the winner of the orwell prize of journalism has authored nine books including almost half prices, a world turned upside down and her new release guardian angel. .. >> guest: and, you know, this is just silly. life's much more complicated than that. most people are neither right, nor left, they're just ordinary folk who are getting on with leving their -- living their life in the best way they can and who see the world as it is.

and what i've done for the last quarter of a century is as ali journalist tell it as i see it d to bone which means as a journalist, you know, i was trained to look at the facts, look at the evidence, arrive at a conclusion, tell people my conclusion, tell people the facts, tell people my conclusion. and, you know, quite a lot of people today who kind of start the other way around. they start with a conclusion, and they say let's make the facts fit the conclusion. and from my work as a journalist, i know there's a lod of people out there in the kindo of sensible center, as i like to think of them, who are completely plugged into reality. completely pumped into reality. what are these people telling us? well, so that is part of it.

people tend to but that interdiction has are you left or right? i am neither. >> host: you use of the term follow the all of the evidence in their last two books. >> guest: that is right. sometimes it takes us into places that are uncomfortable. if rightness or perplexes or whatever, but i believe that's what you have to start with. he don't pretend that things are not as they are. you don't try to remake reality is what you think that it should be. and then you tell the truth about it and you reach a conclusion about it. that is what i have always tried to do. >> host: when did you start on the political sector? >> guest: welcome i started my

professional life as a local journalist just kind of out of nowhere. but i came from a modest type of background, there were people on all sorts of the spectrum. the world is divided into this common this was part of it. then i had a fairly conventional experience. in the very early 1970s. i had very long while you're at a the time. and i adopted a kind of attitude that i thought, i never thought

of myself as left-wing. i thought of myself as a middle-of-the-road liberal, kind of middle road, and wanted to make a better world come out wanting to stop being vulnerable and so on. and i went to work for the newspaper that is the very heart of the left-wing media in britain. it worked for about 20 years. what happened at that time i was working for the guardian, possibly because i was working at "the guardian", i still believe in standing up for their role in societies and making a better world and trying to improve the lives of my fellow human beings. but when i came to realize and

what i came to realize when i was working there, was that people who were on my side are not concerned with bettering the lives of their fellow human beings but themselves they were concerned for themselves and thought of themselves as being virtuous and wife. when i realized they were on the other side, they had intolerances despite what they said and they didn't actually care about the people responsible for this. the little people. that is when i realized that we were on a different side of things. as i said, i still think that i believe in things i the things i did believe in. what changed for me is that i

came to believe that the people who are on my side when on my side and it was rather different from what i had originally thought it would be. >> host: your book transcends just published today to my my site right? >> yes, that is correct. they are either guilty about what they're doing because they know what is wrong, or else at some level, at least, they know that there is a position. >> guest: is on the left side of politics. i'm not sure it's quite the same in the united states. but it is the extreme aggression with which they can.political discussions. they don't have an argument. they don't say to me, okay your

argument is wrong and this is why it is wrong. can have that discussion at all. the process is to shut down the argument and shut down the person that they are disagreeing with. it is to tell other people, she is really dangerous, she is really horrible. so we can't actually have an exception from the left. so i have been at this for quite a long time. and it seems to me the reason that people want to shut down a debate before it even starts is because if they were confident, then we would have a civilized collegiate argument. i would say something, you would disagree, but we would actually

have exchanging of our viewers. it seems to be over the years what they are frightened of is that they will lead the argument. they don't have the confidence of their own convictions. i find that very curious. it means that i look at them quite differently as a result. because it is more defensive end we shut down the argument in case they lose it. one might conclude this and what their argument is actually built upon. >> host: in your book, "the world turned upside down: the global battle over god, truth, and power.", you write about the war in iraq, israel, and science

and what they have in common. not a lot, you might say, but they are involved with those who purport to be unchallenged but are in fact ideologies in which evidence is twisted and distorted and the support includes this governing idea. >> guest: the idea that we are living in this world of objective truth has been replaced by ideology. we are in a postmodern age. what that means is sometimes there are objective truths. if you think there is such a big thing, you're not very clever. you say this is the case. i said, no, it is not. but if there are things that are

suggestible to the truth than lies. what has come and is this kind of power. the noticing of truth, everything is relative. i'm going to show you that my view of the world is going to win win over your view of the world. it is a power struggle. all of these ideologies will be seen as though there is nothing that can't be explained by ball

evidence. nothing beyond the material world. anything that matters is the greatest number and therefore there is no intrinsic value in human life is what they believe. but people are generally happy. there's a lot of evidence to be more of today's conservative environment -- environmentalism. which says we have man-made global warfare. and you know, there is a bunch of evidence that says that is not necessarily true.

but people who believe in these things, like environmentalism, scientism, they start with a conclusion, they don't start with the evidence. but they say it that the evidence has to be arranged to fit. and there are numerous society becomes intellectually fraudulent. with so-called reputable academics. this is a really terrible thing because it causes confusion that what they are reading and being told and selecting certain facts to build up the idea that this is actually true. it is mind blowing.

and this is part of what i have been applying in the media. ordinary people live lives that correspond to reality. and i found that if i write these things, i get letters from people saying, thank goodness, public spirit is what i have always thought to be the case. and i thought that i was being crazy. it is an extraordinary thing for millions of people have been a part of this but ask, have i gone crazy? have you gone crazy? part of the public sphere.

>> host: during your stint at "the guardi h athe end? >> guest: i was in charge of the news in the reporting for that for about four years. it was uncomfortable and i was there. because the "the guardian" -- they operated as a family. i have a lot of friends. i have some perplexity to write things, which they couldn't tolerate because there can be no deviation. you cannot think independently.

it makes that a little strange to separate myself from all that. but i was very receptive. it did take a long time to work that out. it was a whole way of looking at the world. including our place in the world. including the divergence between us. so eventually i came to the conclusion that i simply couldn't carry on. and i left. it wasn't very comfortable, but i did have a lot of good friends there and i learned a lot. and "the guardian" is what made me what i am today. we may not like to think that come apart but they played in my

development, but they're very important. >> host: forty right now? >> guest: i write an opinion column for the daily mail. this is influential because it uncannily has an intuitive part of thinking. it represents a robust view of the world. this is part of the guardian and the mail and they are quite opposite in the british media.

when considered on the left and one considered on the right. it has determined this capacity for reflecting the values of the core constituency. and it will be part of the political elite. the daily mail represents little britain and its aspiration of people. >> host: in your book "the world turned upside down: the global battle over god, truth, and power.", the forward is director and playwright david nutt, and he writes that the new religion is secular humanism, which although it lasts logically, it

does contain innumerable sanctions and others. the most unobserved is loud and clear. do not go to church. what do you mean by that? >> it has to do with the fight that i have been involved in although i think that he came to it more recently. i think what he has come to realize is that people particularly on the left of the political divide, the aircraft by ideology which means that they say things that are true, which actually reflect the world as they would like it to be. they are not true. they don't believe there is such a thing of truth.

and that is what we're finding all the time and it has changed the way that we look at the world. >> host: you talk about this and it embodies the freedom of the individual from the negation of the bureaucratic authority in a globalized world, it threatens islam everywhere. >> does not yes. obviously, it preoccupied us more and more. and i do think there is a problem here with the islamic world. and it's very important to

understand and we want to talk about these concerns. many come because they want you to sign up for freedom. they want to prosper. they won't have good jobs. freedom is very important. the women wanted to -- they wanted all the things that we all want. peace and security and prosperity. they are not hung up on these religious precepts. it has been interpreted and which has now been dominant. the view of the world says that

the world has to be remade according to these precepts. where muslims are enjoying freedom, that must be pulled up. there is a lot of conservative interpretation of islam. and it must be brought to this provision and that is what i call an islamism. i understand what they mean. they understand that it's a made-up made up word, but i use it for particular reasons. in order to allow for the fact that their muslims were not extreme, who do want to sign up for western values, we must acknowledge that.

so those are trying their best to impose the islamic doctrine on people and they are trying to impose the most anti-freedom interpretation is religion at its most narrow. so i call those people islamists. they say the whole time with her intention is, to create the islam empire and go beyond that and to conquer britain and america and it's very specific and to impose sharia law, the rule of islamic law upon any way that islamists live. some of them are violent, some of them reference war and

terrorism. many believe that they can conquer the west. the kind of cultural takeover. on the other hand, there are lots of muslims and we must keep in our minds what second set and those who belong to islam who are themselves threatened by the the islamists. which i think we must keep those things in our minds at the same time. and that was about what i perceive to be the case, which was the way in which to my migrate horror and fear, the british ruling class was given into islamism in this attempt to

take over and undermine britain and for a variety of reasons, that is why i wrote this. i was extremely careful about the technology. many find this find this worrying and have nothing to do with this. >> host: were you called a racist after this book came out? >> guest: i think i was branded something because it is a negative epithet that one does not want to e but people found other ways to create this in their imagination when it comes to distancing

themselves. >> host: you talk about multiculturalism quite a bit. does this affect your view on that reddish society and british politicians? >> i think multiculturalism is one of the most misunderstood people think it must be a good thing because it's all about being tolerant and nice to people well, no, that's if that's all it was, i would be the first to talk about it. it is part of a democratic free society. we should be respectful of differences. including other religions and cultures. all cultures are equal.

