0:03

Welcome to the final episode of series three

0:06

of the Wee Society podcast. But

0:08

today we're in the rolling Gloucestershire countryside

0:10

for something a little different, yet still

0:13

true to what the Wee Society is all about. Our

0:16

guest is one of Britain's most celebrated novelists

0:18

and storytellers, Ian McEwan, whose canon

0:21

of work has won him the Shakespeare Medal, the

0:24

Europa Prize, in 2020 the Girtha Medal,

0:27

and just this month he was awarded the

0:30

Commandeur

0:31

des Arts et Lettres. Developing

0:33

great narratives should not be the preserve of great fiction,

0:36

argues Nobel Prize winning economist Robert

0:39

Shiller. If social scientists

0:41

want to explain themselves to a wider world, they

0:43

need to develop the art of the compelling

0:46

master narrative and use it to

0:48

get their ideas across. Ian

0:51

McEwan is such a master. His latest

0:53

novel, Lessons, is in my view a

0:55

masterwork. But the arc

0:57

of an indicative liberal's life in post-war

0:59

Britain, the subject of Lessons, is but one

1:02

of his many preoccupations. They include biology,

1:04

computer science, neuroscience, journalism,

1:06

even social science. His common

1:09

theme is truth and evidence seeking, all

1:11

throwing up troublesome moral choices

1:13

and the overwhelming emotions they trigger.

1:16

The stuff of great novels. Ian

1:18

McEwan, it's brilliant that you've given up the time.

1:24

Thank you, Will. I can't think of anything

1:26

nicer on a warm Sunday afternoon than

1:28

to be talking with you. When we said,

1:31

or I said, join the We Society

1:33

podcast, you heard this slightly

1:35

kind of idiosyncratic title, the We Society. What

1:38

are you going to make of it? Yeah, I thought it might

1:40

be the Zamiatin Appreciation

1:43

Society after

1:45

his great novel. But anyway, we

1:47

rather than them or us.

1:49

We, yeah. Collective,

1:52

tolerant, generous, inclusive, us.

1:55

We. Precisely. Actually,

1:57

I interviewed Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident.

1:59

pointed out that there's that conception of

2:02

we, but in China there's a very different conception

2:04

of we, oppressive. Of

2:07

course, I mean, like the word people,

2:10

which you might think just refers to

2:12

everyone you know and everyone you see in the street, but

2:15

when the people have decided and you find yourself

2:17

in prison for writing an

2:20

awkward book or awkward piece

2:22

of journalism, then the people becomes

2:24

a very barbed and

2:27

rather odious concept. A

2:29

sense of ship or any sense that you

2:31

might be curtailed or constrained in what you write,

2:33

has that ever crossed your

2:36

consciousness? Early on in my career I

2:38

got a television play band,

2:41

but that was because

2:43

of its sexual content

2:46

rather than anything political. And

2:49

many years later, I think about 25 years later, it

2:51

was shown on television and only even noticed. Time

2:53

to move on. Yeah,

2:55

so not everything's getting worse. Generally

2:58

and relatively compared to

3:01

many, many other countries and they're on the increase,

3:04

this has been a free

3:07

and open society to write novels in. Now

3:10

Lessons is the

3:13

arc of a life. The

3:15

character at Roland is,

3:18

I think, the same age as Hugh Ian. Isn't

3:21

that odd? And

3:25

the reason I liked it so much was

3:28

it this kind of interface between the kind

3:30

of indecisions and anguishes of a

3:33

liberal intersecting with

3:36

major, major national and global

3:38

events, even kicking off with losing

3:40

his virginity to his music

3:42

teacher because the world

3:45

might be blown up with the Cuban

3:47

Missile Crisis.

3:48

How

3:50

much does it refract your own experience, your own

3:52

sense of kind of a helpless liberalism

3:54

or a feeble liberalism interacting with events beyond

3:57

our control? Well, I think that

3:59

just...

