How To Think Politically | Graeme Garrard | Modern Wisdom Podcast 107

Graeme Garrard is a Teacher at Cardiff University & Harvard Summer School and an author. Why do we need politics? And who are the individuals that have most shaped the world of political thought? Today we get to find out about some of the most influential thinkers in history from Marx to Plato, Nietzsche to Machiavelli and Plato to Locke. Extra Stuff: Buy How To Think Politically - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1472961781/ Follow Graeme on Twitter - https://twitter.com/GarrardGraeme Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Has it always been that your political leaning has then been taken as the foundation upon which the rest of your person is built?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  That that has been more the norm in in history, I think.

• 0:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Than what we've been used to until recently, which which is more of an aberration. I think, I mean, sad as it is to say, I think that what what you're referring to now, which is becoming more dominant, is something of a return to to the normal in history, where people have been less tolerant, perhaps, of differences of opinion, where people's political views have been more closely linked to fundamental things like religion, identity, and that sort of thing. I think if you look at history, you'll find that that's more the norm, and that we've sort of gotten used to in recent history, that not being the case.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  But I think we're going back to that to some degree. And that's maybe what's causing the the temperature to go up in political debate and the reluctant increasing reluctance in some quarters to tolerate differences of opinion.

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Graham Garrard, and we're going to learn how to think politically today, right? That's correct?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed, yes.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  Welcome to the show. How are you today?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Yes, glad to be here.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's going to be interesting. We've been delving into politics and history a little bit recently on the show, so the listeners should be in the mood for it, at least appetites have been wet. So to begin the discussion in its purest form, what is politics and why do we need it?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Well, politics is a way of managing human societies that uses argument, debate, rhetoric, persuasion, but doesn't resort to use of force.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  It's uniquely a human thing, because we have language. When shooting breaks out, then politics ends, and you have war. Not everyone accepts that view, though there are lots of different conceptions of what politics is, but really, generally, that's what it is. Some of your viewers may be familiar with a quotation that's often used by a theorist of war, a German theorist of war named Clausewitz, who said that war is just politics by other means. So that's a view of politics that I'm rejecting. My view is that when war begins, politics ends.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  It's not always clear where the boundary is between the two, but that's a view of politics that I have. So, politics is obviously important if you want to resolve differences in a way that doesn't resort to force. So, all human societies involve some element of agreement and some element of disagreement. If you didn't agree on anything, you wouldn't have a political community at all, to start with, right? But if you agreed on everything, you wouldn't need politics. So, politics lies somewhere between those two extremes. People agree and disagree, and so politics is really about how you manage those disagreements.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  So, it takes all kinds of different forms. So, the one we're most familiar with is democracy, although even that takes different forms. But there are other forms of politics that aren't democratic. Indeed, most of human history has been characterized by forms of politics that are not democratic. In fact, the greatest democracy of them all, perhaps, was ancient Athens, and then, for almost 2,500 years, there really wasn't any democracy to speak of. Then it was reborn in the 18th century, 19th century, and now it's the dominant form in large parts of the world. But, you know, there are other forms.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  So, in the particular form of democracy that we know best in the West, in the modern West... We have institutions that we use to manage society, to allow us to cooperate, to pursue our common ends, but also allow us to manage conflict and difference when we disagree, so that we're not killing each other. But, you know, there are other forms as well. So, you know, there's authoritarian forms of politics and aristocratic forms, et cetera, et cetera. But in the general terms, as I said, it's really about managing societies in a way that avoids actual violence.

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember the first person who I heard said it, but the comment that you made about you've got discussion and you've got conflict, you have words and you have fighting, words and fists, I suppose. Those are really the only two ways that we can communicate with each other, right? It's either by talking about something, and then when that doesn't happen, it goes into it goes into fighting about something. There's not really, there's not really many other mechanisms that we have to play with.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Not really. I mean, they say that it's a sort of continuum, and it's not always clear where one ends and the other begins. When, when does a war really start? It's hard to say sometimes. But notwithstanding that, I think you're right. I think that basically it's one or the other.

• 5:43Chris Williamson?

  You can talk about it, or you can fight about it, and that's...

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right, that's right. And of course, there are lots of different ways to talk about it. You can have a rational discussion, an argument, try and persuade someone. But, you know, politics is also about other forms of of language, rhetoric and manipulation, propaganda. So those are ways of trying to get people to your, to take your view without actually using force.

