← Old School with Shilo Brooks
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- [00:00]
A
Every once in a while, someone makes something that feels bigger. Not another Hollywood reboot, but a story built on courage, faith and meaning. The Daily Wire did that with their new seven part series, the Pendragon Rise of the Merlin. Based on a book series by Stephen R. Loughead. It's a retelling of the classic King Arthur legend. The first official trailer just dropped and you should go check it out. In this world, while pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's vision ignites a civilization's rebirth. Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings. The Pendragon Cycle the Rise of the Merlin premieres exclusively on Daily Wire plus January 22, 2026. Go watch the full trailer now at DailyWire.com I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm talking with Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, former Oxford professor, and author of several bestselling books including the Selfish Gene and the God Delusion. Uncle Fred in the Springtime, published in 1939, is a favorite of Professor Dawkins and its author, the iconic writer PG Wodehouse, changed his life today. I'm asking him why. This is Old School. Richard Dawkins, welcome to Old School. It's a pleasure to have you here.
- [01:29]
B
Thank you.
- [01:30]
A
I want to talk to you today about a couple things. One, Uncle Fred in the Springtime, this hilarious novel that you've assigned to me and that I've read and that I've loved, but also PG Woodhouse more broadly, the man, the phenomenon. But first, let me ask you this. I was just delighted that you're a man of science through and through. And when I asked you to pick a book, you picked a novel. You picked fiction. And so I'm curious about your relationship to fiction. I teach a lot of students who are scientists and they come up to me and say, well, I'm not that good at reading books. I'm just a scientist. That's why I went into sciences, because I just, I don't like books. I can't read books or whatever they say. You, on the other hand, picked a novel. Tell me about your love of fiction and your habits of reading.
- [02:15]
B
I think you asked me to pick a book that I really enjoyed reading. And so of course I enjoy reading professionally for science books, but nevertheless, for actually enjoyment. I read PG Wodehouse, I read Evelyn Waugh, and so my mind naturally went to PG Wodehouse that I read over and over and over again.
- [02:37]
A
Yeah. Is there something that you get from fiction or that you're looking to get from fiction? Some intellectual nutrition of a kind that you don't get from, you know, scientific study?
- [02:48]
B
That's a more highbrow question. And I would say no. I mean, I do it for recreation. I just roar with laughter when I read Peter Woodhouse.
- [02:56]
A
I can't blame you. And I want to ask you why. But first, let me ask you this about Woodhouse. When did you first read him? Do you remember what age you were, where you were when you found PG Wild?
- [03:09]
B
I remember very well. I was at school. I went to a boarding school. It must have been about 12, I suppose. And the headmaster came into the dormitory and he noticed that on the bookshelf in the dormitory there was a big book called Jeeves Omnibus, and he took it down and he sat on somebody's bed and read us one of the stories. It was the Great Sermon Handicap, which is when Bertie Wooster and his friends did some betting on which priest, which parson in the neighborhood would preach the longest sermon on a particular day. And the headmaster read us this book and we absolutely loved it. And I've adored PG Wodehouse ever since.
- [03:53]
A
And have you. You know, he's an author of all sorts of books, the Jeeves book, but these two. Do you read pretty. You range pretty widely in his.
- [04:02]
B
Yes. Yeah. I mean, he wrote the most famously, the Jeeves books, and I've read all those. Then there's the Blanding's Castle ones, which is what this one is, but also there are lots of others in Blanding's Castle. Then There are the Mr. Mulliner ones, which are a raconteur in a pub, telling stories in the pub about his relations. He's got an endless supply of nephews and other relations to whom funny things happen, and I love them as well.
- [04:34]
A
Yeah. You know, he's infinitely charming. You mentioned to me that you went to a private school. I was talking to someone from Britain yesterday and they asked me, what books are you going to be talking to people about? And I mentioned PG Wodehouse, and he said, well, the person who read that probably went to a private school. Why did they say that? What does that mean?
- [04:55]
B
I think that's not quite fair. It is true that Woodhouse himself went to such a school and the rest of his life he was obsessed with it, and funnily enough, I've read biographies of him. He seems to be a rather dull man in one way that he just. What he cared about was the cricket results of his own school.
- [05:18]
A
Given that you've read biographies, can you tell us a little bit about him? About who he was and how he grew up, his life?