3:59

as certain songs

4:02

conform the soundtrack of our existence,

4:04

so can, so do international

4:08

crises or national crises. They become

4:11

part of who we are and what we

4:13

are. And even for people who

4:16

take no interest in the news and don't read newspapers,

4:19

they will be shaped by it, I think, by

4:21

a certain kind of optimism,

4:23

pessimism in the air, that spectrum, times

4:27

when you feel that you're

4:30

living in

4:31

an era of possibility and

4:33

other times when you think we're

4:36

all going to hell in a handcart. I

4:38

think a good index of

4:41

whether culture, the political

4:44

world, can judge

4:46

itself is, do

4:48

we think our children are going to have a better life

4:51

or more opportunities than we did? At

4:54

the moment, I would say, I feel, speaking

4:58

as a sort of 68er, as it were,

5:00

that generation who lived

5:02

in an expanded set

5:05

of opportunities from the state,

5:08

I was state educated,

5:09

all the way through, that

5:13

it's a lot harder for a young person now

5:16

than it was then. Even contemplating

5:20

things like rents.

5:22

If

5:23

you were a young writer in 1972 in London, like me, like I

5:25

was, my rent was £24 a month for a

5:27

three-bedroom

5:32

place in South London. And

5:34

although I was living on £500 a year, I felt I had everything

5:38

I needed. Enough in

5:41

the way of paperbacks or library books, enough

5:44

to eat and drink. We didn't

5:46

have many machines to run and

5:50

education was free. University education was

5:52

free. Admittedly, only 6% of

5:55

us went and I think that is an

5:57

important consideration.

5:59

But

6:01

generally, it was the Augustan

6:04

age of rock and roll and paperback books

6:06

and possibility.

6:08

And that seems to have narrowed. The

6:11

world seemed to have both got filled with more

6:13

people and shrunk at the same time. The

6:15

price of a chicken, the supermarket, had

6:20

gone up by the same rate as a house price

6:22

from when you were in 1972. A

6:26

price for chicken would now be 50 pounds. It

6:29

would taste a lot better because it's

6:31

a transactional matter. People

6:34

who tested on wine, if they're told it cost 50 pound

6:37

a bottle,

6:38

really enjoy it. So

6:42

yeah, chicken would have tasted a lot better

6:44

apart from that. Yeah.

6:47

Buying your own house is not possible.

6:49

There's this in your novel where you say, there's a great, I have

6:52

to, it's such a great line that I just have

6:54

to read it to you. Because you're actually

6:57

talking about, it's my generation as much as

6:59

your generation. You talk about

7:01

us, lolled

7:03

on history's apron lap, nestling

7:07

in little folds of time,

7:09

eating all the cream. Yes.

7:12

Our generation. We're the cats who got the cream.

7:16

And for those

7:18

who can help their children

7:20

buy a house or even rent a house, it's

7:23

one thing. But I think

7:25

that's a minority.

7:28

There's a whole generation now who have no hope

7:30

of ever buying a house. Even if they're in employment

7:32

in a 35,000 pound a year job, there's no chance. It's

7:37

just not possible. But

7:41

coming back to your original question, part

7:44

of the first

7:46

thought I had about this novel was

7:49

to write a list of international

7:53

events that impacted my own life. And the very

7:55

first one was the Suez crisis.

8:00

but I was only eight years old. I understood absolutely

8:02

nothing about it. I just found myself bundled

8:04

into an army camp. I was living in Libya. My dad

8:06

was a soldier, an officer.

8:08

You think what Roland does as well? Yeah,

8:11

so I gave all this to Roland as his first

8:14

experience of an international event. My

8:16

mother, by stroke, incredible

8:19

fortune, was in England.

8:22

My father was way too busy. I

8:25

saw him in the distance, striding around with a revolver

8:28

strapped

8:29

to his waist. And

8:31

so myself and a handful of school

8:34

friends just lived a life

8:36

that was so free that I'd never touched

8:39

on before. So the Suez Crisis for me was, I

8:42

mean, not what the Suez Crisis was if

8:45

you were at Sèvres for the secret meeting

8:47

with the French. But it gave me a

8:49

taste of freedom that never really

8:51

left me.

