Start the Week

30/05/2011

Andrew Marr wanders the globe with Paul Theroux, as he celebrates the pleasures and pains of travel, and discovers what makes the best travel writing. The General Secretary of Amnesty International Salil Shetty looks back at 50 years of the organisation, and argues that Amnesty has had to change from a small letter-writing charity aimed at freeing dissidents, to a global multi-national focused on poverty and gender issues. At 50 you're generally considered middle-aged and heading towards retirement, but the journalist Catherine Mayer rejects the traditional patterns of aging, arguing that more and more people are starting to live agelessly. And the landscape artist Charles Jencks explains how science and the patterns inherent in nature have influenced his designs. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 30 May 2011
Audio Format:: other

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Adventures of the mind today from the way we think about aging to campaigns for liberty, life on the road, and art on the grandest scale you can imagine. Paul Thoreau, one of the world's best-loved travel writers, has produced a kind of anthology or chapbook of travel writing called The Tau of Travel. Fifty years after the birth of Amnesty International, it's new 50-year-old general secretary, Sally O'Shetty, is with us to celebrate and reminisce. Later, Catherine Mayer of Time magazine explains her new view about how we age or try not to age, what she calls amortality, but we're starting today with one of the most ambitious, and I think radical artists of our time, a man who works not in paint, bronze, or even video, but in earth and clay, making what Charles Jenks calls landforms. Charles Jenks, I'm trying to find a way of visualizing for people the work that you do, and perhaps one way of doing that, we have to talk about the work that's being created right at the moment in Northumberland, so perhaps you could just start by describing that. Well, a lot of my work comes from coal sites, cleaning up the environment from disturbance, and in this case, it's about a quarter of a mile long landform, which I was asked to design by Matt Ridley and Banks, a coal company, and they wanted something that would be a gateway to the north, so I was explicitly asked to do an icon, and I thought for a long time, well, what is worthy of what's on our mind most of the time, not necessarily sex, but the body, the face, and our interaction with people, we have more neurons to do with facial recognition than you can believe in any other point of recognition, and so I worked very hard designing a landform in the shape of a reclining woman, twisted in a kind of serpentina, a dancing figure. After I'd done it, I realized that such a figure was drawn in the caves of Lascaux, the same sort of zigzag figure, showing how old that image is, really, and how iconic. This woman will be vast, I mean, she will be the size of some of those great cut horses in the south of England, or even longer. She'll be even much bigger. I think she's, by three times the largest human figure on this planet, I think, of course, it's very hard to prove, but the next biggest is being constructed in stone, I think, in Wyoming, you know, near the presidents, the four presidents who were sculpted. That's 50 feet high, and her face, Northumberlandia's face, is 150 feet long, so it makes, you know, parts of her body so big that you don't recognize where you are on her. You recognize her nose. If you fell off her nose, you know it would be really dangerous, 20-foot drop, and that's one of the interesting problems to map the human body, the face, to the landscape, and I didn't want anything that was too recognizable all the time. I mean, what could be more boring than being confronted by the colossus of Tony Blair? It would drive you crazy, so I have to design something that comes in and out of focus. That's wonderful, and some of your other works, the serpentine, terraced, sculpted, cut, carved landscapes with clear shapes in them which refer to a lot of the time in recent years, scientific ideas. Yes, absolutely. Well, the big idea, of course, with a decline of religion and meta-narratives explaining what's going on to us, I think the universe or the cosmos is taken over that role, and so I work with scientists, although I criticize some of their metaphors, like the Big Bang. It wasn't Big, wasn't a bang, no one heard it, it was a fast expansion of space. I use these metaphors, Black Hole, another one, and I criticize them and then design visual metaphors of value, as Gombrit used to say, something that is striking, original, and related to our bodies once again. You are trying to make art quite seriously about the most profound and often most difficult ideas that we're struggling with now. This is art which sometimes may look like a garden but is cerebral. Well, during the invasion of Iraq, I was asked to design a garden in France for around the notion of chaos, and so I naturally took war as one of