Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - What The Romans Did For Us ｜ Helen Dale

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April 20, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:25:42

What The Romans Did For Us ｜ Helen Dale

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	Hi everyone, I'm speaking to Helen Dale.
	She's a freelance writer, journalist and commentator who regularly writes to the spectator in a number of other publications.
	And she's been shortlisted for a Prometheus Award for science fiction for her book Kingdom of the Wicked.
	It's about the Romans.
	Hi Helen, how are you doing?
	Not too bad.
	How are you, Carl?
	Really well thank you.
	Really warm under these lights.
	So I apologise if I start sweating during this interview.
	So let's talk firstly, I think, about the most relevant issue in politics at the moment, which is the phenomenal weakness of the Conservatives at the moment.
	Why do you think that is?
	I mean, by way of background, I joke that not only am I a member of the Conservative Party, but I was born Conservative.
	It's sort of deeply traditional kind of link to Conservatism.
	The Conservative Party has always conceived of itself as a broad church.
	It brings together a number of different traditions.
	What Brexit has exposed is the extent to which two of the traditions, or perhaps even three of the traditions, are pulling in different directions and want different things.
	And the tradition that is most divided is the old tradition, the oldest aristocratic tradition of high Toryism.
	So on one side you've got passionate levers like Jacob Rees-Mogg, who's your classic High Tory.
	But then you've also got very soft Brexiteers or passionate remainers like Nick Bowles or Anna Soubry.
	Now they are all part of either High Tory or one nation conservatism.
	And high Tory conservatism can be quite paternalistic.
	And the problem with paternalism, regardless of how it manifests, is it's this tendency to believe that you have a right to tell other people how to live.
	And that's what you hear less in Nick Bowles, but very strongly in Soubry, that tradition of one nation conservatism.
	That goes back hundreds of years.
	It goes back to the roots of the Conservative Party when it was a party of the aristocracy, which is before the First World War.
	They made the decisions because they were the right people who went to the right schools and the right universities and they were the right religion.
	They have the right breeding.
	The Thackeray line.
	There's nothing like Bladzer, you know, horses, dogs and men.
	You know, this kind of attitude.
	And that has passed through into modern conservatism.
	You can't make it go away.
	The Conservative Party is an institution.
	It's a big institution.
	It's got history.
	It's got heritages.
	It's hugely important in the context of British history.
	So what happens with something like Brexit is that old tradition is pulled in multiple directions.
	Then you've got a newer tradition, but still an important one.
	You've got the classical liberal wing of conservatism, which gave you Margaret Thatcher.
	Now Margaret Thatcher, as everybody knows, started as a big supporter of what was then the European Economic Community.
	And then by the time she'd been in office for a couple of terms, she was going, hang on, hang on, this is not what we agreed to.
	We're signed up to a free trade club.
	And there are still in the classical liberal wing of conservatism.
	There is still a sense from some of them.
	That's a good example.
	Sam Geimer.
	It's a big free trade.
	It's just free trade.
	Come on, look at all this great trade.
	Look at how rich we are.
	Isn't this terrific?
	We should be staying in the EU for the trade reason.
	That is still a very good classical liberal argument, and that's a decent tradition.
	But what has happened with the classical Liberals is Conservatism, because of the way British history has worked, has eaten another tradition.
	And the tradition that Conservatism ate is the Whig tradition.
	Now, it used to be the Whigs and the Tories were on opposite sides of the Commons.
	However, the problem with the Commons then is that no women could vote and no working class men could vote.
	As soon as women and working class men got the vote, the Whigs particularly were dramatically, the Whigs who became the Liberals were dramatically weakened.
	And there were whole books about the strange death of Liberal England and so on and so forth.
	But Whiggism didn't die.
	It just was eaten by Conservatism.
	So you've got this broad church of Conservatism.
	So it ate Whiggism, it ate Liberalism.
	The Liberal Democrats are no longer Liberal.
	They're gone.
	And they can't even get remain people to vote for them because they're just gone.
	They've just lost their way as a political entity.
	Kind of unfortunate because they were heirs for a little while, at least, to the tradition of Gladstone, a great Liberal Prime Minister.
	And so Conservatism is terribly divided against itself because we've produced a situation where the party is just split by Brexit and people are going off in multiple different directions.
	So rather than being united by agreed positions that are sort of the core of Conservatism, they're spending all their time fighting about Brexit, despite the fact that if you took Brexit out, they actually agree on a lot.
	This is the thing.
	Conservatives agree on a lot.
	Nick Bowles and Jacob Rees-Mogg agree on an awful lot.
	And Anna Subry, too, they all agree on a lot, except Brexit.
	But that's the defining issue of the age.
	Yes.
	So they can't just agree to disagree on it.
	They have to make a decision.
	And because they can't make a decision, nobody can make a decision.
	I mean, Labour has an element of this as well, although I'm less well qualified to comment on Labour.
	But they can't make a decision.
	There's this extraordinary analysis paralysis in the commons because nobody can make a bloody decision.
	And we've just...
	The party's in a mess.
	I mean, I am still one of these people who I am a conservative first and a lever second.
	But my Constituency Association and many of my Tory friends have completely flipped.
	They have either become a Remainer or a Lever first and a Conservative second.
	That's the kind of thing that split the Conservative Party historically when, for example, the repeal of the Corn Laws split the Tory Party because repealing the Corn Laws, whilst it was great for cheaper food for British, particularly for the British poor, the English and the English poor, it meant that the Tories, as they were then, had to crap on a significant part of their base, for want of a better word, modern word,
	which was all the farmers who grew the food who were getting all the agricultural subsidies.
	It's sort of like an 18th and 19th century version of the common agricultural policy, except it was in Britain.
	So that split the Tory Party.
	And then the Tory Party transformed as a result of the First World War, where it went from being an aristocratic party to being a business party.
	And we finished up with the 1918, the post-war coupon election, where everything just blew up and people finished up, everything was moving.
	And I think if we had a general election now, it would be like 1918 coupon election all over again.
	And the coupons this time, instead of who was David Lloyd George's best mate, the coupons would be what sort of Brexit or remain or soft Brexit or hard Brexit or up Brexit or do you support kind of thing.
	Yes.
	So That leads us on some really interesting questions.
	Why do you think it's become that kind of such a sort of almost a clear divide where it's I'm a Remainer or I'm a leaver?
	Because these are statements of principle, aren't they?
	The principle and the intent.
	Because I'm thinking if I was a politician, I was an MP, and my constituency voted the opposite way to what I wanted, I would feel either obligated to support that position out of democratic necessity, or even democratic principle there, even if it was not necessarily my preference.
	I would say, well, this is me representing my constituents, or I'd resign because I'd say, well, I'm afraid I can't do this job.
	Why do you think that that's not happening?
	Okay, there's a very specific and a genuine historical reason for this, particularly in the Conservative Party, although it's also present in Labour.
	One of the, probably the founding father of English Conservatism and to a degree British Conservatism, Edmund Burke, when he was running to be an MP and he was elected, although he only lasted one term, he made a very famous speech called the Speech to the Electors of Bristol.
	And one of the points that he made in it was that I am your rep to the equivalent of the local Tory Party Association, but also to many other normal Bristol voters.
	When you vote for me, I'm not your delegate.
	You don't get to take possession of my mind.
	I am your representative.
	So I will take great interest in every single thing that you bring to me and that your arguments and things that you want me to bring up in the Commons and so on and so forth.
	But I will still exercise my own judgment because I am not your delegate.
	I am not a member of your club.
	I am not only for Bristol.
	I am a member of Parliament.
	So it is a very sharp distinction and it's a very important one in the context of here intellectually English history.
	This is what we're seeing where MPs see themselves rightly because of this Burkean heritage.
	I mean it's quite short.
	I recommend Carl's subscribers just Google Edmund Burke's speech to the electors of Bristol.
	It's two pages long.
	Generally they only put the last few bits and just chop the rest of it off because it's all local parish pump politics from when Burke was alive and it doesn't matter.
	But the last couple of pages where he articulates the principle of representation rather than being a delegate is well worth reading and you will find it very sympathetic.
	You will find it very persuasive.
	I mean Edmund Burke is a very clever, persuasive man.
	For Burke you've got a situation where he tries to balance very finely how much I think for myself, how much I acknowledge that I'm a member of parliament and how seriously I have to take my constituents and what they want me to do.