- [05:24]
B
He went to Dulwich College, which is what we call a public school, which. Which is not public. I mean, it's private. And as I say, the rest of his life, he was obsessed with the cricket. He loved his school. He didn't go to university. His brother did, but his father ran out of money, so he couldn't send PG Wodhouse to university. He went straight into the City of London, meaning the financial district, which he hated. And he discovered that he could write and became a very successful writer. He partly. He went to Hollywood and wrote scripts. In Hollywood, he wrote scripts for. He wrote lyrics for musical comedies. In the war, he was living in France and he was interned. When the Germans invaded France, he was interned. And there was a very unfortunate episode when he was rather unwisely. He agreed to do some broadcasts in English for the German radio. And that was. They were just humorous. I mean, he was just making fun of, in effect, making fun of his life in Germany as an intern prisoner. But it was taken up in Britain as an evidence of treachery and he was suspected of being a German spy and a German propagandist and things. And as a result, he went after the war, he went to America and never returned to Britain because of that.
- [06:50]
A
So how many years did he spend in America? In other words, was his literary life mostly in America?
- [06:57]
B
Yes, virtually all of it was in America after the war, anyway. And so his view. I mean, most of his books are about Britain, but they're about Britain in a kind of fossilized time.
- [07:11]
A
Yes, absolutely. I want to talk about that. And the way to get to that might be for us to just say a word about Uncle Fred in the Springtime. For people who have never read the book, if you had to say what it was about, and you know, what is this? It's a strange, hilarious.
- [07:27]
B
Yeah, it wasn't an easy choice. I mean, it's one of the Blanding's castles theories. So it's set in this stately home in Shropshire which is owned by Lord Emsworth, who is an amiable fool obsessed with his pig.
- [07:46]
A
The Empress of Blandincks is the name.
- [07:48]
B
Of the pig Empress of Blandinks. I mean, there are lots of books with roughly the same set, in fact, exactly the same setting. And Uncle Fred is the Earl of Ickingham, and he's a debonair, I think of him as if there was a film, he'd have been played by David Niven. Yeah, it's just one of many. I mean, they're all equally funny. I chose this one arbitrarily, I suppose it's kind of. Maybe it is the funniest. But they're all very funny, you know.
- [08:18]
A
For people who are interested. It's. It's this rollicking novel about people who are wealthier than you and I, who have small problems which are made artificially big through the comic artisan PG Wodehouse. So Uncle Fred sort of envisions himself as a man who can solve any problem, and his family has certain problems with respect to marriage or money, sort of petty things that he then steps in and becomes a kind of living solution to. And the whole novel, and this is a kind of testament to its absurdity, seems to revolve around a very important pig who one man loves and another man wants to take away. With Uncle Fred, I mean, the man himself is a deceiver in a kind of delightful way. I mean, you know, he's a deceiver. He's not, shall we say, the most morally sound human being. And yet at the same time, and this is what I'm trying to figure out, and I want you to help me with it, we delight in him. You don't read about Uncle Fred and think, oh, you know, what a con man. You think you're amused and charmed.
- [09:30]
B
What has to do there for the good of people? I mean, he's helping people all the time. And so he's an imposter, but he's doing it for good reasons, for good motives.
- [09:42]
A
So it's a. He deploys deception for a good end. Because what this does is it gets us to the question of, in what does Wodehouse's brilliant humor consist? And so you have this man who in another context would be a bit of a creep, but who you laugh at and are somehow endeared to.
- [10:01]
B
Ah, well, I think if you're asking me what. What gives Wodehouse his. Why he's a genius.
- [10:06]
A
Well, this would be one example.
- [10:08]
B
It's the language.
- [10:09]
A
It's the language.
- [10:10]
C
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- [10:26]
A
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- [10:30]
C
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- [10:40]
A
One of the things that I always ask the guests to do is select a favorite passage from the book, read it out loud and let's discuss it. So you've brought with you a passage from Uncle Fred that you'd like to discuss. Yes.
- [10:50]
B
I mean, this is just to illustrate his wonderful way with similes. It's describing Horace Davenport, who's very thin, very tall and thin. Instead of just saying he's tall and thin, he says, nature stretching Horace Davenport out, had forgotten to stretch him sideways. And one could have pictured Euclid, had they met, nudging a friend and saying, don't look now, but this chap coming along illustrates exactly what I was telling you about a straight line having length without breadth.
