Reith Lectures 2025

KarlLB

I listened to the first one of these yesterday.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002mmrv?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I wondered if anyone else had listened and what they thought?

There was also some controversy over the cutting of a sentence about Trump - presumably Auntie Beeb doesn't want to upset You Know Who.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/nov/25/rutger-bregman-accuses-bbc-of-censoring-his-reith-lecture-on-trump?CMP=share_btn_url

Turning to the speech itself, I was particularly interested in the bit about how the Left can be paralysed by an unfortunate side-effect of intersectionality - whereby it can fall into requiring agreement on a very wide range of issues. There is, I think, a Charybdis to that Scylla whereby regressive and harmful positions can gain currency by association with people who otherwise hold progressive and enlightened positions.

Baptist Trainfan

I didn't listen to the lecture but fortunately a transcript is available. I basically agree with him, and fear the direction in which we are going. I loved the sentence: "The Roman elite fiddled while Rome burned. Our elites live-streamed the fire and monetized the smoke".

Perhaps two thing the lecturer omitted were, first, the way in which social media algorithms insidiously lead people on, reinforcing their opinions rather than allowing them to be challenged. I also think he omitted the way in which the populist Right get peoples' sympathy by using simplistic, unrealistic but attractive soundbites, while those on the Left engage in more complex intellectual offerings. This was clearly the case during the Brexit campaign, and is something which IMHO bedevils attempts by the LibDems to break into popular discourse. Without wanting to stray into a different thread or necessarily endorsing his position, I think that this is something which Zack Polanski has succeeded in doing.

A very depressing lecture; some would say that it represents the withdrawal of (some) Christian values from the public sphere.

[A PS: a youngish lady I once knew became a high-flying lawyer in the world of corporate wealth. She left her job in order to set up an organisation with the aim of encoraging the use of private capital in the service of a just economy].

KarlLB

It was depressing but it intended to be; it was highlighting real problems.

There are of course three more lectures to come; it is understandable if the first sets out the problems; development of the argument and of solutions may follow.

What you say about social media algorithms is both true and terrifying. Allegedly the big supermarkets have colluded with The Muslims to erase Christmas, based on the absence of the word on a Christmas Tree box in Tesco, and apparently despite the fact you otherwise can't move in a Tesco store for adverts, hoardings and displays with the word Christmas all over them. Express and Mail are particularly pushing this one, and frankly it's clearly intended to stir up community unrest and inflame racial hatred. At the most charitable, these rags don't care that that will result and they're just interested in clicks.

I recall an item some years ago about how effective simplistic slogans are - MAGA, Leave Means Leave, Stop The Boats, Mass Deportation Now, you get the picture. Never explain how it can be achieved or what it would really mean, just inflame passions. It parallels the Gish Gallop - how a pseudo-scientist can make dozens of assertions in the time it takes to address just one of them properly.

Baptist Trainfan

As an aside, I remember Rowan Williams doing a TV interview shortly after he became ABC. As an academic, his answers were naturally detailed, depicting different views and exposing areas of uncertainty. However the interview came over - and this is the important bit - as "dithery" and "not giving straight answers". This is a real problem.

KarlLB

Baptist Trainfan wrote: »

As an aside, I remember Rowan Williams doing a TV interview shortly after he became ABC. As an academic, his answers were naturally detailed, depicting different views and exposing areas of uncertainty. However the interview came over - and this is the important bit - as "dithery" and "not giving straight answers". This is a real problem.

Massive problem. There is a saying along the lines of every question having an answer that is easy, quick, simple and wrong.

I think we're also losing nuance. It's very polarised and binary now. It's surprising in a way that we live in a time where the two main party system is breaking down.

agingjb

In better times the Reith lectures were published in the Listener.

But yes, a (rough) transcript is available, and does contain the sentence removed from the broadcast version.

Baptist Trainfan

KarlLB wrote: »

I think we're also losing nuance. It's very polarised and binary now. It's surprising in a way that we live in a time where the two main party system is breaking down.

Yes, and the BBC's so-called impartiality tends to present the extremes while ignoring the centre.

chrisstiles

Baptist Trainfan wrote: »

KarlLB wrote: »

I think we're also losing nuance. It's very polarised and binary now. It's surprising in a way that we live in a time where the two main party system is breaking down.

