Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with Editor–In–Chief of UnHerd, Freddie Sayers. 06/03/2024
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and this is a podcast that attempts to get to the particular people behind the positions that shape our public conversations. Every week I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or public platform, and I ask them to share what is sacred to them, their deepest principles and the values that they try and live by. I’m digging in one sense for their ethics, their worldview, what they think a good life is about, although we might not always use those kinds of philosophical terms for them, to understand their story and their influences, and approach them no matter where they are coming from with curiosity, ideally empathy, not adversarially. I speak to a real range of people, different political perspectives, different metaphysical beliefs, different professions, in the hope that I and by extension, we, can build understanding about people who share our common life, but who may be very unlike ourselves.
So my encouragement is always not to just cherry pick the episodes that you already know, or guests that you’re going to be interested in. Once you’ve kind of oriented yourself, I would encourage you to also listen to the people that you might instinctively find more challenging. And notice that those that you find more challenging are often the people who you don’t have anything in common with or who you don’t aspire to be, people who don’t reflect us back at ourselves. I really do think listening across our differences is magic. It’s good for us as citizens, it’s good for our souls in my language. And as a bonus, I can promise you, it’s usually really interesting. People are so complex and unique. They are very rarely entirely what we expect them to be, almost every guest I have approached with a sense of prejudices and presuppositions, and they have surprised me, and that is a really enjoyable sensation.
I invite you to come on an adventure with me. And today’s adventure is with our guest, Freddie Sayers. Freddie is the editor in chief and CEO of UnHerd, which is an online news site and magazine if you’ve not come across it. He was previously editor in chief of YouGov, which is a major polling agency and the founder of Politics Home. We spoke about bunch of things as usual. We spoke about his sacred value of beauty, his unconventional path into political journalism via acting, mainly playing very royal roles, why he began to question some of the underlying logic and culture of liberalism, but now finds himself politically very difficult to describe. We spoke about questioning the wisdom of lockdowns and how you navigate being someone who wants to be unorthodox and questioning without letting that very unorthodoxy itself hardened into certainties and tribalism. There are some reflections from me at the end, as usual. I really hope you enjoy listening.
Freddie, we are going to start deep as we mean to go on, which is asking you about what is sacred to you. And you can take this in any direction you like, you can push back, you can reject the word. If guardrails are helpful, I think of it as a way of surfacing our deep values and principles, the things that we want to define our life, you’ve had a little bit of time, what’s bubbled up for you around that that word, that concept?
What is sacred to you? Freddie Sayers responds
Freddie Sayers
Well, I’m not very accustomed to answering the questions. In my most recent job, I’ve mainly been asking them, which is an easier task. So in preparation for this, it’s been an interesting process. I think it’s a good question that you ask, what are your sacred values? If I think back to my upbringing, and my childhood and what has sort of defined me, it’s a bit of a paradox because there was very little religion, in my upbringing, in my life. There was actually very little politics either, but it did feel like there was a lot that was sacred. We had a very big sense of the sacred in my family. The word which I’m about to use is easy to kind of miscast or misinterpret but I would say one of the top values that united with our family was beauty. We had a farmhouse in Sweden, my mother is Swedish, and although we weren’t really churchgoing people, I guess we were theoretically Christian, there was a sense of sacred around Christmas and Easter, the lighting of candles, the importance of a beautiful and sacred home, and the high ceremony of dinners and shared meals. The kind of emphasis that we put on nature and beauty, there was a great deal of wonder in my childhood, which was focused on this sense of the importance of the beauty and the wonder of life. Although we weren’t religious, I would say there was a great sense of a more than material. So yes, beauty. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that as a number one value from one of your customers, but that will probably be the first.
Elizabeth
No, but I’ve been waiting for it. I think a lot about truth and goodness and beauty. This sort of Aquinas way of thinking about God. It is really interesting how most people’s sacred cluster around truth or goodness.
