The End of the End of History

The unnamed introducer welcomes the second of the annual Oakeshott Lectures to the Sheldonian Theatre. The spirit of the series, he says, is robust intellectual argument across a wide range of topics. Tonight: Curtis Yarvin, political philosopher and computer scientist, who writes in blogs and other formats on many subjects including monarchy, which he asked to have mentioned. The title is the end of the end of history. After the lecture he will be joined by the historian David Starkey.

What follows is Yarvin's argument, then Starkey's, then the exchange. It is reported here as argument, not as a conclusion.

Yarvin checks that the room can hear him. In 1989, he says, a utopian empire collapsed. It was based on a utopian vision of the future and it simply ran out of gas. There's a new book on the collapse of the Soviet Union that I recommend. I believe it's by a fellow named Zubok. And it really strips away some of the mythology from that.

And it shows that really what happened in the collapse of the Soviet Union was that Gorbachev attempted to fix the darn place. And unfortunately he was trying to fix the darn place, not by fixing the ideas that led to that system.

But what was the proper nature of the system? He was trying to reform the system, and we all know what happened when he tried to reform the system. It simply fell apart. And it fell apart because although the Soviet Union was indeed very successful in its days, ultimately the analysis of the present is that its successes were not the result of its utopian vision, but were the result of ordinary history.

It's normal history, the history that has been happening for 2,000 years and in the end, and more, and in the end the Soviet Union in retrospect looks like a normal empire, a normal dynasty, a normal history that ended as parts of history do, but of course inside that system it was a utopian and messianic belief system.

A number of years ago, a theorist, Francis Fukuyama, came up with the idea that history had indeed ended for us. Of course, the Soviets really felt that history had ended for them. There was a good old saying, I'm not sure who said this first, you believed in it because you thought might made right. You looked at this thing that was so victorious and you're like it must be right.

And so, we have our own utopian messianic universal system that imagines itself, the inheritor of the earth of the future of humanity. We call it a liberal democracy and it was a professor Fukuyama's feeling that history had ended and liberal democracy had triumphed and a lot of people towards the end of the Cold War.

Well, fast forward to 2025 and we have this little, this little problem which is suddenly that everything we own is made in China. We look at the things China can do and say we cannot do that. Today it is not a calculator. It's an iPhone and we look at our iPhones and like, well, we could sort of make that. But, it would cost three thousand dollars. But we could sort of make it and maybe we're right about that maybe wrong. I'm not even sure. But we are clearly behind and by we I don't mean England. I don't mean America. I mean the whole world of Western civilization, and our political system or political order of liberal democracy, which seemed so triumphant.

In the second half of the 20th century, it had really conquered the world in a way moreover, when you look at the Cold War, you have to see the eastern and western sides as fundamentally as competing progressive empires.

You never see the level of animosity, the true friend enemy distinction in the Cold War that you see, for example, in the fight against Nazi Germany. It's always, we're trying to maybe coerce you to align with us. And so, the that relationship was governed by what we called convergence theory really pretty much from 1917 to 1989.

And so when we look at the Soviet Union, we're seeing a sort of remote and distant cousin of our own progressive empire. The word progressive has been a very strong code word throughout this period. And we saw the collapse of one progressive empire and it's only natural to ask, can the same thing happen to us?

Of course it can because history never actually ends, even though every regime thinks it's the end of history. Genghis Khan thought it was the end of history too, right? And so when we actually look at take a sort of a really critical view at this, mysterious system called liberal democracy, which seems to be having some problems.

Let's unpack that a little and let's basically talk about what it means for us to end this utopian vision of liberal democracy. And the first thing I want to say, I had a debate with Jed Rubenfeld at the Yale political union the other day.

Abolish the word democracy

Sadly, my motion was not carried. Yale voted by roughly 60 to 40 to not end democracy, so it's not going to happen. Not going to happen tomorrow, at least not at Yale, home court advantage, whatever, but, but, but, in the end, one of the things I wound up saying is, let's abolish the word democracy. And I think the word democracy is actually one of the most meretricious words of our time. It essentially means legitimate government and nothing more. The claim to be democratic is the claim to be legitimate. I like to remind people of the DPRK, that's the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That's three euphemisms for democracy in one place name and it's monarchy. Of course, is the United Kingdom a kingdom. well, it has a king. But I don't think that you would call it objectively a kingdom any more than you would call the DPRK objectively a democracy.

So let's let's unpack what we mean when we say this word democracy because if we're if we're contemplating the end of this system and we're contemplating the end of this utopian regime. What we're really going back to when we forget about, utopia is good old Aristotelian political science, really the basics.

We're like, all right, we tried this fancy thing. We're not sure if it's working. Maybe it's working. But let's look into, if it's not working, why it's not working and returning to Aristotle's three basic concepts are only three forms of power or forms of regime.

They are monarchy, the rule of one oligarchy, the rule of the few and democracy, the rule of the many. And what's interesting, what I want to suggest about the word democracy is that it actually means two of these forms at different times.

Meritocracy and populism

So to a certain set of people, probably many of these people in the audience, democracy means civil society. It means the rule of law. It means a certain set of principles. It means what Michael Young called meritocracy. And that's a self-congratulatory word, so we have to be a little careful with that word. But I think we all know what we mean when we say meritocracy. And democracy also means the enemy of this system. It means populism. It means, the rule of the masses. Whenever I sort of bring this up to people, especially of the left component who tend to, of course, favor meritocracy, I remind them of the famous, they're like, why do you hate democracy? I remind them of the famous New Yorker cartoon in which the passengers are raising their hands and someone is saying, these smug pilots have lost touch with ordinary passengers like us. who wants to vote for me to fly the plane? Right. And, and then you're like, well, why do you hate democracy? I'm like, well, you read the New Yorker too, right? And so actually it's true that everyone hates... democracy because the people who support these two opposed and fundamentally irreconcilable or today irreconcilable forms of government, each despise the other. It's sort of like, that couple where they're always fighting and you're like, the problem is, like, he's right about her but she's also right about him.

And I think that's pretty much the case with these two Aristotelian forms of government. And so I'd like to basically present a brief and brutal critique of both of these forms because I think they have both entirely run their course as workable systems of government.

