Populism, Aristotle and Hope

foreign populism Aristotle and Hope and I want to begin by reflecting on a very peculiar change in our civilization and our culture we are sitting here in a room in which is embodied many of the fantasies of a previous era I don't want you to turn around too much while I'm talking but you can see behind you tapestries of knights and shining armor Galloping in a tourney on London Bridge you can see William the conqueror's representative turning up to meet the city of London and over my left shoul

der in the stained glass you'll see pictures of earnest clerics and everywhere around us in the stones in the heraldry is a reminder of an age that's passed an age which was defined by a sense of religion and spirituality at the very heart of our political construct defined by rigid divisions between classes the domination of the Lords and the Bishops over our society and that world gradually evaporated and was replaced over time over many hundreds of years by the beginning of a liberal Democrat

ic consensus whose fundamental Elements by the 1990s had become the idea of liberal democracy and the free market but this Evolution this change was a matter of many many hundreds of years in fact in a sense this whole panoply of buildings is like an ancient oak tree whose bark somehow remains well the center has been hollowed out in some ways in fact the entire British constitution is a little bit like that you only have to go and peer at the House of Lords see the Bishops and the house Lords t

o get a bit of a sense of that but what is so startling is how rapid the change has been from the consensus of the 1990s to today how something the previous sea took many hundreds of years has happened in a matter of decades and I want to quickly run you through some of that change and examine some of the paradoxes and contradictions which we've lived through let me start with 1989 very obvious moment fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of what appeared to be the explosion of an age of lib

eral optimism an age dominated by the U.S and its allies going into the end of the 1980s we are entering a world in which the United States stands unchallenged and over the years between 1989 2004 the number of democracies in the world doubles not just in Central and Eastern Europe we're familiar with what happened in Hungary or Slovakia but in Latin America in Asia and even even in some parts the Middle East and as this begins to change we see other developments we see the developments of peace

every year from then onward says Stephen Pinker likes to celebrate the world appears to become more peaceful every year there are fewer civilians killed in Conflict there are fewer internally displaced people there are fewer refugees and the world becomes more prosperous so much so that the world ends up on track to meet its goal of halving global poverty four years early hundreds of millions of people are dragged out of extreme poverty in this period and this period characterized I would say p

robably by five things and I want you to try to keep these five things in your head as I as I plod my way through my lecture the first of those is the notion of consensus this is an era in the 1990s an era of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair where the conventional wisdom is that politics Democratic elections are one in the center ground the classic graph of public opinion in this period is a belgia the votes are sitting where my fingers are not where my elbows are the conventional wisdom is you need

to scoop up the votes with the fingers the second Assumption of this period is that there is a Clear Vision for prosperity and that is driven by free open Global markets the third element of this moment is an idea that there is an ineluctable and inescapable connection between democracy and prosperity that these free open markets and a liberal democratic system are combined and this is something which I'll explore in a second but is the core of what's called modernization theory in the United St

ates from the 1950s onwards the idea basically here being that as you grow more prosperous you are inevitably going to become a democracy once your middle class gets to a certain size it's going to demand freedoms and indeed your economic system is going to require those freedoms in order to grow so Prosperity creates democracy democracy creates prosperity the fourth element of this system in the 1990s is the idea of the moral legitimacy of the West moral legitimacy of the West and this is seen

in the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo and in Sierra Leone and Liberia these interventions of the late 1990s in these interventions the United States and its allies takes it upon itself takes upon themselves to intervene to do these humanitarian interventions for the first time State sovereignty is broken by military invasions in the name of Human Rights the idea is that we're going into Bosnia to protect the Bosnian Serb population in Sarajevo 37 000 of whom have died from the Serbian artill

ery around the fringes we're going into Kosovo to back the Kosovo Albanian population against the oppression of slovironment and in Liberia and Sierra Leone we are intervening Against Child soldiers and Civil War and this is based on a fundamental idea that we have the moral legitimacy that other countries want to be like us people do not want to live in tyrannies they want to move to the United States they want to move to Britain because we believe our system is better element of this which com

es out of much of what precedes it is the idea that this is universal that there is something called a liberal Global Order that this liberal Global Order is just going to grow and grow if the number of democracies in the world has doubled in that period of 15 years it's just going to double again and pretty soon every country in the world is going to be a democracy because we're right we're good these things are logically connected and they're all going to come together so a nice moment it appe

ars for the world and a moment that evaporates astonishingly quickly and begins to go wrong in the early 2000s the early 2000s we enter a period where on almost every indicator I've mentioned we moved from dramatic growth to a form of paralysis and uncertainty the ideas the forms the developments which have characterized the 1990s begin to re-emerge in slightly more grotesque shapes slight Echoes of the past repetitions which are somewhere between tragedy and comedy the most dramatic of all of c

ourse being the way in which Iraq and Afghanistan does and does not reflect what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo but a series of these events and these events hit every one of our five central pillars of the 1990s the first of those which attacks the notion of consensus right my fingers is the development of social media Twitter and Facebook begin to develop in 2003-2004. and they reach their apogee in 2011 as a political form with the Arab Spring suddenly for the first time somebody setting himse

lf a light in Tunisia man setting himself light in a small town in Tunisia is able to spark unrest Uprising Revolution across Libya Egypt Syria Yemen Bahrain this is a very very surprising phenomenon because in previous eras you would have argued the differences between those countries they're different in their sectarian composition they're different in their constitutions they're different in their geographical location and it seems fundamentally implausible that somebody in a small town in Tu

