Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with think–tanker Sunder Katwala. 20/03/2024
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and this is a podcast about the deep values of the people shaping our common life. Journalists, academics, politicians, actors, writers, policy makers, business people, faith leaders, campaigners, artists, all the people who are feeding into our cultural moment and therefore influencing us and the way we see the world. I want to get behind the positions and the perspectives to the particularity of each person, understand what has shaped them, what their worldview is, essentially. It’s not something many of us think much about, post–education and sometimes even then, but I think it’s vital for understanding ourselves, understanding each other and learning to live well alongside people who land in very different places than us, on religion, on politics or on anything else.
This week’s guest is Sunder Katwala. Sunder is the director of the think tank, British Future. He has worked on immigration, identity and a range of other issues. He was formerly General Secretary of the Fabian Society, which is another think tank, a Labour–leaning think tank. Before that, he was a journalist and a leader writer for The Observer. We spoke about growing up Irish Catholic, why he’s broadly optimistic about the trajectory around race and identity in the UK, and why football is so central to who he is. Really hope you enjoy listening. There are some reflections from me at the end.
Sunder, knowing a little bit about your childhood, I am intrigued by how this word is going to land with you. But maybe we can get on to that. I would like to know what is sacred to you. And you can take that in any direction you’d like, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything religious, it initially started as a question about people’s deep values and principles. But people respond very differently, when asked to reflect about what’s sacred in their life, what they have tried to live by. What bubbles up for you?
What’s sacred to you? Sunder Katwala responds
Sunder Katwala
I think I did hear it as a very religious word. I found that quite tricky, as well, to think about that. I certainly grew up in faith, rooted in faith, surrounded by faith. And so those would be the associations, but I’ve got a bit of a post–faith relationship with faith that I still recognise the importance of. I’ve got other faiths and identities around me as well. So moving away from that to ideas, values, and principles, it’s relatively tricky to articulate because it’s something about fairness, about the way you treat people, and so on, and what that ends up meaning as a practice or as an ethos.
I think fairness becomes quite a quite a relational value, as much as an abstract principle, because it is the way you treat people around you, in your family and your friends, in your professional career. I think you’ll end up having good relationships over sustained periods of time with people you’re doing things with. That is about the kinds of relationships you want to have and the basis on which you on which you have them.
I think the sort of ethos and principle that I’ve been increasingly trying to operate, is about a good faith engagement with people who aren’t in your group, in your tribe or in your team, even to the point of potential naivety, actually seeing how far good faith engagement can get you. I think it can get you a long way, and a surprisingly long way. I think that that kind of ethos of fairness involves treating people in good faith and seeing how you can get on, is the thing I’ve increasingly been interested in trying to do.
Elizabeth
Interesting. It’s making me think of a former guest called Satish Kumar, who walked from India to the great capitals of the world with no money and said, if I assumed people would be kind and hospitable to me, they were kind and hospitable to me. If I assumed that they would be hostile and abusive, they were. Naivete in some ways can be sort of protective. I found it a really challenging thing to think about, and it sounds like you’ve almost been experimenting with it. Is that right?
Sunder Katwala
I think you do it naturally. But also in a world of social media, and so on, you’re sort of doing it publicly and then people start accusing you of doing it too much. And then you think, am I? I’ve got tribes and groups but I’ve also become very interested in getting outside and beyond them, as well as within them. This is the only way that you can do that.
Elizabeth
Yes, one of the things I was reading about you said, ‘Sunder on Twitter is kind of measured and calm and reasonable, which makes him stick out like sore thumb.’ And it was a lovely thing, I think, a lovely testament. Let’s dig in a bit to where some of this might have come from, what were the big ideas in the air in your childhood? Political, religious, philosophical, probably implicit rather than explicit? What was in your sort of culture?
