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March 21, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:17:21
Delingpod 12: Helen Dale
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Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod.
And we have a very exciting guest for you this week.
Imported all the way from Australia.
Well, sort of.
Her name is Helen Dale.
And she is half Australian and half English, I think.
Or...
Half Australian, half British.
Half British, okay, yeah, yeah.
And you are the author of the three in the series, or just two at the moment?
No, just two, and there will only ever be two, yes.
So that's a, not a trilogy, it's a...
I'm not actually sure.
Diptych?
Diptych.
Diptych.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Books called...
Two books called Kingdom of the Wicked.
And we're going to talk about that in a moment.
I've read the first one.
I'm looking forward very much to reading the second.
They're great books.
They're kind of alternate reality books, aren't they?
Yes.
Speculative fiction or alternative history.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We like that.
We like that kind of shit.
But before we go there, I want to know a bit more about you and where you came from and stuff.
Because I met you at the Battle of Ideas?
Yes, that's correct.
Well, I love the Battle of Ideas, the thing that Claire Fox runs, holds at the Barbican every year.
And even though lovely Claire Fox kids herself that she's a kind of Marxist, I mean, she's totally on board with everything I believe in and probably everything you believe in.
If you want to know what the noises are, everyone, it's I'm being molested by a dog.
Yeah, dog.
What are you doing?
That dog, by the way, the reason that my microphone has not got a microphone cover on it...
Is because the other day, the dog ate it, just savaged it.
Oh, you decided that the microphone foam belonged in your tummy, didn't it, doggo?
Mm-hmm.
No, what happened was that I'd been away all day and the dog had been chained up and the person who was meant to come and give her a walk hadn't.
And so the dog punished me because dogs do this.
If you've upset them, they take revenge and it's not sort of conscious, it's just instinctive.
So they rip up your microphone cover.
Or whatever.
Underpants.
Socks.
Yeah, exactly.
So you're from Queensland?
Yes.
Which is, I love Queensland.
I mean, it's got crocodiles, killer snakes, butterflies, the Barrier Reef.
It's got fewer possibly ghastly left liberals than the other states?
Probably, yes.
Even the Labour Party doesn't have left liberals in Queensland.
That's good.
And you've got places in the outback, like Chiligo, which is the outback town that I went to.
I'm just really stunned to find someone who's been to Chiligo Caves, because this was a place of my childhood, and I actually haven't visited there since my childhood, but it is something I associate with my childhood.
Oh, okay.
Well, yeah, I'd say recommend any special friends visiting Australia do go to Chiligo.
It's an amazing place.
And so you grew up, you were chatting me in the car on the way over, under...
He's more or less a kind of...
The closest Australia's ever had to a fascist dictator, isn't he?
Joe Bjelke-Peterson?
Yeah, Joe Bjelke-Peterson.
He was actually born in New Zealand of Danish background.
And this became a long-running joke in Australia and in Queensland.
But he was a peanut farmer from an area around a town called Kingaroy.
And a country area, but fairly dry, Northampton.
Not the sort of association that a lot of people have with Queensland, which is sugarcane, lots of rain, pineapples, bananas.
Yeah, so the cattle and cane from the go-betweens, which was certainly a great song of my childhood and was what I was associated with because I spent all my time, nearly all of it anyway, in coastal districts where it was warm and wet and they grew sugar and that kind of thing.
And I wouldn't call...
Joby Ockipederson, a fascist dictator.
We've never had that in Australia in any state.
But he was very conservative and not in a good way.
And the expression that I tend to use to try to get across to British people what he was like as leader, which was for the whole of my childhood, basically.
That I can remember, was that he was the closest that the white British Commonwealth has come to true authoritarian government, in that he did things that you associate with, say, Louisiana in the United States, where the borders of electoral constituencies were gerrymandered.
They used to call it the Bjorkimander.
The police were terribly corrupt and I actually saw things that really shock people who come from developed first world countries because I saw people bribing police when I was a child in order to get the police to say, for example, release a valued Aboriginal farm worker from jail who'd been locked up overnight for drunken disorderly or something like that.
So it was a very conservative thing.
Largely rural and noticeably corrupt place to grow up.
In a way, it sounds to me like the left loves to caricature conservatism as this authoritarian, selfish, corrupt thing.
And perhaps Joe Bjorki Peterson was as close as you can get to the kind of left's fantasy version of Yes, they used to call Queensland the Deep North, in the same way that people in America refer to the Deep South.
But there are lots of different varieties of conservatism, and Bjorkje Peterson was a very, very particular kind of conservatism.
There were plenty of conservative governments in other Australian states and in other countries all around the world that might have been genuinely socially conservative, might have been genuinely economically conservative, but they were nothing like the Bjorki-Peterson government.
And the really standout thing with Joe Bjorki-Peterson was the corruption.
Did this not put you off being a Conservative?
Were you a lefty when you were a child?
Not really, no.
My family was always, broadly speaking, Conservative, as most country Australians are.
But they have distinctive Conservative traditions that are tied to what used to be called the Country Party and is now the National Party.
But there was also an aspect to Conservatism in Queensland where The country party which then became the national party wasn't just a political party It was a social environment.
Like, there were very strong links, for example, between the local country party and your Bachelor and Spinsters balls.
Yeah.
Which I don't know whether you have them over here, but sort of big country dancers, basically.
And for years, simply because of where I grew up and what sort of background I came from with my family, I got invitations to Bachelor's and Spinsters balls.
Yeah.
Have you seen that movie Get Out?
No, no.
You know what I mean?
It was a really good thing about a black guy who goes out with this white girl who comes from that kind of environment that you've described, where the country club set and they...
They dictate everything.
They dictate the mores and stuff.
The running situation was, and I remember my father saying this, well you have to be a member of the National Party, or the Country Party as it was when I was little, because otherwise it starts getting difficult to sell your crop.
So it was this...
It was more than a political party.
It was kind of a social environment that sucked country Queenslanders in and made it very difficult for them to leave, even if they weren't really interested in politics.
Although, let's not pretend that the alternative isn't far, far worse.
I mean, the left are just way worse, aren't they?
Well, they've just gone feral recently.
I grew up Well, not grew up, but by this stage I was in my early 20s, late teens, when Australia had a series of extremely competent Labour governments, particularly when Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were in charge.
And I just don't recall anybody...
I'm sure they existed.
I'm sure we had mad Marxists and mad socialists and the kind of people who went into the extremes of labour over here.
I'm sure we had them too, but I just don't associate them with the Australian Labour Party that I remember in my 20s.
Yeah.
I really do think this modern feral left that you see is a relatively recent development.
And I've spent a lot of time talking with friends, including a very close friend in Australia who I would describe as labour right.
And she's a professor at an Australian university.
And she says the same sort of thing.
She says, I just don't remember this.
I don't remember people like this in the ALP. Where did they come from?
Yeah, yeah.
