well thank you very much for joining us tonight and we are addressing one of the biggest questions um i'm delighted to have two incredibly big thinkers here to join me to talk about it connor's already introduced him so i i won't run through them again but i'm going to start with you frank because um i think we're going to talk about liberalism we ought to know what it is so what's your working definition so my definition of liberalism is pretty expansive in europe it tends to refer to center-right parties that are pro-free market and that's not my definition nor is it the american understanding of liberalism which is basically left-of-center uh i think that liberalism builds on a philosophical tradition that sees human societies as collections of autonomous individuals these individuals are they're equal and the humanity that they share is something that's universal to all human beings those human beings need to be protected in their basic rights and in a liberal society you do them by having a state that protects those rights through a rule of law uh in some cases through constitutional mechanisms that limit power and so one of the chief characteristics of a liberal society is the fact that the state cannot do anything that it wants it really has to observe the limits of law i think that historically liberalism has also been closely associated with a certain cognitive style which is that of modern natural science and so there's an assumption uh that liberals have that there is a external reality uh we can perceive that we can measure it we can experiment with it and we can use the methods of modern natural science to both understand that external world and to manipulate it which then gives rise to modern technology and the kind of economic growth that uh that technology uh brings and so i believe there's also a kind of ameliorative trend in liberalism because liberals believe that society can actually get better so they're reformists they're usually not revolutionary but they do believe that institutions can be improved and that human behavior in certain ways can be shaped but fundamentally uh people are free to you know to make choices on their own john so you've got a vision there of liberalism which is you know the idea of perfectable state the idea of the arc of history is long but it bends towards freedom is that a definition that you accept i think of liberalism to start with not as a philosophy or a set of principles but actually as a way of life one that emerged in modern europe out of the wars of religion established itself in some european countries and spread to some other countries in the world but it was a particular way of life with particular origins in uh religion and conflicts of religion and in particular i think in the reformation in christianity and before that in judaism so it's a particular historical way of life which later on maybe even then claimed to be universal and it claimed that universality in a way all the way through the intervening years but that universality then seem to be vindicated by the end of the cold war and perhaps we'll come on to that later but i rejected that interpretation because the cold war i thought was a a very unusual binary conflict in the world actually lots of countries weren't in it lots of countries were not aligned or detached from it but it was a binary conflict between two european enlightenment ideologies and one of them collapsed communism and this state collapsed the other seemed to be triumphant but i don't think was even triumphant at the time that it seemed to be because i don't actually think that the collapse of communism had very much to do with liberalism it was more to do with i mean who brought down the which which forces brought down the soviet state religion the catholic church in poland solidarity uh a working-class trade union um uh national self-government in the baltic states and in poland actually that along with gorbachev's uh fanciful notion that the soviet state could be reformed and turned into something like 1960 sweden uh uh was what brought down uh um the soviet state but i do share frank's broad understanding of what liberalism is or was and i think the idea not perhaps of perfectability because i don't think liberals most liberals have any i've ever had an idea of a perfect society i was that they could say this is the perfection we're trying to say i think most liberals certainly the liberal i spent 20 long years studying when i was an academic john stuart mill a man without a single joke by the way in his in his writings it was a long difficult two decades uh um he didn't have an idea of of a permanent society but he did have an idea which he said man he used that sexist but i'll that's what he said so that's what i could man as a progressive being humans are essentially quintessentially progressive in that they want to improve themselves they want to become better than they are and they go on doing it and this is the key and this is where where i'll leave it liberals believe that there can be something like the cumulative advance in science and technology which is undoubtedly real that's why we're all sitting here most of us without masks it's vaccination that did that not an improvement in human nature uh it was science and technology which allowed us to do that but liberals believe that the established fact if you like of cumulative advance moving on piecemeal incrementally in a mineralistic kind of gradual way in which there are periods of decline but not everything is lost and then the advance continues they think that that sort of advance which is absolutely real in scientific and technology can be replicated in ethics and politics so the key claim of liberals i don't think you can believe be a liberal and not believe this is that over time perhaps a long time uh over the long run um not just a few societies here and there can practice something like a liberal way of life for a while and then it vanishes but that which i think is the truth of the matter but but that um humankind as a whole can advance uh um become more rational um and not lose what was gained before but carry it on to ever greater height so i think liberalism and that idea of progress not perfectability but progress are very closely linked well after your brutal diss of john sturtmill i'm tempted to say tell us your best joke about liberalism but there is one joke in john stuart mill except i'm not a i'm not sure he was aware that he was making it when he's when he wrote it in his autobiography he describes the mental breakdown he had in his late teens and uh he had a very complicated relationship with his father and he wrote of his father james miller rather do do a utilitarian he said my father believed that of a whole range of rather improbable reforms were implemented human life might become worth living semi-colon but he never displayed any enthusiasm at this prospect that might be a joke but i want to draw down into this right because i think one of the things that's interesting did refer to liberalism as a world view and it's always interesting to talk about the deeper currents that perhaps lead us to political positions do you think fundamentally you're an optimist and john's a pessimist and does that come out of the the circumstances of your life the time when you were born any of that uh i don't think that optimism or pessimism are like ideologies uh you know they're more mental tendencies but you know i am subject to great bouts of pessimism when world conditions look really bad and right now they're not looking so good and i think in certain ways it is very hard to be optimistic about the future of liberalism as a doctrine about liberal democracy around the world because we've now gone through a 15 16 year period where that world has contracted you've had the rise of dictators of you know great powers and i think it would be foolish to uh pretend that that trend is probably not going to go on and the latest example of that obviously being the invasion of ukraine by by russia i do think however that if you take a sufficiently long historical view of the phenomenon of liberalism there is some grounds for optimism i would say that whatever so i agree with john that it did arise in a particular cultural context in the west we could actually go into its religious roots because i i do think it does have a an origin in the judeo-christian tradition but its biggest selling point is actually a pragmatic one right that uh after the protestant reformation you have 150 years of religious warfare between protestants and catholics and different sects of you know each religion 30 years war kills you know maybe a third of the population of central europe and at the end of this you know you get liberal thinkers that say hey maybe it's not such a great idea to tightly bound a community around one set of ideas about what the good life is you know what the ultimate purpose of life is as a religion would do maybe what we ought to do is focus on survival in a diverse society in which we tolerate people that are fundamentally uh different from us and you know build rules so that we can all live in peace with one another and therefore lower the temperature of politics and you know i think that it's that pragmatic aspect of liberalism i think that is its main selling point so it occurs first in the in the 17th century after the wars of religion but then it next has to deal with you know nationalism in the 19th and early 20th century you go through two horrendous world wars in europe in which there's this assertion of uh national identity that's aggressive and uh not at all inclusive and at the end of all that destruction once again uh you know people say hey maybe we should not build our states around you know a folk or a uh you know a certain ethnicity maybe we should have a liberal society in which we can tolerate uh people