	And I think I like to think of myself as a Burkean, but I think the current parliament on both Labour and Conservative has gone too far down the representation road and is not paying enough to what do my constituents, the delegation part.
	They have generally been fairly good.
	I don't have a problem with the sort of muckiness in Parliament.
	Difficult decisions are mucky.
	It's going to be messy.
	And yes, you've got the guy from Spriti Politi putting Burko and Peter Bone to music and we're all laughing and having a giggle and so on and so forth.
	And it's funny and entertaining and that's great.
	But difficult decisions are going to be messy.
	You've only got to look at the Hansard debates from before the Second World War when Chamberlain was still the Prime Minister and Winston Churchill was the one agitating about how bad Hitler was and you have to take this guy seriously because I think he wants to try and take over Europe.
	That kind of thinking.
	Read, I mean obviously we don't have recordings, but just read Hansard and you can see how fraught everything was.
	Very difficult decisions produce a fraught parliament, so I am less worried about the mess in parliament.
	But the not being able to balance adequately the extent to which you are a representative or a delegate is quite a serious problem, and it goes in both directions.
	There are leave supporting MPs with very strongly remain constituencies.
	Kate Hoy from Labour is a is a good example.
	So it's worse in the other direction simply because more constituencies voted leave than remain.
	But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist on the remain leave side as well.
	We've got a real issue here.
	And we've got this situation where both parties are terribly split.
	And I'm not making light of the situation of the Conservative Party here.
	The party is in a mess.
	But I can assure you that if Jeremy Corbyn were Prime Minister, he would be presiding over a Labour Party that would be in as equally big a mess.
	Yeah, I've got absolutely no doubt.
	Right, so let's try and get down to the sort of the roots of why people do things.
	And this is the part of the conversation I've been looking forward to for quite some time.
	And it's in reference to the subject of your book, there's a very big difference between, I guess what I'll term Roman civic morality and Christian universal morality.
	Yes.
	And I think that we're the kind of inheritors of both traditions in a way.
	And I guess they're at odds with one another, aren't they?
	So could you explain this to me so I have a better understanding?
	Well what I, I mean, by way of background to answer that, what I've done in these two books, and I'll try to show you the cover and I hope they're not too shiny, these two books, read that one first, please, and that one second, otherwise it would make absolutely no sense.
	I will do a little trick here where I will read the summary on the back that my publisher wrote.
	Authors are generally terrible at summarizing their own work.
	My publisher, that's why you get a second set of eyes.
	And so my editor wrote this.
	31 AD, 784 Ab Erbe Condita.
	Jerusalem sits uneasily in a Roman Empire that has seen an industrial revolution and now has cable news and flying machines and rights and morals that are strange and repellent to the native people of Judea.
	A charismatic young leader is arrested after a riot in the temple.
	He seems to be a man of peace, but among his followers are zealots and dagger men sworn to drive the Romans from the Holy Land.
	As the city spirals into violence, the stage is set for a legal case that will shape the future, the trial of Yeshua ben Yusuf.
	So what I've done is I've retold the Gospels story.
	So it's a very, very special kind of clever fan fiction, I suppose you could call it, biblical fan fiction, oh dear, oh dear lord.
	But I've imagined a society with Roman morals and Roman values and Roman beliefs about the way the world should work having had an industrial revolution.
	Now there's an essay in the back of book one that was also very kindly published by the Cato Institute.
	So if you want to read the essay without buying the book and then read the essay and see if the book appeals to you, then you just go to libertarianism.org and look for me and you can have a read of it and see what you think.
	Where I set out the things that had to change about Roman society in order for an industrial revolution to happen.
	And the big one is you have to abolish slavery.
	Now, we know the Romans had a market economy.
	We know that Roman law was very sophisticated, commercial contracts, it had contracts of hire and sale, all of the things that one associates with modern commercial market-based systems the Romans had.
	But because of slavery and because of the very large numbers of slaves, you had a situation where human labour power never lost its comparative advantage.
	So this is coming back towards it, Hiero of Alexandria inventing the steam engine.
	Yes.
	But it never taking off because human labour was cheaper.
	Basically one of the combination of cheaper and readily available.
	One of the things that caused the Industrial Revolution to happen in England and Scotland was, this is going to sound unbelievable to modern people, but it is nonetheless true and extremely well documented, was that wages were actually relatively high.
	So when wages are relatively high, you have an incentive to come up with something like a new common engine.
	And also when labour is relatively valuable, was the main thing that a new common engine did was it pumped water out of mines.
	And the reason you wanted water pumped out of mines was so that your miners didn't drown.
	If you can just go and buy a whole new stack of miners, then even if you know how to build a new common engine or something like it, then there's pretty good evidence, as you were saying, about Hero of Alexandria and other Roman engineer.
	Romans were mainly engineers, Greeks were theoretical scientists, but the two worked together.
	Even if you know how to do it, you don't have an incentive to do it.
	And economics is all about incentives.
	So I had to have that happen, and I explain how I try to make that work in the essay and try to make it plausible as a point of departure for speculative fiction.
	Right, now, because as I understand the sort of the Roman moral worldview, there's no particular impetus to abolish slavery, or at least as I say it.
	How far wrong am I by saying that?
	You're not entirely wrong in the sense that you've got a situation where the Roman attitude to slaves was, and this is going to sound remarkable to modern people, but was actually far more humane than the Greek attitude and also far more humane than the antebellum slavery that existed in the United States before the US Civil War.
	Roman slavery was never race-based and the Romans never conceived of slaves as lesser forms of the human.
	Slavery was a legal status, it was a piece of paper, which is why when slaves were manumitted, it was only a two-step process for a freed slave, their children, to become Roman citizens.
	Much, much quicker process.
	And basically, there are all sorts of details here, but there were three sort of broad categories outside of the slave state.
	You could be a free person, but not a Roman citizen of any sort.
	There was an intermediate stage, like, no, that is called in English a Juni in Latin, and then there was a Roman citizen.
	The Juni in Latin status, the best analogy I can give you is it's like the US green card.
	It gave you certain legal rights, it gave you certain employment rights, it gave you a certain degree of respect in the legal system and so on and so forth.
	And typically the pattern was a freed slave who had been freed by a Roman citizen, if the right legal process was followed, finished up with this Juni in Latin status.
	And that freed slave, easier, strangely, a lot of ancient societies do this, easier if you're a woman than if you're a man, that freed slave, her children became Roman citizens.
	It's important to remember, although there were statutory carve-outs in Roman law, that citizenship for a Roman was inherited from the mother, not from the father.
	So it's the same as Jewishness.
	And my Jewish friends are very funny about this.
	They say, oh goodness, I'm just trying to imagine someone being halarchically Roman.
	It's hilarious.
	So you've got that quite a few ancient civilizations have that kind of thinking, which seems very strange to us because we came up with primogenitor and so on and so forth later.
	They didn't necessarily think that way.
	I think my confusion on this point is that I wasn't clearly delineating between the Greek and Roman view of what a citizen is, how one becomes one.
	And if I think, I mean, I tend to look at the Athenians, they consider themselves born from the soil.
	So it was very easy to see who was and who wasn't an Athenian.
	You were born in Attica and you had a lineage.
	But Rome itself is a conglomeration of immigrants, isn't it?
	And bandits and...
	They're all immigrants too.
	Yes.
	We now have evidence.
	We now have historical evidence, archaeological evidence and genetic evidence that the folk stories that Romans and Etruscans told themselves about coming from Asia Minor were actually true.
	I mean, obviously, no, they didn't come from Troy.
	Virgil made that up.
	He told a bunch of fairy stories, but that's Virgil's job.
	In modern times, he would be a novelist.
	In antiquity, people like that tended.
	They wrote a novel, but they wrote it in poetry.
	But there was an essential truth to it, you know, that they did come from Asia Minor and settle in Italy.
	It was a prestigious status.
	Yes.
	But there was never any idea that you couldn't be one.
	It was more a case of citizenship made you, you had to do certain things, and if you did those things, and I mean, I did laugh, and it's probably better if you repeat it.
	When you put your little video up about you standing for South West England for the European Parliament, you use the line from Starship Troopers, service guarantees citizenship.
	Now, this was one of the promises that was made to men who, free men, they had to be free, who joined the auxilia, which gives us the modern word auxiliaries, who were allied troops.
	They weren't Roman citizens.
	You had to be a Roman citizen to be a legionary.
	But one of the things they got was, and this is an example of the statutory carve-out of you get your citizenship from your mum.