8:52

And I think now, in retrospect,

8:55

for many years of contemplating this, it

8:57

was one element that pushed me towards

9:00

wanting to be a writer and never have a job.

9:03

Just this taste of, for

9:05

example, hanging out in the machine gun nests

9:07

with the soldiers. It's gonna be a nationalist

9:10

uprising in Libya,

9:12

which is why all civilians were herded into camps.

9:17

Being given rides on a Harley Davidson by, you

9:19

know, spirited young

9:21

officers, hanging around in the tank

9:23

workshops,

9:24

playing

9:25

football on a grassless, sandy

9:29

football pitch covered in oil to keep the sand

9:31

down. Smell of oil and sand,

9:33

I think would

9:34

be wonderful. Yeah,

9:36

if you're stuck for a Christmas present for me, a kind of aftershave,

9:40

the smell of oil and sand, I'd be dousing

9:42

myself in it. It'd be the smell of freedom.

9:45

But then the

9:48

Cuba Missile Crisis. You

9:51

know, it's weird. I watched it blow by blow,

9:53

I'm thinking God, the world might end. The

9:56

curious thing about the Cuba Missile Crisis

9:58

when civilization could have. been

10:00

obliterated is that

10:03

it never really lodged in the public

10:05

imagination the way the Kennedy assassination

10:07

did. It doesn't

10:10

come up in an old way. And

10:12

one writer said it's

10:14

almost as if we had lifted a stone and seen

10:16

some unspeakable creatures underneath

10:19

it and just replaced the stone

10:21

and hurried on

10:22

because it was too awful to contemplate and

10:25

too stupid to contemplate. And

10:31

now we have China squaring up to the US

10:33

or the US just going up to China. And

10:37

we can might die for Taiwan

10:39

democracy. Is

10:42

that part of your sense that horizons

10:44

are closing? That you

10:47

and I grew up in a sense of

10:50

opportunity. It seemed unbounded.

10:53

We could talk the language

10:55

of love and revolution. And

10:58

it all seemed possible in 2023 you

11:00

could not say that. Yes.

11:04

And there's all kinds of things you cannot say

11:06

around the world. So

11:07

in the period of optimism, which I

11:09

count as sort of post

11:12

fall of Berlin Wall,

11:14

democracies were increasing,

11:16

Freedom House and like minded

11:19

institutes were counting

11:22

up the numbers. And it wasn't just central Europe

11:25

that was beginning to be free,

11:27

but countries in

11:29

South America, Spain

11:31

and Portugal had earlier gone that way. And

11:34

there was and South Africa, of course, the end

11:36

of apartheid. There was

11:39

a real sense of possibility. And in 1972,

11:41

for example, in my own life, and

11:43

this is why these big things also

11:46

are personal things. I

11:48

went to Amsterdam with a couple of American

11:51

friends, we bought a bit of a jalopy

11:54

and drove it to Peshawar, crossing

11:57

Turkey,

11:58

Iran, Afghanistan.

11:59

fascinating

12:02

and extraordinary journey, we were

12:04

free.

12:07

And one of the things I thought

12:09

when I stood

12:10

in No Man's Land, having gone through

12:13

the west side of the wall, was broken open, we all went

12:16

into No Man's Land from Potts Dammerplants,

12:19

I was thinking,

12:20

you know, I think I might be able to repeat that journey

12:23

and drive to the Bering Straits from Calais,

12:26

maybe in five or 10 years time. Maybe

12:29

there was a tiny window when that was possible, I didn't

12:31

notice it, it came and went. Yeah.

12:36

There are places now where I'd be

12:38

very reluctant to go, you know, if

12:40

you speak openly about, for example,

12:44

your atheism or doubts about religion

12:46

or skepticism about it, there are many countries where,

12:50

from Bangladesh to Pakistan and many

12:52

others,

12:54

where you would be really foolish

12:57

to speak your mind, speak freely. So

13:00

places you can't go because you can't speak freely,

13:03

I think now Russia and China have to be included,

13:06

that's a big part of the world.