therefore it is preferable to any other. what that means for the west if we are truly multicultural, we cannot uphold our core quality for women and someone over those cultures which uphold freedom and tolerance and that is multiculturalism and what it is. but instead we can't talk about that is multicultural. a black child in one case was abused over many years. the most supporting circumstances.

the social workers could not bring themselves to intervene. they said this is their culture. the life and liberty of the rest of us, that is what multiculturalism dead. his white liberals, we can't stand up and say it's wrong to torture a child. or neglected child. that is what multiculturalism is. that is the extent of multiculturalism. it talks about a kind of paralysis.

when you get the boston massacre, the recruitment of young men born in britain, the recruitment of those young men, the islamic radical islam, many say we can't say anything about this because it would be racist in this something that we cannot oppose, freedom or equality or distances. are we really saying that? of course not. so we go through this terrible model. it is what i consider to be the hijacking of language.

most of us believe in freedom and being tolerant and respectful of others. this is not corralled into one political perspective. the language has been kind of hijacked. including justice and compassion, and has been an ideological framework. in one can't use these words without horrible confusion. i would like to see us reclaim

this reclaim what we are trying to say. >> this is where we invite one author to talk about his or her book. the first sunday of the month, a live call-in program. melanie phillips is our guest this month. or they are beginning with a divided house. her book 10 q., "all must have prizes", "the ascent of woman: a history of the suffragette movement", "the sex-change society: feminized britain and the neutered male", and "america's social revolution" came out in 2001. "londonistan: how britain has created a terror state within", we talked about a little bit, that came out in 2006, and "the world turned upside down: the global battle over god, truth, and power.".

that came out of 2011. finally, just today, "the guardian" came out. it is her art autobiography. if you'd like to call in and talk, please call in. go ahead and start dialing in. you can go to our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. you can make a comment or question. you can also send in a tweet. booktv on c-span.org. who published that? >> guest: well, it's frightening for me because i published it.

i turn myself into a publisher of electronic books. this is going to be a platform not just for me, but for all those who think like me that they connect with reality as well. and the reason for this is, you know, publishing is changing. so many more people have the readers and the capacity to reach so many more people is enormous. so i have formed my own imprint and there are five books are being published this weekend. and i hope that they will bring my view of the world to a very loud audience.

my aim is part of the public domain. it is not easily found because it's not generally published. it's very exciting for me as a journalist. this is how the world ends. i'm just telling you how it is. telling you to get on with it. people have sent me over the years, i'm so glad you're writing what you're writing. but i feel so powerless and my goodness, there's a lot of

social media, the capacity to be bullied on facebook or turned into a bully on facebook. so i said, as a journalist, i can help you, all i can do is tell you what i think is part of this. i'm very sorry you feel this way. there is nothing i can do. but now i have a digital platform and books and stuff it can help people. one of the books and publishing today is a book about headmistress at public schools. and there was a very expensive school to benefit from her

wisdom over a period of time. her wisdom about what we do and how you approach them. >> host: twenty-first century daughter's? >> guest: yes, it the 21st century daughter. a guide for teenage girls. how wonderful that i was able to do that for me, and i never thought i would be able to do that. one of my many aims with this inference is due, where possible, say to people, you don't have to feel quite so hopeless. this is how the world is. you can have a bit of a handle on the things that do were you and perplexed her.

>> host: your e-mail just come over to start come from? >> well, my name is melanie, it starts with a capital letter "in depth -- capital letter m. you can download embooks from my website. there are video letter of intent interviews, books and and a conversation that i have that i found really fascinating.

it is with a playwright. and there is a smash hit broadway comedy. it was a smash hit in london. this is a man of the left. he has written a play in the past about integration. he even became the target of total vilification. and we had a conversation that i will put up on my website in which we discussed this phenomenon. ct is difficult to have a nversation with people that don't necessarily

agree on things. we can have a civilized discussion. abuse has replaced discussion and civilized arguments. what a terrible thing that is. it's like the closing of the mind that is going on in the west. it is supposed to be in the most rational society. and yes, it is closing and it's really frightening. it is one of the things that i have with embooks, trying to open it up a bit more and open up the public debate. hopefully creating the aid of the people who will be reading them working.

to helporking. to help create a civilized space. especially in a way that expands public knowledge and consciousness brings us together instead of driving us apart. >> host: let's talk about your books. >> guest: yes, it originated with jean-jacques rousseau. he draws his theory in this country and he was fantastically

inflectional. what his whole philosophy was was what a child brings to question what classroom of experience is infinitely more important than anything that can be given to the child. you have to water it like a plant in the plant grows. it is a construction of that growth. so the child brings the ability to learn by himself. what the teacher has to do is take a backseat and gently water. but not actually give that child

the ability to be coupled forever. that philosophy has ruined american education. but certainly what when the most about, british education. it basically said it is important. the child is an autonomous meaning maker. it means that the child looks at him or herself and the world around. it's like saying, going to the jungle. you're going to find her own way. that is what we have done in the classroom. it guides the child into the world. giving the child a mental map by which they can make sense of the

world. the teacher is saying to the child, you are an adult. we don't have to teach adults. we don't have to guide adults. adults are not people. a child needs to be guided and i think more than that, i tried to explain it, this didn't come from nowhere. we are responsible for ourselves. this includes the intellectual map to guide in the transition of knowledge.

we are not going to say to the child, it's illegal, don't do this. we are going to say to the child , here's the information. they're all good information that you could use or chemicals and here's information about them. that is teaching the child to be a premature adult. as they adult world teaches

children, indiscriminate. it is an abandonment of children and what the relationship is. it is the abandonment of proper parenting. and to know what is going on in the world by him or herself. and i think in britain and america, it has abdicated that responsibility. and several generations have gone past. many don't know how to be adults.

and as teachers, we have this problem so they can't teach, they can't teach mathematics, they can't teach english or grammar. they have this terrible cycle of poor education and poor parenting, creating a problem down through the generations. this is very frightening where people just forget in a society forgets completely. so that is kind of why it is a bit surprising. so i could see what was going on in education and i couldn't find a school for my young children

letting them run roughshod and sling mud at the walls. i could not find schools that would do it. i went with the evidence lead. what they were being taught at teacher training institutions, and came across this. he economists meaning maker. you could not believe the new literacy. i kid you not, these institutions, this is what they're being told to teach. societies unequal. the working class is oppressed. people are taught to read.

but for the fact that they can read, in order that they should no longer be oppressed, we don't teach them to read. it sounds absolutely barking mad. and it was barking mad. but that was the kind of ideology that helped lead generations to stop teaching children to read and say they will teach themselves to read. we will literally kicked them and we will read them a story, they will memorize the words, or they will guess the words and then we can tell them the reason so you have generations of children who grew up to be illiterate, but they were being told that they were illiterate.

this is wicked stuff. when i was at the guardian, i could not believe it. i couldn't believe a society could help do this. unfortunately it was true. you know, it took me into reading in all kinds of avenues that were equally bizarre. and so i wrote this book. so it was kind of what i was saying in the book that this had taken over the entire establishment.

lo and behold, they proved it in the book. establishment. lo and behold, they proved it in the book. i got contacted by unless numbers of parents who say, okay, now i understand what i couldn't understand about my child's education. who said to me what you said is not only true, but i will lose my job. and that is when i realized that there was something there that was happening that was wicked, thwarted then. >> host: very quickly, your website for people who want to see her books today or go to your personal website. >> guest: embooks.com where they can find my memoir and another book as well melanie

phillips.com is where my blog is house of the journalism that i've written so far is archived. >> host: team in milwaukee, wisconsin. you are on. >> caller: thank you for having me on. i am a big fan of yours. you hit it on the head when you say that we are so prone to toe the line and it shuts down discussions and debates. i am a little bit of a left leaning centrist with people out here who think i'm a nut case. but i have talked about these issues with conservatives and liberals. and the more that we have a discussion, the more that we

listen to each other, the more that we find that we are not that far apart. which is just amazing. a quick scenario -- a tutor young inner-city kids. we had a scenario in the '90s. what we had was a super intendant that wanted to break up school system and it got pushed aside by both sides of the political aisle. and he was run out of town. i agree with you and i read your books and i love your thoughts on opening people to open themselves to each other. on religion i would like to ask a quick question and let you go. do you think that we have turned to ideology, do you feel that if we go back a sort of religious

country, where people go to church one or have more faith, are we going to limit the debate again? >> host: okay, thank you we have appointed melanie phillips? >> guest: i think religion is at the heart of all of us and i think it is a problem. people have a problem than belief. but i do think that the ideology is much associated with the erosion of formal religion, specifically judeo christianity and the precepts that underlie it in the bedrock faith of the

west. in comparison to this, america is a religious country. it is still pretty faithful. these great values that we prize so much, it is part of the integrity of every human being. this animates the western belief in democracy at the very center. and we respect each other because we believe that we are

all made in the image of god. if we take god out of the equation, we don't have equality. it is a fact. i think it's a big problem. i do believe that we can't think our way out of this predicament. unless we have some kind of research and of the fundamental precepts. all the characteristics, been appealing the facts to support a predetermined opinion. it could be attributed.

