Why Are We Yearning For Tradition In 2021? - Tim Stanley | Modern Wisdom Podcast 391

Tim Stanley is a historian, author and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph. The modern world has given us a lot. Safety and warmth, lighting at night, medicine, new age religions, Deliveroo and OnlyFans, but a lot of people feel unhappy with the life that modernity has handed them and are pulled toward a different style of living, one where they embrace values of the past rather than the future. Expect to learn why The West is as war with its own history, how Notre Dam nearly became a swimming pool, why Liberalism is the primary villain, why conservatives are terrible at conserving things, how men's roles in society have been eroded, why all revolutions look the same and much more. Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy Whatever Happened To Tradition - https://amzn.to/3pPdcLx Follow Tim on Twitter - https://twitter.com/timothy_stanley Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #tradition #conservatives #liberalism - 00:00 Intro 00:54 Why Tim is Interested in Tradition 06:44 The War with our own History 15:13 Is Liberalism the Primary Villain? 22:17 Tim’s Studies of Circumcision 31:55 Erasing Figures of History 36:47 Traditional Roles Within The Family 46:59 Culture’s Role in Managing Traditions 52:21 Predicting a Tradition Counter-culture 1:06:00 Where to Find Tim - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Liberalism has very good intentions. It wants us to be free. And over the course of a few hundred years, it builds strong institutions that allow us to be free. So it both has a good intent, and it also has a rational way of going about it. The problem with liberalism is that in constantly pushing freedom and in placing so much weight upon reason as the way that we reach conclusions, it slowly begins to erode the basis for its own existence.

• 0:31Chris Williamson?

  I've just got back from Italy, and I've managed to evade all of the cultural stuff, basically not being on Twitter or social media for a full week. And I've arrived back to find out that Ted Cruz has been accused of apologising for Nazi salutes at a teachers' meeting and that Rishi's budget is racist or some other horseshit. So I've descended back into the muck and the mire, but you're here with me, so we're both going into it today.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  It's a pleasure.

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  Why are you interested in tradition?

• 1:00Speaker 00

  I'm interested in tradition because I'm trying to find different ways to live. I think one of the problems with the modern world is we're encouraged to live in the present and we're encouraged to live for ourselves. And one of the great things about tradition is it does the complete opposite. It compels you to look backwards, to root your identity in the past rather than the here and the now. But it also compels you to submit to something other than yourself. Now, that might all sound creepily medieval, and many people just hearing that will think, "I don't want any of that." But that's what's so radical and revolutionary about it. And living in a democratic consumer society as we do, one of the things is you can choose the past you look back to and you can choose the things to submit to. But either way, I'm just interested

• 1:44Speaker 00

  in living beyond the here and the now and all those things you've just described, which are so temporary and fleeting and very often distracting.

• 1:53Chris Williamson?

  There's a blog post by a friend called David Perrell and he identified that the Lindy Effect, which is how long certain ideas and pieces of art and books and stuff stay around, you can presume that however long they've been around for, they're going to be around for that much longer. So the classics are the classics for a reason. 1984 has been around for whatever 80 years or so now. That may continue. We can expect for at least another 80 years moving forward. But he identified that almost all of the content that everybody consumes on a daily basis has been produced within the last 24 hours. That it's the most un-Lindy world that you could imagine.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. And isn't it extraordinary how we have never had so much information at our fingertips, yet it feels harder to learn and to retain information. I don't know about you, but I can, in the course of a day, learn so much and by the end of it, have forgotten all of it. So it's not just that a lot of what we're bombarded with is nonsense or passing or fleeting. It's also our inability to retain it. Whereas those big things, those big central ideas, which partly because they've been around for so long, we slightly resist and kick against because we think we must always be doing something new. But those big ideas, they stick because they're powerful and they're easy to remember and they're embedded in the culture. So you can't escape them.

• 3:12Chris Williamson?

  Is it an allure of novelty? Do you think that's why people always presume that new is better?

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's definitely. It's partly human condition, the desire for something new, but also selfishness. And we all want to be the creator of our own world. We all want to feel like we're writing our own story, that we're in power and we're in command. But this is also a philosophy which has been embedded in Western culture since about the 18th century. I mean, others would argue it actually dates before then. You can go all the way back to Athens, Rome and see much of this as well. But certainly since the Enlightenment, this idea has been woven into us that we must be skeptical, that we must seek the new, that we must always doubt existing knowledge, we must always question and challenge it. But I think in the last, uh, last sort of twenty or thirty years, that's been, uh,

• 3:58Speaker 00

  we've entered a period of hyper skepticism, uh, hyper novelty, um, where partly because it's the ability to do things new is at our own personal fingertips. Uh, we're, we're really encouraged to do that. And we've become allergic to roots. We've become allergic to things which hold us back and constrain us and limit our options. Uh, so we're producing a new kind of man that, that wants novelty all the time. And one result of that is that some of us, you asked the question at the beginning, why am I interested in tradition? Some of us are looking for the novelty of consistency. I quite like now, things which never change. So I like to go, there are certain galleries I like to go back to just to see the same paintings. One reason why I'm drawn to church is because I go on a

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Sunday and I hear the same thing. Unfortunately, those institutions are themselves attracted to novelty and feel they're letting themselves down by not embracing novelty. So we get history being rewritten. We get churches rethinking their literatures. But I think they're wrong because actually many of us crave the novelty of consistency.

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  Is it trite to say that letting go of the wisdom of the past and presuming that we can recreate the things that took thousands and thousands of years of the smartest minds on the planet to slowly culturally evolve and whatever was left over definitely had some wisdom in it. That to me seems like sort of flogging an old horse. Like, yes, obviously that's the case. The fact that we've had so many different iterations of societies, whether that be the, on the individual level, on the local level, regionally, nationally, globally, whatever, whether it's culture, spirituality, health, uh, bonding, family, all of these different topics. To say that, to me, seems really, really obvious. Is it or is it not?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  I, I think it's striking how when people do, uh, attempt to, uh, produce novelty, they, they produce things which have been said before or which everyone else is saying. And I mean on both left and right. So whenever, so many right wing tracks and so much right wing thinking today. I've heard before and has been said before, particularly in the 19th century in the wave of industrialization. So many complaints, we're not having enough kids, men are effeminate, women dominate society. Well, these are terribly old conservative complaints. So I think I'm just really struck by how we keep coming up with the same stuff. And likewise, in this great era of cultural novelty now, I'm really, I'm really bored with it. Because people just say the same things, society is racist, society is sexist.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Everything on TV goes over the same subjects. And yet with each iteration, we're told it's groundbreaking. And you wonder how much ground has actually been left to break, how many glass ceilings there are yet to break through. Because it just feels like we went through that ceiling 20 or 30 years ago. We're just doing it again for the thrill of it.

