Start the Week

17/01/2011

Start the Week focuses on justice, fairness and ethical dilemmas this week. The leading Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm tells Andrew Marr that the inequalities inherent in capitalism has made people question its supremacy, and he argues that Marx remains as relevant today as in the last century. While the American academic Michael Sandel looks at the philosophy that underpins notions of justice, and unpicks the sometimes contradictory nature of morality. In her new play, Tiger Country, Nina Raine explores medical ethics and the huge toll working in a busy hospital takes on staff. And Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi water engineer, is seeking to right the wrongs of the past and restore the marshlands of his homeland to their former glory.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 17 Jan 2011
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. At Arizona State University, we're bringing world-class education from our globally acclaimed faculty to you. Ranked number one in innovation for 10 consecutive years and number two among public universities for employability. ASU isn't just ahead of the curve, it's creating new paths to success. Earn your degree from the nation's most innovative university. Online, that's a degree better. Explore more than 300 undergraduate graduate and certificate programs at asuonline.asu.edu. Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, justice is our theme today. Later on we're going to be discussing the surprisingly cheering sequel to one of the great injustices of the Middle East, the draining of the marshes of southern Iraq. Often seen to be said to be the original Garden of Eden by Saddam Hussein. Asam Alwash, a civil engineer, is helping restore an entire way of life. And on a day when the NHS is dominating the headlines, Nina Rain is with me to talk about life in a busy London hospital, a place she calls in her new play, Tiger Country. But we're going to start with ideas. Eric Hobbsborn, one of Britain's most famous historians, and a long time Marxist, calls his new book How to Change the World and argues that Karl Marx, despite the terrors committed in his name, still has much to teach us today. I wonder what Michael Sandel will make of that. The political philosopher from Harvard, known to radio for listeners from the 2009 Leith Lectures, has made a documentary called Simply Justice. And Michael, you apply the ideas of Kant, Bentham and Aristotle to a series of modern day-to-day problems. One of them would be the issue of bankers bonuses. So if we can just run through Bentham, the utilitarian on bankers bonuses, what would he conclude? Well, whether bankers bonuses or just or unjust would depend on their effect on utility on the general welfare, which these days means GDP more or less. So if paying bankers great bonuses, will create the incentives that will make the banking system run well and work for everyone, that's a utilitarian argument in favor of it. And if not, not. So in that case, it comes back to an economic measurement of how well or not banks do. And the notion of luxury and self-indulgence and greed, all of that is irrelevant in a utilitarian approach. The utilitarian cares about the effects on overall happiness. So it wouldn't only be the success of the banks, but the success of the banks as that success bears on the overall happiness, the general welfare, the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. And Jeremy Bentham presumably would have to include a sort of sense of seething jealous resentment as part of his calculus of overall happiness. One would put that into the calculus and add it up. And so what about Immanuel Kant with his notion of the categorical imperative? Well, here we have to look at Kant as really the fullest expression of a broad tradition of freedom, the idea that the justice and doing the right thing has to do with respecting freedom and fundamental rights and the ability to choose freely. So I suppose if we stretched Kant a bit and saw him as the final expression of the freedom approach to thinking about justice, then we would think about bankers pay possibly from a libertarian free market point of view and ask, were those, was that pay freely agreed to by the people who hired the bankers and by the bankers themselves? Were anyone's rights violated? If the arrangement was freely agreed to, and if no one's rights were violated in the process, then it's just. Now, Kant himself was not necessarily a free market libertarian in all respects, but the second way of thinking about justice has to do with respecting voluntary choice, freedom, rights, and Kant brought that tradition to the fullest philosophical expression. Now, I could almost hear a lot of people listening and thinking that both of those approaches have pretty serious flaws or limits to them. And in your television program and in your writing more generally, you raised the figure of Aristotle as a way of starting to resolve some of the failures or the tensions in Bentham and Utilitarianism or Kant. Yes. For the most part, our public debate these days is an argument. If you look just beneath the surface of debates about bankers pay or the welfare state or how to deal with the terrorist threat, just beneath the