 Hi Leon, it's wonderful seeing you again. You will be one of the speakers at the Nexus Conference 2015. Why not start with introducing yourself? My name is Leon Wieseltier. I am the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy at the Brookings Institution. I'm a contributing editor to the Atlantic. And I do a variety of other things. Thank you. At the conference you will be in the second debate. The conference is entitled Waiting for the Barbarians. Who are today's barbarians, according to you? I think it depends if you mean barbarians literally or metaphorically. Literally, I think we're living in a renaissance of savagery, of sheer physical cruelty in the name of ideology and politics. I have in mind mainly Syria and Iraq and Boko Haram and the savagery in Congo and the unspeakable savagery in South Sudan. People sometimes speak of these barbarisms as anachronistic because this is the 21st century. And how can these ancient savagery still be taking place? And I think that it's time for us to lose the feeling that these horrors are anachronistic. They are as typical of the 21st century as they were of the East century. So you have physical barbarities, but then there are cultural barbarities in the sense that there has been occurring a sustained assault on the humanities coming from a variety of sources, coming from scientism, though not from science, and from economicism, though not from economics, and from the dominance of technology upon the thinking and the behavior of the Western societies. All of this amounts to an assault on the humanities. And if you will, I don't want to call my opponents in this debate barbarians, because some of them are highly cultivated people, but the humanities needs to be defended in ways that never needed to be defended before. I would like to read you a quote from the famous American theologian, Reynald Niebuhr, who wrote in 1932 in his book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, the following. The growing intelligence of mankind seems not to be growing rapidly enough to achieve mastery over the social problems which the advances of technology create. I think he's right that some social problems are becoming despairingly stubborn, and I think that there's a certain confidence that we used to have in our ability to solve problems which we can no longer have. I don't think all the social problems that we have are created by technology, and I don't think that technology will solve all the social problems. I think that technology, despite its massive and excessive and in certain realms deplorable influence, technology nonetheless does not have as much power as some of its proponents think it does, which in my view is good news, not bad news. And we'll talk about, obviously we'll talk about the faith in technology, in technologism, and in the place that technology has in either creating problems or creating solutions to some of the crises that we'll be talking about. So at the end of the day, what do you think can protect us from? Only ourselves, which is the good news and the bad news. I think that, you know, Virginia Woolf once wrote that human nature changed in February 1910. It was one of the stupidest sentences ever written. Human nature didn't change in 1910, and it didn't change in 2010. And we still are dealing with the struggle between the good and the evil in every human heart. I know that sounds sentimental, and you can translate that sentence into more scientifically respectable or psychologically respectable propositions. But basically the questions we face now in the 21st century, which is supposed to be unimaginably advanced, are some of the oldest moral and even metaphysical questions that people have always faced. And I think it's important to understand for that reason that as we cease to educate ourselves in certain, I don't want to say traditional values because that sounds too conservative, in certain traditional subjects and in certain traditional ways of arguing, we will make ourselves more vulnerable and leave ourselves open to the problems that we're deploring. I think that, you know, our fate, insofar as our fate was ever in our hands, it still is in our hands. And so what we think and what we believe and what the reasons are for our actions or our inactions will still be the decisive factor in determining the future. It's still up to us, and all the iPhones in the world don't change that. Okay, thank you. We're looking forward to seeing you on the 14th of November. See you in Amsterdam.