#055 - Prof. Alan MacFarlane - How English Individualism Created The Modern World

Professor Alan McFarlane is a renowned anthropologist, historian, and Professor Emeritus of King’s College, Cambridge. Author or editor of 20 books and countless articles, Alan has spent his career exploring the origins and nature of the modern world. Alan is also the creator of the YouTube channel  @ayabaya.

In this episode, we Alan and I discuss England’s unique national character and its influence on politics, language, law, economics, and literature, the origins of English individualism and how it shaped the modern world, why England was capitalist long before the Industrial Revolution, how England’s history of mobility and lack of clan structures set it apart for over 1,500 years, women’s legal rights emerging earlier than often thought,  contractual nature of English society,  the errors of the anthropological worldview of Karl Marx and Max Weber, why modernity is more than just technological progress, and whether the English and British are becoming a landless peasantry today, and much, much more.

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You can find Alan's work here:

• Youtube - Professor Alan MacFarlane - Ayabaya
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Professor Alan McFarlane. Alan is an anthropologist and historian and a professor emeritus of King's College, Cambridge. He is the author or editor of 20 books and numerous articles on anthropology and history of England, Nepal, Japan, and China. Alan's career has focused on a comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world. In this episode, Alan and I think out louder about England's national character, how its politics, language, law, economics, and literature marked out as unique in the history of the world, the origins of English individualism, and how it created the modern world, how England was capitalist long before the Industrial Revolution, and why the anthropological worldview of Karl Marx and Max Daber falls apart upon a closer look. Why modernity is more than technological development, how records show that the English have been highly mobile and unclunish for at least 1,500 years, how England was never a peasant society unlike other countries, and we asked whether the English and British might now be becoming landless peasantry, how women were afforded more legal rights much earlier than currently thought, the reasons behind the contractual nature of English and British society, and much, much more. This was one of my most rewarding, if not most rewarding, conversation yet. Alan is a man of wisdom and experience, and I found myself hanging off almost every word. He spent his career in academia, and yet he didn't confine himself to isolation, reading books alone. Besides possessing an encyclopedic grasp of the anthropological record, Alan has studied his subject live and in person and is considered one of the most important anthropologists in history, and you can sense it. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. And this is part of an unintentional mini-series within thinking class that explores the values, history, culture, and genetic background of the British people. So check out the other episodes. And as always, press follow, subscribe, share on whichever platform you watch or listen to the show on, and let's grow this show together. Enjoy the show, classmates. Professor Alan McFarland, welcome to Thinking Class. Thanks so much for joining me. It's a pleasure. Alan, you are uh shooting interesting character with a storied background in your field of anthropology. You surveyed a great many peoples across the growth globe and and what makes them distinct and different. And uh as an Englishman, as someone who's who's a Brit, um uh I am interested in what it is that makes the English uh particularly unique. And I suppose in a in an era where if we speak of national character specific to the to the English, um, I think it's probably fair to say that from some quarters you can be accused of an English exceptionalism uh if if we speak of a national character at all. And so you have done some quite extensive work many years ago, which is still very popular on the origins of English individualism. It it was titled that book. And so I would I would like to begin, Alan, with you outlining some briefly some of the the characteristics of the English people and and and uh how it came to be that way.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Thank you. Well to start with um Adam Smith said it was David Hume who said um the English have no national character, unless not having a national character is a national character. Um the second thing to be qualified is that I'm not an Englishman, I'm a Scotsman, or rather I'm five-eighths Scots, one-eighth Welsh, and so on. Um the third is that what I'm talking about are perhaps now not quite so true because England has changed hugely in its character over the last generation, anyway. So England now is a hotchpotch of different nationalities, obviously. Um but sort of boiling it down to its essence of what I was describing in the 1970s, eighties. Um the English were regarded by people on the continent, for example, as a peculiar people. Voltaire, when he came to England, famously said, I have come to a civilization which in no way resembles my own, I France. So you can just go through them. I'll just go through them very quickly. First is political. The kind of centralized feudalism, which was traditional in England as a political system, which then led into the first modern democracy, is unique, except according to Mark Bloch, uh, Japan, which had a very similar political system for a long time, but it didn't have the democracy. So the political system is unique, and that's why it spread all over the world and why it led to the foundation of America and everything else. Secondly, its language is unique. It obviously overlaps with Dutch and Scandinavian and so on and so on, but it is it has various unique features and is very long and continuous since the Anglo-Saxons. And that's the second reason why it's spread all over the world. The third is its legal system is unique. The common law system and again other additions such as uh the system of trusts and so on, um is unique, although obviously it was then taken to America and there's an overlap there, but uh it's totally different from the Roman law traditional continent. Its economic system is unique. It's the first capitalist society going back a thousand years, in other words, a society which separates off the economy from the society as Max Weber described it, and has extensive use of money and markets, has a fully developed private property system from eight hundred years ago, and um so is capitalist um up to three centuries before Marx and Weber thought it was. Um its religion is unique. The kind of Puritan Protestant religion from the s 16th century, and even before. It had tinges of all that, um, is overlaps obviously with the Dutch and so on, but very distinctive features to the religion. Its uh poetry is unique. It's got to be the two greatest uh poetic traditions to my mind, the other being the Chinese um which, if you mix in with the drama, Shakespeare and so on, means that English literature is reddened spread all over the world. Those are some of them, and I could go on, but I'll just mention two that three that um are famous. One is it's children's stories. There's no other country in the world that creates the kind of Harry Potter type, wing in the willows type, Alice in Wonderland type children's stories. Other traditions have other kinds of children's stories, but not those. The second is its humour, it's runic, the kind of irony and dead pan and and completely mad Monty Python, like all the satirical um tradition going back to Pope and Dryden and so on. Um everyone says when they come to England, the first thing you need to learn is how to make a joke or how to take a joke. And then the last thing is uh it's games tradition. The reason why the modern religion of the world, which is football, um is so important. It came from England, it was invented in England. Most of the team games, cricket and so on, were invented or adapted sometimes, like hockey from Scotland. But um so game spaying is another feature. So the culture, the society, the economy, and the ideology are all unique in the sense that they are more developed in a certain direction than in other countries here. Obviously, there's an overlap with say Lowland, Scotland, or say Holland or Scandinavia.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Many first to pull on there. I'll I'll only pull on a couple. Uh the first when you opened with how we were to use by visitors from the continent. I think it's interesting when you read your book and you you have got excerpts of Venetian travellers and Frenchmen coming over, and their accounts typically follow the follow- uh themes like the the English are sure of themselves, they're very well dressed, they love liberty above all, they don't like being told what to do, uh, they like wealth, and as you say, it even as far back as the 1300s, it was capitalistic, and we'll come back to that in a moment because they may all be surprising to lots of people. And we ourselves, when you read accounts, I can't remember who wrote it, but there is someone you quote that was writing in 1559 who didn't uh who didn't see us uh on this island as being um hard done by. In fact, there seems to be this sentiment that we were we were blessed because everyone on the continent ate salads. Whilst we had meat, we had this beautiful island, and we had freedom that the Continentals didn't have because of the the lack of peasantry. And again, I think we'll get onto that in a moment. But the the capitalistic element, Alan, I think it's common for people to think that it was the Industrial Revolution that ultimately turned us into a capitalistic peoples, and it was a big rupture from what went before. But as you outlined in your book, from many records that you surveyed, you could find it all the way back to the 1300s. Why do you think it is that we have the view we do about when that change happened being more around the 18th century rather than back in the the 14th, which you had discovered?

