Big Ideas

ABC Radio National

Tony Abbott (1957):
Nauru is humane, cost effective and it's proven.
(Nauru turns on charm for visiting Abbott, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 June 2011)

Gillian Triggs (1940) [President, Australian Human Rights Commission]:
As of February [2017:]

• 1,400 (approximately) continue to be detained in indefinite immigration detention in Australia.
• 378 detainees, including 45 children remain in Nauru, [and]
• 837 adult men remain, and have remained for years, on Manus.

The average time in detention is about 490 to 500 days but many have been detained for years.
When I was at Villawood, just a few days ago, I didn't meet anybody under 4 years in detention and one woman … had been detained for 7 years …
The countries of origin, of most asylum seekers and refugees, are predominantly Muslim nations: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran …
Religious persecution is one of the five grounds on which people can seek protection under the refugee convention. …
It is notable that Australia is the only common law country in the world that does not have a bill or charter of rights.
(Islamophobia and human rights, 18 July 2017)

John Winston Howard (1939) [Prime Minister of Australia, 1996-2007]:
[If] you try to institute a bill of rights, you run the danger of limiting, rather than expanding freedoms …
All you'll do is open up yet another avenue for lawyers to make a lot of money being human-rights … practitioners.
(Jon Faine, ABC Local Radio, Melbourne, 25 August 2000)

David Marr (1947):
[In February 2007, 85 Sri Lankan] men were brought in by barge from HMAS Success and herded onto Christmas Island's only wharf. …
Keeping the press at bay has remained a top priority in all the operations that have followed to scoop up boat people wherever they appear and detain them on Christmas Island.
(p 41)

According to the Australian government these people are not prisoners.
They've committed no crimes. …
(p 42)

The Immigration Department was playing its usual cat-and-mouse game: asylum seekers can only have a lawyer if they ask for one, and they have to ask for one by name.
Holding them incommunicado for as long as possible is about denying them a voice in both the press and refugee processing.
Good people take their careers in their hands to smuggle lawyers' names to asylum seekers.
(His Master's Voice, Quarterly Essay, Issue 26, 2007, p 44)

Lionel Shriver (1957):
My politics … are libertarian …
I don't like being told what to do.
Actually, deep down inside, I'm a 10 year old child with a problem with temper tantrums.
(Lionel Shriver on free speech, identity and the future of the US, 19 September 2016)

Bryan Stevenson [Professor of Law, New York University]:
Each of us is better than the worst thing we've ever done.
(The fight for racial justice in America, 19 March 2015)

Augustine (354 – 430):
The good Christian should be wary of mathematics and all those who make empty prophesies.
The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and confine Man to the bonds of Hell.

ABC Radio National

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Disobedience is a greater sin than murder, unchastity, theft and dishonesty …

— Martin Luther (1483 – 1546)

Scott Stevens:
Dead Poet's Society demonstrates why Aristotle did not believe that you should teach children to think for themselves.
Because the first thing they need to be taught is obedience.
In other words, respect for a master; someone who knows more than they do.
The next thing they need to be taught is the proper place of the moral emotions.
They need to be able to feel what is good, [to] feel what is beautiful, before they should be empowered to think for themselves — much less [to] think critically.
Dead Poet's Society is this orgy of free thinking and the wilful casting off of tradition.
That is the least moral approach [to] how these sorts of things ought to be taught in schools. …
If we're thinking about ethics as critical thinking … or even [of] empowering kids to think for themselves and simply not adopt tradition, or whatever their parents said, especially at an early age … this is nihilistic.
This is a recipe for disaster.
And, in fact, it's a counter-ethical or anti-ethical position to take.
(Does ethics belong in schools?, The Minefield, 13 October, 2016)

Pokemon Go is the harbinger of the end of the world as we know it.
(Pokémon Go: Revolution, Fad or Omen?, 7 July 2016)

Alvin Toffler (1928 – 2016):
… Herbert Spencer maintained that:

Education has for its object the formation of character

— which, freely translated, means the seduction or terrorization of the young into the value systems of the old.
(Future Shock, Pan, 1970, p 377)

I Am Special

Lynne Malcolm:
[A] study of 15,000 college students in the US [by Jean Twenge and Kevin Campbell] showed that those from today's generation scored significantly higher on narcissistic personality traits than those from the two generations before.

Jean Twenge (1971) [Assistant Professor of Psychology, San Diego State University]:
[The] key difference between self-esteem and narcissism [is that somebody] high in self-esteem values individual achievement but they also value their relationships and caring for others.
Narcissists are missing that piece about valuing, caring and their relationships, so they tend to lack empathy, they have poor relationship skills.
[Those] communal and caring traits tend to be high in most people with self-esteem but not among those who are high in narcissism. …

[There] is a book called Good to Great that looks at the CEOs of companies …
[It turns out] that the most successful CEOs were not the narcissistic ones, it was those who were humble and hard-working and gave their teams credit.
They were team players, they got along well with others. …

So in a stock market simulation … when the stock market is going up, people who score high in narcissism, they do well, but the minute it goes down they crash harder than everyone else. …

[There is evidence of a] generational shift toward more narcissism … across many age groups …

• there is more materialism,
• that plastic surgery rates have gone up so much,
• that people are buying bigger houses so each person can have more space,
• that there is troubles in relationships. …

[People who are narcissistic … are actually less successful [in the long run] because they take too many risks, they are overconfident instead of just confident.
[And they] tend to alienate other people because they don't care about others.

[The] key to success, sure, having some self-efficacy, which is different from self-esteem, thinking — yes, I know I can do this — that's beneficial.
Self-control and hard work, that's beneficial.
And perspective-taking, something that narcissists don't do very well, to take someone else's perspective, to think about what it's like to walk around in their shoes.
That is so useful for getting along with people, whether that's at work or in your relationships.
[So it is] those qualities — self-efficacy, self-control, perspective-taking [— that] are actually more likely to lead to success than self-esteem or narcissism. …

[There] is some indication that is a little more interest in social problems and … caring for others than there was five or six years ago.
So the recession … may put the brakes on some aspects of narcissism.
[The] interesting question is what's going to happen when the economy comes back?
Will the caring and concern for others and interest in social problems and equality fade again as the economy improves?

(The Narcissism Epidemic, All In The Mind, 21 December 2014)

Would you like to know more?

Big Ideas 2013

ABC Radio National: Big Ideas

The Last Tree

Arlo Guthrie (1947)

I remember bein' a little kid one day, you know, and the teacher said:

When you see the white blast out of the school room window and the mushroom cloud, be sure and get under the desk right away. …

And that's fine, when you're five years old, or six years old.
You have to do what they say.

But when you're 12 or 13 and you start realizing it doesn't matter which way you fry.
That these people are actually insane, or they're just stupid.
And, either way, you're not expected to listen to them any more.
And so there was a time in the 60s, when it seemed like the whole world had a bunch of young people who said:

What else are these people tellin us, that is as ridiculous as that?

And so, we had, what we would call these days … a cultural revolution. …
It didn't change everything.
But it changed enough stuff.

Now we're talking about the environment.
We're arguing about it. …
We weren't doin that 50 years ago.
There was only one way to think about it, and that was:

Pollute to make money is the best way to do everything!

And that's changed.
It's changed because people started askin questions.

It doesn't matter whether they're on the Right, the Left, the this or that …
There needs to be people in every group who ask that group questions that an outsider could never ask.
So it's important to make friends in all the different groups, in all the different cultures, in all the different places …
And so that you support each other by having at least that attitude. …

I hate idea that, if you have enough money, and you have enough wealth, and you have enough influence — that you can influence entire nations, and groups of people, and take advantage of their, either, poverty or their fears, or their whatever … so that you profit by it.
Only for a short run.
You can destroy the whole world, for what?
Money.

