the realized promise of most people on that country. so in one instance you have fear of downward mobility and in other places where people have been taken out, extreme poverty and now find themselves, they find their heads locked. that is the case of loss of mobility and at some point, the accumulated frustrations become politically toxic and

that is what has happened i think in the last few years, that we've been promised a lot. we've been promised a lot by the ideologies broadcast from all different directions and we find that most of these promises are unfulfilled. they're certainly not being fulfilled and it's quite likely they are unfulfilled. for one, we have environmentalconstraints . we've already seen the political risk of unfulfilled promises and now we have the simple fact that the planet doesn't have enough resources to bring billions of indians and chinese to the same level that people in europe and america have been on for a few decades. >> and this anger is more general then assigned to people inthe developing world , whose so-called art be

going to be able to live the same way as people in washington dc, it runs right up to the top where people in the upper and upper middle class in this country who are extravagantly well off by global standards are still prone to the same anger and resentment that you are also seeing in nigeria and india and indonesia. this is why it's an age of anger. >> absolutely. i think in a world which is run by four is supposed to run by this ideal, this idea of comparing yourself to the lives of other people, to the well-being and contentment of other people and thinking that you are missing out, that you are lacking something, and then also the fear that whatever you have might be taken away from you,

that youmight lose it . those kinds of emotions are prevalent today because we live in a global society that is supposed to be driven by comparison, by data seeking, by wealthy people and when you find that actually the incredibly unequal society where opportunities are horribly unevenly distributed and even then those who have at this point stopped to be victims to the same fear and anxieties as the have-nots and this is what we are seeing today. the house alsohave in addition , they might also have other problems which is that even though they have money, they have wealth they don't have access to intellectual and cultural capital which is certainly

the case with our bureaucratic president who is really incredibly neurotic, it seems, about the culture and power possessed by manhattan liberals and he is constantly baiting them and targeting the new york times. so there are those kinds of resentments also at work where people feel that a tiny elite as monopolized intellectual and cultural capital. >> host: it was striking to see eurasia in the middle of this argument, most of the arguments in this book are from the 18, first part of the 20th century in europe but suddenly gerard, a frenchman who wound up

teaching at stanford and died early last year contributed to key ideas, the idea of rivalry, can you explain that? >> it's really a notion that lit up the whole african for me quite himself he did not extend his theory of limited tribal read to geopolitics or history. but this notion that what we desire is immediate through the desire of other people, that is something that made me think about much of modern history as essentially an incredibly intense game of emulation. where small minorities achieve extraordinary amounts of power and wealth and cultural sophistication. and then the rest want to catch up, they want to do things for themselves. and this process then spreads around the world in a kind of

escalated fashion. >>. >> host: it has the next essential bases which you bring up powerfully. it's something that's more than material want that people are after. it's the being that the other person seems to have. >> guest: very much so. it's this on the up usable, existential envy and desire. >> host: this person seems demoralized or more fulfilled or more participant in society than i am because that person has a better house or better car, better job, better real estate and that's why i wanted, not just to have better than them but to be, have more being. >> someone who then illustrated this syndrome perfectly i thought was russo. in the late 18th century,

very kind of identified this rivalry as a source of serious spiritual deformity. and that's actually something that prevents individuals from enjoying inner freedom. so very early on as this commercial society premised on vanity, on imitation is coming into being, here's a man saying okay, there are some serious contradictions here. which will leave most human beings deeply unhappy and frustrated because this particular desire to shine, to compete with others, to achieve more thanother people , it's kind of feasible, it's unfulfilled and what we do also is take individuals and make them feel happy when they dominate others.