• 6:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not as if words can't be weaponized as well, right? It's just that it doesn't involve punching someone in the face with them.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  That's right, exactly, exactly right. Yeah, it can be, you know, words can be highly manipulative and can involve elements of threat as well. So that's why the the boundary is as unclear. But to give maybe one example, let's say, in in this country, in Britain, when in the 17th century, at the time of Thomas Hobbes, philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Parliament was at odds with the king, King Charles I, and they attempted to convince each other of their respective views, and they used every manner of means.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  But eventually, it didn't work, and they resorted to civil war. And when when civil war begins, as it did in this country in the 1640s, then you know, you're no longer really in politics. You're into a different realm, where you're not trying to persuade anyone, you're trying to coerce them through through fighting. But of course, that has to end at some point, and politics has to resume. So that would be an example. The examples all through history, where politics breaks down and war begins.

• 7:38Chris Williamson?

  I get it.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  It could be civil war, it could be war between states as well.

• 7:41Chris Williamson?

  So how do politics and power relate to each other?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Right. So power is an aspect of politics, it's a key aspect, a fundamental aspect. Power is always present in politics, it's present in other realms as well. It's not unique to politics. All politics involves power, but not all power involves politics. So politics is, as I said, is a way of dealing with power. And so people have conflicting interests, they have conflicting values, they have conflicting ways of approaching things.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  And in a world of scarcity, where not everyone can have everything they want, they have to resolve these differences. And so this is what politics is essentially about.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  So, obviously, to achieve things, you need power. And, as I say, where people disagree, then they want access to power so they can achieve their own ends, the ends they prefer. So, a large part of politics is, you know, struggle over power, because power is the means to attain these ends. But not everyone agrees on the ends, and so they disagree about, you know, they fight over power. So, that's a sort of key part of politics, but one of the points I make in this book, my co-author and I, is that that isn't the whole story. And indeed, that's one of our main objectives in the book, is to show that power is key

• 9:24Speaker 01

  to politics, but isn't everything. And there is a certain view of politics, which we reject, which says that it is just about power. And there is another dimension that's missing from that view. You could call that view the Francis Urquhart view, or the Frank Underwood view, the House of Cards view, maybe the Machiavellian view, that it's just a struggle for power. But we think that leaves out a huge dimension. And so, there is a way of talking about politics in addition to that, because, of course, that's all true, that's a key part of understanding politics, but this other dimension is missing

• 10:09Speaker 01

  from that view. And that dimension has to do with concepts of justice, ideas, values, and that sort of thing. And we think that a proper and complete view of politics has to include both. We refer to both power and to justice, to might and to right. And I think that's a more complete view, and really a more human view of politics.

• 10:36Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that power is a term which is thrown around so much at the moment in relation to politics?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Well, because I think when people really diverge and the degree, there's always divergence in politics between people, what they want, their values, their beliefs. But there are sometimes moments in history when the divergence becomes very acute and fundamental differences open up. And I think when that happens, the intensity of the struggle for power may increase because there's so much at stake. When there's a sort of lot of broad consensus, then there's still some amount of conflict, not, you know, nonviolent conflict.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  But when the stakes go up, when there's major disagreement about fundamentals, then I think the contest becomes more intense, passions are inflamed, and people's, even people's sense of identity becomes a matter of debate, as we've seen with Brexit. I was hoping I wouldn't mention Brexit this quickly.

• 11:49Chris Williamson?

  Too late, too late, you've already had to do it.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  And so I think that may account for some of the reason that, and also there is a, there's, there is a view now that people don't trust politicians as much as they have in the past, and no one's ever really trusted them that much, but I think levels, levels of trust have gone way down. This is borne out by, by surveys and things. And I think in that case, people become more jaded and more cynical and tend to see just the power aspects of politics.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting what you say about the, the identity thing. So I've had a number of political commentators on recently, Andrew Doyle, who is the, the man behind the Titania McGrath Twitter account, discussing, discussing. Who's actually banned, she's on a seven day ban at the moment. I can't remember what for, something else this time. And yeah, the, the fact that you can no longer have a political ideology which isn't a comment on you as a person. It's not that you have, you are a small business owner, therefore you're looking after your interests. It's, oh no, hang on, you voted, you lean right, therefore you are this sort of a person. And has it always been that way?

• 13:04Chris Williamson?