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Well, um, just to add to my list, one of the things you mentioned was that we don't eat, well, we eat meat and we are well clothed, and this is another peculiar feature of the English for back as far as the records, certainly said in Chaucer in the 14th century and onwards. Um that it's a peculiarly affluent, wealthy island uh for various reasons. Um now as to why we um think, or many people, I mean, if you talk to ordinary people and say, when did we, whatever your word you like to use, become modern, become capitalist, or whatever they use, well usually say it was probably the 18th century, 19th century, that sort of period. And um, this is because it was a big rupture. It was a on the surface, there was a huge change with industrialization and urbanization. And seeing, so if we are peculiar now, it seems likely that that would be the turning point. Um, people without history, much historical training would think that. What is rather odd is that many historians came to believe that. What I discovered in writing the book was that the general view in the late 19th century of people like Maitland Acton, Stubbs, Fraud, all the great historians of that period, Green and others, was that the English had a continuous history. That the Industrial Revolution, of course, was important, but if you looked at any institutions, they were all set down very early. A nice example is the great history of English law by Maitlin and Pollock and Maitlin. When does English law end? In other words, they are writing a great two-volume history of English law. When do they stop? They stop in about 1300. In other words, nothing much has happened since 1300. Now the law is both a reflection and the creator of everything else. So if you don't change your legal systems, it's unlikely that suddenly some other part of your society, like your economic system and capitalism, will suddenly emerge without the law being changed. There was no need because nothing much happened. Now what happened was that after they about the First World War, um the historians in this country, um, particularly in the Second World War, many of them became very left-wing. They saw what had happened in the Communist Revolution, they became socialists, and so many of the best social historians and others, like R. H. Tawley or E. P. Thompson, they um tried to apply Marx, Weber, and um modern sociological models to English history. And the broad Marxist Weberian sociological model says that England was feudal and pre-capitalist until the fifteenth century, and then it there was a watershed and it changed in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. And this was reinforced by a strange thing which is not easy to explain, but medieval history, in other words, making the medieval world feudal and peasant and pre-capitalist. Medieval history was dominated by East Europeans, Kosminsky, Postin, Vinogradov, Titov, Homans, all from East Europe. And they were the leading, many of the leading historians of that time. And what they did was say, well, we know that people before the 15th century were peasant feudal. Where else? What is the mental model we have? And they're from East Europe. So they imposed Russian peasantry or Polish peasantry or East European peasantries onto medieval England. And um in other words, the paradigm shifts and creates a threefold Marxist model, pre-capitalist, transitional capitalist. And I was taught all this at Oxford. I was taught by all the great social writers, E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobbsbaum, um R. H. Hilton, Christopher Hill, particularly, who took this for granted that we had gone through the same transition as everyone else, but a couple of centuries earlier. And so it was only through a set of chances. Because if you have a paradigmatic breakthrough, as I think I created. For example, Lawrence Stone, who was mother of these people, when he reviewed my book in the London Review of Books, said if MacFarlane is right, he is the Einstein of history. In other words, it was, and then of course he said, of course, he's wrong and it's rubbish, but um uh he it was a hostage to fortune because it turns out that many people think I was roughly right. Um to be to make that kind of breakthrough, you can't do it intellectually. It's it's an emotional and psychological break against your what you've been taught about, against your teachers. Um it may well lose you your job. If I had remained a historian, for example, I probably couldn't have said this because I would have never got a history job. Um but because I moved into anthropology and I had a safe, secure place there, the historians could say, oh well, he's not a historian, et cetera. So um it was a set of chances. I can tell you what the other chances were if you're interested, but basically it was one of those Eureka moments when you suddenly the whole world alters because what we think of our history determines very much what we think of ourselves. Um it is a myth or story of our origins, and we interpret our present world very much in the light of our unexamined assumptions about our past.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

