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Hello, classmate, and welcome to Thinking Class.
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I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Alan McFarlane.
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Alan is an anthropologist, an historian, and a professor emeritus of King's College, Cambridge.
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He is the author or editor of twenty books and numerous articles on the anthropology and history of England, Nepal, Japan and China.
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Alan has focused on comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world, and he is also a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.
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In this episode, Alan and I think out loud about why we don't really understand what modernity is when we talk about it, but why we must understand it if we are to understand capitalism and individualism in England and how these spread to the rest of the world.
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We also talk about the unique trajectory of English capitalism, the influence of the Celtic nations on England, and the legacy of the British Empire in shaping national identity.
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We talk about the misunderstanding and reframing of historical narratives, particularly in relation to Marxist interpretations of history, the complexities of British identity, the challenges of cultural integration in an era of mass immigration, the historical significance of the English Reformation, what Allen thinks is the elusive nature of national character, and the coexistence of multiple identities within a single person, whether Alan subscribes to the notion of a clash of civilizations, the importance of cultural rules, and the historical context of Protestantism in shaping English society, and much, much more.
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There's not much I can say about this episode other than that it was another great pleasure of mine to be able to speak with Alan before I started thinking class and I had never had the opportunity to speak to such learned people, a Professor Emeritus of Cambridge no less, and I've now spoken to Alan twice.
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You can find an episode in the archives.
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I've also spoken to another Professor Emeritus of Cambridge in Robert Toomes, whilst I've interviewed Oxford heavyweights like Nigel Bigger and soon to be James Orr, and indeed the historian David Starkey, who has held big positions in big universities.
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So I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did.
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Please check out the others, they're all deeply nourishing.
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And make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice and Substack, where now paid subscribers get the opportunity to ask questions in a special QA section to my guests that only paid subscribers get access to.
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Do sign up, let's grow a thinking class together, enjoy the show, classmates.
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You uh whetted my appetite uh both in our conversation but also since we last spoke, which was about your work on the origins of English individualism.
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I've been devouring much more of your anthropological work on the culture of capitalism and also the invention of the modern world.
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And we're gonna have much to talk about here, so this will be a two-part episode for anyone who wants to hear more about those two topics.
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Let's let's begin on the modern world.
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So modern is used, I would say, in the present day by progressives to delimit the good and almost exclude the past as something that is inherently regressive and modern is seen as in positive light, and and modernity used by those of a more conservative bent, referred to it as a period where life became denuded of meaning.
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But you have argued that the definition of modern is frequently misunderstood and misused.
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So what do you mean when you talk of modernity and the modern world?
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Thank you, and thank you for having me again.
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Um when I lectured or talked to my students and I said, What do you mean by modern?
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And they were well educated and intelligent young people, they would uh look at their, probably not at that time, but their mobile phones, but um, they would look around them and they'd say, Oh well, um modern communications, so telephone to start with, but now up to the internet and things like that.
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Or modern medicine, what's happened since the Second World War with antibiotics and so on, or modern transport, cars and planes and things like that, in other words, technologies, and to a certain extent the standard of living, so people becoming wealthier.
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So they were thinking that what you see on the surface is modernity.
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Now I was taught long ago by Max Weber that you shouldn't look at the surface.
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In one of his brilliant characterizations, he said if you look at Florence in the fifteenth century, it's a very affluent, up-to-date, innovative city, but it's not modern because it doesn't have the modern ethic of capitalism.
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It was still traditional in its um psychology and philosophy.
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If you look at eighteenth century New England, there you will find people who are thinking in a modern way, even though they are living in rural parts of New England.
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So going behind the surface, what I mean by modernity, which I worked out over a long period, which is based on Weber a lot and one or two others, is that if you look at how human beings are driven, the four basic drives of humans, one is towards wealth, a good standard of living, or just surviving, and that's economics.
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The second is towards power, how we influence other people and are influenced by them in our power relations, and that we call politics.
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The third is our social relations with others, our family and others, and that we call society.
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And the fourth is our beliefs and thoughts and ideas, and that we call religion or philosophy.
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Now these four elements historically were all bundled together in the simplest sort of societies which dominated the world for ninety-five-98% of human history, hunters and gatherers and tribal people.
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They became separated into two pairs during the uh growth of civilizations, into a pair which was politics and uh religion.
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Bundled together, they weren't separated.
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And then another pair, which was economics and society, so economics was based on the family, and it was a domestic mode of production.
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That lasted in most civilizations, including China, India, most of Europe, until the 19th century.
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It was only then that you got the final separations of politics and religion, and um society and economics.
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But um Weber pointed out that the capitalist revolution in England occurred when you got the separation of the society and economics.
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So you have a free market economy and people can go out on it and earn their own wages and so on.
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So and that was agreed on by Karl Marx as well.
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So modernity in that sense, or the modern world, modernity is rather difficult because there's a lot of overlaid about modernism and modernity, which is a different sort of thing in literary culture, literary studies.
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So the modern world, the separations, those four separations, are mostly have occurred in the last two hundred years, and they have nothing to do with the technology.
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So by my definition, say Stalin's Russia was technologically quite sophisticated, but it wasn't modern because these four things are bundled together in communism.
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Whereas, as I say, um some quite remote parts of England or Scotland were ultra modern because people were keeping these things apart.
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And my argument, as you know, and we may come on to that, is that England is the outlier because it separated all these things very early.
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On the separation of those elements of society happening much earlier in England, what was it that led to the English with a culture that enabled the birth of what we now call capitalism many centuries before anyone, any any any other country?
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Well um if you looked at Europe in the half millennium between the fall of Rome and about the thirteenth century, much of it was quite modern in my sense of the word.
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That is to say, this is Carolingian Europe, Western Europe.
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And you had a very um dynamic society in which monasteries, universities were beginning to grow, cities, a great deal of trading, and there was a great deal of freedom and independence between the national power of the kings was weak, and so you had a lot of independence at the urban level, at the religious level, and these worlds were separated.
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So in many ways you had quite a modern world by 1200 across Europe.
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So the origins go back to the chaos that occurred after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the shooting up of all sorts of independent, fairly independent institutions, the absence of a very strict social hierarchy of caste or anything like that.
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So that's how the world that is described by the greatest of historians of that period, Mark Bloch, in his feudal society is described in that way the disintegration of the state as he describes feudalism and the disintegration of the church and everything else.
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What happened was that after about 1200, England remained modern.
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In other words, being an island, it was able to filter out pressures that were sweeping across Western Europe in continental countries, which were largely caused by a natural tendency which you find in human societies, which is the gravitation of power towards the centre.
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And this was exacerbated by the fact that these small nation states were in a constant state of competition and war.
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And in that situation, a ruler was in a prime position because he, the ruler of what would be France or Spain or anywhere else, would say to their nobility, if you don't do what I say and obey me and accept my increasing authority, I will throw you to the wolves.
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In other words, the Italians or whichever power is on our neighbours.
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So they used this lever to extract more and more obedience from their nobility, more and more obedience from their urban formerly independent people.
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They went into league with the papacy.
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So you got the joining together of more and more papal and royal power.
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And so gradually, and especially using a new tool, which was the revival of Roman law.
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Now, late, very late Roman law, Justinian law of the sixth century, was very, very dictatorial.
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It put the king above the law, it put the nobles in a very powerful position, it was a very hierarchical, caste-like system, and suitable for a late imperial power.
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And this Roman law had died out, but it was revived, particularly firstly in Bologna and then in other European universities, and it's called the Reception of Roman law.
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It spread across the continent between the 12th, 13th century and the 15th century, and it buffered and supported the uh central government.
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So by the 16th, 17th century, you had got a huge divergence.
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You got an island of law in England, the common law, which had been preserved, with a balanced constitution, the king under the rule under the law, etc.
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etc., a powerful middle class in their cities and urban areas, um, but everywhere else had moved towards authoritarian centralized systems.
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So England, all of Europe to a certain extent, was Europe was modern, but England remained so and the rest gave up.
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As you were talking about two uh strands of what made England different, uh firstly the nature of uh the economic relations within the country, which we we spoke about last time, this notion of almost regardless of class, everyone was trading parcels of land and moving around the country uh uh away from the place that they were born and raised, and didn't seem to have any particular um um attachment to the things that they owned, and it wasn't a feudal society in the same way as you found uh on the continent.
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Uh, and then also talking about the differences in the legal systems, the the common law legal system in England, and then the United Kingdom more broadly, that didn't exist on the continent, is as someone who has um followed quite a familiar arc for uh young people, I suppose, is that uh I, as you know, through our email exchange, I I left school early, but I don't think this is down uh what was it was down to.
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Um but I started to read a whole bunch of books to try and educate myself, and some of those earlier books tended to come with a Marxian bent, you know, Shague Barbara's Diaries, uh lots of Noam Chomsky.
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Um there was there was a heavy dose of socialism, and I'm sure you as a university professor know that that is quite a common arc for students to go through as well.
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And so then a lot of my views on the world became inflected by the social history that Karl Marx very much popularized the notion that just before the Industrial Revolution we had a patriarchal, familial, community ownership, feudal society, or at least something where things were held more in common, I think, is probably more true to say.
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Um but actually that may have applied to Europe, but it hadn't applied to England for centuries.
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So my question, Alan, and I know you're not a political philosopher, but you you know your stuff.
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How how prescient do you think this misunderstanding of history is to public policy and even academic and now mainstream political discourse?
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Well, by prescient, I think you mean influential.
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Um prescient means um foreseeing.
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So if you mean how influential, it it was very influential, um, particularly in the fifties and sixties when this Marxian interpretation of British history was at its peak.
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And a good deal of government policy was based on this idea that well, this idea has two advantages.
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Firstly, it suggests that you can easily remodel society because what we are now is very modern.
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We were um community-based, um feudal sort of people until, say, the 17th, 18th centuries.
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So we are now in a new world, we can forget that old world, and we can move forward.
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So the the Marxian message is one of empowering you to make big changes.
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So the world of Harold Wilson and the 1960s and into the 70s was very much dominated by that.
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Um, and the welfare state and so on were all around this.
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When my book came out, um it was very influential because it also this sort of kind of social movement towards a socialist society in Britain had moved to such an extent that in the 70s you got very great power of the trades unions, you had strikes, you had chaos.
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And Thatcher was a symptom and uh reflection of a change of mood.
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And Thatcher herself was a fan of mine.
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That's to say, her uh advisor, particularly Sir Keith Joseph, got his all his treasury ministers to read my book.
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Her um advisers like William Waldegrave and others were great fans of the book, because they suggested two things.
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One was that um all this um was a new fashion in introduced by Marxist thinkers, and that there was an older England which was much more individualistic and uh flexible and market-driven.
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So we could go back and look at that and appreciate it as well.
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So in the Thatcher era, um this new version was quite influential even in government.
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It's the one time I suppose my work has been influential.
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Um but I I read all the stuff you're talking about as well.
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I'm a great fan of Noam Chomsky, and I read all his work and not Cheek Ovara, but others of that thing.
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Um I mean I one likes to think that if one is exploring the world as a young person, one challenges all the current um myths of and and uh assumptions of one's the generation above one, and should one should rebel against it.
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And at the time that you were thinking about it, and even I was thinking about it, the rebellion was against the establishment and hence favoring all that Marxist sort of stuff.
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But one interesting just footnote to this is that um in the 60s and 70s, this was the sort of thing I was interested in, um, and my friends of rebellion.
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Recently I did a an interview.
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Interview with someone who was also a fan and has been influenced by this.
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And in turn, this is by a long chain of circumstances, possibly led to the Gaza ceasefire.
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But this person was someone called Jeff Sachs.
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And he told me that he'd read Origins and been deeply influenced by it.
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But he also, when I interviewed him at length, I asked him about the influence of Marxism when he was at university at Harvard in America in the 60s.
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And he said, absolutely not.
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No one ever taught me anything about Marx, and no one, they just said it was rubbish.
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And so it was in England that this sort of Marxist um interest came up.