  Has it always been that your political leaning has then been taken as the foundation upon which the rest of your person is built?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  That has been more the norm in history, I think,

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  than what we've been used to until recently, which is more of an aberration. I think, I mean, sad as it is to say, I think that what you're referring to now, which is becoming more dominant, is something of a return to the normal in history, where people have been less tolerant, perhaps, of differences of opinion, where people's political views have been more closely linked to fundamental things like religion, identity, and that sort of thing. I think if you look at history, you'll find that that's more the norm and that we've sort of gotten used to

• 14:02Speaker 01

  in recent history that not being the case. But I think we're going back to that to some degree. And that's maybe what's causing the temperature to go up in political debate and the increasing reluctance in some quarters to tolerate differences of opinion.

• 14:23Chris Williamson?

  So genuine is a little bit of a step backwards?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I think it is, myself.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  We tend to take it for granted because it's what we're used to, if you're beyond a certain age, anyway, like me. But I think if you put it in the bigger perspective, you see that the abnormality is the kind of tolerance and civility that we had until fairly recently, which is now seems to be declining. And I think evidence for this, I mean, there's lots of evidence for it, but I'll give you a couple of examples.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  One of the themes in the book is the risks that political thinkers have taken through history in propounding their views, often controversial views. So it starts with Socrates, who was executed by the Athenians, which was a democracy, after all, fairly, by the standards of the time, fairly... Open society, relatively speaking, and yet they put him to death, they forced him to drink hemlock for his political views, not for anything he did, but for what he said in public. And from that point on, you see almost every major political thinker, right up until the

• 15:43Speaker 01

  19th century, suffering some kind of consequence for propounding their views. They either were killed, or they were tortured, like Machiavelli was tortured, or they were forced into exile, like John Locke, for example, or Karl Marx, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So that gives you some idea of how intolerant the public sphere has tended to be in history to the, to people propounding views that are considered heterodox and unconventional. And so it's really only from around the time of the Enlightenment and onwards that people

• 16:25Speaker 01

  have taken a more relaxed view in the West towards this sort of thing. But, so that one view is that that period, which of greater tolerance of difference, differences of opinion, is declining. And we may be entering a period when, when we're going back to the way it used to be. That's debatable, it's a controversial point, but there's certainly some evidence for that.

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  It's bizarre, isn't it, that we've, we're currently framing a slightly more conflict-centered environment for politics up against a unrepresentatively placid period that we went through just before, but taken with a slightly broader range view over the last 2,500 years or so, this is, it's just par for the course, or more representative of what we've been used to. One of the things that you mentioned there, Socrates dying, the story that you put in the book, which I absolutely loved, was when he got convicted by the court, he, convicted and before, before he was sentenced.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 17:34Chris Williamson?

  He said, "Okay, that's, that's great, thank you for convicting me, now where's my reward?" He considered himself worthy of a reward, hadn't he, for the things he'd come up with? And I just thought like... I mean, it's such a ballsy move, like a crazy ballsy move. And also, did you say he was grotesquely ugly as well?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Well,

• 17:56Chris Williamson?

  Reports said he was grotesque.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:58Chris Williamson?

  Is that true? I'd never heard that before.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Well, we have no real way of knowing other than through accounts, but he's reputed to have been outwardly ugly, but had a beautiful soul. And the contrast is with his friend and lover, Alcibiades, who was a bad boy of the ancient world and came to a sticky end as well. But he was famously externally beautiful, handsome, but inwardly had a corrupt soul. And so the way that the two have been presented as sort of contrasts in the writings of, say, Plato, then, yeah, that's, but whether that's just a kind of dramatization on Plato's part,

• 18:44Speaker 01

  hard to say. But yes, that's how he's often been seen. And it has a, he's making, Plato's making a point there and emphasizing this because he wants us to see that what really matters is the beauty of your soul, the purity of your soul, the goodness of your soul, not outward things. That's one of Plato's major themes. It's a theme that comes out in a lot of ancient thought, like Stoicism and things. So he's, whether Socrates really was all that ugly or not, it's, we'll never know, as I say, but it serves a point that Plato's trying to make.

• 19:23Chris Williamson?

  What do you think, what do you think Donald Trump would, how would his speeches go if he started talking about the beauty of people's souls?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Well, hard to imagine that kind of speech if he was making it. Yeah, I mean,

• 19:40Speaker 01

  I don't know that Trump would be able to reflect on that level about such things. That said, I don't think very many politicians would be. I think the point would probably be lost on most of them.

• 19:52Chris Williamson?