Yes, and the BBC's so-called impartiality tends to present the extremes while ignoring the centre.

Which centre are they ignoring (apart from a largely synthetic one) ?

Baptist Trainfan

One rarely seems to hear the LibDems, at least on the main news programmes - yet they have 75 MPs.

Merry Vole

I'm interested to catch up with these lectures because I'm a fan of Humankind by the lecturer, Rutger Bregman, and I have his Utopia For Realists on my shelf waiting to read.

chrisstiles

Baptist Trainfan wrote: »

One rarely seems to hear the LibDems, at least on the main news programmes - yet they have 75 MPs.

My impression is that they were more present in the past when they actually had fundamental critiques of policy, as opposed to the current era where they seem to be mostly trying to live down their horrendous period in coalition government (which bears a huge responsibility for why the UK is in the state it is).

pease

Regarding the first lecture by Rutger Bregman, I don't find it surprising that the (now) atheist son of a preacher would preach a secularised gospel. It's the message of Christianity (particularly the morality) without the grounds of Christianity. (Which Nizzi Hassaid addresses in a question, below.)

Rutger Bregman [00:27:14]What we need now is not just better policies or better politicians. We need a moral revolution. We need to revive an ancient idea, almost laughable in today's climate, that the purpose of power is to do good. And that is the goal of this lecture series. To argue that the most urgent transformation of our time is not technological or geopolitical or industrial, but moral. We need a new kind of ambition, not for status, or wealth, or fame, but for integrity, courage, and public service, a moral ambition.

And some of the questions that arose:

Suki Fuller [00:43:04]… So how do you think that we are going to engage that generation that is being dumbed-down, particularly when it comes to morality or questions of morality. Yeah. Where do you think we are going to be able to make that generation understand what morality is, what a moral revolution looks like, and how we can bring them into the fold?

Theresa Villiers [00:49:06] … we all would like to see the kind of renewal of trust in our leaders that you've advocated. In the past, such movements drew on terms and concepts such as duty, patriotism, and Christianity. Do you see these playing a role in the moral revolution you want to create?

Rutger Bregman [00:49:32] Absolutely. … what has gone utterly wrong, especially among the left, is the development of a kind of moral purity, right? Is that we can only work together, with people who agree with us on a whole list of causes and ideas and opinions.

Sometimes, you know, the dark side of what they call intersectionality, right? In theory, that concept of like, hey, there are different ways in which people can get mistreated can be really powerful, right, can be a source of working together. But I think what often happens, and I try to say that in the lectures, that we, you know fragment into ever smaller moral circles, right. And we forget what politics is all about, which is building coalitions, gaining power, changing the world.

Nizi Hassaid [00:50:33] … I think what I could feel was being discussed a lot of the times was this idea of goodness, of virtue, right? But it was like there's an underlying assumption that every single person has an intuitive sense of morality, an intuitive of sense of what goodness is. … What you mentioned earlier, right, with the overturning of Roe versus Wade, I mean, the Republicans fundamentally, they were driven by morality from their perspective. They believed that what they did was the right thing and perhaps some of them would say that that was a moral revolution. So I mean, if you're calling for a moral evolution, how do you, how do justify that if there's fundamentally no objective morality for that to be based on?

Rutger Bregman [00:51:23] … I've written a book called Humankind, which is about why we have conquered the globe. … And I think that it's been the result of a process that evolutionary psychologists call survival of the friendliest. So for millennia it was actually the friendliest among us who were best at cooperating with one another, who had more kids and passed on their genes to the next generation. That's the secret of our success and I think that's where our morality comes from. The desire to work together, to protect the weak, to recognize the inherent dignity of everyone.

Good luck with that.

Another problem for me is that he seems to be blissfully unaware of the early history of capitalism, the transition from societies with markets to market economies, and how this change transformed those societies. (And didn't transform the societies in which it didn't happen.)

pease

Baptist Trainfan wrote: »

…
Perhaps two thing the lecturer omitted were, first, the way in which social media algorithms insidiously lead people on, reinforcing their opinions rather than allowing them to be challenged.

KarlLB wrote: »

What you say about social media algorithms is both true and terrifying.

KarlLB wrote: »

I think we're also losing nuance. It's very polarised and binary now. It's surprising in a way that we live in a time where the two main party system is breaking down.

