Meeting People
Amul Pandya converses with independent, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Creativity is an act of rebellion. Whether they are entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, investors, chefs, or corporate antagonists, Amul's guests all share a common disposition of not just pushing boundaries but re-drawing landscapes.
Meeting People
Nigel McGilchrist: Living with the ancients, the importance of beauty, and the birth of the modern world
As people who have been kind enough to follow the pod know, I seek to converse with adventurous, rebellious (and sometimes courteous) free spirits. Not only does my latest guest, Nigel McGilchrist fit this endeavour, but so does the subject of his new book – a biography of ancient Greek polymath Pythagoras*.
Nigel has dedicated his life to understanding and teaching the ancient world having lived in Italy for over thirty years before moving to Greece in 2008. His twenty-volume travel, art and history guide to seventy Greek islands has morphed my visits from what would have been pleasant holidays into Indiana Jones style adventures (buy a volume, go to the island and see for yourself).
His book When the Dog Speaks, the Philosopher Listens opened my eyes to how Ionia – a patchwork of landmass in modern day Western Turkey was a melting pot of knowledge in the ancient world from the near and far East to Egypt. To quote Nigel “This is a book not of philosophy, but about how philosophy was born; about what it was like to explore the earliest, and most universal, scientific concepts.”
Not only is it a beautiful book (a word I don’t use lightly) but also one that has given me a fresh perspective on the challenges of modernity. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
*Many of you would have got nervous twitches from suppressed memories of GCSE maths. Those classes would have been much more interesting if our teachers had read Nigel’s book.
Find out more about Nigel and his work here: https://www.nigelmcgilchrist.com/
Hello and welcome to Meeting People with me, Amol Pandey. Meeting People is a podcast where I have long conversations with rebellious, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Good morning, Nigel. Thank you for sparing the time.
Speaker 1:Thank you, thank you. As you know, the theme of this podcast is conversations with rebellious, adventurous, free spirits, and A that, I think, describes perfectly the subject of your latest book, pythagoras, which I'm going to hold a copy of up now, but also yourself, and before we get on to the book, I thought it'd be great for people to get a bit of context about who you are, and so, as a teaser, you've spent the last 15 years in Greece and the prior 35 years in Italy, so that you finished your education.
Speaker 1:so what have you been doing in that time?
Speaker 2:An awful lot of studying in the in the school of life. So I mean, I yes, I decided very early on that I didn't want to stay in the grey and went north and to move into the Mediterranean. And that's not just a weather decision, a meteorological decision. It's because I felt, right from the very first time I went there as a teenager, that there's something very special about this inland sea, which was like a kind of felt to me like a kind of piazza, with all these interesting cultures dotted around the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans and all the cultures that have grown up since then about that. So the Mediterranean has always had a huge appeal for me. Principally, it's art and architecture and, more recently, it's thinking.
Speaker 2:And yes, I spent 33 years of my life in living in Italy, teaching, teaching at the university there taking students history of art, basically in history of architecture, and I began by taking students to Greece because I thought that was there was something there I wanted to get a hold on and I've ended up moving there because, you know, as you will have understood from reading the book and anybody who does my take on history and on thinking is that geography, namely physical geography, the landscape, the nature of the land where you live, the very physical parameters of your living natural environment, determine the way you think and this determines, broadly speaking, the way the Egyptians think, the way you think, and it's determined, broadly speaking, the way the Egyptians think, the way the Greeks think, the way the Romans thought. You know, all these different cultures made the British think and always have done, and so yeah, that's been my mission.
Speaker 1:That's been my mission and I first came across your work probably about seven years ago, when I was on an island called kios um, which is a greek island very close to turkey. Um, and I had one of your travel books, guidebooks. You've written a series of uh of about 20 volumes covering about 70 islands. Is that right in greece? That that focus on the geography and how that drives um outcomes was very, was very, um noticeable.
Speaker 1:Now that you mention it, um but you basically have noticeable now that you mention it. But you basically have provided a really thorough way for someone going to this country, which is so deep and full of history, to actually get a taste of it in a way that you know, if you go and sit on a beach, you just can't do so. You have this ability to kind of, um, get to grips with what ancient greece was and how that results in where we are today. And I've used it for paros, I've used it for kithara, um, and I've gifted it, the whole collection, to two or three people, and I would love you to talk about what drove you to write those travel books, um, and why people should, um, you know, have them when they go to an island or even pick an island from them off their shelf and go there okay, I mean two things.
Speaker 2:I think I felt as someone who was teaching students and taking students and teaching them about the classical world and about why it's important. Um, there are, there were sort of two obstacles to get over. One was the perception that the Greek world, and particularly the Greek island world, was one really of beaches and bars and didn't really have a great deal of historical interest. That's a very minor and more recent one, but the older one is that the way in which people have written about and talked about the ancient Greek culture in the past has always been inevitably very Athenocentric. In other words, the picture we have of ancient Greece comes from Athenian writers that have been studied and restudied and poured over for centuries, and the islands have been de-emphasized. Now, if the islands weren't important, that wasn't a big oversight, but they are very important.
Speaker 2:Before Athens becomes the great city it becomes in the 5th century BC, there were other cities, like Samos, which is is, of course, the home of Pythagoras, which had a bigger navy, which was richer, which was more important, which was more inserted into the trading world of the English but had more contacts with Egypt. And Athens certainly did. And that's just one island, but lots of these islands Milos, santorini, naxos, islands that we sort of think of always in terms of recreation and holiday are actually hugely important in a very early period of Greek history. And lastly, the crucial thing is, I felt all along and I was trying to kind of grasp this idea that the fractured nature of the Greek geography, in other words, a lot of rocky islands scattered in a very unpredictable sea, gave rise to a very, very particular mindset which was very, very different from those that had come before, and by that I mean the Egyptians in the Nile Valley and the Mesopotamians in the Euphrates Tigris Valley. And that geography, that fragmentary ness, because the Greek world originally was a sea dotted with islands and with ports all around it, one of which was Athens. Its principal port was Piraeus, but the city was oriented to the sea. It was a sea-oriented world and not a land-oriented.
Speaker 2:When we say Greece today, we tend to think of the Balkan Peninsula, what we see on the map as the Hellenic Republic. To an ancient Greek and let's hear what one really great ancient Greek named Hippocrates had to say he says we Greeks live like frogs around a pond, and what he meant was that the Greek cities are all like a lot of different croaking frogs on the edge of the pond which is the Aegean. Now, that fragmentariness, that difficulty for anyone to unite them, and the fact that there were lots of small units and the units were to some extent self determining means that human thinking took a big change when it came into the Greek world and we can talk about how it comes into the Greek world later and the foundations of our way of thinking and our Okay, it's a platitude to say that democracy comes from ancient Greece, but democracy comes from the geography of ancient Greece because small units the equal size, forming alliances and changing, you know, like parliamentary democracy and, of course, governing themselves the first self-governing units as far as we can tell.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it feels, from our modern nation-state perspective, an odd concept to get our heads around Another. Another place I went to, thanks to your books, was roads, and you know you have this sense. You know, with the knights hospital versus the ninth temple, each, each state had its own, each island had its own kind of story. Um, you know, like paros, you know we went down the mine shaft that you recommended we go down which was actually boarded off, but we kind of went over the barriers and you can see the striations in the wall where the marble has been kind of picked out.