13:07

Muslim majority countries plus

13:10

China, plus Russia, and

13:13

Saudi Arabia certainly included

13:16

in that. And

13:19

weirdly enough, Will, in

13:22

the West where we have these freedoms, we seem

13:24

to be closing those off too. And

13:28

last year I signed a letter in support

13:31

of Joanna Rowling for, you know,

13:33

she's, you know, death threats.

13:36

Well, how extraordinary. It

13:38

started with a tweet

13:41

she wrote about

13:44

a clean water charity, a very worthy organization,

13:47

but in its rubric,

13:50

it was falling over backwards to avoid

13:52

the word women in, as in men,

13:55

women and children, access to clean

13:57

water. And she said, well, what was that word?

13:59

Was it?

13:59

wambles or wibbledons

14:02

or wambons. And

14:04

it was a piece of perfectly, you

14:07

know,

14:08

harmless teasing of

14:13

a protest. You can't remove this word from the

14:15

vocabulary. Look

14:17

what happened. Look what happened.

14:19

This is just one small case. And

14:21

it's a case of a very wealthy woman whose

14:24

life can

14:25

certainly flourish. So

14:29

we're in danger of taking

14:31

away this gift and doing it

14:34

willfully among ourselves,

14:36

things that can't be said in the states. It's just got nuts.

14:40

Come back. You wrote Machines

14:43

Like Me. It was

14:46

kind of before the current controversies about

14:48

artificial intelligence. I mean, in a sense, you were ahead of

14:50

the curve. And

14:53

I just wondered, I mean, one of

14:55

the I cited in my introduction,

14:57

Robert Schiller, who talks

14:59

about kind of having a vision

15:01

and social scientists have a vision, you want

15:03

to get their ideas over a couple of great economists

15:06

say, published a

15:08

book just kind of a power of progress,

15:11

Darren Asimov, Lou, and Simon

15:13

Johnson, and they say, all

15:15

technology is malleable. You

15:18

can, you know, AI could be used

15:20

for bad things like the Chinese are

15:23

going to use it, or it could be used for good

15:25

things, kind of medical diagnosis,

15:28

but you have a vision, a great,

15:30

you know, you hear your great

15:31

narrative tellers, great kind

15:33

of novelist of our generation, you know, do

15:35

you have a vision for how we

15:38

might use AI? Well,

15:40

first of all, I absolutely agree, it's

15:43

a human thing. And the human uses is put

15:45

to the human control it has will determine

15:49

how we're going to feel about it.

15:51

Again, I think in binary terms,

15:54

let's say China and the West, there's

15:58

the problem of state control of it in China. China.

16:00

And there's a problem here of commercial control of

16:02

it. Exactly. And that is the division

16:05

we have. So there must be,

16:08

certainly in the west, some

16:11

kind of Wikipedia, as it were,

16:13

an old fashioned, early

16:16

internet romanticism

16:18

that we have to return to where we're

16:20

in a collective.

16:22

It needs to be constrained by legislation

16:24

that has a firm grip

16:27

of what those values are of

16:29

openness and fairness and

16:31

inclusiveness of who has access

16:34

to this and what's done with it. And

16:36

we're only at the very, very

16:39

early stages. We've hardly got our toes

16:41

in the water, chat, GB and

16:44

so on. And

16:45

chat, the fourth iteration

16:48

of open AI's software.

16:52

Most of us has

16:55

been the case now for a couple of centuries, are

16:57

like, you know, innocent children in a

16:59

forest of giant redwoods.

17:02

I mean, our understanding, most

17:04

of us could not tell you how a two

17:06

way electric switch works a little bit. So,

17:10

you know, it all seems to me a miracle, by the way, that when I turn

17:12

a light on the other end of the hall. But

17:14

that that that requires a

17:17

vision. And I heard a conversation

17:20

you did about six things

17:22

you love that aren't very well known about. I

17:25

immediately thought, even before you started speaking, well, that

17:27

that's gonna be six things that we'll no longer love,

17:29

because everyone knows about them. But

17:33

anyway, you said something right at the end

17:36

about a clause 172 or something

17:38

of the

17:40

responsibility put on businesses that

17:43

seemed, you

17:44

know, far reaching. Section 172. Yeah.