nisia would be able to spark this kind of kind of change the second thing that happens in this period is going to strike the notion that free markets and globalization and prosperity are necessarily connected and this is of course the 2008 financial crisis the 2008 financial crisis is devastating devastating for The credibility of our economic system devastating also for the credibility of our Elites devastating for the bankers devastating for the politicians who failed to anticipate it and deva

stating of course most fundamentally because it leads in countries like Britain to 15 years of Frozen GDP per capita and Frozen productivity exposing that the dreams of the 1990s have actually in the case of many people particularly on low incomes corresponded with stagnant incomes and Rising inequality the third thing that happens in this period is a challenge to the notion of the necessary connection between Prosperity free markets and democracy and that of course is symbolized in our period b

y the rise of China the modernization theorists the 1950s and 1960s fundamentally held that it would not be possible to reach a certain economic weight for your middle class to get to a certain size for a certain GDP per capita to be surpassed without you becoming a liberal Democratic state China joins the World Trade Organization in 2001. in 2005 China economy becomes larger than the French economy 2006 it becomes larger than the British economy 2007 it becomes larger than the German economy 20

08 it becomes larger than the Japanese economy 900 million people are pulled out of poverty and the Chinese middle class becomes very large and very considerable however China does not convert into a liberal democracy in fact sustained growth of nearly nine and a half percent since 1980 appears to be compatible with the retention of a highly authoritarian system solidified in 2012 by Xi Jinping becoming the ruler of China and the moves that he makes to Tyson party control and his own authoritari

an rule the fourth big change that happens in this period is a challenge to the notion of our moral legitimacy or superiority and that actually is in some way combined with social media because social media begins not only to polarize but to unlock various unstable coalitions of dissent and begins to question the fundamental hierarchies that have preceded it we see it in the media landscape we see it in the shift away from everybody watching the same BBC programs or in the United States watching

the same news anchors to a world in which we begin to atomize into various different very separate Echo Chambers but we see it also fundamentally in the ways in which the West Begins to challenge itself and particularly the ways in which young people and movements in the west begin to challenge the authority of the old system we see it of course very very dramatically in the environmental movement and the way in which fundamental challenges in the 2000s about the environment and climate begin t

o challenge the construction of our economic system we begin to see it in 2013 which is the beginning of the black lives matter movement in the United States we begin to see it increasingly in a concern that our own States Britain the United States through their histories of racism or colonialism are not in fact morally legitimate actors but are deeply indicted in structures of inequity the fifth development of this period is of course the loss of the idea of the global liberal order which stems

from some of those previous factors but is exemplified and revealed to us most dramatically by the humiliations in Iraq and Afghanistan there most dramatically of all the fundamental idea that it's possible for the United States and its allies to topple in Afghanistan a Taliban theocracy what seemed to us to be self-evidently a repellent oppressive system and replace it with a more liberal Democratic model or in Iraq topple Saddam Hussein the epitome of the grotesque dictator and replace it wit

h a more liberal democratic system is exposed as optimistic folly the United States and its allies spend 3.5 trillion dollars in these Enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan that is incidentally the same amount of money that China beginning in 2013 begins to spend on the belt and Road initiative however China's belt and Road initiative which is China's Endeavor to build dams roads ports electricity substations right the way across Pakistan sub-Saharan Africa Latin America of course returns far more

to China than this extraordinary extravagance in Iraq and Afghanistan this then leads us with a degree of Hysteria into the third age that I want to examine and that's the third age that begins in 2014. and because these changes are happening so fast many people don't notice they're happening let me take a classic example of this classic example of this whole world is a figure called who many of you in the room May struggle to remember but a figure called David Cameron so David Cameron enters w

orking life as in the conservative research Department the end of 1988 the beginning of 1989. and it is of course true for him as for most of us that that first 15 years of working life defines your world view for life so he is coming into his working life for the fall of the Berlin Wall he brings in that she is his chief of staff somebody who's been Paddy ashdown's Chief of Staff in Bosnia he sees the world through the lens of humanitarian intervention he has no idea of social media he doesn't

anticipate the 2008 financial crisis he remains deeply committed to an idea of an old Global Order and he remains in this world until 2005 when he is elected as the conservative party leader and from then onwards I can assure you as an ex-politician one no longer has the time to think the key thing to understand about leaders of political parties and particularly Prime Ministers is that they're spending so much time on their focus groups their poding groups their campaigns and simply trying to s

urvive from The Barrage and hostile media attention in the opposition that the idea of actually being able to have any time to think about policy and Global forms is for the birds that said she pointed out to me when I left Harvard University came into British politics by Mitt Romney who took me aside and said to me how much longer are Jew at Harvard and I said four weeks he said that's the last four weeks you're going to have to think in your life right so David Cameron comes in in 2005 and you

can see the ways in which his experience from 1989 to 2005 defines his missteps as he moves forward you can see it in his inability to predict the financial crisis you can see it in the ways in which his intervention in Libya his attempts to propel an intervention into Syria are very much part of an old world where he imagines the West is still going to be able to act in the way that it did in Bosnia and Kosovo you can see it in his great great reluctance to vote against Iraq or Afghanistan he

continues to endorse those interventions and is extremely reluctant to see any problems with them you can see it in his relationship to social media famous theater in an interview in 2009 he said he had no intention of using Twitter because as far as he was concerned people who use Twitter were [ __ ] it's David Cameron's great great comment um and so he's not a man who is prepared for the world that is about to erupt and you can see this from 2014 onwards so 2014 is the beginning of the age of

