Start the Week

24/01/2011

Andrew Marr talks to John Gray about our delusional quest for immortality, from Victorian séances to embalming Lenin's corpse to uploading our minds in cyberspace. Equally ambitious has been the quest to create the ultimate living, thinking robot, and the anthropologist Kathleen Richardson assesses how far machines could take over the earth. The science fiction writer Paul McAuley imagines a utopian world in the hostile environs of Jupiter and Saturn, based on a system of favours and patronage. And Dai Smith offers up an alternative history of his native South Wales, which brings together the events, people and writings that have shaped its unique culture.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 41m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jan 2011
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, mere mortality is our theme today. Later in the programme, we're going to be dissecting with the writer, Dye Smith, the mighty cadaver of working-class South Wales, a society of heavy industry, music, sport, politics and vivid argument that is, I fear, no longer quite with us. By remembering, can we freeze the seeds of a culture and regrow them later? Before that, we're going to be talking about scientific fantasies, including overcoming human limits with the sci-fi author Paul McCauley, whose work tests the boundaries and politics of hard science, and the anthropologist Kathleen Richardson, who devotes her time to studying not humans, but robots, or possibly humans studying robots. But first, though, the philosopher John Gray, on the immortalisation commission, science and the strange quest to cheat death, which is a study of Victorian and Edwardian psychics and Soviet would-be Superman, and the more modern dream of uploading human minds into machines. John, you cover a vast range of different attitudes to immortalisation in this short book. Let's just start with the sort of late Victorian Edwardian psychics and automatic writing. This was, by your account, very much driven by the high mortality, not just of the First World War, but remarkable numbers of people dying quite early of typhus or whatever, you know, relatively young, and a desperate desire to replace fading religion with something else. That's right. In the late Victorian Edwardian periods, religion had lost its emotional hold of large sections of educated people, the intellectual elite, but also large sections of limited classes. And all of these, the whole society really was, in a sense, under the spell of science, and in particular of Darwinism, and what Darwinism had revealed was a world in which, when individual humans died, they vanished, and the human species would eventually be extinct. And that vision, at a time when we tend to forget, infant mortality was still very high. People lost lovers and fiancés, husbands, wives, and so on, at a rate which we can hardly imagine. There was a tremendous amount of almost unbearable grief, and several of the people involved in these, to us, rather incredible experiments, people like Arthur, the politician, Arthur Balfour's brother, also a conservative politician, but who gave a politics to devote his life to the study of the paranormal, and many others, including many women who had lost children in early years, or lost loved ones, were involved in psychical research, and in particular in this practice of automatic writing, in which it seemed to them that minds other than their own, including the minds of loved ones who passed on, were communicating with them by their hand-moving and revealing messages, messages which offered consolation, offered meaning, and offered hope. So what I think it's important to realize is that, for pretty well, all of the people involved in this practice, it was a form of science. It was conceived to be science, not religion, because for them science was the authority. So they turned to science, if you like, to for an exit from the meaningless world that science had revealed. It's a poignant story in many ways, because it is driven by intense yearning and emotional of the time, but it is unintentionally, from time to time, comic as well, and you tell the extraordinary story of the idea of creating a spirit child, a real child who is going to be a sort of future world leader. Yes, one of the most extraordinary episodes in this period, the Edwardian period, is concerns the belief among a number of leading psychical researchers that deceased scientists were engaged in a eugenic experiment on the other side, whereby a child would be designed on the other side and appear in our world with extraordinary capacities and abilities, so extraordinary that this person could transform the world and bring peace to it. Now, there is a kind of subtext to this, which is that the key automatist involved in this was a woman who else suffered yet, actually, but also someone intensely interested in art and also the British representative at the League of Nations who practiced under a pseudonym. She was someone who'd lost a child in infancy, someone with what was described as a strong predilection to paternity, married to an older man, who we now believe produced the child as a result of a covert relationship with Jerry Balfour, Balfour's brother. But the very idea that on the other side, as it were, scientific progress was advancing more quickly than on in the earth, so that on the earth, so that this child could be produced, and one was produced. Henry Coom Tenant, Henry Coom Tenant, a child did emerge, not it seems by virgin birth, and had an interesting life. Well, guards, Second World War says here, captured in France, spent two years in German prison camps. Prison camps later entered