17:47

Of the 2005 companies. Marvelous.

17:51

I didn't know about it. And

17:53

I thought, let's translate that

17:56

vision to

17:58

a notion of what AI could do. can be, and

18:00

it needs that kind of statement,

18:03

firm grip of what

18:06

an open society is, for example. And

18:08

you see its failure, we saw it last week, policemen

18:11

rounding up and arresting people

18:15

who have got a different view on the role of the monarchy. The

18:18

law-run intended consequences. The membership

18:21

of Republic has doubled since then. I

18:23

know, I know. Yeah, it's gone

18:25

from 2000 to 4000, but yes, it's doubled. But

18:29

it does need, and

18:32

the trouble is, I mean, I don't feel

18:34

it's in the air at the moment. It needs

18:37

values, and those values

18:40

need to be generally agreed, and I thought

18:42

the spirit of those values was in your 172.

18:46

It is, actually, you've really got, one

18:48

of the things that these two economists

18:51

that I quoted. Maybe you should just tell

18:53

what's in 172, because it's

18:55

a few million two sentences. Section 172

18:59

actually came out of the

19:01

state we're in, which I wrote

19:03

nearly 30 years ago. And

19:06

I read it in TypeScript. And

19:09

you gave it in endorsement, thank you. But

19:12

it simply says that actually the

19:14

responsibility of the directors of

19:17

a company is much bigger and

19:19

larger than the promotion of the share

19:21

price and immediate short-term profits.

19:23

You have a duty of

19:25

care to your employees, to

19:28

your customers, to your stakeholders,

19:31

and to the wider society. This

19:34

doesn't have the force of law, or

19:36

even is it part of the Companies Act? And

19:39

there's been big debates about to what extent, it

19:42

should be legally supplant, the

19:44

notion that all a director has to do is to maximize a share

19:47

price. But it is there. Suppose

19:50

you transferred all that, those duty of

19:52

care to users of AI. You

19:54

would have, it would be devastating. It would be really

19:56

devastating. It would

19:58

have to come out of the hands.

19:59

of commercial interests. I

20:02

mean, they could still run it and make profit on it, but they would

20:04

have to be in the law. It would need enforceability.

20:09

In other words, if you suddenly thought, ah,

20:12

AI, this kind of open AI

20:14

stuff, marvellous opportunities

20:16

for pornography or whatever, well,

20:20

that doesn't serve everyone in the ways that 172

20:22

does. So I thought you had answered

20:27

your own question

20:30

by proposing to me or teaching

20:32

me something I had never heard of,

20:35

the idea that a business is

20:37

a social entity and is rooted

20:39

in our collective sense of selves

20:42

and has a responsibility to all

20:44

those around it and not just the shareholders

20:48

is something deeply

20:50

applicable to how we approach AI.

20:54

We're heading towards, I

20:56

mean, let's suppose we had it even at the best, we

20:58

still would have this

21:00

binary conflict

21:02

between state controlled AI

21:05

in China. They've

21:08

worked very hard. They probably have maybe 150,000 people now working on censoring

21:13

just the old fashioned internet. Well,

21:15

it's beyond Orwellian big brother. I mean, this

21:18

social control where if you

21:21

even jaywalk,

21:24

a message will come from party HQ

21:26

or from the central authority on

21:29

your mobile telling you what you've offended,

21:31

you've now lost, you've now got three

21:32

points. And if you did it again, you're going to have six points

21:35

and you'll lose your license to walk about. Or you'll

21:37

get a mortgage or whatever. It's extraordinary.

21:39

And of course, I mean, that

21:42

in a way is what this

21:44

coming argument, fight war

21:48

in Taiwan, if it ever comes to that, will

21:50

ultimately be about. Yeah, absolutely.

21:53

But I can

21:55

imagine the voters in Detroit saying,

21:58

I don't want to die for 28 million.