  So the big question, you've covered thirty, thirty individuals in this book?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  You're out for dinner and you need to choose five of the individuals that you researched to be sat around the dinner table with you. Who are you going to choose and why?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Right, okay, that's a tricky one. That's a hard choice to make.

• 20:14Chris Williamson?

  This is like choosing your favourite child, isn't it?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Sophie's Choice, yeah. Sophie's Choice for philosophers, okay. Well, I mean, there would be a personal aspect to it. One of them would have to be Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss philosopher of the 18th century, who lived during the French Enlightenment and who inspired a lot of the French revolutionaries. He was one of their biggest heroes, mainly because I've written about him and studied him so closely, so I have a personal interest in that. Plus, he was a very inherently strange and interesting man.

• 20:51Chris Williamson?

  What was strange about him?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  He didn't fit into society, the polite society that he inhabited in 18th century Paris, the world of Voltaire and the other philosopher. And he rejected that whole world and he preferred to live a life of austerity. He also may have had some mental problems. He had a tendency toward paranoia. And, you know, he was a difficult man in most respects, both on principle and by virtue of his personality. Right, who else would I be interested in? Well, Socrates.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  I mean, Socrates features in the book, but of course Socrates didn't write anything, so it would really be Plato. So I would have to include Plato as well, I think. Just because of the sheer range and depth of his thought. He just wrote about everything and he did it all brilliantly. I'm not really a Platonist, but, I mean, five minutes with Plato, I'd give a lot of, I'd sacrifice a lot to spend five minutes.

• 22:05Chris Williamson?

  The table wouldn't get bored, would they? You know, if Plato's sat on the table, there's always going to be something else to have a discussion about.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. He's almost inexhaustible.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  So that would certainly keep the conversation going. I don't think Russo would be a good conversationalist, but...

• 22:23Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, what role do you think Russo would play? He'd probably be smoking, wouldn't he? He'd be smoking over the far side complaining about the service or something, yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he would. He'd be complaining about something, anyway.

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  And we'd be disagreeing with people, at least. So, um... Who else would I include there? Well, um... I think Thomas Hobbes would probably be on my shortlist of five. Again, for the power of his mind and his originality. He had a very acute and analytical mind. And had a very clear, if rather stark, view of the world. I think that would be really interesting. He had a huge range. I mean, he was famous initially for writing about mathematics and geometry and things like that.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  So he was a really, what we would call Renaissance man in terms of the range of his thought. And so I think he would be a fascinating person. And I think he would have a lot to say about the contemporary world as well.

• 23:31Chris Williamson?

  What do you think he would think?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  I think he'd feel a lot of vindication. Because, you know, he lived during the English Civil War and he wrote his masterpiece Leviathan. In response to the English Civil War, it sort of traumatized him. And that's what prompted him. So he's a man who really saw conflict as the human norm. And thought that that was the most urgent and pressing issue. So I think he would look around the world today and see that he had been proven right.

• 24:01Chris Williamson?

  Would it just be a big "I told you so"?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  I think it would be a lot of that, yeah. I think to a large extent it would be, uh... Of course, people, you know, see what they want to see. What they call confirmation bias involved, but, um... He would certainly be someone I think I'd like to spend time with, chat to. That's three fingers.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  I think Karl Marx would have to be on that list as well. I'd be interested to meet him personally. It was a sort of larger-than-life figure and a gregarious and bearish sort of man in many ways, larger-than-life.

• 24:40Chris Williamson?

  But I say, what is he actually like as a personality? Because I know a very shallow amount of his work. I don't actually know what he was like as an individual. Could you tell us about that?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was formidably intelligent, vastly well-read, extremely broad-ranging as a mind. He was, say, a reputation as being a somewhat bearish and cantankerous as a personality, but also quite gregarious, disorderly. He liked to drink in carols with his mates. He used to go on pub crawls and get up to no good in that respect. He was extremely unconventional. He was fearless. He sacrificed an enormous amount for his

• 25:32Speaker 01

  views and his family. He's lived in great poverty, in exile in London, and so therefore did his family. So he's a very courageous man, had the courage of his convictions. So a very big, complex personality that would be, I'm sure, fill a room and would probably dominate it too, and could be really fierce, I think, as well.

• 25:58Chris Williamson?

  He'd probably be, he'd probably be good at bartering with the waitress to get the cheque down. I imagine he'd probably be, once, like, the foods come at the end, he'd have a reason as to why this shouldn't be so expensive and this shouldn't be so expensive.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Well, he, you know, he had a tendency, actually, to be quite profligate with money.