the most chaotic institutions of the human and had created a waterpult where water is thrown back and forth and used it to signify the Israeli-Palestinian tip for tat. So a water war garden became the metaphor for chaos, and that was 2003 and 2004, just at the time Iraq was being attacked with this pseudo-war on terror. I can think of other examples of gardening about war. One of the most famous Scottish artists would be Ian Hamilton Finley who created a great garden, and he said something that you quoted in your book about gardens not being a retreat but a form of attack. He said famously a garden is not just a retreat from the world but an attack, and his work was meant and was critical of the contemporary democratic situation. It's democratic deficit and some of the problems of the hypocrisy of political correctness. So he was a key figure. Before we open this up, just let me ask a little bit about the economics of the art you do, because a great deal of modern art is about producing an easily salable, instantly recognizable image or series of images from an artist, so whether it's Damien Hirst or where it is will produce something that is instantly recognizably a Damien Hirst, which has a high value is sold off to collectors and realises a quick income. It seems to me that your art is at the other end of that. You can't move it around, you can't pick it up and sell it to people, and it must cost a great deal to actually create in the first place. Actually, it's quite the reverse on its cost at the beginning. That's how I got into it, because I was thinking my late wife Maggie and I were thinking of buying a David Hockney, and I realised that you could create a sculptural land form at something like a 20th of the cost, and no one could steal it either. So actually, land forming is an inexpensive way of creating something that has a great history going right back to Stonehenge and before. The American Indians practiced it in a way I like to use nature to comment on the underlying laws of nature. So in the recent one outside of Edinburgh, it's designed around the cells of life, and looking at how your body cells duplicate through mitosis, that becomes the basic content. Salut, Shati. The thing that struck me just reading some of the background stuff on what you've been doing is the relationship between small and large and the sort of scale question, because this is a big issue, managerial speaking as well, when you're running an organisation, how large do you need to be in order to be effective? I was just curious about how you look at the relationship between scaling up and in the context of what you do. Although I've been asked to do these huge schemes because of coal sites, I'm very interested in the very small, and so I do what I call metaphysical landscapes, which are just small growing and rock sculptures. So I'm not particularly committed to the extra large, but in our culture, of course, that's where the culture is going, and we are able to destroy and create so much so quickly today. Catherine, Matt. You talked about the growing role of science in society and the way that it's coming into sort of fill gaps that are left by the way in which some of the other authorities, if you like, have receded. I'm interested by that. I'm sure that that's right, that we pay far more attention to scientists than we used to, but scientists are also fallible and confused and argumentative, so I wondered to what extent that is also something that you try and explore in your work. Well, I found scientists wonderful to work with and often work for nothing, which is great. I'm working with CERN now, but they are argumentative and they are, I think, victims often of metaphors which are third-hand, such as the selfish gene to go to mention another one. So in my work, it's always double design. You have to work with science and understand the underlying facts of the case, but you don't have to accept their really retrogressive metaphors, like Big Bang, which is basically a Bush, joint chiefs of staff metaphor that pull through. I don't understand this garden is not a retreat, but an attack. I made three or four gardens myself, and they are a retreat. I find them places to go, places to lovely, places to sit, places to create. Time is a factor in gardens. I noticed in your book that they seem static, they seem, you scoop out a landscape and it's there. It turns green, I understand that, but it seems that it's made by a person, Charles Jenks Garden. If you take a Zen garden, it's a void, it's not made by anyone. It seems to have arrived. It's a place where there appears to be nothing. You are loaded to the American Indians. The serpent mound in Locust Grove is, I'm part Native American, so it means a lot to me. So this, anyway, I don't know whether there's a question in there, but I'm kind of reacting against what you've done. Well, you know, I did the time garden in Milan. I'm still working on it. It's nine years of work. I would say on the contrary, I'm absolutely immersed in time and the