It would definitely be interesting to hear any other chances, but that last point you made, uh the the assumptions of the past, um, and and how they impact us in the present. So you've outlined how there wasn't a peasant peasantry, as far as you could tell uh in in England in the periods that these social historians uh post-World War II um posited, and that we've all come to think, which is that pre-capitalist, capitalist society, whatever. Um but I suppose what you found was you find there were lots of land transfers between peoples of all different classes, people weren't particularly attached to the land, they're quite happy to sell things on even if they had a small amount, and this was happening through all the records you could find, which is which is remarkable. I suppose the question I've got, Alan, if I if I look at today, um so we we have if I look around the cities, we're we're we are building lots of um small box light like light flats, people are increasingly becoming leaseholders rather than freeholders. We are not really a nation of shopkeepers or innkeepers or smiths anymore, able to be self-governing and self-sufficient in some way and live in that Adam Smith world of um of trade in your own interest, but it benefits everyone else. And instead we are you know employed by increasingly faceless, unrooted corporations or um you know a big a big public sector which is covering a big geographical region rather than a localized one. And I suppose the question I'm I'm asking then is um and before I do ask that question, again, that Venetian traveller as referring to earlier, he remarked uh in the passage in your book that there's no small innkeeper, however poor and humble he may be, does not serve his table with silver dishes and drinking cups. And then again, talking about wearing very fine clothes. And if I look around at all of those things we just talked about, plus you know, our cheap IKEA furniture and crockery that we adorn our houses in, and we wear athleisure rather than small clothes. I ask, have we come up with a self-fulfilling prop prophecy and we're almost becoming like a a peasantry, a land, a landless peasantry with none of those etc more? Uh I know I'm asking you to do some modern-day social commentary here rather than your field, but what do you make of that?