• 26:17Chris Williamson?

  Did he?

• 26:17Speaker 01

  His friend, yeah, his friend Friedrich Engels kept him afloat financially, so he could be an intellectual, full-time intellectual. And he ended up spending quite a lot of money on Karl Marx, who was very free in spending it. For someone who didn't have much, he spent it quite freely.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  But so I wonder if he would, but I mean, he, you know, he was argumentative. So he would probably have put up a fight. He once applied for a job with railway. This is before British Rail existed, when the railways were private. And he was turned down for the job. But one imagines if he had been accepted for that as a conductor on a train, what that might have been like. We might not have had, the 20th century might not have looked the way it did. But one could imagine him, you know, trying to collect the tickets of the well to do bourgeoisie on the trains. And, you know, telling them, your ticket to please you bourgeois pig or something like that.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  So he was a sort of angry man, but he thought he had good reason to be.

• 27:31Chris Williamson?

  I got you. So we've got four. Who's your final guest going to be?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Right, well, that's now it gets really tough. Let's say, let's say Friedrich Nietzsche.

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  That's difficult, you know, it's to choose. But yeah, I would say Friedrich Nietzsche, a lot of Nietzsche is very, very popular now. He wasn't in his own lifetime. He publishes.

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't, wasn't very well circulated when he was alive?

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Not in the least. He, his books didn't sell. He had to publish them himself. He had to finance the publishing of his own books in his own lifetime. Books that now sell in the hundreds of thousands. He couldn't, he couldn't get published often and had to finance the publishing himself. He, his response to that was, he said that, you know, if my books don't sell, don't blame me if there are no fish in the sea. He said, you know, people weren't ready for them yet. And in a sense, he was right. He was a sort of ahead of his time. So that's all changed and now he looms very large.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  He goes to sort of find his books in airport bookshops now. Libraries and bookshops grown under the weight of his books. So he, he touches a chord in a way, resonates with readers now in a way that he never did in his own lifetime.

• 28:59Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that is now?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Really good question and very hard one to answer. I think he offered a diagnosis about the malaise of modernity, about the crisis of Western civilization as he saw it, that centers around the idea of the death of God, the loss of belief, the beliefs that really sustained Western civilization for 2000 years, were starting to be really questioned in a serious way in his own lifetime. And that induced a sense of angst. And he expressed that very well, very powerfully, in a way that a lot of others didn't. And

• 29:44Speaker 01

  I think that his sense of the problem was very acute and very profound and interesting. The problem with Nietzsche is that the cure that he prescribed was much worse than the illness. The cure he prescribed was really quite a disaster. It appealed to the Nazis, for example. But, so, I mean, there's not much to be learned from his cure, but from his diagnosis. I think he's one of the supreme diagnosticians of the problems, the malaise and problems of sort of late modern civilization.

• 30:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've got Douglas Murray on in a couple of weeks.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:29Chris Williamson?

  Talking about his new book, which I need to hurry up reading, which is over there. And he's delivering it. The book's hilarious in a very hard-hitting way. But one of the things that he brings up is exactly that, the fact that this, the breakdown of the previous institutions that gave us social cohesion, that made us work together, that gave people a greater sense of purpose. I also recently went to go and see Alain de Botton, the guy behind The School of Life, who, if anybody who is listening has the opportunity to go and see him live, unbelievably compelling public speaker, absolutely fantastic. I saw Jordan Peterson last year, and I would... Be prepared to say that Alain was more engaging live, which is a real credit to him.

• 31:13Chris Williamson?

  And Alain Dubon was talking about the same thing. He talked about the the crisis of a meritocracy, the fact that we're disconnected from nature and from a sense of grandeur and all of these sorts of things. And it is it is interesting that as society modernizes and we have more convenience, better healthcare, people are living longer, we're not dying of diseases, there are these unpredicted and expected side effects that come with that. I also, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I was discussing a little while ago about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And what I said was that a Paleolithic ancestor who was out on the plains, who was struggling to fulfill

• 31:56Chris Williamson?

  the bottom of that, the foundation of that particular pyramid, probably isn't too concerned about self-actualization or about the existential dread of whether or not he is spending his life in the service of the greatest purpose that he can. But as soon as we've flipped that particular pyramid on its head and all of those bottom things have been taken care of, I think that's where a lot of the existential dread comes in, that there is so much convenience at the bottom, the problem is now of abundance, not of scarcity.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's very much Nietzsche's view. So Nietzsche attacked his own civilization for being a world of comfortable self-preservation, a really narrow, sheepish world where most people's lives involved had no tension in them. He used the analogy of a bow and arrow. He said that the the bow of life in modern Western decadent civilization was flabby, it wasn't taut, there was no tension in the bow. Because as you say, a lot of the the things that had

