00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, Welcome once again to conversations. I fear I'm going to be vastly out of my depth today with my next guest. Raymond Gator is an Australian philosopher. But what an interesting story he has to tell. He's probably better known by the wider community for his novel Romulus My Father, which was made into a really good film, the story about his father and Raymond's early life as well and later life. I've been reading one of his books. It's called Justice and Hope, Essays, lectures and other writings, and if you want to stimulate your mind, just pick up this book because it covers a breadth of topics. He joins us Raymond Gator, and thank you so much.
00:00:42
Speaker 2: I'm very pleased to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:00:45
Speaker 1: You described as a moral philosopher. Now I'm not sure what that is.
00:00:52
Speaker 2: Well within amongst philosophers, it's controversial in itself, but let's just say what I think it is, and I'll start up with a little bit about my childhood.
00:01:06
Speaker 1: Actually, well, i'd love to talk. I'd love to talk about your childhood because it's so formative and it's so interesting and indeed side tragic.
00:01:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I say in the book Romulus my father that, and I say this of my father and his very dear friend Horror, who helped bring me up because my mother was often absent, and in fact, she killed herself when I was twelve, and Horror had enormous influence on my life. But I say of them both in that book that I've never met anybody who believed, really in their bones and not just in their head, that the most important thing in life is to live it decently. And I say also of them that I've not met anybody who had such disdain for people who relied on the external signs of status, prestige and so on. And that obviously I picked that up, really a sense of that, very quickly in my childhood with them, And so I grew up with a profound sense that morality, it wasn't just important, but it was on some kind of different plane in our lives. It wasn't just a way we regulate our interests, you know that, or keep the show, wasn't just a way of keeping the show on the road. That that that morality could have such an importance in a life as it was in the lives of Horror and my father made me reflect on what this kind of mysterious thing is morality. That's when I started thinking about, well, that's when I started to think about what for me at the central questions of moral philosophy. It wasn't it's There are some philosophers who think that philosophy philosopher should really be able to tell people how to live. And I think philosophy isn't so much a matter of trying to work out principles to help people how to live, is try to try to understand what morality is and how best to understand the situations the moral situations?
00:03:37
Speaker 1: Can I can I budd in there because and I hope this isn't too blunt a question. I mean, you witness the immorality of your mother, who had an affair, and it's been described as promiscuous. Now, I don't know whether that's your description or somebody else's observation, but you witnessed her in fidelity, and I'm wondering how that impacted.
00:03:58
Speaker 2: On you painful. I don't think people have said to me, you must have resented your mother and you probably must continue to resent her deep down in your life. People who are especially interested in psychoanalysis keep saying, Look, these things don't disappear in your life, they keep showing themselves. And my reply to that is, I just don't think it's true. I think if it were true, had it been true, it would have shown in the writing of the book. I wrote the book in three weeks, and Romulus my father. Romulus my father, And as I've said in other places, so it must have been written in my heart long long, long before. So I don't think one could say that there's a resentment shown to my mother in that book. But I did feel, after i'd written it for some time, for almost fourteen years or so, that I hadn't done her quite justice, and so I wrote a very long essay about her, about seventeen thousand words. Book essay is called after Rominus, and the essay is called an unassuageable longing. And I got that expression from Helen Gano, who wrote a piece about me instead of my mother, that she inspired in me. She says she inspired in the boy and assuageable longing when it used to climb into her bed when she was lying depressed in that shack that we lived in on the Malort Planes. And I think that's true, and the essay expresses longing for her. And though I think it's true that she deserted my father, I think that's a moral description that I would apply and me in a way, I think of her as such a troubled woman. But something that is much more important than that is that my father always showed to her always the compassion for her needs, and indeed, when she was with her lover, she suffered. It's really important to say she suffered from many depression. I don't say that in the book because Isa didn't want to introduce theoretical language. I just wanted to describe how it all appeared to me. And promiscuity is one of the signs. One of the common symptoms of it, as is spending a lot money. So she and the lover she took, who had been a very good friend of my father, were often being thrown out of their rented lodgings because he would at the time earn let's say, six pounds a week in those days, and she might just decide to spend twenty pounds on her drill. They are often thrown out, and my father often helped pay the rent. And what was interesting about this is that my father was a Romanian, and so he came from an area of Europe where honor, a certain kind of masculine honor, was almost the central moral idea, and his compatriots used often to say, for God's sake, man, have you no pride? Have you no honor? Your wife goes off, she cuckles you with another man. She has another child by this man, and you helped pay their rent. Have you no shame? My father had plenty of honor, a very profound sense of honor, but he felt that he just couldn't turn his back on their need. And I sensed that as a boy, and it obviously would have made a very deep impression. And therefore on how I saw my mother, even though I knew that people around the area looked down on her, even fact sometimes were even contemptuous of her, Especially the women in that farming area where I grew up. You know, they felt sorry for me and often offered to my father that they would help look after me and so on. And so when my mother just came and went well, they pitied me and were angry with her.
00:09:03
Speaker 1: Fair to say that the compassion within your father trumped any sense of honor he might have had, or any sense of resentment he had. He sounds like he was filled with compassion. You must have you must have inherited that. Well he was.
00:09:20
Speaker 2: And I think you know people who have often asked me about well after the book was published, well, how did you manage to survive your childhood? And one of the really important things was not only that I did feel I was loved. I felt, actually I was loved, even by my mother. I don't think I really doubt of that. But what was just as important as feeling that I had been loved was that my father enabled me to love my mother without embarrassment or shame, because I knew what people thought of her.
00:09:57
Speaker 1: Do you have a relationship with the your half half sibling?
00:10:02
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes. In fact, I'm just arranging for the seven to a birthday seventieth birthday party for one of them.
00:10:12
Speaker 1: So how many are there too?
00:10:14
Speaker 2: Too?
00:10:15
Speaker 1: I want to trace you. I was fascinated, obviously by the story your father Romanian, but he worked in Germany during during the war. He was a metal worker, so I can imagine he must have worked on armaments and things like that.
00:10:31
Speaker 2: Well, he was certainly a conscriptive to work in tool making factories and probably armaments.
00:10:42
Speaker 1: Never talked about that.
00:10:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, he talked about that, but he didn't if he worked on armaments, I don't think he would have thought much of the fact that he did.
00:10:57
Speaker 1: But what was the regime like, Well, I mean, we we're here from outside looking in, But here's somebody in Germany during the war having to deal with the highs and the lows of it and subjected to all sorts of treatment by the regime. How was he treated well?
00:11:17
Speaker 2: He was because after the Jews, the Nazis had their eye on killing quite a few other groups of people in Europe, including the Slavs. His life there was a resky moment. He was often beaten, in fact, by the Gestapo, and he felt, and I think this is probably true that if his relationship to my German mother were known to the Guestavo, that they both would have been shot.