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But in America it was much more fringe for various reasons.
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So that's bits and pieces of an answer.
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Remarkable.
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And I would like to delve into uh a little about the relations between historically the different peoples on the island of Great Britain.
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So before we saw big demographic change post-Second World War, so we're talking English, Scottish, uh, and the Welsh.
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Um, and I think we should also include the Irish, given all of the um the interactions and historical events and uh enmity that has existed um between those peoples over the years.
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Um, what what has been the influence of the Celtic fringe on England and vice versa?
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We've spoken a lot about uh English individualism.
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We've we've spoken about uh in the previous episode how this is something that spread across the world with uh the uh the the Britain heading over to the Americas and Australasia uh and beyond, and now it's the water in which we swim, and that's modernity because of that English way of life, which was an emergent property uh many, many centuries ago, more than millennia millennia ago.
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So so instead of focusing all on England, what's been the influence of the Celtic nations on England and vice versa?
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Well, just to declare an interest, um my name is Alan Donald James MacFarlane, um, and I'm five-eighths by ancestry Scottish through my parents.
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I'm also about quite a lot Welsh, um two of my families are from Wales, um and um just two things that are surprising.
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One is that when I read history at Oxford, I had a Scottish, by name anyway, teacher, a very famous medievalist called James Campbell, and he sent me a long essay to do in the holiday, my first holidays, on Norman Scotland.
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And what that basically showed me was that during the Norman period, most of Scotland was just part of England.
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I mean there were fringes, no doubt the Outer Isles and right in the north, but most of it had been uh Anglicised in its feudal, uh in its governmental structure, and in many other ways.
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So the clans were weak relatively weak.
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So the idea that until the unification of these countries, Scotland was a separate country was shown to be a delusion.
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Um the Scottish kings who came to England weren't coming from a different country.
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They were coming from a country with very deep, similar roots to England.
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And the second part of that is that Scotland is two countries.
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The Highland Celtic Catholic Scotland of my ancestors to a certain extent, and the Scotland, which is the wealthy part, the lowlands, is another Scotland.
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The lowlands are absolutely hardly different at all, and that's why the writings of people like Adam Smith from that area chime in so beautifully with English thought and so on.
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So you have to get the Highland Line, which is in the middle of Scotland, and talk about these separately.
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My ancestors were on the west coast and now are still in the Outer Isles, but um they thought in a different way.
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So um the English very early, and they did the same in Wales, Wales from very early on was influenced by England and was united very early.
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So the English have had a huge and immense effect on the Celtic fringe.
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There's no doubt about that from very early on.
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In terms of the other way round, um the the whole Celtic world, the the Gallic language, the kinship system, everything about the Celts is very different from the Anglo-Saxons.
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And so that admixture of a much more um poetic, spiritual, um filled with myths and legends and a very different um aesthetic and intellectual world, has had, through Scottish writings and Scottish artists and others, and also Welsh and Irish, a huge effect on England.
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I mean, it's many of the greatest of our writers.
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My favourite poet of the 20th century, W.
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B.
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Yates, for example, and others are from the Celtic fringe, and they carry across that deeper interest in a less less practical world.
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The English are very plodding, down to earth, practical, money seeking, nation of shopkeepers kind of people.
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These mystical kind of second sight Scottish away with the fairies sort of people are a very useful counterbalance.
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And of course, um their effect not only on England but on the British Empire is out of proportion to their size, because most well, I don't know if it's most, but many, many of the early settlers, uh rather uh colonialists like my father and his family in India were from Scotland.
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Um they went um this is for obvious reasons, which is Scotland is so poor.
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Once you get into the highlands, there's nothing for anyone to do.
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It only needs one person to look after a herd of sheep.
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What are the other sons going to do?
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One might go into the ministry, but if you have one out looking after the sheep and one in the ministry, what are the rest going to do?
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They're gonna go to India, Burma, China, wherever, and make the British Empire.
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So many of the great imperialists were Scottish, and many of those who set up the firms, like Jardine Matheson and Hong Kong and so on, Scottish.
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So it's had a huge kind of rebounding effect because these Scotsmen, Irishmen and in America, Welshmen, like my ancestors who went to Jamaica, they shaped the British Empire, and the British Empire shaped England.
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Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
00:31:06.720 --> 00:31:32.480
You yourself are a child of Empire, you're born in India, and you've you've written about your your schooling in in Britain, how you came back and and and you you spoke about how there was a real uh a real sense of Anglo identity or British identity that was felt across the the Empire.
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Everyone felt part of something.
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Britain was home even when they weren't there.
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And there's a passage in your book, which is the col the collection of the collection of essays, The Invention of the Modern World, where you you you talk about how the boarding school inculcated a kind of nationalism.
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And I'm using that word not in a kind of blood and thunder, blood and soil sense.
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You spoke about how you were um you were uh marinaded in literature, songs, rituals, religion, rank, and national character was brought through.
00:32:11.839 --> 00:32:16.400
I think the words you used that there was an ancient and powerful myth of unity.
00:32:16.799 --> 00:32:32.160
And it made me think a little bit about a film I saw which is uh set uh indeed at the university in which you made your name at the University of Cambridge, that the Chariots of Fire about uh uh Eric Liddell and Howard Abrams.
00:32:32.319 --> 00:32:50.240
And Howard Abrams was was Jewish, his father was Lithuanian, and he went to went to Cambridge, and there's a scene in the film where there are some Cambridge dons, and they say that their job is not just to teach them whatever they're there to be taught, their job is to teach them to be Englishmen.
00:32:50.720 --> 00:33:02.160
And I suppose my question is that we live in post-Second World War world focused on multiculturalism.
00:33:02.319 --> 00:33:06.319
It is not really any sense of uh unity.
00:33:06.480 --> 00:33:14.079
If anyone talks about how there was once a unity, it is dismissed as fairy tales or uh or that it's corrosive in some way.
00:33:14.400 --> 00:33:24.799
And my question is: should we still have space for this kind of mythmaking within the formation of the people of Britain?
00:33:27.119 --> 00:33:29.279
Well, it's a complex question.
00:33:29.599 --> 00:33:34.000
Um I'm not sure I'll answer it absolutely directly.
00:33:34.319 --> 00:33:38.720
The early characterization you made, which um made two points.
00:33:38.880 --> 00:33:55.759
One is that the English were peculiar in their empire, in that unlike other empires in in Europe, they always my father who went to India and others, and my grandparents and great-grandparents, they always thought of England as home.
00:33:56.000 --> 00:34:06.640
Whereas in the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and other empires, um many of those who went stayed and settled, married local women and the rest of it.
00:34:06.880 --> 00:34:28.639
So um, but it's very clear from the letters and so on that I've uh edited with, or my wife Sarah's edited, that um they always thought, they were always waiting to go home, and home was England, and they uh famously set up home wherever they were.
00:34:28.800 --> 00:34:40.559
So if they were in Upper Burma like my great-grandfather, they uh set and did plays and um wrote poetry and dreamed about home all the time.
00:34:41.519 --> 00:34:50.880
So that was the kind of empire, it was an unusual empire in that always England was the focal point of their sentiments.
00:34:51.119 --> 00:35:02.559
And sending us back to those boarding schools was part of that, that if we didn't go back, then we would not be part of that dream home.
00:35:02.880 --> 00:35:07.920
We would become local people going to local schools and so on.
00:35:08.159 --> 00:35:15.760
So, whereas the French and others educated their children in the empire, we were sent home to these boarding schools.
00:35:15.920 --> 00:35:33.039
And the boarding schools would teach us a very complicated thing because as Adam no David Hume pointed out, if there is any kind of national characteristic of the British, it's that they don't have a national characteristic.
00:35:33.280 --> 00:35:35.360
We don't have a national character.
00:35:35.519 --> 00:35:45.440
The feeble attempts of governments to sit down immigrants and tell them what they should be if they are British, you know, uh are laughable, you know.
00:35:45.679 --> 00:35:51.679
They should learn a bit of Shakespeare or learn to like fish and chips or something.
00:35:51.840 --> 00:35:57.039
I mean, you know, how do you define the twenty characteristics of being British?
00:35:57.280 --> 00:35:59.599
So it's a very difficult job for the schools.
00:35:59.840 --> 00:36:07.039
So what they taught us basically was class, that we were upper middle class.
00:36:07.599 --> 00:36:31.360
They taught us humour, they taught us something of the history of our country and something of the history of our literature, they taught us the importance of games, not taking anything too seriously, of fairness, of justice, of um treating people uh civilly and with respect.
00:36:31.840 --> 00:36:37.440
So they taught us values and they taught us some stories about our past.
00:36:38.800 --> 00:36:51.440
And all of that would then make us into professional Englishmen wherever we were, whether we were in the Empire or at home.
00:36:52.320 --> 00:37:00.079
So that was the role both of the schools, and the schools were just a continuation of chariots of fire.
00:37:00.639 --> 00:37:10.159
Um, you know, from the age of eight, I was basically being trained to run round Trinity Great Court and become a long-distance runner or whatever it was.
00:37:10.320 --> 00:37:13.519
Um, it's a seamless web from then on.
00:37:13.679 --> 00:37:21.519
And the final um coating on the cake of Englishness was Cambridge or Oxford or whatever it was.
00:37:22.400 --> 00:37:44.719
Um but one way that I've learnt recently, I've been thinking a lot about this, uh, about how this multicultural world we have in Britain and elsewhere deals with these problems may be of interest to your viewers, though I've only just beginning to write it down and so on.
00:37:45.039 --> 00:38:05.920
Basically, um, when talking particularly to many young students from other countries, and they ask me how they can resolve the fact that they are in England, they've been in England for some time at English schools, yet they're Chinese or Japanese or whatever it is, what are they?
00:38:06.320 --> 00:38:10.960
And I say to them, well, think of it at three levels.
00:38:13.119 --> 00:38:18.800
The top level is summarized in the famous Roman saying, When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
00:38:19.840 --> 00:38:22.239
You have to learn the cultural rules.
00:38:22.480 --> 00:38:36.079
If you're in Rome or if you're in China or if you're in England, there are many cultural rules you must learn, which side of the road to walk on, how to greet someone, whether you kiss them or shake hands or whatever.
00:38:36.400 --> 00:38:43.519
Um, there are hundreds of little signifiers which you've got to learn as cultural rules.
00:38:43.760 --> 00:38:49.920
Once you've mastered those and the English sense of humor and so on and so on, you are culturally English.
00:38:50.480 --> 00:38:55.519
But of course, you are also culturally Chinese or whatever.
00:38:55.840 --> 00:39:01.599
They are a set of it's like learning the piano or learning to play tennis.
00:39:01.760 --> 00:39:07.760
You learn the rules of the game, and you play the game when you're in that country and you play another game.
00:39:07.920 --> 00:39:09.519
So that's easy.
00:39:10.400 --> 00:39:14.719
The second level is your identity.
00:39:16.639 --> 00:39:24.239
And your identity is what you say when you answer the question, who are you?
00:39:27.840 --> 00:39:32.880
When we go on taxi um trips, which we do frequently.
00:39:33.119 --> 00:39:40.559
Most of the taxi drivers in Cambridge are from Eastern Europe or the subcontinent or somewhere like that.
00:39:40.880 --> 00:39:46.000
And so we get into conversation, we say, you know, where are you from?
00:39:46.159 --> 00:39:52.239
And they say, Well, I've been in England for 20 years, but I'm from Bulgaria or Pakistan or something.
00:39:52.559 --> 00:39:57.519
And then if we ask them, I say, you know, are you you feel English?
00:39:57.840 --> 00:40:01.039
They say, no, of course I was born and brought up in Pakistan.
00:40:01.119 --> 00:40:05.360
I'm Pakistani, but I live here and I play the game.
00:40:05.519 --> 00:40:07.039
They don't put in those words.
00:40:07.360 --> 00:40:11.440
But my family are there and I may go back and retire there.
00:40:11.920 --> 00:40:18.159
So your identity is often very different from the cultural rules.
