 Has he got a teleology? Has he got a vision of what society should be like, other than what I got from your speech, something like a pre-socratic society with about 5% nobility maybe and the rest are all slaves? That's sort of my question. The other question is for Sean Gabb about the Savile case. I live in England as well so I've got a close view of this. And I have a slightly different view of this. Could it be seen as a revolt of the people against the trend to debauchery? I think it's a kind of Gramscian tool to destroy the middle class and finally it got too much as seen by the Savile case and there has been a kind of uprising against it. Can you see this as part of this phenomenon? I think Nietzsche is imagining a kind of elite, maybe a very ancient, maybe a very barbaric way. So he didn't wrote that directly but I think this Dionysian world is a world of maybe a few barbaric leaders surrounded with poets and musicians and deliver a very vital and maybe funny and cruel life. And they're surrounded with people, they adore them and they adore them because they give them sense, these people. And the thing that got back is food and help. It's a very ancient and rural society. It's something that doesn't exist anymore and I think will never exist. Yes, Robert, thank you for your question and I'll begin by saying that when you are dealing with a mass phenomenon like the Savile hysteria there may well be no single cause and part of the hysteria may well have been a reaction against the perceived debauchery of British life by trashy entertainers like the late Jimmy Savile. Another way of looking at it however is to see post war British life as a progression but a progression in which one part passes into another. Now in the 1960s and 70s we had what is called the permissive society, everything goes. Some of you may have seen those awful carry on comedy films in which middle aged men run around chasing young semi clad ladies or perhaps the Benny Hill show which was rather higher class. But during the past 20 years there has been a sharp reverse of permissiveness and we are now living in a much more puritanical society in which people are expected to conform to all sorts of new standards. Indeed we are often told that modern England has a much more tolerant approach to homosexuality and in a sense it does because whereas homosexuality used to be illegal it may now be regarded for some purposes as compulsory. But sorry I borrowed that from Bob Hope. Forgive me. Something that needs to be borne in mind is that if Oscar Wilde were to commit today in England the offences for which he was sentenced to three years hard labour in 1895 he would get a much longer prison sentence. Because many of the rent boys with whom he was consorting were considerably under the age of consent and so in that sense many of our sexual standards and the laws underpinning those standards are harsher today than they were in the past. And this is a fairly recent development. So yes what happened in the Jimmy Savile case may have been a reaction against the permissiveness of the 1960s and 70s or it may be an example of a reaction which had already taken place against that permissiveness. It is difficult to say because as I said we are talking about something done and believed by very large numbers of people all of whom may well have had slightly different motivations. I just mentioned something that I was told it's an anecdote and of course I believe everything I'm told but this chap had worked for a very long time for the BBC back in the 1950s and 60s. And he said that the reason Jimmy Savile was employed in the first place was that he was vulgar and was perceived to be a working class and at that time the BBC was run by upper middle class people who had lost their belief that they had a right to set the standard for society. So they looked around for someone whose behaviour was horrible and they found Savile and they employed him. And the demand for people like Savile actually didn't come from below in the first place. There were no people marching through the streets saying give us more vulgarity on TV, we want more vulgarity. It was a decision by the BBC elite. I have a question to Sean Gep. You mentioned that England is ruled by American Marxists but I wonder what happened to the Fabians and how was it possible that this movement was as far as I know created in England. Very well. Again I'll say that we are dealing with and with a progress through time. The Fabian socialists were not Gramsian Marxists, the Fabian socialists believed in authoritarian state socialism which is rather different from the authoritarianism of the people who rule modern Britain. The people who rule modern Britain, and I'm now talking about Britain rather than England. The people who rule modern Britain are not terribly interested in who runs the railways or the telephone network or indeed whether the universities are formally private or are royal corporations. What interests them is that whatever the system they should be in control and that they should impose their moral and cultural standards irremovably upon the whole population. So yes, there is a native British tradition of socialism but it is a different tradition from the one which has taken hold in modern Britain. I didn't call the American Marxists. What I'm saying and I'm not entirely original of this, I owe this observation to a mutual friend of Robert called Ian B. The initial inspiration came from European Marxists and Neo-Marxists, as I said, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Al Tussier, Theodore