surface are competing philosophies, one to do with utility and the other to do with rights and freedom. And what I suggest in the documentary and also in the justice book is that these two ways of thinking about justice are insufficient. They don't fully capture what we care about when we argue about politics and justice. And I suggest that there is a third older tradition that goes back to Aristotle that says we can't really figure out what's fair or what's just without arguing through the nature of the good life, without taking up questions of moral dessert, virtue, and virtue. Now, there's a tendency to shrink these days in the modern world from bringing questions of virtue into politics because people associate virtue rightly with very particular moral and spiritual conceptions. And judgments, it's not just a hesitation about these politicians would run a mile from discussing virtue and the good life and making moral judgments. Well, it's true because it seems to be judgmental. And I suppose in so far as the documentary and the justice book have an argument, it's that justice, I think, is unavoidably judgmental. And I think part of what's missing in our public life, and people sense it, is that there is not a direct engagement in politics with fundamental questions about the good life and the meaning of virtue. Well, this is very interesting because you could argue that there are at least two parts of the political spectrum where you do get a sense of justice and the good life and virtue, and and are both preachy in different ways. You could talk about the environmentalist, deep green left, if you like, who certainly talk about the good life and say you shouldn't get on planes and you shouldn't do this, and you should consume only so much. And on the other side of the spectrum, you might talk about something like the Tea Party in America, the religious right. And I wonder whether they both sides are rising in popularity in the public debate because they are at least making judgments about virtue. Yes, I think that's true. I think the source of the resonance of these movements is precisely that they are trying to bring a deeper moral engagement, including an engagement with virtue and the good life into politics. I would hazard one speculation as a visitor to the UK. It seems to me that even the mainstream political parties in their way are reaching for a language of virtue and the common good, David Cameron, with his idea of the big society, stronger notions of engaged active citizenship, and also in the labor party, the attempt of Ed Miliband to revive the tradition of solidarity and the good society. So I think from all points in the political spectrum, there's a sense that a purely managerial or market driven politics doesn't really address fundamental questions about the common good. And that kind of politics can't be sustained for long. We're going to be talking Nina Rain about your play Tiger Country later on, but this does set the context a little bit. Here we have a lot of people inside an NHS hospital trying to make very fast judgments about the right thing to do. Would you agree that in mainstream politics to call it that we do not have languages of virtue and the good life? Yeah, I don't think we do enough. Yeah, I think that's certainly true. I mean, what interests me is the malleability of the idea of justice, because I think we all have an interior sense of justice that we get even from the playground about what is fair and what is not. And yet laws change, for instance, on homosexuality. So how do you marry that paradox that we have something that seems inherent and yet things that change? I'd be interested to know what you think about that. It's very interesting. And you mentioned the debates we have. Well, we have debates about same sex marriage, certainly in the US. And these are questions that inspire great passions on all sides of the political spectrum. And I think one of the reasons they do, and this comes back, Andrew, to your point about the Tea Party, the environmental movement, the issues that seem to raise the deepest passions are ones that step outside mainstream political strictures against judgment, moral argument, questions of virtue and the good life. And I suspect that in hospitals and when you've spoken to doctors and observed them, on the one hand, there's a great emphasis on deciding medical care, hard ethical questions based on consent and autonomy. That's the Freedom Rights Oriented idea. And yet, don't doctors confront all the time the desire of patients and their families to advise them on what really will be for the good of my adult? I cannot be captured by legislative language. You're making human judgments. I think something. I think so. Yes, I've got a lot of sympathy, obviously, for your criticism, both of utilitarianism and the like of Kantianism, because it both seemed to me to be based on the conception that the world consists of a lot of individual, separate balls knocking against each other. And the relations between them are solved by arithmetic, voting majority and minority. And in fact, I don't think this is a case. The problem, it seems to me, is really this. It's an old problem which Michael will know, the old one between community and society. Once you stop having a traditional