and domination would be, and kind of ideal, secretly so i think gerard and others, they identified certain psychologies which you know, have kind of a huge political thought today and again, they had this political form in the past and lead to all kinds of incredibly lucky competitive wars, conflicts. now at least their relatively controlled, you see them exploding within particular national contexts. we are at least not faced with a repeat of the destructive wars for instance that we saw in the first half of the 20th century, all driven by the competitive

instinct to have what others have got. what is the states of germany illustrates which is this fanatical desire to catch up, with great britain and france. and beat them at their own game. >> to accumulate the same kind of political, economic and military power that they seem to possess. >> at least today, those kind of limited rivalries don't seem to be opting into another major war i think but the conflict we are faced with right now is serious in its own right. >> these fashions, these emotions in this narrative that you set out, it grew again and again in this thing you call the alien domain of promise. the alienated domain of promise appears in all modernized countries piece on the half of the illiterate majority. the educated minority or

himself. so it turns out to be painfully divided. in all cases, he articulates a profound sense of inadequacy and tries to draw an ambitious blueprint to overcome it but this improvised program believes in action cannot be massed on to the classifications of ideas and movements to the broad categories of the left and right, that commonly mediates our understanding. history is current to theirs. this alienated young man of promise, encountered in your reporting over the world. >>. >> guest: absolutely and also since i started out as a novelist, my unit of analysis has always been this divided human being. >> and one reason why i specified very clearly that i do not really want to talk about my subjects in these categories of left and right,

liberal and conservative, all use the category of class. to describe this. this cross span of history. i wanted to stay focused on the individual and as i said, i encountered this individual through fiction, through literature. and i wanted to show how this person is deeply, deeply internally divided. so this is not a coherent bear. we cannot simply take the plane that person makes, whether it's being poor liberalism or socialism or nationalism at face value. that we have to examine what exactly this person is suffering from. and that was, you know, really what i wanted to do in this book. that to simply assume this person is on the left or right or this person is a

liberal or conservative based on what they say about themselves and about their intentions, which meant that you know, a lot of conventional history really in sort of, and it's the way i look at it, basically sets off these abstractions against each other without ever taking into account this concrete human being with this next essential fear and anxiety and desires. and i think in a way, someone like gerard or russo really helped me, although i think someone like gandhi was very alert to this particular divided figure and he held

the whole way of being in the world and of doing politics on the basis of this divided human being. still, i think in the way we have done history and the way we've done is national history, we haven't really taken on board the insights into this human individual and this is a book that would be inconceivable without the help it has got from novelists and poets. >> you said a couple years ago, i think as someone who has that same strong attention to the 19th century, prefiguring some of the patterns that we see in the president, he will write a novel like snow that makes a reference but applies the situation in russia then to the situation in turkey in recent times.

are you going to talk about this kind of thing with him? >> guest: we did. whatever people from the so-called left behind nations get together, there's always a lot to discuss about these issues because you realize that at a very fundamental level, there are a whole set of experiences that link us. this feeling, primarily the feeling of being left behind or at least thinking we have to catch up, we have to do something. and then of course the feeling of confronting this superior civilization. and feeling intimidated by receiving or borne by it. >> dostoyevsky is in many ways these tribes and in that is this syndrome in its fiction. you can think of any number of japanese novelists and of course armor is in that

particular tradition. before i started writing this book i've been taking notes for a book which was going to be primarily about left behind nations, trying to construct the kind of economy. of these countries and the peoples and their particular literatures who share certain very important features, whether you are an egyptian writer or an indian writer or a chinese writer. there are certain resemblances and easy recognitions so i think that again, that came in very handy, all the notes that i'd taken for the story of the left behind people. when it turned out there were a lot of people left behind in the heart of the left will also manifested some of these

traits of responding, again that sort of feeling of existential envy and resentment. that depending on circumstances, these feelings and emotions can arise in completely unexpected context if the loss of power, the prospect of economic alliance can induce those feelings and emotions in the richest and most powerful country in the world. >> host: so you speak about you and your talking about the left behind nations and yet you got a nobel prize, you have a list of prizes as long as my arm and you describe that alienated promise, this division and sometimes speaking for the

dispossessed, sometimes speaking for the elite, speaking for yourself it seems there are sideways self portraiture there. you talk about your multiple social location and how you identify yourself. >> i suppose his idea is not really have access to all set of experiences that are i suppose taken for granted by people in power. wherever you are, whether you are in india or china because i grew up in a really small place in india and belonged to, it's not quite accurate to call it the normal class but somewhere there, somewhere in those levels and so it's a very different experience of the world where all the feelings aren't i