Adorno, a group of people who were developing Marxist thought for the changed conditions of the 20th century. But it is quite possible that these people would have remained obscure foreign thinkers, completely unknown in England except among a rather eccentric elite. But for the fact that many of these people, Herbert Narcuse for example and even Michel Foucault, moved to the United States and became very influential within American universities. And it is from America that these European Marxists and Neo-Marxists were able to gain a decisive influence over English life. That is how it came in. But again, we are dealing with intellectual developments and actions among very large numbers of people and there is always more than one way of looking at it and there is certainly always more than one cause. But I suggest that the scheme I've just outlined is at least a useful way of trying to explain what has happened and what is happening. Not just in England of course but also in your countries because we are all nowadays cultural satellites in the United States. And that is why developments within the American universities have been so important in England and in other countries. But as I said, the United States has a certain limited immunity against these intellectual infections so far as they have a strong native religious right and an entrenched constitutional order which is still taking a long time to subvert completely whereas countries like England have no religious right and no entrenched constitutional system and so what has given America a cold has given us terminal pneumonia. I would like to thank all four speakers for great speeches. My question goes to Sean Gabb again. I would like to point out the role of British humour being a fan and great admirer of British humour. What happened to the role of British humour against the authority? Lastly, if you have any prominent comedians that you would like to recommend us to follow from the British comedy. Yes, and you did ask me this question earlier so I've had time to think about it. If I sound rather polished it's not spontaneous. British humour in the 1960s and 70s was anti-authoritarian in the conditional sense, not in the intrinsic sense. That is, these comedians did not regard authority or authoritarianism as bad in itself. They regarded it as bad because it was the wrong kind of authoritarianism. As soon as these people reached middle age, and I think David Frost might be a good example, as soon as these people reached middle age and their friends got into positions of importance in England, political satire died. It died suddenly in 1997. Right up until then the television was filled with savage political satire and invective against the authorities. The moment their man Tony Blair was in Downing Street, political satire just vanished. It vanished from the screen like some disgraced Soviet tractor factory manager. British humour has been at rather a low level ever since then. There are anti-left humorists in England. I suppose someone called Jimmy Carmichael might count as one and he just about gets by on television. But for the most part subversive anti-authoritarian humour is in short supply in modern England because it doesn't get an airing on the BBC. Why do you need to subvert something which is by definition the best of possible worlds? That is what the average BBC bureaucrat would ask. Let's take a vote. How many people in this room have heard Mr Cameron tell a joke or say anything funny? Dr Daniels, your presentation reinforced my sense of optimism as to both how and why so much of human action is becoming decentralised. It goes back to some of the understanding that's deriving from the study of chaos. Chaos tells us that the more complex a system becomes, the more actually it becomes impossible to make predictions. And there's probably nothing more unpredictable, more non-linear in terms of behaviour than the individual human being. And I just wondered of what extent chaos theory itself is going to help make efforts to predict both harms and benefits from collective forms of medicine, completely meaningless undertaking. I regret to say that I'm completely unqualified to answer this question because I know nothing really about chaos theory. All I can say is that from my reading of the medical journals experiments have continued to be done on huge numbers of people. And there is a fundamental rule I would have thought that if you need vast numbers of people to show to establish benefit, then the benefit can't itself be all that great. And that seems a thought that doesn't occur to people who do experiments on vast numbers of people. But I'm afraid the specific thing about chaos theory I'm not in a position to answer. So my question is to Eugen on Nietzsche. Nietzsche claimed to be an apolitical thinker. And he didn't say much what he was for in politics, but he said quite a lot what he was against. And he was clearly against socialism, against democracy, against equalitarianism, against the state. And, you know, when the Danish critic Georg Brantes that discovered with both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in a letter he labeled Nietzsche a aristocratic radical, and Nietzsche quite liked that term, quite liked that label, and perhaps that something says about him. And I was wondering, you know, I agree that Nietzsche is certainly not a Rothbardian. He's not an anarcho-capitalist. He lacks the ethical structure of anarcho-capitalism. But wouldn't you say that it's fair to say that he is a right wing anarchist of some type? Right? You could