23:58

and

24:00

quiet to devise

24:03

the structure of a fiction. I

24:05

can't do it and be on the road for

24:08

the thousand

24:09

very good causes that are going.

24:12

So that balance has been a constant feature

24:14

in my life. I really care about this or that. But

24:18

then do I want to fly to

24:21

Lisbon and say so when,

24:25

for a start I don't think it's going to make much difference, but also

24:29

my central concern

24:31

and has been for 50 years is to write fiction. Where

24:33

do you get the ideas from? And one

24:36

of the things I'm always struck by, I mean,

24:38

you know, when

24:40

you wrote Saturday, you

24:43

shadowed a neurosurgeon

24:45

and you actually kind of wanted

24:48

to go and watch him operate and actually

24:50

put your hand on someone's brain. Just a finger.

24:53

A finger, okay, all right, well, I mean, okay, I think

24:55

it's better. It's bone flap, it's quite small.

24:58

Okay, nonetheless, not everyone has got a finger

25:00

on a person's brain. They have to take a lot more skull

25:02

off to get a hand in there. Okay, and you

25:04

came and shadowed me when I was under the observer. That's

25:07

right. That's not what every novelist does, what does every

25:09

novelist do that? I haven't done it for

25:11

a bit actually. I don't know whether getting older makes

25:13

you just more reflective and think, actually, I've got

25:15

loads more material just sitting in my head. Where

25:18

does that come from? The radio, television, lived experience,

25:20

how does it come? Well, in those instances

25:24

you just mentioned there, there

25:27

was a long period of time when I was interested in

25:29

other people's work and

25:31

I thought that what people did to earn

25:34

a living was strangely missing from the modern novel. That

25:40

identity is caught up with their means, education,

25:42

I mean, a

25:45

sense of self, everything about a

25:47

character and I've always been interested in characters.

25:51

The delineation of character in fiction.

25:54

Because

25:56

writers are generally either

25:59

teachers or... or

26:01

freelancers living at home,

26:04

working from home, their

26:06

characters are often rather cut

26:08

off from the world of what people

26:10

do nine to five or eight

26:13

to 10, as in the case of neurosomes. And

26:17

I love, maybe it was all my first

26:19

experiences of film sets, I love other

26:21

people's expertise and things. Love

26:23

learning the sort of small vocabulary

26:28

that

26:29

protects, as it were, an in-group

26:32

of people who are collaborating

26:34

on something. So

26:37

it was very natural for me to

26:40

go and spend time in

26:43

the national hospital, watching

26:45

operations, scrubbing up with the guys

26:47

in the morning, being horrified by the state

26:49

of the changing room.

26:52

I mean, can you imagine it? These are neurosurgeons

26:54

and on the laboratory door, it said, for

26:57

the 10th time, will you please

27:00

lift the seat

27:01

while urinating? These

27:04

are guys that have their hands in your brain. You

27:07

think, my God, but details

27:09

like that are irresistible. These

27:13

are not gods. They have feet

27:16

of, well, and other parts

27:18

of clay. And I've

27:21

spent time in solar laboratories

27:24

and yeah, came to one of your news conferences,

27:27

set in the BBC news conference for radio

27:31

when I was writing Plowman's Lunch.

27:34

I'm interested in the realist novel. I

27:36

mean, that's what most of my fiction is being, with

27:39

one or two sort of breakouts from it.

27:42

Depicting

27:44

the reality that we all

27:46

can name and share is a

27:48

matter of huge artifice and getting

27:51

it right

27:52

is important. And it can

27:56

only be done by highly selective detail.

27:58

I'm finding those details. You

28:01

have to go and look for them. You have to go and

28:03

be there and sit

28:05

and broom with them. And

28:09

having seen them, you've got to cogitate, which

28:11

is why I can't fly off to all

28:14

over the world to go and protest

28:16

about something. Science

28:18

and social science, this

28:21

is the Academy of Social Sciences doing this podcast. Everything

28:24

about us is an attempt to

28:27

marshal evidence

28:30

and on the basis of evidence, say

28:32

something illuminating

28:34

about the world. And in a way,

28:37

you're saying that your craft as a novelist is

28:39

kind of first cousin to that. Yeah.