describing the book, are widely shared among those that i grew up with, people i went to college with. >> the kind of responsibility for instance mister modi has done our sewing politically important in india. i grew up with that idea of the local elite who seem to be feathering their nests who are speaking of democracy and progress and freedom. people who had, monopolized for cultural and intellectual capital and scored people who do not have access to it. >> i turned that the great advantage in this particular version of class conflict in india by railing against this corrupt and arrogant elite. and he has found lots of

people who believe that he's right. and he is right to a certain extent. so it was easier for me to understand because i was one of those people who accepted those emotions in the past and i certainly spent a lot of time with people who were, who excelled in emotions or feeling those emotions. and that i feel had given me a kind of access to the alienated stranger, the provincial outsider who presented neglect in our intellectual journalistic discourses. and has been become political extremely powerful. >> with these recent elections. >> so the semi-urban inhabitants who did not feature much in our conversation who had been in a way simmering with all

kinds of rage and frustration. and now we see this figure all around us about this figure, the new journalist articles are being aptly commissioned but i think what is disappointing to, all this new interest is this totally absence in our discourse all the time. and i feel like we really need to pay more attention to the leaders of history. we've been too obsessed with the winners. and in a way, this book really is an attempt to describe those and what they do when living becomes intolerable. >> host: you say the history is the winners? >> guest: it becomes almost a

kind of truism that it's hard to remember area. >> host: this is an attempt to write history with a greater attention to the seeming losers in this economic terms anyway, the last 40 or 50 or 60 years. you wake up timothy mcveigh at crucial point in the book and that link becomes suggestive for the way these kind of angry people in different cultures have more in common than we might expect, can you explain? >> this is another way of talking about how these series about the clash of civilizations, all this idea that people belong to different religious communities are bound to enter into conflict with each other and don't share much. any number of examples, historically and independent, mcveigh's friendship with

ramzi yousef is one example. >> they were in adjoining cells. >> guest: in prison, the maximum facility and discovered each other and became great friends and realized they had a lot in commonpolitically . mcveigh said he believed in what use of and subsequently osama bin laden was doing and they were right to politically put it. that meeting of minds, that kind of intellectual, ideological affinity we see over and over again. we don't want to notice it. the no region must mantras was staffed by hindus who wanted to get into these hindu fanatics against multiculturalism. the man, the young boy, teenager who kills nine or 10 people in munich last year is

an arabian german, he was inspired by relic. any number of instances where these affinities are crossing religious national borders and more pointing to the kind of shared temperament. again, that sort of divided self and driven by rage and frustration into extreme acts of violence, identifying certain targets that either multiculturalists or liberals or states, the american states and i do think we have to going back to gerard. inside the world today is constituted by seamless rather than indifference. constituted by increasing similarity area. >> of experience, of emotions , of ideas, rather than say

all this all began when the fictions started fighting muslims back in the crusades. >> this is all a recipe of those ancient enmities and battles. we really have to sort of look at how these ideas and ideologies travel. how they're absorbed in different contexts and turn to different users. >>. >> when we stop emails last september, one of us said to the other we have to about talk about francis and then i see him referenced in the book as the most influential public figure today and in ways that where you see us lining up with some of your most important points. can you explain that? >> guest: officially, here's a man with an enormous moral authority representing an

institution that the most oldest, valuable institution in the world today who dared to speak of charity in a time when we've all become !, you know, and i include myself in that category. i include individuals, not just people i don't disagree with politically. we become aggressive, we started defining ourselves in exclusive ways with the nations, with particular ideas and ideologies. here's a man who comes at the end of a really long phase of relative peace and stability, things are starting to fall apart and he's still talking about how charity is the way out. how so many of our foundational ideas and concepts are lying in tatters today and the only way in which he can escape this

rampant destruction is through acts of charity and through acts of compassion. you know, the intellectual life and the way it has been institutionalized and professionalized has had very little space for this kind of discourse, or this kind of conversation.all the time when a certain kind of religiously motivated thinker or still central to the culture is one example of that and mlk, another one but we haven't had that kind of figure who speaks that kind of, employs that kind of essential moral vocabulary. otherwise what is public internationalism? it's become essentially regurgitating the possibility of the day, maybe disagreement a bit to a

