idea that the next generation will be
05:27not just materially better off than the existing one, which by the way is now doubtful,
05:32very doubtful, but somehow morally even better off then.
05:36And John, you were mentioning growing up in Shields and early on, you saw an example of this idea that
05:43even often progress has a shadow to it as well.
05:46Well, I grew up in one of these streets, which now many people say it's an urban legend. It wasn't,
05:54it was true. There were streets which were multi-generational, whole families lived in them,
05:57grandparents, parents lived in them. The doors were never locked at night, that is true. There was
06:02very little or any street crime, a bit of violence at the pub in the night, in the rough behaviour,
06:08that's about it. People were safe. They had flaws, these societies that were quite patriarchal.
06:14If you had strong individual ambitions, you usually had to leave.
06:18But they were in many ways, although life was hard and short for many people there,
06:24I think the lives that many people lived there were good. And I actually experienced
06:29what happened when they were levelled, because the decision was taken for good reasons,
06:33wasn't corruption, for good reasons, or what was seen to be good reason to get rid of all of these
06:37old houses, because they didn't have mod cons, they didn't have internal baths, they didn't have central
06:41heating, they didn't have any of these things. So they were levelled. So the street I spent some of my early
06:45years in now, and he has one house standing in it now. We moved out, my family, to an orbital estate,
06:52a new estate, which embodied all the good intentions. All the streets were named after famous authors,
06:58Hardy, Wordsworth, poets and so on. But within about six months of being there, first of all,
07:04the families were segregated by age, which they hadn't been before. They were shaken up like marbles
07:09and deposited there. There wasn't much of an infrastructure. Graffiti appeared, there'd never
07:13been graffiti, then vandalism. Because the assumption was you could put people in better,
07:20did have central heating, did have internal loose, materially it was much better off. But socially,
07:25culturally, as a way of a human form of life, it was worse off, as I actually experienced. Now,
07:32what did I learn from that? Well, what I learned was, later when I read the philosopher Karl Popper,
07:38great liberal philosopher, George Soros, who I used to know quite well, takes him as his mentor,
07:44as a mentor, talks about piecemeal social engineering. He said you shouldn't try and have
07:48revolutions like they had in Russia. What you should do is you should get the piecemeal
07:53social engineers to gradually solve problems in society. Well, that's an idea I've always abhorred.
07:59First of all, who are these piecemeal social engineers? How do they decide what are the problems
08:04in society? What if one value conflicts with another value? But the basic reason is,
08:09human societies are not machines. They're more like spiders webs. They're more like cobwebs.
08:16If you blunder in and start, move people suddenly to a new housing estate you've created in fields,
08:22which is what they were before, you can't expect the good features of their life before to go with
08:28them. And they didn't. So that was that bred in me a deep suspicion, not actually of revolution.
08:34Revolutions are inevitable. I benefited from a revolution. There was a benefit. There was a
08:37revolutionary government, in the British sense, came out of the Second World War. I still honor and
08:44admire the Labour government of 1945 to 50. And the war itself, terrible as it was in many ways, reduced,
08:51for example, dietary diseases, fell because of raffling, rationing. There was full employment,
08:57which there hadn't been before. Women entered the workforce in a huge way into the factories. True,
09:02there were armaments factories, but they went into the workforce. After the war, they didn't go back
09:08to becoming domestic servants. They didn't want to. Why should they? So actually, the Second World War in
09:14Britain was a sort of revolutionary process, and a good one in many of its respects. But it didn't last
09:21forever. That Labour settlement, the Labour settlement of 1945 to 1950, by the 1970s was
09:27beginning to run out of steam. It was beginning to disintegrate, which is when I first got involved in
09:34politics in the early 70s, before Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party. I met her before,
09:41and then later when she was leader, and even after she was toppled as leader, I met her occasionally.
09:47By the mid-70s, it was beginning to fall apart, and that illustrates another aspect in which I reject
09:54what might be called the story of progress. The one thing we learn from experience is that human
10:00beings throughout history never learn anything for long, and then they forget what it is they've learned.
10:06An example now, throughout much of history, including 20th century history, violence has been used as a
10:12way of settling debates, or stopping debates. Never thought that would come back. Well, it has
10:17the Charlie Kirk. I'm not using this in a political sense, because it's been weaponized by both sides.
10:22But once somebody has been killed in the way he was killed, you can't go back to what is before.
