Holloway sees danger of return to ‘absolutes’
Prolific writer and broadcaster Richard Holloway was back in Blairgowrie last week for a special event for members of the BOOKMARK festival.
The author of ‘A Little History of Religion’, which topped the bestseller lists last year, returned to east Perthshire at the invitation of the Blairgowrie, Rattray and the Glens Book Festival following his popular appearance at the event in October.
‘A Conversation with Richard Holloway’ saw the champion of equality, fairness and kindness tasked with the modest brief of reflecting on the world’s situation for his second visit to Blairgowrie.
He started his talk, which he described as a series of “scattered ideas that might connect up”, by saying how delighted he was to be back in east Perthshire before moving on to discuss thoughts on Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory, the idea that “no group of humans can see the whole truth” and that people need to have “a certain kind of modesty in the claims they make”.
Holloway looked at post-modernism and how no single world view dominates how people understand life, and the digital revolution, which he said has “had a colossal impact on the way we think and communicate with each other”.
That, along with other factors such as a transport revolution that has “shrunk the globe”, has led to the idea of the “death of distance” which he finds worrying as “distance gives us a measure of things”.
Referring to political events since his last visit to east Perthshire, specifically the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States of America, Richard said: “The tragedy of American politics now is that disagreement has been criminalised.
“It hasn’t quite happened in our political culture yet but if we fall into a trap of disallowing argument then we are in very dangerous territory.
“There doesn’t seem to be any capacity for intelligent discourse or patient disagreement anymore.”
He went on to warn: “We are seeing a hankering for the simple, for the absolute, and we saw a lot of that in the 30s.
“If we have not got a way of handling human complexities we can plunge whole cultures into darkness and I worry that that is happening.
“There were traces of that in Britain in the discussions about Brexit for example.”
And he added: “Human beings are a dangerous mix of instinct and a small amount of intelligence.
“People are not creatures in balance and can live in an ugly and tyranical way but we gradually developed systems to cope with that, specifically democracy.
“I worry that we have lost a bit of pride in that system and, fragile though it is, we need to keep our nerve and recover our passion for democracy and remember its strength.
“We need to recognise how flawed and unbalanced we are but also how patient we can be.
“We have to doubt and love our way in trying to save humanity.”
Following his thought-provoking discussion, audience members asked Richard questions covering everything from morality and migration to nationalism and optimism.
We have to doubt and love our way in trying to save humanity