>> the individuals allowing these things, there are people on all signs who exaggerate and to play with the facts. all of us are prone to the political divide that we may be on. there are people people on all sides are prone to this kind of behavior. the conversation is trying to make was a bit different than that. they had a conclusion to which they wish to fix. that is so that is held by people not on the left.

i hesitate to say the right. there many people and i don't think it is the kind of institutionalized characteristic of people not on the left. as part of a preordained conclusion. let's start with an ideology. there is no ideology. the ideology is the left. they may hold those ideas very strongly. but nevertheless, it is not people who are on the left.

they're a certain individuals who take these extreme positions were not on the left. i do know the people that control the hearts -- including in britain, the conservative party. that includes uncharitable truth which in my view and it comes about the truth. the number of physicians follow. i don't see that kind of thing

operating among people as a group of people. >> host: in the book "all must have prizes", he was institutionalized for the political program. with no blame or shame or pain society. in the process, it helps the integration of british culture itself. >> yes, people are very shocked. much more complicated. she was a political titan.

finding a role, and we have to subside gently -- that is what leadership is. i have a great deal of respect for her. there are so many on the left. however, i still have

considerable reservations about what she did. she took on this in the government. but she did it entirely is not correct. but she did give them a sense of industrious perspective in the world. she thought of everything in terms of economics. she thought that everything could be solved by running everything like the corner shelf. perform certain changes on those which word lasting and probably undying value. the problem is she didn't actually register there was something else going wrong with it could not be corrected by market forces.

things to do with the way we related to each other. the bonds of fellowship, the bonds of common culture which were breaking down under the impulse, the attacks from all these forces of secularism, the rise of groove right setting group against group, what was happening in the education profession, and which she never realized and late in the premiereship and grafted partially and the free-market. and a shared sense of inherited value. and basically dismiss him far

too lightly. anything inherited was a conspiracy dance the consumer. and people who share the same unspoken assumptions, there was a recipe for defrauding the consumer. if we open up these professions to market forces the results you destroy the bonds of trust and unspoken belief in the other person's honesty and attached to the intangibles which were read knit from tradition.

a true radical. and i thought at the time, i don't think i was wrong in thinking this, a terrible symmetry on left and right, left basically said family education, nations, all the bonds at link us to each other had to be sort of thrown up in the air, and what we say about ourselves mattered, all external authorities were the point also. if i decide living with my three lubbers is right for me than it is right and no one else has the authority to tell me otherwise. radical privatisation of morality, the individual reigns supreme.

as an individual determining what is right for me and you have no right to tell me that i am wrong. from the left it was individualism, radical individualism in the social sphere which i thought was destroying family, the traditional family, education, morality in general and information. thatcherism basically said we don't hold with any traditions, the ideas that the civil service, the official class of person is found by some sort of traditional understanding of duty. the individual consumer is the only thing that will keep us honest so all these things open up to the consumer.

that was individualism in the economic sphere. these two forces working together, they were both hyperindividualism in a society which i thought and still think was being driven apart and fragmented by individualism. what we need is to get away from individualism and find the bonds that keep us together, the bonds of shared tradition and shared language and shared religion and the bonds of shared history, to bind us as a nation and a society and paperindividualism on left and right is fragmenting us. after all that happened and the journey i have been on. >> san antonio, texas, you are on booktv with melanie phillips. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. i must admit i never heard of

this before. i agree with most of what you are saying but wants to challenge something. you talked about people putting basically pejorative truth out, then making the arguments to prove them, putting conclusions first. you may have done the same thing when you talk about multiculturalism. you said multiculturalism means all cultures are equal. i don't know who said that so my question, i would like to say rather than -- i don't know if they are universal to humanity but what i do know is people have a right to express cultural understanding of humanity, universal scrutiny, what we may call universal truth, hold

worthy of consideration, what people do and as you have done when you talk about multiculturalism occupy on the fringe and talk about a silly way out. such as beating up on a black child and the social worker, multiculturalism, that is abuse. i would like you to reconsider is that and tell me why you are getting this definition. >> melanie phillips. >> guest: we are on the same page, it is a question of language more than anything else. -year-old -- u.s. what texts. there have been but not that i am basing my view of this on text. i base my view on what was back to the operating, the people who said we cannot say that any culture is better than any other

and i heard this over the last quarter-century over and over. i heard it said to me, i heard it said in the context of a whole range of events that have happened. it seems to me from the evidence that i have seen, that is the conclusion i have come to that that is what multiculturalism is and i agree, different people have different understandings of what multiculturalism is and that is what be doubled this conversation. i am talking about multiculturalism in the way i understand to this case and other people are talking about it to mean something quite different. whenever i have this conversation i always try to put out what my definition is so we all know what we are talking about. when it comes to other people's

truths, this is the greater point that yes, of course, in my view, a properly tolerant society accepts different people believe different things and you have respect for that but nevertheless in my view if you want to uphold a liberal democratic society which ascribes to certain irreducible values such as tolerance of other people, belief, the ability of people to have no religion without persecution, the quality for and women, you can add the core values, you cannot be multi-cultural, you have to say actually, my culture is preferable to another and therefore i will act on that basis. quite frankly i think you and i basically on the same page on

this. this conversation about multiculturalism, by which these terms are used so differently. >> host: next call for melanie phillips from patricia in cambria, calif.. >> caller: i enjoy your conversation and i plan to start reading your books as soon as possible. i had one comment in that i worked in a large urban california school district and i experienced all the things you are discussing. i want to ask you a question. i thought about this problem a lot. i don't write about it. i am an artist in the literary spirit, i did feel that in the practical day to day operation dealing with difficulties in large urban school districts a

lot of the adults who have come through this system and been trained in a lot of these newer methods and so forth they are really at a loss because basically it is hard to impose any point of view under the current effect of the legal system. i wondered if -- i know in britain is very different. for example, i remember when i was teaching we had an english teacher who had a ph.d. she was told it was racist to teach grammar, things like this. i saw things, you are talking about. one of the things you don't experience in these places is if you do buck the system and go against the grain you could be facing a legal challenges so i wondered if that was a problem in britain and my other question

to you is can you recommend any contemporary british writers? currently going to make a trip to britain very soon. >> the legal challenge you mentioned, we have a different system in britain from yours. i am not sure it is quite the same. there are legal challenges to teachers but the real problem comes from -- in the past, when i wrote my book "all must have prizes" in the 90s, in the 80s. >> host: 1998. >> guest: so sorry. got mixed up. i've put into that book some of

the experiences some teachers and education psychologist had, in which they were terrorized by the education boards, the education officials and local authorities. and i recall one feature writing to me saying she taught in a fairly conventional way a step to teaching classes are facing funds structured reading schemes, that kind of thing, people did very well, but when the local education inspector was due to come around, she rearrange all the shares into chaos, extending chaos in the classroom in order to get through the inspection and that was going on then. i don't think that is the case but there's a conformism which

means if you don't teach in the approved way. and it is not so much a kind of legal challenge necessarily. you asked about -- wasn't sure you were talking about writers of education. >> host: who are you reading right now? maybe we will start there. >> guest: in terms of factual books? >> host: whatever you want to say. if somebody said like the caller did recommend a british author? >> guest: a british author besides myself, depends what you are looking for. i tend to read stuff about foreign policy which perhaps is

not for everyone, to work out what on earth is going on. >> host: we will show your favorite books, the books that influenced you. maybe take a look at that list and go from there for that color. mrs. ct tweets a woman after my own heart and mind. too better web site is only showing about one eighth of the content. >> guest: which website? >> host: not sure which website she is referring to. i have been on melanie phillips.com, your columns. >> guest: my personal web site melanie phillips.com, my archives have been subjected to terrible technical glitch. there is great difficulty accessing it for which i do apologize. >> host: your recent daily mail column. >> guest: people can access the recent columns without a