10:28So we're moving in, I think, in that respect to a, into a, into a very dark way. But what I was going to
10:34talk about next was, in the mid-70s, I became convinced that this labor settlement, which I'd benefited
10:41so much from, which was in many ways very humane, but which had these strange examples of social
10:46engineering that had malignant effects, that that was over. So what was needed was something completely
10:53new. And that's why I'm often criticized as being politically inconsistent, or changing as politics
11:00change. Politics is not, for me, a universal project of human emancipation. Politics is a succession
11:09of partial and temporary expedients for dealing with recurring human evils. And they're different
11:18to some extent. They're recurring over history, but they're somewhat different in each generation. So what
11:23these big experiments, even when they're partly successful, as I think the labor experiment of 1945 was,
11:30don't last for long. Thanks, John. Just going back a little bit from you, when you left South
11:37Shields, you went to Oxford. And at Oxford, you met one of your key influences, Uzziah Berlin.
11:42I just wondered if you could talk for a few minutes just about how, what attracted you to Uzziah, and then
11:48also what you took from his thinking into your own thing. One of the things that attracted me is that as a
11:53little boy, he'd witnessed both Russian revolutions. He was a little boy in Riga to begin with, and then
12:00in Russia. But it was all part of the Roman Empire at that time. And he'd seen the first revolution in
12:06March or February, depending which calendar you use. And he said it was a wonderful experience. People
12:12went around kissing each other, embracing each other. There was a feeling of having gotten rid of a terrible
12:18tyranny of the Roman Alps. That lasted a few months. And then by the second revolution, he said,
12:25fear was the dominant feeling, together with the love of power. And people began to appear in crowds,
12:32dressed in leather jackets, who were representative of the secret police, who would be created,
12:42or originally Cheka, by Lenin. And fear began to seep in. He stayed there for a few years. And then
12:50he and his family migrated to the West, where he had a different life. So one thing that interested me
12:58about him is that he was speaking from a position of experience, which went on throughout his life.
13:05In the Second World War, he ended up in Washington, working at the British Embassy
13:11in Washington. And his job was to find out, examine the shape of opinion in America as to going into the
13:19war with Britain, which they basically, most Americans and most politicians, and even Roosevelt
13:24himself, did not want to do. But he believed, as others believed, as Churchill, who he then came to
13:30know, believed that unless the Americans came in, we were probably sunk. I mean, the war was won.
13:36The largest casualties were not American. They were Russian, actually, about 25 million
13:40when they entered the war. But if the Americans hadn't come in when they did after the
13:46attack on Pearl Harbor and the Russians hadn't been attacked by the Nazis, we would have either been
13:54defeated or, to my mind, even worse, had to accept a shameful peace. Anyway, he was there. So he wasn't
14:04speaking in an intra-academic way when he talked to me about tragic choices, when he talked about choices
14:11in which whatever you do, there is some irreparable loss or harm. He meant it. I'll briefly tell you
14:19one story he told me of the Second World War, which illustrates this. He knew a case where a senior
14:24civil servant appeared in his typing pool, let's say 20 people, and told them, I'm now going to do
14:31something which is very wrong. I'm going to sack every person in this typing pool, because one of you
14:37has been leaking information to the enemy. And as a result of that leak, brave men and women
14:44are being, who are being dropped behind enemy lines, are being tortured to death
14:48and revealing information. So it's terrible for them, obviously, but also bad for the war effort.
14:53But what I'm doing is wrong, because none of you will ever get a job in any legitimate employment
14:58again, because you'll have a black security. So it'll be an irreparable wrong. Your lives will be
15:04ruined. But I'm going to do it anyway. Now Berlin told me this story because it represented his view
15:10of ethics, and it represents mine too, which is that if you were what's called a utilitarian,
15:15you'd say, do the best thing with the best consequences, then there's nothing to regret.
15:21You've done the best, the most rational thing. He thought there was something to regret. You've
15:24ruined 19 of those people's lives, irreparably, for no good reason, because they're innocent.
15:30Or you might do what someone who wanted to keep their hands clean might do. They might say,
15:33I won't take the decision. I'll resign. He regarded that as I regard that as bloody cowardice.
15:39It's your job to take, I would have taken the same decision as he would.
15:44So what he illustrated to me, he taught me this basic truth, I think, which that human values are
15:49not coherent. They don't form into a single coherent set. They conflict with each other all the time.
15:57And that's why trying to impose a pattern on a human life, trying to engineer a better society,
16:03always goes wrong. And the ultimate reason is an anthropological reason. Humans are
16:08highly contradictory animals. They have needs that can never be, not just impulses or wants,
16:15but needs that can never be fully realised, never be fully recognised, reconciled with each other.