As Exhibit A, I would present Rod Liddle, who's maybe the best columnist in Britain.
Do you read Rod's stuff?
Yes, I do.
I really read the spec, definitely.
Rod captures, I think, that bemused attitude.
Rod would consider himself an old-school lefty.
He's not a socialist, but old Labour.
Yes.
And I think he's as bemused as we Conservatives over what's happened to the left.
It has gone...
Feral.
Feral.
No, that's the expression I use is feral.
And I have many, many very close friends who I have an enormous amount of respect for because they put so much into defending the civil liberties of Queenslanders when we had the Bjorkje-Peterson government.
And they were from the Australian Labor Party.
And a lot of them are just sitting there going...
Not me.
But they're still Labor.
They're still members of the Labor Party.
And they're quite shocked by it.
Well...
Do you not think that people like that have a moral duty to quit the...
This idea of voting for a...
And this, by the way, is a problem facing Conservatives at the moment.
If the Conservative Party ceases to represent Conservative values, then you shouldn't keep on voting for it.
And in the same way, I'm shocked that these people in the north of England, particularly, for example...
Who would vote for a monkey if it was wearing a red rosette.
Yes, they vote for the rosette, not the person.
Their party in the North is being taken over by MPs who sell them out to Islam or MPs who are denying them Brexit.
And you're thinking, well, how much bad stuff does the Labour Party have to do before you start taking away your vote and voting for what you believe rather than what the party represents?
Brexit has produced this extraordinary social division in the United Kingdom where you've got this situation where an issue divides both the major parties and Roughly 60-40.
It seems between 60-70% of Conservatives are pro-Leave, but there's a very significant rump of Conservative Remainers.
On the other hand, you've got in Labour, roughly 60-70% are pro-Remain, but there's a very significant 30-40% that are pro-Leave.
So you've got this huge division down both the parties.
And so the party system is ceasing to work.
And I tend to take very seriously the arguments made by Dr Stephen Davies at the Institute for Economic Affairs, and I've quoted him extensively in my coverage of Brexit for The Australian, which is Australia's main national daily.
And he talks about this realignment in politics where the governing issues that matter most to people are just changing, and they're changing as we watch.
Yeah.
Absolutely right.
I have never felt...
I've never witnessed a clearer divide within Britain, a clearer and more logical divide between the goodies and the baddies, as I have over Brexit.
Suddenly I found myself allied with this...
Occasionally I'll get people saying...
How can you rail against the establishment elite when you went to Oxford and you talk posh?
And I say those distinctions don't count anymore.
The establishment I'm talking about now is not the Brigade of Guards and the...
The old Church of England and people in bowler hats and stuff.
They're gone.
They're gone.
They went ages ago.
They were probably only ever a straw man in the imagination of Owen Jones and his forebears.
But...
Brexit has really...
Do you know what it reminds me of?
I went to...
I wrote my first novel.
I decided that I'd have to go and live in the south of France to write my first novel.
So I went and lived in this village in Montpellier called Saint-Jean-de-Fosse and I watched the communities and there were two boules terrains in the village.
And one boule terrain was used by the people who had been more or less collaborators in the war.
And the other one was used by the people who claimed to have fought for the resistance.
And everyone knew who was who, and neither of the parties really mixed.
And I'm seeing that divide now.
I've lost friends over Brexit.
But more than that, I've watched an element within my generation just flip, flip completely.
Just lose it.
People actually losing their marbles.
I'm not going to name my ex-friends because that would get me even deeper in trouble.
But I see them...
Yeah, I see them not just losing it over Brexit.
I also see them embracing causes, the kind of SJW causes, oddly enough, in order to distance themselves still further from what they perceive as the racism and Little England mentality of us Brexiteers.
I have tried.
I have seen this as well.
And I've written a bit about this in Quillette and for the Australian also.
Is that how you pronounce it?
Quillette?
Yeah, well, it's a French word, so Quillette.
Not Quillette.
But huge numbers of people, including people who work for it, say Quillette, but it is a French word.
By the way, can I just say, I love Quillette, Quillette, so much.
I think it's one of the best.
It restores my faith.
Claire Lehman is...
I have known her for many years because she's Australian.
When I used to live in Sydney, she's dined in my house.
I knew her very well.
She knew the politician I used to work for, the senator in Australia.
And I would describe her as probably the most gifted commissioning editor ever.
I've ever worked with.
And I've worked with a lot of good commissioning editors who have real talent, who are very good at finding good writers and who are very good at bringing the best out of you.
I mean, there are some...
I mean, because I'm a freelancer, I've written for lots of different outlets.
From The Spectator, I've started...
This month, I start a column for Standpoint.
Also, The Australian and for Quadrant...
But also even going in the opposite direction politically, I've written for The Guardian and so on and so forth.
And I was actually working in the Parliament at the time.
I was working for politicians, for Senator David Lionhelm.
And when Kiet first emerged as a sort of force, and there was just one extraordinary article that...
Claire actually wrote herself about something known as stereotype accuracy, and I'm not going to go into that.
I just recommend you just...
People listening to the Delling pod, just Google...
Quiet, layman, stereotype accuracy.
Just Google it and just have a read of what she wrote.
I was actually in Canberra.
It was during a sitting fortnight.
This article about the way we all stereotype our opponents...
But also stereotype ourselves as well, which is really quite extraordinary.
Just went all around the red wing of the Australian Parliament.
Staffers, it did not matter what their political persuasions were, were just going, this is it.
This is exactly right.
And not only did she have the ability to explain complicated, in this case it's from psychiatry, Psychiatric ideas, but just to find other people who could do exactly the same thing.
You know, it's like she's been hiding them all in her back pocket.
And the thing is with me, I mean, she got me to write for Kiet, and okay, that's fine, but I'd already been writing for The Spectator and The Australian and that kind of thing.
So I was kind of a known quantity.
And before that, I'd had novels published and so on and so forth.
But some of the other people she found, I mean, she found one bloke who was an undergraduate student and who was like 19 at the University of Queensland studying anthropology.
And she just found him, this chap called Matthew Blackwell, and he's just extraordinary.
Coleman Hughes, he's American.
I like Coleman Hughes, he's black.
Yeah, I don't know as much about him because obviously she recruited him from the United States.
I tend to know the Australian people she's found and the British people she's found better.
But it's just this extraordinary talent for finding writers that no one knew existed who are just really good.
Yeah, it's really good.
And she's hot, isn't she?
Yeah.
You're allowed to ask me that.
Local homosexual.
As a lesbian, you can give me the...
Can I congratulate you, by the way?
I think you are the first Leza we've had on the show.
Oh, really?
I think we've...
But unfortunately, I've already gone better than that.
I've already had a transsexual person.
Oh, who did you have?
Zuzanna Miroz.
And the weird thing was, this is just a side story.
I wanted to talk to Zuzanna about the experience of being a transsexual.