00:40:18.400 --> 00:40:22.800
But an interesting thing I've learnt recently is that you can have multiple identities.
00:40:23.039 --> 00:40:32.239
I'll give you a nice example from a very dear young friend of mine who's ten years old and who was born in England.
00:40:32.400 --> 00:40:38.559
He's Chinese, he was born in England and he's lived in England all his life, and he's in an English boarding school.
00:40:38.960 --> 00:40:46.400
And so when I say to him, um, we'll call him Jay, Jay, are you English?
00:40:47.119 --> 00:40:50.719
And he pauses for a minute and he says yes.
00:40:52.639 --> 00:40:55.840
Though his parents teach him Chinese and the rest of it.
00:40:56.000 --> 00:41:09.280
But when we get on the plane to China together, and they start serving us delicious Chinese food, and the waitresses are beautiful young Chinese air hostesses, and the music is Chinese and so on.
00:41:09.440 --> 00:41:12.239
I say to Jay, What are you?
00:41:12.400 --> 00:41:14.559
And he said, Chinese, of course.
00:41:16.159 --> 00:41:18.159
And when he's in China, he's Chinese.
00:41:18.239 --> 00:41:22.159
So he has split identities, multiple identities.
00:41:22.719 --> 00:41:30.079
The third level, which has interested me recently, is is personality and character.
00:41:31.760 --> 00:41:46.320
And to give you an example, the people I worked with in the mountains of Himala of the Himalayas migrated down into the cities of India and Hong Kong and came to Britain.
00:41:46.719 --> 00:41:52.559
And they're now in the second and third generation in North London, for example.
00:41:52.880 --> 00:42:21.119
But when I look at the children in the third generation and look at how they behave to each other, to me, to the world, their character, which is formed in the first year or two of their life by the influence of their parents and their siblings, is still the character that I saw fifty years ago in a mountain village in the Himalayas.
00:42:21.280 --> 00:42:37.119
In other words, they are respectful of old age, they're very truthful, they're very optimistic, they're gentle, they're very sensitive, they have all the qualities that I admired with their parents and grandparents long ago.
00:42:37.360 --> 00:42:46.159
And this is transmitted invisibly by the way we are brought up in the first two or three years.
00:42:46.639 --> 00:42:53.280
And that doesn't change, and I think that goes on possibly for several generations.
00:42:54.559 --> 00:43:11.519
And I think if you did an investigation of people in Britain who are second, third, fourth generation from all over the world, and looked at actually how they're behaving with each other and with um their parents and so on, you'd find that.
00:43:11.679 --> 00:43:16.719
So these are the three levels which coexist in all of us.
00:43:18.559 --> 00:43:20.000
It's fascinating.
00:43:20.079 --> 00:43:43.039
It's a question that is asked, I think, much more frequently these days, with uh, as we referred to earlier, a big demographic shift having taken place in the country, continues to take place, I think something like 4.2 million people net having arrived in the last five years from all over the world.
00:43:43.119 --> 00:43:52.000
And there have been all sorts of uh studies done on uh the notion of integration or the long tail of culture.
00:43:52.159 --> 00:43:57.840
Uh and and there was an excellent work by Paul Collier called Exodus.
00:43:58.159 --> 00:44:15.679
You may have read it, where he Spoke about how the the bigger the numbers of a certain a certain people from a certain place typically group into a diaspora and then at that point there's not really any meaningful integration as such because culturally you can remain the same.
00:44:15.840 --> 00:44:16.880
It's back to that point.
00:44:18.719 --> 00:44:20.079
Do you play the rules of the game?
00:44:20.239 --> 00:44:22.079
Are you doing as the Romans do?
00:44:22.320 --> 00:44:29.679
And what you mentioned there is people end up living as they were brought up in those first few years of their lives.
00:44:29.760 --> 00:44:41.360
And I suppose you've got uh whole generations that will continue ultimately to live in accordance with the mores of their ancestral homelands.
00:44:41.440 --> 00:44:43.199
It's not like true of everyone, of course.
00:44:43.360 --> 00:44:49.199
And uh I I'd quite like to uh to know your thoughts on this, Alan.
00:44:49.440 --> 00:44:53.199
So uh it wasn't that long ago that I read Samuel P.
00:44:53.360 --> 00:45:04.800
Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, but depending on who it is you speak to about the future of a multi-ethnic, a multicultural society determines the kind of answer you get.
00:45:04.960 --> 00:45:18.239
But there's there's a there's a passage which Huntington, I think, is quoted on all of the time, where he says, It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.
00:45:18.400 --> 00:45:23.039
The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.
00:45:23.199 --> 00:45:33.360
Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.
00:45:33.519 --> 00:45:40.559
The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics, the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
00:45:40.800 --> 00:46:00.400
Well, perhaps we can see this on a geopolitical stage, but my question is if we have different civilizations living amongst each other within the confines of a single country, and back to that, is there a need to have a myth of a powerful, an ancient myth of unity?
00:46:00.639 --> 00:46:10.480
Uh what's your take on Clash of Civilizations theory, whether at geopolitical level or or within a nation?
00:46:10.639 --> 00:46:14.719
Does it does it stand up as far as you're concerned?
00:46:16.400 --> 00:46:28.239
Well, th those are separate questions because most of it was about his particular take on that cultural clash, and then at the end you asked me what I thought of his theory.
00:46:28.800 --> 00:46:31.360
You want me to answer both or one or the other?
00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:33.679
Let's go with the first one.
00:46:34.000 --> 00:46:36.000
And sorry for confusing matters.
00:46:36.559 --> 00:46:43.039
Um just to set Huntington in his context, Samuel P.
00:46:43.199 --> 00:46:46.320
Huntington is a war criminal.
00:46:47.119 --> 00:46:47.840
He's dead.
00:46:48.000 --> 00:46:49.280
He was a war criminal.
00:46:49.599 --> 00:46:55.280
He was behind the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, of Vietnam.
00:46:55.760 --> 00:47:07.360
Um he worked for the Pentagon and uh he recommended that the people in the countryside were should be driven out of the countryside by bombing them out if they wouldn't leave.
00:47:08.480 --> 00:47:10.559
That's the first part of his life.
00:47:10.880 --> 00:47:19.840
And the book after that book is the application of his theory of that we can't mix with other people.
00:47:20.400 --> 00:47:30.079
And he he was the advocate of building a large wall, um, which Trump took up, uh, which would keep out foreigners.
00:47:31.679 --> 00:47:41.920
Um, I mean, it was a bit late because quite a lot of foreigners had already arrived in America by that time, um, including his ancestors, no doubt.
00:47:42.159 --> 00:47:48.320
Um so um that's Huntingdon's message.
00:47:48.960 --> 00:47:58.800
I think his work is deeply, deeply harmful and um unpleasant and misguided.
00:47:59.440 --> 00:48:19.039
Um and to just to give you an example, um I live in a small Fenland village, which until ten years ago, you'd never or hardly ever see anyone from any other culture.
00:48:20.159 --> 00:48:30.079
Um they were all increasingly commuters from Cambridge, but they were all white um English sort of British sort of people.
00:48:30.559 --> 00:48:48.719
During the last ten years, um perhaps, I don't know, one in five or six people you see now are from Africa, India, China, Japan, continent, whatever.
00:48:49.599 --> 00:48:57.039
And most of them are reverting to my idea, they're w they're learning the cultural rules perfectly well.
00:48:57.360 --> 00:49:10.400
They join the cricket team if they they teach their children cricket, uh, they go to the local schools, they integrate and are doing useful work in the National Health Service or whatever it is.
00:49:10.639 --> 00:49:15.840
So they're perfectly good citizens of our village.
00:49:17.119 --> 00:49:30.159
Um but I suspect that in their home life they carry across parts of their culture in form of food and maybe their religion and so on and so on.
00:49:30.400 --> 00:49:32.880
But there's no clash.
00:49:33.119 --> 00:49:53.440
And that was one of the great features of the British Empire by separating off the social rules, the economic and social and political rules, so that you had to pay your taxes and obey the the law and so on and so on, from your cultural life, what you believed and what you ate and what you wore.
00:49:53.599 --> 00:50:02.079
The British managed to run this multicultural vast empire very mostly peacefully.
00:50:02.800 --> 00:50:26.960
So I don't see at all when I go to Chinatown in London or parts of Cambridge which are now have lots of immigrants, Chinese and Indian, I sense no sense of antagonism or strain or um whatever.
00:50:27.199 --> 00:50:39.440
When I look at the students in my college, perhaps half of whom now come from non-English backgrounds, if not more, they get on extremely well.
00:50:39.599 --> 00:50:52.800
When I look at my young friends, and this is an important point, we of my generation find all this p possibly threatening and uncomfortable.
00:50:53.119 --> 00:51:01.840
Even the generation below me find this sudden change very disturbing or possibly disturbing.
00:51:02.159 --> 00:51:09.039
My grandchildren's generation, the twenties, don't even notice it.
00:51:09.840 --> 00:51:22.719
I mean, if you if you watch your television for five minutes and you look at a school in London, it's multicultural and they appear to be getting on.
00:51:22.800 --> 00:51:31.519
I have a friend who was a teacher in one of these schools, North London schools, and he said sixty different languages were to were spoken in the school I was at Master of.
00:51:32.639 --> 00:51:44.079
So I I don't I think it's a false old uh contr uh uh contradiction or um uh opposition.
00:51:44.800 --> 00:51:57.599
So I think uh it's it's a panic, all this I mean the whole um boat business is a is an artificially created panic to divert attention from other things.
00:51:57.920 --> 00:52:16.480
I mean if you're worried about people coming and living in this country, why bother about, you know whatever few thousands or tens of thousands are coming in boats, uh but not uh bringing in uh tens of hundreds of thousands of other people.
00:52:16.639 --> 00:52:21.840
I mean it's a small two percent or whatever of the immigrants to this country are coming that way.
00:52:22.239 --> 00:52:27.760
So I'm quite relaxed, as you see, um, about a lot of this.
00:52:27.840 --> 00:52:40.960
And I think that Huntington, his whole um idea is, and I can go on to the other aspects of it if you want, but I think it's very misguided.
00:52:43.840 --> 00:52:47.920
I I agree that largely people rub along pretty pretty well.
00:52:48.000 --> 00:53:07.039
I mean, even even myself, I uh I am marrying into um an ethnically mixed family, and um uh much to much to be said about the um my future father-in-law and and his past and his love for the country.
00:53:07.280 --> 00:53:14.880
I suppose I think people I think people are concerned not just about the boats, but the the large numbers.
00:53:14.960 --> 00:53:44.639
And I think they're concerned primarily because of um the notion of cultural transfer, that point about diaspora earlier on, is if you if you have uh a large demographic change of peoples and you say, for instance, South Hall in London, you know, it's a it it it is uh a very Hindu Indian area, um, and all the shops will reflect those kind of things.
00:53:44.880 --> 00:54:04.800
I suppose people's people's attachment in this respect are let's say in 50 years' time we're looking at um uh you know a minority majority, insofar as less than 50% of the country are for of white British extraction, as it were, and we're talking about the long tail of culture.
00:54:04.960 --> 00:54:09.519
I think people are having that sense of, well, what does that mean for our politics?
00:54:09.679 --> 00:54:40.320
If you see examples of politics being transplanted from elsewhere and these things we've talked about that are very unique, like the common law, whether it's the the way of life, is if though if the diasporas grow so so large that there is no one learning the cultural game, then I think as far as I can see, I can understand why people would have concerns about that because that's not home to them.
00:54:40.480 --> 00:54:56.880
Um but I do understand what you're saying with regards to pushing constantly this notion that there are clashes among civilizations is not necessarily going to lead to a peaceable, peaceable relations.
00:54:57.199 --> 00:55:04.000
Um so much longer conversation on that one, and and perhaps a little bit away from where we're from.
00:55:04.079 --> 00:55:28.639
But one thing that I wanted to finish on, Alan, in this particular part is religion in the country and um religion in the sense of uh England and then Britain becoming a Protestant island, and many talk about uh the Reformation in a way that you don't necessarily recognize.