that are fundamentally different and so i think that you know liberalism has in a way been defeated in the short term and then it's come back because it does have this pragmatic uh characteristic of allowing societies that are diverse in either by religion or nation or ethnicity or other characteristics to actually work together and then since it's also tied to a certain set of rights having to do with property rights and contract enforcement and law it also makes people rich you know and the richest societies the the first ones to really uh break out of this malthusian cycle that human beings have been in for the last you know uh 50 000 years were liberal societies and i think that means that they're not going to go away because that's a pretty powerful combination well let me put that to john because i think this is something that you both i've seen in both of your work is you talk about that kind of lowering the horizon of politics lowering the temperature as a selling point but it can also make liberalism feel hollow some people want to have a religious war some people want to live in interesting times don't they some people get complacent on the liberalism they want to live in interesting times until they become interesting right because when they become interesting they very often also become violent and when they become violent there's no very few people can be sure that they're safe that's why by the way one of the i think of one of the early modern thinkers thomas hobbes as a liberal in in that sense he's often described as an absolutist or a or an authoritarian but his idea of the state is strictly limited maybe too limited to go back to what helen was saying for hogs the state is about preserving peace above all and basically about preventing human beings from killing one another now that might sound a terribly modest goal but actually if you look at human history as a whole including that of europe uh and including now um it's not that it's not that modest and it's something that can give strength to um regimes that are otherwise um very undesirable so um i have to say i regard many aspects of the current regime in china as very undesirable particularly its persecution of minorities but compared with the 20th century history of china compared with the cultural revolution compared with long periods of upheaval and anarchy and mass starvation and famine some of them stayed engineered but others coming out of wars and so on it has a basis of support in the preservation of of peace and that's a very very strong i think a strong if you like as the occasional outbreak of the passion for war because they're they're both real i mean i agree with pretty much most of what um um um francis francis said particularly he used the word tolerate and i think if there was one thing that characterized the has characterized liberalism until recently it's been uh the practice of toleration which essentially is a judgmental practice because what you tolerate when you tolerate something is not something you like or love or even respect you might actually hate it and think it's completely false and pernicious but unless it passes beyond some really strong boundaries you'll put up with it because that's the condition of living together in a kind of modus vendi and i think that's um terribly uh important that's what to me liberalism is basically about but rather key point here there have been experiments in toleration outside the west and outside of liberalism it's not uniquely western uh buddhist india for example um certain periods in the history of um uh the ottoman empire a different example they weren't liberal because there weren't autonomous choices being made there but communities learned to live together uh religions learned to live together i think this even was attempted in a half-hearted way in in in prussia um uh i i seem to remember i think was frederick the great said something like all religions will be tolerated as long as there aren't too many uh i think you thought there were about three or way out maybe four um so this is not liberalism we're talking about but it's not but it's a type of toleration and that seems to me very important helen's question was is doesn't that feel hollow um well maybe i share uh frank's view in this respect i think one shouldn't look to politics for salvation for human salvation and one shouldn't look to politics even more for a meaning in life if you do you'll be terribly disappointed i mean that very seriously not as a joke you should look at um politics as a way of protecting yourself people you care about the things you you value so that you can enable to find or make a meaning in life and promote pursue the values that you like i think the overvaluation of politics especially in the 20th century is what was one of the great errors of that time but i'm afraid i found that infiltrating liberalism well let's come back to that because i think in 1989 well everything comes back to 1989 eventually but i think you're you're right to pick up on the fact that i it was what i would see now is one of the left-wing challenges to liberalism isn't politics as a form of religion with all the attendant things but i want to go back because frank you have a you know what a very rare achievement which is that all of this conversation is happening in the shadow of your work and your thinking and the end of history is an often misquoted misremembered book can you refresh on what you were actually arguing that yeah because it's the end of history with a capital h right which is very important but what was the central thesis of that book yes well let's see if i can think of that argument i usually get asked it once or twice a day for the last 30 years so that is the price of success i'm afraid yeah i have a lot of practice well first of all i would i would explain what the end of history those words mean so history is history with a capital h today we would call it something like modernization or development that is to say the slow evolution of human social organization over the millennia as you go from hunter-gatherer societies to tribal societies to i don't know feudalism to you know an industrial society and then wherever we are today that's history and then the end is not a stopping it is the direction that that progress is uh pointing us towards and um there was a well karl marx had a you know he bought into the idea that there was history in this progressive sense and he also talked about an end of history for him the end of history would be communism because that was the highest form of human organization that resolved all of the contradictions of prior forms and my observation back in 1989 was we weren't going to get there we weren't going to get to this higher stage that we could get to liberal democracy connected to a market economy but it wasn't clear that there was another stage in social evolution higher than that better than that and that that's you know where we would uh end up i did not predict that everybody would end up being a peaceful you know democracy but i said that there is this larger process you know call it modernization that is valuable you know people don't want to live in poor chaotic less developed countries they want to live in you know switzerland or canada or you know britain that has a high level of wealth where you can you can educate your children you don't have to worry about your physical security the way you do in many uh poor societies and you know that's really what the meaning of the end of history was which then leads me onto the question of why didn't that happen to russia after the end of a cold war why didn't it become a liberal democracy well i do think that there are uh you know cultural traditions that can get in the way i mean so many factors uh one of them was uh just bad policy and i really do think that a lot of the especially the american economic advisors that were talking to russian policymakers after the soviet union fell apart gave them bad advice they made a much too rapid transition to a market economy they didn't have the and it was based on a really fundamental misunderstanding they didn't understand you need a state in order to have a market economy a functioning state and the you know the soviet union had just dismantled its state and so that was part of it i think that you know just the shock of losing an empire that rapidly was deeply traumatizing to a lot of people it shouldn't have been because i i believe there's a country in this neighborhood that lost an empire at some point in the not too distant past and it didn't go into this big revenge you know effort to reconquer lost territories but i do think that there is a tradition in russian national identity that understood its own identity in terms of the domination of its region and that simply just didn't go away and then you know i think uh part of it is just the luck of particular leaders and i think we've got a lunatic running this country right now who is just fixated on that what he regards as a historical uh injustice but you could have imagined other outcomes you know boris yeltsin could have appointed somebody other than you know a kgb agent to be the next president of russia and we may have been on a very different path well john i want to challenge you a bit about the ukraine situation because one of the things i think has been surprising is how unified the western response has been how dignified the american response has been in letting europe lead on it even countries like switzerland joining sanctions regimes against russia that is that does show there's a bit of life in the old western alliance yeah right yes it does but let's not overdo it [Laughter] i think in the last three weeks something like four billion euros have been spent by the germans on um russian calf so they've been funding the russian war machine by that amount