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In conversation with Douglas Murray
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Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric.
It’s not just dishonest scholars who benefit from this intellectual fraud but hostile nations and human rights abusers hoping to distract from their own ongoing villainy.
If the West is to survive, it must be defended. In this very special episode, Will talks to the preeminent defender of western civilization alive today, Douglas Murray.
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Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Douglas Murray's Influence
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. There have been two public intellectuals who have influenced my worldview more than any others. The late Christopher Hitchens and my guest today, Douglas Murray. Douglas is an author, a journalist, and the preeminent defender of Western civilization at a time when, to borrow the title of his most recent book, There is a War on the West.
00:00:42
Speaker
Douglas, welcome to Australiana.
Reflecting on Christopher Hitchens' Legacy
00:00:44
Speaker
Well, it's very nice to be with you and thank you for that very kind introduction.
00:00:48
Speaker
I'll start with Christopher. It's been a little over 12 years since he passed away. He was a mentor to you. He was a friend. How do you reflect on his legacy today? Gosh, that's strange. It's 12 years. Somebody yesterday popped up on my YouTube feed of recommended things. Somebody had done an AI of Christopher talking about the death of Navalny.
00:01:17
Speaker
And I couldn't listen to it for very long. It was extremely accurate. Got his voice completely right, almost completely right. Got the content of his prose pretty, pretty well. But it was a haunting thing to hear him like that. And I couldn't really listen for very long. I turned off.
00:01:39
Speaker
He was wonderful, of course, one of a number of people who made a huge influence on me and who was very kind to me and, as you say, sort of mentored me in a way. I never think that people like that are really dead. They're always with you, which is the wonderful thing that remains.
00:01:58
Speaker
Well, the other wonderful thing is his thoughts and his writing remain with us. And I thought it could be fun if we used a few of his thoughts and quotes as jumping off points for discussion.
Islamism and the Political Left's Reluctance
00:02:13
Speaker
So, on Islamism, he said, resist Islamism whilst you still can, and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing. You will be told you can't complain because you're Islamophobic. He went on to say, the barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open for them.
00:02:37
Speaker
Now, one only has to look at what we've seen since October 7. One only has to look at the streets of London every weekend to see that lesson wasn't heated. Why wasn't it heated? Well, probably two reasons. One is that the fellow members of the left, Christopher, didn't have the guts that he had to face up to something that was problematic, let's say, for their political side.
00:03:05
Speaker
It seemed to trouble them to accept that a minority group within a society might be a subject of concern and it seemed that it took more heavy lifting than they were capable of to actually face up to that. And the second is that they
00:03:30
Speaker
There's just this question which politicians and others all have on their minds, which is, when it comes to that question, well, what are you going to do about it? And the answers to that are not obvious to very many people, perhaps to anyone. And certainly the stomach to do the thing that would be required seems to have been lost in societies like Britain.
00:03:56
Speaker
for the time being, I would say, it's not inevitable they're lost forever. But yes, there's a general distaste for the subject and for the people who have approached it. And quite often it is just like that. In the years of communism, there were people who were
00:04:16
Speaker
slightly later, semi-joking an ambassador as premature anti-communists. That is, there was a decent time to become an anti-communist, and there was a time when it was a little suspicious to become an anti-communist, when Malcolm Margaret became an anti-communist in the 30s, a little early.
00:04:35
Speaker
little infradig, you know, somebody in the 1950s after Hungary, for instance, that was okay. You could become an anti-communist then, but not too early. And it's the same with the anti-Islamist thing in a way. There were people who were right, but too early. And now we are where we are.
00:05:02
Speaker
Well, we are where we are because of, I think, two different forms of cowardice. There is the cowardice related to threats of physical violence that comes from Islamic extremism. And then there is the cowardice for the fear of being called a racist. Yes. Effects the media and political classes. Maybe difficult to disentangle, but which one of those driving forces do you think is the bigger problem and the bigger motivator to prevent change?
Public Discourse on Islam and Fear of Racism
00:05:29
Speaker
Well, funnily enough, there was a conservative commentator on a rather little watch show these days for question time on the BBC, sort of the British version of Q&A. And he mentioned the other day on air that something, he said that if, you know, if people wanted to realize one of the problems that our countries face, they should realize that, you know, nothing would happen to him if he said something negative about Jesus.