• 6:44Chris Williamson?

  You say that the West is at war with its own history. Modern culture encourages us to examine our ancestors with skepticism, even contempt. Why?

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Why does it do that? Partly it's an inheritance of this 18th century skepticism. The desire to start again, which is reflected in the French Revolution and all revolutions since, which are this, this idea that we have got this baggage hanging on us and we need to get rid of that baggage. And that if we did, if human beings were unencumbered by the past, they would be pure, they would be noble savages. Who would reach moral conclusions based not upon anything that was lumped onto them. Not upon this sort of rucksack put on their back full of stones of old ideas and old sins. And instead they would reach good conclusions through reason and debate.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  So there is, there is to a certain extent a huge faith in human beings at the heart of this, the idea that we don't need the past. So I think it's that. But I, but there's also a cruder political motivation. Which is, you mentioned 1984, if you want to create a new future for people, you really have to start by erasing the past. You have to change their memory of the past. So that you change their thinking about the present and the future. And in particular, if you give people this idea that the past, in the past, we were thoroughly utterly evil. We were terribly wicked people, then obviously you need to start again. And once you say we need to start again, well, that hands enormous political power over to the people who've said the past is bad, because we're left saying, okay, so what's the future going to be?

• 8:18Speaker 00

  What must, what, what are we allowed to think? What can we be like? And that's when you empower the revolutionaries, the cultural revolutionaries, to say, okay, this is what the new society will look like in the future. Now, the, the experience, every time this has been done in the past, the experience is that you replicate the power structures of the past in new forms. This is, this is why Michel Foucault is, is someone who conservatives should read, because he points out that with every revolution, you, you change the power structures, but power doesn't go away. Someone still wants to dominate. So when we create this new society free from the past, you can bet your bottom dog, there'll still be someone at the top and someone at the bottom, and oppressor and a victim. So it, it's a frustrating cycle of behaviour. But nonetheless, I think, I think that's politically at the heart of it.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  If you could discredit the past, then you can say that the present order is broken, therefore we need a new one, and that leaves it open to intellectuals to write the new order.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the examples of previous revolutions that have gone through a similar cycle?

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Well, the classic one is the French Revolution, which starts out as an attempt simply to rein in the king and to produce a constitutional monarchy. But it very quickly, it very quickly moves beyond that and becomes a revolutionary republic. And then, once, once you have torn up the old order and the old constitution, and particularly once you have beheaded the king, then anything's possible. And there was a great desire, there was a great fervour for novelty and the new. So French society didn't just change its constitution, it instituted a 10-day week, it rewrote the calendar, it abolished slavery. This is not all bad stuff, there's some good stuff that's done. That's one thing the American Revolution didn't do, the French Revolution did. So there was an attempt then to rebuild society from the ground up.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  The consequence of that was not democracy, of course, it was revolutionary dictatorship. Once a constitution had been written, it was effectively suspended. It is true that you got rid of a lot of prejudices and you got rid of a lot of authoritarianism from the past, but once constraints of ritual and custom had gone as well, you also made it far easier to impose a tyranny. So that blank slate approach was...

• 10:30Chris Williamson?

  Why is it easier to impose a tyranny when you get rid of the past?

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Because you do, over the course of centuries, you do accrue privileges, but you also accrue rights. And once you come along and you wipe the slate clean, you get rid of the privileges, but you also make it possible to get rid of the rights. In part because you change the structure and the order of society in a way that usually ends up empowering the state and the new people who are in control. So for example, French society pre the French Revolution was incredibly decentralized with a great deal of local governance, which would govern through rituals and customs and patterns of authority which had developed over hundreds of years. But the French Revolution doesn't want that. It's about creating a nation-state.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  So there's an attempt to harmonize the entire country, to get it to move and to think and to operate as one. So you could say that's a refreshing, bold thing. I mean, we as modernists, we as children of the modern world are encouraged to think in terms of nation-states. And that would be a liberating thing because the individual is now part of a nation rather than just some local area. But of course, the consequence is you get rid of local governance and you get rid of local authorities and all the local rights that had accrued around that. So in the course of trying to create a new state, you demolish much of that which came before. And this is very typically a pattern in revolutionary societies that in that attempt to modernize,

• 11:59Speaker 00

  you also eradicate those things that over hundreds of years gave people identity and rights.

• 12:06Chris Williamson?

  Why was Notre Dame an interesting example, speaking of the French?

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Well, I use Notre Dame in the book because it was really the fire of Notre Dame a few years ago, which made me think I want to turn my attention to this. And I mentioned it in the introduction. The history of Notre Dame is great because it's an example of how tradition does not appear overnight, but evolves and adapts and develops over time. So much of what you see of Notre Dame actually, most of it's very, very old. But in the Baroque era, it was subject to a great deal of quite actually unpleasant new decoration. And then during the French Revolution, when the old religion was abolished and there was a creation of a cult of supreme being. I mean, literally, the revolutionaries couldn't imagine a world without a supreme being

• 12:54Speaker 00

  because they needed someone who would have the authority with which to, an authority with which to invoke in order to impose a moral order. So having got rid, having nationalized the church, having carried out a mini-reformation and having established a secular state, the first thing they decide they've got to do is create a god, create a supreme being. And so Notre Dame is then transformed into this extraordinary pagan temple. By the end of the 1790s, Notre Dame was falling apart. It was then restored in the 19th century with the effect that many of the gargoyles and many of the decorations to the church that you look at and assume are centuries old are actually part of a neo-Gothic romantic design to reclaim the medieval past. So modern Notre Dame is actually a 19th century.

• 13:36Chris Williamson?

  It's a throwback, it's a throwback Thursday, yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And then a couple of years ago, the roof caught fire. And when it caught fire, I noticed in the reporting that many reporters found it curious that people fell to their knees and prayed. And there was a stunning headline, I think it was an AP headline, which said something like, "Tourist Mecca Notre Dame, also revered as a place of worship." And that just says where we've got to in the 21st century, that the primary purpose of the church has been lost. That within the very society that built Notre Dame, there are people who don't quite know what Notre Dame is for, or don't get it,

• 14:22Speaker 00

  and don't instinctively think that's a place of worship. Instead, it's a tourist centre. And in the aftermath of the fire, there was discussion about how to rebuild Notre Dame, and people came up with lots of grotesque ideas, modernist nonsense, much of which hinged upon the idea that Notre Dame should now belong to everyone, not just the religious, that it should be opened up to the entire public, so you can create a sectarian cathedral, sorry, you can create a secular cathedral. That's very interesting. That that shows where the culture has gone in much of Western Europe, that we've lost the sense of sacred. And much of what we deal with nowadays in our culture, which you can see in woke as well, is Christianity minus the eschatology. It's a hangover of Christian culture, but without God

• 15:05Speaker 00

  and without a clear understanding of how religions work, it sort of deforms into a new kind of liberal left madness.