design of others. I collaborate all the time with others. So I don't accept that it's got my signature all over it. Of course, my own work has its identity and language and style. No question. But you know, I was also struck by one other thing in your book is that how ugly cities are compared with your garden. Your garden in place is very serene, harmonious, sculptural, and then everything surrounding it is look so disgusting. Clutter. Clutter. Yeah, hideous buildings around them. Well, again, you know what I mean? Yes, by contrast. I think that's true. Our lives are full of clutter, necessarily. So and a garden is retreating in that sense. It's also a form of art that you need to walk on and through to understand, which interests me because, you know, we've been, a lot of it has been educated to think that art is something sort of flat on a wall, or at least something sitting in a room that you walk around if it's a sculpture. But this is something you can't, you can't understand unless you walk through it. You have just physically engaged. Absolutely. And I think the American Indians knew that. And the Nazca Indians... Well, Nazca, they danced those lines. They walked the lines. And I think ancient Brits did the same. They walked the horses. Yeah. Well, that leads us neatly to walking in another sense, and Paul Thoreau's book, The Tao of Travel. This is a whole collection of different forms of narrative and mini essays, aphorisms, and so on, about notion of traveling, Paul Thoreau. And therefore, it's difficult to sum up because, for every statement about travel, one's able to find an alternative in this book, pretty much. But can I just start with some of your own principles, for instance, that travel should mostly and essentially be a solitary act? I think of it most usefully as a solitary act, but a vacation seems to me something that people do in groups, husband and wife, partners, lovers, friends, go on a trip together. But it's not travel in the old sense of revealing something about the trip, but it's not about discovery. That the discovery or self-discovery usually comes in solitude, the solitary walker, or the person traveling alone, the Crusoe figure, let's say. I always wonder. Did Bruce Schatwin go alone? Did Dr. Johnson go alone? We know the answer to that question. But did John Steinbeck go alone? He travels with Charlie, he went with his dog. Turns out that in one of the sections of the book, I describe how a lot of people who appear to go alone, because this is kind of your question, the solitude of travel, is an ideal, didn't go alone. So that they recognize the ideal of I'm alone against the elements, just me and my dog, my dog, Charlie. But in fact, he had conjugal visits with his wife, and his recent event revealed that even a lot of the book was invented. He was sick of the trip and laid up. Ideally, it's alone. Is it possible to travel anymore in the way that you describe it? Not so long ago, it would have been a kind of romantic and exciting form of travel to walk thinker trail or to walk around Peru. These days, vast, vast numbers of people are coming off jets and buses and queuing up to do these things. So much of the world, which was once a place where you could discover something new, you could discover something else about yourself, you could be alone, is simply another cue. That's true, and people say that, you've just said it. But actually, in 1853, Richard Burt went to Mecca in disguise, and in 1908, a man called AJB Wavell did the same thing in disguise. No one's done it since then. You want a trip? Go to Mecca in disguise, risk that, or for your gap year, or for you. Send your kids to Mecca in disguise, tell them to learn Arabic. Parents, turn off the wireless right now. Get circumcised, learn Arabic, and do that, try that, for example. A lot of people, what you're alluding to is lots of people go to Bangkok, lots of people go to Brazil. But not many people go to Afghanistan these days. If you go to Afghanistan or wander over the border of Iran, you'll probably be arrested. There's more of a challenge in some countries these days that it was in the past. It's harder to cross through Africa now than it was in the time of Stanley, that Tim Butcher, quite a respected journalist, tried to go from Zanzibar to the mouth of the Congo a few years ago. He didn't fail, he made it, but he needed a lot of help. As countries open up, as you can go to Albania now, you can go to Russia, others close. And Mr. Shetty will have something to say about that. But there are many countries that are very dangerous to travel in, or forbidden to travel in. And so, yes, it is still possible to travel. You just have to look at the world, not through a Google map, but take a leap. People travel for all sorts of reasons. I mean, they travel to run away from things. They travel to run towards things. What in your life has been the purpose of the great journeys you've done? There are a lot of reasons. When I was a little kid, my mother, I come from a family of seven