and if you take the whole of europe it's much much larger i just don't have a figure at my fingertips but it's it's very big um the americans i think have particularly biden who's i think quite often unjustly attacked president have done very well but let's not forget as well as they could in these difficult circumstances it was biden last year who overrode congress on the absolutely crucial geopolitical issue of the hst-2 pipeline this is among other things he's backed off later on he said he altered but basically he stymied uh uh those people in congress who um wanted to put an end to it and that's an absolutely crucial feature of this um of this of this war uh um because although uh ukraine a huge producer of agricultural commodities which is going to have already has knock-on effects in places like egypt for example um it's a transit area for energy and that's very very important um so has the west really come together all that much the huge change in german foreign policy lasted less than a week um it's going to up its defense spending and it's paused the nordstrom pipeline so when did it backslide it back well it it backs it backslid because they're um nothing yet as far as i know most of the weapons that they zelensky complained about this just two days ago i think zlanski complained that most of the weapons that they were supposed to haven't derived nothing not much has arrived originally sells helmets you remember what he said why didn't you sell sender's pillows that might have been some uses for being killed on math um somewhere our heads perhaps nothing much has yet yet been um done and also um um the uh uh especially by germany and and by um other european countries the countries which european countries which have done magnificently above all poland um are those directly uh faced by russian power i'd also single out um the baltic states but i i think one can greatly over uh estimate this let's look a little bit deeper at this rise of the west in the first couple of minutes first of all um it has not been a global alliance of democracies against the axis of autocracy this has not happened india has not joined us south africa has not joined it the united arab republics have not joined this and china has not joined it it's in a very difficult position it doesn't know which side very very ambiguous and equivocal and yet i find this very amusing that the people who say that the west is resplendent as never before look to china as the only the world's greatest most powerful most formidable autocracy for salvation maybe they and they alone can pull the rug from under putin not any of the west so that tells you something about the state of power in the world and i don't actually attack these i myself would be i'm a very strong supporter of the ukrainians i think we should arm them as long as they want to fight with the best arms that we can give them i do not favor a no-fly zone um because that could uh lead to nuclear war and to cite a statistic which is i've checked um russia has um many many nukes like tactical nukes um which it's the official doctrine the public doctrine of the russian state can be used first and has ten times as many as nato it has about two thousand nato has about two hundred of which a hundred are in america so if you're gonna tr if you're going to risk this catastrophe it's a really very big catastrophe that you're risking so i don't support a no no flies on well can i bring in frank on this because i think this is an another question that has been floating around ether i really wanted to know your take on it which is has the what looks from the outside to a non-informed observer very botched invasion of ukraine which ran into trouble has not been the kind of shock and awe and legislation of a public government does that suggest that a fundamental flaw in autocratic decision-making that everyone is so scared of putin that they won't tell him well she has a bad idea here well uh i'll answer that in a second i i disagree with john uh on just some facts weapons are pouring into ukraine right now from a whole variety of european countries including this one maybe not in the first instance you know from germany but a lot of weapons are arriving ukrainians are doing much much better than anyone expected and i actually think that they can defeat putin and force a withdrawal not a negotiated settlement but they can actually defeat the russian army because they've been taking unsustainable casualties up to this point and so i think the overall situation is much better than a lot of people are allowing for but yes i mean putin's decision making in this case shows why you shouldn't have an autocracy and why that's not good for a society if you run by one person with no checks and balances he seems to have retreated into a kind of shell especially under the code i mean you saw these pictures of him meeting with his national security council you know when they're all 25 feet away from them and at the end of these long tables apparently you know all his ministers are triple vaccinated but he still doesn't want to come within 20 feet of them and it speaks you know some mental paranoia or or disturbance he's also been completely consumed with these historical narratives comparing himself to peter the greater katherine the greater prior you know russian rulers that extended the territorial reach of russia but the most important thing is that the invasion was planned so incompetently that you know they're now paying a very very heavy uh price for it they didn't understand ukraine i mean i have gone quite a lot over the last seven years to ukraine because we run a lot of programs to train uh young ukrainians and i think the russians had no idea that ukraine has actually become at least with its elites quite a liberal society that you have a very westernized elite there that really want to be a european and that across the country they don't want to be part of russia you know they simply did not understand that and that's why they thought you could wage a 48-hour war the ukrainian army would surrender you get a lot of uh collaborators that would run a pro putin ukraine and it you know it shows what happens if you're cut off from basic information and uh you know you're running a system where everybody wants to say something that they know will please you you know i i can't imagine any you know i don't know if you saw that meeting where he berated narishkin the head of the fsb uh in a very humiliating way i did and i've never seen a spy chief look so worried that he was going to be getting a you know teapot with something in it and so your intelligence your intelligence chief should be able to give you bad news you know if that's what the intelligence is telling you but you can't do that in this country because everybody is too afraid of the guy on top and so this is you know a general argument for more distributed power you know some constraints where you can't just do whatever you want where you need to consult at least with a you know larger council i mean the chinese created something like this after 1978 it's collective leadership where you know the the guy at the top couldn't make all the decisions you'd have to get consensus that didn't exist in uh in russia and they're paid a really heavy price for this now john i've been um tough on frank for writing the end of history okay that he was arguing for a coherent and directional history of mankind that will eventually lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy i'm now going to give you a rough time of what you wrote in your review of that so cast your mind back to 1989. yeah okay you wrote the days of liberalism are numbered but here's my contention it's limped on and maybe that's all systems of government ever do maybe that's the best you can hope for that is the best you would hope for i didn't mean that uh there would be no liberal societies left in the world the view i expressed in there as you remember what i said in that article 33 years ago was it wasn't history that had ended what had happened was that history had resumed in a traditional or classical fashion that history and future would be governed by uh resource wars nationalism religion all the kind of forces that moved it in the past and of course in that there would be some liberal societies which if they disappeared would disappear probably largely or morphed into something different because of problems within themselves which i think frank actually agrees with i mean at the end of his book uh he talks in a way which could be seen as an anticipation not only of what is now called work but of also what liberals call populism so i wasn't saying um that there'd be no liberalism but liberalism as a universal sorry liberalism as a universal creed liberalism liberalism as a universal creed i thought would begin to decline as i think has happened india is no longer a secular republic as imagined by the british the arab spring uh did not end many there are liberal democracies in um parts of uh eastern europe um that has not been that has not happened that hasn't been the universal um um uh uh advance of liberalism of course you can always say and frank though you say well it's the long run it's the long run that counts the very long run well an economist i admired said in the long run we're all dead me not keynes and that might be not that much of a long run now because just to take up briefly what frank said ukrainians are winning well if they're winning it's a point of maximum danger for the world because if they're winning then um putin is not going to sue for peace on that basis he's not going to go back to russia and say i've still got crimea he had crimea to start with before this he's going to be humiliated and possibly um toppled if he's toppled by the way it won't be by some of his yet unknown harvard graduate in liberal rights theory