• 15:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you say that liberalism is the primary villain here. Why's that?

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Well, liberalism effectively has the political expression of the Enlightenment. And it's a primary villain because liberalism has very good intentions. It wants us to be free. And over the course of a few hundred years, it builds strong institutions that allow us to be free. So it both has a good intent and it also has a rational way of going about it. The problem with liberalism is that in constantly pushing freedom and in placing so much weight upon reason as the way that we reach conclusions, it slowly begins to erode the basis for its own existence. Because if you have too much freedom, you undermine freedom.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  You know, the man who eats too much, who has the freedom to eat too much and gives way to that passion, ends up becoming so physically sick that he is unwell. And likewise, when you have a political culture which is so obsessed about individual freedom, so obsessed about liberty, that it becomes, it increasingly becomes impossible to think about the corporate anymore or to operate effectively as a society, you begin to actually undermine it. And what's interesting is that the liberalism has sort of gone off the tracks a bit. And it has now bled into identity politics groups, which are actually at war with the very institutions that liberalism helped to build. So the effect is that those institutions are either trashed

• 16:46Speaker 00

  or are captured by people who don't really value what the institution was created for, of which the starkest example is the university. Always controversial, I have to say conservatives have hated them for a very long time, but the university has now been so captured and corrupted by identity politics, that increasingly it isn't capable of doing the things that liberals establish universities for and wanted them to do. That is to test ideas. It's now becoming difficult to test ideas in them.

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's strange to think that human nature is so inherently flawed, that we do need some constraints, that oddly constraints can give us a sense of freedom. And throwing everything out of the window means that you need to wake up on a morning and choose what it is that you're going to do. How am I going to spend my day? Am I going to lie in bed and smoke weed and play Xbox and order Deliveroo? Or am I gonna fly to Rome? Or am I gonna...? Those are the two options that I have in my life. It's smoke weed, play Xbox, I fly to Rome. And yeah, I sense this as well, because I think you're an only child, as am I. Is that right?

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  That's correct, yes.

• 17:53Chris Williamson?

  And I think that maybe one of the reasons why you were quite attuned to some of these things is the extra sense of individualism and perhaps atomization that comes with having a very small family structure. That if you don't have these huge, big roots into the ground, because it's not just the sister and the brother, it's then the sister's partner and the brother's partner and their kids and their in-laws and so on and so forth. And yeah, I get that sense sort of from a personal level as well, looking back and realizing that you get to define... Whatever it is that you want to do, which is liberating, but also terrifying at the same time. And it means that you can make a lot of mistakes. If you don't have an older brother

• 18:38Chris Williamson?

  that has made a ton of mistakes before you and goes, hang on, Tim, maybe, maybe that thing, because, because I tried, I thought that thing was a good idea and I wasted three years of my life. Without that, you end up having to discover these mistakes for yourself. And a lot of what we need to do in life is you can achieve an awful lot of success by simply avoiding failure. But the vast majority of the things that you need to stop doing is just not fucking up. And if you manage to get that right, you've probably gone pretty far. But the freedom opens up those problems.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not giving away anything here because I mentioned this in the book. So, but I had a difficult relationship with my father. And morality slash common sense is very often transmitted and it's transmitted down the generations, particularly between fathers and sons. And when you have, when you just have no communication with your father, you don't, you have someone who's not telling you how to behave or what to expect. So then your family becomes even smaller. And I was fortunate enough that my family stayed together. But of course, other people have broken families where that transmission between father and son doesn't take place at all. And you can get to a point, there's an Italian thinker, Massimo Ricacalci, I think his name is, who argues that actually we've

• 19:54Speaker 00

  reached a point where because that transmission has already been broken, you've now got people who didn't even have the information to transmit it. So you have a generation which is completely divorced, divorced through several generations from that original learning that fathers were supposed to pass down. So I, so, so if you have a difficult relation with your father, it makes it all the harder. But also, yes, if you're an only child, if you have a small family as I do, you edge towards older age and you become aware that what was once liberating and freeing is actually a prison. Because I could, unless they invent robots that can look after us in old age, I am going to get to old age unmarried, without siblings, and there's going to be no one to look after me, right?

• 20:39Speaker 00

  So we need to be embedded. Now, I, for instance, became a Catholic for religious and spiritual reasons, but it serves a utilitarian purpose as well. I have something to do with my time. I have somewhere to go on a Sunday. If I am old and alone, I will be visited by the priest. When I come to die, I will be given the last rites. These, you should not, you should not sign up to a tradition purely in order that things will be done for you. That would be a very cynical way of doing it. But my point is that these traditions serve human needs. And over hundreds of years, they've worked out how to look after the lonely and how to provide a family for people who don't have one.

• 21:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're talking about liberalism being part of the villainy here, but conservatives aren't fantastic at retaining tradition either.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  No, they're not. No, and part of the problem is that the Conservative Party with a capital C exists in order to preserve whatever status quo it inherits, partly because it is the party of the establishment. So if the status quo is liberalism, and if the establishment are all liberals, then you're going to get a Conservative Party that actually isn't terribly conservative. And that's what we've had for about the last 20 years. The Conservative Party has really ached New Labour. I like Boris Johnson and I like where this government's going. I think this government might be a change of direction, but only because the public has changed the status quo with Brexit. This is the thing about Trump and Brexit. They came from the public, saying, whatever this system is, whatever this order is, we don't like it anymore.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  So clever conservatives are adapting to reflect what the public thinks. But in their heart of hearts, conservatives just don't like rocking the boat. And if the order is liberal, that's what they will defend.

• 22:17Chris Williamson?

  I noticed that you spent a fair bit of time researching genitalia and circumcision.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Yes, I did. It's funny how you can go down a rabbit hole, isn't it? I did, I did get drawn to it. I was drawn to it because it's the starkest example one can think of,

• 22:35Speaker 00

  of an identity being imprinted upon a child at birth, and the most controversial one. Now, I'm talking, of course, about male circumcision, because I think female circumcision is in a different moral order. Although some of the arguments against male circumcision can apply to female circumcision. But fundamentally, the idea that at birth the child is marked

• 22:57Speaker 00

  as belonging to a tribe, and that that mark communicates not just identity, but also moral order. Although it is physically done by Jews and Muslims to the boy, it is also, of course, spiritually done by Christians to girls and boys, because they are marked through baptism in a very similar way. And of course, baptism of water is meant to replace the literal circumcision of the flesh. It's described as the circumcision of the heart. So I chose it because I wasn't just being prurient. It is the starkest and most controversial example of identity being imprinted at birth. And I understand why people have difficulty with it.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  But I also, in researching it, came to understand why it's so important to people.