children. My mother used to say, "Play outside. Go outside. Please, play outside. Please go outdoors. I'm busy. Go out." So, the house was in Massachusetts. So, just playing outside was the beginning. And then, I suppose, just the idea of being alone, being solitary, if you come from a large family, you want the solitude of travel that may come from that. But it's also due to the fact that the profession I chose myself keeps me in a chair for years on end writing novels. And it's escaped from that. Catherine Mayer. You say solitude and getting away, but you also mentioned self-discovery. Of course. And there is this sort of interesting balance between the idea of a journey as something being about self-discovery and being about discovery and observation. And I just wondered if real travel could ever be about actually avoiding both self-discovery and discovery rather than finding it. You mentioned in your book that Freud's fear of journeys that Heiser hunched. And so, there is also the question about the journey itself as a metaphor for life and the inescapable destination of death. But there are many other things that people may wish to avoid, to escape, to distract. In my book, I sort of answer that because I've been trying to account, we're talking generally about travel. And my book is both about travel and travel books. There are books about there are some sort of travel is falling in love. Some of it's self-discovery, some of it's anthropology, some of it is confrontation, some of it is botany, some of it might be wandering over Charles Jenk's beautiful landscapes, some of it might be, you know, looking for a landscape, looking for a metaphor. There's so many motives. So people think that a travel book is one thing. It's many things. It's many things. Some of it is pure autobiography. It's the most clearest expression of autobiography. of the self that you can find. Although it's happening in Brazil, or it's happening in Argentina, some of it is collecting new smells. Charles Jenk's. I was fascinated, if that's not too strong a word, by the the discussion of the navel of the world. And it reminded me of something which may be true. I heard when I was young that every tribe in the past and maybe today carries a center of the earth pole around with them and when they travel, when they walk, when they, if they're nomads, and wherever they put the pole is the center of the earth. And what I find fascinating by that, from a scientific point of view, is that although Copernicus, the famous Copernican revolution, distanced us from the center of the universe, in fact, it's true. Wherever you stick a pole, it is the center of the earth because the earth comes from that infinitely dense point. And therefore, every part of the universe is at the center in some metaphorical sense. I wonder if you came across the center of the earth poles and whether you have one. I know I don't. But what you find is not so much the center of the earth pole, but the center of the earth mentality. Most cultures, virtually a whole cultures, think that if they don't have a pole, they have a, they are the center. And Native American people are an example, the Ojibwe people, the Chippewa. But that name means original people. Inuit means original people. I live in Hawaii half the year. Kanakamaoli means the original people. We're people. If you go to what you find in travel is that when you go to a place, you're meeting people who regard you as not a person. You might be a distant ancestor, but you're not a person in the same sense that they are. I am a person, you're a stranger, you're Charles, you're a guy from some other place, but I'm a person in my country. And that gives you the center of the earth, this egocentric way of looking at the world is very, very common. I mean, in fact, you find that that one of the difficulties of travel is that you're meeting people who don't regard you as human and not as human as they are anyway. This business at the center of the world being wherever you want it to be reminds me of Colonel Gaddafi when you went visit Colonel Gaddafi with Blair. And we asked where he was and they said, "He's at the place." And we said, "Where is the place?" And they said, "He's at the place, which place?" And the place was simply wherever Colonel Gaddafi happened to be, was the center of the country and the place to which everybody would go, which takes us neatly on to dictators, I guess. And it is 50 years since Amnesty International was founded. Salil Shetty is the new general secretary, also 50, I think, Salil. So that makes... The whole world knows my age now. It was founded really through a single letter to one newspaper about one tiny little protest 50 years ago. Absolutely. I think that's the... I mean, it's all about ordinary people getting together to do extraordinary things. In fact, Peter Benenson went into St. Martin the Fields Church when he saw... When he heard the story about two young Portuguese students who had been arrested during the Salazar regime in Portugal, just