certain extent but essentially the assumptions are broadly shared by the so-called public intellectuals. and you know, we are struggling, all of us are struggling to make sense of what happened today. i don't think pope francis is struggling to make sense of what is happening today. he has been warning us about it for some time. >> what you think is there anything to be done, it's the age of anger, it's global. things are getting worse. the anger that people feel is perfectly justified. because society is not there and getting worse in so many ways, what should we do? >> well, my principal is going to businesses in my indian background. >> i think personally i've seen that as a writer all i

can do is challenge myself. more and more. and then just work harder. but you know, if i were to prescribe anything i would say to other people, i would actually, i would say that look, it's actually these prescriptions that were supposed to work universally that have brought us into this. and that what was solutions we work to have to be contingent on our political circumstances, wherever we are in the world today. there are certain i think the fact that so many people have become politicized overnight. >> in the last few weeks. and have realized how high the stakes are suddenly for

themselves or their children or grandchildren. and become engaged with politics , with you know, just everything that happened around the world today. that in itself is a great sign. >> and i think solutions will emerge from this experience of greater knowledge, greater solidarity and feelings of trust and compassion that have to accompany this kind of politics. otherwise i think the days of broad, overarching solutions are over and quite rightly and i think we should celebrate that in a way. that this crisis, this disaster around us is forcing us to ask some hard questions and think again about the shape of our societies, the shape of our ideologies . that in itself is a way in which we can craft our way

towards a workable solution. >>. >> amen to that. it's thrilling to have you here and hear your answers to questions that i've been forming. i want to open things up to questions from members of the audience. the microphones are in the center and if you have a question, someone will give a microphone to you and direct the question. >> thank you so much for just such an enlightening conversation, i was thinking when you are mentioning mimetic rivalry in this pursuit which of course is embedded even in the american declaration of independence, does that mean there's a pathological flaw in our founding documents here which then perhaps orders this kind

of mimetic rivalry? >> sort of built into our bloodstream. >> it's really the, a question that can be answered in all kinds of different ways, one is of course the contradiction that opens up in the individual soul when you enter into this race for status and wealth and end up rejoicing in the domination of other people or rejoicing in the humiliation action of other people. >> that is a contradiction that you know, a lot of people have talked about. the other contradiction is that the ideals of freedom are formulated by members of a minority who simply assume

that that freedom is not going to be available to people were not like them. >> to slaves, for instance, to native americans. seemingly on the other side of the atlantic, people have already made assumptions who is human and who isn't, who's deserving of freedom and who isn't. in many ways, we are looking at as civilization of a minority whose ideas are formulated by a minority for themselves. >> how do we extend those ideas, admirable as they are to the vast majority that wants to realize them? that is the question we've been struggling with as the advent of the foreign world, that is the modern history. as a russian writer who's been a huge influence on me like load in the book saying

after long experiences in europe that what he has seen there is the civilization of the minority where the masses are uninvited guests at the feast of life who have to be eitherexcluded or suppressed . and that in many ways, you know, remains at least the experience of a lot of people and of course what we're seeing today are these feelings of rage that are generated by this experience of exclusion and oppression. >> host: your analysis is quite profound of the problem. i'd like you to talk a little bit more about solutions, even in abstract terms. i'm stunned by your praise of pope francis going back to charity but of course he's

not a political person. he's a political person but he's not a politician and some of the people you praise like he junior, like gandhi were not politicians but they were very political and they organized movements,political and social movements and it seems to me that the problem we have is partly because of politics . bad politics, divisive politics and i would state i guess that without some overarching piece of movement and based on values that i feel there are more partial kinds of politics which are taking over from religion, aggressive nationalism and so forth, f no racial populism so i just like to push you a little bit on that, what about politics? >> thinking of people like martin luther king and gandhi are interesting figures in that they tried to marry spiritual projects, religious