You know, there's an old Cree Indian saying …

After you've poisoned the last lake,
And you've cut the last tree,
And you've killed the last river,
Only then will people realize that you can't eat money. …

I don't want to wait for that.
It's important to get out and talk about that.
You don't have to be right.
It's not a matter of bein right.
It's a matter of not being … herded, like some mindless cattle herd just goin down the road, goin along with the program, without at least askin.
And that's when things change.
When people are at least not afraid to ask.

(15 August 2013)

Background Briefing

ABC Radio National

Malcolm Turnbull (1954):
I regret to say, that a number of the state Labor governments have, over the years, set priorities and renewable targets that are extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic, and have paid little or no attention to energy security. …

Tony Wood [Director, Energy Program, Grattan Institute]:
The policy that drove the 40% of electricity in South Australia coming from wind was actually a federal government policy introduced originally when John Howard was Prime Minister under a Coalition government for the Renewable Energy Target. …
[Industry then capitalised on the renewable energy target by building wind farms in the state with the most wind, that is, South Australia.]
So I would say that if you wanted to place blame on anybody for undertaking an aggressive renewable energy target and not thinking through the consequences, that blame could just as easily be laid, if not more so, at the foot of the federal government than the state government.
(System Black, 6 November 2016)

Future Tense

ABC Radio National

Contents

Military Expenditure and the Arms Trade Treaty

Climate Change and the Top End

Rear Vision: 2012

ABC Radio National: Rear Vision

Peter Whiteford:
In Australia we spend about 3% of gross domestic product on age pensions currently, and by the middle of the century with the ageing of the population that’s projected to increase to 4.5 to 5% …

[The Scandinavians] spend a lot more than Australia [on welfare], but they [spend it] on childcare and labour market programs [—] on ways of getting people into work and keeping them in work, as opposed to retiring and withdrawing from the labour force.
[Because their] systems … support participation and … employment [they also] support the funding of the welfare state. …

[We] target to the lowest income groups more than any other country in the OECD …
[The] amount of money in terms of social security that we spend on the poorest 20% of the population is 12 times as much as we spend on the richest 20%.
[In] the next nearest country — New Zealand — that ratio’s about less than half of what it is in Australia. …

Francis Castles:
Australia has [arguably] the most coherent and consistent welfare state of any country in the western world in as far as virtually all its benefits have the same character:

• they’re flat rate,
• they’re not very generous …
• they are invariably means tested, and
• they’re funded from the general exchequer rather than by contributions. …

Australia’s welfare state is … considerably smaller than most western states …
[According to the OECD Australian expenditure] was the lowest of all the advanced states [on]

• pensions,
• unemployment benefits,
• housing support,
• childcare,
• [aged care] and
• health.

We spend less as a percentage of our national income … than the United States … Japan [or] Greece.

When the [Hawke] Labor government came into office in 1983 … we were spending … just above 10% of GDP on those things …
[We’re] spending something like 16% now and that hasn’t changed [significantly] since the Howard government came into office …

[We’re] not big spenders at all.
[We do welfare] in a very egalitarian [and frugal] way.
The money we spend is very focused on those who need it.
The downside is that [because it is funded] from general revenue … people are very resistant to paying … for it …
[It is perhaps because] our welfare state is less generous to those in need than other countries [that Australia has become an increasingly] less equal place than it was in the … 1950s and ‘60s.
(Australia's welfare state, 25 November 2012)

RN Breakfast

ABC Radio National

Ephesians 5:22-33:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church …
(King James Bible, 1611)

Julia Beard:
It was … a bishop in Queensland who [drew my attention to the] cultural issues surrounding the teaching of headship — which is an emphasis in some particularly conservative evangelical parts of the church on women submitting to their husbands and on men being the 'heads'. …
[In] Australia, 1 in 5 perpetrators of domestic violence go to church.
[And, according to American researchers,] the men most likely, whether religious or non-religious, to assault their wives are evangelical men who go to church sporadically. …

It is extremely common for abusers to use words of the bible to tell them that they must obey …
That if they disobey the husband, they are disobeying God. …
I found that marital rape was very common in these situations … and that the church had a very inadequate … response to it.
The women were not believed.
If they were pastor's wives, the pastor would be believed or moved to another parish.
And … a lot of [the women] had to leave the church while the men remained within it.
(Church enabling and concealing domestic violence: Advocates, 18 July 2017)

Joe Hockey (1965) [Federal Treasurer, 2013-5]:
… I find those wind turbines around Lake George to be utterly offensive. …
I think they are just a blight on the landscape. …
[Unfortunately, we] can't knock those ones off … because there's a certain contractual obligation — I'm told.
('Ideology' driving energy policy: Australian Solar Council, 8 May 2014)

Erwin Jackson [Deputy CEO, Climate Institute]:
Over the next 15 years [the Chinese have committed to building] a power sector the size of the United States completely powered by renewable energy.
(Australia to support UN Green Climate Fund, 11 December 2014)

Who Speaks for the Dead?

Fran Kelly:
We have heard a number of comments from Iraqis … saying that their lives are better today — free of Saddam Hussein.

Peter Kilfoyle [Former Defence Minister under Tony Blair]:
Many thousands of people would agree with that.
But there's many thousands who are dead, who are not in a position to agree or disagree. …

It's wholly specious of people to say, somehow 10 years ago, the evidence was not there to suggest that they were wrong.
What's more important is the evidence was not there to show that they were right.
They should have erred on the side of caution … and they never did.

(Ten years in Iraq, 20 March 2013)

Counterpoint: 2011

Counterpoint

Mark Steyn (1959):
In a democratic age, you can't buck demography — except through civil war.
The Serbs figured that out: if you can't outbreed [Muslims,] cull 'em.
The problem Europe faces is that Bosnia's demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.
(America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Regnery Publishing, 2006)

[If Obama] can establish federal spending at 25% of GDP as the new baseline, then he fundamentally transforms the nature of American society in a way that is tremendously advantageous to those of his political disposition. …
(Armageddon will be brought to you by "the experts", 26 September 2011)

Sunday Extra

ABC Radio National

Budget of the Century

John Hewson (1946): Coalition Opposition Leader, 1990-4; Professor and Chair, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Australian National University

[The] inequity of the process!
To argue that everyone is sharing the burden, when obviously they are not, because, people at the bottom end of the income scale are losing between 12-15% of their disposable income and people at the top are losing less than 1%.
The inequity just screams at you …

I think [Abbott and Hockey] actually did believe they had brought down the 'budget of the century' — [one] that actually will be remembered as probably one of the worst; because, it was so ill conceived, so many incoherent messages, so many partial attempts to solve problems, with massive inequity overriding the lot.
A lot a pain for very little gain.
What do they do now?
If the revenue continues to be weaker than predicted, which is … a pretty high probability, and the deficit will start to blow out and they can't go back an try and fix it again.