• 23:43Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Well, in some cases, it's a historical, cultural thing, that because there were attempts to wipe it out before, some people feel a responsibility to keep it going. Because it lends them identity and belonging. And also because in the Jewish faith, there's a covenant with God. It's more than just identity. It also marks, it connects you to Abraham, it connects you to the past, to the history of the Jewish people. And it conveys a moral order, that you are born to be a good Jew. You are born to maintain this covenant. And therefore, it is a stamp of belonging. And when you are part of a people who there have been sincere attempts to eradicate you,

• 24:31Speaker 00

  physically eradicate you, keeping that culture going is so much more important. And you often find that among groups that have been subject to attempt to genocide, that the culture speaks for them and they need to keep it going because it's proof that they have survived against the odds.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  Were there any other rituals or interesting identity-related branding techniques that you noticed during your research?

• 24:57Speaker 00

  Oh, I find the Chinese ritual called jiao jiao, which is practiced after a baby is born. I was actually told about by some friends who are of Bangladeshi descent. So it seems to have spread throughout East Asia. It's the idea that shortly after birth, you lay down objects in front of the child and the child is encouraged to crawl towards one of the objects. And whichever it picks up will tell you what their personality or what their chosen career will be. And what I love about this is I was told that the parents stack the game. So first of all, the parents get to decide which objects are laid down. Now, there are certain traditional objects you're supposed to put down, but people will put down things like stethoscope to show doctor. They'll put down calculator to show accountant.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  And if there's any risk of the child crawling towards the wrong thing, like a makeup box or something like that, they will entice it towards the profession they want it to do. So although in some ways that's utterly cynical, I think that speaks to how much of our identity is pre-chosen. There are things that can overcome it, genetics and circumstances and personality. But so much of the modern world is wrapped up in this silly idea that we invent ourselves. We really don't. I mean, just you and I, our language, our gender, the color of our skin, these things over which we have absolutely no say, pre-determine a lot of what our lives will be like. And in much of these rituals, they're just being honest about that.

• 26:27Chris Williamson?

  I had Robert Ploman, behavioural geneticist on the show a couple of months ago. And he has done the largest twin studies in history. So 10,000 ish pairs of twins, every twin born between about 1992 and 1995 in the UK has been contacted by him. And he's done, whether it's adoptive parents, whether it's twins, and he's teased apart nature and nurture as tightly as you can. And he ended up doing a study to work out what difference the choice of school makes to your child's outcomes in terms of education and also in terms of earning once they get out. And when you end up controlling for the area that people live in, so the friend groups

• 27:12Chris Williamson?

  that the children have outside of school, it's between 1 and 2%. So all of the move, we're going to change postcodes, we're going to pick up a move because this state school's got better UCAS performance or whatever, all of that stuff, horseshit. 1% is the difference. And as he says, genes do not predetermine, but they do predispose. That if you have a child that's going to be a musician, you can force them into being a doctor and you'll find them like twanging the stethoscope. And these, these, um, the ways that we move through life. So a perfect example for me, I was a club promoter for a very long time and I still am, but I loved being a businessman. I didn't love being a party boy, but it took me forever to realise that.

• 27:56Chris Williamson?

  If I look back at what I did when I was a kid, I talked too much and I listened to lots of audiobooks. But roll that forward by 20, 30 years, what's that? It's a podcast. So that's, you know, we've sort of find our way to the things that we're compelled to do. And the world and environment and parents and tradition can sometimes wrangle us away from that, but we end up creating our own. And I think that there's a certain level of anxiety that comes with having to be self-created as well, that if your failures are yours to bear and your successes are yours to bear, then your outcomes in life are completely yours. And that it makes sense why people, um, why there's a two-sided dagger to meritocracy.

• 28:37Chris Williamson?

  But it's not very nice to feel like if you are dealt a bad hand in life, or if you end up with some poor luck, which ends up occurring, that that was somehow your fault or it's your job to get over it. I'm not saying the solution to that is a victimhood mentality and quite the opposite, but it, I can see why that would be uncomfortable to hear.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Well, I think the modern anxiety about genetics nicely touches upon some of those contradictions within liberalism. Because on the one hand, if we are going to reach conclusions based purely upon scientific method, then there is a great deal of evidence that favors genetics. So you'd think there would be a consensus around genetics and genetic studies. On the other hand, if you believe as we believe, and as I, as a child of the Enlightenment and also as a Christian, like to believe that people are the authors of their own stories, and also that we shouldn't prejudge people on the basis of their parents, so there's

• 29:42Speaker 00

  a combination of liberalism and Christianity there, then genetics becomes really ethically difficult to deal with. Because the more information we have about someone in advance, that means we could make judgments about them, or we could see their lives as somehow limited. So you have a tension in liberalism between a weight of scientific evidence and the actual ethical demands of liberalism, that we are the authors of our own story. So I think that's one reason why we have a great deal of tension about it, and it's understandable. And then you get on top of that the modern egalitarian impulse that says that regardless of genetics, or regardless of even your own efforts, we ought to have a more equal outcome,

• 30:24Speaker 00

  or if we don't have an equal outcome, then that's possibly because of some bias, or prejudice, or misfortune that we need to correct. So you begin to see how liberalism keeps posing interesting questions, but then sort of denying itself an answer. Because each time you come towards a possible answer, liberalism comes up with a new objection, and a new question, and a new social problem we have to confront. None of this is necessarily bad things, this is all part of being human, and I welcome the moral inquiry, but you can see why it is that we have confusions over how important genetics is, because it goes to the heart of the contradictions of liberalism.

• 31:02Chris Williamson?

  What use is nostalgia?

• 31:06Speaker 00

  It can be a bad thing, obviously. Although I think when we are nostalgic, we edit rather more than people give credit for. So we are very rarely nostalgic about bad things. So if you take the example of the war, there's a great effort now to say we shouldn't be nostalgic about the war. And we should certainly be sceptical and we should present facts as they actually were. But very few people are nostalgic about the bombing and the pain and the sacrifice. People are nostalgic about the sense of coming together. So in other words, nostalgia can be a way of writing a moral story out of the past. So I'm upfront about nostalgia not being necessarily exact history.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Rather, it's an attempt to engage with the past that pulls useful lessons out of it. And for that reason, I think nostalgia can actually serve a moral purpose.

• 31:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's an interesting one, thinking about the last, whatever, year, eighteen months or so, with statues being taken down and all around Florence and Rome, as I've spent the last week, there's some pretty uncomfortable lessons and stories there. But they hold on to them. And I'm not sure that the same can be said for the UK or the US, holding on to its history. What's your thoughts on the danger of deleting or unpersoning figures from history and some of the statue-related debacles we've seen recently?

