 I think this is probably about the sixth time I've been here. It gets better and better. This splendid hotel. Unfortunately, we are meeting at a very unfortunate time in the history of this country. I've been here for more than 20 years. And for much of the time, you could see good things about the country. Still can, of course. But of course, we've had a bit of a shock. Now, when Anne's asked me to talk this time, I thought the obvious subject to take is religion in politics. And I thought, for a time, I would talk in code. And I will, to some extent. I mean, you'll make the connections as I talk. But we had the great shock in the middle of July of that extraordinary military coup. And what defect that's going to have, nobody knows. It's been inexplicable. Now, I'm going to talk about religion and politics. And one thing I think needs to be said that under this government in Turkey, which is religious and gets more religious, ordinary people live better. I could expand on this without any difficulty at all. It's not what you expect from, frankly, you expect from an Islamic government. Most Islamic states are field states. This isn't. It's quite successful. Now, I think rather than try to talk specifically about religion, which, and it's very difficult to talk about a religion which isn't your own, I would try and put it in the context of religion and politics in Europe. And I should say, as I go around Turkey, except for perhaps bits of the East, I think of it as a European country. And it was in 1453, 2 thirds Christian. And there are connections to be made. If you talk about religion and politics, if you talk about religion from an anti-religious perspective like, say, Richard Dawkins, you can take a large number of tricks right off the top. As Richard Dawkins did rather remorselessly, the poor man forgot that God is not marked. And he had a stroke in Australia at the age of 74, got back to England where his wife said she wanted a divorce. He should be careful of his enemies. It's easy to take tricks off the top. And I'm going to take a few, because I thought, well, is Olivier Richard still here? Oh, good. I thought when you were talking about the Juferri reforms in France, you must know it. But I thought you missed a trick that it's essentially anti-Catholic. After all, the French Republicans could quite easily say France has been ruined by the Catholic Church. The worst mistake in French affairs was the expulsion of the Huguenots. Now, if you look into how the Second Empire worked, this is a fairground regime. I'm a great addict nowadays of the novels of Emile Zola, the world of the gonzoes en tal, these crooked bankers, corrupt journalists, generals with epaulettes like this, with strings of mistresses. The whole thing, making mistake after mistake, I think the biggest mistake it made actually was wrecking old Paris. I would love to see the old Paris back instead of these big boulevards. Now, that regime was the product of the Catholic Church beginning to learn about politics. If Louis Napoleon, rather absurdly, was elected president of France in 1848, it's because the priests led the peasants by the nose. And he triumphed in referendum after referendum. Now, here is one of the things that goes wrong with that sort of government. It appoints the wrong people. And the wrong people led France to what I would have to say, I know we have a German general here, but I think I would have to say it's a European disaster. That is an easy set of tricks to take. Now, when the Republicans come in, they say no more Mother Church, no more of this obsolete, sentimental stuff. And they bring in a French education system which I encountered in the 1950s, and it was formidable. Many things go wrong with the Third Republic. I think the big thing was it didn't make babies. Now, why it's the only country in Europe which didn't make babies, apart from Ireland, I simply don't know something to do with the revolutionary land settlement. Who knows? At any rate, you can understand why the French, the makers of the French educational system, would say, let's get the church out of it. There's another thing which I, as a Scotsman, I won't insist on this, feel deeply and strongly about that it is necessary to stamp out unnecessary languages. If the European Union in its wisdom, in 1707, had existed and imposed the Copenhagen criteria, Scottish Gallic would have been preserved. I would have been the national poet. I would have had an audience of 10. I would have been permanently drunk and I would have been living off handouts from the European Union. Mother Church had a way of supporting these languages which the world is better off without. Breton, for instance, à quoi bon être Breton is well said. And at the same height, they said, a Irish Gallic, but perhaps I don't want to make too many enemies. The Third Republic would secularise the education system and the results, I think, were really formidable. France didn't have industry or not much. By 1900, the French would remade themselves with aircraft and motorcars and electricity, all that and remained an almost artificially strong despite the loss of population. Now, yes, there's a book which I know I'm getting old. There's a book which I absolutely love. It's called New Les Institutaires. It's a lovely book about these school teachers in provincial France. And the story I most liked was, how in Brittany, if a boy in the playgrounds, the boys were given a clog as they went into the playground and any boy speaking Breton was given the clog. The last one coming in to school with the clog was beaten with it by the headmaster. New Les Institutaires. Now, mention of the Second Empire brings me really to the central question of all of this. Can Catholicism, and by implication Islam, be reconciled with liberalism? Now, I mean liberalism in the classical European sense, not the American one. It was the dilemma of the 1860s. And it went on being a dilemma for quite a long time. If you think back to the 1860s, it's a period which I often think of as the first Fukuyama. It wears top hats. It's very full of itself, rectitude. But it believes in progress. It's English-based liberal constitutional progress. It believes in parlance. It believes in tort. It has battalions of lawyers doing things. And it's quite different from the ways of the old regime. And all of Europe got converted to it. Alexander III emancipated the serfs overnight. The decade begins, in a way, with two very nearly contemporaneous events. 