S2 EP9 - Wrapping Up

[music] This is Stephen Fry's Seven Deadly Sins. Episode 9, wrapping up. Well, here we are. After seven weeks of sinful thinking, the series is all but over. What shall I say? Well, firstly, thank you for listening, of course, in the extraordinarily prolific podcast space. Everything is in a space these days, isn't it? In the prolific podcast space, there are many splendid shows vying for our attention, and I did wonder as I prepared this one. Whether anybody would be interested, sin is not a good thing. Sin is not a word we use in our time, and one might think that the introspection and self-examination space is crowded enough with mindfulness and meditation, perhaps to the point of saturation. And you can never be quite sure how to pitch these things to serious, dense and convoluted, and people might very well think, "Lighten up, Stephen, and on the bus on the way to work. I'm jogging in the park. I'm driving to the littles. I need a pleasant way to pass the time, not a hectoring or an earnest lecture." On the other hand, two, Jokey and Light-hearted and plenty might have caused a tick me off for that, too. "Oh, come along, Stephen. You could do better than such surface skimming and facetious froth. We're not idiots. Credit us with a bit more genuine interest and depth. Where's the beef?" So there was that concern. Also, I wanted to be free to float ideas that I didn't necessarily agree with. Debate and open thinking often involve the adoption of masks. We try them on in order to articulate contrary points of view. It's a way of dramatising the ambiguities and uncertainties of real life. It is an ironic mode in the deep and proper sense of the word irony. But if the internet has taught us one thing, it is that there are plenty of people who, on hearing and analogy, metaphor, similarly or ironic comparison, will fail or refuse to do the substitutions, the semantic algebra, if you will, on which the proper reading of such imagery and figuration depends. You say, "Oh, I don't know. Something like, uh, it doesn't even have to be an original image." You say, "Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat, of course, and sure as Christmas, someone will message you to claim that it's disgusting even to think of skinning cats. What kind of person am I? Or if you build an analogy out of the way we drive as an illustration of how we consider or fail to consider other people through life, someone is certain to say, "Ah, well, I don't drive, so that doesn't apply to me." And you think, "No, no, you see, I, oh, okay." Oscar Wilde at one point in his letter from prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, berates him for having been one who had not been able, quotes, "To acquire the Oxford Tempa in intellectual matters. Never I mean having been one who could play gracefully with ideas, but had arrived at violence of opinion merely," unquote. Well, while we might all agree that to play gracefully with ideas is a fine thing, I'm sure we also know that such a capacity is scarcely confined to, or even noticeably present in alumni of the university that has blessed this fortunate land with every single one of its prime ministers of the last seventy years with the exception of Gordon Brown, John Major, and James Callahan, and before that only Churchill. The ability of any of these Oxford-educated figures to play gracefully with ideas can certainly be called into question, but perhaps I'm being unfair. Maybe politicians need to abandon such frivolous games and approaches to thinking and to narrow their horizons to the practical and the every day. But the podcast space is, I hope, a place where ideas can be played with gracefully in opposition to what Wild Called merely "violence of opinion," because goodness knows there's plenty of violence of opinion around, which is not to say that I sign up to the people out there are dim and malevolent view to which it is all too easy and comforting to subscribe. Not at all. Most of us know that there's something more impressive than the wisdom of crowds to be found in the so hated and impugned social media world. There's the wisdom, the wit of individuals. Let's say you put out a post showing an unusual photograph. You twiddly of thumbs trying to think of the most apt and arresting caption with which to accompany it. Then, after much trial and error, faffing and fluffing and humming and eyeing, you post. Minutes later, seconds later, replies and retweets fly back at you with much better comments or caption ideas than the one you spent ten minutes agonizing over, damn, that's good, you have to admit. Wish I'd thought of that. All right, captioning picks isn't necessarily a metric of intellect, soul or sense, but to underestimate your fellow humans' insight, knowledge and capacity and fall into believing that everyone out there is a doofus and a dick wit is far enough from the truth to make