the secret intelligence service, worked with Kim Philby, after the war did a bit more of that, then quick to become a monk at downside. They came a monk for most of his life, so in a sense he was interested in immortality and immortalization in a rather different way. Indeed, but he doesn't seem to have known of his own role, the role that had been assigned to him, or not fully or not till late in life. Now, you then jump on in the study to look at the catastrophically murderous and bloodthirsty Bolshevik belief that you get rid of enough bad humans, and eventually you'll create better humans and possibly even super humans, and the strange story of Lenin's pickling, I think we could call it, but I'd like to jump on towards the end of the book where you raise the idea of the singularity, which is much talked about Kurtzfeld, the notion that a human consciousness, not simply the information in the brain, but actually consciousness, will eventually be downloaded in some fashion onto a computer system, which would then allow that consciousness, yours or mine or anybody else's, to live forever. Yes, the American writer Ray Kurtzweis, widely influential, and he's a more radical proponent of immortality through science than earlier groups, some of which still continue, who propose to that humans achieve immortality by having their bodies or their brains frozen, and then resurrected later and repaired. For him, freezing is not really good, it doesn't work very well. Freezing tends to damage the bodies, the cadavers and so on in the brains, but in the Kurtzweis, there's a more radical notion, it's that, as you say, human consciousness will be somehow stored on a computer and then uploaded, that individual human consciousnesses can be uploaded into a cyber realm where these consciousnesses can have whatever bodies they want. And for me, this is very like the Victorian and Edwardian spiritual Summerland, because in that land, Summerland, you have a body, but it's not the body you had before, it doesn't have arthritis or warts, it's not ugly, it's somehow an enhanced version of your body, but of course, Kurtzweis is even more radical, he says you don't just have to have one virtual body, you can have as many as you like. The key thing though, in all of this, is the idea that new technologies, technologies, in this case of the internet and of cyberspace, will enable humans to escape the natural limitations that go with being an animal of the kind that Darwin described. And therefore, that original intolerance of the Darwinian vision of eventual death, and so on, the inability to accept that. It's a strong today's, as a strong today. We've had plenty of biologists on this program over the years who've ridiculed the idea, Paul McQuarley, we're going to come on to your science fiction in the moment, of the singularity of being able to download a consciousness onto silicon, because they insist again, and they don't write clear that the brain is after all an embodied fleshly, a bony, a part of a fleshly and bony structure, and can't be removed from it. But this is an idea that in your world, in science fiction, just won't go away, is it? No, and also that it's a tremendously easy to interface with machines by simply plugging yourself in through the little node in the back of your neck, as has been prevalent for quite a while now as well. As science fiction writers always like, there's two ways of looking at this, first of all, that it's, first of all, that technology is fiction-free, you know, there's the scenes with Kurtzweil assumes where this kind of weasel world download, which encompasses an enormous amount of difficulty and problems which aren't the biologists to be getting at. It's much more likely, I think probably they'd say it's more like a simulation than a download, because you'd have to simulate every state of every neuron, and you could only approximate that simulation. This is the big objection to it. So anything you do is only an approximation, it's not an accurate model, it's not a replica. Kurtzweil seems to think that you can just replicate things that in the same way that you can copy, you know, the information on the CD onto a hard drive and then back again. But a lot of science fiction seems to me to be driven by some of the same instincts of driving the characters in John Gray's book, in the sense of belief that eventually we'll be able to cheat death, or at least cheat our natural limitations and push beyond. Yeah, I think a lot of science fiction is about death actually, or cheating death, or confronting death, not only the death of yourself or the human species, but also the heat death of the universe, which was discovered around about 50 years later after Darwin. There's another big thump there that the universe isn't going to go on forever, the earth isn't going to go on forever, there's a finite time, the sun will gutter out, if we go to other stars, fine, but they will gutter out too, and eventually the whole universe will gutter out and there'll be nothing left for life to cling on to. And I think what is quite sinister, H.G. Wells with figures in your book, there's an narcissism there as well, isn't there? I mean, it seems to me that they are ignoring the specificity of other human beings, other than their own. So in Winifred Coon Tenants business of what do Nicole Kidman says, she was a gestation carrier, or for the Messiah. But in real life, she was embracing whales and the nationalized Stethford, and sometimes Lloyd George, as if that was the afterworld, you know, perhaps it was, you know, here and then. And yet when we go to Wells, you have this kind of progressivism, which melds into, you know, the appalling crimes committed in this