Quite right!: Francis Fukuyama interview

0:00Hello, welcome to Quite Right, I'm Michael Gove, editor of The Spectator. And joining me today is Francis Fukuyama, one of the leading public intellectuals in the world today. Many were believed familiar with Francis' work, The End of History and the Last Man, which explored exactly how, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, history was not so much ending as being remade. Francis explored then whether or not the ideas of liberal democracy that appeared to have prevailed, would in the future determine how our societies and how our civilization endured. And in that book, Francis also outlined The Last Man, an idea borrowed or rather as a tribute to nature. And the question that Francis asked then would be, would identity, would it as our for

1:00respect, would some of the primal feelings that human beings have reassert themselves in a world where the ideological competition between communism and the West had ended. So in a sense, not just historian but also Cere, Francis Fukuyama joins me now, he has a new book out in the realm of The Last Man, in which he considers both his own life as a public intellectual, involved with the decision making at the highest level in the American state, and also the world we know inhabit. Francis, it's a pleasure to have you here. Now, inevitably the first thing is, as you point out in the book, the title of that best-selling book has been taken to mean that you pronounce that history had ended. Any reader of the book would know that was very, very far from what you meant.

2:01What was it that you wanted to get across about the world that was to come? Well, it was a couple of things. So the end of history apart refers to the thought of the German philosopher Hegel, any idea that we have what today you would call modernization or develop in process, and the question was where was that leading? And I think the 20th century produced a lot of pessimism because of the two world wars that it would lead to some extremist ideology like communism or fascism, but in fact, it looked like it was leading to liberal democracy. Now, the problem was that people actually didn't read the last five chapters of the book version, the part on the last man, which was really from the philosopher Nietzsche, who basically said, actually, people aren't going to be happy at the end of history. If they have peace and prosperity, it's not enough for human beings because they want to strive for something more. And so I think that it was both a prediction of a kind of immediate future that looked

3:03very democratic, but a longer term one in which there would be threats to that tranquility. And in that sense, this book was epoch defining epoch shaping, but it was also misunderstood as so many contributions by intellectuals and politics can often be misunderstood. You're dealing with the ideas of Hegel, you're dealing with a concept introduced by Nietzsche. Do you, when you look at politics, today think that the influence of intellectuals and ideas is a force for good or not? Well, I'm really struck today in the United States on the right that there's kind of an absence of ideas. Yes. I think that the agenda has been set by Donald Trump in his movement, and it's very hard to discern a coherent set of underlying ideas. For example, he presented himself during the election as an isolationist, basically, no more forever wars. And then the first thing he does is he gets the country into a, you know, into a big war.

4:06And I think that a lot of intellectuals on the right have been scrambling to try to create a coherent narrative out of all of this. And it's very difficult, you know, so you have people like Patrick Deneen that basically want to revive a sort of Catholic integralism. You have odd figures like Curtis Yarven that actually want to deny the primacy of democracy, you know, some of the tech bros in Silicon Valley are edging towards, you know, that kind of a perspective. But I don't think it's really a coherent intellectual conceptualization of what the contemporary right, at least in the United States is. It is an interesting point because Patrick Deneen is an academic who's tried, as you say, to give a veneer of coherence to the post-liberal trend that Trump has personified and Curtis Yarven is a, I suppose one could describe him as an internet personality. I think that certainly, but someone who rose to prominence, operating under a pseudonym,

5:10making provocative arguments about the return of the monarchy, he's not actually involved in power. No. One of the things about your own career is that you're first and foremost an academic thinker, but it's also the case that you've been involved in influencing and advising political figures in the United States. And you touch on that in your book looking back on your life. Can you tell us just a little bit about your own journey? Sure. Joining the rank corporations. Well, I started out in, well, I took a brief detour through French postmodernism when I was still in graduate school. But I focused on policy and international politics. Initially, I worked on the State Department on two separate occasions in the Reagan administration and then in the George H. W. Bush administration. My position back then, I was part of this new conservative movement that really wanted a very forward-leaning American posture that emphasized military preparedness.