problem. that is probably what this person is referring to. if you go back into the archives, several years back there is a problem accessing the archive material. >> host: how much electronic book will be published? the first chapter? the forward? >> guest: there are bits of it, bits of the books but not -- different templates from different books. i don't want to give away the excitement about to be put up in the next few days but if people look at the website over the next few days, they will see the creative use of digital which will delight and excite people away the authors don't usually do with their published books. the main thing you do on my web

site is download the book, there's a certain amount of video there, party in angel was published today. . >> thank you for booktv. two questions. have you written anything about the extreme christian right in america that wants a theocracy or radical muslims who want sharia to dominate, or the promisemaker. don't know you have written

about this. and how do we restore radical -- rational discourse? >> guest: that is a real humdinger of a question. all i can do is engender it and bring on people who are also riding in a similar kind of vein and this conversation, and that the debate going, very difficult to get a debate going. hopefully this is the only way one can operate. what you are asking is a deeper question. how do you shift a culture that has gone wrong. this is gone on over a long period of time, in all these ways it has gone wrong in education, family and so forth, how do you shifted away again. and one person to do and all we

can do and those who are like-minded can somehow make our voices heard. i think there is some sort of strange chemistry, the right thing happens, you feel sometimes you are speaking into a wilderness, all of us say these things and nothing happens, everything looks a bit hopeless and out of the blue it is a kaleidoscope has been shaken, and changes and people say something quite covered. where did that come from. and society works with a different set of levels at the same time, like subterranean levels going on, on the surface you are having a conversation, a loud conversation in which people don't seem to be

listening to each other at all. and and they start shifting their view and after a period of time that pops up. and just keep saying things as we think they are, trying to produce this law in rational discourse and hope that eventually this becomes the default mechanism. i have written about the extreme christian right, i have not looked at them. i am aware there is a controversy about such individuals but basically in my journalism i have been -- my journalistic careeriting about domestic issues and those

cultural developments, the kind of things, the american/christian right as you call them is something particular to america but i haven't got my head around it but it is a straw. >> host: lane in houston, texas. >> caller: i'd teach high school science and special-education. i have a comment and a question. guy who came up with the concept that developed into black history month, he wrote a book called education of the negro and he speaks about how the church is organized religion is

actually helping to miss educate the negro in america but my question to you is how do you thing, you mentioned ignorance were teachers haven't learned to be adults and teach what they know. how do you think the african is affecting education. >> didn't quite hear that. how do i think what? >> caller: the trans-atlantic slave trade and spreading of africans during slavery, as the descendants of slaves how do you think that is affecting education? >> guest: the british perspective is different from the american perspective. the african diaspora has not had

much effect at all. the kind of changes i have been talking about, developments in education came about exclusively as a result of white so-called liberals in britain. as a young reporter on the guardian i recall, this is some one of my books, i remember encountering this, i remember going to area called put them, significant black population, afro caribbean population and being told by representatives of this particular community how horrified they were that the left-wing education authority which control the schools in their area were preventing them

as black parents from setting up as an independent school independence of local authorities, state funding and state control, setting up an independent school which would teach their children, black children the rudiments of a proper education, teach them about the world as it was because their children were being treated by white liberals, black children being treated by white liberals as if they were not entitled to the best in education and they were being prevented from setting up this school by the local education board on the basis that there was no need for it, and the education board knew what was best for black children. so that is the experience i am coming from in britain, the role black people play in britain is

different from the role played on the history of black people in america and in britain we don't need the history of slavery you had. >> host: another call from houston from kirk. >> caller: i had never heard of you or heard you speak about listening to you this morning, i am optimistic that people in the world like yourself are speaking about moderation, talking about prudence, talking about tolerance. as a member of the, quote, silent majority, i feel incredibly repressed by the left and right with the rhetoric, the things that are thrown out to me and to the people that i love.

they have to try to sort it out and disseminate it. do you have any suggestions on a social level, what would be a suggestion for family gatherings, for something as simple as having a dinner party and inviting people over and setting the ground rules for discourse and discussion without throwing things at each other and acting in a non prudent manner? any suggestions for something like that? seems to me before the technology age took over people use to sit down and have civil discourse. it seems there is none of that now. >> host: melanie phillips? >> guest: there are family gathering for members of the same family come to blows. another point which i think is rather regrettable, don't know if this is the case in britain but in america, in britain, i suspect it is, we are becoming

rather atomized. the dining table is going out of fashion. people don't buy dining tables anymore because they don't sit around the table anymore. they grace, as they sit in front of the tv or their computer screens or plugged into their iphone or whatever it is and they are grazing from refrigerator and meals are a fantastic vehicle for socialization, social discourse. gathering around the table is really a sort of premier way in which families talk to each other and anybody can talk to each other around a mirror, very social event. how you restore the social pull

meal in a society where we are all basically doing our own saying to the extent that we are is a very difficult challenge. it would be very nice if parents were to make a bit of a feature on this. once a week, once the day, whenever it is, gather around the table, rituals are important at this point for this purpose, religious rituals, thanksgiving dinner, christmas dinner, and i am jewish, the friday night meal, these are the places where people, families and friends literally get together and they put aside their technology, they need their television, they get their heads up from their desks and look at each other and talk to each other and it is

essential and the more we can encourage that among our own families and friends the better. i think you are right. >> host: we have not built into the sex change society, "the sex change society: feminized britain and the neutered male". you write mail bret baier winner is not the anachronistic. is important to cement masculine identity and to civilize of aggressive male characteristics. >> guest: how unfashionable is that? did i really right that? i think i was right. it is very unfashionable. we do -- i wrote that book. we are unisex society. women go out to work. i am working mother, i have been

a working mother all their lives. men -- chain up. i do think that there is a need to recognize that for women, work, however important it is and it was vital for me, i cannot imagine that. never the less i also understand that work for women place a different role than it does for men. for men it is essentials to their identity. for women work is often very important, paid work, and employed work, it was important for me, important for millions of women, but we don't feel less of a woman if we don't work. to to feel less of a man if they don't work. this is a very unfashionable thing to say but i believe it to

be true and consequently, unemployment for a man is absolutely devastating whereas for woman is painful, it is annoying, a state she doesn't want to be in but doesn't have the same effect. there's another point to bring winning which is the erosion of the breadwinner function, chicken and egg, which came first? in my view, what has driven families of part, there are many factors that drive families apart, the traditional family life being driven apart by many factors but one of the key factors, the key driver is the

fact that by and large women have changed the calibration of where their best interests lie. in the past women thought of themselves, they wanted to work but thought of themselves as wanting to have children and in order to have children, they needed the father of their children on board to support them and their children when children were growing up and looked for a marriageable make and they married him. along came a whole bunch of social changes. women decided they could do it on their own. they could be if they wanted mother and father to their children. they could have their child without a father on board at all. this is the local sperm bank. they could do without a father completely. if they had a father, if they were married to the father or live with the father of their child, didn't like him, throw

him out because we can go it alone now. the results of that is men kind of got marginalize, they got pushed out, made to feel they were spare parts of the human race, basically a waste of space, they were only needed to provide the sperm in the first place and i call from sperm donors, walking wallets and occasional repairs. that was the limit of their usefulness to women. they become demoralized, if they were not going to have one woman making herself uniquely available to them, they started fathering serial children and they wanted a commitment to bring about giles, the whole business of working became less vital. , the whole business of working became less vital.

it is the chicken and egg, if he has child you will work, if not -- these are more complex than i am making out but it is an important change that has happened and a change for the worse. we throughout the baby with the bathwater because as i say women should be able to work, men should be able, feel under some obligation to take an active role in the nursery of their children and helping in the home and the rest of it but the sense of proportion, lost the sense that there are some irreducible differences between the sexes and it is not stupid and ignorant to say that. it is true. unless we acknowledge what those differences are, we can't

actually shake the fashion to accommodate reality. we are trying to refashion reality to accommodate an idea of what we think should be the case and that wise and great deal of distress. >> host: our guest is melanie phillips. we have a little over an hour left in our program. here is a look at some of melanie phillips's influences and favorite books. ♪

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e-mail to booktv@c-span.org. melanie phillips is the author of nine books, the most recent just came out today, called guardian angel. she began writing in 1980, divided house: women at westminster," "doctors' dilemmas: medical ethics and contemporary science" came out in 1985, "all must have prizes" in 1998, "the sex change society: feminized britain and the neutered male" in 1999, "america's social revoution" came out in 2001, "the ascent of woman: a history of the suffragette movement" in 2003, "londonistan: how britain has created a terror state within" came out in 2006, "the world turned upside-down: the global battle over god, truth, and power" in 2011. if you would like to see "doctors' dilemmas: medical ethics and contemporary science" one talk about that book that particular book more in depth you can go to booktv.org.