00:55:28.719 --> 00:55:41.360
So people will talk about the Reformation as being this point in time where everything changed, but you argue that the English Reformation was actually an epiphenomenon of English culture.
00:55:41.920 --> 00:55:43.679
What do you mean by that?
00:55:46.159 --> 00:56:03.280
Well, as with many things, you can see the Reformation as both a big change and a revolution and something that set things in another direction, and at the same time very continuous, and that's the nature of history.
00:56:03.840 --> 00:56:20.000
Um if you look at um English belief and practice and ritual before the Reformation, you find many of the features of the post-Reformation there.
00:56:20.480 --> 00:56:32.320
For example, the rather ascetic puritanistic aspects of the English Reformation are there in English life in many respects.
00:56:32.480 --> 00:56:52.639
If you look at, for example, the architecture of my college in Cambridge, King's College, and you look at the um 15th century part of it before, it was all built before the Reformation, it was finished just as the Reformation was happening.
00:56:52.800 --> 00:57:03.199
And it is Protestant and ascetic and severe and all the things that we associate with Puritanism.
00:57:03.440 --> 00:57:22.880
If you look at the work of um, for example, someone uh who was very ended up very high in the Anglican Church, John Wycliffe, in the 15th century, 14th century, he was a Reformation thinker.
00:57:23.039 --> 00:57:33.039
He didn't like the Pope, he didn't believe in much of the Catholic belief, and his followers, the Lollards, were the same.
00:57:33.280 --> 00:57:42.960
So there was a very strong stream in England of Protestantism going right back to through the centuries.
00:57:43.760 --> 00:57:49.199
And um Max Weber himself isn't widely known.
00:57:49.280 --> 00:57:51.760
Most people read his book, The Protestant Ethic.
00:57:51.920 --> 00:58:10.639
But if you look at his wider work on the um religions of the West, he recognises that there is this Protestant stream going back even into the early church.
00:58:10.800 --> 00:58:24.239
And indeed the Protestants argued that this had been lost, that the overlayer of Catholicism had overlaid what was always there, which was the simple message of Jesus and so on and so on.
00:58:24.559 --> 00:58:28.159
Um and that all you were doing was recovering that.
00:58:28.559 --> 00:58:36.239
So I think the Reformation was um immensely important.
00:58:37.199 --> 00:58:53.679
In for example, if you hadn't had, and I've written just written a piece on this, the Reformation started in my college in Kings, in a pub on the edge of my college within it, called the White Heart.
00:58:53.840 --> 00:58:54.960
There's a blue plaque.
00:58:55.119 --> 00:59:27.760
If anyone visits Cambridge, they should look at the blue plaque which says, This is where the Protestant Reformation, one of the places it started, and it started in an inn called the White Heart, where the great writers and translators of the Reformation, Whitgift and uh Aylmer and other people, congregated and discussed the new writings coming from Germany and translated them and then preached them and persuaded uh Henry VIII to go with it.
00:59:29.039 --> 00:59:39.199
So and if that hadn't happened, if there hadn't been that pub, if Kings hadn't existed, we would now be living in a Catholic Europe.
00:59:40.800 --> 00:59:58.000
Because without the switch of Europe of Britain, the growing power to um Protestantism, it would have almost certainly been wiped out in the small pockets where it was um beginning to flourish in northern Germany and Holland.
00:59:58.719 --> 01:00:08.800
And so that small accident of Anne Boleyn wanting to marry Anne Boleyn, so this is the beauty of history.
01:00:09.039 --> 01:00:27.679
You've got the great forces that England was always Protestant, argument, plus the attraction of one man to one woman, Anne Boleyn, which led by chance to our present world.
01:00:31.760 --> 01:01:08.239
It's it's fascinating, all of these hinge moments in in history, and to put a final point on that Protestantism being a natural reflection of the English, is what you're getting at the the way the English lived, this individual, very loose community, though there was a civil society that was created out of these uh volunteer groups of people getting together to work on things is quite transactional.
01:01:08.480 --> 01:01:25.840
Whereas when you look at the southern southern European nations, and and and I think lots of us can look enviously towards them when they go, Oh, look how tightly knit they are, and but they live in multi-generational households, and and you've said that that never really never really happened in in English history.
01:01:26.000 --> 01:01:47.519
Um, is it is Protestantism an epiphenomenon because ultimately it was a more truer reflection of how the English lived and governed themselves through the common law than Roman law, where there was that diktat from the top and a much more tight community.
01:01:48.079 --> 01:01:50.880
Is that is that on the right lines or am I totally off there?
01:01:51.280 --> 01:02:02.079
No, no, that's that's it's not exactly an epiphenomenon, but it's part of a package because ideology both reflects and creates things.
01:02:02.320 --> 01:02:28.639
So the extreme individualism of the English in their economic and legal systems, that each person has their rights and duties and in law and is treated as equal and so on, the fact that they have advanced private property and ownership of their own means of production and so on, all that individualism and protection of the individual means that people don't sit easily with being told what to do.
01:02:29.519 --> 01:02:31.440
And you can find it in many other things.
01:02:31.599 --> 01:02:39.360
The English pub, for example, is another part of it, and that's why it's rather nice that the English Reformation began in a pub.
01:02:39.599 --> 01:02:46.719
You know, you stand around at the bar and you say, What are these useless politicians doing now?
01:02:47.199 --> 01:02:54.800
Now, you know, in most countries you'd be sent off to prison for such sp talk, and there would be spies listening and so on.
01:02:54.880 --> 01:03:02.320
But in England you can talk about how useless the government is, and you know you want to do this and that and so on.
01:03:02.480 --> 01:03:23.280
So it's all part of a fairly egalitarian, self-confident, well-educated, affluent sort of society which goes back, and if you want to see it in action in a beautiful poetic form, read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
01:03:24.000 --> 01:03:37.519
I mean, these opinionated, bossy, um, tough, um, somewhat um obscene characters who tell their tales are English.
01:03:37.920 --> 01:03:46.159
And they're, you know, the women are telling their tales, the men are telling their tales, the ordinary people, the knights, and so on.
01:03:46.320 --> 01:03:58.320
And they all reflect great self-confidence, great um private um views about all sorts of things.
01:03:58.559 --> 01:04:05.119
And you wouldn't find something like the Canterbury Tales, I don't think in any other culture at that time.
01:04:06.400 --> 01:04:07.039
Hmm.
01:04:08.639 --> 01:04:11.599
Well, I'm gonna draw it to a close there, Alan.
01:04:11.760 --> 01:04:27.039
There's going to be a part two, and in that part two, I'd like to delve a little bit more into your own personal view of religion and uh also religion more broadly within within Britain.
01:04:27.199 --> 01:04:35.119
But I'd also like to cover sexual relations, violence, and class relations.
01:04:35.519 --> 01:04:44.320
Uh, I think that will that that will draw things uh together quite nicely in this this exploration of the English and indeed the the British.
01:04:44.480 --> 01:04:52.880
Uh Alan, it's been an absolute pleasure to be able to pick your brains again and I look forward to picking up the threads for the next time we speak.
01:04:53.360 --> 01:04:53.760
Thank you.
01:04:53.840 --> 01:05:03.519
And I if I can just end by saying that on High Table at Oxford and Cambridge until recently, all the subjects you've mentioned are not to be talked about.
01:05:03.760 --> 01:05:06.559
Sex, religion, politics.
01:05:06.960 --> 01:05:07.280
No.
01:05:08.800 --> 01:05:11.440
So don't ask me at high table, okay?
01:05:11.840 --> 01:05:12.480
That's all right.
01:05:12.559 --> 01:05:13.840
I would never be invited there.
01:05:14.079 --> 01:05:20.480
I'm I'm certainly not not academic enough and and nor never been able to make my way into such an august institution.
01:05:20.639 --> 01:05:30.639
So I'm I'm taking advantage of this digital world to be able to speak to uh the professor emeritus of one of the greatest educational institutions ever created.
01:05:30.719 --> 01:05:38.079
So uh if they if they're silly enough to not go and ask you these questions, then I I'm I don't know the rules, so I'm gonna break them.
01:05:38.320 --> 01:05:38.639
Okay.
01:05:39.760 --> 01:05:40.239
Thank you.
01:05:40.400 --> 01:05:41.280
Thank you, Ellen.
01:05:41.440 --> 01:05:42.800
Until next time.
01:05:47.360 --> 01:05:56.960
To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
01:05:57.280 --> 01:05:59.760
Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issue.
01:06:00.320 --> 01:06:03.119
We face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
01:06:03.280 --> 01:06:12.559
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00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:02.640
Hello, classmate, and welcome to Thinking Class.
00:00:02.720 --> 00:00:05.679
I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Alan McFarlane.
00:00:05.839 --> 00:00:10.560
Alan is an anthropologist, an historian, and a professor emeritus of King's College, Cambridge.
00:00:10.720 --> 00:00:17.199
He is the author or editor of twenty books and numerous articles on the anthropology and history of England, Nepal, Japan and China.
00:00:17.440 --> 00:00:26.640
Alan has focused on comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world, and he is also a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.
00:00:26.879 --> 00:00:41.439
In this episode, Alan and I think out loud about why we don't really understand what modernity is when we talk about it, but why we must understand it if we are to understand capitalism and individualism in England and how these spread to the rest of the world.
00:00:41.679 --> 00:00:51.039
We also talk about the unique trajectory of English capitalism, the influence of the Celtic nations on England, and the legacy of the British Empire in shaping national identity.
00:00:51.280 --> 00:01:26.079
We talk about the misunderstanding and reframing of historical narratives, particularly in relation to Marxist interpretations of history, the complexities of British identity, the challenges of cultural integration in an era of mass immigration, the historical significance of the English Reformation, what Allen thinks is the elusive nature of national character, and the coexistence of multiple identities within a single person, whether Alan subscribes to the notion of a clash of civilizations, the importance of cultural rules, and the historical context of Protestantism in shaping English society, and much, much more.
00:01:26.959 --> 00:01:43.680
There's not much I can say about this episode other than that it was another great pleasure of mine to be able to speak with Alan before I started thinking class and I had never had the opportunity to speak to such learned people, a Professor Emeritus of Cambridge no less, and I've now spoken to Alan twice.
00:01:43.920 --> 00:01:46.319
You can find an episode in the archives.
00:01:46.480 --> 00:02:06.879
I've also spoken to another Professor Emeritus of Cambridge in Robert Toomes, whilst I've interviewed Oxford heavyweights like Nigel Bigger and soon to be James Orr, and indeed the historian David Starkey, who has held big positions in big universities.
00:02:07.680 --> 00:02:10.800
So I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did.
00:02:11.439 --> 00:02:14.479
Please check out the others, they're all deeply nourishing.
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And make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice and Substack, where now paid subscribers get the opportunity to ask questions in a special QA section to my guests that only paid subscribers get access to.
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Do sign up, let's grow a thinking class together, enjoy the show, classmates.
00:02:54.159 --> 00:03:04.560
You uh whetted my appetite uh both in our conversation but also since we last spoke, which was about your work on the origins of English individualism.
00:03:04.639 --> 00:03:14.560
I've been devouring much more of your anthropological work on the culture of capitalism and also the invention of the modern world.
00:03:14.879 --> 00:03:24.400
And we're gonna have much to talk about here, so this will be a two-part episode for anyone who wants to hear more about those two topics.
00:03:24.879 --> 00:03:27.280
Let's let's begin on the modern world.
00:03:27.520 --> 00:03:56.879
So modern is used, I would say, in the present day by progressives to delimit the good and almost exclude the past as something that is inherently regressive and modern is seen as in positive light, and and modernity used by those of a more conservative bent, referred to it as a period where life became denuded of meaning.
00:03:57.280 --> 00:04:04.960
But you have argued that the definition of modern is frequently misunderstood and misused.
00:04:05.120 --> 00:04:10.479
So what do you mean when you talk of modernity and the modern world?