And then if we have time we'll talk about the third. So when you look at essentially meritocracy and when you look at the roots of the 20th century progressive system of government by elite institutions and policy setting by elite institutions. And of course here we are in this beautiful elite institution. that happened through very specific historical processes. That happened through elites in all major Western countries, especially England and America looking at the system of democracy that then prevailed in which, this has never been entirely true but they looked at a system in which politicians were in control of the government, totally in control of the government. I mean, I wouldn't bother with raising hands, but if I said who likes democracy and then I said who thinks that we should put politicians in charge of the government, they'd be like whoa we can't do that, right? And because this word politics and politicians is a dirty word and in fact we have this peculiar dichotomy where when we hear the word democracy we think only good thoughts and when we hear the word politics we think only bad thoughts and yet these things are synonyms. Like, how does that work? Like that's really rather strange and so we're actually fine that we're unpacking an Orwellian contradiction that's really at the heart of the political mythology of our empire. And so when we look at the motivation for essentially putting elite institutions in charge of policy, which was an idea that very few people had in 1900, especially in America, it was found a little more in England and maybe a little more in a very different way in Germany. You basically, one of the ways I like to think about it is, you saw these people, they were elite, thinkers, people like Henry Adams, I love these people, they were absolutely great people. They looked at the system of putting politicians in charge of the government and they were like well, when I read about this in John Stuart Mill it sounded really noble, but actually what we get is Boss Tweed. And we're ruled by crooks with 30 IQ points, less than us. This is absolutely unsustainable, this is ridiculous, this is absurd. of what we need is a new, and this is said really very explicitly, if you go far back enough, what we need is a new platonic guardian class. These people had recovered, of course they knew Plato and they were like, well, it's time to do the Plato thing again because there's no other solution. And they had this world of academia, of course they had, science coming on like a huge dynamo. all the sort of intellectual society and they were like here we have this political sewer.

And in the, in the mountains of academia we have this beautiful alpine, like full of beautiful clear water, why don't we just release the clear water and clean all this dung out. It was a very obvious idea, and what they were, the only thing they were missing in that idea is that there was not a valve in the pipe, and so because there was not a valve of the pipe, first maybe it worked brilliantly, and then you started to see strange algal blooms and bubbles of ugly stuff bubbling up in the university, and what they'd done was polluted their clear blue alpine lake with the sewage of politics that they were seeking.

COVID and normal science

To destroy. And let me, just without, to zoom in on those generalities to basically describe one sort of clear, real thing that happened to us because this choice was made. I want to describe an experience that we all went through, me as recently as a month ago, COVID.

Because when we look at COVID, there's often this question of, was COVID a lab leak. Actually seems to me to be a material because if we were looking at a first degree murder in the case of COVID, if anyone really seriously thought this was an intention, that would be a different story, but nobody that I know of thinks that actually I want to put to you that is the result of essentially what Kuhn would have called normal science. It was actually stamp collecting science. and what happened there was, very fundamental charge, a system of meritocracy, because essentially the system of meritocracy said, well, one of the roles of government is protecting the public health from dangerous viruses.

Okay. And if you're a virologist, what is your mission as a virologist? Well, it's to serve the public by protecting us from viruses. But what corruption is in the broadest and most general sense is a conflict of interest.

And when you have a conflict of interest, you have an ideal that pulls you in one direction, and then you have a practical reality, that the pulls you in another direction. And the practical reality of being a scientist, in this world, is that what you do as a scientist is you get grants, and you get more grants.

And the way in which you get a grant is you write a document saying, here is an important matter of concern to the public, and here is what the what I. I intend to do about it that will help the public.

This is the system of funding of post-war science, this is normal science, this is the way science works. In the UK what, in the UK it's called the Haldane principle. The principle is that scientists should decide what science to fund. Where else are you going to ask? Like shoemakers are going to decide what virology to fund? It's ridiculous. Right? But that created a conflict of interest that created what we call gain of function research.

Because here's what happened with COVID. What happened with COVID is in 2003, there was SARS-1, it was a genuine zoonosis. It was the escape of a It doesn't really matter whether the virus by some incredible coincidence came out of a bat that flew all the way to Wuhan and made it with a pangolin or something like that.

It could have been, I can't track all the bats. But what is certain was that basically two thousand three created a huge boom in virology created a huge boom in pandemic research and it created a huge boom in the study with science. Okay, let's just science the fuck out of this. So they decided to science the fuck out of this. Well, these are dangerous viruses, so we're going to study, we have to collect them. We have to go to the bat caves and get them. And interestingly enough, the outfit that was doing the research, something called EcoHealth Alliance, was a, they changed their name from the Wildlife Trust, Which was originally established by Gerald Durrell to rescue cute baby fuzzy monkeys and breathe them in a zoo in In Jersey. Lovely. I read all the Gerald Durrell books as a kid. Absolutely lovely author. I later learned that his brother Lawrence was a superior writer but love Gerald Durrell. Gerald Durrell passes away and his place is taken by, is very good at getting grants. And he realizes that actually cute baby fuzzy monkeys Are not even either going to save the world or end the world, but what really matters is viruses and the Pentagon is not going to give you a monkey grant, but they might give you a virus grant. And get these viruses. Of course, they're bad viruses, they're naturally infect bats, but as we've seen, they can mutate and affect humans.

Well, mutation, you could sit around and wait for it to happen, or you could do more science and you could say how these viruses have to mutate to infect humans. So, what if they had a furin cleavage site? And so on and so forth.

What way when we look at virology, it's kind of like we need to talk about Kevin and in fact, virology, even despite the election of Trump, okay, who is in theory a populist opponent of these systems, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, there was actually no positive purpose to any of this work. , there was no use of any of this work in this situation. Actually nothing was gained by gain of, function research, but it basically makes a good grant proposal. In fact, this way of doing science is so deeply embedded in the post-war scientific infrastructure that because, actually, many people died all over the world from that flow and some of them died in Alaska and in Alaska, there's permafrost and we dig up these bodies and sequence the virus and actually regenerate the virus in the lab and he did that and it made his career.