00:11:54
Speaker 1: We need to take a break. It's an amazing story. Raymond Gator is my guest, one of our great philosophers, moral philosopher. I've been reading his book Justice and Hope, Essays, Lectures and other writings. One of these books you could pick up and sort of go to a page and pick up a thread back after the break, Folks, my guest on conversations today is Raymond Gator, one of our great philosophers. But for just before we went to the break, we were talking about Raymond's father who was Romanian but was conscripted during the World War II to work in Germany on as he's a blacksmith, a metal worker. Met Raymond's mother there who was who was German? Did he ever talk about, like when when the end of the World War came, what there must have It must have been chaotic? Did these things are fascinating really when you think about it, How how did things wind down? How did they escape or did they escape or.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: Oh no, it wasn't a matter of needing needing to escape horror had to escape from Romania because that was under it after the war, under a brutal Communist. But immediately after the war he hoped just too that he might thrive as an iron maker, you know the way in Europe where they have these wonderful big gates and balustrades. And he looked forward actually to a relatively he hoped a life in Germany where he could fulfill himself at least in his work, but immediately after the war it was very, very hard. He used to he used to walk up to eighty kilometers just to get for me, especially a bag of potatoes, eighty eighty kilometers, and he would often faint from hunger because he denied himself food that he wanted for me and for my mother.
00:13:55
Speaker 1: So you were born in Germany, weren't you. Do you have any memories of those times?
00:14:00
Speaker 2: Not much. I remember being hit by a tram.
00:14:03
Speaker 1: That's well, you remember that. Oh, you're lucky you can remember it.
00:14:11
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, well, as you know, in Europe the tram tram lines run right next to the footpath. And well, and this is a story about Germany. My I was with my grandmother who was in a in a butcher shop and buying sausages. Well, in those days they would feel, you know, people talk about God knows what goes into a sausage. In those days in Germany, a lot of the content of a sausage was pulpwood.
00:14:43
Speaker 1: Oh, well, anything that satisfies the hunger. So did he talk about making a decision to come to us, to Australia, How did that? How did he end up in Australia.
00:14:56
Speaker 2: Well, my mother had a very very bad ass and it was really terrible, and she had been advised that Australia. Well two things. One is she was already restless, the symptoms of manic depression well showing her, and she was anyway by nature of vivacious and volatile sort of. But also they had been advised that Australia would be a good place for her asthma, especially Melbourne. Well, Melbourne is one of.
00:15:38
Speaker 1: I can't imagine how hard it is. I mean, I'm old enough to remember immigrant children coming to school and they were isolated because they didn't have good grasp of the language. So how hard was it your dad, for your dad to assimilate and indeed you, as a by then young boy, well.
00:15:58
Speaker 2: I don't remember it as being hard. Really, only only a couple of times do I remember being tortured taunted as a Nazi. My father was conscious of being an immigrant and a degree of condescension that was shown to him. But he and Horror even more because Horror was much more politically a political animal than my father, and of course he had fled.
00:16:31
Speaker 3: How did they befend Well, it was part of the condition of their passage to Australia that they worked for two years wherever they were sinned more.
00:16:44
Speaker 2: And they ended up in Central Victoria working on the construction of a reservoir. And so they met in a camp.
00:16:52
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:16:53
Speaker 2: And so when we that is my mother and my father and I arrived in Australia, he was sent to a camp called bonnie Gilla, which is in sort of northern Victoria, and my father was sent on to another camp in central Victoria. And I was with my mother, but she was having already well this would say. Someone came to visit my father from bonnie Gilla and said, look, your wife is stealing our men and your son is running wild. Perhaps you should do something about this. So he brought me down to the camp where he was, but it was a men's only camp, and the authorities allowed me to stay there for a time, but they made it clear that it could be only for a time. So to help to look after me here by that stage met horror in that camp. And so they would alternate shifts, one night shift the other day shift, so that one could always be ready to look after.
00:18:08
Speaker 1: Me after you.
00:18:09
Speaker 2: And my father sought and got the job of cleaning the toilets in the camp so that he could be near me.
00:18:22
Speaker 1: I can't imagine you seem such a gentle soul. I can't imagine you're running wild.
00:18:28
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you can run wild.
00:18:32
Speaker 1: Look.
00:18:33
Speaker 2: By the time I was a teenager, it was all Jimmy Dean and Elvis Presley. And it actually got to a stage when I was a boarding school when three of us decided we would steal a car like that did in a course. And I told this this is I was at a boarding school in Balarat, and we were very lucky. Actually, I mean, this is an important story, just shows how luck comes into your life. We have jumped over the fence and we're on our way, and being country kids, we knew how to start a car with our keys. But within five minutes the police stopped us and one of us had a starting pistol, haven't we We didn't know. We don't. I still don't know.
00:19:27
Speaker 1: Why know he had one starting pistol? Get your self shot?
00:19:31
Speaker 2: And so we were bundled off to the police station and for three hour were separated and for three hours integrity interrogated. I tell you, it was a hell of experience held out of us and they just took us back to the school, threw us and all of us threw us over the fence and said, don't be so stupid again. But if we were really inten to do this, and had we done it, god knows what would have happened.
00:20:04
Speaker 1: And so your father realized that your best chance was to send you to a boarding school. Obviously obviously not a rich man.
00:20:14
Speaker 2: So he worked hard. But that's when when we had to leave the camp because the authority said, he's been here three months, he can stay no longer. And they said, well send him to a boarding not to a boarding school to our own, because at that stage I was only five. Well, that was morally impossible for my father to do, and so by luck we managed to rent an old, broken down farmhouse on a farm that the farmer still had sheep on. He developed diabetes and went blind, came only during shearing times, and I remember I remember him fondly. I remember his wife especially, who was always very very kind to me, and I still have letters from her that she wrote to my mother and saying I'm in the sharing shared with Raymond. I hope you're well.
00:21:11
Speaker 1: And so Raymond Gata is my guest, folks, we need to take a break. It's such an interesting story that this man with such humble beginnings become such a great intellect. Back shortly. Welcome back everybody, if you've just tuned in. We're chatting with Raymond Data, one of our great Australian philosophers. It's a really interesting story of such hardship. When he was a kid growing up, my mother and father immigrated out of wart On, Germany. Her mother had manic depression. Raymond had to go and live with his father. Then eventually he was sent to the boarding school. You were eleven when you were to boarding school, so how formative was that for you?
00:21:54
Speaker 2: Well, to tell the truth, when I was there, I hated the place. And it was a Christian Brothers school college.
00:22:06
Speaker 1: And good football teams.