00:04:12.000 --> 00:04:15.199
Thank you, and thank you for having me again.
00:04:15.759 --> 00:04:21.519
Um when I lectured or talked to my students and I said, What do you mean by modern?
00:04:21.920 --> 00:04:43.199
And they were well educated and intelligent young people, they would uh look at their, probably not at that time, but their mobile phones, but um, they would look around them and they'd say, Oh well, um modern communications, so telephone to start with, but now up to the internet and things like that.
00:04:43.600 --> 00:05:05.439
Or modern medicine, what's happened since the Second World War with antibiotics and so on, or modern transport, cars and planes and things like that, in other words, technologies, and to a certain extent the standard of living, so people becoming wealthier.
00:05:05.920 --> 00:05:13.839
So they were thinking that what you see on the surface is modernity.
00:05:14.800 --> 00:05:22.240
Now I was taught long ago by Max Weber that you shouldn't look at the surface.
00:05:22.560 --> 00:05:45.120
In one of his brilliant characterizations, he said if you look at Florence in the fifteenth century, it's a very affluent, up-to-date, innovative city, but it's not modern because it doesn't have the modern ethic of capitalism.
00:05:45.360 --> 00:05:50.800
It was still traditional in its um psychology and philosophy.
00:05:51.040 --> 00:06:08.480
If you look at eighteenth century New England, there you will find people who are thinking in a modern way, even though they are living in rural parts of New England.
00:06:09.120 --> 00:06:36.720
So going behind the surface, what I mean by modernity, which I worked out over a long period, which is based on Weber a lot and one or two others, is that if you look at how human beings are driven, the four basic drives of humans, one is towards wealth, a good standard of living, or just surviving, and that's economics.
00:06:37.839 --> 00:06:47.839
The second is towards power, how we influence other people and are influenced by them in our power relations, and that we call politics.
00:06:49.040 --> 00:06:56.000
The third is our social relations with others, our family and others, and that we call society.
00:06:57.199 --> 00:07:07.680
And the fourth is our beliefs and thoughts and ideas, and that we call religion or philosophy.
00:07:08.319 --> 00:07:24.160
Now these four elements historically were all bundled together in the simplest sort of societies which dominated the world for ninety-five-98% of human history, hunters and gatherers and tribal people.
00:07:24.480 --> 00:07:35.120
They became separated into two pairs during the uh growth of civilizations, into a pair which was politics and uh religion.
00:07:36.480 --> 00:07:39.040
Bundled together, they weren't separated.
00:07:39.360 --> 00:07:48.720
And then another pair, which was economics and society, so economics was based on the family, and it was a domestic mode of production.
00:07:49.199 --> 00:07:58.560
That lasted in most civilizations, including China, India, most of Europe, until the 19th century.
00:07:58.879 --> 00:08:08.000
It was only then that you got the final separations of politics and religion, and um society and economics.
00:08:08.879 --> 00:08:17.040
But um Weber pointed out that the capitalist revolution in England occurred when you got the separation of the society and economics.
00:08:17.120 --> 00:08:23.680
So you have a free market economy and people can go out on it and earn their own wages and so on.
00:08:23.759 --> 00:08:28.240
So and that was agreed on by Karl Marx as well.
00:08:28.879 --> 00:08:43.679
So modernity in that sense, or the modern world, modernity is rather difficult because there's a lot of overlaid about modernism and modernity, which is a different sort of thing in literary culture, literary studies.
00:08:44.080 --> 00:09:00.320
So the modern world, the separations, those four separations, are mostly have occurred in the last two hundred years, and they have nothing to do with the technology.
00:09:00.559 --> 00:09:13.279
So by my definition, say Stalin's Russia was technologically quite sophisticated, but it wasn't modern because these four things are bundled together in communism.
00:09:14.159 --> 00:09:26.080
Whereas, as I say, um some quite remote parts of England or Scotland were ultra modern because people were keeping these things apart.
00:09:26.399 --> 00:09:35.519
And my argument, as you know, and we may come on to that, is that England is the outlier because it separated all these things very early.
00:09:38.480 --> 00:10:05.600
On the separation of those elements of society happening much earlier in England, what was it that led to the English with a culture that enabled the birth of what we now call capitalism many centuries before anyone, any any any other country?
00:10:06.879 --> 00:10:24.559
Well um if you looked at Europe in the half millennium between the fall of Rome and about the thirteenth century, much of it was quite modern in my sense of the word.
00:10:24.960 --> 00:10:29.039
That is to say, this is Carolingian Europe, Western Europe.
00:10:29.679 --> 00:11:02.399
And you had a very um dynamic society in which monasteries, universities were beginning to grow, cities, a great deal of trading, and there was a great deal of freedom and independence between the national power of the kings was weak, and so you had a lot of independence at the urban level, at the religious level, and these worlds were separated.
00:11:03.039 --> 00:11:10.320
So in many ways you had quite a modern world by 1200 across Europe.
00:11:11.440 --> 00:11:32.799
So the origins go back to the chaos that occurred after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the shooting up of all sorts of independent, fairly independent institutions, the absence of a very strict social hierarchy of caste or anything like that.
00:11:33.759 --> 00:11:51.919
So that's how the world that is described by the greatest of historians of that period, Mark Bloch, in his feudal society is described in that way the disintegration of the state as he describes feudalism and the disintegration of the church and everything else.
00:11:52.559 --> 00:12:01.440
What happened was that after about 1200, England remained modern.
00:12:03.039 --> 00:12:26.159
In other words, being an island, it was able to filter out pressures that were sweeping across Western Europe in continental countries, which were largely caused by a natural tendency which you find in human societies, which is the gravitation of power towards the centre.
00:12:27.200 --> 00:12:34.639
And this was exacerbated by the fact that these small nation states were in a constant state of competition and war.
00:12:35.360 --> 00:13:01.120
And in that situation, a ruler was in a prime position because he, the ruler of what would be France or Spain or anywhere else, would say to their nobility, if you don't do what I say and obey me and accept my increasing authority, I will throw you to the wolves.
00:13:01.200 --> 00:13:06.399
In other words, the Italians or whichever power is on our neighbours.
00:13:06.879 --> 00:13:21.360
So they used this lever to extract more and more obedience from their nobility, more and more obedience from their urban formerly independent people.
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They went into league with the papacy.
00:13:26.720 --> 00:13:32.399
So you got the joining together of more and more papal and royal power.
00:13:33.360 --> 00:13:43.759
And so gradually, and especially using a new tool, which was the revival of Roman law.
00:13:44.240 --> 00:13:53.679
Now, late, very late Roman law, Justinian law of the sixth century, was very, very dictatorial.
00:13:54.480 --> 00:14:11.039
It put the king above the law, it put the nobles in a very powerful position, it was a very hierarchical, caste-like system, and suitable for a late imperial power.
00:14:11.600 --> 00:14:27.600
And this Roman law had died out, but it was revived, particularly firstly in Bologna and then in other European universities, and it's called the Reception of Roman law.
00:14:27.679 --> 00:14:43.600
It spread across the continent between the 12th, 13th century and the 15th century, and it buffered and supported the uh central government.
00:14:43.840 --> 00:14:50.559
So by the 16th, 17th century, you had got a huge divergence.
00:14:50.799 --> 00:15:00.480
You got an island of law in England, the common law, which had been preserved, with a balanced constitution, the king under the rule under the law, etc.
00:15:00.799 --> 00:15:15.279
etc., a powerful middle class in their cities and urban areas, um, but everywhere else had moved towards authoritarian centralized systems.
00:15:15.840 --> 00:15:25.759
So England, all of Europe to a certain extent, was Europe was modern, but England remained so and the rest gave up.
00:15:28.080 --> 00:16:09.679
As you were talking about two uh strands of what made England different, uh firstly the nature of uh the economic relations within the country, which we we spoke about last time, this notion of almost regardless of class, everyone was trading parcels of land and moving around the country uh uh away from the place that they were born and raised, and didn't seem to have any particular um um attachment to the things that they owned, and it wasn't a feudal society in the same way as you found uh on the continent.
00:16:09.840 --> 00:16:41.840
Uh, and then also talking about the differences in the legal systems, the the common law legal system in England, and then the United Kingdom more broadly, that didn't exist on the continent, is as someone who has um followed quite a familiar arc for uh young people, I suppose, is that uh I, as you know, through our email exchange, I I left school early, but I don't think this is down uh what was it was down to.
00:16:41.919 --> 00:16:54.639
Um but I started to read a whole bunch of books to try and educate myself, and some of those earlier books tended to come with a Marxian bent, you know, Shague Barbara's Diaries, uh lots of Noam Chomsky.
00:16:54.799 --> 00:17:05.920
Um there was there was a heavy dose of socialism, and I'm sure you as a university professor know that that is quite a common arc for students to go through as well.
00:17:06.319 --> 00:17:33.440
And so then a lot of my views on the world became inflected by the social history that Karl Marx very much popularized the notion that just before the Industrial Revolution we had a patriarchal, familial, community ownership, feudal society, or at least something where things were held more in common, I think, is probably more true to say.
00:17:33.680 --> 00:17:39.839
Um but actually that may have applied to Europe, but it hadn't applied to England for centuries.
00:17:39.920 --> 00:17:46.240
So my question, Alan, and I know you're not a political philosopher, but you you know your stuff.
00:17:46.480 --> 00:17:59.759
How how prescient do you think this misunderstanding of history is to public policy and even academic and now mainstream political discourse?
00:18:01.359 --> 00:18:05.440
Well, by prescient, I think you mean influential.
00:18:05.519 --> 00:18:09.839
Um prescient means um foreseeing.
00:18:10.079 --> 00:18:24.640
So if you mean how influential, it it was very influential, um, particularly in the fifties and sixties when this Marxian interpretation of British history was at its peak.
00:18:25.279 --> 00:18:35.200
And a good deal of government policy was based on this idea that well, this idea has two advantages.
00:18:35.359 --> 00:18:44.960
Firstly, it suggests that you can easily remodel society because what we are now is very modern.
00:18:45.279 --> 00:18:52.480
We were um community-based, um feudal sort of people until, say, the 17th, 18th centuries.
00:18:52.720 --> 00:18:58.079
So we are now in a new world, we can forget that old world, and we can move forward.
00:18:58.240 --> 00:19:04.640
So the the Marxian message is one of empowering you to make big changes.
00:19:04.720 --> 00:19:16.640
So the world of Harold Wilson and the 1960s and into the 70s was very much dominated by that.
00:19:17.200 --> 00:19:22.160
Um, and the welfare state and so on were all around this.
00:19:22.880 --> 00:19:47.359
When my book came out, um it was very influential because it also this sort of kind of social movement towards a socialist society in Britain had moved to such an extent that in the 70s you got very great power of the trades unions, you had strikes, you had chaos.
00:19:48.400 --> 00:19:55.279
And Thatcher was a symptom and uh reflection of a change of mood.
00:19:55.519 --> 00:19:58.640
And Thatcher herself was a fan of mine.
00:19:59.599 --> 00:20:10.319
That's to say, her uh advisor, particularly Sir Keith Joseph, got his all his treasury ministers to read my book.
00:20:10.640 --> 00:20:18.720
Her um advisers like William Waldegrave and others were great fans of the book, because they suggested two things.
00:20:18.960 --> 00:20:38.319
One was that um all this um was a new fashion in introduced by Marxist thinkers, and that there was an older England which was much more individualistic and uh flexible and market-driven.
00:20:38.640 --> 00:20:43.519
So we could go back and look at that and appreciate it as well.
00:20:43.759 --> 00:20:53.039
So in the Thatcher era, um this new version was quite influential even in government.
00:20:53.200 --> 00:20:56.799
It's the one time I suppose my work has been influential.
00:20:57.359 --> 00:21:02.880
Um but I I read all the stuff you're talking about as well.
00:21:03.039 --> 00:21:10.160
I'm a great fan of Noam Chomsky, and I read all his work and not Cheek Ovara, but others of that thing.