28:41

I'm interested, these are kind

28:43

of novels I like to read as well as write.

28:47

I'm quite drawn to

28:49

the novel that tells us something

28:51

about what it is to be

28:53

a person

28:55

in these conditions of modernity. Now, you

28:57

know, early stages of the 21st century.

29:02

I'm writing or trying to write a novel

29:05

based on the premise of the humanities

29:08

for all the turmoil and catastrophes

29:10

that the world has gone through in the

29:13

next four or five centuries. So this is the 26th century that it survived.

29:19

What will survive about us is poetry. What

29:21

will survive of us are English

29:24

literature studies as it was. So

29:26

this is trying

29:28

to see the 21st century, which

29:31

is the period

29:33

that my hero, my narrator

29:37

specializes in, through

29:39

the lens of, or 10 lenses

29:41

as it were, of a fairly

29:44

remote future.

29:45

Most science fiction is based

29:47

on the idea that it's like, you know, like

29:50

Dune. We're all living in a desert

29:52

and or crouching around a peep

29:55

fire, remembering

29:57

how our

29:58

great-great-great grandfathers came up. could stand

30:01

under a stream of hot water in February,

30:03

douse ourselves in luminous liquids to

30:05

make our hair shiny. No

30:08

one believes that anymore. No,

30:12

what about someone in a rather seedy, run-down

30:15

humanities department in a university in

30:18

the year 2560, trying to write a book about

30:23

a completely invented poet of

30:25

our time, sort of equal of Seamus

30:28

Heaney.

30:29

I've read biographies of

30:32

written and now, say, of 16th

30:35

century poets. And they'll get

30:37

right inside their love life,

30:39

right inside their communications. People

30:42

try it with Shakespeare, it's rather difficult. There's not much private

30:45

stuff about him. What

30:48

happens when you have

30:50

at your disposal

30:52

the 87 and a half thousand

30:55

emails that you're subject to study

30:57

sent in a lifetime? Every-

31:01

You have to have artificial intelligence to sort it out. Yes,

31:04

you need really good search engines because you never

31:06

get to read them all yourself. So although

31:09

people bemoan the fact

31:11

that people no longer write long letters to each other

31:13

and like Dickens, like Darwin,

31:16

like Napoleon, for that matter, we

31:19

will have maybe a hundred thousand emails that they

31:21

sent or 200,000 that they sent, with

31:23

the minute details that

31:26

novelists who are interested in social realism like

31:29

me will have a feast on.

31:31

So you think it would be more fun to be a novelist

31:33

in 2560 than today? The material

31:36

is just going to be like a mountain range. You

31:39

have, let's say also

31:41

six centuries of movie making,

31:44

six centuries of novel writing,

31:46

six centuries of journalism, and

31:49

it's all there, retrievable.

31:51

And let's say all the private encrypted

31:55

communication

31:56

that's on say WhatsApp, all

31:59

stripped open. by

32:01

AI and by quantum

32:03

computing and advanced,

32:06

you know,

32:08

travelling salesman problems.

32:11

So you don't find this world dystopia, it doesn't frighten you. You

32:13

think freedoms will be preserved

32:15

in this world.

32:17

Well, I'm just postulating

32:19

how

32:21

the realist

32:24

novel has a future. We're

32:28

reaching the end. I just want to ask you, I just want to read

32:30

back that quote from

32:33

Lessons, Our Generation,

32:36

Loed on history's aproned lap, nesting

32:38

in a little fold of time, eating all the

32:41

cream. It's kind of Shakespearean. Well, thank

32:43

you. Yeah, it is too, I am a bit pentameter

32:45

than I know you say. Where

32:48

does this word come from?

32:50

How does it happen that you write stuff like that? I mean,

32:52

it's magical. Well,

32:54

I wrote a similar sentence in,

32:57

maybe it was Amsterdam.

