Academy of Ideas

#PodcastofIdeas: the Brexit debate and public-health campaigns

Claire Fox and David Bowden join Rob Lyons to discuss the debate about Brexit so far. What does it reveal about attitudes to democracy today and the snobbery of many calling for the UK to stay in the EU? Is the media too obsessed with Westminster politics rather than the serious issues involved? What will really change if Britain votes to leave? 
The team also discussed the new public health campaign, 'One You' - why are government lecturing people to change their bad habits?

#BattleFest: Reassessing paternalism: is autonomy a myth?

A keynote from the Battle of Ideas 2016
‘If I have a book to serve as my
understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to
determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all.’ Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (1784)
When One Direction announced they were splitting up, child psychologists
offered parents of grieving tweenies advice on how to console their
offspring. In the same month, parents were also told by researchers how
long they should read to their children each day. Business Secretary
Sajid Javid has ordered university heads to establish a taskforce to
take on sexist ‘lad culture’ and guide students to conduct their
interpersonal relations in line with enlightened mores. Of course, not
everyone follows expert advice on any of the above. Policy advisers and
academic experts frequently complain about those who refuse to
acknowledge their wisdom and carry on smoking, drinking sugary pop,
being laddish. Cutting-edge techniques of behavioural psychology are
being marshalled to deal with this problem. The UK’s Behavioural
Insights Team, now a private company, has quadrupled in size since it
was spun out of government in 2014. It is now working for the World Bank
and the UN, while ‘nudge’ teams are being established in Australia,
Singapore, Germany and the US.
The ubiquity of nudge heralds a new renaissance for unapologetic
paternalism. But where does that leave the great Enlightenment
breakthrough, the idea that individuals should be self-determining and
capable of making their own choices? Kant’s description of ‘mankind’s
exit from his self-incurred immaturity’ seems strangely at odds with
today’s enthusiasm for paternalistic intervention. For Kant, the outcome
of any particular choice was less important than the cultivation of
moral autonomy. The Enlightenment idea was that we should stop
‘outsourcing’ decisions about how to live to external agencies, whether
the church, the monarchy, or some natural order. Today, though, new
forms of authority have taken their place, leaving us just as childlike
in relation to the new experts.
Sceptics about the idea of autonomy suggest breakthroughs in
neuroscience have revealed we are less rational than Enlightenment
thinkers suggested. They argue it is wrong for strong-willed individuals
to run rough-shod over vulnerable groups with less power. In a complex
world of multiple choices, what is wrong with people seeking help to
make informed decisions? Is autonomy really undermined if students themselves
demand university authorities provide safe spaces, issue trigger
warnings on course materials, make lessons in consent compulsory? If we
are nudged into the good life, what harm is done? Should we grow up and
accept new paternalism or does this mean sacrificing self-dominion and
consigning ourselves to a life of permanent dependence? Is individual
autonomy an outdated myth?








Speakers




Dr Tim Black

books and essays editor, spiked




Dr Katerina Deligiorgi

reader in philosophy, University of Sussex; author, The Scope of Autonomy




Dr Daniel Glaser

director, Science Gallery London, King's College London




Professor Mike Kelly

senior visiting fellow, Behaviour and Health Research Unit,
Institute of Public Health, University of Cambridge; researcher in nudge
theory and choice architecture




Georgios Varouxakis

professor of the history of political thought, Queen Mary University of London; author, Mill on Nationality



Chair



Claire Fox

director, Institute of Ideas; panellist, BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze

#PodcastOfIdeas: Free Speech at Manchester University

Student Elrica Degirmen on her fight for free speech on campus

In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas Rob Lyons speaks to
Elrica Degirmen who is leading the fight for free speech at the
University of Manchester, and is currently running for election to the
Student Union on a free speech platform. 

#PodcastofIdeas: Martin Durkin on Brexit

The polemical filmmaker talks about his crowdfunded documentary making the case for leaving the EU.

With the date for the UK’s referendum on membership of the EU
now set for 23 June, Rob Lyons speaks to filmmaker Martin Durkin about
his forthcoming feature-length documentary, Brexit The Movie, which sets out the case for leaving the European Union and it’s anti-democratic technocracy behind.
You can find out more about Brexit The Movie and contribute to the Kickstarter fund here. Donations close on Wednesday 2 March.