00:22:09
Speaker 2: Sorry about that. Let's put it this way, young people. Now I wouldn't understand this distinction, but we boys had a very clear distinction in our head between justifiably getting the strap. It was a long, thin thing in which it was rumored they put axle blade and know if that were true, but it felt like it was true. And even if we got six of the best, which happened often, enough, we thought fair cop but when they laid it into us with their fists, we thought this was something different, and there were worse things than that. But to cut a long story short, by the time I was in what is now called year An, I became interested in a philosopher called Bertrand Russell, and he was much hated by the Catholics because he had written a book Why I'm Not a Christian. He had promulgated I said free love was a good thing and ought to be encouraged, and so so I read this book and the headmaster called me over one day and said I he had been telling the boys that I have been reading Bertran Russell, and I said yes. He said immediately, what do you think of his views on sex? And I said, well, Sir, I hadn't thought about them. But I had, in fact said to the boys, remember, maybe free love is a good thing. And he must have got winto that. And he said he thrown me out that I was corrupting the boys, But he said that said at that time, you know, Gota, I don't like the way you think, but I like the way you play football. Well, you star, I wasn't start They used to call me the tank because if you can imagine someone like I don't know, Tom Libertore or Liam without any talent whatsoever, that some talent.
00:24:26
Speaker 1: So look, but this is an important question. Were you the intellect at school? And you know, I guess you know what I mean by that. There's always one or two kids who easily navigate the school curriculum and probably don't have to work hard at it, but their marks are always good.
00:24:44
Speaker 2: Not particularly. I really wasn't all that interested in school work. I was much more interested in Elvis presently and Jimmy Dean and things like that. So no, I wasn't at all used to listen to that music occasionally, but only in the car.
00:25:06
Speaker 1: I imagined more of a classical music sort of guy.
00:25:09
Speaker 2: Well, that pastoral music had been deeply, deeply important to me. But when I was before I went to boarding school, there was a family. When I was at primary school in the little village, there was a family who's they had a hard time. They lived in a really broken down thing. A mother whose husband had deserted her, was an alcoholic and had three girls and two boys. And it was rumored that in order to get money to feed the alcohol addiction. She would allow the girls to sleep with boys from the town. But I was really friendly with one of those girls. And I remember sitting on the veranda of her house and she had a transit radio and honored came Elvis Presley singing, Baby Let's play House. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And she had all these little magazines, and so she showed me these magazines, pictures of Elvis, you know, Elvis, the Devil, Devil music, all that sort of stuff. And I put it in my put these magazines in my school bag and wrote the eight kilometers to our home. And my father was in Melbourne at that time on a business adventure and didn't come home till two o'clock. I wrote a book, my first book, Elves, Devil or Heroes.
00:26:48
Speaker 1: So this mind of yours is developing. But this is the critical question. This is the critical question. Why on earth did you pick the foot Scradeer follow as a football team.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: Well, actually it's how I played football and enjoyed it when I said school. I didn't get really interested in as a spectator sport until my first grandson was born, and he became really fretty crazy and in Seedin, which is next to foot Gap, and his mother, being very community minded, said well, if you're going to be football made, you're better support your local teams. I thought, well, in that case, I should take my grand and well, now I'm more fanatical about the thing. I think it must be. I would reckon. I look up about three three times a week. I look up what's going on?
00:27:44
Speaker 1: You've had the heartbreak, you've had that one good year and that amazing year.
00:27:49
Speaker 2: And I went there with my grandson. Did that was an incredible experience.
00:27:55
Speaker 1: It certainly was, except Bob Murphy missed out and we were talking. We were talking offer about Bob Murphy. How much you admire him?
00:28:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do, And we had a wonderful conversation about I published a book at the time, well I mentioned it before, called After Romulus, and in it it has a essay called character, The Limits of Character, and I was going to have a public discussion of it with Helen Garner that she became ill. So the fellow who was organizing and said, what are we going to do now? And I said, well, I don't know, but I occasionally I get this idea that I always dismissed, thinking it's a bit crazy, But why didn't you invite Bob Murphy and we can talk about courage, loyalty, physical courage, moral courage that differ between them and all that sort of thing. And we did, and it was a terrific conversation.
00:28:51
Speaker 1: We're going to around it enough time, as we always do with interesting people. But when did the thoughts of moral philosophy, I mean, when did they really spread? You've talked about, you know, being at boarding school, but one of Australia's great thinkers, how did you reach that high moral plane?
00:29:10
Speaker 2: Well, it happened like this. And in fact, when I went to university I wanted to I studied psychologists to begin with, because there was so much madness in my family. My mother was mentally ill. My father had had a friend who was also mentally ill, who lived between two great rocks near us, which he covered with bits of stuff and cooked in his Europe and offered your food and talked and he was visibly insane, but he was always very very kind to me. He would turn up sometimes in the middle of the night with his big, bushy beard and his big and knock on the window and say, mister gator master Raymond and times stay with us over night, sometimes for a week. So he was there in my life. And my father also went mad and ended up in a mental hospital when we were still living together in that terrible shack. So I thought I'd become a clinical psychologist, hoping to understand these things and to help people like my father and my mother and Vats. But it was the department in which I was studying was hoping or had this illusion that clinical psychology could really be a hard science, and I thought that was just wasn't true. And in my second year I wrote a rather pugnacious essay called man or methodolatry, You're idolizing your method and the fellow who marked it in the psychology department, and they had also to get someone in the philosophy department to market. He was a check famous for being an anti communist on the campus. Notorious. But anyway, he said to me, Gaeta, you're not an impirical psychologist, star. He said, you should be doing philosophy. I said, I don't want to do philosophy. I want to change psychology. He said, never mind, I've made an appointment with a professor of philosophy next week.
00:31:28
Speaker 1: Make sure you keep so and what a philosopher you have become backshortly, folks, My guest on conversations today is Raymond Gator, a famous Australian philosopher. Philosophy intrigues me, Raymond, and I know we haven't got time to address it properly, but the great names around Phillis, you know, the Socrates, Aristotle, Plato. You know when they're they're there beas centuries ago have Are they relevant? Are they still relevant?
00:31:56
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, I mean a Socrates and played he have have had a great influence on my thinking. And in fact, if I think of the difference between me and let's say the working class kids that I grew up with, and my sister is like, let didn't grow up with? Oh well, I won't go into that so long. It's that I feel that my life. I feel that I live in a community of the living the dead, not just the living. And Plato is one of my companions in that community. I really feel that. And Socrates has had a great influence. And he was accused of corrupting the youth and was in a fact told to drink poison hemlock.
00:32:49
Speaker 1: Surely, I mean, how can they be relevant, decided the way society has changed, and the way people interact.