Growing up: Irish and cafeteria Catholicism
Sunder Katwala
Yeah, culture is a complicated idea. I was born in the north of England, in Yorkshire, but moved to the northwest of England by the time I was five or six. Both my parents had come to this country, my dad from India in his mid–20s and he qualified as a doctor, and my mother from Southern Ireland, from Cork, and she was a nurse. I was basically growing up Irish Catholic, and certainly the Irish Catholicism of my mother, trumped the Hinduism of my father such that my dad did convert to Catholicism, I think slightly on the ‘do you want to get married in the car park or get married at the altar’ kind of offer. He took us to church, we went to church every Sunday, we went to Catholic Primary School, Catholic Secondary School, at first. He took us to church every Sunday, and he was there with us. And if his mother and father came to visit, he would also be at the temple, or if we were in India. So he was able to shift between what essentially was a sort of Indian Hindu cultural identity that he didn’t give up by becoming a Catholic and to some extent, I think his Hinduism believed in that being possible as I think on the Catholic sides of things, it was much more that you would have to choose. We were in Cheshire, Ellesmere Port Cheshire in the northwest, it’s in the scouse sphere of influence. The Northwest English church is the Irish church. And so the Catholicism is much about the culture of Ireland, not the Irish community as such, but that is the culture. By the time I was 15 or 16, I was having my doubts about the Catholic Church, as you might do as a teenager, but I was becoming increasingly keen to sort of declare myself as Irish.
As a teenager, I wasn’t then at a Catholic school once we moved to the south of England, in Essex, and I was doing A–Level English Literature and nobody other than me can spot a Bible reference. It’s only when you come out of that world, where sort of faith and the culture that surrounds it is like the water that maybe it was a bit different to other people’s upbringing. I was an altar boy. If you were the smallest altar boy, you got to carry the baby Jesus to the manger on Midnight Mass, with the clanking incense and so on. The majesty of it I thought was very good. When I was 7, we went to stand on a window ledge and saw the Pope coming to Liverpool. I got confirmed as well. And then I think about a week or two later, I was like, I don’t really believe it. The way in which the church presented its choices to you about whether you were onside or offside, actually I couldn’t stick with actually as a sixteen year old.
Elizabeth
This always feels like a very private thing to ask. But prior to that, maybe when you were a child, do you remember having a sense of religious experience or a sense of God’s presence? What was before that you then lost a belief?
Sunder Katwala
I think by the time I was 15 or 16, philosophical doubt and skepticism seemed really important. It seemed like quite a big question. I think what’s interesting about that kind of upbringing is you believe it in an entirely unskeptical and undoubting way that it’s actually a very important, slightly weighty, somewhat scary kind of thing. By the time I’m a teenager, I’ve probably got quite a sort of Anglican sensibility, a church with a bit more pluralism in it would have been quite good.
I actually remember when we were getting confirmed, and the term of cafeteria Catholic was kind of presented to you as the kind of pejorative thing you couldn’t and shouldn’t be. It was incredibly arrogant to think that you could pick and choose. If you’re interested in the history of the church or the church in Ireland, the church was going through a very difficult time where it’s been absolutely socially and culturally dominant and it was just getting into tons of trouble with my generation. Obviously, a lot of people stay in a church by deciding of course, you can be a cafeteria Catholic. I think the fact that I was told that, you know, don’t think you can do that, that be incredibly arrogant was actually the thing that made you think, maybe not.
Elizabeth
Are there things you miss?
Sunder Katwala
I think this is why I think I would have been quite happy to be a high church Anglican, not too trendy. If you can go along to midnight mass, sing the hymns, nobody really asks you if you actually believe or not, that that might be quite an attractive offer. Or the ethos of a particular version of the Christian church, without actually necessarily the epistemological claims that it was that it was that it was making. Where the Catholic Church, I think very strongly is saying in this in this era, maybe it softens, the fact that they’ve impossible things to believe that’s the point, if you can’t believe impossible things then don’t sort of stick around and bother. So, in a way, I think the sort of optics ethos of it, is quite an important thing.
Elizabeth
I think it really depends on which Anglican church you go to, you’ll get a very different experience. Politics has been a big theme in your life. When did you come to a kind of consciousness of politics? And was that around a lot in your childhood?