SPEAKER_01 21:15

Um well, the first thing that people watching this need to know is what we mean by peasantry. Um most people, when you say peasant, they say they think, and I thought just a country dweller, someone who works on the land, doesn't own it, probably working for someone else. So it's a a farm laborer, really, or farm small holder. Um there's a I was using peasant in a technical sense taken from anthropology, which means that a peasant is someone who um owns for rents or has land, but they work it with their family. So it's Sometimes call the family mode of production or domestic mode of production. So it means that you use family labor, so your children work for you, they inherit the land, brothers work together, and so on. So it is the overlap of the social structure, the peasant of their family system with the economy. So the unit of production in Marxist sense is the family, not the individual. And capitalism comes about when you break this, and the unit becomes the individual who earns for themselves, who earns and keeps the rewards of their labor and so on. And doesn't have to, for example, pay for their parents' old age, if they don't want to, there's no law, they have to, they don't have to bring up their brother's children if their brother is poor or anything. There is extreme individualism in every field. So that's what I mean by peasant. And in uh not peasant in Capacitus, in that sense, these people who I see sprouting all over Cambridge, we have, I think, a big Dutch one called Mali, which is creating these little boxes all over Cambridgeshire. And as you say, they're they're filled with people fairly identical furniture and wearing fairly similar clothes and not having gardens and not having shops and the pubs are disappearing and all the rest of it. They're not I think it's probably wrong to think that they're going back to peasantry in any sense. But if you said they are um landless um workers who who uh are living with pretty basic conditions around them, um and we've moved from householding uh civilization to this. That's probably true, and it's part of this hollowing out of the um social structure. So the the middle class and the lower middle class and the upper middle class are disappearing, and you're getting a two-structure society here in America. Picerty's work, for example, whereby you have a very small number of Uber rich and everyone else is a drowned, it's more like a it's a kind of beehive. There are one or two queen bees and others, and then the rest of us are drained. That is certainly something we're moving towards. On the other hand, one shouldn't overdo it because although people living in such box-like environments, they're pretty rich. And they'll probably have two cars, or certainly have one car, they'll have a lot of consumer durables which are quite valuable. Their income, since I was a child, their income has gone up at least fourfold from the 1950s. So compared to other parts of the world, the per capita income is still very high, but it's going into rather kind of what we now consider less um stylish, shall we say, at least clothing and food and so on. So there has been a big change.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

I agree. I have a habit of doing that, but there's much more that I want to cover it. But also not least that um you before I asked you that question, you were talking about the the chance moments which led you to your realization that saw you uh not necessarily fated as the um uh Einstein of uh of history, um, but uh sounds like he may well have been on the buddy, so let's grant you that title now. What were the or the other chances that gave you this earth-shattering worldview change about uh uh about the people of England?