or economist it'll most likely be someone from within the security apparatus so we actually don't know what would come come after but if if really they're winning and i have nothing but aberration for what they've done and not doing then he's repeatedly said as i said it's official military doctrine that one can use these mini nukes of which he's got lots more than we have though i think the americans and biden are right to say that there's probably a false flag operation being put into being about chemical and biological warfare and don't forget this is the this is the syrian playbook we talk about this terrible war as if it has never happened before well it hasn't happened recently in europe you'd have to go back a hundred years to the russian civil war or something like that but it did happen in syria city after city was obliterated destroyed um hospitals were bombed schools were bombs this is the aleppo and the grozny playbook that he's operating with so if anyone thinks he won't use these weapons i think i would have to say perhaps rather externally you've not learned much from the last three weeks well let me put that to the shrink because i think that's really interesting what do you think is the best outcome that we can hurt for aside from john's theory that we won't get a new statesman columnist as russian president moore's a pity in the circumstances what is the best possible outcome that is plausible well i think you can actually paint a pretty rosy scenario if the ukrainians really do defeat the russians or force a withdrawal it does seem to me that putin is not going to survive this uh there will be somebody in his security apparatus uh you know maybe somebody in the army that will say look he's humiliated the country he's put you know there's actually this very interesting piece that was posted by a former hardline general named um uh uh iva ivashov about three weeks before the war in which he said attacking ukraine is a stupid idea and i think putin ought to step down as president and this is a very senior you know retired military officer and some of my russian friends tell me that that's actually a very common uh feeling among the senior officer corps in the russian uh military they've now lost you know the estimate is over ten thousand killed meaning if you add the wounded that's like 30 35 000 casualties out of their initial invasion force so it's a really terrible setback for any professional military officer i don't think that the successor is going to be worse you know i don't think that the successor is going to have even greater ambitions to use this military in a more yet more terrible way than putin and i actually think that there's a pretty powerful logic for not starting a nuclear war you know yes true uh so i i'm i don't want to minimize the danger of the moment but i do think that it's possible that you could get a pretty big russian retreat if that happens i think that there will be a feeling you know among other democracies that they actually can do something about these negative trends that have been happening in the last few years and if they stick together and if they support one another the way they're supporting ukraine that you can actually have good political uh outcomes i think we've been suffering from this i don't know liberalism fatigue or something you know there have been so many people criticizing liberalism that nobody's kind of stood up and and tried to explain why it's a good thing you you couldn't get a better illustration of why a liberal society is better than an autocratic one than what's happened between russia and ukraine right well i was curious when i was reading your back catalogue i was thinking to myself i wanted i was one of those times when you want to kind of get the author and ask them a few probing questions and now i've got you here so tough luck on you is there any system of government you would rather live under for all your criticisms liberalism it is it is nice to have a free press and free elections and i mean singapore is very clean but also you know you could get fined for jaywalking it depends on who you are depends on who you are would you prefer if you were living in detroit would you prefer detroit or singapore now you've got free speech in detroit if you're not one of the hundreds of thousands i think now of deaths of despair in the colossal opioid um epidemic there people don't only want free speech very important i've lived by it so i'm not going to i'm not going to attack it um i think it's it's a great thing but there's no one single ideal type of government for the rest of the life of everyone in this room i think there will be slightly tattered liberal democracies there'll be illiberal democracies there'll be autocracies there'll be theocracies um there'll be ethnic nationalist states there'll be civic nationalist states and there'll be parts of the world where there's no state at all just zones of anarchy that's what will be for every single person in this room in my view there might be slightly more liberal democracies or slightly fewer but there won't be a universal or even anywhere near a universal liberal democracy because there's been 30 odd years since this prophecy or prediction or whatever it was frank didn't predict that there'd be no major conflict he never did but he did think that there was no sustainable alternative uh to liberalism well um some regimes are so abominable that no one wants to live in them most are mixed and uh legitimacy in regimes isn't a matter of fitting any theory like liberalism or marxism or some other theory it's a complicated thing to do with peace prosperity security having rulers you can halfway trust or at least not 100 mistrust who somehow reflect your values it's a very complicated thing and all and shifting all the time and so that's as it were my my answer to you i should say one final thing i'm put in i think there's a great error actually an extremely dangerous error being unfolding at the moment which is to say that um putin is mad now he may be solid he may be isolated he shows many of the characteristics of isolation there may be people not telling him the bad news that might be why he'll sleep scapegoats for the failure he'll feel sack a lot of his people he already has military and and intelligence but when one says that one is making the the classic error of liberals which is to say that underneath all human beings are rational in the sense that liberals understand rationality what they really want is freedom peace prosperity always i think wolf events said about iraq he said two years from now they'll all be sitting reading the wall street journal and checking their stock prices didn't happen and not only because of american mistakes this can lead to catastrophe because it leaves out the possibility of that a ruler like putin with goals goals about reviving russia in its czarist or or perhaps its soviet form uh unifying it uh having it as not be as a kind of a world historical uh force in the world um um in in human affairs there is goals and we leave out the possibility which has been many times exhibited in history that people will put as human beings leaders and even some of their followers will put away put on one side these liberal goals but apply um um um some other goals instead i think he is rational he's been preparing this for a long time um he's um turned the economy into a fortress it's in people say it's in free fall now well they can probably still feed themselves because eighty percent of their food is domestically produced um it'll be other parts of the world the developing world that face shortages and and and hunger well let me think upon that then because because you talk um about the idea of a resource war and i think frank this is one of the things i think is maybe the biggest challenge to politics in the 21st century is water wars climate change during forced migration is there a fear in you that liberalism was response to a particular set of political conditions and scarcity and the fight for the last few remaining places on earth that are still livable completely changes politics that we are entering a new political era entirely well if things turn out you know to be as dire environmentally as that it's possible that a lot of our modern institutions will you know begin to break down and you know i think that one of the big advantages of liberal societies is economic growth if you have economic growth then inequality can be managed in certain ways because if everybody is getting a little bit richer the fact that some people are getting more rich you know more quickly is tolerable if you basically move into a world where growth doesn't happen then you're back in this malthusian world where the only way i can get rich is by taking something from you and so predation becomes the major way that entrepreneurs then you know uh the mass fortune by stealing from other people and yeah i think that it's pretty hard to maintain a liberal society and a world without economic growth and that's why you know climate change is a big challenge because if there's no way of breaking the link between emitting carbon and growth then you're basically saying you know if if you're going to save the planet you're going to have to stop growing and there are in fact you know greens that support degrowth and you know other things that i think are politically pretty hard to swallow so yes i do think that's a problem however i don't believe that the regime type actually makes a difference in you know in your attitude towards growth because authoritarian regimes want to grow too right china wants to grow and in fact it's going to be the major emitter of carbon you know between now and 2050 and it's got an authoritarian regime and so i don't think that moving away from liberal you know so the the environmental crisis may uh may weaken uh our commitment