we covered an event with her when that book came out and today guardian angel comes out and that is an evil on hew in fringe -- who are alfred and mabel? >> guest: they were my parents. we were extremely close. they were very typical of british jews of that generation around the second world war, they were married after the second world war in 1947 and they came from families that originally came as immigrants to britain from poland and russia around the turn of the 20th century, the immigration of jews

into britain around that time and they were kind of typical of the british jewish community. my father so aggressive, my mother ran a children's closed shop, they were people of modest means and the jewish family, religiously we were not very religiously observant. my parents went to the synagogue a few times a year. we observed the jewish laws and we expect to be home friday evening and it was a home which instilled in me jewish values to do with self discipline, looking after other people particularly the most vulnerable in society

and there i am today, and only child particularly close relationship, and -- >> host: was guardian angel a tough ball to right? >> guest: very tough book to write. and keep yourself out of the story. and don't bring your cell, and the family background, and what people find perplexing, the left-wing establishment in britain to be coming what some

people think of as being on the right and champion of the center ground so i wanted to explain that journey and through the prism of that journey that eliminates what happened to britain over the last quarter of a century, particularly britain and having sketched this out i thought to myself, actually, i can't actually do this without going one step further and explained why i reacted to what i came across and became what i became. if the only one who can do that, to explain why i was as i am is to go to my family background because that is what made me. i found myself for the first time ever going in print, a

story which is extremely painful to me because it involved separation from individuals who i loved very much but to whom i was far too close, the strange the is i wrote a book guardian angel about two para separations in two families, separation from my real family which was extraordinarily painful, separation from the political family, also extremely painful, and set into each other, rather strange thing that these things in parallel and it was a painful thing to write because i was writing about myself and about those nearest and dearest to me. very uncomfortable experience in

viet. that is why i did it. >> if you can't get through on the phone lines or social media, and if we want to let our international viewers know, particularly those of you in, 20232-22 for dedicated viewers, please go ahead with your question. >> i don't know what the realities there are but the united states really don't have a list, it was destroyed in the mccarthy period and anyone who believes we have a labour party, socialism and marxism demonized.

not that people don't exist in our society you can't talk to them because they might be completely irrational calling names they insist they come from the right. the left has no power, we have one senator in vermont, really a socialist. if you are writing a book, experiencing it in the united states you might have a different take on who you cannot talk to. currently the people you can't talk to are the tea party people and the political spectrum in the united states has moved completely to the right. we don't have all left. we have a center which is what the democrats are and you have the extreme right which is what the republicans have become and as a consequence of the pressure of the ty. >> host: where are you on the political spectrum?

>> caller: i am one of those who would consider myself -- labels are a problem. i agree is so we should respect one another and listen to one another. my concerns are as a consequence of the economic situation and the foreign policy situation, i am a critic of u.s. foreign policy and don't have to be on the left because johnson, who was a conservative economist was very critical of u.s. foreign policy, his books blow back and start over empire. >> host: we have a lot on the table. let's hear what melanie phillips has to say. thanks for calling in. >> guest: there are differences between britain and america. i hear what you say, there's no socialist policy in america,

that is true. i am talking about something that goes beyond party affiliation and conventional understanding of socialism. communism, this is the soviet union, soviet empire, communist empire is a thing of the past. i am talking about a way of looking at the world which i considered to be the left adopted it which is very secular perspective which we were saying earlier on. the core of it is only a matter of opinion and none of us can -- any way of life is better than another way of life. as far as i can see. a lot of this has taken grip in america. you may be right about the

extreme right in america. the fringes of political debate on that side of the division and that is something we don't have in britain and that is a considerable difference. and looking across the pond at the democratic party, they are different from the democratic party of 40 years ago because they seem to me to have them bodies to a greater or lesser extent that the view of the left is everything is relative, that is our choice and all of that. does aim for conventional values and disdain for the people who subscribe to conventional values. a view of the world that is ashamed of america, ashamed of the idea that america stands for values that are really great and wonderful and we shall try and

espoused them. i have occasionally picked that up in your practice as well, who i would not say, i would say he was a pretty left-wing character from where i am sitting, his belief that the state is basically a benevolent act there whether you agree with it or not is another matter, but that is very much a left-wing perspective, i would suggest. what i'm talking about is different from what you are talking about. what i am talking about is a way of looking at the world's which i think has taken hold across a wide swath. in britain as i alluded to earlier, these attitudes have taken hold in our conservative party, the equivalent of your republican party and the situation is different but there

are certain similarities, which made you are not quite acknowledging. >> host: the america is divided between cultural relativism, individual license and anything goes and the culture of social virtue based on civic responsibility, family values and sexual morality and holding behavior to account, the war between these two cultures continues to rage in america as it does in britain and that was from 2001, america's social revolution. david t. c. tweets in to you, and u.s. and britain's support of israel, the muslim world. >> guest: i think it is putting the cart before the course. i think the antipathy the muslim

world is currently expressing towards the west is to do with the fact the muslim world as i was saying earlier has been largely taken over by a particular view which seeks to hold back and turn back modernity, it wishes to prevent muslims from living under the tenets of modernity which is individual freedom and democracy. and instead to subject them to the submissive tenets of islam and it hates the west because it embodies this belief that individual freedom is so important because it is not islamic. the islamists who now rule the islamic world hate the west

because it is not islamic and they wish to subjected to the dictates of islam. they hate israel, their hatred of israel is subsequent to that. israel to them is the expression of american values in pretty durant modernity in particular in the middle east. to them israel is illegitimate from that point of view and within the muslim world there is a very widespread and deep hatred of jews as jews. and evidence to this effect. and these are there reasons israel is the kind of lightning rod for the hatred of the

western world. the hatred of israel has been used to those who keep their subjection of misery in the islamic world, used as the kind of alibi or displacement exercised, and ruled the islamic world with their population's hatred of israel as a way of diverting the hatred away from themselves because they are keeping their own people in such poverty in conditions of political -- in political terms. i was interested to hear this vision of america, your question, talking about the support given to israel by america and britain. america supports israel as

indeed it should because the bulk of the american people, the vast bulk of ordinary god-fearing christian american people who understand very well israel stands up for its own values, the forward stadium of those values in the middle east, they identify israel as being a kind of nation founded on values america is founded on. britain doesn't have the same perspective toward israel, it is a more troubled history in which britain, the last colonial occupiers of the pre is real space palestine in which the world played by britain to the returning jews, jews returning to restore their ancient homeland in the land of israel.

the british colonial administration was to side with those who in the arab world wished to frustrate the declared will of the world as an enshrined in the international treaty to restore the ancient jewish homeland as the state of israel. britain's history is a little trouble in this regard and britain's current attitudes to israel is let's put it this way. i think of it as talking out of both sides of your mouth simultaneously. with one side of the mouth britain says israel is our ally. with the other side of the mouth of britain says israel is our ally and anything military that it does to defend itself we think is wrong. i slightly exaggerated that is the position the british government got itself into. of very complicated attitude, very complicated relationship with israel, it is tied to

israel as america through intelligence and military cooperation. without israel's intelligent eyes and ears in the middle east, britain and america would be in more danger than they are now but nevertheless in the political sphere things are more complicated. >> host: melanie phillips writes "the world turned upside-down: the global battle over god, truth, and power" among the military and high-minded in particular israel inspires an obsessional hatred of the tight and scale that is directed no other country. steve post on our facebook page, congratulations, i am so excited i can find more of you now, second, i was wondering what your view on the church of scotland's new position on israel. what is he referring to? >> guest: the church of scotland has taken off in recent days of

very belligerent attitude toward israel, talking about -- boycott sanctions movement which basically seeks to identify israel by pretending it is the tyrant of the middle east and inverting everything so that the true victim in the middle east which is israel, the true tyrants and true aggressor which is the arab muslim world becomes the victim and the church of scotland has leapt on to this bandwagon. very distressing it is too but in britain you see the established church, britain is composed of england and scotland, scotland has a different church from england, england has the church of england, scotland as the church of scotland but as i understand it, theological broadly on the

same page, they have broadly the same view of the world, broadly this same view of the middle east and israel's role in the middle east and therefore the mainstream, the established church in britain, church of scotland, had this view of israel which is a view that i think in america is true of your more liberal churches, presbyterians, churches like that, evangelical churches are much more well disposed towards israel. in britain we don't have that kind of balance. we don't have so many evangelical churches who remain, let's put it this way, scriptural the faithful. the church of england looks down at scripture as being only believed by those who are

basically ignorant and stupid. you referred to a quote buy me about the animosity to israel seems to go hand in hand with education. it is part of the same thing. the more highly developed brains people seem to think they have the more they hold their own intellect in the highest possible regard, the more departing from reality they are and that is true of the churches and true more generally. this hatred of israel, i am afraid is correlated with education and social class. as a load on -- the lure on the scale you go the more decent, moral and sensible and rational people are, the higher of the educational and social scale you are the more divorces they are