projects with political activism. and what they realized is that for the range of human needs and aspirations are not being met by politics abstractly. that politics have become you know, to determined by certain pursuits that were deemed essential, the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of happiness through, the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of status. and that's caused the divisions in a society that's caused people to take in hyper individualistic ways, neglecting other human needs such as solidarity and community, the feeling of longing to a particular group and acting in unison with other people. all these needs were being

systematically neglected by modern politics and economy. and so there intent was to combine politics with spirituality in a way that those needs are met and at the same time !, in a very distinct very clearly defined political agenda is also advanced at the same time and i think when i think of solutions, maybe this is to anti-intellectual of me, this is what i imagine, this is what i think. >> that we have to re-conceive in a way solidarity and a sense of community, otherwise it's the demagogues were going to offer stability and solidarity to the aggrieved and disaffected. and triumph. and how they've been offered

solidarity by saying let's exclude a lot of people and demonize a lot of people and that can become the status of solidarity. >> so in a way, i think they have very intuited that a lot of people are suffering today are actually in dire need of these communities , what we call people or what is dismissed as people in an chambers or you know, faith communities but this is a kind of political expression of longing for community. and the longing for identity. that i think the left or liberals have been inclined to. >> host: through the day was against the new deal. the reason she was against the new deal, a catholic anarchist, is it appropriated, the state appropriated doing this good work and systematized and bureaucracy eyes it and she thought that the solution

really had to be love and caring of people for one another. >> these spontaneous and freely offered person-to-person and that idea sounds truly strange today i think but that's something like what you're suggesting. >> thank you very much for an absolutely illuminating talk. i haven't read the book but i can't wait to get my hands on it but i was struck by the way in which religion seems to be sort of haunting a lot of these projects because your experience is actually about violence and in that sense, thinking about rivalries is deeply depressing in this context because for himthere's no divisiveness, we have come to a scapegoat , we become monstrous and there's no end to the violence so in your thinking about another traditional century. >> going back to people like gandhi and his appropriation

of really big practices a new form of political process or mlk or pope francis today, and so i'm thinking about the sort of debate for example gandhi had with stuttgart where on the notion that it has a way of being is going to actually really transform society so that the vast majority of marginalized and live well and cause there's this the cynicism that that could ever be the case and that you have to rely on sort of illegal practices of the state to protect people. are we back there now? are we rehashing the same problem? and if so, how do we not fall into the same impasse? >> i think for those of you who did not know about this great debate that between gandhi, a shorthand version

of that is that gandhi as you correctly categorize his position, sort of this notion of devotion as creating the conditions in which equality and the antidiscrimination can be achieved and i think there's a sort of at least in that faith and his life was a classic modernist, thinking of stateslike many people at that time. like all of us . and then again, trusting in the state to enforce equality and of course there are examples of the state doing that. most notoriously in china. where the strikes were achieved by total dictates from above. i think you know, that debate continues, that debate can be had but the state is altered,

the state is no longer. >> the social democratic state that someone like baker simply assumed would be around. the state has changed its characters everywhere, whether it was in india or europe and in the here. so we can't really expect too much from the state at this point, we can't even expect too much from political parties, political parties, which are completely dysfunctional right now, unable to harness any political energy. and this is the case again everywhere.>> you see that in europe,you see that here. although there are insurgent movementshere and there like bernie sanders . on the whole , the kind of institutionalized politics has become unresponsive in a really very depressing way. but i think gandhi, in his

distrust of abstractions, there's a great line in the obituary of gandhi. that again, a very unlikely, gandhi was an unlikely hero. also for like mcdonald said i love the man he never gave great speeches about progress and freedom and liberty, he was focused on the every day, on small things in life. and i think you know, gandhi did not talk about these things because he saw them as essentially beguiling illusions. and what he was focused on is basically these things are meaningless, these are meaningless slogans and in the end, you have to deal with individuals, you have to deal with human beings and also fears i think a side of him, that kind of nihilism that could be unleashed by