those who think it the real fools. Another risk with this podcast series was the alienation of those whose convictions lie in ascribing most of the world's ills to a particular political outlook for them the world is heroes and villains. They don't have the time or patience for soul searching, the too busy arsehole searching. I don't want to disappear down the rabbit hole of internet ethics and politics, but the image of social media and other related services and phenomena as a lens like a magnifying glass strikes me as a good one. As with the lens, there's a bringing closer, the first function, people and ideas that were distant and alien can be understood better. But if you choose, a magnifying glass can also be held in such a way as to distort and to shrink even to turn the world upside down and ask backwards and worse still you can use it like cruel children popping ants to focus the rays and burn. The intense heat created by the concentrated beam that can shrivel and torch another person is not created by the one with the lens. They are weak, they are harnessing the power of the sun or in our metaphor the power of the hundreds of millions whose fusion generates the heat. That's why trolling and abuse hurts so much. Once had lonely and confused individual posting something harsh has no power as a person in themselves. They have no authority over us or special reason to be respected and attended to, which may be the source of their fury of course, but the reach and permanence of what they idly or cruelly create can seem to roar from the heart of the digital world's furnace. The hyper-costs of hate can consume us all. Having said all that I have been charmed, delighted to find that the comments that have come in for this series have been sound, friendly, helpful and informed. I'm not going to go through every single contribution and address them individually. There isn't time and space and it would seem a bit like a schoolteacher marking homework assignments. But from time to time I'll single out one or two. From the first many of you were agreed that it was often a fault or deficiency of language that raised any hint of ambiguity about the words we use for sins. And none more so than the first pride. You saw the need to distinguish between good, healthy pride and vain, unattractive and harmful pride, but plenty of listeners from other countries hastened to tell me that you could never make that mistake in Russian say or Swedish, where they have different words for those different kinds of pride as a matter of course. Adam Denning tweeted that one kind of vice activated another in him, the Roth he felt when people described themselves as humble, which he identifies as pride. The humble brag has certainly become a thing. There's a switch I sometimes have to make when I'm asked to post a tweet to announce some upcoming event as when I'm hosting an award ceremony or giving a talk or whatever. The organizers or press office usually offer a specimen tweet for me, which oddly often begins, I'm humbled to announce that I'm presenting X or speaking at Y and I strongly feel the need to change humbled to honored, thrilled, delighted, pleased or anything but humbled. Because for me too, the use of the word humble always strikes me as anything but, that then maybe it is pride to be so concerned not to sound proud. Still on pride, not everyone was necessarily convinced by my offered suggestion that we should be proud of. But we try to cut the 'me' myself and 'I' out of conversation. Steve Siddles, for example, says, "But don't you think a better remedy for self-focus than rationing first-person pronouns would be to knuckle down and get on with the hard work of finding peace with, integrating and befriending oneself." Well, finding peace with oneself, integrating oneself, befriending oneself, these are clearly very good aims that seem neither to derive from nor require any methodology, discipline or belief system. I want to park that thought though and return to it later when I look at mindfulness." When it came to greed, lots of you were equally repelled and fascinated by 'ine-rand'. Her atomism, her purest, fundamentalist belief in the individual over the collective, her conviction that the only morality is to recognise the primacy of self, its stark certainty is certainly shock, especially when one thinks of how many powerful people in our world today reverence and follow her precepts. If we keep our heads down and consider only our own interests, how does that affect society? Well, playing Devils Avocado once again, there is an experiment that's always fascinated me. If you take a shallow, perspex tray and fill it with mice and place it on the surface of a tank full of water, the tray will float. The individual mice have no knowledge of or interest in the nature of the tank or its buoyancy. They just move randomly around in brownie and motion, getting on with their