Why, I don't know. I think fortunately we're actually immune to this flow because its descendants are among us today, but that's sort of an example of kind of the mentality that you create in gain of function research and so you have this huge conflict of interest between doing normal science, getting normal grants, doing all of this work and your mission as a virologist until you've lost such track of this that you're actually trying to burn down the house as an, as an exercise in fire safety science. And once you basically say, say, ah, I see that problem, I wonder if it affects others other areas, other areas of government because in all of these areas of government, you basically have these expert-driven policies and not just the policies, but actually the experts are also finding the facts that these policies depend on, well experts can find a lot of facts and which facts they, it depends on many practical things in their lives and so you look at this and you're like, what if thought of like expanding NATO to the east is like gain of function research in diplomacy.

Here again, we have a situation where many, many experts were like, no, do not do this. So I don't know a bunch of people in DC got to feel important and like the risk return is really really serious when we look at basically all of the things we let's say just education why is progressive education essentially anti-education progressive and education is anti-education because in the petri dish that you created by basically taking expertise and contaminating it with power, actually the destructive idea is powerful. They're not more true. They don't work better. Mississippi, in which I'm afraid to come here and say this, but is perhaps the most backward state, decided to basically in teaching reading remove like 50 years of progressive ed expertise and suddenly they're like ahead of everybody else. Right. And so again, we see that, we have this clear blue Alpine Lake, which was the marketplace of ideas and the only advantage in that marketplace of ideas came from being true or being writer or being demonstrated by results. And then when we put that thing in power, there was a new way for an idea to succeed. It could be a more powerful idea. It could be an idea that got more funding. It could be an idea that worked better for the bureaucrats who were going to implement it. And so we basically have been sort of consigning, our future government is the most important thing. The history is a study of government. We've been consigning our future and our lives to this like actually extremely broken machine like the check engine light is on like, our self driving car is not driving us to the destination that we thought we were going to. It is actually not working. And this is a really serious concern. And the fact that this country of China is essentially out competing us in making everything like, maybe Chinese are just better at making things. I don't know. Right. But it's at least a warning that basically maybe we haven't reached the end of history. Maybe we just decided that this was the best system ever because we looked at how victorious it was. And we felt that might make right. So now that's my critique of meritocracy. It's a really fundamentally failed system. And then if we go back and we look at populism, again, the other meaning of democracy, let's put politicians in charge of the government. Good idea. and if we look at what happens when we put politicians in charge of the government, I think most of the critics of democracy who are basically coming from an elite standpoint, look at the masses, the people, and they say it's utterly absurd that mass man has this, magic vox populi, vox Dei. How does that work anyway? Does God speak to people? Right. are you telling me that you're going to run the country based on the ideas of Facebook moms, who think the Bill Gates is injecting, micro chips through you, into your windows? that's a well worn path of critique of democracy in its meaning of populism. But I'd like to suggest another, which is still much more damning. So essentially, the reason why democracy becomes a thing and why the power of the masses becomes a thing is always fundamentally related to actually the real power of the masses. And there are a few that are happening in the last half millennium that, basically show that policy. One is the spread of information starts to spread much better, in other words, like wild rumors. And number two is simply the physical power of human beings, whether in the form of a mob or the form of an army. 500 years ago in London, if their princesses of London decided the Germans in the steel yard were undercutting true war in Englishmen in the in the wool trade, they'll just be like, let's kill all the Germans. And they would make a good start to that, too. and like moms are like wild and terrifying things. And so to sort of formalize this force and to say, since I'm here at Oxford, I, I should mention Charles, Charles the Blessed. And one of the things that I was reading a little note that Charles wrote surely before he was murdered. And one of the points that he makes is that one of the reasons why he has this problem with Parliament is that Parliament has to sit in London and is physically intimidated by the London mob. And that was the London mob of then. Now, we have seen riots in London in our lifetime in 2011. They were not exactly political riots. But when we look at and they were not exactly populist riots. And we when we see populists getting together, think of the gilets jaunes in France, the good old tea party in America, the second tea party like the 2010 era tea party, you get hundreds of thousands of people together in one place, hundreds, a hundred thousand people, unless it's opposed by an actual army can do anything. They can seize the presidential palace, form a new government, whatever they want. But there are certain requirements in order to do that. They have to be ready to do violence. They have to have physical courage. They have to have a sense of collective solidarity. They have to feel a right to rule. And even a hundred years ago, one of the things that was noticed about putting politicians in charge of the government was that actually democracy was growing weaker physically. It was growing less confident of its right to rule. It was growing less, think about it. There's sort of this assumption in Anglo American political thought that the last, especially American political thought that the last resort is like the people will rise up, and like we can't do that or the people would rise up. And then if they looked at the things that were being done by 21st century governments on a number of different fronts, and I'm sure you can think of one, our ancestors would be very puzzled that the people do not rise up. And the answer is the people are weak and have only grown weaker.

They simply do not have that strength to say that your country is a democracy when we have a bunch of people who will vote for something. for example, let's let's look at just one of many phenomena that have happened in America over the past 15 years, which is gay marriage. Now, whether you're for gay marriage or against it, and probably there's still a few people in this audience who are against it, whether you're for gay marriage or against it, you notice a curious phenomenon, which is that it was defeated. It fought in many, many elections before the Supreme Court it a reality, it was always defeated, and then the Supreme Court was like, no, actually, in 1789, the founders knew that gay people should be able to get married. They didn't say it, but they meant it, or it's true in some spiritual sense. So shut up, chuds, this is the new law. And then it became the new law, and then it became popular. And so you see that basically one of the core assumptions of political democracy, of populist democracy, is that public opinion is an ultimate cause. And when public opinion is not an ultimate cause, you basically, when you rely on public opinion, you're simply relying on whoever is in control of public opinion. And you might think that, okay, we had, 100 years of broadcast media in newspapers, of course, of the original broadcast media, and we had this sort of Walter Lippmann philosophy of professional journalism, that the journalists are the new guardian class, and basically should filter ideas before they get into the Vox populi, where they multiply and cause problems. and all right, we're getting out of that, and now it's really vox populi, vox Dei, and the ex-algorithm now with more grok is coming to save us all, right? And actually, like, I don't think there's any particularly good evidence for vox populi, vox Dei. There's certainly an interesting social science experiment where the public tries to count the number of balls in a jar, and gets, and their, their estimates tend to cluster around reality, that's certainly interesting. I don't know how many phenomena that applies to, and I don't know if it applies, for example, to virology. At the same time, basically, it doesn't take, a nation of geniuses to realize that going out and collecting all the dangerous viruses and mutating them in a low-safety, biosafety Chinese lab to infect humans is maybe not a smooth move. You have to be pretty crazy to do that. And so there are certainly ways in which, the Vox populi, the conventional wisdom, serves as an effective check on these insane mad scientists. I mean, what's so amazing about COVID is this was normal science. These were not like, it's like magneto, it's gonna get all the coronaviruses and mutate them to be more dangerous, right? That's not at all what's going on in these guys' heads.