the shackling of faith. in these abstractions and we are seeing some of that today. >> that the substitute religion will fail and well before that happens, we've got to introduce these ideas and these disciplines into politics. so i think you know, that after these projects, not depending on the state, not depending on conventional political parties or prophecies. but depending on individual transformation. an individual personalization. >>. >> i. i had a question, so you talk a lot about how in the 19th century a lot of books that you read when you were growing up were how you

came to these ideas and how you understood them and a lot of scholars of nationalism recognize the role of metabolism, of literature, ideas of nationalism and sort of expressing the feeling that you're talking about. you see any parallels from the 19th century and that type of literature with 21st century and with the internet and the way that a lot of different movements, national movements have moved online and have been moving in a way that hasn't really been looked at and how they are using those platforms to sort of frametheir movement? thank you . >> guest: that is sort of essential to our culture now in a way the novel was essential to 19th century culture in europe. in that that is where the new communities are being formed. new solidarity's are being created and constructed and

the speed with which this happens is quite staggering. in the days of the 19th century and the days of print books , things happened relatively slowly and it was still confined to the literate so you're talking about small minorities of people who were leading nationalist movements or are defining the national idea or the national community. now can happen overnight. so 20th century in that sense , the 20th century fiction writer finds himself or herself in a very strange place. because he or she is no longer essential to the culture. that place has been taken and it's also true that the 90, this is another discussion but the first 45 novels, it

would be, you would be hard-pressed to draw from it the kind of historical lessons and philosophical insights you could draw from any number of 19 century writers and it's interesting to compare the two and see what happens and what would the beat of a social shift to make this you know, to make this, to render the 19th century novelists so unimportant and the 24th century novelists so marginal. but you know, that's a different discussion. >> are there exceptions, is it a fine balance, 20th century novels just lacking in the power of the 19th century? predecessors or are there people who are putting it together? >> the fine balance is the 19th century novel? >>.

>> and you know, there's nothing in it about, there can be in a different era altogether. about what the world we inhabit today which is being transformed dramatically, greedily that it's really hard for anyone to keep up. let alone the novelist works at a minimum three or four years. >> that's what philip roth said in 1952 so if that's the case, then no fiction of social consequence or whatever you want to call it has happened in our lifetime? >> so i think no, i won't go that far. i think what i'm saying is that fiction, 19th century fiction and the way it died and remains have died to 19th century society. >> their particular politics,

their attitudes, people learn a lot about how a very small change for instance works by readingbalzac . and that's a superficial level of information if you are interested in the big philosophical debate of the 19th century, it's easy enough to go to tolstoy and dostoevsky and read them, find essential debate. someone like nietzsche owed so much to ostoyevsky so even philosophers are people who we, all philosophers are reading the novelists of the 19th century and being stimulated by them.>> it's hard to think of any, i suppose because philosophy today has a different role, it's very modern today. so it couldn't have the same kind of relationship with fiction. but it's really hard to imagine a book as meaningful

in all kinds of ways as say the brothers cannot solve. or war and peace, i mean i know these are unfair comparisons in many ways but you could also look at a small book like notes from the underground which featured a line this book. >> and take readings of particular psychologies, particular temperaments in the way it did in the 19th century novelists did, i just don't know whether that is possible and are much more diverse, much more fragmented today. >> let's take a novel that i know we both really admired. i remember the nightfall came out, we talked about it and you said rightly, you know, it's a decent book but it didn't explain how that man ended up in the river. so that a novel, it's not

about the sentence but the past 25 years, can you imagine someone looking back on the best of nightfall and understanding this world of ideas, this culture at that time through the novel the way we look back on dostoyevsky? >> guest: i suppose it could but you would not think of that novel again as breaking new ground philosophically. it would not illuminate in many ways, you could argue it's an updated version of notes from the underground. you're talking about a man, half educated man who finds himself in an indian assistance or finds himself in a part of africa and in a very flawed political context. which also you can find in many other novels. and sometimes much more acutely done. the local politics of it.