community, which is a, so to speak, a human-sized unit in which you think you know, at least everybody who belongs to it, and in which a certain degree of consensus is possible. And judgments are being made about individuals in that market. And judgments are being made as within that. And we come into large modern societies. These communities are necessarily rather limited, or maybe lots larger. How do you get back these values? And by no means certain, let's undo it by cheerleading and saying, let's all take initiatives to go around being nice to old people or whatever. You know, I agree. It's a very, very difficult question. And what I suggest is that to think of society as a social contract or as a concatenation of individuals with preferences that we should simply try to add up and satisfy. That misses something terribly important. And yet, we live in mass democratic societies where there is much disagreement about the good life and about virtue and about the judgments that everyone seems to want to bring to bear. And so the question, I think, is how to design structures and institutions within civil society that stand between the individual and the state, or between the individual and the global community, to provide places where people can argue in morally engaged ways about these questions, about the nature of the good life. Well, I suppose one of those institutions might be the one that, as I'm always created, to help the marsh Arabs, the area where you came from, as I'm interested in the film we'll talk about it all later on, but in the film where you talk about the tension between not seeing your family and going out there to create a new organization to give hope in a particular part of the world, that is a choice about the nature of the good life. Indeed, we have to make choices about what motivates us individually. Well, while Michael was talking, I was wondering about how that applies to the issue in Iraq of water. We live in an area in Iraq where water is extremely limited and it's getting worse. And I find myself always arguing for the marshes because nobody there can speak for the marshes more eloquently, and argue for the value of the marshes, as opposed to using that water for agriculture. And this is going to get worse and worse with time. I find myself in the position of trying to speak for nature. Nature itself does not have a legal standing, as it were. We have to take the mantle to speak for nature. How do you work that in? Right, it's a fascinating question. I would really like to put a question back to you as I'm about this. I understand it. We're going to come on to the marshes themselves later on. But about the way this connects up with justice, what you're really talking about when you're making the case for the marshes is a certain idea of the public good. And to argue about the public good, ideally, one has to have a kind of democratic public space where people can bring to bear competing moral and civic visions about what the public good, in this case with regard to water, consists in. And so one of the things I'll be interested to hear from you as you describe your project is whether you think that within Iraq there will emerge the kind of public space that will enable citizens, as citizens, to debate seriously questions of justice and the meaning of the public good. But there is, I think it seems to me, another side to it. Water, I think, raises the idea of justice in a different way from the one that you've done. Because with limited amounts of water, this has been happening in all societies with interests and irrigation. You have to have a system for distributing it in such a way that it is regarded as satisfactory to all and to the community. Now, that, it seems to me, is a different sense of justice from the general sense of a society leading the good life. You've got competing societies and you've got competing societies and you've got competing that's right. There are a lot of historically speaking. The historical speaking, for instance, there are lots of water courts in Spain. They still operate from the Arab days in which the irrigation in the east of Spain is from time to time distributed by a democratically elected or other elected seniors to the various members who cultivate in this area. Well, let's move on with a remark. Some people may recognise because we've been talking about philosophers and they've only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. And I'm, of course, quoting Mr. Karl Marx, subject of Eric Hobb's book, "How to Change the World, Tales of Marx and Marxism." Eric Osborne, a lot of people would say that if you look back over the story of the 20th century, so many of the most appalling regimes called themselves Marxists, that the one thing that we ought to be doing in the new century is not thinking about Marx very much. Well, it's perfectly true that Marx, the ideas of Marx, have changed the world to an extraordinary degree. But if change is not only in one direction, remember, for instance, that at the end of the 19th century, Marx's only political program was originally that of saying let the industrial workers acquire consciousness of class and undertake political action in the way in which eventually they will come to power. Now, in actual fact, this inspired these