- [11:20]
A
Yeah.
- [11:20]
B
You see, now, that's an elaborate way of saying he's long and thin.
- [11:24]
A
That's right. That's right.
- [11:25]
B
And it's absolutely typical. Another example would be describing a very fat man. He said he was so fat that tailors would measure him just for the exercise. Yeah. Or it's never difficult to distinguish a Scotsman with a grievance from a ray of sunshine.
- [11:47]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [11:48]
B
Over and over again, you have these way out, outlandish similes which just make you love. Right.
- [11:57]
A
The first one you read, the passage you read is pretty high concept. I mean, one would have to know who Euclid is, that he was a Greek geometer and that he said a line is breathless or has no width.
- [12:07]
B
Yes, well, there's a lot of that, and especially with Jeeves, because Jeeves is very well educated and Bertie is not. And Bertie's constantly vaguely remembering things from his school days, and then Jeeves corrects him and gives his erudition.
- [12:26]
A
Yeah. What you say about the language of simile makes a lot of sense to me with respect to us trying to trace the essence of Woodhouse's humor. But don't you think there's. I mean, the plots. I mean, setting aside the language, the plot, when we take the plot of Uncle Fred is so absurd, you know, this one person wants to take a pig from this other person. There are these love stories in it, you know, these bizarre matches and these sorts of things. And I wonder, as we try to think about what Woodhouse's humoristic genius consists in, if it doesn't have something to do with making high things, the aristocracy, very low. And so he talks about the high in terms of the low, which is a kind of classic comedy tactic. Do you find that to be at least part of this charm.
- [13:16]
B
Yes, that's probably part of it. I mean, his aristocrats and his. Yeah, they're all idiots. And so, I mean, I suppose Bertie and Jeeves is a particularly good example because Bertie is a complete fool and Jeeves is so clever, and Jeeves could be running IBM. I mean, you know, it's ridiculous in a way that Jeeves is just a servant because he's immensely knowledgeable, he's highly intelligent, he's extremely ingenious and resourceful, and he's moving among, let's say, aristocracy or the leisured classes who are portrayed as complete fools. Yeah, yeah, sort of quite nice.
- [14:07]
A
And do you think that that humor, making fools of the leisured classes, the kind of aristocratic, you know, in Uncle Fred. I mean, these people have so much time on their hands that they're just engaged in the most absurd things that a person of purpose and work would not have time to be engaged in. Do you think that that humor will remain accessible? I mean, you know, in other words, I've been thinking a lot about, as I read these books, about democratic humor and aristocratic humor and what it takes to find these books funny.
- [14:38]
B
You know, it's so far from modern life. It's so far from all of us who have to have a job and things. I mean, these people never worked.
- [14:45]
A
Yeah.
- [14:45]
B
As you say, Evil in War is quoted on the back of several of Woodhouse's books as saying something like, he has created a world for us to escape to. And the world of Wodehouse is a world that is no longer with us and never was with most of us who read it. But it's a world of great charm, and I suppose it is a place to escape to.
- [15:16]
A
Yeah, but it's an old world. In other words, if a person who was 18 sat down to read this today, whether they were British or American, would they find this book funny?
- [15:28]
B
You would have to ask them. I don't. Well, when I was 12, I found it extremely funny. And even when I was 12, it was long after the events would have happened.
- [15:46]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I asked that question because, you know, I think about. You know, I was saying, who is the American analog, PG Wodehouse, who's the American humorist? You know, and Mark Twain came to mind, you know.
- [16:01]
B
Yes.
- [16:01]
A
And I was trying to think, well, is there a difference in the way Mark Twain rights and the kind of perennial accessibility of Mark Twain's humor and that of PG Wodehouse? And, you know, Mark Twain is quintessentially American. I'm of course not British. But when I read Woodhouse, I can't help but be immersed in a kind of British atmosphere. And so I'm comparing these two writers and trying to understand what's distinctive about each.
- [16:25]
B
Yes. Do young Americans like Mark Twain? I think they do, yeah.
- [16:32]
A
I mean, well, some find his language in Huck Finn offensive. You know, he uses the N word. And some schools have begun to censor that. I am certainly opposed to that. But I think in general, Mark Twain's humor still lives. In a way, it's very democratic humor. It's the humor of poor people, of ordinary people. It doesn't require. And when I read this, I think, I wonder if my American students, who have no access to the British aristocracy, would find this funny. And thus, if there's a difference between the way that these two authors, just to take them as examples, are going at humor.