6:16And I think that hit the shoals on the Iraq war because that's when I made a break with them because it struck me that it was in the American DNA to be a global supporter of democracy and to promote democratic and liberal ideas, but the way that they were going about it through the use of force, I thought, was really mistaken because it didn't recognize the limits of that kind of over military power. And sure enough, I think it led to one of the great disasters in American foreign policy and were in a way still paying the price for that. The other idea, set of ideas, were economic because conservatism under Ronald Reagan was very much tied up with free market economics, Milton Friedman and figures like that. And I think that it was one of those revolutions that was necessary in the 1970s and 80s when it happened, but it went a little bit too far and particularly in the lead up to the financial

7:17crisis in 2008. I think the deregulation of the financial system actually had been very imprudent and the United States paid a price for that. And so both of those were, I think, failures of conservative ideas at the time. And I think if an idea fails, you've got to rethink the idea. Is it fair to say then that you're a liberal of the right, someone who believes in the virtues of democracy and celebrating those and hoping to see them spread. The virtues of the market, recognizing those, hoping that others will benefit from its capacity to generate growth. But there's also an older conservative tradition, the Marx you were thinking, which is a warning against hubris. That's right. The belief that any idea, however admirable, if taken to extremes, actually has the seeds of its own undoing within it. This is saying in Greek, maiden, agon, meaning nothing in excess.

8:18And actually moderation was one of the four cardinal Greek virtues. And it's not a virtue that's respected in the modern world. I think that there's a desire for a kind of expressive individualism that prizes extremism in a certain way. And I think that's been one of the problems. So in terms of these conservative ideas, you know, the idea that the United States could use military force to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was a good idea. The idea that you could use military force to democratize Iraq was not a good idea, precisely because it was immoderate. It didn't understand the limits of that kind of power. And similarly, you know, we needed a free market revolution back in the 1980s because a lot of the Western economies had become, you know, greatly over-regulated. But again, that was an idea was taken too far. The core of it was a right one, but people didn't know where to stop. And I think that was part of the problem. And in learning the lessons of having been an enthusiast or certainly a supporter of

9:22a particular set of principles and then tempering that judgment through experience, would you say that you've become overtime in a small sea sense, more conservative? Well, I would distinguish between different realms because I think in economic thought, I've definitely moved to the left. I think one of the things that defined Reaganite conservatism or thaturism was distrust of the state and the desire to get the state out of regulation of the economy. And I'm not so sure that that is a universal formula for economic success. I think in cultural matters, I still remain fairly conservative. I, for example, wrote a book, our post to human future about biotechnology. And in a way, the hubris of using technology to actually try to change human nature, which I thought was profoundly misguided because we've seen efforts at that in the past that

10:26have led to all sorts of unforeseen and unwanted consequences. In that sense, a lot of your work has been prescient because the whole point about the end of history as we touched on earlier is that it wasn't saying that history overall was over. It was making the point that when you had a particular type of ideological competition ending, there were new demons that would emerge. And your, your two volume book on political order is a study of the competition between different political ideas as different groups compete in order to offer a better idea of what a brighter future might be. And that and your work on what a post to human future might look like speaks very much to a moment when artificial intelligence, gene technology and also at the same time uncertainty in the West about our future are at the center of our debates. No, absolutely.

11:26And strikingly, as you touched on, ancient wisdom, not just philosophers from the 19th century like Hagel and Nietzsche, but also Greek and classical thinking can help us to look at that. And in this book at the end, you have a sort of bibliography of scholarly articles on economics and politics that help us to navigate these times. But as you touched on earlier, the cramp point has. He's not only a marginal place where much thought is given to Hagel, to Nietzsche, Plato or Socrates or thinking about whether or not Manceros Olsen was right about economics. That's right. Yeah, unfortunately, I think we have an administration that's become quite untethered from ideas. And I think also quite frankly, can be explained only in terms of personal psychology. I've felt in the last few years that actually social psychology and individual psychology

12:27are actually much better guides to thinking about politics because the Republican Party, for example, in the United States has been completely transformed from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump. And they believe very, very different things. The same people now claim to believe very different things. And I don't think you can explain that through, you know, they're taking in empirical information about the world and reflecting on it and coming up with different conclusions. I think it's a social process. But we have, I suspect, both of us, you as an academic, an intellectual, an analyst, and we know as a journalist, we have a juvenile responsibility trying to explain why this has come about. So of course, we can condemn or criticize aspects of Trump. But why is it that the Republican Party has changed and that Trump became president? Because in your book, you reflect on some of the frustrations that voters and citizens will have felt that will have led them to move in this way.