working class parties, which shot up in the 1880s, '90s, immediately became, in some instances, the largest parties in their country, and are still in being either at the governments or the alternative governments in most of Europe. So you would say that the Leninist tradition of revolutionary parties is only a small one part of the Marxists inherited. Exactly, social democracy is the child of Marx, just as much as Leninism is. And if you like, social and social democratically, these new parties, for instance, without them, there would be no democratic elections, there would almost certainly be no modern welfare state, the pressure and the fear of them which ensured this. Now, the Leninist effect, the revolution setting, had much more dramatic effects and more global effects. In fact, I don't think there's been anything quite comparable since the Arabs swept over the East and West after Muhammad. In its 30 years after the Russian revolution, a third of the human race was on the government of communist societies, communist parties. And they didn't last many people. Because they didn't really have a political philosophy of any great sophistication, either. They'd picked up the military statism of the Second and First World War societies, in some respects, the distribution on a kind of military or emergency basis. They had an ideal and they tried, I think, to carry it out, but the idea is you can't actually change human nature by deciding what needs to be changed about human nature and then pushing ahead. But it's quite true that practically all the discussions about socialism and planning in the 20th century were post-Marx. Marx left very little instruction about it. People had to improvise, and my argument is that they improvised largely in the experience of the total war economy to the First World War. And that's what gave them the idea, and then they went on from there. If we say that what Marx explained and taught was that capitalism is dynamic, volatile, and can be highly destructive and unpredictable, was he telling us something that other thinkers of the 19th century and starting with Dickens, I suppose, didn't tell us? Yes, I think so. If you actually start reading the Communist Manifesto the first few pages of it, you will be struck by the fact, particularly if you read it now, that what he's talking about, this was written in 1848, that he was talking about our society, modern globalized society, destroying everything, transforming everything, and through a sort of built-in dynamism, but not a dynamism of gradual growth, and not a dynamism which ends up with a sort of stability in the way in which free-market theorists believe it's a self-stabilizing, in theory of self-stabilizingism, but one which goes constantly through crises and changes. And that's actually what people discovered at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. That's why a lot of Marx was rediscovered after he had been more or less dismissed because after the end of the Soviet Union and the crisis of the Social Democratic Party saying, we don't have to worry about him at all anymore. Yes, well, I remember Franz is ween writing a biography of him, and she said, Franz, you have to understand Marx basically as a kind of great 19th century novelist, describing that the society around him and not look to him for a specific political programme. In a very different way, you seem to be saying something similar. Well, he didn't actually, he deliberately didn't want the full programme, but what he did want is to analyse the way, first of all, he did three really very important things. First he established that the present society, capitalism, he called it Bourgeois Society, was like former societies, it was not a permanent state for humanity. It had come into being and it would go away and it would belong to history. That's right. Secondly, he predicted that transforming and globalising effects of this new society in a way in which I don't think anybody else saw, I mean, he may have done it by intuition because if you actually look at what was available in 1848, it was chicken feed. Back copies of the Economist, mainly as far as I recall, back copies of the Economist. Well, actually there were 70,000 tons of steel being produced in 1848, but he said to himself, this thing is going to conquer the world, you see. And essentially, he then analysed the uneven, jagged way in which this system would evolve, keep changing and generate, in a sense, crises, which it might overcome, but which would also generate economic, political and social crisis. And we're living once again in one of these periods of transition, and so we should pay attention to him. We should, Michael Sandor. Well, Eric, we've all learned an enormous amount about what we still have to learn from Marx for the contemporary world, from your writing. It's a great privilege to be in this conversation with you. Here's the question I'd like to put to you maybe overly sharply just to invite you to respond to this about Marx. You've emphasized rightly Marx's analysis of capitalist society. And he had a fierce economic analysis and also a moral critique of capitalism. But what do you say to the familiar argument that he gave us no picture of what a just society would look like? Do you agree with that? Yes, I