Finding football and witnessing change
Sunder Katwala
No, it wasn’t. My dad would vote for Labour and then my mum wasn’t Labour so he would vote Tory for a bit and then me and my teenage brother switched him back. My mum grew up with the Daily Mail. She was very for a united Ireland. Certainly on my Irish family side, they thought the church could do no wrong. She was a Thatcherite as well. She said to me, Labour put the troops into Ireland. And I went and looked it all up and I said, well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. She thought Ireland shouldn’t be divided because God drew the boundaries in the sea.
Politics was very much secondary to me to sport and identity. So my main faith was football. Everton football club. Faith, Catholicism and football are very similar. When I’m 7 my best friend Andrew gets to go to a football match with his brother who supports Liverpool, they watch Liverpool and Everton and I don’t get to go and so I’m just going on for three years to my dad to like, you know, when am I going to a game. But I get to go at 10 or 11 and I absolutely love it. But my engagement in politics comes through being interested in football, interested in cricket, and interested in the history of who I am. By the time you’re a teenager people start asking you, why are you here? You’ve got to find out what the answer is.
I really love the atmosphere of football, I started going all the time. Nobody’s got any Asian or mixed race players at all and nobody notices. I don’t know if I noticed that Everton hadn’t got any black players, either, but they’re one of the late teams to get black players and occasionally play Arsenal or Aston Villa and they’ve got four or five black players. Liverpool signs John Barnes the England star player and suddenly the supporters in are chanting,
‘Everton are white, Everton are white.’ It’s a tribe, you know, I’m supporting them and I’m too far in. But that is a different kind of racism than the kind you get in the primary school ground. So that’s my introduction to anti–racism, is racism of that kind in football. This is the year of Hillsborough as well. Fans movements are starting, the things to get involved with if you’re 15. My dad is much more interested in cricket than football and he supports into India who are not very good at cricket at this time. When I’m 16, Norman Tebbit declares that if you want to fit in round here, you should support England, not India. I do support England by my supporting England has become a sort of bit of an endorsement of why Norman Tebbit doesn’t like my dad. I was just trying to you know, watch football and cricket. Suddenly you’re at the heart of the identity questions of the late 1980s. The chairman of Luton Town Football Club is, is a very strong right wing conservative MP. They were going to introduce a scheme where you have to have an identity card to watch football matches. So my very first political action is hawking around a petition at Southend United. In a very real way politics kind of turns up when I’m getting on with other stuff.
Elizabeth
Trace this for me because you’ve spoken really eloquently about the changes that happened from your childhood to your 20s. It sounds like when you were quite young racism felt quite close up.
Sunder Katwala
I think it’s much more the sort of overt public racism of the culture of the football stadiums that is very heated. I end up having two very big positive experiences of social change. One is catching the end of that really terrible period where in a way, football and the culture of football is going to be the absolutely worst place in society for inclusion, I see that absolutely transform between when I’m 14 and when I’m 20. All sorts of things happen in the culture, in the policing, in the law, and so on. But there’s an argument going on, you know, once you sign a black player, should you be putting the other players off with racist chants. By the time I’ve got a 10 year old daughter, and we’re off more to watch women’s football than men’s football, I’ll always believed the society transformed itself, for the better because I’m just on a completely different planet.
When I was a university student, and I remember going to see an England match, there was just a menace in the air. There’s a menace going on, around my young adult self, but I’m actually seeing it change. And I’m also involved with people who were talking about how it changes and making a change. And I had one other parallel experience that which is that I go to university. I studied PPE at Oxford. I wasn’t sure about applying to Oxford, I’ve got my scouse identity and I’m not sure if scousers should go to Oxford. I go to Jesus College, Oxford, which, I don’t know until I get there, identifies as Welsh. Every Welsh person for miles around is there. So I’ve always supported Wales in the Six Nations. And so my main regret now is not being Welsh, as a result of this sort of loss of lack of Welshness.