Speaker 1:They're moving. Supplied marble from Paros, not in the initiation world but for Napoleon. Supplied marble from Paris, not in the Indian world but for Napoleon. And how did you put that together? Was that just years of traveling and observing and writing that you put together at the end, or was it kind?
Speaker 2:of. You picked an island and you did it, then you move on to the next one. No, it was step by step, but it was just driven by by a bit of, obviously, passion, but also the discovery that you know, incredibly, all these islands were so different one from another, and that'll be your experience. You've been to Chios. You mentioned Paros. I mean they're as different as chalk and cheese. You can't generalise about the Greek islands, except they're sort of rocky and have nice seascapes and beaches and things. But no, I mean they have.
Speaker 2:They have very, very different stories, very different geographies, very different climates, very different histories, different minerals and different things that they've contributed to human endeavour and human culture. It's extraordinary in such a small place. Now, that contrasts very much. I mean this is not a game of awarding prizes for Greece being a more interesting culture than Egypt or Mesopotamia. For heaven's sake, that would be stupid.
Speaker 2:Live along the border of an extraordinary corridor of water which flows through the middle of a desert, as the Egyptians did for millennia, with that regularity of the flooding of the Nile, which they thought was a divine gift to their country, quite rightly, the movement of the planets, so regular, you know, from east to west across this north south river, the river that they could sail down because the current took them from the south to the north, and they could hoist a sail and go back upstream, because the prevailing wind is always from the north to the south. The regularity of the uni unity of egypt and its world contrasts totally with the Greek world. Its government was pharaonic, the ancient Egyptian government. Its social structure was a pyramidal, with a semi-divine or divine pharaoh at the top, quite different from the Greeks who sat in these noisy theatres and discussed the small issues of their small island.
Speaker 1:So you started setting the scene, I guess, for your book about Pythagoras. Why don't we do kind of continue to do that? He's a sixth century BC philosopher. What was going on? Can you just give a little short history of what happened in Greece before? When was the Trojan War? What happened after that, before getting to the 6th century, and also set the scene with what's happening to the east of Greece in Mesopotamia, phoenicia and Mesopotamia and to the west, in terms of the south, I should say in terms of Egypt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean a lot of things there. Yes, yes, okay, greece has a very unusual early history because it has in the Bronze Age history, because it has in the Bronze Age, which is a long, long period, fascinating period. We call it the Bronze Age, but I mean that in itself is an extraordinary thing because bronze is made of copper and tin and you know lots of copper on the island of Cyprus. That's why it's called Cupras. I mean some name tells it, that's why it's called cupras. You know, I mean some name tells you. But you need that 10% of tin to make bronze, which is a fundamental thing for weaponry, for all kinds of, you know, cutting tools and so forth. And the tin really comes from very few places in Europe. It comes from Cornwall, brittany, galicia, the extremities of Europe, and so when we talk about the Bronze Age, we should remember that it's an age in which there was a lot of communication by trade from Cornwall down back into the Aegean area.
Speaker 2:The Bronze Age produced great art in Greece, but for some reason, around the 1200s, about the time in late 1100s BC, 1200s BC, the time that we generally associate with the Trojan War there was a massive breakdown and an influx of refugee people. They're often called the sea people. We don't know quite where they came from, whether they were pressed by famine or whatever, but the point is that that well, that delicate island world which had been producing great art, which you can see in the paintings in Santorini, you can see in the sculptures from the Cycladic islands, broke down and what's commonly called the dark ages followed. And at the emergence from that dark ages, in other words, there was a resetting for about two or three hundred years, from about, let's say, 1100 bc through to 800 bc, in which things are, let's say, going to say resetting. And then we, the first signs of life we have, are, with Homer, these great nostalgic poems about that past, that Bronze Age past, clearly remembering that, and then the lyrics of Sappho, and then the coming of Greek culture.
Speaker 1:Sorry, when was that? When was Homer writing Sappho and then the coming of Greek culture? Sorry, when was that?
Speaker 2:When was Homer writing? We're talking about 800s, 700s, and then the 600s for Sappho, and then for Pythagoras, 500s and so forth. Now all that contrasts with the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, where there is a continuity. I'm not saying that they didn't have their ups and downs. Obviously there are civil wars within Egypt, there are changes of dynasty, the same also for the Euphrates and Tigris, but there was a continuity going on all along.
Speaker 2:So Greece comes onto the map again with a kind of renewed energy, of a sort of rebound, as it were, something with this nostalgic remembrance of a great past, but a complete break with it. And it finds itself, in terms of planetary geography, in a very particular place. It's a sea, as we said, scattered with islands Europe on one side, one great continent, asia on the other side. It's like a little funnel, a bridge, stepping stones. I mean, these islands really are stepping stones the Greek sea between the east and the west, between Asia and Europe, and also between north and south, because there's the Black Sea to the north, the Straits of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, then the Aegean, and then that communicates down to Egypt.
Speaker 2:So trade, very important trade from the Black Sea, all kinds of things like gold and leather and furs and things which are essential for the winter, coming through there and going to Egypt and vice versa, things going backwards and forwards, but most importantly, the east-west Now, like two poles of a battery. The west Europe is a culture at this point that we know I mean mainland Europe that we know much less about. It certainly doesn't have at this point the glorious productivity and creativity and thinking of, say, egypt and Mesopotamia. Yeah, so there's a pressure, as it were, on that side and a sort of emptiness on the on the European side, and Greece forms this bridge between them at this crucial moment, always linked by trade. I mean, trade is the one thing that leads thinking and culture by the nose, if you don't have trade.
Speaker 1:Sorry, one of the things you talk about is that, because the sea is quite constraining and in this rebirth after this dark age, population growth and then a diaspora of Greeks just sort of spread across Europe to all the way to Spain on the northern side of Europe, is that the coastline of Europe? The coastline, sorry? Yeah, is that part of this story as well?
Speaker 2:absolutely, and it goes back again to the geography. We talked about the fragmentariness before, but let's not forget the poverty, I mean the real poverty of the Greek. I mean you'll know this from having been, say, to Paros. Anybody who's been on holiday to a Greek island will know they're not great for cultivation. There are no rivers, not much water, rivers, not much water. You know. I mean you can't build an agrarian economy on the Greek islands in the way that the Egyptians just had, this flooding Nile which brought silt every year and enrich their soil and produce harvest after harvest. I mean it's so different. So the Greeks had, you know, and there was very little fresh water.
Speaker 2:They could only sustain a certain number of people because when the water was not enough for the growing population and the population had to go somewhere else. So they start to spread out, but always in places where they can be connected by sea with, with the sort of what let's call it, the homeland of the Aegean. So they go all up and around the edge of the Black Sea, yes, around the south of Italy, Sicily, south of Italy into the Adriatic and then on into the south of France Antipolis, Antibes, Nicaea, Nice and down into Spain.
Speaker 2:So, yes, this was a product of their dependence on trade, because they had such a poor land and there's a hot zone, though.
Speaker 1:That hot zone or epicenter is that, that part, that region? Um called ionia, and you mentioned homer, sappho and also herodotus heraclitus. All these people um come from this narrow strip. Where is ionia? Uh, why is its geography important in the context of trade, and what can you expand on the significance of the type of people, including our heroes? No, you're absolutely right.