lives like atoms and all is fine. But if you scale the experiment up and put humans in a similar tank, it sinks at once. People notice that it's listing in one direction and so rush to the other, thus fatally tipping it over. Consciousness, awareness, understanding of the situation, they all result in overcompensation, capsize and calamity. So a randian might well claim on the basis of this that their view is right. If humans could be like mice and go about their own business without concerning themselves about the ship of state or the welfare and direction and disposition of others, then things would work out perfectly. Interference drowns us all, they would argue. But where does empathy, kindness, consideration, altruism, looking out for others fit into this, you might wonder, working for the common good? Randians and like-minded individuals have an answer to that too. They point to the tragedy of the commons. This idea was given the world by the economist Garrett Hardin. Essentially he said that in the case of commons, i.e. the human pasture, free to be used by all, the result is overgrazing and the ruination of the land. He likened welfare to this, advocating enforced sterilization and goodness knows what else along the way, which didn't do much for his reputation. Despite the extremity of his views, the idea of the tragedy of the commons was taken up in the eighties with fervor as another reason why collectivism and socialised services are disastrous. Most economists, it has to be said, don't agree with this grim view of shared resources, open access and welfare, but plenty of those currently in power and jostling for it all over the world do agree. Still on this subject, Jane Carrotface, probably not her real name, wondered if Randism, the raising of selfishness to a philosophy and a political ideal, is akin to hedonism. The belief that pleasure and in parallel the avoidance of pain are the only goals in life. Aren't they alike? Both interpret morality and ethics with their political and spiritual ideals as muddle-headed delusions. "Seek out pleasure," says the headanist, "it's the first duty, the only moral law." At first blush, many bristle and bridal at such a thought, but the kicker is to be ruthless and honestly honest about where pleasure truly lies. If we indulge in everything that we believe gives us pleasure, the usual result we find is serfid, nausea, guilt, shame and a sense of sick misery. We end up gruesomely bloated in mind and in body. Most of us find, whether Christian, Muslim, atheist, left, right or centre, that there is a deeper and truer satisfaction and joy for oneself. In friendship, love, deferred pleasure, sharing, fulfillment, achievement and giving delight to others. We find, unless we are socio or even psychopathic, that individualism, dissociation and disconnection in the pursuit of ease and enrichment, bring no pleasure at all. This relates perhaps to the sense of lust as delivering a short spasm of pleasure, followed by post-coitle priestess, melancholic sorrow in the damp patch, the expense of spirit in a waste of shame, as Shakespeare's famous sonnet 129 puts it. Of course, we know all this. Oscar wrote of tasting every fruit of every tree of every orchard in the world, but the point is that some fruits will be bitter, some will make a sick, some are addictive, some poisonous. The adventure in life is to taste, which means to try to test. It doesn't mean that you simply gorge yourself forever, like some room and emperor scoffing and barfing, sucking and sicking till he has to be carried to bed. Where's the fun in that? Well, okay, once in a while. But as far as lust was concerned, most of you just simply enjoyed me using rude words, especially those that began with a hard C. Oliver Kennet, the pen slinger, as he splendidly styles himself, posted this, "Steven Fry's Seven Deadly Zins is an excellent reminder that we're nothing but disgusting beasts locked in a perpetual battle with our own sense of self, desperate to become more than our needs and our desires in an anxious bid to become human, whatever the fuck that is." Well, there you spoke a mouthful, Oliver. We do all seem to share some high idea of what a human could and should be, which we try, hopelessly, I fear, to square with the recognition of our own dark appetites and impulses. The Hobbesian view, i.e. that expressed by the 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, is that we are "scuallied creatures." Our natural unchecked lives being famously solitary poor, nasty, brutish and short, which I just had amusingly auto corrected to nasty, brutish and short. He wrote that we needed what he called a Leviathan, an absolute ruler to keep our base instincts in check. Long ago, as he was, there is a general view that this is still the right interpretation. Many adhere to the Lord of the Fly's belief that if we revert to nature, we are necessarily everything