Soviet Spies, Death Squads in El Salvadaor, and the Meaning of Life

Originally recorded with Delia Burgess

A Good Reason to Keep Going

Originally recorded with Delia Burgess

On the COVID-19 Pandemic

Originally hosted and recorded by Nick Fabbri

Full transcript below

25 April 2020
Melbourne, Australia

Full interview transcript:

00:00 Paul:   

Such was the funeral that took place during this winter, with which the first year of the war came to an end. In the first days of summer, the Spartans and their allies, with two-thirds of their forces as before, invaded Attica, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, King of Sparta, and established themselves and laid waste to the country. Not many days after their arrival in Attica, the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighbourhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered. Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them altogether.

00:58 Nick:  That was Dr Paul Monk, reading from Thucydides, Book Two of his classic The Peloponnesian War, and his opening description of a plague in Athens. So, Paul, we're all in lockdown today in the midst of fears about a global pandemic on the scale of the Spanish Flu of 1918. Why?

01:16 Paul:   Well, I think you put your finger on it by referring to the Spanish Flu. So, the moment it became clear that COVID-19 had broken out of China and was spreading around the world - because it was a new virus and the degree of its infection, you know, its infectiveness and the mortality rates from it were hard to gauge; there was an immediate fear among specialists that this could be the pandemic we've been fearing for many years and that it could replicate the Spanish Flu in its impact. 

01:47 This has been a meme in wide circulation in the last few months for obvious reasons, but it's worth recapitulating, that the Spanish Flu killed an estimated 50 million people in 1918 to 19 in a world with a population a quarter of what it is now. So, the equivalent now would be 200 million people dying. That's unimaginable. I mean, that's four times the number of people that died in whole world during the Second World War, for example. So, it would be a true catastrophe. 

02:15 People felt that something like that could be in the offing, unless we were able to react quickly. Of course, we hadn't reacted altogether quickly for a number of reasons we can discuss. 

02:24 So, the concern was that it's out, the horse has bolted, and we don't know how dangerous this is We don't know infection rates or mortality rates. We have to move quickly to find a way to keep this under control, or it could be devastating. That's why we're under lockdown, because the consensus was that the only way to stop this becoming devastating was to stop people from freely associating and thus spreading the disease. 

02:51 Nick:   So, how good a grasp do we have on projections and mortality rates? 

02:55 Paul:  I think it has to be said that even now, after specialists, you know, virologists and biologists and analysts, have been pondering this for the last three months, we still don't have a clear analysis of exactly what the expected infection rate or mortality rate is. 

03:13 This is due to a number of factors. One is that we don't have good data out of China where it began. The Communist Party has been very secretive about at all. Secondly, that it's a new virus and so we don't have, as it were, population data to build upon. Thirdly, because the mortalities that have occurred so far have been confused somewhat by comorbidities. So certain cohorts of people have been more prone to get the disease and to die from it than others, because they were old or were already ill and vulnerable for other reasons. 

03:50 It's been difficult to get this data clear. The mortality rates appear to have varied from one country to another. The data collection has been different in different cases and getting global cooperation, coordination and analysis hasn't come readily. 

04:04 That's indicated for example by the fact that the World Health Organisation has played an ambiguous role in this matter. So much so, that the US government, rightly or wrongly, has chosen to defund the World Health Organisation now, on the basis that UN organisation failed us all.

04:23 Whether it did fail us and, in particular, whether defunding it is the appropriate responses is something one could debate. but that's what's happened. That's indicative of where we're at with data. We're still trying to make it up as we go along. 

04:35 Nick:   Leaving aside for a moment the matter of broader public reactions, how did you come to terms with the outbreak and the projections?

04:42 Paul:   Well, it's worth pointing to, I suppose, three factors, maybe four factors, that position me to think about this relatively clearly. So, the first thing is that it originated in China and a lot of controversy concerning it was swirling around because of the way it had been handled by the Chinese Communist Party. As much as the question of infection rates or virology, the role of China was central and this attracted my attention because, as your listeners may be aware, I was at one time head of the China Desk at the Defence Intelligence Organisation and I have remained a student of and a commentator on China and the Communist Party and geopolitics ever since.

05:22 So, that meant that I was drawn to the subject from an analytical angle. Secondly, one of the things I had long being interested in, which was connected both with China and the question of viral disease, was the SARS crisis of 17 years ago. Now, many of your younger listeners won't even have been, as it were, intellectually conscious 17 years ago.

05:46 It's worth recapitulating that at the time, in 2003, under very similar circumstances to what appears to have happened in this case, a new coronavirus broke out of China and there were alarm signals, because it was feared this could be a global pandemic. It didn't turn out that way. The total number of mortalities in that case was fewer than 1000, most of them in China.

06:08 However, the way it was handled at the time by the Communist Party was disturbingly similar the way it's handled this case. That is, that it was in denial. Early, it suppressed stories. It tried to tell the Chinese public and the world that there was no problem. It wasn't believed. Eventually the virologists managed to get some action taken and things brought under control.  

06:31 The problem originated in wet markets in Guangzhou rather than Wuhan and the general lesson that was derived from this by specialists was, "well, we've got to do this better next time." Well, we didn't do it better next time and because I was aware of that SARS case, I immediately started thinking, "Oh-oh, so this is SARS2 and it's not going well." So, that's the second reason why I was well positioned, in a sense, to make sense of what was going on. 

07:00 The third is that I had been familiar for many years with a great novel about epidemic disease, if not pandemic disease - one which a number of your readers may have encountered for the first time in this present context. That is, a novel published in 1947 by the French writer, Albert Camus, called The Plague. 

07:23 Now, it's a fictional story set in Oran and the disease is confined to one city, but it's a magnificent portrayal of human reactions to the breakout of disease. In a lot of ways, he modelled that story and what happens in the city on his knowledge of the Thucydides - we had that brief reading from Thucydides at the outset. 

07:46 He also used it as a kind of allegory at two levels. He wrote it during the Second World War, when France was occupied by the Nazis. So, it was an allegory in a sense of the occupation of an oppressive and indeed barbarous power of another country, and how human beings respond to that. 

08:04 Secondly, he was an existentialist philosopher and he was using this as a way to explore the way in which human beings more generally respond to the intrinsic precariousness and, as he would have said, absurdity of the human condition. 

 08:24 It's beautifully written at all three of those levels and it's still powerful. I had read it many years ago. I'd reread it in recent years and one of my first instincts when COVID-19 broke out was to pick it up and read it again.

08:40 So, all of that pre-positioned me to respond. The fourth factor - as I said, there's perhaps four and not just three - is that due to having had problems with illness myself in recent years, I had retired from active consulting work. I was already a kind of pioneer of self-isolation before we were urged to undertake that because I live on my own, I work from a home office. I spend most of my time reading and writing. I go for a solitary walk most days on a constitutional basis. 

09:11 Nick:   A monkish existence... 

09:12 Paul:   A monkish existence, you might say, yes. So, I didn't have to change my lifestyle terribly much, while everybody else was drastically changing theirs. It gave me an unusual point of view on the requirements of the circumstances. 

09:25 Nick:   So, if we could unpack each of those four responses you've outlined in a bit more detail. Talk to me a bit more about your knowledge of the history of pandemics.
09:35 Paul:   Yes, well again this was something, you might say, exhibited by the fact that I would have begun with a short reading from Thucydides that was familar to me from deep background reading, long before there was a COVID-19, and indeed in my personal case, before there was SARS. I'd read Thucydides as a young person and have always regarded The Peloponnesian War as one of the master classics in the Western canon.

10:00 His description of a plague of Athens is very sobering, because he was interested not only in symptoms and in trying to figure out what was this disease and where did it come from, but in the impact it had on society, on people's morality, the way they behaved, their belief systems, etc. It's a very searching few pages of his history.

10:23 What I also knew, of course, which Thucydides for obvious reasons didn't, is that there'd been major epidemics or pandemics after that. There was a major one in the late second century in the Roman Empire, generally known as the Antonine plague, which is estimated to have killed about 5 million people. That’s about probably 25 times the size of the population of Athens in Thucydides time, right, so that's a lot of people.

10:52 It sapped the vitality of the Empire towards the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, generally regarded as the last of the so called ‘Five Good Emperors’ in Rome. It was a geopolitical event, quite as much as an epidemiological one.

11:05 But there was a much bigger one with more dramatic consequences several centuries later, when Justinian was emperor of a shrunken Roman Empire, which was in fairly robust condition, even though it was half the size of the Empire at its height.

11:19 A plague of monumental proportions hit the Empire and it's estimated that 25 million people died. Now, that's something like half the population of the empire. It's a devastating plague and had it not also smitten the Persian Empire, the great rival of the Roman Empire, then the Roman Empire might have been in very serious difficulties. At any rate, it certainly did sap the strength of the Roman Empire at a critical point in its history.

11:47 One consequence of it smiting both those empires, combined with the fact that they fought each other to a standstill for about 50 years, is that they were so weak by the early seventh century that the Arabs were able to overrun both empires and establish the Islamic empire, which is a major geopolitical shift in world history. 

12:09 All of this was familiar to me again, as I stress, before anything like what's just happened to a place. People are generally aware of the Black Death of course which killed about a third of the population of Europe and many people outside Europe in the 14th century.

12:24 There was the great plague of London in the 17th century. There was the Spanish Flu. As a student of history, I was familiar with all of these so...

12:32 Nick:    Smallpox in the Americas is one you've written about.

12:35 Paul:   Well, indeed. That's true and thanks for reminding me, because that was the mother of all plagues, as it were. As some people may be aware, there's a famous book by Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs, and Steel about the European conquest of the Americas.

12:51 He makes the point that we didn't - I say we in a loose sense - but Europeans didn't arrive in the Americas only with better weapons than the Native Americans had, which they did, and with horses which the Native Americans didn't have. They arrived also, and much less intentionally, with germs to which many Europeans had immunity and to which there was no immunity in the new world. 

13:13 So, plagues swept the Americas well ahead of the conquistadors themselves. In the first instance, smallpox. Smallpox spread from European landing points in the Caribbean and Mexico down into South America and up into North America, well ahead of the conquistadors themselves, who had nothing to do with it. They were oblivious to it. They had no germ theory of disease, so they were themselves ignorant of what was going on.  

13:39 By the time Pizarro, for example, arrived in Peru to conquer the Incas, the Incas had already been swept by disease and were somewhat weakened in consequence. In the century between 1492 and roughly 1600, the population of the Americas is estimated by the specialists to have dropped by 95%. So, just compare it with the black death. A third of your population dies in the 14th century, 95% of the Native American population is swept away.

14:09 Nick:   How many tens of millions is that meant to be?

14:11 Paul:   Well, there is considerable debate about exactly how many Native Americans they were in 1492. To put it concisely, until about the 1970s, the consensus was probably about 7 million in the two continents combined.

14:27 As a result of a lot of spade-work done in the 1960s and 70s, that consensus shifted radically. It is now agreed, even by people who were sceptical initially, that the native population of the Americas as of 1492 was probably more like 60 million. So, the number of deaths we're talking about extending over a century, allowing for reproduction, is in excess of 60 million people dying.

14:49 Nick:   Very sobering indeed. You've also got an angle in response to the virus, given your work in the Defence Intelligence Organization on the China desk, and your particularly interest scholarly and personally as well in China, and the Chinese Communist Party. So, could you talk more about that?

 15:05 Paul:   Yes, well, the deeper background to that is that when I joined Defence Intelligence in 1990, I had a degree in European history. Hence, the Antonine Plague and the Black Death and so forth. I had a PhD in international relations on the United States in counterinsurgency in the Cold War.

15:24 Defence Intelligence said to me, "That's all very well but we want you to work on East Asia - that means China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan." I gravitated towards China, because it's the biggest player on the block, even then and certainly now. I became head of the China Desk by 1994, and it was a very, very interesting job even then. It would be far more so now.

15:46 Since leaving government, I've continued to take an active interest in it. I taught Chinese politics in 1999 at one of our universities. I published a book in 2005 called Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China. So, actively thinking about the way the Communist Party governs China, about the implications of China's economic growth, about its military and strategic ambitions, about secrecy and human rights and so forth positioned me, you might say, very well indeed to understand what the party was doing - in this case, what was going on. 

16:22 Inevitably, of course it attracted my interest. The key thing here is that from very early, once it became evident not only that a disease like SARS had broken out again, but that it had got out the door and it was becoming a global problem, not just a Chinese problem, and that the party had arrested and detained people who were trying to tell the truth about this.

16:46 It arrested and imprisoned people who were criticizing it for arresting those people. Inevitably one thought two things. First of all, well this is par for the course of the Chinese Communist Party. This is what it does. It's deeply dishonest, totally self-interested and strategic in the way it behaves. It's not transparent, it's not accountable and it's not just.

17:06 That activated interest in pursuing the matter of secrecy and repression. Secondly, because it is now a global problem of disease, one had to take an interest in, "So, how is it that this happened exactly?" That's where, very quickly and globally - nothing to do with me personally of course - a number of conspiracy theories arose.

17:29 Now, as an analyst - as an intelligence analyst - I was very interested. So, where are these conspiracy theories coming from and how much credibility is there in any of them? 

17:38 Nick:   Yep, and you've also got an academic interest in the virology and globalization as well. 

17:43 Paul:   Yes, I wouldn't say an academic interest but because of my interest in the SARS problem years before there was COVID-19, I read things about Ebola in Africa and how it was handled. I read about SARS and, in particular as a reference point I read a book published in 2011 by an American biologist, Nathan Wolf, called The Viral Storm, in which he was saying in the wake of SARS and Ebola and so on, we really need better global early warning systems for pandemics, and we need to share information. We need to be open about this, and we need to better understand the public health implications and the economic implications of possible pandemics because - and he elaborated on this beautifully in his book - we need to understand that two things are happening in lockstep in our time. 

18:34 One is that our science and our understanding of what viruses are, how diseases spread. how to treat them is all improving rapidly and this is good news. The other is that the vectors that drive the outbreaks of pandemics are all getting worse. Why is this? Well, he says - and he explains this very carefully - in historic time, diseases - pandemic diseases that have killed a large number of human beings - have actually been able to germinate and spread because of the human invention of agriculture, because of the storage of grain, because of the building of cities and people living in close proximity to one another in the various unsanitary conditions that result from that, because of trade and travel. All of these things in the 20th and 21st centuries have grown enormously. So, huge numbers of people now live in vast cities. Vast numbers of people travel all over the world, right? 

19:27 It's very difficult therefore to quarantine a bug when it starts to travel because it looks for extra parties and hey, there's lots of humans around in cities, there's lots of them traveling. That, he says, means that the danger of a viral pandemic is greater now than ever before but so is our science better than ever before and it's an arms race between these two things.

19:50 Now, he's writing this a decade ago. He was quietly confident he said at that point, that we would be able to set up a global early warning system. Well, we now know that we didn't. We failed. Globally, we failed. The early warning system didn't function adequately. The World Health Organization didn't do its job properly. The Chinese Communist Party didn't work on a cooperative basis, it was secretive and mendacious. The US government was all over the map and trying to figure out whether there was a pandemic and how serious and what to do about it. Everybody basically had to act on an improvised sauve qui peut - that is, you know, every man for himself basis. Now, that's a mess and we'll come back to it, doubtless. 

20:34 Nick:   Could you also do a bit of a deep dive on Albert Camus and The Plague, that novel you mentioned before?

20:40 Paul:   Yes, well I described it before, I think, - and I posted this on Facebook very early in the current situation where I said if you're looking for some reading to help position yourself in these contexts, one of the best things you can do is read the The Plague.

 20:56 It's remarkable to reflect that Camus himself wrote this when he was in his early 30s, a very young man, and the maturity of his description of human behaviour and of character and of the nature of the disease is still very impressive.

 21:13 But why in particular is it relevant now? Because it's not a sensationalized story. It's a philosophical, deeply reflective story. The main character in it is a doctor in Oran called Bernard Rieux. You realize only at the end that if any character in the novel represents Camus' personal standpoint, philosophically and morally, it's Bernard Rieux. Rieux responds to the disease in a stoic way. He's responsible. He's reflective. He doesn't panic. 

21:47 He's a doctor and so he sees it as his job to help people and to try and create with the civic authorities regime which can contain the disease and quarantine people that are seriously ill and treat those that it's possible to treat and prevent people getting out of the city so that they don't spread it to other cities. All of this is striking relevant right now because we have faced the same basic problems. Rieux’s composure and seriousness and rationality are admirable.

22:21 He's not an enthusiast. He's not self-conceited. He doesn't think he's got all the answers. He's not sure that his measures will work. He's not even very quick off the mark to diagnose the plague when it starts because his mind is elsewhere. He's doing these other things. 

22:41 The particular reason that I would emphasize the beauty of this is because right at the end - and I might read the final paragraph of his novel - what Camus has Rieux reflect is that okay, so we've contained this disease. People died and the city went through a trauma, but the disease is subsided and we're going to recover from this. 

23:08 We will probably in the near future be in that situation ourselves. The question is what are we - what lesson do we draw from that? What Rieux reflects on which I'll read, is that people didn't expect this to occur and they'll probably want to go back to the way they were and assume, "Well, that was just an accident or misfortune. Don't make too much of it. Live as we would have lived."

23:26 He said what they're not taking account of is that just as when it started, they didn't initially take it seriously because they thought the plague disappeared a long time ago, that plagues don't occur anymore. Well, it did occur. We have been struck by a pandemic. Most people it seems to me are probably caught short thinking, "Where does this come from? Why is this happening at all?" So here's the way he concludes the novel.

23:51 This is Rieux reflecting as I said:

"As he listened to the cries of joy that rose above the town, Rieux recall that this joy was always under threat. He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, but it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and that perhaps the day will come when for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well contented city." 

24:30 So, metaphorically that's precisely where we are now, right? In a beautiful kind of way, the very end of that French novel from 1947 gets us to precisely where we started at the beginning of this year and where we're at. What we need to bear in mind as we come out of the immediate crisis is the wisdom of that paragraph. 

24:52 This is not a one-off event. This is not a random accident. We live in a century where pandemics are going to be a danger because as Nathan Wolf pointed out in 2011, all the vectors that drive pandemics have been exacerbated by the very prosperity and globalization that most of us rejoice in.

25:11 Those aren't going away anytime soon. If they do, the consequences would be catastrophic. So, we don't want to throw those away, and therefore we're going to have to deal with this danger. 

25:20 Nick:   Yeah, and despite the universality of pandemics and plagues in this experience, there have been wildly divergent global reactions and experiences of the virus itself, thinking about Italy and the US and those high death rates and mortality rates there. The strange case of Iran, and obviously the Chinese obfuscation and in Australia and New Zealand, the antipodes, the almost complete suppression or squashing of the curve, as they say. 

25:47 Paul:   Yes, there have been different policy reactions, different public reactions, different epidemiology. I mean, the infection and mortality rates seem to have varied sharply. In part, because of public policies, in part for factors or for reasons that we don't seem to really have a clear or firm handle on just yet. So all of that is very interesting. 

26:08 If one was to draw a general conclusion, it would be this. That, in the absence of a global regime of early warning and public health management, in the absence of agreed protocols for heading off and handling something like this, each country has reacted according to its local circumstances and culture on an improvised basis. That's precisely what Wolf hoped we would have overcome before now, and had we done so, we would have been much better placed to handle this than we were in fact.

26:38 It's worth I think putting this in a bit of depth and perspective, by remarking that that very frequently, when people talk about politics or economic management, they talk in generalized ideological terms, as if everybody is more or less the same or should be and they know what that way should be. 

26:56 They need to keep thinking because it's much more complex than that. Although this will seem a long way from the pandemic context and current politics, this was driven home to me many years ago when as part of my doctoral studies, I was looking at the history of El Salvador and the brutal violence took place in the 1980s.

27:14 There was a book by a specialist on Central America - they're a rare breed. Specialists in any field are, by definition, a fairly rare breed. This was about the little republics that make up the isthmus in Central America.

27:29 The author made a very instructive point. He said that all of these countries have the same basic geography. They grow pretty much the same cash crops, prominently among them coffee, but they all have different political histories. They all have differing levels of inequality, of state violence, of democracy and dictatorship. How can that be if geographic circumstances or economic geography are determinative?

27:57 Well, because they have different human communities that have made different choices and these have had consequences, right? Now, without digressing to discuss how we reached that conclusion, it was very illuminating to me. I think we need to bear that in mind now. 

28:12 So, whether you're in Western Europe where there are differences between countries, or you're comparing Western Europe with East Asia or either of them with the United States or Australia with New Zealand or Oceania with Europe and so on - all these different comparisons - what we're encountering is that different political cultures from different starting points with different public habits and attitudes to public policy have, for those very reasons responded, differently.

28:39 That's not to lay blame actually at anybody's door. It's just to be analytical. It's just to understand what's happened and why it's happened. If there were clearer global protocols and greater confidence in early warning systems, that would be modified, and we're not there yet.

28:55 Nick:   Could you also reflect on the virus in its politicized or popular imagination? In particular I'm referring to the kind of, well, proliferation - viral proliferation even - of conspiracy theories and sort of, you know, human kind of incomprehension at where these viruses come from, in the absence of that deep history you've just outlined. 

29:18 Paul:   Yes, well it's important to remind ourselves that, without wanting to sound condescending, most people for very understandable reasons don't have an historical context on which to base their judgment, so they don't know about previous diseases. They might be only vaguely aware of them occurring at all. They don't know about biology. They don't do probability and statistics. So, when you talk about exponential infection rates and the implications for mortality as a matter of probability, it's like talking to them about meteorology and weather. You know, they don't understand how you make probabilistic estimates. They think this is either going to happen or it's not. Weather isn't that way. It's chaotic and infection rates will vary enormously depending on density, comorbidities, public policy, and as we've seen, self-isolation or quarantine.

30:14 In the absence, therefore, of a sound basis for making judgments and given fear and rumour, people will respond in what we would regard, from a sober point of view, as irrational ways. The remarkable thing, certainly in the case of Australia and New Zealand, as overwhelmingly despite discomfort and concern, people have heeded public policy warnings and government advice. As a consequence, we appear to have sailed through the worst of this and have a situation, epidemiologically, at least, largely under control. That's good news. The economic consequences? They're another matter. We might come back to that.

30:53 Why is it in those circumstances - given uncertainty, given ignorance, given fear and concern - that conspiracy theories will spring it up? Well, that's what happens under those circumstances. Where there's bewilderment and fear, people will latch on to fearful and dramatic explanations or pseudo explanations.

31:16 This happens chronically in human affairs. You know, let's take an illustrative example. So, in the mid-18th century, there's a major earthquake that destroys a lot of Lisbon in Portugal.

31:30 It set a lot of people speculating as to as to why this had happened? Now, they didn't have a theory of seismology and earthquake incidence and probability at the time. They didn’t even have what we would recognize as modern geology. So, this is 80 years before Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, right? 

31:47 So, various theologians weighed in helpfully and said, "It's God's punishment for the vices of the citizens of Lisbon." This is a very traditional religious view, right? The philosopher, Immanual Kant, among others, pointed out, "Well, I'm not sure that theory works, because one of the areas of Lisbon that was not destroyed by the earthquake was the red-light district."

32:07 Now, that's a use of empirical data to upend sloppy thinking, right, and the way people jumped to conclusions and pseudo explanations. What's happened in present circumstances is that in a great deal of uncertainty and apprehension to do with how quickly this disease might spread - whether they themselves are in danger, whether the government is concealing stuff, whether the lockdown is going to hurt them financially and so on, which it has a lot of people - people are susceptible to rumours and conspiracy theories. There's been some really wild ones out there and we can talk about a few of those. 

32:43 Nick:   Yeah, let's do it. I mean, firstly who would believe such things; but also, what kind of conspiracy theories have there been about coronavirus?

32:50 Paul:   Yeah. Well, so the answer to the first part of your question is the people who will be inclined to believe these things are those who suffer most from ignorance, uncertainty and fear, right? So, those who have a scientific training, a public policy training, an education in the nature pandemics, etc. are better placed, than Joe citizen to say, "Okay, I think I get the general idea. I think I understand broadly, at least, what's happening, what the implications are, and what it might make sense to do about it." They can participate more or less rationally in the discussion or respond to public policy, even if they're not a direct participant in the making of it. 

33:33 But if you already are of a mind that the world is manipulated by secretive elites - and alas, very many people are these days - then you might well be susceptible to the suggestion that, for example as has been doing the rounds on social media, there is no Coronavirus. This is a hoax perpetrated by these global elites, because they're imposing on us new social media technologies like 5G and when they tell you they're going to vaccinate you, don't go near them. Don't have the vaccination, because it's going to be a means to secretly implant in you tracking devices that will make you even more vulnerable to manipulation and control through 5G. 

34:17 This is actually out there. You can listen to videos and audio recordings where this is being preached. That's a hell of a conspiracy theory, right? You know, without spending our precious time discussing why it's mad, let's just pronounce that it is. Yet it has gone viral.

34:37 I know of people personally who have taken it seriously. They asked innocently and honestly, "Is this true?" Why would they ask me? Because even though they're susceptible of believing such a thing, they respect my knowledge and judgment. So, I gently try and explain to them that it isn't true and they need to just calm down a little.

34:59 Nick: There are some conspiracy theories which are taken up at the highest level of the United States government even or other world governments - sorry. I sound like a conspiracy theorist myself. 

35:08 Paul:  Haha. 

35:08 Nick:   No, by other national governments. You know, for instance, that you know, the Chinese plot theory is that this was some sort of form of biological warfare that the Chinese government which is known to be, you know, malicious and scheming in many ways - or that it was simply accidentally leaked from, you know, the Wuhan virology lab for instance.  

35:30 Paul:   Yes, there are what you might call a hierarchy of conspiracy theories regarding Chinese Communist Party behaviour in this. It's worth setting these into clear perspective for two reasons. One is because they are out there and unlike the 5G or other madcap conspiracy theories, they have at least a general plausibility. 

35:51 So, the gravest accusation has been that the Wuhan Virology Institute and another the Bio Research Institute were actively and deliberately working to create humanly transmissible Corona viruses that could be used to conduct what two senior Chinese colonels in 1997 called 'unrestricted warfare'. In other words, instead of launching biological warfare with unambiguously, you know lethal military biological weapons, the plot putatively was to develop something that would look like it was something like SARS, that had just broken out accidentally, but would in fact be deliberately leaked. 

36:37 Then there would be a time interval between it being deliberately leaked and any announcement by the party that this was a humanly transmissible disease until it had gone global. Then they would shut it down in China so that it would limit the damage to themselves and let it wreak havoc in the outside world, in order to increase or further their strategic agenda of becoming the master power in the world.

36:59 That theory has been put out there, alright? Now, why is there any plausibility to it? First of all, because the book Unrestricted Warfare was in fact written, in 1997, by two senior colonels at the National Defence University in Beijing. They did argue these kinds of things. 

37:16 So, there's as what you might call that background plausibility, they could do this. They were thinking about doing something like this. Well, it doesn't take very much imagination then to apparently put two and two together or connect the dots.

37:31 So this is not like 5G. This is not completely off the wall. The question is, of course, as in any such conspiracies, granted that background suspicion of plausibility, what is the evidence that that in fact is what happened?

37:45 Well, the first reality check you need to make is so let's suppose somebody at least, like those colonels, thought, "Why don't we do this?" Why would the Party as a whole and the power brokers in China buy into that, given that the consequences would be so grave?

38:04 So, first of all, how could they guarantee that if they deliberately let it loose, they could control it in China? Secondly, if they let it out in the outside world, how could they be confident that the outside world wouldn't cotton onto the fact that they had deliberately done this and there would be hell to pay?

38:19 Thirdly, if in order to bring it under control, even in China, you had to shut down the economy, what about the huge cost of doing that? Why would you do that? If you want to become the predominant economic power, why shut down your economy? China's economy has shrunk in the last few months. 

38:33 Nick:   For the first time in thirty years...

38:33 Paul:   For the first time since 1976 in fact.

38:36 Nick:   Oh, right.

38:36 Paul:  This is dramatic. So, when you do that basic reality check, you think, "Hmm, it begins to look rather implausible that they would take those huge risks and some of those immense costs for a putative gain they couldn't guarantee." Alright?