13:28And what do you believe those principal frustrations were? Well, I think there are quite a few of them. I think one had been the way that the left in both Britain and the United States has evolved because right from the beginning of the labor party and then with the Democrats, they were always a party of working people. That was a key part of the coalition of Franklin Roosevelt. But then over time, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, it began to evolve so that it became increasingly the party of educated elites. Yes. And this is a pattern you see everywhere now, where urban areas that have a big concentration of college-educated, university-educated people tend to vote for left parties and people that live in smaller towns, villages in the countryside tend to vote for populous parties. And I think that the reason that there's been this wave of resentment against those elites is precisely because of that educational divide, that people that have this belief in their own

14:33wisdom and knowledge talk to each other. And they've lost the ability to talk to people that are not like themselves. And obviously that's something that's felt and resented by their working class peers. And so it's shifted what it means to be a person of the left. I suppose in a way, an apogee of that was Hillary Clinton, referring to the type of people who supported Trump. And so it's like she scorned as deplorables and even Barack Obama, referring to people clinging to God and guns. And so there was a sort of scorn from elites that Trump was able to exploit. But were there also do you think structural factors in the way in which the American political system worked that meant that someone like Trump who posed as a strong man? I do. This is a big theme in especially my recent thinking that one of the problems with it. So the way I define the liberal part of liberal democracy, it's really about the rule of law. Exactly.

15:34Constraints on executive power. You want to have checks and balances that make it impossible for a president to abuse the rights of citizens. But one of the phenomena in a liberal society is its tendency to just accumulate rules endlessly. And I think we've seen that in all of our societies. We have a professor at Stanford in the law school who has been trying to use big data. So it's simply catalog how many rules there are and a federal state and municipal level. And he can't do it because I mean, the number is in the millions, you know. And I think that that leads to a phenomenon that I, and one of my books labeled v talkercy where you have many points within a democratic system where people are able to stop things that they don't like. But you don't actually delegate authority to make decisions. And that leads to paralysis in many areas of policy. And I think that's been one of the frustrations that has been driving support for people like Elon Musk or Donald Trump,

16:38who actually then just ignore the law and try to find out. I will. Yeah. And one of the points you make is that the genius of the original American revolution in a way was a recognition that a distant monotony George III ruling empirially and empiriously was depriving the citizens of the of the then colonies of the chance truly to flourish. And in the immediate aftermath, you had two strains. The strain represented by Alexander Hamilton and the strain represented by Thomas Jefferson. Absolutely. A strain between saying you need a strong executive power and you need to disperse power. And that conversation as it were between them more than a conversation has been an animating spirit. Absolutely. In American politics. Yeah. So there's a professor, Mark Dunkelman, that wrote a book recently, I guess, last year about why nothing works. And he uses exactly that dichotomy. On the one hand, the Jeffersonians want to push power down to the people as far as possible because they don't trust the government.

17:42And the Hamiltonians want to use the government to achieve progressive ends. And there's been kind of generational swing back and forth between these perspectives. So for most of the 19th century, the United States was Jeffersonian. There wasn't a strong federal government beginning in the progressive era. You know, you had the need for, for example, interstate regulation of the railroads, this new technology that had appeared. And progressively an accumulation of power. And the new deal, you know, Franklin Roosevelt's new deal was about using the power of the federal government. For example, electrify the upper south, the Tennessee Valley to build, you know, monumental infrastructure works like Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge. But then in the 1960s, you had a shift to the Jeffersonian side where especially progressives became increasingly suspicious of government. They felt that it had been captured by corporation or corporate power. So this is Ralph Nader and all of the young lawyers that followed him into public interest law. And so I think

18:48from that period up until the present, if you're an idealistic progressive, you don't go to work for the government, you go to work for a public interest law firm, and you spend your time suing the government to stop it from doing things. And in a sense, the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, became a party of lawyers. And this goes back to the whole point about vitocracy. People frustrated that they believe that the better life that they want is deny them and frustrated also because they see different arms of government and the courts preventing action being taken. Find in Trump, certainly someone who professed to be capable of cutting through that. And even though again, I don't know if he knows much about Hamilton beyond what the musical may have told him. Who knows? Don't want to be unfair. Don't want to be a cyber musical. But he does want to have an imperial presidency, almost, lots of executive orders. The whole approach that he's taken