	So this is a legislation passed by the Roman Senate to make it possible for someone other than young men to become Roman citizens was if they did the military service, which was 16 years.
	So that's a lot of, you know, 16 years in the army is a big deal.
	You're running around the countryside with 50 pounds on your back in a society that before you hasn't invented antibiotics.
	So just think of that.
	So you took a risk, but it was worth doing because almost for the entire of Roman history, the Roman legions did not conscript.
	It was a volunteer force.
	That's a really important thing, like the modern military in a liberal democracy, for the bulk of Roman history, they did not conscript and they didn't want to conscript because they knew you finished up with reluctant soldiers who didn't want to be there and who wouldn't fight bravely.
	And this has all been conceptualized and thought through by Roman writers.
	They thought about how to do their military properly.
	But to come back to your earlier point about the different morality, it's civic nationalism, civic morality, nothing to do with race, but also nothing to do with inherent moral claims about equality of the person.
	If you'd have gone to a Roman and said, everyone is equal.
	They would have laughed.
	They would have laughed, yes.
	But they would have laughed for a different reason from an Athenian.
	An Athenian, it would have been, well, they're not Athenian, of course they're not.
	And a Spartan likewise.
	Oh, of course, yeah.
	We were born.
	Yes, and even though Sparta was a completely different civilization, did things completely differently and all of that.
	And Alexandria and all the other Lesbos and all the other Greek city-states.
	Because a Roman would have just responded with the way they conceived of things legally, which is everything was a piece of paper.
	That's a slave.
	I've got a piece of paper to prove it.
	That's a citizen.
	I've got a piece of paper to prove it.
	That's a Juni in Latin.
	Here's a piece of paper to prove it.
	That can be changed.
	But you are not equal and you have different rights and different responsibilities.
	Now they were aware that this could cause social problems and particularly economic problems.
	And this is one of the reasons why they were quite an intensely mercantile society.
	Is they knew that Roman law had a proper commercial law.
	And so legislation was enacted to ensure that all transactions undertaken, commercial transactions, undertaken through the borders of the Roman Empire, Roman law was applied to them regardless of whether the litigants were citizens or not.
	And that was purely and simply done, not because they believed in the equality of persons, but to oil the wheels of commerce.
	It was completely instrumental.
	It was, you know, we will make more progress.
	And entirely practical.
	We will make more money.
	Money is good.
	You know, that kind of thing.
	See, now that I love the way they're drawing these distinctions because the Romans were so legalistic.
	If there's no inherent blood claim to a thing, then you need something else.
	And if I have a solid legal claim, then I require the law to be very important because I don't have a family lineage to fall back on.
	No, you have to fall back on enforcement.
	Exactly.
	And you have to fall back on the fact that everyone else recognises the legal claim.
	And that, sorry, I'm learning a huge amount from this conversation.
	I very much appreciate it.
	I'm having a wonderful time.
	And we'll probably have to talk about another subject.
	Right, so let's contrast this with Christian morality and what you consider the way it came in and the general change of tone of the civilization.
	One of the things, the crucial difference between Christian, the emerging Christian morality, and not necessarily a Jewish morality at the time, it's very important to remember, and I've tried to do this in the books to the greatest extent possible, to the point where I actually got a close friend who is Jewish and reads Hebrew to get the very distinctive cultural differences.
	The way Christians took a lot, they raided Judaism.
	They treated it like a charity box and just raided Judaism.
	They really did that as true.
	But there were also very important differences because Jewish morality and Jewish customs were for Jews.
	And Jews have very had and have very clearly worked out ideas about what it is to be a Jew and what that means and what rules you have to follow and why you have to follow them.
	That is the whole point of Judaism.
	Now, that doesn't sound very different to the ancient Greek city-states.
	That's the thing.
	It's a very sort of Eastern Mediterranean attitude, isn't it?
	Yeah, although Judaism was morally distinctive compared to the Greek city-states.
	It was morally very distinctive society.
	But monotheism, the two big ones are the monotheism and unfortunately the homophobia.
	The Greek city-states are just worse.
	Of course they were not.
	And if you get a Greek writing about Jews, the first thing they'll notice is the homophobia.
	They won't call it that, but they'll just say that they disapprove of male-male relationships.
	And there will be all comments to that effect.
	Whereas a Roman will tend to say both that and then say, ooh, they treat women like shit.
	So you get a bit of that as well, because the status of women was much higher amongst the Romans than it was amongst nearly all the Greeks, with the exceptions of the lesbians and the Spartans.
	You've got to be really careful with the Greeks because there's all these different kinds of Greeks.
	Yes, I often have to tell people that in ancient Athens, the women were kind of dressed like some highly oppressive Islamic regime.
	Modern classicists legitimately compare the status of women, and I have read this in multiple classical studies journals, including relatively recently, a legitimate and wholly fair comparison for the status of women in classical Athens is modern Saudi Arabia.
	Nobody would dispute that.
	And the thing is, if you were a man who wanted a female companion who was intellectually your equal and not just to reproduce children and so on and so forth, you finished up having to get a non-Athenian woman and then make her all sorts of ridiculous promises in order to have her fit in with you.
	And the classic case study for this is, of course, Pericles.
	Because he wasn't...
	His marriage will block alone.
	Yeah, and Aspasia was his partner.
	He couldn't even really marry her because of Athenian law.
	And he was constantly having to go to his fellow Athenians because they were taking the having a piece of it because of who he was with.
	Because she wasn't an Athenian-style Greek.
	She was like a Greek, because she was non-Athenian.
	She was like a Greek from another city-state where the status of women was higher.
	So you get all of this kind of...
	She must have been a remarkable woman.
	Well, yes, there's actually quite a I've just started reading it.
	I'm going to review it for probably for the specky or for standpoint.
	A book called Socrates in Love by a classicist at Oxford.
	And he makes the argument, a pretty compelling argument, that the diotiva in Plato's dialogues was actually Asphasia.
	Oh, okay.
	And so it's well worth it.
	I haven't finished his book yet, but what I've read about a third of it, and what I've read of it so far, it's very compelling and very thoughtful.
	But yes, so you finished up in an awful position if you were Pericles.
	So whereas the big thing with the Roman morality is, and Christian morality, Christianity comes along, raids a lot from Judaism, including some pretty unfortunate stuff like the homophobia.
	But it also brings an idea that is hugely important to all strands of modern liberalism, left or right, whether it's the Whig classical liberal tradition, whether it's the American progressive liberal tradition, whether it's the liberals of Gladstone and so on and so forth in the UK, is that the belief in the moral equality of persons or a belief in moral egalitarianism,
	that regardless of people's different attributes or skills or appearance or anything else, religion or anything else about them, there is a fundamental core that says that everybody is equal initially before God.
	Male or there is no male or female.
	This is the line from Paul.
	There is no male or female in Christ Jesus, that line.
	And so initially that moral equality of persons or moral egalitarianism is before God, but it developed as a result of the Enlightenment into the idea of equality before the law.
	It is a hugely important principle.
	Romans didn't have it.
	Yes, and I guess the way I've always conceived of it from just my own study of it is every human life has some kind of fundamental value, which, I mean, you can see through just reading anything on any classical studies, there are many societies that just simply did not think this.
	No.
	You know.
	And weirdly enough, as ancient civilizations go, the Romans were at the more humane end.
	The Romans were progressive.
	You see, that's very interesting.
	That is very interesting, isn't it?
	We might crucify you, but we will do it after due process.
	And we're not doing it because of your race.
	We're doing it because we think you're up.
	Yeah, we've got our reasons though.
	Yeah, so no, no, right, yeah.
	So that, I think the, I guess I call it the sort of universalism of Christianity.
	Yes.
	I think it's very interesting.
	So how did this end up meshing together with Roman civic values?
	Well it didn't.
	That's the problem.
	That was why it didn't fit.
	And so you finished up with a situation where you had this base Roman culture and then Christian moral beliefs laid over the top of it.
	And I spoke to James Dellingpole on his on the Dellingpod podcast about this, but I'll repeat it for you for people who are watching Carl.
	You finished up with a very, very odd religious blend that produced some really, really strange cultural phenomena.
	And the way I explained it to James was if you go to a Catholic country that has always been Catholic, and particularly a Mediterranean Catholic country, and the one I finished up recommending to James, and I would recommend to people travelling around Europe, is go to a Portuguese cathedral and see what the blend of Roman civilization and Catholic Christianity produced.