instance within the lands of the Soviet Union, because other human beings are not human in their mind. I think other humans are radically imperfect versions of a kind of ideal humanity, which is a projection of their own image. They would like to have of themselves that they see developing in the future. So they're not really interested in actual human beings, not even. You could have just jumped in there. You could have equally gone to the Nazi experiments that talked about the perfect Aryan that was eventually going to be created if you waited long enough. The difference is that the Bolsheviks weren't racists, but it is so there's a profound difference in that respect. And the killing in the Soviet Union, although it was on a colossal scale, didn't involve the type of genocide that occurred in the Nazi lands. But where they were similar, and it comes out quite explicitly in Trotsky, is Trotsky explicitly envisaged using what he called psychophysical experimentation to create a higher human being. And Gorky, and I said this in the book, wrote to Stalin, saying, "Don't be too squeamish about the methods. We need to experiment on what he called human units." It's just a disgusting phrase. We're going to come on to robots, which actually kind of fit into all of this in the politics, as well as the timescale in a moment, Kathleen. But the quest to cheat death is also part of the history of the robotic world. Well, very interesting, because tomorrow is the 90th anniversary of the robot, which was a character in the play called IUR, Rossims universe, or robots. And in it, there's a strong sense of terminus and human destruction. So in the play, the robots eventually do all the human labor, apparently, fitting in with this idea that if machines did our labor, then we'd have more freedom to go and explore our kind of interests. But as machines do well, as the robots, they weren't actually machines at this point. As the robots do more and more labor, then they eventually become more powerful and they rebel and take over society. And that is the end of the human species, basically. So the themes of terminus are very much then and now, still very much intimately connected with the idea of the robot. We could say there's almost a culture of death surrounding it. So we're absolutely on the edge between the physical world in which we live and fantasy world. And it's, as we've demonstrated, it's about the fear of death drives us over that edge, which takes us to Paul Macaulay's writing, your science fiction writing, Paul. Explain to us, you would describe yourself, most of the time, as a hard science fiction writer, you're using hard science in your books, dealing with a lot of these themes. What is the definition of a hard science fiction writer as opposed to, I suppose, a soft science fiction writer? I suppose it's playing within the rules of what's known. You can start extrapolating wildly from what's known, but you start with a common ground that's shared among scientists. The good example would be using the speed of light that you don't violate Einsteinian principles when you're traveling. If you want to get your character to start, they're going to have to spend at least, say, four years to travel four light years. They can't go fast on the light because we know at present you can't go fast, the light is impossible. Other science fiction writers think, well, to get the story going, we'll just get around that. Then you've become slightly softer version. You give yourself those limits. You can play within those limits. That makes it quite interesting because you then get into all kinds of problems and how do you construct a ship that's going to last that long? I mean, four years is like the minimum time to get to the nearest star at the speed of light, assuming you can get up to speed of light instantly and then get down to the speed of light to rest again, instantly. But it would, in fact, probably be much, much longer than that. Again, this comes into the idea of death. I mean, how in the normal human lifespan do you comprehend these vast interstellar distances? You wake your people up after these long travels with appalling stomach cramps and boulders or other things. That's just the trip from Earth to Jupiter, which is a mere baccatel compared to actual interstellar distances. And we've also touched on robotics, but you've got a very interesting instance, for instance, where you've got fighter pilots in one of your books, who have to be re-engineered to increase the speed of their reactions, which is coming close to some of the sort of engineering that we've been talking about in the singularity. Yeah, I suppose there's two ways. The first way of looking at re-engineering is to make yourself much more of an ideal human being, which I've talked about earlier, but the other way of doing it is to make yourself more of an ideal kind of machine. And the fighter pilot idea was to try and fit them into the kind of kind of machines they're going to operate in the same way that the polo, Mercury and Apollo astronauts were selected and tested very relentlessly and brutally to basically become switch-throwing monkeys. The first astronauts in the American program were chimps who were trained to throw certain switches when lights came on to show that they could work in Zero-G and the scientists, some of whom came from Germany, Nazi Germany, had the same idea that the astronauts were basically what the astronauts called spamming a can. They were just there to throw switches. The astronauts of course rebelled against this, because there's this romantic notion, which I obviously share, putting fighter pilots in advanced spaceships, that you should have some human element