for raising a toast to freedom. And from there came the Amnesty idea and within weeks, thousands of people started forming local groups. And, you know, today we have more than 3 million people fighting against dictatorship and all sorts of freedoms. And Amnesty's iconic image of the candle with the barbed wire spiral around it came right from the beginning too. Absolutely. I mean, that's how it started. And since then, more than 40,000 political prisoners have been freed by people's action. And there couldn't be a more appropriate time to talk about this because in the last six months, we've seen what's happening in the Middle East and North Africa. Once again, people coming together, standing up for their rights. And it's starting to happen in Madrid in the recent past as well. The story of Amnesty includes some extraordinary individual cases because, as you said, it starts with people sitting at home, not traveling, but they're sitting at their desks and they're writing letters and firing them off, this is long before emails and texts and all the rest of it. And the notion, it seems a naive idea that individuals in countries to start with in the West could actually have any impact at all on repressive dictatorships or authoritarian regimes anywhere else by simply writing letters. Well, it seems to have worked. I mean, it was called one of the larger insanities of the time when it was founded. But, you know, since then, we've had about 40,000 political prisoners released. If you take the one major campaign, we run on death penalty. When we started fighting for the abolishing of death penalty, there were only 16 countries who were ready to abolish it. We now have 96 countries. So, you know, it's, it's, and the whole convention against torture. I mean, torture was, seemed to be an accepted way of behavior, but that was completely challenged over the years. It's also unusual in being as far removed from an ideological organization as it's possible to imagine you don't take positions to the left or to the right or anything else. It's simply about freeing prisoners of conscience around the world. That's led you to some difficult internal debates, hasn't it? I'm thinking of the famous argument about Nelson Mandela and the armed struggle in South Africa. And did that make Nelson Mandela a suitable person for amnesty to rally behind, which today seems a strange question, but it was very intense at the time. I think it's, it's very important for amnesty to have retained that independence and objectivity. And, you know, most of our work is based on quite a lot of detailed research. I mean, this is a bit, bit of a challenge for a studio, because if you have YouTube and wiki leaks and all of these things happening in a sort of in one hour cycles and two hour cycles, our research normally takes two to three years. And so that is a big challenge. But I mean, on the question of not supporting anybody who espouses violence, that was the issue on the case of Mandela, I mean, yes, with hindsight, it's different. But we did support a lot of other what we call prisoners of conscience. But in the case of Mandela, that was a hot debate internally. And you didn't at the time, did you? No, we didn't. No. But I mean, we did support the anti-apartheid struggle. But in the individual case was the issue. Coming right up today, before we open this out, you mentioned wiki leaks just now. Very interesting. Now you're confronting problems where freedom of information, information spilling out into the public domain can actually cause serious threat to individuals. So there's a naive notion that freedom of information and freedom of conscience always go together is wrong. And in fact, you're arguing with wiki leaks. I think about this at the moment, aren't you? I mean, we had an initial argument around Afghanistan that, you know, there shouldn't be individuals, names of people who are giving out the sources. That's that puts them at risk. And but they have, they did, they did take them out and the later releases, I think they've taken care of that. But in fact, allowed Amnesty International people to come in and redact names and help them with that. We had a sort of heated discussion and then much water floats since then. But I mean, on the balance between, you know, public interest and national security, I think we would definitely lean towards freedom of information and public accountability. That's really where we're coming from, pull through. This is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Shetty, because I've been a member of Amnesty for a very, very long time since I was in Africa, went to Africa in the 60s as a teacher, and I stayed there for six years. And we were always in the presence of political prisoners. And as a matter of fact, in terms of travel, most people travel or have vacations in dictatorships. It happens to be a fact that when people want to go have a good time, they go to a place like Kenya, whether political prisoners or to look at animals in Zimbabwe, whether political