SPEAKER_01 26:26

I think it's um mainly two things. Um one is that I was trained as a historian in Kent, or did an undergraduate degree and a postgraduate degree at Oxford and History, and then I was for various reasons attracted to anthropology, and I retrained and did another master's and another PhD in anthropology. And as part of that, explicitly I wanted to go and see what it was like to live in the kind of society which I had been studying, in other words, a supposedly pre-capitalist, pre-industrial society, to actually sense it and not just to read about it. So I went and spent 15 months in um central Nepal, um, in the Himalaya Mountains, in a very remote village with no electricity and no roads and no nothing. And that showed me what a real peasantry was like. People working flat out for at least most of the time, living on very insufficient food, um, very simple housing, a family mode of production, um, and so on. So I I sensed what it was to be a peasant. And that gave me a backdrop, which no other historians had because none of them do this. I then came back and returned to being a historian for a while. And the second thing that happened is that I started a project in the 1950s-60s, local government became much wealthier in this country, and as a result, they set up proper archival offices, record offices. And the leading one was in Essex. And I had the good fortune to be studying witchcraft in Essex, so I knew the Essex Record Office, and I knew the wealth of records which were becoming visible both there and in the public record office for the first time. The past had been buried, more or less. There were people like Maitland who went into the archives, but most historians didn't actually go into the archives, and they weren't even there. They were sitting in solicitors' offices and church vestries and things. They all came into these record offices. And I was of the first generation of social historians who was allowed to go in and look at these things. And so I was absolutely, it was like seeing, you know, a new ocean or new continent. The whole world was suddenly revealed in a way that even my teachers had never seen it. So I set up a project, which turned out to be the longest project of its kind and the only one of its kind that's ever been done, which is to collect all the records of one village in Essex, Kern, from when they began, which is about 1380, through to 1860, and to transcribe them and then later to put them into a computer and analyze them. Now, no one has ever done that before or since, because it's a huge amount of work. It's all up on the University of Cambridge server. So if you put in Earl's Cone, you will find the website which has all the records there and the maps and everything. And what I expected when I did that was that as I moved from 1380 through 1480, 1580, the records would change. In other words, something dramatic would happen because there was a capitalist revolution. What I found was that they didn't change. Minor modifications, obviously, but the records, the courts, the court structure, and the kind of arguments and the kind of sentiments and everything else in those records didn't alter. And what they showed was nothing like what I'd seen in the Himalayas. They showed a far more affluent, far more fluid, everyone moving around, being born in one place, going to another place, dying in another place. They didn't find yet, they didn't show a family inheritance of property except sometimes. They didn't show any sharing of property between brothers or parents and children. And above all, and you mentioned the Venetian traveller, one of them was a later a pope. And he his brilliant insight into the English was a key. He said the English are very peculiar because they, when they have their children, when their children are very young, twelve or younger, they send them away from their homes. And he said this would be understandable if they then had them back into their homes, but they never come back. And so what he was describing is this break between the family and society. Because people send their children, if they're working class, they send them off as servants. They're a bit higher up, they send them off as apprentices, they're a bit higher up, they send them off as pages to an L family. Or the great British public school tradition, they send off them off to boarding schools from 14th, 15th century onwards. And before the boarding school is the oldest institution in England, which the first boarding school was in the 6th century. Um Canterbury. So sending your children away, telling them you are no longer part of your parents' family, you are on your own. You have to make your way. That this Phoenician found very heartless and unkind, but it is the key to the breaking of the nexus between the family and the economy. And that goes right back. So the combination of an anthropological experience and firsthand contact with many, many, many documents, transcribing them over the years. I think those two things put together. And plus the social history revolution, which I was part of in the 60s and 70s, which turned attention away from kings and queens and the top echelons of society down to ordinary people in their villages and so on, and the growing interest in emotions and emotional history and psychohistry and the rest of it. All those things, it was the right time at the right place. And I was also had a wonderful supervisor, Sir Keith Thomas, who encouraged me and who was at the forefront of the bringing together of history and anthropology in that period. So I had superb mentors, Pierre Coody, Peter Lasliot, Keith Thomas, and others. I was in a wonderful environment, Cambridge in the 1970s was a wonderful place to be, as it still is. I had a, above all, a superb helper in my wife, Sarah, who did much of the work on Earl's Cairn, and who encouraged me and went out on the poor with me later. So to do this, you need a kind of lifestyle and a set of fortunate circumstances. And the last tribute is to my mother, who was I worked with a great deer, and we wrote books together on tea and things. So I had the right people around me, the right environment. There's a very good theory of creativity by a gentleman called Zint Mihaili, and he said that creativity occurs at four in four levels, the national level. So England was the right place to be doing this. At the institutional level, Cambridge was the right institution to be doing this in, because of the Cambridge group and other things. The network level, I had the right network of people, and then the individual life experience level. And good by good fortune I have all these.

SPEAKER_00 35:32

Dear classmate John here. This isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button. If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you are watching or listening to Thinking Class on. You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class. You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at thinking class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser, and you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox. You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support. Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate. That's fascinating. What really was um blowing apart something that I think I've always viewed and I think is a common a common uh understanding of how the West, as it gets referred to, you know, we all get lumped together, I suppose, um, is different to much of the other world, is that we're not really clannish. The family um was broken down ultimately into that that nuclear family, and it's it's typically seen to be down to popes uh in the Middle Ages who ultimately broke down that clannishness. But hearing you talk there and reading that book, and to understand that that process seemed to have happened many centuries before this island, uh, rather than it being a a um a top-down um cultural change imposed by um the Catholic Church, this almost sounds like it was an emergent bottom-up cultural change, and it happened so many centuries before, which is amazing. Um there there's there's something else that you were saying in there about um the uh that because of the family uh being broken down into the nuclear, um the nuclear unit and the English being a very individualistic people. Um I don't know if you come across the writer Louise Perry, um, but she um recently wrote an article that was about modernity and its um uh this technological modernity and its fate. And effectively she was linking it to the declining demographics that you see across the West, as uh shown by the the very low fertility rate, and that that fertility rate um is decreasing across every group of people as they go along that same path. And she was saying modernity is showing that perhaps it can't reproduce itself, and there were other things she was linking to it. Is it just that nature doesn't want to live this way? That's a totally separate question. But within within all of this, I suppose she then says, perhaps our future is much like our past, it'll be extended families living together in a more rooted place. And it made me think of a question, Alan, which is if if culturally for all of this time, that at least some of the peoples that inhabit this island appreciate, as we've mentioned, there are many different other peoples living here now. But if those peoples who've been here uh since the times we've been talking about have this long-running cultural trait, which is individualistic nuclear family moving around, you know, it's not actually that there was even really a rooted experience of a family through the generations, as you've seen through the land transfers, is do we go back to a point that actually never really exists? So if modernity might be forcing us more to a rooted existence, uh bigger extended families, does culture win out against these pressures in the end? Does it hold up, or is it the world that in the end will end up changing the way we are?