00:21:10.559 --> 00:21:31.200
Um I mean I one likes to think that if one is exploring the world as a young person, one challenges all the current um myths of and and uh assumptions of one's the generation above one, and should one should rebel against it.
00:21:31.440 --> 00:21:44.400
And at the time that you were thinking about it, and even I was thinking about it, the rebellion was against the establishment and hence favoring all that Marxist sort of stuff.
00:21:45.519 --> 00:21:58.160
But one interesting just footnote to this is that um in the 60s and 70s, this was the sort of thing I was interested in, um, and my friends of rebellion.
00:21:58.319 --> 00:21:59.759
Recently I did a an interview.
00:22:00.079 --> 00:22:05.440
Interview with someone who was also a fan and has been influenced by this.
00:22:05.599 --> 00:22:13.920
And in turn, this is by a long chain of circumstances, possibly led to the Gaza ceasefire.
00:22:14.160 --> 00:22:16.880
But this person was someone called Jeff Sachs.
00:22:17.599 --> 00:22:23.839
And he told me that he'd read Origins and been deeply influenced by it.
00:22:24.640 --> 00:22:35.279
But he also, when I interviewed him at length, I asked him about the influence of Marxism when he was at university at Harvard in America in the 60s.
00:22:35.680 --> 00:22:38.160
And he said, absolutely not.
00:22:38.559 --> 00:22:44.160
No one ever taught me anything about Marx, and no one, they just said it was rubbish.
00:22:44.400 --> 00:22:52.400
And so it was in England that this sort of Marxist um interest came up.
00:22:52.559 --> 00:22:56.480
But in America it was much more fringe for various reasons.
00:22:57.920 --> 00:23:01.680
So that's bits and pieces of an answer.
00:23:04.319 --> 00:23:05.359
Remarkable.
00:23:05.680 --> 00:23:18.160
And I would like to delve into uh a little about the relations between historically the different peoples on the island of Great Britain.
00:23:18.319 --> 00:23:25.920
So before we saw big demographic change post-Second World War, so we're talking English, Scottish, uh, and the Welsh.
00:23:26.079 --> 00:23:38.480
Um, and I think we should also include the Irish, given all of the um the interactions and historical events and uh enmity that has existed um between those peoples over the years.
00:23:38.640 --> 00:23:46.240
Um, what what has been the influence of the Celtic fringe on England and vice versa?
00:23:46.400 --> 00:23:50.319
We've spoken a lot about uh English individualism.
00:23:50.559 --> 00:24:19.920
We've we've spoken about uh in the previous episode how this is something that spread across the world with uh the uh the the Britain heading over to the Americas and Australasia uh and beyond, and now it's the water in which we swim, and that's modernity because of that English way of life, which was an emergent property uh many, many centuries ago, more than millennia millennia ago.
00:24:20.079 --> 00:24:27.519
So so instead of focusing all on England, what's been the influence of the Celtic nations on England and vice versa?
00:24:28.160 --> 00:24:42.079
Well, just to declare an interest, um my name is Alan Donald James MacFarlane, um, and I'm five-eighths by ancestry Scottish through my parents.
00:24:42.480 --> 00:24:57.599
I'm also about quite a lot Welsh, um two of my families are from Wales, um and um just two things that are surprising.
00:24:57.759 --> 00:25:14.640
One is that when I read history at Oxford, I had a Scottish, by name anyway, teacher, a very famous medievalist called James Campbell, and he sent me a long essay to do in the holiday, my first holidays, on Norman Scotland.
00:25:15.759 --> 00:25:24.079
And what that basically showed me was that during the Norman period, most of Scotland was just part of England.
00:25:26.160 --> 00:25:42.880
I mean there were fringes, no doubt the Outer Isles and right in the north, but most of it had been uh Anglicised in its feudal, uh in its governmental structure, and in many other ways.
00:25:43.039 --> 00:25:46.079
So the clans were weak relatively weak.
00:25:46.400 --> 00:25:56.559
So the idea that until the unification of these countries, Scotland was a separate country was shown to be a delusion.
00:25:57.279 --> 00:26:03.599
Um the Scottish kings who came to England weren't coming from a different country.
00:26:03.759 --> 00:26:08.319
They were coming from a country with very deep, similar roots to England.
00:26:08.880 --> 00:26:14.640
And the second part of that is that Scotland is two countries.
00:26:15.680 --> 00:26:28.640
The Highland Celtic Catholic Scotland of my ancestors to a certain extent, and the Scotland, which is the wealthy part, the lowlands, is another Scotland.
00:26:28.720 --> 00:26:42.720
The lowlands are absolutely hardly different at all, and that's why the writings of people like Adam Smith from that area chime in so beautifully with English thought and so on.
00:26:42.960 --> 00:26:49.039
So you have to get the Highland Line, which is in the middle of Scotland, and talk about these separately.
00:26:49.680 --> 00:26:59.920
My ancestors were on the west coast and now are still in the Outer Isles, but um they thought in a different way.
00:27:00.400 --> 00:27:14.480
So um the English very early, and they did the same in Wales, Wales from very early on was influenced by England and was united very early.
00:27:14.720 --> 00:27:19.680
So the English have had a huge and immense effect on the Celtic fringe.
00:27:19.839 --> 00:27:22.480
There's no doubt about that from very early on.
00:27:23.599 --> 00:27:38.000
In terms of the other way round, um the the whole Celtic world, the the Gallic language, the kinship system, everything about the Celts is very different from the Anglo-Saxons.
00:27:39.039 --> 00:28:17.519
And so that admixture of a much more um poetic, spiritual, um filled with myths and legends and a very different um aesthetic and intellectual world, has had, through Scottish writings and Scottish artists and others, and also Welsh and Irish, a huge effect on England.
00:28:17.759 --> 00:28:21.599
I mean, it's many of the greatest of our writers.
00:28:21.839 --> 00:28:24.079
My favourite poet of the 20th century, W.
00:28:24.240 --> 00:28:24.319
B.
00:28:24.480 --> 00:28:36.400
Yates, for example, and others are from the Celtic fringe, and they carry across that deeper interest in a less less practical world.
00:28:36.480 --> 00:28:45.680
The English are very plodding, down to earth, practical, money seeking, nation of shopkeepers kind of people.
00:28:46.000 --> 00:28:56.799
These mystical kind of second sight Scottish away with the fairies sort of people are a very useful counterbalance.
00:28:58.000 --> 00:29:22.559
And of course, um their effect not only on England but on the British Empire is out of proportion to their size, because most well, I don't know if it's most, but many, many of the early settlers, uh rather uh colonialists like my father and his family in India were from Scotland.
00:29:23.359 --> 00:29:30.960
Um they went um this is for obvious reasons, which is Scotland is so poor.
00:29:31.359 --> 00:29:35.200
Once you get into the highlands, there's nothing for anyone to do.
00:29:35.279 --> 00:29:38.640
It only needs one person to look after a herd of sheep.
00:29:38.799 --> 00:29:40.720
What are the other sons going to do?
00:29:40.960 --> 00:29:48.480
One might go into the ministry, but if you have one out looking after the sheep and one in the ministry, what are the rest going to do?
00:29:48.640 --> 00:29:55.920
They're gonna go to India, Burma, China, wherever, and make the British Empire.
00:29:56.160 --> 00:30:05.839
So many of the great imperialists were Scottish, and many of those who set up the firms, like Jardine Matheson and Hong Kong and so on, Scottish.
00:30:06.160 --> 00:30:25.839
So it's had a huge kind of rebounding effect because these Scotsmen, Irishmen and in America, Welshmen, like my ancestors who went to Jamaica, they shaped the British Empire, and the British Empire shaped England.
00:30:26.640 --> 00:30:31.759
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00:30:31.839 --> 00:30:40.000
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00:30:59.039 --> 00:31:02.079
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00:31:02.240 --> 00:31:04.480
Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
00:31:06.720 --> 00:31:32.480
You yourself are a child of Empire, you're born in India, and you've you've written about your your schooling in in Britain, how you came back and and and you you spoke about how there was a real uh a real sense of Anglo identity or British identity that was felt across the the Empire.
00:31:32.640 --> 00:31:34.240
Everyone felt part of something.
00:31:34.400 --> 00:31:37.200
Britain was home even when they weren't there.
00:31:37.599 --> 00:31:54.640
And there's a passage in your book, which is the col the collection of the collection of essays, The Invention of the Modern World, where you you you talk about how the boarding school inculcated a kind of nationalism.
00:31:54.720 --> 00:32:00.400
And I'm using that word not in a kind of blood and thunder, blood and soil sense.
00:32:00.880 --> 00:32:11.680
You spoke about how you were um you were uh marinaded in literature, songs, rituals, religion, rank, and national character was brought through.
00:32:11.839 --> 00:32:16.400
I think the words you used that there was an ancient and powerful myth of unity.
00:32:16.799 --> 00:32:32.160
And it made me think a little bit about a film I saw which is uh set uh indeed at the university in which you made your name at the University of Cambridge, that the Chariots of Fire about uh uh Eric Liddell and Howard Abrams.
00:32:32.319 --> 00:32:50.240
And Howard Abrams was was Jewish, his father was Lithuanian, and he went to went to Cambridge, and there's a scene in the film where there are some Cambridge dons, and they say that their job is not just to teach them whatever they're there to be taught, their job is to teach them to be Englishmen.
00:32:50.720 --> 00:33:02.160
And I suppose my question is that we live in post-Second World War world focused on multiculturalism.
00:33:02.319 --> 00:33:06.319
It is not really any sense of uh unity.
00:33:06.480 --> 00:33:14.079
If anyone talks about how there was once a unity, it is dismissed as fairy tales or uh or that it's corrosive in some way.
00:33:14.400 --> 00:33:24.799
And my question is: should we still have space for this kind of mythmaking within the formation of the people of Britain?
00:33:27.119 --> 00:33:29.279
Well, it's a complex question.
00:33:29.599 --> 00:33:34.000
Um I'm not sure I'll answer it absolutely directly.
00:33:34.319 --> 00:33:38.720
The early characterization you made, which um made two points.
00:33:38.880 --> 00:33:55.759
One is that the English were peculiar in their empire, in that unlike other empires in in Europe, they always my father who went to India and others, and my grandparents and great-grandparents, they always thought of England as home.
00:33:56.000 --> 00:34:06.640
Whereas in the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and other empires, um many of those who went stayed and settled, married local women and the rest of it.
00:34:06.880 --> 00:34:28.639
So um, but it's very clear from the letters and so on that I've uh edited with, or my wife Sarah's edited, that um they always thought, they were always waiting to go home, and home was England, and they uh famously set up home wherever they were.
00:34:28.800 --> 00:34:40.559
So if they were in Upper Burma like my great-grandfather, they uh set and did plays and um wrote poetry and dreamed about home all the time.
00:34:41.519 --> 00:34:50.880
So that was the kind of empire, it was an unusual empire in that always England was the focal point of their sentiments.
00:34:51.119 --> 00:35:02.559
And sending us back to those boarding schools was part of that, that if we didn't go back, then we would not be part of that dream home.
00:35:02.880 --> 00:35:07.920
We would become local people going to local schools and so on.
00:35:08.159 --> 00:35:15.760
So, whereas the French and others educated their children in the empire, we were sent home to these boarding schools.
00:35:15.920 --> 00:35:33.039
And the boarding schools would teach us a very complicated thing because as Adam no David Hume pointed out, if there is any kind of national characteristic of the British, it's that they don't have a national characteristic.
00:35:33.280 --> 00:35:35.360
We don't have a national character.
00:35:35.519 --> 00:35:45.440
The feeble attempts of governments to sit down immigrants and tell them what they should be if they are British, you know, uh are laughable, you know.
00:35:45.679 --> 00:35:51.679
They should learn a bit of Shakespeare or learn to like fish and chips or something.
00:35:51.840 --> 00:35:57.039
I mean, you know, how do you define the twenty characteristics of being British?
00:35:57.280 --> 00:35:59.599
So it's a very difficult job for the schools.