It is not the most diverse place, Oxford in the mid 90s. But also there’s a reasonable fringe of both international and British Asian students. Ethnic diversity in British public life now is very, very prominent, but back then there actually isn’t any at all. I’m 13, when we get the first post–war Black and Asian MPs, but only 6 out of 650. When I’m 18, there’s never been a black or Asian government minister in this country. However optimistic I am, I didn’t think I could really make it in politics. But I’m part of a cultural moment, when if you’re my generation, things are obviously opening up for people like me if they’ve got good degrees, as opposed to if they haven’t. I can’t persuade anybody born in this century of that argument. The higher expectations of people 20/30 years younger than me are essentially the product of the progress I experienced. But I experienced something they haven’t, which is that you can see and feel the change.
Elizabeth
We’re such story made creatures and the story that we think we’re living inside is so key for what we feel able to act in and how we understand. I was listening to Caitlin Moran about gender. And she said, for her generation of men, broadly, our generation of men, they had seen some of the terrible misogyny of the kind of 80s and 90s. When feminism came along, they were like, yeah, you know, fair enough. It’s probably time. But she was talking about teenage boys coming through now who’ve never lived through anything different, right? All they’ve received are messages about men that are largely negative and messages about women that you can do anything and, and they didn’t connect with what come before to see it as a corrective. They just see it as a standard. So that’s why we’re seeing this story emerging amongst young men of, it’s worse to be it’s worse to be a boy, because they’re living inside a completely different story than the generation above.
Listening to you gave me a similar sense of understanding of depending on the ideas that are live in your teens and 20s, you’re like, okay, what is real about the world, what is true about the world? It can change, it can’t change, it’s getting better, it’s getting worse. It can define our personalities.
Do you feel sort of largely still that you have faith that we are moving forward, that kind of things are getting better? And they’re getting better? Probably, I think, because people come through and go, this isn’t good enough and get angry and change things.
Generational change, conflict and cohesion
Sunder Katwala
That’s why I wrote the book, really. What I want to know is if I’m an optimist by experience about my society division, and how we get through it all, why are the rest of you going mad. My eldest daughter tells me that story about gender change but it’s from the opposite perspective as well, that I might be being a little bit optimistic that it always pays itself forward. It’s clear what happened on race and identity and contact is there’s just much closer relationships down two generations than there were two generations before, but unevenly spread. So if you grow up in a primary school, with just a norm of diversity, and you’ve navigated it, you haven’t adapted to it, and older people, I think, have to adapt to it.
What interests me I think about that gender norm point is that among my sort of wife’s family, mostly in Essex, mostly non graduate, when they see people in their 30s, with kids, they say that they think it’s really lovely, how much the men can do, like, have a relationship with the baby with the kid, etc. It wasn’t like that and it would have been nice. That was a new insight for me about seeing that progress. This is the group that were told to go to the pub while the birth is happening, they’ll be phoned up when they are born. We’re not in a generation where you sort of expect a round of applause if you change a nappy, you’re expected to change a nappy. They’re saying there’s an emotional warmth between dads and children that might have been relatively difficult for them to perform, given the roles and expectations that they were offered.
Elizabeth
We’re such ridiculous creatures, aren’t we? I’m just thinking how difficult it is for us to hold in our head, things have hugely changed for the better and some things still need to change more. Both things can’t be true, it just feels like there’s not a lot of cognitive space for, particularly in public.
Sunder Katwala
So much of this turns out to be generational. It’s generational in different ways depending on your experience of where you grew up. What is really going on between the generations on everything, but maybe especially on issues like race, is that the same changes have felt very fast and very slow to different people. They’re definitely fast changes to the Essex group that associated and identify with East London and say it’s changed an immense amount. And they’re proud of having adapted to the change, and therefore telling them we haven’t even started made it up, we didn’t even try just feels a bit offensive. And yet, if you are a young British born person in East London, you have got more opportunities and your grandparents, maybe we’re doing quite well, but the changes still been a bit slow, because we’re still talking about wouldn’t it be nice if we had equal opportunities, when you send in your job. In a way that that story about change and having to adapt to it just feels a bit behind the curve. I think a lot of these cultural identity arguments and who’s a woke person and who’s a dinosaur, are really about that, what are the expectations of the sort of emerging graduate cohort versus people a generation two generations older?