SPEAKER_01 39:45

Yeah, two separate things yeah, I'd like to mention there. One is modernity. He used the word. Most people don't know what modernity means. Or rather, I I think they don't know what modernity means in my sense. Most people like this lady in the reese seem to equate it with surface phenomena, technology. So that's part of the reason why people think the modern world began with the Industrial Revolution, because you got a change in the technologies, and that is modernity. So if you ask most people, what is it is it to be modern, they'd say, well, to drive a car and to have life then and have you know, most young people, most intelligent people will associate modernity with uh the physical world. We've created science and technology, really. Um that's obviously part of it, but it's only a small part of it. At a much deeper level, my definition of modernity in a number of have written about six books about which have the title modern in it, in them, you know, the riddle of the modern world, the making of the modern world, um, the invention of the modern world, and so on. In all of them I define at the beginning the meaning of modern. And it's taken from the great social thinkers, which is that modernity consists of separating out your life. So human beings have four great drives, towards wealth, and we call that economics, towards social warmth, and we call that society, towards power, and we call that politics, and towards striving for meaning and understanding, then we call that ideology. Those are the four. In most civilizations, in simple sub societies, they're all together, so a tribal equally. In peasantries, they split into two pairs. Politics and religion are together, and society and economy and Zyvex Pain is together. What modernity does is the final splitting apart. So you can pursue politics without worrying about religion or economics or your family. My uncle was a member of Parliament, and I know that if I had asked him to do things privately on my behalf, he would have said, sorry, Alan, you're my nephew, but nothing to do with me, etc. And if his local priest had told him what to do, he wouldn't have done it, yes, so um this is modernity. Now it's a fiction, because of course these things are influencing each other, and we often call that corruption, uh nepotism, helping onesheo. Um, but it's a necessary fiction for freedom, because if you want to be operating truly in any of these fields, then you need to keep up the fiction that they are separate and you can and separable. Um this is what England achieved in the medieval period, to a large extent. Separation of God, the market, you know, family, and the king, they're they're separate things. And we've maintained it, and it's very deeply ingrained. And I personally, in answer to your question, think it will continue. Um many groups in in England don't um in much of their lives subscribe, subscribe to it. For example, if you're a Muslim, a Hindu or a Jew or whatever, you don't subscribe to the separation, say, between family and religion. You want to marry off your daughter, and so on and so on. But England developed through its empire a tolerant system whereby you Would allow a good deal of personal mixing of fields, as long as it doesn't impinge on the general playing field on which people operate. So as long as you obey the laws, you pay your taxes, don't go around killing people, then what you eat, what you dress, wear, what you believe is up to you. So this allows a good deal of multicultural tolerance, which you don't find in the same way in many continental countries. So I think it will vary and it'll change and so on, but I don't think we will live in multi-generational peasant-type families. I mean, there are statistics showing that many more children are staying at home for much longer. But that has to be looked at rather carefully because when I was studying this leaving home syndrome, I was also doing a study of my grandchildren. Lived down the road, and I was filming them and watching them grow up and studying them in a way I couldn't with my own children. I saw that though they lived at home, stayed at home and went to school locally till they were 18, they'd basically made this separation when they were 11 or 12. In other words, their room had a notice on it, don't come out in it without my permission. They had their own pocket money and accounts. They decided what their interests were, and they built up a kind of understanding with their parents about their private space. And their parents were, and they were very soon aware that their most important people in their lives were their friends at school rather than their parents. So they broke away. They didn't have to leave home to break away. I suspect that if you look at many young people living at home, they're living in a bedsit, which might be in someone else's, but now they don't have to pay the rent. So they don't necessarily eat together and so on. So I think it is compatible with statistics showing much more co-residential activities. Um and even, you know, bank of mum and dad or bank of granny and grandpa is a bank. It's something you borrow money from. But they've lent you the money, they don't have to lend you the money. They can ask for it back, you can pay it back. So this contract, very contractual relationships, which agree develop early on with your own family, I think, is what will happen. And looking at it in reverse, I'm doing a lot of study of China. Well, the Chinese problem is the reverse. Are they going to lose their traditional and not peasant but close familyistic system? And I've been talking to a lot of young Chinese who say it's changed greatly. But it hasn't gone and it won't. They still feel deeply bound up with their parents, with their siblings, with their wider relatives. They would still, if your cousin had a son who wanted to go to America, they'd still chip in with part of their salary to pay for them. If their parents are ill, they'll fly from England and go and look after them. It's very different, and it's remained different. And I think given the huge change that's occurred in the last twenty-five years, it's probably gone about as far as it will go.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