00:05:58
Speaker
Christ, or said he was a fraud, to say. He might get a few angry letters from a couple of suburbs, but that would be it. And he said, whereas if I said the equivalent of an Islam, and he said, and I'm not, you'll notice I'm not brave enough to say, well, even what I would say, or who I would say it about. I thought that was very telling. In a way, it was brave of him to admit he was a coward. But that's the standards of bravery we're in these days, maybe.
00:06:25
Speaker
But I thought it was interesting that he at least did say that because of course it's completely true that people are very scared of people of violence and it makes total sense that doesn't require any analysis. People of violence have an enormous head start if they're pushing at a weak democracy.
00:06:46
Speaker
So I think that that is a big thing. The Reputational One definitely matters. It matters to some people more than others. And again, just to go back to that point about Christmas, people on the left are more worried about being thrown out of the sort of church of liberalism than many people on the right who are equally
00:07:09
Speaker
Not that this is an entirely left-right issue by any means, but if you're a vaguely conservative, you expect those brick bats to be thrown. If you're a leftist, like something like Martin Amis, for instance, when he trod on this landmine a couple of times, it mattered to him very much because he didn't want to lose his liberal credentials or be given up by his political tribe. That's how a lot of people feel.
00:07:38
Speaker
intriguing line there, the Church of Liberalism. It implies that this new ideology, newish ideology of Wokism has become a new religion. Now, Christopher said on religion, on Christianity specifically, everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of the flock. My mind there actually went to the flock
00:08:02
Speaker
as it relates to identity politics and the way that that is mindlessly now followed by so many institutions in society. My question would be, is there a link here?
New Atheism's Unexpected Path to Wokeism
00:08:14
Speaker
Do the new atheists of the early 2000s, of which Christopher Hitchens was a lead member, did they unintentionally pave the way for the new religion of wokeism that we now find ourselves subjected to today?
00:08:29
Speaker
almost certainly too early to say, but I get the inkling that that is the case, yes. I mean, there are times when you have to make an argument wherever it will lead. In fact, I think that's generally the case to make an argument wherever it will lead, if you think it's true, because you can't foresee to any meaningful extent the unfolding course of events, as Churchill said on Chamberlain.
00:08:53
Speaker
It's not given to us to see the future. We certainly can't see, we can see slightly around the next bend, but we can't see around several bends. In the early 2000s, you couldn't have seen, I mean, if you'd have said to me in the 2000s that the major preoccupation in liberal democracies in the 2020s would be, among other things, whether a big bearded man with a penis should be called her, I'd have said probably not. I can't see it happening.
00:09:21
Speaker
possible. If you would tell me that JK Rowling would become
00:09:27
Speaker
a person of international opprobrium, I'd have said, why? How does the last Harry Potter book end? That's what she'd done to the series. And if you said, well, she defended women in women's sports, I'd have thought, well, I don't see how that follows. Anyhow, it's a very tricky one to see around several corners.
Societal Disorientation from COVID
00:09:48
Speaker
The new atheists as I see it in the 2000s were reacting to 9-11 and the rise of Islamist extremism.
00:09:56
Speaker
And it was not just easier, but it was also part of their mindset that all religion was the problem. I never really had that view. So I don't share what Chris said even about the flock. I think the nature of the flock is degrading, although it depends, of course, the whole thing on whether the shepherd in question is good or not.
00:10:22
Speaker
So, yes, I think, however, the idea that the idea that you could strip out religion from the society and the society would become reasonable and rational was something which pretty early on I saw was not likely. I said this to Sam Harris, another New Atheist a number of times, including on stage, you know, if it were the case that
00:10:50
Speaker
you stripped some of the ideas from the society and you got a lot of Sam Harris's or it was Sam Harris all the way down. I could be fine with that, but it's not. It's a little top layer of Sam Harris. And then underneath that, a lot of maniacs who follow whichever wind blows and can be moved ideologically with alarming ease.