prisoners are in the past in South Africa, where there was political prisoners, racism, but they were seeing elephants. So what the hell? But I want to ask you a question about a man called Agustino Nieto, who was a political prisoner in Angola, put in prison by the Portuguese. This would have been in the 60s. And there was a campaign, Amnesty had a campaign for Agustino Nieto, who was a poet. Then later, he became the prime minister of perhaps president of Angola. And he became someone who put political prisoners, who was responsible for it. He had been released by Amnesty, and then he became a persecutor. Does this happen very often? Yeah, I think, you know, when people get to seats of power, I mean, as they say, you know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely. So, he's an ungrateful little person. What is the story with that? No, I mean, that's precisely why the campaigns have evolved quite a lot. We are now also looking at, I mean, if you take the International Criminal Court, which now brings these people to account at the international level, that was a major campaign we ran. So we evolved quite a lot from the individual prisoner to having norms and standards and infrastructure at the global level for accountability. Some people worry that you've expanded too far, that you're running campaigns on issues of poverty and gender and so on, which may be very important, but are somehow less focused, less sharp than the old campaigns. But the thing is, you know, I think the important thing is that Amnesty is adapted by listening to people whose human rights are being violated, because it might be easy for us to sit here and make a judgment on what's right and what's wrong, but we have to be responsive to the needs of the people whose rights are being violated. So, when we started, we would look at prisons, but those and, you know, dictators became more and more clever. They stopped putting people in prisons. They were just disappearing people, so we had to start looking at enforced disappearances. We used to deal only with individual rights till Rwanda happened with a genocide like that you couldn't take it. And then, of course, most of the prisoners we discovered also are men. So the whole issue of women's rights came in later on, and I can tell you very briefly, Indonesia, you take the case of Indonesia, I was there recently. Twenty years ago, we were working mainly on the dictatorship there, you know, the Suhato issue, etc. Today, a lot of the deaths are happening during childbirth, 20,000 women die every year during childbirth. So it's just keeping in with the reality of the time. Charles James. Yes. I'm also very in favor of it, but I don't know who sets the agenda. What brain trust do you have behind it decides to go into these new areas and define because you have to do it preemptively. Obviously, you need all the information. You've got to research it, but someone is setting your agenda. And who is that? How is that agenda set? In fact, that's what makes Amnesty International quite unique because we're a membership organization. So Paul is a member, and hope that by the time we finish, you'll all have become members of Amnesty International, if you aren't already members. And it's not just membership in terms of making... Three million people can't set an agenda. No, no, but that's saying that not all the three million are active on a day-to-day basis, but a significant chunk are... So we have elected boards of governance. So our board is elected. So it could be a musician, a plumber, it's not just human rights, legal experts. And apart from the governance, which is internal, we spend a lot of time talking to the people who's rights are being violated. And they're the ones who ultimately have to help us design the agenda. But it's not an easy choice to make. I join because I'm against torture. It was purely the anti-torture. I've lived in countries where people were tortured. Amnesty is against torture, and the United States has allowed torture. So it was purely that. But torture is something that some people agree on. Most people agree you shouldn't have political prisoners, but there are some people who think, "Well, maybe torture is okay. You can find it." That's why I joined. Well, at any rate, we can agree that Amnesty is 50 and is debating its identity, as it always does. And actually, a lot of people debate their identity around the age of 50. And the old days, we'd be slipping towards retirement at that age. But Catherine Mayer, in your new book, A Mortality, The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly, you point out that many people, certainly in the rich parts of the world, are now thinking about aging an entirely different way. So let's just start with the basics. A mortality, the word you've coined in Time Magazine, is what? It describes, I say living agelessly. What I'm actually talking about is the fact that not only do we not grow old as we used to, we don't grow up as we used to, we don't go through the ages and