that Hobbes wrote and worse. I'm currently reading an interesting repost to this in a book called "Human Kind" by the Dutch thinker Rutke Breggman, and then not published till later this year, unfortunately, he has unearthed some very interesting research to show quite conclusively, it seems, that actually school kids marooned on a desert island don't go feral, violent and repacious. There was a real life case, which ended quite differently from the William Golding novel, that much of the Hobbesian view of mankind is simply empirically wrong. But Oliver Penselinger's question is no less pertinent. We do seem to want to rise up and be better than we believe our emotions and desires lead us to being. We want, if not a Leviathan outside in the form of a deity, king or tyrant, a Leviathan inside, a governing deontic spirit within us to reign in and mitigate our worst instincts. Who told us there was such a thing as better? Who told us there was such a thing as fair? And yet from the very first as infants we have a deep sense of justice, fairness and right. I offered the thought that the fourth vice, envy, was peculiar to humans, but Colin Denman Jones and Norma of Walter Monstoe were not alone in pointing out to me that research indicates otherwise. You talked about animals being unaffected by envy, right Norma. But I'm sure you must have seen the video of a monkey throwing back his reward of cucumber in disgust because the other monkey got paid in grapes. I believe that this has been repeated with other animals. Don't you think that was straight envy? rather than some deep animal sense of unfairness. It's a damn good point. Norma and Collin were referring to the primatologist Francis De Valle's much viewed Ted talk. And I can't claim to have a definitive answer there. I was probably wrong. We are animals. Maybe over the decades we will be able to discover more about the thinking, communication and consciousness of other animals. Whether those as closely related to us as apes and primates, all the more distantly related creatures like dolphins, elephants, octopuses, even ants and termites, all the many and varied species, manifestly endowed with forms of intelligence, cooperative social complexity, and qualities like altruism and a willingness to sacrifice for the communal good. Not just fauna, either. There's a convincing case for complexity and a sense of common feeling in the plant world, especially trees, it seems. Maybe we will see that other life forms truly do functionally possess language, self-consciousness and those capabilities that we once thought were unique to us. Maybe we will look back on the time when we didn't therefore judge animals by moral standards, as absurd. After all, if we discover they truly have all those attributes of guilt, shame, sin and responsibility that we once thought uniquely human, then it follows that they have just as much reason to feel guilty or ashamed of their behavior. And as the medieval French did, we might even put animals on trial for wickedness and sin as a consequence. It follows, after all. Or more likely, we will conclude that we, being no different from animals, have no more need or cause than any shark, iguana, weasel or wombat, to feel ashamed, guilty or self-conscious about our behaviors and thoughts, and will acquit ourselves of any greater responsibility or need to correct our behavior than any other animal has. It seems unlikely. It seems we will always be doomed or privileged to recognise that we have a duty, a drive, a destiny to improve ourselves and to take responsibility for the extra power and influence of our sense of agency and its impact on the planet. And while still on Envy, I'm atrole asks this. Do you care to comment on what Spaniards call "healthy Envy", which is the feeling of desiring something an esteemed person has or is? Could there be such a thing as healthy Envy? Hmm. Well, I think that hero worship, sheer unalloyed admiration of another's skill, talent, beauty, grace, accomplishments, intelligence, yes, I think such Envy can certainly be healthy. Along the same lines, Camilla Lin's home writes, "I've invented a Norwegian word for the situation when one would like to have the same as the next person, but still wishes that the other keeps this thing, talent, vocation, or whatever one envies, hoping it will catch on. #MidSunner#MidSunnelig Not sure about my pronunciation there, Camilla, but I like the idea. Plenty of voices were raised to endorse the view held by our Prime Minister, among others, that Envy as aspiration is the necessary driver for ambition, achievement and success. I remember the powerful feeling that surged through me when I went to my first pantomime and saw buttons on stage, getting laughs and admiration from the audience. I was overcome by a desire to be him. On stage, receiving all that love and laughter, it was Envy, a huge eating Envy, and it did propel