Foscinating. There's so many examples within your book that suggest some of the biggest philosophical innovations or economic innovations or technological innovations or literary innovations have all come downstream from this national character. And to give a few examples, uh and it'll be interesting to hear your thoughts on anything that I've I've missed, is you've got you've got you mentioned this contractual relationship that we have with our families, and it makes me think of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan and this social contract theory. And that seems when you start when you understand your work and what you find, that seems like that could have only ever really taken place here, just like Adam Smith's idea of you know the bakers, the butchers, they're not doing it, they're not doing it for benevolence, they're doing it because it benefits them, but in the end, it benefits everyone else by having this contractual agreement and uh able to trust that other people can produce for you and you need to do stuff as well. And within your book, you also talked about how you can find repeatedly throughout uh any of the things that you've been reviewing, any of the documents, uh, whether it's high society stuff or people's um people's uh sentiments about where they live, that there's this deep connection with the land, that people have always seen the country as being this kind of Eden, which explains why you have Blake writing Jerusalem and Wordsworth and the other romantics. Um and I suppose Ellen, you you have posited, uh, if I've if I've gotten you right, that the modern world which you've just outlined there effectively came about because of the English and their particular ways of seeing. And is there anything else that ultimately uh has led to the world that we see us see around us today that we perhaps don't realise comes downstream from all of those things we've been talking about?

SPEAKER_01 50:17

Well, it's uh whole other session, really, but um when we talk about contract, most people think it's a bit of paper which you sign. We're using contract in the 19th century sociological sense, it's an agreement, a freely entered into agreement where both parties decide that they're going to do something. And that agreement can be very, very small. When you get on a bus, you enter into a contract with the driver, that you're not going to suddenly stand up and shoot him or um cause a row in the back of the bus or anything. Every action that you take, more or less, when you buy something, when you um go into a public library, uh, all these public spaces, there are contractual implications. And so in the 19th century sociologists, the idea was that most societies are based on what they call status, in other words, the position you are born into. So nearly everything in your life is determined into what position you're born. You're born into a freeman or a slave, you're born into a lower caste or an upper caste, you're born as a woman or a man, etc. So most societies are based on status almost entirely. And the great sociologist and historian Sir Henry Main said that the movement of the progressive societies, this is his famous phrase, is from status to contract. So when you progress or become modern, as we might say, you move from a world based on your birth to one based on achievement and your own efforts. So he said that. So the relations between men and women, between father and our daughter, are still there as status-related positions, but they're not as strong as in many societies. So this panged off world where you maneuver and manipulate, and your destiny is in your own hands, is one of the things that England has given to much of the world. I used to tell my undergraduates it was a bit like detergent if you have an oil spill. You know, it's all glued together, and then you put some detergent on it and it makes it split apart. And the English, wherever they went with their common law state system, which is based entirely on contract, you don't give, I mean, in traditional Chinese law, if you were prosecuting someone, you first had to find out what their status relationship was. It was entirely different if they were uncle and nephew or father and son, do if they were strangers, etc. We don't care. If you come in, if you are bringing an action, you bring an action against your parents for wrongdoing or whatever. So we have contract in our legal system, and when it spread around the world, it separated out things, it made people free, it broke down the barriers of caste and gender and whatever, whatever. Um so and it's found in our own society historically in every sphere. You mentioned Hobbes. Of course, uh his theory is that you have a contractual relationship. Most people think of him as a kind of authoritarian figure with La Vasin. But he's actually a libertarian. Well, he's a free proponent of freedom because he says in the end we have the right to resist Lavassi, if La Varsin is going to kill us or harm us. So he is much more, surprisingly, much more in favor of ultimate individual freedom than Jean-Jacques Russo, who was proclaimed as a believer in great liberty and freedom, but who actually said the state, the general will, is dominant, and if the general will says you should die, you should die. Nothing else you can do, you have to. So, but Hobbes is, of course, um the forerunner of Locke, who takes it further on, and Hobbes is only a later reflection of philosophers in earlier periods, writers who are taking the same view. The British political system from the medieval period was based on a contract, um, most famously Magna Carta, that's a contractual agreement. And Magna Carta wasn't just something new they invented, it was putting down on paper assumptions that had been there but were broken by King John. So the our political system is contractual, our religious system is contractual because in Protestantism and Puritanism and its forerunners, you decide, you know, I am going to worship you, and you will look after me. And I it's a contract, it's a personal contract, no one else intervenes. How I work it out is up to me personally. And the same in economics, in society, your parents. So every aspect of life is up to the individual will to make a deal, and as you say, in economy with Adam Smith. So ours is a peculiarly contractual civilization. Very different even from across the channel.