38:50 Oh, but that's quite separate from the question of, is there any direct evidence that that happened? The answer to that is no. We don't at the moment have any direct evidence that's what happened.

38:59 What we do know, to a near certainty, is that the disease did originate in Wuhan. This brings us to a second level, as it were, conspiracy theory; which is not that it was deliberately released by the Chinese government for strategic reasons, but that it unintentionally escaped from their experimental labs, got into Wuhan, possibly through the wet market, and they were initially shutting down news about it because they thought, "We don't know the truth yet. We don't know whether it came from the lab. We don't know whether some mad subcomponent deliberately leaked it. It wasn't policy but jeepers, this is going to look really bad." So, this is giving the party in fact benefit of the doubt. They're trying to bring it under control and figure out what happened before it sets hares running. Then they realize, "Wow, this is serious," and at that point, they actually come out and say, “This is a pandemic." Alright?

39:57 So, there's a lot of ground to be gone over. That is more plausible in all the circumstances than the big conspiracy theory. That is that, yes, they conspired to conceal it but they did it because they themselves weren't certain what was going on. 

40:11 The third conspiracy theory is that they didn't deliberately leak it. They didn't try and exploit it geopolitically once it had leaked, but once it had leaked out of control, they thought, "We've got to bring it under control domestically and now we've got to look good domestically and internationally."

40:33 So, they conduct a propaganda campaign. Now, that is true. That is what they're doing. So, that's not in a pejorative sense, a conspiracy theory. That's actually what's happening and it's causing quite a bit of irritation and pushback because people are saying, "That's a bit rich. You act irresponsibly so that this thing starts to happen. You don't warn us and so it spreads globally. We're all paying the cost and now you want to tell us you're the good guys in this? I'm sorry, that doesn't cut any ice." But that's where we're at right now. 

41:03 Nick:   Yeah. So, go back to the biological warfare sort of theory. Greg Sheridan made the point in The Australian newspaper, on the second of April, that the biological warfare story doesn't stack up in terms of evidence and has been rejected by Five Eyes intelligence analysis. So, would you differ with him in any way, especially given that you've got Senator Tom Cotton from United States Senate basically putting two and two together, trying to sort of assert that it was indeed a biological warfare agent, which was either leaked deliberately or accidentally, and that there was some sort of malicious intent behind the virus? 

41:39 Paul:   Yes, I would say that basically what Greg Sheridan was doing - and let's bear in mind that Greg would be in the eyes of most people, a right-wing correspondent, right? So, if somebody in his newspaper was going to accuse the Chinese of getting up to mischief, it might be Greg, right? Instead he says, "No, look we need to hose that down, because that actually doesn't stack up." 

42:07 His point of reference is not a personal opinion. It is that the Five Eyes - which for those who are not aware of this means the five English speaking countries who, since 1947 or basically since the Second World War have had an intelligence alliance around the world, the United States, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand - their intelligence communities which have long cooperated globally which share information, which do our analysis, have agreed among themselves, "We don't think this is what happened."

42:36 Now, if anybody was going to blow the whistle on the Chinese conspiracy to launch biological warfare, it would be Five Eyes and there would be hell to pay. I mean, imagine if the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and then somebody in Washington said, "Nah, that's not the Japanese." Well, of course, in that case there was no way to conceal it. That was very obvious, right?

42:55 In this case, of course, if it had been covert warfare, if it had been a biologically engineered virus launched to cause mayhem and mischief, that would be an act of war. It would be the job of Five Eyes to pin that down, and then what would happen next? Well, that's not at all clear, which is why I said it's actually implausible that the Chinese would have done it in the first place.

43:16 The fact that they looked at this very closely, given their responsibilities and their access to secret information, they drew a conclusion, "No, we don't think so." Says Greg, almost certainly that's not what we're seeing. It's not biological warfare from the Chinese.

43:32 The nature of critical reasoning is that, as with scientific theories, you don't say categorically there's no possibility that it was. What you say is there's a high degree of probability that it's not, right? If there was any serious degree of probability, the Five Eyes intelligence agency would have been saying to the government, "We have grave concerns that the Chinese have acted completely out of school here. This is a big problem." Then we've got to decide very quickly what to do about it because they're on the offensive. 

44:06 Nick:   Publicly and privately as well.

44:07 Paul:   Well, they would certainly have been doing that on a confidential basis in briefings to the leaders of these five countries. It's very difficult to imagine that if there was any serious grounds for believing that, that you wouldn't have had the Western countries - the Five Eyes countries - and their allies, saying, "This is an act of war and there's going to be very serious measures as a result."

44:27 What measures? Well, gee, one doesn't even like to think, right, because it would have been the secretive and biological equivalent to Pearl Harbour. It would have been an attack on the outside world. 

44:39 Nick:   Yeah.

44:38 Paul:   what they're saying is, "We don't think that happened," and we should draw the breath and say, "Well, probably therefore it's not what happened." Alright? But here's the thing. What Greg didn't do and he didn't have the space to do in a single newspaper article is go back and say, "However, when you consider the clear strategic ambitions of the Chinese state and the Xi Jinping, which have been made very explicit - not guesses or conspiracy theories - when you consider the proposals laid out in the book Unrestricted Warfare and the statements being made by a number of other leading Chinese strategic thinkers about the US since then, you can see why people might have leapt to the fearful conclusion that this is what happened." 

45:19 There is a serious discussion here. This is not the 5G nonsense. This is the nature of the problem we've got in assessing China's intentions and actions. Until the Chinese state becomes more transparent and cooperative in international affairs, that problem is not going to go away.  

45:35 Nick:   Yeah, and regardless of whether it was a Pearl Harbour incident or not, there has been a massive recalibration already amongst Five Eyes partners. The most, sort of, I suppose high profile one would be the reconsideration of Huawei being allowed to sort of run that 5G network in the UK. That sort of partnership is being reconsidered. There have been talks at number 10 Downing Street in the UK about a massive sort of reckoning with China has been the language. So, you know, regardless of whether it was purposeful or not, I think that the relationship with China is going to be reset going forward. 

46:12 Paul:   Yes, it was very striking as you say that the UK, in particular the Johnson government, said, "Okay, we are going to reset the relationship with China. In fact, there's going to be a serious reckoning once we've got past the immediate crisis." 

46:30 That is because for some considerable time now - and this has been true in Australia as well as elsewhere in the Western world - there's been growing exasperation with the Communist Party. Without digressing to go into chapter and verse on this, for the better part of 30 years, the policy consensus in the Western world was if we invest in China, if we open up to China, if we allow it to sell its manufactures, China will prosper. That'll be good for us. We can profit from trading with China. As it becomes more prosperous, its middle class will grow. They'll want political liberalization and the Communist Party will become a more tractable regime and open up and everybody will have - a rising tide will lift everybody's boats. It hasn't happened. 

47:12 So there's been a sea change in much of the Western probably the last five years, and that's certainly true in Australia on a bipartisan basis really, despite the fact that we have indeed benefited greatly from China's growth. We've profited handsomely. We've run a big trade surplus with China. 

47:29 But the consensus is China is not well intentioned. It's not benign. It's intending to take over and we don't want it to take over. It's not liberalizing. In fact, it's becoming a harsher dictatorship and that's a serious concern.  

47:45 So what are we going to do about it? Boris Johnson's shift about five year, a small part of that bigger picture, and the pandemic has precipitated it. So, one of the things we're going to be looking at, as we emerge from this crisis, is the way the outside world responds now to an unrepentant, mendacious and manipulative China. 

48:04 Nick:   Yeah. So how does this all play out globally then?

48:08 Paul:   Well, that's as it were the $64,000 question. In fact, to update it in the light of the expenditures we’re seeing, you might call it the $64 trillion question, because the costs to countries around the world of just coping with this pandemic have been enormous, and the irritation with China for behaving in an irresponsible and opaque manner about it is running deep.

48:38 So, the most constructive and enlightened approach would be for the Western democracies first of all to confer with one another. Secondly, to rally to their side as many aggrieved countries in the developing world, notably in Africa, where there's much discontent with the way China's behaved, in a coalition to say to the Chinese, "Okay, so here's the way it has to play. You don't get to dominate. You must cooperate. We welcome you and we have been welcoming you for 30 years to trade with us, to become a senior partner in global security, and we've been hoping that because we invited you into the World Trade Organization, we invested, we opened our markets to you, that you would play cricket, but instead you're playing hardball. That must change because this cannot work. It can't work for us and because it can't work for us, you're going to realize it cannot work for you. You need to rethink your strategy, and we know you're capable of doing that, because Deng Xiaoping underwent a sea change in his outlook on basic things after Mao died. China began to open up, and then you got cold feet about that and you killed thousands of people in 1989 to crush their aspirations for democracy in your country. That's got to change. We know that there are powerful interests in your country that don't want to go that way. We're here to tell you, there's no other choice. If you want to be a responsible and welcome participant in global affairs, instead of trying to seek to be Masters of the Universe, you must change and the best way to do that is peacefully and intelligently and gradually the way we've been hoping for 30 years that you would, but now's the time."

50:18 You know, now will that occur? Will there be that cohesiveness in the outside world’s response? That's anybody's guess, because Donald Trump is supposed to be leading the free world, and he's not going there. He's all over the map on this. There isn't a clear consensus. There's a common irritation, but it's a long way yet from being a clear strategic consensus about what to do. 

50:41 Nick:   Yeah.

50:41 Paul:   China is dug into its foxhole at the moment. It's by no means evident that Xi Jinping and the Party are thinking, "Gee, this was a screw up. We better talk to the outside world about how to manage better." They're not thinking that way at all. They're thinking about exploiting this for all it's worth. 

50:57 Nick:   When those cascading social and economic impacts which are as severe as they've been since the Great Depression, are fully sort of realized over the next 12 months, combined with the kind of the trend of the last five years towards sort of rising domestic populism and nationalism, it paints a pretty bleak picture, I think, not just between China and the rest of the world but also within different sort of geopolitical arenas like Oceania or Europe, you know? Much more sort of long running tensions could sort of boil over.

51:31 Paul:   Yes, they could, and one doesn't want to overplay analogies, but many people have been solely reflecting it seems to me - I mean strategic thinkers, not necessarily members of the public - but reflecting on the precedent that haunts us all who know any history and that is of the Great Depression, and what then happened in the 1930s because the global depression introduced a degree of wildness and unpredictability and reactionary politics around the world.  

52:05 Most famously, it precipitated the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany. It precipitated the takeover in Japan by the military from a parliamentary government. It precipitated in - for example we referred to Central America earlier, in El Salvador, you went from a basically nascent democracy, a constitutional government to a military dictatorship. You had a peasant uprising and thousands of peasants were massacred by the army to restore conservative rule.

52:34 That was happening all over the world. Fascist Italy, you know, rose and it invaded Libya and Ethiopia. So, the fear is that instead of the liberal international order which, despite the reaction against it by many populist groups in the Western world in recent years, did in fact make possible the greatest expansion in average human wellbeing across the planet - the greatest growth in wealth, including China's growth in wealth - over the last 30, 40, 50 to 70 years ever in history. 

53:11 That should not be underestimated. That was the Pax Americana. That was the American created order based on Bretton Woods, and without the role America played it would not have happened.

53:22 It's now all in danger. To the extent that countries now start to do what China clearly is doing which is to say, "Our interests are paramount. Bugger everybody else," then we're back in the 1930s, and the results will be predictably the rise of more nationalist xenophobic governments, a recrudescence in at least some places of militarism, and as a reaction to that defensiveness, in certain other countries. 

53:51 I'm not suggesting we're going to have World War III because the nuclear arsenals of major states still are overwhelmingly likely to inhibit major war, but unhappy and non-constructive things are distinctly possible. So, the great challenge before us all is to think as clearly and calmly as we can and advocate for intelligent policies and try to build coalitions, rather than build armed camps.

54:19 Nick:   Yeah. When you think about that as a sort of prognostication coupled with existing global problems, such as climate change or environmental destruction, global hunger and the eradication of major development gains across the developing world, are there any silver linings behind these rather dark and ominous clouds?

54:41 Paul:   Well, it seems to me that there are, provided we work with that metaphor advisedly. So when one talks about silver linings behind dark clouds, it's not to say there aren't dark clouds. That's the whole point of a silver lining behind dark clouds. So the dark clouds are indeed the things to which you just referred, right? That things could fall apart rather severely here in a number of ways. This pandemic has, as you rightly said, occurred in a context where there were already a number of serious global concerns that weren't being handled optimally, to say the least.

55:17 So what's the silver lining, if there is one? Well it seems to me that more immediately and driven home more personally to masses of people around the world than the climate change thing ever really has been - what the pandemic has highlighted is, we need global solutions and those solutions have to be based on accountability, transparency and cooperation. They can't be based on fierce opportunistic interstate competition because that's precisely what generated this problem. Therefore, we have to think more clearly than ever about what form international conventions and cooperation can take, such that we can head off or overcome challenges of this generic nature - not just pandemics, but other global problems that transcend national borders. 

56:06 I think that is a silver lining because it is something that people have been very focused on and during a lockdown, because of enforced sort of time off, stand down time, I think there's growing evidence that a lot of people have been thinking, "You know, I'm living differently now than I was before. I'm spending more time with my family. I'm using social media to communicate with people where perhaps I didn't before because I was too busy or I met them at work on the street anyway. I'm thinking about, gee, disease. I'm thinking about how I run my household budget. I'm thinking about priorities in life. I'm thinking about life and death." These are actually all quite healthy. These are, actually, good things to be thinking about.

56:46 The big one is the question of global governance. We are in this together. In the popular film The Martian, a feel good movie, you have Matt Damon marooned on Mars and what happens? Not only does he think very clear headedly and scientifically about how to survive and he does it successfully, but his colleagues, who were in the spacecraft heading back to earth when they realized that he's actually alive not dead, they think, "We've got to go back. He's our mate. We’re not going to abandon him."

57:19 The people back on Earth debate. "Okay, so what can we do? How can we do it? What should we do?" This is such a big problem. It’s a human problem really. It's a species problem. Let's for heavens' sake reach out to the Chinese. They're getting really technological advanced. Maybe they can help. As I say, this is a feel-good Hollywood movie but it's beautiful precisely because it's not cynical, purely realistic and it's saying to us, "Suppose we behave this way. Suppose we are scientific, team based, cooperative and internationalist? Wouldn’t we get better results?” That's the silver lining.

57:54 Nick:   On that note, Paul, thank you very much for your time this evening. It's been a pleasure as always.

57:58 Paul:   It's great, Nick. It's good to have these conversations.

On Religion and Society in Our Time

Originally hosted and recorded by Nick Fabbri

Full transcript below

Religion and Society - Paul Monk

 00:00 Paul:   Writing for a largely Greek readership in the second century BCE, the great classical historian Polybius in the sixth book of his history of the rise of the Roman Empire, wrote:

"The sphere in which the Roman Commonwealth seems to me to show its superiority most decisively is in that of religious belief. Here we find that the very phenomenon which among other peoples is regarded as a subject for reproach, namely superstition, is actually the element which holds the Roman state together. These matters are treated with such solemnity and introduced so frequently, both into public and into private life, that nothing could exceed them in importance. Many people may find this astonishing, but my own view is that the Romans have adopted these practices for the sake of the common people. The approach might not have been necessary had it ever been possible to form a state composed entirely of wise human beings, but as the masses are always fickle, filled with lawless desires, unreasoning anger and violent passions, they can only be restrained by mysterious terrors or other dramatisations of the subject. For this reason, I believe that the ancients were by no means acting foolishly or haphazardly when they introduced to the people various notions concerning the gods and belief in the punishments of Hades, but rather that the moderns are foolish, and take great risks in rejecting them.”

01:26 These lines were composed well over 400 years before the Emperor Constantine took the first steps to making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Half a century after he did so, the Emperor Theodosius suppressed pagan religion and made Christianity the only legal religion around the Mediterranean Basin. Whether that was a sound or retrograde step for the Empire, or for Western civilisation, has been the subject of serious debate, ever since.

01:53 Nick: That was Dr Paul Monk reading from his occasional paper for the Rationalist Society of Australia, Religion and Society: Dilemmas of Our Time, which was published late last year. Paul, could you tell us a little bit about the Rationalist Society, your affiliation with it, and why you wrote this occasional paper, and why they published it.

02:11 Paul:   Yes. Thanks, Nick. The Rationalist Society is actually quite an old body in Australia. It's been around for pretty much a century and if you want to encapsulate what it stands for and why it exists, you could identify it with that strand in British philosophy that many people might associate with Bertrand Russell. So, it’s a commitment to being systematically rational in terms of our understanding of reality and the way we approach public policy and for that matter private life.

02:40 The Rationalist Society is not a religious organisation. In many respects, you could probably say that it is not only a non-religious organisation but critical of the cast of mind that gives rise to religious belief. 

02:57 I was invited a few years ago to become a member of the editorial board for its magazine, The Australian Rationalist, to which I contribute two columns in every issue in that capacity. 

03:08 This occasional paper arose not, in the first instance, at the initiative of the Rationalist Society, but because a businessmen’s club, the Probus Club of Malvern, invited me to give them a talk about religion society. Most of its members are at least nominal Christians. They're elderly retired businessmen, and they approached me saying we talk about religion in our club and we're, between us, rather bewildered at the relationship between religion and contemporary society, and we wonder whether you might talk to us on that subject. 

03:40 I was very happy to do that. I've given this subject a lot of thought for most of my life and the talk was very well received. So, on the basis of that, the President of the Rationalist Society, Meredith Doig invited me to turn it into an occasional paper which has become a publication of the Society and has been disseminated by it.

04:00 Nick:   A couple of years before this paper was published, I interviewed you about your biography of your great teacher, Mark O'Loughlin, called The Secret Gospel According to Mark: The Extraordinary Life of a Catholic Existentialist. That book set the great questions of religion and society in the frame of reference of one man's life. 

04:18 Today I'd like to discuss with you the larger questions of how 21st century societies, here and around the world, can deal with both the relationship between religion and science, and the clashes between different religious faiths and between any given one of them and secular norms. How, in the most general terms, would you characterise the relationship between religion and society in our time? 

04:40 Paul:   I think the simplest possible way to put it would be that that relationship is increasingly fraught. That is to say, it's conflictual, it's uneasy. That's why there would be some reason to discuss this. Really, that's the context which gave rise to the paper. 

05:02 The interest one has from the point of view of let's say the Rationalist Society and, I would think, from the point of view of any good citizen of a modern society - and I include in that people of traditional religious beliefs is - how do we sort this out in a constructive way as distinct from taking an angry stance and saying, “Here’s the one right position and everybody else is just wrong," because that's part of the problem we've got at the moment. There are too many people doing that.

05:28 Nick:  So, how would you characterise the relationship between what you describe as liberal or socialist democracies of the West and religion as it has evolved since the Reformation?

05:38 Paul:   So, when I refer to liberal or social democratic societies, clearly I'm referring to those that we are most familiar with in Western Europe, in North America, in Australia, as distinct from many other countries which are either dictatorships or they’re underdeveloped and somewhat unstable countries, or they’re theocratic societies like Iran or they're communist states like Cuba, North Korea, China. It's only in the West that the traditions that we are talking about, of multicultural tolerance, have really arisen, which is not to say that there's never been any period before in history where there was relative tolerance, but as a systematic approach to mutual toleration between religions and separation of church and state, something quite unique has arisen in the West, largely since the Reformation. 

06:34 Now, many people, it seems to me, make the mistake of thinking that arose because of the Reformation. It didn't. The Reformation was not a movement of people saying, "The Catholic Church is tyrannous and corrupt and therefore we want freedom of conscience in choice of religion and we want separation of church and state." 

06:52 No, no. The Protestant reformers were hardliners who said, "The church is tyrannous and corrupt, but therefore back to the Bible. There is a strict orthodoxy and everybody should believe this." 

07:04 That gave rise to savage religious conflicts for 150 years, not only between the Catholic Church and the Protestants but across societies really, in terms of what do we believe? What religion does the king or the prince have? How is this to be sorted out? Culminating in the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, from 1618 to 1648. 

07:26 The idea that you needed a civil order in which these conflicts could be damped down or not occur arose because of those civil wars and among increasingly secular thinkers. That's crucial.

07:38 What we call the Enlightenment in many respects arose as a reaction against the wars of religion. One of the foremost documents of enlightenment in that particular regard is the work of John Locke in the late 17th century in England who articulated principles of religious toleration.  

07:56 Now, it's notable from our point of view today, that when he wrote that document what he said was, the established church in England, which was of course the Anglican church, should tolerate non-conformists, should tolerate Puritans and Quakers and others, should tolerate Jews and Muslims, provided people of these different religions kept the civil peace. He pointedly excluded from toleration the Catholics. 

08:24 Nick:   Really?

08:24 Paul:   From today's point of view, it seems a little odd that he would exclude Catholics and includes Muslims and Jews because you think, "Okay, how did that come about?" The reason it came about is because Muslims and Jews in 17th century England were a tiny minority and he felt perfectly comfortable saying, "Well, them too, yes, whatever." But the Catholics were a large party and seen as beholden to a foreign entity, seen as beholden to the Vatican, and that was seen as the core problem. 

08:52 So, if you wanted a civil society that would be peaceful and orderly, it had to be one that respected the authority of that state, not another state, and the Vatican was seen - as indeed it was - as another state. The Papal State still existed then. Well, technically it still does in the Vatican but it was much more substantial then and had much greater pretensions. 

09:11 So, that was the origin of what we regard as the broad principles of mutual toleration and it wasn't full toleration and it excluded the Catholics. Over time, that became extended and by the time you got 100 years later to the American Revolution, the founding fathers in the United States were largely people who were Deists or Epicureans or materialists. You know, they weren't people of a fervid traditional religious faith - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, etc. 

09:42 They said, "Yes, well..." and famously, you know, that, We are one state under God," but God was a very loosely used term in their vocabulary. It was perhaps a reference to the Aristotelian prime mover or the, you know, the idea of a Unitarian or Spinoza’s deity, that the intelligence that broadly governed the universe was not necessarily the God of the Bible. 

10:10 Thomas Jefferson famously said in the early 19th century, "I think Unitarianism might end up the national religion of the United States." Well, if there was to be a national religion in the United States, one might fervently hope it would have been Unitarianism, but it clearly is not because the US was left open to the rise of revivalist faiths and cultic faiths and conflicting faiths and right now, the religious scene in the United States frankly is a bit of a mess. 

10:39 Nick:   Yeah. So, we might come back to looking at Locke later in the interview, but would you say we have achieved such a stable and peaceful balance now of religious toleration?

10:49 Paul:   Only up to a limited point and it seems to me that things have been going backward for about a generation.

10:56 Nick:   Yeah. Why is that the case? What's undermined that stability?

11:00 Paul:   I think three things probably. The first and most obvious - which has been dramatic for some years now - is that after a period of time, through much of the 20th century in which the West was ascendant - for better or worse, it ruled most of the world through colonial empires - many secularists slowly came to the belief that religion - and they tend to think of this is Christianity and at a secondary level, Islam perhaps - would fade away with modernisation. As societies became more modern, they would become more secular and that was all to the good. 

11:34 It's not the way things have worked out so far. The single biggest shift was surely when the Ayatollah Khomeini was able to pull off a theocratic Muslim revolution in Iran, in 1979. That inspired Islamic militants around the world, even though he was Shia and many of them were Sunni. So, for the last 40 years, there's been a lot of very militant and you might say increasingly militant and violently aggressive Islamic revivalism.

12:05 Nick:   Funded by states... 

12:06 Paul:   Funded by states like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Of course, 911 was a spectacular instantiation of that militancy, but that's only one of the problems. There are two others. 

12:19 One is that as the natural sciences advanced, traditional evangelical religion - notably in the United States but not confined to the United States - dug in its heels, you might say epistemologically, and denied that evolution was the way life came about and human beings evolved.

12:41 So, creationist defensiveness has not faded away. It has dug in its heels: the idea that the Bible is in some literal sense the word of God and that the moral code you can find in the Bible is true for all time and must be respected. The idea that there will be an End of Days, a Second Coming, an Apocalypse is held to be true and faith is extolled as if it's a virtue.

13:09 To those of a pious outlook, the word 'faith' tends to denote goodness and hope and vision, but epistemologically it's a vice. If you say, "I'm going to believe things even though there's no direct evidence for them, only because there's a textual tradition which announces them," then you've got a problem because we don't do that with the sciences. We don't do it with serious history; but in religion, it's rampant and it's got worse in the last generation or two, I would say. 

13:37 The third thing, however, is something that has contributed to triggering those two militant religious movements. It is that in secularist society, there have been increasingly activist moves to directly undermine those codes of conduct, those principles and those beliefs and practices which have defined the traditional religions. 

13:57 This became very evident recently with the major brouhaha around the world over gay marriage, but it comes to the fore in other things as well - with regard to genital mutilation, with regard to abortion or even contraception, with regard to divorce. Across the gamut of morality, the secularists have not simply been walking away from traditional religion; they've been openly and directly challenging it Some of them in the last 20 years in particular, I would say, have become almost as militant and activist and aggressive as their religious counterparts and so conflict has been growing rather than diminishing.

14:37 Nick:   So, why do we come to a state of growing and crackling political and social tensions which sometimes overboil into violence, rather than, you know, political compromise?

14:48 Paul:   Well, political compromise is the art form that liberal and democratic societies are supposed to be built on but because you have multiple parties, because you have free elections, because you have an education system that's relatively open, because you have continuing social and scientific inquiry, it should be easier. In some respects, it is - to resolve differences through inquiry and debate and compromise.  

15:13 However, when you get militant parties that are determined that their view will prevail come what may, then compromise in the nature of the case becomes difficult. We've been seeing more of this cast of mind in recent years. 

15:25 You see it among politically activist groups on US campuses and in the streets, for example, as you see it among the the militant religious, for example, who will besiege or attack abortion clinics or among Muslims who will fly planes into the Twin Towers in New York. How do you compromise with movements like that? In a sense, you can't and that's a real dilemma for us. 

15:50 We have to think this through. The reaction to 9-11 of course was spectacular. It was two wars that turned out to be very long, very bloody and ultimately unsuccessful. We have to rethink our general approach, our social approach to the question of religion, and indeed our strategy in terms of tackling fierce and uncompromising opponents.

16:13 Nick:   So, what about if we consider things from a religious point of view? So, isn't it the case that the western democracies and their approach to individual rights and conscience have their roots as much in the Bible as in Greek philosophy or Roman law, to say nothing of modern secularism?

16:29 Paul:   Yes, I think that that's one of the areas where considered and scholarly discussion can help us, because there's not much doubt there is a pronounced strand in the Christian tradition, which emphasises individual conscience, individual dignity, the relationship between the individual conceived as a soul with a relationship to God and the whole idea of a vocation. You know, that there's a calling to an individual to play a meaningful role in life. 

17:06 These are Christian traditions. What we derive from the Greeks, if you like, in that regard is the idea of citizen participation in public debate, which is not a Christian tradition. It's specifically a Greek democratic one - pre-Christian - and Roman law which recognizes property rights and individual rights under law and citizen rights. Those strands come together to form the basis of what we call Western civilization. It's quite distinctive. It's very different from Chinese or Islamic civilization, for example.  

17:37 So, there ought to be a lot of room there for us to find common ground with one another in the West. By and large, we have in the modern era. However, there's a difference between drawing upon a tradition in which there are rich stories of the prophets or of the kings, of the disasters that the Bible reflects upon; or of the prophets calling upon people to emphasise that what really matters. 

18:05 That's a rich part of our tradition. It's like reading Shakespeare or reading Greek tragedy. It's quite another to lay down the law and say belief in the dogmas of the Christian Church is incumbent on everybody. 

18:17 As recently as the First Vatican Council, in 1871, the Papacy specifically rejected the idea of freedom of religion, of freedom of conscience with regard to religion and morality, of separation of church and state, of liberal education. These were rejected as anathema by the Papacy. It's taken a lot of work to find therefore common ground on those principles between the canonical Christian religions and secular liberal society. We don't have common ground at all in that regard with the Islamic world right now. 

18:52 Nick:   So, if you were to set an agenda for the reform of religion in our time to make it more reconcilable with secular society and natural science, rather than Vatican One and Pope Pius the Ninth, on what lines would you set it out? 