Speaker 2:In all this there is a hotspot which is Ionia, and Ionia is an ill-defined it's not an area with a border at all. It's an ill-defined cultural zone, as it were, unified by a language, an Ionian language, which is the language that Homer used. That Homer used and it's really around. It's on, obviously, what is now the coast of what is today Turkey but was then the ancient Greek world, and the islands next to it, and particularly in the middle of that coast, in other words, going from about Izmir or ancient Smyrna down to Bodrum, today Hylikarnassus, which actually was part of a Dorian cultural area. But that Ionia there, miletus, those cities there just to the south of Izmir and Smyrna, are it Now.
Speaker 2:It's hugely important because of a big sort of autostrada of the ancient world, a thing called the Royal Road, which was something which joined the capital of Persia, and there were several capitals in the Persian Empire, but they were joined by this road which maintained communications with the western part of the Persian Empire, which came right to the edge of the Aegean Sea, pretty much at a place called Sardis, just inland of the island of Samos, where Pythagoras comes from.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of trade and ideas and music and poetry and ancient aesthetics, all these things from the East coming down this, as I call it, the Royal Road, communications, rather like an ancient silk road, if you like, and coming to a sort of halt there in the Greek world of the Aegean, opposite these islands which, as I said, were the kind of stepping stones for the rest of Europe. And so this mercantile mentality of the Greeks, shipping, trading, because they're not cultivating, they're not sowing and reaping, as the Egyptians were taking note of the number, you know the quantities of grain, storing them in. No, they weren't doing any of that, they were trading, and so it creates a different kind of mentality. So all this eastern knowledge and poetry and music and things like that is coming out of the east, sort of pausing there before going on into the west, in this extraordinarily different geography in which there are people who are governing themselves up to a point and, most importantly, don't have a king, don't have a pharaoh don't have any overarching.
Speaker 2:You know there are a lot of. It's like a choir that's got no director. You know everybody's singing their own song. That's what the Greekreek world is like. So it's a very, very interesting and important place by union.
Speaker 1:So it's almost like this, um petri dish or yeah, absolutely nursery garden where there's no leader or ruler, deciding that you know. This is what knowledge is, this is what good behaviour is, and also as importantly, there's no theological dictates which you talk about.
Speaker 2:I was going to say I mean no, priesthood, I mean really important. Yeah, because I mean, as well as the Pharaoh, the priests in ancient Egypt had huge power, the same Mesopotamia, as well as the kings. The priesthood was the conservative embodiment of all knowledge and therefore of power, and the Greeks didn't have this. Now, if you don't have someone telling you, or a sacred text telling you God created the world in seven days, or that you mustn't marry this person, you mustn't eat, that you mustn't do this, you must observe the following things you must respect priests and so forth. If you don't have that, then in your little communities, each little island, each little frog around Socrates' pond has to sort of kind of work out those things for themselves.
Speaker 2:Why are we here? Where did we come from? What is the world? What created the world? It's not a thing that's been revealed by priesthood or by God or by a prophet. No, you just have to sit and debate it and work out and think about it, and that's why these thinkers, you know, really are hugely important. They're picking up ancient knowledge. You know, I'm talking about Heraclitus Pythagoras, about Heraclitus Pythagoras, the pre-Socratic, thales, anaximander.
Speaker 2:These sort of people are picking up things that have already been observed in the East and are looking at them with an entirely independent and fresh and basically scientific and non-theological mind.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:Pythagoras is important in this because he is the first, I think one of the first great sort of I want to use the word de-anthropomorphize, which sounds terrible, but that's what I mean. He de-anthropomorphizes the divinity. The divinity is no longer Zeus with a beard sitting on a throne on Olympus. It's no longer Aphrodite with her lush clothes. I mean, it's not. I mean, maybe we feel this is a loss the poetry of these wonderful figures, he creates a cosmos, as he calls, calls it that doesn't have squabbling gods in it.
Speaker 1:So he in that sense de-anthropomorphizes the divinity and says that there are divine things in our world we have a vacuum where um ideas are allowed to bounce off each other and the significance of those ideas and that knowledge, which is coming from the east a lot of the time, is being understood. And in that special period of the 6th century BC, in Ionia, you've got Pythagoras, as you say. So why don't we turn to kind of who he was? What do you think his background was? What little do we understand about him? And how? Turn to kind of who he was, what you think his background was, what little do we understand about him? And how have you kind of pieced that together?
Speaker 2:I mean, the problem, as I say at the beginning of this book, is that we know next to nothing about Pythagoras. You may well say, well, how can you write a book about Pythagoras if we don't know anything? We hear lots of stuff about Pythagoras because for centuries afterwards people chatted about him and what he said and what he did, but we know for certain very little, and my book's only an attempt to sift through all the chatter, the chattersphere as it were, and try and see what underneath he was actually possibly saying. Now, he's important because in this world that we've just described, one of the things we can say about him was that he was a traveller. I mean, he came probably from a mercantile family, though his father's also described as a gem engraver, actually from from what we would call the Lebanon today, from the town of Tirel, you know. So he had a slightly international background, we think, but almost certainly was.
Speaker 2:He grew up in this trading milieu on the island of Samos and he travelled. He went to Egypt that much we do know, because Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos that means the ruler of Tyre of Samos gave him a letter of introduction to the pharaoh of Egypt and he went to Egypt, probably once, twice, three times. That's fairly clear. Less clear is that he went also to Babylon, but in the end it doesn't really matter for understanding Pythagoras whether he went in person to these places. He was listening, he was picking up, he was on the frequency of what the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians were saying, and not only that, but what was coming out of India. And this is something that I mean this was a revelation for me, because I grew up going to school and we heard about a lot about ancient Greece and we had a bit about sort of the Egyptians who were sort of you know. So rather we heard, we heard nothing about how important early India was in the creation of Western thinking.
Speaker 2:And this comes through Pythagoras, because he clearly and we can give a little instance of it later on, if you want is clearly picking up things from ancient Vedic literature, in other words literature from India of the period that we would call the Bronze Age in the West, you know, the second millennium BC. And so whether he went to India or not, we can't say Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, maybe he went to Babylon, Maybe he didn't, but he had enough, he was meeting people. This was a very fluid world. We think that everybody just stayed at home. Well, of course 90% did, but the traders traveled and traveled huge distances and actually in the sixth century they could do it more easily between East and West than almost any other time in ancient history, because of a man called Cyrus the Great, the great emperor, the king of kings of Persia, because he unified that southern Asian world from the Indus.
Speaker 2:River right through to the shores of the Aegean, in one kingdom, his own kingdom. He was an enlightened man by all accounts. He's spoken of the respect, both in the Old Testament of the Bible, by the Greeks, herodotus. Obviously he was greatly admired by Alexander the Great, who did something rather similar in the other direction unified that same tract of land from the Greek world. So it was a time when somebody could travel and trade was very, very vibrant. And therefore when there's vibrant trade then there's vibrant ideas coming, and not just ideas. But I've always said music. You know music is a very important part of this revolution, particularly in connection with Pythagoras. And you know aesthetics as well. These things come to an effect. So India, babylon and Egypt are very important, but their funnel is more Pythagoras than anyone else. Right, he's not the greatest of all those thinkers or the most original at all. Heraclitus is extraordinarily original. So is Anaximander in his thinking. I mean, pythagoras perhaps doesn't reach that, but he is a wonderful transformer of what he learns from the East.