stages of life as we used to. You might think that because we're living longer, 30 years on average, since the beginning of the 20th century, that we'd fit in more ages and stages, more than the seven ages defined by Shakespeare. Instead, you find that it's very hard to tell what age somebody is from what they like to do, from how they dress, from even their physical condition, their cognitive condition. So there's this sort of illusion going on. And you see it at both ends of the spectrum. People tend to think it's more noticeable in older people. You can see it more easily, but they tend to think that it wouldn't affect younger people. It does. I mean, we worry about children becoming adopting adult behaviours, for example. This illusion happens right the way through. At some point in the last half century, the ideal age or the iconic age changed. It seems to me that if you look at photographs or films of people in the 1950s and 1960s, very quickly, when people were about 16, they want to look about 30. And everybody's sort of proper grown-up person wearing a proper suit and a proper haircut, either genders. Whereas these days, the iconic age is a teenage image, almost. Well, one of the ironies is clearly a mortality has been driven by baby boomers. It isn't by any means confined to baby boomers. But one of the things that a lot made me laugh when I was researching this book, and I am a baby boomer. I'm the same age as amnesty. But what made me laugh was the way in which boomers became the great proponents of youth culture. They were part of this youth revolution, and they never envisaged that they grow up and grow old and become the people who were then disrespected by the youth culture that they'd created. But a lot of its enduring legacy, if you like, you see in the irony that as the population ages and the whole population of the world is growing older all the time, that our veneration of youth is increasing rather than decreasing. We're not actually learning to appreciate the older people who are in greater numbers around us. How much of immortality is material selfishness? And indeed, very expensive lifestyle of a small number of people who can think they can hold back the years by technology. Clearly, that's one very obvious manifestation of a mortality. We live in a very solipsistic society. We live in society that has lost sense of community. So that's part of both what drives a mortality and one of its manifestations. But I have to say, I take a much more positive view. You might say I would do because I tend to think I am a mortal. But there, there is a nice quote in there from that famous philosopher Bob Gildov, who says that age disappears and direct proportion to the vitality of your ideas. And I think that that is also very important. You know, there are all of us around this table in a previous era would have been on our way to the scrap heap, if not already on the scrap heap. And actually, you know, to me, one of the things that is sad is our inability to see that people are capable of things at all different ages of life. You know, that it's a double thing, isn't it? Because clearly at one level, if we're all living longer, then we have to work for longer as well. Otherwise, all of our economies will collapse and turn turtle. People have to find creative and busy things to do for much, much longer. Which means they have to stay healthy enough to do that. And that's a good thing. But there is an aspect of this which is simply terror of death, isn't it? Well, I think that actually goes back to what I was asking Paul relating to journeys and distraction is I think that a great driver of a huge amount of human activity is fear of death and a desire to distract. But I think it also, in our society, goes further that we have a dependence anxiety as well. So, for example, a lot of the debate around assisted dying is about this idea that, oh, it would be so terrible to actually be dependent, and therefore, you start trying to control your age and death by saying, okay, I'll go to Switzerland. Maximum amount of good living and quick, quick, as possible death, not connected to other people who then have to look after. Exactly. That's what people call us, James. I was reminded in your phrase, live ageously of Nietzsche's famous remark, live dangerously. And I was wondering whether you're going to write a polemic like Nietzsche in Nietzsche's style, maybe proposing that we live ageously. But the one obvious downside today is the way it's led, as you point out, the life of Hollywood to become a norm. And one thinks of the infatilization of our culture by celebrities, by Hollywood, by the monarchy, and so on and so forth. And I think the average mental age of our culture, if one can have a mental age of a global culture, is 14 and descending towards probably the limit of eight. And I wonder if you have anything to say about the infatilization drive. Absolutely. I mean, there is clearly a danger that in not growing up as we used to, that we become infantilized, that we