People are so capable of it. We have quite big generational rifts in our society, because of the progress we’ve made because progress we’ve made has been profound across generations, and pretty fast, and people have to adapt to it. But people don’t think we’ve got intergenerational rifts, because everyone has intergenerational relationships, and they just don’t perceive themselves as on the opposite side of their extended families. And so you end up with older people with quite socially conservative views about you know, how government has handled immigration, and whether it’s all got a bit woke these days with people working from home, you ended up with them telling you stories about how their parents were much more racist, but they got on with it, but they’re incredibly proud of their children and grandchildren, because their children just don’t see any of this and get on with it. There’s pride in a group of people who’ve got the views that you’re complaining about. Everybody tells you anecdotal stories about how they experienced these things. My father in law, changed his views about social issues quite a lot, because his daughter went to drama college in Edinburgh. He met people that were very, very gay and keen to let you know about it. And he was fine, because they’ve got names and faces.
Elizabeth
I’m very formed by the Christian non–violence tradition and reconciliation and the kind of adjacent thing about contact theory. If you can put and a name and a face in a story for someone, it’s much harder to hate them. And so deliberately interviewing people from a wide range of perspectives and just inviting listeners to go, let’s think about this person, as a person, before we get to their position. And by the time you get to their position, it’s easier to hear, because often it sort of makes sense, why they ended up where they are, like the life that they’ve lived and the influences that they’ve had. Would you put these major changes in society, really down to that, to contact theory to the more we, the more we mix ourselves up, the easier it is to betolerant or open or curious or empathetic towards people that aren’t like us?
Sunder Katwala
I think I think there’s a big common sense case for that doing a lot of the work. I mean, it seems to me that the shift on sexuality actually starts later and goes faster than the shift on race. And there’s an advantage once people who are gay feel that they could come out if they want to, or maybe they want to, maybe it’s not a massive dilemma, and if you’re somebody of faith, you could do it and so on. It’s obviously harder for some people than others at different times. But the interesting thing about that is that once it’s a social norm, rather than a brave thing to do, it will be distributed absolutely everywhere in society geographically by social class, and so on. And so lots of different people will just have the experience of how did they deal with that as a parent or as a uncle.
Contact by ethnic diversity, faith, diversity, etc, is more unevenly distributed by geography and by education. So you don’t have the same random seeding. The people who are keen on it will go and experience more of it and people who are less keen on the idea will retreat a bit more from it. And so actually, how we talk about these issues in media and television matter, quite a lot. If you take the British Jewish populations, 300,000 people or the black British population is 4% of the population. So these are people you’re going to meet on the television, in good ways and bad ways in sport, or in news events more than you’re going to meet them in real life. The confidence across the generations is stronger in the areas of high diversity for a long time. And it’s difficult for an area experiencing its first big moment of diversity and contact, that is disruptive. And it’s quite difficult to be 10 or 50 miles away from rapid change as well, because you’re seeing it happen, but you haven’t got the contact. And so if you’re looking in at East London, or Birmingham, and feeling it doesn’t feel like me anymore, you’re more worried about it, if you’re adjacent to it than if you’re actually in the oceans.
So I think I think there’s a lot of common sense to contact theory but we should then say the contact is unevenly spread, and that people who go to university meet, maybe get segregated by class, but they’re going to meet people of different geographies. If you’re Scottish, or Welsh, and you don’t go to university, your experience of like English people might be much, much less close than graduates from those countries.
Elizabeth
We going to get on to British Future, and How to be a Patriot in in a minute, but just want to fill in a bit of your biography. You left university and you were a journalist for a while at The Observer and other places. Then you were the General Secretary of the Fabian Society. And then you later went on to set up British Future, both of which are, broadly think tanks. We met because I used to run Theos, which is a think tank, and the conversation for people who were outside that world about what a think tank is and does, what does it for? What is it? What is your theory of what, in an ideal world, a think tank is adding to our common life? What should it be? What should it be doing in the public conversation?