Freddie Sayers
It’s a sort of unfashionable value, it sounds superficial to the modern ear, it’s almost a bit of an embarrassing word to use. It’s supposed to be the most subjective and it’s sort of mixed up with the ideas of taste and things like that, which I don’t think is what it’s about in the kind of deeper sense. I do think it is an important value.
Elizabeth
I did a whole Master’s in theology and the arts specifically because I felt like there was some kind of apologetic from beauty that we had missed. So I am not at all offended or surprised, but you’re right, it is not a common one to surface.
The early years: family debates and wooden clogs
Freddie Sayers
In my strange journey to doing what I do now, I had a moment after I left YouGov where I joined a Plato class. We did this weekly reading, I think it was 12 of us literally reading Plato line by line. We started with the symposium which is very much about beauty. I found that a very crystallising and important period, because for me, it felt very radical, that ideas and values could be considered completely real, rather than purely subjective. The good and the true and the beautiful are lone stars that are out there in the cosmos that we need to try to orient ourselves towards. I found this to be a very clarifying and important step in my journey. So yes, I would put beauty up there.
I’m going to throw one more at you to get this conversation going, if I could, which I don’t know if you’ve had either, which is conversation. If I’m thinking of my family and my life, as a younger person, we were always talking. We were very lively, this is a polite way of putting it you know, quite hot occasionally but always sort of sincere and engaged conversation. I have a nearly twin sister who is 11 months older than me so we born between two Christmases. We were so close that we almost could finish each other’s sentences and still can, and also both quite argumentative. It’s almost like having a sort of mirror reflection where you know what the opposing argument is going to be and you’re sort of three arguments ahead of each other. I have a wonderful half brother as well and my two parents, they are also very, very different. My father is a criminal QC, or was, so has very much a forensic way of thinking what your former guest Iain McGilchrist would call the left brain: focused, rational, logical. My mother is the exact opposite. She is extremely intuitive, much more interested in the widest possible perspective, the biggest ideas, the mystical. So we as a family kind of move between these two poles. It meant that our conversations were always interesting and always sort of evolving. There was no clear dogma. There wasn’t a clear sense of our family cosmology and everyone needs to fit into it. Everything was always up for negotiation and everything was moving. I think that I really have carried forward the sense that you need to talk things through to get at the truth, it can’t be laid down in a tablet.
Elizabeth
We know that you are comfortable with argument and conversation, but how else would you describe yourself? If you had if I had met you say, age nine? How would I report back on this little boy that I’d met?
Freddie Sayers
I think I was probably a complete monster, extremely precocious, probably quite pleased with myself. I’m good at talking, after all these years of preparation around the family dinner table, so very comfortable with adults. Probably quite spooky to adults, because I would sort of immediately engage them on adult topics. I probably don’t like the memory of myself very much age nine. Going to those London schools, I went to a private school in London, very cerebral, lots of banter, it was boys school. That sense of constantly talking your way through the day. Here I am still talking.
Elizabeth
Politics has been one of the threads in your very interesting journey. Did you have a kind of dawning political awakening, a sense of ideas that were becoming relevant to you or did that that come later?
Freddie Sayers
I think it came a lot later. I grew up in what is now called ‘The End of History.’ Famously, it wasn’t the end of history, history very much started again. But actually, I think he was on to something, which is that the 1990s 2000s era, even though it didn’t turn out to be like that, did feel like the many of the great questions had been settled. If you grew up in that era, like I did, it didn’t feel like you were in a mobile political moment, where things were potentially going to go wrong, it was sort of a done deal. I’m sure there were lots of people who are my age who had a different experience, but my experience of university as well, completely alien to what I read about today on university campuses. It was bizarrely unpolitical. Everyone was worried about all of the usual young things. I wasn’t involved in political movement at all. My sort of awakening, if that’s the right word, or radicalization as I sometimes jokingly referred to it as, was much later it was much more in the last 10 years to be honest.
Elizabeth
You came out of university and patching this chronology together is tricky because you’re very private person which I’m respecting but also pushing on. Modelling and acting, was that where you went after graduation?