there. It was important to have these kind of nights riding off into the wild blue yonder, representing humanity. In your case, the brain is enhanced and the neural systems are speeded up through you. Yeah, you're given this kind of secondary nervous system, which takes over this kind of secondary self, which is kind of sinister shadow itself that does the operations. Your books, and indeed a lot of science fiction actually, also has a strong political element, we touched on politics quite a lot already, but one of the things you seem to be doing is asking political questions, not quite like the Soviets, but you're asking about how the limits of human cooperation and adaptability. I started with a couple of novels thinking about what, looking at all the lovely pictures that came back from Cassini about the moons of Saturn, and wondering what it would be like to walk around there. As soon as you put up a human being there, you immediately have this kind of a trap. How do they get there? Why are they there? And how do they live? And in an environment like that, it's incredibly hostile, there's no air, it's very, very cold. The obvious answer is, well, they'd have to cooperate, and you immediately start thinking of places like Antarctica, places where you're entirely dependent on technology to survive. If technology doesn't work, you're going to die. If you don't cooperate with everybody around you and they don't cooperate with you again, you rely on the survival you're going to die. So the society was kind of built up from that kind of idea of cooperation. Why do you've got figures in your books who may not live forever, but live for very, very long lifespans, 180, 200 years, and so on? You're obviously worried about the inequality aspect of it, because you've also got sort of serfs and slaves. In other words, you suggest that if we ever advance, if that's the right word, which is not to a humanity which is enhanced and very, very long living, it will be at the price of other people, the majority who can't be like that and are just used as objects towards that. As the day HG Wells. Yeah, I suppose actually, I see, unfortunately, we always go back to HG Wells because he came up with most of this stuff first. But certainly, the idea that if you're going to live longer, you're gaining some kind of capital, you're accumulating stuff. It's very unlikely you're going to have long-lived people who are very poor living as beggars, and this would be rather difficult. So it's much more likely that the people who live longest of those who have also got a lot of stuff to begin with. Which takes us neatly to robots, and Kathleen, because the word robot, it's one of the relatively rare words in English, which is check in origin, and it means... To work slavishly, immediately to work slavishly. It's the extra labor, it's a feudal term, it's the extra labor that the serf used to give actually, so it's that extra labor. And interestingly, you know, the idea of the robot was also a very political character. It was in the 1920s, the kind of context that inspired it was the Russian Revolution, the First World War, Fordism, this kind of obsession with kind of labor and production. So there was definitely a political entity, because sometimes we think of Terminator, we think of Hollywood depictions of it as this kind of creature, and it stripped of all its... And the Karl Chapak play, which is where it comes from, the robots are not actually machines at all, they're biological living humans, but without full consciousness. I think this is one of the most interesting things about the play, because obviously the four-disproduction line was just taking off around the world. I mean, even in the Soviet Union, they kind of celebrated that four-disproached to manufacture and production. So in the play, the human bodies are assembled on a production line, so... But it's biological material that's assembled. And what was quite interesting is that the first depictions of the play, if anyone looks at any pictures, they'll see robots that look identical to people. But by the end of the 20s, what happened was other artists, you've got to remember in the 20s, the kind of machine metaphor that science almost taking hold of the kind of imagery, the machine was transformed, sorry, the robot was transformed into a machine. So by the end of the 20s, early 30s, that's right. And then from there, you can really see that most of our concepts of machines are robots on machines. But interestingly, this kind of idea of the robot as a human entity, where the boundaries lay, was there from the start. And I mean, your research, although you're an anthropologist, you're an anthropologist looking as much at robots as you are at people. And for those of us who are beginning to get slightly uneasy and possibly scared about this kind of chilly, post-human future, you would say when it comes to robots, don't worry, you're pretty little heads. No. When I first entered a robot lab back in 2003, I actually thought that from my childhood, this kind of idea of robots being very sophisticated. And when I arrived there, I realized that actually they're not very sophisticated at all. In fact, some of the imagery that we see in popular culture and the media about robots are all kind of videotaped, perfect representations of robots working. And if anyone does actually interact with the robot, they'll know that it breaks down. And this is why this breakers will idea. I mean, machines are continually breaking down, code is continually going wrong. And so I don't think we have to worry quite yet about the robot revolution, if ever. In fact, if anything, it's reinforced my notion that being human is very unique and