Inclusive patriotism and British Future
Sunder Katwala
There very different kinds of think tanks. There are people who are experts, and very neutral, or people who are very political. British Future wants to be a different kind of think tank, because I wanted to work out to reshape the public conversation about the issues that people really find difficult. And then it isn’t about the quality of your research as to, what are the employment rates about different groups, it’s about what drives that, what drives that public conversation.
British Futures has a very vanilla motherhood and apple pie idea, which is that we’d like a confident, welcoming, inclusive, fair society. And we’d like more people to find that common ground. But how we will do that if we will anything that people find difficult, divisive, polarising, we’ll find the sharpest edges. So it was it was very much about talking about immigration to people who were pretty worried about it, skeptical, on the fence or against it in a way that could get you somewhere. A lot of other people who thought that something like this should exist, were interested in a broader conversation about immigration, it became it British Future, because my view was that if you wanted to talk about whether it’s immigration, or race, or integration, or faith minorities or diversity, then in people’s heads, everything is mixed up, you’ve either got confidence in the future of your society, or you haven’t. Are we still a society anymore? If we’re changing so fast, or if we’re not changed fast enough, that you have talk about whatever people want to talk about, and then ask whether or not we can find common ground on the place that find it quite difficult.
We’ve got a culture in Britain, we’ve got a culture that is naturally a bit avoidant of difficult issues. And that has that as a value in it, one of the reasons we’ve taken some of the heat out of Brexit, unlike what the Americans have done since Trump, is that we haven’t liked the experience of ourselves as more polarised more divided than we thought. We’re saying actually, there’s a good story to tell about our society, but it’s actually quite fragile. It’s quite anxious. It’s quite fragmented. If we don’t get to those words, how do you shape a public conversation? If you want to shake the public conversation, you’ve got to find the moments frames where the identity conversation is on and do something useful with them.
Elizabeth
And what have you learnt about how it is possible to find common ground on some of these issues that make people most tense?
Sunder Katwala
I become more confident, the more you the more you do it. We do qualitative things where we just try and get people to talk, giving people permission to talk about things they’re not sure if they can talk about is. I have a little experiment where we have a discussion with people who think free speech is kind of over or being closed down about what that’s like, where they then have to pick the topic and are like, oh, did we pick trans rights? But then, 90 minutes later, they’re like, oh, you know, we should pat ourselves on the back a bit. I wish I could just find someone I really disagreed with about this now. There’s a cathartic reassurance, if you let people do it, we don’t have a lot of spaces for a lot of confidence. While we’re protecting the boundaries, we should make sure that people get the space to speak, you’d need quite a lot of confidence to take that on. Because there’s a lot of risk to doing that. I do get more confident when we do it. But the problem of the culture we’ve got is, I think 75% of people across all groups have a sort of ethos of, they’d like it to be like this, the politicians behave better, the internet calms down, and they will model those behaviours themselves, on the bus, on the train, in the street, in the pub, sometimes not saying things that they could have said, because they don’t want to, but the public culture is driven by people who very much got their axe to grind and very legitimate axe to grind. People know what they would do in the real world, but don’t know how to translate that into the media and online culture. That is one of the problems.
Elizabeth
And your book is called How to be a Patriot. And one of the things you talk about is progressive patriotism and patriotism that can unite and challenging this idea that patriotism is sort of inherently exclusive or excluding. Could you tell me more about how that your idea developing?
