A weekly reflection on a topical issue.
Howard Jacobson does not feel complimented when someone describes him as "wise". He would sooner have understanding, akin to that of Shakespeare. "What's wrong with wisdom is it implies stasis, as though our greatest faculties of cognition and intuition are at their journey's end, have attained a peak of complacency from which they gaze down imperturbably on the small vanities of man.".
Howard Jacobson would sooner see Radio 4's Thought for the Day more not less religious and argues that humanists and the religious can meet in sermonizing when it's of the majesty of a great preacher like John Donne. "I fall to wondering what exactly non-religious needs are, and whether, by insisting on a distinction between the religious and the non-religious, humanists aren't making an unpardonably limiting assumption about both." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Howard Jacobson recalls the healthy mongrel mix of traditions in his Jewish family's festivities at Christmas. "Let's rejoice in the eclecticism, I say, and find in the varieties of ways people choose to mark or miss the point of Christmas the universal love that is its message." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Sarah Dunant reflects on the nature of protest against the threat of terrorism and the threat of climate change and their coming together in the city of Paris. "How do we find a sense of potency in the face of terror, how do we embrace life when threatened with death, how do we champion our future against those who claim they will just carry on dying until they win? Perhaps what is needed is mental as much as military action." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Sarah Dunant welcomes Canada's plans to fully legalise marijuana and sees the benefits of a booming cannabis products industry in the American states where it's already legal. "It costs society too much, in all senses, to criminalise so many people - and disproportionately young black or Latino men - for doing something, which legalised could create jobs and help balance the budget." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Sarah Dunant sees a new crisis in the Catholic church as a result of unchanged policy over divorce, homosexuality, celibacy and the role of women. "Men may truly believe in God but for most of them chastity is too big an ask and if enforced leads, at worst, to abuse and at best to a clergy and hierarchy ignorant of, and often unsympathetic to, the problems of being human. From there it's but a skip and a jump to the role of women and their exclusion from the heart of the church." Producer: Sheil...
Roger Scruton deplores the tyranny of banal and ubiquitous pop music. Young people, above all, need help to appreciate instead the great music of our civilisation. "Unless we teach children to judge, to discriminate, to recognize the difference between music of lasting value and mere ephemera, we give up on the task of education." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Roger Scruton says we must feel free to express opinions and to make jokes that others may find offensive; censoring them them only leads to a loss of reasoned argument. "The policing of the public sphere with a view to suppressing 'racist' opinions has caused a kind of public psychosis, a sense of having to tip-toe through a minefield, and to avoid all the areas where the bomb of outrage might go off in your face." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Roger Scruton argues that the law on freedom of speech ought to protect those who express heretical views and not be used to close down debate. "Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Will Self reflects on our relationship with gardens and gardening.
Will Self says we can't pretend that looks don't matter or that everyone is beautiful, including the obese. "That different cultures, during different eras, have found different aspects of the human form beautiful is another straw the sub-gorgeous clutch for." Producer:Sheila Cook.
Will Self reflects on the significance of names, including his own. "We desire to be recognised for who we really are, and seek out in our very ascription the means of uniting our intimate identities with our social selves.".
Will Self sees our love of habit as a shield against the unexpected in life. "For us, custom, and its bespoke application, habit, are integral to our lives; because - or so we sort of reason - if we fill up our days with oft repeated actions, we can shut our ears to the siren song of contingency." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Will Self reflects on the various reasons for his inability to sleep soundly any more. "I concede there is something about our contemporary existence, especially in big, bustling cities, which seems altogether inimical to a good night's rest." Producer: Sheila Cook.
P J O'Rourke sizes up the candidates aspiring to be the President of the United States. "Who are all these jacklegs, high-binders, wire-pullers, mountebanks, swellheads, buncombe spigots, boodle artists, four-flushers and animated spittoons offering themselves as worthy of our nation's highest office?" Producer: Sheila Cook.
John Gray warns about the dangers of science that attempts to enhance human abilities. He says such knowledge can jeopardize the very things that make us human. More than 70 years after C.S. Lewis wrote "The Abolition of Man", John Gray argues that Lewis' questions are even more relevant today than they were then. "The scientists of Lewis's generation were dissatisfied with existing humankind" he writes. "Using new techniques, they were convinced they could design a much improved version of the ...