	Southern Italy is good as well.
	Go to a cathedral in Naples or something like that.
	And you get this really, really odd society that is at once sort of mawkish and sentimental.
	Lots and lots of little sculptures of kids and this kind of thing.
	And you sort of think, oh, isn't that cute?
	It's like puppies and kittens.
	But at the same time, they're just murderously evil.
	You know, when they encounter anyone they disagree with, and of course, Protestants or Muslims are the ones.
	Remembering, of course, though, if the Muslims or the Protestants got a chance to be top dog, they were murderously evil too.
	So because everybody is doing this at the time.
	So you finish up with this very, very peculiar mix of values because you couldn't make pagan Rome go away.
	And the ornateness of a Catholic cathedral, the ornateness of church dress, you know, all those silly jokes that used to be told about Pope Benedict and his fondness for red shoes.
	You know, and they look like something out of the Wizard of Oz.
	Well, you expected him to click his heels.
	Of course, but he's still the Pontifex Maximus.
	Chief Bridgebuilder.
	Yes.
	So yeah, that's what it means in Latin, by the way.
	He didn't do Latin, but he knows enough to mug.
	I have read enough to mug, that's correct.
	Yeah, but that's the point, isn't it?
	It's a continuity.
	Yes.
	It's been inherited.
	It has.
	And they didn't mesh well, which is one of the reasons, I mean, Gibbon always, he identified 16, Edward Gibbon in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, identified 16 reasons for why Rome fell.
	And one of them, and it used to enormously annoy people because Gibbon was an Enlightenment figure, was, well, because Christianity was part of it, because it did all these weird things to a culture that was already pretty weird, but also took away the things from that culture that were pretty good, like the civic nationalism, like the idea of civic service and public duty, and the fact that the distinction between the public and the private.
	So yes, Romans have this, pagan Romans have this reputation, a deserved one, for being really, really amoral.
	But it was All done at home, you know, you still, when you went out into public, in public, you had a different face on.
	And often I have to sort of, it's easier to get this across to Australians who have more familiarity with Chinese and Japanese and Vietnamese culture because of the immigration streams that have come into Australia.
	The Romans had a much stronger sense of keeping my face.
	That is the, when it's the Chinese phrase is translated into English, it literally means, please let me keep my face.
	And so the Romans had a similar sort of sense.
	There was what you did in the home and what you did privately, and that was entirely your business, and you walk into someone's house and that's where you finish up with the lady riding on the flying penis across the room on the wind chimes and all of this saucy artwork and so on and so forth.
	If you go to Pompeii, if you go to Herculaneum, if you go to any other Roman civic site, you will find all of that stuff is inside people's houses.
	Roman houses, they present this sort of blank front to the world.
	And because all that lovely, amongst the middle and upper class people, all that lovely stuff with the swimming pool and the beautiful columns and the spots for people to sit and eat olives and all of this kind of thing, they're all out the back.
	You can't see them from the street.
	The idea of a front garden, the deeply English front gardens or the American yard, Australian yard, it's the complete opposite.
	You have to imagine the house that flipped.
	Well, one of the things I first found really interesting was I was a lot younger and I was just reading about the plan of a Roman villa and the fact that it was effectively like a fortress around the garden that was in the centre that was open, I found very interesting.
	And all the bedrooms have got lovely views onto the garden, lovely windows.
	But it's very austere on the outside.
	That's absolutely fascinating.
	And literally all you would know about who was posh in your street was, was their house bigger than everybody else and did it have mains plumbing?
	Because everybody else had to.
	I mean, the Romans were very good on water supply and their water was clean and they, you know they, you know and they, you know, they were famous famous for proper water supply, I mean, that's one thing they did.
	And for sewerage as well, you know.
	So you didn't have poop in the streets and whatnot.
	They were good at that.
	They were good at that.
	But poor people had to go to the street and pump or to the fountain public, a public fountain.
	There were public fountains everywhere and they're the ones that look like lions and lionesses faces and things like sometimes they're all the face of a deity or that kind of thing.
	You see those a lot.
	However, the wealthier people, because you had to pay for this, it wasn't provided, got piping made typically of lead, which is in Latin plumbum, which is why piombo, lead, and plumber.
	To this day, a plumber is someone who works with lead pipes.
	And they came into your house and they had taps and the things that you associate with a modern house.
	And because they could do boilers for hot water systems, but they couldn't do boilers for steam.
	That's another reason why they've struggled with the industrialization is, they struggled with coming up with boilers that didn't burst, and there's actually a very good display on this at the National Museum OF Scotland in Edinburgh if you're interested.
	They've got a working new common engine in there as well.
	So if you want to, if you're interested in industrial archaeology, I strongly recommend the Industrial Revolution floor at the National Museum OF Scotland, which does this really well.
	But yeah, so the posh people.
	They had hot water and running hot and cold, heated floors, all of that stuff.
	They did that very well.
	But you have to be posh for that so that you could tell who the posh people were, because they would have, you know, they would have the drain out in front for all plumbing connections.
	Yeah, but that's so.
	Um, since we, since you brought it up uh, was was lead poisoning anything to do with the decline of the Roman empire?
	There's all sorts of arguments about this.
	The general view amongst chemists is that having lead pipes doesn't matter if the water is relatively hard because it lays down lime scale and lime scale is a prophylactic against the effects of lead poisoning.
	If there was a problem with lead in the Roman world, it wasn't from their pipes because most water, because you're dealing with a limestone environment, most water is quite hard.
	So that wasn't the issue.
	The problem for the Romans with lead came from their makeup.
	And remember, both men and women wore makeup.
	Yes.
	Now, have you ever been to India?
	No.
	Anyone who has ever been to India will have noticed the beautiful makeup that Indian women have.
	It glitters.
	If you go to an Indian wedding, you will see this, and it's all done with pencils, cold pencils, K-O-H-L.
	Now, I think the modern Indian government is in the process of changing this so that it can't happen anymore.
	But that beautiful, glittering makeup that seems to stick to everything and never goes shiny and always looks fabulous on Indian dances, the reason it looks so beautiful is because the base of it, the substrate, is lead.
	And what health effects does that have to you?
	Well, I mean, lead is notoriously associated with increased violence, reduced IQ, problems with miscarriages.
	You know, there's all sorts of issues there with lead.
	But yes, it's not the lead pipes, it's the lead makeup.
	That's very interesting.
	Right, okay.
	I feel that we've kind of talked ourselves into a position where I only want to talk about Rome.
	No, you need to go back to politics.
	People will expect to chat about something other than ancient Rome.
	Well, okay, actually, no, no, I remember where I wanted to go now.
	So, yeah, so it was a very, very uncomfortable fit to have Christian and Roman moral systems operating in the same space.
	Yes.
	What happened?
	Well, basically, Christianity became a warlike and militant creed.
	And the offshoot from Christianity, I mean, I think Dante was quite right to portray Muhammad as a schismatic, as he does in The Divine Comedy.
	A lot of people try to blame Muhammad on the Jews.
	That's not fair.
	There just weren't enough Jews and they were so weakened by that point.
	You can't, theologically, I don't think this works.
	Now, I will just preface this by saying I'm much, my first degree was in classics, and my next degree, because classics gets you nothing apart from the ability to translate school mottos and read copious quantities of Roman smart, which is what I've used it for.
	But it's not going to get you a job.
	So I went off to Oxford and became a lawyer.
	So that's how you make a living until I use my classics degree for this.
	But of course, classics is Greek and Latin, which Latin I read very well and Greek moderately well.
	I don't know any Hebrew and I know only a smattering of Arabic from working on an archaeological dig and it's only spoken.
	I struggle to read it.
	So when I make theological comments about Islam, I'm less well informed.
	I'm much more strongly informed on Christianity because I can read the source languages, or most of them, I can't read Hebrew.
	And so what you've got with when you blend these two traditions, and then of course it is exported to Islam as well and it takes on the same characteristics, is you've got ideas that are fundamentally quite pietist, quietistic, unobtrusive.
	They might seem weird.
	You might feel terribly sorry for any kid that happens to be born to be gay in these societies.
	But they're not inherently, I mean you've only got to look at rabbinical Judaism to see this.
	They're not inherently violent or conquering or nasty.
	You know, the rules in the Quran, you might not want to follow them, but they're not inherently nasty.
	But what happened because of the overlay of this set of monotheistic values on top of what was underneath, which was a militant, conquering, aggressive civilization that developed modern colonialism in the form that it makes sense to us.