19:06 Paul:   Well, it seems to me there are two ways to approach this. One is you can lay out a program which ideally you would introduce. That's challenging enough but even if you lay it out - and I'll come back to that in a moment - even if you lay it out clearly, the problem is then getting it accepted. 

19:26 So, let's start with what kind of program ideally you'd introduce. If we go back to the late 19th century right here in Australia, we pioneered the idea of an elementary education for everyone that would be compulsory, free and secular. Secular, I emphasise. 

19:45 So, we won't go into having religious schools teaching sectarian dogma. That's changed and it changed for a number of reasons which would take too long to go over in this interview, but we now have many schools that are explicitly religious. We have Catholic schools, we have Jewish schools, we have Muslim schools, you know, we have Protestant schools. Many of them, simply as schools, are fine institutions, it has to be said, but their primary purpose is to perpetuate belief in and the practice of their particular religions. 

20:20 If we want a secular society in which the foundational view that children grow up with of their world is cosmopolitan, scientific and rational, we've got an enormous amount of work to do. In the better institutions, there's been a blend between that and the religious teaching in the schools, but it's not an agreed and common curriculum and it's under challenge in many of those schools right now as religions dig in their heels a bit against secular society. 

20:48 So, I would say, ideally we would revert to a situation where religion becomes a communitarian and private matter and schooling is conducted as something that is free, compulsory and secular - at the very least, in elementary school so the children's basic formation is to an outlook on humanity, on deep time and history and on science, that is not shaped as belief in innocence in the dogmas and traditions of any particular religion. 

21:18 If, on the basis of family life or broader social experience or wider reading, they choose to embrace a religion, we could not deny them that liberty, but we will not actively encourage it because it happens to have a number of dubious consequences among too many people of religious persuasion.

21:39 Nick:   Sure, but I mean, from a Christian perspective, if a Christian or another religious believer confronted you by saying they're just simply an atheist or even a Marxist, you know, you're really just asking them to abandon their beliefs and cherished traditions which are of the most, you know, fundamental prime importance to them and their families and their communities. How would you respond? 

22:02 Paul:   I would say personally I'm an atheist, but that I'm not requiring other people to be atheists. I'm simply saying that if we're going to have a society that is peaceful and civil, where mutual tolerance and common standards can apply, then we need a common educational formation, and that's not to be found in any specific religious set of beliefs.

22:27 It won't do to simply say, coming from the background of one of those sets of religious beliefs, mine is perfectly adequate; because that doesn't solve the problem of finding common standards.  

22:38 If you're saying to such a person, by all means, go to your churches on Sunday or your synagogues on the Sabbath or your mosques on Fridays. We're not going to persecute you for holding your religious beliefs. If you really do practice what you claim are moral and inspiring traditions, you will turn up to be a good citizen and we want good citizens. 

23:00 That's where we have common ground. Where we don't have common ground is if you say, "The world was created 6000 years ago..." or "There's going to be an apocalypse any tick of the clock... or that, "Homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord therefore it must be a criminal offence”. That's something that we disagree about and therefore it cannot be part of the common moral order and it can't be part of our common set of beliefs about the world because those claims about creationism are simply not true. They're not true. No claim of faith is going to make them so. There is evidence here. There are approaches to what we can meaningfully claim as knowledge and faith doesn't cut it. That's what I would say to such a person. 

23:46 Nick:   Yes, but I mean, they are extreme examples of religious epistemological, you know, belief or even religious moral belief as well and, you know, there must be middle ground.

23:58 Paul:   Yes, but the middle ground needs to be precisely that. I think where we've struggled in secular society now for some time is in pretending that tolerance means acceptance of the claims of religions. Tolerance, rather, in a secular society, it seems to me, needs to be understood as saying we don't, the rest of us, accept the claims you make as being true and we don't intend to argue endlessly with you about them. You have your beliefs. If you're determined to stick to them, that's your affair, but we do require you to conduct yourself in such a way that people who disagree with you can get on with their lives without being pestered or persecuted by you.  

24:41 That's what's at stake. Where people are of a broad religious or cultural background - let's say Catholic because I came from that tradition, I understand it very well - and they see themselves as good citizens, as upright people, and they value, whether they're still observant or as people say lapsed or whether they become as I did, an atheist - they appreciate that tradition. They understand it, but they see the good bits of it. They love some of the music, the art, the architecture, etc. Then there's not a lot of basis for quarrel. 

25:13 There will still be disagreements, however if observant Catholics say, "Abortion, contraception,  homosexuality, gay marriage, these are not on," and many of them do that. That's Catholics. There are more hard-line people among Evangelicals and Muslims and Orthodox Jews. We need rules that enable a society to get along without those people imposing themselves on others. We need common rules. That's what needs to be negotiated. 

25:43 Nick:   So, is this an issue that's only arisen in the 21st century, or are there strands throughout history you can draw on for example?

25:49 Paul:   Yeah, look, I would say there are many figures in the religious tradition and in the philosophical tradition in the West certainly and even in the Muslim world, at the margin, that should be common reference points here. 

26:04 If you look at the great prophetic figures in the Old Testament like Micah and Isaiah, if you look at Jesus, what are they saying? Again and again, they're saying the Temple ritual, the dogmas, the letter of the law, the things that seem to be emphasised by the establishment; they're completely beside the point. What is it, says Micah, that the Lord God requires of you, but to act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with your God? I've never heard a better or more concise summation of the best elements in the Bible which leaves aside all the stuff people quarrel about.

26:32  Isaiah said similar things. Jesus said similar things. If you come forward a little bit, you find in the Acts of the Apostles Gamaliel saying, "We should not persecute these followers of Jesus because if he was and they are doing the work of the Lord, then it would be wrong to persecute them and if they're not, then their work will fail of itself."

26:53 Now, he may or may not have been correct but it was certainly a magnanimous stance to take, right? You fast forward then to the Medieval period. One of the greatest Jewish sages, well worth reading for anybody of a Biblical orientation - Christian, Jewish or Muslim - was Maimonides who grew up in Cordoba in Spain, fled from there with his family because of Berber Muslim persecution of the Jews - he was Jewish - ended up in Egypt, still Muslim territory but more tolerant.

27:20 Maimonides articulated what he called negative theology. He said, "When we read the Bible, what we discover is that idolatry is discounted. You're not supposed to worship idols."

27:33 The problem is we do a lot of verbal and imagistic idolatry. We might not worship golden calves or statues, but we form these mental images of who God is, that are every bit as idolatrous. God doesn't have human characteristics. God can't be, rigorously speaking, identified and objectified. 

27:54 This is really rigorous thinking and if you pursue that line - and remember, he is a venerated and deeply theological Hebrew sage/Jewish sage - you follow that line of thinking, you end up in territory where there's a lot of common ground with those who say, "We agree with you. That's why we’re atheists." This is not something at that point we need to quarrel about.  

28:17 Spinoza, another great Jewish sage in the 17th century about 500 years or 400 years after Maimonides, spells this out and is condemned as a heretic for it by the Jewish synagogues, by the Protestants, and by the Catholics, but his view of how to understand the Bible and theology had enormous influence on the Enlightenment.

28:37 When Einstein, for example, talked about God, he went out of his way to say, "it's Spinoza’s idea of God I'm talking about, by the way. It's not the traditional hocus pocus."

28:46 Immanuel Kant argued the same thing. Wittgenstein in the 20th century essentially argues, "We've got a scientific view of the world and you can pin down what is so. Beyond that, there is mysticism," but you've got to be very careful what you claim in the name of mysticism. It's a way of experiencing reality, but you can't make dogmatic claims about it. This distances us from dogmatic, Pharisaic, letter of the law, oppressive religion, right?

29:14 We should be encouraging that. There's a ground in which we can have a very learned, very principled dialogue with any of the religions. Averroes in a Muslim tradition went down that path. He had almost no influence in the Muslim world. He had more influence in the West, where his work was translated into Latin and sparked the development of Aristotelian thinking by the schoolmen in the Middle Ages, but he was a remarkable thinker.

29:36 Nick:   So, what do you make of the rich traditions of mysticism, prayer, ritual introspection and consolation?

29:43 Paul:   They are rich, and it's worth remarking that in part, there's no question because I had a Catholic upbringing; something that I cultivated after I stopped thinking of myself as Catholic is an appreciation of these things from an anthropological point of view.

30:02 So, consider human beings over the millennia, as far back as we care to go, have done this thing we call religion. They've invented rituals to mark the various rites of passage in life - birth, marriage, death. They have done ceremonies, etc. Why do human beings do this? Because we are an open-ended creature. We have to invent ourselves, and we have to do it socially, so that we can live socially, so we can know what to do, what's appropriate, interact in a ritual way rather than a confused way. 

30:32 That's what's happening when we see religion. Along the way, it has led to some beautiful and moving traditions and has led to some barbarous ones. I mean, animal sacrifice, human sacrifice. We've had to gradually work our way through; so, what rituals are we really prepared to accept, and why are we accepting them, and do they ultimately matter if you, as I said before, talk about Micah or Isaiah or Jesus or in the Chinese world you talk about Confucius? What they say again and again is that what really matters is ethical conduct, not bells and whistles, not incense and noises and gongs. You know, the great sages of the world come together on that. We as a society need to rise to that level. 

31:13 Nick:   Right. So, can science replace dogma, tradition and scripture in our education, without undermining our culture? i.e. our religious traditions and so on as well. Hasn't this been happening for some time? 

31:26 Paul:   Yes. Science, I believe, can in this respect. If we shift from an inclination, in a traditional dogmatic religion, to go to the Bible to tell us how the world began and how it's going to end and how it works and how we should conduct ourselves in the world, and instead we inquire into, well in fact, scientifically how did the world begin? How did the cosmos begin? How does it work? Right? How did life arise and how has it evolved and how do human beings emerge out of life, and what are we as creatures and how did our capacities and our behavioural traits emerge?

32:03 We now have an enormous body of knowledge around that. An open inquiry is ongoing. That's where to look. So, science not only can - it must - replace religious traditions in informing us about those things. Once it does that, there's very little need for any of the so-called holy scriptures, except at the margin as part of our traditions. We could regard them the way we do the Greek classics. Nobody believes in Zeus or Aphrodite or Neptune anymore, but we still love the Greek classics.  

32:33 I think we need to get to a stage where one would say, "We appreciate the best aspects of the Biblical traditions, but we don't believe in Yahweh walking around in the Garden of Eden or causing punishments to people or talking to Job or Moses," any more than we believe that... 

32:49 Nick:   Zeus throwing thunderbolts... 

32:50 Paul:   Exactly so, right? Now, that's where a fervent believer will say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You can't surely think that the Bible is at the same level as the Greek classics." The answer is from the point of view of dogmatic belief, absolutely one does. If you're epistemologically serious about the nature of reality, you need to get to that place. Beyond that point, you can draw upon the best aspects of the tradition and if, as the prophets argued, what's really at stake is ethical conduct, then you're not going to lose that one because we all want you to be ethical. 

33:20 Nick:   Yeah. So, coming back to Locke and principles of religious toleration, do you believe that the agenda you suggest or have suggested in this interview has any better chance of renewing our civilization and reconciling the religious with the scientific and secular society, than was the case in the time of Locke and Spinoza, 350 years ago?

33:41 Paul:   There's a twofold answer to that. The first is that we are much better placed to do it now than they were because we know so much more. In the 300 years or more since Locke and Spinoza, the natural sciences have flourished. They didn't have the understanding of deep time, geology, biology, cosmology, or for that matter, medicine that we've got now. 

34:07 Secondly, we now have the technologies in terms of communications and in terms of research and access to information, in terms of research that they would just have died for. They would be gobsmacked by what we can do now. 

34:24 So, we have both the knowledge and the means to transform things in a way that they could barely have conceived. However, we face very real challenges and the simplest way to encapsulate those is to say, as people are increasingly aware, that the very technologies that could be used, and to some extent are being used to deepen our collective awareness and cooperation, are being used to malign and confusing purposes by trolls and dictators and hackers and so forth. 

34:55 There's an old saying that a lie goes all the way around the world in the time it takes the truth to pull on its boots. That's a problem for us in the 21st century because conspiracy theories and propaganda and lies and fears and tabloid reporting and sensationalism dominate social media at the expense of serious considered reading. A great many people, even university students and intelligent school students these days notoriously, will not read books. They're scatterbrained, and this is a serious problem.

35:26 Our neuroscientists and educators are increasingly trying to analyse what's happening here, right? We have to get to the bottom of it. So, the challenges are very big. The means are at our disposal and we need to take on that challenge, instead of being complacent and assuming that, "Oh, everything's working out," because it's actually not.

35:43 Nick:   Yeah. One of the recurring themes in our discussions in these interviews is this idea of rising to higher standards and human beings as being a risen ape, rather than a fallen sort of being. Can you expand upon that a little bit more in this context and what actually rising would look like to those highest standards that Locke articulated? 

36:04 Paul:   Yes. I mean, that's a large question. There's probably three considerations that bear upon it. The first is that it can't be seriously disputed any longer, that our lineage is ancient, that genetically - biologically - we ultimately go all the way back, that our hominid ancestors go back seven million years to a common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Creationists can jump up and down about that. They simply don't have any ground to work on, right, except confusing those who listen to them.

36:37 We did evolve. That's not a demeaning story. That's an extraordinary story. It's far more dramatic and detailed and interesting than anything in the Bible, to say nothing in the Koran which is wholly derivative from the Bible. 

36:50 So, if we met in that common ground, we could say, "We as humanity have come from a species that hunted with sticks and stones in small bands, to the point now where for better or worse, we command the planet, and we're sending out satellites."

37:09 Very recently, one of our satellites parked a few thousand kilometres above the surface of Jupiter, took stunning images of the landscape or the atmosphere of Jupiter, and sent these photographs back to Earth where they can be reproduced with high fidelity and circulated in the evening around the globe. That's staggering. That's who we are. That's who we are. That's how we've risen. 

37:30 Have we risen morally? Well, in fact, although we still do terrible things to one another at times, we have risen. Consider that in the ancient world - and this was true of the Temple cult in Judaism as it was in Roman religion - animals were killed as sacrifices to gods - human beings and even children to some of these gods. It took a big struggle to convince people that blood sacrifices are an abomination. It took a big struggle for us to get to a point where there was even broad consensus that if religion means anything, it is about being in awe of the cosmos called God and behaving in an ethical way.

38:13 That, it seems to me, has led the best adherents to the great religions to actually live more upright lives. Many haven't. For many, it's eye-wash and they get on with sleazy or dubious behaviour, but that doesn't mean that as a species we haven't gradually created institutions that have made us collectively better informed, healthier, living longer lives, more cooperative in lots of ways. We couldn't run vast societies with hundreds of millions of citizens in cities with millions of people if we couldn't do these things. We do do them. 

38:49 So, the story of humanity is a story of ascent and the problems we've still got arise because - let's face it - we came off the savanna, having evolved over millions of years as half human creatures and in the last 10,000 to 15,000 years since the end of the last ice age, we've gone whoosh. We've invented like you wouldn't believe. We've invented agriculture, cities, writing, music. It's just phenomenal. To be fully alive to that and see yourself as a member of that species is surely to be inspired. That's the future.

39:22 Nick:   Yeah. Coming down from that deep history and context to a particular case or example in our political society now in Australia, what do you make of the religious freedom bill before the Australian Parliament at the moment? 

39:36 Paul:   Well, it seems to me in a nutshell, this piece of legislation brings home to us all the things we've been discussing. You know, it's the microcosm of that big picture.

39:46 So, why is it occurring? It's common knowledge, in Australia at least, that it's occurring largely because of the Israel Folau case, right, where this very talented rugby player made clear that he had very traditional Biblical moral beliefs, that he believed that homosexuals - and he added, though not much was made of this, adulterers, drunkards, you know, and atheists - will all go to hell. 

40:10 This caused an enormous stink, because of his remarks about homosexuality being, you know, abominable. As a result, he was sacked. Without going into all the details, the result of his being sacked was that there was a groundswell of support from religious believers and free speech advocates saying, "You can't sack somebody just because he has religious beliefs that you don't share. This won't do it all. Where's this going to end?"

40:37 This caused a very considerable public debate. So, the parliament decided in its wisdom, "Well, we need some legislation that will better articulate what our standards are." That's why there is this piece of legislation. 

40:49 The question is, of course, is this the right form of legislation? I don't personally believe it is. I think that if I go back to the Folau case - and I said this well before the legislation was tabled - if I'd been running Rugby Australia, you know, and I had the beliefs I have now; rather than making a big issue of this by sacking Israel Folau and saying it's unconscionable for him to say things like that, I would have simply said, “Israel Folau is a very talented footballer and he actually lives - according to his lights - an upright life. He happens to hold religious beliefs that we neither share nor endorse”, and move on because he's not physically assaulting anybody, he's not raping anybody, right? These things had been done by other rugby players who weren't sacked. He's expressing a religious belief. If we refuse to tolerate that and sack somebody, we're going down the wrong path. 

41:42 Now, what the legislation is doing is saying people who hold religious beliefs must be allowed to discriminate against others in terms of their religious beliefs. That is to say, they must be able to behave towards others consistent with their own religious beliefs and this trumps any call for wider or more universal human rights. That's going down the wrong path and is going to fuel the problem, because it's going to lead not to less discrimination or less intolerance, but to more intolerance, more discrimination, more conflict. 

42:16 What we need is a body of legislation, surely, that would be more consistent, if I may say so, with the principles I was articulating earlier; which is to say that there will be a body of civil law under which people's freedom to choose in important respects will be upheld - and that includes contraception and abortion, it includes sexual practices like homosexuality and identity - and this [freedom to choose] can't be infringed because some little sect happens to object to such things. 

42:47 Moreover, people who were brought up in a religious sect or organization must be free to leave it, to apostatize, but we will not persecute people because they happen to have religious beliefs. That's a different matter, right? What we need to do is to find, as I've been saying, common ground where that can happen in reality.

43:08 To a very considerable extent, that has been happening. What's happened in the Folau case is that the clash between traditional and strongly held religious belief and militant political correctness triggered a crisis, right? Both parties need to learn from this, but a legislation that entrenches the right to hold sectarian beliefs and impose them on others is going down the wrong path. 

43:30 Nick:   Yeah. It makes me think about how you would restructure the curriculum in schools and universities, in the interest of bringing about both the religious literacy and secular balance you advocate, because it seems to me that your average layperson really doesn't have a sense of the issues as you've outlined throughout this interview. 

43:50 Paul:   It's a big challenge. I've been spending most of my life trying to think this through. I mean, I went to university - I've probably said this in a previous interview - many years ago to get a liberal arts degree, not because I wanted to be a boffin, not because I had a particular area that I wanted to dig in and become a specialist on - I wanted an overview. I wanted to understand how did we, humanity, get to where we are? What is religion? Why is there religion? What about modern revolution? What's communism? Why is there a Cold War? I explored all those questions at university. 

44:20 One of the things that troubled me then and still troubles me is I had to cobble all that together myself, because nobody was offering a coherent curriculum - not at school, not at university, not in graduate school. I had to pull it together myself, ask the questions that I wanted answers to and then find the answers. 

44:35 Now, that's a great thing to be able to do and you can't do it in a theocratic or dogmatic or dictatorial society, so I appreciate the liberties that I've had to do it, but I do think that we need a core curriculum that inducts people into responsible, rational citizenship, and it needs to start from primary school, and it can't be religious. 

44:56 That's a direct challenge to religious institutions but it's also a challenge to those who are so actively or militantly anti-religious that they throw out the baby with the bathwater. They do not understand where these traditions have come from. They're not doing anthropology, they're doing activism. 

45:15 We've got a witches' brew at the moment of all that stuff. So, I could design or attempt to design a curriculum. Getting people to accept it? Wow, that's a whole other game but you’ve got to play the long game here. 

45:27 I'm 63 years old. In the best case, I might live another 20 years or so but they will be the years of my old age. They won't be the years of my youth. I cannot in those years, impose a vision on others. I wouldn't impose it if I could, but I do seek to contribute to an understanding - I'm right in the public realm - in an effort to communicate what's possible if you think these matters through in an open minded and tolerant way.  

45:55 Will that vision prevail? Well, possibly not. Possibly not at all or possibly not anytime soon and, in any event, always partially but one has to keep chipping away. In order for us to chip away, we need an extended and shared common vision among those who are trying to solve these problems, rather than a militant and even violent activism. We need to find ways not simply to fight back against militant activism, but to douse it, right; to draw people away from it.

46:32 Although I don't want to digress into this subject, by way of a kind of metaphor it's worth recalling that I did my doctorate on counterinsurgency in the Cold War. The big issue that I found myself addressing was how well did those who were trying to do counterinsurgency think the problem through? As distinct from killing guys who they thought were bad, like the Vietcong, how hard did they think about why are were Vietcong? What's motivating our enemies? How can we find common ground? How can we sort out the problems that lead people to join their organization, instead of just killing them when they do join?

47:04 This was an ongoing issue through the Cold War and it's an issue, it should be added, for communist revolutions because when they seize power, they kill a lot of people instead of winning them over. 

47:15 We don't want to kill people if we can possibly avoid it. We want a society in which people learn, cooperate and create. There's been a lot of that - you know, in the history as I said earlier of human civilization. We've made extraordinary strides. We still have a lot of work to do and those of us who want to see a better future need to do the good work.

47:33 Nick:   One of the things that's always struck me about you, Paul, is the deep understanding and knowledge and mastery of a lot of subject matter that you have for Christianity and other world religions too. I'd say you're fluent in religious texts and traditions and things like that. 

47:53 You know, but you are open about the fact that you're an atheist and you are an apostate from the Christian faith. Can you talk about your relationship with your Christian heritage in which you were raised?

48:05 Paul:   Yes, I'm very happy to do that. One way into that is just to recall a little anecdote which I think throws some light on this landscape. At Easter this year  - so only, you know, a few weeks ago - I was talking with an old school friend of mine who came from a Catholic family just like mine, and if anything, a little more conservative than mine and who rebuked me with real feeling when I stopped going to church many years ago. 

48:29 He's long since stopped going to church himself. He said to me in a jocular tone at Easter, "So, how are you celebrating Easter? You know, are you doing any religious stuff?" This was not said as if to say I ought to be. It was a joke as if no, obviously you wouldn’t be, right? That's how far he's come. 

48:47 I said, "Well, actually, every year at Easter, I make a point of listening to the great oratorios of Handel, Israel in Egypt and The Messiah in particular. This year I varied that slightly listening to Bach’s St Matthew Passion." What happened next astonished me, because he didn't know what I was talking about. He'd never listened to these things and he didn't know what they were. He said, "Oh, I don't really have any feel for opera." I said, "Oh, these aren't operas."

49:20 Nick:   It's a very Parkville, inner-city Melbourne thing to say, isn't it?  

49:24 Paul:   I was fascinated that somebody who, like me, had grown up a Catholic and been more committed for quite a while than I was after leaving school, didn't know what Bach’s St Matthew Passion was, didn't know Messiah or Israel in Egypt, and to me these are wonderful pieces of music.

49:44 You don't, it seems to me, need to be a dogmatic believer to appreciate how wonderful this music is and how stirring the stories are. These are great stories. They're every bit as great as the Homeric myths and in some ways, more so. That's why they've had such a cultural influence for 2000 years. That's why I listen to them.

50:05 In the same way - to broaden the picture a little - when I read, for example, the work of Averroes, the 12th century Muslim philosopher to whom I referred earlier, I don't do it because I think maybe I'll convert to Islam. That's simply not in the deck of cards. I do it because this man 800 years ago was trying to think through how you reconcile the rationalism and the more or less scientific approach to reality of Aristotle, which seems compelling, with the Koran which is a completely different kettle of fish.

50:37 His answer, after a lot of very hard and rigorous thinking was well, if you reach a conclusion based on reason and science, that seems to be at odds with [a passage in] the Koran, you must give priority to reason and science. You can't do it the other way around. Therefore, you must assume of that passage that it needs to be interpreted allegorically or symbolically and not literally. That's good thinking. I relate to that kind of thinking.

51:03 So, I go back over these religious traditions to see the emergence of humanity, the efforts of humanity to shape institutions and moral codes and ritual practices that are dignified and that improve on paganism and on child sacrifice - all those things - which they do. 

51:22 Does that mean I'm committed to believe in the Tridentine God or real presence in the Eucharist? Absolutely not. So, you have to separate out what's credible from what's humanly real and of enduring value, and that's certainly what I've attempted to do. 

51:37 Nick:   Finally, Paul, if a devout religious believer declared to you that he or she radically disagreed with you and thinks the secular society you imagine is based on errors or decadent morals, how would you respond?

51:49 Paul:   I would say, "Let's have a conversation there, because I understand where that might come from." Let's bear in mind that the religious tradition all the way back to the Bible is founded on this idea: that a faithful and visionary minority break with what they see as an oppressive or corrupt society and seek to live by a code that will elevate their humanity; as the religious put it ‘in the eyes of God’. 

52:16 I respect that existential stance. It's just that I don't think there's a white bearded guy up in the clouds or a vengeful humanoid up there who's going to punish you if you don't do this. 

52:27 What can happen and to some extent in various secular societies and religious societies has demonstrably happened is that human beings mess things up. They become corrupt. They become decadent. They fail economically. Their societies fall apart. It's quite possible on present showing that for a number of complex reasons, the liberal democracies will flounder. They're doing, you know, a bit of heavy going right now. 

52:55 Does that mean, however, that the answer is a dogmatic religion? I really don't believe that at all. It certainly isn't some literalist cultic religion that would say, "Believe on Jesus and you will be saved," because actually, you won't. That's rhetoric that might get a few misguided souls to gather around some cult leader. It might persuade large numbers of traditional Catholics or Muslims to rally around religious figures and pray or do religious observances. They won't solve the problem. 

53:26 We have a lot of heavy lifting to do to construct a society in which the best values that religious believers would say they espouse in terms of integrity, compassion and justice, are flourishing and in which human beings are able to be fully alive, and that includes the complexities of human nature, some of which we've been exploring in recent years to do with gender and sexuality and with divergent opinions in which human beings can be free and creative, not oppressed and persecuted. 

53:58 There's a lot of common ground to find there. If somebody - and I know people of different religious persuasions say, "But I have found elevation and purpose through this particular religion." I say more power to you or more precisely, you know, I hope that you continue to find that fulfilment, but I think you're mistaking general existential stability and purpose for truth. 

54:25 So, I can quite understand how somebody might say, because there's such a rich tradition in the Bible and let's say in the Catholic Church - and I have a nephew who's made this move - you know, therefore I find stability, I find moral guidance, I find community etc, in belonging to the Catholic Church. I say I completely understand it, but it doesn't mean that the doctrines of the Catholic Church are the truth. It just means that they're stable, that they offer one option. There are other options, you know.

54:54 I think the biggest challenge of the 21st century is to be creative enough and rigorous enough to build new institutions, not simply to say either there's chaos or there's some old institution which we've got to cling to by our teeth, but rather we have to reinvent our civilization, because we've learned so much - so much - in the last 200 years. 

55:16 As I said earlier in this conversation, if we really absorb and if our schools impart to us the immense richness of what we've learned about who we are as human beings, about the history of the planet, about the cosmos, about the methods that make it possible to learn such things, we're going to be able to build those new institutions, but if we hunker down and bunker down in old dogmatic religions, we're not going anywhere.

55:38 Nick:   Thank you so much for your time this afternoon, Paul. I's always a pleasure.

55:42 Paul:   You're most welcome, Nick.

On Trump, Impeachment and the U.S. Constitution

Originally hosted and recorded by Nick Fabbri

Full transcript below

Melbourne
Monday 10 February 2020

Paul Monk on Donald Trump, Impeachment, and the U.S. Constitution

 00:00 Nick:   Welcome to Bloom, a conversations podcast about anything and everything. I'm joined today by Dr. Paul Monk who is an Australian public intellectual and historian whose most recent work, Dictators and Dangerous Ideas, concerns power, liberty, constitutions and freedom of speech.

00:16 I'm talking with Paul today about the political impeachment and acquittal of president Donald Trump and the implications for the United States and the world. Paul, it's a pleasure to be here with you today.

00:26 Paul:   Yes, likewise, Nick. We haven't done a recording for a while and this is a particularly topical and interesting issue.