(The rise of anti-establishment political parties, 25 May 2014)

Rear Vision: 2010

ABC Radio National: Rear Vision

Big Ideas TV

ABC Television

Sam Harris (1967):
Values reduce to facts about the wellbeing of conscious creatures. …
[We] are right to be more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects.
Because … there is an inner dimension there that can be modulated to a much greater degree by changes in the universe.
For changes in the universe to matter, they have to matter to some conscious system. …
(Can Science Determine Human Values?, 10 May 2011)

Mark Lewis [Lawyer]:
[The initial prosecution into phone hacking was the responsibility of] Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman.
[He subsequently left the Metropolitan Police to become] a journalist for The Times newspaper which belongs to Rupert Murdoch …
[He] wrote an article which said, the phone hacking investigation in 2006 [— which uncovered one 'rogue reporter' —] was a 'proper' investigation [in which] 'not a stone was left unturned'. …
[His article was reprinted in the News of the World —] the very paper he should have been investigating …
(Politics and the Murdoch Press, 23 April 2012)

Life Matters

ABC Radio National

Contents

Values and Ethics in Schools

Life Matters

Natasha Mitchell

• Everybody Matters: A Memoir by Mary Robinson, 15 January 2013.
  
• Values and ethics classes in schools, 28 September 2009.
  Philip Cam: Associate Professor, School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales; Author, Thinking Together: Philosophical Inquiry for the Classroom.
  
  Richard Aedy:
  Should government schools be able to offer a secular ethics and values alternative who don't attend faith based lessons?
  In some states schools must offer … scripture or special religious education [SRE].
  The instruction's provided by representatives from different faiths in school hours.
  [Students] who opt out of religious education, can't really do anything else.
  So you hear stories of kids being put in the library, watching a DVD …
  At the moment, those kids aren't offered a secular alternative. …
  
  The [State] Education minister's just been presented with proposal to trial an ethics based complement to scripture in NSW state primary schools.
  The man who will devise the curriculum for the proposed trial, under the auspices of the St James Ethics Centre is [Philip Cam (an internationally recognized expert in the area of philosophical and ethical inquiry for children).]
  
  Philip Cam:
  [Religious education in schools] goes right back to the beginning of free secular state education system … when a bargain was struck with the churches.
  [When] the state took over education from the churches, they put in this provision, so that provision has been there since the late 19th century.
  It's part of the state legislation for education …
  
  In relation to the kids that go to scripture, they're getting an extra special extension of that … in terms of their own faith and beliefs or their parent's faith and belief system.
  The other kids are now not getting that extension.
  They're not getting that opportunity to think further about ethics frameworks. …
  
  [Some] faith based groups are actually interested in this.
  In having some ethics based material that they could use to strengthen what they do.
  So what's on offer here … is something that could be helpful to other faith based groups. …
  
  [In] part it's a social justice issue, because [at the moment,] if you don't have religion, you get nothing at all. …
  
  Richard Aedy:
  You have to opt out.
  You are automatically opted in.
  That's the default position. …
  
  Philip Cam:
  [And if] those kid's parents opt out …
  Why should [the kids] thereby be disadvantaged?
  Why should it be religion or nothing? …
  
  Richard Aedy:
  [The] Inter-church Commission of Religious Education in Schools [has] come out against this idea; even though the proposal does not advocate that ethcs and values based education replace religious education for those parents who want it. …
  
  Philip Cam:
  I'd understood that the St James Ethics Centre had made approaches to a number of faith based groups and, in fact, had a wide range of support from faith based groups. …
  
  Richard Aedy:
  The St James Ethics Centre has been working on this [since 2003.]
  
  Philip Cam:
  In the past … when this was taken to [two education] ministers in succession.
  One of the things that was suggested was that there wasn't a ground swell of support for this in the community. …
  In fact, once you start looking around in the community, you find there's a huge amount of support for this.
  [At] the NSW Parents and Citizens associations [AGM this year] there was absolutely unanimous support for this proposal. …
  
  [What's being proposed is] a 10 week pilot in [seven schools for] kids in the last 2 years of primary school. …
  What they would get is 10 different lessons, each on a different issue [—] friendship, bullying, lying and telling the truth, ganging up on kids …
  A whole range of things like that, that come within the experience of these kids in their everyday lives.
  [And] rather than now being told what to think about those things; they'd be presented with … problematic little scenarios that they could relate to. …
  They would discuss these [situations] in small groups and [as a class] with a view to exploring these issues together. …
  
  Richard Aedy:
  You want to give them the tools, to work things out for themselves. …
  
  Philip Cam:
  It's a matter of them using their reason, in the right sort of social setting.
  To think about, and reflect upon, conduct and ethical issues and ideas. …
  
  [It's] about wellbeing …
  Kid's who have been able to think about conduct, about issues and problems, and learnt how to deal with them, are going to be in a better position to take control of all the kinds of problems and issues that they have to confront in their lives than kids who have not had that opportunity.
  [Ethical] reflection, is something that could help to support that process.

Conversations

ABC Local Radio

Oliver Sacks (1933 – 2015):
[Hans Asperger (1906 – 80) wrote of a sort of “autistic intelligence” that was] scarcely touched by tradition and culture — unconventional, unorthodox, strangely “pure” and original, akin to the intelligence of true creativity.
(An Anthropologist on Mars, 1995, Vintage, 1996, p 253)

Mark Karpelès (1985):
I've spent 30 years living with myself, so I've developed a number of methods and … habits to pass myself off as human.
(The Bitcoin Bandit, 2018)

Ursula Le Guin (1929 – 2018)):
[There comes a point] when you have to choose whether:

• to be like everybody else [for] the rest of your life, or
• to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

(The Dispossessed, Harper, 1974, p 249)

Late Night Live

ABC Radio National

Peter Kuznick:
[During the Cuban missile crisis] US boats were dropping depth charges on the Soviet sub that was … accompanying the ships that were moving toward … the quarantine line.
And we'd knocked out the power systems, the carbon dioxide is rising, the Soviet sailors are … passing out, and the commander says:

War must have started already, let's fire our nuclear torpedo!

— and gave the order to fire.
[Vasili Arkhipov (1926 – 98),] who was a sub-commander on the ship, talked him out of it.
Had Arkhipov not talked him out of it, then the Soviets were going to fire their nuclear torpedo, nuclear war would have begun in 1962 and much of the world as we know it would have been wiped out.

Tony Windsor (1950):
I've always been a fan of having a price of carbon …
Even John Howard, and Malcolm Turnbull, and Tony Abbott supported it back in [the day.]
They proposed to have an emissions trading scheme, but to get the institutional framework in place, you've really got to have a fixed price for a certain period of time.
[For Howard and Turnbull that was 1-2 years.]
[Under the current scheme it's] only a fixed price, or a tax, until 2014 when it becomes an emissions trading scheme. …
It is the cheapest way of trying to deal with the risks that are out there.

The City on the Hill

Peter Kuznick [Professor of History, American University, Washington]:
This notion of American Exceptionalism [dates back to] John Winthrop, in his sermon on the Arbella in 1630 in Massachusetts bay, where he says that

[Wee] shall be as a citty upon a hill.
The eies of all people are uppon us.
(A Model of Christian Charity)

You are the light of the world.
A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.
(Matthew, 5:14)

That belief has been central to American mythology throughout American history.
That the United States is different from all other countries.
That the United States is more moral, more righteous …
(Oliver Stone, Untold History of the United States, 1 July 2013)


George Will [Conservative Columnist]:
There are many magic moments in American history that convince you that there’s something miraculous about the American experiment.
And one of them is the simultaneous death, 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
These great rivals, the crusty, awkward — not very lovable, frankly — New England Federalist and the graceful Virginia gentleman striking up this wonderful correspondence that becomes one of the treasures of American letters, dying simultaneously on July 4, 1826.
And John Adams’ last words were,

Jefferson still survives.