distinctive, if anything. The more- Terrible to be downloaded, and then somebody just simply changed the plug to do some hoovering, you've gone. Well, I can. After all that effort. You know, I kind of think this idea about science, sometimes we recycle kind of very kind of fundamental human ideas about existence, but we recycle them in new forms. And you know, this kind of idea that you can download your consciousness. Well, you know, when Marx wrote capital, presumably downloaded an aspect of his consciousness into a thing, didn't he? And when we create objects in our society, we're always downloading. Or if you like writing down, as my friend said, our consciousness or creating things. So apart from the robots that are simple assembly machines, working factors on production lines, which we all understand, where do you think the sort of growth of robotics is going to go? Because you've talked about social robotics. I think social robotics is the biggest departure from our kind of conventional notions of robotics. And I say that because once again, when I kind of had an idea that the interest in action can do those kinds of things from pets to carers. Well, interestingly, when we kind of imagine the robot, it was as a worker has something that did a task. Now the task that the social robots seem to do is engage in a social interaction with the person. Now, we then have to question whether we need machines to have social interactions with, and particularly a group in society that these robots have been tested on at the elderly, for example. And you know, elderly people have that issue that they lose their siblings, they lose family members as they grow old. In fact, their human relationships diminish. And for that group of people then to like have robots as their kind of social solution, I think it's problematic. I can imagine there, I've got my kindle and I can, and that's a machine which helps me to read. And I can imagine a version of a kindle which talks back to me. And where I say that, you know, well, that's enough troll up. Can we go to some Thomas Hardy or whatever it is? And there's okay, all right then, because it's programmed to do so and read it back. But that wouldn't be a robot. That would simply be another machine. I'm just wondering about the definition of robot now. Well, it's a kind of vague definition because a robot is a machine. But we imagine it to have some kind of mobility, some movement, something it can kind of do, some action that it can do. But there really is no difference between a humanoid robot and your washing machine. They're both machines. However, there's something very fascinating that happens. And as an anthropologist, we look at this. Once you start crafting human characteristics on things, people start to attribute all kinds of qualities to it. I'd like to ask both you and Paul, whether there is any evidence at all of so far of robotics or machines learning fast enough to actually be described as intelligent in any meaningful way? I would say from I'm not a scientist, so I'm sure there are, there might be people who disagree. But in my interactions with scientists, I would say no. Paul, yeah, there are some robots that can do very simple learning tasks. They can they can figure out how to get around a block on the floor, for instance, but not much more than that. I mean, I'm kind of interested in the fact that robots have to have bodies because anybody who's used social media like Twitter will be have found all kinds of sort of spam bots and things like that, which pretend to be human, you know, Twitter users, but actually are there to disseminate ads for your diets and things like that. And perhaps that's one way that intelligence might accidentally come up is not, you know, scientists are lab designing robots, but add people designing, you know, add robots that people eventually can't tell the difference between a robot that's talking to you on the internet and another person, you know. I was quite interested in the cultural things that Kathleen was talking about as well as casting my mind back to robots that were kind. I mean, in my childhood, it was Robbie the robot on Forbidden Planet, which of course comes from The Tempest and his aerial. And then that takes you into John's distinctions, not distinctions, but the drawing together of magic and science. And in the early 1950s, there was a game called The Magic Robot, which I think came from the States, which is a little green figure that you put on one set, a magnet, on one set of a piece of paper, and it asked the question, they put him on the other side and he went to the question. And at the same time as that was being marketed, the Magic Robot in Britain, they were also marketing something that Ayman Andrews had brought out called The Great Marvello, who was a wizard with a wand, doing exactly the same thing. And I just have a feeling that particularly with robots, these issues of what can they do magically for you? And what can they do scientifically is maybe still a confusion. It also seems that every time there is a scientific advance, the innate poetic religious aspect of our personality, you want to seize it and extend it endlessly to some sort of death-cheating transcendence. I suppose the basic project of magic is to over-leap natural boundaries, transgress them so that we are more powerful, not mortal, and we can have all the good things, any of the bad things. And as Dies pointed out, many of the ideas of, some of the ideas of robotics and many subsequent ideas have that characteristic. And I'd say that the confusion of science with magic is not a sort of ailment of our culture that we can hope to cure. It's sort of encrypted in modern life because with