to liberalism but i don't think that authoritarian government is a solution to the environmental crisis by the way john i i just have to make a comment on your so i i agree with you basically that you'll have all these different kinds of regimes in the world and it may not be the case that the liberal ones will necessarily be dominant but there's one fact that i think is indicative of which is the best regime and that's the that's kind of the question uh that was posed that you skipped over and i think people are voting with their feet right there are hundreds of thousands of people every single year that escape from chaotic uh poor you know badly governed places and where do they choose to go do they go to russia do they go to china do they go to north korea no they go to liberal societies because i think that everybody has this perception that they want to live if they have the opportunity they want to live in a law governed you know stable country that is well to do gives their children opportunities education for education for you know socially advancing themselves and so i think people are voting with their feet and they're voting to live in liberal societies sure that is that is a strong tendency i don't i don't deny that but um that let's think uh by the way one slightly tragic fact is that the efflux now the exiting of liberal or not necessarily liberal but russians who can't stand living and reporting it's happening in almost to the day that the philosophers steamships left russia i don't know if any of you know about those 100 years ago lennon sent out a message throughout the intelligences theologians ballerinas musicians linguists you've got to follow if you want to say in russia he told this was lenin not stalin you've got to um accept that your freedom will be curtailed so for those of you who don't like this prospect we're providing steamships to take you out with two steamships followed by trains they were all left very famous uh musical and theological and other things now it was exactly a hundred years ago the same thing is happening so this is something it has to be said about russia uh um a tragic extremely gifted culture uh um but but a tragic one um but i think um the basic difference between um frank and myself is not that i deny that liberal societies have done well and are pretty good to live in but then i can't see them as a universal goal and not only that i can't most of humankind can't actually now is it the case that beneath these autocracies there are populations with just long to be american just can't wait to be i don't think so i think that they perceive deep weaknesses in western liberalism that are real what has happened in the last 20 years well there was a huge financial crisis there were a series of spectacularly incompetent and hubristic wars not just afghanistan and then iraq but also libya they've seen the west not so much hollowed out as full of itself just one comment on this i don't actually think that liberalism as an ideology in the political class is in as much decline as frank says i think that in some ways unfortunately it's still very strong let me give you an example the most dangerous proposal around at the moment apart from the supply zone is the second nuremberg as in the war crimes tribunal as a war crimes tribunal yeah to put up putin and his cronies for um war crimes now they have committed war crimes there's no doubt about that but there's a difference between where we are now in 2022 and 1942. in 1942 hitler didn't have the bomb if they if this becomes official policy and putin and his cronies realize that they can be standing in the dock there what does that do to give them any incentive to wind down to de-escalate it means it's an existential choice of life and death with them then i think that as if the ukrainians continue winning uh um they'll up the ante they'll escalate it's not just me who thinks this the americans think this american intelligence thinks there's british intelligence in public made public statements that they fear that this is what we're going to happen it's going to happen so maybe we should have another similar conversation maybe um a year from now or even sooner because i actually think that the axis of these events it'll either drag on this terrible war like in syria for years and years and years it's a possibility uh all there might be a rapid russian crumbling of their army with very low morale and so on but then i don't think one can count one can bet on putin being removed and even being replaced by anyone substantially better it would probably be i think frank would agree someone from within the security apparatus because only they've got the opportunity to remove him you can't get to him but he won't as you say let anyone within 20 feet of him which is probably i mean again is that actually a very rational thing to do if you're vladimir putin i see i think the problem here is that um liberals are so confident of their idea of rationality that they think that all other human beings basically have it and if they they don't they're uh crazy i knew a polish sociologist called stanislav probably forgotten name he wrote one many books but one was called social sciences as sorcery even the title's worth buying the book for it's a very good very good book he was captured in um in poland in the second world war um by the soviets um as a young man and marched into the woods he was being marched into the woods his friends were his comrades were told you will get cigarettes you will get hot water you will get food um he told me that what he did was he told one of the guards i need to relieve myself he went behind the bush and just didn't come out his comrades were never heard of again and probably were among the 22 23 000 so uh uh poles who were murdered in the catin uh um massacre um and i asked him well why did you do that is it because we're both passive i bet he was a great pessimist he said no he said i just didn't believe it and i never got further with that to him but i think what he was what he was thinking was you've got to ask what the goal of the person you think is irrational is if they goal the soviet goal of that time was the same as the nazi goal which i think it was which is to destroy the polish intelligence then what they were doing by killing was rational and what the soldiers who were marching unknown to their deaths were the captive soldiers what was doing was irrational because they were counting on liberal rationality he told me they were saying well they'll need our labor they're not inefficient the germans after the uh the soviets they are inefficient but they'll need our leader they'll need our labor they didn't they had different goals so if putin's goals are really what he says they are in his extraordinary 5000 word essay on polish and ukrainian history if that's what he really thinks did he do it as a joke i don't think so there's even less evidence of humor in putin than there was in john stuart bill uh um if he really thinks that is he prepared to bring the house of car is he ringed house down for it well we're gonna go to questions in five minutes but before that i you mentioned the w word i would like on record that i didn't say the w word woke um so five p and the swears are for you but uh this is you know this is a topic of home i think great angst among whether you want to call them the intelligentsia or pedcolamas however it might be the idea that liberalism is not just under threat from autocrats but also from a new type of leftism that again doesn't have what you would say tolerance for diversity it believes there are you know there's the right side of history and then people could have got to be on it and some questions have just been settled is that so the new york times for example ran an opera this week so for the leader from the editorial board saying there is a free speech crisis in america and people lost their minds on twitter because they say come on this is absolutely nothing compared to the real problem out there which is the right where do you stand on that oh i well i agree in general that the immediate political threat to liberal values comes from the right i mean basically stealing the next presidential election that's pretty serious but the cultural threat that's posed by the progressive left is also serious uh you know there it it comes out of a different interpretation of identity politics that is definitely illiberal so there's one version of identity politics that is the fulfillment of liberalism which is really the politics of martin luther king right he wanted black people to be treated exactly the same way that white people were treated so they could be part of a broader you know mainstream but um the way that uh the progressive understanding of identity has evolved uh the particular you know fixed characteristics like race gender ethnicity and so forth uh become essential characteristics that then determine the way that society distributes rewards um it becomes something that you know where social justice is allowed to override other liberal principles like freedom of speech like due process and a lot of the critique that you know on which this kind of understanding of identity politics is based is explicitly anti-liberal it regards a little bit like herbert barkuza in an earlier age that liberalism is just a sham you know you may think that you're living in a free society but in fact you're living in a racial patriarchy that is manipulated by you know sinister people behind the scenes they want to make you think that you're living in a free society but you're really not and i think that that is a view that's taken hold in you know in certain parts of the left and it's cultural rather than political but i do think that it's um you know it is a threat to liberal values but this is what i struggle with because i also i write on both