00:32:58
Speaker 2: Well, well a Socrates is well, let me just to say two things in this sect. One is he said as his triald, to explain why he wasn't going to flee and why he wasn't going to stop philosophizing. He said, for him, the unexamined life is not worthy of a human being. And for me, philosophy has been a way of trying to be clear about the meanings of things in my life. And I feel to be clear about those things. You don't have to be too philosophy to be like that, but to be clear about that is a way of honoring the gift of my humanity. And that's my deepest relation to philosophy. But if you've got this just one minute, somebody has also said a thing that's sort of enduring moral relevance. He said, it's better to suffer evil than to do it. And in Romulus my Father, I describe my father as a man who truly believe that it was better to suffer evil than to do it. And a part of my philosophical work has been expounding what I believe to be the importance of that idea personal lives and not political life.
00:34:20
Speaker 1: I've read your discussion on that people who are feeling as though they have to commit evil just to survive, and whether that's justified. Is it justifiable to commit a sin or a crime just to survive. You're saying it's not.
00:34:36
Speaker 2: Well, I think sometimes we shouldn't be too concerned with the question of justification. And it's a morally terrible thing to kill just to survive, But that doesn't mean that someone outside has the right to point fingers.
00:34:52
Speaker 1: One of the chapters in your book, Justice and Hope that I went straight to was the Monk and the Philosophy. Now was admired Buddhism. I've always thought it was a gentle religion, and I suspected you you were critical of it in that essay.
00:35:10
Speaker 2: Well, I was critical of a particular Buddhism monk. I feel I don't understand Buddhism well enough to say I'm critical of it. What I was deeply critical of, and still i am, is the idea that true wisdom enables you to detach from the pains of life, which means, of course, you have to detach your affections. And I think there are two two two have been two big traditions, not just Buddhism and others, but it goes in Christianity. There's versions of this version of it in Plato, a philosophy of detachment, which enables you to suffer the most terrible things, and to suffer the most terrible wrongs, and to suffer the loss the most people you love in the most brutal way and have a kind of attached calm, and that this is wisdom. There's another view, which in that essay I attribute to George Orwell, where you have to be if you want to live a human life, you have to fasten your love on things that can break you. And all Well said in that essay you have to choose between being a saint and a human being. If you're a human being, then you're you have loyalties and loves that if if if, well, if I think of people now in Gaza, I know I've.
00:36:45
Speaker 1: Read your comments on that, and you have a your wife is Jewish and she's from Israel, and it seems it seems to me you are conflicted with what do you think is right and what do you think is wrong?
00:36:57
Speaker 2: Well, I have no one of the deep lessons of the Holocaust should have been that and what you would always taught it was that you can't think of all the Germans as monsters, even though they're involved in the most terrible things we can think of. And there and that good people can support and in fact too but often support or remain silent about really terrible things, and that that I think what Israel is now doing is just there's no there are no two sides to it. It's just evil. But we have people, because of my life in Israel, who have been silent about it or who have supported it, even because of what happened on October seventh, whom we love. But that this is just one of the awful, not awful tragedies of life that people you love through through luck of one kind of another.
00:38:01
Speaker 1: I suspect though it's within you, goodness is innate with you. And I'm not the only person who has made that a Sam Richard King, when he reviewed the book Justice and Hope, he said Gator is too Gator is far too civilized, too humane to want to devastate anybody. When he says we see much, so much contempt and hatred that unspoiling their news feeds every day. But you are above that the world is a good place. This is your quote, the world is a good place despite the suffering and the evil in it. And you know, I've written about Donald Trump and the likes. I mean, do you still have the utmost belief that the world is a good place despite the evil in it?
00:38:45
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well put it. I think you can develop a love of the world which is not conditioned upon your assessment or whether the good in it at the time that you're around outweighs the evil, you know, and so you can have this unconditional love of the world, which I call it because, as I say, it's not conditional upon such an assessment. But be deeply pessimistic as I am.
00:39:17
Speaker 1: You're pessimistic. I would have thought optimism was a thread that runs through your character.
00:39:23
Speaker 2: I sort of feel optimism and pessimism, I think are kind of superficial aspects of our personalty. Some people are optimistic. That's nice, and it's good to have friends optimistic that you you're up and all that.
00:39:39
Speaker 1: But what about realism is that a condition?
00:39:43
Speaker 2: Well, realism, the most fundamental aspect of realism is just to know. You don't know the future. And if you're optimistic, you're you, and your optimism depends always on a your sense that the future will be on the whole, Okay, you won't have much to fall upon. I mean you won't have many moral or spiritual resources to fall on when it all turns terrible. And I think this is my deepest one, sorry, one of them, the deep things of my personality or characters. I really believe nobody knows the future. And if you if you think it's going to be great?
00:40:31
Speaker 1: Great are your kids? Do the kids share your philosophies? An't it?
00:40:38
Speaker 2: But the important thing is if you think it's not, if you're inclined to pessimism and incline there been things that are likely to get words, that doesn't relieve you of an obligation to fight for the world, for the good in the world. If someone says to me, I don't have the energy to fight for the world and to as a mystic, I'd say, well, you better find some energy somewhere, because who cares with your pessimistic.
00:41:07
Speaker 1: You're so qualified, you're so educated. What would you want people to get from reading your book Justice and Hope?
00:41:14
Speaker 2: Well, I would want them to get that and to try. Do we have time for me to read just a little extract? So what I'm talking about doesn't seem I say, it is hard to be optimistic about the future. But perhaps that doesn't matter because optimism and pessimism are superficial expressions of personality. Duck rabbit perceptions of the world, as talk of glass empty, half empty, or half full suggests. Hope it takes many kinds of forms. The first can be one of the deepest expressions of courage and affirmation of life. Its ability to survive unrelenting disappointment relies to a degree on whether it can sustain faith that the good in the world will defeat the ill in it. It also depends on retaining faith in humankind. It must be able to trust that enough people will remain decent even in the worst of times. But there is another kind of hope, and this is the one I'm talking about. It's of a different kind because it's not essentially an orientation towards the future. It's an unconditional love of the world. Unconditional because it's not based on an assessment of the wather. The good outweighs the ill in it. Pablo Casals had an important when I wrote Romulus, I used to listen to him playing the bachjellos with Pablo Cassals. Expressed it in the Wonderful quotation to be Found in an essay that I wrote. It was an expression of his sense of his life, his humanity, and the world as a gift. And this is the quote. For the past eighty years, I've started each day in the same manner. It's not a mechanical routine, but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano and play two preludes and fugues of bach I cannot think of doing otherwise. It's a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not the only meaning. For me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a past. It fills me with the awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. I do not think a day has passed in my life in which I have failed to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature.
00:43:50
Speaker 1: Raymond Gator, what I'd like to chat to you? I wish we had more time. You're going to need all that hope and optimism with your bulldogs.
00:43:57
Speaker 2: Uh giving up on the hope.
00:44:02
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for your time.