the retreat of religion, which contains, if you like, elements of magic, the idea that we can somehow come back with our own bodies, but their better bodies and in a different world, but with all the sorrows of this world and so on. These are kind of half-magical ideas. These ideas have been channeled into science, and I agree with you, Andrew. I mean, it's exactly that way. Whenever there's an advance, and of course many of these advances are useful, it might be the case, as we've just been discussing, that some of these robots can be useful in some context for old people who've lost their human relationships and human networks. I'm not sort of adamantly saying them. They might turn, but what they can't do is get round, as it were, the assent-- The limits of our human situation of our fleshly life. The idea that they can is magic. Well, let's turn to a land of magic. Let's turn to a land of magic and a place which certainly demonstrates that the the joys and the sorrows cannot be disconnected or utterly. South Wales, at the turn of the 20th century, beginning of the 20th century, the Welsh-California gold rush territory die. In your part of South Wales, in particular, English speaking, by and large, but a real sense of boom tone and wildness from the cold fields. Yeah, and I think one of the things about Welsh history is where it's still misunderstood, is that the images of the 30s, the hunger marches and the grainy newsreel, is still what sort of visits the sense of Wales, whereas if you look at it in a different, if you're like in a longer time span, let's say from the 1890s to the 1920s, you have an extraordinary dynamic global capitalist society, one with boom and bust, huge amounts of immigrants coming in, as well as the Welsh transmigrating internally, we don't go to America like the Irish, we find American whales within whales, and that in turn led to the formation of what were meant to be consensual and stable communities under liberal politics and non-conformist religion, and of course, it breaks apart. Very quickly. It breaks apart because of the pressures and it feel like the massification and then those other pulses of that history happen later on down the road. I sometimes feel looking at Paul that whales was living in a kind of a dystopia, a real dystopia, but aspiring to a utopia, or at least in forms of its socialist politics and unionism, looking for ways out of what were sometimes robotic conditions, and if you look at the mass workforce in South Wales, 290,000 coal miners alone in 1920, and then you add to that the people dependent upon that army. So you had aggregations of people brought together for the purposes of work who, and this in some senses is the burden of my book, form themselves into congregations and communities, and then the rest of the book really is about this long dying, I was going to say downloading consciousness in the novelists and the painters and the photographers who try to give us, or I argue, they try to give us articulate an expression of that society which is extraordinarily vibrant and ultimately stick my neck at valid. Laquatius, highly literate, musical, and in some respects at any rate artistic, you start the book with a particular moment in time, a very, very specific brief frozen moment in time where you find your own grandfather in a crowd in Toni Pandey. Just tell us a little bit about why that moment in time, apart from the personal connection, is so important in the story of South Wales. Well the importance is because what occurred in Toni Pandey in 1910, the riots of Toni Pandey, which happened over two days or the further instances, was tied into a very long and difficult industrial dispute. Now if you imagined in a counterfactual sense that the riots hadn't happened, that the commercial and social fabric of the township hadn't been destroyed, so it was just an industrial dispute. It would still be very important because it led, amongst other things, to the minimum wage strike of 1912. There were theories of workers' control, nationalisation, or all the familiars, if you will. But what happened in Toni Pandey broke the accepted bounds. You had people turning on, as it was said, their own kind and the shopkeepers and the chemists who dealt with them. And traditionally this had been seen as a mob of drunken marauders or socialist inflamed ideologs or strangers coming for a bit of fun. And what I discovered, I hope, in my historical work was that it wasn't that, it was really enough, it was enough, it was a kind of a code. A lot of the shopkeepers were renting out properties at exorbitant rates. It was an eruption against the whole system. Yes, it deeply implicated the whole, if you like, class integration. And that's what upset Churchill was the home secretary. Troops did come to Toni Pandey. That's what upset Edwardian Wales. But also, if you like, moderate socialists like Keir Hardy, who incidentally also was a spiritualist in 1915. And the frozen moment, Andrew, was, you know, we were celebrating Toni Pandey, if you will, in Wales last year. And I'd looked at that photograph of striking miners going into a mass meeting. And I'd looked at it many times over the years because there's thousands of people in the photograph. And I suddenly did see in a clearer image my own grandfather. He's got your nose and eyes. He's sitting in front of me now. I can't tell about the hair, because he's got to be kept on, like they all did. It's a kind of scary photograph in a sense, because they are so massed, so uniform. You know, what the hell are they going to do? Well, we do know they're about to wreck the high street. Yes. This intense and very vivid culture starts to be destroyed, I suppose, as early as