Indeed he does.
(Ken Burns, Thomas Jefferson, PBS American Experience, 1997)

On Tolerance

Douglas Murray (1979):
We are the inheritors of Christian culture whether we like it our not. …
What we have in countries like yours, countries like mine, is historically very unusual.
Values like tolerance … are not made such a big thing of in many other societies around the world.
(Is Islam killing Europe?, 13 June 2017)

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970):
The Syrians, who were largely Nestorian, suffered persecution at the hands of the Catholics, whereas Mohammedans tolerated all sects of Christians in return for the payment of tribute.
Similarly in Egypt the Monophysites, who were the bulk of the population, welcomed the [Muslim] invaders.
(A History of Western Philosophy, 2nd Ed, 1961, p 513)

Fanaticism:
From Latin fānāticus (“of a temple, divinely inspired, frenzied”), from fānum (“temple”).
(Wiktionary, 22 December 2012)

Peace and Long Life

Historically speaking, religious tolerance is no more an essential feature of Christianity than intolerance is of Islam.
In the 17th century the Catholics and Protestants fought each other to a standstill.
It was only after the Catholics found there were too many Protestants to kill that they resigned themselves to 'tolerating' the continued existence of the heretics.
They did, however, give it their best shot.
If it had been in their power to destroy them, they would have.
Indeed, when Christian minorities were sufficiently small and weak, eg the anabaptists (who were persecuted by both Protestants and Catholics), they were annihilated.
Ironically, in the Middle Ages, the Nestorian and Monophysite Christians were safer under Islamic rule than Christian rule.

Tolerance arose not out of religious doctrine but military exhaustion.
Not from divine inspiration but practical reality.
From necessity rather than choice.
Western civilisation owes its tradition of religious tolerance not to its Christian heritage, but to secular modernity.

Fanaticism is the breeding ground of atrocity.
Atrocity is the breeding ground of fanaticism.
Christian, Jewish and Muslim fanatics are not dangerous because they are Christian, Jewish or Muslim.
They are dangerous because they are fanatics.
Dogmatic adherence to scripture is not productive of civil relations between diverse groups.

The Philosopher's Zone

ABC Radio National

Ants and Grasshoppers
Less taxes for the rich
More taxes for the (improvident) poor

— peaceandlonglife


Saul Levmore (1953) [Former Dean, Chicago Law School]:
[Regarding inheritance taxes, I would argue that] if people couldn't give away their wealth the way they wanted they might not work so hard — I might have retired at 50 if I couldn't control the wealth I earned after that. …

I am wealthier than the average person.
But 40% of people my age save no money at all.
[They] are counting on the state to bail them out. …
[They] might figure that … we won't have the will to let them suffer when they grow old even though they should have saved more and spent less money on ridiculous cars, and drink, and stuff like that, when they were young. …
[This] can only handled by … taxing them yet more when they're young, in order to save on their behalf for when they're old. …

[That's] what I mean by a bigger social security system.
I'm otherwise a pretty libertarian person.
(Aging, 10 February 2019)

The Engine of Progress

Joe Gelonesi:
Is changing the ground rules of science to include the supernatural a paradigm shift you would actually like to see? …

Steve Fuller (1959) [Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick]:
My answer to your question would be: yes. …
[Unless we move] away from this platonic vision of saying [you have to have] one truth regime, whether be in politics or science, you not going to be able to make progress.
[We] have to make progress is a space in which there are multiple competing frames of reference that are always at play, and whoever it ahead at any given point — it's a temporary arrangement …
[We] have to admit the game-like character of reality …
[Anyone] who considers themselves an endorser of democracy has to basically buy into this idea …
(Steve Fuller on post-truth, 16 December 2018)

Peace and Long Life

Science and the humanities are not competing in the same epistemological race.
They are playing different games with different rules.
Physicists are not 'temporarily' ahead of political scientists when it comes to explaining the fundamental nature of matter, any more than biologists are 'temporarily' ahead of theologians when it comes to explaining the origin of species.

Physical science and social science are not alternative 'frames of reference' of equal standing competing to explain a singular reality.
Reality is multidimensional.
Physical reality is not the same as social reality.
Explanatory methods and tools are, substantially, domain specific.
A hammer and a screw-driver are not equally useful when it comes to driving in a nail, and no amount of methodological democracy is going to change that.
To suggest otherwise is not a recipe for progress, but an obstacle to progress.

Adding antiscience to science is like adding sand to petrol.
The effect on the performance of the engine of progress is not a happy one.

Contents

The Philosophical Baby

Among the Dead Cities

Human Consciousness and Free Will

Divine Fine-tuning

Freedom (of Action) Without (Freedom of) Will

The Philosopher's Zone

Joe Gelonesi

• Devotion, Democracy and Duterte, 3 February 2019.
  Tracy Llanera: Associate Research Professor in Philosophy, University of Connecticut.
• Telling the story, 5 August 2018.
  Barry Lam: Associate Professor of Philosophy, Vassar College.
• The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, 27 May 2018.
  Jessica Whyte: Senior Lecturer, Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney University.
• On Parfit, 12 February 2017.
  Garrett Cullity: Hughes Professor of Philosophy, University of Adelaide.
• The Worst Argument in the World, 30 June 2013.
• The Worst Argument in the World, 22 April 2012.
• Extending the mind, 25 March 2012.
• Global fairness, 18 March 2012.
  Thomas Pogge: Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University.
• The Myth of Plato and Plato the Myth-maker, 11 March 2012.
  Rick Benitez: Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney.
• Group agents, 26 February 2012.
  Philip Pettit:Professor of Politics and Human Values, Princeton University.
• Philosophy and the Environment, 5 February 2012.
  Mark Colyvan: Professor of Philosophy, Director or the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, University of Sydney.
• The inconsistency of Hannah Arendt, 29 January 2012.
  Danielle Celermajer:Associate Professor, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney.
• Human consciousness and free will, 26 November 2011.
  Daniel Dennett: Co-director Center for Cognitive Studies, Austin B Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University, Massachusetts.
  
  We have free will whether or not determinism is true.
  Determinism is just not the issue. …
  [There] are different concepts of free will.
  And some of them are really important, because if you don't have free will in these senses then you're not a moral agent. …
  
  [We] are only too happy to have past conditions and experiences inform us about the way the world is, and use that information to guide our behaviour.
  If only the world will tell us how it really is and give us a bunch of choices, and if only we can have the competence to look hard at the choices that the world reveals to us, and to assess accurately their likely consequences, and to choose the ones that have the best consequences, what more could you want?
  Then you can be the author of your acts.
  It's not as if you have to have this flying carpet of indeterminism so that your decision at the point, at the moment of decision, is completely cut off from all higher influences. …
  
  The intentional stance is the habit we have [of treating] unknown things, complicated things, as agents is the heart of the intentional stance.
  It is the strategy of supposing the thing that you're dealing with is rational, has beliefs, has desires. …
  It has the beliefs that it can get from its sensory equipment;
  And that makes it an agent that is highly predictable.


• An atheist's God: the paradox of Spinoza, 4 June 2011.
  Beth Lord: Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Dundee.
  Principal Investigator, Spinoza Research Network.
• Hume on cause, effect and doubt, 30 April 2011.
  Helen Beebee: Professor of Philosophy, School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham.
• How do octopuses think?  9 April 2011.
  Peter Godfrey-Smith: Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York.
• The Philosophical Baby, 29 January 2011.
  Alison Gopnik: Professor of Psychology, Affiliate Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley.
  Author, The Philosophical Baby — What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life.
  