16:24So that's what I learned from him. He was also, of course, a fountainhead of stories about life in
16:29Russia and in Europe and in America. He knew everybody in America. Just as a slightly salacious
16:37side note, when he was in America, he was walking in Washington. He worked with Royal Dahl, a short story.
16:43They hated each other for reasons that he didn't go into. But Dahl was there also as part of the war
16:49effort to try and drag the Americans in. His job, Dahl's job, you can read about this now,
16:54was to sleep with the wives of important American senators and compromise them. And in an unverified
17:03story where he was asked how he was feeling at one point, he said, I'm completely effed out.
17:07So that was his job there. And although they didn't get on, Dahl was a bit of an anti-Semite,
17:16remained one, actually. They did work together. They even overlapped in an apartment. So Berlin
17:22knew what history, human events are really like. When he talked about this, it wasn't an intra-academic
17:28discourse. He knew what it meant to either witness or take choices in which whatever you did,
17:40there was a terrible cost. There's a lot of that ethics that you capture in your book,
17:45Straw Dogs, talking about causing a stir. Straw Dogs caused a philosophical stir. Did you expect the
17:52reactions that Straw Dogs got? And why do you think some of them were so strong?
17:56Well, I expected it to be ignored by philosophers, but that was very gratifying. It was.
18:02It just proved that I'd gone mad or never been a proper philosopher in the first place. But I
18:07expected that. So that was quite pleasant. I hadn't expected it to take on. And there was no PR
18:13campaign. It was all a complete surprise. People ask me why I wrote it then. It was really because I
18:19could write it then. I mean, I'd done a lot of intra-academic work on ethics and politics and so
18:30on. I was in a position to do this. And I wanted to write in a different way that would communicate
18:36a different way of looking at the world to people who are not academics or not solely academics. That
18:42was my reason for doing it. And it voiced thoughts I'd had always, at least since I was a child or a
18:49young teenager growing up in the Northeast. So it voiced these thoughts. And that was my only goal.
18:55My only goal initially was to get it published, actually. And the publisher did publish it. And
19:01then a few weeks later, there was no PR. I said, he rang up, he said, people are seeing other people
19:07reading your book on the tube. So I thought, well, that's good. It had some effect. By the way,
19:11someone I got to know very well later in his life, the novelist J.G. Ballard, still a name for you,
19:17I think, the Spielberg film and so on. He read it, he told me, right through twice in one sitting.
19:25And he gave me the best comment I've ever said. He said, every damn sentence packs a punch.
19:29So I was very pleased. But I wrote it in order to give, not necessarily to convert anyone
19:35to my view of the world. I wrote it for those people, and there are many, who are discontented
19:45with the ruling view of the world in progressive terms. And so they're open to a different view.
19:50And I wrote it for them to be encouraged to think more freely and a wide range of people. But they
19:57don't all come to the same view. Some who were Christians become deeper Christians, more Christians.
20:03Some who were conservatives have become more conservatives. Not many liberals have become
20:10more liberal, I have to say. But it has a wide variety of different impacts on different people,
20:18people who've served in wars, and a number of war photographers have written to be a number of
20:25poets and so on. And as I say, not philosophers very much. But that reflects what philosophy has become,
20:32an intra-academic conversation. Sadly, the saddest fact about philosophy today is that it's
20:37philosophers are mostly professors.
20:40And a lot of what you focus on is philosophy, obviously, but it crosses over into politics.
20:45Yes.
20:45You're very engaged in politics. And I think that your quote from earlier that politics is the search
20:51for partial remedies for recurring human evil.
20:54Partial and temporary.
20:55And temporary. And you've said also that responsibility of someone who takes politics
20:59seriously is to look at these evils that are predominant at any given time as they changes over
21:04time and point to partial remedies. Looking at the situation now we have in the world, looking at
21:10Trump's second presidency and the populist attack on liberalism in the US, what are the partial remedies
21:17that you would look to now? And maybe talking a little bit about a thinker that's influenced your
21:23last book, New Leviathans, Thomas Hobbes, what he can contribute to that conversation?
21:27Well, I'll begin by saying we can't expect to improve or even the present situation or even to prevent
21:33it becoming worse, unless we understand something of why it came about. And I think I learned an enormous
21:40amount from an extraordinarily and characteristically stupid observation by David Cameron.
21:46When he was asked, you know, what about this? He said, oh, that's populism.
21:52As if it had absolutely nothing to do with anything he'd ever done or failed to do.
21:55It's just a completely inexplicable upheaval of wickedness, demagoguery, ignorance, etc. That's populism.