- [17:08]
B
Well, they're certainly not about poor people, so that's one difference. And I suppose they would be found politically incorrect. I mean, there's one episode where Bertie blacks his face. Well, you can't get away with that nowadays. Right, right.
- [17:30]
A
Yeah. So there are things in the book that would simply be inaccessible. This seems true to me. I mean, the other thing about Woodhouse is I have a professor in graduate school who was about of your generation, and Woodhouse was his favorite author as well.
- [17:45]
B
Was he American?
- [17:47]
A
He was American, yes. And I just wonder. Or not his favorite author, but his favorite sort of fiction humorist. And I'm just contemplating the degree to which these books and all their richness, and after all, they've been made into television series and all these sorts of things, the degree to which they'll maintain, you know, their relevance.
- [18:06]
B
Yes, I think are not a success. I adore Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, but the scriptwriters mauled it. I mean, they thought they could do better than Woodhouse, and they can't. By the way, quite a lot of the stories are set in America. There are some very good ones set in Hollywood because, as I said, Woodhouse worked in Hollywood for a time, and he satirized Hollywood very brilliantly. And there's a lovely story about a nodder. And the nodder is a job that somebody has to go to script conferences in Hollywood and nod when the boss says something.
- [18:46]
A
Yeah.
- [18:47]
B
So whenever the boss says something, the first yes man has to say yes, and then the second yes man has to say yes, and the third yes man, and then only then do all the nodders have to nod. And so this jab, his profession is a nodder and he's just a humble nodder. And his boss says he's a very good nodder. He never complains of a stiff neck kind of thing.
- [19:09]
A
Yeah, there's a certain wit to that which is irreplaceable. I mean, we've talked about the way Uncle Fred's. The humor in Uncle Fred is at least. At least partly consists of making high things into low things, you know, royal things into absurd things. It occurred to me in talking to you that Uncle Fred, for people who haven't read the book, you know.
- [19:30]
B
He.
- [19:31]
A
Goes on these adventures, he's trying to get this pig. There are several love stories and he's trying to patch those up. Star crossed lovers and these sorts of things. One of the things that he does, though, is he impersonates a doctor, a man of science. And I wondered if this wasn't itself a moment in which a high thing is being made into a low thing. In other words, a position of authority is being poked fun at the way royalty and dukes and lords are poked fun at. A man of science is sort of made fun of. And I wonder if that rang true to you.
- [20:03]
B
Well, Sir Roderick Glossop is the doctor. I'm not sure about taking down a man. I mean, it takes him down as a pompous, rather conceited man. Sir Roderick Glossop comes into other books as well, whenever they need somebody. What he called a loony doctor. I don't really. I think you're being more highbrow than I'm ready to be in trying to dissect this rather frivolous novel.
- [20:37]
A
Well, but it's frivolity. I mean, I think humor can't help but be a very serious matter. In other words, we only laugh when we know that at the kernel of the joke there's something very serious. You know, I read often this author, Nietzsche, who I have written a book on, and one of the things he says that always strikes me is that from the heights, maybe the heights of the gods, humor and tragedy, comedy and tragedy are identical. And I give you this example. There are people who will laugh so hard that they will cry. There are people who will cry so hard that they will laugh. And so it's not obvious to me that there's not something tragic in comedy and something comic about tragedy. And so that's why I say this is not necessarily frivolous. There's something very serious in these books.
- [21:26]
B
I mean, it has been noted that comedians are often rather tragic figures. There was a British comedian who I liked very Much called Tony Hancock. I think he actually may have even committed suicide. He was certainly a very melancholic type. Spike Milligan, another British comedian, very, very funny and also suffered from depression, I think.
- [21:49]
A
Yeah.
- [21:50]
B
So I think there is a distinct overlap between comedy and tragedy.
- [21:56]
A
Yeah. And, you know, one can think of the American comic Robin Williams, who was an extraordinary man, but a man of some darkness. And that's what I mean is that Woodhouse. I grant the frivolity of the thing, and again, I don't want to be too highbrow about it, as you would say, but on the other hand, you know, I am a reader of books of great books in their depth, and I want to do justice to the man. And I wonder if there's not something dead serious at the core of PG Wodehouse.