They're just doing their jobs, man. and then suddenly they're getting criticized for doing their jobs. And they realize that they have to kind of, shade, well, they kind of have to paint a different picture. Otherwise, science itself could be in danger, and, and you heard this said repeatedly in the leaked Slack messages. They're like, oh, crap, what will happen if people realize that this happened? Well, fortunately, we most look for them. We mostly haven't realized that it happened. And they seem to be avoiding prosecution for killing 20 million people.

So be it. so it's done. But the, but, but you sort of, you look at this and you're just like, no, actually, I don't think that the public is a reservoir of the wisdom needed to, I mean, the wisdom needed now is tremendous because suddenly we're, we're running behind. We actually have to catch up with China or we turn into Argentina with nukes, which is basically, in other words, Argentina, because we're not. But to use those nukes either, right? And or Argentina with a global reserve currency might, might be a better, but I guess you don't have that here, do you? So, balance of payments is pretty serious thing when you have your own currency. And, and, when I come to England, I see a lot of wealth. I see a lot of prosperity. I don't see a whole lot of productivity. And amazing real estate, though. Oh my God. And the real estate is just to die for.

It's like, you can sell that to Chinese or something, that'll, that'll, that'll carry you on for a while. but suddenly, fundamentally, you're looking at one form of government meritocracy that has really very clearly proven capable of like the levels of insanity that you would literally expect from a mad scientist. And you're looking at the other system of government, populism and populist politics that was that, that meritocracy was invented to replace because it was generally in the agreement of most intelligent people completely broken. And it only seems to have decayed since. And so, as a, like, it's just a reality that both of these systems of government are, extremely imperfect in both of these ways. And you can sort of see why basically someone would take either side of this position because someone takes either side of this position because they know the evils of the other. They've seen them directly. They may also know what's wrong with their own sign, but they're like, we can fix it. We can make it better. We can educate the people. We can have better scientists or something. I don't know, better grant making procedures, something, something. We can fix it.

We can fix it. We can fix it. Well, that's what people thought about the Soviet Union too. There's nobody in 1985 in the Soviet world and the dissonant world who's like looking for the fall, the Soviet Union. They all have their ideas to fix it. Here's how we're going to get grain harvest back up. And in fact, when you looked at the Soviet Union, again, what it needed to replace was not the people in charge. Oh, we need a new red czar. It wasn't even the organizations. It was actually the ideas needed to go because essentially all of the ideas behind that state were bad ideas. And so when you look at the ideas behind liberal democracy, you're like, all right, what's the year? What do we have to go back to? a lot of people would be like 1960. That was before Woke. There wasn't any Woke in 1960, right? I don't know about that. the, I don't know about that at all. And actually I would say that the length of time that we need to go back to ask these questions has some relationship to Oxford because I think it's a few centuries. Whether it's four centuries, five centuries, something like that. I believe, let's take, for example, the idea of the rule of law, that law should be above the king, that the king should be subject to law. This was not an idea that the Tudors recognized. The Tudors had the royal prerogative, which they saw as essentially Carl Schmitt's exception. And they were like, it's the, most basic principle of a monarchy that the king is the chief judge, that the king is above the law. I was just, perhaps Professor Starkey will argue with me a little more about this. We were just debating this afternoon. The Stuarts come in and the Stuarts are not deeply rooted in any English political faction. And so power being power, as Fidel Castro, says everyone desires the sweet honey of power, they start messing with them. And the people who start messing with them are indeed the judges. And I refer most specifically to the great English jurist, Edward Coke, spelled Coke, who comes up with these ideas that the king is not above the law. And in order to come up with these ideas that the king is not above the law, he starts doing what can only be described as bad history. And so he brings up this thing, he's like Magna Carta. And nobody in England has heard of Magna Carta for the last 250 years, right? he's like, and, and then he comes up with this like Saxon stuff. He's like, well, before the Norman yoke, the Witenagemot, made the, I'm like, what the hell are you on about? Like this stuff was actually as fake as the donation of Constantine. And it is explained not by we have made new steps in jurisprudence, but by we're, performing a slow motion coup against the Stuarts. And so, actually these hallowed institutions that we're thinking of all originated in banal political events. They are all entirely sub-lunary.

They are, a matter of the real world. And when we look at the choice between oligarchy and democracy, meritocracy and populism, we're like, wow, both of these systems seem really, really broken when we look at them really hard. It's really too bad that there's only two, oh wait. And then we're reminded that actually the third system of government, monarchy, is number one, the approach, the design that has been used for almost all human governments in every continent since the beginning of time. In fact, even chimpanzees seem to have kings.

Moreover, it is the way that all productive institutions work. I have a little piece of technology in my pocket here. And if you look at the box that piece of technology comes in, it says design by Apple in California assembled in China. Okay, that's two monarchies, Apple in China and two one-party states, China and California. Now, if we imagine California, which is very much an oligarchy trendy, either assemble an iPhone or God forbid, design one, we'd be back in the 1980s with a handheld brick or something, they could maybe do that, right?