00:32 Nick:   Indeed. So, little more than 18 hours after the November 2016 election, you wrote a piece for The Australian entitled, 'US election: like Rome and Athens, the great republic teeters', in which you outlined a series of constitutional concerns you had following the election of Donald Trump.

00:49 Since then, he's obviously been impeached by the house and more recently, acquitted in the senate at the political trial. But nonetheless, there remain deep divisions within the American polity, and it seems as though Trump may still win the 2020 presidential election.

01:05 So, in simple terms for our listeners who might not be particularly familiar with the whole ongoing saga in the last couple of months with regard to impeachment but more broadly Trump in the White House for the last 3.5 years, could you outline what's happened in his recent impeachment and acquittal?

01:23 Paul:   Yes. I think the simplest way to sum it up is that Donald Trump was accused first of all under the Mueller inquiry and then with the more recent proceedings of colluding with foreign powers for personal and political gain. In the first instance, and this was the subject of course of the Mueller inquiry which went on for quite a period of time, it was alleged collusion with the Russians to win the election in 2016.

01:52 Robert Mueller concluded his inquiry by saying he did not have sufficient evidence to indict the president, but a number of Trump's circle were in fact charged and convicted of having improper relations in the context of the election with the Russians. That of course led to a great deal of rancour and public debate.

02:15 Subsequent to that, the charge was brought against Trump and this became a subject of the impeachment proceedings that on an altogether separate basis, he approached the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and asked him for a favour. Asked him to initiative an inquiry into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, and their alleged corrupt activities.

02:44 That was something that might under slightly different auspices have been okay. They would not normally have been something a president would ask another foreign leader.

02:56 The problem arose essentially because he said unless Zelensky initiated such an inquiry, he, Trump, would withhold $391 million of military aid that was due to the Ukraine under a standing agreement in order to help it defend itself against Russian aggression.

03:13 So, the charge brought against him was that he was in this instance expressly colluding with a foreign power in a way that would compromise the integrity of the electoral process of the United States…

03:23 Nick:   ... because Biden was potentially his main political rival.

03:25 Paul:   Biden was his main political rival. At the moment, it's not clear that he will be as it turns out, but that was the basis for what then became the impeachment proceedings.

03:35 Now, obviously we have a situation in the United States by common agreement in which this is probably more polarised than it's been - people sometimes say since the Civil War. I would say well you could go back to the 1960s, I mean, with the Vietnam War and the race riots and so forth in the US. The US was pretty divided then, but it's clearly deeply divided now.

03:56 So, the operative question really is was the impeachment of Donald Trump warranted? We know that when it went to a senate trial, he was acquitted. Was the acquittal justified or was that partisan? Was the impeachment itself justified or was it partisan? That's a question that's well worth discussing.

04:17 Nick:   Just to come back to first terms for our Australian listeners, what is impeachment and what role was it designed to play in the US constitution?

04:26 Paul:   Well, this is a very good question to ask and it is germane to the piece that I did write back at the time of the 2016 election. It has to do with a fundamental aspect of the constitution of the United States.

04:37 In 1787, the founders of the United States who had been debating at great length and it must be said, very intelligently, how do you build a republican government that will not slide into dictatorship, that will not return to monarchy of the kind that they had rejected? They had rejected a British monarchy and established an independence only a few years earlier.

05:03 One of the codicils they inserted in the constitution was the power of congress to impeach the president of the United States. Now, they didn't want this done on a cavalier or partisan basis. It was only ever intended to be a kind of last resort in the event that you had a man in the white house - or we would say these days, a woman, but they don't seem to have envisaged that in 1787 - who was deemed to either have engaged in treason or in bribery in a way that undermined public trust and/or what were termed by the founders, 'high crimes and misdemeanours'.

05:39 One of the interesting points about it is that they debated for some time what language to use there, but specifically they didn't say if the president has committed a statutory crime, and this became relevant in a couple of subsequent cases.

05:54 In the case of Donald Trump, the argument has been put - and I would say on not simply a partisan basis - that whatever one makes of the Mueller inquiry, the approach to Zelensky was something that met the description of high crimes and misdemeanours. It was a violation of public trust. It was an attempt to make electoral political gain for himself, not for the good of the public, and exposed him one might add to potential blackmail which would have further compromised the White House, and that was sufficient to deem that he should be removed from office.

06:31 The debate of course naturally then centred on whether in fact that offence had been sufficiently serious, and that then brings us to the question about well, under what circumstances would any president be impeached and has this ever happened before?

06:45 Nick:   Yeah, and some of our listeners on that note will recall the political impeachment of president Bill Clinton, the downfall of Richard Nixon in 1974 as well. So, have there been other cases by which presidents: 1) have been impeached or perhaps even been driven from office by the broader impeachment process, and I suppose finally whether anyone has been found guilty in the senate political trial and removed from office by that means?

07:10 Paul:   Yeah, and the short answer to that last question which in a sense is pivotal is no. So, there has never been a US president who has been impeached, brought before the senate for trial, deemed guilty and removed from office.

07:22 Does that mean that the impeachment power is nugatory, that it doesn't really matter? I don't think so. I think it shows the fundamental health of the US constitution, that it's never been so necessary to remove a president from office that has gone all the way.

07:37 That’s an important point to come back to when we talk about Trump and the presidency right now, but to go a bit deeper. There were four precedents for this. One might just in passing make this parallel that there's also been a small number of cases of American presidents being assassinated but probably the only one that sticks in the popular memory is John F. Kennedy, but there were others in the past.

07:58 Similarly with impeachment procedures, the first was all the way back in 1842 when John Tyler had succeeded to the presidency early. He had been vice president and inherited the presidency when the elected president died.

08:14 Impeachment procedures were initiated against him but it was deemed that they weren't grounded in the constitutional principles enunciated by the founders and so they didn't proceed. It was an abortive attempted impeachment.

08:27 Something similar but a much closer call occurred after the American civil war when president Andrew Johnson who had succeeded Abraham Lincoln was impeached and it came down to a vote in the senate. So, this was a closer call than a Trump impeachment but Johnson again was acquitted.

08:48 What's significant is essentially he was acquitted on the basis of one man, a senator from Kansas called Edmund Ross. Ross was not a partisan of Andrew Johnson. He didn't like the man. He wasn't a member of his political party. Why did he in a sense have the casting vote?

09:06 It is because he said in a way similar to what had happened in the Tyler case, that Johnson was a bad president. He was doing bad things but not, said Ross, in the way that the founders of the constitution had deemed grounds for impeachment. Therefore, it should be left to the voters to decide and on the basis of that one vote, Johnson was also acquitted.

09:34 The fact that he was acquitted of course - and this is important - didn't mean that he was a good president and people were saying, "No, he's just fine." They didn't like him, you know, and he came within a whisker of being removed from office, but he wasn't.

09:46 That didn't happen again then for 100 years and famously in the case of Richard Nixon, he faced possible impeachment but he wasn't actually impeached, and why did he face impeachment?

09:58 Well, at the most fundamental level because a group of dubious characters hired by members of his White House staff burgled the democratic national headquarters in an effort to bug it to find out more about his political rivals.

10:15 Nixon didn't personally authorise that. He was astonished and appalled actually when he learned that it had happened. He said it was the dumbest thing he could imagine, why did this happen? But he was faced with the mess. He was the president and his staff had organised this. That's when he made his fundamental mistake really because he attempted to cover it up.

10:38 When journalists started to discover - the US having a free press unlike China (it's worth remarking in the context of the current Corona virus) - when the press started to investigate, they found leads back into the White House and they kept asking questions.

10:53 Nixon got deeper and deeper into trying to cover things up and finally this became a major political issue. Ultimately what brought him down was not that the Watergate incident had occurred so much as that he engaged in a cover up and was finally charged with obstruction of justice. He was trying to stop the inquiry. He was trying to withhold evidence.

11:15 The significant thing is that well into that process, his party colleagues - the Republicans - did not believe that the indictment of the president was warranted. They didn't want to see him removed from office but in the end, it was Republicans, not democrats, who went to him and said, "You are facing impeachment. You have gone beyond the bounds of constitutional propriety. You probably will be voted out. We recommend that you step down to avoid that, to avoid that disgrace."

11:43 Significantly, Nixon did. You know, he was shattered by this and arguably, there were political ramifications that are worth reflecting on but he did face the prospect of impeachment. He was advised by his own party colleagues to step down and he did. Many people - I'm certainly one of them - believe that showed that the US constitution was working because he didn't stage a coup. He didn't arrest people, right? He didn't defy them and barricade himself in the White House. He stepped down and his vice president, Gerald Ford, succeeded him.

12:16 Then Bill Clinton was facing impeachment and this time, the Republicans were going after a democrat, rather than the other way around. But in that case, similar to both Tyler and Johnson, what happened is ultimately it was deemed that he had perjured himself. He had behaved improperly and he tried to in a sense cover up his traces as Nixon had done, but the offence was much less serious than Nixon's in the eyes of the public certainly and in the eyes I think – more or less both side of politics and ultimately, it was decided he acted improperly but he did not commit high crimes or misdemeanours. You know, he wasn't colluding with a foreign power. He wasn't doing bribery, etc.

12:52 So, that case also was dismissed. So, the gravamen of all that is that Trump being impeached was a very rare event in American political history. That it actually went to a senate trial is a very rare event in political in history. That in the end he was acquitted is actually pretty much the norm in America political history and that's with reminding ourselves rather than saying, "Oh my gosh, he got off," and if you're anti-Trump, that's shocking. No, it's pretty much what normally happens.

13:19 I think what that shows us is to be impeached and voted out and forced from office actually does require an unambiguously high crime, misdemeanour or treason and the power is there for that. It's been tested in this case. You know, it was available and the senate rendered judgement and Trump is still in office.

13:42 Nick:   I'm interested in why you've compared the assassination of a president to the impeachment process and in some ways, how they're both answers to the same problem of imperial or tyrannical overreach or abuse of office by a president.

13:54 This is something that's deeply rooted in American society and it's constitution and balance of powers, given it's history, particularly the American Revolutionary War with England.

14:03 Paul:   Well, it is and I would say in response to that point three things. The first is that when the founders were debating this, it was Benjamin Franklin, a very well-known founding father, who said, "If we don't have an impeachment process available to congress and we do end up with a dubious character in the White House who is disregarding the constitution, what options does that leave?"

14:25 Well, the historical tradition is in that case you end up resorting to assassination. He was thinking of course of Rome and most famously, there were many emperors who were assassinated. It was Julius Caesar who had essentially put an end to the republic, who was assassinated precisely for that reason.

14:43 The American founding fathers were steeped in their Roman history. You know, they knew of that antecedent and they wanted a republic, not an empire, and they didn't want to have to resort to assassination, and that's why they put in the impeachment process.

14:57 So, given that there have been a number of American presidents assassinated but they haven't been assassinated...

15:02 Nick:   ... because they were tyrannical.

15:03 Paul:   ... because they were tyrannical. I mean, Abraham Lincoln was a model president in so many ways and the people who assassinated him were a small group of unreconstructed confederates who were aggrieved because he had defeated the confederacy and put an end to the slave regime.

15:22 John F. Kennedy was assassinated despite the prevalence of conspiracy theories not by the military industrial complex, not by the mafia and not by the Russians or the Cubans, but by Lee Harvey Oswald. And Oswald was an unstable, minor character who had his own agenda.

15:41 Similarly with other presidents. You know, William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. It was not the other party. It was not a revolution.

15:49 But I think it's important if while we're at that, to remember that in current circumstances, more - I think it's true to say than in the case of Clinton or Nixon or Johnson or Tyler - there has been an edginess about the whole political process. There has been the fear that violence could occur in the United States.

16:15 Specifically, I think this is...

16:17 Nick:   Were Trump to be removed, you’re saying...

16:20 Paul:   Well, that's a specific thing that was raised as the impeachment process was getting under way. There were people in the United States saying that if he was found guilty, if he was impeached in the full sense of the word, people would take up arms.

16:36 Now, that's deeply disturbing. So, what we now have is a situation where because Trump was acquitted, we don't face an immediate prospect. What we do face however is the distinct possibility that in the election that's approaching in November, there will be angry rhetoric about the democrats who tried to remove this man from office.

16:57 Nick:   ‘a coup’ – it’s used in military language even.

16:59 Paul:   This has been used for some time and this means that instead of the election being, as at least in theory it's supposed to be, a vigorous but peaceful and thoughtful process to select a national leader, it could be even more partisan and tense and possibly violent. That's a serious worry.

17:17 Nick:   Yeah. The other point that I was thinking about as you were speaking before was the fact that okay we could maybe, by looking at this impeachment and subsequent acquittal of president Trump, say that perhaps he has been found innocent of the charges that were alleged against him but it almost seems like there's been a derogation in the actual authenticity of the impeachment process as laid out in article two, section four of the US constitution, because you have this sort of a hyper-partisan protection almost of their republican president by the republicans in the senate and only one senator, Mitt Romney, dissenting from the majority political opinion.

17:59 But secondly, the fact that as a sort of a political strong-arming tactic, Mitch McConnell and others in the senate did not allow witnesses who might have provided further context as to Crump's - oh, Crump's! - Trump's conduct with president Zelensky which could have raised reasonable doubt in the minds of republican senators as to the conduct of the president.

18:23 Paul:   Yes, I think that's absolutely true. I think this is a terribly important point. When you consider that in the Nixon case, it was republicans, not democrats, who finally went to Nixon having changed their minds about the merits of the case and said you need to step down in order to avoid this going to a senate trial, in order to avoid the opprobrium of that, in order to avoid the political ructions that might generate. We appeal to you to step down and Nixon did.

18:52 We're in different territory at the moment because the process didn't have that degree of integrity it seems to me and that's a worry. But that brings us, as you implied, to the specific question of Mitt Romney's stance because we said a little earlier that Edmund Ross stood out in 1868 and said ‘simply as a matter of constitutional principle, I do not believe that we should be indicting Andrew Johnson. Don't like the man, don't think he's a good president, but a constitution made specific grounds for impeachment and I do not think that those grounds are present in this case.’

19:29 Nick:   It's a case study for courage, isn't it?

19:31 Paul:   It is. In fact, John F. Kennedy wrote a book called, 'Profiles in Courage’, and among the people he heroized you might say in that little book was Edmund Ross, a very obscure American political figure whose one moment of glory was that moment.

19:47 That brings us to the question of Mitt Romney because Mitt Romney took a similar stance. He risked opprobrium. He risked and probably has incurred the end of his political career, right? Why did he do that? He did it because, like Edmund Ross, he said, "I considered the constitution. I considered the grounds. I consulted my conscience and I believe I have taken an oath before god to act impartially and according to my conscience, this matter and that's what I'm doing."

20:16 It's worth reflecting, right, that he specified in that speech not simply a stance, not a final judgement only, but the grounds for that judgement. He precisely itemised the three grounds on which White House counsel defended Donald Trump. Those grounds were that an impeachable offence has to be a statutory crime, that the Bidens conduct justified the president's actions in his communication with president Zelensky of Ukraine and that judgement of the president's actions should be left to the voters.

20:44 It's important it seems to me to understand that none of these three grounds is valid. In other words, the White House counsel defended the president on three fallacious grounds. Romney makes this point in his speech but let's just summarise that the grounds were that an impeachable offence needs to be a statutory crime. It doesn't. The constitutional grounds for impeachment are treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanours. This has to do with political and constitutional offences, not statutory or civil crimes.

21:15 Secondly, even if the Bidens were indeed acting corruptly, the president's actions were directed at his personal gain to the prejudice of his office, not a judicial processes as regards to corruption.

21:29 Thirdly, that the judgement of the president's actions should be left to the voters is precisely not relevant because impeachment is in the constitution to avoid a president abusing his power to influence the voters.

21:43 That's what was being alleged against Trump, both in the Mueller inquiry and as regard to the Zelensky matter. So, it's worth listening to Mitt Romney's speech on all three heads and his explanation of why he chose to vote for conviction of Trump.

21:59 Mitt Romney: So, the verdict is ours to render under our constitution. The people will judge us for how well and faithfully we fulfil our duty. The grave question the constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime and misdemeanour. Yes, he did.

22:26 The president asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival. The president withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so. The president delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders. The president's purpose was personal and political.

22:47 Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust. What he did was not perfect. No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security and our fundamental values.

23:06 Corrupting an election to keep one's self in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one's oath of office that I can imagine. We have come to different conclusions, fellow senators, but I trust that we have all followed the dictates of our conscience.

23:26 My vote will likely be in the minority in the senate, but irrespective of these things, with my vote I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me.

23:42 Paul:   That's a principled stance and it's open, he admitted for people to disagree with him and he didn't speak in rancour. He spoke it seems to me with integrity. Then Trump was acquitted.

23:54 I still think that while one can debate that case and people differ quite strongly about this, we have again in an important sense at least seen the American republican system work. Trump hasn't been assassinated. There hasn’t been violence in the streets. Mitt Romney wasn't dragged from the podium or beaten up, right? He was able to speak his piece. The newspapers were able to cover this according to their lights. That's what a republic is about, a democratic republic.

24:22 Now it will go to the voters. I think the probability at the moment is that he is likely to win that election. People will continue to debate and disagree about whether they are comfortable with him being president, how he is conducting himself as president, but so long as that debate can go on and so long as the constitution is upheld which means that even if he wins this next election, he's got one term left and then he's gone, alright? Then the republic endures.

24:52 Nick:   So, what's striking though is when you wrote that piece, you know, ‘like Rome and Athens, the Republic Teeters' back in 2016, you sort of foresaw a lot of these constitutional strains and stress tests which have actually eventuated in the subsequent 3.5 years, but what are we actually meant to make of the health of the US constitution and the republic overall when although a lot of it seems shaky, this is exactly how the constitution was designed to work, to sort of resolve problems of precisely this nature, you know, were a questionable figure like Trump - or whoever else - in office and abusing power. It’s sort of resolved itself. So, what are the broader lessons we're meant to draw from this whole thing?

25:32 Paul:   Well, I think that the issues about which I expressed concern in 2016 are very much still on the table. But it's worth reminding ourselves that the decline of the ancient republics was not something that happened in a few years. It didn't happen with one political figure.

25:49 When I wrote that piece, I wasn't saying that the election of Donald Trump meant the end of the American republic. I just said it troubles me that such a man could be elected and it troubles me the rhetoric that he's using and the nature of some of his supporter base, that anger and deep division were appearing in the United States.

26:09 I compared him with Sulla who most people these days won't know of. Sulla was not the man who overthrew the Roman republic. He was a conservative. He was a self-made man. He was a dictator. He tried to reform the constitution to stabilise things and ultimately, he didn't succeed. It was several decades later that Julius Caesar, having won a civil war, made himself dictator of Rome. That's when the Roman republic fell.

26:36 Its process of gridlock and then unravelling took place over many decades. In the United States, it's still conceivable and one certainly hopes this will prove to be the case, that whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, he serves out his time, somebody else is elected, there's deep debate and reflection about where the US is heading. There are some reforms, some new political changes and the republic endures and even flourishes.

27:03 So, I wouldn't despair but I did at that point express concern about where this could be heading and I still feel those concerns.

27:10 Nick:   My final question for the interview is to try to broaden things up on a global scale. The removal of Nixon from office, although he wasn't impeached, he was removed through the impeachment process, had massive global ramifications. For instance, with the Vietnam war, the perceived strength and durability of the relations at that executive level between Nixon and China for instance.

27:35 You know, you mentioned China and the Coronavirus for instance before and the way in which there wasn't a free press which was able - or there wasn't the sort of separation of powers by which these sorts of political issues could be played out - but it taps into that debate about the differences in systems between and often chaotic and violent bear pit US politics or any politics in the western liberal democracies verses the sort of new emerging model of authoritarian, you know, dictatorships of the mould of, you know, China or Xi Jinping's China or Erdogan’s Turkey or Putin's Russian, whereby you don't have this sort of ostensible instability and yet...

28:15 Paul:   You certainly have abuses of power.

28:16 Nick:   You certainly have abuses of power, yeah.

28:18 Paul:   So, it's worth saying just to pick up your first point about Nixon. First of all, yes, the fact that Nixon was forced from office - and forced is a strong term because he accepted the advice of his republican colleagues and he stepped down. I mean, he wasn't arrested. He didn't resist arrest. There was no violence. It was a constitutional procedure. That's very important.

28:38 But the reaction in both Beijing and Moscow was incredulity. They didn't understand how this was even possible and they said how would Nixon permit this to happen, as if he was the dictators. He was a strong man like them and you don't let this happen. You can't impeach Mao Zedong. You can't impeach Leonid Brezhnev, you know? What's going on? They didn't understand this political system.

29:04 Given the Coronavirus, apart from anything else, if China had say a British or Australian style parliamentary system, it's very easy to imagine that his popularity in the polls would be plummeting, that the press would be hammering him and there would be a vote of no confidence in the Chinese parliament.

29:20 None of that is happening because there's no free press. There's no parliamentary politics, alright, and you don't pass a vote of no confidence against a guy who will just throw you in prison for doing it or trying to organise it, right? That's the difference between two systems and if I had to choose between Trump's America as a governance process with all it's ruptures and that of China, there's no hesitation on my part. It's the American republic every day of the week because people like you and I and I would imagine our listeners get to think for ourselves. We get to read different accounts. We get to criticise political leaders. We get to vote them out of office if we so choose. Not in China. Not in China.

29:59 But to pick up the substantiative point you made about Nixon and the Vietnam war. He had been trying amid growing controversy to engineer a situation which south Vietnam could survive on its own merits and the US could get out, and it was an enormously difficult process. There were people saying cut and run, just get out. Stop, we should never have been there.

30:18 One could make a case for that but his concern and that of Henry Kissinger was if we do that, then many of our allies who are afraid of communist aggression or insurrection internally will lose confidence in us. They'll say, "Oh, the US can be beaten and won't stand up and this a third-rate state, this is a third world tin-pot dictatorship."

30:38 Nick:   ... tin-pot dictatorship, yeah.

30:40 Paul:   "And it's beaten the United States?" You know? Nixon was tormented by this, you know? He described the US as a pitiful giant, you know, that felt hamstrung because of it's principles and it's constraints.

30:55 There's no question it seems to me that his departure from office and a subsequent congressional action to say well now that he's gone, we're in control and we will not give any further aid or support for the south Vietnamese regime with a key component in it collapsing in 1975.

31:10 Nick:   South Vietnam?

31:11 Paul:   South Vietnam. So, that prompts the question - let's just imagine hypothetically that Trump had indeed been judged guilty and removed from office. What then happens?

31:23 Well, the first thing is that Pence steps up, becomes president from being vice president. Are there consequences internationally? Well, it would depend in some respects about what Pence did, but what we can say is that the US is not currently engaged in a Vietnam war. Trump is not fighting a war. In fact, he has by and large been trying to do what Obama did which is to limit America's involvement in the Middle East and elsewhere.

31:48 He's taken various limited measures like assassinating Soleimani or imposing sanctions on Venezuela but these are a long way short of war.

31:57 So, it's arguable that if Trump had been removed from office, there wouldn't have been a dramatic consequence of the nature of what happened with the Vietnam war when Nixon went.

32:07 But it might on the other hand be seen as a signal by the powers that be again in Beijing and in Moscow and in elsewhere, I imagine in Ankara, that this is another sign of the weakness and decline of the United States.

32:19 Nick:   Indeed, yeah.

32:19 Paul:   So, their confidence goes up and they think, you know, the American's can't even keep their act together, right? So, one has to ask that question because when the Roman republic was in difficulties, its enemies did at times take advantage of that, alright?

32:34 Nick:   Yeah.

32:34 Paul:   So, it is important. You always need a sense of proportion and this may, to be charitable at least to republicans, have been one reason why they thought, "We don't think that it's going to serve the country to say nothing of us and the party, well, to remove the president on this specific charge.

32:55 One could go further and say that had the actions of Trump been more unambiguously self-serving or treasonous even, that enough of them might well have walked across the aisle and said, "No, he's got to go." Alright?

33:11 So, I think we've seen an interesting test in the nature of the US constitution. We've seen vigorous debate in public. We've seen due process, even if it was a bit constrained and not altogether in good faith. We've seen a distinguished politician, a notable politician in Mitt Romney make a stand on principle which you can only do in a free republic because otherwise it's not just the end of your political career, you go to jail, you get killed. All these things should actually give us some heart.

33:39 Nick:   Yes, in that this process, as ugly and as concerning and strange as it might seem to watchers of US politics, this instantiation of the impeachment process actually might be a sign of the republic's inherent strength and capacity for self-renewal, rather than another, you know, example of the decline of the US which has been talked about for decades, relative or outright decline.

34:00 Paul:   Yeah. Well, if they, as I hinted before talking about China - if there was a genuine democratic system in place in China or in Russia - let's take Russia. There are good reasons to believe that Putin would long since have been impeached. If there was in China, Xi Jinping would be in significant trouble right now, even if he wasn't necessarily removed, because we see this happening in western democracies all the time.

34:24 It's not allowed to happen in dictatorships. We don't have a dictatorship in the United States. Trump is not a dictator. Whatever as we said happens in the election this year, it would take an enormous upheaval in the US for him not to end up leaving office in 2024 or 2025 if you like, right?

34:45 So, that's the way a more or less healthy republic works. What's necessary and what's available to citizens of the United States as to citizens of the other western democracies is to say we have concerns, we can and we will vote according to our concerns, we can join a political party, we can attempt to found a new movement, we can write in the press, we can read what we choose, we can change our opinions. That's what you do in a free state. That's what's at issue and that's still available. That hasn't been removed. Despite all the concerns about fake news and rancour, alright?

35:16 The fake news in China comes from the state. The fake news in the US is multiple different groups, right, not just one power.

35:25 Nick:   Dr Paul Monk, thank you very much for your time tonight. It's been a pleasure.

35:29 Paul:   Excellent. Thanks, Nick.

On Living a Poetic Life

Originally hosted and recorded by Nick Fabbri

Paul Monk on Living a Poetic Life

00:00 Paul:  

[Chopin Nocturne in B Flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1]

LXXX: Listening to Chopin

The combination of protracted convalescence,

Bouts of exhaustion halting all my projects,

Melancholy news of Venezuela

And wintry thoughts of my relentless aging;

Have me, lately, turning down the lights

And listening intently to some Chopin -

Chiefly to his nocturnes, late at nights -

And feeling deeply privileged, overall,

To be myself, disposed oneirically,

Equipped with such advanced technology;

To have the scope, in quiet, private space,

The means, the education and good grace,

The access to such high fidelity

Recordings, by the Warsaw Philharmonic;

But, not least, our love, my bold, creative muse,

My own George Sand, with her cigars and trousers –

At least if we see them as metonyms –

Whose novels outsold those of Victor Hugo;

Who’s been with me to lakes up in the mountains

And taken her composer to Mallorca.

Yet Chopin never wrote a book on China,

Or a book of thirty essays on the West;

Or a book of sonnets, set in B Flat minor;

Or political opinions in the press.

There’s much, in short, that Frederic didn’t do,

Even with Amanthe Lucile Dupin,

That I’ve done, in my fleeting years with you

And, having cheated death, perhaps still can.

But when I’m gone, if your lone psyche yearns

For all we were, read these – my own nocturnes.

01:50 Nick: That was the opening bars of Frederick Chopin's Nocturne in B Flat minor, Op. 9 No. 1, and Paul Monk reciting his recent poem Listening to Chopin.

01:58 You're joining us on Bloom, a podcast about anything and everything, featuring conversations with people who have led meaningful, interesting and flourishing lives in order to better understand ourselves, each other and the world around us.

02:11 My name is Nick and today I'm talking with Paul Monk: poet, essayist, scholar of history and international relations and former senior intelligence analyst of at the Defence Intelligence Organisation, and author of ten books.

02:23 Now, Paul, today I'd like to talk with you about why you write poetry, how you write it and why anyone reads poetry at all. Can we perhaps begin by having you explain what lead you to write the poem you just recited?

02:34 Paul:   Yes, I had been convalescent for some time after a prolonged battle with metastatic cancer. So, I still get quite a bit of fatigue and for three nights in a row prior to writing this poem, I was feeling particularly tired. So, at nights I would put on those Chopin Nocturnes and turn out the lights and lie back in a recliner and just listen to the music to relax before retiring for the night.