Freddie Sayers
Modelling! I’m taking that as a compliment, but no, I never did any of that. I like that. I think I once was a hand model. At one point, there was a picture of my hands holding a Nintendo on bus stops in London. I’m not even sure how that happened. I did a little bit of childhood young person acting, very forgettable, I was hopeless. They kept giving me parts, which was really bad because I then did them and then watched myself and it was like, oh, no, this is not my gift to the world. There was then a TV film about the Musketeers in which I played King Louie the 14th. It was during my finals at university. So it was quite intense. But it filmed in Croatia. I would sort of waft around the palace fretting about things. But the costume people were very determined to follow the original Louis the 14th clothing. So they gave me three inch clogs, which he famously introduced as the high fashion because he was smaller. I’m six foot four and a half so when I came teetering on to set in my three inch clogs, the whole set went silent. I watched that back and thought, don’t do any more of this. So I left that behind. I talked about conversation and beauty at the start of this. And actually, all of the strange collection of things that I’ve done since have sort of veered between those two, there’s always been one foot in politics and media.
Elizabeth
I think at some point, what comes next is what I have done in my notes as the Clinton chapter. And you’re just going to have to explain how that occurred and what it was.
Hillary Clinton and the 2016 turning point
Freddie Sayers
I feel like 2016 when Hillary lost the second time, that came for me at the end of a year where the world started to really shift. I really began thinking differently about the world during that year, this began earlier than the November presidential election. It began like many of us here at the Brexit moment. I was at that time at YouGov, the polling company. All the evidence we were coming up with for Brexit was pretty much 50–50, yet the certainty in the media, in the financial markets, that Brexit wasn’t going to happen was so bizarre to me. It really just made me realise the power of groupthink the power of willful logic, there were extremely elaborate reasons given for why it was definitely not going to happen. I remember, there were articles in newspapers describing why one particular set of polls done by telephone was correct, as opposed to ones that were done on internet, all of which was just made up. It just wasn’t true.
Elizabeth
It’s the confabulation of trying to make what we were seeing line up with what we already thought.
Freddie Sayers
That’s right. Observing that and all of these people who were in charge of the world, believing things that were just so quickly shown to be untrue, and in fact, those people who were most educated and most sophisticated in their reasoning, were the ones who were most wrong. So I really began to question who’s right and who’s wrong, and who should you trust in these kinds of big discussions during that year, and then, of course, the 2016 November 2016 experience really finished it off. There again, everyone thought Hillary was going to win, including, of course, the Hillary campaign. The degree to which they believed the polls, they had extraordinary amounts of very sophisticated looking numbers all the time. We were getting daily polls from each state down to decimal points about how definitely it was going to go. It wasn’t right. So, for me, the relative emphasis I put on intuition and spidey senses over elaborate evidence of the kinds that people were relying on in 2016 shifted forever.
Elizabeth
You have described yourself as a liberal prior to that, and that had changed? Or was it more about sort of those authority structures and legitimacy structures for you?
Freddie Sayers
I still don’t describe myself politically, because it’s evolving. Before COVID–19, I was definitely interested in the set of ideas that are sometimes called post liberal. I think the critique that post liberal thinkers who come from the left and the right make of liberalism is an interesting and powerful one. In a way, like what we’ve just been talking about, liberalism has made inadequate account of those deeper intuitions and needs of people, whether they are tribe or nation or religion or purpose. So it’s sort of lost its way. But then the post liberal solutions offered, I don’t find it all convincing, and then my COVID experience, which happened soon after that was, was another big shift in the way that I saw the world. We should probably spend some time on that because that was a big deal for me and has definitely tilted me back in the direction of valuing freedom.
Elizabeth
I want to dig into that. UnHerd and what happened around 2020 and your thinking behind that, but before we get I just sort of want to know, what was the thread you were pulling on that got you there? Are you someone who felt a sense of vocation? Did you have a like, right, this is what I’m going do the world, I’m going to be involved in politics and journalism and public life and I’m going to do something good. Is it more, you know, opportunities arise and they sound interesting? What is motivating you when you’re making the decisions about what to be doing with your professional life?