Obviously, I mean, duh, it's what you'd want to talk to her about.
And how she funded her operation and why she did it and what it's like.
We're talking about conservative transsexuals, so...
What's it like being a conservative transsexual in a world where that whole issue has been stolen by the identity politics left to advance their cultural Marxist agenda?
I couldn't talk about any of this shit because at the beginning of our interview she says, I can't reveal that I'm transsexual because I've already got to deal with somebody else that I'm going to talk exclusively about.
I thought, sod this for a game of such...
So we had this quite interesting conversation about...
I haven't spoken to her recently.
I don't know what's happened.
Anyway, so being a lesbian is not quite as...
You're not quite a Rara Arvis as...
As it...
To be a conservative...
But congrats, by the way.
I mean, look, I think...
Would you not say it's probably fair that most lesbians swing left rather than right?
It depends.
Some can be...
There is a stereotype that both lesbians and gay men are all on the left.
No, I've got so many right-wing gay friends.
It's infuriating.
It really, really annoys a lot of us.
And the one who is my favourite writer about this issue, about being a really, really kind of very, very Tory gay man, but who is also extremely good at explaining gay issues, is Graham Archer, who writes for Unheard.
I think he's terrific.
I just think he's a terrific writer and he also has the best beard in British journalism.
He's just got this wonderful beard.
He does write beautifully, although I have to say I find him a little squishy.
He's not as hardcore as I think of all my gay friends.
You know, Douglas Murray, for example.
They make me look like Tony Benn.
I mean, they make me look like a bloody pinko.
Whereas Graham, I think, he writes exquisitely, but I think he's the kind of person who would call himself centre-right.
And I would never call myself centre-right because I don't buy into that definition.
I think it's a fake definition used actually...
More for the purposes of virtue signalling to the left, that you're not, you know, I'm right wing, but I'm not that right wing.
I think, fuck that.
Anyway, that's another...
But yes, and it was to do with, you had situations, now you're being molested by a dog.
Stupid dog.
It was to do with...
with the police, with religion that drove a lot of lesbians to the left.
That certainly is a real phenomenon.
But the stereotype of bonkers lesbians who are all radical feminists, that's just not true.
Is it not?
There is quite a lot of empirical evidence now that lesbians tend to be statistically very high earners.
So you've got a lot of very middle class and upper middle class lesbians who do very well economically.
They're up in your high earnings bracket when you do calculations of the gender pay gap that are not silly and That actually take things like childbirth and choice of major and hours worked into account.
You tend to find...
I remember reading relatively recently there was one study, and I think it might have even been an Australian study, that childless lesbians are 117% Ceteris paribus of your male earnings.
So when you've got a lot of people like that, I'll quote a line from my old boss from Senator Lionhelm.
He says, well, after a while you get sick of seeing your paycheck with so much taken out of it.
And that simple effect of having your pockets picked can drive people to the political right.
It's funny you say that.
I want to do a podcast with my eldest boy, the Rat, as he's known, who left England for Hong Kong.
And okay, I mean, being my boy, he was already...
He had a sound upbringing, let's say.
But going to Hong Kong, just absolutely, when he compared and contrasted his experience there, where you get low taxation, you know, 10% tax maximum, with his experience in the UK, where he was, he recognized even as a young man that he was supporting where he was, he recognized even as a young man that he was supporting lots of bludgers, In Australia, yes.
Yeah.
You're absolutely right that nothing like a kind of depleted pay packet turns a man or a woman or whatever to conservatism.
To being conservative, yes.
And I know a lot of, I have a lot of lesbian friends who've gone through that process, who might have, and they probably still are very socially progressive, but they're just sick of...
I've seen people just sitting in front of me holding their pay slip going, this is getting really old.
This is getting really, really old and I'm through with it.
I'll tell you what's sad though.
Back in the day, I could probably have said, look, some of my best friends are gay.
And I could have pointed to my friendship with Helen Dale.
And this would have shown to the enemy that I was actually really okay.
Nowadays, it's not enough.
The left has readjusted itself.
It's gone so insane that you've really got to embrace all identity politics nonsense.
I actually think that's a terrible loss to not be able to say I have gay friends or black friends or Jewish friends or whatever the minority is under discussion.
Because the way human beings come to see other human beings as human beings and not as a stereotype is by treating with them as individuals and as friends.
I totally agree.
If you can't do that, then it is actually so much easier to be turned towards being prejudiced.
Prejudice comes from not treating individuals...
As individuals but only seeing them as members of the relevant group and it is the most awful thing ever and you were mentioning in the car when we came over from the station that there are certain things that drive you to despair.
Well that is one of mine.
I mean I really do buy the idea of the consolations of friendship and being able to put politics aside and to be able to treat with people regardless of their backgrounds and what they believe and so on and so forth and It breaks my heart when I see friendships bust up over politics or over something like Brexit.
I just look at that and I think, no, that's really sad.
As soon as I knew you were a lesbian, I was quite interested in finding out more about it and about your experiences, in the same way with black people.
I don't want to just pretend that they're not...
In the early stages of the friendship, I don't just want to pretend that they're the same colour as me and they've had the same experience.
I want to find out about what it is that makes them tick in their experiences.
Nowadays, these kind of questions and discussions are called microaggressions.
Yes.
It's ridiculous.
But it seems to me that in order to form a bond with somebody, you've got to talk about the things that make them them and make you you and find the points that you have in common, but also understand the points of difference.
Well, it becomes difficult.
The one that's something that stands out to me because it's a very Queensland experience is...
Yeah.
particularly in rural areas towards racism.
Yeah, yeah.
And often the only way to sort of get a handle on what that was like, apart from some of the things that, like bribing the police to get an Aboriginal employee out of the lockup, Uh, Often that involves hearing an Aboriginal person talk about driving while black.
Now obviously that's not a thing anymore.
That's gone.
But it was a real thing.
You know, Particularly if the Aboriginal person was middle class and had a good job.
They were a farm manager or something.
Plenty of these in North Queensland when I was a kid.
And they had a nice car.
I mean, I have...
He's dead now.
But at the time, I had an Aboriginal friend who, among other...
He worked sometimes for my father and some other people in the local area.
He was a farm manager.
He was very good.
He had a BMW. And every single time he drove it from Cairns to Townsville...
He would be booked.
Oh my goodness.
Every single time.
And until you heard that story from his mouth, it was, unless you have a good and sympathetic imagination, it's actually quite difficult to understand what it means when someone says, oh yes, I got booked for driving while black, and everyone has a giggle and moves on.
They don't realise it's a real thing of, oh no, how dare that Aborigine be driving a nice car between Cairns and Townsville?
You know, this kind of thing.
We should talk about your books because their genesis is quite interesting in that you were studying at Oxford.
Yes.
You got some kind of scholarship?