think that's true. He thought you could not actually draw a blueprint of what a good society would like. It will emerge out of historic development. He announced a certain number of things that he was in favour of, some of which were his own, some which he took over from utopian socialists. But you cannot draw up the way in which some other socialists did a constitution of the socialist commonwealth on the basis of Marx. Or even what fair pay would look like? Or even what fair pay would look like, for example? Well, he did say one of the few things he said about economics is that in the first stage, obviously, pay would have to be very largely by the results. But eventually, pay would be by, as it were, what people gave to society and wanted to receive back and would be no longer purely market oriented. Well, let's move to another story about justice now, which is in the marshes of southern Iraq. Let's begin, if we may, by painting a portrait of the marsh Arabs and their way of life, as you as a small boy, remember it before Saddam Hussein destroyed it. The marsh Arabs are, to my point of view, an extension of the Sumerian way of life. We have clay tablets that show how the Sumerians used to live in huts made out of reeds, on islands made out of reeds and dirt. And in the 60s and early 70s, when I used to go with my father, I did not know all of this. What I know is that I was in this unique place in a desert, yet in its water world. You go into these into these reed forests. And every now and then, you come into lakes. In the middle of lakes, you would see these encampments of villages where people are living as one with their environment. An extraordinarily lush and varied environment, so in terms of nature, often referred to as the Garden, the original Garden of Eden, I suppose, because it's Mesopotamian. Well, you know, according to Genesis, Eden is fed by forever. Guess what? The marshes are fed by forever. It's not only the Tagus and Ephrades, but also the Karan Karan. The story of Genesis probably is cryptid as a tour from the Sumerian story of creation. And Saddam Hussein, in one of the most appalling acts of his regime, decided that the marshes were a source of trouble and dissidents, a bit like Sherwood Forest, and that he was simply going to destroy the entire environment. Indeed. I mean, it's remarkable that you use the Sherwood Forest, because in fact, that's what I use in the lectures, is to talk about how the marshes were where the outlaws went to escape the wrath of the Sheriff of Nottingham. In this case, the Sheriff of whoever is controlling Baghdad, the marshes forever has been a place where the outlaws went to escape the central authority. And that's what happened in 1991, when Iraq went into rebellion and 14 out of 18 provinces went out of Saddam's control. And then they were allowed to fly helicopters, and shortly thereafter, the rebellion was crushed. As their ancestors did for forever, the rebels, or the remnants of the rebels went into the marshes to hide. And Saddam was about control. In fact, he was afraid for his throne. And he knew that these rebels will, in fact, be a pain and a source of instability. So he decided he diverted the rivers, and created embankments, and turned it into desert. In a time when Iraq was not allowed to sell at single drop of oil, every piece of equipment that was available in Iraq was used to construct six major rivers. And thousands upon thousands of kilometers of embankments, seven meters high, every piece of dirt had to be imported from miles away, because there's no dirt in these marshes. And within three years, he was able to divert the water, the source of life for these marshes, divert the water away into the desert, and into the gulf. And he couldn't wait for the marshes to die, by the way. They put light to the reeds and to flesh out the rebels. And by 1997, the marshes went no longer. And you had been in the States during, and after the fall of Saddam, you came back, and you've been involved in the recreation of the marshes, because the extraordinary and heartening was once you break down some of those old embankments and let the water come back, what was desert has returned, some of it at any rate, to marshland. It's amazing what nature can do. You know, really, all you have to do is let the water back in. And the seed bed that has been created over thousands of years takes over and the reeds would come back within six months. Whatever water was introduced, the marshes came back. Now, I want to make sure that you're on the scent that the marshes were stored by the marsh Arabs themselves. It wasn't as them, I always thought they were stored in marshes. It was basically the marsh. They're helping. I gave advice as to where the backnuts should be broken, where where the water can can can be let. And the point I make this is because I believe this is sustainable restoration. This is not some tree hugger coming in from the United States, telling them that they should restore the marshes and because it's good for the birds. These are the people who are restoring the marshes because they depend on the marshes for their livelihood. They harvest the reeds, they have the water buffaloes, they hunt. Proper environmentalism requires traditional human communities to be living and using