03:00 On the third night, it occurred to me that to be able to do this at all was a privileged thing. It was a beautiful thing. It was expressive of my whole way of being and the way my life has worked out, and because I'd been writing quite a bit of poetry, that thought suggested itself to me as a poem.

03:21 So, I thought - because I often do this - okay, I'll take that thought with me to bed. I'll sleep on it and in the morning, the poem will arise, which indeed it did. The beauty of it is that I began, as the listeners will have noted, by simply describing what had happened that night in the opening stanza. Then, the poem began to unfold and I had the idea of my muse, my wife - my partner in life - being like Chopin's muse, George Sand.

03:51 So, I drew metaphors from their relationship and having done that, the third stanza occurred to me because I thought, you know, I've done quite a few things too and Chopin didn't do those things. So, the poem emerged like that. It wasn't mechanically produced and it was only right at the end that I realised as I say in the final couple of lines, that actually these poems, including this one, are my own Nocturnes. So, I think it turned out - you might say 'nocturned out' rather nicely.

04:20 Nick: Ha, ha. So, you've written quite a bit of poetry over the years and the last several last decades actually. Could you sort of talk us through what got you started and what that process was like?

04:29 Paul: Yes, and the shortest possible answer is that it was a very prolonged process. I, when I was very young, wanted to live you might say a poetic life. I had encountered little bits of poetry. In my personal case, the richest encounter was the poems in the Lord of the Rings but there were other things that influenced me to imagine what it would be like to have a life that was actually suffused with poetry, and that included very coloured pictures in children's books which I had when I was a small child or other stories, adventure stories that I'd read, or history books which were about the big, wide world.

05:11 But it took me a long time before I wrote any poetry that I felt was actually quite good and it took me decades before I had the confidence to write poems about almost anything that occurred to me as meaningful or moving which is what I'm able to do now.

05:28 I think part of the problem was that nobody around me when I was young wrote poetry. Very few people read poetry and certainly nobody at school, no English teacher at school ever said, "How do you write poetry? Let's write poetry."

05:44 I think some people are introduced to it at school. I was not. So, I was really on my own and I felt eccentric for a number of years because I thought I want to write poems and I like poems but they seem like they're from another culture, another time and place, they're just in old books and it's an odd thing to do. So, it's taken quite a while...

06:03 Nick: They're quite a structured disciplined thing as well, to do it well.

06:05 Paul: It is. It's a skill, like any other. I mean, we refer to Chopin in that first poem there and how did Chopin become a great pianist? Well, by a lot of practice, and he lived in a culture where people did that kind of thing but it still took a lot of practice. It is said that he was very good at improvising at the piano but he agonised over turning it into a composition. That's the work of creativity and certainly poetry is the same but I've gone from a child who longed to do it, to an adolescent and young adult who fumbled in trying to do it, to a man of mature years who is now increasingly comfortable in doing it and finds it very satisfying.

06:43 I might give us an example, if I may. A poem that was written very recently refers us back to when I was a little boy. I talked about coloured pictures in children’s book and this poem is about coloured pictures in a particular book I was given when I was only about six or seven years old.

07:00 It was a children’s book about the life of Marco Polo, and the images from it and the story that it told made an indelible impression on me as the poem relates. It's simply called Little Marco.

07:12

I: Little Marco

The picture books of Lawrence Peach -

John Kenney’s pictures chiefly -

Filled my childish mind with coloured dreams

Of exotic countries and far off times –

Beginning with Marco Polo.

Travelling much, in intervening years,

I’ve marvelled, more than ever, as an elder,

At his images of Caesar and of Alfred;

Of Harry at Agincourt, Nelson at Trafalgar –

But, not least, of little Marco Polo.

The very opening pages show the boy

Crouching nimbly on the Venetian docks,

At the age I was when gaping first at him;

Looking with round-eyed wonder

At Chinese characters on a bale of silk.

‘Little Marco Polo,’ Peach intoned,

‘Whose father was a merchant, often stared

At the queer Chinese or Arabic writing’,

Pondering, as did I, from whence

These bales of wonder had derived.

Niccolo, his father, brought the bales

From the rim of the Euxine Sea,

Which Jason crossed, in fables, long ago;

But they’d come from farther, Peach related:

On the longest road from the farthest Eastern lands.

The ancient Silk Road led to Xanadu,

To the awesome Mongol courts of Kublai Khan

And there, Peach showed, the youthful Marco went

While I, all eyes, went with him on his journey

And, aye, have done, on all my travels since.

08:29 Nick: Yep. One thing that strikes me about that poem is the sense of wonderment and playfulness of the language and I suppose the child-like perspective. Could you reflect on the differences in your relationship to poetry when you were at the foothills of life to your perspective now, both in terms of the types of poetry you find fascinating and interesting and engaging now and I suppose the different levels of comprehension and understanding you have, having lived over, you know, five decades or so?

08:58 Paul: Yes. The first thought that springs to mind in answer to your question is that of course when you're very young, you're only beginning to master language itself, so you might exclaim joyously, you might have a lot of free emotion but you don't have a sophisticated vocabulary or capacity to express yourself.

09:17 Nick: The language lasso around a thought or feeling...

09:19 Paul: Yeah, you know, and you try and do it but there's a lot of learning to do. When you get to my age now - I'm in my sixties - it's very different if you've pursued education and been working at poetry, where you find and increasingly you have a superfluity of the capacity to express yourself and it becomes a matter of choosing the form of expression - the words you'll use, the rhythms that you'll use, the topics that you'll choose.

09:50 What's interesting in that case is that I was able to give expression to the experience that I had a long time ago which I couldn't have done when I was little but the feeling, the memory had always been there, and it's deepened in terms of meaning precisely because I'm looking back and so much has happened since.

10:07 Nick: Of course, many poets are able to write poetry by reflecting on experiences that they had thirty or forty years ago and infuse it with meaning in the present, but other poets of course write poetry or are inspired by current events and other people as well. Has that experience occurred to you as well?

10:24 Paul: Well, yes it did. Of course, when I was little like most of us, I was a child in a conservative family in a little community and so I had very limited experience of things that I might write poetry about as well as lacking the language and the skill to write poetry at all.

10:41 Having had quite an adventurous life, I've now got a super abundance of topics, but for many poets of course, it's very particular kinds of experience that prompt them to write poetry and famously, one of those experiences is you hit adolescence and you start getting smitten by members of the other sex or let it be said, members of your own, though that wasn't my experience.

11:05 It was certainly true for me that in adolescence - particularly late adolescence and early twenties - I did fall in love with women or girls that I wanted to write love poems but I didn't know how to do that well.

11:17 There were times when I would write a poem and even give it to a girl and get often confused responses which were a combination of, "So, why is he doing this? People don't do that in Australia," or, "It's a bit of a, you know, an awkward poem," you know, it's not a great poem or they might be touched by the fact that one had written a poem...

11:39 Nick: Not sure how to respond.

11:40 Paul: Not sure how to respond, right? So, one of the very - you know, looking back - very rich experiences I've had is gradually getting better at that so that I've now got to a point where the muse of the poems for whom I write my current poems is my wife. She is somebody with whom I have many shared memories and a very close relationship and a creative partnership, and so I don't have the problems I had as a fumbling adolescent, right? It's no longer a matter of adoration from a distance and writing something intense. It's a matter of putting into a form of words things that we've shared, things that we dream about together.

12:18 Nick: That question of audience - who the poem is written for on any creative work - is always quite an important one, isn't it?

12:25 Paul: It is, you know? I mean, a poet in one sense, I think it should be said, writes for themselves. So, you can look at almost any poet and they've had an experience. We'll come shortly to talk about say William Wordsworth and one or two of his poems where he's reflecting on an experience he has had, but other people when they read the poem can relate to that kind of experience and also to the beautiful expression that he gives to that kind of experience. They may even then go to the place where he was when he wrote such a poem in an effort to capture that kind of experience for themselves.

13:00 Nick: So, if we were to distil it into a definition, what is poetry? What is actually going on through this medium, this construction of human language?

13:08 Paul: I think the point of departure has to be that as human beings, we're language animals. Human beings have language and from the time we're born basically, we start learning it. We hear it, we pick it up, we acquire vocabulary, we start burbling away and then constructing phrases and sentences.

13:26 Poetry is an extension of that and it's very ancient in human experience, but another way to describe it and Edmund Muir, the Scottish poet, said this precisely about half a century ago is that poetry, when you stop and think about it, is like a combination of language and music and it used to generally be something that was chanted or sung. When it turns into something on the written page, you can't hear the music but it would normally have a musical pattern, a metrical pattern.

13:57 Nick: Providing it's read aloud, that can come through as well.

13:59 Paul: That's right, but if it's recited - and we still have performance poetry which is the case, where the rhythm of the language and the stanzas is very much part of the experience.

14:11 I think most people would concede that if such a poem or any form of words is put to actual music and performed, the music can really lift it up, you know? If you see a concert - one of my favourite examples of this is a concert that the Rolling Stones performed in Havana a couple of years ago. They start singing classic songs like Gimme Shelter or Brown Sugar and this audience – a huge audience, half a million Cubans - are dancing and singing along. They're ecstatic. Now, that couldn't happen if Mick Jagger stood at a microphone and recited the words. It just wouldn't happen, right? In fact, you might even listen to those words or read them on a page and think well that’s...

14:49 Nick: Quite bland...

14:50 Paul: Yeah, right. So, music is key and I think that when somebody listens to a poem, even if there isn't actual music - if it has musical characteristics, if it has a metrical pattern of an appropriate kind and rhyming language or assonance in it, those elements themselves musically affect the brain.

15:09 So, the answer to your question in short is that poetry is a human proclivity to be very expressive in language and try and communicate musically and meaningfully and not just informationally, and it’s heightened language.

15:25 Nick: Why has it been essential to human evolution? We think about hundreds of thousands of years ago in our development. What was it about music that preceded language and is so deeply rooted in our selves and our sense of connection with others but also the interior connection with ourselves or, dare I say it, a higher being or a higher reality?

15:45 Paul: Yes, that's a profound question. Claude Levi-Strauss, an anthropologist, remarked about sixty years ago, "Music is the supreme mystery of humanity." He was trying to figure out where did music come from because it's so pervasive and so integral to our way of being that we can forget that it is. We breathe like fish swim. We don't think about why do we do that?

16:09 There is an argument. Gary Tomlinson in a very recent book called A Million Years of Music - and he's a theorist of opera - advances this fascinating argument that music as such, that is the sense of rhythm and rhythmic motion, is older than language. So, when it gets us moving, when the crowd in Havana as I mentioned a moment ago start dancing, something quite profound and intrinsic to our humanity is taking place.

16:39 Poetry it seems to me is the interface between that very deep relatedness to rhythm and to the emotions that music can literally tap into and articulate speech. Therefore, if it's done properly, if it's done consciously, it can be really quite profound.

17:00 Nick: Do you have an example where that's done particularly well?

17:03 Paul: Yeah, there's a famous poem of Wordsworth which he wrote when he was still very young in 1798 called Lines Written a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. He was walking into Wales with his sister, Dorothy, and he'd been there before some years ago, five years before. He was so moved standing, looking down at Tintern Abbey and its surrounds that he wrote this poem almost on the spot.

17:28 Anyway, it's opening lines read as follows:

Five years have passed, five summers with the length

Of five long winters and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain springs

With a sweet inland murmur – Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs

Which on a wild, secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky

17:52 That's Wordsworth more than 200 years ago, and I think if you talk with people who know their poetry, in particular English Romantic poetry, that poem about Tintern Abbey is one of the better-known ones.

18:06 It's evocative, not only of landscape but of the experience of landscape and the sense of nature and of personal being that it evoked for Wordsworth. So, it's a rather nice example of what poetry actually is.

18:23 If we move from Wordsworth specifically to the more general question of what poetry is, I think we could probably say three specific things. The first is that the mode of expression in poetry is meditative. It's rhythmic or as I said, a more or less musical use of language.

18:42 The second is that as we see in that fragment from Wordsworth, there is reflectiveness as distinct from reactiveness, so it's not just as it were an emotional exclamation or shout or something. It's the articulation, the putting into words of something that's otherwise inchoate but moving. In other words, it's an exercise you might say in extracting meaning and not only having sensations or impressions.

19:12 The third is that as we can see in Wordsworth's case because he opens with this very statement, there's a sense of time giving depth of meaning to what is seen and to being in the world.

19:25 One very famous exercise in that which is not normally regarded as poetry but which is highly poetic in the sense that I've been describing it in Marcel Proust's vast novel a hundred years ago In Search of Lost Time. The language he uses is exquisite and again and again, what he's doing is looking back on his childhood or his earlier life and remembering things that occurred and finding all sorts of meanings in it, precisely because he's looking back. It's not that he's recalling all those meanings from that moment. He's able to recall the meanings looking back - a) because he's had so much more experience, and b) because recalling it in the context of time makes it more poignant.

20:11 Nick: Just when we think back to you now writing poetry 40 or 50 years ago since your own childhood and the way that you're able to relive or reexperience those childhood memories which were they not given expression in the fullness of your language and poetic structure would be lost, but is that what's at work here as well? You can actually sort of come to relive and reexperience and feel again things that were lost to time?

20:37 Paul: Very much.

20:37 Nick: In Search of Lost Time and Proust, right?

20:38 Paul: Yes, precisely so. I mean, you're absolutely right. Take that little exercise with Marco Polo. It was a personal experience I had. Nobody but me had that precise experience. If it's not distilled into a form of words that has some structured characteristics, then it just disappears. It's gone.

20:59 Once it's put in that form of words, not only does it capture my experience but it's available to others who could then read that poem as they read say Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey poem and relate to the kind of thing that it's saying as well as being pleased one would like to think by the form in which it's stated.

21:17 Nick: But there are gradations of experience, right? I mean, one might have 80% of the experience of Wordsworth or Paul Monk or Mick Jagger's poetry but there's a sense of fully inhabiting a poem and its import, its meaning, which you can only fully experience having written the poem. Is that also your experience from being a reader to a creator of poetry?

21:39 Paul: There is that sense and certainly if you've written a poem that does capture well and express well an experience you've had, there can be a great deal of satisfaction I have found in going back to it and saying, "Wow, that gives form and structure and endurance to something that was otherwise ephemeral or inchoate."

22:00 But there's an important adjunct to this which is that other people, while they cannot - no matter how well you've written a poem - they cannot recapture your personal experience. What they can do however is first of all get some sense of your personal experience and sometimes it's a very fine expression of it, but above all it sharpens their own perceptions of what a poem is, of what that kind of experience is and they will carry away an interpretation of your poem in the same way that you have carried away the experience of the original incident, right? That's what meaning is all about. It's very subtle and enlivening.

22:38 Nick: Can you give us another example of the interconnectedness of this tradition, of this exchange across centuries and millennia?

22:44 Paul: Yes. There's a poem I wrote called How to Use Our Tongues which is in fact an exploration of the poetic tradition. What have we inherited? How did the capacity to write poetry develop?

22:59 This draws on a passage in Homer's very famous epic, The Odyssey, and ends up suggesting that not only can you appreciate his poem but through reading this particular passage in it, you can use it as a metaphor to understand what poetry as such actually is.

23:19 So, it goes like this:

XVII: How to use our tongues

There is a passage in the Odyssey

In which the beauties of Icmalius’ chair

Are brought before our eyes;

Almost so that we, in wonderment,

Like it’s fabled footrest,

Find ourselves mortised in the frame,

Draped with a heavy fleece

And listening, as Penelope

Instructs her house help, Eurynome,

To seat the guest for story.

Imagine that fine Icmalian craft

And conjure, in your mind, the scene in which

Penelope, in her own voice declares

‘I wish our guest to tell his story whole

And patiently to hear me out, as well,

As I’ll be full of questions, point by point.

I want him, seated in our polished chair,

To tell me of his travels, in good time.

For this stranger, who has come into our halls,

May know somewhat of Odysseus himself.’

All poetry is such an Icmalian chair:

Its music mortised into practiced frames;

Mellifluous rhyme and artful assonance

Cast over it, like Homer’s softened fleece.

Through aeons, both these crafts have been refined,

Since earlier than Gilgamesh or Ur

And they have fitly shaped the conversation,

From Pindar’s odes to Martial’s epigrams,

Of all that we call prosody or verse -

And taught us better how to use our tongues.

24:36 So, notice how in that poem I draw upon the rich tradition of other western poetry and how poetry itself has developed and how it works and how to do so, how to generate it in a poetic manner.

24:50 This is available in principle to us all but gaining access to this skill requires education which is to say being led into it from one or another of the Latin verb's educate, to lead or bring up, rear, raise or bring away. I think this goes to the heart of what we mean by culture or higher education or good education.

25:15 Nick: I'd like to come back to your own formative process in an educational and cultural sense but before we get there, I think it's worth thinking about some modern forms of poetry or post structuralist or perhaps post-modern poetry which struggles to I think satisfy a few of the criteria that you set up for poetry. Could you maybe reflect on the state of modern poetry and I guess how we sort of broaden the definition to include things which seem to be totally unstructured.

25:40 Paul: There's no question that in the 20th century particularly, in most fields of creative endeavour - poetry being only one, it's happened in music, it's happened in plastic and graphic art - there has been a breakage with traditions, with formalism.

25:56 Nick: An entropic sort of deterioration or decline, isn't it?

26:00 Paul: Well, that's the way it seems. I mean, people - others have insisted that it's breaking free and it's immensely creative and it's progressive and so forth. That's a debate one might have all on its own, but one way to put it without being excessively judgemental let's say is to liken what's been done in a lot of 20th century poetry or let's say modern poetry/modernist poetry, to let's say jazz.

26:32 I mean, when the saxophone was invented, when jazz started to be composed for that or other instruments, there were many people whose habituation was to classical music or romantic music who were horrified. They were, "This is not music, this is nonsense. This is anarchic."

26:48 Well, it was anarchic. Whether it was nonsense is another matter and many of us now think that jazz is a very fine mode of music and it's a very playful mode of music. So, it darts all over a melody, it lifts it up and raises it and varies it and so on.

27:02 So, in the best cases, a lot of let's call it post melodic poetry is doing with words, doing with the very idea of metre or meaning, things that are somewhat anarchic.

27:17 Nick: And sometimes it's absent of metre and rhyme and everything.

27:20 Paul: Exactly so, but if it's any good at all, it never the less impinges on our minds, our imaginations with its sharp use of language, with its very angularity, with violating expectations, with very colourful use or even novel uses....

27:40 Nick: Typographical arrangements and things...

27:41 Paul: Yeah, all sorts of things. I haven't myself written for the most part that kind of poetry and I have two feelings about that which are at loggerheads with one another. One is I don't really want to do that. I want to write something that's more intelligible and immediately accessible, and I want - because I do a lot of analytical work, I'm chary about writing stuff that's too hermetic or opaque because I think maybe it's just nonsense, maybe it doesn't mean anything at all. On the other hand...

28:11 Nick: Solipsistic and...

28:13 Paul: Yes, but there's another part of me of course which says well, let's be a bit more broad minded and experiment. Let's try out other things and see whether they work. So, there is in the body of work I'm preparing at the moment quite significant variation in rhyme, metre, rhythm, assonance, stanza length and construction. Not so far at least in what might be regarded as really radical and certainly not completely hermetic forms but certainly very experimental.

28:46 Nick: What springs to my mind is the relationship between form and structure and meaning and whether were you writing in the style of sort of post melodic form or formless poetry writing that's I suppose conventional now, you would be able to achieve the same levels of meaning as you have done so by replicating Shakespearian sonnets or Petrarchan sonnets or experimenting with sort of quite structured rhyme and metre forms from centuries and millennial ago. Even Sapphic Odes and things that I've seen you write as well. So, do you want to reflect on the relationship between form and meaning?

29:24 Paul: Yes. I think the first thing to say is that if you discard those forms of rhyme and metre or rhythm, you can lose the ear of the recipient because they can't follow the soundwaves. They can't absorb just the beauty of the use of language. They have to focus in on the meaning of specific words and they have to grope or search for what's really being said here.

29:53 I confess that in reading a number of 20th century poets, literate though I clearly am and attuned to what poetry is and what it's for, I often struggle to figure out what is this poet trying to communicate. That gives me pause and a friend said to me recently - and he's an intelligent man though he's not a poet but he said to me with regard to a particular poet whose work I had said I had difficulty understanding - he said, "Well, mate, if you can't figure it out, who can?"

30:25 But of course what modern music also did - you know atonal music and so on - is quite deliberately moving in that direction in order to challenge people to think and not just be more passive or conservative. Whether it's achieved that, whether that is a desirable way to go is a debate that's well worth having.

30:45 Nick: One thing I find fascinating about your poetry is it sort of stands outside of that linear progression of poetic forms across human civilisation. So, you know, it's one thing for poets of the 21st century in Melbourne, Australia, to sort of reflect the spirit of their times through the different modes and formal structures they apply or do not apply in their poetry. We can all agree it's kind of similar in the way they're going about it or you think about like Langston Hughes' poetry was very much a product of its time in its sort of shape and rhythm and feel, but yours is sort of somehow really quite interesting in that it sort of stands outside of all that and is sort of playful with different structures and ways of creating meaning which could go back millennia which I find interesting, but I always wondered why yours hasn't sort of, you know, become part of...

31:31 Paul: ... part of the flow. I would say the short answer to that is because I didn't grow up as part of an artistic movement. I didn't publish poems as a young person in journals. I had never been part of a literary clique that wanted to be fashionable. I have only come to poetry as an avocation outside of my analytical and historical work because I wanted to give expression to what I was experiencing. I wasn't trying to meet a fashionable criterion.

32:08 You know, when I wrote the Sonnets for example, I was fully conscious that really nobody writes sonnets anymore in Shakespearian mode, and I write in a preface to my book Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty why therefore did I write sonnets? Well, I wrote them to please myself. I wanted to see what it would be like to write sonnets in the manner that Shakespeare had, albeit with a contemporary vocabulary, and demonstrate to myself as much as anything that I could move around freely in the western cannon in terms of myth and poetic style.

32:37 I did that, and what other people make of it is a secondary consideration. To some extent now, what I'm doing is very much self-expression. It is a much wider range of that expression and of subject matter and I'm finding that a growing number of people are saying, "I really like what you're writing."

32:59 Nick: Yeah, and the primary motivator or inspiration behind your poetry as you mentioned is your wife, Claudia.

33:05 Paul: Yes, she is. This is something that arose over a period of time because she arrived in my life fortuitously 15 years ago and right from the get go, she was fascinated by what I did and the breadth of my reading.

33:24 Unlike any other woman that I had known, many of whom I had written poems for, she said to me, "You are a writer and a poet. That's what you should be. Don't just treat it as a sort of eccentric thing you do on the side or privately. Fulfil yourself, do it."

33:42 This was crystallised one day when I emerged from the office because I was working as a consultant. We met after work and I came out of the office with a suit and tie on and carrying a briefcase and she said to me as if it was with surprise, "You look like a businessman." I said, "Well, I am a businessman," and she said, "No, you’re a writer and a poet."

34:03 What's actually happened in the 10 or 12 years since then, more than that now actually, is that I've gradually come to identify myself as precisely that, as a writer and a poet. I've said to her recently she is the perfect muse because she not only sees in me what I have longed to be and have now in an important sense become, but she has encouraged it, cultivated it, challenged it. We've travelled together. We read things together. We talk about everything and so it's a fantastic partnership in that sense.

34:41 I'd like to share a poem with you that is called The Pact We Formed and it's a pact that I formed with Claudia who I should point out for your listeners - this will surprise a lot of people - lives in Venezuela. She lives on the other side of the world. We haven't cohabited now for more than a decade but we've grown closer, and that's a whole story in itself which you aren't going to hear but as a result of living apart, we've had to work very hard at what keeps us together and we have discovered that there are profound things that keep us together.

35:14 Three years ago, I went and visited her in Venezuela and then flew on from Venezuela to Brazil. When I landed in Rio, I had an experience that took me back six years to when she and I had been in Buenos Aires and this poem gives expression to that, and it means directly even in terms of language with Tintern Abbey, with the Wordsworth poem, because he begins five years ago and I begin this poem six years ago. Not to echo Wordsworth, it just so happens that we're having similar experiences and we're looking back in time as a reference point.

35:48 So, the poem goes as follows:

XXXVIII: The pact we’ve formed

Six years ago, in Kirchner’s Buenos Aires,

You turned to me and said, in a quiet tone,

‘Look carefully at all you see around,

Since this, as cities go, in all the Cone,

Is the finest and the grandest that you’ll see.

It’s all downhill in quality from here.’

But how, in saying such a scathing thing,

Could you have failed to take into account

Great Rio, with its beach and circling hills?

For, once one’s breathed the air of Ipanema

And heard Brazilian music in the streets,

I have to say, one takes a different view.

I drove in from Jobim by private cab

And revelled in the pulsing sense of place.

Confessing to imprisonment in English,

I told my man, in halting Spanish phrases,

That all the world finds Rio fascinating;

As much, in truth, as any city known.

He answered me in swishing Portuguese,

With warmth that showed he’d plainly understood

The root and sense of all I’d tried to say.

He pointed, then, to Corcovado Hill,

Upon which stands the giant, sculptured form

Of Cristo the Redeemer, as he’s called.

But it was not the sculpted, looming Christ

That made me feel redeemed on Rio’s strand.

It was, instead, Atlantic Avenue:

The beauteous sweep of Copacabana Beach;

It’s contrast with the grimness of Caracas –

And the pact we’ve formed for bravely thinking big.

37:09 Nick: It's very beautiful. I think it's rendered with more meaning, having heard the relationship that you and Claudia have had over the last 15 years or so, but when you mentioned that she was the one who said, you know, you were a writer and a poet and the way that actually gave you licence to subsequently go and create and I suppose become who you really are, it did immediately recall in my mind the Greek aphorism of Gnothi Seauton, ‘become who you are.’

37:43 I think it’s quite profound thinking back to the image of Claudia almost sort of uttering an incantation that you are a writer and a poet. It brought this into being and it made me think of the phrase which we have used before about living poetically, living one's life with a sense of heightened meaning and purpose but also sort of with the sense of now looking back on you and Claudia as almost characters in the story you both shared and that that you've independently but now you’re entwined in sort of a poem or a song together. Do you want to sort of reflect on those sentiments?

38:14 Paul: Yes, you've put it very well and in fact, Claudia has a gift for that kind of insight and challenging formulation. There was another occasion in which she said to me many years ago, "Do you realise that we are living a story that has not yet been written?"

38:32 She used to urge me to write stories and she still urges me to write our story and in a sense with the poems I'm doing that, at least in part, but the precise question you're asking is if you're living poetically, how does that occur? What does that mean?

38:51 Nick: But also looking at living as writing, right?

38:54 Paul: Yes, that's - well, if we're language beings and literate beings, there ought to be some kind of strong and positive correlation/relationship between language, writing and being, the way we live, but for many people those things become adrift. So, it's notorious that many people in terms of their everyday communication and in terms of their supposedly intimate relationships ended up stuck in banalities, right? They don't communicate in any depth; they don't have real intimacy.

39:25 Nick: When we think about social media and digital communications as sort of being circumscribing mediums by which we can communicate as well...

39:31 Paul: Well, that seems to me to aggravate the problem more than...

39:34 Nick: Yes, indeed.

39:34 Paul: But it's a very old human problem and the way I think about living poetically is that you live your story, so there's authenticity in this. It's not affectation. Certainly, one can write poetry in an affected manner and there are many people I think who have a view that poetry is artificial, that it's pretence, that it's fantasy, that it doesn't have any strong relationship with reality.

40:02 There are occasions where that well may be true and if people live their lives in a certain way that's not very poetic then they make it true, but suppose instead you live your life inside story and you're creating a story authentically with depth of meaning and you're giving expression to that story in your poetry, then I would say that's the real deal and that, I don't blush to say, is what I've been able to get to, and I recommend it to others. It's not easy. It's not a little game, right? It is real and it's challenging.

40:39 Nick: Do you mean to say that being able to write, think and feel poetry has heightened your everyday experience and also heightened your feeling of being in the world phenomenologically since childhood to adolescence to early adulthood and now maturity as well?