me throughout my life in a desire to perform. Can I in all honesty repudiate such a drive? No, I think Envy, without resentment, can indeed be healthy. You're listening to Stephen Fry's Seven Deadly Sins. I'll be back after a short interview. Platiny next. That seems to have fewer upsides. Some of you certainly agree with me that it would be wonderful if human ingenuity came up with a guilt-free pleasure on which to gorge. No such thing as a free buzz I reiterated. K.M. I won't use his or her full name in case the drug-scorder listening and in a mean mood. One does if pure M.D.M.A. can qualify as a perfect free buzz. But in my experience K.M. much to like, no doubt, and offering nothing as horrible as the awful K-holes and crashes of many other substances, but I wouldn't say there is no shadow cast by it. Susan Butler writes, "This Seven Deadly Sins episode gluttony highlights an interesting contemporary relationship with fat phobia and body positivity, the undesirability and unattractiveness of gluttony and greed and associated perceived lack of discipline, i.e. beauty equals self-control." Yes, for sure there have been times in my life when I've hated what I've seen in the mirror, the roles of fat and flab have not just been unsightly and unappealing in their own right, but as gelatinous physical reproaches and wobbling registers of my weakness and feeble self-control. At the same time I have every sympathy with those upset and angry at a culture which elevates leanness and a certain kind of look to a pitch of desirability. I have never, I hope, related beauty, athleticism, slenderness and glowing health with any real virtue. But I try to avoid making the mistake and I think it is a mistake of automatically going too far the other way and treating such qualities as certain indicators of shallow, air-headed vacuity. While with gluttony I made the point that our addiction to nicotine has been useless and deleterious for us as a species. Well, what is the point of it? Well, I said if you look down the other end of the telescope there has been a great point. As far as the tobacco plant is concerned, whose adaptation into a carrier of the toxic alkaloid nicotine raised it from being an obscure and leafy American herb to a valued and prolific worldwide crop. The same could be said for many other members of the endemically American Solonaceae family, the tomato, the potato, the objín, the chili and bell peppers, not to mention those other wild southern and central American successes, chocolate and cocaine. They've all got their hooks into us and have coerced us into increasing their variety and thriving profflegacy around the world with stunning success. Many writers notably know a Yuval Harari in his bestselling sapiens have made the same point about wheat and rice. Green cereals like their mason, dull, but you could argue that their history is testament to a greater evolutionary triumph even than our own. To evolution, it's all of a piece. No different from giving pelagic flight to the albatross, a hoarding instinct to the squirrel, or language to the human. Evolution doesn't privilege intelligence or stunning feats of navigation, nest building, migration or camouflage. Just plain variety and survival is all that matters. Grab feathers or peacock plumes, whatever works. Whether you can spread yourself and propagate widely and variedly by filling a dull niche like woodlice or mosses or by being addictive, hardy, harvestable, flavorful versatile and by offering the addictive buzz of brain stimulation, spice heat and euphoria makes no odds, so far as indifferent nature is concerned. So perhaps that thought, in the long view at least, lets us off the hook. We're not the greedy gluttonous ones. Those damned plants are. The chili and chocolate, the chips, the coca leaf. Gah. Gah. Brings us to Roth. Joss sentience pointed out that a lot of anger comes from frustration. Being heard is a prerequisite, he writes. Yes, I think this is a point many have intuited, but I don't know if there's empirical proof of it. It does appear that much of the rage and outrage, flaming and frothing that we know to be so toxic and element of the modern world does come from the idea that the internet can make citizen journalists, celebrities and superstar influences of us all. We all have a platform we can all comment and contribute, the disconnect between that happy promise of social media and the melancholy truth. that it's still just a favored few who get heard, a favored few who get the plaudits, the followers, the attention, the queuedos. And yes, it's hard to see how in some that wouldn't fuel rage, resentment, bitterness, gall and misery. How do we stop that? How do we get that awful genie back in the bottle? Teach humility? Tell people they should know their place and not expect to be heard or taken into account, save perhaps via the ballot box, in elections that many of us feel