say that the Greek policy, the antique Greek policy is a kind of right wing anarchy. If you think so, that this is the right term for that, then it fits. This was a world without, a world dominated by families. They have their slaves, which was in the former times a kind of employment. It was not that slavery that you can see in films, that what people do with black people, that's another thing. People that live around these families and they have no land that they have no things to work with. They went to these people and these were the slaves who were living in the houses and the other ones are working in the mines. That was a bad thing, but it is not. It was a kind of employment. Maybe we should never forget that the Greek policy was based on slavery. This is one of the reasons why the philosophers said philosophy is a high thing. The phyllaches, the warriors, that's a good thing. People work, that's dirty, that's not interesting, that goes on money and such things. We are above that, we are in politics and that's much better than the economy. We still have kind of this approach in some universities in Europe that look down to the economy from the standpoint of politics that's much higher. This is, I think, a bad heritage of the ancient Greek time. Thanks. Question for Anthony Daniels. If the thrust of what you were saying was to allow patients to make decisions including parents in relation to their children, you spoke about the amount of misinformation that is out there about treatments and the impact of treatments and so on. How do you get past this issue that individuals are making decisions in relation to a subject where they have no direct information? They are dependent upon information sources which may all be wrong, particularly in an internet age. You can google up any disease and you can read all sorts of stuff which no doubt is all wrong. We'd be all in favour of free decision making by individuals but if the free decision making is all based on stuff which is 99% rubbish, how do you think about dealing with that? I think that it's a very difficult question when people begin to make decisions on behalf of children which are obviously from a more rational standpoint, completely rational and very harmful. Then it is a question of how you deal with that and whether at some point there has to be an authority saying that you will not treat your child in that way and how that authority will actually be arranged. Now where the dividing line is is of course always a very difficult question because there is a slippery slope to be gone down. For example Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion suggests that bringing up any child in any form of religious belief is a form of child abuse. Now either he's using the words metaphorically in which case it's a dangerous use of metaphor or he means it literally in which case presumably he means that there must be some public authority preventing people from bringing up children religiously. Now where you draw the line or whether the line has to be drawn at all is a very difficult question and I think it's a matter of judgment rather and common sense rather than having an answer that is suitable to all cases. Should there be laws against female circumcision? I suppose most people regard it as at least an abhorrent practice but I suppose if we have laws against female circumcision we should also have laws against male circumcision. And yes I agree with Anthony it's extremely difficult to draw the line. As a rule of thumb I would say yes if parents circumcise their daughters they should be sent to prison if they circumcise their son you just shrub and look the other way but I wouldn't like to say more. I have a question from Mr Gabor, Dr Daniel. You spoke of this idea of tolerance in the British society. I'm thinking of the causes perhaps that have brought about these conditions you described. One could not think of tolerance and not think that other nations are equally as tolerant even if more so. This is an example of the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Denmark, Germany or Switzerland or Austria. Yet the tolerance that we see in continental Europe has not really come down to this degradation of moral relativism that we see in the UK and I bring in some of the writings of Dr Daniels which describe it in far starker terms than we have heard today. And I wonder why that is the case if you can compound it. I think in the UK the only thing I can think of frankly is this at the same time as this idea of tolerance has come about there has been increasing intolerance towards for example God or religion or the church. This has not been seen in continental Europe and I wonder if there is a connection between the two. This idea of moral relativism has grown disproportionately than other places in the world. I'll give a particular answer. I'm sure you'll give one as well. I must say that what has happened in modern England to some extent puts a question mark over the whole earlier history of England which I still regard as a time of unalloyed glory. Traditionally, or at least since the middle of the 17th century, England was a remarkably tolerant country for all manner of reasons but one of the main reasons was that the toner society was set by a landed hereditary aristocracy which did not feel threatened by any particular set of religious or political or cultural. And so because they didn't feel threatened by anything, they tolerated everything. Why? Even the panic of the 1790s against French Jacobinism was relatively mild in England compared with many other