00:11:19
Speaker
And you don't have a very nice ideology either. I mean, that's the other thing. As I say, back to the nature of the shepherd, it would be fine if, in a way, if the ideology was forgiving or kind or anything else, but actually it all reminds you of that truth that Christopher landed on, that sometimes you have to really believe you're doing good to behave really appallingly. Well, it raises the question, how has it
00:12:07
Speaker
gained such traction? Well, the usual way is a sort of bullying, obviously. And speaking into a vacuum, speaking into a rather cowardly age, speaking into an age that's forgotten things that everyone knew or is forgetting things everyone knew, I think the main one is also disorientation. I think that for a lot of people, recent years have been profoundly disorientated.
00:12:17
Speaker
become so widely adopted, how is it so popular?
00:12:35
Speaker
think of the COVID years. Everyone literally isolated, that was disorientating. Several manias were injected into society through, we have the BLM, the idea that everyone in America was systematically racist and therefore the wider world was, we had all that happen whilst everyone was in lockdown. I think there's been just a set of events that have been demoralizing like that.
00:13:03
Speaker
But that's sort of always the way with plagues, in my view. They come in batches and they make society. I said to a historian friend of mine at the beginning of COVID, what do you think? And he said, well, historically,
00:13:22
Speaker
Plagues, Justinian plague, whichever one you choose, historically what they do is they cause intense suspicion and fear in a society. People fear and are suspicious of their neighbour at the beginning, and then they're fearful and suspicious of other things, and then of everything.
00:13:45
Speaker
I think that's come pretty true.
Trust in Science Challenged by the Pandemic
00:13:47
Speaker
Why would we be different from our ancestors? That we can be worse because we've got these bloody devices in our pockets that can send us a skew for the day without us having touched any problem.
00:14:00
Speaker
There's a really good chapter in Brendan O'Neill's recent book where he looks at that phenomena of how plagues have influenced and created manias throughout history, a heretics manifesto. You've opened the door on COVID. Let's go there. Another one from Christopher. People know when they are being lied to. They know when their rulers are absurd. They know when they do not love their chains. Now,
00:14:27
Speaker
The unfortunate reality of the COVID era in my eyes is that too many people seem to be very comfortable in their chains. If you looked in Australia particularly, but I think in UK as well, measures like lockdown had overwhelming popular support. Do you think freedom and individual liberty is less valued than it has been throughout history or at least recent history? And if so, why? No, I don't. I think that freedom
00:14:53
Speaker
is only ever an ideal of a relatively small number of people. Security is preferable to majorities in my view, certainly the messiness of freedom. I think that's the case on, I've always said that's the case with, for instance, freedom of speech. The number of people who actually believe in it is relatively small.
00:15:17
Speaker
the number of people who would rather just things got on okay is usually quite large. I don't agree with that that people know. I don't think there's any particular wisdom or insight of the masses that
00:15:42
Speaker
that can just see if they're being lied to. I don't think we can. And the bewildering thing about COVID, study for me, I'm somebody who sort of ducked much of the discussion because it wasn't one of my areas of knowledge, pandemics.
00:16:03
Speaker
And I suppose the difficult thing about it for a lot of us was that it spoke to one of the few remaining areas of undoubtable expertise in the society, which was science. We had reached the point where if somebody came on our televisions in the evening and said, trust me, I'm a theologian.
00:16:28
Speaker
we might not all have done what they said. If they'd have said, trust me, I'm a gender expert, we might not have, and so on. In fact, if they'd said, trust me, I'm a journalist, that might not have worked. But trust the science, it spoke to what I regard as being the one remaining
00:16:54
Speaker
area of recognized expertise in the society. Therefore, when it turned out that the scientists were wrong, or significantly wrong, or wrong in part, then I think that it destroyed the last remaining area of credibility in our society. It destroyed the last sanctum of, okay, we'll go into our houses and not come out.
00:17:22
Speaker
I don't think anyone else could have done that. The politicians couldn't have done it without that appeal. I'm not saying they did it nefarious. You had to appeal to the science. Otherwise, there's no reason why people would have listened to politicians. I know that Australia is a higher trust society on all measurable factors than Britain, for instance, and New Zealand. They are higher trust societies about public servants, public workers, and much more.