- [22:21]
B
I'm not sure. I mean, there should be, I agree, but I think he was not of a serious man. I mean, what I read of his biography, as it happens, I think he doesn't go along with the thesis. He was. I think he probably was rather frivolous.
- [22:39]
A
You know, again, I teach political philosophy, and my impression of the book was there's a kind of political blasphemy here, you know, And I thought, that's pretty powerful, you know. And you mentioned he was in fact, excommunicated for political transgressions involving humor. Yes, and I'm just trying. I can't help but give him the benefit of the doubt and think he was thoughtful about these matters.
- [23:03]
B
Well, the transgression you mentioned was something he himself said. He was very foolish to do it. In Germany at the time, there was a man whose nickname was Lord Haw Haw, who was equivalent of the Japanese Tokyo Rose, who broadcast propaganda. And Lord Hawa was a horrible man. He was a definite Nazi sympathizer. He was British. He went over to America and he broadcast these awful things. And then when Wodehouse broadcast humorous things, I mean, things like, if this is Upper Silesia, then what must Lower Silesia be like? Things like that. I mean, it was just poking gentle fun at the Germans and the guards who guarded him and things like that. And his object was purely humorous, as it always is. And it was taken in Britain as being propaganda to make the Germans look sympathetic. Well, what he was doing was just gently poking fun at them. And it was. He was an innocent. He didn't know what he was doing.
- [24:25]
A
See, that's. Again, I don't know the man's biography, but I think that's where maybe my view diverges from Yours is that you accord a certain innocence and purity of intention to him. And I find the books thoughtful enough, in fact, critical enough, to be somewhat subversive in character.
- [24:44]
B
Yes, yes. Well, the Mulliners of Hollywood is subversive of Hollywood.
- [24:50]
A
Yeah.
- [24:50]
B
And the story about the nodder, I told you is. I wouldn't call it biting, but it's satirical of the sheer bossiness of a Hollywood mogul whose word was law and you couldn't contradict. I mean, I could imagine he would have had fun with Trump, for example, in the same kind of way, as a pompous vein.
- [25:20]
A
You know, what comes to mind on this score as an analogy is. And again, what I think Wodehouse is doing is not that different from what some of the greatest humorists in the history of the west have done, I think often in this context, and in fact, it came to mind when I was reading P.G. wodehouse of Aristophanes. Aristophanes, for people who don't know, is a great Greek comedic writer, but he wrote a play called the Clouds, which was critical of Socrates. Socrates. The origin of philosophy and science in the West. So critical of Socrates that Socrates, in his apology, says, there's a comedian, Aristophanes, who bears at least some responsibility for the reason that I'm here. And so this is what I have in mind, that since the genesis of the west, comedy has been critical in a subversive way of certain aspects of our society in a much more powerful way, such that it's not simply superficial.
- [26:15]
B
Yes.
- [26:15]
A
And that's why I push back on your interpretation of it. Yeah.
- [26:17]
B
Okay. When I was at Oxford, my college, Balliol, had a company of actors called the Balliol Players, who put on an annual play, which was Aristophanes. It would be the. It was called the Frogs or the Birds or the Clouds, but it was brought up to date. And so it would be satirical of modern politics.
- [26:40]
A
Yeah.
- [26:41]
B
Using some of the. Making vague allusions to the original Aristophanes, but was about, in those days was General de Gaulle and Harold Macmillan and people like that.
- [26:54]
A
Yeah.
- [26:55]
B
By the way, PG Wodehouse did also satirize. He had a character called Roderick Spode, who was based on Oswald Mosley, who was Britain's answer to Hitler, who never actually came to power, but Oswald Mosley was the British fascist, and he had quite some success at one time of building up kind of private armies of thugs who went around beating people up and so on. So he was aspiring to be the British Hitler. And Woodhouse satirized Him in this character called Roderick Spode, whose followers went around in black shorts. Yeah, so he was political in that.