Freddie Sayers
I’ve always been quite reactive. I definitely have inherited the more intuitive mode of making decisions. I respond to how I feel at different moments. In 2016 I had a very sudden feeling after that, that I didn’t want to be an observer during this momentous period, the restarting of history. I just felt there was so much misunderstanding. That sort of cross boy around the dinner table, when someone makes a crappy argument, you feel like you need to fight back on, it was really riled up in 2016. So many people talking such a lot of nonsense, the whole idea that you demonise half the population, which happened here during Brexit, and then happened again, in the US when Trump was elected, I thought was morally horrific, but also logically stupid. The idea that we meet people from the other half of the population every day, and they’re usually wonderful people. They’re not demons. I really felt like the world was going mad during that year and that people who could speak the language like I could have the Metropolitan elite, the liberal elite, needed to get activated to push back on some of the excesses. It was my own class that were most responsible for that mood, not the Brexit voters or the Trump voters. It was the response which was so over the top. I really felt I needed to fight against them. And that then led me to UnHerd.
COVID–19: Going against the grain
Elizabeth
When you took over it had been established for a few years, but it was it was nothing sort of like the reach that it is. What was the vision that you and Paul Marshall and others involved had for it? What were you trying to build?
Freddie Sayers
I think somewhere that could question some of these orthodoxies without going down the rabbit hole, and becoming either furious, reactionary, or conspiracy adjacent, or all of these things that are often misused, but sometimes quite real. It was to provide intelligent, thoughtful critiques of some of the over dominant orthodoxies was the impulse. For me, it was a completely the dream job, because that’s what I like to do anyway. So the contrarian in me was very attracted to it. It’s been a huge privilege and great fun to see it grow. We now have millions of readers, we have more readers in the US than the UK, we’ve now opened this club and restaurant attached in London, and God knows what the next steps will be. But it felt like it was the right thing at the right time. A lot of people like me were not happy with the public conversation from 2016 onwards and needed something better. I’m sure we don’t get everything right and there might be many people listening who have read something they don’t like on UnHerd, but we do our best to provide different perspectives.
Elizabeth
I’m fascinated. I spent some time at the BBC and was never very senior there. But what I was particularly fascinated by was the editorial decision making, these fine grained discerning judgments. How do I know I’m not good at getting swept up in groupthink? How do I know I’m not being contrarian for the sake of it? What have you used as you’re making those decisions? The COVID–19 thing came about and for a while, it felt like you were the only place that was offering different perspectives on lockdowns that was creating space for people who had queries about vaccines. It became a place where a lot of people clustered but you didn’t know that was coming. How did you navigate that editorially, philosophically, ethically? Where did you go looking for wisdom as you and the team sort to navigate your way through that?
Freddie Sayers
Well, editorially, we have a great editorial team. There’s a wonderful editor called Sally Chatterton, who is brilliant, and we collaborate very closely on every article that is published. The COVID–19 thing was my obsession. I suppose we all were obsessed with it when we weren’t allowed to leave our homes because of it. But the truth is, I just had a very strong reaction to the idea that suddenly we could shut down all of society and force people to remain in their homes on the basis of so many unknowns. I never doubted that it was wrong. We included all perspectives, and I really did my best when quizzing people who are either in favour of the measures or against them, to put the opposing arguments. But the whole way that decision was arrived at, to shut down, I think should be rightly studied for decades. I think it was the wrong decision. As we’ve talked about, I’m half Swedish and it didn’t happen in Sweden. I went to Sweden in May or June in 2020 and it was like a completely different universe. People were going about their business, of course there were cautions. And people weren’t exactly the same as normal, but it was an open normal society and the levels of sick people were in by no means higher.