And so we're basically seeing that every time we get an opportunity to compare monarchy to any other, imagine a... Apple had a parliament and a Supreme Court. I guess you guys have a Supreme Court now. It's like seeing your little brother wearing your clothes or something. It's really embarrassing. But imagine if Apple had a Supreme Court. Imagine if Apple users voted on the design of the operating system. It's as absurd as the pilots as the electing a passenger to fly the plane. And so when we basically compare apples to apples, we're just like, oh yeah, actually everything functional in human society, whether it's a corporation, an army, a movie has a director, a restaurant has a chef, they all work this way. And we have this extremely powerful prejudice against running our government on this basis. And I would say, I would go even farther than that and this is where I wanna stop. I would say that what we've discovered in the corporate form is something that you might call accountable monarchy. Where essentially, and I give a lecture on this at Stanford Business School actually on corporate governance at the sovereign level. Different talk than this one. But actually when you look at corporate governance, it's actually misnomer if anyone who's been involved in the process. It's not corporate governance. If the board is running the company, the company is hosed. If the shareholders are running the company, you're done, you're cooked. Actually the role of the board is to sit back there and say, is the CEO doing a good job? And they're like, yep, Apple profit's still going up, it's all good. Some companies do without this.

Mark Zuckerberg is his own board. He has special magic shares. And there are even interesting, a couple of interesting sort of crossovers where you can kind of see the resemblance. So for example, the world's most powerful and most prestigious hereditary absolute monarchy is certainly The New York Times. And The New York Times is a fifth generation absolute hereditary monarchy. But it is still an accountable monarchy because the way The New York Times is governed is there are actually two classes of shares, the A shares and the B shares. And the A shares are held only by the descendants of Adolph Ochs. And so every once in a while, a Sulzberger passes away and they have to pick the new Sulzberger. His name is not always Sulzberger. And they picked this young fellow AG who I don't think even has a, they're supposed to have nicknames like punch or pinch or punch or something. I don't know that AG has one. He seems a little young and a little weak, but I'll have 50 years to go into the role. So compare that to the monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Say what you want about MBS.

He's quite an effective king, I think, in a lot of different ways. Love the Ritz thing, the whole Saudi embassy thing. I don't know, but I mean, he was a journalist. But the, sorry. But he was not actually really a journalist. But MBS has chosen in actually much the same way as the leader of the New York Times, the publisher of the New York Times, excuse me. I was about to say King, which is that, the descendants of Ibn Saud were very opaque processes that do not involve any shareholder voting and may involve people being strung up by their heels in the Ritz. Chooses basically the next leader from this battalion of princes. Could go wrong in many ways. It's not perfect. It's not a utopia. And when I talk about basically doing accountable monarchy at the sovereign level, that's actually the complaint that people seem to have the most. They're basically like, but how will that it's perfect? But wait, but this isn't perfect. This could go wrong in some ways. And I'm like, yeah, I think we're a long way from perfect. I think we're a long way from perfect. And so actually like, and the CCP is a single party monarchy, not unlike the Soviet system, but they reformed themselves in a very different and much more effective way. I think there are many things wrong with the CCP system.

It's not my ideal system. It may be better suited to China than to the West. And yet, you can go to the subway in Chongqing and you can go to the subway in New York and you will see the difference. Don't even go to the subway in San Francisco. And even, I mean, and of course, even the New York subways are pretty horrible compared to the tube. And I think that if you put Apple in charge of the tube, not to mention California, or I think you notice some differences relatively soon.

And so we sort of live in a world where everything that functions is a monarchy and we have these two systems of governance that are, whose interaction is centuries old and both of them appear to be running out of steam. You basically cannot really honestly say, all right, we're gonna put the politicians back in charge of the government. That's gonna work great. I think for the moment, it's probably better in some ways than the alternative and that's why I'm a Trump supporter. But you have to basically look at the structural failings of both of these systems, especially as they apply in the present. We simply don't have a demos that is capable of governing and we simply don't have an aristos that is capable of governing. And but that's the thing about monarchy. It's a much more fragile system. It has a wide range of outcomes. North Korea is really a thing. And yet, when you're in a hole, you need to not just stop digging, you need to actually climb out of the hole. And we dug this very, very deep hole because we thought we'd built this utopia that was gonna work and it turned out that we did conquer the world with it. But maybe we conquered the world because we conquered the world and not because it is the perfect utopian ideal system of government that we discovered. Thank you.

The eater, not the cook

The introducer thanks him and brings on Professor David Starkey. Thank you, Curtis, for that fascinating lecture. Welcome now to the stage, Professor David Starkey, leading historian. And I'm very curious to know, David, how you respond particularly to the points about the Stuarts and the Tudors. But I'll hand it over to you for a first response. Okay. So in case you can't hear me, I'm inviting David Starkey to give the first response and tell us what he thinks about the points on the Tudors and the Stuarts. Can I jump into the bigger question? Because I think this is a lecture on big questions and we're not gonna get into debate on exactly what Edward Coke did or didn't do. I think the big question. Let's take your biggest point. You didn't mention Aristotle. What you've been really talking about is the extent to which the West has lapsed into neoplatonic government. That's the idea of the expert. I think as far as Britain is concerned, you can identify this process. Forgive me, I'm sorry. You can, I'm talking too much. Curtis seems to be able to get away with it, but here in Britain, we've seen the triumph of the phenomenon that you would find out, which we call the quango, the quasi-autonomous governmental and non-governmental organization, particularly since 1997. And we have 444 of the things of which interestingly sage, the thing that ran COVID is the most obvious example. But let's look at why there's a problem with the platonic mode. You didn't mention Aristotle. You mentioned the cook. You mentioned expertise. You mentioned monarchical government. Aristotle has the perfect answer. The judge of the meal is not the cook, it is the eater. Politics is about the eater. It's about the consumer. Now, I agree fundamentally on the importance of monarchy in organizations and indeed my own work on the Court of Henry VIII effectively pioneered these ideas. But you see, we do, have a test. We do have an absolutely specific test as to what works. In other words, why did we think there was going to be the triumph at the end of history? Why did we think the West was going to win? We thought it because we invented modernity. we know exactly how and where and when modernity, i.e. this extraordinary world in which Malthus is defeated.