populism and it's an age of populism where all these factors that I've mentioned are beginning to accelerate a very dramatic shift in the moral values the political assumptions the economic models and indeed the very State structures of the West we see this first in 2014 when a barely known group Isis manages with a few hundred fighters to Route three divisions of the Iraqi Army capture mosul the second largest city in Iraq and create a caliphate that stretched from Syria into Iraq breaking that

border and this is very much a movement fueled by social media but the same year is also the year in which Narendra Modi is elected in India bringing a particular form of Hindu ethnonationalism in replacement of the old structures the old assumptions of the congress party in India 2014 is also the moment where we see a shift in erdogan and maybe it's worth thinking a little bit about everyone because if David Cameron is a symbol of the old era 1989-2005 erdogan is a symbol of somebody transitio

ning into the new era so everyone was uh from a very very poor background in Turkey he in his teens was to be found on the streets selling water bottles to truck drivers and symmet which is a sort of giant pretzel and you'll see young boys young girls like that if you drive through Istanbul even today right these are people he's from a very very low income background he probably didn't go to university although he currently claims that he got some kind of degree nobody can find any record of it

anywhere in the Turkish system but in the late 1990s he became the mayor of Istanbul and he drove through some very very impressive infrastructure Investments particularly in bridges and Roads and by the early 2000s when he's beginning to come to National Power in Turkey he becomes the great hope of the West he seems to epitomize the possibility of turkey joining this liberal Global Order he's pro-european he endorses gay rights he abolishes the death penalty and he becomes for people like Europ

ean stability initiative a hope that actually democracy May flow not just through turkey because of course he's also moving against the military regime in Turkey but that it may eventually spread from Turkey right through the whole of the Middle East 2014 however beginning the age of populism is the year in which a very different erdogan emerges erdogan as president this is the year in which when a thousand Turkish academics protest against military operations against the Kurds immediately they

are arrested but half of them lose their jobs about 20 of them remain in jail this is the moment at which journalists begin to become arrested this is the moment at which perhaps most dramatically of all erdogan completes the construction of his 350 million dollar presidential Palace representing a different vision of the leader to the man who is selling simet on the streets in his teens moving forward through the age of populism 2015 we see the law and Justice Party come to power in Poland 2016

is of course the brexit referendum in Britain 2018 bolsonaro takes over in Brazil and bolsonaro is simply a symbol of something that is happening in a very accelerated fashion across Latin America and whose Legacy is with us today Latin America basically follows the model that I've laid out to you Latin America goes from various forms of autocratic military-backed regimes in the 1980s and finds itself late 1980s early 1990s entering this liberal World Order technocrats emerge in Chile and Peru

and Mexico and Brazil and Colombia these are people who are great Darlings of the International Community who push ahead with Washington consensus economic reforms and who broadly speaking stand for a Centrist technocratic vision of their country but many of the things that we've explored Transformations and social media transformations in the global economy and particularly for that in America a later commodity crash not so much the financial crisis but for them commodity crashes in 2013-2014 b

egin to open the door to these bizarre figures people like borage in Chile through Hilo and of course bolsonaro on the left and the right coming forward but in the center of this period in the center of 2016 the person who epitomizes the age of populism most is of course that great orange grotesque Donald Trump right and we see in his election how all the features that are defined in the 1990s the five features that I have identified are beginning to be replaced by a very very different universe

so I talked uh about the first Assumption of this period which is the idea of consensus the idea that we agree remember I had my fingers in the middle of my elbows at the side but in this new age starting in 2014 with apologies to Lloyd with a culinary reference um my my fingers collapsed like the kind of souffle I make at home it becomes the graph of public opinion becomes a u-shape there are no votes left where my fingers are and all the votes are now at my elbows the votes have moved to the

extremes and this is particularly clear of course in Donald Trump in the United States where the country begins to feel as though it's teetering on the edge of a civil war potentially it's true with brexit too for the first time we see in the brexit remain conversations a situation in which a half of brexit Voters say in interviews that they would not consider having a conversation with a remainer and half of remain voters say the same and in fact in the same polls in this period only 25 from ei

ther Camp would consider one of their children marrying somebody who came from the other category so that's the collapse of consensus the second feature of this phenomenon is as I said the necessary connection that seemed to exist between Global open free markets and prosperity and this is very much challenged by the emerging populist age Donald Trump of course is an avowed out and out protectionist he goes into a trade war with China and we are entering an age in which it is assumed with reason

that 2008 demonstrated that the old liberal Market Washington consensus had not delivered for people and where particularly in Rust Belt communities or in the north east of England people are looking for a different form of industrial strategy a different form of investment and no longer have confidence in the market to deliver for them in the way that they were led to believe it might in the 1990s another thing of course continues to accelerate I was talking about the link between prosperity a

nd democracy during this period we see the opposite of what we saw in the 1990s 1990s the number of democracies in the world steeply increases from 2014 onwards the number of democracies in the world begins to decrease as increasingly around the world people begin to question the link between prosperity and democracy and where many voters and certainly many politicians around the world begin to wonder whether Prosperity might not be more important than democracy talked about that in America it's