19:53towards tariffs irrespective of the intrinsic merits of trade policy, the fact that it's done by executive fiat. And yet, there's still discontent in the United States. And in those realms where he's less constrained or less constrained domestically, like going to war in Iran and so on, is almost though there is huge public satisfaction. If you were going to pass judgment at this stage, on the Trump presidency, as we approach the halfway point of its second term, what do you think that judgment would be? And is there anything to be said for Trump's approach? Well, I think that you need stronger executive power in order to make decisions. I think the way that he's chosen to go about it is a very bad one because it's very arbitrary and it doesn't exercise power in the areas that are needed. Now, the one area where I think there would be pretty broad agreement that he's been successful has to do with the Southern border, that Americans, I think, according to

20:58polling data, are basically favorable towards immigration, but they really don't like uncontrolled immigration unless what they got under Joe Biden. Barack Obama actually deported, you know, 3 million people, but Biden fell into this kind of sympathy for people seeking refugee status, which was actually a loophole. I mean, something similar exists in Europe as well, where people were claiming that they were being persecuted politically, where they just basically wanted a job in Texas. And so Trump closed that. I think the problem is that he did it in an extremely cruel and I think ultimately illegal way deporting people with no due process whatsoever. And I think people have reacted, you know, negatively to that, but I do think that that's probably the one part of his agenda that would get, you know, broad support. And if you said, well, what's he done that's great? It's that tariffs, I think there's never been broad support for.

22:01That was actually an aftermath to Reaganite Republicans, but I don't think that somehow people think that Canada is the big enemy of the United States or that we really need to have Greenland as part of, you know, our American territory. In that sense, it gets back to the point that you made earlier that while it is understandable why Americans wanted a stronger executive presidency post-biting particularly perhaps, nevertheless, prudent moderation and the exercise of that additional power is a virtue and excess leads to disappointment and actually undermines the authority of the office. Absolutely. I mean, for example, we were promised high speed rail in California in the mid 1990s. And the federal government teamed up with private contractors in the state to actually build high speed rail. And here it is, 2026, they built maybe 10 miles of it in the middle of nowhere. And it's very disappointing because, you know, China in the meantime has built

23:02the largest high speed rail system in the world. And again, it's through this unbridled use of executive power, which is what China is all about. Now, we don't want to become China, but we want to be a little bit more like China in this ability to actually get things done. British listeners, hearing you talk about the failure to execute a high speed rail project, will roll their eyes and sympathy. Do you see the same problems of vitocracy that you described so clearly in the United States here in the United Kingdom and in Europe? Yeah, well, here, I mean, the problems are slightly different, but I think you have the same ultimate result. In Europe, you've got this additional problem that on the member state level, you have excessive layers of regulation. But then you've got this very powerful bureaucracy and Brussels that adds a whole separate set of rules, which are less accountable in many ways than

24:05the national level ones, because there's basically no real powerful European parliament that can reign them in. And so in that sense, I think there's less account of feeling of less accountability in Europe. That's obviously one of the reasons that Britain left, you know, the European union. So I do think that that is the case. There are some differences. In the United States, I think the courts have been heavily implicated in vitocracy because every decision can be reviewed by the courts. And then if you don't like that decision, you appeal it to a yet higher court. And by the time you're done, it's 10 years and, you know, billions of dollars later and you still haven't built the high speed rail, you mentioned the understandable feelings that led to Brexit. And of course, you said that there was a risk, a real risk that it disorderly breaks. It would be harmful to the United Kingdom, harmful to our allies. 10 years on, what's your assessment of how it's gone

25:06disaster? Utopia? Somewhere in between. Well, I think it's not had a good effect on the British economy. I think there have been, I've seen various estimates about how much lower British GDP having left the EU. And I think that, you know, there's been this general stagnation and productivity that is really the result from Britain closing itself off from. And then, you know, you get this double whammy because I think at the time of Brexit, there is this argument that we might be better off in an Anglo sphere where we're close to the United States and you'd have free trade and, you know, other opportunities outside of Europe. And that's been closed off as well. And do you think that there are, as you look at the other European countries and the upsurge of what's often called populism in those countries that they moved in Britain that led to Brexit in your analysis is replicated, not that these other countries may leave, but is replicated