As suggested just by the word "binary", polarisation is a consequence of these same algorithms.

Jane R

I think the two party system will survive unless FPTP is abolished. The only question is which of the smaller left/centrist parties is going to replace Labour. Reform have already been anointed as the new Conservatives.

pease

Lecture 2, How to Start a Moral Revolution, has landed. (Including a transcript.) And I found it more troubling than the first. The lecture is from Liverpool, and is mostly about the abolition of the slave trade, and how the abolitionists (for his purposes being the members of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade) form a template of morality to which we should aspire.

Unfortunately, his narrative about abolition resembles what Akala (Kingslee Daley) calls "white saviour" or what Sudhir Hazareesingh calls "liberal myth". Until he starts replying to audience questions following the lecture, there's no mention of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint L'Ouverture, or the maroons (or the French abolition of slavery in 1794, and its reintroduction by Napoleon in 1802).

Rutger Bregman: Let me start with some basic facts about British abolitionism. … Its masterminds were 12 men with black hats. On May 22 of that year [1787], they had gathered in a small print shop at 2 George Yard in the heart of London. And there, among the inkwells and piles of paper, they started the first and perhaps most influential human rights campaign ever. The 12's mission seemed as simple as it did impossible, to eradicate the greatest evil of their time.
…
The reason I became so obsessed with British abolitionism is that it offers an example of a different kind of ambition, a moral ambition. … we have to take a closer look at the founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Interestingly enough, 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs. While French abolitionism was led by writers and intellectuals, the British movement was powered by merchants and businessmen. … We remember them because they used their privilege to change the course of history.

Selected questions and answers:

Tayo Aluko: Thank you. My name is Tayo Aluko. I am actually Nigerian. I've lived in Liverpool for many years. Of all the abolitionists you've mentioned, there wasn't a single black man or woman. Your institute of very clever, brainy people; does that include people of African descent?

Rutger Bregman: Absolutely. So, one of the great British abolitionists was Olaudah Equiano. I'm sure you're familiar with him. He was really one of the great bestselling authors of this movement. He described his experience of growing up in Africa, being enslaved, being transported across the Atlantic, and then just describing this extraordinary life story. He travelled across the seven seas. He worked for his own freedom and then arrived in London and became a very good friend, actually, of Clarkson and joined that band of abolitionists. So, he was incredibly important. And as I mentioned just now, it was also actually the slave revolts that were really, really important, most famously on Jamaica and on Haiti, of course, that put a lot of pressure on the whole system.

What I do think we have to keep in mind, though, is that people who are enslaved always resist that condition, always. So, one out of 10 voyages across the Atlantic saw a slave revolt. But this system was so horrific, so cruel, so totalitarian, that for centuries, those who suffered from it could not overthrow it. And that's the reason why it did take also a group of fairly privileged people to join that fight. And I think that's the reason why, in the end, they were able to overthrow it.

Diana Jeater: I'm Diana Jeater. I'm the professor of African history here at the University of Liverpool and I'm also a Quaker so this is partly my story. But I was thinking about what you just said, which I thought was an extremely interesting comment, that the resistance that we saw from people of African descent doesn't count as morality because it's motivated by desperation. And if we go down that route, we end up kind of saying that morality is something that only the privileged can have. And I don't think that is where you want to go. I hope that's not where you want to go. But I do think there's a problem in the way that you've presented that position. And I wondered if you could say a bit more about that.

Rutger Bregman: Yes. So, I really don't think that. I did want to say that it was really special to have this first movement for the rights of others. … And I think we need a massive movement for the rights of those who are now forgotten. But that's absolutely not to say that those who fought with everything they had against this horrific system for many, many centuries, I mean, obviously, obviously, they were on the right side of history.

Diana Jeater: But were they moral?

Rutger Bregman: Obviously, yes.

A woman called Christina subsequently makes the rather salient point that slavery has not been abolished. Rutger Bregman helpfully points out that an estimated 40m to 50m people live in conditions of slavery today and adds that slavery was a normal condition of human civilisation. I would add that in the modern slave trade (which has also not been abolished) many people pay for their transport to the places where they live in conditions of slavery.

I'm undecided whether Rutger Bregman's argument is coherent, but really badly made, or just a rather incoherent argument.