parts of the world which were threatened by French radicalism. And with the decline of aristocratic values which continued to dominate English culture for several generations after the decline of the actual aristocracy, with the decline of aristocratic values you see the debasement of toleration from what we would mean by toleration into some kind of celebration of diversity. So long as the diverse people are of different colours, different races, different religions, different heights, different body sizes, different sexual preferences, but so long as they all believe in the same silly left wing views. And so that is the main difference between toleration in the traditional sense and toleration in the modern sense that makes your eyes turn up. One possible explanation I wouldn't claim that it has any scientific validity is that for a considerable length of time before present developments we had a culture which valued and perhaps overvalued self-control and restraint. And when you get a moral gestalt switch as it were then you go to the opposite extreme so that people think that what was formally regarded as a virtue is now a vice and what is a vice is now a virtue. So people now think, for example, young people there and talked quite a lot, they think that getting absolutely drunk in public is actually virtuous. It's good for them and it's good because it is expressing themselves irrespective of the fact that they have nothing to express, of course. And actually if you listen to young British people on the train and I do and I enjoy it and they're talking about the wonderful night they had last night, the main evidence of this is that they can't remember anything about it, which is a rather dismal view of the view of their possible pleasures from social intercourse is the best that you can hope for. Is that you can't remember anything. So I think that and of course the traditional values did come under the kind of satirical attack that Short has described and people therefore concluded that the opposite of those one time virtues were now virtues. So people that we have in Britain, I think for the first time something which I wouldn't have believed possible, ideological drunkenness, people believe that they should get as drunk as possible. They believe it's a good thing to do it. It's not a lapse or anything like that. They aim at it. Of course I agree that there is a link between aristocracy and culture and civilization, but according to my Swiss approach, I think there is also a link between aristocracy and war. And this is a price that we pay for this type of culture and I have to remember that culture started with agriculture. That's the starting point of every culture. And so it makes sense what I mentioned this morning that the farmer is higher than the king. But of course you need to, if you have to separate culture from politics, that's a good thing. But you should never forget culture. You should combine it with economy. You should put culture and economy together and separate politics and culture. That's the most important thing we have to do. Yes, I suppose so. Sorry, I've plagiarised Bob Hope. Let me plagiarise somebody else you may recognise. In England we had aristocracy and we got the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution and the rise of modern liberalism. In Switzerland you had farmers and you invented the cuckoo clock. Sorry, that's a completely gratuitous comment. But I do think that aristocracy is a very important principle and just because I don't happen to be a member of the aristocracy does not in the least lessen my regret for the passing of aristocracy in England and indeed in every other country. I envy the Swiss not for the cuckoo clock but for their self-reliance, their independence and for their sense of privacy and their ability to maintain their civil liberties into an age when most other peoples have manifestly lost virtually all of their own civil liberties. But I would admire Switzerland even more if it had an aristocracy. I stand corrected. For Sean and Tony, feel free to jump in. I'm a naturalised British citizen and one of the things that always shocked me about being in England is that the immigrants like me and my friends seem to actually love it a lot more than the native British. Not just because we couldn't remember everything from the night before, I hasted to add. But for either one of you, do you feel that if, and I know this is looking like an increasingly unlikely possibility, but if the Scots left the Union, do you believe that maybe a lot of the left wing gobbledygook would also leave with them and that England could go back to a more landed gentry aristocracy type of place? Because it seems to me that there are a lot more right wing than the rest of the place. Or am I completely barking up the wrong tree? They have a good arching that first. What you're doing is you're inviting the pair of us to lapse into the kind of fault that many Americans fall into. You ask a couple of Americans a question about particle physics and they'll start telling you what Thomas Jefferson said in 1786 or something. If Scotland were to leave the United Kingdom, it would be much better for England, not because all of the really nasty socialists are Scottish, though a surprising number of them are, but because at the moment we'll have a general election in two years' time. I shall vote Conservative in that election, not because I think David Cameron is doing a very good job, but simply because I do not want Labour back. If Scotland were to leave the United Kingdom, that would be 