- [27:38]
A
Sense, and that can be powerful. The word of the day is a proper name. And it just came up in the passage Richard was reading. And that name is Euclid. Who or what is Euclid? Well, Euclid is a Greek geometer, which is a great profession. It means he engaged in the act of doing geometry. He wrote a very famous book in the history of mathematics, a very influential book called the Elements. And Euclid's Elements really consists of 13 books bound into a single volume which elaborate the basics of what we today call Euclidean geometry. So two dimensional kind of planar geometry in particular. And it begins with what he calls definitions, which are things like a point is that which has no part, you know, just the basic pieces of geometry. A line is breadthless width. And then from, you know, establishing what a point is, what a line is, he goes on to connect these things and then he goes on to make angles, and then he goes on to make shapes. And what he begins to show is the relationships of lines and angles and the whole science of geometry, which is slowly elaborated over the course of Euclid's Elements. He also wrote other books less studied, but he wrote an Optics. An Optics is of course a book about the way we see, so the way our vision perceives shapes at a distance. This of course involves geometry. Right. If you've ever stared down a line with two rails and you see them converging at a point, but then you walk down the two rails and it turns out they don't converge, why don't they converge? So in optics, Euclid uses geometric phenomenon to talk about and elaborate a theory of the way that we see.
- [29:38]
D
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- [29:54]
A
And breathe.
- [29:55]
D
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- [30:06]
A
1-800-Contacts. What you made me think of there is. And then you mentioned Trump. And as we record this, I think south park, the American cartoon show, has just done a satirical episode on Donald Trump which has caused some stir. And in fact, late night comedians such as Stephen Colbert, who is the host of. In America, there are these late night television shows that have stars come on and talk about their films.
- [30:35]
B
I know, I've been on his show.
- [30:36]
A
Colbert was very, as you. Okay, you must know, he was very critical of Trump and he's just been taken off the air. Colbert has. And some people speculate that the kind of era in which you can make fun of politics in the way that he did has come to a kind.
- [30:51]
B
Of conclusion that would be tragic. I hope that's true.
- [30:53]
A
I agree, I agree. But this phenomenon also came up in the sort of 2000s, I think people use this word, woke, that such people didn't permit humor, they didn't permit laughter. In other words, their ideology was one that was completely devoid of humor. And I wonder if this is not true of ideology. Simply, you know, Marxism or something like this. One can't within the ideology, poke fun at the ideology and you get an author like George Orwell in Animal Farm who is just totally satirizing Marxism with talking animals. It's just not permitted. And so just to follow up on what you said, I do worry about the evacuation of humor from intellectual life because ideologies take hold so easily these days.
- [31:41]
B
Well, I quite agree. By the way, Tom Lehrer has just died and ought to mention that an outstanding satirist, greatly missed. Well, started to miss him, of course, years ago because he gave up doing it quite early in his life.
- [31:58]
A
Would you say that, Woodhouse, is that his legacy will be that of a man of letters. And I know you don't like to talk about him as a kind of literary titan. On the other hand, his corpus is very large. Oh, yes. So he is a man of letters.
- [32:13]
B
Oh, he's a man of letters. I mean, he was knighted right at the end of his life. Quite rightly so. Oh, he was superb. I mean, he was absolutely a master of the English language.
- [32:24]
A
Let me now turn to the connection between humor and some of your work. I wonder if you might engage in an intellectual exercise with me which is to evaluate the role of laughter in a godless world. In other words, does laughter mean something different to a non believer than it would to a believer? And why does God laugh? Would we laugh if there were a God? You see what I'm saying?
- [32:53]
B
I've only written two books about God, the God Delusion. I think it's a funny book. It's sometimes described as a strident book, but actually I like to think it's a funny book. And I get a lot of fun out of making fun of Religion, for instance, I've got a passage there. I'm trying to remember how it goes. Something about, oh, yes, one of the popes, I think it was the Polish pope, John Paul ii. There was an assassination attempt and he survived. The pope attributed his survival to intervention by the Virgin of Fatima. And so I said, well, presumably the Virgin of Medjugorje, the Virgin of this, that and the other. All the other virgins, There are about 15 of them were busy on other errands at the time. This satirizing the polytheistic nature of Roman Catholicism. The fact that not only do you pray to the saints, not only do you pray to the Virgin, you pray to the Virgin of Fatima, as opposed to the Virgin of this place or that place or that place. They seem to think of these different virgins. They're all Mary, but they pray to this one or that one. It was the Virgin of Fatima who guided the bullet. And I think I added, what a pity she didn't guide it, to miss him altogether, rather than just. Just to avoid his vital organs. So I like to use humor, and I think there's a lot of humor in that book.