40:55 Paul: Yes. It means two things. One, as we said earlier, I have come to the point now where I can give articulate expression to things that previous I couldn't. You know, I would experience them but I couldn't give it articulate or poetic expression. Now, even looking back 50 or 60 years, I'm doing that.

41:11 But more importantly in a way, what I now find is that I can have an experience, I can have an encounter with somebody, I can reflect on an object - even a simple household object - and poetry just arises because I'm experiencing it as you say phenomenologically and so much more meaning comes alive for me than it does for people who for instance think of any given object around them, if they think about it all it's just an object.

41:39 Nick: A humble podcast microphone for instance.

41:41 Paul: Yeah. I mean, the way I think about objects, whether it be a podcast microphone or a teacup or whatever... [sirens in the distance]

41:47 Nick: This is thoroughly unpoetic. It's a horrible...

41:51 Paul: Well, you see there are assumptions built into saying that it's horribly unpoetic but think about it this way. Using your expression, phenomenologically, any given object we encounter - and a microphone is a perfectly good example - is phenomenal. It is an awesome thing when you stop and contemplate what brought this into being? Why is it possible? How is it possible to do what we're doing and recording something with considerable fidelity and considerable autonomy? This was not possible a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago. It wasn't possible in the ancient world, right? The technologies that we dispose of now when used intelligently, when appreciated sensitively are extraordinary.

42:32 Nick: It actually is extraordinary, isn't it, because it was a conversation we were having in your living room here in a beautiful corner of Melbourne which will be beamed out into the world and connect with other people who will be listening to this podcast and intellection and perhaps find some gradation of, understanding and resonance themselves.

42:51 Paul: I mean, that's the technological projection. That's what it's capable of doing, but when we talk about poetry here, I'm saying the meaning inherent in that object, its mere existence is a source for wonder. If we just stop and reflect for a moment, instead of taking it so entirely for granted that it's just some dull thing, right?

43:10 Experiencing life that way means when you encounter as for example we all do in Melbourne - you encounter someone who is a beggar, whose life has fallen apart for whatever reason. You could walk past them. You could have some stock standard or banal attitude towards beggars, or you can pause and reflect on what this signifies - this person, what background they've come from, how striking it is that there's such a contrast between their life and yours, to start imagining how might it be possible even in principle to resurrect that life, to do something for that person and what would it be and so on.

43:51 So, at every point in your life, whether you're eating, encountering people, using everyday objects or reading literature, this awakened sense of significance, meaning, perspective is what it means to live poetically. Then, giving expression to that by capturing your experience in articulate speech enables other people to share in those perceptions and perhaps to acquire through that sharing the very idea of doing that themselves and how you might experience life that way.

44:26 Nick: We've just been talking about living poetically and how you feel that you are now at this stage of your life able to do so. Have you given effect to this feeling or sensation in any poetry?

44:37 Paul: Yeah, I have and it won't surprise you if I say that the poems I've written along those lines have been very recent ones because it's only been in the last two years that I've reached this point of thinking I've arrived, I feel as though I am living poetically.

44:53 One of the poems I wrote only in the last six months or so is called Robert Graves on Majorca. Some of at least of your listeners will know that Robert Graves calls himself a poet and a novelist and a writer and a poet, as it were. He died in 1985 and he was very old when he died. He was one of the famous great war poets. You know, he emerged from the first world war and his initial poetry – mostly - was about that.

45:24 Then, he couldn't bring himself to stay in England, live in England. He wanted to be a writer of a distinctly kind of - he left England and went to the island of Majorca in the Mediterranean, and he spent most of the rest of his life living in Majorca with his muse, a woman called Laura Riding. He wrote most of his poetry and books about the nature of poetry and his famous novels like Claudius, Belisarius and so on, there in Majorca.

45:51 I wrote a poem called Robert Graves in Majorca because I was thinking and had thought for many years, "Gee, I'd like to be like Robert Graves. I'd like to go to a place like Majorca and just write poetry and write novels."

46:05 As you'll see or your listeners will hear in this poem, I reflect on that and then come to the realisation in the poem and at the end of the poem that actually, I don't need to go to Majorca because right here, right now is my Majorca; I’m doing this, right?

46:21 It was really nice to see that emerge in the poem because again I didn't mechanically conceive of that and then just sort of hack it out. I started writing about Graves in Majorca and then I realised as I wrote the poem where this was taking me.

46:34 It goes as follows:

XXIV: Robert Graves on Mallorca

Poetry is housed at Canallun, so Graves decreed -

Once at that faraway home, to which he’d fled

From the scars of war - and domesticity -

With a new muse and a fugitive longing:

To write in devotion, to sing history.

Deia, where he lived, sounds so like goddess;

And there, we know, he wrote his paean to her:

The White Goddess of his fond imagination -

The Moon, the Muse of ancient times;

To whom he could or would not say goodbye.

His grasp of myth was imprecise,

His arguments quite whimsical;

Yet here he walked, each morning,

Through the hills, down to the sea,

Read The Times and wrote prolifically.

Here, he later wrote, was such tranquillity

And that was why he made Mallorca home:

The sun, the sea, the hills and olive trees,

Sans politics and superfluous luxuries,

Gave him grace for memoir, myth and verse

I’ve longed for years for some such Canallun;

A writer’s refuge lived in with my muse -

A hamlet with a better Laura Riding -

But could I find it, would you choose

To dwell with me in hiding?

I first read Graves’s verse when I was young:

‘Love without hope’, ‘Lost love’, ‘One hard look’;

But now the notion tingles on my tongue

That these soft songs, the poems in this book,

Are our abode - our living Canallun.

48:04 So, notice that the poem draws upon not only the refined resources of languages but on the poetic past in the form of life and poetry of Robert Graves, imagined geography and personal memories of love and loss, ideally with poetic feeling but not least how as it concludes, it finds a surprising insight. One not anticipated at the beginning of the poem. Not obvious, but itself made in the process of rendering the reflection poetic; that one may long to be Graves or be on Majorca, but one's own poems such as this present one - are one's own Majorca, and one is a poet now.

48:43 Nick: I think that brings the arc of our conversation today, Paul, to a natural end but before we do wrap up today, I just wanted to ask a question not so much about poetry but literature and its status or I suppose utility as a human art form which enables knowledge of the self, of others across time and this has been reflected throughout a lot of your readings today, in paralleling your life to Graves or Wordsworth and so on or even Homer for instance, but its ability to kind of allow us to understand humanity and the human condition across the centuries and millennia.

49:25 So, the quote I'm going to read today to sort of kick off your subsequent reflections hopefully is one from one of my favourite books. It's Michel Houellebecq’s Submission which I reference a little bit too much around you, I think.

49:38 It goes as follows: "The special thing about literature, the major artform of a western civilisation now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy. Like literature, painting has the power to astonish and to make you see the world through fresh eyes but only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit as a whole, with all its witnesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettiness’s, its obsessions, its beliefs.

50:09 With whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant, only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave; a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you'd have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know."

50:31 So, what do you make of that? Does that sort of have resonance in you and your attitude toward literature?

50:38 Paul: It absolutely does and in three ways that I'd specify. The first is that I've always been a reader of literature and history. I was a precocious reader as a child and I completely relate to this idea of gaining access through the written word, a quality written word, to a world of reality and imagination that's otherwise just not there.

51:01 The second level which I relate to is that there have been particular works of literature which expanded my imagination way beyond what straightforward factual studies or discipline studies have done.

51:17 I feel as though I've said this a couple of times in interviews with you and I probably, if people are observing, say it a little too often but that's only to show how significant it actually was, and that is that when I was a very young boy, our fifth grade teacher read us a number of children's stories. I said to her in recent years that those stories made an indelible impression but above all, The Lord of the Rings which she read to the class, it just made a huge impression on my imagination as a child.

51:49 I should emphasise by way of closing out that second point that, that impact on my imagination was not such that it took me off into a fantasy world. I've not actually read a lot of fantasy literature. Rather, what the Lord of the Rings opened up to me was the very idea of a whole world, his imaginary and in miniature.

52:11 I thought to myself when I was still very young what would it be like if you had that kind of integrated, diachronic understanding, the understanding across time and history and meaning of the real world. I've spent my life trying to acquire that one and understanding.

52:27 The third and perhaps most important point is this and it's one that I would say I derive principally from reading the works of George Steiner many years ago. If we think of language as the way - I have some friends who are analytical philosophers, who do think of it this way - as a medium that is supposed to communicate simply straightforward, transparent, logical information, we thoroughly misunderstand what language is all about, to say nothing of literature.

52:55 As Stier used to argue, the whole point of language, the way it in fact works for human beings and what gives it its magic and its great power is that it defines our identity and our experience over, against and around and past and beyond objects. It isn't just about communicating truth or facts. It's about generating meaning and interpretation and alternative possibilities. That's what literature does if it's any good at all. That's what poetry does if it's any good at all.

53:23 So, metaphor and simile and the language of futurity and possibility, you know, the conjunctives mood - sorry, not the conjunctive; the subjunctive mood, octative mood. You know, the very idea of dream, of imagination is crucial to our capacity to set ourselves free, even in dire circumstances, by remembering and imagining and projecting and countering, alright? That's to live poetically if you can do that and if you can share it powerfully with others.

53:57 Nick: Thank you very much for your time today, Paul.

53:58 Paul: You're most welcome. It's always a pleasure.

On Sex, Love, and Poetry

Originally hosted and recorded by Nick Fabbri

Melbourne, 13 August 2018

Interview with Dr Paul Monk

Melbourne
Saturday September 1, 2018
 

00:00 [Music - Angie, Rolling Stones]

00:30 That was the legendary Mick Jagger singing his wistful song, Angie, about a love that had slipped away. I've been fascinated about the elusive and profound nature of love ever since I read The Road Less Travelled by American psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, when I was a teenager. It's a stunning and mature work which, among other things, makes the distinction between sexual desire and romantic love.

00:55 I decided to interview my friend, Paul Monk, about this topic because aside from being a poet who has written a lot about love and infatuation, his own life has been a kind of road less travelled.

01:05 Nick: So, Paul, if you were to sum up love, you know, in a succinct manner, how would you do so?

01:08 Paul: Well, you know, as a poet I could - perhaps later I will - wax lyrical about that but it seems to me that there is a folk wisdom about this and I would be inclined to distil it into two quite simple maxims. They're not sentimental ones.

01:17 The first is that love will make a fool of you, but life is bleak without it. I think each in our own way we do experience the truth of this and it goes back a long time.

01:23 The second is that there is no remedy for mortality. We age, we die and that's in the best case, and the losses that are entailed in aging and dying are poignant. The things that are most poignant are the loss of the things and the people that we love.

01:42 Between those two maxims it seems to me one might claim to have summed up the importance of love to human beings and the depth of feelings that it stirs so that would be my summary, if you like.

01:50 Nick: Do you feel as though you’re able to articulate those two maxims as succinctly and eruditely as you have done so just now, having lived a lifetime in which you have experienced love and romance and intimacy and desire, and all various facets of human intimacy as opposed to when you were maybe 18 and sort of just setting out on life...

02:15 Paul: Absolutely. I mean, look, I would say - and I speak from personal experience in this - when you're 18/19/20, even well into your twenties, and people offer you stuff from wisdom literature or in many cases lines from poetry or offer you advice, it can sound cliched and weary and not very interesting because you are just - your hormones are raging, and you want love, you want passion, right? Everything in your being is screaming out for it.

02:49 After you've lived a few decades and lived and loved, you begin to understand why there is poetry and what is the difference between wisdom and superficiality and, you know to perhaps quote something that's overquoted, it was I believe John Lennon who said, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans," and that's absolutely been true in my case.

03:07 I had many plans and most of them came unglued. I had many loves and most of them came unglued and along the way I kept learning, and that's why such maxims now mean a great deal to me. They're not empty.

03:19 Nick: Yeah, something sort of comes through in those maxims but also in our various conversations is this - and the reference to the M. Scott Peck's work as well - is this dichotomy or definitional difference between love and sexuality or love and infatuation. Scott Peck famously refers to it as ‘the illusion of falling in love’. If you could set up the difference between love and desire, I mean, how would you do so?

03:49 Paul: Well, I think we need to think or let me put it more generously, we can think for the sake of clarity about this subject in terms of a kind of pyramid with three steps. The first is the biological world. Sexuality is biological. It's absolutely fundamental and the whole animal and plant kingdom is full of sexuality. Every spring, there's blooms to life and animals getting into the mating season.

04:10 The second level is the distinctively human. What is it that makes us any different from any other animal when it comes to attraction, to display, to courtship, to mating, the reproduction?

04:19 The third beyond those basic human characteristics is what is it that is possible for human beings, what heights can we rise to in the kind of love we can experience and give to others? And we might perhaps make progress by addressing those three steps, one after another.

04:35 Nick: So, if we were to begin with the biological - you referenced spring. It is the first day of Spring today in Melbourne though you wouldn't know it by the freezing cold temperatures outside. 

04:42 Paul: It's a Melbourne Spring, after all.

04:43 Nick: It is a Melbourne Spring indeed. It keeps you on your toes but if you were to give a lot of biological basis for sexuality and thereafter love and intimacy, how would you do so?

04:54 Paul: Well, if you look at the poetry, the song, literature of virtually every human culture on earth, one thing that springs to the eye straight away or the ear if you will is that sexuality constantly draws on metaphors from the natural world - of spring growth, of the winter of lost love, of the beauty of flowers and trees, of the magnificence of animals and their courtship rituals, of the beauty of various kinds of animals and their display, and human beings themselves of course give flowers in romance and dress themselves in finery and they display and they compete. So, this is age old.

05:50 What we've discovered in the last 150 years or so is the whole science of biological evolution which has thrown a lot of light on what's going on in the plant and animal world, on the nature of sexuality and has given us access if we take the trouble to inquire to a better understanding of the nature of sexuality and the traps it actually sets for the unweary because the whole thing about attraction, desire, the compulsion to sexuality and the consequences that flow from that is something we experience by trial and error in every generation and it's only by learning - hopefully before we've made fatal mistakes - that we can rise to a higher level and gain ourselves freedom and dignity. That's what the human thing is all about.

06:31 Nick: Sexuality and the compulsion towards romance and mateship and courtship is nothing more than, I guess, a function of life reproducing itself. Is that kind of what you're referring to?

06:40 Paul: At the most fundamental level, absolutely and unequivocally. And let's not consider that that's selling it short. You know, Nick Lane in a recent book called Life Ascending points out that there are two basic kinds of biological cell in the world. The prokaryotic cell which reproduces itself by cloning - bacteria do this - and the eukaryotic cell which reproduces by swapping genetic information and this is the foundation of sex. What we’re doing in sexual relations is swapping genetic material...

07:15 Nick: … eukariotically.

07:17 Paul: … eukariotically. and all animal life and plant life on the planet is essentially eukariotic so the profusion of colour, of display, of song - birdsong, etc., all the repertoire of human courtship and romantic behaviour...

07:34 Nick: All the beauty we see in the world really, isn't it?

07:35 Paul: Absolutely and, you know, Lane put this very well when he said sex makes the difference between a silent and introspective planet full of dour self-replicating things and the explosion of pleasure and glory all around us, alright?

07:48 Nick: That is amazing.

07:49 Paul: That is the biological reality.

07:49 Nick: That is incredible.

07:51 Paul: … and if we fail to understand that, not only do we not understand the natural world and other creatures, we fundamentally fail to understand ourselves.

08:01 Nick: So, if we were dour self-replicating beings, what's the point of it all? This seems like so much of our telos - our purpose in life seems to be partnership and romance and courtship and that kind of maybe sometimes get misconstrued with the, you know, sort of the external manifestations of love and romance and desire, right, rather than I guess the ultimate nuts and bolts of it, if you will, of actual reproduction.

08:34 Paul: Well, notoriously...

08:34 Nick: In a universe in which all we had to do was reproduce which we've acknowledged is the point of sex and attraction and whatever, why do I need all this fanfare?

08:42 Paul: … because otherwise we wouldn't bother. We have to be tricked into it. I mean, I'm perfectly serious. When you look at other living creatures, leaving aside human pretentions and illusions, our living creatures do these things, right?

08:56 … and they do it seasonally and males compete brutally and often, you know, for female favours. There are variations on the theme but one or other gender tends to engage in a great deal of display in terms of colour and physical beauty or dance or song and all sorts of things to attract a mate, alright? This is about reproduction, alright?

09:12 There's a wonderful book by Richard Prum which was published only a couple of years ago called The Evolution of Beauty and his argument is that we have neglected the role of beauty in mate selection and therefore in evolution to our cost, in terms of understanding ourselves and life on the planet.

09:29 … and I think if we do understand this, not only can we take these things more seriously, but we can also gain a certain amount of freedom from our own compulsive behaviours, right? We need to rise above the automatic to generate what's distinctively human which is a free and creative approach to the whole issue of desire, attraction...

09:58 Nick: … impulse.

09:58 Paul: … courtship, impulse exactly. So, not only in moral terms, but in poetic terms. In terms of making something of our lives that's distinctive and free and dignified and this is where the philosophy as well as the morality of sexuality kicks in and ultimately - and in my view at the pinnacle - where poetic creativity enters the picture.

10:27 Nick: That's all fascinating and I will touch on in the interview the nature of human love and what it means to be human and participating in this exchange but, you know, it's remarkable to thing that there are prokaryotic cells in the world which sort of fulfil the same function without all the circuitous and often painful and, you know, difficult...

10:50 Paul: … and very time consuming.

10:51 Nick: Yeah, and process of mating and falling in love or reproducing. So, I don't know, it's almost existential, like why are we eukaryotic and not prokaryotic? It's extraordinary and why is it that the eukaryotic cells seems to have attained a state of sort of primacy on planet Earth?

11:08 Paul: Well, there are two ways to answer that question. The first is that eukaryotic cellular structure and behaviour makes things possible that have never been achieved by prokaryotic cells and from any aesthetic point of view, if you were as it were, a godlike being looking at the planet, the emergence of eukaryotic cells and complex lifeforms is far more interesting than anything that happened before, alright?

11:30 … and if you're a human being and you take an interest in the natural world, you would surely reach the same conclusion.

11:34 On the other hand, from a prokaryotic point of view, all of this is in one sense a departure from the norm because for about two and a half billion years, the whole of life on earth consisted...

11:49 Nick: … prokaryotic.

11:50 Paul: … of prokaryotic cells, alright, and they had the planet to themselves.

11:54 Nick: Dour and grim and efficient.

11:58 Paul: Well, from our point of view but from their point of view, that's life, alright? 

12:03 Nick: … but why life? Yeah, go on. Let's not answer that.

12:06 Paul: Well, you might - of course, without digressing at too great length here, you might still ask as people do, okay so we're human and we have all these impulses and we do all of this stuff but what's the point? What is the meaning of life?

12:15 Nick: So it’s like telos before, what is the meaning essentially?

12:18 Paul: Well, now that's a whole big subject.

12:19 Nick: Another podcast.

12:20 Paul: It's one that philosophers and poets in their own way attempt to answer and at the very least, in the case of poetry, attempt to give a liveable answer here and now to that question.

12:30 … but to cap off an answer to your question about prokaryotic and eukaryotic - as you know at least but your listeners won't - one of my early poems is called Wekaryotes and it makes precisely this distinction and without reciting the whole poem, it opens by saying How would life be? Would it still be erotic had it made you only simply prokaryotic? 

12:55 Nick: This is an interesting point to jump off into the nature of human love rather than biological or material, functional love. What, if anything, distinguishes human love from everything else we see around us in the world, not just prokaryotic exchange but, you know, the love and the courtship rituals of lions for instance or ants or bees or whatever it might be? You know, when we speak about human love, do we mean anything beyond that in a different form?

13:26 Paul: Well, this is where we have to make a couple of distinctions. So, one way to answer your question is to say on the whole there isn't any very great distinction. If you look at the way birds or dolphins or whales or monkeys and others court one another, you can go into the insect world, there are countless variations on the theme. They differ in detail but fundamentally the same thing is happening. That is, on an intraspecies basis, male courts female or vice versa and they reproduce, and another generation grows and that's extraordinary as a phenomenon and then they grow up and they do the same thing all over again and it's been happening for millions and millions and millions of years.

14:01 Our species has been doing it for, well it's now estimated in the case of our particular species perhaps 300,000 years but our stories are almost entirely confined to the last few thousand because it's only then that we've had writing, but I would say this. 

14:19 At one level, generically speaking, there's no difference. We're just like other creatures in our own way but there is a sense in which what's different about human beings is that what's possible for human beings, not what happens automatically....

14:36 Nick: It's something you have to work at, it's not an impulse.

14:38 Paul: It has to be culturally and even personally generated in order to rise above the completely automatic and banal. In any given culture, overwhelmingly people go through the same rituals. Why? Because neither they nor the people around them have terribly much imagination in terms of making it in any way different. This is just what you do.

15:04 Physiologically, there are impulses. Culturally, there are rituals, and generation after generation, that's what they do, and it seems to add a certain amount of meaning to have rituals that go back at least decades, sometimes centuries, sometimes millennia.

15:19 What the poet tries to do is to give it a whole new meaning. What the philosopher tries to do is to understand what's really going on here and what's possible for human beings more generically is to keep rising through those levels of meaning and giving felt meaningful expression then to their personal love.

15:36 Nick: So, before we jumped into this interview, we sort of spoke about Plato's Symposium as the first or I guess the seminal work that tried to distil or unpack or define/understand this idea of human love. So, do you want to sort of speak about that?

15:49 Paul: Well, you know, it certainly wasn't the first attempt of course to do that. Human poets, long before Plato, had been attempting to give expression lyrically and reflectively to their experience of love and the possibilities of love and not just in the Greek world.

16:03 … but what's interesting about Plato's Symposium is that it consists of a dialogue among a number of educated Greeks at the height of the glory of Athens, the 5th century B.C. In fact, in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, the dialogue can be dated to 416 B.C., and several famous historic figures are present. Socrates is there. Aristophanes, who is the great comic playwright, is there. Agathon who is a tragic dramatist is there and he's won the prize at the Dionysian festival for his tragic drama. Alcibiades, the statesman, is there who is a young protégé of Socrates and they've had a kind of erotic involvement which Alcibiades reflects on.

16:48 … but the subject of their drinking party, their symposium, is this question, what is love? And Plato of course wrote it and it's a consummate work of dramatic art because he begins with love or Eros being described in fundamentally biological terms just as we have done. And Aristophanes who is a comic playwright has this hilarious scenario in which he says, you know, originally human beings didn't have four limbs, they had eight because they had two sets of genitalia and they were joined in such a way that they could copulate whenever they wanted, and they rolled around, tumbling around on their eight limbs.

17:29 Nick: Prokaryotically.

17:30 Paul: Well, not so much prokaryotically but certainly erotically, and Aristophanes says but the God's eventually became disgusted because there was this constant sexual congress and so they decided to crack down a little and they bisected all of these eight limbed human beings, the way he says you split an egg in half with a hair.

17:59 And as a consequence, he said human beings have ever since been running around looking for their other half and we feel very happy if we find our original half and we feel a great sense of unity and completeness but it's very hard to find our authentic other half. And it's complicated by the fact that some of us were originally two male bodies or two female bodies, not just one male and one female, and so we're attracted to our own sex.

18:22 This is quite an ingenious piece of writing and it's completely unashamed from the point of view of later puritanical morality and Agathon then speaks and he says in a very highbrow way that Eros is about all the highest ideals and the greatest fulfilments and happiness. And Socrates then says well, you know, that sounds find, but is it really true? And he reflects in a more analytical way on what's really going on, what love really is and perhaps what it's not.

18:50 And he ends up suggesting that there is something that's available here that the others had either failed to noticed or skimmed over and that is that yes, there's the biological and yes, human beings run around and they need to find another half as we even say now but he says there comes a point where you can realise that there is the beauty of another human being to which you're attracted but that rather than just feeling this compulsive attraction to an individuals, you notice that there is beauty in one, there is beauty in another, there is beauty in a third. In short, there is beauty as such and that it's beauty that really draws and that it's incidental in a sense which individual draws you or is idiosyncratic.

19:46 Once you realise that sororates, you can start to reflect that beauty in its own right and the creation and regeneration of the beautiful is what draws you. Well, he says, that can bring you to a whole new level of freedom and dignity as a human being and a commitment to creation and preservation of what is beautiful to treating the other as beautiful rather than simply desirable.

20:10 This makes the dialogue profound and then Alcibiades bursts in and he's drunk, and he's come late, and he hasn't overheard what's been said but he makes clear that, you know, Socrates is a rather strange individual, but he's had personal experience with Socrates. He says, you know take it from me, I tried to seduce Socrates and he wouldn't be seduced. He was trying to instruct me the whole time and I eventually realised that this was authentic, and this was a most unusual human being. I haven't been able to rise to the standards that he sets. I'm much more worldly but I think Socrates is extraordinary.

20:49 Now, that's a bold summary of the symposium but I mention it because of two things. One is that the view of sexuality is very candid. It's not puritanical and yet at the same time, we're being offered the possibility of a transcendence of let's call it animal sexuality. Not because one is condemning sexual desire but because one is seeing through and beyond it to human possibilities.

21:19 Later, in our culture Christianity and on the borderlands of Christianity but coming from the same biblical route, Islam, were much more inclined to be puritanical and condemnatory of sexual desire, much more haunted by it and ill at ease with it than you find in the symposium.

21:32 So, if we a refreshing and free approach to sexuality and love in our time, we could do a lot worse than begin with the symposium.

21:39 Nick: That's a fascinating summary of the philosophical nature of love, Paul, and made more astonishing by the fact that it was written 2400 years ago but supposing you were Alcibiades 2400 years ago, bursting in on the symposium, and you want to sort of outline what love means for you in terms of human possibilities as you references, what would you say? What has it meant for you?

21:59 Paul: Look, I would say that in a sense, every one of us who picks up the symposium now to read it is Alcibiades. We're bursting in on the drinking party which is already taking place and we come in with that kind of ingenuous and worldly question.

22:17 Socrates is offering a rarefied vision here. How do we rise to that standard? What does it mean for us? In my person case, of course I read the symposium a long time ago and I've always regarded it as a classic.

22:37 And to me, when I was younger and first read it, what it indicated was that sexual desire is an impulse that can lead us either to physiological entanglement and/or to a kind of sublimation of that desire, to an appreciation of the beauty of another person and a beauty of such which opens up being human in a whole other way.

23:11 And I wanted that for myself, but I wasn't sure as a young man, of course, how do you do that, and it took a long time. You know, I was a romantic from way back. I mean, I’ll never forget for example more than 30 years ago when I had an encounter with a woman who I went on later to write poems for and it was a case - a classic case - of being smitten. That I was standing in my dorm room at a university and she walked past my open door. I was talking to a male friend and she looked at me and smiled and, I tell you, I was smitten on the spot, just I thought wow and it was beauty that struck me. I didn't know the girl. I got to know her somewhat better later, but I was smitten by beauty and I had to wrestle from that point for several years with that smitten and the question of beauty and the other person and sexuality, and I tell you, it was a painful lesson and I wrote my first half decent poems in wrestling with that.

24:13 And that wasn't the first time I'd fallen in love and it certainly wasn't the last time, but it was an indelible moment and all those questions that were raised in The Symposium were being raised right there.

24:24 Nick: There's a really interesting distinction you've made just now through appreciating the beauty of another being just by virtue of themselves and appreciation of another being is almost like a vessel towards a form or an ideal realm of the beautiful which Plato refers to in The Symposium. Can you kind of - not necessarily with reference to that person in the example you just gave - but comment on that distinction and whether maybe Plato's - I don't know, it doesn't seem right to me in many ways, to think about other human beings as vessels to the beautiful, where we're actually in love with the form of beauty and the human particular is almost incidental.

24:59 Paul: I think there is a danger of that of course and if that is what happens, you can end up with a rather cold idea of beauty. So, we have to hold a certain tension between the transcendent vision and as you rightly say, the particular human being.

25:17 Nick: … which is the physical manifestation of that reality.

25:20 Paul: It's a mortal being with their own concerns and needs and an organic being. We're living beings. We're not abstract entities...

25:30 Nick: Yeah, who lives an individual life as unique as your own.