65 Labour MPs who would not be sent to sit in the House of Commons, which means that we would not risk a Labour Government again. Without the risk of a Labour Government, without the threat of a Labour Government, people like me do not have to vote Conservative. We can vote for something that we actually want instead of voting against what we are terrified we might get. That will be the benefit, I suggest, of breaking up the United Kingdom. It might actually be good for Scotland to give another example. I had a ringside seat for the break-up of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, and many people said, if the Slovaks go their own way, they'll be putting up swastika flags within three years. Well, no, what happened was that left their own devices without the possibility of subsidies and guidance from Prague, the Slovaks pulled themselves together, and I won't call Slovakia an economic miracle in Central Europe. But it is a credibly prosperous, stable, semi-liberal democracy, and it might be the same for Scotland instead of voting for crazies and kilts, that they might start voting for people who will pay some regard to the interests or at least the wishes of the taxpayers. I don't have much to add. I think it probably would be a good thing for Scotland, actually. It would be a good dose of reality because the constant national dependencies doesn't breed gratitude. Of course, it breeds resentment, and I read in the spectator, and I don't know whether it's true. I like to believe it's true, so it is true, that there are only 15,000 net taxpayers in Scotland, and if that is the case, or anything approaching that is the case, then obviously Scotland itself would have to change very profoundly, which it won't have to do so long as the union is maintained. People don't like to lose their subsidies, and I believe that, again, more people are in favour of Scottish independence in England than in Scotland, so we might have a unilateral declaration of Scottish independence, but not by the Scottish. I have several friends who are thinking of moving to Scotland and registering themselves to vote, so that they can vote yes to independence. The thing is, the Scots, however, are very talented people, and I believe that they could make a very good go of it if they could get rid of this terrible dependence, so I think they would probably benefit more than us. Right, I have more people on the list than we've got minutes left. I have a question for Dr Daniels. You told us that we are now all pre-ills, so the logical next step due to bureaucrat activity is that we will be all patients. Imagine that you are a high-powered bureaucrat on the WHO. Do you have any suggestions to do the next transfer to patient-ness of all of us? What will actually happen to make us... What will be necessary in your eyes as a high official of the WHO to make us all patients instead of just pre-ills? Well, one thing one could start doing is suggesting that people are penalised for not taking care of their own health. I don't know whether you know the book by Samuel Butler, Erowan, in which crime is illness and illness is crime, and we are approaching that. So I think that's one possibility that we will actually be penalised. On the grounds that we are imposing costs on other people by not taking care of our health, not to the next end, that already happens. I don't think the WHO actually has a kind of conspiracy. It's just in the nature of those organisations to expand like fungus all over the world. Hi, for Sean. I love your little piece there on the influence that American intellectuals have had on the UK thought. I guess my major concern is that we still talk a lot about socialism, but in America we don't talk about socialism. We talk about what you would call cultural Marxism, and I think we talk about it under the term postmodernism. Why is it that we don't have a movement of this nature? Why isn't the generational shift changed to be critical of that rather than an economic model that everybody is already abandoned? Sorry, I think you might catch the last bit of your question. Why are we talking about socialism when actually everybody is given up on the institutional model and actually the problems become cultural? In other words, a normative discussion rather than an institutional one. Okay, well Paul Gottfried and I and many other people have written about this. It's just that we belong to various movements which have spent a century or more opposing socialism, and now that socialism in any meaningful sense has been destroyed, it is very difficult to recognise the new enemy as something different. I remember reading a book by Sir James Mackintosh published in 1790 in which he was discussing the French Jacobins, and there was a repeated typing mistake thanks to the typesetter which wrote Jacobins as Jacobites. The Jacobites having been an earlier threat to Britain. It's said that generals always fight the last war, and in the intellectual sense we do. It's quite fun to call Tony Blair a communist or President Obama a socialist radical when quite manifestly these people are not socialists in any meaningful sense, and the left wing socialists who denounce these people as non-socialists are not deluded, but bearing in mind that we won the war against socialism it is very comforting to keep insisting that our present enemies are of exact the same kind, whereas in fact we are facing an entirely different kind of enemy. Totalitarian humanist is the phrase used by an American philosopher called Keith Preston. My friend David Davis uses another phrase