Yes, I was on a scholarship at the University of Oxford and I completed a law degree at Oxford known as the BCL, Bachelor of Civil Law, which isn't really a bachelor's degree, it's a master's degree, but it's taught in exactly the same way as undergraduate law degrees at Oxford in that you have the tutorial system and you live in your college.
So you live like an undergraduate?
Yes, so it's like an undergraduate, but it's taught at a higher level.
So none of my tutors, for example, when I did the BCL, were other graduate students.
My tutors were people like John Finnis, Professor John Finnis, or Professor John Gardner, or Professor Roger Scruton.
You were taught by Roger Scruton?
I was indeed.
Oh my goodness.
That's why I was tweeting your podcast with him everywhere, because I was trying to get across to people, this man has this extraordinary voice.
He's another Geoffrey Cox.
He's got this rich, rum-soaked fruitcake of a voice.
And people would just sit there and listen to Roger Scruton.
And he could have recited a bloody bull-bearings manifest and you'd sit there and listen to him, because he's got this glorious speaking voice.
Yeah, he is our God.
In fact, almost of all the fine moments in my podcast today, I think the best...
I'm not sure whether he said this on tape or not, but at the end he sort of intimated that this had been a good and worthwhile discussion and sort of intimated that I was intellectually acceptable.
And I thought, oh my God, that's like surviving a tutorial...
Yeah, you've got off.
So that's the difference with the BCL. So it's taught by the sort of leading figures in the field rather than by other graduate students because it is, despite the name, it's at the master's level.
So this was when?
I went up in 2007.
Okay, tell me.
Had Oxford gone to shit by that stage or was it still all right?
It's absolutely fine.
This is what I'm talking about.
This bonkers leftism is quite new.
I really do think it's a recent phenomenon.
I've talked to a lot of my friends in Australia and UK people who studied with me at Oxford when I did the Roman law subjects I needed in order to be able to practice in Scotland, up at Edinburgh.
We've all talked about this and going, this is new, this is weird.
This is something that is really quite new.
But anyway, the genesis of Kingdom of the Wicked was I did well in the BCL, for which I had a scholarship because it's quite short, and I decided to stay and do a defil, and I got some funding for that.
The problem, of course, was that I then got completely distracted and...
I think I produced about two chapters of my defil and my supervisor quite liked them.
He thought, oh no, these are good.
You're going well.
I got a very nice supervisor's report.
And then I just didn't write another word.
I wrote two novels instead and I had to turn up to my scholarship provider.
At the end of it and go, I'm terribly sorry, but I haven't written a defil.
I've written two novels.
And I was fully expecting to have to pay about £20,000 back to them.
And they were just good about it.
They said, oh no, you came up.
With an established reputation as a writer, you'd already published a novel.
You'd written a lot for different outlets in different places.
We understand that this kind of thing can happen.
And I was just sitting there going, thank you very much, because otherwise that would have involved me doing weird things to my mortgage.
But that's a really happy story, because that makes me think that sometimes the world does work.
Because it's obvious that...
And in a way, your books do justify the scholarship and your grant, whatever, because...
Actually, they are about the workings of the law, really, aren't they?
The workings of Roman law.
And lots of the reading that I was doing for what was going to be a defil in aspects of jurisprudence, that was my area of interest.
Jurisprudence, governance, rule of law, those are the areas that I was always interested in as a scholar.
They all fed into a novel and the thing is if I had have written a defil, I'd have got a few academic papers out of it.
I'd have gone further down the path to academia rather than practice, back into practice.
But the thesis itself, the actual doctoral thesis, the defil, would have been read by, to use the Australian expression, two men and a dog.
I.e. my supervisor, my examiners, and maybe a few other scholars.
Whereas I don't have the figures for book two of Kingdom of the Wicked for order.
that.
But book one of Kingdom of the Wicked, as of just before Christmas, had already sold about 10,000 copies.
That's a lot more people to read your ideas.
I agree.
So while I've got you, tell me what the fundamental difference is between Roman law and English common law.
Everything to the Romans is reducible to contract.
Nothing is taken outside the logic of the law of contract, and even their religion.
If there is a god, or if there was a god, or gods because they were pagans, that the Romans got down on their knees before, and I actually give this line to one of my characters in, I think it's in book two rather than book one, And worshipped.
It is the law of contract.
So things that the English common law never reduced to contract and are now struggling with.
The way divorce works in England.
The way the sale of property works in England.
And you have problems with the chain and you get gazumping and gazundering and so on and so forth.
The Scottish system which is based on Roman law and a blind auction.
It's completely different and much, much more efficient.
But it's also got a degree of ruthlessness to it that you don't associate with...
A lot of European countries because, for example, the European countries, a lot of them call on the Napoleonic Code.
Roman law was actually quite like the common law in that it was uncodified and it developed progressively over time and so on and so forth.
If you want to see large areas of law that look really quite close to what the pagan Romans had, then you need to look at something like Scottish property law or Scottish family law.
Right.
And you wouldn't look, although there are some areas where it is quite close to the pagan system, you wouldn't necessarily look at the law in France and Spain because it is, whilst it's Roman, it's also Napoleonic.
And if I have a little argument with my fellow Brexiteers over the law is that some people, like the likes of Daniel Hannan, they only see the Napoleonic form of Roman law.
They don't see that the Roman law that, for example, fed into the ideas of Adam Smith, which is the Roman law that was used in Scotland, and how that too could also be a great engine for liberty.
Right.
So there is quite a widespread view amongst a lot of Brexiteers, and I tend to have to sit there and be the person who explains Roman law 101 and go, no, no, no, no, no.
You're making the mistake of thinking that all Roman law is what they have in France.
And yes, France does indeed have Roman law, but it has codified Roman law with the code Napoleon.
And that's not the way the Romans did it.
And you need to be aware that the traditions that fed into that codification were not necessarily the same as the traditions that fed into the development of Scots law.
That's interesting.
You've sort of answered, well, Sammy answered my next question, which is...
We spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves on the living system that is English common law, the case law, and it evolves over time.
So in that way, it satisfies the needs of a changing culture.
So it's sort of law by common consent, isn't it?
And we think that's good.
And a lot of countries in the world seem to like it too because they're happy to do business here and they look up to our legal system.
But are you saying that actually Romans are better?
No, no.
I've always been, because I'm trained in both and I've practiced in both systems, it's very much horses for courses.
There are certain things that the English common law does that are just extraordinary.
And the one that I would like to nominate as the greatest achievement of the English common law is the Limited Liability Corporation, which was a creation of the English Equity Draftsmen.
Marvellous thing, because it allows...it democratises capitalism...
Because it allows ordinary people who don't have very much money to bear relatively small amounts of risk in order to enter into markets in the form of buying shares.
All of the legal structures that existed before then, both Roman and English exposed people to enormous amounts of risk in order for them to participate in capitalism.
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean those structures are bad.
The Roman mutual is a very good system.
The John Lewis partnership is a good example of that.