Speaker 1:Well, let's give people a taste of it without giving too much away. I think you've separated his fundamental observations, or and the universality of those observations, into three parts, loosely one is cosmos, the other one's harmony and the other one's philosophia. Can you talk to the etymology or philology which one's the right term and the significance to those in his observations, and why they have percolated or have been expanded on as the foundation stone of how we think today?
Speaker 2:Okay yes certainly, I'd happily do that. There are three words have been expanded on as as the foundation of how we think today. Okay, yes, certainly, let's happily do that. There are three words, and there are three words that we know, that he seems to have been instrumental in changing their meaning and I'll explain in a moment that. And they are cosmos, as you said, harmonia, harmony and philosophia philosophy said harmonia, harmony and philosophia philosophy.
Speaker 2:Let's just look at harmony first, because this brings in to our mind the question of music.
Speaker 2:And the fundamental thing that Pythagoras brought from the Babylonian world was an understanding of tones and intervals in musical harmony. Tones and intervals in musical harmony, okay, the Babylonians had observed that if you have strings of different lengths under tension and you twang them or you rub them with a thing rather like a primitive bow of a violins bow or whatever, they'll make a sound and, according to the exact mathematical proportions of lengths, they will either be in disharmony, make an unpleasant sound, or, at one particular moment, two to three, three to four, four to five, depending on whether we're talking about a musical fifth, a musical fourth, a third or whatever they come in and they create a beautiful sound harmony. Now, he took the word harmony from the carpenter we know from carpentry, from woodworking, was in Homer that word harmony and harmosa. The verb harmosa means to create a beautiful joint, like a dovetail between two things, and Homer talks about Odysseus making and joining the pieces of wood for his raft when he leaves the island of.
Speaker 2:Calypso, a snuff fit, sorry, a snuff fit, a snuff fit, absolutely yeah. And he takes that four musical harmony and says at this moment, this mathematical moment of perfect proportion of length, of string one to the other, three to four, two to three, so forth, we get this snug fit and it is a harmonia. So he began to perceive that behind what we call beautiful was a mathematical structure based on number. So that word was very interesting. The other word that he liked and used and changed, changed in a similar way, was cosmos. Okay, cosmos.
Speaker 2:Again, we have to look to Homer, because Homer's the first Greek literature we have of the modern era, the post-Bronze age, and therefore we have the first uses of words there. And cosmos means two quite distinct things in Homer's world. In the Iliad he talks about it being the cosmos, the order in which soldiers are arranged or sailors are seated in a boat, the rowing, sailors or whatever. In other words, the arrangement, the right, the correct arrangement, is the cosmos. But it's interesting also in the Odyssey he talks about Hera, who is the queen of the heavens, the spouse of Zeus, and the cosmos of her, the decoration of her face, the makeup of her face when she wants to be her most beautiful and most majestic. And so cosmos meant to the ancient Greeks also the beautification, let's say, of a face, and that's gone straight into our language in the word cosmetics.
Speaker 2:Now you may think there is nothing in common between cosmetics and Chanel and all that and the kosmos, the universe. But the origin of the word is the same, of the word is the same, and this fits with what Pythagoras was talking about with harmony, that beauty and order. Just as with music, the order is the mathematical structure which lies behind the beauty that the music appeals to our ears. So he's beginning to build up, with these words, a picture of something very important harmony, kind of something good, beauty, something again, something good that enhances our lives and gives meaning to our lives as having a natural mathematical order to it. The last word, philosophia, is on a different axis in all this, and it relates to that what we were saying earlier on about the Greeks not having a revelation, a revelatory text. You know, a sacred text, a testament, a bible, a book of the dead, the scriptures of some another. How are we going to know things?
Speaker 2:By having an open knowledge, an open attitude towards knowledge, being open to anything listening examining, and philosophia simply means philoxenia in Greek, means the philosophers, means being open to being welcoming to the foreigner, hospitality. Philosophia is just being open to friendly, towards accepting, of welcoming to Sophia, knowledge, and that this is really what he implies and should be, in a way, a religion for us. He does instead of just accepting and chanting and saying what you know, the liturgy says no, we should love knowledge for what it is, because it can help us to become more illuminated.
Speaker 1:So those are those three words, really, really important and the idea of the final one, as you've said, is an act of receiving rather than an act of doing. People think of philosophy today as this sort of ivory towered activity where you're saying long words and trying to confuse people and, you know, sound smart.
Speaker 2:But for pythagoras it was more of a um observational activity to be open to lots of different things and in the dogmatic world we live in, that's kind of hearts of bad right now it is because philosophy, as you rightly says, has such a different sort of connotation of feeling to it, and I like to think of philadelphia pythagoras in a way as an anti-philosopher, because he, he, seems to have eschewed words. I mean, there is nothing written by pythagoras at all, nothing that has survived, and there's actually very little evidence, except one thing in Diogenes Lerches, much later, saying that he wrote certain books. You don't know him, but Diogenes was writing. Let's see, you know, 500 years after Pythagoras, 600 years afterwards. So he may not have known correctly, but Pythagoras avoids words and his philosophy is based on just simply showing certain things the musical experiment, the theorem of the triangle, which everybody hates and nobody wants to buy the book because they think it's going to be about mass and triangles and all that.
Speaker 2:It's the beauty of that that it's a law which he discovered. Well, he didn't discover it again. He took it from the Babylonians, who knew this and used it, and the Egyptians used it, but they didn't see the wider significance of this. There was this order behind everything. And so the triangle, the square on the two shorter sides of a right-angled triangle, is equal to the square on the hypotenuse. The longer side is in itself, not something that lights up our life, but what it purports, that you know, there are these things which are universal, which are not about sort of a hypothesized God or, you know, ra or one of the divinities of ancient Egypt or whatever.
Speaker 1:It's simply something which is true everywhere, and that's it reminds me of a story, um, which we've talked about before, um in a very different domain, in in silicon valley of all places, where um, xerox, was a very successful company and it was based on the east coast of of America and it had a research center, kind of R&D center, in Palo Alto. It was called Xerox Park, palo Alto Research Center, and they were kind enough to give the Apple team in the 1970s a tour of the research center and the Apple team saw this thing called a graphical user interface, which is where computers before then were very different, but you could move a mouse and it would move on the screen and you could type something and it would appear on the screen. And they were like, have you told anyone about this?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, this is something we're playing with, some sort of gimmick one of many gimmicks we have lying around here, some sort of gimmick, you know, one of many gimmicks we have lying around here, and they didn't. What the Apple executives saw was the universality of this, the power of this thing that was sat there, xerox, doing nothing about it, and they, you know, mentally copied it, stole it, effectively stole the idea and took it back. And the rest is history when it comes to computing, because that's the major computing universal, do you think?
Speaker 2:That's very interesting, because that's the case of picking up the ball and running with it, which is what we're talking about with the ancient stuff.
Speaker 1:Exactly so, like my question is do we over over, over and over value originality, whatever that means, over and above actually, observations and mixing two ideas and putting them together to create a mixing copper and tin, to create bronze, the positive sum impact of that more powerful combination than the two inputs, for example, is more a creative act than it is sort of sitting in the bath having a eureka moment of kind of pure theoretical, original thinking.