Sunder Katwala
I’m quite patriotic about my own country, I wouldn’t have called it that when I was 15. But actually, British people, especially people from a Commonwealth background, who are minorities, whenever they’ve been rejected, they’ve doubled down on it. The Windrush generation did that. I think British Muslims have done that. If you ask why I’m here, learn your own history. Actually, there aren’t many minority groups in Europe who have such a stake on the common culture. Progressive patriotism I’m not that keen on, inclusive patriotism instead. Because progressive patriotism is a way of saying to the left, watch out the far right are around. The progressive should, if the progressives can, find things they’re proud of, in our history, to campaign for change. We are trying to respect the conservative traditions of patriotism, if they want to accept and include people who want to join them, and finding the moments of change, when we disrupt our own society to campaign for its change. And that’s part of part of who we are.
But we actually learn the approach we come to take from our history, and it’s different, it’s a bit different here than in France as to exactly where we ended up because of how we did it. So if patriotism becomes too politicised in Scotland, on two sides in Northern Ireland, around Brexit, then actually we will lose the ability to do this. Where Britain is doing a little bit better than America, and to some extent France is, America is so deeply divided, not just by politics, but by the way politics interacts with faith, and democracy and identity and geography, that if I know a thing about you, the identities all get stacked up. If I know what you think about climate change, I can guess what you think about abortion, if I know what you think about abortion, I can guess if you’ve taken the vaccine. And if I see you wearing a face mask, I know how you voted in the presidential election. You need to not let that happen in a culture that’s got drivers that’s got drivers to doing that. Britain actually has got several things, the National Health Service, remembrance traditions, the sports teams. There are lots of moments where you can say it’s quite good that that quite big argument doesn’t define us in entirely.
Elizabeth
Sunder Katwala, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Sunder Katwala
Thanks very much.
Reflections from Elizabeth
Elizabeth
Well, just state the obvious thing that Sunder in his very presentation is helpful for challenging my cognitive shorthands. You know, when you see someone like Sunder with Sunder’s name, and he said this himself, the immediate association you don’t have is Irish Catholic. And so it was really lovely to hear about that childhood and that some of the blessings and the complexities of that, it was such a sweet thing to be like, I really wanted to be Irish, a strong identification with Ireland because of the tribe that he bought up in, in the northeast of England. And again, I’m just forced to notice these assumptions that I have and be forced into awareness of my confirmation bias and wonder how often I’ve kind of looked at people as I walked down the street or run my name down a list of names, whether it’s a name that it seems like the origin is in a different language or a name that’s double barreled or all these short hands and these associations that we have and just, I want to be able to be the kind of person who go just pause a minute, like that’s possibly useful data or it’s possibly not. Wait and see, look at the person that’s in front of you in all their particularity.
Fairness, that’s come up a bit in the series. Fairness and good faith to the point of naivete and I think there’s something profound there about that posture. Expectations matter. I’ve been writing about this recently, when we expect good faith from people, when we expect respect from people, when we expect that people are changeable and persuadable, it’s not that we will always be right, but I think we will more often receive that back from them than if we had come with a set of negative associations. When I interviewed Satish Kumar in our previous series, he said something similar, he went around the world, relying on the kindness of strangers and received it. And I did say, you know, this all sounds like motherhood and apple pie. It really sets off my sort of cynicism trigger. But I think it might be true. I certainly want to experiment with it a bit more myself.
It was really interesting listening to him talk about the Catholicism in his childhood and how being given this vision of a certain kind of Catholicism versus none was not helpful for him that he was told, you know, you can’t be a Catholic and I think he thought well, therefore I can’t be any kind of Catholic at all. And how often no matter what kind of tradition you’re raised in, I think many people have these moments of thinking, well, okay, now I have questions, I’m trying to work out if this is for me, I’m trying to work out where my place is in this tradition, in this tribe, in this background. And if we’re not met with enough grace and patience and empathy and space to work it out for ourselves and ask those questions, it’s very easy for it to just feel like a place we don’t belong anymore, as it has happened with Sunder.