26:11in the political currents there. So if you look at Audubon, of course, he lost, but still, he had a decisive impact on how hungry operated and how other neighbours operated. If you look at Malonean Italy, if you look at the rise of the pan in France, if you look at the AFD's potential future success in Germany, what do you think lies behind that? Are there similar impulses to those in the UK? No, so I think France is probably the best example where immigration has just been the central issue. Many French people feel that the Muslim population in France really has not been at all integrated into the French mainstream. The fault for that is complicated because I think it's actually part of the French, you know, the native French people's failure to, you know, to open to that. But the fact is you do have large neighborhoods in many French cities where, you know, you have very angry, unhappy Muslim populations. And I think La Paine is kind of an outgrowth of that

27:13fear that France is going to lose its cultural distinctiveness because of that. In Germany, you know, there isn't, well, certainly in the eastern parts of Germany that are the home of the AFD, there hasn't been that level of immigration. So it's not like an immediate issue for them. I do think that there is this feeling in general that you have elites in control that, you know, have a liberal ideology that really doesn't take them seriously. So in that sense, I think it's similar to what's going on with populism in other European countries. One of the things about Germany is that in the east, people who were certainly involved in manufacturing in the past and some extent still in areas like chemicals blame high energy costs, among other things, for their travails. And as exactly as you say, a sort of rhineland political elite that hasn't taken account of them. That's why in Germany at the moment, the AFD are prospering because they argue that there should be

28:17datont between Germany, the West and Putin's Russia in order to get back to cheaper energy from Russia. Do you think looking at how Russia is playing the global game and how China is playing the global game? But they are in the realm of offering alternative models or just seeking to disrupt the West and throw it off balance because again, there's a temptation for us to use them the mental models of the past and say, oh, this is a new Cold War. Is it a battle of ideas or is it something different? Well, let me just back up first and talk about Germany because I think that there elites made several really big strategic mistakes. So one is developing this great dependence on Russian energy that gave them lower manufacturing costs and all sorts of advantages, but turned out to be strategically very destructive. The other was depending on the American security

29:23guarantees that they really didn't have to spend money on their own military. And that has now disappeared. And then, you know, seeing the China market as the savior for German industry and making huge investments there when China really does not have Germany's best interest at heart. And they've been hit by all three of these things simultaneously. So they're in really a lot of trouble. Now, there's a big difference, I think, between Putin and Xi. Despite the fact they're both authoritarians, Putin is a reckless risk taker. You know, I wrote my PhD dissertation on Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East. And the conclusion was that they were very cautious. You know, they would threaten to intervene, but they'd never actually did it. They'd wait until the conflict was really resolved before they made their threats. Putin is happy to send troops all over the place, including starting, you know, the largest war in Europe since World War II. And he's got very bad judgment that, you know, he completely underestimated the Ukrainians. He

30:25thought the Ukrainians would welcome Russia as a protector, but, you know, he didn't count on the kind of resistance he's gotten. And so he's paid a grievous price for that. She is much more cautious. I think he understands that he's playing a long game. Right now, he sees technology competition as the main area. Previously, it had been infrastructure with the Belt and Road. And both of those were playing to real Chinese strengths. And so I think he's played a much more, and I don't think he wants to simply disrupt for disruption sake. He understands that there's a long-term conflict or competition between models. And he wants to show that his model works better. And in that sense, Xi obviously believes it and Chinese elites believe in the superiority of their model. But during the Cold War, it was the case that there would be Marxist-Lendus, Marists, outright communists and fellow travelers in the West who would share an ideological kinship

31:32with Russia and China. Argue not just that they were better societies, but societies that we should emulate, whether it's a revolution or whatever. I don't sense that you have many people here, even if they may come up with a chance to end their eyes at China, who are arguing that China's ideological model or that Russia's philosophical model should be deployed here. How does that make it different from the challenge of the Cold War, as we saw it? No, sure. It's really not a battle of ideas in the sense that the Cold War was because neither Russia nor China is really offering its own model as something universal. And all countries, at some point, would need to adopt, which was the argument that Marxism, Leninism made back in the days of the Cold War. And I think it means that the threat that they represent is also different. It's not this universal threat that you're going to get little China imitators all over Central America and this sort of thing, because I think the cultural conditions for the Chinese success are very specific to Chinese