	Rule Britannia, you know, all of that kind of thing.
	I mean, the Romans had all of that.
	You've got lines in Virgil.
	I quote a bit from Virgil in book two of Kingdom of the Wicked.
	And I did it quite deliberately because I wanted to get across to British readers in particular because classics is not widely taught in British schools anymore.
	I won't read the Latin, but I'll read my translation of Virgil.
	And tell me which English writer he resembles.
	Roman, you are to rule the empire's peoples.
	Remember, these shall be your skills to bring peace, impose the law, to spare the beaten, and to beat the proud.
	It's on the tip of my tongue, but I can't remember it.
	Jungle book.
	That's a Kipling.
	Kipling.
	Okay, so you need to, yeah, you need to sort of, they conceived of themselves, and everyone sort of says, oh, look at the British, or look at the Belgians, or look at the French, or look at whoever's a colonial power.
	But the British and the French are probably the best ones in this circumstance because they had large empires and compared to many of the other colonial empires, they were competently run.
	And so, but they didn't make up that conception of colonialism.
	That conception of colonialism and imperialism was broken.
	And they could not have done it without the Romans.
	So what happened to Christianity and Islam as a result of this substrate is the aggression, the conquest.
	And then, of course, so you've got first the Christians, then you've got the Muslims, then they encounter each other.
	They fight for a while.
	The Muslims win, they're in front, largely because they have better scientists.
	But then Islam, the Islamic region, is terribly damaged by the Mongol invasions.
	So the poor Muslims are copying it from both sides.
	They've got the Europeans pushing back on one side and they've got the Mongols pushing on the other side.
	You've got the sack of Baghdad in 1054 and the burning of many of the Islamic world's libraries.
	For anyone who's not familiar, it's hard to overstate the importance of the sack of Baghdad.
	Yes, it's hugely important.
	Imagine if the Chinese burned down Washington, D.C.
	Yes.
	It's staggering.
	Yes.
	So you've got these two warring religions fighting with each other, and so then the Muslims start to back off and back off, but it's quite slow.
	They are still fundamentally a colonial, imperial, conquering civilization.
	And they think they have a right to.
	The rhetoric is the same.
	You get this Kipling-esque rhetoric from Christians, you get it from Muslims, and so on and so forth.
	Then the Europeans, it's sort of fairly even for a while, and the Chinese and Indians, or particularly the Chinese, are off doing their own things.
	Because everyone who conquers China becomes Chinese.
	That's what happened to the Mongols.
	They conquered China, they became Chinese.
	Whereas India was Muslims, the Mughals conquered India and profoundly changed the substrate of Hinduism in lots of different ways and also made it non-viable to be a Buddhist in India.
	So Buddhism comes from India, but nearly all the Buddhists in India are actually from Tibet.
	They're refugees from Tibet.
	Ashoka is long gone.
	Yes.
	But that beautiful symbol on the Indian flag is ultimately Buddhist in origin.
	It's Ashoka's symbol.
	So you've got then two things happen.
	You've got Reformation in Europe and followed fairly rapidly by the Enlightenment.
	And you've also got earlier in Islamic history, you've got the split between the Sunni and the Shia.
	So you've got two big groups in both.
	Then your European powers have the Enlightenment.
	And the Enlightenment is a very interesting mix of a rediscovery of aspects of Roman law and the scientific revolution.
	And you've got to appreciate the extent to which it was...
	So much Roman law was in it, the intensely commercial law, is when you read Adam Smith.
	Adam Smith is a really good place to start.
	But please read theory of moral sentiments first before you go on to Wealth of Nations.
	Wealth of Nations actually makes very little sense unless you read Adam Smith banging on about the Stoics and Roman law in Theory of Moral Sentiments.
	I haven't read that, but I haven't read it.
	No, no, yeah.
	A lot of people have read Wealth of Nations, and bits of it don't make sense.
	But the point of...
	There was a surprising amount of moral philosophy in there.
	Yes, I mean, I was taken aback by how moralistic it was.
	I thought it was going to be an economic textbook.
	No, it's not.
	But it's because Smith's argument, the same as the Roman jurist's argument, was that markets are moral, but they are not moral by design.
	They are moral by process of operation.
	And it's procedural.
	I mean, Voltaire described going to London and seeing people of all different religious backgrounds and women as well.
	He was really shocked.
	It's really amazing.
	And they're all just transacting with each other completely peacefully and in an orderly fashion.
	And it was to do with the anonymising fact of markets where what matters is the mutually beneficial exchange, the transaction, rather than the person who is selling to you and what they are or the status of the person.
	So you move, you have this progression from status to contract that legal historians talk about.
	And if I might say, just a little tiny side thing, one of the things I hate about the modern cancel culture of trying to get people fired from their jobs or trying to close down someone's business or so on and so forth because of their politics.
	And I don't care if they're left-wing or right-wing, they're right-wing, I don't give stuff, because it happens in all sorts of directions, is it takes away that thing that Voltaire noticed, which is the anonymising quality of markets, where the status or identity of the person transacting with you does not matter.
	What matters is the transaction.
	And that is absolutely vital.
	If we summarise liberalism with liberty, egalitarianism, and fraternity, the egalitarianism thing is completely underwritten by the idea of an anonymous transaction, isn't it?
	Yes.
	How could you make a judgment if you don't know who the person coming in is?
	But I mean, well, to the extent that they are judged, they are judged on how well they do what they do.
	This is Adam Smith's point about self-interest.
	The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, he doesn't give you a good piece of meat or a candlestick or whatever it is because out of the goodness of his heart.
	He does it because he doesn't want you to tell ten friends, don't go and shop buy anything from so-and-so in the Cannon Gate.
	We'll keep it in Scotland because we're dealing with the Scottish Enlightenment.
	And from so-and-so in the Cannon Gate, because he sells duds.
	He overcharges for crap product, that kind of thing.
	So that's the way your reputation...
	Isn't that amazing?
	That's an amazing distinction between, like, it's not, oh, he comes from the Alcmonaghi family or something like that.
	Yes.
	It's about character.
	But then it's the sort of self-ownership of your own work.
	If you are making bad products, you can change that.
	That's something that is not inherent to you.
	It's in your behavior.
	It's overpowering.
	Yes.
	Exactly.
	And so of course the Enlightenment means that Europe just steamrolls everybody.
	And look, we've had empires for thousands of years.
	There's been empires since humans have lived in cities.
	So the idea that if somehow Christianity and Islam hadn't been smooshed up with this very imperial morality, I just think is quite silly.
	The Chinese were never really influenced by Christianity or Islam in their early history.
	They had their own distinctive traditions and culture, a very remarkable one.
	I mean, China is the other great civilization.
	Don't ever be in any doubt about that.
	It's an extraordinary civilization.
	Just say, I actually know next to nothing about China because I'm well aware that it is just like the antonym of the Mediterranean on the other side of the world.
	It's the enormous and I'm still too busy trying to figure out our way.
	Yes, that's fine.
	That's a totally fine thing to do.
	But just as long as you keep in the top of your head that this is the other great global civilizations, China, you know, with all of these extraordinary things, culture, religion, music, literature, beautiful architecture, science, technology, all of that, they have all that too.
	And they have still had terrible, terrible, bloody wars.
	They didn't necessarily have them over religion because they don't have that sort of religion, but they found other things to fight at.
	Yeah, other ways of drawing distinctions of who gets to die and who gets to live.
	Yes.
	Right, okay.
	So where does that leave us in the modern day then?
	Because, I mean, we seem to be coming to a point now where we're finding, I feel very much that the cancel culture, all that sort of thing, I feel that that is a replacement for knives.
	Yes, it is.
	And so that is to sort of draw a distinction between one moral community and another, and that's a replacement for wiping the other side out.
	Yes.
	Well, it's a classic, in a sense, it's, I hate to say this, but the people who do it, both left and right, there is this social expectation that middle-class people don't solve their problems with their fists or with knives.
	But cancel culture, particularly the way it manifests, men get them fired.
	Women, sexual threats of some sort, or humiliation of some sort.
	If the sexual threat or humiliation doesn't work on that woman, default to the one that you use on men, try to get her fired.
	And the same thing in reverse, a good example is Hulk Hogan.
	If the get him fired doesn't work on this particular man, default to what you do to women, which is humiliate him sexually.
	It's what you do instead of doing what certain gangs in London are doing with knives.