22:03Well, populism, as I understand it, is a word liberals use to describe the political backlash
22:12against the social disruption produced by their own policies. They don't understand,
22:19I genuinely don't understand, that what they have done or failed to do has produced
22:25or helped to produce these morbid phenomena that we now see. It's nothing to do with them.
22:31The only thing they ever admit to, I mean, when I talk to them is that they weren't liberal enough.
22:36Well, we were tremendously liberal, of course, and rational. No one would deny that. I would,
22:41but anyway. But maybe we should have gone further on that. Maybe we should have.
22:46I suggest that. So you mean when Hillary Clinton described 40% of the nation as the American nation
22:52as deplorables, what she should have really done is kept on saying it louder and louder.
22:58That would have converted them. Telling them that they're deplorables, that their feelings are
23:03atavistic, that they're invariably racist, that the reduction in their life, their income and their
23:09wealth, which had been going on in America, or at least stagnation in their income and wealth
23:16for 30 years. It's irrelevant. What they should do is shut up and be, I think she actually went to a
23:22mining town and told them that they should all, mining area, that they should all be glad that
23:26they were going to become unemployed. Now, it might be that coal is a bad thing and it might be that
23:30fossil fuel should be phased out, but you don't go to it. And if they resist, they're deplorables.
23:35So the first is to understand why this has come out. I believed in a talk I gave on the radio.
23:43I said in August of 2016 that I thought Trump would win and that the main reason or one of the main
23:50reasons he would win was actually wasn't doing very well up to that point was
23:59this description of voters or 40% of American voters by Hillary Clinton as deplorables. I thought
24:05he would win again, as he did win again. And I think he's now going to use the power that he does have
24:12to produce an irreversible change in American government. He's basically neutered the courts,
24:19either by putting his own people in them in the Supreme Court or ignoring them. He's got the National
24:27Guard at his disposal. I can't tell you what will happen, but I can tell you what to look for.
24:32The next thing to look for is how does he respond when he loses the midterms?
24:37Does he say, well, fair dues? I don't think so. I don't think so. What he will say is it's a hoax.
24:45This is what I expect. Now, if he does that, if he really tries to resist the democratic pushback
24:51against some of his policies, then we're in a different ballgame. We're really in a different
24:57world because then we're in a – people call it fascist, but in a way it's worse than that because
25:05fascism was time-bound. Fascism was primarily into war. It came about as a result, largely,
25:11of the disruption of life because of after the First World War. And after Nazism was defeated – fascism
25:19went on in some European countries, Portugal, Spain – but after Nazism was defeated,
25:23basically, it could – you could take out the fascist elites, you could inflict military defeat.
25:31And then what had survived, even to some extent, in Nazi Germany of a civil society could kind of
25:37reemerge. What's happening in America now is different. First of all, America is much more
25:41polarized. And this is very relevant to ideas of progress. People say progress is always possible,
25:47not when there's no agreement on what progress means. If society – we are less polarized, I think,
25:54in this country than America is. But there can't now be, I think, a reversion to the pre-Trump,
26:00pre-Charlie Kirk. You've gone beyond that. Whatever happens will be different. If you want me to speculate
26:07about what will happen, my speculation will be that Trump will be the godfather of populisms,
26:13if I can call them that, more radical and more disruptive than any he either intended or imagined.
26:26Actually, what will come after Trump, because there will be an after Trump, he's mortal,
26:32will be more radical still, either via J.D. Vance, who is more radical, more consistent,
26:38and less easily flattered. He'll not be, he'll not be swayed by being driven around Brinsor Castle.
26:50He'll do what he wants to do. And that's for another reason, which is unlike Trump, he believes in it.
26:58Trump is a real estate operator and a reality TV showman who's moved into politics by reading
27:06the American unconscious correctly on a lot of issues. But now a lot of his policies are proving
27:13not as popular as they expected. There's a danger of a crisis of the dollar, there's inflation,
27:18the cost of living is getting worse. Disillusionment will set in. And then the question is, what does he
27:25do? You've only got a year to wait, you find out. If he backs off, wouldn't be characteristic,
27:30would it? Because he still says the last election, the one before the one he won was a hoax. He didn't,
27:37I mean, he even said, as you know, that he never met Peter Mandelson. He'll simply deny it. And then
27:45what will he do? What will he do with this? And that maybe gives us the chance to widen the lens as well.
27:49You mentioned Peter Mandelson and Windsor Castle. What are the partial remedies from a UK point of
27:57view if that is the America that is going to develop over the next couple of years or so?