  [Infants] have capacities to empathise with the emotions and internal states of other people, and by the time they're 18 months old, perhaps even a bit younger, children show signs of altruism.
  [They'll] actively act to help another person achieve their ends or achieve their goals. …
  
  [There] seems to be a link between this early empathic ability, this ability to read and identify with the internal emotions of another person, and [the] impulse to say …
  'Well if this is going to hurt someone else, you shouldn't do it.'
  It's a sort of fundamental [and underpins] versions of the Golden Rule:

  Do unto others as you would have others do unto you …

  [That piece] seems to be in place from the time that the children are very young. …
  
  [Newborn] babies actually imitate the facial expressions of other people.
  So if you stick your tongue out at a … baby, 30 minutes old, the newborn baby still stick his tongue out at you.
  Now that [seems] sort of weird … because there aren't mirrors in the womb [to allow babies] to map what it feels like inside of them to say smile or frown, and what you feel like when you smile or frown. …
  So this … fundamental link between the expressions on someone's face and how they feel [seems] to be in place from very, very early on. …
  
  Felix Warneke at Harvard [showed] 15-months-olds, a person either throwing a pencil to the ground, or dropping a pencil on the ground.
  And in both cases, the pencil was in a place that the person couldn't actually reach. [The] 15-month-olds would crawl over and get the pencil, give it back to the person, if they had dropped it [—] if they acted as if they really wanted it, but they wouldn't do that if the person intentionally threw it to the floor, [acting] as if they didn't want it. …
  
  [Even] 7-month-olds [show some] understanding … that people have goals and intentions and are trying to make things happen in the world. …
  
  [Piaget thought] young infants didn't have any kinds of representations, abstract representations of the world and that even 2 and 3 year olds only were able to reason in very, very limited ways. …
  
  [Babies start out in] the world with certain kinds of assumptions [or hypotheses] about what the world is like, what objects are like, what people are like.
  But they [are also born with] with very powerful capacities for revising, changing, altering what they think on the basis of new experience. …
  We're not blank slates, we start out knowing a lot but we're not stuck, we're not constrained by what we start out knowing, that's just the jumping-off point for our ability to revise and learn and understand new things about the world. …
  
  … 8-month-olds already understand probabilistic notions like the idea about the relationship between a sample and a population, and 3 and 4 year olds can use quite complicated patterns of correlation and dependence to make causal inferences about the world.
  
  [Babies] are like the research and development division of the human species and [adults are] production and marketing.
  [They] are just exploring in a blue-sky way figuring out the way the world works, and we're the ones who actually take all those things that we learned as babies and put them to use …
  [Babies] have more neural connections when they're a year-and-a-half, than they ever will in the rest of their lives. …
  [They] have this tremendous capacity for flexibility, for learning new things.
  What they don't have is the capacity to do any one thing very well and swiftly and quickly and efficiently …
  [That's] the capacity that we … have as adults.
  [After] 5 babies start to become more like adults …
  [There's] a lot of pressure now to make … preschools look more and more like school, to try to get children to [exercise] executive function earlier and earlier …
  [There's] good reason to believe that [this may be a] good idea for 8 and 9 year olds [but] a terrible idea for 2 and 3 and 4 year olds. …
  
  [Babies] and young children are extremely good at imagining counter-factual alternatives, other ways that the world could be, other than they way that they are now.
  That's what children do when they are involved in pretend play, which is one of the most characteristic things for 3 and 4 year olds to do.
  3 and 4 year olds will spend 24/7 often as crazed world princesses and ninjas and who knows what else. …
  [It may be that what they] are doing is figuring out the causal structure of the world …
  [Through] their pretend way, children [are] exploring all the different ways the world could be. …
  [They're] mucking about, exploring all the different possibilities, not seeing them in terms of a path at they travel from the past to the future. …
  
  [The] advice that comes out of this is [that we] should pay attention to them, we should let them explore [and] give them rich, safe, stable environments in which they can explore. …
  
  [As adults] we need to strike a balance between our ability to actually focus, get things done, do things in an organised way, and our ability to let go of that, explore, brainstorm, be creative. …
  
  [We] put tremendous amounts of public money into educating people between the ages of 18 and 24 … but we don't put anything like that investment into educating people between the ages of 0 and 5, and we know that that's the time when really the most dramatic learning is actually … taking place.


• The philosophy of mathematics, 15 May 2010.
  James Franklin: Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New South Wales.
• A Very Public Philosopher, 20 March 2010.
  AC Grayling.

  There comes to seem very little difference in principle between the RAF's operation Gomorrah or the US AAF's atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York by terrorists on 11th September 2001.
  (Among the Dead Cities)

  … I wanted to draw a very precise analogy between the use of an indiscriminate attack on civilians as a way of coercing or terrorising a population in general.
  And if you concentrate just … on that tactic, then you see that the night bombing of German cities or the atom bombing of Japanese cities, and the terrorist atrocities of 9/11 have that one thing in common …
  
  [The] United Nations [only] agreed to treat indiscriminate attacks on civilians as a war crime [in 1977 in] the annexes [to the fourth Geneva Protocol.]
  [An] effort was made to outlaw attacks on civilians, whether by non-state [or] state parties, as early as 1949, but the British and American governments who'd just been doing it, turned it down …
  So it took another 30 years.


• A Conversation with Isaiah Berlin, 13 June 2009.
• Utilitarianism, 27 January 2007.
  Peter Singer.

Saturday Extra

ABC Radio National

The New Gilded Age

Geraldine Doogue:
The three richest Australians now own more than the million poorest Australians.
That's pretty amazing, isn't it?!
(Making sense of 2016, 13 February 2016)

Yuval Harari (1976) [Professor of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem]:
As of early 2016, the 62 richest people in the world were worth as much as the poorest 3.6 billion people!
Since the world's population is about 7.2 billion, it means that these 62 billionaires together hold as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humankind.
(Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Penguin, 2015, p 347)

Hugh Mackay (1938) [Social Researcher]:
More than 700,000 children are living in poverty. …
About 2 million Australians are either unemployed or underemployed.
100,000 Australians are homeless.
We are further from egalitarianism than we were 50 years ago.
(The state of the nation starts in your street, The Conversation, 2 February 2017)

Simon Marginson

Professor of International Higher Education, University College London

I suspect the eye of the needle has closed a bit, when you're trying to enter the upper echelons of society.
And that's the result of this massive shift of inequality: when you look at the figures it's quite staggering when you look at the top 1% of the top 1% [ie the top 1 in 10,000] taking nearly all the fruits of economic growth. …
[So, when you] look at the position of the top 1% in incomes:

• in the US they've got 20% of all income,
• in the UK they've got about 16%, and
• in Australia they've got 10 to 11%. …

If a child is from a very wealthy family, they really aren't going to need to go to university to have a successful life, because they're going to inherit from this generation of super-managers with super salaries.
And you're going to see a build up of old style wealth in the next generation — people who are living on capital income and property. …

Education is still very important for the lower middle-class family. …
[But if] the rich are exiting the tax system [and] aren't really sharing the benefits of a common approach to education or health or any other … public service, then they're [unlikely] to pay for it either.
[In] that situation, those who are benefiting [from the common project] are also carrying the cost as well, so their net position is reduced. …

The working of the market doesn't create the inequality that's now quite extreme by international and historical standards — it's the tax and transfer and public spending side of the United States that turns market inequality of a moderate level into extreme inequality in terms of final incomes.

(Education and social mobility, 25 July 2015)


Wealth is always much more concentrated than labor incomes. …

There has been an explosive growth of managerial salaries in the US and UK …
Highly paid managers often set their own remuneration, including bonuses, or negotiate their remuneration with boards of like-minded folk on which they themselves sit. …
[Between] 1980 and 2010 the share [of income in the US] held by the top 0.1% rose from 2% to nearly 10%.
[And, by 2030, it is anticipated that] the top 1% in the US will receive 25% of all income …
In the UK between 1980 and 2010, the income share of the top 1% moved from 6 to 15%, reaching the highest level since the 1930s.
(pp 12-13)

In the next generation, when today’s super manager salary is tomorrow’s inheritance, society will become more closed at the top, reducing meritocratic mobility into and within the elite, while at the same time income shares will continue to decline at the middle and bottom of the pyramid.