	Now, yes, I am not pretending that these are the same, and I think one of the problems in modern culture, broadly speaking, and certainly a free speech issue, is people collapsing non-violent acts that are nasty into violent acts.
	Absolutely.
	Unspeech is violence.
	Yeah, and all of this is nonsense.
	I mean, so obviously those kids in London who are knifing each other have to go to jail because it is violent crime.
	There is a difference.
	We have no permissiveness of that.
	On that issue.
	But there is no getting away from the fact that people who try to sexually humiliate or get their opponents or get their opponents fired are doing it because there is still some semblance of social rule that says, well, you can't go round to their house and beat the crap out of them.
	But it is instead.
	Cancel culture is instead of the kids in London with knives, it really is.
	But I do genuinely feel that it's a step on the path.
	I really do feel it's a step on the path.
	And I say this as someone who's been physically attacked in the university by communists.
	These people, I do feel that they are eager to take this further, frankly.
	And I say that as someone who's been assaulted by them.
	This is the problem we've got now: and we were talking a little bit about it, it doesn't hurt to sort of re-up this when we were talking about Brexit earlier before this chat started, the danger of a politics of the street becoming a situation where people think that that's the only way they can get what they want.
	You've had in the history of the UK the Countryside Alliance march, the Stop the War march, most recently the second referendum People's Vote march in London, where you had over 300,000 people, 400,000 people at all of those.
	It is generally acknowledged that the Stop the War march was a million, more than a million people.
	And those marches, peaceful, orderly, all of them, everybody impeccably behaved, achieved nothing.
	With far fewer numbers, although still significant numbers, the Gilets Jean in France, because they are willing to be a party of the street, they got Macron to scrap all his environmental taxes, they got Macron to scrap a lot of the rules about a lot of the, to increase pensions, they got Macron to back down on various changes to French employment law.
	And it was to do with this willingness, which is not embedded in British culture the way it is in France, and particularly not in middle-class culture, to be a party of the street.
	But I think it's important before anyone starts saying, well, that sounds like a fantastic idea, every action has a consequence and a reaction to it.
	Macron is becoming tyrannical.
	He's banning people from saying there is the police have been unreal.
	Yes.
	The injuries to these.
	I mean, I'm amazed that there haven't been deaths.
	Yes.
	Well, there have been a few deaths where people have been backed over and stuff like that.
	Yeah, but I mean like deliberate state.
	We're getting to that point, I feel.
	And I'm genuinely worried.
	turning Macron into a tyrant yes and I mean and to be fair one of the reasons why he has been in these I cover Brexit for the Australians so I'll just make a little Brexit point here One of the reasons why he has been so intransigent and so nasty to everybody, not just Theresa May, he's been very nasty to the other European leaders, is because his political movement in France is going to be put to the sword at the European elections.
	And he knows that.
	And it was a relatively fragile coalition to start with and quite Blairite, you know, sort of this.
	And in the face of Le Pen.
	In the face of Le Pen.
	You know, this hopey-changey kind of politics, which British people just go, oh, we've had identicites, silly identicit politicians like David Cameron and Danny Blair.
	We've had that before.
	But for France, it was new.
	And so he managed to make it work for one election cycle.
	And now it's all just unravelling terribly.
	And I feel for the French, they're in a dreadful situation.
	And I mean, Macron has behaved disgracefully towards Donald Tusk.
	And he's behaved disgracefully towards Theresa May.
	He's made life very difficult for Barnier and other EU negotiators as well.
	For himself, I think.
	And for himself.
	I think his high-handedness has been the complete undoing of him.
	You could have approached this in the complete opposite way and probably had so much more positive results.
	It's absolutely atrocious.
	It's just, yes, so the French are in a real state at the moment And now Notre Dame was burnt down into the bargain as well.
	Although apparently the very famous Rose window has been preserved, I was just reading the paper coming up to London for this interview.
	And the very famous Rose window that's used all the way through Hunchback of Notre Dame with the light coming through on Cosimodo.
	It's been preserved.
	So there's something out of it, but they've lost the 13th century oak roof completely.
	It's gone.
	I've actually tried to avoid finding out what's happened because when the event is in progress, a lot of misinformation flies around, conspiracy theories.
	And I don't want to be the kind of person who's trying to chase every story.
	It's not me.
	So I'll wait until all the evidence is really categorised and I'll figure out what's going on then.
	But yeah, so right, coming back to Britain and the peaceful middle-class mass protests, I mean, I agree that they have very little effect.
	I mean, there have been huge Brexit protests and like the huge Remain protests, because London, a Remain area, and then in the sort of south counties, very easy for them to reach.
	To be fair, the protest that was actually outside of London that was pretty significant because it's much smaller geographically and the people involved in it were much poorer.
	And the one where I first started to think in terms of party of the street issues was actually when Tommy Robinson got 5,000 people outside the BBC studios in Salford.
	That hasn't happened for a long time.
	Yes.
	Very northern protest.
	OK, I'm glad you...
	Yeah, yes, yeah.
	And it's important to note that the values are the same.
	The repudiation of violence generally is the same.
	But I think that it's more a sort of the comfort level that they're at.
	I think the middle class people would end up going this way if their discomfort was raised enough.
	It would take a while, though.
	Well, of course it would.
	But this is the problem.
	I think a lot of middle class people want to draw a strong delineating line saying, we are not like that.
	It's like, yet.
	You are not like that yet, because you are comfortable and safe.
	These people do not feel comfortable and safe.
	They feel that this is an existential crisis they face and it's not getting any better.
	And so this is why I've long been a proponent of, look, civilise Tommy.
	Just bring him into the fall.
	Stop telling him he's a bad person.
	Stop telling him he's bad.
	Because if you listen to what's happened to him, you can't say that you wouldn't also be like this.
	And all the people who support him, and I've got a huge amount of empathy for the things that these people have gone through and the establishment's reaction to it.
	How do you think this is going to end up?
	Well, there are two things going on with Tommy Robinson in particular.
	One of them doesn't just apply to Tommy Robinson.
	It's a more serious problem across liberal democracies.
	The other applies to Tommy Robinson and a few people like him.
	The first is, I started out in life at the criminal bar, as in a criminal lawyer.
	And my pupil master was a QC and became a judge in the Queensland Supreme Court and I was in a regional area, so an area with a lot of deprivation, a lot of meth, a lot of quite serious drug-related crime.
	I'll preface that, what I'm going to say with that bit of throat clearing.
	How do we as a society respond to convicted felons once they have been released?
	Because the traditional undertaking is that once a person has served their jail term, they have paid their debt to society.
	You shouldn't bring it up again.
	And well, These people need to have some sort of a chance at employment and at a decent life and education or whatever.
	It's a question of rehabilitation.
	Or otherwise you have a situation where the only thing they can do is continue to be trapped in the criminal cycle.
	Now, this is of particular import.
	It's not just relevant with someone like Tommy Robinson, but you've got the United States where relatively brief custodial sentences can deprive someone of the franchise for life.
	And of course this has a racial effect, particularly in the southern parts of the United States.
	A racial and a sexual effect.
	So you've got black men disenfranchised because of people's inability to accept that the prison sentence is the punishment.
	Can you stop punishing people after they've got out of jail?
	That applies to Tommy Robinson and a lot of people.
	We need to have an adult conversation about that.
	And I mean, the book, The Secret Barrister's book, his book goes into these kind of issues and he does it very well.
	Quite a lot of legal writers talk about it.
	The other one, which applies to Tommy Robinson, but also applies to people who don't have a rap sheet, is our, yeah, to you, to a degree, not to the same extent.
	I'm not a criminal.
	But you've got a situation where the only people who can talk about certain issues, and it tends to be on the conservative side, although occasionally it crops up with Labour as well with the anti-Semitism issue.
	I'm thinking of Paul Enbury, who's very Labour, who's copped it last week.
	The only people who can talk about certain issues are people who went to the right university and have the right accent and sort of are very conservative, but it's a very domesticated, benign form of conservative.
	Lots of people loathe Douglas Murray with the blazing heat of a thousand suns, but he's very hard to argue with because he's, you know, he makes his points in an erudite and thoughtful and humane way.
	And the contrast between him and you is really quite extraordinary.
	Here's you banned from Twitter, having people take away your Patreon money and so on and so forth.
	Meanwhile, Douglas Murray is on Twitter with his nearly 200,000 followers and a best-selling book and a column for The Spectator and a column for Standpoint and a column for The Tory Graph and all of this kind of thing.