00:35:59.840 --> 00:36:07.039
So what they taught us basically was class, that we were upper middle class.
00:36:07.599 --> 00:36:31.360
They taught us humour, they taught us something of the history of our country and something of the history of our literature, they taught us the importance of games, not taking anything too seriously, of fairness, of justice, of um treating people uh civilly and with respect.
00:36:31.840 --> 00:36:37.440
So they taught us values and they taught us some stories about our past.
00:36:38.800 --> 00:36:51.440
And all of that would then make us into professional Englishmen wherever we were, whether we were in the Empire or at home.
00:36:52.320 --> 00:37:00.079
So that was the role both of the schools, and the schools were just a continuation of chariots of fire.
00:37:00.639 --> 00:37:10.159
Um, you know, from the age of eight, I was basically being trained to run round Trinity Great Court and become a long-distance runner or whatever it was.
00:37:10.320 --> 00:37:13.519
Um, it's a seamless web from then on.
00:37:13.679 --> 00:37:21.519
And the final um coating on the cake of Englishness was Cambridge or Oxford or whatever it was.
00:37:22.400 --> 00:37:44.719
Um but one way that I've learnt recently, I've been thinking a lot about this, uh, about how this multicultural world we have in Britain and elsewhere deals with these problems may be of interest to your viewers, though I've only just beginning to write it down and so on.
00:37:45.039 --> 00:38:05.920
Basically, um, when talking particularly to many young students from other countries, and they ask me how they can resolve the fact that they are in England, they've been in England for some time at English schools, yet they're Chinese or Japanese or whatever it is, what are they?
00:38:06.320 --> 00:38:10.960
And I say to them, well, think of it at three levels.
00:38:13.119 --> 00:38:18.800
The top level is summarized in the famous Roman saying, When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
00:38:19.840 --> 00:38:22.239
You have to learn the cultural rules.
00:38:22.480 --> 00:38:36.079
If you're in Rome or if you're in China or if you're in England, there are many cultural rules you must learn, which side of the road to walk on, how to greet someone, whether you kiss them or shake hands or whatever.
00:38:36.400 --> 00:38:43.519
Um, there are hundreds of little signifiers which you've got to learn as cultural rules.
00:38:43.760 --> 00:38:49.920
Once you've mastered those and the English sense of humor and so on and so on, you are culturally English.
00:38:50.480 --> 00:38:55.519
But of course, you are also culturally Chinese or whatever.
00:38:55.840 --> 00:39:01.599
They are a set of it's like learning the piano or learning to play tennis.
00:39:01.760 --> 00:39:07.760
You learn the rules of the game, and you play the game when you're in that country and you play another game.
00:39:07.920 --> 00:39:09.519
So that's easy.
00:39:10.400 --> 00:39:14.719
The second level is your identity.
00:39:16.639 --> 00:39:24.239
And your identity is what you say when you answer the question, who are you?
00:39:27.840 --> 00:39:32.880
When we go on taxi um trips, which we do frequently.
00:39:33.119 --> 00:39:40.559
Most of the taxi drivers in Cambridge are from Eastern Europe or the subcontinent or somewhere like that.
00:39:40.880 --> 00:39:46.000
And so we get into conversation, we say, you know, where are you from?
00:39:46.159 --> 00:39:52.239
And they say, Well, I've been in England for 20 years, but I'm from Bulgaria or Pakistan or something.
00:39:52.559 --> 00:39:57.519
And then if we ask them, I say, you know, are you you feel English?
00:39:57.840 --> 00:40:01.039
They say, no, of course I was born and brought up in Pakistan.
00:40:01.119 --> 00:40:05.360
I'm Pakistani, but I live here and I play the game.
00:40:05.519 --> 00:40:07.039
They don't put in those words.
00:40:07.360 --> 00:40:11.440
But my family are there and I may go back and retire there.
00:40:11.920 --> 00:40:18.159
So your identity is often very different from the cultural rules.
00:40:18.400 --> 00:40:22.800
But an interesting thing I've learnt recently is that you can have multiple identities.
00:40:23.039 --> 00:40:32.239
I'll give you a nice example from a very dear young friend of mine who's ten years old and who was born in England.
00:40:32.400 --> 00:40:38.559
He's Chinese, he was born in England and he's lived in England all his life, and he's in an English boarding school.
00:40:38.960 --> 00:40:46.400
And so when I say to him, um, we'll call him Jay, Jay, are you English?
00:40:47.119 --> 00:40:50.719
And he pauses for a minute and he says yes.
00:40:52.639 --> 00:40:55.840
Though his parents teach him Chinese and the rest of it.
00:40:56.000 --> 00:41:09.280
But when we get on the plane to China together, and they start serving us delicious Chinese food, and the waitresses are beautiful young Chinese air hostesses, and the music is Chinese and so on.
00:41:09.440 --> 00:41:12.239
I say to Jay, What are you?
00:41:12.400 --> 00:41:14.559
And he said, Chinese, of course.
00:41:16.159 --> 00:41:18.159
And when he's in China, he's Chinese.
00:41:18.239 --> 00:41:22.159
So he has split identities, multiple identities.
00:41:22.719 --> 00:41:30.079
The third level, which has interested me recently, is is personality and character.
00:41:31.760 --> 00:41:46.320
And to give you an example, the people I worked with in the mountains of Himala of the Himalayas migrated down into the cities of India and Hong Kong and came to Britain.
00:41:46.719 --> 00:41:52.559
And they're now in the second and third generation in North London, for example.
00:41:52.880 --> 00:42:21.119
But when I look at the children in the third generation and look at how they behave to each other, to me, to the world, their character, which is formed in the first year or two of their life by the influence of their parents and their siblings, is still the character that I saw fifty years ago in a mountain village in the Himalayas.
00:42:21.280 --> 00:42:37.119
In other words, they are respectful of old age, they're very truthful, they're very optimistic, they're gentle, they're very sensitive, they have all the qualities that I admired with their parents and grandparents long ago.
00:42:37.360 --> 00:42:46.159
And this is transmitted invisibly by the way we are brought up in the first two or three years.
00:42:46.639 --> 00:42:53.280
And that doesn't change, and I think that goes on possibly for several generations.
00:42:54.559 --> 00:43:11.519
And I think if you did an investigation of people in Britain who are second, third, fourth generation from all over the world, and looked at actually how they're behaving with each other and with um their parents and so on, you'd find that.
00:43:11.679 --> 00:43:16.719
So these are the three levels which coexist in all of us.
00:43:18.559 --> 00:43:20.000
It's fascinating.
00:43:20.079 --> 00:43:43.039
It's a question that is asked, I think, much more frequently these days, with uh, as we referred to earlier, a big demographic shift having taken place in the country, continues to take place, I think something like 4.2 million people net having arrived in the last five years from all over the world.
00:43:43.119 --> 00:43:52.000
And there have been all sorts of uh studies done on uh the notion of integration or the long tail of culture.
00:43:52.159 --> 00:43:57.840
Uh and and there was an excellent work by Paul Collier called Exodus.
00:43:58.159 --> 00:44:15.679
You may have read it, where he Spoke about how the the bigger the numbers of a certain a certain people from a certain place typically group into a diaspora and then at that point there's not really any meaningful integration as such because culturally you can remain the same.
00:44:15.840 --> 00:44:16.880
It's back to that point.
00:44:18.719 --> 00:44:20.079
Do you play the rules of the game?
00:44:20.239 --> 00:44:22.079
Are you doing as the Romans do?
00:44:22.320 --> 00:44:29.679
And what you mentioned there is people end up living as they were brought up in those first few years of their lives.
00:44:29.760 --> 00:44:41.360
And I suppose you've got uh whole generations that will continue ultimately to live in accordance with the mores of their ancestral homelands.
00:44:41.440 --> 00:44:43.199
It's not like true of everyone, of course.
00:44:43.360 --> 00:44:49.199
And uh I I'd quite like to uh to know your thoughts on this, Alan.
00:44:49.440 --> 00:44:53.199
So uh it wasn't that long ago that I read Samuel P.
00:44:53.360 --> 00:45:04.800
Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, but depending on who it is you speak to about the future of a multi-ethnic, a multicultural society determines the kind of answer you get.
00:45:04.960 --> 00:45:18.239
But there's there's a there's a passage which Huntington, I think, is quoted on all of the time, where he says, It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.
00:45:18.400 --> 00:45:23.039
The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.
00:45:23.199 --> 00:45:33.360
Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.
00:45:33.519 --> 00:45:40.559
The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics, the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
00:45:40.800 --> 00:46:00.400
Well, perhaps we can see this on a geopolitical stage, but my question is if we have different civilizations living amongst each other within the confines of a single country, and back to that, is there a need to have a myth of a powerful, an ancient myth of unity?
00:46:00.639 --> 00:46:10.480
Uh what's your take on Clash of Civilizations theory, whether at geopolitical level or or within a nation?
00:46:10.639 --> 00:46:14.719
Does it does it stand up as far as you're concerned?
00:46:16.400 --> 00:46:28.239
Well, th those are separate questions because most of it was about his particular take on that cultural clash, and then at the end you asked me what I thought of his theory.
00:46:28.800 --> 00:46:31.360
You want me to answer both or one or the other?
00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:33.679
Let's go with the first one.
00:46:34.000 --> 00:46:36.000
And sorry for confusing matters.
00:46:36.559 --> 00:46:43.039
Um just to set Huntington in his context, Samuel P.
00:46:43.199 --> 00:46:46.320
Huntington is a war criminal.
00:46:47.119 --> 00:46:47.840
He's dead.
00:46:48.000 --> 00:46:49.280
He was a war criminal.
00:46:49.599 --> 00:46:55.280
He was behind the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, of Vietnam.
00:46:55.760 --> 00:47:07.360
Um he worked for the Pentagon and uh he recommended that the people in the countryside were should be driven out of the countryside by bombing them out if they wouldn't leave.
00:47:08.480 --> 00:47:10.559
That's the first part of his life.
00:47:10.880 --> 00:47:19.840
And the book after that book is the application of his theory of that we can't mix with other people.
00:47:20.400 --> 00:47:30.079
And he he was the advocate of building a large wall, um, which Trump took up, uh, which would keep out foreigners.
00:47:31.679 --> 00:47:41.920
Um, I mean, it was a bit late because quite a lot of foreigners had already arrived in America by that time, um, including his ancestors, no doubt.
00:47:42.159 --> 00:47:48.320
Um so um that's Huntingdon's message.
00:47:48.960 --> 00:47:58.800
I think his work is deeply, deeply harmful and um unpleasant and misguided.
00:47:59.440 --> 00:48:19.039
Um and to just to give you an example, um I live in a small Fenland village, which until ten years ago, you'd never or hardly ever see anyone from any other culture.
00:48:20.159 --> 00:48:30.079
Um they were all increasingly commuters from Cambridge, but they were all white um English sort of British sort of people.
00:48:30.559 --> 00:48:48.719
During the last ten years, um perhaps, I don't know, one in five or six people you see now are from Africa, India, China, Japan, continent, whatever.
00:48:49.599 --> 00:48:57.039
And most of them are reverting to my idea, they're w they're learning the cultural rules perfectly well.
00:48:57.360 --> 00:49:10.400
They join the cricket team if they they teach their children cricket, uh, they go to the local schools, they integrate and are doing useful work in the National Health Service or whatever it is.
00:49:10.639 --> 00:49:15.840
So they're perfectly good citizens of our village.
00:49:17.119 --> 00:49:30.159
Um but I suspect that in their home life they carry across parts of their culture in form of food and maybe their religion and so on and so on.
00:49:30.400 --> 00:49:32.880
But there's no clash.
00:49:33.119 --> 00:49:53.440
And that was one of the great features of the British Empire by separating off the social rules, the economic and social and political rules, so that you had to pay your taxes and obey the the law and so on and so on, from your cultural life, what you believed and what you ate and what you wore.
00:49:53.599 --> 00:50:02.079
The British managed to run this multicultural vast empire very mostly peacefully.