00:17:49
Speaker
But yes, I think that it's had this additional deranging effect, because who would you listen to next time? I'm not by any means immune to the appeals of science, but I think that if this time next year
00:18:07
Speaker
a group of scientists I'd also never heard of were put forward by a government I didn't like and I was told to behave like that I would think differently and I'm sure everyone else would as well, a lot of people. That term, the science, was interesting, you know, as it going from the concept of scientific inquiry being about debate, different ideas and testing hypotheses to try and find an answer or find truth came to
00:18:35
Speaker
one object, one truth, the science. How have these sorts of what were once objective fact-based areas of inquiry, even mathematics is now somewhat captured by work of ideology, how have these areas been so ideologies in a way that they just haven't been throughout much of say human history?
Critique on Denigration of Western Science
00:18:56
Speaker
Well, that's because of the cringing era that the West is now in and that
00:19:02
Speaker
and just the very boring but obvious fact that everything that comes from us has got to be bad and everything that's come from anyone else has to be good. The Western mode of science has been decried as the creation of white men and dead white men at that, worst of all. And of course, the fact is the Western way of science has been successful, not because it was come up with by dead white men, but because it works.
00:19:32
Speaker
Same thing with mathematics, which is by no means a creation of only white men and dead white men, but which the people who now lambasted, mainly in America, where most of this madness comes from, they try to pretend that other ways of knowing exist and that math, as they call it, is a creation of dead white men. Whereas in actual fact, the reason why math
00:19:59
Speaker
in the maths in the Western system works is because it works, because two actually does equal four, no matter how much you say otherwise, it just does. And if you don't believe that or believe that that truth is relative, then as I've always said, eventually the bridges will fall down. But there are people who are willing to allow the bridges to fall down, and some who are rather erect at the idea.
00:20:28
Speaker
That's for them to find out. But yes, the fact is that all of these systems have caught on not because they're Western, but because they work. And it's a very strange thing in our time that people war on the things that work. It's the same in almost every system, everything in the era. But I'm hoping we can get out of the worst of that quite soon and clear this flotsam and jetsam from our path.
00:20:58
Speaker
people I hope have noticed by now that those who claim to know.
00:21:04
Speaker
better than all the facts we knew until yesterday are not very smart people. They're rather unimpressive and behave in a pretty horrible way. And perhaps we shouldn't listen to them. You said you are hopeful. Yeah. But do you actually, do you anticipate that there will be some sort of turnaround, some sort of change? What would you anticipate? What is coming next is
Australia's Cultural Identity Crisis
00:21:26
Speaker
the question. I have no idea what's coming next. You know, you never really do. As I say, you can barely see around the bend, let alone the next corner.
00:21:34
Speaker
I think some of this is being some of that stuff and i hate the word work i'm so bored of it it's it's it's such a it's just i don't waste my time with this stuff you know like no i'm not going to have the most arranged and. Ill read person in society grab the mic today say something demonstrate be true and make us all have make us say something demonstrate i'm true and make us all have to respond to it no no no no not going to that speed can't can't.
00:22:03
Speaker
And I think that a lot of people feel that. I think that people will, I think already are slightly hardening to this stuff. The ability of somebody to, for instance, grab the mic literally or metaphorically and insist that they be listened to by dint of victimhood. It's probably waning.
00:22:28
Speaker
I'll see, by the way, one of the things I'm very interested about in Australia in the coming days is the state of Australian man, by which I mean Australian woman as well. But I'm very curious about this because when I was in Australia last a few years ago, I was struck by a loss of confidence.
00:22:50
Speaker
in Australians that I had sort of expected, I hadn't expected to be so bad. I was one of those who grew up, not only around the Australians, but with a great fondness and admiration for what I saw as being the central thing in the Australian character, which was, as well as a sort of bomb for me and cheerfulness, also a sort of no, can we swear? Of course. Yeah, sort of no bullshit.
00:23:21
Speaker
And I always loved that because I like, I like non-bullshit. And I like just, I like that instinct of like, I don't waste my time with this crap. I think it's good, particularly in a stupid era. And I was rather surprised a few years ago in Australia to find the extent to which Australians had been sort of dampened.