a dramatic example of this at the moment is in El Salvador with a president who's managed to not just Embrace a Bitcoin as his National currency thus relating to my comments about technology and change but it's also locked up about five percent of his population imposed an extreme authoritarian Rule and has been rewarded with 85 percent popularity in the ratings we can see it in Saudi Arabia where Muhammad bin Salman has imposed an extremely authoritarian state but combined it with forms of cul

tural social liberalization which have allowed women to drive have led to an explosion of public music festivals tourism cafes restaurants a cultural transformation which has not been combined with any changes in human rights liberal democracy and where he too has been rewarded at the moment with enormous popularity ratings and economic growth this year of nine and a half percent country in the G20 soon to be in the top 15 economies in the world and a similar story could be told about UAE in sad

der ways things are beginning to happen in Africa during this period so we found ourselves the pre-2014 period at the the back end of this idea of the liberal Global Order and you can see it in francophone Africa the French deploying troops into places like Mali advisors and Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic trying to support pseudo-democratic governments against islamist Insurgency by today all those situations have flipped over the French have been thrown out of those countries in

the Sahel military coups have happened and these new military hunters in the Central African Republic in Mali in Burkina Faso most recently in Sudan are beginning to turn to Russian Wagner mercenaries to come and provide the support that they previously would have received from the West point legitimacy the moral legitimacy of the West well the attacks on the moral legitimacy of the West have of course accelerated but it helps the populist cause because fundamentally populism whether under Donal

d Trump or under Boris Johnson is a narrative of the people against the elite and the more that the elite is discredited the more the elite is made to seem selfish in the words of Occupy Wall Street the one percent the out of touch the corrupt the more it suits the populist cause the easier it is for politicians in Poland or Hungary to seem to stand for the real pure National people against this discredited Elite but it's also true that the crack between prosperity and democracy also means that

the same populace are able to challenge their own constitutions there is a degradation of democratic practice we can see it in microcosm in Britain but in much more dramatic forms of course with the January 6th Uprising United States but in microcosm you can see it even in Britain you can see it in the way that Boris Johnson set out consistently to undermine most of the unwritten rules that governed the way in which Parliament and our democracy worked he started first by challenging the way the

conservative party worked Harold MacMillan elected as conservative leader 1950s makes a great acceptance speech in which he says he will not even consider the idea of purging or eliminating people from the left or the right he says the conservative party is in one of his great metaphors fed by many tributaries and to a great stream I have inspired brace left and right and I will want them on my left hand and my right hand and will March forward together this was not the vision of Boris Johnson r

ight Boris Johnson's Vision instead was to take power and immediately expel 21 members of the conservative party from Parliament because they happen to represent a different one nation tradition and these people included you know Churchill's grandson included Ken Clark who'd held almost all the great offices of states and have been a conservative leadership candidate being in every conservative government from the 1970s onwards it's thrown out the door he then proceeds to try to provoke Parliame

nt try to lock the door on parliament in order to drive through his particular policies he's then challenged by the Supreme Court that forces him to reopen Parliament and instead of making a speech of the sort that David Cameron probably would have made or Tony Blair would have made which is sort of grudging deference to the rule of law acceptance to Supreme Court he stands up and spits Fury talks about the people against the elite talks about how the Supreme Court is wrong talks about how the w

hole thing is a disgusting conspiracy to try to prevent the will of the people and notice in this rhetoric the will of the people it's not of course all the people it's barely a majority of the people in most these cases but it's nevertheless represented as the people you can see it also actually in the development of conflict of interests the degradation of the ministerial code again Britain is a minor example of this but remember when he's challenged for lying in Parliament and someone points

out this is in contravention of the ministerial code his solution is to rewrite the ministerial code to make it no longer necessary to resign if you lie to Parliament but of course much more dramatic form in Poland where we really do see the judges appointed by Parliament and the Parliamentary commissions and the judicial commissions completely excluded by the law and Justice party bringing Poland into a deep deep conflict with the European Union we can see it in Hungary with the development ess

entially the absorption of the state media the closing of universities and we can see it of course in much more dramatic form in in India in Brazil and of course in Trump's United States and then the final thing that comes out of this is of course the question of the liberal world order that was the fifth of my things and during this period the liberal World Order collapses really because the other facet the other facet of populism in its new form is isolationism we move into a world in which we

are retreating one indication of this and many many indications to this but one dramatic indication of this is the cutting of international Aid budgets around the world when I was the Africa Minister I had a bilateral development budget of about four and a half billion dollars today my equivalent would have in the UK and I wasn't the African Minister that long ago uh it's 2018 to today would have a budget of about 1 billion it's about a quarter the rest of that money has either been cut the poi

nt seven percent commitments being cut down to 0.5 percent or it's been diverted into looking after refugees in the United Kingdom and the same situation is happening in Sweden the same situation is happening in Norway and the United States is about to announce enormous cuts to its International humanitarian spend having held the burden that the rest of the world was dropping and this isolationism is driven by two things it's driven by the right increasingly thinking it's none of our business we

don't care about them anyway and by the left feeling so guilty that they feel all we do is cause trouble everywhere we go in the world and maybe we shouldn't get involved at all meanwhile the number of people in extreme poverty in Africa has gone from 170 million in 1980 to 470 million people today and yet do you hear anybody talking any more about ending poverty are there any more Live Aid concerts nothing of the sort instead donations to Red Nose Day goes from 30 million during my period Rise