I pressed him a little bit and this always feels like nosiness akin to asking about someone’s sex life about the internal experience of his religion and he didn’t really go there. I think it revealed to me one of my prejudice and presumptions and because my faith story began with an ecstatic experience and is very internal and emotional. I project that onto other people. I assume that’s true of lots of other people, but I think my faith story was about coming sort of inside building outwards. But I think for a lot of people that the containers, the structures, the rituals, the rhythm, the outside is, is the heart of it. Charles Moore said this to me, various of the guests along the years have said this. And it’s another way I need to acknowledge that my experience is not everyone’s experience. It’s not that mine is right and other people’s are wrong. So I have to keep saying to myself, upsettingly, I will my whole life.
I think Sunder’s story is the definition of the personal is political. He is now a political person involved in politics, policy, political journalism his whole life because he loved football, and didn’t know if he had a place there because of the colour of his skin. It was really helpful to hear him narrate that story of, I have seen change happen. I have seen change happen in my lifetime around football. I’ve seen change happen in my lifetime around who is represented in politics. And this is this week, there’s this big spat about race and Rishi Sunak and whether him being PM proves that Britain’s not racist. Sunder made me go, I think we probably do need to acknowledge that having a brown skin Prime Minister wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago. And therefore it is progress. And it doesn’t mean that racism doesn’t exist. And again and again, this need to hold together two true things and accept the world in all its complexity. That doesn’t actually come at all naturally to us. I was thinking about progress and whether it’s exactly the rage of a rising generation at the state of the world as they find it that helps us move forward. Yes, we need more change, but look how far we’ve come. The emphasis on what still needs to change that drives us forwards. I’m generally not a very angry person or rage filled and it’s challenging me to think actually maybe it is rage and discontent at the state of the world that helps us be people who can work for justice. Certainly I see that as in line with lots of strands in my tradition. But yeah, maybe we need both. Maybe we need the sort of elder saying, look how far we’ve come, change is possible. And younger people, either younger in age or in perspective, saying no, there is more.
We mentioned contact theory a little bit. Contact theory is just one of those fancy academic names for something that is incredibly common sense intuitively, which is that if we spend time around people from a particular group or tribe or race or language or sexual orientation, whatever it is, prejudice goes down. We feel less hostile towards them. We are less likely to accept misinformation about them. It just allows us to be open to them as human beings who we want to live amongst. Sunder’s really interesting point was about sexuality that it’s possible that change around changing attitudes around sexuality have happened faster because queer people of all stripes are more evenly distributed across the population. Whereas people of colour tend for lots of historic economic social reasons to be concentrated in urban centres and therefore more people have someone who is LGBTQI+ in their networks on average than maybe white British people have people of colour. That was interesting to me as a thesis.
Finally, listening to Sunder, honestly, I was reminded of how much I am part of the problem because sometimes what I wanted to say back was, well, Sunder, that’s too nuanced. That’s too reasonable. Because I, like all of us, am programmed to seek extreme views and novelty, my brain is looking for, what’s something dressed up in a way I’ve not heard it before or, what’s extreme, what’s spiky, what’s standing out to me. And Sunder’s wisdom is precisely resisting that and saying, I think you’ll find it’s more complicated than that. And I think, as Sunder is saying that, about identity and about immigration and about British values and about patriotism. It’s complex. It’s nuanced. I want to raise my ability to listen to complex and nuanced things without my brain going off seeking the next tweet, right? Or shiny reel on social media or just something to distract myself. I want to have the attention span to literally attend to the world in all its complexity and all its variousness. It’s not enemy and friend, right and wrong, black and white, things are getting better, things are getting worse. And I want to resist needing one simple story. Sunder’s helped me with that today. I hope it’s helped you too.
Thank you so much for listening to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and our production team are Daniel Turner and Fiona Hanscombe. We are edited by Drew Hawley and our music is by Luke Stanley. Please go and check out the work of Theos. The Sacred is a project of the think tank Theos and there’s loads of brilliant research and events and commentary going on within the wider team. You can find me on social media, on Twitter and on Instagram, you’ll be able to find me. I also have a sub stack called morefullyalive.substack.com and I love it when you’re in touch, so does the whole team. So reach out to us on social media or on our email. Tell us what you thought, recommend a guest, ask a question. Until next time, I look forward to speaking to you then.
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