1859 saw the publication of the Origin of Species. But a few months before in Lourdes, young Bernadette had her vision of the Virgin. Now, which has had more effect on popular consciousness, one has to ask. Now, as the decade went on, you get the unification of Italy, which was bungled by Napoleon III as he bungled everything else. In 1861, the pope was expelled from Rome and the papal states, which are an example of misgovernment beyond imagination. And he retired to the Vatican, denounced the modern world. He said the makers of the unification of Italy were either hypocrites, if they were Catholics, or they were atheists. A lot of Jews began to come in in the New Italy. Then in 1864, he produces one of the great heroic documents of all time, the syllabus of errors. They're all there, feminism, Masonic things, positivism, science of all sorts, money, banks, all there. 84 of them. It's a heroic document produced at a time when the entire world believed in progress. And then he was the French protectors withdrew. And he lost everything except the Vatican City. And he appealed to the Catholic states of the world not to recognize the New Italy. One Catholic state followed. Do you know which one it was? No, Ecuador. Then in 1871, after the unification of Germany, comes another heroic document, the Declaration of Infallibility. Now you would have thought that a church which had these blows is going to find it very difficult to recover. But it wasn't the church that lost. It was the liberals. 1873 saw the first utterly unexpected stock exchange crash beginning in Vienna and spreading all through Europe, certainly central Europe, which came as a great shock. And the liberals wonder, how do we respond? Some say, protect industry. Others say, more free trade. Some say, protect agriculture and make an alliance with peasants. Others say, we must balance the budget by nationalizing the railways. In England, there was an election which put an end to the Gladstone government. And it was over drink. Should the English be allowed to drink, the English said, yes, Gladstone lost office. Now that came as a bit of a surprise to the liberals who had assumed that they would go on forever, full of themselves. But by the end of the decade, it's the Catholic Church which had picked up the bits. The priests were into politics. You can see how the Catholic aristocracy, who had dominated the Catholic movement before, lose power to lower middle class people with maybe origin as a postman in Bavaria, like Matthias Hertzberger and so many others. The Catholic party organizes itself, adapts to universal democracy, a universal suffrage, or adapts to an extended suffrage, and begins to take commanding positions in a great part of Europe. Belgium, for instance, which had been run by liberal Catholics, is gradually taken over by people of Amor. They've got sympathy with the Flemish. In Austria, you get the party of Karl Lueger, which called itself Christian social, by which Christian is code for anti-Semitic, and social is code for stealing. And it did very well. Then take Bavaria. Now, the Bavarian church is very clever indeed. And they managed to do a deal with the trade unions, by which, in a bus or a tram, the driver is a socialist, and the man who collects the tickets is a Catholic. They begin to take over city governments all through Germany. And the deal would be that the tax, the businesses, usually are often Protestant, and employ their sisters and their cousins and their aunts in varying ways. And this drove the non-Catholics in Bavaria out of their minds. And they set up in 1905 or six a Gauss-Akoali tomb. And it was indeed a koali tomb. The anti-Semites who were, well, apostate liberals, the Jewish liberals, the socialists, the Protestant conservative element all got together with one electoral program. At one point, let's get rid of the Catholics. They got 49.5% of the vote. And Catholicism in Bavaria has gone on triumphant from that day to this. Now, I don't want to talk too much about this, but the success of political Catholicism at the expense of liberalism came as a big surprise. And there's another great, how can I say, prophet in a way, it's not the right word, but somebody else who saw that liberalism was not going to be right, and it's Dostoevsky. And if you read the notes from the underground, there's a figure in that, ranting away, knowing that his moral consciousness is somehow warped. And Dostoevsky has an approach to liberalism, that it's such a distorted view of the world that it will distort the individual within. And the notes from the underworld man is extraordinarily reminiscent of the memoirs of John Stuart Mill. Now, John Stuart Mill is a hero of so many subjects. He knew an awful lot. He was a very modest man, a good writer. He thought about all the central problems of the age, all the things that appear in the syllabus of errors, and the things to say about them. His upbringing was characteristic of that era in that his father taught him Latin and Greek at the age of two and three. And his mother's influence on him was such that he lost his virginity to a dragon at the age of 42. Now, he's almost the classic case of what Dostoevsky was talking about. And since I'm on his subject, Gladstone, another great hero of liberal rectitude, kept his diaries in ancient Greek and used to record his sexual fantasies, which he controlled when he was chancellor of the Exchequer by having a little golden whip, slagulating like that poor man. Now, that's a criticism of liberalism which I won't go along with. I think it's not necessary to go that far. But it's just to point that the Catholics were onto something and were as liberalism disintegrated. It kept going in England. I think you'd probably agree. It kept going in England because Gladstone and others managed to find the trick of an alliance with the Catholics. Liberals everywhere else couldn't bear Catholics and almost defined themselves by anti-Catholicism. But in England, the English genius, if you like, somehow they found common ground and liberalism went on. And even socialism didn't denounce the Catholic Church. Glasgow, my city, went red in 1920 or 1919 when the Catholic vote switched away from the liberals to the socialists. But still, the liberalism