Speaker 2:No, I think that's true. I mean, what is originality? I mean the actual seeing of the potential of an idea is also great originality, but I think it's just important in the case of someone like Pythagoras, I mean you know, it's generally said.
Speaker 2:You know, he, it's just a mistake that he discovered the law of the right-angled triangles and their relation of their sides. He didn't. I mean, it was known probably a thousand, maybe even twelve hundred years earlier in Babylon. And you may say, well, you know why is it so important? Well, it actually was terribly important because if you have, if know that three, four and five, three squared plus four squared equals five squared, nine plus sixteen, twenty five, um gives you a right angle when you arrange these lines.
Speaker 2:You make sticks. You know your early construction. You may have sticks that are three units. Whatever they are, four units and five units, and you can make a wall which is straight and a doorway which is straight. If your doorway isn't at the right angle, then it isn't a doorway anymore. You have a problem having a door in it. So 345 was really important and it had been used by everybody for ever and ever and ever. But Pythagoras saw that it was a unit and it had been used by everybody for ever and ever and ever. But Pythagoras saw that it fitted with his other observations. It wasn't just on its own, it fitted with his understanding that there was physics. It's the birth of physics, that there is a law governing, there is mathematical coherence governing the world we are in. That it's not just subject. In this sense he's the great de-anthropomorphizer. We live in a world which is not just at the mercy of scrapping gods and all the rest, but one in which there is order. That doesn't solve all our problems, but it does give us a framework.
Speaker 1:I think part of the challenge of this conversation in many ways is that we're talking about things in 2024, or whenever someone's going to be listening to this in the future, even if it's significant at the time, why is it relevant to me? It's a bit like trying to get someone to read lady tattly's lover or listen to jimmy hendrix for the first time and you kind of go, you know what you know.
Speaker 1:In the age of mtv music videos, lady tattly Lover doesn't seem particularly revolutionary, but at the time, and I think what comes across reading the book is that you know, you go on that journey of understanding how Pythagoras came to make these observations and understand their significance. And one of the things that enables you to do that is, you know this story probably apocryphal, you, you, you say about the fact that when he found, when he finds his founds, his school in southern italy, you're not allowed to speak for five years when he joins, because you just have to sit and listen and observe the winds and the woods and the trees and the sky before you're allowed to kind of sound clever or talk and pine, is that that understanding?
Speaker 1:there's that point of that definition of philosophy that you see, it's that act of receiving rather than an act of having an opinion quickly for an op-ed. That's deadline tomorrow, you know, or whatever it might be.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean this tallies with. I mean it's a spiritual. I mean what you've just described is what happens in monastic communities, and you know in.
Speaker 2:Zen you know the business of being still and listening. And whether or not it's true about Pythagoras this thing about students having to be quiet for the first so many years of their apprenticeship, even if these schools did in fact exist it shows that Pythagoras certainly had an interest in the spiritual side of things as well. And this is where India, I think, is very, very important, because he's bringing also, as well as all this kind of rather technical stuff about musical theory and geometry, he's bringing for the first time the ideas of the transmigration of the soul, that the soul is something that lives beyond our life, beyond our death, which was something the Greeks had no feeling for. I mean, homer's view of death is a very, very gloomy and sort of hopeful one. Pythagoras brings into the West from the East, from principally from India, the notion that, yes, life can move from one being to another and therefore we're not just confined to this life.
Speaker 2:Now, that's really important and we only really know this from the one anecdote, one contemporary anecdote that still survives, about Pythagoras. All other anecdotes are hearsay. Much later there are Chinese whispers. But there's one anecdote told by a contemporary of his, called Xenophanes of Colophon and Colophon was just a city across the water from Samos, so probably Xenophanes knew Pythagoras Same period and he says that Pythagoras was in the marketplace one day and a man was beating a dog and Pythagoras said stop beating the dog. Essentially, stop beating the dog because I recognize in its barking the voice of a deceased friend of mine. Now this actually gives rise to the title of the book on Pythagoras. The publisher said don't put Pythagoras in the title or nobody will buy it. So the title is when the Dog Speaks, the Philosopher Listens.
Speaker 2:Referring to this anecdote, which is the only one we have from a contemporary of Pythagoras, wonderful, first of all. I mean we like people who intervene to stop people being cruel to animals, on a simple level. But he's also saying something much more important. I mean he's saying something which seemed to his contemporaries and seemed to Xenophanes to be a little bit ludicrous and worthy of being teased about. You know that the dog might have the voice of a deceased friend of Pythagoras. That's not the point about it. It's simply saying to humanity, to us, listen. There is a kinship in all natural beings. We're all at a deep level related. Ok, it's not necessarily it's the voice, but I can hear the voice of a deceased friend. That's how he metaphorically expresses it. But there is a kinship in nature which is terribly, terribly important and we are part of that fabric along with the animals which we may become, or have been us, or maybe again, or whatever, and the plants and so forth.
Speaker 2:So he introduces into the Greek world this idea of the transmigration of the soul, which Plato later toys with but makes rather more literal.
Speaker 2:And of course then gets completely lost with the arrival of the Abrahamic religions in the West. With principally I mean not just Judaism, but Christianity and Islam, where God says to mankind you know, created man, this is your garden, do anything with it, this is your, your domain, you use it. It gives us this unfortunate attitude to nature that it's something to be used, not to participate in, and that's creating us lots of problems today I think that's a good segue to a discussion on beauty.
Speaker 1:I even even my exposure to hindu philosophy and the veda tradition that you've touched upon with the transmigration of souls. When we say, don't beat the dog it's it's partly driven by the fact that we see ourselves in the. We say why? Well, because I see myself, you know, or my friend, and what we're saying is we're seeing that the dog has a soul and it's more than just flesh and bones.
Speaker 1:Um, and a lot of religions maybe have been guilty of including the hindu one, I would say of devaluing the body in many ways and saying, well, we are just a just a soul or there's nothing it's just flesh, it doesn't matter, and you know that's just in the temporal realm and there's a spiritual realm which is superior and higher and we need to strive to reach the spiritual realm and what what happens in the temporal realm is is irrelevant. Um interviewed Alex Martin a few months ago and you know he talked about a hatred of ugliness and at the time I was like, well, you know, that's a bit of a, you know, trite thing to say, or you know what's the original and that who likes ugliness. You know what do you mean by that? And it's from reading your book on the importance of beauty. I never even reflected on what is beauty. So, bok, in terms of harmonia, what is this? What is beauty to you? Can you kind of explain what Alex said?
Speaker 2:No, I mean, I agree absolutely with what Alex says of a hatred of ugliness itself.
Speaker 2:Because, yes, I mean, it's something yes which disturbs us, in the way that disharmonious music disturbs us, agitates us, and harmony brings us peace. Okay, what is beauty? Beauty is the quality of something to go beyond what's on the surface. In other words, you have two notes or three notes or maybe five notes, and you bring them into harmony and they become so much more than the sum of each of their noises. They become a harmony, they become beautiful to us, they become beautiful to our ears. Okay, maybe that sounds a bit abstract. Let's take a really fleshy example, if you'll excuse me sex. Fleshy example, if you'll excuse me sex.