which Robert might be able to remind me of. There are many names for these people, but we haven't agreed on a single name for them yet, but they're not socialists, they're something else. I'd like to address this to Robert Neff. I thought it was a very nice point that all the rest of the world other than Switzerland was a special case, and that the paradigm was Switzerland. The question is, is Switzerland changing and is it becoming a special case in the sense of the other countries of western Europe? I think it was part of my lecture that we shouldn't overrate these specialities and that in fact we do all the wrong things of our neighbors that just lead with the slowlier, but that's a unique selling position to be slow by going in the wrong direction. Of course our politics is more or less social democrat, it's a mixture of everything and when I am asked what would you change, I say less of all. But it's hard to find the way out of the trap, it's hard to find the way back. I tried to tell it in my last sentence, we should not go back to the ancient times of Switzerland, of Lanzke-Mainazone, but we should reinvent what worked and it was a lot what worked, it was the money system that worked, I didn't mention it and a lot of those things. So Switzerland is in this way and I repeat it, it is not a model to copy, but it's an experiment that's worth to learn from it. Okay we can allow one more question, that's the end then. Thank you. It's interesting the juxtaposition between Switzerland and the United Kingdom and I know you've blamed all your faults on the colonialists and the Americans here. The interesting juxtaposition is that it appears from Dr. Daniels you're writing in your presentation this morning that it's a problem from the top down, from the intelligentsia, from Gramsci coming over to Columbia and making an impact and influencing from the top. And yet it appears from your presentation in Switzerland there's this tremendous vitality in the local communities and from the bottom up. Is freedom, and I know this is somewhat of an esoteric question maybe unable to answer, is freedom best preserved from the bottom up or the top down? We're looking for the top down solutions but there seems to be a 500 year history in Switzerland that seems to sustain it from the bottom up. And yet there is really a lot of connections between the British and the Swiss and one of the most important business in Switzerland is tourism. And it has been invented by the British people liking the arts but the Swiss didn't like it themselves. We didn't know that it is beautiful and that it is nice to climb but we had the people from your country coming here and they liked it and in fact thank you very much. It's good business. But of course in the 19th and 20th century there was a very strong connection between Germany and Switzerland. This connection has been destroyed in the first world war that destroyed a lot of things. It was one of the big catastrophes of the civilization. And after this we still have good connections. We have also kind of an island feeling in Switzerland and this makes maybe good and English is kind of our fifth official, non-official language because the French speaking don't like to learn German. And the Germans speaking they try to learn French but it's very difficult to speak a good French and so it starts that young people start to communicate in English. And I am sure that in maybe 20 years it will be the normal language in business and the normal language between the young people communicating with each other. So of course English is not only British. It's a world language but it went on on spontaneous order. Nobody really said you have to speak English here. That the French tried to do that. That maybe it was really a mistake that they tried to put language and politics together. The British never did it and so it developed and now it's the global language. Thank you. The Russians believe they have a saying a fish rots from the head down. But to which one can add but it does rot. So that even if the rot in Britain has spread down there is that actual rot now. So if you like it's a dialectical relationship dare I say it with the word dialectical. And so now what is necessary is a change I think of mentality of the entire population. And that's why I'm not really very optimistic. But something can rot from the head down from the top down but the rot is real enough. As far as freedom is concerned it depends on circumstances. In Switzerland quite obviously freedom is sustained from the bottom up. And it may be though I'm speaking of a foreign country which I know very little and one should be cautious of doing that. It may well be that in the United States there is a strong determination to protect freedom at the bottom. In England and I don't have much time for Nietzsche but I am somewhat of an elitist. In England freedom was most effectively guaranteed by a liberal aristocracy and gentry. Of course there were persons from the bottom who added to the canon of classical liberalism. But when you look at the classical liberals when you look at vaguely libertarian politicians they were nearly all drawn from the upper reaches of society. And it has been with the decline of the old landed order that freedom has seen its greatest decline in England. And so at the moment we are left, at least I am left with the only available option in England which is to hope that there will be a reassertion of rights from the bottom up. But I suspect that freedom is most effectively guaranteed in the long term by a vaguely liberal upper class.