00:44:04
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
00:44:05
Speaker 1: Raymond Gator is my guest, folks. The book we're talking about is called Justice and Hope Essays, Lectures and other writings. Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, Welcome once again to conversations. I fear I'm going to be vastly out of my depth today with my next guest. Raymond Gator is an Australian philosopher. But what an interesting story he has to tell. He's probably better known by the wider community for his novel Romulus My Father, which was made into a really good film, the story about his father and Raymond's early life as well and later life. I've been reading one of his books. It's called Justice and Hope, Essays, lectures and other writings, and if you want to stimulate your mind, just pick up this book because it covers a breadth of topics. He joins us Raymond Gator, and thank you so much.
00:00:42
Speaker 2: I'm very pleased to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:00:45
Speaker 1: You described as a moral philosopher. Now I'm not sure what that is.
00:00:52
Speaker 2: Well within amongst philosophers, it's controversial in itself, but let's just say what I think it is, and I'll start up with a little bit about my childhood.
00:01:06
Speaker 1: Actually, well, i'd love to talk. I'd love to talk about your childhood because it's so formative and it's so interesting and indeed side tragic.
00:01:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I say in the book Romulus my father that, and I say this of my father and his very dear friend Horror, who helped bring me up because my mother was often absent, and in fact, she killed herself when I was twelve, and Horror had enormous influence on my life. But I say of them both in that book that I've never met anybody who believed, really in their bones and not just in their head, that the most important thing in life is to live it decently. And I say also of them that I've not met anybody who had such disdain for people who relied on the external signs of status, prestige and so on. And that obviously I picked that up, really a sense of that, very quickly in my childhood with them, And so I grew up with a profound sense that morality, it wasn't just important, but it was on some kind of different plane in our lives. It wasn't just a way we regulate our interests, you know that, or keep the show, wasn't just a way of keeping the show on the road. That that that morality could have such an importance in a life as it was in the lives of Horror and my father made me reflect on what this kind of mysterious thing is morality. That's when I started thinking about, well, that's when I started to think about what for me at the central questions of moral philosophy. It wasn't it's There are some philosophers who think that philosophy philosopher should really be able to tell people how to live. And I think philosophy isn't so much a matter of trying to work out principles to help people how to live, is try to try to understand what morality is and how best to understand the situations the moral situations?
00:03:37
Speaker 1: Can I can I budd in there because and I hope this isn't too blunt a question. I mean, you witness the immorality of your mother, who had an affair, and it's been described as promiscuous. Now, I don't know whether that's your description or somebody else's observation, but you witnessed her in fidelity, and I'm wondering how that impacted.
00:03:58
Speaker 2: On you painful. I don't think people have said to me, you must have resented your mother and you probably must continue to resent her deep down in your life. People who are especially interested in psychoanalysis keep saying, Look, these things don't disappear in your life, they keep showing themselves. And my reply to that is, I just don't think it's true. I think if it were true, had it been true, it would have shown in the writing of the book. I wrote the book in three weeks, and Romulus my father. Romulus my father, And as I've said in other places, so it must have been written in my heart long long, long before. So I don't think one could say that there's a resentment shown to my mother in that book. But I did feel, after i'd written it for some time, for almost fourteen years or so, that I hadn't done her quite justice, and so I wrote a very long essay about her, about seventeen thousand words. Book essay is called after Rominus, and the essay is called an unassuageable longing. And I got that expression from Helen Gano, who wrote a piece about me instead of my mother, that she inspired in me. She says she inspired in the boy and assuageable longing when it used to climb into her bed when she was lying depressed in that shack that we lived in on the Malort Planes. And I think that's true, and the essay expresses longing for her. And though I think it's true that she deserted my father, I think that's a moral description that I would apply and me in a way, I think of her as such a troubled woman. But something that is much more important than that is that my father always showed to her always the compassion for her needs, and indeed, when she was with her lover, she suffered. It's really important to say she suffered from many depression. I don't say that in the book because Isa didn't want to introduce theoretical language. I just wanted to describe how it all appeared to me. And promiscuity is one of the signs. One of the common symptoms of it, as is spending a lot money. So she and the lover she took, who had been a very good friend of my father, were often being thrown out of their rented lodgings because he would at the time earn let's say, six pounds a week in those days, and she might just decide to spend twenty pounds on her drill. They are often thrown out, and my father often helped pay the rent. And what was interesting about this is that my father was a Romanian, and so he came from an area of Europe where honor, a certain kind of masculine honor, was almost the central moral idea, and his compatriots used often to say, for God's sake, man, have you no pride? Have you no honor? Your wife goes off, she cuckles you with another man. She has another child by this man, and you helped pay their rent. Have you no shame? My father had plenty of honor, a very profound sense of honor, but he felt that he just couldn't turn his back on their need. And I sensed that as a boy, and it obviously would have made a very deep impression. And therefore on how I saw my mother, even though I knew that people around the area looked down on her, even fact sometimes were even contemptuous of her, Especially the women in that farming area where I grew up. You know, they felt sorry for me and often offered to my father that they would help look after me and so on. And so when my mother just came and went well, they pitied me and were angry with her.
00:09:03
Speaker 1: Fair to say that the compassion within your father trumped any sense of honor he might have had, or any sense of resentment he had. He sounds like he was filled with compassion. You must have you must have inherited that. Well he was.
00:09:20
Speaker 2: And I think you know people who have often asked me about well after the book was published, well, how did you manage to survive your childhood? And one of the really important things was not only that I did feel I was loved. I felt, actually I was loved, even by my mother. I don't think I really doubt of that. But what was just as important as feeling that I had been loved was that my father enabled me to love my mother without embarrassment or shame, because I knew what people thought of her.
00:09:57
Speaker 1: Do you have a relationship with the your half half sibling?
00:10:02
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes. In fact, I'm just arranging for the seven to a birthday seventieth birthday party for one of them.
00:10:12
Speaker 1: So how many are there too?
00:10:14
Speaker 2: Too?
00:10:15
Speaker 1: I want to trace you. I was fascinated, obviously by the story your father Romanian, but he worked in Germany during during the war. He was a metal worker, so I can imagine he must have worked on armaments and things like that.
00:10:31
Speaker 2: Well, he was certainly a conscriptive to work in tool making factories and probably armaments.
00:10:42
Speaker 1: Never talked about that.
00:10:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, he talked about that, but he didn't if he worked on armaments, I don't think he would have thought much of the fact that he did.
00:10:57
Speaker 1: But what was the regime like, Well, I mean, we we're here from outside looking in, But here's somebody in Germany during the war having to deal with the highs and the lows of it and subjected to all sorts of treatment by the regime. How was he treated well?
00:11:17
Speaker 2: He was because after the Jews, the Nazis had their eye on killing quite a few other groups of people in Europe, including the Slavs. His life there was a resky moment. He was often beaten, in fact, by the Gestapo, and he felt, and I think this is probably true that if his relationship to my German mother were known to the Guestavo, that they both would have been shot.