the 20s and 30s with the depression there. And what it's left is still quite a powerful division in Wales about what Welshness is about and Welsh history is about. I mean, you're occasionally criticized, I think it's fair to say, by some of the more Welsh language, plidist elements of your nation. That's a division which has always been there, but it's about as strong now as it ever has been. Well, I think the criticism is there. I'm not sure it's as strong. You know, I said those three pulses, and you mentioned the second, the Great Depression. I think the third really was welfareism and post-45 and a different kind of society. Now all of that is gone, and my book is a eulogy, but it's also an elegy, but I didn't want it to end on a dying fall, because I think we're actually into a fourth phase, if that's the right way of putting it, which is that the different cultures of Wales are in surprising ways coming together now because of the new institutions which have one way or another being created in Wales. So to give them vivacity at all, they have to be given the breath of life, which is more than political. You know, if less than half the people vote in the elections in Wales, that's a cultural error, if you want, and that has to be understood in terms of you build a culture, or give up. And your book, which you call Memory in Society, contains exchanges of letters and profiles and essays on writers and artists and intellectuals, and tries to preserve some of the conversation and the wit. And I felt reading it that your hope was that if you can kind of freeze it all and put it behind under hard covers, then in some manner at some point parts of this culture that you love so much can be revived again after death. I wouldn't take, I wouldn't take freezing. I'd say that I'm trying to sing a song, and one can maybe hear some of the tune of that. It's a book about consciousness, and it's also a book which attempts to say that there was validity in some of the collective impulses of that society, which actually work for not just Wales, but for, I'm tempted to quote the Prime Minister, we had a big society. Well, I find all this fascinating, it's one of the things Dye's work teaches me and reinforces me in the sense that human beings, all of us, are embedded in cultures. And when the cultures go, as it were, you can't bring those particular human beings back. And one of the oddities of this experiment in automatic writing of the start of the 20th century is that they communicate these supposed embodied, disembodied deceased intelligences, using cultural code, biblical and classical tags, Tennyson's and Browning's poetry with each other, in a way that was intelligible to all of the psychical researchers, which is completely unintelligible to us, partly because we don't read Browning and Tennyson at the Bible and the classics in the same way. So the idea that these people, as it were, could go on immortally in an post-mortem realm is really inconsistent, not only with Darwinism, but with the facts of lived experience, which is that we're all embedded in cultures. Because the culture goes, we change or we go. Yes, but you can goad and provoke people who haven't got a particular culture to a sense of envy or embarrassment, perhaps, and therefore to kickstart something. I don't think there are any patterns or templates, certainly not in the culture I've been describing. I don't think it's repeatable, or in that sense, translatable. But I do think, as I say, that there were values, and I'll call them moral and ethical as well, which do translate into the way people's lives live today and might give people some kind of sense. But it's more than that. I mean, I call the book Memory in Society, because having spent a life as a professional historian, it worries me that sometimes in professional history, historiography, can actually freeze in the way that you've described, Andrew. It can actually take people away from their sense of cultural, the sense of belonging. And memory, not myth, but memory in society is, I think, a kind of an emotional thing, which is worthwhile, because it does allow different forms of growth, different processes. Would you embed culture in that sense, Paul, in a science? I was just thinking of Dawkins' memes, and I was just wondering if you could think of culture as being a set of this idea of the memes that are like a culture of genes, and they're inherited and passed on, if they're strong enough. I just wonder if there's a sense that- Probably there's memes on myths. Well, it's a little bit vatable. Let's just assume that they kind of exist, and I'm just wondering if there's elements of the culture that have been passed on still. I was thinking, for instance, of Bevan and the NHS, and the post-war, the idealism of the post-war, the kind of utopianism. I mean, there was a poll a couple of years ago, and Bevan was the most popular man of the 20th century in Wales, from all sides. Now, what people think they mean by Bevan is a different issue, but that memory is there. That memory is there. Well, our ability to pass on memes and cultural DNA has run out, because our time has. Thank you to all my guests. Kathleen Richardson is giving that talk entitled, "Will Robots Take Over the World?" on February the 24th at the UCL. Paul McCall is taking part in Science Fiction and International Orders, next month's details on the start of the week website. John Gray is the Immortalization Commission, and Dye Smiths, in the frame, are both out now. Next week, Courage, Boldness, and Rebellion. We'll be celebrating the art of the manifesto with Neville Brody, Susan Hillier, Alex Danchef, and E.C. Osundu. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.