In the US the top 1% recovered quickly [following the 2008 recession,] securing 93% of all additional income in 2009-2010 while the average homeowner lost more than a third in property value.
In both the US and UK the shares of the top 1%, 0.1% and the top 0.01% are now climbing above pre-recession levels.
[The financial industry captured] more than 40% of all US profits prior to the recession …
After triggering the crisis, the … sector has been able to use the crisis to further expand its share of wealth.
(p 14)

The lesson of the last fifty years is that higher education does not [create] egalitarian societies on its own, though it can facilitate them. …
In aggregate, what happens with incomes, wealth, labour markets, taxation, government spending, social programmes, and urban development, are overwhelmingly more important.
(p 20)

[The University of California has] a more egalitarian entry policy than Oxford and Cambridge …
[It has] as many low-income students, and students from under-represented minorities, as the whole Ivy League.
Under the progressive tuition policy, 40% of undergraduates at Berkeley are subsidized by other students and pay no tuition, and two thirds of all students receive at least some financial aid.
Half of all of Berkeley’s students graduate with no debt.
(p 21)

(Valuing Research into Higher Education, Keynote Address: 50th Anniversary Colloquium, Institute of Education, University College London, 26 June 2015)

Big Ideas 2012

ABC Radio National: Big Ideas

William Faulkner (1897 – 1962):
The past is not dead.
It is never dead.
It's not even past. …

Alan Trounson (1946) [President, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine]:
The returns on the human genome [project —] $3.8 billion last year — is somewhere between $700 and $1,400 for every dollar invested over 23 years.
(Stem cells in medicine: Opportunities and challenges, Dean of Medicine Annual Lecture Series, University of NSW, 12 July 2012)

Paul Barklay:
… 70% of the world's poor are women.
They earn less than 10% of the world's wages [for] two thirds of the world's work.
(International Women's Day, 8 March 2012)

Rear Vision: 2011

ABC Radio National: Rear Vision

Rashid Khalidi:
[What we are seeing now in the Arab Spring is the] expression of sentiments and aspirations that seem to cut across different classes and groups and age groups within the Arab world.
[That transcend] divisions that everybody thought were hard and fast.

[Most] people in the Arab world … have a sense of what's going on the rest of the world.
They understand that other people benefit from some elements of democracy and constitutional rule and they want that for themselves. …
[People] in the Arab world actually are like everybody else.

In most other parts of the world [people] have similar aspirations towards freedom and some social justice.
[The] tides that have affected the rest of the world affect this part as well.
It is not … a place made up of crazy fundamentalists who if you allow them to have a free system, will turn towards extremism.

[What] we've seen in Tunisia so far, what we're seeing in Egypt so far, has been an expression of this exact thing kind of sentiments that we saw in Eastern Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we saw in South Korea, we saw in Brazil, we saw in other countries that have managed to overcome autocracy and move towards democracy.

Background Briefing: 2012

ABC Radio National

Nassim Taleb (1960) [Author of The Black Swan]:
[The] system is too fragile [and the] regulators are [not] particularly intelligent.
[What is needed is] simplicity with the financial instruments to counter this complexity.
(Zombie banks, 12 April 2009)

The Spirit of Things

ABC Radio National

Contents

Breaking Religion's Monopoly on Spirituality and Ethics

The Spirit Of Things

Rachael Kohn

• Forced marriage, 29 July 2012.
• A Secular Bible, 15 April 2012.
  Anthony Grayling (1949): Former Professor of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London.
  
  [AC Grayling] bills himself as 'the maker' not the author of The Good Book: A Secular Bible …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  You must be wondering why you're on a program that's usually dedicated to religion and spirituality, but you have written a secular bible after all.
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  [T]hat was to encourage people to think that there are other ways of thinking about the good … life, which if I may use the word 'spiritual' in a non-religious sense, would also be a spiritual life.
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  [Atheists] have come under fire for behaving as if they are a religion.
  [Is] your secular bible going to feed that perception?
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  No, I don't think so …
  The [central feature of] religion is a commitment to belief in the existence of a deity or deities and a … need for a relationship between the individual and that deity. [Atheists] are people who simply don't take that [view of] the world. …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  [Another aspect of religion is a] commitment to a [sacred] book or books ….
  … I wonder whether your secular bible is going to be used in that way.
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  One reason for formatting it in the way that I did [is that it's a] very accessible and inviting way of laying out text …
  
  [The] real purpose behind it is [to outline] the tradition of classical thinking, [that predates Christianity by nearly 1,000 years,] about the nature of the good and well lived life …
  [T]his was the outlook of educated people for [many centuries, before] Christianity, became dominant in Europe.
  
  [What I have done is to] collect together non-religious texts from the poets and historians and philosophers, to show people that there is a tremendous amount of insight and wisdom and consolation and inspiration in those ways of thinking about things, fundamentally a humanist way of thinking about things.
  [This] really is a humanist bible, it is not an atheist bible.
  [The] primary purpose of it is the ethics of atheism, which is humanism. …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  [Of] course the Old Testament on which your parody bible is partly modelled was written well before the New Testament, centuries and centuries, almost 1,000 years before. …
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  … Christianity, as an organised religion, came into its dominance in Europe around about the 1st century of the Common Era …
  [While some] of the books of the Old Testament [do] date from quite early, perhaps as early as 1,000 years before the beginning of our Common Era, … most of them are [from] much later, and … the organisation of the Old Testament is only a couple of centuries before the beginning of the Common Era.
  
  It's interesting history, the way all these different texts got together.
  They are … a regional set of texts, coming … from what we now think of as Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East.
  
  [My] reason for choosing the format of a book that has come to be so influential in history is that the thinkers, the philosophers and their writings were pretty well marginalised or were shunted aside …
  They were once very much available to [the literate] minority in society [who] read people like [Aristotle,] Pliny and Cicero …
  [This formed] the substance of their thinking and their discussion about matters ethical.
  
  [The Church] in the late 5th century [CE] closed down the philosophical schools because they were in competition with Christianity …
  [A] whole tradition of thinking, a way of looking at the world which is very rich and deep, was set to one side and people were encouraged to concentrate on just one book …
  
  [I first read the Bible] at about the age of 14 [and] was very struck by … some of the awful things in it.
  The deity of the Old Testament seemed to me to be a sort of monster in a way, committing genocide whenever he was angry or dissatisfied.
  And there were some stories in it, like the story of Lot and his family [which are hardly edifying.] …
  
  [Bertrand Russell once commented that] Socrates was more intelligent than Jesus and the Buddha was more compassionate than Jesus …
  [It's an] accident of history or a victory of propaganda, that Jesus should be the one that people turn to when they try to think about a model for the ethical life …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  Well, philosophy is dedicated to the rational exercise of the intellect, but your secular bible is earnestly seeking to produce a wise person.
  Philosophers of course are not always wise, especially those that don't venture beyond their ivory towers.
  Have you sensed a certain failing amongst your academic colleagues to go out and really speak to the common man, to care about the common man?
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  I think in the last 100 or 130-odd years the academy has become far too professionalised, too inward looking, too jargon laden, too technical …
  … I feel that those of us who have had the great privilege of being given time to read and to study should try to share some of these things with other people …
  [To] invite them into that … great conversation of mankind that [they] are missing out on …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  And in your defence of sexuality you counsel the man to

  be quiet while you argue for the inexpressible charms of the sexual embrace.