• 32:23Speaker 00

  I am not unsympathetic, partly because some of those statues, you'll often find are quite modern. So in the case of the United States, a great number of Civil War statues are not from the Civil War period or immediately afterwards, they're actually from the 1950s and 60s. And they were established in order to support segregation, as it was at the time. So there are examples of statues which actually we shouldn't be nostalgic or rose-tinted about. They actually were put up in order to make a racial or political statement. Plus, some of those figures that were up, like Colston in Bristol, were actually pretty unpleasant. They were regarded as unpleasant at the time, they were controversial at the time. And the idea that the public space is unchanging and unchangeable, I find pretty strange.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  There's no reason why you shouldn't change it. But I object for several reasons. One is a democratic one. I don't like the idea of small groups of people saying we need to change the public sphere without asking others. And when they do that, they very often misunderstand what it is people like about public places. One of which is, as we mentioned at the beginning, the novelty of consistency. A lot of people didn't know what those statues were of. A lot of people hadn't heard of Edward Colston. They just liked the statue. And the meaning of that statue can change over time. So a classic example is the statue of Baden Powell was targeted. Well, people aren't nostalgic for Baden Powell because they support his views about empire or race, or his unusual approach towards the raising of young men.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  They're nostalgic because they were in the Scouts themselves. And that's what Baden Powell represents to them. So I don't like this undemocratic thing of rewriting people's history. But I also think there's a risk that you end up creating a very simplistic binary approach to history where you say there was a bad thing and it got fixed. And there's no in-between. But the reality is that history is a process of people arguing and debating, getting things wrong, changing their minds, et cetera, et cetera. And sometimes it can be useful to have the entire historical record on show.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  What are you going to do with the founding fathers of the United States? Some of whom owned slaves, some of whom supported slavery, some who were against it but didn't want to get rid of it, some just state of, well, some who didn't have a great strong record of their views on the subject. What are you going to do with people who didn't oppose something that should have been opposed because it's so morally awful? So you end up creating a history that jumps from oppression to Martin Luther King. And the problem with that is there's so much in-between that's interesting, that tells you the story of how we eventually got there through trial and error. So I think you can end up creating quite an artificial history if you just take down all the bad stuff.

• 35:05Chris Williamson?

  Is there a potential that if you rely on tradition or if you hold tradition up too highly as a virtue that we need to keep a grasp of? That you're going to end up not having to call people that did things, mean things, bad things in the past to account. That I'm not a fan of judging the actions of people from yesterday by the standards of today. I think it's, it's kind of, I don't know, it just logically, I can't square that circle in my mind. But I can also see the other side of the fence that says we also need to bring those people to account.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. What I would say is that most, well, many, many traditions have changed and have had a moral reckoning and engage morally with their past. A classic example is the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has not, does not change doctrine or dogma, but it has changed its views on many subjects and the way that does things. It has, its views on slavery have clearly developed and have changed. And it has held itself to account over that. It's doing it now slowly over child abuse. It will act like it's not. It is, very much is. And it will change culturally as a consequence. So many

• 36:19Speaker 00

  traditions do exactly that already. But of course, if you take a blind approach towards tradition, if you choose to simply to revere something without interrogating it, there is a risk that you will end up perpetuating the oppressions of the past. Of course, there's a risk of that. But I, I think most sophisticated traditions don't do that and are very self-conscious of their limits. At least the ones that have survived generally are.

• 36:46Chris Williamson?

  What did you discover about the traditional roles of men and women and the family? Because that seems to be one of the real flashpoints at the moment.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, it is. It varies across the world. And that's, that's an important thing to bear in mind. One mustn't assume that your tradition is the only way that things are done. And they're not. I mean, I was fascinated to discover the existence of, as very crudely put, a third sex in India called the hijra, who

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Are analogous to transgenderism but not quite the same. Because it's a category which can include gay men and feminine men as well as as trans people and eunuchs. But that that's an example of how a culture can have a completely different attitude towards gender and sexuality to the one that we have in the West. Plus, you also find that Western attitudes towards gender and sexuality have changed significantly as well. The eighteenth century has a much different attitude towards sexuality than the nineteenth does. And also, there have been shifting attitudes towards the role of of women and their authority within the household. I was fascinated to discover that in the wake of industrialization, as men move to the city and they start to have children out of wedlock,

• 37:57Speaker 00

  the Catholic Church begins to shift its views away from the idea of men as the moral head of the household to women as the moral head of the household. And the Church begins to promote things like marriage counselling. And that's when you get the explosion of the Veneration of the Virgin Mary and you get new ideals of of matriarchal leadership. So the really interesting thing is how it has altered over time. That said, until fairly recently, in the West at least, there have there have still been clear feminine and male archetypes. And those seem to be under some degree of assault. And I I know I understand why, and those archetypes can be deeply oppressive.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  If you obsess about men being manly men, well, how do you categorize people who are not manly men? And gender can end up becoming a performance which is oppressive and restricting, and no one wants that, it can be deeply mentally unhealthy. Nonetheless, the idea of ideals or archetypes, I think, is useful. And and the the attempt to throw them out is very dangerous and unhelpful. So, for instance, you you don't have to think that men are better than women to say that men can have moral virtues that are masculine, such as courage, such as strength, such as chivalry. And if you take away those virtues from men, knowing men as I do, we'll just become slobs.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  And not just slobs, we'll probably become women-hating slobs as well, because men are like that. So I think that the nature of masculine and feminine has altered over time. But what I think is novel now is the attempt that you can get rid of these things. And that actually, being a man might actually be some sort of original sin.

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, without a firm place to stand, I see a lot of the masculine subcultures online, whether that be MGTOW, or Red Pill, or Black Pill, or incels, or whatever. It's a lot of men trying to find a place in the world, the ones for whom the traditional positions in society or in a family, that those don't exist. Okay, well, what is there for me now? And this is, I guess, one of the common excuses or reasons that's given for why we have this. We have this collapse of religion. There are no more grand narratives to make us feel like we are connected to those around us. We don't have ritual. We don't have anything sacred. We're losing a sense of awe, its connection to the wider world, and dread

• 40:32Chris Williamson?

  about the fear of so on and so forth, all of this stuff. But you see this replicated on a cultural level as well, outside of religion. You see that there are things that people need to bind them together. So it's, it sounds like a lot of what we're going over here is just explained by Chesterton's fence. Is there, is there, where's the nuance beyond just wide-eyed longing for the past and wanting tradition back?