s to 100 million and has now dropped down to 30 million again as a single indication of this move towards isolation and away from our Global responsibilities now I promised Aristotle and I'm bringing Aristotle and hope to conclude how do we begin to respond to this well the traditional way of responding to this would be within a classic Enlightenment utilitarian perspective and that was basically the way in which we saw the world in the 1990s we had an idea that there was a relatively simple Wor

ld which was not particularly concerned with moral values was fundamentally governed by economists and had a very clear idea of means ends calculations and actually a relatively Machiavellian worldview this is then developed by the populace into a much coarser and more extreme Machiavellian world view in which the end clearly justifies the means and most of the moral qualms begin to get shifted aside in fact many of the populist leaders portray themselves as unashamed Rogues they're able to crea

te these very curious coalitions where they can get religious voters voting for them despite being flamboyantly adulterous mendacious and the rest and what they seem to reveal appears at first to be a lesson from Aristotle it appears at first that the populace are the people who understand Aristotle because what the populists understand is that one of the problems that is hit the liberal Democratic consensus the 1990s is that it's unbelievably boring the 1990s has actually characterized by a wor

ld in which because everything had been sorted because we knew how markets created economic growth because we knew that economic growth created democracy because we knew that history had ended a loss of politics in the center ground in this period is largely a process of finding a think tank who's done a little study on something happening in Sweden and then trying to import best practice and capacity building into your civil service because fundamentally the idea is that all the big issues have

been solved and all that's required really is a good managerial technique and a prime ministerial delivery unit to drive through the chain of change that you need but Aristotle Aristotle points out that political communication cannot just be about what he calls logos cannot just be about the rational argument it requires two other things as well it requires pathos which is emotion and it requires ethos which is the sense of character and of course what the populists do so well is to do the path

os bit or some version of the pathos but they're unbelievably good at finding how to get the great slogans going again dust them off the shelf where the technocrats and the centrists have left them bring back words like patriotism Nation Liberty sacrifice and above all the secret really of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump is they bring back something that all the other politicians are lacking which is a sense of humor right they're terrible human beings but they are funnier than the other not and

this is part of their secret power however what Aristotle suggests and I'm going to finish with five Aristotelian Concepts because I talk in fives I don't know why I talk in fives now maybe I'll be better talking in threes so I want you to think about five Aristotelian Concepts I want you to think about those three rhetorical Concepts the idea of logos pathos and ethos I want you to think about the notion of Hope which in Greek is called elpis but particularly in Aristotle is you alpis Good Hope

and I want you to think about his notion of eudaimonia particularly Aristotelian notion of happiness or flourishing what I think he would say to our predicament and and I understand I don't have luckily for you four hours to talk about all the problems in this argument and I'd like to point out that there is a big problem with taking somebody who lived in ancient Athens and applying him to the current day for example he didn't have an iPhone and he wasn't aware of social media and the developme

nts of the global market system and he wasn't particularly attuned to artificial intelligence so take that as read however I think there is something very interesting in the way Aristotle approaches the world which provides an antidote to what was bad about these smug consensus the 1990s and is also an antidote to what is deeply disturbing immoral and in some ways horrifying about the age of populism as follows he would say firstly that in order to deal with an age of polarization my souffle the

votes that the elbows are not in the center we need to understand that the notion of pathos the notion of emotion needs to find what Aristotle would call the golden mean the intermediate State the moderation between two extremes and those two extremes are of course the boring technocratic fantasies the centuries and the hysterical emotions of the populists and that intermediate State finds itself in the word empathy the point about empathy the emotion of empathy is that it's emotion directed to

wards understanding the other towards moving from this towards that absolutely Central because the core values of our democracies lies in the idea of compromise lies in the idea of equality the moral equality of human beings which requires that we do not say that only 25 percent of us can countenance our children marrying somebody from the other side right empathy requires understanding these alternative positions that's the pathos bit the second thing that obviously needs to be addressed in my

story is the story about the connection between a particular market system and economic growth and here I think we need to look at the Aristotelian notion of logos but the point about Aristotelian logos is it avoids on the one hand the problem of the centrists of the 90s which is the problem of universalizing abstraction jargon and avoids of course the deep irrationality and the refusal to engage with facts which is so characteristic of the populists instead Aristotelian logos is embedded it's a

practice of practical reason practical reason which takes into account the place you're in the historical moment you're in the constraints that you face the moral context in which you operate and which begins to move away from saying to somebody in the northeast of England you don't fit the market system and therefore either you're going to be forgotten or somehow in some magical way your life is going to be transformed in a way that none of us can anticipate but instead actually engages with t

he reality of why governments need to get involved in markets why industrial strategies which are flexible and thoughtful could make sense and why it makes sense to make decisions across our country which are not purely based on return on investment which can take into account landscape environment and deep structural injustices the third thing that we talked about was the relationship between economic growth or economies free market economies and democracy and here I want to try to examine anot

her notion in Aristotle right so we've talked about pathos we've talked here about the notion of logos what was the third one anyone remember ethos right okay so the point about ethos here is to try to embed in the way in which we think about our relationship to democracy and understanding that democracy is not simply about the production of economic Goods that moral virtues are Central to what matters about democracy that democracy is not an instrumental means to an end that Notions of our righ

ts our Liberty our equality as Citizens and in fact what Aristotle would call The Joint activity of politics is Central to what makes human life livable the fourth one of these things that I was talking about is the loss of the sense of our moral legitimacy and in the loss of the sense of moral legitimacy I want to return to the idea of eudaimonia the Aristotelian idea of happiness because the Aristotelian idea of happiness again is not simply vested in a means-end calculation its response to so