  [It] sounds a bit quaint for our times, doesn't it Anthony?
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  … I was very careful not to give references to the texts that I drew from …
  What I wanted is just to address the ideas. …
  
  [The point of that passage was that] moralistic anxieties about love and sexual enjoyment fail to recognise how when two people have a great deal of mutual feeling for one another, among other things, among the pleasure that it gives them and the bond that it creates, it might also very well result in children and the tremendous responsibility and pleasure of bringing up children together.
  It's a very beautiful ethic …
  [It] incorporates the idea of our human loves and human reproduction in a story of nature, making it one with nature, [a] part of the good aspect of nature.
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  Yes, it certainly is, I just don't know whether there are many moral anxieties these days about having sex and embracing anything for pleasure, if it's anywhere in your reach. …
  
  [We are told in the chapter on the creation of Man] that
  • knowledge is freedom from ignorance and fear …
  • legends are limitations, [and]
  • science is the world's greatest endeavour, achievement and promise …
  [There] have been some dubious achievements [of science], not to mention some of its promises can be a bit way out and scary …
  [It] can be cruel, fearsome and utterly unpredictable.
  [Knowledge] is not always used for good.
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  [Certainly] science has been misapplied, the creation of … the atom bomb, [as] an instrument in the Holocaust … in the Second World War …
  But I think the majority story about science is that the lives of greater numbers of human beings have been vastly enhanced …
  [The challenge is] to be not be merely cleverer … but to be wise in the use of the cleverness. …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  You echoed the Stoics … who warned that emotions [may] hinder thinking.
  But isn't thinking which is unhindered by emotions a pathology … both clinically as well as historically? …
  
  Anthony Grayling:
  [Our] rationality is our highest and most distinctive gift …
  [But] in order to be fully reasonable you have to … give the emotions their place … but educated emotion.
  [Unbridled] uneducated emotion — lust, aggression, jealousy, selfishness — [are] obviously very destructive things.
  [When we raise] our children … we try to help them to manage their emotions, to express the positive ones, to allow themselves to feel affection and love, but to understand the wellsprings of jealousy and anger so that they can manage them better. …
  
  [The truly] reasonable person is going to recognise that, as a compound of emotion and reason, [the educated] reflective sensibility [is] one where you try to enhance and give expression to positive emotions like affection and love … especially in intimate relationships.
  When I think about my children … I think that the greatest gift that one can give them [is the] sense of being loved, it gives them confidence and a certain sort of poise.
  Children who are never loved spend too much time and energy in misdirected ways trying to find love. …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  [In] the Genesis chapter … you urge people to do nothing against their will, to covet nothing of anyone else's, and in so doing they will encounter no resistance and they will be free then to do what they wish and life will be lovely.
  There's a wonderful sense of order there, that everyone behaves according to the best intentions, but surely, [b]ad things do happen to good people.
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  They most certainly do [and] that is a reality that forces us … to think as carefully as we can about what kind of world [would be] a fully good world, and then to try to … to work towards it. …
  It's not fair on other people that we should impinge on their possibility for making and living a good life, any more than we would want them to impinge on ours.
  [So] there's this reciprocal thing, there's this relationship requiring thought, [understanding and experience.]
  Experience … not just through actual [encounters] with other people but through our reflective reading, our understanding of history, and our best use of the kinds of insights that the various sciences give us about ourselves and the world we live in.
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  … I can easily see your secular bible being quoted out of context at the way the Bible often is, and people … saying,

  It says there to do nothing against my will, so I'll just go ahead and do this.

  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  [You] could just as easily quote St Paul where he says 'love and do what you will', which seems to be a kind of a licence for everything.
  [Nobody] who has any capacity for reflection would [take] a few lines out of context and act on them. …
  
  In the case of Consolation … I remember once many years ago at a time of bearing with a very considerable loss, coming home one day and finding that somebody had baked a cake and left it on my front doorstep for me …
  It was completely anonymous, I never found out who did it, but it was such a tremendously kind thought.
  It was probably … of that whole experience, it was one of the most moving things.
  
  [My] sister was the victim of murder, and my mother, who was unwell at the time … died very soon afterwards as a result …
  
  [If] you think about families in Iraq and Afghanistan and people in the Second World War and all places of strife, really awful things do happen to people, and grief is a great fact of life …
  
  [This] reminds us that whenever you establish a relationship with another person, for example when you fall in love, you're entering into a contract in which one or both of you are going to suffer because [even] if you live together for 50 years, one of you is going to die first and the other one is going to be grief stricken.
  It's just a brute fact that all the good things in life have these potentials connected with them.
  
  [We've] got to confront it, and we've got to understand the nature of loss and grief …
  [We've] got to understand something about how we can offer consolations … and if it's at all possible … to do something good to try to mend the harm …
  
  [Those] texts of Consolation [address the fact that] life goes on …
  [We] have to incorporate those griefs and become better because of them in a way …
  [To] be more conscious of the fact that other people suffer them and [learn] how we might help to console them …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  [In] your last chapter, you seem to quote Paul.
  [Of] all the virtues and values, you say the greatest of these is affection.
  [One] can't help hearing Paul in this who extols faith, hope and love and says the greatest of these is love.
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  I wasn't quoting him there …
  [200 years before Paul] Mo Tzu … taught his followers [that] brotherly love … is the greatest bond that we can create between us … or the Buddha himself, or Aristotle …
  [T]hose are [the real] sources for that, the idea of the human bond. …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  [Alain de Botton] recently said he is going to build a temple to atheism. …
  Do you think there would be a role for The Good Book in its weekly meetings?
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  [They'd be] very welcome to make use of it, but [my] hope is that [The Good Book] might move [people] to read some of the original texts themselves and to become part of … the great conversation that is carried on through literature [-] through our reading [and] thinking about it.
  [It's] not only [about] the philosophers, but … also the poets [novelists and dramatists] who portray different aspects of our human experience …
  [The] result … should be a re-description of things that we've sort of lost sight of …
  [Again,] if I'm allowed to use the word in a completely non-religious sense … the spiritual dimension of life … our sense of the great yearning that we have for the whole, for the universe, for the absolute, for everything, for the interconnectedness of things, which a lot of people [just assume] must have a religious dimension.
  It doesn't, it's about this world and about this life in it now.
  
  [What I] would like to encourage people to do is to re-describe, as spiritual exercises, a walk in the country or listening to music or having dinner with friends or lying in bed and twiddling your toes on a Sunday morning, or reading something pleasant, or laughing, that those are the things that refresh and nourish the spirit, those are the things which are important, which give real value, a real significance to our daily lives.
  [Religion has] hijacked that sense that what's important and good and valuable sort of belongs to Holy Communion on Sundays and that everything else is just of the world.
  But it's the world itself which is that important …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  … I think you're sort of polarising it a bit.
  [Those] who gather in temples, synagogues and churches once a week are mandated or encouraged to go out and live their lives infused with the spiritual awareness of everything that they do. …
  Those who truly are religious are also truly spiritual, so that they live their lives according to these great ideals.
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  [From a secular viewpoint] the conflicts and divisions and the strife and even indeed in the mayhem caused by people who become very zealous at the other end of the spectrum [show] that there's something … very tainted about that well.
  It's a world view which … stems from people who knew nothing, or very, very little indeed, 3,000 years ago tending their sheep on the hillside …
  [Illiterate] people who told themselves stories and came up with beliefs in order to try and make sense of their world …
  
  [They provided] the foundations of [today's religious] outlook.
  [It's] sin to be autonomous, to think for yourself, to take responsibility for your morality.
  [The] sin of pride in Christianity is the idea that you don't need to rely on God.
  Islam, the very word means 'submission' …
  
  It's no accident that [the Abrahamic religions] took their major rise in a period of history [when] monarchy was the [dominant] political model.
  [The] idea of a supreme ruler to which everybody has to bend the knee is embedded in this view.
  [It needn't] be like that [now].
  We have reason and we are capable of managing our emotions …
  [We] ought to be … encouraging that and accepting that this life, in this world, and our relationships with the people around us, are the things that we should be focusing on …
  [Not] distracting ourselves with … fairy stories.
  