• 33:09Speaker 01

  preoccupied humans through much of history, just getting by, having enough food to eat, shelter, those basic things had by the 19th century. By the late 19th century, for a lot of people, had been satisfied, perhaps not completely and for lots not, but for those for whom it had been satisfied, their minds, as you say, turned to other things. What's the purpose of life, the meaning of life? And Nietzsche was very contemptuous of, well, of the English in general, and of John Stuart Mill, who also features in the book, who was a utilitarian who believed that happiness was the purpose

• 33:51Speaker 01

  of life. And Nietzsche said, no, it's not. Life has other purposes. And one of his inspirations was the Greek tragic poets of the ancient world. So Nietzsche thought that one of the prices that we pay as a civilization for having satisfied so many of these more basic needs is a loss of that tension, a loss of tragedy, a loss of drama, a loss of struggle. And in the absence of those, we don't, we can't achieve anything great. And our civilization won't produce, it's just a civilization of mediocrity, of, as I said, comfortable self-preservation. And that he thought that was an ignoble form of life.

• 34:35Chris Williamson?

  I think, I think that me and Nietzsche would probably have quite a bit to agree on. Everything, even if you look at the individual level, rather than a societal wide level or a nation-state wide level, a lot of the things that make us feel good involve periods of some sort of stress. So acupuncture mats, I was discussing this the other day, acupuncture mats, I don't know whether you've seen them, it's like a yoga mat, but it's got little spikes on it and you lie on it. And I asked one of my friends, because there's all sorts of different claims that are touted around on the internet about these sorts of things. And one of my friends, I said, well, what mechanism do you think it's working on? Because he's a doctor, but he also thinks that they're effective. I was like, well, what do you think it's doing? And he said, it's the same as everything else. It's the same as doing

• 35:18Chris Williamson?

  high intensity workout, it's the same as having a cold shower, it's the same as going for a difficult run. It is a brief period of stress which allows the body to reset its equilibrium to a better state. Also, it allows you to feel discomfort on your own terms. And that discomfort on your own terms then reframes other levels of discomfort. If you've Run a half marathon last weekend. What is a minor disagreement with your colleague at work this week? You're now seeing things within this new frame. And it's interesting that that life of comfort, that flabby life of comfort, I think, it encourages people to look at small problems with such fidelity, that they then begin to grow and grow and

• 36:02Chris Williamson?

  grow. And then this has been enabled by always on communication. And then this has been exacerbated by echo chambers online, which are delivered by social media and frictionless. You know, it, when you look at it through this lens of history, it really isn't that much of a surprise that we are coming up against these problems. And the fact that Nietzsche was able to see this with such, in so much advance, is pretty impressive.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he was talking, I think, about the, the, the pathologies of, of a, as he saw it, decadent civilization, a rich, flabby, indulgent decadent civilization. And he recoiled against that. But, you know, there's a concept in psychology known as contrast effect, which says that, that, that the human mind functions to some, to considerable degree, on the basis of contrast, that, and they've done experiments to support this in, in social psychology, that, you know, we understand things and we experience

• 37:12Speaker 01

  things by means of contrast. So if you only lived in a, an environment that had one temperature, you wouldn't really understand the concept of those, of different temperatures. It's the contrast between them that gives meaning and definition to the experiences. And I think that's part of what Nietzsche was getting at. The, the basic insight here being that, you know, a life lived only one way, is missing some key element to understanding and appreciating what's good about that life, as well as what's missing. And so I think is a really fundamental insight in Nietzsche at a psychological level,

• 37:53Speaker 01

  not just at the level of civilization, but he was a really acute psychologist, better psychologist than philosopher in my opinion. He was a pretty sloppy philosopher, very self-indulgent philosopher, but he was a very brilliant psychologist. Sigmund Freud was a believer that Nietzsche was a great psychologist. And I think he understood this. I think he was expressing the same idea that you really need tension, contrast, drama to really achieve things in life and also to understand and give meaning to things and even to experience them fully and properly.