00:23:45
Speaker
Not everywhere, but most cities, I found that that was sort of... And that good old Australian instinct of, you know, come on, don't have time for this bullshit and sort of
00:24:03
Speaker
certainly been dampened. It hadn't disappeared. I'm very curious to see if that's returned a bit. I hope it has or it might have got worse. You can always tell literally by how people speak in the room when they ask questions, whether they say something by way of introduction and everyone holds a sort of holy silence, you know, speaking as a woman. That doesn't really do it anymore.
00:24:28
Speaker
But speaking as a person of, and then you list a couple of minorities, does the audience sit there and go, oh, it's one of the shamans of our time. It's one of the holy people of our time. Or do they just go, come on, out with a question. And a lot hangs on that sort of thing, actually. I'm very, very interested to see how, what's your instinct in Australia of how that's,
00:24:56
Speaker
I've reflected on this a great deal. I think there is a cognitive dissonance in Australia today. I think if you asked most Australians, they would still, when asked to reflect on the psyche of the nation, they would still point to some of those historical traits, irreverence, egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, a laid back attitude. And if you actually look at how many Australians act today, if you look at say the response to COVID,
00:25:25
Speaker
If you look at a whole range of different policy settings at government level and the way people act individually, I actually don't think you see those traits play out in society. So there's this cognitive dissonance between what Australia thinks they are and perhaps what they thought they were and then how they actually act. I've thought a lot about what happens when you have cognitive dissonance on a mass, countrywide scale. I'm not quite sure the answer, but I think it's certainly there.
00:25:53
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's the same in Britain, of course. I mean, I don't know exactly how the British think of themselves these days because there's the way they're told they should think of themselves and that's the way they...
00:26:06
Speaker
in all the multifacetedness actually do think of themselves. But I mean, our self-image in Britain is of a sort of resilient, quiet, strong, proud people. Although there's very little in public life that demonstrates that's what British people any longer are. They're rather coddled, protective, cowed, and much more. So yes, yeah, no, it's going to be very interesting to see. But
00:26:35
Speaker
But I would like to think we can return to being societies which can get on with things. That's a real thing. It's not an attitudinal thing. It's just like, don't put this rubbish in my way. And I mean, there's just too much to do in our lives. It's my friend, Chris Williamson, did a thread about this yesterday, picking up on something that Jordan Peterson and I had said in stage in London a while ago. There's just too much we all have to do in our lives.
00:27:04
Speaker
everyone to be able to put up with going at this speed of this stupid ideology of our time. And even getting involved in the outrage cycle is sort of demeaning.
00:27:18
Speaker
minor, nobody, doesn't matter, figure says something stupid and ridiculous and provocative this morning. Before you know it, everyone's online, piling online doing what they mistakenly think is their work by either reacting or counter reacting or defending or both. And actually, you know, that's not the work of your life. It can't be. It can't be.
00:27:45
Speaker
On this, Christopher said, those who are determined to be offended will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt. Yes.
Diminished Culture of Public Debate
00:27:59
Speaker
How practically can we improve public debate in Western countries? Because it is a very low air. What are the practical things we can do to make sure that we can actually have open, free, honest conversations in a way that perhaps we once had and no longer have?
00:28:13
Speaker
Well, there's a layer since Christopher died that's worth pointing to, which he couldn't have expected, which is that the culture of public debate has pretty much disappeared in my view. There was a time about 20 years ago, Christopher became very famous when I was starting off, where, you know, you really did have to defend your views in public.
00:28:39
Speaker
And if you were good at it, like Christopher, there was a reward. And if you were bad at it, you know, well, I mean, you didn't die. You just, you know, you lost the debate. The era of podcasting, among other things, has meant that people don't have to do that. And what they have is the ability to throw out ideas and then not defend them.
00:29:02
Speaker
They just assert them in front of their home crowd repeatedly. And I find this very unsatisfactory. There are a number of people whose work I criticise in the war on the West, people like Ibram X. Kendi and the Cole Hannah Jones, who just, it's like nailing jelly to a wall, not criticising them, but trying to get this out in the open because both of them, among many others,
00:29:31
Speaker
just will not debate. They will not appear in public. Jordan and I and others have tried to coax them out with promises of large amounts of money, but the amounts of money are not as large as the amounts of money they get for having their alleged views held without being counted. So you have this thing of I'm not going to platform my opponents and so on.