SPEAKER_00 56:44

I think for anyone who wants to understand the world that we see around us, for example, drawing on your your your um um sections in the book that talk about what marks out a peasantry uh or a peasant society with a non-pleasant society, i.e. England, is all of those ages which we've talked about, is that peasant societies can often be contra-women's rights and pro-child marriage. And what we see in England is um people not marrying until their mid-twenties and having children until that point. And you even talked about how the the notion that um women weren't able to inherit may be true across much much of the world, but actually you can find lots of records that suggested transfer between uh males to females, and um and then you know, even when you think about where the the English and the Brits then went and uh colonized, you know, if you want to understand why the Americans love freedom so much, you kind of need to understand that part of um English history, and um it's uh that that moment you spoke about uh having which changed you, which upended your whole view um of the the part of the world you inhabited. I think I think work like yours, Alan, this deep understanding of people and peoples, um that intermingling of philosophy and history and literature and and everything that goes with it, I think I think this is the kind of work that if people were to go and get into, instead of reading the latest uh the latest books that are being shared on LinkedIn to supercharge your career, is you really want to understand the world that you inhabit, um your kind of work is where we needed to be headed because you could have those those moments of aha, all right. I can kind of understand the context of all of this now and why things are the way they are. Um so anyway, I've I found it utterly, utterly beguiling um delving into your work, and I I I will be delving into much more of it. Um before I let you go, Alan, and I know you've already shared with me um some moments in your life which changed your mind. However, I do ask all of my guests in the spirit of thinking class um what you've changed your mind about during the course of your life that was once something that you thought was set in stone, um unwavering in your belief that that was the way things were, um, but then it changed. Um, and what was it that made you think differently?

SPEAKER_01 59:39

We talked about some of them here, but I think one of them was um, I mean, one of the deepest parts of most of us is our ideology and our belief systems. And I was brought up as a Christian, um, and through one of my uncles, through quite a an evangelical Christian. I went to some of these boys' camps. I went to the one that John Smith frequented a few a few decades later, I'm at say UN Minster. So we were sent off and we waited for our Protestant God to enter our heart and change our lives. And um I I three-quarters accepted it, but there was always these deep questions, particularly sort of late teenage questions of how could God have created this terrible mess? Otherwise, pain, sin, um etc. Because if he was all loving and all powerful, surely he and all intelligent, he could have thought of a way of um both having free will and having pain-free existence for human beings. And the whole Garden of Eden story seemed monstrous as I read it in Milton and so on, increasingly, because you know, if God hadn't wanted Adam to sin, why did he put the serpent there, etc.? So um I'm questioning, and when I went to university as an undergraduate, I questioned more and more. And um I still remain formally a Christian and a monotheistic believer. And then when I went to the Himalayas in Nepal, it was uh in one way a great relief because I came across a society which didn't believe in God, a god. They were partly Hindu, they were partly Buddhist, they were partly uh shamanic, they were partly ancestral. And so I found a small society which didn't which got on perfectly well ethically and socially without a monotheistic religion. And then when I went to Japan, I found the same thing on a larger scale. And then when I went to um China, I found it on a huge scale. And I discovered three-quarters of the world doesn't believe in monotheistic religions, um, and they get on perfectly well without it. This and so the whole weight of sin and contradiction was largely lifted off me, and I found some sort of peace um in non-religious philosophies like Buddhism. And I think this is certainly one of the turning points in my life.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:50

Well, that is uh a bombshell to finish on insofar as we could talk for hours more about um how we we English and British have grappled with that question over the centuries. Alan, I've kept you long enough and we started late because uh of technical issues which were my doing. So thank you very much to your enduring patience for coming on, for being so generous with your time. Um I can't promise that I won't be peppering you with other emails in the future asking you to come back on so I can talk about more of your work. So I do hope I'm able to speak to you again. But um, in the meantime, thank you very much. This has been one of my favourite conversations on the show, and uh I hope to speak to you again soon. Do do pepper me. All the best. And you to keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters. Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond. Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you. I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.