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned that Machiavelli was suffered for his thoughts. I haven't heard that story. Would you be able to tell us about that?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yes, he suffered quite horribly. It wasn't, well, it was less for his thoughts than simply for his involvement in politics. He was a diplomat and civil servant in his working life until, you know, in the Renaissance, in Renaissance Florence where he lived, politics was a nasty game. And if you backed the wrong side, you suffered consequences if your side lost. And his side did lose. And he was kicked out of office because he was on the losing side. And then he was arrested and then he was tortured. And then he was exiled and nearly killed, in fact.

• 39:27Chris Williamson?

  It's a big laundry list of nasty things to have happen to you, isn't it?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, he took it really well.

• 39:33Chris Williamson?

  Fair play.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  He wrote some amusing sonnets about his being tortured. The bit that that that he had found the most difficult of all those things was being exiled, being removed from politics, because he was a really political animal. He loved politics. He loved being in the fray, in the center of the storm of politics, the vortex of politics. And he he took the torture reasonably well, but he didn't take the exile very well, the exile from politics. Then it was only after that that he wrote his his books, the books for which he's most famous, The Prince, for example. But these weren't published

• 40:13Speaker 01

  in his lifetime. And they were they became notorious later on. But, you know, that's the way politics was was played, the game of politics was played back then. He understood that. He knew the rules of the game, and he took it well.

• 40:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, that's fun. So one of the things that you've there's been a consistent theme throughout this discussion is a lot of the political thinkers, the scholars or the statesmen that we've been discussing have been real intellectual powerhouses. A lot of them have had been able to draw from multiple different subject areas. Nietzsche not only doing philosophy, also doing psychology, Aristotle, Socrates, these sort of guys. You've got people that were economists, master economists, and they then funneled this ability into politics. One of the things that you brought up at the very beginning in the book, which I really loved, was talking about the difference between knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, I think,

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  which were the three different the three different levels that you had to to the way that people put knowledge into action, and the highest version of its delivery to reality being that of wisdom.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 41:27Chris Williamson?

  Is that something that politicians should strive for? Because to me now, politics and a lot of the people that are listening will think, well, this all sounds well and good, but this is kind of a archaic romantic view of what politicians were. They were these armchair philosophers who didn't actually have to deliver things. And now politicians, to me, appear much more like kings would have done perhaps in the past. Does that make sense?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes sense. I understand that criticism. They're wrong. So, in the introduction to this book, we make a distinction between what we call naive idealists and naive realists, and we try to position ourselves somewhere between the two. So a naive idealist would be someone of the type you've just described, who hasn't got a lot of experience, of real experience in politics, who's a bit otherworldly, has their both feet firmly planted in the clouds, as it were, and just sort of prescribes things with no real sense of reality. So that's one extreme, and, you know, we don't think that's the right view.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  And the other extreme is what we call naive realism, the kind that I started with at the beginning, the Frank Underwood, the Francis Urquhart view, that ideas and values have really no part to play at all, that politics is simply about power and interest. So, we try to show that politics involves both aspects, it's power, but the idea that you can understand or be effective in political life without considering that there are other things involved than just power and interest, things like ideas and values and beliefs, I don't think makes people very effective politicians.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  And that's particularly the case when they come up against big problems. And if I can give a concrete example, I think, a recent example, I think David Cameron is a good example of a kind of politician, he's in the news now for his memoirs, who didn't really have, as far as I could see, any really clear conception of the role that ideas and values play in politics. A kind of very pragmatic politician. Now, that's fine in good times, but when you're confronted with really deep divisions and problems of the kind that Brexit has opened up, let's say, or the rise of populism.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  In the West, let's say, then I think you need to be able to understand that people are interested in in issues of identity, of of goals and ends, and that these necessarily play a part in life. They may not always play the same part or a big part, but they're always there. There's no way around it. And I think that that the the ideal view of politics combines an appreciation of both. It's it's it's a mixed form of of activity. It involves power and interest on one side, and ideas and values and and conceptions of justice

• 44:48Speaker 01

  and ends as well, means and ends. And so people who say, well, it's just naive to involve, you know, to try and move politics in the direction of of the latter, of ideas and conceptions of justice, the the ends and purposes of life. I think that's wrong. I think that we we need to rebalance our understanding of politics so that it involves both. And that the politics, the the quality of public debate would be improved, the understanding of political life would be improved. I think we've moved too far in the in the into the

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Frank Underwood view, the the sort of extreme cynical view of politics.