00:29:59
Speaker
And I think obviously it's a demonstration of weakness, but I think that that incentive structure of the incentive of staying in your bubble and being paid by your base was more lucrative than to go out of the bubble and risk everything is something that would have been hard to have predicted unless you really understood already the nature of social media in the 2000s, which very few people did.
00:30:26
Speaker
And when I started off, I was debating all the time. Not because I particularly enjoy it, I don't especially. I can have moments where I start to relish it and lick my teeth and write a big bad wolf, but normally when provoked. But when I started off, I had to do it all the time because you just did.
00:30:50
Speaker
Now, I don't know. I mean, I did the monk debates in Toronto, which Chris also did many years ago with Tony Blair. I did that. I realized I was in Toronto the other day and I was thinking when I was asked the energy, it was November 2022. I'd had a very good debate on the nature of the media, obviously, Malcolm Gladwell. But I realized that, I mean, it's one of the last times I actually had a public debate because they just don't happen very much anymore.
00:31:21
Speaker
And I think that has seeped through into all of the culture is the idea you can just sort of assert something for the home crowd. It'll be clipped. Look at the way I sometimes watch, look at what a mad person I am. I sometimes watch footage from the Canadian parliament. Well, that's masochistic, extraordinary vice. But of course, what happens in there is, you know, you see non debate. And I think you see it in all of our parliaments, really.
00:31:51
Speaker
it's non-debate. You know, Trudeau says something, his opponent says something that shows that what Trudeau just said is not true. And then Trudeau repeats the talking point. And I suppose that has seeped into all of our culture. And a much more worrying one is the one of not debate, but chanting. And I noticed in some of the issues I've been writing about recently, I mean, that is
00:32:20
Speaker
Just look at that as a mode of public interaction, not taking on ideas and trying to whittle them down or win through to the truth or whatever, but I will stand here and chant my thing until you shut up. That's a form of dialogue I can never accept and will never accept. I think it is actually anti-dialogue.
00:32:48
Speaker
when Roger Scruton and I had our last conversation in public some years ago, this actually came up, and he, it was very interesting, he pointed me onto this, that the nature of the person who has the placard and shouts something repeatedly is not the same as the person, of course, having a dialogue, and they're motivated differently. One wishes to beat you down with their truth,
00:33:15
Speaker
the other actually, the person involved in real dialogue wants to get to the truth. And it's, and it's a demonstration of strength when you can say the same thing repeatedly over and over again, in a way, you could you've shown you've got the sort of boxers ability to just bruise and bruise and bruise. But on the other hand, it's a weakness, of course, because you won't realise when you've fallen
00:33:40
Speaker
in the form of John Stuart Mill's understanding when you've fallen into terrible error. And it's, I'd rather know if I've fallen into terrible error and I could only do that by listening. I remember that monk debate that you mentioned very well from memory, it was that we should not trust the mainstream media. Would you go beyond that? Would you say the mainstream media is now beyond saving? And if so, what comes after that? I don't think it's beyond saving.
Mainstream Media's Credibility Issues
00:34:08
Speaker
I don't know. I don't like to think that it
00:34:10
Speaker
it would be beyond saving. I think that the mainstream media has an incredibly important role because I don't like the idea of having a society in which we have no common reference points or where, as I've often said, we don't only have different opinions, we have different facts. But of course, the mainstream media has let itself down terribly in recent years and it can't admit its errors and
00:34:40
Speaker
doesn't want to and, you know, the significant amounts of it have just become campaigning organizations. I think that everything, I think it's a little bit like the United Nations, everything else you set up is likely to replicate the same errors. And so I don't think the answer is just sort of citizen journalism or anything. And nobody has enough time for this. You know, we don't actually have enough time. Now I'm sure you have this every day when you're sort of
00:35:07
Speaker
feed comes up, you not only have to navigate what the source is, whether the source is known to you, of course, because whatever Elon has done to Twitter since taking over and all the good things, one of the slightly bad things is that you get pushed a lot of stuff that you didn't ask for much more. The dampeners are off, but there's that other downside. And
00:35:32
Speaker
I think that you don't only have to work out now whether this source is reliable, but whether the thing in the video has happened. That puts an extraordinary onus on us. And it might not be bad in itself. It's quite a lot of work for the average person to do. But I think of the counter media as being a fantastic corrective to the mainstream media. But I never thought that it would simply replace it.