So I just had this very strong sense that there was another way to do it. We had some interviews that launched the YouTube channel where we spoke to some Swedish scientists, very senior, convincing, good epidemiologists who were like, no one’s ever done this before locking people down. It’s not a scientific approach. There have been very small examples of shut downs in small parts of cities but no one’s ever tried to shut the whole world down. It’s an outrageously reckless, ambitious project. It’s never happened before. I don’t think in all of history, it’s never happened. And yet, in the very same tone, which was educated people, sneering at people who disagreed or questioned it as proletariat, peasants with pitchforks who didn’t understand the science and were a danger, was very much a continuation of that Brexit–y mood. I thought it was just completely outrageous. And not only on the evidence, which I now think we have quite a lot of. I have to share my killer statistic here: Sweden, after these three and a half years, the only country in Europe that never did a lockdown has at least either the lowest or second lowest excess death numbers of that three year period of all 28 countries in Europe. So for me, the evidence is there and people just aren’t accepting it.
In terms of why I reacted so strongly, it pushed all of those buttons of unfairness, high handedness, a deep misunderstanding to me about what was important about life because the logic of those lockdowns was that there was only one metric that was worthwhile. That was infections and deaths from COVID. Everything else in the vast tapestry of life receded in service of those metrics. So it was the sort of ultra technocrat view. It’s utilitarianism gone wild. My parents who are getting older, suddenly being stuck in their house for month after month, visibly diminishing, not being able to live their normal and active lives. Happily my parents have recovered from that, but I know that many people didn’t. The beauty, frankly, of life, the purpose of life was just ignored, in favour of a very strictly utilitarian calculus, which became tyrannical. I think it’s a real lesson of how thinking can go wrong, and how dangerous educated people can be when they have very narrow values.
Elizabeth
I started the podcast after 2016 because it felt like this thing that should have been a reasonably technical question about borders and governance and these things that only really nerds in European politics should be interested in, became something sacred. became about a clash of opposing visions and opposing values. And COVID–19 felt the same, I’m what’s sacred can play either a unifying, steadying rooting role in our lives or a dividing role. But looking back on that time and how triggered we were, we live in a small community house and we were navigating different risk tolerances within our house, different tribes in which we were embedded, some medical tribes, some other tribes. The ability to love each other across those disagreements, whilst potentially putting each other at risk, we were able to do it because we had already covenanted and committed together, and we were forced into the same physical space. But when you remove all those conditions, it became almost impossible to understand each other. Did you lose friends? Was there a kind of emotional component within your own tribes and your own relationships?
Freddie Sayers
There were definitely raised eyebrows, that I was asking all these questions. A lot of those people who were most critical have quietened down in the year subsequent as I think it’s become more acceptable over time to think that mistakes were made during that period. I think what you say about turning people against each other is exactly right. That’s why it was so scary, because by inserting this fear of each other, into the heart of the conversation, it sort of inverted what is our greatest superpower as a species, which is our ability to form societies and to work together to build relationships, into a negative, so that the very thing that was making us strong was turned into making us weak. It was a very frightening period, which I think a lot of people have not recovered from. The number of people who philosophically have changed their worldview, since those years 2020/2021 is very great. Something very fundamental in our societies was broken.
Elizabeth
I’m always nervous asking this to people who are journalists or journalists adjacent, because it’s very earnest. But I feel like you are, you can tolerate it. You said you didn’t want to stand on the sidelines, you wanted to be involved in the world that we built together, in our common life, in our public conversations. There is a sense in which these platforms, commentators and columnists are incepting ideas into people’s minds. We just take a lot of opinion secondhand because we haven’t got the RAM to research it and come to our own conclusions. What is it that you’re trying to do? What is a great opinions based news based media platform doing? What would you love to be able to say about UnHerd and the role it played in public life and public conversations?
Freddie Sayers
I think it wants to be about keeping the conversation open and useful. Specifically, this probably doesn’t apply to all media platforms, but our role I see as a corrective force, that when the group think, starts gaining momentum, and the stampede begins, we need to be there. Asking the difficult questions and bringing credible senior people in to make sure it’s socially and politically acceptable to ask those questions. I think that’s our role.