Speaker 2:I think we've all had in life the experience of what we might call beautiful sex as opposed to sex which is not beautiful. I mean, we know there's a big difference between these. There is a harmony, there is something which goes beyond simply the union of two bodies in the beautiful sex as opposed to the what is done for rote or without the quality of beauty. So beauty is coming, coming to mean, at least for me and for Pythagoras, and I think you know, for many poets in the past, and I quote Keats at the end, who said truth is beauty and beauty is truth and truth, beauty. It's all you need to know and all you'll ever know, it's giving meaning to something. It's the moment when something just comes into that order, that cosmos that releases meaning and releases a greater dimension, so that you don't just see two people copulating, you see beautiful sex. You don't just see two notes vibrating, you have harmony. And it's something you can find everywhere and we've lost the ability to concentrate on that. Just take a nice, not too ripe but ready pear, slice a bit of the flesh off and eat it. I mean, the flavor of a pear is something so beautiful and so unique. It can do what. I mean.
Speaker 2:I spent a life, you know, because I've dabbled with Buddhism and Christianity and all these things, and I spent sort of hours trying to sit in special positions and empty my mind of this and that and meditate and pray, and you know, nobody ever speaks to me when I pray and then I can never get down to the total emptiness and I'm doing a meditation of nothingness and whatnot and I think, no, that's well, it doesn't work for me. But when I feel gravity under my feet, when I feel the taste of a pear, when I see, you know, beauty gives meaning to my life, I'm happy to be alive. At other moments I'm not necessarily happy to be alive, not even aware of the fact I'm alive. But beauty makes us aware and this goes back to your excellent point that these religions have tended to take us away from the body.
Speaker 2:What the hell you know I mean our bodies is where we live in this life. We shouldn't be downgrading it. Our bodies have all kinds of problems, but you know, they're windows to things of great beauty and meaning and significance. If we want our life to have meaning which we all do purpose we want it to have some meaning. Our being here, beauty is what we have to look for.
Speaker 1:It's a long answer to your question. I know it's a tough question because I've got a quote from your book where you say the importance of beauty can neither be justified nor explained.
Speaker 1:It can only be intuited without it, our human existence has no meaning, and I've had a similar definition of the divine in many ways, where you ask someone what's the divine? And they go. Well, if you try and define it, it's no longer divine, it loses its divinity. So let's not try and force it down, that funnel of words or that pipe, something that cannot be reduced to mere words, something that is felt and intuited. But I think, in terms of meaning, you're right. Beauty drives us to kind of do good work, create nice things, create good things that you know are beautiful and helpful, and the more beautiful they are, the more um, um, the more successful they tend to be. If you take, you know, an iphone, for example, you know is is in itself uh they want the inside of the iphone to be as beautiful as the outside, even though no one would ever see it.
Speaker 1:There was no.
Speaker 1:There's no ability to open your iPhone, but the culture, of that aesthetic importance percolates through our most important developments over time. I would love to talk more about Pythagoras, but I think people should definitely read the book. What I would like to do is talk to you about a couple of separate things while I've got you, while I've got a subject matter expert such as yourself, one that we've touched upon a few times. You've talked about Pythagoras being exposed either through direct travel or through the travel of ideas, or to the vedic text, uh, to india and also to what was coming out at the same time in terms of buddha.
Speaker 1:Um, I, as a person of indian origin, feel, when I'm talking to Greeks, I get this sort of again, it can't be explained, it can only be felt or intuited, this sort of sense of fraternity for want of a better word when they're moaning about, when a Greek is moaning about something about their country or their culture, it just sounds very familiar. Or when they're excited about something my best friend is of a Greek origin and, in the book, familiar. Or when they're excited about something you know, my best friend is of a Greek origin, greek origin and, hmm, in the book, this kind of migration Am I? Is there a? Is there a am I just feeling might just spotting a false pattern here, or is there something more to that for the Greeks and Indians, or Europeans and Indians to kind of unite culturally, spiritually, philosophically?
Speaker 2:I think you're absolutely right about it and there's good evidence for what you're saying. It's just something that hasn't been thought about for a very long time, you know, until recent decades, you know, western education was so concentrated on the West and didn't have this wider vision. But we now know that and I think it's generally accepted it may not be in all corners that the people of the Indian subcontinent and the people of the Greek world that you're talking about are of Indo-European, hence the word Indo-European stock. They came from Central Asia, they were the same cultural sort of phonetic group and for whatever reason because, I don't know, drought or whatever they moved out of their homeland in the center of Europe and went in two different directions west into Europe and south into the subcontinent. And those contacts have always been, you know, always been there, even though in recent times they've been separated, those two cultures and those two parts of the Indo-European identity by Islam and, of course, the great Semitic peoples who occupy the space between. But they were unified, as we were saying earlier on, in the period of Cyrus the Great, you know, by sort of, you know the same political sphere, and again by Alexander the Great, and it's very important to remember that Alexander, you know, brought Greek culture.
Speaker 2:I mean, he didn't just travel with an army, with thinkers and scientists as well in his entourage, botanists, people who were to observe what was there and to listen to people talking, you know, and to meet gurus and whatever. And he took his army right to the shores of the Indus, at which point they mutinied. He wanted to go on to the end of the world, as he wanted it, but they mutinied and said we've been away from our wives too long and we need to get home. And so, you know, he had to turn back, but he left behind these cities in which he encouraged those who were stationed to protect the cities, to marry with the local intermarriage and the culture.
Speaker 2:The Greco-Indian culture which comes out of that area Afghanistan and the borderlands is, you know, is really the beginnings of Buddhist visual art, because in the earliest centuries the Buddha was never figured as a person that was not kosher. You had to figure him just by his footprints or by a sign or whatever. And the Greek, the Indo-Greeks of the area around Afghanistan, today in Pakistan, were the first to create Buddhist imagery. So that link between India and Greece is very, very ancient and has been reinforced in different ways by people like Pythagoras, by people like Alexander the Great. But there is an ethnic thing there, there's a genetic thing there as well, and that's very interesting that you say that when you come to Greece, you feel a kind of affinity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which maybe you don't feel if you go to Egypt or whatever, because that's I mean not that it's any less great. Egypt is a wonderful country and it still is, but it's a different people, a different gene a different, you know a whole different universe.
Speaker 1:Well it it takes me on to my next question, quite neatly actually, because I I think around the same time as in that sixth century bc period, pythagoras, across this, across the sea, um, I believe nebuchadnezzar from Babylon had crushed Jerusalem or had besieged Jerusalem, and that was the end of the kingdom of Israel for the following few thousand years, until you know 1940. For the following few thousand years, until you know 1940.