are wholly tainted anyway, by old media and new, by interference digital bot tampering lies and distortion. It's as if the internet age has led the world's population by the nose up to the trough of power and warhol's 15 minutes of fame held their heads over the head-y perfume of success, connection, riches and status and then jerked them violently back. Oh no, no, no, no, no, not for you, back to servitude and obscurity you go. I'm keenly and embarrassingly aware of course, and I've had to say this in earlier episodes that this all sounds a bit odd coming from one with so comfortably higher number of followers on social media and with all the luxuries and privileges that come with that fake painted pantomime cow, fame. But I do endeavour to imagine life without the many blessings that I try to remember to count, which brings us on to the positive qualities, which many feel might alleviate and remedy the unhappiness, imbalance, distress and pain that the seven deadly sins seem always to bring in their train. Empathy and mindfulness. First and foremost, many of you do advocate mindfulness training of one kind or another. Is that the answer? Now, it's not my place to dis-mindfulness apps, TM, the works of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the Buddha, Vedic happiness and all that. I don't know enough about mindfulness or Eastern religions and yogic and meditational practices to comment fairly. I know enough at least to have discerned very clearly that they are not for me. They mostly make me deeply uncomfortable, self-conscious and irritated. But that doesn't mean I'm going to dismiss scoff or sneer. I know meditation and yoga and many of the offerings out there suit some people very well indeed and I'm genuinely delighted for them. But I've been pondering a concern, which I will offer now. And it seems I'm not alone. Ronald Persa coalesced a lot of what I've been thinking in an article on the Open Democracy website not long ago. He wrote that, "The hubris and political naivety of the cheerleaders of the mindfulness revolution is stunning. They seem so enamoured of doing good and saving the world that these true believers, no matter how sincere, suffer from an enormous blind spot. They seem mindless of the fact that all too often mindfulness has been reduced to a commodified and instrumental self-help technique that unwittingly reinforces neoliberal imperatives. The term "near liberal" that Persa uses here we have to remind ourselves doesn't mean liberal or left-leaning in any political sense, almost the reverse. It means the untrammeled free market of rampant capitalism." Persa goes on to say that "the mindfulness movement insists that it is mindless and maladapted individuals who are to blame for the problems of a dysfunctional society, not the political and economic frameworks within which they are forced to act. By shifting the burden of responsibility to individuals for managing their own well-being and by privatising and pathologizing stress, the neoliberal order has been a boon to the $1.1 billion mindfulness industry." In other words, I think he's saying that it's all those companies who treat their employees like shit, then have the nerve to say it's the employees fault that they are so anxious and stressed, nothing to do with the hours, the pressure, the low pay, the threatening work atmosphere, the glass or indeed concrete ceilings denying promotion, the unfeasible targets and the infantilising teen talks and managerial bullshit. No, no, it's all your fault for not being attentive enough to the moment, not being all mindful and relaxed and aware like. But we have the solution, there's a primary colour meditation pod in your rec room for use in your own time, and here's a free subscription to this mindfulness app. Now meditate, be mindful, sleep properly with this sleep tracker and back to fucking work with you slave, whew, whip crack, meet those targets, fulfil those quotas. As a schoolboy, I hated having to join in with team sports and the gym and cheerleading and all that. I don't mean in pompoms and rar skirts, I probably would have enjoyed that. I mean having to stand on the touch line and cheer on the rugby team. I don't think I could call myself any kind of coherent, rebel subversive or heroic maverick, but I certainly hated the idea of joining in to any kind of group ethic. It's not uncommon in teenagers to loathe the major tribe and to hive off into your own weird clique of minorities. We see it in all those high school comedies I quite weirdly love, Romeo and Michelle Mean Girls, all those. The main group was the focus of our hatred, the conforming games playing heard. Maybe we feared them and some of us even perhaps yearned secretly to join them though it never dared confess it. And we hived off into groups within groups those who loved Led Zeppelin and those who loved Motown, those who preferred the goodies to Python or