the environment that is there. Indeed. In the west, we preserve the wetlands for the birds. These people are presenting them for to preserve their way of life. And just before I open this up, the problem that you've got, however, is as you were saying earlier, on simple lack of water, is that this water is shared by many different countries and Turkey, for instance, is putting up dams and using the water for their own purposes. Indeed. That's a major issue for the future, for the present even. I mean, right now, the agriculture in Iraq was kind of slow. It's not using as much water as it could, and the water quality is not very good. So sustaining the marshes for the future generation, for my grandchildren and your grandchildren to enjoy, really requires eventually reaching an agreement between Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran about the equitable and just distribution of the water resources is a philosopher in the house. I was going to ask you about just that, about the politics of the restoration of the marshes. Marshes, there's an international politics that you've just spoken about. What about the domestic politics within Iraq? Are there competing views about the use of the water and the importance of restoring the marshes? And how do you deal with it? I'll answer you as an engineer, not as a philosopher. What I will tell you is that Iraq, for the last 7,000 years, where agriculture was introduced, in fact, has been suffering from too much water. Our problem has been floods, not lack of water until 1990s when Turkey began building dams upstream, and now it's becoming a water shortage issue. The Iraqic farmer is overusing water, is wasting water. So what I preach inside Iraq is that Iraq needs to modernize agriculture, not for the sake of the marshes, by the way, but for the sake of their own farms, because originally when we had floods, what we had every year is water comes in from the magazine if it is, covers the farms, wipes out the salt that accumulates from evaporation, and then deposits a layer of salt and clay renewing the life of the farm. So for 7,000 years, we had agriculture in Iraq without the need for fertilizer. The only time we needed fertilizer was the last 25 years. So here's what my argument was with the Arab farmers and the Arab farmers of water resources. We really need to modernize agriculture in Iraq. If we do that, there will be enough water, at least to maintain the portions of the marshes that we have restored so far alive. The problem is, that's not enough. That's not enough. Eric hopes for. Could I ask you controversial questions? Suspending my membership as a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Now, we in this country had for long periods wetlands in the same way. The fens and the whole area of large areas of Britain. These were eventually drained and became good agricultural land. If somebody were to tell me, would it be a good thing to revert and make the fens back to where they were in the 17th century? What would you say? I can't speak about England. I can speak to you about Iraq. I can tell you that the soil of the marshes of southern Iraq is not good enough for agriculture. In fact, Saddam sends original attitude or proclamation is that he's writing the marshes to bring more agriculture land into production. The problem in southern Iraq was that this is very clay and soggy soil, so people try to farm in the dried marshes. It failed miserably. They couldn't even get enough product to pay for the seeds. In southern Iraq, I can't speak in England. Oh, by the way, nature is in fact a bird life international partner in Iraq, just like the RSPV is in England. And so I will argue from Eric's point of view, agriculture in the marshes is not sustainable and failed. We have proof that it failed. As what you should do in England, I'll speak to you as a tree hugger. I say, you know, the more wetlands, the better. All right, from one kind of wild countryside to another, tiger country, which is the title of Nina Rain's new play. But tiger country refers to the excruciating pressures and dilemmas on doctors and nurses in a busy London hospital, which is where you've set this play. It's a play which takes a whole series of different problems occurring in the life of a hospital. But what will strike people, I suppose, about it is the kind of scabrous and atrocious pressure on the people inside the hospital. This is absolutely the reverse of the meticulously ordered clockwork administration that people presumably hope and assume that hospitals have. Yeah, well, when I was researching it, and I did that over a number of years, really, I was struck by the recurring sense of chaos, but also of goodwill. So there are these things in conflict with each other. You know, people go into medicine because they want to help people generally. And yet there are these forces that prevent that from being affected in the most. These are these are people who in their way are trying to live the good life or have come into this particular profession to live the good life. But find themselves, certainly by your account, ground down quite often deeply cynical, or at least sounding cynical. Yeah, I think that they sound cynical, but you always find at the core that they're not completely cynical, at least