No media should be didactic. I think what we have at the moment, you mentioned a lot of these new media outlets, I think they are just as dangerous as the traditional ones I really do. So this is the way to get hated from both sides. I do feel like the quote unquote establishment, whether it’s the BBC or the New York Times, versus the now growing in influence anti establishment YouTube channels, new digital publications, Tucker Carlson on X, that is also now a force to be reckoned with. Although many of them started their journey, in a similar way to me rejecting the orthodoxy and wanting to keep the conversation open, they also have found solace with each other. They amplify each other’s voices. And you can see it hardening into a new dogma, where there are certain things you can’t say. And there is an element of loyalty. It’s a new herd, frankly, and it’s just as dangerous. I think a good media platform, certainly what we should be doing is constantly revisiting your priors, constantly trying to stay open minded, and do your very best not to just join a new gang.
Christian envy and an allergy to certainty
Elizabeth
One of the spaces I think UnHerd has been distinctive in the last few years is very explicit conversations about religion. It’s one of the reasons why I pitch to you and write for UnHerd, because it feels like I can be honest about that as part of my ethical framing as a way that I see the world. How does that come about? How does that play out personally for you? What interests/intuitions do you have about the moment that we’re in?
Freddie Sayers
A lot of our contributors are becoming Christian. I noticed this, a lot of people who were formally simply searching and were not Christian. Paul Kingsnorth is now quite famous example. Matthew Crawford, Nick Cave, someone we have done quite a lot with. Personally, I am not a Christian, I would be dishonest if I described myself as a Christian, I’m very envious of people who are. I don’t have a faith but I feel very defensive of people with religious belief for kind of the reasons that we’ve talked about, that outlawing it, or pouring scorn on it, or trying to tell people that it’s nonsense, and that we live in an internal, only mechanistic universe and believing anything else is absurd, I think is an outrageous. I will go to the wall in defense of people with religious beliefs. We recently had Richard Dawkins on the show, and we had a bit of a fallout over this. He describes himself as an ultra–Darwinian, in other words, he believes that almost everything about human nature and the body is selected into being by design of natural selection. I put to him, what about religious intuition, which is a near universal among human peoples? He sort of conceded that it might be useful at a population level. But of course, stopped short of saying he was going to suddenly tear up his life work and embrace religion. I think it’s so important to stay open minded and also to realise that these deep intuitions that people have maybe truer than the kind of surface technocrat explanations that we normally talk about in politics freely.
Elizabeth
Whenever someone says I’m not a Christian, but I really envy people who are, I always want to be like, you can be? What’s stopping you?
Freddie Sayers
I don’t know, I don’t sort of believe it, in the way that I would need to. I’m not actively trying to become a Christian either, I should say, I guess it is quite useful not to be in my particular position right now. I support it. I love church, I love all things about it. I think it’s foundational to our culture. I am envious of those people, I suppose I think perhaps they are more open than I am.
Elizabeth
Forgive me, if this is an illogical deduction, but if you’re envious of it, but you’re not actively trying, what is it that’s stopping you? Bear in mind I’m unoffendable, what’s stopping you? There are some good reasons not to pursue it. What do you think it was?
Freddie Sayers
I guess it’s my allergy to over overly confidently knowing the answers. I would also be repelled by it. I’m envious of those people who have that faculty and feel those things so deeply, but I also would be worried about being overly confident in the answers. I suppose I probably have a little bit of beef with Christianity in particular, in that I think it has led to some unhealthy habits, in what Tom Holland would argue is the kind of post Christian secular age. A lot of this strange ideas that are moving around are very much Christian inheritance. I think it has a bit of a case to answer on those grounds. I like my ever–evolving cosmology, as it is. So I think I’ll stay without the answers for now.