00:50:02.800 --> 00:50:26.960
So I don't see at all when I go to Chinatown in London or parts of Cambridge which are now have lots of immigrants, Chinese and Indian, I sense no sense of antagonism or strain or um whatever.
00:50:27.199 --> 00:50:39.440
When I look at the students in my college, perhaps half of whom now come from non-English backgrounds, if not more, they get on extremely well.
00:50:39.599 --> 00:50:52.800
When I look at my young friends, and this is an important point, we of my generation find all this p possibly threatening and uncomfortable.
00:50:53.119 --> 00:51:01.840
Even the generation below me find this sudden change very disturbing or possibly disturbing.
00:51:02.159 --> 00:51:09.039
My grandchildren's generation, the twenties, don't even notice it.
00:51:09.840 --> 00:51:22.719
I mean, if you if you watch your television for five minutes and you look at a school in London, it's multicultural and they appear to be getting on.
00:51:22.800 --> 00:51:31.519
I have a friend who was a teacher in one of these schools, North London schools, and he said sixty different languages were to were spoken in the school I was at Master of.
00:51:32.639 --> 00:51:44.079
So I I don't I think it's a false old uh contr uh uh contradiction or um uh opposition.
00:51:44.800 --> 00:51:57.599
So I think uh it's it's a panic, all this I mean the whole um boat business is a is an artificially created panic to divert attention from other things.
00:51:57.920 --> 00:52:16.480
I mean if you're worried about people coming and living in this country, why bother about, you know whatever few thousands or tens of thousands are coming in boats, uh but not uh bringing in uh tens of hundreds of thousands of other people.
00:52:16.639 --> 00:52:21.840
I mean it's a small two percent or whatever of the immigrants to this country are coming that way.
00:52:22.239 --> 00:52:27.760
So I'm quite relaxed, as you see, um, about a lot of this.
00:52:27.840 --> 00:52:40.960
And I think that Huntington, his whole um idea is, and I can go on to the other aspects of it if you want, but I think it's very misguided.
00:52:43.840 --> 00:52:47.920
I I agree that largely people rub along pretty pretty well.
00:52:48.000 --> 00:53:07.039
I mean, even even myself, I uh I am marrying into um an ethnically mixed family, and um uh much to much to be said about the um my future father-in-law and and his past and his love for the country.
00:53:07.280 --> 00:53:14.880
I suppose I think people I think people are concerned not just about the boats, but the the large numbers.
00:53:14.960 --> 00:53:44.639
And I think they're concerned primarily because of um the notion of cultural transfer, that point about diaspora earlier on, is if you if you have uh a large demographic change of peoples and you say, for instance, South Hall in London, you know, it's a it it it is uh a very Hindu Indian area, um, and all the shops will reflect those kind of things.
00:53:44.880 --> 00:54:04.800
I suppose people's people's attachment in this respect are let's say in 50 years' time we're looking at um uh you know a minority majority, insofar as less than 50% of the country are for of white British extraction, as it were, and we're talking about the long tail of culture.
00:54:04.960 --> 00:54:09.519
I think people are having that sense of, well, what does that mean for our politics?
00:54:09.679 --> 00:54:40.320
If you see examples of politics being transplanted from elsewhere and these things we've talked about that are very unique, like the common law, whether it's the the way of life, is if though if the diasporas grow so so large that there is no one learning the cultural game, then I think as far as I can see, I can understand why people would have concerns about that because that's not home to them.
00:54:40.480 --> 00:54:56.880
Um but I do understand what you're saying with regards to pushing constantly this notion that there are clashes among civilizations is not necessarily going to lead to a peaceable, peaceable relations.
00:54:57.199 --> 00:55:04.000
Um so much longer conversation on that one, and and perhaps a little bit away from where we're from.
00:55:04.079 --> 00:55:28.639
But one thing that I wanted to finish on, Alan, in this particular part is religion in the country and um religion in the sense of uh England and then Britain becoming a Protestant island, and many talk about uh the Reformation in a way that you don't necessarily recognize.
00:55:28.719 --> 00:55:41.360
So people will talk about the Reformation as being this point in time where everything changed, but you argue that the English Reformation was actually an epiphenomenon of English culture.
00:55:41.920 --> 00:55:43.679
What do you mean by that?
00:55:46.159 --> 00:56:03.280
Well, as with many things, you can see the Reformation as both a big change and a revolution and something that set things in another direction, and at the same time very continuous, and that's the nature of history.
00:56:03.840 --> 00:56:20.000
Um if you look at um English belief and practice and ritual before the Reformation, you find many of the features of the post-Reformation there.
00:56:20.480 --> 00:56:32.320
For example, the rather ascetic puritanistic aspects of the English Reformation are there in English life in many respects.
00:56:32.480 --> 00:56:52.639
If you look at, for example, the architecture of my college in Cambridge, King's College, and you look at the um 15th century part of it before, it was all built before the Reformation, it was finished just as the Reformation was happening.
00:56:52.800 --> 00:57:03.199
And it is Protestant and ascetic and severe and all the things that we associate with Puritanism.
00:57:03.440 --> 00:57:22.880
If you look at the work of um, for example, someone uh who was very ended up very high in the Anglican Church, John Wycliffe, in the 15th century, 14th century, he was a Reformation thinker.
00:57:23.039 --> 00:57:33.039
He didn't like the Pope, he didn't believe in much of the Catholic belief, and his followers, the Lollards, were the same.
00:57:33.280 --> 00:57:42.960
So there was a very strong stream in England of Protestantism going right back to through the centuries.
00:57:43.760 --> 00:57:49.199
And um Max Weber himself isn't widely known.
00:57:49.280 --> 00:57:51.760
Most people read his book, The Protestant Ethic.
00:57:51.920 --> 00:58:10.639
But if you look at his wider work on the um religions of the West, he recognises that there is this Protestant stream going back even into the early church.
00:58:10.800 --> 00:58:24.239
And indeed the Protestants argued that this had been lost, that the overlayer of Catholicism had overlaid what was always there, which was the simple message of Jesus and so on and so on.
00:58:24.559 --> 00:58:28.159
Um and that all you were doing was recovering that.
00:58:28.559 --> 00:58:36.239
So I think the Reformation was um immensely important.
00:58:37.199 --> 00:58:53.679
In for example, if you hadn't had, and I've written just written a piece on this, the Reformation started in my college in Kings, in a pub on the edge of my college within it, called the White Heart.
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There's a blue plaque.
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If anyone visits Cambridge, they should look at the blue plaque which says, This is where the Protestant Reformation, one of the places it started, and it started in an inn called the White Heart, where the great writers and translators of the Reformation, Whitgift and uh Aylmer and other people, congregated and discussed the new writings coming from Germany and translated them and then preached them and persuaded uh Henry VIII to go with it.
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So and if that hadn't happened, if there hadn't been that pub, if Kings hadn't existed, we would now be living in a Catholic Europe.
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Because without the switch of Europe of Britain, the growing power to um Protestantism, it would have almost certainly been wiped out in the small pockets where it was um beginning to flourish in northern Germany and Holland.
00:59:58.719 --> 01:00:08.800
And so that small accident of Anne Boleyn wanting to marry Anne Boleyn, so this is the beauty of history.
01:00:09.039 --> 01:00:27.679
You've got the great forces that England was always Protestant, argument, plus the attraction of one man to one woman, Anne Boleyn, which led by chance to our present world.
01:00:31.760 --> 01:01:08.239
It's it's fascinating, all of these hinge moments in in history, and to put a final point on that Protestantism being a natural reflection of the English, is what you're getting at the the way the English lived, this individual, very loose community, though there was a civil society that was created out of these uh volunteer groups of people getting together to work on things is quite transactional.
01:01:08.480 --> 01:01:25.840
Whereas when you look at the southern southern European nations, and and and I think lots of us can look enviously towards them when they go, Oh, look how tightly knit they are, and but they live in multi-generational households, and and you've said that that never really never really happened in in English history.
01:01:26.000 --> 01:01:47.519
Um, is it is Protestantism an epiphenomenon because ultimately it was a more truer reflection of how the English lived and governed themselves through the common law than Roman law, where there was that diktat from the top and a much more tight community.
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Is that is that on the right lines or am I totally off there?
01:01:51.280 --> 01:02:02.079
No, no, that's that's it's not exactly an epiphenomenon, but it's part of a package because ideology both reflects and creates things.
01:02:02.320 --> 01:02:28.639
So the extreme individualism of the English in their economic and legal systems, that each person has their rights and duties and in law and is treated as equal and so on, the fact that they have advanced private property and ownership of their own means of production and so on, all that individualism and protection of the individual means that people don't sit easily with being told what to do.
01:02:29.519 --> 01:02:31.440
And you can find it in many other things.
01:02:31.599 --> 01:02:39.360
The English pub, for example, is another part of it, and that's why it's rather nice that the English Reformation began in a pub.
01:02:39.599 --> 01:02:46.719
You know, you stand around at the bar and you say, What are these useless politicians doing now?
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Now, you know, in most countries you'd be sent off to prison for such sp talk, and there would be spies listening and so on.
01:02:54.880 --> 01:03:02.320
But in England you can talk about how useless the government is, and you know you want to do this and that and so on.
01:03:02.480 --> 01:03:23.280
So it's all part of a fairly egalitarian, self-confident, well-educated, affluent sort of society which goes back, and if you want to see it in action in a beautiful poetic form, read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
01:03:24.000 --> 01:03:37.519
I mean, these opinionated, bossy, um, tough, um, somewhat um obscene characters who tell their tales are English.
01:03:37.920 --> 01:03:46.159
And they're, you know, the women are telling their tales, the men are telling their tales, the ordinary people, the knights, and so on.
01:03:46.320 --> 01:03:58.320
And they all reflect great self-confidence, great um private um views about all sorts of things.
01:03:58.559 --> 01:04:05.119
And you wouldn't find something like the Canterbury Tales, I don't think in any other culture at that time.
01:04:06.400 --> 01:04:07.039
Hmm.
01:04:08.639 --> 01:04:11.599
Well, I'm gonna draw it to a close there, Alan.
01:04:11.760 --> 01:04:27.039
There's going to be a part two, and in that part two, I'd like to delve a little bit more into your own personal view of religion and uh also religion more broadly within within Britain.
01:04:27.199 --> 01:04:35.119
But I'd also like to cover sexual relations, violence, and class relations.
01:04:35.519 --> 01:04:44.320
Uh, I think that will that that will draw things uh together quite nicely in this this exploration of the English and indeed the the British.
01:04:44.480 --> 01:04:52.880
Uh Alan, it's been an absolute pleasure to be able to pick your brains again and I look forward to picking up the threads for the next time we speak.
01:04:53.360 --> 01:04:53.760
Thank you.
01:04:53.840 --> 01:05:03.519
And I if I can just end by saying that on High Table at Oxford and Cambridge until recently, all the subjects you've mentioned are not to be talked about.
01:05:03.760 --> 01:05:06.559
Sex, religion, politics.
01:05:06.960 --> 01:05:07.280
No.
01:05:08.800 --> 01:05:11.440
So don't ask me at high table, okay?
01:05:11.840 --> 01:05:12.480
That's all right.
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I would never be invited there.
01:05:14.079 --> 01:05:20.480
I'm I'm certainly not not academic enough and and nor never been able to make my way into such an august institution.
01:05:20.639 --> 01:05:30.639
So I'm I'm taking advantage of this digital world to be able to speak to uh the professor emeritus of one of the greatest educational institutions ever created.
01:05:30.719 --> 01:05:38.079
So uh if they if they're silly enough to not go and ask you these questions, then I I'm I don't know the rules, so I'm gonna break them.
01:05:38.320 --> 01:05:38.639
Okay.
01:05:39.760 --> 01:05:40.239
Thank you.
01:05:40.400 --> 01:05:41.280
Thank you, Ellen.
01:05:41.440 --> 01:05:42.800
Until next time.
01:05:47.360 --> 01:05:56.960
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