sides of this line if you look at feminism perhaps and the first wave of feminism the suffragettes that was a demand to be treated equally everyone should have the vote we're all equal citizens the trouble then comes when you move forward in time and you say well actually men and women have different biologies and one side's got to do the unequal investment in rearing the children and therefore you need a special set of policies you have to be treated differently and i think you could say the same thing about police shootings in america the disproportionate effect of them on black men how do you raise the consciousness required to assert your particular rights as a group and the unfair treatment without as you say essentializing it and that making it everything to be seen through that that's why i've never understood so that's uh that's true enough i mean identity politics is an important and time-tested way of mobilizing people right right and making them conscious of injustice uh but i guess the question then is what do you do about it and what is your ultimate objective and uh if the objective is actually to you know do things that in effect do essentialize these characteristics then you're moving away i think from a liberal society that really does see a kind of underlying universal humanity behind you know people regardless of what their gender cultural you know experience race all these other characteristics are and i think you know there are many societies that are organized that way you know lebanon is organized that way uh iraq is organized that way bosnia is organized that way where you have these fixed identity groups and they're all engaged in a kind of zero-sum contest over resources you know among each other and i think you know compared to that if you you know that they're kind of stuck in that that kind of consciousness and i don't really see how they get out of it but if you are a society where you still have the ability to treat people as individuals you ought to stick to that you know before you move too far down the road to you know to being bosnia with its three presidents and three parliaments and three police forces and you know so on and so forth and john you've had some fairly heterodox opinions over this often profoundly out of um step with the prevailing consensus is it harder now to speak than it was i've been extremely i've been extremely lucky i think it is hard i left academia before the problem i left academia in 2007 before this became an issue in academia but i know that within academia young academics are extremely careful in what they research what they say or they even say in um canteens because it could be held against them that's a sign of a society that's or a culture or a way of life that's gone a long way from liberalism because there used to be a private realm where you could say what you like and there will be no come back and even extend it to your colleagues at work you might have professional rivalries uh you would have because they're normal in workplaces but you you wouldn't be afraid of being snitched on six months later uh and your career wrecked so it's really real people who say they say when i say the woke is a problem they say well what about you you're constantly giving public events and this is the first one i've given for two and a half years never mind but that is the thing is council culture isn't real because you don't look very cancelled that's right but there are not many of us and i'm retired so i um i'm i'm not in the same position as young scholars are or young journalists in some organizations or young workers in in some corporations it's absolutely real and if you ask what walk is it's liberalism without tolerance it's hyper liberalism it's it's it's the idea of autonomy understood in a certain kind of way but taking out of it uh the cultural and civilization and religious and other matrices in which it developed and taking out of it um toleration tolerance and i must say mill back to mill who i still revere in many ways a very serious careful thinker he has something there's something in him to he he has some responsibility for this because in a crucial chapter in his own liberty people always quote the chapter on freedom of speech which is a good chapter in many ways a chapter on individuality says that anyone who doesn't make themselves doesn't define themselves doesn't create themselves aren't really human in other words if you're a traditional religious practitioner if you're an orthodox jew or traditional catholic or muslim or you're just somebody who knocks through life without ever working out what you want or who you are you're quite happy just to bubble your way through life you haven't really made it as a human being you're a human being when you have individuality which means you create and invent yourself and one of the problems about that is the key problem which frank just referred to in these other societies is that if you create an identity for yourself you've also got to have it recognized by society you've got to have it validated by society and then the kind of hobbsian war the war in which you can only get power opposition from someone else you can only get resources from other people breaks out again because when you say well i'm a member of this group this group doesn't get what i want and i demand that it gets acceptance and sometimes of course as both helen and um frank have said this there's a there's a huge background of oppression and discrimination which makes this a legitimate um claim in many ways the trouble is it fragments society it creates a kind of professional struggle um there's a russian theorist i mentioned to helen before we came on stage who's got the theory of surplus elites just too many of them about they're not all needed or wanted too many lawyers too many aspiring novelists too many poets too many uh human rights they got hundreds and thousands of the figures i think back this up at least in america where are they going to sort of find find themselves somewhere so they're battling it out in this slightly cynical the russians in america been there for many years but they're battling it out under the under it's a kind of ideology of self-promotion i don't think it's that or only that i think it's a genuine mutation in liberalism and that's what one of the reasons i do feel concerned about the future of of of of liberal societies a time will come when no one remembers the kind of tolerance that perhaps many of us here younger than me even do remember in which you can't say without anxiety what's on your mind you have to sense self-censor and once that once that happens the game's up well if it makes you feel better i had my voice removed from a video game for saying that biological sex exists which must be one of the most absurd cancellations of the 21st century but that's probably a good time to um to turn to questions i've got one mic over there this side of the audience you're going to have to bellow at me because john's stolen your mic i've got a mic up in the center could i take one from from this side of the room i'm afraid you'll have to make your way to the microphone could someone make their way to the microphone upstairs and can i make a plea um for women to ask some questions because i think they're often bit hesitant about coming forward and i love a mouthy woman i am a maori woman and is there anyone upstairs he wants to oh okay sorry if anyone upstairs could make their way to the mic if you want to ask a question hello hi uh alex willard thank you very much it's been a wonderful debate so far and when you say obsolete do you really mean relevant and are we confusing liberalism with democracy and i guess that comes from around saying do you really think that the usa is still liberal in any shape or form well there's a lot to unpack that okay let's try and do them all let's do that first one because you you alluded to this next election being stolen and i think the question to what extent the u.s is a liberal democracy is a kind of interesting one so let's start there well i wrote this book about liberalism and not about democracy and not about liberal democracy because you have this phenomenon on the populist right where you get popularly elected leaders that are democratically legitimated through elections so that's erdogan or bond you know the law and justice party in poland there's no question that democratically they represent a very powerful part of their societies and the first thing they attack is not democracy it's the liberal part it's the rule of law they want to undermine the judiciary's independence they want to muzzle the free press that could criticize them and basically escape the kinds of constitutional checks and balances that should limit executive power so liberal it's really the liberal values that come under attack in the first instance now once they succeed in doing that they also then go on to attack the democratic leg as well by gerrymandering and denying access to the vote you know various people so the two are actually related to each other i think that the united states yes it is a it is still a liberal society uh you you know the the limitations on freedom um are you know the the sort of self-censorship that john is talking about in terms of political speech you're getting some conservative legit state legislatures that are passing rules about what you can teach in uh schools and you know that's worrisome but it's not a it's not a huge uh impact basically you can say whatever whatever the hell you please you know in the united states and nobody is going to hold you to account and i think the rule of law is still very powerful that trump was not allowed to do a lot of the things that he wanted to do because you had jurists that and then judges that wouldn't let him do that so i think that the institutional checks are still there