We know exactly where, when and why it's invented. It's more or less here. It's actually a few miles away. It's in London. And it is invented and Man is just one, the Nobel Prize in economics for discussing this. He is, of course, I can never, he is needless to say, American Israeli, and he is called Joel Mokyr. And what he argues very straightforward is that the transformation of. The world arises for cultural reasons in late 17th century England, which is essentially the idea of freedom of debate. In other words, you can debate and discuss.

And this seems to me to be also central to the concerns of monarchy because what also happens in late 17th century Britain, and if you go and look, let's have an example, that a building constructed at exactly the same time as this by the same architect. That is to say, the great. Hall of Greenwich. The Great Hall of Greenwich shows the clash between representative, not the idea of the world monarchy of Louis XIV is defeated by this thing that you seem rather to despise. Now I think still that is the fundamental truth. I think I believe in a thing-called truth that debate, discussion and the empirical method which are all of the things that are celebrated in Thornhill's great ceiling, in Christopher Wren's Great Building, I think they remain central to now and to the future as much as they were to the past. And what you talked about when you talked about the corruption of science with its mingling with power is precisely because it ceased to be honest debate and discussion. It's precisely that. What's gone wrong with so much of academic life is similarly that it ceased to be that honest debate and discussion. So I remain it's wonderful to say it. I remain deeply old-fashioned. I think China is a huge flash in the pan frankly. I think it will be proved to be a flash in the pan. Again, it is perfectly clear if we look at we look at Egypt. But you can do the most wonderful things with it. Are you really, say to me that you think that highly erratic profoundly wasteful model of China look at the, look at the so I'm just ask you the question and in other words, I can answer. Exactly resume good. All right so what heard there was, I don't disagree with the incredible greatness of England from 1660 to 1688, which was the period for which it really was a mixed government. I think that's, those are really the years that describe England as a constitutional monarchy and not a ceremonial monarchy and not an absolute monarchy. Tudor England, you might differ with me in some, in some respects, but I think it's mostly an absolute. It's not. It's an absurd idea. This really is where you're wrong The fundamental note, Henry VIII says quite explicitly, I stand my highest in Parliament. Only Parliament, Parliament could have brought about the reformation. There is an astonishing level of respect for property, which sorry, the essential bases of the economic growth and development. There's an extraordinary, this unbelievable linguistic explosion of the 16th century, which enables you to debate and to argue better than ever before. Because, remember, built into the parliamentary idea, is the idea of' competitive discourse' is the idea of debate and this seems to me to be something that's almost entirely lacking in Chinese civilisation. If you remember, the Chinese language only allows slogans. It is impossible to think. Seriously, this is why whenever you see a piece of Chinese translated, it reads like a selection of slogans. It's grammar does not permit, I am told by experts, it does not permit what we have by means of the subtleties of debate and I'm, again, this seems to me, not simply to be necessary for economic prosperity, it's fundamentally necessary to be human. But can we shift again?

Can I, let me, at the risk of fighting the shark in the water, at the risk of fighting the shark in the water, you always want to get the shark on land, you never want to take him in the water. Let's talk about the Tudors a little bit, because when I look at the Tudor Parliament, what I seem to see, or what I think I see, is that all of these grand acts of the reformation parliament, to me, when I look at the Tudor Parliament, I see something that was managed, that had to be managed, but was effectively managed and when I look at these acts that are passed by parliament, all of these reformation acts, all of these grand works, they seem to have come from someone to whom... How else do you think any parliament works? They have to be managed. There's levels of that. China has a parliament, it's completely managed, it's completely fake. But it doesn't function as a parliament. I mean, it is merely a facade. And again, it's very important that we understand the difference between the one-party states and the Soviet Union had an immensely elaborate parliament. It had a very detailed constitution, it had a wonderful declaration of rights. Let's go back to, again, the whole of the argument, starting with Fukuyama. Why did we think? Why do we think? Why is everybody now persuaded that the grand Fukuyama argument failed? I think there are two things that we need to distinguish. You've been talking about the specific problems with essentially in the homes of this system, particularly Anglo-America, Western Europe, and so on. But the reason that Fukuyama wrote the argument that he did, he assumed that there was going to be a universal triumph of this system. He, of course, also invoked many other very dangerous ideas, and I think here we'll actually start to shift onto much more common ground. He assumed that there was a universal destiny for human history. He assumed that there was a universal human being and that the triumph of liberal ideas were built into the very nature of being human, founded on Corinthians 14, fundamental equality and all the rest of it. He totally ignored something you actually seem now to be putting your finger on rather interestingly.

The extraordinary specificity of human experience, the nature of the West, again, that wonderful formula, weird, depends on very, very specific things about us, like our individualism, like the peculiarity of our family structure, like certain attitudes to property, attitudes to eccentricity, all of these things. Are you saying that we've lost those? I would say that we have not lost some of those, we've lost those in many ways. Some of them have been damaged, some of them have been polluted. I would argue that it's actually the change, one of the most basic conclusions of real political science throughout history is just as you were saying, there is no political system that is appropriate for all polities at all times. In fact, even John Stuart Mill, if you read John Stuart Mill on Representative Government, he's actually a very moderate advocate of democracy, and later in his life, he would say in a letter, apologies to any Irishman in the audience, but he would say, I believe we should govern Ireland as we govern India with a good stout despotism. John Stuart Mill liked a good stout despotism every now and then. What you see really in the Roman Republic rises and the Romans expel their kings because they have this aristocracy that has the right to rule, that feels the right to rule, that feels that it can govern collectively. I've seen collective Republicans small are governance work in non-political, I've seen it work in like technical standards, internet standards are set that way, in a true republic and it works rather well.

