 I'll give you the, you know, you start, how civilized are we? I remember, first of all, let me thank Rob, thank the Nexus Institute for having me. I feel a bit overwhelmed sitting with all those wonderful people, but I also need to say that when we spoke about that, I simply told Rob that, no, we are not civilized, all of us, and I will start by just quoting the quote that you sent us in your background paper from Goethe, which says, he underlines that civilization protects us from barbarism and defines it as, quote, a permanent exercise in respect, respect for the divine, the earth, for our fellow man, and for our own dignity, unquote. And from what I've heard this morning, from what I can see, I think we really don't exercise any kind of respect towards one another. It seems that the population of the world has all of us, I mean, East and West, Muslim, Christian, Jews, Hindus, whoever. We've all sort of internalized this theory of the fact that there should be a clash between civilizations, and we're just acting by it all the time. And we rush to condemn one another, and that brings me to what was mentioned this morning. The outcome of that is fear and hatred of the other, and of the other's values, of the other's culture, and at the end of the day, we end up, as was said this morning, humiliating one another. And we end up also not exercising what Amos Oz said this morning, any sense of curiosity about one another. So answer to your question, Rob. I don't think we are civilized because we don't know enough about each other's cultures, each other's ways of life. We don't bother, we don't have the curiosity to find out what are things that can be common and what are things that can be differences that should also be celebrated and appreciated for what they really are. When you ask, are we civilized, it all depends on what you mean by we, certainly if you're speaking about the West, I would say that in some ways we're civilized, in some ways we're under-civilized, and in some ways we're over-civilized. But what I want to make are two larger observations about how to think about your question, about how to think about this problem. The first observation is historical, philosophical. The second one I think is just philosophical. The first thing I want to say is that we have to get over our governing assumption that there is anything anachronistic about barbarism. We have to get past that. For example, as my friend Amos said this morning, that after September 11th, he was a 21st century in New York, but then there's the 11th century in the Middle East. I think it's very important to recognize that ISIS is as contemporary as the iPhone, and I'll say why, what I mean by that. We have to get, we are always shocked by eruptions of barbarism. And if it's moral shock, then we must retain the capacity for moral shock. We must never get enured to such horrors. But historical shock is a big mistake, a big analytical and philosophical mistake. And it's a philosophical, there was nothing whatsoever shocking to me about what happened in Paris last night, historically. Morally it was beyond shock. And the reason I say this is because we need to resist first the mythology of modernity according to which everything changed in the modern period. And there was a total transformation of human society and the human person. We are now living in a rational age and everything that isn't rational is a throwback or an adivism or an archaism or an anachronism or a survival of some primitive culture that has nothing to do with us, that is not in any way an expression of anything we are. And similarly we have to, whereas there obviously is moral progress. In fact, in the last 20 years in my country in the United States, we've seen extraordinary moral progress in various ways. It's a dangerous illusion to think that there is linear moral progress or that moral progress is inevitable. One of the things we see regularly in the history of moral progress that it is always followed by spasms of moral regress. And sometimes they are incredibly catastrophic so that as Zevno's fascism and communism were the two great allergic reactions to liberal modernity in the West. The human cost was incalculable. So even if we believe in moral progress, it's very important not to recognize that it zigzags and that it's a constant struggle. It's a constant struggle and it's a struggle that never ends and the reason it never ends is because civilization and barbarism I think are best thought of as regular features of human experience, full stop. As regular features of human experience, not as eras or entities, not as Rome or the Visigoths, not as us and them, not as, but as qualities so that we speak of things that are civilized and things that are barbaric. They are both human qualities and they are both qualities of human society and so the challenge for us becomes not anything quite as simple as to leave barbarism behind and embrace civilization but to always increase our civilized qualities and always decrease our barbaric qualities. So that's my first observation about this anachronism that we have, this feeling of anachronism that we have to get over. The second one is and I was very pleased that, I mean, Jermyle this morning quoted Walter Benjamin's famous line that there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism because I'd like to put a little pressure on it partly because I'm sick of hearing it but also I think it's wrong in some deep way. I think that view accustoms us to accepting a kind of ironic or dialectical relationship between civilization and barbarism that where there is civilization there will be barbarism and we must always look where there is light, there will be shadow and so on and if you recall, Benjamin's aphorism it appears in a sentence appears in an aphorism on behalf of historical materialism by which he means a Marxist or sociological view of culture according to which all the highest human expressions are fundamentally expressions of social and political power which in a so that truth, goodness and beauty we must stop being naive, we must recognize that fundamentally they are not illusions but they are high expressions of low relations of power or to put it differently if we accept Benjamin's view then what we're really accepting is the view that a civilized society can never be a just society and I think that is a terrible, terrible thing to believe. I think we have to reject this and see that civilization and barbarism they don't compliment each other even though they go together they are indeed contradictions, they don't go together in some deep way because they represent different ideals, different worldviews, different views of society of the human person and so on whether religious or secular, whether religious or secular it can be both versions and so one can still, you can still fight barbarism in the name of civilization and we don't need to be told that even though we're fighting barbarism in the name of civilization you know when you fight, when you use force against barbarism that does not make you barbaric as long as you're using force as long as you understand the means in the end and you think morally and philosophically you know as long as, but there are, it's not the case okay etc. And so the goal that we have to set ourselves when we ask ourselves are we civilized I think is whether we can be a society that is both increasingly civilized and increasingly just and increasingly just. There's no question that justice however you interpret that has to be a feature of civilization. Again we need to know what these words mean and we can talk about that but I would, but that's what I would say.