00:11:54
Speaker 1: We need to take a break. It's an amazing story. Raymond Gator is my guest, one of our great philosophers, moral philosopher. I've been reading his book Justice and Hope, Essays, Lectures and other writings. One of these books you could pick up and sort of go to a page and pick up a thread back after the break, Folks, my guest on conversations today is Raymond Gator, one of our great philosophers. But for just before we went to the break, we were talking about Raymond's father who was Romanian but was conscripted during the World War II to work in Germany on as he's a blacksmith, a metal worker. Met Raymond's mother there who was who was German? Did he ever talk about, like when when the end of the World War came, what there must have It must have been chaotic? Did these things are fascinating really when you think about it, How how did things wind down? How did they escape or did they escape or.
00:12:47
Speaker 2: Oh no, it wasn't a matter of needing needing to escape horror had to escape from Romania because that was under it after the war, under a brutal Communist. But immediately after the war he hoped just too that he might thrive as an iron maker, you know the way in Europe where they have these wonderful big gates and balustrades. And he looked forward actually to a relatively he hoped a life in Germany where he could fulfill himself at least in his work, but immediately after the war it was very, very hard. He used to he used to walk up to eighty kilometers just to get for me, especially a bag of potatoes, eighty eighty kilometers, and he would often faint from hunger because he denied himself food that he wanted for me and for my mother.
00:13:55
Speaker 1: So you were born in Germany, weren't you. Do you have any memories of those times?
00:14:00
Speaker 2: Not much. I remember being hit by a tram.
00:14:03
Speaker 1: That's well, you remember that. Oh, you're lucky you can remember it.
00:14:11
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, well, as you know, in Europe the tram tram lines run right next to the footpath. And well, and this is a story about Germany. My I was with my grandmother who was in a in a butcher shop and buying sausages. Well, in those days they would feel, you know, people talk about God knows what goes into a sausage. In those days in Germany, a lot of the content of a sausage was pulpwood.
00:14:43
Speaker 1: Oh, well, anything that satisfies the hunger. So did he talk about making a decision to come to us, to Australia, How did that? How did he end up in Australia.
00:14:56
Speaker 2: Well, my mother had a very very bad ass and it was really terrible, and she had been advised that Australia. Well two things. One is she was already restless, the symptoms of manic depression well showing her, and she was anyway by nature of vivacious and volatile sort of. But also they had been advised that Australia would be a good place for her asthma, especially Melbourne. Well, Melbourne is one of.
00:15:38
Speaker 1: I can't imagine how hard it is. I mean, I'm old enough to remember immigrant children coming to school and they were isolated because they didn't have good grasp of the language. So how hard was it your dad, for your dad to assimilate and indeed you, as a by then young boy, well.
00:15:58
Speaker 2: I don't remember it as being hard. Really, only only a couple of times do I remember being tortured taunted as a Nazi. My father was conscious of being an immigrant and a degree of condescension that was shown to him. But he and Horror even more because Horror was much more politically a political animal than my father, and of course he had fled.
00:16:31
Speaker 3: How did they befend Well, it was part of the condition of their passage to Australia that they worked for two years wherever they were sinned more.
00:16:44
Speaker 2: And they ended up in Central Victoria working on the construction of a reservoir. And so they met in a camp.
00:16:52
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:16:53
Speaker 2: And so when we that is my mother and my father and I arrived in Australia, he was sent to a camp called bonnie Gilla, which is in sort of northern Victoria, and my father was sent on to another camp in central Victoria. And I was with my mother, but she was having already well this would say. Someone came to visit my father from bonnie Gilla and said, look, your wife is stealing our men and your son is running wild. Perhaps you should do something about this. So he brought me down to the camp where he was, but it was a men's only camp, and the authorities allowed me to stay there for a time, but they made it clear that it could be only for a time. So to help to look after me here by that stage met horror in that camp. And so they would alternate shifts, one night shift the other day shift, so that one could always be ready to look after.
00:18:08
Speaker 1: Me after you.
00:18:09
Speaker 2: And my father sought and got the job of cleaning the toilets in the camp so that he could be near me.
00:18:22
Speaker 1: I can't imagine you seem such a gentle soul. I can't imagine you're running wild.
00:18:28
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you can run wild.
00:18:32
Speaker 1: Look.
00:18:33
Speaker 2: By the time I was a teenager, it was all Jimmy Dean and Elvis Presley. And it actually got to a stage when I was a boarding school when three of us decided we would steal a car like that did in a course. And I told this this is I was at a boarding school in Balarat, and we were very lucky. Actually, I mean, this is an important story, just shows how luck comes into your life. We have jumped over the fence and we're on our way, and being country kids, we knew how to start a car with our keys. But within five minutes the police stopped us and one of us had a starting pistol, haven't we We didn't know. We don't. I still don't know.
00:19:27
Speaker 1: Why know he had one starting pistol? Get your self shot?
00:19:31
Speaker 2: And so we were bundled off to the police station and for three hour were separated and for three hours integrity interrogated. I tell you, it was a hell of experience held out of us and they just took us back to the school, threw us and all of us threw us over the fence and said, don't be so stupid again. But if we were really inten to do this, and had we done it, god knows what would have happened.
00:20:04
Speaker 1: And so your father realized that your best chance was to send you to a boarding school. Obviously obviously not a rich man.
00:20:14
Speaker 2: So he worked hard. But that's when when we had to leave the camp because the authority said, he's been here three months, he can stay no longer. And they said, well send him to a boarding not to a boarding school to our own, because at that stage I was only five. Well, that was morally impossible for my father to do, and so by luck we managed to rent an old, broken down farmhouse on a farm that the farmer still had sheep on. He developed diabetes and went blind, came only during shearing times, and I remember I remember him fondly. I remember his wife especially, who was always very very kind to me, and I still have letters from her that she wrote to my mother and saying I'm in the sharing shared with Raymond. I hope you're well.
00:21:11
Speaker 1: And so Raymond Gata is my guest, folks, we need to take a break. It's such an interesting story that this man with such humble beginnings become such a great intellect. Back shortly. Welcome back everybody, if you've just tuned in. We're chatting with Raymond Data, one of our great Australian philosophers. It's a really interesting story of such hardship. When he was a kid growing up, my mother and father immigrated out of wart On, Germany. Her mother had manic depression. Raymond had to go and live with his father. Then eventually he was sent to the boarding school. You were eleven when you were to boarding school, so how formative was that for you?
00:21:54
Speaker 2: Well, to tell the truth, when I was there, I hated the place. And it was a Christian Brothers school college.
00:22:06
Speaker 1: And good football teams.