When you talk about debate in Parliament, I can't resist an anecdote. I had my stepfather actually got his PhD in political science from Harvard in 1965, went off and worked on the hill for many years, worked for Biden in the 80s for a period and now teaches at Johns Hopkins, not a young man, and I said to him once, I was like Charlie, were you ever in the Senate and a senator was making a speech and another senator heard him or her and was so convinced that they changed their mind and therefore their vote, and Charlie ever the diplomat was like, I'm sure that must have happened at one point but I can't remember a specific instance. And so once that is no longer going on, you basically no longer have a Parliament in any real sense and when I try to explain to people what the English Parliament was in its heyday of more or less absolute power, of course it could do anything except change a man into a woman and a woman into a man. We've learned some things about that as well but sort of in the heyday of Parliament, which you might... say it's kind of the long 18th century in a way because Carlyle was already talking about some of these problems that I was talking about in the 1840s but when we look at an 18th century Parliament the way and Carlyle actually explains this quite well although not in the terms I'm gonna use imagine that you've got the Fortune 500 CEOs in a room and ask them to govern America well they would all be kings in their own right they would all know how to rule know how to run things they would make up their own minds they would be in fact statesmen I don't think they would actually be rather just we don't have that no no but what we remember the Parliament you described wasn't a meeting of kings there were a few great aristocrats there were gentlemen there were representatives of the towns but the debates and remember I think the great dividing line is actually the beginning and you should be making this point the great dividing line is actually the beginning of democracy it is the creation from the 1860s of the broader ballot which in first the skill working class and then below that enables the construction of very large parties you're in support of the reform bill of 1832 forgive me let me let me conclude the point that the that what you get from the 1870s 1670s onwards is the Erskine May structure of Parliament that leads to exactly the sort of discipline you talk about that in fact excludes the genuine debate to an extent but the debate up to the 1860s and 70s was one that echoed widely it wasn't just a meeting of CEOs it echoed through newspapers it echoed through a multitude of local political associations of friendly societies of churches and I think that what we should really be addressing it could be serious about responding to some of your problems is the way in which the foundation of this kind of parliamentary structure as it's really described by Edmund Burke is the idea that self-government is not simply something that operates on the high political level and it was voting for members of Parliament the kind of self-government that sustained the I would argue the English polity right through from the 12th century onwards was what was what Burke talked about as the little platoons it was the fact that self-government operated at every level from the jury to the friendly society for the local town council to the church wardens and whatever and the what you've talked about the thing that's destroyed two three things have destroyed this at a parliamentary level it is to a very significant extent the rigidness of the party system secondly it is the replacement of so many things by the expert but above all and you didn't fill this point in it is bureaucracy and the bureaucracy coupled of the welfare state virtually every form of voluntary activity has been obliterated by this and it was a perfectly deliberate intention hospitals were run by voluntary boards all forms of welfare were run the poor law was run at mental hospitals every schools were run and the creeping growth of bureaucracy which in Britain is fundamentally a product of the two world wars you can actually date the foundation of the cabinet office to 1916 and but what's astonishing it seems to me with all of these problems something of the essence still survives and i'm convinced it can be revived and that it must be revived and that merely waving the monarchical wand will not revive it for us can i take us back to china so david said that china is a flash in a pan and i'm going actually very large okay i think it's closure in the pan yeah i think it's at least more than a flash in the pan but i do wonder how sustainable it is it arguably came close to falling in Tiananmen Square so i want to add could you respond to the sustainability of it i want to add a question of my own how much is it actually a monarchy versus an oligarchy of the party itself so Xi Jinping is certainly ruling as a monarch but there's no clear automatic succession to is a very yeah so it's a very complicated system and of course a very opaque system thinking about china broadly i would say that it was really one of the things that you saw from these soviet systems based on democratic centralism which of course is a euphemism for monarchy was that they developed into these very kind of really mentally unbalanced leaders like stalin and mau and these mentally unbalanced leaders who were very ruthless and competent but really not quite right in the head basically cut down all the trees around them and created this real hydraulic despotism type of monarchy and what was remarkable about china is that power was inherited by Deng Xiaoping who was very monarchical probably even more monarchical than Xi Jinping and he essentially used that wisely to reconstruct that society now in terms of risks facing china i don't have the kind of respect for Xi Jinping that i had for Deng Xiaoping on the other hand you have it's a very stable system that seems sort of hard to move in a lot of ways it's unclear what the succession pattern will be both for china and for russia this is and it's like even they sort of can't quite get to hereditary monarchy and they can't quite get to the stability that the king is dead long live the king gives you from that system now there are flaws in hereditary monarchy certainly as well i would note that a lot of the problems historically in hereditary monarchy came through the vagaries of biological inheritance and we now have the ability to create as many babies as we want essentially and even to iq test them before they're born we can iq test embryos now which is insane and pity it wasn't available slightly earlier in the english succession but isn't the isn't the problem with oh sorry isn't a point that you conspicuously haven't made china has always been ruled as its rule now indeed that quite simply as is characteristic the revolution reproduced simply the salient features of the earlier regime and the party in china functions as the mandarinate indeed china has been ruled by many the ideas of our mandarinate the authors of the Northcote–Trevelyan report i think we're all we're all and do who warned against it on exactly the grounds you're raising exactly the grounds i've raised israeli disraeli is the only leading politician that i know of the 19th century to point out he cites china and he cites egypt ancient egypt of societies that were capable of this vast monumentality but also essentially frozen civilizations and i think one of the things that's also happening in the west is a similar freezing and you didn't mention the other side of the expert problem the in britain the other side of the expert problem is law Blair as well as delegating power away from the people away from the politicians away from anybody answerable about anything not only sent it to the 444 quangos he completely reversed the relationship between law and politics he took cook literally which actually means if you talk about the rule of law by definition you mean the rule of lawyers and the great problem of course is that the lawyers and the and the quango crats have broadly the same set completely alien values which brings me to the people see you're very contemptuous about the people if we actually look at who has led the reaction against what we call woke and which we did test it is the uninstructed multitude if you look in 1984 the people who believe the party i'm afraid of the kind of people in this room they are the products of institutions like this because you have to be very clever to believe anything so stupid and it is the proles outside who resist the proles are voting for reform i happen to have in nor i come from the proles i have enormous you don't i have enormous constant enormous confidence in the proles they have a magnificent degree of rebellion i'm also very unconvinced by this argument of easy manipulation which you seem to be putting forward i think that the very extent of resistance that's built up over the past few years to the otherwise astonishingly tight hold of woke i mean in britain it's remarkable because of course eh the ideas are so absurd but they are completely legally entrenched this is why they're so dangerous Nevertheless, the signs of rebellion are broad, general, and manifest. I draw much hope from that. I would say that, again, going back to when I talked about mob politics, I think that the signs of rebellion are broad, but we've seen many of these rebellions in the post-1945 era. And they have a... These are Tiananmen Square. And they tend to... Well, let's look at the gilets jaunes in France, for example. As I discovered when I crashed my car in France, every car in France is required to have a yellow jacket in the boot, as you call it here.