but they're weaker and that's what's really worrisome because like all of these other populists he is going to use a democratic mandate if he manages to get into power again to further erode those liberal institutions and that's the point of which i think your question will then become really relevant but john let me put the same question to you surely as you said some of the discontent in the us with liberal democracy is due to the financial crisis due to the foreign policy disaster that was the iraq war do you think that you know a republic if you can keep it do you think a liberal democracy if you could keep it is that is that the people are reluctant to defend liberal democracy in the us well there isn't a good alternative to liberal democracy in the us it may not exist anymore in the way that it did exist i actually think that it's more compromised than um frank is uh argued uh just now i wonder if a far right candidate maybe trump or maybe someone more intelligent than trump wouldn't be that hard in many ways uh more disciplined more like auburn supposing supposing someone wins in a couple of years time and liberals say the election's been stolen some of them have already been writing that way now even before it's hasn't it may not happen but if it does happen well we won't accept it it's illegitimate because so that speaks to me of a very polarized society in which neither side accepts the legitimacy of the other so that's a very bad sign but there's no alternative i do not share the view of some on the american cultural right who look to look to russia or to hungary as a kind of bastion of traditional virtues perhaps they aren't aware that the country in the world with the highest level of proportion i don't think abortions are wrong by the way but they do it's russia it has all of the uh problems and conflicts addiction broken families in space that the west that the west have um these are the people who are still tucker carlson the um tv host i don't know if any of you don't know his name just the other day said well i know i'm i'm on the side put in at least he's uh you know he's not woke uh well he certainly isn't woke uh um but i think i think i think it's more i think america is in greater trouble especially if you think not against the background of a pretty decent performance by biden but what might happen in two years time uh what will that mean for the west because frankly with all this stuff about the revival of europe supposing it wasn't the american security guarantee of europe supposing it wasn't there supposing it had gone with trump or before trump so that the baltic states and all these peripheral states like porn didn't have the american nuclear umbrella what would have happened if putin will still rely really completely on the americans so i think it's a very important issue of how far america can still be relied on in that way but did that make did i give you pause for thought because i it did me um that alliance of the people who see themselves as you say anti-work tucker carlson being one example who went too hungary last year year before and hung out with victor orban jordan peterson again was went for a sort of one-on-one interview was photographed with him that for some people the anti-wokeness has tipped them into a softness is that is that something that you see is as a problem on the on the right oh definitely it's not a softness it's a madness because although the issues around what were important and we i think we should treat them seriously um they're not as important as having your whole city ravaged and reduced to rubble they're not as important as a potential nuclear war they're not as important as a large-scale war breaking out in the middle of europe for the first time since the end of the they are important they're varying but they're not as so people who determine the world in terms of these cultural um wars i think have just lost all human perspective they've lost the sense of what really matters to human beings but they spend a lot of time in television studios so yes oh yeah television studios and twitter the two places that will melt your brain um i have an online question for you frank which is essentially posing the karl popper's paradox of tolerance right which is liberal paradox liberalism is tolerance of belief sets which are themselves intolerant how do you have a liberal society which allows ultra-orthodox jews or islamists or whoever it might be fundamentalist christians to live within it well look the liberal principle of tolerance does not extend to people that would undermine that liberal order so you can't tolerate everybody um and i would say that you know with these religious groups the degree to which you tolerate them really depends on the way they treat their fellow citizens so if you have an islamist that is plotting you know violence then that you know is a criminal act and that needs to be suppressed if it's an orthodox you know jew that is living within a closed community and not bothering anybody then i think the liberal principle would say you know leave well enough alone so that's the working out of the principle of tolerance i i strongly agree with john that one of the big problems in the interpretation of liberalism these days is that we've moved from tolerance to basically demanding a kind of uniformity of thought it's not just enough to punish bad behavior that's racist or sexist but you want people to have you know certain private beliefs and express them you know in in private settings and that's not a liberal society that's something you know that's something different because the fundamental uh you know uh virtue in in a liberal society is tolerance and they're different kinds of intolerance so a lot of conservatives in the united states basically they don't want to tolerate you know the changing racial gender characteristics of their society on the left they don't want to tolerate conservatives or they don't want to tolerate you know religious people and they want you know a uniformity of thought uh from those groups as well and so there's different types of intolerance that are uh creeping into the society but pushing from tolerance to actually you know demanding that people think a certain way i think is is fundamentally illiberal you know one of my favorite blog posts by um slate star codex is entitled i can tolerate everything except the out group which is that which is the point so people say well of course i'm incredibly tolerant of um lgbt people and you go well do you think do you think that's you know do you think it's a sin to be lgbt and they go no and you go so you're not actually tolerating that you just agree with them right the measure of tolerance is tolerating but i think there is a secret i think there is a really difficult problem in this i agree wholeheartedly with what frankie said i think it's a really difficult problem to which liberals and everyone else doesn't really have a solution to what's called children to what extent can children be brought up within the closed society that their parents choose to live in which they live in other words if you choose to live in a i won't name them because it'll be considered as a slur but in some community which closes off other opportunities uh for uh information and uh if you're physically separated at some religious communes have been in the united states and elsewhere is that a violation of the autonomy of the child and if so should the state intervene to protect the autonomy of the child or is it an example should we should that be tolerated because it's the freedom of the parents to live the way they want or is it a restriction of the child's freedom to find out how many ways there are to live and who will then provide that i don't think that's been solved in any sus in any country fully uh um because it involves conflicts conflicts of values conflicts of freedom you might even say conflicts of toleration who is it that you and how far are you are you and i think that's endemic it's not just extremists who kill others or attack others who um are a problem for liberal toleration it's people who actually just stay within their own communities but bring their children up fully within those communities and make it hard for them to stray or make make the cost of exit inordinately high they can leave physically they can get on a train and go to london or something but the cost is inaudibly high for them because they haven't known about the rest so that's what we're about that's one of the reasons i feel guilty not to be rude about america but but feel grateful to live here where actually what's on the curriculum is you know it's of interest to parents but it hasn't become the curriculum wars that we're now beginning to see in the states because as you say that's where the real fight is you can say other other adults can believe what they want but everyone has a stake in what children are told i'm just going to take a question from up there and are you waiting to ask question two so let's have your question first please um so in thinking about identity politics and wolf culture more generally and the resulting polarization do you think that you know particularly in context of perhaps the million marketplace of ideas where you're supposed to be exposed to all the ideas before coming to the right one has social media exacerbated our inability to come to conclusions as a society um and if so to what extent that's brilliant we'll come back and then may i just take yours as well for mr gray i wanted to ask what form of government you believe humans should ideally be under and whether that form of government has any room for liberalism it's going to be playing top trumps with uh with forms of governments and there was someone that if you could just say it allied and i'll repeat it back to the room uh yeah sure so uh he was our frank's