33:01

I can't remember, but

33:04

I've often thought

33:05

of our privileges. I mean,

33:07

my parents left school at 14. My

33:10

father got a scholarship to grammar school, but he couldn't

33:12

take it up because his family wanted him to go out to work. It's

33:15

a very, very common story.

33:18

I was born

33:20

in 1948. I had

33:22

all the opportunities

33:25

of a much enhanced

33:27

primary school education, even though it's sort of run

33:29

by the British army in North Africa. All

33:33

its goals were the same back in England. But

33:35

you're on your laptop or your PC,

33:38

and these words come out. Well,

33:40

what's actually happening? What's the outcome inside your head?

33:43

I don't know because that's almost

33:45

a question for neuroscience. I don't know what's

33:48

happening, but when you

33:50

sit quietly

33:52

and try and lissue

33:57

the sense of meaning you have in your head with the words.

34:00

And it often fails. It's rather like if you

34:02

could think of a tune in your head, but you go to whistle

34:04

it, it just vanishes.

34:06

The gap between thinking of something and finding

34:08

the words for it is something to leap

34:11

across. That's

34:14

why you need silence and

34:17

exile and cunning. Are

34:20

you an optimist or a pessimist, finally? Well,

34:24

I think my sort of automatic

34:26

daytime grumpy

34:28

75-year-old almost self

34:31

is pessimist. But

34:33

when I reflect on

34:35

the need

34:37

for never giving

34:39

up on the possibilities

34:43

of progress, which is a

34:46

much discarded and ridiculed notion,

34:49

especially in academia, then

34:53

I think that life would be futile if

34:55

we don't think that we could

34:57

do things better than we are doing now. So

35:01

my optimism really

35:03

hangs in that consideration. So you're

35:05

a progressive in a sense that you

35:08

believe in progress, broadly defined. Well,

35:10

broadly defined in terms

35:12

of openness in a society and

35:16

distribution of opportunities

35:18

and possibly even some wealth. Yes.

35:24

Well, you yourself have dedicated a lifetime

35:26

to positing better

35:28

economic ways of doing things. I mean, better

35:31

ways of doing things in economics. I'm still trying, Ian.

35:33

I'm still trying. You're still trying. Yeah, well, behind

35:35

that must lie a sense that it's

35:37

achievable. It is. It is achievable. It is

35:39

perfectly achievable. I wouldn't

35:41

be doing this job as president of the Academy of Social Science

35:44

if I didn't think it was achievable. And occasionally it pops up

35:46

and we think, aha, and then it

35:49

gets forgotten or washed

35:51

away by events or some

35:53

countermeasures,

35:54

and principally

35:56

by vested interests. Well,

36:01

I mean, this is a bit corny, but

36:03

I have to say that if one has children and grandchildren

36:06

as I do,

36:07

it's almost becomes beyond

36:10

reason and a matter of faith, the

36:12

world could be better for them. And

36:14

we all have

36:16

our responsibilities towards

36:18

them. I'm dedicating my next book to my grandchildren.

36:21

Are you? Good. You'll

36:24

never know if they read it. That's

36:27

the good thing about dedicating your mentor. Thank

36:29

you so much. My God, we've covered ground

36:32

from your boyhood in the Libyan

36:34

sands through arguments

36:37

about tolerance, through opening

36:41

up artificial intelligence, through

36:43

a section 172 of the Competence

36:45

Act. Yeah. You

36:48

must start the 172 movement. The 172. And

36:54

rounding off with a, you know, optimism

36:57

about progress, partly

36:59

because we're condemned as grandfathers

37:01

to believe in progress. But it's

37:03

been great. Thank you so much. And thank

37:06

you for being on the Wee Society. It's

37:08

been a real pleasure and fun.

37:13

Thank you so much for joining in the conversation.

37:17

The Wee Society is brought to you by the Academy

37:19

of Social Sciences, acss.org.uk.

37:23

I'm Will Hutton. The producer is Emily

37:26

Finch, and it's a Whistledown production.

37:29

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