Speaker 1:It's also, yeah, what's in that conflict that we keep hearing about, seeing today. I don't want to rehash it here in many ways, but are there any things that you see from your perspective as an ancient historian, art historian, that you see from your perspective as an ancient historian, art historian, um, who has knowledge of the ancient world, particularly um, that you know, that levantine, um, that you just see are this? Is there parts of this conflict that are as old as time or is, or that you can see spots on the end, or is it just purely a just, you know, a modern age conflict that has can see spots on the end, or is it just purely a modern age conflict that has no relevance to the ancient world?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, if you forgive me for taking a very specific thing which came out of that conflict rather than talking about it generally and it's playing out through time I mean there is Nebuchadnezzar's arrival is terribly important because it troubled the Egyptians and the Egyptians came into conflict with Nebuchadnezzar and were having an ongoing war under the pharaoh Necho II and Nebuchadnezzar, babylon and Necho. The Pharaoh of Egypt was short of money and so he called the best mariners of the time who were Phoenicians. I mean, the Greeks were very good mariners, so also were the Phoenicians. The Greeks sort of populated the northern shores of the Mediterranean, the southern shores of Europe, and the Phoenicians the northern shores of Africa, the southern side. They were both great traders, great trading peoples and navigators and mariners. And he said to this group of mariners he said I need. Basically the subtext was I need money and gold to finance my war against Nebuchadnezzar. Go south from the Red Sea and see what you can.
Speaker 2:Later, and around the year 600, they set off out of the Red Sea and their remit was to find gold in Africa, or what they called Libya the Egyptians called it and the Greeks called it Libya in those days and sort of the rest of Africa, that was not Egypt. And they set off and went further and further and further. And we don't know the details of the story except that Herodotus says that three years later they came back to Egypt, not through the Red Sea but through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean from the west. What does this mean? It means they had circumnavigated the whole continent of Africa in 600 BC. Hugely important thing. I mean whether they found the gold and it was necessary for Necco or not, but for whatever reason, they went on and on and on. They went down into the southern hemisphere, they went around the Cape of Good Hope and back up through those terrible swells through the west of Africa, you know, and finally came back to the Straits of Gibraltar, hugging the coast of Africa, always on their right hand side.
Speaker 2:And Herodotus says you know, they said when they came back something which you know. He sort of laughs and he says I don't really believe. He says you know that when they were in halfway around their journey, you know, maybe year one and a half, that the sun was in the north of the sky and the shadow of the mast of their ship fell to the north, not to the south. And he said you know, this is clearly impossible because they knew, I mean, the sun always rose on the east and set on the west, but at one point the position of the sun during the day wasn't any more in the south, as it always was in the Mediterranean, but went into the north. And he says you know, well, you know, maybe this is a reason for not or he implies, maybe this is not a reason for believing that they didn't go around Africa, but for us who know about modern astronomy and what happens when you go into the southern hemisphere, it's the confirmation that they really did.
Speaker 2:Now that's a great thing to have done. So I can navigate in the year 600 or around the whole of Africa, but remember, this is just 50 years before people like Pythagoras and Heraclitus and there would be a lot of chitter-chattering in the ports of the Mediterranean about this Word would have spread like wildfire. What was going on? What was happening? Why was the sun in the north? Why was the phases of the moon going in the opposite direction? All these things that you observe in the southern hemisphere, that we now know are perfectly normal because you're around the other side of the planet and it's behind the thinking of people like Anaximander and Pythagoras. It's hugely important.
Speaker 2:Anyway, it's a bit of a digression, but it comes out of your question about Nebuchadnezzar, in a way, and his impact on history.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think it's a region that's going to hopefully resolve itself, but we certainly hope we can learn from history in some way and I think that, in terms of kind of regional relations, that there's a question which I guess people you know you're a Scotsman is that right? Yes, yeah specializing in ancient history, living in Greece, so I can feel people shouting at me to ask you um should the British Museum return the Elgin Marble?
Speaker 2:return the Elgin Marbles. So they return the Elgin Marbles, yeah.
Speaker 1:In your view.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think the whole game changed when the Greeks very cleverly constructed that marvelous museum where they will be safe, in many ways safer than they are maybe in the British Museum. Yes, with many regrets, I think they should be. It is a problem. I mean it's a very special case that it's a very special case because the Parthenon is a symbol of Greek identity. I mean it is the how can one say? I mean it's the Colosseum for the Eiffel Tower. The Parthenon is associated with Greek identity only far more deeply than either of those other two monuments I've just mentioned. So there is a case there because of that.
Speaker 2:It doesn't mean to say that every other country can claim everything else back because they're not things to do with national identity. Yes, the Turks immediately want the Pergamon altar back there, but that's not something that defines Turkishness particularly. It was a Greek creation anyway, long before Turks ever came into the peninsula of Asia Minor. So you know, I think it shouldn't be an. I mean yes, in answer to your question, they should go back and I think they will do. It's only a question of time whether they go, you know, legally, as a loan or whatever, but they will go back, I'm pretty sure. But that shouldn't open the door to a mass exodus and a lot of spurious claims for all kinds of things. You know, there are certain things that been in bronzes. They pass them and marbles certain things. I mean it depends on many facts. It depends how they were removed, under what circumstances and whether, importantly, there are things of national identity or cultural and that's not about nations, because I hate nations. Cultural identity, yeah I mean there's.
Speaker 1:There's three arguments, I think, that are out there for for it not to return them two are particularly good one you've touched on, which is, if you have to give that back, then you've got to give everything back to everyone, and you've really crossed that um one.
Speaker 1:I've one that is sort of, I guess, slightly compelling is that if you're a american or a someone from africa or someone from asia visiting europe for the first time and you've got three days or a week, you know, and you don't have time to kind of go everywhere, there's value in lots of these things being in one place so that you can cover as much of civilized european civilization as you can, um in a trip, basically, um so that you don't have to go everywhere. So London is a natural place for that to be. And the other argument that I've heard, which is again not very good, is that it would require an act of parliament for it to be returned. It would demonstrate the kind of final end of Britain being a serious country. It's symbolic more than anything. It doesn't matter what it symbolises.
Speaker 2:Take the passing of marbles out, and the British Museum is still one of the greatest collection of things with didactic possibility anywhere in the world. I don't agree with that. The world, I don't agree with that. And I don't agree with the second um a point. With what? With what? We? Um what was your second?
Speaker 1:it's like the efficiency of having all these things in one place yeah, yes, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:But I mean the the experience of seeing the Parthenon marbles in the Duveen Gallery in London on one side, the experience of seeing them in Athens in the Greek light, in the Greek context, with the Acropolis Hill behind, visible from the museum. I mean, I agree it's going to mean that some people are going to have to travel more if they really want to see these things, but it's so much more important to see works of art if it's possible in that context, and I mean apropos of this.
Speaker 2:You know I studied the ancient Greek and Roman world at school. Okay, it meant nothing to me, you know I did it because it was part of school curriculum. But when I first went to Italy or went to Rome, I thought shit. You know, this all begins to make sense, it all comes together. And then when I went to Greece the first time and saw you know what I was talking about earlier on the sort of fragmentariness of the islands, the poverty of the natural environment, the rocks, the extreme light then I began to. Then I really saw what Greekness was about and what Romaness was about and what Italianess was about. So I think there's an awful lot to be said for as much as possible seeing works of art. You know where they are, and within Greece itself there's lots of discussion about whether works of art should be returned from particular islands. You know I mean to Athens. There's many more people are going to see them in athens than they are on the island of carpathos or whatever.
Speaker 2:but that's a you know, it's important that people go to you know samos. See the samos kouros in his hometown yeah, and that's you know.
Speaker 1:Education with a small e doesn't exist in the classroom. It's not rote learning, it's not exam taking, it's going, as your life has demonstrated.