32:38culture. And it's not something that can be exported easily. So I think that's correct that we are not in that kind of a Cold War. We are in a more classical 19th century type of great power competition where power is important and power gives you influence and powers are trying to maximize that. The surprising thing really is the United States where democracy and a sort of principled support for democratic ideas had been so much in the DNA of the American Republic right from the beginning epitomized by Woodrow Wilson and this whole Wilsonian tradition. And that under the current administration seems to be completely gone. And I think this is a part of one of the many lessons in your book. You make the point that the prosperity and freedom of the West enjoys is as a result of liberalism. And there are different strains and flavors of liberalism,

33:38whether you draw from Canton rolls on the one side or if you look at a tradition drawn from Hobbes and Lalkan and looking at human nature. But liberalism is to an extent a universalist greed. It argues either there are universal freedoms that should extend a respect to a human nature or the human nature will dictate the nature of those freedoms, but humans are alike at that regard. But one of the realities of our time is that culture has fought back. Ethnicity has fought back as it were in that if you were thinking about the questions we touched on migration in France and Germany, the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union, the American border, a desire to protect culture as it were has meant that some of the gains of liberalism have been countered or rolled back. And one of the key questions that you ask in your book is

34:44how can you simultaneously have a state strong enough to protect its citizens and to protect freedom and yet at the same time with enough commonality to adhere. And are there any points that you would offer or insights that you would offer about how to navigate through that? Yeah, well that's one of the central problems of liberalism. So liberalism, as you say, is a universalist doctrine that all people have a base level of dignity. It needs to be respected. And therefore we can't really distinguish between somebody from Myanmar or from Guatemala and our own people. Not in the most recent book, but in my book about liberalism, I tried to explain why borders are still necessary. Because I think that the authority of a state is based on the use of force. I mean that's kind of the definition of what a state is. It's the terrible. Yeah, it's Max

35:44Weber's classic definition of stateness. And as long as the state is really about the legitimate use of force, it can't be universal. It can't have one country that can intervene anywhere in the world in order to protect the rights of citizens. It has to be territorially limited. And then furthermore, you can't have a coherent society that doesn't have a national identity. And actually successful liberal states are built on top of preceding nations that did have that kind of identity. And that was not created by liberalism. It was actually created in authoritarian times. France, Germany, the United Kingdom, these were all coherent cultures that had been unified sometimes by force, linguistically for example. And that was not something that liberalism itself promotes. And that's why there's attention in liberalism between the need for a strong national identity and these liberal principles. And that's why many liberals I think have made a big

36:48mistake, you know, declaring that they're really citizens of the world, not of their country. But you know, they have this belief in the universal rights of man, but they don't understand that those rights cannot be enforced beyond the borders of their country. And that's why borders remain important. The anti liberal thinker, French thinkers, Jesus domesticer, when he was invited to think about mankind, humanity said, man, man, I know about man, I know about a Frenchman, I know about a Russian, I know about a German, I don't know about man. Did he have a point and more than that? If only were to be devil's advocate for a second and to say, look, I'm a Russian, Russia has never been and can never be a liberal nation. What would you say? By the way, I lived on ruchos, if to master when I was a student in Paris. I know, I know this individual quite quite well. No, I think that, you know, culture is important, but there are

37:50universals, there are human universals because I think that the human species actually does have characteristics in common. I don't really see any culture that prizes dictatorship and really loves to live under a tyrannical government. And I think that, you know, the quest for human rights is something that is not simply limited culturally. The other thing is that culture is evolved. If you look at Europe, Europe was not democratic until really the 20th century. It was a very long, hard slog to move from, you know, so the origins of liberalism lay in these strong cultural identities. After the Protestant Reformation, Europeans spent 150 years killing each other over things like Transubstantiation, infant baptism, right? And the early liberal thinkers, you know, basically said, look, we're not going to agree on even within a single Christian culture, we're

38:51not going to agree on these ideological issues. And therefore, we need to tolerate people that have different views about the good life. And that was really the origin. It was a very pragmatic adaptation to the existence of religious diversity. In the 20th, 19th and 20th century, nationalism began to replace religion as a dominating passion in politics. And once again, you know, people could see the dangers of an unbridled nationalism that spilled over its own borders and wanted to dominate, you know, other countries. And that's why after 1945, there's an attempt to create a liberal international order in which, you know, that kind of military aggression is, you know, is not acceptable to other nations. So, yes, culture remains important, but it changes. And I think it can be modified by different kinds of political institutions. If you were to offer advice to people who would think of themselves broadly as liberals, they're classical liberals,