from reality on a range of issues, the more they subscribe to ideologies, ideas, the more disgusting they are quite frankly. they side with people who are tyrants tyrannize their own populations, treat their women as animals, and deserve their venom for the jews of israel who are merely trying to defend themselves in their own historic homeland which they have every right to be entitled to which once upon a time the international energy said they have the right to settle this land and those people, the beach head of the kind of values liberals hold dear, freedom, equality, tolerance, political enfranchisement, the people of holding those values are the people being subjected to

sanctions, excoriation, vilification in order to delegitimize israel and bring about a situation in which it disappears from the map. the people who are tyrannizing their own populations, locking up political dissidents, hanging them from cranes, throwing them from the tops of tall buildings, hallucinating their children, using their children as human bombs, indoctrinating their children to hatred and murder of people simply because they are american, jews, the west, they get a free pass from the people who are highly educated. go figure, all this education produced this irrationality, this hatred. i am afraid for me it is part of

the pattern i have been painfully unraveling all my professional life which is in these books, actually part of the same story. that a class of people who through education have come to the belief that there is no such thing as truth believe lives. they believe the lies are true and can't distinguish truth from lies and turn themselves into accomplices of the indefensible landon tolerable, people who in any normal, decent moral, sensible universe would be people any decent individual would be against. that is why i called my last book but one "the world turned upside-down: the global battle over god, truth, and power" because it is exactly that. the world -- >> host: melanie phillips is our guest. little under an hour left in our

program. mark in california, you have been very patient. please go ahead. >> caller: you have a number of interesting belief that need to be exploited. however, you lose credibility with the scientific community when you claim the scientific method was not used to establish the facts about global warming has caused by humans burning fossil fuels. the scientific method was used extensively in the 1970s and 80s and the predictions started coming true in the yearly 90s and the only claim you can make against the scientists in this area is that they understated the significance of this problem and today we have a situation where 97% of the top 200 climate scientists diametrically opposed to your beliefs, your beliefs are paralleled by sarah palin

from the state of alaska and senator and off, the state of oklahoma, two state to economies are based on burning fossil fuels. you need to rethink this so that you get on the right side of this issue. >> thank you for that. interesting point of view. sarah palin and the other senator you mentioned -- i have been looking at man-made global warming theory since 1988 looking at it in great detail, talking over the years to a large number of scientists, reading the literature, reading scientific literature. i don't say science has got it wrong. i say science has been hijacked by ideologues who pretend a science is as it is but it is not. the story of this is quite extraordinary in the way it has been presented so good people like yourself, i sympathize. file me read what is in the media -- i have done the

research, looking at what is behind it all. it is simply not true that 97% of scientists think man-made global warming is true. they don't. there are many pieces of evidence now where hundreds of the top climate related scientists have come forward to say this is simply not the case. they don't believe this is true. was not the case the science always said this. the science to the always say this. man-made global warming theory was actually to a large extent the result of computer operators putting into computers information which first of all was skewed, secondly the idea that you can actually predict climate through computer model is absurd because climate is one

of the most complex mechanisms involving biofeedback mechanisms which no computer can properly assimilate. the fact is we have been told since 1988 that a rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will produce catastrophic amount of warming and to cut a long story short in the last ten years the climate has been flat lining and no amount of the excuses that are being made and also the fact that the theory we were told was absolutely inexorable that the rise in carbon dioxide would mean a rise in heat simply hasn't happened. i am afraid thest can't ain plat. this is a very complicated

story. my position has always been that i have never seen any credible evidence that anything out of the historical ordinary is happening to the climate. climate has always gone up and down. what has been happening in the last century or so is part of that pattern and there is no credible evidence to suggest anything out of the ordinary has been happening but i can quite understand why you are saying what you are saying because by and large people are not aware the best and brightest, the most brilliant of climate related scientists are saying something very different and the final thought to leave with you is not simply that there are some scientists saying this or some science saying that which is how science proceeds, that is how it proceeds that there is also evidence, and not just

disagreement of scientists but active fraud. i have spoken to some of the scientists who watch this fraud take place under the aegis of those bodies putting out this theory of man-made global warming in which the science has been actually misrepresented and some of the brightest and best who are involved in the governmental panel on climate change were employed in the early days as expert witnesses resigned on the basis that their science was being manipulated and they could absurd the fraud being manipulated upon science and frankly this is a terrible scandal that happened because the integrity of science has been compromised by people who wish to hijack science to make a political point. it may be that politicians you don't agree with i taken up on this particular argument i am

making. that may be the case, but that in itself i am sure you would agree, that in itself does not prove that the argument is wrong. you may not like those politicians but whether the argument is right or wrong, to answer that question is one really has to go look at the science itself. i have done that and i would suggest you do too. >> host: melanie phillips is the author of nine books, she is a columnist with the daily mail and as a publisher with anbooks.com. dennis post on our facebook page regarding truth which you're free to the left will not discuss, what are some examples of those truths as they relate to a portion of homosexuality? as he puts it, what are some examples of those truths that the left will not discuss as they relate to abortion and

homosexuality? >> guest: in the case of abortion, i think that just looking at the narrow business of truth being suppressed, that i would say, stated, dismissed or negate the affects of what takes place in late term abortions, they don't talk like to talk about it. they think it is going to be used as ammunition by the other side with people who are anti-abortion. i find the question perplexing because to me these issues, abortion and homosexuality have nothing to do with truth as much as the opinions and ways of looking at the world and ways of looking at human beings, where

this life starts, what is valued, do we complacent and human life, how prevalent should we be with people whose sexuality is different from ours, to what extent should we accommodate those differences in our mainstream executions? those are the debate that attend upon issues like abortion and homosexuality. apart from multitudinous aspects, late term abortions, i guess i am missing the point of your question. i would not say this is to do with truth as much as a difference in the way we look at the world. >> host: was your view on abortion and gay marriage? >> gut: it is infory jewish background which is, this

may sound a little strange from an american audience which has a different view of abortion, in britain politically is not an issue people generally accept the law which permits abortion in certain circumstances. the argument in britain is about whether the law should be amended to take account of changes that happened in technology, the fact that we keep premature babies alive much longer and so on. my view is informed by my jewish background which says it is not an absolute point of view. it says at the very earliest stages, abortion in certain circumstances is okay. is the lesser of two evils, never okay but the lesser of two

evils in certain circumstances. but later on in a pregnancy it becomes very much more difficult and at a certain point cannot be tolerated. broadly that is my view, in certain very limited circumstances it is the lesser of two evils. what happened in britain, the law was enacted with that kind of approach in mind in the 60s and 70s but very quickly, overtaken by the view, specifically committed. a complete change in the way in which the law was applied which led to abortion on demand situation in britain which has brutalized our culture, brutalized it in a way that our respect for all human life

including very early human life has been eroded. it is very early. if for example there is a threat to the life of the mother there should be no question that the life of the mother takes precedence over this very early form of human life. that is my personal view. it is a more nuanced point of view, is jewish but also very british. this is my view about rights, the rights engender is an important distinction to be made between the public and the private. what people do in their private lives should be respected and people should not be persecuted for their private life.

where the private life becomes taken into public culture so public executions change it is more of a problem. so for example politics for the moment, most concerns, destruction of the potential family. and children are growing up. in personal terms one would be less than compassionate if one did not accept the facts. it is a necessary evil if you like, divorce, fatherless child, necessary evil in certain circumstances, not desirable. in personal terms one is compassionate. in public terms what happened in britain is a disaster, compassion to the personal has made a terrible jump so that it

has become a woman's right to bring into the world a child without a father. how can it be right to bring into the world the child in the position of this, so that made a jump, personal and public. as far as gay marriage is concerned, in times gone by in recent times gone by homosexuals had a terrible time, disparaged vilification abuse, terrible, i would not wish to go back to that for one moment. i have a great deal of sympathy for gay people. i can see what they want is just to be like anybody else. they want to live the same light

as everybo to be madeo feel different. they want to enjoy the same things, stability, family, love, companionship, all those things, i have every sympathy for that and every sympathy for gay couples, and i don't care if they're happy in their private lives, that is great. gay marriage is different because it is a category, marriage is of necessity not as it has been preconceived in the heterosexual world, contract which can be broken, is that a partnership? it contains elements of partnership coming together two individuals who make a

completely different entity. and any other couple, a business partnership. and two people refuse, they are not the same, complementary, and the reason it is the fusion, and the way we create humanity and we create the next generation of human -- is the best way of nurturing those human beings. that is what drives me. and the idea that a marriage is a contract.