Speaker 2:Nigel, more than most people, is getting hundreds of yeah, hundreds of students to Italy, to Greece and hope to open their minds to what these things are really about. That it's not just some dead culture, that's, you know, maybe sort of quirkily hope to open their minds to what, what these things are really about. That it's not just some dead culture, that's, you know, maybe sort of quirkily interesting. It's fundamental understanding who we are ourselves, where we come from.
Speaker 1:In what we call western country as you know, I like to close these conversations with a question that I ask all guests, and we've talked a lot about the past. I'd like to try and think about the future a bit, use all that you know about the past and put that into some sort of mental model and make a prediction about the next 10 years. And I I unfortunately have to keep it consistent across guests. You, you can, you know you can do eight or 12 if you'd like, I'd like 100, anyway.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the thing. I think the reason why it's roughly 10 is because you know there's some form of accountability but it's not so close to us that it kind of it's next year and it's kind of meaningless. And you know we can all have probably a pretty good idea. The next year is going to be quite similar to this year, but is there something over the next 10 years that you think will play out or that you would like to play out, um, uh in the future, knowing what you know about the past and you can frame that within a hundred year cycle if you'd like to um, um well, I mean, as a historian, I tend to think in terms of larger things and of cycles.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean political history, and we didn't actually get to talk about it because I went off on a digression between Egypt and Nebuchadnezzar. It's full of pendulums which swing to and fro and you know, I think, newton's third law of dynamics, whatever you know, to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction is the determining thing of you know the trends of politics and history.
Speaker 2:Okay, we're going through a resurgence at the moment, apparently, of sort of right-wing feeling that sort of disturbs the left. But you know, as soon as the pendulum goes far enough one way, then it swings back the other way. And you know, I mean in terms of 10 years, 20 years, the political cycles may function like that. They go to and fro. It's the laws of motion, as said by Newton. The only one that seems to me that's a much, much longer cycle, if ever, is the environmental change, and let's put aside all the sort of claptrap which is talked about it not happening. I mean, even in the interview just the other day between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, elon Musk was saying we don't really need to worry because it's a long way off. I mean he was just giving, in a way, donald Trump a sort of free ticket on things environmentally. In a way Donald Trump a sort of free ticket on things environmental.
Speaker 2:I think all the people listening to this will know that we've been through a hotter summer or a more stormy wind or whatever. Things are just, you know, changing. And human beings I'm not saying that sort of the end is nigh, no, not at all. Human beings adapt and they need to adapt and they adapt. Only they don't adapt in advance.
Speaker 2:When the scientists first start saying, oh, you know, things are going to change, they're going to think we'll go. Oh well, that's a bit of a pity, but waiting, but the excuse that the um expression, but it's, you know, it's very useful and it's beginning to hit the fan and we're feeling the heat. Well, you know, I mean, even on this little island where I live I came here 14 years ago changed dramatically. Fire removed 20% of its green cover. A little stream and waterfall, which had run for millennia on this island fed mills, has now completely dried up. The trees in it are dry. Everything's changing very much. Okay, I don't want to sort of moan about that, but I think, because this is this moment when things are hitting the fan in the next ten years, I would watch for signs of the adaptation, human adaptation, and I think the obvious way we'll have to go is using huge I we've got a demographic problem as well the open spaces of the deserts, of the oceans for habitation.
Speaker 2:I think you're going to see just the beginning you're not going to see them completed or realized, but the beginnings of thinking about how can we design urban habitation areas in these areas. But we have a lot of space, like oceans, where there is free energy and you know, and the deserts as well. I think we're going to see a lot of thinking about this and I would think 2034, if we were to have this conversation there will be some things on the drawing book. There is something already on the drawing book, some I'm sure you know. Saudi Arabia Prince whatever he's been Salman.
Speaker 2:Mohammed bin Salman, who is the prince of Saudi Arabia, is promoting this great project for a city in the. Mohammed bin Salman, who is the prince of Saudi Arabia, is promoting this great project for a city in the desert north of Jeddah called Na'im, which is going to be a new city which is going to be self-sufficient energy from the heat of the desert and what kind of using area which is otherwise unproductive for integrated living, which will take the pressure if there are more of these off the areas, particularly in the very inhabited countries like Britain, japan, whatever. Which heavens do we have any wild spaces in Britain anymore? Do we have any wild spaces in Japanain anymore? Do we have any wild spaces in japan anymore, in holland anymore and germany anymore. You know I mean for roads, industrial complexes. You know it'll take the pressure off that and maybe a way forward for conserving energy, consolidating things.
Speaker 2:It may be our way of adapting, but but, adaptation has got to happen, and I think in the next 10 years. I mean 2014,. We were still hearing scientists prophesying about it. 2024, we're seeing it hit the fan. 2034, I think we're going to see adaptation really gaining traction.
Speaker 1:It's an imaginative end, it's quite an optimistic forecast. In many ways, I think part of in my mind, what needs to change is the mindset, maybe away from a scientific approach to looking at the environment to more of a stewardship approach or a philosophical oppression. In many ways we are. You know, we don't know, we can't wait for the data to kind of validate, because by the time it validates it's probably too late.
Speaker 1:You know that we've got to treat ourselves as stewards um the oceans of, of our environment, and think of it more in the way pythagoras probably would have thought of it than someone with a lab coat crunching numbers on a spreadsheet and, you know, making forecasts. And we've only got one planet we've got. You know, we don't know what impacts we're going to make on it. We probably can't predict the impact of what we're doing. But we need to behave responsibly. And maybe that's a luxury belief that we can have in the west as wealthy people, but we need to kind of maybe get everyone else as wealthy as possible to have that belief, to start having the bandwidth to start acting as stewards rather than, you know, recipients of.
Speaker 2:I totally agree and second everything you're saying. That's a different and longer cycle and if you'd asked me about 100 years or 50 years, that would have been a good thing to talk about, because it's about education. It's simply about we've got to educate people because, as you say, it's a luxury that we think of as a western liberal luxury and sort of. You know there's people who can afford to think in these terms, but you know, if you're lacking water in Africa, it's not much help. But education, you know in every way, is the secret to the future and we've got to educate people for that stewardship. And that's why Pythagoras is actually important. People should read about Pythagoras and then they'll become better stewards.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, look, this has been an absolute, you know, eye-opening conversation.
Speaker 1:I've learned so much about it you know, eye-opening conversation I've learned so much about. You've given, you've given a, opened a window into, you know, 50 odd years of learning at the coalface um, and I recommend people look up your travel books. Uh, nigel mcgill, chris, get a, pick an island, grab a book, go to the island, follow the book around the island and whilst you're out there on the beach and not following the book, you know, buy a copy of this um and read about pythagoras, because you'll with you know what I like when I read books like this is I learn stuff about myself just as much as I learn about curves, about the world and the history, and so I want to. I want to take a more pythagorean approach to my life and be thinking about harmony and receiving and learning and listening more than people watching my podcast going. You need to shut up more anyway. So hopefully in future episodes I will take on a bit more of that.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the nicest thing you could say. I'm very glad. Yes, that's what it should be Brilliant.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks's the nicest thing you could say I'm very glad, yes, that's what it should be Brilliant. Well, thanks so much, and I will link to all your work in the description, and I'd love to have you again soon.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:This has been Meeting People. I've been your host, amal Pandya. This is a podcast produced by Matt Cooper, with music composed by Loverman.