00:36:02
Speaker
all the evidence is that if it did replace it, it would go through the same problems. Indulge me with a few rapid fire questions. Sure. Christopher said the foremost overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.
Overrated Virtues and the Value of Gratitude
00:36:21
Speaker
What is your most overrated virtue?
00:36:24
Speaker
That very much upset Peter when Stephen Fry said that at Christopher's memorial. What's my most overrated virtue? You mean that I have, or I think in other people? What do you think is the most overrated virtue in other people? Gosh, that's so hard to answer. I mean, an immediate thought is politeness, but that's in a very small corner of society. In fact, I like politeness, civility and courtesy.
00:36:50
Speaker
I just thought probably actually the one that I was slightly brought up with, which was keeping your head down, not making too much of a fuss, which I, again, I mean, it's pretty difficult because I regard that as being a sort of British thing, you know, keeping on buggering on and not making a scene. But on the other hand, I think that people should make a fuss and should make a scene when you need to. So that's the problem.
00:37:14
Speaker
He also said his favorite virtue was an appreciation for irony. What is your favorite virtue? Gratitude. Without doubt. Gratitude. I adore irony, but I can't live on it. I don't think Christopher could have done either, really, much as he liked the
00:37:33
Speaker
machismo bravado of pretending that was the main driver. No, for me, it's gratitude. I find resentful people everywhere. I read about this in the War in the West, but I find our era resentful, resentful of what it hasn't had, what hasn't been given, what hasn't been given to us. And the thing that's most missing is a sense of just dumb gratitude.
00:37:59
Speaker
of any idea what most of the world is like, not just historically, but now. And the sort of, Louis C.K. did this great a few years ago with that scene, the sketch of, the skit about, you know, the young person sitting there going, oh my God, my text message isn't going through. And he says, it has to go to outer space and back. Give it a moment.
00:38:29
Speaker
And I think the lack of gratitude is astonishing in our time. I don't like it at all. Douglas, my final question. Christopher said his idea of earthly happiness was to be vindicated in his own lifetime. What is your idea of earthly happiness?
Defining Happiness and Hitchens' Influence
00:38:49
Speaker
Well, actually, he and I had another definition of happiness, which is what I thought you were going to
00:38:56
Speaker
Vindication, actually, by the way, I've had it a few times. I wouldn't like to exaggerate it, and it's never universal, by the way. There's never a point of ultimate victory. There's ultimate vindication. The problem with vindication is sometimes there's vindication of something you wish had not been the case. I've had that quite a lot. I don't particularly want to be right about some of the things I'm writing about, but there it is.
00:39:26
Speaker
So vindication on its own is preferable to the opposite, but I wouldn't rely on it. No, Chris and I both had a definition of happiness. I thought it was what you were going to say, which was that definition of happiness was having the first drink of the evening on your own, reading a really good book, something like P.G. Woodhouse, knowing somebody wonderful is coming for dinner.
00:39:52
Speaker
I think that's unimproveable as a definition of happiness. The contentment of the first drink, the company of a great author, the privacy of a great book, and the knowledge that you're going to have a wildly fun evening afterwards. That's the one I would probably
00:40:19
Speaker
hold on to. For me, happiness is a room full of books with me on my own, awaiting the arrival of friends.
Conclusion and Future Series Promotion
00:40:29
Speaker
Douglas, there are so many people who are thrilled to see you coming to our shores. You are doing a series of conversations with Josh Sepp's across the country. There may be the odd ticket left because there have been new shows added due to overwhelming demand. This has been a real privilege for me. Thank you for coming on, Australiana. Always been a great pleasure for me and look forward to seeing you in Sydney.
00:40:52
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.