and i sympathize, if you give it to people outside that idea, complementary elements of what makes a human being. and you basically, you do inescapably undermine the whole notion of what marriage is and if you undermine the motion of what marriage is, it no longer to be nice to people who are gay which i do, it is the question of undermining something that is of such importance not just to heterosexuals but homosexuals because if our society collapses and i believe the marriage family which nurtures new human beings is at the core of protecting the society we take for granted and if you undermine a new road the core execution

that guarantees all those freedoms and that tolerance than all of us, heterosexual and homosexual will be the losers because we will fragment. we are fragmenting not because of the gay marriage thing but because of what heterosexuals have done to the idea of marriage. they have made it contingent. they made it less than what it should be which is something i was going to say sacred but that sounds too religious, something that is unique, completely unique. they made it just like a contract. as a result heterosexual marriage is going down the tubes with results we can all see. it is a great shame that gay people, i understand where they're coming from. i sympathize greatly but how much one wants to be, compassion is necessary to people who want

to be like everybody else. if theost of that is to destroy one of the pillars of society so that we all suffer, so one has to have a conversation which hopefully will encourage everybody who understands what the stakes are putter just attitudes accordingly. >> we are talking with author and columnist at the one. matt you in silverdale, washington. go ahead with your question or comment. you still with us? matthew is no longer with us. mark in kingston, new hampshire. >> caller: you truly are a brilliant person and very interesting to listen to and i find it difficult disagreeing with anything you say however i am a earlier in the program you said something about how america has

history of slavery, institution of slavery where we don't have that in great britain. i know you didn't mean that how it sounded. you know better than i at the time slavery, institution told of this country, these were british colonies, british subjects. let's look at india, treatment of the natives in indiana and black africa. britain is one of my idols, so bring institution, british, this is not a knock but let's not forget because i know you didn't mean that how it sounded. as a well spoken writer in this country, and coulter tries to blame the democrats on slavery and all that and i know you are a very well thinking conservative but i will leave it at that. i can't believe you meant that how it sounded. >> i think you are right. speaking in a shorthand fashion, let me explain a bit more what i meant and to agree with you and

explain a bit more. i was referring specifically to black slavery in america in the context of the questioner at the time who was talking about the particular experience of slavery in america on the education system and the point i was trying to make is we didn't have black slavery in britain in the way you had it in america, involved in the slave trade, you mentioned in the and other areas in the world obviously but the point about slavery, how britain is concerned is yes, britain was involved in the slave trade but britain took the lead in abolishing the slave trade and that is often forgotten. britain's great achievement was to bring about the slave trade. the other thing that is forgotten about slavery is not a white on black thing, it is a

black on black thing. there are still slaves in the third world and black slaves, and the way the debate is -- you would agree with me, the europeans will in the slave trade and the role americans played in black slavery was reprehensible and regrettable. two things have been borne in mind and to be fair about that issue. and slavery has never been simply a white on black phenomenon. it has been black on black phenomenon and still is. >> host: mary in arizona. >> caller: i have so many

comments it is amazing. you are a brilliant thinker and i wanted to ask q. have you read about g k teste r aton? many of the things you are espousing our paraphrasing what he said. there are parallels between your form of fox. do some more reading, enjoy and also another personal thing, is there a gentleman named mike maloney still working at the photo desk? he is an old friend at the daily mail? >> host: let's leave it there and get her views on g. k.

chestertonton. >> a british author. i don't know him very well. i have encountered him a little but not a great deal. >> host: do you know the gentleman? >> guest: i am afraid i don't. i hope -- he may still be there. i don't go into the office of the daily mail that often, that is my excuse. >> host: you do your column from home once a week? once every 2 weeks? >> guest: i have a regular weekly slot which is in the daily mail. at is my slot. in addition, i right other

pieces depending on what is happening, and what i want to write. it is if flexible arrangement. i do every police lot. >> host: this e-mail from chris in connecticut. thank you, i am enjoying your interview immensely, look forward to following your column. there is a pervasive sense among people finos on the right that the pecans destruction of the ethic and strengths of western society is irreversible. the expansion of liberalism by creating widespread on an ever-growing government taking this be on the point of no return not just in the u.s. but worldwide, do you see any way back at this late stage of the game? >> guest: this may surprise people who think of me as a pessimist but i man incurable optimist. i don't believe it is ever over until the fat lady sings.

if we were sitting around in britain in the 18th-century in coffee shops and having hot chocolate, we would no doubt be the moaning of the state of britain and the state of the world. we would be saying to each other is all over after cereal in morality, everyone lying in the gutter, everyone having babies out of wedlock, britain is over, that is it, finished and turn into the nineteenth century, the greatest period of british history ever, britain had an empire, queen victoria and all of that. on the other hand we also have in front of us the example of the roman empire which one day it was fair and the next day was gone. empires crumble from within.

that is where the damage is really done. the final assault, the coup the grass may be affected by an external follow so have we passed the point of no return? i doe so have we passed the point of no return? i do not believe we have. the problem is we in the west don't even know the we are on the cliff loan that we are about to go over it. consequently i believe, and you may think i am ridiculously naive optimist for saying this but i believe if we actually do come to realize we are on the cliff and just about to go over v edge we will stop.

stopping will be painful, no question, no question. it means taking decisions, setting society on a course which would be very challenging. it all depends. if we think we are going off of the edge of the cliff, we will actually pull back. the question is whether enough of us can realize this in time and have enough traction on those to lead us and more important, whether from the ranks of those who need us can come from one who actually has the power of leadership, the quality of leadership, our leaders tend to be fumbler is a round leaders. and we also find five years down

the track, with leaders of the western world who do come forward with a very strong idea of the dangers in front of us. and start putting those into a sect in which they come to a halt before we go over. whether that will happen, and we are trying to do. and a bigger platform and alarm, to build a community of like-minded souls. and feel disenfranchised. can't believe in the left politicians or the right, who do i go to?

what would i do. and by leading to a conversation. >> host: melanie phillips, we have not had a chance to talk about your 2003 book "the ascent of woman: a history of the suffragette movement". i did want to ask you, what was the contagious disease act? >> guest: this was a true moral panic which was going on in various stages throughout the nineteenth century and also had to do with the terror of prosecution. the horror of prostitution. and also the very strong desire bio whole bunch of people to curb prostitution and to prevent the disease's prostitutes were

said to be promulgating by venereal disease and what was so explosive about this, the contagious diseases act led directly to the female suffrage movement, behind a contagious disease act lay what the feminists of the time or women of the time, what inspired there feminism, the men using the prostitutes were deemed to be simply satisfying their mail urges and everybody knew that was so and the men work had on the head and that was what men were. the women who service them, the prostitutes were regarded as pull lowest of the low and more than that as carriers of disease. they were subhuman almost and

they were subjected through the contagious disease act which was designed to stop the spread of venereal disease by prostitutes, they didn't just bring in their train, a set of punitive measures, what really got women going was they involved internal examination to see whether they had a disease and for the women of the time this was akin to rape, they were being raped and being raped as a result of a disgusting double standard. the route over this was quite complicated and the people among the ranks of women and feminists, some of them were coming from an evangelical tradition and wanted to stamp out prostitution altogether. some offered to stand out males altogether and some wanted to be

hygienic. told thing was quite complicated. and decades on and off, large numbers of women got the more denies, writing pamphlets, having meetings, speaking in public, women didn't speak in public, it wasn't done or gentile, and there they were not just speaking in public but prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases, and the reaction toughened these women and gave them an infrastructure of protests and the experience of being agitated and a taste for influencing public debate.

or specific being this. and led formation of the suffrage movement. and the previous conversation and absolutist session with slavery. and experimentation on animals, one of the great crusades of the time because it was slavery and the slavery of women at the hands of men. this feeds into the female suffrage movement. the contagious diseases act was probably the single most important sector in the radicalization of women in the nineteenth century which led directly to the vote. >> host: tom in southampton, pa. go ahead with your question or comment for melanie phillips. >> caller: you are truly a st.. i had so many things to do and

can't tear myself away. with regards to influencing the public debate. i wonder if he would speak to how we do that when the left believes that 100% of what the right says is wrong in the united states? when the subject is brought up the opinion of the right is wrong regardless of the circumstances? >> guest: it is a very great problem that influence and affected me over the years because i had the same problem. you say anything you are labeled right and it is like a label hung around your neck. don't miss and to him because his or her opinion and no account. how do you deal with it?

by simply keeping on, keeping on, a bit vague as that may sound but the only way of doing it and by continuing to write and speak wherever we can do above all in ways that give lie to the lie of the left, to make our points in a civil and courteous fashion and to make them in a way which accepts there are valid arguments from the other side and keep on doing that and to try to build communities to people like ourselves doing that and that way we forced our way in gently but determinedly into the public debate and fried it open because as i said before, you may see we are getting nowhere, sort of speaking into a kind of fog and nobody can see or hear you, it

is not like that. people are listening, they may not say anything, but they are listening and they may not agree with you to begin with but they are thinking and if you present your arguments in a courteous fashion and it is based on evidence and reality, a lot of them -- after a while, months, weeks, years, whatever, you find public opinion has shifted mysteriously but it is not mysterious. it is a process going on all the time. we may think that our words are not carrying any wait but if they are true and again, you may think i am naive but i actually believe ultimately, eventually truths does win. it may take a while. it may there may be much grief along the way, much pain and anguish

along the way, the truce does win, we have to keep going. >> michael from new york. the biggest problem is the lack of training in logic, logic and critical thinking used to be a major academic curriculum but now it is not anywhere. do you see a renewal of that? >> i don't see a renewal of logic because it was related to what we were talking about. what has gone down the tubes is reason and reason has gone down the tubes because we have a kind of prevailing intellectual athos told us there's a thing as truth. if there is no truth you can't have reason so we have to unravel all of that. you can't have logic until you restore truth and reason.