the characters in the play and definitely the doctors that I met. I think if they become entirely cynical, they leave the profession. And you focus particularly on young doctors and young nurses who've come in, presumably because they've still got their relatively un bruised and untarnished sense of idealism, and therefore the conflict about real life in the hospital is that sharper. Yes, and also they're at the very front line. You know, as a young doctor, you often work in A&E, and that's where the pressures can be sharpest, you know, on deciding who to admit and who to send away. And it's your name that is signed at the bottom of the notes. If a mistake is made, it's at your door, and that's terrifying when you're 24, 25. And that was what sort of inspired me really to write the play. And the language of the play will surprise and no doubt shock some of the people who watch you, weren't it? What are you saying, Andrew? I'm talking about the sort of the sexism of the racism and so on of the casual language used by some of the doctors. Yes, well, I hope it will. I was a fly on the wall and I was thrilled and, you know, amazed by what I heard. And it was not politically correct. And that was fascinating to me. And I tried to put some of that in the play, absolutely. Lots of people are familiar, well, think they're familiar with the world inside hospital because these endless TV dramas of one kind or another, soaps and so on, set in hospitals that we see. As somebody who actually spent a lot of time flying on the wall, standing in the background, watching how different is real life in NHS hospitals from that televised version. You actually have a television character in your hospital. I do, I do. Yes, I wanted to sort of confront that because of course, the hospital territory is so colonised by TV that I felt I had to face that head on in the play really thematically. So that's partly why I had that character. The thing that I've noticed, I don't watch a lot of whole being casualty. I have to admit that. But what I notice is that the narratives, often, stories are introduced through patience. And in the play, my play, the stories are really of the doctors much more than the patients that they're coming into contact with. The moments I hope will really move the audience to involve patience. And there are lots of moral dilemmas, questions about justice here. Michael Sandal wants to jump in at this point, I think. Nina, I had an even more elementary question of personal interest. After you did your research and observed what actually goes on in hospitals, did it make you more or less confident about the prospect of being a patient in one? Oh goodness, it was a mixture because you see how human error is absolutely there at the heart of it. It can't help but be there. And a little knowledge is a sort of scary thing. You see how, I mean, I watch some operations and you see how within five minutes it can go from being calm and in control to something going wrong. I mean, I remember watching an operation where suddenly they encountered up the swabs and there was one missing and there was a panic about was a swab left inside the person. And that kind of thing is not, when I next go in for an operation, that will be in my mind, I'm afraid. It reminds me slightly of something that Eric Holson was saying earlier on about the difference between arithmetical and abstract systems and real communities, living, breathing communities. Yeah, I think what I noticed about this rather admirable text, I haven't seen it, is the difficulty of for doctors, of caring about their patients in the same way that they would care if their patients were, for instance, relatives. There is this case that you mentioned in your play. So you can't do that. You have to develop a case, a degree of, I won't say cynicism distancing or distancing, because if you're too close to it, you get burnt out. Yes, yes, it's easier. And this is why it's much easier for patients to come to terms with nurses rather than doctors, because nurses don't have to do this. They're not constantly under responsibility to say, am I key curing or killing this person? They're just doing their job. And it seems to me to be very good at that. Yeah, yeah. A short final response with earlier. Well, yes, I remember watching a man in A&E about to have a very major operation and the nurse, the male nurse, in fact, telling him gently, the doctors will be with you in a moment to deal with you. You're going to have a very major operation, but it'll be okay. And then simply stroking this man's hair, a male nurse stroking this man's hair. And that, to me, was a powerful moment of what doctoring could be. And should be. Yeah. A good note to end on. Thank you to all, my guests, Nina Raines, Tiger Countries on at the Hampstead Theatre in London until February. Eric Hobbs forms How to Change the World Tales of Marks and Marxism is out this week. You can see, as a Malwash in Miracle of the Marshes of Iraq tomorrow night on BBC Two, and Michael Sandell will be presenting a series of programs on justice on BBC Four, which start next week. Next week for us, Immortality, Collective Memory and the Bird of History with Patti Smith, John Gray and Dye Smith. But for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Katy Hickman.