cial movements is to say that happiness is not an end it's an activity and a particular politics is a joint activity it's a communal activity it's an activity where ethical considerations combine with the Practical considerations in the definition together of the good life and the fifth is of course the question of the collapse the liberal Global Order and it's here where I want to appeal to the notion of you alpsis I want to appeal to the notion of Good Hope because what characterized the first

stage I talked about the 1990s was unmoored optimism a form of abstracted fantasy which assumed that it was going to be possible to turn Iraq and Afghanistan into liberal democracies that generated books called a beginner's guide to nation building pilisteria was defined by a form of extreme pessimism many of these forms of nationalism are based on a deep profound pessimism but what Aristotle's us does is it says that the hope that matters is based on a courage that acknowledges failure acknowl

edges fear again it's an intermediate point where the courage responds to the fear and avoids full hariness the courage is the intermediate ground between paralysis which could be very easy faced with this rather gloomy story I've given of the world's Evolution the the also avoids the idea of slick unconvincing fairy stories instead it is rooted it's granular it Finds Its position in a tradition in a place in a country because that form of Hope acknowledges and it's on this that I wish to conclu

de that if we can often do much less than we pretend we can do much more than we fear thank you very much indeed [Applause] what a spectacular talk um good evening everybody my name is martinellias I'm the Provost of Gresham college and I'm going to take questions from the floor and then allow Rory to continue this stunning speech and I think we have one right at the front thank you very much for I mean how you do it without notes it's just confounded all of us but it's it's amazing I I want to

I I really want to um take you up on the logos Point um I'm a banker so I follow financial markets we're about to see one of the biggest seismic moves of finance and of wealth moving from one generation to another like a hundred trillion dollars will do so Mike to a generation that are very angry with a previous generation who themselves have a redefinition of the locals because not to name any names we all know you know my truth is what I want to feel for today which could absolutely destroy th

e capitalist system and how's the transfer Ence from one generation what's the mechanism of the transfer death um Bank of mum and dad and the huge increase in capital that we've never seen before as a result of quantitative easing asset inflation people who own their homes in the Next Generation can't own their homes and Ray dalio one of the leading hedge funds has estimated that this continues there's a 30 chance of a civil war in the US when you see this intergenerational inequity how do you t

hink we should be responding to it I think it's I mean I think this is a very very deep and fundamental problem I mean uh in in the story that I gave of these change between different periods um one of the defining pieces of of opinion research is that at the end of my first 1990s period the majority of people in the United States and Europe believe their children are going to be better off than they are 2014 the beginning of the period of populism is the moment at which the majority of people b

elieve their children are going to be worse off than they are and it is very troubling in a whole series of ways I mean it's not simply that intergenerational inequity is profound I mean one of the one of the uh things that's very misleading about the Occupy Wall Street movement is the Occupy of Wall Street movement suggests that the fundamental problem in our society is about the one percent it's very very tempting to think there's this one percent and we're all the 99 and politicians like that

because they want to feel that they've embraced the majority of their voters feeling like victims against this this group but in fact actually if you look at Britain the division is more between the 60 who own property and the 40 who don't if you don't look at incomes but look at wealth that is the fundamental inequity in our country people who own houses are much much much better off basically than people who don't and people who own houses tend to be older than people who don't and a lot of o

ur assumptions in our pension system and things basically at the moment when we model pensions we assume that the pensioner doesn't pay a mortgage and doesn't pay rent because almost all pensioners in the United Kingdom today do not do those things but the generation that's coming May well end up doing those things it's also true that we have another problem which is that our societies are based on the Assumption of growth have to be based on the Assumption of growth because our society's aging

our pension costs are therefore necessarily increasing people are living longer and the inflation in health care is always two or three times uh the growth of your economy so Healthcare inflation in most developed economies is six seven percent a year at the moment that's because drugs are more expensive but it's also simply that we live longer and it's also that we go to the doctor more a lot of our assumptions around climate change and the environment are increasingly trying to come to terms w

ith the possibility that infinite growth in a planet with finite resources ultimately cannot continue forever and it's certainly questionable whether the ideas of green growth are really going to deliver to make it even worse most of the policies that we are currently introducing to deal with climate change are regressive in other words they have their biggest impact on the poor not on the wealthy why is that that's because the way in which we get people to convert from carbon consumption to non

-carbon consumption is we tax their use of those things we tax the fuel they put in the car we tax their energy at home now that of course from an economically rational point of view makes sense you put taxes on those things you incentivize people to change their behavior but of course for the wealthy those things are a much much smaller proportion of their income of their expenditure than they are for the poor and we saw this with what happened with Russia there was a tiny glimpse of a much muc

h bigger problem coming as soon as Russian gas stopped we were forced into an energy transition which was immediately felt in people's gas prices at which point the government then suddenly had to introduce forms of Economic Policy which we've spent 40 years telling everyone in the worlds in the world not to do I used to go on these missions with colleagues in the world bank and the IMF telling off people for putting energy price caps on or subsidizing their electricity and that's of course exac

tly what the British government ended up doing so what are the solutions to these problems I think they're going to be very very very difficult and very very radical they are going to involve much more radical taxation they're going to involve probably larger wealth taxes I think one of the smartest proposals on this is Theresa Mays proposal on adult social care which is that you fund adult social Care by taking the money out of someone's house after they die and in essence during a life you liv