25:34 Paul: … and it's full of vulnerabilities and uncertainties and so a personal love is a way of the exploration and it's almost an infinite journey and potential into understanding and caring for and appreciating the complexity of another person. And the wonder of it is when that's reciprocated, when you find that the other person is...

25:56 Nick: Totally and completely.

25:56 Paul: … exploring you but if you can do that...

25:59 Nick: … and appreciating you and accepting you.

26:01 Paul: Absolutely and, you know, it's a fraught journey. We know this is not all, as we say, wine and roses but if we are operating at more or less this philosophical level as urged by Socrates, then I would say - and I would say this this as a matter of personal experience - while we love that individual, we can see the nature of love and the attempts we're making at loving in a transcendent context.

26:31 All the religions claim of course to do this in their own ways. The philosophy here is separate from and I would say free from any idea of punishment of hell or heaven, of angels or rituals. It's about real experience and how it can rise to a level of vision and appreciation and awe that otherwise is largely subconscious and strongly driven by biological impulses.

27:00 What we need to be able to do ideally is dance with the two and our most creative endeavours, our greatest achievements in music and poetry, in ballet, in dance, do exactly that.

27:11 Nick: So, I'm fascinated by the poetic, literary, musical, artistic expression of love which to me seems to be like another step on from - I think you articulated this earlier - but from the biological to the human nature of love which we've just touched on in the philosophical nature of love, but then there's this sort of like almost expressive transcendent kind of articulation of that human experience which I think not everyone can access but everyone can relate to. You know, we all love, you know, beautiful love songs or like we started the whole interview with Angie by Rolling Stones, right? So, there's something in that which kind of like distils in its purest form what it means to be human and someone who seeks to love and be beloved on this earth.

27:53 Paul: … and, you know, we asked before about whether there are differences between human beings and other creatures in this regard and I said well, at a very generic level, no. We just do in our own way what they all do in terms of courtship and mate selection and reproduction and the cycle of life, but we are a distinct species.

28:17 Now, two of the things that set us apart are language and music and they are key to our possibilities in the area that we're talking about in terms of love and vision and creativity because language is not as most of the sonic systems - birdsong or whale song - language is not limited in the ways those are to certain kinds of signal or expression.

28:49 Nick: … or expression or whatever, yep.

28:51 Paul: Language is generative of all sorts of subtleties and modes of reference to past, to future, to possibility and through it if we use it - and a poet uses it pre-eminently - we create meaning. We articular our experience. We have it shape than other people who are less perhaps linguistically gifted find that they want to inhabit. As you said, you know, you listen to a song, you know...

29:14 Nick: I suppose feeling these emotions I think are quite similar or...

29:17 Paul: Exactly and the music enhances that, and the musicologists and our theorists of music have been establishing in recent decades in terms of neuroscience and everything else that music seems to be even more deeply rooted in our being than language.

29:31 And one of the most fascinating ways this emerges is that people can have Alzheimer’s or dementia and they can seem far gone. They don't speak anymore. You start playing music and they'll tap their feet. Sometimes they'll even burst into song. You think they can't speak and they'll sing. This is extraordinary. This is music and music is distinctively in that sense human and we're only beginning to, as it were, do an archaeology of how did this come about?

29:54 That’s a profound area and when you see a concert and you see thousands of people responding to an elite musical performance and they're just profoundly physically moved by this - they dance, they chant, they're full of emotion.

30:15 Nick: It's rhythmic, it's primal.

30:17 Paul: Absolutely so and it's worth reflecting on that. You know, we talked about Plato and the sense of beauty. If you go to a concert, you can get carried away with the music. If you're also philosophical, you realise this is a profound experience and you get a kind of binocular vision of this, the immediate experience and the meaning of that experience. And if in addition you are a creative human being, you take it another level again, you contribute to that.

30:43 Nick: Before we move onto poetry and your experience of it, is it not also true that, you know, animals do experience love as well?

30:51 Paul: Yes, there's a continuum in life. You know, if I might put it this way, I briefly refer to my poem Eukaryotes and I asked will I still be erotic if we were prokaryotes instead of eukaryotes? And the answer in the poem is well, no, not really. But from that point where eukaryotic cells start to exchange information, there's this very long slope - we would say upwards slope - to creatures becoming more and more elaborate and experiencing life more and more fully, more and more emotionally.

31:35 And clearly that varies over a broad spectrum of lifeforms, but we know - every person who has paid the slightest attention knows that the animals we associate with - dogs famously, horses - we know in the wild elephants...

31:57 Nick: Whales, pigs, monkeys...

31:58 Paul: Whales, pigs, monkeys, etc., there's a lot of feeling there. There's a lot of sentience, a lot of awareness.

32:01 Nick: Capacity for suffering but also of love.

32:03 Paul: Clearly. I mean, dogs can be enormously affectionate and loyal. Elephants have long memory and we observe animals...

32:07 Nick: … grieving.

32:07 Paul: … in various kinds - grieving, mourning, mating, flirting. You know, monkeys famously and of course, they're very close to us in the evolutionary scheme of things. So, the short answer to your question is absolutely and we've done a disservice to ourselves in the modern world where we've tended to see animals in a Cartesian sense as just unfeeling machines. That's simply not the case.

32:30 Now in the 21st century, some of us at least are edging back in another direction saying animals have rights, you know? They're sentient beings like us and we need to pay attention and give them more love and that industrial farming for example is simple criminal because of the pain and distortion it inflicts on animal lives.

32:47 And you can link that back to our central concern with human love by saying that if we treat another human being - any human being - simply as an object of physical exploitation.

33:01 Nick: Gratification.

33:02 Paul: Gratification, right. We are in a way doing to them what our industrial farmers do to chickens and pigs and so on. We're treating them as an unfeeling, pointless thing and that's the very opposite of love and physical abuse of another person should in no way be confused with love.

33:31 Nick: You said earlier when you were a young man, you felt these great set of impulses or a compulsion to write poetry, to give expression to the sort of rich feelings or this rich interior life that you had with regard to, you know, emotion and love and attraction to other women and so on.

33:46 Paul: Not other women because I'm a male, ha ha. You can leave that in, that will be funny.

33:53 Nick: I'll leave that in as well, but how did you get there? How did you sort of overcome the fact that when you first starting writing poetry or analytical writing about the nature of love - it was difficult and fumbling and maybe not altogether expressive and lucid as it clearly is today - so what was your sort of transformative slope, as it were?

34:15 Paul: Well, the simplest way to put it would be trial and error, you know? And I have to say that a thought that's occurred to me in recent years is if I had in fact succeeded in the ordinary romantic sense in any of my early loves and married in a conventional way and had children, etc., I wouldn't have become a poet. Almost certainly. I wouldn't have had the time. I wouldn't have learned enough. I wouldn't have had the leisure to practice. I wouldn't have had the, you know, varied experience that I've had with different woman, different loves, different kinds of failure and above all, I wouldn't have met the woman who finally has become my muse and who more than any other has inspired me to write good poetry and with whom I have a very authentic loving relationship.

35:16 It's in many ways deeply satisfying to be able to look back on that and see how much I've learned, often very painfully let it be said, but I do remember saying to a younger male friend about 20 years ago when he had lost a girlfriend who had left him, and he was desolate as one tends to be. I said my advice is exploit this for all it's worth by listening to the best soulful music and song which has been composed by people giving expression to what you're going through. Find the better poetry and take it to heart because you're discovering how real it is.

35:39 Nick: You can mine it and excavate it.

35:40 Paul: Absolutely, you can, and you build your own interior world. And I did do that and, you know, one early step along the way was almost fortuitous. I was staying at a university college 35 years ago and the English tutor in the college decided to run a sonnet competition and the girl I was seeing at the time said, "Are you going to write a sonnet?"

36:08 My initial response was no, I don't write poetry. You know, I'm a political scientist and historian and she said, "You're very good with words. I think you should have a go."

36:21 Nick: Amazing.

36:23 Paul: And I did. I wrote a sonnet and how did I get to write a sonnet? Well, first of all, one is supposed to write a sonnet. That was the competition but secondly, to teach myself I read Shakespeare’s sonnets. There's 154 of them. I read the lot.

36:39 By the time I had read all these sonnets I thought well I get the hang on this, this is what a sonnet is. Then I simply had a crack at writing one and it turned out to be a good one. From that point, over the years when I fell in love which I did many times, I would write sonnets.

36:51 It took me a long time before I became free enough emotionally and in terms of self-confidence to have a crack at other kinds of poems and it didn't really happen until I met my current partner and muse and she really lit up the landscape for me. So, I've written better and much more varied poetry with a whole variety of rhyme and metrical forms and themes and moods for her than for anyone else.

37:16 Nick: If you had to pick one to read now, what would you choose and let's have a read of it, I think.

37:22 Paul: Well, to kick it off with, I...

37:23 Nick: Here's one you prepared earlier.

37:25 Paul: Yes. Yeah, well we talked about biology as the foundation and about evolution and beauty and so on and there is a poem that I wrote a few years ago called Fire in the Wheel which is about exactly that. The central conceit of it is a poem is that the same couple - let it be said in this time of all sorts of gender variations that it's about a heterosexual couple, not a gay couple. I'm heterosexual, you know. People with different experiences and identities will write poetry about that. I'm uncomplicated in being heterosexual. This about a male and female who live through the whole human evolution over millions of years and it's addressed by the male partner to his beloved partner, looking over the many many millennial, the millions of years in which they have been reincarnated as it were again and again.

38:23 And so, it brings together the biological theme that I mentioned with this specifically human and then being upon, it instantiates a third, so it gives you the whole pyramid.

38:34 Nick: A very nice end way to sum up.

38:35 Paul: It reads as follows. I've loved you from the beginning with the simplest of gestures, with inarticulate cries, with unselfconscious mimicry. I've loved you since the first fire wielding when we yelled together at encircling beasts, feasted on fire roasted insects and nuts, huddled around the flames in awe. 

38:56 Was that Eden, that long-ago eon? As the hand formed, and the inner eye, the larynx and broker's brain, before ever we sang to one another. Or was Eden a time of hand-axes, as all this came together in our hearts and hunting, from old Andalucía to the Chinese rivers? 

39:13 What years those were of wide exploring. Eurasia was ours with new spheres, exulting in our uncanny craft, we wondered at what we were. Our long days fell like forest leaves. They endured like evergreens. Our fire circles lit the long nights, changing our dreams. 

39:32 Were those shimmering years, those many hundred millennia before our love made music, truly our golden age? Did you feel loved then, as the wide seas rose and fell, as the ice advanced and retreated, as the giant forests shifted again and again? Or was it only later that sentiment came and crooning, coaxed by oxytocin out of the flicker of long light under the waxing moon? Was I a caricature to your mind of all that was possible? Possible for a singing hominid under the sun. Was I stone in need of shaping? 

40:07 Ah, we buried each other many times, again and again with grief and ochre, over ages under the ageless stars, from [unclear] to [unclear]. Remember the times sheltered from the harsh climate shift in the north when we relished our little piece of Africa in Andalucía, those idyllic coasts and caves. 

40:27 But your love transformed me. Your call for songs and stories. You’re playing to me on bone flutes. Your vivid art of changing forms. We shook the shackles of the ancient trees, hailed the sky-god with high hands. We took to the open horizon, pitched bold camp on the stark step. 

40:46 There at last, you carved me into shape. Your love cut antler into a figurine and I, deer hunter, roamed forth graviton, making long lasting legends on the plains. You wove me a coat of wool, dyed in wondrous new colours, finer than any cured skin and I revelled in your homespun beauty. Even that was a long age of ardour under the high wheeling stars, rich with rumour of far mountains, with mammoth hunts and possibilities. 

41:15 Then the revolution came at last. The wheel. The mastering and mustery of horses, the making of wanes and war chariots, the being of bright, burnished bronze. Ah, sky-gods, the wheel and the horse brought an end to our long cycles. Ah, my lover with golden hair, the wheel set us rolling, riding, racing in the chariot of the sun, did it not? 

41:36 Since then, everything has gone in a flash. A riotous blur of songs and innovations, a nightmare of blood and terror. I've loved you from the beginning. Let's not now go under the wheel. All our myths are confused. I long only for your beauty.

41:57 Nick: That's a really, really stunning poem and I think - you know, not that I've read it recently - but it seems to me to be remarkable because it encapsulates the expansive feeling of love in the way that you've sort of straddled it or extended it, kneaded it, across space and time and matched it to the entire history of human evolution and development on the planet through the story of one love which is reincarnated and almost eternal and infinite which I think at its deepest expression, all love should be thought of in a metaphysical, eternal sense which transcends the brief time you have together on earth.

42:58 Paul: The immediate, and the banal.

42:59 Nick: The immediate, exactly. Well, not necessarily the banal, but the immediate and the confined, necessarily mortal nature of love. One thing that struck me as I was listening to that was the fact that, you know, the idea of being ground under the wheel - the wheel of life - was the fact that how many, you know, billions of stories - individual human stories and individual human loves - have there been on this planet since homo-sapiens or this animal - this human animal - sort of evolved consciousness and the ability to think in this manner. You know, and they’re all essentially ground into the dirt and then just sort of lost for all time. It's striking. If you think about it. One likes to think that one’s love transcends and it immortal and is eternal.

43:29 Paul: Well it's a conceit of course because it isn't but in cultural forms, whether a poem or a treatise like The Symposium or a great song, things can endure and be passed on long after the author is gone. You know, we could read a poem - for example, Shakespeare famously wrote a poem saying that his poem would immortalise the life of his beloved. We read the poem and we get his sentiment, but we haven't any idea who the beloved was.

44:03 Nick: No, exactly. But I suppose for Shakespeare in writing in, in any writing, perhaps it feels - perhaps it is a conceit, like a literary conceit, but you know, I do still feel as though for the author, when you set down and you express in writing - maybe in music or in art - that feeling and that relationship that you have with that particular person who hopefully if it was love, felt the same way about you, authentically. You know, one likes to think that it will endure in some way.

44:45 Paul: Well, think of it - here's another way to think about it. If we make up a melody in enthusiasm and if we're able to do that but we don't have any means to record it - we don't have notation, we don't have a recording device - it can disappear. We might even personally forget it. We whistle it to ourselves on a morning walk and then we can't set it down and we can't remember it after a little while, and we certainly can't share it readily with others. But if we had notation, we can write down the rudiments of it. Somebody else can then take that notation and say, "That's not bad but if you did this and this, you could enhance it," and then you get a musical ensemble and they start to perform it. And they said, "What if we added this instrument and that variation and this?" and it just becomes something bigger, right?

45:33 Nick: But in your example with Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty, it was almost metaphysical in a sense that the story behind your writing of that was you might explain yourself but your love that inspired that particular set of poems said that whatever comes with this, at least this will be like a lasting testament to our love. It doesn't matter if - no one reads this stuff. It was there, and you set it down in writing and it's almost enough for you...

46:00 Paul: Yes, that's of course - within literary human cultures, that's an ancient aspiration, you might say, or conceit. Specifically, what happened, and I did share this story with you was that - I must have written about 40 sonnets for this particular young woman a long time ago now and I was madly in love with her and she loved the poems. She loved the fact that I wrote them for her. She said to me things like, "Other men have written poems for me but never like these."

46:25 And then one particular night, she held up one of them on the piece of paper I'd written it on and waved it in the air and she said, "You must get these published then in years to come, whatever happens between you and me, I'll be able to hold up your book and say I inspired this."

46:38 That's a lovely thing to share and I did get them published eventually. Not the 40 but 12 of the best arranged in a sequence and illustrated and with commentary and it makes a lovely book.

46:54 We had long since gone our separate ways by the time that happened and I've no idea - I've lost track of her completely - I've no idea whether she ever got hold of the book but it's there. It does exist and for me at least, quite apart from whether she ever gets to hold it up and say that it inspired her - and I hope she does so, I hope that it consoles her, whatever the condition of her life now is - but for me it made something beautiful out of an ephemeral love affair that fell apart and left me heartbroken.

47:33 Nick: Yeah, so what do you say to those people who kind of are cynical and sceptical and say we don't really need love and it's all...

47:41 Paul: I would lay good money that they are being disingenuous but it's a defiant way - like in the old Simon and Garfunkel songs saying, you know, I'm a rock, I'm an island, I don't need love. They're fooling themselves. Either they actually do want it and they're defiantly pretending they don't or they're so shut down emotionally that they don't realise what they're missing and then one feels a little sad for them.

47:58 I would rather have the pain of unfulfilled passion or loss than not love and I've tried to express that in my poetry. If I may, if we have time, I'd like to add a second poem. This is one that I also wrote in recent years. It's called Dance me on down from Toledo and it attempts to capture this idea that once you've formed an intimate partnership and just to the extent that there really is love and it is working, it becomes a kind of dance.

48:28 Dance requires cooperation, you know? Even in most classical forms of dance, a man may lead but if a woman is not there with him and not moving with him, it doesn't work. So, it is with love.

48:46 So - pardon me - this one goes: “Come and dance with me down from Toledo by the light on the bridge we have made, to a land with a non-Christian credo, where flamencos and tangos are played. Dance me speechless to high snow-capped mountains from which orchards and pastures are fed, and the cypresses, arches and fountains of Alhambra, the Isle of the Dead. There the rich Andalusian musers sing softly to all who can hear, though a pallid blue past still confuses the mind and the heart and the ear, for vengeful and dark Catholic violence five centuries since overthrew and condemned to the grave or to silence the voice of the Moor and the Jew. 

49:31 But dance with me down from Toledo by the light on the bridge we have made, to a land with a non-Christian credo, where flamencos and tangos are played. Though golden Al-Andalus perished, suppressed by the cepted and crossed, the ballads and songs gypsies cherished plucked song lines from ruinous loss.

49:47 The spirit of Arabi lingers in the genius of Spanish guitar, in flamencos for feet and for fingers, in [unclear] and in [unclear]. Those flamencos and song lines in flower, the soul of Granada reborn so offended the fascists in power that they murdered poor [unclear] at dawn.

50:04 Still dance with me down from Toledo by the light on the bridge we have made, to a land with a non-Christian credo, where flamencos and tangos are played. From there, let's dance on out of reason with our hearts full of [unclear]’s deep song and to beauty has come into season and we know that that's where we belong.

50:23 While we dance, let's sustain that illusion with whatever good faith we can find. May our steps take us wide of confusion. May our love keep us blissfully blind. For to sing and to dance in our yearning, to share our deep song face to face, to glide into each twist and turning is to live with both freedom and grace.

50:49 And so dance me on down from Toledo by the light on the bridge we have made, to a land with a non-Christian credo, where flamencos and tangos are played. 

51:01 Nick: Stunning. 

51:04 I would think that there is another note which we might perhaps finish on that is to do with communicating and just intimacy. So, that last poem was about in a sense the movement of life, dealing with the twists and turns and challenges of life. But there's a very important sense in human love though not as we hinted earlier, altogether absent in the lives - emotional lives - of other animals with the dogs or whales, etc.

51:30 But that is that you want to be understood by the other person and you want to think that they want to be understood by you. There is very subtle elements to that and I've written a short poem which is actually a variation on a poem by Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, and it's called So that you will hear me.

51:48 It goes like this: “So that you will hear me my words like lithe chameleons are changing shape and tone. Before you touched them, my words will murmured darkness and cold stone, but you soothed my psyche, persistently making murmurings light, lamps over the muttered. Now I want my words to say what I want to say to you so that I will hear you say that you want to hear me say them. I want my words to form a necklace of pearls for your hidden self, for your heart's throat.”

52:17 Nick: Stunning. Well, thank you very much for your time, Paul. As always, it's been a great pleasure.

On Western Civilization

Originally hosted and recorded by Nick Fabbri

On The Secret Gospel According to Mark

Originally hosted and recorded by Nick Fabbri

Paul Monk on Living an Authentic Religious Life

00:00 Nick: Welcome to Eudaimonia, a podcast about people. My name is Nick and by hosting these conversations, I hope to engage with women and men who have led interesting and good lives and broadcast their stories to a wider audience for inspiration and interest.
The show takes its name from the Greek word meaning human flourishing and it is this theme which rests at the heart of the podcast.

00:20 My guest today is Dr Paul Monk, poet and polymath who has been a long-time friend and mentor of mine, who has just written his latest book which is called The Secret Gospel according to Mark: the extraordinary life of a Catholic existentialist. Welcome, Paul, to the podcast Eudaimonia. It's great to have you here and I was hoping you might be able to open up and firstly tell us a bit about yourself and also about the book which you've just written.

00:45 Paul: Thanks, Nick. It's good to be on Eudaimonia. This is the technology of our time and I think it's giving us a very flexible means through which to reach a wider audience. Briefly about myself, I set out many years ago after leaving school to get myself what you might call a liberal arts education. I wanted to understand western civilisation rather than just go into a profession. Meaning, truth and value were high on my agenda.

01:14 I did an arts degree in European history. I then did a doctorate at the Australian National University in international relations which was about US counter insurgency strategies throughout the Cold War. At that point, I thought I really better a job and I worked in the intelligence services for a number of years after that and they assigned me to work on east Asia.

01:31 After six years in the bureaucracy, I lost interest in being a bureaucrat, intelligence work or otherwise. Since then, over more than 20 years, I've worked as a consultant, I've taught in universities and I've written a string of books.

01:45 This latest book however takes me all the way back to before I launched into that liberal arts degree and in many ways, it tells the story of the person whose influence on me prompted me to want to do that. That man was a fellow called Mark O’Lachlan who taught me briefly for one semester in year twelve and made an indelible impression. I would never have anticipated 44 years ago that I'd end up writing his biography and indeed, all those years ago he hadn't done most of what I've described in the biography, but he became, after being my teacher, a mentor, a friend, a role model in a lot of ways and an inspiration. In this latest book, I've told the story of how he was all those things to me and as it turns out, to a great many other people as well.

02:34 Nick: It's an extraordinary summary and I guess a fascinating insight into how, you know, life can have sliding door moments where you incidentally meet someone. I met you at a pub in 2012 and, you know, we've since struck up an incredible friendship and relationship which has informed many aspects of my life. So, perhaps I'll be writing your biography one day.

02:54 Anyway, so could you maybe using that as a jumping off point about Mark, tell us a little bit about how and why he first made that big impact on you. Was it through the teaching of religion or science? I mean, what kind of was that moment in which you knew this was a special person?

03:10 Paul: Well, it's probably worth observing though I didn't know it at the time that he met me at Aquinas College in Ringwood in 1974 because he had in a sense been sent to Coventry. He was in a religious order and they sent him out to Aquinas by way in a sense of disciplining him because they thought that he was off the reservation a bit, he was too progressive in his thinking.

03:35 Nick: Heretical...

03:36 Paul: Heretical in a way, and they wanted to corral him. He says these days that they thought they were punishing him but in fact, it was providential sending him to Ringwood because he met me and my family, but that's all looking back.

03:54 At the time, he was sent out there in a teaching role. He was a science teacher, an excellent science teacher but I didn't study sciences. I met him in religion class and for only one semester in year twelve, but what he did in that class was transformative and it really lit a fuse. I might read just a paragraph from the book...

04:16 Nick: Wonderful.

04:16 Paul: ... where I'm making precisely this point. "I first encountered Mark when for a single semester he taught my year twelve humanities class, religious education, 43 years ago. I found him to be a teacher different from any other that I had had. He was tall, strongly built, spoke in a clear and authoritative voice and seemed to brim with vigorous ideas. At a defining moment, he stood before us with a book called African Genesis by Robert Ardrey and read to us its opening lines. Not in innocence and not in Asia was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African highland reaching north from the Cape to the lakes of the Nile. Here we came about slowly, ever so slowly, on a sky swept savannah glowing with menace. Man is a fraction of the animal world. Our history is an afterthought no more tacked to an infinite calendar. We are not so unique as we should like to believe and if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march.

05:17 He read these lines not as some mere academic book learning but as something fundamental to what we needed to understand as human beings. It was the winter of 1974 and this was revolutionary. No lay teacher, never mind any member of a religious order had ever brought evolutionary biology or the science of human origins into a religion class in my earlier schooling. Mark placed these profound matters front and centre and invited us to reflect upon them."

05:44 That in me ignited a passion to get to the bottom of the relationship between human evolution, religion and the history of our species that I have lived by to this day. That's why I undertook the studies that I did and it's what enabled me in the end to write Mark's story so many years later.

06:04 Nick: That's an extraordinary passage which has these incredible sorts of Shakespearian and Hamlet resonances as well in it but, yeah, certainly it's very moving to hear from you what a profound impact that that passage and Mark's role as an educator, pastor and teacher actually had on you as a young man.

06:22 Paul: Well, I should add that there was of course more than that. That was simply a signature moment which I've always remembered but he also brought into religion class an unusual sense of the real human meaning of various passages from the bible. No other religion teacher had brought the bible alive to me in the way that he did, not as a fundamentalist, not as a preacher, not as a dogmatist; as a human being.

06:47 There was passages from Isaiah, from Micah, from the gospel, from the actual apostles which he brought into religion class and discussed with us which have remained with me ever since. It was clear to me the better that I got to know him, that this wasn't just doctrine he was teaching, this was the way he lived.

07:04 Nick: Yet, this is all extraordinary because you were head altar boy and dux of the school and obviously Mark had that profound influence on you as a Christian teacher but you - I mean, this is just a tangential aside, but you did leave the Catholic church and are an avowed sort of atheist.

07:20 Paul: That's correct and this of course goes to the heart of the project because I found myself thinking Mark comes across as completely real and authentic as a human being, the values that he's espousing seem profound, but I cannot make a connection between those values and the dogmas that I'm supposed to recite and profess to believe and I can't make sense of this idea of god. So, I'm not going to keep going to church and saying I believe in god, the father almighty, when in fact I'm not even sure what all this means. In so far as I think I'm clear, I don't think I do believe that but I do believe in justice, in integrity, in compassion, you know, and Mark brought into religion class in addition to the bible and human evolution the novels of Albert Camus and the thinking of John Paul Sartre, these existentialist thinkers who had made an impression on him only a few years before and whom I'd really never heard of before then.

08:19 When I left school, as soon as I left school not only did I buy Ardrey's books and read them for myself, I bought the books of Camus and Sartre and I started to put, you know, get my hands on anything I could about what was the church, how did it come about in the first place.

08:33 When I went back to university, I studied classics, I studied philosophy, I did reformation history, I did modern revolutions because I wanted to understand quite literally what on earth is going on.

08:45 Nick: Extraordinary. So, just moving along in the interview, I mean, what are some of the things that seem to you to make his life extraordinary or worth writing a 700 word biography on which I think is really, you know, a testament to like this great gesture you've made for this incredible man obviously, telling a story about I suppose an unremarkable man in many ways because he's, you know, not a celebrity. He's not famous, he didn't accrue great wealth or fame or power, you know, and yet you say in the subtitle of the book Secret Gospel according to Mark, the extraordinary life of a Catholic existentialist. Why is he extraordinary?

09:25 Paul: I would say two levels and let me say, it's not a 700-word biography but a 700 page one.

09:31 Nick: Sorry, did I say word? Yeah, I can't edit that out unfortunately. Yeah, first time nerves.

09:35 Paul: That was a moment of humour.

09:38 Nick: It would be a very short biography, wouldn't it?

09:41 Paul: I think the thing that struck me about Mark from very early on was the breadth of his interests and the strength of his character. The combination of these two made a profound impression on me. Subsequent to that, he kept developing. He didn't remain static and he wasn't a figure in my past. We remained in touch and what I realised is that in addition to teaching science and teaching religion at school and doing that exceptionally well, he was an outstanding sports coach. He had been an outstanding athlete as a young man and then he became a scientist of world stature in his own right in marine biology. He became a great mentor of young Catholics in a youth movement called The Stranger Movement and many of them wrote letters to him which I got to read, you know, in recent years in which they testified to his unique impact on them as a person, for his intelligence, his care, his imagination, his freedom.

10:47 He also founded ecumenical communities so that he extended the reach of his Christian vision or his biblical vision if you like beyond the Catholic community in which he'd grown up and certainly beyond the male monastic order in which he'd been formed from a young age. He brought women as well as men into these communities. He brought non-Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Chinese, Thai, Korean, East Timorese into this community and he made that community work. Again, there are letters from numerous individuals from these different backgrounds testifying to what a remarkable father figure he was, what a great community leader, what a great mentor he was, what a splendid human being he was in terms of his humour, his compassion, his intelligence.