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Where's the nuance? Well, first of all, as I've said, we now live in a consumer society. So the joy is that you can choose your tradition. And I think you're going to get shopping. And I'm seeing that a lot among my friends. I've got friends who've converted to the Orthodox Church, who've become cops. I've had friends who have decided to leave London and go to the countryside, and to raise poultry and things like that, to live much closer towards, towards nature. So I think people are finding their own way, and their own practical way of making tradition work for their lives, for themselves. I see it in the flowering of literature of people like Jordan Peterson. One of the striking things about Peterson is that he just tells us things that 20 or 30 years ago were taken

• 41:44Speaker 00

  for granted, and they are received by people as though they are novel. They're really not, but they're, they're very helpful to people. I think also, I mean, just to go back to what you said there about men and women. I think people need self-respect, and men in particular need self-respect. And I think there are certain rights that are linked to sex and to gender identity. And we have a very, rightly, we have a very strong idea of women's rights and what women are owed. And they are owed those things: respect, space, and the right to advance and all that. But we've eroded what men are owed. And I think some of what people are looking for is self-respect.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  There is a sense that men have the right to be independent, to stand on their own two feet, to have dignity, to have a job with purpose. And the loss of that identity is actually the loss of a centuries-old right. So I think people are searching for things that used to, in our culture, be taken for granted, which they now have to rebuild on their own terms and their own lives, partly because the institutions are not going to give it to them.

• 42:50Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that's been lost for men?

• 42:54Speaker 00

  Why do I think it's been lost for men? Partly because of economic and social change, because of changing patterns of work, which doesn't favour men, the loss of blue-collar jobs, things like that. But also because the culture since the 1960s has increasingly become feminised. And that's, you say that, it's not a criticism of women to say that. It's just that there is a cultural sense that masculinity is bad and femininity is good. And you see this constantly sold to you by advertising, consumerism, and television. It's just a constant message being drummed home to you. And whenever you do get a heroic man, he is usually conflicted and erotic and troubled.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  I hate to bring this back to Bond, but if you take the evolution of Bond, I would accept that he was a well-dressed Neanderthal in the 1960s. I don't want men to be like Bond, because if nothing else, he's going to die of alcohol poisoning and lung cancer. But equally, what he has become now, it's so frustrating that he cannot be a hero without being a psychological mess who is redeemed through women and is redeemed through family. I don't want to give anything away about the new film, I haven't seen it, I've just read synopses, I refuse to see it. But it just frustrates me that men cannot be allowed to succeed on men's terms.

• 44:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's an interesting parallel with children's TV that I think gets brought up a lot as an example, that if you ever have a competition between the boys and the girls, the girls will always be a little bit more cunning and perhaps a bit more meek, and the boys will try and push the rules and be boisterous. And inevitably, the girls, because of their quick wit, they will always end up winning. And this kind of is a very consistent archetype that you see in children's TV shows.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'd never thought of that. I'd never thought of the fact that you can't just have the classic hero, the classic masculine male hero anymore, that is able to save the day because of hard work and temperance and virtue and courage and fortitude and resilience and grit and blah, blah, blah. You can't have that. It has to be a part of some twisted...

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  That needs to be the other side of the coin to some deficiency that he has. And the deficiency often is fixed by a woman.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  It's the difference between the Adam West Batman and the contemporary Batman. We don't just have to...

• 45:22Chris Williamson?

  Fucking Adam West Batman.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Right, right, okay, but that's that, okay, the overweight guy staggering his way through fistfights with pow and blam. I mean, it's an unrealistic, silly... And actually, he was quite cap, and it was kitsch. So actually, it's far more aware of the limitations of gender identity than we might give it credit. But my point is this difference between a two-dimensional morality, in which courage wins the day, versus a contemporary morality in films, whereby they're reluctant to allow that to succeed on its own terms. It usually does, Batman still generally wins. But there's usually some neuroses, there's some moral... There's some moral paradox. There'll be a woman who saves him, no doubt.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  And also, the other intriguing thing is that increasingly, the villains are the heroes. So you have Suicide Squad, you have a movie all about Joker. And they are still presenting their flaws and they're still presented as psychopaths. But I find a culture which increasingly venerates bad guys, whereas in the past, they were the bad guys. I find that really strange and it speaks to something about the loss of clear moral compass now. That we're concerned about the victimhood of the Joker.

• 46:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  He's the Joker, he's the bad guy.

• 46:35Chris Williamson?

  He's supposed to be the bad guy. That is, I mean, what role, what role does culture have here? Because obviously, culture is, how would you say, it's emergent, right? It, yes, it can be manipulated by people that are in powerful situations, but you look at TikTok. Look at the ways that brands that used to hold the power now replicate what the creators that have just been on the scene for six months do. So what is culture? Do you see it as a filtering mechanism? Do you see it as some sort of reflection? Is it a magnifier? Is it a catalyst for what's going on? What role does culture play in either perpetuating or eroding tradition?

• 47:10Speaker 00

  It's all of those things. A part of me cynically thinks it's primarily about making money, which it is. I remember when I wrote a book about Hollywood some time ago. I spoke to someone who had tried to sell an anti-war script to Hollywood during the Iraq War. And he had been rebuffed. And he came back to them and said, I assume I'm being rebuffed because I'm a man of principle. I'm anti-war and you Hollywood studios, you're in bed with the Pentagon and you love war. And they said, oh, no, no, it's just that we've got dozens of anti-war movies in the making. We're just bored of them. If you want to write us a pro-war movie, we might be able to make it. So it's always been my view of Hollywood and entertainment. I think it is just terribly cynical.

• 47:53Speaker 00

  It's also stuck in the problem of novelty. We come back to the need constantly to do something new. And that very often, when you have that need, you end up replicating yourself. So when you come to the end of Marvel, when you've made not just every Superman or Spider-Man movie, but you've made them several times with a new cast, you reach a point where you have to say, look, what the hell do we do that's new? So you end up doing things like elevating the villains over the heroes or something like that. Or I don't know, you might make Spider-Man. You might change your sexuality or something like that. The irony being that because everyone else has reached this point of cultural exhaustion, they're all doing the same thing as well. So we have novelty that is reproduced and replicated.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  So I think it's partly just the desire to make money.

• 48:40Chris Williamson?

  Once tradition's been destroyed, can it ever be restored?

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, because it's been done many times before. As we mentioned with Notre Dame, a building which has been collapsing can be rebuilt. And not just rebuilt to look like the past, but also rebuilt using contemporary techniques. So you can have a beautiful synthesis of the old and the new. And we've seen traditions come and go, and they have miraculously revived. Much of the conversation that we're having now about culture was being had in the late 19th century. And that was turned around. Yeah, yeah, much of the concern about gender, about identity, about technology in particular, and about how life was becoming too fast, there was too much information. That complaint was being made about the steam train and about the newspaper.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  And then you saw a sort of revival of spirit in the, well, I suppose, did you really? You saw fascism and communism, but you saw in opposition to those things, you saw a revival of moral purpose. So I do absolutely think traditions can be revived because it has been done.