  
  

  Another New Republic

  
  Rachael Kohn:
  [Is] your intention as master of New College of the Humanities, a private university which you and others have founded … to train up the new wise leaders of tomorrow? …
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  [Any] higher education institution exists to help people learn how to think [not] to tell them what to think.
  So there's no aim … to train up a cadre of people who share my views.
  I very much hope that [our students] will test and challenge all the views that they meet, including mine and my colleagues'.
  [It's] about helping them to [become] questioning thinkers …
  [It's] their responsibility to come to the views that they will eventually live by.
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  [Who] you would look up to as the pre-eminent embodiment of a wise man?
  
  
  

  Imperfect Exemplars

  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  … I admire many, many people … people like Einstein and Russell, right the way back through history to David Hume, to Descartes, to Copernicus, to Galileo, to [anyone] who ventured to think and to use [their] insightful, incisive, creative intellect to understand our world a bit better and to move us forward …
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  … I must say Einstein and Russell … may have been brilliant, but there has certainly been a lot of criticism [of] on how they behaved in their personal lives. …
  
  Anthony Grayling (1949):
  [If] we allowed people to go through our (figuratively speaking) rubbish bins, each one of us would not escape whipping, as somebody once said.
  We're all human with our failings, and we would admire nobody if we didn't [behave generously] by looking at the best things that they managed. …
  
  The wonderful thing about the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne is that, probably for the … very first time in history, [we're seeing] people who don't have a religious outlook, [coming] together with a wide variety of … other political and ethical views, to discuss how we deal with a world which is now moving … beyond the dominance of religion.
  
  People think [that] in the last 10 or 15 years … religion has come back much more into focus, whereas what's actually happened … is that the religious voice has been amplified … because of the polarisation following the 9/11 atrocities …
  [The] horror that many … felt that religion was positioning itself to become as destructive and violent and bloody as it had been in the 17th and 16th centuries … or during the medieval period with the Crusades.
  [The] opposition to [being] taken over again, having won this great liberation of mind, [enquiry,] diversity and plurality that resulted from the Enlightenment.
  
  [This] movement is a coming together of people who share … that view …
  [A] movement, that [argues that we] have to take responsibility for the ethical, and [do] it far better than the religions have … in the last 2,000 years.
  
  
  

  Excerpts

  
  Genesis, Chapter 1
  
  
  1. In the garden stands a tree.
  2. In springtime it bears flowers; in the autumn, fruit.
  3. Its fruit is knowledge, teaching the good gardener how to understand the world.
  4. From it he learns how the tree grows from the seed to sapling, from sapling to maturity, at last ready to offer more life.
  5. And from maturity to age and sleep, whence it returns to the elements of things.
  6. The elements in turn feed new births; such is nature's method, and its parallel with the course of humankind.
  7. It was from the fall of a fruit from such a tree that new inspiration came for inquiry into the nature of things.
  8. When Newton sat in his garden, and saw what no one had seen before: that an apple draws the earth to itself, and the earth the apple.
  9. Through a mutual force of nature that holds all things, from the planets to the stars, in unifying embrace.
  10. So all things are gathered into one thing: the universe of nature, in which there are many worlds: the orbs of light in an immensity of space and time,
  11. And among them their satellites, on one of which is a part of nature that mirrors nature in itself,
  12. And can ponder its beauty and significance, and seek to understand it: this is humankind.
  13. All other things, in their cycles and rhythms, exist in and of themselves;
  14. But in humankind there is experience also, which is what makes good and its opposite,
  15. In both of which humankind seeks to grasp the meaning of things.
  
  The Good, Chapter 4
  
  
  5. There is not one single kind of good that suits and fits everyone; there are as many good lives as there are people to leave them.
  6. It is false that there is only one right way to live and one right way to be,
  7. And that's to find it we must obey those who claim to have the secret of a 'one right way' and a 'one true good'.
  8. If there are guides to the good, one must eventually leave them behind and seek the good of one's choice, and which suits one's own talents.
  9. This is the ultimate responsibility: to choose, and to cultivate the talents for one's choice.
  
  Wisdom, Chapter 6
  
  
  1. The meditation of the wise man is a meditation on life, not on death.
  2. The wise see the necessity of things, and by this they free themselves from distress:
  3. For the pain arising from loss is mitigated as soon as its inevitability is perceived;
  4. And likewise no one pities a newborn baby for being unable to speak or walk, because this is natural to its state.
  5. Thus the recognition of necessities is a liberation, and the wise are those who distinguish between necessity and contingency.
  6. Emotion is bad if it hinders the mind from thinking.
     An emotion that opens the mind to contemplate several aspects of things at once is better than one that fixes thought to an obsession.
  7. By framing a system of right conduct and practical precepts, one better bears adversity and resists evil.
  8. The wise thus remember what is to their true advantage, and the good that follows from friendship, and the fact that men act by the necessity of their nature.
  
  Lamentations, Chapter 11
  
  
  1. Every state of well-being, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative;
  2. It merely consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.
  3. It follows that the happiness of any given life is to be measured not by its joys and pleasures,
  4. But by the extent to which it has been free from suffering.
  
  Consolations, Chapter 4
  
  Of grief, to a friend.
  
  
  1. I am grieved to hear that he is dead whom you loved, but I would not have you sorrow more than is fitting.
  2. That you should not mourn at all I should hardly dare insist; and yet I know that it is the better way; for he is at peace, safe from any further harms,
  3. And you and his other friends will cherish the best memories of him, and speak of him, thus making him part of life still.
  4. But what man will ever be so endowed with that ideal steadfastness of mind, unless he has already risen far above the reach of chance, not to mourn?
  5. Even the most stoical would be stung by an event like this, though for him it were only a sting.
  6. We, however, may be forgiven our tears, if only our tears have not flowed to excess.
  7. We may weep, but we must not wail.
     Do you think that this advice is harsh?
  8. Well: only consider the reason for lamentations and weeping.
     It is because we mourn for ourselves as well as for he who has left us; we are sad because we are bereft.
  
  The Good, Chapter 9
  
  
  1. Seek always for the good that abides.
     There can be none except as the mind finds it within itself;
  2. Wisdom alone affords everlasting and peace-giving joy, for then, even if some obstacle arises,
  3. It is only like an intervening cloud, which floats beneath the sun but never prevails against it.
  4. When will you attain this joy?
     It will begin when you think for yourself,
  5. When you truly take responsibility for your own life,
  6. When you join the fellowship of all who have stood up as free individuals and said,
  7. 'We are of the company of those who seek the true and the right, and live accordingly;
  8. 'In our human world, in the short time we each have,
  9. 'We see our duty to make and find something good for ourselves and our companions in the human predicament.'
  10. Let us help one another, therefore; let us build the city together,
  11. Where the best future might inhabit, and the true promise of humanity be realised at last.
  
  Rachael Kohn:
  That's the last chapter of A Secular Bible …
  [There's] a lot more to it, including … Songs, which is something of a parody of the Song of Songs from the Bible.
  
  Would you like know more?