was finished by Catholicism. Now, I think we're left with, let me jump forward a little, we're left with, I think, two interesting questions. First of all, you'll have noticed that in the 20th century Catholic countries found it difficult to combine not just with liberalism but with democracy. It's Italy, Spain, which Catholic countries in Eastern Europe, which in one form or another fall for some variant or other of fascism. Although in Germany, it's the Protestants who were more strongly Nazi than the Catholics ever were. Still, we can say there is a certain weakness as far as the relationship of Catholicism and democracy is concerned. You can obviously say orthodoxy has a similar weakness. I'm not from Russia, Ukraine, Greece just about gets away, but quite recently and so on. Now, can anything be made of questions of that sort? And I think it's too difficult. Max Weber tried to argue that there was a correlation between Protestantism and meaning, in effect, Calvinism and capitalism. He wrote the book in very bizarre circumstances. His past had been a very German nationalist. He wrote statistics proving that Polish peasants were buying up too much land in Pomerania or West Poison. He made a famous inaugural speech saying that what Germany needed was a navy. It was very popular. And it ended up at the bottom of the North Sea, having fought for a day and swallowed half the money for the army, a mistake, in other words. He sort of grew up having got married to a dragon as it happens and had a very brief affair with an electric woman, which caused a nervous breakdown. She came and did it again after three years. He got up whistling. And in six weeks, flat, read, wrote Protestantism and capitalism on the basis of one book, Baxter's History of Methodism. And he mainly talks about his cleaning lady at the beginning. That book, everybody has said, all wrong. From 1903 onwards, or more or less 1903, it's been denounced ritually. In other words, it's got a point. But you know, any effort to show correlations of Protestantism and capitalism just sort of break down. I was reading a book of Vindromontanelli, who's an Italian genius. And he sort of assumes that the Calvinists think that somehow people are predestined to if they're successful. It doesn't work. I don't pretend to understand the theology of it, but it simply doesn't work. I'm not sure what does work. The latest theory, at least the latest I read, is that the Weber Calvinists were successful in the Netherlands, in England, in Germany, because they were immigrants, rather like the Jews of the 1930s. I pass. I think these questions are possibly unanswerable. Now, sorry, give me a moment. Now, why should this be a religion which loses its intellectual backing with Darwin and so often later, which gets ritually denounced not just by rather rationalist souls like Richard Dawkins, but by really rather spectacular arguments like Christopher Hitchens? Why is it that it was so successful in the later 20th century? Christian democracy has done remarkably well. And it's worth thinking about this. Now, the first thing to be said, and here I absolutely join with Tony Daniels. And I would also say that this is where I can come back to my Turkish theme. The secular state can be very arid for a start. It's not a particularly inspiring thing. And the second thing is that it can be subject to corruption. Now, if you go out and ask, I won't say in modrum, but if you go, let's say, up the road to Denizli, which is quite a pious town, and you ask people in the street, where would you send your child? They'll say, we send them to a religious school because the state schools are just full of druggies and the girls are corrupted from a very early age. And to some extent, this is true in Western Europe. I stand to be corrected on this, and I don't want to exaggerate. But significant things have gone wrong with the secular state, which I think in Turkey, which saw the corruption and much else of the 1990s, has caused a religious reaction. The interesting question here is, why did it take this form? There were in the 1980s perfectly civilized people like Turgut Erzal, or especially Süleyman Demirel, who promoted the country, which got more and more prosperous under a messy surface. And then we have had this religious reaction coming up, which is making the country more religious and has been doing so since 2011. It's, of course, causing considerable tensions. I sometimes think that it's sometimes not unlike Spain in 1936, where half the country blames the other half, either for being religious or not being religious at all. Things have become tense here, and I never expected, and God knows I hope they get over them. But we're still left with, I think, the biggest question of all, which I leave to the very end, which is, is Islam combatable with liberalism? Because we're really talking about liberalism rather than democracy. You can have a sort of referendum-style democracy where everybody says, ah! Or you can have a proper election with arguments. And we're really talking about liberalism, tolerance for people who are different, the kind of state that so many of us really just want to grow up in. And I think the jury is very much out on that. I won't pretend to be an expert on Islam. I noticed the two chief French ones, what's his name, Olivier Wa and Capel, that they are not talking to each other about what is going on. And it's very difficult for me, although I've read some of the books. I won't pretend to be any kind of expert on it. But the question really is, can the good Islamists or the good Muslims, in Daniel Pipes' sense, can they come up and start tolerating other people as, after all, Islam used to do? Or do we have to go on with a religion which goes on playing the same note remorselessly again and again and again and again and louder and louder and louder and louder. What do we do about it? I don't pretend to know. I'll end on this. Neil Ferguson, whom I used to teach, he's a wonderful man, has proposed setting up with Graham Allison in Harvard a historical advisory council for the president, saying that, after all, they have economic advisors. Why don't we have a historical advisory board as well? Well, I think I can tell him that history is an enormous school for caution. And if you want to hear your advisors saying no all the time, set up such a body, thank you.