00:22:09
Speaker 2: Sorry about that. Let's put it this way, young people. Now I wouldn't understand this distinction, but we boys had a very clear distinction in our head between justifiably getting the strap. It was a long, thin thing in which it was rumored they put axle blade and know if that were true, but it felt like it was true. And even if we got six of the best, which happened often, enough, we thought fair cop but when they laid it into us with their fists, we thought this was something different, and there were worse things than that. But to cut a long story short, by the time I was in what is now called year An, I became interested in a philosopher called Bertrand Russell, and he was much hated by the Catholics because he had written a book Why I'm Not a Christian. He had promulgated I said free love was a good thing and ought to be encouraged, and so so I read this book and the headmaster called me over one day and said I he had been telling the boys that I have been reading Bertran Russell, and I said yes. He said immediately, what do you think of his views on sex? And I said, well, Sir, I hadn't thought about them. But I had, in fact said to the boys, remember, maybe free love is a good thing. And he must have got winto that. And he said he thrown me out that I was corrupting the boys, But he said that said at that time, you know, Gota, I don't like the way you think, but I like the way you play football. Well, you star, I wasn't start They used to call me the tank because if you can imagine someone like I don't know, Tom Libertore or Liam without any talent whatsoever, that some talent.
00:24:26
Speaker 1: So look, but this is an important question. Were you the intellect at school? And you know, I guess you know what I mean by that. There's always one or two kids who easily navigate the school curriculum and probably don't have to work hard at it, but their marks are always good.
00:24:44
Speaker 2: Not particularly. I really wasn't all that interested in school work. I was much more interested in Elvis presently and Jimmy Dean and things like that. So no, I wasn't at all used to listen to that music occasionally, but only in the car.
00:25:06
Speaker 1: I imagined more of a classical music sort of guy.
00:25:09
Speaker 2: Well, that pastoral music had been deeply, deeply important to me. But when I was before I went to boarding school, there was a family. When I was at primary school in the little village, there was a family who's they had a hard time. They lived in a really broken down thing. A mother whose husband had deserted her, was an alcoholic and had three girls and two boys. And it was rumored that in order to get money to feed the alcohol addiction. She would allow the girls to sleep with boys from the town. But I was really friendly with one of those girls. And I remember sitting on the veranda of her house and she had a transit radio and honored came Elvis Presley singing, Baby Let's play House. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And she had all these little magazines, and so she showed me these magazines, pictures of Elvis, you know, Elvis, the Devil, Devil music, all that sort of stuff. And I put it in my put these magazines in my school bag and wrote the eight kilometers to our home. And my father was in Melbourne at that time on a business adventure and didn't come home till two o'clock. I wrote a book, my first book, Elves, Devil or Heroes.
00:26:48
Speaker 1: So this mind of yours is developing. But this is the critical question. This is the critical question. Why on earth did you pick the foot Scradeer follow as a football team.
00:26:58
Speaker 2: Well, actually it's how I played football and enjoyed it when I said school. I didn't get really interested in as a spectator sport until my first grandson was born, and he became really fretty crazy and in Seedin, which is next to foot Gap, and his mother, being very community minded, said well, if you're going to be football made, you're better support your local teams. I thought, well, in that case, I should take my grand and well, now I'm more fanatical about the thing. I think it must be. I would reckon. I look up about three three times a week. I look up what's going on?
00:27:44
Speaker 1: You've had the heartbreak, you've had that one good year and that amazing year.
00:27:49
Speaker 2: And I went there with my grandson. Did that was an incredible experience.
00:27:55
Speaker 1: It certainly was, except Bob Murphy missed out and we were talking. We were talking offer about Bob Murphy. How much you admire him?
00:28:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do, And we had a wonderful conversation about I published a book at the time, well I mentioned it before, called After Romulus, and in it it has a essay called character, The Limits of Character, and I was going to have a public discussion of it with Helen Garner that she became ill. So the fellow who was organizing and said, what are we going to do now? And I said, well, I don't know, but I occasionally I get this idea that I always dismissed, thinking it's a bit crazy, But why didn't you invite Bob Murphy and we can talk about courage, loyalty, physical courage, moral courage that differ between them and all that sort of thing. And we did, and it was a terrific conversation.
00:28:51
Speaker 1: We're going to around it enough time, as we always do with interesting people. But when did the thoughts of moral philosophy, I mean, when did they really spread? You've talked about, you know, being at boarding school, but one of Australia's great thinkers, how did you reach that high moral plane?
00:29:10
Speaker 2: Well, it happened like this. And in fact, when I went to university I wanted to I studied psychologists to begin with, because there was so much madness in my family. My mother was mentally ill. My father had had a friend who was also mentally ill, who lived between two great rocks near us, which he covered with bits of stuff and cooked in his Europe and offered your food and talked and he was visibly insane, but he was always very very kind to me. He would turn up sometimes in the middle of the night with his big, bushy beard and his big and knock on the window and say, mister gator master Raymond and times stay with us over night, sometimes for a week. So he was there in my life. And my father also went mad and ended up in a mental hospital when we were still living together in that terrible shack. So I thought I'd become a clinical psychologist, hoping to understand these things and to help people like my father and my mother and Vats. But it was the department in which I was studying was hoping or had this illusion that clinical psychology could really be a hard science, and I thought that was just wasn't true. And in my second year I wrote a rather pugnacious essay called man or methodolatry, You're idolizing your method and the fellow who marked it in the psychology department, and they had also to get someone in the philosophy department to market. He was a check famous for being an anti communist on the campus. Notorious. But anyway, he said to me, Gaeta, you're not an impirical psychologist, star. He said, you should be doing philosophy. I said, I don't want to do philosophy. I want to change psychology. He said, never mind, I've made an appointment with a professor of philosophy next week.
00:31:28
Speaker 1: Make sure you keep so and what a philosopher you have become backshortly, folks, My guest on conversations today is Raymond Gator, a famous Australian philosopher. Philosophy intrigues me, Raymond, and I know we haven't got time to address it properly, but the great names around Phillis, you know, the Socrates, Aristotle, Plato. You know when they're they're there beas centuries ago have Are they relevant? Are they still relevant?
00:31:56
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, I mean a Socrates and played he have have had a great influence on my thinking. And in fact, if I think of the difference between me and let's say the working class kids that I grew up with, and my sister is like, let didn't grow up with? Oh well, I won't go into that so long. It's that I feel that my life. I feel that I live in a community of the living the dead, not just the living. And Plato is one of my companions in that community. I really feel that. And Socrates has had a great influence. And he was accused of corrupting the youth and was in a fact told to drink poison hemlock.
00:32:49
Speaker 1: Surely, I mean, how can they be relevant, decided the way society has changed, and the way people interact.