• 49:44Chris Williamson?

  I can see how that would be done for an archaeological disaster, sorry, an architectural disaster. But I don't know, my concern is that there's something, whether it be the frictionless access to information and communication across the entire world, whether it be racing to the bottom of the brainstem, whether it be living standards going to the point where people on the whole don't have to concern themselves with getting a sense of purpose from their work and the slow disintegration of the nuclear family and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm concerned that you chop away at so many moorings that potentially you can do so much damage that it's a cul-de-sac you can never drive back out of again.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Yes, my answer to that is partly it would be, well, it would be un-Christian to despair, so I refuse to do that. It's probably because really that's a sinful attitude because you've got to have faith and hope in the future and in the Holy Spirit and God's wisdom. So I reject that on a sort of almost theological basis. But I also think You've got to have faith in the strength of traditions themselves, that they have been tested by so many things in the past, plagues and wars and fascism and communism. And they have endured because they've got good ideas that speak to human need. And those needs don't go away. I mean, even if you have a leisure society, there still is a need to be productive. There still is a need to fill your time with something.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  And that can be filled with craftsmanship, with artisanship. And the other point I'd make is that it becomes different. I agree with you, something has changed in our society because so many institutions have collapsed. Information has been democratized, there is so much of it. And the way our brains actually work has altered in the last 20 years. But that simply means that we then have to actively choose to step outside of this new order and go and do something else. And just in the course of writing this book, I had to read so many things I'd never read before, and it was like being back at university. And for a year, there almost was no TV, no internet, there was just good old fashioned books. And not only was it an intellectual feast and a joy, but I also physically felt better.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  You actually find that old forms of living, they actually have a physiological effect. And I'm convinced that once people, I think most people, almost like getting bored of McDonald's, will get bored of this lifestyle, will look back and they'll find waiting for them this treasure trove of traditions and customs and rituals to enjoy, which have been designed to meet these desires that we have.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that's certainly something you're seeing at the moment. Do you predict a, how would you say, a tradition counterculture coming at some point soon then?

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's happening. I think it's already happening. It's happening within religious circles, it's happening within the Catholic Church with the revival of interest in things like the traditional right. So I can only speak to those areas of life which I know about myself. But I see it taking place there. And I see it in the conversations that people are having about culture. It's so fascinating that culture seems to have trumped economics. At a point at which we really ought to be concerned about whether or not we can keep the lights on, people are still tearing their hair out over things like statues. And that's both a depressing thing, a frustrating thing, but in some ways a good thing. Because I think people have realized that it's not all about material questions, that there are bigger cultural and spiritual things that really matter, and possibly even are

• 53:13Speaker 00

  more important than money. And the return of those fundamental questions, I think, shows that the human species is in the mood to revive some things.

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  I hope that people that resonate with that sort of a message realise that they're not on their own. The number of guys and girls that I've got that I'm friends with, that work for me, that I've podcasted with and I keep in touch with, so many of them are yearning for this same sort of thing. Perfect example, I have a buddy out in Austin who's just bought a ranch, which is four units down from Ryan Holiday, so it's probably about 100 miles away from it, but it's only however many units down. And I was saying, hey man, I can't wait to come out and visit you. How are you spending your weekends? What can we do? Should we go wakeboarding or should we go and have dinner? And he said, well, actually, man, like, a lot of the time on a weekend, we spend building fences. We put fences up, we hoe the ground, we do this sort of stuff. And my first reaction was, dude, like, tell me and I'm in.

• 54:10Chris Williamson?

  Tell me and I'm in. And you think that's the most indigent labourer, the lowest of the low, sort of job, and I'm choosing to do that in my leisure time? I'm choosing to go out of my way. Why? What is it that's compelling me, that's drawing me toward that sort of a lifestyle?

• 54:27Speaker 00

  You need, you need structure and purpose. Ultimately, there is, and I speak entirely for myself here, there is no point to life unless there is a reason to die. There is no point to your life unless you have something to die for. That's how I feel. I feel that strongly. And for most people, it's their kids. Most people, it's their family. Well, I don't have that, but I have a set of other principles and philosophies and beliefs for which I am prepared to die. And the strange thing is, that makes life more worth living, and it makes, it makes life so much more colourful and enjoyable, knowing that there is this thing beyond myself that I am connected to, which is my faith, for which I am prepared to go to the wall.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  And those parts of my life in which I didn't have that were awful. They just felt pointless. You're just, you're just getting by day by day. And you accrue tasks and responsibilities. You accrue a sense of responsibility that flows from that philosophy, that means that small things that if you didn't have that philosophy would be pointless, actually are the most important thing. Alright, so I've reached the point, when I was young, I wanted to be rich and powerful like most people want to be. I now, when I die, hope people say, he was a nice person. That's the most important thing to me, not because I've given up, but because I've actually realised that's the most important thing and that that flows from my Christian

• 55:54Speaker 00

  beliefs. I would much rather be remembered for the one time I gave someone a lift than for having been Prime Minister of Great Britain or some crap like that, which ultimately doesn't matter. So that's what comes from having purpose, is a well-ordered life in which the small stuff actually gains new meaning.

• 56:13Chris Williamson?

  Where should people find their meaning? Let's say that somebody doesn't have your faith. Where should they find it?

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Just look for it. And I know you may well not, it may well end up not being found in religion. I just, I just implore people, that's what I, one thing I hope the book does, is I implore people to explore, to explore not just their own traditions and past, but other peoples as well. And they might find, they might find redemption in very surprising places. But also, one finds meaning in other people too. Not everyone does. I'm a natural loner. But still, as I said, to be remembered fondly by people, to be appreciated by people is very important. So I think it's a combination of study and learning and travel, but also trying to do good for people so that they appreciate you being around.

• 57:01Chris Williamson?

  That's a firmer place to stand. When you think about a lot of the existential ills that people have, it's around the fact that everything feels a bit hollow

• 57:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:13Chris Williamson?

  and a bit shallow and kind of fragile and a bit of a waste of time. And everyone kind of in the back of their mind has this fear that what they're doing might just be a waste of time.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:28Chris Williamson?

  And I think that the reason that the family is, that's why it's so pernicious when you think about potentially destroying the family as a source of meaning, or saying that you don't need to find, find purpose and meaning within the connections that you have around you in your familial setting. You know, you are, what's left for people to stand upon? Once you do take that away, if you've got an increasingly secular society, you have one that bows at the altar of science rather than religion. There's not a whole lot left. And that's why I think just the general pointlessness of it all. I'm just the droid 379,405, bleeping away in the background, doing things until I slowly cart myself off to the grave.