#PodcastofIdeas: Gravitational Waves

Physics teacher and communicator Gareth Sturdy discusses a major scientific discovery.
Earlier this month, scientists confirmed the detection of
gravitational waves, confirming an important conclusion from Albert
Einstein’s work. But what are gravitational waves and what does their
detection mean for our understanding of the universe?
In this podcast, Gareth Sturdy from The Physics Factory talks to Rob
Lyons about space-time, the Big Bang and the on-going debates in physics
between quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

Book Launch: Frank Furedi on the Power of Reading - from Socrates to Twitter

Podcast: Frank Furedi discusses his new book in conversation with Russell Celyn Jones.
Have we forgotten how to read well? Is there a tendency to reduce reading to a minimalist set of functional skills? Or is reading over-fetishised as a signifier of civil and enlightened society? In The Power of Reading, Frank Furedi addresses twenty-first-century anxieties about the future of reading. He takes a wide-ranging historical approach to examining the changing meanings attributed to the act of reading. From ancient Rome to contemporary society, his book focuses on the relationship between reading and social discourses about morality and culture. He questions key contemporary beliefs such as that the internet damages our ability to digest information and that boys don’t read, and argues for the art of reading, not as a mechanism to moral good or social and economic advancement, but as a humanist pursuit.
In this podcast, recorded at the launch of the book earlier this month, Furedi delivers a talk on reading followed by a discussion of the book with Russell Celyn Jones.
SPEAKER
Frank Furedisociologist and social commentator; former professor of sociology, University of Kent in Canterbury; author of numerous books, including Authority: A Sociological History, On Tolerance and Wasted: Why Education Is Not Educating.
CHAIR
Russell Celyn Jonesprofessor of creative writing, Birkbeck, University of London; prize-winning novelist and short-story writer; book reviewer, The Times; Man Booker Prize judge.

#PodcastOfIdeas: Brexit, US election and public health naggers

Listen to the team discuss Brexit, the US presidential election and public-health naggers.
In this edition of the Podcast of Ideas, Rob Lyons, Claire Fox
and David Bowden discuss the lacklustre start to the EU referendum
debate and how the lack of cohesion in the pro-Brexit camp doesn’t bode
well for the campaign ahead. In the US, politics is also in disarray,
with anti-establishment candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both
narrowly missing out on winning their respective caucuses in Iowa,
signalling a crisis for both the Republicans and Democrats. The team
also discuss the latest killjoy advice from the UK’s most senior doctor,
Dame Sally Davies, who believes that women should ask themselves
whether they want to raise their risk of breast cancer every time
they’re tempted by a glass of wine. 

#BattleFest2015: From literature to Twitter - the death of the reader?

From the Battle of Ideas 2015When Roland Barthes infamously declared ‘the
death of the author’ in 1967, he also intended it as a celebration of
‘the birth of the reader’. And while literacy campaigners continue to
fight the Reading Wars over literacy rates, by most measures reading is
in a healthier state than ever. Polls indicate the number of Americans
reading books has doubled since the 1950s, and reading is increasing
among under-30s, while sales of printed books are proving remarkably
robust in competition with e-books. The announcement that Harper Lee
would be publishing her sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird generated
a storm of international media interest, as did Mark Zuckerberg’s
announcement that he was launching his own online book club with 31
million members. Meanwhile, that once-seemingly doomed literary form,
the essay, seems to have enjoyed a resurgence, as new media embraces the
‘long-read’ and serious literary journals and small publishers continue
to thrive rather than face extinction online.
Nonetheless, many others share Philip Roth’s concern over the
long-term health of ‘people who read seriously and consistently’. He
warned that ‘every year 70 readers die, and only two are replaced’.
Perhaps the stress should be on reading ‘seriously’: young people may be
reading more than before, but by far the largest spike comes from young
adult fiction, with no strong evidence they are moving on to more
serious material. Moreover, adult society seems increasingly ambivalent
about drawing the kind of sharp divisions between the nineteenth
century’s ‘men of letters’ and the ‘unlettered’, though a special type
of scorn seems to be reserved for the term ‘tabloid reader’. At the
same, where reading was once closely associated with liberation and
dangerous subversion – the prosecuting QC during the court case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover
famously asked whether the jury would tolerate ‘your wife or servant’
reading such a text - increasingly university students demand the right
not to read books that come with a real or imagined ‘trigger warning’.
Is the twenty-first-century reader facing a crisis of cultural
confidence like that of the author in the twentieth? Has the legacy of
the millennial Reading Wars been that we focus too much on reading as a
technical skill rather than on what we read? Can we still appeal to an
ideal of ‘the reading public’, or is the reality one of many discrete
audiences with only occasionally overlapping tastes? Is the digital age
undermining erudition or broadening our horizons? Is society losing the
ability to read serious and difficult literature, or are we simply
becoming more selective and discerning?







Speakers




Teresa Cremin
professor of education (literacy), Open University; trustee, UK Literacy Association; board member, Booktrust




Professor Frank Furedi
sociologist and social commentator; author, Power of Reading: from Socrates to Twitter, Politics of Fear, On Tolerance and Authority: a sociological history




Sam Leith
literary editor, Spectator; judge, Man Booker Prize 2015




Laurence Scott
lecturer in English and creative writing, Arcadia University; author, The Four-Dimensional Human: ways of being in the digital world (winner of Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for 2014)


Chair



David Bowden
associate director, Institute of Ideas