old Hobern to Golden Virginia rolling tobacco, whatever. I'm sure you can identify in some way. But for some of us that ordinary refusal to join in has never quite gone away. We are repelled by groupthink, group hugs, team talks, the hive mentality. We perhaps wrongly, perhaps rightly, detect an element of command and control in the corporate enthusiasm for mindfulness. I'm put in mind of the Queen Borg in Star Trek, the next generation. And there's a quotation I've always relished from Yefgeni Zemiatin, which applies not just a literature but to any creativity or advance. True literature can only exist, he wrote, "Infinity is created not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics." Of course there's an inbuilt ironic counter to that too, as James Thurber wondered, "Why do you have to be a non-conformist like everybody else?" So much of this podcast series has put me in mind of the push me pull you nature of our humanity, the desire to be individual, to stand alone, not to conform, not to surrender to the majority, countered by the equally strong impulse to bond, to connect, to conjoin and be stronger in our social cohesion. Are we bred to this, I wonder? Will Carpenter, at WAC-55, tweeted me a pertinent question. Are we humans susceptible to the physical and psychological urges that are the underpinnings of the seven sins because of some Darwinian evolutionary advantage they give us? Or are they accidental and unpleasant side-effects of natural selection? I wish I could answer that, but of course can do no more than blindly guess. Adaptationist fallacies are bound on the internet and in newspapers that should know better. But the question is worth asking, is our species divided into those who want to stand alone, the randians at one extreme, and those who want us to bind together the collectivists at the other because of some adaptive advantage in being not quite a full colonizing social species like termites and ants, and neither being all solitary and individual like, say, cats. Or is it because we are still evolving into one type or the other? Is it a fault line in us that we are even as individuals divided in our impulse to stand alone and are impulse to conjoin? Well, it would certainly seem that the sins can be categorised that way too. They each impinge upon both the individual and society. Clotony, for example, makes us fat, unfit, compromises our health, appearance and ability to function as individuals, but it also impoverishes denudes and threatens the fragile biosphere on which we depend as a whole species. Well, that diversion was all meant to look at whether or not mindfulness is a solution to the world's distress. Another, at first glance, less controversial idea, is to look at empathy, and how that can be as it were cultivated and grown in us all as individuals and yes as groups. Even here, it seems, there's a shadow. You would think empathy was wholly good. Who could possibly stand against it? Well, a growing movement, not of malevolent selfish eagomaniacs, but social scientists, psychologists and philosophers. Professor Paul Bloom's book Against Empathy, the Case for Rational Compassion, argues that empathy, as Rutger Breggman puts it, isn't a, quotes, "beneficent sun illuminating the whole world. It's a spotlight, a search light. It singles out a specific person or group of people in your life, and while you're busy, sucking up all of the emotions bathed in that one ray of light, the rest of the world fades away." Empathy puts you in the shoes of another person, which of course seems a good thing. A social media campaign to help a sick child who is way down a waiting list will activate all our empathy and money floods in to crowdsourcing efforts to help. But what about all the other children on that waiting list? Breggman goes on to offer this. One thing is certain, a better world doesn't start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalize about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries because everybody else falls outside our view. I should hasten to add, in case you think this all sounds gloomy, that Breggman's book is actually a passionate defense of the goodness of humanity and quite the opposite of pessimistic. But it's back to that group versus individual problem. In the podcast about Envy, I articulated one side of it when remembering those hard left friends of mine at university who thought giving money to beggars and charity generally was oppressive and wrong. They preferred to privilege the group, the masses, as they called them, an ugly, almost contemptuous word I always thought, but I'm sure that's not how they meant it to sound. They preferred to privilege the masses over individuals. It's the old argument. If you make the world free enough for every individual in theory to rise and flourish, is that better than regulating it so that the mass can never fail or flounder? Contemporary