• 58:10Chris Williamson?

  Like, that's not, that's not, that's not the story that we were given, right? That's not the life that we were fucking promised. And especially the last, the last week I've spent, you know, walking through the streets of Florence, or, um, vespering through the, the hills of Tuscany, which is obviously very traditional, vespering and drinking red wine, because that's precisely what Michelangelo was doing. And just doing that and seeing, feeling much more connected, seeing a very different pace of life, seeing a much more religious pace of life, seeing people that were really, really connected to their work and found great meaning in their work. You know, tour guides are a perfect example of this. For the two and a half hours that you have that tour guide, all that that person's concerned with is educating you on something that they know inside out.

• 58:51Chris Williamson?

  Some guy that went to university for four years to study the city of Florence and its history. And if you decide to ask him about Dante, he's got two hours that he can do on Dante. And if you ask him about Machiavelli, he's got two hours that he can do on Machiavelli. And you just think like, this is somebody who is connected to a higher purpose. They believe that they are doing something that adds value. Because I will remember the different guys, whether it was Lorenzo, or Christian, or Oscar, the different people that took me around different areas of their country and had pride in it and had genuine connection. When they spoke about it, they spoke about we, we had this, we had this challenge. And we came together, this story about the Mud Angels, where there was this huge flood in 1966 in Florence.

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  And people from all over the world came, we were so thankful for all of these people that were coming towards it. And you think, yes, this is connection. And in those people, you see a sense of belonging and purpose and meaning. And yeah, it's, it doesn't surprise me that that's the case. And the other thing that I was thinking, as I was reading your book, and as I was travelling around, yomping around Italy, it seems paradoxical that some people want to totally tear down and reconstruct modern society. And then other people kind of just want nothing to change. But with both of them, the implication is that neither of them are very happy with how things are going right now. That one's fearful of the, the direction that we're going into, and that one kind of is trying to restrict the, the changes.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  But neither group's actually that happy with what's going on.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  No, no, and one criticism I have of that, that kind of conservatism you just described is very often they are patriots who don't like their country, which, which I think is quite unhealthy. You have to accept that your country has changed and will change and changed in the past. And it might actually be part of what makes the country good is its capacity to change. So I'm, I'm very wary of those sorts of people. But what, what you described there, that connection to the community's identity. And this is really what tradition is, it's the passing on. It literally means the passing on of something. That's all it really means, which means you have a relationship as an individual to what's come before

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  and also what's in the future, which is a brilliant way of, of rooting yourself. It's not just about you in this moment, not just about you on Twitter or you on YouTube or you having sex, doing drugs and getting the joy out of the moment. You're actually, you're actually engaged with what's come thousands of years before and you're concerned that you will be able to contribute something that will be passed on. And people do that genetically through family. That's what family is about. Families have great mythologies about their past. They have great nostalgia about their past and they pass those stories on. An example of tradition is the football game, taking your son to a football game. You do it because your father did it to you and you do it in the hope that your son will someday, someday take his son.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  So in that moment, you're not just in the moment of the joy of the game, but you're also, you're also situated in history, a past and a future you don't yet know. And you do, you do get that sense in Italian society, which I think is far more self-confident, be happy with its past, although you're also there in the city of Savanarola and the bonfire of the vanities, where there was an attempt during the Renaissance to eradicate classical learning of the past. So even, even those highly traditional societies still go through these revolutionary moments.

• 1:02:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's revolutionaries all smattered throughout history. It's some... It's a strange one. It really is. I feel like this is a conversation, talking about tradition is something that continues to come up. It's kind of like an undertone that seeps through. It's a common thread that I noticed through a lot of different conversations, no matter what it's about. Anytime that it's about culture, always brings up the fact that there is a loss of connection to the past, that there is the collapse of religion and grand narratives and community. And I wonder whether the introduction of technology and the increase in our awareness or the visibility of other people's specialness

• 1:03:01Chris Williamson?

  and their ability to communicate information has maybe made us feel like what we have to say is less important, that we realize that there's so much noise, that the signal we thought that we had, you know, our voice moving forward, just wanting to try and create a body of work that we're genuinely proud of, let's say, or wanting to raise a son or a daughter or have a family in a particular, or be a member of a community. Because the community perhaps now is so large and has access to so many more people that you see as being so much more competent than you are with so much more expertise, that what's the fucking point? Like, why, what have I got to add? What have I got to say that's going to contribute to this? So if that's the case, why don't I just try and win the game by the lowest common denominator, the lowest hanging fruit that I can? I'm going to use audience capture. I'm going to limbically hijack the people that are

• 1:03:46Chris Williamson?

  around me. I'm going to be more manipulative. I'm going to just try and chase down to get much more shallow senses of success. Because what can I actually contribute that's of any genuine value in a world with 7 billion people, all of whom can talk to each other?

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  Well, a completely different circumstance technologically and culturally, it would be so-called Dark Ages Europe, in which there are monks producing illuminated manuscripts that almost no one in the rest of the population would be able to read, and which may only be seen by a few pairs of eyes. But why do they do it? They do it because they are they are curating, celebrating and transmitting a culture of value and of virtue, which they believe in, partly because it has a moral purpose to it. So I, for instance, I'm not saying it's the same, but I've written a book. There's a huge amount of effort that goes into that.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  I'm normally, prior to that, I'd be very much a social media person on Twitter. Well, you can, in the course of five minutes, become famous on Twitter. And you can also, five minutes later, be destroyed by Twitter and never heard from again, except, you know, there'll be an ITV programme a few years' time about whatever happened to. So you can rise and fall so quickly. But a book is a completely different process, involving loads of people, a long time editing, showing it to friends, contacting experts. So I think it's partly about the nature of the cultural production. If you're on Twitter or Instagram and that's where you're trying to get noticed, it's actually easier, but it won't have a long-term effect and you won't be read by generations to come.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  Whereas I always think one of the reasons why I still do books and why I prefer, actually, if I'm honest, writing for print newspapers than I do for online. Because I have this fantasy that the product will still be available in 100 or 200 years' time. That it'll be sitting in a library or an archive somewhere. And that, you know, some invading species or some future telekinetic person will read it and find it as fascinating as I do, an illuminated manuscript from the 12th century.

• 1:05:57Chris Williamson?

  The Lindy effect's a hell of a drug, all the way down. Tim Stanley, ladies and gentlemen. People want to keep up to date with what you're doing, where should they go?

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  Oh, they can go on to TimothyStanley.co.uk or just buy the book. Buy the book, it's very good.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Whatever happened to tradition? History, belonging in the future of the West will be linked in the show notes below. Tim, thank you so much.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  A pleasure.