dumb down. That is not, you can't blame a mortality for that, but it is part of the process that actually drives a mortality. The, you know, I mentioned our increasing faith in science. It seems to me that what's happened is that as the various authorities that we trusted, like the church, politicians, I mean, God, can you remember when we used to trust politicians? As those, as those authorities lost power, we transferred our faith to scientists into celebrities. I don't really feel that comfortable about trusting science. I feel even less so about trusting to celebrity. It's part of our culture, and as I say, it reinforces a mortality. Sally L. Shetty. Catherine, I, when I started reading the bits of the book, and I was thinking, this is really about people who are really privileged, and this, you know, because so many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have life expectancies of 40, 45, and you were talking about it. And then I did the test at the end of the book, and I discovered I was immortal. I said it can't be that bad. But, you know, the issue really, and I had the same question earlier about, you know, privilege, you know, how many people can travel. And so the issue of the relationship between poverty and human rights is very central to everything that we, we need to talk about, I think, because if you look at it, you said you, you are against torture. But who are the people who are being tortured? Who are the people who are in prisons? They're mostly poor people. I mean, I was just in Brazil recently. Brazil and Rio, 1,000 people are killed by the police every year, you know, so-called security battles with drug dealers, and most of them are poor and black, and their mortality is, you know, appalling. So this book, this book was not actually conceived as a polemic, but I got, I said I laughed at a lot of the research. I also got furiously angry at one particular underlying factor, and that is the health gap and lifespan gap between the rich and the poor in rich countries. If you look at the life expectancy of a man in black pool, and a man in Kensington, there is about a 10-year gap. If you look at the health span gap between them, it is 17 years. I agree that with Mr Shadi, that in many countries, you live and then you die, and people don't think about a Botox or anything else. It's the poor who suffered, but I was going to ask whether you'd read The Death of Ivan Illich by Tolstoy. You know, that's about death, and it's about two views of death and aging, and Ivan Illich is a lawyer who doesn't want to die, and his family's going to the opera, and he's suffering and screaming, and he's looked after by Gerasim, who's a peasant, who sees death as a natural thing, aging and death, and he's not thinking, you know, what's your problem, Ivan? But he's saying, he holds his hand and he guides him into death. I was also thinking in the role of work, how work can be such an inspiring thing, such a vital part of our lives, that Charles will go on designing landscapes until you die, obviously. I'm going to go on scribbling until I drop, but for many people, the end of work is also the end of their life, and they kind of check out then. That's true, although that also goes back to what Salil's just said. I mean, for all of us privileged people doing jobs that we love, work is life, and I have a whole chapter on work because it is very clear that we need people to work longer, working longer is generally better for us, even in jobs that we don't like. I mean, there's a lot of science backing that up, but, you know, to take your point about Tolstoy, one of the great things about art, but also something I was trying in my own smaller way to do in this book, is that it can help you to deal with the metaphysics, to actually live more intensely because you become aware of the possibility of death rather than blanking it out. We all age at different stages. This program ages very, very fast, about 44 minutes, which is where we've come to. So we're out of time, thank you to all my guests. Charles Jinks is the universe and the landscape. Land forms is out now, beautiful book it is. And there's an exhibition of his work at Jupiter Artland, just outside Edinburgh. Paul Thoreau's The Tau of Travel and Catherine Mayer's Amortality, the pleasures and perils of living ageously, published this month. And you can see Salil Shetty in the documentary, Amnesty, when they are all free, looking back at 50 years of Amnesty International Tomorrow Night at nine on BBC Four. Next week, we'll be discussing Faith and Its Follows with Jane Shaw, Zia Dinsadar and Jonathan Kent. But for now, thank you and goodbye. The Winter Blowout Sale is happening now at your local Big R. Huge savings on winter essentials. Get 25% off beanies for the family, cozy winter gloves, and all women's winter scarves. Need to gear up with BIBs? Coats and vests? Shop now. Insiders save 30% off. Stay prepared for the snow with 20% off in stock snow throwers. 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