history certainly seems to suggest the first approach, while sympathy and a sense of equity inclinus towards the latter. But fundamentalism in either seems wrong to most of us. Here's an interesting paradox of the individual and the group. I first came across the idea as a boy when Sherlock Holmes observed it to Watson in the second Holmes adventure, the sign of four. While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. Holmes says, "You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to." "Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant," so says the statistician. "Yes, and so say the advertisers and marketers, the election polsters, and many, many others. You are all individuals," Monty Python's Brian urges the crowd gathered under his balcony to believe, "Yes, we are all individuals." They chorus up to him. "I'm not," says a lone voice. "There you have it all, really." "In out, in out, group individual. My good, the good of the country, the good of the planet. They should all be interlinked, surely. Is it self-indulgent egoism to care about the cleanliness of one's own soul? Does charity begin at home? Can it all be reduced to be kind?" "Steven, what are the answers? Where are they? After these eight weeks of patient listening, we demand answers. How do we become happy and good?" "Well, not by listening to anyone who claims they know, I would suggest, with some conviction. My sorely missed friend, the late William Goldman, put it well in the mouth of Wesley, in his book and film The Princess Bride. Life is pain, heinous. Anyone who says differently is selling something. There are more fraud, snake-hawls, salesmen, hucksters, preposterous life coaches, mad dieticians and plausible fake gurus than the world can accommodate. Not a one of them has ever said anything that isn't either so fucking obvious. It gives you a nosebleed or so wrong as to be actionable, or indeed so plain loopy. It makes you laugh." "And you know the more I think about it, the more I wonder if laughter isn't the answer, or at least an answer. Laugh at yourself, principally. If we can laugh at the absurd gap between our grand self-images and our grubby realities, at our ludicrous explosions of anger, our embarrassing desires, our disgusting greed and petty obsessions with showy, shiny trifles, if we can giggle at our silliness and shallowness and smile at our desire, always to be one-up. If we can laugh at the rogues and villains that infest our world, if we can laugh at death and pain, we laugh that we may not weep," said Byron. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly, chestered and thought. There's that. But making light of oneself doesn't mean one's making light of the world. Being light can shed and spread light, laughing, needing, meaning, or diminishing. Like the hero played by Joel McCray in the Preston Sturgis masterpiece Sullivan's Travels, we should learn that laughter can be enough. The last words in that film are about laughter. Sullivan says of it, "Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this coccyde caravan." Boy. All there's an early hero of mine, André Louis Moro, in the Raphael Sabatini novel, Scaramouch. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. That's on Sabatini's gravestone, apparently. It's as good an epitaph as I know. I hope you're not disappointed that I haven't furnished you with an answer. You probably already know that Douglas Adams had the last word when it was revealed that the answer to life, the universe, and everything was 42. It turned out that the question was wrong. For it's always the questions that matter, not knowing, but questing ceaselessly and excitedly to find out. That's the real joy. And the purpose of our strange journey, surely. So thank you for your questioning, your listening. Go on searching, asking, and wondering, wondering in both senses, wondering by wanting to know, and wondering by marveling. And here's to Madman Hermit's heretics, Dreamer's Rebels and Skeptics. If you are diseased and strange enough to miss my voice and haven't tried it yet, there's always my first podcast series, Stephen Fry's Great Leap Years. A available way you found this, which you might find refreshingly different. It's about the strange and extraordinary adventures that brought us the technology through which you are listening to this, through which you, the individual, connect with other individuals and with the mass. I hope you enjoy it. I must now send myself off into silence, as I try to think of another subject to bother you with in future potlic-astintents. Farewell, much love, and many thanks. Go and sin in peace. You've been listening to Stephen Fry's Seven Deadly Sins. Grateful thanks to our composer, Guy Farley. The show is produced by Andrew Samson and Norman Goodman. Additional episode information can be found at Stephen Fry.com/bananaskins. This has been a Sam Fry limited production.