And indeed, the ubiquity of this jacket makes it very suitable as a uniform. And who would have thought the idea of people putting on the same-colored shirt would create a strong sense of power as... Well, people did wear red, you know. Yes. There's been a number of colors used in this way by various forces.

And one of the things that you could see with the gilets jaunes is that these people were all products of the French education system, and they all have been taught that when you want to have a regime change or a political change in France, you need to get together a large number of Frenchmen on the streets of Paris, and then it'll happen. And there was a phenomenon after World War II in Polynesia called the cargo cult, where all this stuff flowed into Polynesia for the war, and then it all went away. And they had to fish again instead of eating spam. And they liked the spam better, who wouldn't. And so they're like, how do we get the cargo to land? And the answer is, basically you clear a long strip in the jungle, and you go to the end of the strip and wave orange paddles, and the big planes will land. And if the big planes don't land, you're probably waving the paddles wrong. Right? And this is essentially what the gilets jaunes are thinking.

They're thinking, oh, if we are the American Tea Party, another moment of this. If we all get together and do these things and wave the paddles, then we'll get changed. And they wave the paddles and nothing happened. And they're like, all right, we'll be back for Act II. This time something will happen. And I think they got up to about Act 54. And then COVID happened and they called the whole thing off. In Britain, we've actually set up a new political party. And it is growing at a rate which is literally phenomenal.

Branches of reform now have membership of a thousand. This is unheard of in 100 years. We are responding to the fact that we have had a unit party, that we've had the equivalent of Butskellism, the continuation of the rule of the expert and the lawyer through Blair and through Cameron and even extraordinarily enough, even under Boris Johnson. But we are responding to it in a very English fashion. We're not rioting, we're rioting, but in a very orderly fashion. But we're setting up a political party. That's right. I'm sorry, I know I'm stupid in comparison with your vast erudition.

But doesn't this suggest that the system might actually be working? I know, it's a very old fashioned proposition that it might be working. But couldn't you see signs that it? Well, I can and I see the orange paddles being waved and I see that in many respects, as I really hope for most of my life, the internet has sort of broken this drab, this institution of managing the public mind in America we had you have your BBC and later you got your ITV in America, we had the three channels, ABC and CBS and NBC for the proles, and for the elite of PR PBS, the three letter the three letter of management of the public mind and they managed the public mind rather, I mean, they come on, tell the story dramatically, it is Elon Musk with a piece of white, porcelain. The long twentieth century begins with another piece of white porcelain: Marcel Duchamp beginning the process of absurdity and inversion. I think it ends with the breaking of the monopoly. I think it ends with the breaking of the monopoly of Twitter. The thing that the thing that's cemented and several of us in the room, including me, the thing that cemented, the grass, the grasp of the meritocracy, the grasp of the woke was precisely the structure of Twitter and the Twitter storm. Remember you were talking about the New York Times and much more interesting observation on the New York Times in 2020 was Bari Weiss, the New York Times whoever is the Monarch who emerges by your process the real ruler the real ruler was Twitter. that's broken that structure is broken and it's operating much more in that debate fashion that I'm talking about. It's crude, it's cr, but do what?

The great debates of the coffee houses of the 17th and 18th century, they were crude and they were cracked well, I mean linked but they delivered. They really delivered and let's not forget that the great settlement of 1688 was set up by Titus Oates in the Warming Pan myth. It's a brilliant lie. n it also failed, it also deliberately did not incorporate something else that we have talked about which is the excesses of mad root and branch. It did not incorporate the idea of government based on universal rights or any kind of Lockean thesis, whatever.

It deliberately preserved the facade of that Royal Republic which again is something else I think we need to talk about. I still think in Britain, unlike France, I mean look, France the fifth the fifth Republic is about to fall, seems to me to be certain, but here for all sorts of Burkean and Disraelian reasons we have managed to create this new structure constantly within the outward forms of an old one and I think that sense of Burkean continuity of history not as a straight jacket, not as not as binding chains, but history is a fertile soil for which new things come out. It's my sad duty to bring this friendly debate to the end. I will have a word of agreement I think that we should end on a word of agreement and of course this process of construction of the new within the forms of the old is a process that we've followed in America as well because depending on how you count I would say we've had four republics in America. We had one from 1776 to 1789. Then we had the counter-revolutionary reaction of essentially a system which was essentially trying to create an absolute but accountable monarch in George Washington and his aide Hamilton. That was a monarchical system. Abraham Lincoln was also really completely in charge of the government as was Franklin Roosevelt and in a way the relationship between Roosevelt and his congress is a little similar to the relationship in some ways between the Tudor kings and the Tudor parliament. Or a modern prime minister and a modern parliament. We have two kings that if a prime minister functions properly that doesn't mean that it's narrowly monarchical. And so and so to sort of agree more I think that the problem facing Farage if he comes in whenever he comes in is that this amazing Gordian knot has been assembled of all these laws of all this sort of procedural system. He doesn't have a parliament of statesmen who are prepared to burst out in debate at any point. He has a parliament full of hacks and time servers and the like not when they're all thrown out and and there's sort of and he will basically have no choice if he means to be effective to act in a monarchical way.

And actually I would say considering what the rule of law has turned into in a monarchical way that I think perhaps reminds us most reminds me most you of course will probably differ with this because I'm fighting the shark in the water again. But I'm thinking of the period of Thorough under Strafford and and I think that is the level of power that Farage and his entourage will have to basically exercise over the Quango bureaucracy expert system and I don't know if we're still capable of it but I hope we are. Thank you. Please join me in thanking David and Curtis one more time.