John Gray looks to history to argue that it's time to rethink today's narrow view of atheism. He ponders the lives of two little known atheists from the past - the nineteenth century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and the Somerset essayist and novelist Llewelyn Powys. He says their work shows how atheism can be far richer and subtler than the version we're familiar with. "The predominant strand of contemporary unbelief , which aims to convert the world to a scientific view of things, is only one ...
John Gray recalls the life and work of the thriller writer Eric Ambler and finds uncomfortable echoes of today's society in the pages of his novels. "What they reveal is a world ruled by financial and geopolitical forces that care nothing for the human individual. Most unsettlingly, this world is unmistakably European." Producer: Sheila Cook.
John Gray sees the European currency as a misconceived project from the outset and thinks the austerity policies imposed on Greece are destructive and self defeating. "Attempting to maintain the euro at any cost can only result in mounting desperation, which will seek expression in violence if no practicable policies are on offer to ameliorate the situation." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Adam Gopnik reflects on the reason for our obsession with long - form television series and sees a link to the current brevity of all our other forms of discourse. "As communication, public and political and spiritual, becomes ever more condensed - as newspapers close and are replaced exclusively with Instagram feeds, as texting becomes ever more enciphered and as the demotic slang of teens, which we will all speak sooner or later, becomes ever more abbreviated then we can expect, or dread, ever...
A weekly reflection on a topical issue.
Peter Aspden thinks the powerful influence of Greece, both ancient and modern, on European sensibilities makes the current economic crisis full of emotionally charged symbolism. "I often think that the hostility between Greece and its harshest current antagonist Germany, for example, is best seen as a furious tiff between former lovers." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Although he loves to read collections of private letters by public figures, Adam Gopnik feels disturbed and offended by the lip-smacking ease with which people thumb through Hillary Clinton's or Amy Pascal's once private e-mails and asks what are the proper limits of privacy in the Internet age. Are we putting at risk part of the future historical record? "The practice of showing what life is really like later depends on keeping some parts of life clandestine while they're happening". Producer: ...
Adam Gopnik wonders why religious people are feeling "persecuted" following the US Supreme Court ruling making same sex marriage legal in all fifty states. Can a religious person free to practice their religion actually feel persecuted? Are they just offended by the practices of a pluralistic society, or do they have a point? "Their complaint is, in its way, one that seems fixed in the political choices of the late Roman Empire: the only alternatives they can recognise as real are either power o...
Adam Gopnik's ten-year family reunion brings into focus the passage of time. "The inescapable material of any family reunion, British or American, Jewish or Celtic, is always the same: each offering a hair-raising or hair-losing seminar on the effects of time on the human body and soul, and especially on the difference between aging and growing." Producer: Sheila Cook.
Adam Gopnik's experience of writing a libretto casts light on the mysterious relationship between words and music. "Sung words belong more fully to the world of ritual and routine, of incantation and mother's murmurings, than to the fully lucid and well-lit world of argument." Producer:Sheila Cook.
Adam Gopnik found himself supplanted as his family's waffle maker while he was away on a trip and concludes there are no indispensable people in any organization (or family) anywhere, though we all like to imagine that there are. There are only instructions on the side of the box, which anyone can follow. Producer: Sheila Cook.
"A school's core strength is that it's a school" writes AL Kennedy. She argues that the "monetisation" of learning - where its value is assessed in purely monetary terms - risks destroying the very essence of learning. She says we need to rethink this "quiet mess" before it's too late.
"I'm getting old. Not older, just old" begins AL Kennedy. Through childhood memories of drinking Creamola Foam, her grandfather's voice ...and being kicked by a boy in the shin during playtimes, she reflects on how age changes our perception of the past and the future. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
AL Kennedy takes the recent death of a friend - the screenwriter Gill Dennis - as her starting point in an exploration of courtesy. "When courtesy walks into a room," she writes, "it seems to turn a light on". She contrasts this with a striking example of discourtesy she encountered on a train journey. Producer: Adele Armstrong.