definition of liberalism at the beginning uh mentioning the protection of rights constitutional mechanisms limiting the power of the state and equality of systems before being very fundamental to his constant liberalism and their things are high as you were saying that has been corroded in the uk over the last 20 years it was kind of interesting to me that in everything tonight that the word neoliberalism hasn't actually been said it hasn't been used it's why in some sense to me actually john your analogy with uh detroit and singapore's missile point so that you could look at the last 30 years necessarily of us politics and look at and look at that as being characterized by liberalism as opposed to neoliberals it's my question really both of you with with those things in mind it's what crap we think neoliberalism poses that's great and i know you've written about this in the book so we'll we'll we'll cover that so let's let's do that one first so neil is liberalism as distinct from liberalism well two of the uh ten chapters in my book are about neoliberalism because i think you know my argument is that both on the right and on the left good liberal ideas were pushed to extremes where they became unsupportable and so with neoliberalism i define that as basically milton friedman and the chicago school that then you know leads to policies by thatcher and reagan that erode the state that undermine its legitimacy and that create a kind of market economy that exaggerates uh inequalities and and and promotes them and then undermines the social protections that were meant to soften you know those uh uh those differences and that was a big mistake and that's one of the reasons you get the left-wing reaction to it uh to this rising inequality uh but i don't think it's a necessary characteristic of liberalism itself you can dial back economic policy you can expand the welfare state you can provide more social protections you can change the tax laws and that's actually i think what's going on in a lot of societies today including you know uh including the united states and and then let's let's have your right let's have your top well my my whole belief is that there isn't an ideal form of government there are just lots of different ones and at any particular time some are better than others and the reason um the reasons they're better are sometimes liberal reasons about freedom and rule of law but sometimes they're about peace and security and they don't always go together because there are conflicts actually these values the unit there are universal human values they really are i think um but they don't they don't compose a harmonious set they often uh compete with each other you might want um a very high degree of um individual free speech you might even want that as much as the americans want it when they allow free speech by nazis and anti-semites and and racists i don't share that american absolutism about free speech at all i'm happy that most countries in the world to the most european countries and britain protect other people from hate speech because we one shouldn't think only of the freedom of the speaker one should also think of the freedom and dignity of those who are spoken about um well that leads us very naturally into question about social media right because that is the challenge of social media john to liberalism is that you get a kind of heckler's veto and that's both a sort of left liberal one person's offense immediately derails the conversation she connects up with what the speaker was asking uh the question he was asking earlier on about um neoliberalism and worked liberalism see i think my view is slightly different from frank's here i think there's a risk of essentializing liberalism liberalism is the good bit liberalism is the welfare state liberalism is um so no true liberal scotsman is what you're saying but you always define it you like i remember there was there's an austrian writer called robert mosel who mocked this and he has one of his characters say well true liberalism true socialism and true christianity are basically all the same well you know they're not they're different and i think liberalism has gone through many different phases it's not just one thing it's like an extended quarrelling family of things but i do think walk liberalism and neoliberalism weren't just arbitrary distortions of underlying liberal principles they grew out of certain problems that liberals didn't know how to solve they grew out of certain real difficulties in practice it wasn't it wasn't just grabbed by conspirators he said we're going to turn liberalism into something intolerant and something awful so i think there are problems all the way back to liberalism actually um which is why i think there are some things which are should be living in liberalism tolerance is one of the key things um and other parts of liberalism are or should be um dead or at least regarded as um obsolete in the sense of no longer relevant well let me put a version of it one of the most interesting interviews i've done this year was with an academic called karen stenner who researches authoritarianism and her belief is that about a third of people in each society have what she calls the authoritarian predisposition they value oneness and sameness in societies which is as john was saying if you live in someone that's chaotic and an arctic what you fundamentally want is people not to come knocking on your door and stealing your stuff but in in liberal democracies that becomes a problem because as you say there's a set up to manage diversity the cacophony of them of people's competing ideas this marketplace of ideas for those people is intolerable and makes them want to be everyone to be the same is that intellectually something that you feel is appealing as an explanation uh yes i think that actually um some people want to expand their realm of autonomy they want more choice they want to be left alone to make their decisions but other people want the opposite you know they actually want to be told who they are because they're confused and you know one of the big problems in a liberal society is there's so many identities that you could adopt and the society gives you no guidance as to you know which is the best way of life that you should pursue and that is what i think makes people join cults and join movements that anchor their identity in something you know stable because i do think that there's a side of you know human nature that that you know craves that kind of stability if i could just add to the question about social media it does seem to me the internet in general has put us in this very difficult situation so a liberal society we agree that we're not going to agree on the most important ultimate questions but we used to at least agree on factual information like who won the last election you know are vaccines safe and effective you know this sort of thing and because i think of the rise of of the internet we no longer agree on that because we can live in parallel information universes since there is no authority on the social media platforms that distinguishes good information from bad information and that is a very serious problem and we've not figured out how to solve that now we're running out of time do i just need to say that um copies of both men's books will be on sale in the foyer frank will also be able to sign for a minute i have to ask you one final question you have been having this argument since 1989 it's not quite the keynesian long run but it's a pretty long run who is who's winning so far oh we're both winning we're both winning all right okay that's a nice consensual note but and how much of your thinking has affected each other what things have you taken from each other because you quoted john in your book right you've nicked his definition of liberalism uh well i what i took from john is uh you know at least two really good great books about the liberal tradition where he goes through all of the major thinkers and you don't have to read their books you just read john's book and you know all about john stewart mill and you know all of these other great minds but i think that john kind of understands the theory of liberalism you know from the inside out and it's you know great achievement of his well i can tell you what i've learned from frank and i think you should all read his original book and his subsequent books which there are many book on trust book on political order but the first book that uh hit me was um and the article before that but it was um the end of history in the last man and practically no one reads the last chapters and if you want an inkling more than an inkling of woke and populism as it came to be called it's in there these are the into the internal pathology of liberal societies is anticipated in frank in frank's early work 30 years ago so um i understood that then we differed as to what would happen next and we even differ as to what's happening now uh um but um in in terrible tragic uh heart-rending case of ukraine but we do uh i think share this i think one thing we have in common which is that in a sense the big question about politics at least in the west is still about the fate of liberalism that's the big question if you haven't thought that through and thought through it seriously you haven't thought through what's about to come whether it's a revival of liberalism or a further uh um deformation of it in some way or other like neoliberalism was and what liberalism is um or um some kind of drift which may be the most likely because that's what i think most of history most of history is well there we go to understand this subject i can't think of two better people to listen to as i said their books will be available outside if you've pre-ordered a book it will be available in the foyer but for now john gray and francis fukuyama thank you very