e in your house you pay for your social care and the government then gets the value of that house when you die and redistributes it but remember Theresa May lost the 2017 election on that single policy but she went from a projected 150 seat majority to losing a majority on that so the politics of doing any of these things is very difficult and Industrial strategy is necessary right we need to shift money up to the northeast of England but the one thing we know about governments doing industrial

strategy is it's never honest and the politics gets into it they're not making rational choices on what to invest in even if they were able to see into the future and know which Industries they needed to do even if they could be certain that having a giga battery Factory in Britain was the way forward or manufacturing wind turbines in Britain was the way forward sure as eggs as eggs where they put that money in the industries they invest in are actually deeply deeply inflected by their political

and voting calculations not really by a rational economic analysis so um I haven't really answered your question except to make it even gloomier and more depressing because most of the moons will have to make will be politically impossible yeah I can give you another one so someone in outer space is sending in this question which I think is quite relevant following that given that we seem to be rushing headlong Into Climate disaster and given that we've seen the political changes you so beautif

ully describe maybe we need autocracies to pull us back from the brink because the systems we've had in current traditional Democrat democratic government have failed to react sufficiently quickly so this is of course a very um another very dangerous and very tempting idea so in a moment of Crisis it's very tempting to think that democracies are too slow that Democratic politicians are too affected by electoral cycles and this is of course what the Chinese government wants to project the Chinese

government is basically trying to say we can plan 20 30 years in the future we can make the big moves that are necessary whether on Industrial strategy or the green transformation and climate change and the democracies are finished because they're too slow too bureaucratic too incompetent um and I don't know what the answer to this is I mean my instinct is very strongly on the side of the democracies but my instinct is on the side of the democracy is partly on ethical moral grounds partly becau

se I believe that actually Our Lives benefit from Liberty Our Lives benefit from rights our lives benefit from voting that these Notions of equality are important I'm also extremely skeptical about the efficiency of autocratic systems in the long run I think their feedback and response mechanism support but perhaps most important of all the one thing that democracies deliver in a slow uneven fashion is the necessity of consent getting consent is really painful right the reason hs2 will be very e

xpensive is we have to negotiate with every Community all the way along the way and apparently in China you just run the rail line and you don't care right But ultimately if you are to sustain a policy if you are to actually do radical things that are going to end up with people making sacrifices and costing them money and lead a very very difficult transition you have to bring people with you and the electoral system the Democratic electoral system is a really important forcing mechanism for fo

rcing politicians to listen forcing politicians to explain forcing politicians to try to bring people with them and in the end I think although slower that's probably a shorter a more sustainable way to tackle climate change than trying to impose it from above thank you let's take some more questions from the audience let's go close to you at the back there's a hand up and one just there as well pretty obvious why you left Party politics but can you tell me what are the prospects that you'll com

e back into Party politics in this country um [Applause] I I don't know what the prospects are um I I feel my currently I feel that these issues are immensely important and I feel that I'm sort of um I'm facing a sort of block of stone and I have a kind of chisel and at the moment I'm sort of it's scraping along the surface and I have to find the angle to bring the chisel down and cleave this thing apart and I don't know whether how that's done I don't know whether that's done through elected pa

rliamentary politics how I get back into politics I mean we're in a a first pass to Pace system I'm certainly not rejoining the conservative party anytime soon so it's uh um so there's a question of a how there's also the the other thing which is that I'm not I'm not sure how good a politician I am um I um a couple of ways one of them is that I find the the business of being a politician very very bad for me it's bad for my mind it's bad for my body it's bad for my soul I end up becoming a vain

um slightly immoral person who uh ceases to listen I mean politicians not only don't think they didn't listen after about 10 years the politicians incapable of listening to anybody um so um of finding a route that allows me to try to um defense some form of values and make changes is something I'm still struggling with yeah let's take another question I think we had one more the at the back there beforehand yes thank you very much for your talk um do you have a view on how Margaret Thatcher fits

into these developments and changes that you've spoken about tonight yeah um I think she is important in this because I think she established with Reagan the consensus of what in the end came through in 1989 and I think it was a world view that was in many ways um it's liberation of the markets its consensus on privatization on deregulation on the shrinking of the state on the lowering of taxes on a shift away from society to the individual these things definitely powered economic growth I mean

in terms of GDP growth uh Britain from the mid-1980s to 2008 began for the first time to grow more quickly than the United States by the 1990s and was finding itself the second fastest productivity growth in the G7 so on the kind of things that liberal Market economists want to measure it achieved an enormous amount and of course the transfer of council houses to many Council house residents gave them wealth gave them assets they didn't have before that they were able to then put to use but the

consequences of this are also very troubling and very disturbing in the long run and lay the lay the ground for a loss of what is now populism because of course this is also the period of the hollowing out of the traditional Industries in the northeast of England the removal of affordable housing from the country through the selling off for the Council of states uh increasing inequality a sense of the individual and the loss of a confident way of talking about Society because in this Essence wh

at's revealed there is that the liberal markets Unleashed are not really conservative in the sense of Edmund Burke's conservatism they're not really slow-moving prudent restrained traditional they are upending everything very very dramatically and as the inequities or cruelty of that it's exposed um many of the other problems that we then see in terms of the moral legitimacy of the West the relationship to democracy and the liberal Global Order begin to have relationships to that to that develop