- [34:37]
A
Is a world without a God a funny world or a tragic world? Isn't that a tragic insight? That there's no provident God to see us, to help us?
- [34:49]
B
Not at all.
- [34:49]
A
That's not funny. And would a world with a God somehow be a more joyful, humorous place? So I'm just trying to figure out the way the world works with respect to humor.
- [35:00]
B
I'm not sure whether humor is the right. I mean, I would find it a very cheerful. I do find it a very cheerful place. I don't find the idea of lack of a supernatural being a gloomy prospect at all.
- [35:15]
A
Say more about that. Why is that?
- [35:18]
B
Because the. Because the scientific understanding of the world is so marvelous. I mean, because we have, in the 21st century, we come close to understanding everything. We don't understand everything yet, but we come close to it. And that's a marvelous feeling, that before you die, you have the privilege of understanding why you were ever here in the first place.
- [35:41]
A
But don't you presume on that basis that reason doesn't evacuate the world of a certain mystery which does bring joy.
- [35:49]
B
It brings a superficial kind of joy. I mean, the joy of understanding is so much classier than that. It's really. The joy of mystery is a superficial, trivial, unworthy kind of joy.
- [36:07]
A
Well, it makes me. I mean, one can say that. Although when I read Immanuel Kant or something like That I can't help but be bored to tears by the thoroughgoing evaluation of the world. Or Hegel in purely rationalistic and relatively cold and bloodless terms. Whereas were I to read Homer and see the majestic blood of men standing forth, shouting to their gods in glory and courage, that's a world of life to me in the way that a rational account of the world doesn't seem to capture. And you say that's a superficial thing. Well, okay.
- [36:46]
B
I mean, you chose Kant and Hegel, but what about Darwin? What about Newton?
- [36:51]
A
The same. The paragons of reason. You know, these sorts of things.
- [36:54]
B
Oh, okay. Well, I think I disagree there. I mean, I think. What about Carl Sagan? Don't you find his sense of wonder as. Isn't that enticing?
- [37:07]
A
Absolutely, it is enticing. But what it's not is it doesn't capture the essence of some of the most important human longings. It's not clear to me that reason can stand on its own grounds and refute revelation without any. Without aid. Does that make sense?
- [37:26]
B
No.
- [37:26]
A
Yeah.
- [37:29]
B
I have no time for revelation. I don't know where it comes from. It doesn't come from anywhere. And reason, if it's based on science, if it's based on empirical observation and evidence, it's wonderful.
- [37:50]
A
Yeah.
- [37:50]
B
I mean, when you think about the things that science has done. I mean, think about detecting gravitational waves from a distant collision between two black holes. When you think about the fact that we understand why we exist. Darwinism. You think about managing to land a spacecraft on a comet, a mission to Pluto. These are. We call it spiritual, if you like. It's wonderful.
- [38:18]
A
Why do you turn to Uncle Fred in the springtime? Why do you turn to PG Wodehouse? What is it in you or in all of us that needs to be amused in the world in which we find ourselves?
- [38:29]
B
I don't know that laughter is pleasurable for some reason. I'm just the. I have a heightened sense of the absurd. And so a humorous look at the absurdity of life gives me pleasure.
- [38:48]
A
Is there an evolutionary explanation for why laughter is required for human life?
- [38:52]
B
No, I've given up on that kind of thing. You can't really do that kind. You can't do your Darwinism on human. On the details of human psychology like that. You can do it on major items of human psychology like sexuality and aggression and things like that. But when you come to things like humor, I find I'm out of my depth.
- [39:18]
A
Well, let's turn. I'm gonna do a lightning round. What's the best popular science book not written by you that you've really enjoyed?
- [39:24]
B
Carl Sagan the Demon Haunted World what's.
- [39:28]
A
The last book that changed your mind about something? Jeffrey West Scale which scientific theory, insight, discovery, fact do you wish got more attention than it does? Darwin's what's the most important scientific discovery of the past, say, hundred years? Watson Crick if you had to convert to a religion, which one would you convert to?
- [39:53]
B
I wouldn't.
- [39:54]
A
You wouldn't. And do you have thoughts on Keir Starmer? No. Richard Dawkins thank you for coming on Old School. And thank you for laughing with me about PG Wodehouse.
- [40:07]
B
Thank you very much.
- [40:11]
E
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