Elizabeth
And I will leave you there except to say, I don’t feel that different from you. I don’t feel certain, ever. I have been a Christian and then attempted atheist and then an agnostic and then a Christian. I’m going to get boring because I’m always quoting this, but I was on my Radio 3 program recently talking to Dan Dennett. I said, please read go back and read Pascal’s Wager, because it’s not what you think it is. Some people are becoming Christians with a lot of certainty and a sort of thunderclap. I think if you listen to the stories, often people say they’re no suddenly certain of this list of ten doctrines. I guess I’d say if what is stopping you is a worry that you have to be certain about it, you can just let that go. That’s not that’s not what it is. There is much room particularly in the mystical and the contemplative traditions, there’s a whole strand of theology called apophatic theology and negative theology. There’s loads of space for that.
Freddie Sayers
I think that’s why we get on so well Liz. We can carry on asking the questions together. You know, let’s talk again in 10 years on your podcast, when it’s still going and who knows where I’ll be.
Elizabeth
I really appreciate you reflecting with me today, thank you so much for being on the sacred Freddie says,
Freddie Sayers
Thanks, Liz. I enjoyed it.
Elizabeth’s reflections
Elizabeth
Interviewing interviewers is hard. People who are used to being the one asking the questions, not kind of searching their own mind and soul for what they think about a perspective is often a bit of a gear change. Freddie said to me, it was really sort of enjoyable but uncomfortable, to have the roles switched on him. I also think he is quite a private person. There’s not a lot about him online which is unusual for journalists, who are often not always pretty comfortable about talking about themselves, they’re sort of naturally communicators in that way. And when I meet someone, or I’m interviewing someone who I can sense just is temperamentally a bit more private, it’s a really interesting thing for me to navigate because this space is always supposed to be invitational. I think vulnerability is extraordinarily powerful, it helps us understand much better the sort of fragile complex humanity of someone that we’re listening to or meeting or watching or whatever the situation is, it’s one of the reasons I ask people about their childhood. If we’re coming to a guest, that we might not share their religious beliefs, or their political position, or their tribe, or whatever it is, we can sometimes come into that listening in quite a sort of defended position expecting to feel annoyed, with this low level threat reaction. Imagining someone as a child can’t help help us imagine them as slightly vulnerable, as someone who at least sometime in their life, someone owed care that we would have hoped to have been cared for. So there’s little things like that, where I’m trying to invite vulnerability in ways that feel, you know, not intrusive, not exploitative. Because demanding vulnerability is, I think, really a problem, not a loving way to approach an endeavour of trying to get to know someone at a deep level.
As I’ve reflected on this and talk to Freddie a bit around it, I think what it’s showed up for me is one of my prejudices. I know that because Freddie is often speaking about topics that often get labelled controversial, he’s actually experienced quite a lot of online abuse, trolling, hate attacks. I assume those things, bounce off people like him, in that ridiculous way we have where we think some people are more vulnerable than others, or some people are more woundable than others. In my case, my sort of personal set of prejudicial associations is that, very confident and articulate privately educated males might not mind about all that. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think that’s one of the many dehumanising tendencies, that our failure to treat each other with particularity and to see the particular person in front of us, not the set of associations that we bring into the conversation.
Beauty as a sacred value, I really love that it’s come up, I really have been waiting for it. We’ve had a few artists on and poets, fewer visual artists actually which we should correct. But no one I think has yet said beauty but I know that there are some very dedicated listeners who will correct me on that if I’m wrong. It’s fascinating to me that it comes from a political journalist. Again, expectations confounded and I think Freddy sounds like he’s got a sort of almost platonic philosophy. The good and the true and the beautiful I sort of lode stars that are out there in the cosmos as a real things you know, that we need to try and orient ourselves towards, just a beautiful thought provoking perspective. He spoke obviously about his family in which argument and conversation were really key very different parents. Iain McGilchrist came up again, and I would point you to our sister podcast Reading Our Times which has got two very useful explainers of his recent books. Freddie is someone who uses both sides of the brain and reflects both and doesn’t want to just shut down into one or the other.