39:56about what they need to take account of. In order to keep their worldview relevant, in order to keep institutions uncorrupt, in order to guard against excesses of whatever kind, what general advice would you give given the nature of our times? Well, I give different kinds of advice and different domains. So the first is when we just talked about which is national identity. Yeah. Liberals should not issue patriotism. And a strong sense that we have something in common, we have national symbols, we ought to, you know, prize them. The other thing is that I think they need to understand that government is legitimate, not just because of the procedures that it follows, but because of the results that it actually provides its citizens. And, you know, governments don't exist simply to have people obey the law just for its own sake. It's because the law leads to things like public safety, infrastructure, healthcare, education, you know, all these substantive things that governments

40:58are supposed to do. And if the accumulation of law prevents them from doing that, you know, they're going to be in trouble. I would start with those, there are many other things that are over the horizon, having to do with, for example, human nature. I talk about human nature a lot because for classical liberals like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, there's an understanding of human nature and the higher of human needs. And we are on the verge of a couple of big technological revolutions and that is going to have a big impact on the way that we think about human nature. I'll touch on those in just a second, but coming back periculate to home here in the UK, we have a new Prime Minister Andy Bundle. Someone who does believe in a more assertive role for the state, someone who has also talked about the frustrations that working people have felt with a failure to be listened to. It's only days for him. Do you have any observations about

42:01British politics at the moment and what you can see or discern in the way in which Andy Burnham is operating as Prime Minister? You know, I don't follow British politics closely enough to really have a very strong opinion. I do think that the communicative style is very important. A lot of successful politicians from Trump to Mom Donnie have figured out that people just don't communicate the way they used to, you know, 20, 30 years ago. And I think that in this world offenticity is very important. I think that was one of Starmars problems that people just didn't think that he was really, he was more a PR creation than somebody that was really saying what he believed. And I think to the extent that Burnham can actually persuade people that he means what he says, he will be more successful. As to substantive policies, I think Britain's got a lot of problems because some activity has been very low over the past decade. I think there's a complicated

43:04discussion about why that's true, but unless something is done to juice creative energies of British entrepreneurs, you know, it's going to be a very difficult political politics that will follow. In London, and again, you've been a regular visitor to the United Kingdom. Have you noticed changes in the way in which Britain looks and feels during the last decade or 15 years? One of the things that has impressed me about Britain compared the United States is that it may be a superficial thing, but the way it's dealt with diversity is quite different from the United States. You know, you have a person from the subcontinent who's the prime minister, the leader of the conservative party is a black woman from, you know, who's roots are in Africa. The head of the Scottish National Party, you know, this family comes from Pakistan. You couldn't have that in the United States. It's quite interesting degree of actual tolerance in a way. There is in British society, which I find, you know,

44:09actually quite admirable in many ways. We will take that compliment if you were to offer advice as a friend, but a clear eye to observe about the things that Britain might do in order to improve either its economic performance or its respect on the world stage, on the particular things you think British politicians should reflect on and consider. Well, maybe a hard thing to say to you, but I think they ought to reconsider Brexit, you know, I think that it was a mistake. And I think that cutting yourself off from the biggest market, you know, nearby market at a time when the American market itself closing is not the way forward. I will resist the temptation to push back. Okay. At that point on this issue, but your observation comes from a friend who wants Britain to do well. So I will respect it entirely on that basis. And move on to another area, which is our post human future. And in particular,

45:12artificial intelligence, the notion, not just of the singularity, the notion of computing power, not just matching and emulating, but potentially exceeding that of the human brain, but also the power of figures like Sam Altman, Darry Amiday and others, Elon Musk. What challenges do you think that creates for America and for the world? Well, there's several of them. I think the biggest one is the economic one that many forms of work, I think, are going to be done by machines in the future. And I think that you cannot solve this by universal basic income or redistributive schemes because people's self-conception, there's feeling of self-worth is very much related to their jobs. And the fact that they are being paid for something that society thinks is useful. And if that's all taken over by machines, I don't think they'll be content to basically live on essentially welfare and play video games all day.