11:38 So, when you combine mentoring youth, family and communities, being a great teacher, being a great scientist, being a great sports coach and then you add yet another dimension, he became a pastoral counsellor for the psychiatrically afflicted and he did extraordinary things in that field. Once again, I have letters that people wrote to him or interviews that I did with them where they testify to his unique impact because of his capacity to reach out to such people as people, not as patients, not in terms of their illness but in terms of their humanity.

12:16 So, you can see from that spectrum of activities that he really has lived an extraordinary life in terms of range, doing more than most people do, but what's really extraordinary is that in every one of those fields, he has delivered with extraordinary integrity and effect in terms of other people, his impact on other people.

12:35 Nick:   He's a wonderful model I suppose for the types of lives we'd all like to live, you know, lives committed to ideals, great causes, other human beings, rather than I suppose the, you know, hum drum, you know, I guess tasks that sort of confront us day-to-day and week-to-week and month-and-month which we sort of just get through, right?

12:54 Paul:   I think that's true. We live in a culture that is very addicted to celebrity. So, a lot of people read glossy magazines. They're always reading about movie stars. They're reading about wealthy people. They're reading about famous people. What we know from these glossy magazines is first of all that a lot of that stuff is puffering, right? It's not even accurate or honest a lot of the time. Many of these celebrities actually live dysfunctional and unhappy lives. Their impact on others is as often destructive as it is creative or nourishing.

13:29 What's remarkable in Mark's case is that he has never been a celebrity. He's never sought celebrity. He has never sought high office even within his religious order, though he's had leadership positions. He has simply sought at every point to do what he felt was called to be done in terms of the biblical background from which he came, you know.

13:51 I can't emphasise this too strongly because most of us need models that are real, that are doable, that aren't fantasy land, right; that if we dream only of being an elite athlete or a Hollywood celebrity, we're in many respects off with the fairies. First of all, because it's out of the reach of most people and secondly, because it's often not what it's cooked up to be.

14:12 If on the other hand it's possible to live a life which has great impact and is intrinsically rewarding without any song and dance routine or puffery, then that's far more within our reach in principle and that's what Mark has done.

14:29 I want to share with you another aspect however of his life and this becomes crucial to understanding the richness of his life as he experienced it because not only was he so compassionate and such a great mentor to so many people, he had a great interest and has a great interest - he's now 83 - in the arts. He loves good cinema, good classical music, ballet, great art and this goes all the way back to when I first met him. It's always struck me that this range of interests on top of everything else contributes to how extraordinary a human being he is.

15:09 I'd like to read a brief passage which just - one of many which in the book illustrates this aspect of his life. This is the first time he travelled abroad. He went on what was called a tertiary trip, a study tour, with his order to Rome and got to see a bit of Europe. The passage I'm going to read is his first free day in Rome. It will give you some idea of the kind of mind we're talking about.

15:37 "On his first free day in the eternal city, the traveller visited the Pincio, the great hill that had been outside the old city walls during the early history of Rome but was the site of the fabled gardens of Lucullus from the first century BCE and was brought within the enlarged walls of the imperial city in the late third century CE.

15:56 What had been the gardens of Lucullus, including a fabulous villa and library coveted by others and eventually taken over by the empire, was by the last 20th century the Borghese Gardens which surrounded the Villa Borghese and the Borghese Gallery. All three would later become favourite haunts of the Christian brother on his returns to Rome.

16:14 His first visit was a reconnaissance. He moved quickly onto the Tiber, crossing it at the Ponte Cavour, then visited the Palace of Justice, the Castle of St Angelo, originally the Mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian built in the early 2nd century CE and then Vatican City.

16:30 Several days later, he travelled outside the city limits up into the Alban Hills and visited Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence away from the seasonal heat. There in a large courtyard, he heard an address by Pope Paul the Sixth to several thousand people from around Europe in Italian but simultaneously translated into German, English and Spanish.

16:51 He was stepping here into a quite extraordinary historical setting. Castel Gandolfo is a town that has grown up on the ruins of what long ago was an immense summer residence of the first century CE emperor Domtian which had occupied a staggering 14 square kilometres. Even earlier than that, it had been the site of ancient Alba Longa, dating back before the foundation of Rome itself.

17:14 Castel Gandolfo was built in the 12th century but acquired by the papacy when it ruled much of central Italy in the late 16th century. It was handed over to the Italian state as a museum in 2016 by Pope Francis.

17:27 Mark took daytrips south to Pompei and north to Assisi but within Rome, his attention was riveted by the endless architectural and art treasures of the ancient secular and perennial religious capital of the western world.

17:38 He visited the Capitoline Hill, gazing upon the imposing equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, then wandered through the Capitoline Museum and the Capitoline Picture Gallery, laying eyes for the first time on such classical works and sculpture as the Dying Gaul and Eros and Psyche. He was attended Verdi's La Traviata at the Teatro Eldesayo on 20th September, a production of the same composers Rigoletto on the 26th, a second performance of La Traviata on 3 October and a dance fiesta in the Alban Hills that evening.

18:10 In between, we find him at the National Museum of Villa Giulia, the National Modern Art Gallery, the Borghese Museum and Gallery and the Catacomb of St Priscilla. His interest in the arts was inexhaustible."

18:21 Nick:   That's extraordinary. The second sort of component to the sub-title which I wanted to come back to was this notion of him being a Catholic existentialist. Can you sort of reconcile those two terms for us here briefly?

18:34 Paul:   Yes, it's important to understand that Christian theology, Catholic theology in its foundational centuries was greatly shaped by Greek philosophy. In its earliest centuries, that was principally the philosophy of Plateau and Plutinis, the Neoplatonist. In the medi-evil period on the other hand, the writings of Aristotle were rediscovered and it started to become clear that Aristotle was a very different thinker to Plateau, much more of what we would call a secular thinker. There were people who feared that Aristotle's philosophy would pull the rug from under Christian belief. So, people called the scholastics set about trying to demonstrate that Aristotle's philosophy was perfectly consistent with Christian belief and used it to articulate it on a new basis.

19:23 Nick:   Aquinas and so forth.

19:24 Paul:   Thomas Aquinas is the most famous of the school men, the so-called scholastics. For centuries after that, most notably in the wake of the reformation with the counsel of Trent in the 16th century, scholasticism was the philosophy that defined Catholic belief and to a significant extent also, Protestant belief: Lutheranism and Calvinism.

19:42 However, in the 20th century, scholasticism had come under very substantial criticism in terms of epistemology, in terms of how we define what is truth. A number of philosophical schools grew up, the proponents of which one might say were not particularly religious and the same kind of challenge occurred for the church as it occurred in the med-evil period. How would you articulate Christian belief in terms of these philosophies to make them acceptable to or comprehensible to 20th century people?

20:15 One of the most notable such philosophies was existentialism. The difficulty with existentialism, unlike the other philosophy of Aristotle, is that it was somewhat vaguer, what exactly is existentialism? The simplest way to define it - and this was crucial to Mark's life - is that scholasticism basically says god is a thing out there, an existent entity in which one believes. The resurrection actually happened. The eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus. The existentialist turn in theology is all of these things have to do with the human imagination. God is a projection of the human psyche as a conscious being in the world, the horizon of being; not a thing or an entity, external to a conversation among human beings.

21:01 The eucharist is a symbolic ritual about community, about being members of a body of Christ; that is to say, a redemptive community which we call the church. The resurrection is an event within the human mind in terms of our transcendence of the mundane and of the concern with mortality or of the carnal appetites rising above that despite for example the execution of Jesus, his presence animates the redemptive community called the church. That's an existentialist way of looking at it.

21:35 Karl Rahner was a distinguished Catholic existentialist theologian. Mark picked this up in the early 1970s because he started to ask himself I've taught these documents in scholastic terms, I've said I believe them but now that I ask myself what exactly do I believe, I find that I can't make sense of them in scholastic terms, because he was a modern man, because he was a scientist, because he was a highly intelligent and thoughtful person but perhaps existentially he could because if you could understand them in those terms, you could continue to live by the great values which he believed you were called to in that tradition and which he did live by.

22:15 So, from that point he tried to live out and find the existential meaning of the Catholic tradition, the biblical texts, the scriptures as they've been called. The argument I suppose I would say of my biography is that he did that with exceptional quality and integrity and that's what made his life a Catholic existentialist one as well as a humanly extraordinary one.

22:39 Nick:   This notion of living up to the example or stature of Christ. Is that right?

22:45 Paul:   Well, this is an idea that was put to him by the Wesleyan minister, Drew Le Lean, who was his supervisor when in 1991 already aged 55, he undertook clinical pastoral education to become a pastoral counsellor to the psychiatrically afflicted.

23:04 Drew said, you know, our call as pastoral ministers are to rise to the full stature of Christ. Now, if we took that in a scholastic sense, it would be a little difficult to understand what exactly it would mean and it might even seem a little blasphemous, Christ being the lord and god. You can't, in the nature of the case, rise to that stature.

23:27 If on the other hand we're talking about existential meaning, then Christ is the great myth that grew out of the exemplary life of Jesus of Nazareth and one endeavours to rise to the stature that that myth calls one to which is of compassion, of forgiveness, of healing the sick, of visiting the prisoner, of caring for the orphan and the widow, and it traditionally goes back before Jesus to Isaiah and Micah.

23:55 Mark undertook that and what we find in his ministry there is really quite extraordinary. Again, and again, he encountered people deeply afflicted; suicidal, depressed, schizophrenic, psychotic, and he was able to touch them as human beings in such a way that he won their love, their gratitude and their respect uniquely in that environment. I interviewed a number of these people who had actually been drawn back from the brink by his care to living more normal and even completely normal lives.

24:33 Nick:   Is this through his work as a pastoral counsellor for psychiatric patients?

24:36 Paul:   Indeed, it is. I'd like to share with you just as an illustration of a profound impact he had on some of these people, a letter that was written to him by a 20-year-old girl to whom he had been a counsellor. This is at Larundel Psychiatric Hospital as it then was. She was suicidal. She'd been sexually abused when very young and her life had become a psychological mess but he was able to find her and reach out to her in such a way that she saw him as unique. The tragic thing is that she took her own life unable to go on, but what I'm about to read is a letter that she wrote to him an arrange that he would get only after she had taken her life and these are a few words this brief letter, I think, conveys quite profoundly the impact that he was having on her as on others in aspiring to rise to the centre of Christ as Drew Le Lean had suggested.

25:42 The letter reads, "Dear Mark, I know you're probably angry and upset with me but it's because you couldn't possibly understand what it’s like to be me. I decided once and for all to end the nightmare and set myself free. Please forgive me. I want you to know that to me, you were the father I never had but always wanted. You made me feel so special and so happy. Whenever I was with you, the sun shone brightly and I felt safe and secure but you couldn't be around me all the time and I couldn't go on feeling the way I do.

26:14 I deliberately stayed away from you in the past weeks in the hope that the longer you didn't see me, the less upset you would be. I hope it worked. Thank you. Thank you, Mark, for all the wonderful times you shared with me and all the things you did for me. Apollo Bay was one of my all-time fondest memories when I said to you what I did in the kitchen that day, that I now felt able to give my life a go. I was really telling you the truth but, in the end, the urge to escape forever was too great. I love you, Mark. Your eternal friend, Kelly."

26:46 Nick:   That's very deeply moving.

26:48 Paul:   It's quite stunning, isn't it, because you think how could somebody write such a sweet letter, such a lucid letter written I should add in impeccable handwriting without errors or corrections...

27:01 Nick:   Recognising the significance of this man and his redemptive power in many ways.

27:04 Paul:   ... and then go and hang herself. It's...

27:06 Nick:   It's baffling.

27:08 Paul:   It's, you know, powerful.

27:09 Nick:   You mention in the epilogue that Mark maintains to this day - he's 83, I believe - this incredibly human warmth and, you know, supporting, reassuring educative sort of human qualities identified by Kelly in her letter all those years ago. Yet, despite all that he has seen in, you know, clinical, pastoral work in psychiatric hospitals and a whole range of other facets of his life as a Christian Brother in his order, he has become more melancholic in his later years. It's that sort of just I guess the accumulated weight of all that he's seen in terms of human suffering, that idea from Romans 8:18 and, you know, the world is groaning and we groan with it sort of thing or is it - is his melancholic, I don't know, disposition (not that he is a melancholic person, he's lovely) but, yeah, can you speak to that sense of sadness that he has?

28:07 Paul:   Yes, there are several strands to it. I should preface it by saying that over a long period, since he took the existentialist turn in the early 70s, he started to develop his science as an outlet for his passionate imagination as well as these other things. By the time he is becoming melancholic which I think is an accurate description of his mood in the last 10 years or so, he has published 65 scientific papers. He's given papers around the world…

28:44 Nick:   A world renowned scientist...

28:44 Paul:   He's done five stints of research at the Smithsonian, he's been on an expedition to the Antarctic, you know, he's very highly regarded. So, his life had expanded, his circle of friends had expanded, the gratitude coming back to him from all sorts of people was abundant and you would have thought that perhaps in those circumstances why would he be melancholy?

29:04 Well, the answer is twofold. One is that he had striven throughout those years to get his order to also rise to the full stature of Christ, to renew itself, to become more imaginative, to reach out more...

29:15 Nick:   The Christian brothers...

29:16 Paul:   The Christian brothers, to be less enclosed, less cloistered, less conservative. He'd had only moderate success and that weighed on him, that wore him down a bit so that by about 2008, he's in Washington doing research at the Smithsonian and he's writing back to his community saying that he can't do that anymore. It's almost become traumatic for him. He thinks that they don't want to hear what he has to say; they're not going to change and he's just got to put that aside. So, there's that strand to it.

29:47 The other strand is that he became more and more concerned that the world of mankind at large was not moving in a very promising direction, that ecologically we were devastating the planet in terms of going back to another species, in terms of the sustainability in the natural environment of our materials use and our appetites, in terms of I think what he perceived as our culture becoming more and more consumerist, not only in terms of materials but in terms of human relations.

30:22 Nick:   Yes, and he has this incredible grasp of quite literally like earth history because he does work in deep time given his scientific work with echinoderms and so on. You know, he's going back, you know, many, many millennia to different periods in, you know, the earth's biosphere and so on. So, he has this incredibly sense I guess of I guess of perspective for humanity, that idea in - that initial reading, was it Ardrey you read about our whole history is just like the last page turn in the book of the earth's history really.

30:52 Paul:   I think this is important. I don't think it's led to melancholy, I think that aspect of his life opened up horizons to him that are largely unguessed by those of a narrower outlook, but I haven't talked about the specific fact that you've just touched on which is his marine biological work and his reputation are linked to work on echinoderms, what many people would think of as sea stars though sea stars are only one kind of echinoderm.

31:23 The crucial thing here to pick up your hint is that echinoderms are an extremely ancient life form, that all the fila of echinoderms that are in existence today appeared what's known as the Cambrian explosion 545 million years ago.

31:41 Nick:   So, I was off when I said millennia....

31:42 Paul:   Indeed.

31:43 Nick:   Millions of years...

31:44 Paul:   Yes, it's hundreds of thousands of millennia, right. Echinoderms are very unusual creatures but among invertebrates - and this will really sound strange to our listeners - as Richard Dawkins points out in his book The Ancestor's Tale about evolution in general, echinoderms are among our closest relatives in the invertebrate kingdom.

32:14 Nick:   Is that right?

32:15 Paul:   This is one of the many counter intuitive aspects of what we've learned about genetics in by and large Mark's lifetime. So, he's been positioned a, in deep time; b, with exotic and very ancient creatures in deep time; c, those creatures have been sea creatures and the sea became more and more of a metaphor for him in terms of his dreams, in terms of meaning, in terms of ecology. He was at the cutting edge by the last 10 or 15 years of research on echinoderms and a significance of research for our understanding of life on earth, of conversation, of speciation, of environmentalism. So, he was getting his source of transcendence and depth of meaning and his sense of concern and melancholy at the same time.

33:11 Nick:   That's quite an extraordinary reflection. I really can't add much more to that. I mean, that's incredible. If I can sort of make a bizarre shift I suppose but all of what you just mentioned in many different buckets of conversation have sort of - you know, they sort of bespeak an incredible energy, a vitality, a - you know, an unerring sense of endeavour, all the while as a Christian brother which we've gently alluded to towards the end of the interview. Of course, that order prescribes that its members must be chaste, so without any sexual relations at all. Can you speak to that notion of chastity and I guess abstinence in the 21st century which is entirely unappealing and just not workable for many people? It's an outdated sort of concept and yet it seems to have underpinned, you know, his ability to be such a wonderful person without any kind of overlay of sexual relations at all. It's almost enabled him to be a more fuller human being but that's an uncomfortable thought, isn't it, because so much of our relations as human beings are tied up in sexual relations basically.

34:27 Paul:   Yes, they are. It's been a very notable phenomenon of western civilisation of let's say the last 100 years or so, that our culture has you would have to become more and more sexualised so that we're essentially told at one at the same time that sexual gratification is indispensable to the sanity and wellbeing or happiness of a human being and that what's generally called sexual repression, that is to say non-gratification, is simply unhealthy.

35:01 On the other hand, we now know with the 'we too' movement and all this other stuff, that there are all sorts of anxiety about sexual abuse, sexual licence, sleaze, etc. How do we strike the right balance?

35:18 Well, I know that when I first met Mark, you know, I was idealistic and I contemplated religious vocation but the central thought in my mind in the 70s was ‘but I'm not going to give you my sexuality.’ You know, I've always been a romantic and I thought, you know, why would I give up women? They seem to be the most extraordinary phenomenon in the world, you know?

35:42 So, I, you know, apart from the epistemological questions about theological belief, I thought no, I'm not going to go there.

35:47 Nick:   A bridge too far...

35:48 Paul:   Yeah, a bridge too far. However, I remained as I said in touch with Mark and he seemed to me to be different to any other religious figure I knew. I knew others - priests, brothers, nuns - who had taken vows. They didn't impress me as having the same qualities of personality so I wouldn't say that Mark was an exceptional person because he was religious or because he was chaste, he was an exceptional person who was religious and chaste but the way in which he lived out his vow chastity has been exemplary and it shows that this can be done. That's the point I would make.

36:27 I used to ask him all the way back in the late 70s why are you a Christian brother? Why did you do this? Why would you accept these vows? Why would you limit your life? His response then - and I would say this has remained the case - was ‘I'm not a Christian brother now for the reasons that I was when I took vows many years ago...’

36:44 Nick:   When he was 15...

36:45 Paul:   When he joined the order as a novice when he was 15 which was very, very young, but he said, you know, he was formed by men of character and intelligence and high ideals. We should make this clear, you know, at a time when there's this sense that too many religious figures seem to have infringed against canons of proprietary or even engaged in really criminal activity, that even according to the Royal Commission is still the distinct minority of religious figures. So, most of them - a great majority - have not been accused of any such thing. Mark stands further apart because not only is he not accused of such things, he has lived quite an exceptional life, a really virtuous life, right?

37:34 Let's come back to centre frame, alright? I know many people and particularly women, right, who testify to Mark's integrity, his virtue and also of course his virility. So, he hadn't withdrawn from sexuality out of incapacity or distaste, he was a great athlete and a virile man interested in human sexual relations and in culture more generally. So, he wasn't shut off, he wasn't blind to reality. He was looking it right in the eye and choosing freely to live this way in order to give to others and not succumb to basic appetites. That's exceptional at any time and not least in our time.

38:19 Nick:   It is.

38:20 Paul:   It's one of the reasons why telling his story was well worth doing.

38:24 Nick:   Just conscious of time, Paul. I want to sort of come back to the title of the book again which has sort of underpinned a lot of my questions today. You know, you call the book The Secret Gospel according to Mark. A couple of questions here which I hope you might be able to remember. I know you will, but firstly what do you mean by the gospel, like are you suggesting that there is some sort of message in his life which I actually think that answers itself, having just done this interview? In this book that you have written which is almost the gospel to - which has recorded the life of this sort of Christ-like figure frankly, what would that message be and what makes it a secret?

39:03 Paul:   Well, I got the idea for the title from Frank Commode’s book The Genesis of Secrecy where he says that in the 20th century, a guy called Morton Smith found in a monastery in Israel a letter or a copy of a letter - it was an 18th century copy of a letter - apparently written in Greek in the 2nd century by Clement of Alexandria, one of the great church fathers as we call them.

39:31 Clement in this letter had said that when St Mark wrote what we regard as the canonical gospel, he wrote it in Rome based on the reminiscences of St Peter, but when Peter was executed under Nero, Mark fled from Rome, went to Alexandria and there says Clement he wrote a second and secret gospel which is only made available for those being initiated into the deep mysteries.

39:56 Now, I thought to myself how tantalising is this? Given that the Mark of my story first of all is called Mark but secondly had been christened Peter, right? So, if you just look at his life, there's the...

40:09 Nick:   Peter Desmond O’Lachlan...

40:11 Paul:   Peter Desmond O’Lachlan is his name. His family to this day calls him Des, right, but he took the religious name, Mark. As Peter Desmond O’Lachlan, he was taken into the religious order and trained in scholastic theology in the old monastic, conservative tradition but over time, he rethought this and he thought to himself no, I think what the gospel surely really means, what this whole idea of Jesus as a salvific figure of the last supper and all the meanings we attach to it, they have an existential meaning. He tried to live that meaning out, not turn it into a doctrine that he sort of self-righteously preached to anybody which he never did. That's in a sense the secret gospel according to our Mark.

40:58 What I do towards the end of the book, having told the story of his life in its many dimension, is try to distil out so what are really talking about here? The answer is that Karl Rahner, the existentialist theologian, said if we retreat from the idea of god or deity and the sacred, we run the risk of regressing to just being clever animals with tools and weapons and appetites. We would lose our self of the transcendent.

41:26 So, I ask well maybe Rahner was onto something but let's look at Mark's life because what he did is he retreated more and more from that theological language. He was more and more immersed in human community, in human art, in human science and in the truths that science has made plain, did he regress? Demonstrably, in fact, he did not. Did he become merely a clever animal? No, he didn't. Did he lose his sense of transcendence? No, he didn't. This ought to be reassuring.

41:55 What Rahner had said is if you also disconnect from the idea of a personal god and god intervening in history as in a biblical tradition, then at best you will be left with natural religion where it is this world and its possibilities in which you seek your transcendence and your meaning.

42:16 Well, Mark did do that and one could say that by the 2010's, his religion was in a sense a natural religion but one nevertheless anchored in the greatest calls for justice, the greatest poetics, the greatest methodology if you will of the biblical tradition, but attached now to being a person informed by the scientific sense of deep time and actual ecology and the nature of the world. That seems to me distils the secret gospel so it is a hermeneutical one. It brings down to us in our time the values, the best insights that we can still find if we read what we've so often called the holy scripture but without the dogmas, without the mystagoguery, without the able authority, without the scholastic mystifications; you know the idea of transubstantiation, it's a stumbling block for non-Catholics.

43:13 Nick:   Literally eating the body of Christ and the blood of Christ...

43:14 Paul:   Body and blood of Christ, what can this possibly mean? It sounds like cannibalism, it sounds weird but if on the other hand - and there are hints of this even in the epistles of St Paul - what one means is that when we partake of last supper consuming bread and wine, we are members of the body of Christ; the mystical body which is the church, which is living differently. Well, that has some meaning.

43:38 Nick:   What I think also has meaning, Paul - and this is my final sort of point of today's interview - is that I think that the power of narrative - and you refer to this in the biography. The power of narrative for understanding and engagement is so much more compelling than rigorous, you know, schema of doctrine or ideology or dogma or whatever it might be and particularly those who sort of, you know, blandly just regurgitate what is sort of laid down to them. I think that, you know, stories like Mark's need to be told because it is frankly, I guess psychologically - or I don’t know in terms of engagement - how people relate. I think you'll actually find a lot more people who have lost, you know, touch with the Catholic church, with their faith, whatever it might be - Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist and so on - really being inspired by this lived example of I just think a good human being which we should all aspire to be. So, that's what I - as a final reflection, do you have anything to add onto that?

44:46 Paul:   Yeah, I would say that is surely the case. You know, there's an old quip, you know, which points to hypocrisy when you accuse - when you say a certain individual who purports to be an authority is in effect saying do what I say, not what I do; in other words, don't look at my example, just follow my words.

45:07 With Mark, it's completely the other way around, right? He has never in all the years I've known him be someone to say this is the truth, take it from me.

45:15 Nick:   ... with deeds, not words.

45:17 Paul:   Absolutely right and even when he does as he has done exemplary things, he doesn't say you see, I'm the guy whose got it right. He just says well I think this is what I'm supposed to be doing; this is, you know, I'm seeking transcendence, I'm trying to form community. He doesn’t have tickets on himself.

45:35 Nick:   Earnest, authentic, genuine, hardworking, humble...

45:38 Paul:   Yeah, and you know, he's not seeking the limelight. What he hoped when he asked would I perhaps write his biography was that I could at least help to get the record clear and show what if anything had been the meaning of all the things he'd been trying to do.

45:58 Nick:   What does it add up to?

46:00 Paul:   Yeah, and I should - perhaps this is a good note in which to finish. So, the bottom line is well you can try things out, whether cynically or idealistically, whether dogmatically or open-mindedly but at the end of the day you have to ask does it work? Well, he founded these ecumenical communities which were clearly experimental. They weren't hippy communes; they weren't social utopias and they weren't monastic communities and they certainly weren't Celtic. They were communities in which people - men and women, old and young, Christian and non-Christian - could come together and what he was able to generate was a community. Always only a dozen or so people, the number of whom - well, not the number but the, you know, specific members of whom changed over time - they would come and go but the community worked.

46:51 In preparing the biography, I interviewed numerous people who had been members of his community at different stages. What they said is the community was a wonderful family like place to live, to be mentored, to feel safe; that Mark was like a father figure or a big brother; he was so caring, so competent, so full of humour and interest in his stories. This surely is a model worth looking at.

47:17 Then, I would say to some of these people so is it a model that can be replicated? Is this a way for more people in our society where so many people feel alone or uprooted, to be brought into communities that might give them a sense of belonging and identity and warmth and security?

47:34 The answer tended to be well it's a good idea in theory but without Mark, I'm not sure whether it would work, right? That's challenging, isn't it? So, can we as it were to use a contemporary term - can we clone Mark? If people look at his life, might they be inspired to say I'm not Mark but this kind of thing is worth doing?

47:58 Nick:   Living up to the stature of Mark.

48:00 Paul:   Yes, exactly, so that's what the biography perhaps is asking people.

48:06 Nick:   Yeah, well it's an extraordinary gift and an incredible gesture. I think it's deeply humbling for him to have someone write about his life in such detail with such depth of understanding, feeling and an incredible understanding of the great sort of seismic forces that are at any stage of human history operating on and influencing the individual. We tend to, you know, labour this idea of, you know, man is, you know, the maker of his own fortune, the artisan of his own fortune but, you know, yes we have faculty within us to do certain things but ultimately we are subject to forces which are incomprehensible and far greater than, you know, the sum total of the actions of our own individual endeavours.

48:55 I think you've taken both those things into consideration. You know, Mark as the man and the individual but also, it's this incredible sweep of philosophy, theology, economics, social changes, academic shifts and other social - I think I've already mentioned that - upheaval. So, it's a unique work I think, Paul, and I do thank you very much for being here today to explain it. I hope that we can help Mark's legacy live on through not only the gospel, The Secret Gospel According to Mark, which you've published and is available online but also through this podcast which might broaden the sort of set of listeners a little bit wider.

49:36 Paul:   Yeah, and we should point out to your listeners of course that they won't find the book if they go into their favourite bookshop but they will find it online. It's available on a print on demand basis through all the major online retailers - Amazon, Book Depository, Angus and Robertson, Barnes and Noble. For those who are a little finicky about cost, it's a big lavishly illustrated and expensive book but this winter, we hope to produce both a paperback and a kindle version. They won't have all the photographs, they won't have the maps, they won't have the appendices but you'll get the main text, so you can choose.

50:13 Nick:   Perfect. Alright, thank you very much, Paul.

 - Ends