ment thank you um what do you think about dissemblies you say of organizing politics um and do you think they have much chance of taking off okay um I I love citizens assembly citizens assembly it's very quickly for people in the room who aren't familiar with them the it's essentially like a large jury the idea is that you do a census the population and then you randomly select a group of it could be 300 people who are meant to be representative of the country as a whole and these people will be

demographically representative and you gather them in a room and you put them with experts so it'll be a room about this size about this number of people and they will have presentations on various issues and they will debate them and they will discuss them and they will come forward with recommendation and what you tend to find is extraordinary results which are actually much more impressive than you get out of a parliament whenever I say this to my colleagues in Parliament they say we don't n

eed assistance assembly we're the citizens assembly but but the truth of the matter is that 300 randomly selected citizens do not come with strong partisan agendas they didn't have strong party political agendas and they tend to find their way towards compromising the middle ground much more easily the classic example was in Ireland this is what resolved the arguments around abortion in Ireland because what happened I mean and you cannot imagine Republic of Ireland you cannot imagine a society i

n which abortion was more controversial issue but by putting people in a room and getting experts up talking about trimesters and the biology of human evolution and raising legal questions around rape you actually found the debate going from a foreign against to a how many weeks debate and this is incredibly important it would have been incredibly important in brexit if we'd managed to get assistance assembly we could have got away from brexit remain towards what is a softer more workable compro

mised brexit a customs Union it's my money right and indeed when we did citizens assemblies around it that's in fact what they ended up with because they were thinking about Northern Ireland borders and they were thinking about trade with Europe but they were also trying to acknowledge the fact that 52 of people who voted to leave and they were trying to accommodate that so I I'm a real believer in citizens assemblies and I think they have powerful wisdom and Powerful legitimacy and Powerful con

sensus building mechanisms uh embedded in them and I'd like to see many more of them um I I just thought that the politicians parties they don't know what they're missing without you things you didn't mention Ukraine and the public service sector workers nurses doctors teachers what do we do with them two two very very big questions and public sector workers I think um you know obviously we are in a situation in which many people in our society feel they're in a very precarious situation and pub

lic sector workers are one of those groups um they feel in many ways that their salaries are not keeping up with inflation and that's partly because the inflation indicators that we look at are not revealing the full extent of the pressures that they're facing particularly if you're operating in the southeast of England the real expense of getting a house the real expense of looking after yourself at the same time more and more is being asked of them at the same time respect for politicians civi

l servants is at an all-time low you know we we're a Long Way Beyond a fantasy 19th century world where in your village or town you doffed your cap to the teacher and the doctor and the priest and these people were great sort of figures of authority and respect we're in a world now where people feel abused they feel attacked on every side and this is one of the many elements along with inequities and pay and pensions which is driving public sector anger but at the same time of course you notice

that KIA stammer is not promising to increase their salaries because it's very very difficult to see where the money is coming from to pay for all these things in part because as I say the expansion and the cost of our health care and pensions is beginning to outstrip almost every other part of government spending Ukraine um well Ukraine of course in a sense represents the beginning of a final age an age that started in February of last year which I didn't get onto which of course is the move fr

om the age of populism to the age of global conflict and in which the attack by Vladimir Putin on attempts to get to Kiev not only disrupted most of the complacent assumptions of the or whatever complacent assumptions remained in the liberal order but also has begun to clarify a new emerging cold war between the United States and China because of course Russia Ukraine prestiges and points towards tensions between China and Taiwan the problems of trying to decouple our economies from the Russian

economy which was I mean deeply deeply damaging in terms of our fuel prices in terms of sub-Saharan Africa which Imports sixty percent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine but will be to a power of 20 if we begin to start thinking about decoupling from China because currently you know Taiwan produces 50 of the world's semiconductors 90 of the world's Advanced semiconductors and if trying to imagine a world without Russian gas is difficult imagining a world without semiconductors is almost imposs

ible and that's before you get on to the fact that 50 of the profits of European automobile and luxury goods manufacturers are made in China 50 of our their profits in China but also 50 of their growth in China so China is a problem 20 times larger than Russia in fact so much so that we shouldn't be thinking about decoupling at all we should be thinking if we were Aristotle in terms of de-risking and de-risking has a double meaning de-risking means yes occasionally thinking about resilience not

having all our eggs in that basket but de-risking also means actively engaging with China to lower the chance for confrontation and a conflict and trying to work out what we do about the situation in the United States which is really beginning to build allies for what seems like a new Cold War thank you very much I'm gonna have to draw an end to the questions but first I want to just say it's been an unbelievable privilege to listen to your talk tonight it's clear that from the murmurings in the

audience that they feel that politics has lost something important which is potentially regainable with any of that it's great for those of us who are engaged in speaking from time to time to see such fluency such a noteless presentation such clarity and the ability to pray see complex issues essentially on the Fly it's extremely impressive um and we're very grateful to you for doing it I would also like to say it's no surprise to me that your podcast is so successful and I think that those of

you who haven't heard the rest of politics you've probably missed a great treat and they're all available to listen to we look forward to many more of them I'd just like also to say that there's a wonderful overlap between what you've spoken about and the series of talks to be given by our new professor of rhetoric starting in October of this year Melissa Lane who's professor of political philosophy in Princeton is going to be talking about the impact of classical democracies on Modern politics

and it will be an extremely interesting series I hope you'll listen um thank you for your insights it has genuinely been a privilege and I hope you've joined me in thanking Rory Stewart for an outstanding Thomas [Applause]