that is not beyond the bounds of human endeavor in the ways we have been talking during the discussion, very difficult for all the reasons we have been alluding to. if you keep on trying to to pull public debate to the territory of evidence, factual evidence of reality, of truth separating truth from lies you do get back to logic, there is one specific thing i always thought, i wrote it in the prizes, but this was really true of our education in the education system. we have to -- i was tossed to write an essay that at a particular structure. you started with a preposition, you then had a

counterproposition or more than one and then arrived at a conclusion. that's taught you how to think logically on the basis of evidence. it taught you not to imagine or fantasize but to ground your arguments in reality and apply logic to progress from one stage to another, otherwise the conclusion and in britain the essay was virtually abolished. instead of the essay, what was prized above all was creative imagination. people were encouraged to a mansion, children were taught to imagine, that is fine, i am in favor of the imaginative thinking, creative thinking, if a disease, stories, novels, fiction, i enjoy them as much as anybody. that is not logic, it is not evidence, it is not reason, it is fantasy. consequently we replace the

ability to reason and to think the idea ability to imagine and fantasize and basically replace facts with fiction and that is the confusion of the age. >> host: crystal in mississippi, you are on booktv on c-span2 with melanie phillips. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. as -- hypocrisy, abuse, double standards some of which you talk about, some of the standards you are talking about today are great indeed but certainly everybody wasn't given an opportunity to live by those standards. the caller before talked about how do we determine those standards? we need to start by cleaning up their own house. if you have double standards, hypocrisy and abuse of power people are going to reject those

notions out right and anybody who espouse those beliefs. so until the right can clean up their own house and make sure they have righteous indignation across the board, your righteous indignation is only for those things in europe's best interests, not in my best interests. i wonder if you could comment on that. >> guest: i agree. hypocrisy among politicians seriously gets in the way. i am not familiar with the details of your political controversies but insofar as politicians say one thing or doing another that is pretty

intolerable. the fashionable word is transparency, honesty and integrity. you need politicians to stand up for certain things that are important and to live by those and be consistent so that you contrast them. you may disagree with them but you know they me what they say and they say what they mean and that is where they are coming from. one specific point, talk about policies on the right. that pretty village point about hypocrisy started on one side on the way the republican party is in trouble, doesn't seem to know what it is doing, messing around, veering off into extremes or being told they are republicans in name only, e, the tremendous argument more heat than light. there are certain key tasks for any people who want to repair

society and related to scenes coming off in this discussion over and over again, education. what i have been talking about, and the collapse of education as you have been hearing and talking about, taught people how to think, how to think properly and stop giving people the knowledge that they need to encrypt them to with maps to find their way around the world, it seems to me so much needs attention in your american education system just as in my british education system. i am not aware that republicanism has made this a key objective to get to the roots of what has gone wrong. the education board, charter schools, structure, that is important but i am talking about

the actual ideas that got into the educational -- for decades now in north america and britain. in britain our government is making a stab at this, don't know if it will succeed but the first time i can remember, politicians who understood what has gone wrong in education is not simply restructured but has to do with what is going on here or in teachers's minds or teaching of teachers or the assumptions behind with education actually means and what we have been talking about today confirms the inability to connect with politicians who do reflect the need to address the problems that need to be addressed. we have to start somewhere. one of the ways in which those

who are confirmed about repairing society or whatever part of the spectrum they come from one of the key areas for them is to say something has gone terribly wrong with the way we think and the way we are no longer for educating our young and for me to tell americans how to conduct your politics but for me that would be a priority. >> host: in 1985 you published "doctors' dilemmas: medical ethics and contemporary science," the power of medicine to prevent major taking her course is massively extended and with that greater power has come almost intolerable extension of moral choice. you go on to put down principles to unlock the dilemmas of responsibility, respect the autonomy of a patient to not

exploit the discrepancy and power inherent in a professional relationship, where does this come from in 1985? >> a long way to go in 1985 in terms of medical ethics because so much has changed in medicine and medical technology and the dilemma i was talking about exponentially increase. where that originally came from, i wrote is with a doctor who died very young but at the time he was the officials who served as medical ethics committee of the british medical association which is the professional organization accessing clinicians' i britain. in 1985, i have not thought about this but he came to me and

wanted me -- to write the book about medical ethics, noticed the kinds of things i had been riding in the guardian. at that early stage in the mid 80s in charge of medical ethics, he was concerned by the beginnings of a slide. he received two things happening. on the one and a tremendous amount of medical ethics in medicine and medical technology creating these demands, creation of the first test-tube baby was at that time, questions about extending wife, whether you should intervene, technology was creating dilemmas we had never seen before. at the same time among the doctors who were his colleagues,

the beginning of a slide what i was beginning to pick up in the general atmosphere, the business of there is no such thing as objective truth and no such thing as objective morality. we all make up our own moral codes, the individual reigns supreme, my choice is equivalent to your choice and everyone else's choice and no one has a right to deny me my choice, everything is a subjective individual, makes his own morality. beginning to get in the way of what he considered to be the cardinal ethical imperative of medicine, first do no harm and he saw there was an erosion of respect for human life and this happened subsequent to writing the book and what i observed is a great deal, this erosion of the in the respect for eli life among doctors has meant they no

longer know the difference between dying and killing, many of them. they say at the end of life about euthanasia, no longer a debate about euthanasia in britain, no longer a debate about mercy killing put a debate about allowing people to die. but what they're talking about is not allowing people to die but taking a course of action which takes someone who is not dying and as a result of a course of action the doctor takes the person dies. by my view that is killing. that is different from not prolonging the process of dying that is taking place already. the moral distinction is absolutely crucial, but increasingly in the 1980s at that stage, the doctor was no longer able to make these distinctions. as the result he was worried doctors would turn into killers and pretend to be simply helping

people to die. that was only one example. there's a whole host of other examples through genetics, genetic engineering, test-tube babies, how long ago that seems, a whole variety of dilemmas but the march of technology and the erosion of moral values was going to create -- of we were not careful -- a brutalize society in which medical ethics -- that is why he wanted me to write a book and i wrote a book. >> host: stan in palm dale, calif. only a minute or two left. >> caller: i disagree with the guests on so many things it is hard to know where to start. on the other hand it is good to hear opinions i disagree with. as far as israel goes, how can the guests expect israel -- the

arabs to -- i am sorry. how can arabs negotiate with israel as long as israel keeps stealing arab land on the west bank? and one comment. i don't believe god is a real-estate agent. >> host: melanie phillips, with a question like that you have 16 seconds. >> guest: i am glad we agree to disagree on this but it is not sterile--stealing arab lands. this gentleman would be advised to look at the history. in the 1920s the international community said the jews alone were entitled to all this land including -- they alone had this land originally as their own historic national kingdom. this is a very complicated issue but that is the reality which

many people don't understand, that the jews have returned to their own historic homeland, inalienable historic, moral and legal right. once you realize that, most americans do realize that, one perspective rather changes. >> host: one of your books you read it was almost the mistake that britain accidentally helped to found israel. tongue-in-cheek. >> guest: certain people in the british ruling class would think it was rather a mistake that they helped bring -- helped and did their damnedest to stop it from coming about that that is another issue of immense complications for another time. >> guest: final e-mail from kerri in maryland. have to comment on the guess when the interview started. i wondered how such an intelligent woman could have such obviously wrongheaded opinions on topics such as

global warming. but as the show progressed i began to realize i agree with everything you had to say except global warming. amazing. that will be my last word. melanie phillips, author and columnist has been our guest for the last three hours. "the divided house: women at westminster" was surface put, "doctors' dilemmas: medical ethics and contemporary science" 11%, "all must have prizes," "the sex change society: feminized britain and the neutered male," created a terror state within," "the world turned upside-down: the global battle over god, truth, and power" and finally guardian angel is being published today at mbooks.com, that is your autobiography. melanie phillips.com is her web site. this is booktv on c-span to. c-span2. >> you are watching 40 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. here are some of the programs to look out for this weekend. ..

>> literary critics and more to talk about politics, war, history, religion and culture. watch these programs and more all weekend long on booktv, and for a complete schedule, visit booktv.org. >> david graeber is next on booktv. he argues that america's political system is only responsive to the wealthy and