It produces attractive relationships between the individuals who form that partnership.
That's one of the characteristics of a mutual structure.
But partnerships as originally conceived of, if you were a partner, you put yourself at enormous risk.
An equity partner did.
I'm sure you've all, every one of us who's had friends who go into a law firm that isn't an LLP is still a traditional partnership on the partnership model.
They have to put money in.
And if the firm goes under, they lose it all.
Yes, it's like Lloyd's names.
It's the same principle as Lloyd's names, exactly.
So that is, to me, the great achievement of the English common law is the limited liability corporation.
It made modern capitalism possible.
And when did that come in?
Well, the original joint stock companies go ultimately back to sort of the 17th and 18th century, but in its modern form, in Salomon's case, it's 19th century.
Right, okay.
Well, I never thought the conversation would head in that particular direction, but that's interesting.
So, you wrote these books, and you created this alternate reality in which industrial civilization had come to the Roman Empire.
So when are your books actually set?
I mean, if you had a date...
Well, this is where they're slightly unusual in terms of speculative fiction or alternative history.
And this shows my history as a literary novelist rather than a writer of science fiction.
Right, yes.
By way of background, my first novel, called The Hand That Signed the Paper, was straight literary fiction, and in the quite traditional sense, and because of my education and background and upbringing and style of writing and so on and so forth, I won a large number of literary awards for it in Australia, including the Miles Franklin, which is the Australian equivalent of the Booker Prize.
So literary fiction.
Prizes like that go for literary fiction.
When I came to write Kingdom of the Wicked, I knew I was changing genres and I've actually had a couple of reviews because being a Miles Franklin winner, you get reviewed in all the papers in Australia.
Yes, you get such expectations.
Yes, and I have had a couple of reviews spank me for changing genres.
You know, basically, you're going down market and doing science fiction, and that's what they do.
They call it science fiction, which it isn't really.
But in terms of setting, it is actually set in the first century AD, during the reign of Tiberius, with Pontius Pilate as governor of Judea.
And I have created a society, an industrialized Rome, with all of those characters – And all of those Roman values, but I have applied the reasoning and logic from one of the people who's...
I read a lot of his stuff for my D film, from F.A. Hayek, the classical liberal legal scholar, economist and philosopher, about how legal systems evolve over time.
So what I did was I first developed, based on my knowledge of Roman law, I tried to work out what industrialisation would do So as you were saying, before we were really interrupted by that phone call.
Yes.
The book was set, is set, in the first century AD. Yeah.
Tiberius is the emperor of Rome.
Yeah.
Pontius Pilate is the governor of Judea.
Yeah.
But...
All other things being equal, it is a Roman Empire that has those people, but it has had an industrial revolution.
And I set out in an essay at the end of it, and I did this quite deliberately, how I came up with that, what my point of departure was, which is basically Archimedes survives the siege of Syracuse and becomes Rome's DARPA guy, basically.
But in order to get the law right...
I actually used quite a lot of the scholarship that was supposed to go into the DPhil that never got written.
And I used the Nobel Prize winning economist and lawyer F.A. Hayek's research on the way law evolves.
And the way things like, for example, the Limited Liability Corporation came originally from the Joint Stock Company.
The way, for example...
Modern ideas about democratic worker governance come from Roman ideas about mutuals and how you get interesting compromises along the way.
So I wanted those real people and I wanted those real stories and so I went back and reread all the Gospels and read a lot of the historical material.
My first degree was in classics so I read Latin very well and I can crib my way through Greek although I have forgotten a lot of it.
So I wanted all those familiar names with all of those King James version resonances.
But I wanted a modern story that showed you what we would look like if we industrialised but with a different set of underlying values.
Yes.
So the two things that came across to me that stood out in terms of the society that you depict...
Well, one, the kind of the implacable logic of the legal system, the sort of the ruthlessness, the Roman ruthlessness that you can.
We're talking about this in the car on the way here, weren't we?
And I was saying, for example, I can't imagine the Romans agonizing too much over whether to bring home Shamima Begum.
Begum or not.
Begum or however you say it.
They'd be going, well, look, hello, she went off to fight for an enemy's state.
If she comes back, our civilization will bear the cost of having to pay for the security, the security risks that she poses for the rest of her life.
And she's a threat to our citizens.
I mean...
And also, too, because you're dealing with people that just...
Most of our modern ideas about compassion, and it's quite difficult to get this across to people because the history seems to be contraindicated, particularly when you're dealing with sexual minorities, but most of our modern ideas about compassion are Christian.
And so that is why I have scenes in the book where you get otherwise quite civilised and urbane and humane Romans who appear to be quite modern in their values and in some respects very progressive because this was not a civilisation that had particular issues about, say, being gay.
But then just go, well, why would you want to look after that baby?
You don't want that in the gene pool.
It could be dangerous.
You know, and...
I didn't put that stuff there gratuitously.
There is too much historical evidence for those attitudes.
The Romans were fairly short on compassion.
They were good on friendship.
They were good on loyalty.
They were good on bravery.
Their fundamental underlying cosmology was an order chaos one rather than a good evil one.
So you've got a character in it and the character Cornelius was Who is the Roman equivalent of a principal crown prosecutor, who seems to be extremely honourable and decent.
And I've had women writing to me about Cornelius for two years now saying, I think he's very shaggable.
You know, that kind of thing.
It's been quite funny.
But he is also totally on board with torturing people.
And he just makes an application to court so that he can torture someone.
And he thinks that's entirely legitimate and fair because he is not about being good.
He is about being orderly.
And that's the sort of underlying logic of it.
Do you think Christian compassion is actually a weakness in our civilisation and kind of the woodworm which ultimately will destroy us?
Not necessarily.
For the simple reason that every single...
People do things for reasons.
This is sort of me being a jurisprudence here, jurisprudential.
And the underlying inner logic of civilisations leads to certain manifestations of behaviour.
And it was Nietzsche who basically just went through Roman criticisms of early Christianity jurists like Kelsus and so on and so forth, and summarized them all in Genealogy of Morals.
And he was the one who had made comments along the lines of, sometimes a society can be so compassionate and so full of love, it's actively self-harming, or words to that effect.
This is what Nietzsche said.
This is what I would call pathological altruism.
Yes.
So that's probably as good a way as anything of putting it.
And I must admit, that quotation from Nietzsche, which I don't have exactly right, because I'm doing it off the top of my head, in the context of the Shamima Begum case, I saw Tom Holland tweet it.
Now, Tom Holland is a very sincere Christian and he has done some of the best scholarship that I have, popular scholarship that I have read on this difference in moral values between pagan Rome and modern secular post-Christian society. popular scholarship that I have read on this difference in
And it is the thing that I really wanted to bring out in Kingdom of the Wicked is this is a fundamentally different set of moral values and the key defining difference is where the locus of compassion is.