28:03You know what it means here? I think the difficulty is that
28:10the underlying disenchantment with mainstream politics has reached a point where it can't
28:20really be expressed without some sort of crisis. And if you ask what was the trigger of the crisis,
28:26I would say, and this sounds a little dull because it's not in the realm of ideas, but of economic
28:31realities. I think a kind of super Liz Truss crisis on the foreign exchanges might do it.
28:42What would happen if, that's why I don't believe, I mean, I'm confident in saying this,
28:46there's practically zero chance of the present government, led by Keir Starmer, going into an
28:53election in 2029. You won't be there that long. The government won't be there that long. It's too
28:59systemically weak. And basically, no one has any ideas hardly about what to do. And I think connected
29:08with this is that the live players in British politics are, so to speak, outside most of them
29:15of the major parties. And so they adopt non-standard positions. If you've been watching,
29:21I don't say you should, but if you've been watching Farage, what you might have noticed lately
29:25is a left turn in his economic policies. Partial nationalization of utilities, water to start with,
29:33and so on. Nobody ever thought he would do it. I was sure he would do it. People would say,
29:39he's just a Thatcherite, it's a Thatcherite Tribute Act. No, he's more like George Maloney,
29:44one of the most successful European politicians. He's got a tremendous sense of what the,
29:49there's a problem, of course, about Farage's switch, which is that it's not deliverable.
29:56The problem is that if he does come to power, he won't be able to do it, not because the civil
29:59servants stop him, though they might try, but because it's extremely difficult to impose massive cuts
30:08on fiscal spending when they become a norm. Even, I mean, you've heard of Millet in Argentina,
30:15he, with his chainsaw, he says he takes his economic policies by consulting a medium who is
30:22in touch with one of his dogs. But actually, up till now, he's been moderately successful,
30:28but now there's rebellion going on because there's been an enormous amount of sudden suffering for
30:33lots of people who don't have access to hospitals and other public services and so on. So it's very,
30:37very difficult. So I think what this means is a period of, somewhere over the next year, two years,
30:48whatever, maybe sooner, there'll be some sort of economic shock which will destabilize politics
30:58and may ultimately then result in an early general election. And you can't be absolutely certain about
31:05what will happen then. I mean, I remember when the Social Democratic Party, this 1980s,
31:10they emerged as challengers to the two main parties. And at one point, they were commanding over 25% of
31:16the vote. Some people now say it'd be the same with reform. I don't think so. I don't think so.
31:22The depth of disillusionment now is much more profound. And the problem is now we got used to
31:27getting poorer because it was slow. As long as we could borrow more and have services, however
31:37difficult they might be, national health, long waiting lists, so on and so forth, trains that
31:42don't work very well. We got used to that. And perhaps if it could go on like that forever, just
31:48bumping along, we could remain used to it. But unfortunately, a lot of the money from that
31:53is comes from global markets, comes from global bond market. If that's pulled out suddenly,
32:00then there's a big shock. So that sort of connects with what the one thing I can sort of say with
32:06reasonable confidence is that the political world in this country and other countries will be very
32:12different by 2030. So I'm just going to ask one more question to you, John, and also don't want to
32:19end on a complete downer. So once you've been accused of being a political pessimist,
32:28sometimes even a nylon. I don't know why. But I find much that's hopeful in your work as well.
32:34I wondered if you could just explain the subtle difference between optimism and hope.
32:39Well, optimism is the belief that if you apply certain types of thinking, rational thinking,
32:48informed by knowledge, you'll get a better result almost certainly. I think that's
32:53an exploded view. I mean, you could almost say, I mean, if the belief in human rationality was a
32:59scientific theory, it would have been long ago abandoned, because there's really not very much
33:03evidence for it. But hope is a different thing. And I think the main reason one should be hopeful and
33:08always can be hopeful is that human beings, means each of us, can live well
33:13without believing the problems in their lives or their societies are soluble.
33:20You can live, you can live well in your own life. Things happen to us that we can't change.
33:26You have bereavements. You have, you have good things too, falling in love. All sorts of things
33:30happen to us that we can't really control and shouldn't really try and control. I think in some cases,
33:36um, um, let them happen and then go with them as long as, as long as you can. Um, but I think
33:45actually the optimistic, sorry, the, the hopeful attitude is to say, we don't need a life which is
33:52steadily progressing to some goal we've set for ourselves, either as a person, individual or a
33:57society to live well, to live, to live in a fulfilling way, to have a life which is full
34:02of meaning, which you can look back on and say that was, that was well lived. That's my main idea.
34:07I think the idea of progress in this sense, and even worse of perfection is, is a, um,
34:15is a burden we should really, uh, shake off. Try it. You might, you might enjoy it.
34:20Thank you, John, for that hopeful answer.
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