	And he's saying exactly the same thing.
	But of course, Carl from Swindon didn't go to Oxford, did he?
	No, I went to Coventry.
	You went to Coventry.
	But I have to say, in defence of the system in this way, I did this deliberately.
	I made these rods for my own back.
	I guess I would say I'm a lot more of a warrior in this regard than he is.
	I'm a lot more confrontational because I like fighting.
	I like fighting with people.
	Douglas is a, and I never expected to have to have conversations like this.
	I thought I was going to make video games and podcasts about history.
	I didn't think I was going to go into the political realm.
	So they're digging up old tweets and I'm like, well, yeah, I was trying to hurt people's feelings.
	I was trying to get them to understand that there is opposition to what they're saying.
	Yes.
	And they can't just block us.
	And then this tweet about Jess Phillips that's going around, they don't seem to understand that the whole purpose of it was to make them acknowledge me.
	That was the whole purpose.
	Because I've been talking block, block, block, ignore, ignore, ignore.
	I'm presenting in the same way Douglas Murray is principled opposition to the philosophy that they're espousing.
	And they're not engaging with that whatsoever because presumably I'm Carl from Swindon.
	And like you say, and so they can just probably, so I had to do something that would make them how.
	But James Dellingpole and I talked a bit about this, but we talked about it privately.
	And when I go back and do the deling pod again, because he's read book one, but he hasn't read, I think he's only just finished book two, but at the time we did the first delling pod, he hadn't read book two, he'd only just finished book one.
	And we were talking a bit about this phenomenon that I have noticed, and he has noticed it as well, since about probably 2012, where, and I really started to notice it in 2016.
	And by way of a bit of throat clearing, in 2016, well, until halfway through the year, I was working for an Australian politician in an election campaign, the 2016 federal election.
	I was working for a classical Liberal politician called David Lionhelm.
	He's not in the Parliament.
	He resigned, retired from the Senate because he was 68 years old.
	But I was working for him.
	But he was a crossbencher, which is sort of the equivalent of someone in the European Parliament, not politically necessarily, but someone from the Brexit Party or UKIP or the Cucks Change UK.
	I'm sorry, that's called themselves that.
	I thought I laughed like a drink.
	I had a wonderful time with the Chad UKIP Virgin Cuck Party.
	But all of these people, so a crossbencher, a minor party, you're agreeing.
	Yeah, a minor party, not one of the two big ones, which in Australia are called the Coalition, Liberal, National, and Labour.
	And so it meant, of course, you get it from all sides when you're in the minority party.
	You get both big parties gang up on you for whatever reason.
	And one of the things I noticed, and he noticed it as well, and we talked about it, and James Dellingpole has noticed it too, is this tendency that's become quite common amongst a lot of people of minority backgrounds.
	And I have to, unfortunately, it tends to be the younger ones.
	It's not people of my age.
	I'm happy to out myself here.
	I mean, sort of lone classical liberal and resident local homosexual.
	You get a lot of younger people who are sort of gay or immigrant or ethnic or black or whatever, and they've clearly never had any pushback.
	And they're just not capable of dealing with someone pushing back.
	And I recognise, although I've never done it, what you were doing.
	It becomes very tempting when you find someone is basically a piece of sponge cake.
	This person isn't capable of arguing, they're a piece of Victoria's sponge.
	I'm going to stick my finger in and leave a big hole like that.
	Yes.
	Yes, I know.
	Look at your face.
	I know exactly how you're thinking here.
	Yes, and it was entirely under this self-awareness that I ended up getting myself banned from Twitter or wherever.
	I'm well aware of what I'm doing.
	What you were doing, yes.
	But it is, I mean, I have, I mean, I don't know what time you put these up on YouTube, but if I was going to say this on the BBC, I would say, I hope this is after the watershed.
	If I had a pound for every time someone in my life has called me a muffmuncher, I would not be on your, much as I like you, I would not be on your show hoping people find us interesting and vote for you for the European Parliament and buy copies of my book.
	I just wouldn't be here.
	I'd be on a yacht somewhere.
	I'd be on a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean, having bought an island on which I could moor my yacht.
	So I'm thinking, I have been called everything.
	As I said on the delling pod, I grew up in the most conservative state in Australia, under the most conservative state premier.
	To quote from an Australian sociologist, Mark Bainish, who's written a very, very good analysis of the history of Queensland politics.
	And he called it very immodestly but amusingly Queensland, everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask.
	And he describes it as the closest that the white British Commonwealth came to true authoritarianism.
	And I grew up in that as a gay person, you know, where what I was was illegal.
	Yes, you know, so this kind of thing.
	And I just think I remember my father having to bail Aboriginal employees out of the local lock-up or there was no one to cut cane.
	It's just, you get these modern people and they get one nasty word and they crumple.
	And if you have a different sort of demeanor from me or Douglas Murray, it must be enormously tempting to try to get that effect.
	Well, not really for most people.
	I'm not a belligerent person to anyone who is just leaving me alone, frankly.
	Ultimately, I'm very libertarian in that regard.
	I just want to be left alone.
	But these people won't leave us alone.
	They come into every space in which we operate.
	They can't say, well, that's your space.
	That's okay.
	I didn't make that space.
	You guys did the service.
	You guaranteed your citizenship of whatever community you're a part of.
	It's when they come in and then tell us how things have to be done.
	And I can't stand that kind of.
	It's an authoritarian mindset.
	It's in itself belligerent and aggressive.
	And the first time I was ever called a misogynist, I was outraged.
	Absolutely outraged.
	How could you say that?
	Now, that was the first time I'd really encountered academic feminism.
	Yes.
	My goodness.
	Carl from Swindon was probably not expecting this.
	Oh, I was shocked.
	I was genuinely shocked.
	Now it's part of the course, obviously.
	It's actually quite quaint now.
	I haven't been called a misogynist in such a long time because obviously this doesn't work.
	Well, you then finish up with the situation, the little boy who cried wolf.
	If you constantly call someone a racist or a misogynist or an anti-Semite or anything like that, you just finish up with the situation of when it's not true, you lose the power of a very important term for when it is true.
	And a friend of mine, who is Russian Jewish, actually, she puts it like this.
	She says, always remember that the little boy who cried wolf was eaten by a real wolf, which I think is a very good way of putting it.
	And we've got the situation where all these people on both left and right, it's worse on the left, but if you want to see some wolf crying, you can certainly see it directed at Corbyn and Labour.
	You know, everything has become about trying to portray the guy as the next Stalin.
	Everything is, you've got finished up with a situation where a bloody MP has wired herself up to record Jeremy Corbyn in a private chat.
	Who do you think you are, love?
	MI, Farmer.
	As bad as Jeremy Corbyn is, he's not going to be the next Stalin.
	It would be like making Michael Foote Prime Minister.
	He'll tank the economy and get voted out.
	Yes.
	Yes, it's like calling Jacob Reesmog super Hitler.
	Yes.
	It's ridiculous.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's absurd.
	But I have to say, I really think the sort of moral authoritarianism of these people who are in other ways very weak morally and sort of like personally, I think it's amazing how they seem to have managed to use weakness to bully the strong.
	I find that very interesting.
	Because that's how I very much see this.
	I see them as just personally weak people.
	They can't stand you to press that button and they expect you not to press it.
	But they'll come at you with everything they have.
	They have and be very unpleasant.
	Unbelievably so unpleasant.
	Yeah, Angela Nagel calls it a cult of weakness and victimhood.
	That's not my phrase, that's the Irish commentator Angela Nagel uses that phrase.
	I've spoken to her.
	She's one of those things.
	Yes, she's very, very good.
	And she's politically very different from both of us.
	She's a proper socialist, Corbynista.
	And she got in a lot of trouble just for having a conversation with me.
	Yes.
	Because of the nature of the faction that is essentially driving for Irish.
	There is a very good analysis that I think explains this, to use Nagel's phrase, the cult of victimhood and the cult of weakness that she identifies.
	She calls it tumbler liberalism, which I'm not even sure if I'm saying that properly.
	All of these technical sort of I'm on Twitter and I'm on Facebook and I am also on Instagram, but I only put pictures of my cat on Instagram.
	So, I mean, and that's it.
	And the only really public profile, because my Facebook page is sort of for me and my friends, is just my Twitter and I'm me.
	I still have my blue tick.
	You know, I think it's the polite conservative who went to the right school, basically.