And because you haven't read book two yet, but I mean, you will have noticed already with book one, the lack of compassion produces this very orderly, pragmatic, reasoned society that produces a functioning legal system and...
I strongly recommend get the Oxford University textbook on Roman law by Paul de Plessy, who was my tutor up in Edinburgh, so I had to do Roman law so I could practice in Scotland, and he was my teacher.
And if you read that, you see this commercial, orderly, brilliant, genius civilization for law, but you also see this trait of terrible cruelty.
You know, you can't accuse the Romans of being terrible misogynists.
You can't, because they weren't, the status of women was high.
You can't accuse them of being horrible homophobes.
They weren't, you know, this is not something they didn't even think it was an issue.
They just didn't think it was an issue.
But you then go through, if you go through, there's a There's a section in Di Plessis' textbook and there's a section on how to draft contracts and he's quoting various Roman lawyers.
One of them was a lawyer called Gaius and we know so little about Gaius we don't even know if the Gaius in question might have been a woman.
Because there's a lot of attention in Gaius' writings to the status of women and arguing in favour of it.
He, in inverted commas, sounds quite feminist.
And then you get to a section on the difference between contracts of purchase and contracts of hire.
And he talks about it and his case study that he uses to teach young lawyers, you know, he was a barrister or what Romans called an advocate, and to train people in his chambers, is gladiators.
If...
You buy the gladiator, or you hire the gladiator and the gladiator is killed, then you have to pay to the person who trained the gladiator, you have to pay under a contract of sale.
If, however, the gladiator is not killed, And is not harmed greatly and goes back to the trainer at the end of the games, then it's a contract of hire.
And he goes through very carefully all the different either or, or in the alternative, when you do legal drafting, the different clauses.
And it's beautifully constructed.
A modern law student can read Gaius' section on that and understand it and learn something productive about the difference between a contract of hire and a contract of sale.
Where there's a change in condition during the course of the hire.
And you read it and it's just also a monument to cruelty.
So you have this extraordinary civilisation that just basically doesn't do compassion.
Yeah.
At all.
And without me going into...
I would like people who listen to Dellingpod to read my novels.
But if you find the society in Kingdom of the Wicked interesting because of the way Romans think, which I've put a lot of effort into researching and getting accurate in my characters, if you want to read more scholarship on it, then you could do worse than start with some of what Tom Holland has written because it's very good.
We love Tom Holland.
He's been on the podcast and we must have him back.
Yeah.
So, the other thing that really struck me about your Roman society, and I'm sure it's accurate, they're shagging an awful lot and they're much more liberated about sex than we are.
Yes, because they were, broadly speaking, you get cultures, I mean, every society does weird pathologiser sex in some way, shape or form.
The idea that there was some sort of mythical golden age where everybody, to use the Australianism, banged like a dunny door in a gale and no one cared is nonsense.
That's not true.
But you get, broadly speaking, a division into sex positive and sex negative, and the Romans were definitely in the sex positive category.
They thought it was a good, healthy, normal expression of...
Of life, an affirmation of life, and it was also a fairly important part of their religion as well, which is why in places I actually had to tone it down, because you really do find dinner sets where the plates and cups and salt and pepper shakers and so on and so forth are all based on different bits of the male and female anatomy.
You really did get pretty little wind chimes outside people's That show naked women riding on flying penises.
You know, these things were real.
You got mosaics and beautiful artwork in people's houses in entirely respectable sort of upper middle class and upper class homes where you'd have on one wall absolutely gorgeous garden scenes, you know, or somebody's folly or one of those lovely manicured gardens that's done like a maze that were then made popular again in the Renaissance.
And then on the opposite wall, you just have every position known to man or woman.
And then you get on the third wall in the same room, often in a dining room, you'd have gladiators chopping each other up.
This is the thing.
So say I'm an upper middle class Roman.
Do I... I'm married.
Do I get to shag whoever I want or do I... If you're a man, you've got more freedom than your wife.
Right.
That sounds legit, yeah.
Okay.
So you are, however, expected to be good at it, because the Romans had unilateral no-fault divorce.
Well, that's good, because I can practice on lots of actresses and things.
I'm doing it for you, darling, to get better.
Yes, to get better.
You were expected to be good at it, and a man who wasn't good at it was considered a bit sad, really.
Right.
So being skilful was very important.
Right.
But you do have, certainly not in the society I have portrayed in this book, but the running joke was that, and Ulpian actually talks about this, he's another one of the great Roman jurists, was that a significant number of upper middle class and upper class Romans bought attractive female slaves with the idea of making more of them.
But that seems sensitive to me.
And it was the man of the house who was making more of them.
But then you get the ruthless Roman pragmatism, because sometimes it would be clear, because of the appearance of the children, that they were the children of the master of the house.
And so there are records of Roman trials, litigation, where one of those children is injured or killed.
There's a negligence claim.
Yes, they had them too.
They had that kind of...
Those kind of public liability type ideas the same way that we do.
And you would get the master getting up in court and saying, that one's actually mine.
Yes, it's a slave, but it's actually mine.
Can I have four times the damages, please?
And the Roman court's going...
No, you don't.
Stop trying it on.
Less value, slave.
Doesn't matter that it's yours.
Still a slave.
So it's not like in, say, medieval England, or going probably at least up to the 19th century, where the aristocracy would have loads and loads of illegitimate children, and they would...
Well, they'd be given...
I mean, if you were the son of a king, you'd be given Fitz, wouldn't you?
Fitz Roy.
Yes.
Bastard son of.
Bastard son of.
Or you'd be given a title, and you'd be looked after.
If I had children by my slave, or slaves, I couldn't grant them status.
Oh, yes, you could.
Oh, you absolutely could.
But the thing is, because this is an entire society that just runs, is motored by contract, you certainly could.
And...
In terms of formal relationships, the Romans were monogamous in the sense that you could only have one wife and you could only have one husband.
And they frowned on bigamy.
And they also frowned on things that have caused problems now.
They frowned on cousin marriage.
That's why when you read the Roman writers and the historians, and some emperor passes a law so that a pair of cousins can marry, or an uncle and niece, or an aunt and nephew.
And it's always people in the imperial household doing this.
Even the Senate, they don't try that on.
Because there was a huge taboo against line breeding.
But that makes sense.
It makes sense, yes.
And it's actually a gift from Rome to us, because it means that our societies, one of the reasons they have been able to produce the modern liberal market order is because we're less tribal.
And the reason we're less tribal is because we've had thousands of years of lots and lots and lots of people, the majority of people with the exception of a few people in the aristocracy producing Habsburg lips and And things like that.
The great bulk of people have always married out.
Married out.
Married out.
Exogamy rather than endogamy.
And that's a great gift from the Romans to us.
What did the Romans do for us?
For us.
Exogamy is a good one.
Exogamy.
Okay.
And did they...
Where did they draw the line?
in terms of what you could do sexually and whom you could shag or...