As a child he was very confident, very articulate, bit of a monster as how he described himself and then this boy’s private school and I do try and ask about people’s schooling. And that’s complicated, because in the UK, we’re just completely obsessed with class. Wanting to delineate ourselves upwards or downwards, depending on who we’re speaking to. School is one of those real classed conversations in the UK. I have some very dear friends who, who went to kind of private and public schools and it’s a complicated thing in their identity, because we will drag all these associations in with it. But when I’m asking about private school, what I’m not trying to do is go, because you went to that kind of school, you’re like that. But instead, I asked myself, really, if I had been to that kind of school, what would I be like? Might I be different? And it’s this concept I come back to again and again about formation, what are the influences that have led to someone being where they are? If we had had those influences in that life, might we have ended up where they are? You know, what are the big ideas and the communities we’ve been part of, and the ideas that we’ve been exposed to that make up this complicated picture of a human being in the world. So that’s why I asked about school, not as a way of putting people in class boxes, I hope.
I love that when I hear people’s careers have taken this windy route, we don’t all have a sense of what it was we want to do to have a clearer sense of vocation. Often, we’re just trying to find the place where our gifts are useful, and where we can do something that feels interesting and hopefully meaningful. That’s really only happened maybe in the last 10/15 years. And then we got to UnHerd and some of the presuppositions that people had with each other, both around Brexit, and then around COVID. It left me so thoughtful, talking about COVID and vaccines, and all of those debates I can feel myself there’s resistance, because I’m like, oh, no, we had enough of that, let’s not go backwards to that. But I think Freddie’s right that it taught us something, it taught us a lot about ourselves, not great stuff, often. Some of our tendencies when we are destabilised, are not good. I don’t think anyone came out of it sort of smelling of roses, because uncertainty is so excruciating. There is so much we don’t know. Looking back on that time and the way we were all just working with the best information that we have but we were generally listening to different voices, trusting different people, the power of testimony, the power of kind of peer pressure, essentially adult peer pressure. Once we’ve made a decision, I think we so don’t want to be destabilised again into uncertainty that we just lock down. The temptation to demonise people that have come to a different decision, to harden into a tribal group around that decision, is so strong.
I didn’t end up in the same boat as Freddie at the time. I don’t know where I’d be now, I haven’t thought about it for a while. But I think that that desire to be someone who questions who says, wait, how much do we know here? And is that true? And what about all these other factors? I do think there’s something very beautiful and what Freddie said about what makes life meaningful is other people and time with other people. And the loss of that as profoundly dehumanising and whether you land on, that was worth it, or there was a shorter term greater good that required it. It really helped me I think, to hear that argument from him of the reasoning behind his disquiet at the time about lockdowns, so helpful.
Finally, the Christian curious, this comes up with guests a lot and actually Freddie sort of asked to talk about it, which was really good. I never want to trespass. I never want to push someone’s boundaries. It’s made me a terrible journalist in lots of ways. I’m not like a bloodhound for the scoop, really wanting to care for the person that’s in front of me. And that felt like a very honest thing to say, I really envy it but also I’m not actively pursuing it, because I’m scared that I might have to be certain on something. And also that lovely thing at the end of life, talk to me in 10 years. Giving each other and ourselves to space to change our mind on things and to move to just understand that as a part of life, and navigate what that means for all the places that we belong and the tribes and the people that we love. More of that more of that spaciousness.
Thank you so much for listening to The Sacred. My name Elizabeth Oldfield, our guest today was Freddie Sayers and our team are Dan Turner and Fiona Hanscombe were edited by Drew Hawley, and Our music is by Luke Stanley. The Sacred is a project of the think tank Theos, which I would really encourage you to go check out, visit our website, there are loads of amazing reports and events, there is a sister podcast called Reading Our Times, which is much more about the big books that are shaping this cultural moment by my wonderful colleague, Nick Spencer, and you might really value checking that out. If you want to get in touch with us, you can do that on all of our normal social media channels. You can find both The Sacred team and me on Instagram, Twitter, I have a sub stack called more fully alive, and I have a book coming out in May also called Fully Alive, which you could pre order now if you so wished. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you next time.