00:32:58
Speaker 2: Well, well a Socrates is well, let me just to say two things in this sect. One is he said as his triald, to explain why he wasn't going to flee and why he wasn't going to stop philosophizing. He said, for him, the unexamined life is not worthy of a human being. And for me, philosophy has been a way of trying to be clear about the meanings of things in my life. And I feel to be clear about those things. You don't have to be too philosophy to be like that, but to be clear about that is a way of honoring the gift of my humanity. And that's my deepest relation to philosophy. But if you've got this just one minute, somebody has also said a thing that's sort of enduring moral relevance. He said, it's better to suffer evil than to do it. And in Romulus my Father, I describe my father as a man who truly believe that it was better to suffer evil than to do it. And a part of my philosophical work has been expounding what I believe to be the importance of that idea personal lives and not political life.
00:34:20
Speaker 1: I've read your discussion on that people who are feeling as though they have to commit evil just to survive, and whether that's justified. Is it justifiable to commit a sin or a crime just to survive. You're saying it's not.
00:34:36
Speaker 2: Well, I think sometimes we shouldn't be too concerned with the question of justification. And it's a morally terrible thing to kill just to survive, But that doesn't mean that someone outside has the right to point fingers.
00:34:52
Speaker 1: One of the chapters in your book, Justice and Hope that I went straight to was the Monk and the Philosophy. Now was admired Buddhism. I've always thought it was a gentle religion, and I suspected you you were critical of it in that essay.
00:35:10
Speaker 2: Well, I was critical of a particular Buddhism monk. I feel I don't understand Buddhism well enough to say I'm critical of it. What I was deeply critical of, and still i am, is the idea that true wisdom enables you to detach from the pains of life, which means, of course, you have to detach your affections. And I think there are two two two have been two big traditions, not just Buddhism and others, but it goes in Christianity. There's versions of this version of it in Plato, a philosophy of detachment, which enables you to suffer the most terrible things, and to suffer the most terrible wrongs, and to suffer the loss the most people you love in the most brutal way and have a kind of attached calm, and that this is wisdom. There's another view, which in that essay I attribute to George Orwell, where you have to be if you want to live a human life, you have to fasten your love on things that can break you. And all Well said in that essay you have to choose between being a saint and a human being. If you're a human being, then you're you have loyalties and loves that if if if, well, if I think of people now in Gaza, I know I've.
00:36:45
Speaker 1: Read your comments on that, and you have a your wife is Jewish and she's from Israel, and it seems it seems to me you are conflicted with what do you think is right and what do you think is wrong?
00:36:57
Speaker 2: Well, I have no one of the deep lessons of the Holocaust should have been that and what you would always taught it was that you can't think of all the Germans as monsters, even though they're involved in the most terrible things we can think of. And there and that good people can support and in fact too but often support or remain silent about really terrible things, and that that I think what Israel is now doing is just there's no there are no two sides to it. It's just evil. But we have people, because of my life in Israel, who have been silent about it or who have supported it, even because of what happened on October seventh, whom we love. But that this is just one of the awful, not awful tragedies of life that people you love through through luck of one kind of another.
00:38:01
Speaker 1: I suspect though it's within you, goodness is innate with you. And I'm not the only person who has made that a Sam Richard King, when he reviewed the book Justice and Hope, he said Gator is too Gator is far too civilized, too humane to want to devastate anybody. When he says we see much, so much contempt and hatred that unspoiling their news feeds every day. But you are above that the world is a good place. This is your quote, the world is a good place despite the suffering and the evil in it. And you know, I've written about Donald Trump and the likes. I mean, do you still have the utmost belief that the world is a good place despite the evil in it?
00:38:45
Speaker 2: Yeah? Well put it. I think you can develop a love of the world which is not conditioned upon your assessment or whether the good in it at the time that you're around outweighs the evil, you know, and so you can have this unconditional love of the world, which I call it because, as I say, it's not conditional upon such an assessment. But be deeply pessimistic as I am.
00:39:17
Speaker 1: You're pessimistic. I would have thought optimism was a thread that runs through your character.
00:39:23
Speaker 2: I sort of feel optimism and pessimism, I think are kind of superficial aspects of our personalty. Some people are optimistic. That's nice, and it's good to have friends optimistic that you you're up and all that.
00:39:39
Speaker 1: But what about realism is that a condition?
00:39:43
Speaker 2: Well, realism, the most fundamental aspect of realism is just to know. You don't know the future. And if you're optimistic, you're you, and your optimism depends always on a your sense that the future will be on the whole, Okay, you won't have much to fall upon. I mean you won't have many moral or spiritual resources to fall on when it all turns terrible. And I think this is my deepest one, sorry, one of them, the deep things of my personality or characters. I really believe nobody knows the future. And if you if you think it's going to be great?
00:40:31
Speaker 1: Great are your kids? Do the kids share your philosophies? An't it?
00:40:38
Speaker 2: But the important thing is if you think it's not, if you're inclined to pessimism and incline there been things that are likely to get words, that doesn't relieve you of an obligation to fight for the world, for the good in the world. If someone says to me, I don't have the energy to fight for the world and to as a mystic, I'd say, well, you better find some energy somewhere, because who cares with your pessimistic.
00:41:07
Speaker 1: You're so qualified, you're so educated. What would you want people to get from reading your book Justice and Hope?
00:41:14
Speaker 2: Well, I would want them to get that and to try. Do we have time for me to read just a little extract? So what I'm talking about doesn't seem I say, it is hard to be optimistic about the future. But perhaps that doesn't matter because optimism and pessimism are superficial expressions of personality. Duck rabbit perceptions of the world, as talk of glass empty, half empty, or half full suggests. Hope it takes many kinds of forms. The first can be one of the deepest expressions of courage and affirmation of life. Its ability to survive unrelenting disappointment relies to a degree on whether it can sustain faith that the good in the world will defeat the ill in it. It also depends on retaining faith in humankind. It must be able to trust that enough people will remain decent even in the worst of times. But there is another kind of hope, and this is the one I'm talking about. It's of a different kind because it's not essentially an orientation towards the future. It's an unconditional love of the world. Unconditional because it's not based on an assessment of the wather. The good outweighs the ill in it. Pablo Casals had an important when I wrote Romulus, I used to listen to him playing the bachjellos with Pablo Cassals. Expressed it in the Wonderful quotation to be Found in an essay that I wrote. It was an expression of his sense of his life, his humanity, and the world as a gift. And this is the quote. For the past eighty years, I've started each day in the same manner. It's not a mechanical routine, but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano and play two preludes and fugues of bach I cannot think of doing otherwise. It's a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not the only meaning. For me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a past. It fills me with the awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. I do not think a day has passed in my life in which I have failed to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature.
00:43:50
Speaker 1: Raymond Gator, what I'd like to chat to you? I wish we had more time. You're going to need all that hope and optimism with your bulldogs.
00:43:57
Speaker 2: Uh giving up on the hope.
00:44:02
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for your time.
00:44:04
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
00:44:05
Speaker 1: Raymond Gator is my guest, folks. The book we're talking about is called Justice and Hope Essays, Lectures and other writings. Thank you so much for joining us.