46:16That's one thing. I think there's a doomer scenario about the loss of control over these machines that I didn't take seriously up till now, but you've now had a couple of instances where you have a machine that breaks out of the playpen that it's put in and breaks into other computers in ways that the programmers did not instruct it to do. And that's, you know, I think quite worrisome. And then the final one is the one you referred to that, especially because of software, there tends to be this incredible returns to scale where the larger you are, the larger you get. And it's meant that really only China in the United States play in this frontier space of artificial intelligence. It increases both the inequality between societies and then within societies. And that's obviously something that's not good for democracy. You do make the point in the book that you challenge the idea that even though all of these points that you make are real concerns,

47:20the idea that machines will be able to replace or transcend humanity, you challenge on a basis that there is a sense in humanity, a quality in humanity, an X factor that can't be replicated, that the human brain is not simply a wet computer, right? Do you still hold to that view and do you think that you have to be religious to hold to that view? No, I don't think you need to be religious. I think you just need to be observant that human beings have consciousness and they have emotions. And we simply do not understand where these come from. We don't understand what part of the brain, well, we know that there is a certain part of the brain that lights up when we feel fear, you know, when we feel remorse or conscience and all of these sorts of things, but we really don't understand why you have subjective experience. And I think that it is the subjective experience of

48:21emotion that I think most people would regard as kind of a core of their humanity. A sociopath is somebody that does not feel remorse for cruelty or violent behavior. And I think that there's speculation that machines will ultimately evolve this, but nobody knows. There's no reason for thinking that just because you reach a certain density of neurons that you're going to develop consciousness, that's just a postulate. We don't understand that process. And so I would be very cautious about according, you know, rights to computers because, you know, they simply are very fundamentally different from human beings. And again, one of the thinkers that you've cited in the past has been Jonathan Haight, the author of the righteous mind. And again, one of the points that he makes is that as you bring out, that there are principles and values that are common to much humanity, in notions of the sacred and of honor and of disgust. That are not the product of

49:28rational thought, but are bound up in the emotional reality of what it is to be a human being. Yeah, that's right. I think our hierarchy of values comes out of our nature. We would guard the right to life, not in the sense of abortion, but just the right to not be killed by another human being, you know, as much more fundamental than the right to a nice pleasant vacation in August. And so I think those are really established by our understandings of human nature. You know, for example, in most countries, you have much more severe punishments if a mother kills her children than if a stranger does it because we have a certain view of the natural obligations, you know, that a parent has to their offspring. And so there's a lot of ways in which human nature actually is really the foundation of a lot of our moral feelings about things and origins of our laws. And it becomes very different if it's a machine involved.

50:28Finally, if you were to say to a young person thinking about the world, wanted to make a contribution, what course would you urge the to follow? And what would you encourage them to read? Well, I think everybody should start with a humanistic education that introduces them to some of the great thinkers in the past that have thought about big questions. What is the nature of justice? What is the nature of human nature? What is conventional? What is natural? All of these sorts of things, I think, are questions that are addressed in the best way by a lot of classical philosophy. That's what Socrates does in the Republic. He says, what's justice? What do you think adjust society looks like? I think if you delay on that and you don't study it, you know, when you're at the beginning of your higher education, you're never going to get to it. The skills you can acquire at any point, one thing I would advise, don't learn how to code, because that's going to be done. It's already being done by machines much better. But,

51:32but, you know, understanding some of these big ideas, ancient Greek is more important than Python. Well, I mean, I know both Greek and Python, and I think they both have their role. But I do think that, you know, that kind of openness to these large questions at an early stage in your career is something very important that will stick with you for a long time. And if you were to offer a lesson or two to anyone now involved in politics, what would be your golden rules? The golden rules can change over time. I think that it's important to keep in mind what higher values you're seeking to achieve in your political career. And, you know, every politician has to learn how to compromise. That's what democratic politics is all about. But you also need to have a sense of where you can't compromise and what issues are of such importance in the hierarchy of human values that you need to devote your life to seeing how you can uphold them and not simply

52:37be transactional where everything is up for negotiation if it suits your short-term advantage. Frances Fiquillin, thank you very much. Thank you for talking to me. for just £12. Not only that, but we'll also send you a £20 Amazon gift card. Absolutely free. Go to www.spektator.com forward slash voucher to claim this offer now.