• 45:34Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree couldn't couldn't agree more there, that the fact that politicians, you know, we've I I've given you the opportunity to sit down with five people who were involved in politics. You've you've struggled to choose those five, right? Because you're spoiled for choice. You've got these people who are unbelievable thinkers and polymaths across all different areas of of thought. Now, my conception of politicians isn't that of someone that I look up to with as a paragon of wisdom, right? I don't I don't think, oh, my God, I can't wait to sit down with Boris Johnson. I bet he's got like such an unbelievable understanding of the inner nuances of of the human human mind. I don't I don't think that. I think that.

• 46:18Chris Williamson?

  That lack of aspiration equates to a lack of respect on an individual level for a lot of people who look up at these politicians. And yeah, that's definitely a mechanism that I can see working. Interestingly, you've mentioned about David Cameron's memoirs. Did you see his morning routine? Have you seen this?

• 46:35Speaker 01

  No, I haven't.

• 46:35Chris Williamson?

  So we're big fans of morning routines on the show, and we work quite hard to come up with something that we enjoy on a morning. So presumably, it's something that he enjoyed. But he spoke about, he would wake up on a morning, and he would have mackerel on toast,

• 46:50Chris Williamson?

  and then sit in a room for two hours and just think.

• 46:55Chris Williamson?

  David, I'm not, I don't want to critique it too much, right? You know, you did, you've got yourself certainly further in the House of Commons than I ever have. But mackerel on toast and sitting in a room on your own for two hours, I'm not, I'm not convinced that sets you up for a fantastic day of politics. But

• 47:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 47:12Chris Williamson?

  Maybe that's where he fell off. Maybe it was the mackerel.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Well, I don't know about that.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Maybe he should spend two hours reading rather than thinking. It doesn't seem to have produced a great result in his case. But, you know, just, just to your original question, I mean, we're not saying, I'm not saying that I want philosophers to be kings, rulers to be thinkers. I just think it's, it's not that I would expect the prime minister to be well versed, although, you know, in the classics of political thought, although Boris Johnson presumably has read some of these because he's a classicist himself. But it's rather that I think that the tone and language of public debate that surrounds politicians could be raised and should be raised. And that's one of the purposes of the book, to

• 48:06Speaker 01

  try and maybe to some tiny little degree, show that we can discuss these things in different terms and use different language. And I'm not naive enough to think for one second that, you know, that these active politicians can themselves become, you know, political thinkers in any sense. But Rather that the the the overall context within which politics happens could be elevated to some degree. As I say, rebalanced a little bit in favor of um of of trying to think a slightly deeper level. Maybe talk in more general terms and not always be obsessed and preoccupied with the horse race of of politics.

• 48:51Chris Williamson?

  Well, certainly, reading through How to Think Politically, I was struck by the fact that I have bizarrely, I have more respect now for politicians overall. I have more hope, I have a little bit more hope because there's some really good examples, right? Of people who you would want to lead your nation, or you would want to be at least contributing to the discourse. Um, you know, it it's just a hope that we get some more characters that would make it into the pages of this book at some point in the not-too-distant future.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, uh, with surprisingly few exceptions of those thirty thinkers we profile. Um, with surprisingly few exceptions, they all were involved to greater or lesser extent in actual politics. You know, from Confucius right on to the to the to the present. Um, very, very few of them were pure intellectuals, surprisingly. Um, they all were um, uh, lived in inhabited worlds where politics and ideas did overlap. And as I say, most of them paid some kind of price for that. Um, so, uh, you know, they weren't just completely um, uh, isolated from reality.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Um, they had a direct involvement in most cases, and that's part of where they derived their views about politics. Um, and so, uh, as I say, I I I think I think it's realistic to expect that um, uh, that people like that should have some role to play in public life, in shaping the debate, in reflecting upon it, and moving us, as you said, from information to knowledge to wisdom. Now, I don't realistically expect to ever get there um, in the actual practice of politics. But I do think there's scope for improving and elevating the tone of debate um, somewhat.

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I hope so too. Well, anyway, Graham, it's been absolutely fantastic to speak to you. Thank you so much for your time. The link to How to Think Politically will be in the show notes below. Anybody who is interested to go and check it out, it will be linked there, plus any of the resources that we've gone through today. Graham, it's been a real, a real interesting insight into the, the past of politics. I hope that we've opened some people's eyes to a Yeah. A, a world of thinkers that are a little bit different to what, what they're seeing at the moment.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Um, if only that, then that was well worth the time and I really enjoyed it.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. It's a pleasure. Catch you later on.