	It is a version of that.
	I mean, I don't have the perfect Tory accent.
	I have the weird half and half Australian and Shires accent.
	You've got the credentials and connections.
	Yes, yes.
	And it's sort of Australians who went to Oxford are sort of given a pass to a degree.
	I have no, sort of, because they pat you on the head and they go, oh, you must have been a Rhodes Scholar or something.
	Yeah, this kind of silly nonsense.
	Although you can get Rhodes scholars from Australia who are very, very Aussie sounding.
	Tony Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar.
	People don't realize that.
	You would never know.
	No, no, no.
	And you know why?
	People don't realise.
	And so is Malcolm Turnbull, who was a Rhodes Scholar as well.
	And the thing is, Malcolm Turnbull and I actually went to the same Oxford college in different years, of course, because he's a lot older than me.
	And Turnbull sounds like that kind of slightly posh Australian who went to Oxford, like me.
	Tony Abbott, no, but they're both Rhodes Scholars, and people just don't realize it because Tony Abbott made a very deliberate decision that he wasn't going to finish up with this half and half Australian and posh British accent like Turnbull and I have got.
	And it's just quite extraordinary.
	The book that captures what you're talking about about people in this cult of weakness and victimhood, to use Nagel's phrase, is called The Rise of Victimhood Culture.
	And I can't remember their first names, but their surnames are Manning and Campbell.
	And they are two sociologists.
	And you don't associate this kind of analysis with sociology, but sociology done right can be really impressive.
	And so they draw on the sort of the well of sociological reasoning, particularly Durkheim, and talk about how the difference between dignity cultures, honour cultures, and what they are now talking about as a victimhood culture.
	And I read their book, and it's quite easy to read because it's sort of quite short.
	And what they've done is they've just edited about 10 academic papers, and they've basically taken all the waffle out, all the academic waffle, but they've left all their footnotes in, so you can research where they got their scholarship from.
	And they just set out how, you know, an honour culture is something like samurai Japan or feudal Europe or America in the Wild West.
	Those cultures worked, but they were pretty unpleasant.
	A kind of broken honour culture where it becomes all about sex is something like Pakistan, the hill country in Pakistan.
	But it's not a functioning honour culture.
	Functioning honour cultures, Tokugawa, Japan, the west of the United States, they were honour cultures, they functioned, but they were pretty unpleasant, and they go through the response to verbal slights and people shooting each other in the streets and this kind of thing.
	A dignity culture, the Romans were actually the first example of this, a dignity culture, is one where what you were talking about earlier, where if it's a little dispute, yeah, who cares?
	If it's a big dispute, you go to law.
	Enforcement, the courts.
	You go to a neutral third party in the form of the courts and you get your rights enforced.
	We lost that.
	I mean, that was one of the great losses, Rome's gift to the world.
	We lost it, but then we got it back again.
	Victimhood culture is where, according to Campbell and Manning, is where you've got a situation where people get very angry about tiny little piddly slights.
	You know, you brushed me outside the cinema, or you used the wrong pronouns, or you used the phrase rootless cosmopolitan in a tweet.
	Paul Embry of the Fire Brigades Union, who if he's got any A levels, I'll be surprised.
	He's one of these self-educated people, anyway.
	And he was sort of like...
	Don't judge.
	But no, self-educated is more impressive than someone who's been to a university because he's taught...
	It means he's learnt it all himself, which is actually really quite remarkable.
	I got taught, I had people like Roger Scruton and John Finnis teaching me that, you know, that makes my life a whole lot easier.
	So, and he probably, realistically, didn't even know what it was.
	Because it's actually, when it was used after the, once again, my Russian Jewish friend, when it was used after the Second World War in the Soviet Union, it's a translation of a particular phrase in Russian that people in the Communist Party used to do to try to say to Russian Jews, oh, if you don't like us, why don't you all just bog off to Israel?
	You know, that kind of thing.
	It was a way of going like that to Russian Jews and being really quite nasty about it.
	But you have to know, I mean, I didn't know the DI.
	I knew it was a phrase that was used of Jewish people before World War II, but by fascists, not by communists.
	I didn't know the post-war history at all, and I had to be told by someone who is Russian Jewish.
	You can't expect Paul Embry to know that.
	So you've got this tiny, trivial little slights.
	Everyone's starting a big dogpile, but instead of saying, right, let's go outside and settle this and have a duel or punch up or fight samurai swords or whatever it was historically, they still run to the authorities, run to the courts and expect enforcement.
	But of course, because resources are scarce, you've got a situation where the police are visiting a docker in Liverpool for retweeting a funny, sarcastic limerick about trans people, while meanwhile there is knife crime happening in London, which of course we shouldn't be caring about the trivia, we should care about the knife crime.
	The way that you've described this makes it sound, I mean like the way that you're describing honour culture is it's honour for the individual and the way you're sounding you're describing victimhood culture makes it sound like it's honour for the group.
	Yes, yes, and I'm probably not doing justice to Campbell and Manning's argument.
	They have written an entire book.
	All these books have been published, many of them in the most prestigious journals, academic journals of sociology.
	And because this is a discomforting perspective for people on the left, and most people who are in sociology are on the left, and I suspect these two gentlemen are as well, but they're just good and careful observers of the world around them, which is what sociology is supposed to be about.
	It's the study of society.
	I mean the chap I quoted to you earlier, Mark Vanish, about talking about Queensland, he is also a sociologist and he's also a man of the left and a lifelong member of the Australian Labor Party.
	But a smart sociologist is capable of putting their politics aside and just analysing.
	And so, but yeah, so it's a full-length book.
	But I got to the end of it and I thought, I think you lads have just found the keys to the office, the keys to the kingdom or whatever it is, because it just makes sense.
	It just fits with the data.
	As soon as you start saying it, it's like, well, I can see exactly what's happening here.
	I mean, they are political racialists, I guess I would say.
	Each individual is not an individual.
	They're actually a political unit of a wider group.
	if one is slighted, then hypothetically, all are slighted, and therefore any tiny slight.
	And all are harmed.
	This radical idea about words in themselves are inherently harmful.
	They're not even making the argument that used to be made about porn and video games was the classic one.
	And I'm sure you're familiar with this.
	I mean, I'm familiar with it, and I've never played games, but I remember I'm so old I can remember the arguments over postal, for example.
	And the gamers rightly pointed out there is no evidence that playing postal leads people to go out and perpetrate school shootings.
	And they're correct.
	But the old argument that used to be made against gamers and the argument that used to be made against people, I mean, and I freely disclose here, I have previously written for Penthouse, an extract of that book was actually published in Penthouse.
	So there you go.
	Writers take their money where they can get it.
	And it's so the old argument was that porn leads to sex assault or that people playing Doom or Duke Income or whatever it was, I'm showing my age here, leads them to want to go out and perpetrate school shootings or rob banks or whatever it is this week.
	That's one argument.
	It's a leads to argument.
	We need to regulate this because it leads to something.
	The harm argument that these people are making is not that argument, which is actually a relatively sophisticated argument and one that you can settle empirically.
	It's that the words in themselves.
	The emotional reaction is the harm itself.
	Yes.
	And I don't agree, Decking just points out.
	No, no, no, that's nonsense.
	I mean, I think that the claims made about porn and video games are wrong.
	The science is on my side when I say that.
	There's a lot of evidence.
	It's very difficult to prove any kind of causality between the media that people consume and then their subsequent behaviour.
	There are other problems that come from these, but...
	Yes, but that's not the issue.
	However, the claim that words in themselves are harm and that they constitute some sort of slight...
	We can't permit it.
	No, that's nonsense.
	It's just absolute nonsense.
	My father would have called it rolled gold nonsense.
	Well, absolutely.
	But even if there was some kind of kernel of truth to it, it would undermine any kind of civic discourse that we have.
	It would require some kind of authoritarian authority to regulate all speech.
	It would be unworkable.
	Well, it was the comment, the best conception of it, although he was applying it to sort of more the video games porn argument, is actually Rowan Atkinson's comment, and he was talking about section 5 of the Public Order Act.
	He said, if you don't get this, if you try to enact something like this, you will make every holy book of every monotheistic religion illegal.
	And he was absolutely right.
	Helen, thank you very much.
	This has been a wonderful conversation.
	Thank you very much, Paul.
	We are going to have to have more conversations like this.
	It's been a real pleasure.
	Well, you'll have to do what James does.
	You'll have to read book two now.

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