Bestiality?
They didn't like that.
It was...
People did it.
Yeah.
Because it's all through the mythology.
Right.
Some of which is Greek, but some of which is Roman.
Oh, like swans.
You can have such a swan.
But it was considered a bit off.
They also had a special word that had two meanings.
It's stuprum in Latin.
And it could mean just a general term for sexual immorality and was kind of a floating noun verb and adjective.
The way Australians use bastard, it can just mean all sorts of different things in lots of different contexts.
It can be extremely rude and can start a fight, but it can also just be funny or endearing.
So it had that meaning, but it also had a specific meaning, which was...
I'm going to quote a Scottish friend of mine because I was forced to translate it in a tutorial with Professor de Plessy where he was trying to explain what a piece of Latin meant without turning everybody in a...
All these English lawyers who want to be Scots lawyers without embarrassing them enormously.
And he looked at me and said, stuporum.
And I said, well, it's...
Two men and one woman.
And a lady from Fife, who I still know, who is still in practice in Scotland, became a solicitor up there.
She said, oh, in her lovely Fife accent, which I can't rip off, a spit roast.
So that was encouraged or discouraged?
It was...
Ooh la la.
You see it in their artwork, but that group sex thing was widely liked, but it was considered very risque.
Oh, okay.
Where were they on what we would call paedophilia?
That's a difference actually between the Romans and the Greeks.
You see in gay relationships, you do see the age gap.
Right.
In gay male relationships that you associate, even in modern society, there is often an older gay man and a younger gay man.
So pederasty.
But unlike in Athens, where the boy was often about 12 or 13, you see the...
With the Romans, you tend to see the kid is sort of 16 or 17, is older, getting towards modern ideas of age of consent.
And of course, the concept of an age of consent is with a bright line.
This is the age beyond which you can consent.
Below that, you can't consent.
It's actually a Roman development.
It was a development of the Roman law.
Okay.
What was that age?
It varied from time to time.
It went down to as low as 13 at various times, but also came up as high as 16 at various times, depending on the historical period.
It was always a bright line.
There was actually an enormous argument between two opposed groups of Roman lawyers.
One group, which had the modern argument, Which said that you have a bright line, that's the age, because it's just ridiculous otherwise, and you finish up with a situation where you have to look at the individual child rather than a simple rule of general application.
But the other group, like we're arguing, other group of Roman lawyers were saying, well actually no, you can work out who's an adult.
Has he got...
An Adam's apple?
Has his voice broken?
Have her periods started?
A bit like Bill Wyman and Mandy...
You probably don't even remember that.
Bill Wyman and Mandy Smith.
Yes.
Bill Wyman and the Rolling Stones.
Mandy Smith, I think, was...
Very young when he met her, but she looked, I mean, I'm not defending him, I'm just commenting, she looked much, much older.
In the same way, some girls are 13 going on 40, and some girls are very much little girls.
It's the classic difference.
You get one that's a paddle pop stick, and you get one that looks like Cindy Crawford.
Yes, exactly.
But you get exactly, and they're often remarkably detailed, these debates between Roman lawyers, and you eventually get people saying...
No, we cannot have a situation where you get the teenage son and make him drop his toga, or you get the teenage daughter and start going through her underwear.
You just cannot have this.
This is ridiculous.
You need to...
You need a...
You need a rule.
You need a rule.
And that was a gift.
That legal argument between two opposed groups of Roman lawyers before legislation was enacted actually went on for about 50 years.
I wanted to ask you, because...
About the parallels between the end of the Roman Empire and our own era because I rather feel that we're living in decadent times and that phenomenon that we talked about whereby the SJWs seem to take over Oxford very rapidly.
I mean the analogy I use is like the zombies in World War Z. They move really swiftly and not like the ones in Walking Dead.
I really feel like But you mentioned something in the car about how civilisations can collapse very, very quickly and knowledge can be lost very quickly.
And you talked about what happened during the Dark Ages, post-Roman Britain.
Yes.
How we lost so many of the technologies.
As a general rule, I mean, obviously I've taken a sort of academic interest in this that I've then turned into fiction in Kingdom of the Wicked.
And people can read my story because ultimately I'm a novelist and I want to tell a story.
And then they can read the essay in the back of Book One and other stuff I've written about it for Kiet and for Aereo Magazine and for the Cato Institute and take it for what it is.
But the broad rule is that as a general principle, things don't change very much.
Not in an observable way.
For a very contemporary case, the arguments being made about no-deal Brexit are just insanely silly.
Now, that does not mean no-deal Brexit is going to be a bed of roses if it happens.
That's silly as well.
But the idea that it is going to turn Britain into Venezuela is bizarre.
Bonkers.
No, Corbyn will do that.
Not Brexit.
But it will take him time.
That's the thing.
It's the boiling a frog thing.
That is generally...
Very good point.
If you look at the history of Corbyn's Venezuela...
Sorry, not Corbyn.
Corbyn's Venezuela.
What's he called?
Not Maduro.
Chavez.
Chavez.
You see that at the start, things were quite...
It seemed fine.
It seemed fine.
I mean, my father used to say before he died, he used to say, it's...
It is always remember that you can do something that's really, really difficult for a short time.
And that kind of redistributive socialism can be done and also redistributive fascism like you saw in Mussolini's Italy where all the jokes about making the trains run on time.
You can do something really difficult for a short time.
It's when you keep trying to do it over years and years and years.
That's when the wheels fall off.
Or when you've got to pay for it.
Yes, well, it is still, I know it's a cliche, but it is still my favourite quote, is the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.
I still think that is the best way of describing it.
So a good guiding principle is that as a general rule, things don't change that much.
However, certainly there were aspects of the collapse of the Roman Empire where it was one of those world-defining changes.
And some of the best scholarship that has been done is actually about what happened in Roman Britain after the withdrawal of the legions.
Oh, what did happen?
This country lost kilns, the potter's wheel, the spinning wheel.
The size of cattle shrunk by between a quarter and a half, the average size.
Because they couldn't selectively breed anymore.
Because they couldn't selectively breed anymore.
Basically, what happens is modern market-based societies that produce a high level of sophistication and material prosperity and comfort depend very heavily on the division of labour.
And division of labour is wonderful.
Thank you, Adam Smith.
It's a great thing, but it requires specialisation, which means the whole jack of all trades, you know, someone who might be educated and literate, but also able to fix their car...
Or fix a washing machine?
Or do technical help?
Refit a window?
Could you refit your sash windows?
That kind of thing.
Obviously I could.
How dare you insult me, Helen, by suggesting I couldn't.
But that kind of thing is that when you get the underpinning...
Market prosperity and social order that you need to maintain a highly specialised society pulled out from underneath it, which is what the research about post-Roman Britain indicates, is that the wheels just fall off.
There is this incredibly rapid loss of sophistication and technical knowledge.
In Britain's case, we actually regressed here back before...
To a level of civilisation below what had existed in Iron Age Celtic Britain before the Romans got here.
The regression was so bad.
Oh my God.
Yes.
So it can happen, that kind of thing.
But you need to realise that it is quite rare...
And people catastrophizing about whether it's no deal Brexit or whether it's the yellow vests in France or whatever.
It could be any side of politics or Orban winning in Hungary or anything like that.
From either the left or the right, they need to understand it's much more likely to be like boiling a frog than it is going to be to some sort of rapid civilisation or collapse.
Do you not see parallels between late Rome and our own civilisation?
No, I don't.
And the reason I don't is because the society that was very successful and capable and orderly and peaceful and produced all the long periods of peace...
It was a pagan society with very different values from ours, which is what I wrote about in Kingdom of the Wicked.
The society where the wheels fell off was one that was actually morally much more like ours.
It had become Christian.
It had taken on significant Christian ideas and values.
It had warped them in many respects because you've got to remember Christianity was laid over the top of a very distinctive civilisation that did some really quite weird things to Christianity.
You've only got to look at what Roman Christianity became in the early days of the Christian church and the religion from which it was ultimately derived, Judaism.
To see really quite extraordinary differences.
You know, like Judaism has no concept of original sin, for example.
This is an enormous difference and has incredible theological and sociocultural consequences down the line.
Judaism has a completely different conception of the afterlife and there are also a very large number of Jewish traditions, including the ones I had to write about in Kingdom of the Weekend, that don't have an afterlife.
Yeah.
You know, you still have to be a Jew and you're still meant to follow the 613 rules of, you know, the mitzvoth.
But it's just the idea that it's salvific is completely ridiculous.
And if you'd have gone to...
People on the Sanhedrin, if you hypothetically spoke Hebrew or Aramaic, and had asked people, and these were religious scholars, I mean Judaism has this tradition over many thousands of years of people thinking deeply and critically about their religion and then committing it to paper.
And this was going on in the time of Jesus.
The people that Jesus was debating with, and my Yeshua Ben Yusuf character that he's debating with on the Sanhedrin, these people were not dummies.
They had thought their religion through and they gave a crap about getting it right.
And it's kind of unfortunate the way they're portrayed in the Gospels.
It doesn't really give Judaism a fair run.
And so you can see Christianity laid over the top of Roman paganism became quite weird in lots of ways.
And some of the cultural transfers are very odd, like the patron deities in all those little Italian...
Hill towns, they all turned into the patron saints.
And I mean, I remember when I was working in Italy at one point, there was this extraordinary thing that there were these two little villages quite close to each other in Umbria.
And the only difference in their two patron saints stories was that one of them, he was sawed in half across the middle.
And the other one, he was sawed in half from the top of his head down to his bits.
You know, that kind of thing.
So you get very weird cultural crossovers and it can be worth going to deeply Catholic countries and looking at their churches, like looking at Portuguese Christianity and you just look at it and you go, my goodness, this is so foreign.
This is so not like an English cathedral.
And it is that Christianity laid over the top of the pagan Roman bedrock and then the two interpenetrating each other and becoming something really quite odd.
So no, I don't see a parallel and I...
I discussed this with Paul de Plessis, my Roman law tutor, a few times.
He and I used to call it a bad classics alert.
Which is where you have to be quite careful about drawing analogies between modernity and a pagan civilization and modernity, secular modernity, and a society that had become Christian but not at all secular.
So, yeah, but I... And like I said, are you suggesting that actually...
The Roman Empire that fell wasn't really Roman anymore.
It had become something very odd.
Okay, but that doesn't mean to say that there aren't parallels between that period and now.
I would struggle to find them about...
The one that does periodically come to mind, and this is once again drawing on Nietzsche, genealogy of morals again, is that...
And this is me going right out on a limb here.
There are parallels between a lot of women who got involved in early Christianity because they didn't like being leched at.
So Me Too was the downfall of the Roman Empire.
They didn't like being looked at or thought of in that way by Roman men.
But this was a very...
And remember, this is a society that had slavery and was terribly, terribly unequal in ways that we struggled to grasp.
You'd have to go to...
You'd need to go back in time, about 50 years, into probably a South American country to see something similar in modern terms.
Terrible, terrible class-based inequality.
What about...
Am I not right in thinking that the welfare burden was one of the things that destroyed the Roman Empire?
That previously they would have had a much more lax sense of obligation towards the...
Well, no.
The pagan Romans had very intense obligation ideas, but it was not something that was considered appropriate for the state to do.
Well, that's good.
Yeah, when you read Book 2.
Whereas later on, though, in the dog days of the empire, surely there was that kind of, possibly as a result of Christianity.
Yes, yes.
And look, pagans wrote about this.
You're always giving away other people's money.
So you actually, you do get arguments like that.
So Christianity killed the Roman Empire?
Well, that was one of Gibbon's arguments, and that's not something that I tend to buy, because I just see these kind of things as big cultural movements that take time over.
And you've talked to Tom Holland, he will say...
And they're going to happen anyway.
No, I'm not a Marxist.
That's one of the reasons why I write speculative studies.
So you don't think empires do naturally rise and fall?
Because I do.
But I do think empires naturally rise and fall.
But you've got to be very careful when you look at...
Large, complex, urbanised facts that existed for hundreds or even thousands of years and then the wheels fall off.
The danger is because that's what happened, that that's what was always going to happen.
And you've got to be really, really careful with that kind of thinking because that's the kind of materialist view of history that a lot of Marxists have.
And it's why the people who are very critical of scholarly thinking I mean, I've written novels.
I've done the best I can, but they're novels.
I'm a novelist.
I want people to read my stories and to see whether they can relate to my characters and that kind of thing.
But you get a historian like Nile Ferguson, who has actually done scholarly work in this area, and when he first started doing it, the people he was arguing with were Marxists, because Marxists have this conception of history that you're always going to go where you went.
Right.
The material, the facts of history determines you've got the, it couldn't have happened in any other way.
Right.
Now they're wrong.
We know that now, but they weren't unfortunately proven wrong by people like Nile Ferguson.
They were proven wrong by physicists who came up with the alternative timelines.
And so we now know that They were wrong, but initially those scholarly arguments amongst historians were all between historians in a liberal or Whig or conservative tradition and historians operating out of a Marxist tradition.
Do you know what's really sad?
What's really sad is that we could go on this podcast for hours, but I've got to eat that curry that we've got in the lunch, otherwise I'm going to flip.
And actually, what this means is we can do another podcast another day.
Yes.
I mean, you know, not next week, but you can come back because you're great.
And once you've read book two.
Exactly.
So we can talk about Kingdom of the Wicked even more.
And yeah, we can talk about learned things.
So thank you very much to my podcast guest, Helen Dale.
Thank you very much.
Author of Kingdom of the Wicked.
Thank you very much.
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