but there's this potential aspects of the novel, that i don't think are particularly unique. you can find examples of that all across the 90s and it's interesting, the bringing together of the second and this particular, this alienated stranger, an outsider in this particular setting, that is interesting, that is something but i'm not sure whether that will stand as a panoramic account of that part of africa. >> you're saying two things and one is that novel owes more to its predecessor, and it's got a lot of inheritance. >> my point itself is that the novelists finished because the big moment within the 19th century and that is

beenrepeating that soak the admits . >> there's a lack of originality but also just the philosophical dimension, a way that ideas are tossed and turned in the great 19th-century novels and away we are not used the scene in fiction today where i can turn lots of will go on a discourse about the odyssey or tolstoy as his, dostoyevsky has his, george eliot has hers. >> that's out there, that easy access to ideas. >> also those experiences are fresh in 19th century and i think we may blame the novelist today for not being alert enough and so forth which many people do but i think it's unfair because what novelist in the 19th century was describing was a moment of transformation that he or she were actually

living through where they were intimately part of it and those experiences were having too many people for the first time in history, the experience of organization for instance was having for the first time, today when novelists are written about organization in india, or really limiting fine balance, you can, you know one of the pleasures of reading fictions like that. is the memory that constantly wants you of the novels you read previously. of set in the 19th century. that similarity. >> it's also the extent to which the 19th century novel was developing the way society was developing, there's a sense of discovery and the breakthroughs in our correspondence to this engine and rail and the electra

glide and so forth. doctor lewis set up novelists that we make our good leads but there's this smaller area of organization. >>. >>. >> this is a question, first of all great talk. it was really articulate and logical. supported by historical examples. but there are people who don't even know like most of the words being said today, let alone understand and reedit so like, you mentioned like earlier, there are divided families, there are people that are led by their emotions regardless of their circumstances. and i kind of feel that way sometimes where i feel like i am for example at the new york times and the person i'm talking to is donald trump and i want to ask like how do you facilitate a dialogue

between people like that, where good people like that. how do you dumb down the material or should you or like, if you lose something when you dumb down all of these really important arguments that you are making ? >> guest: i don't know whether it's mild to have a dialogue as it were with people on the other side and also i don't think they are on the other side. weare as i keep saying , we are all inhabiting the same space. these divisions are essentially mental constructions. so you know, i could talk about its context in a particular kind of language. when i go back to india, i've

spent most of my adult life, there's a different language in which i speak about these issues and i don't see why i have to dumb down anything because you know, these people who i'm speaking to have the benefit of long experience, of realities that i'm writing about. in fact, i am plagiarizing from these, i'm stealing their experiences so it's really a friend coming down, really.so i think one of the ways in which we can transcend this of great conflicts and divisions of the time is by not really, i mean, trying to examine or trying to think of these divisions as essentially instructions that we

ourselves have created. and then learning to recognize them and experience in places outside our circles and our particular groups and the ability to identify them, to talk about them meaningfully. i feel like that is something that as you were discussing earlier has been lacking in a lot of journalistic discourse. that it has been too much, it has been about the winners and it's not really talked about the losers and we need to refocus attention on them. >>

>> and your skepticism about social progress i can understand but i have difficulty in reconciling it with economic progress, with the fact that we've been able to overcome such poverty in the 21st century come in many areas of the world. the fact that childbirth now is much less difficult, much less fraught with the dangers that have been brought by modern medicine. so i guess what i'm asking is do

you see the same type of skepticism in economic progress as you do in social? >> i think this is, you know, it's a minefield of the subject. anyone who's had, who sat in the dentist chair and had local anesthetic applied and then still felt sore afterward must be grateful to modern medicine for the progress it has made. the time not long ago when anesthetic had not been invented and operations really serious, life-threatening operations had to be done without it. so of course there's progress of that kind. economic progress, it's much more, get it issued and it seems from the quantitative measures, mortality, childbirth, people

being lifted out of poverty. when they make those assessmen assessments, we actually don't often didn' then see what happeo people when you're lifted out of poverty. and what is this poverty line anyway? quite far from the fact that measures are shifting, variables certainly not followed, dependent, very much contingent on who's making them at what time. i can speak for my own experience i get of individuals who i've seen leave the village where, in search of better opportunities in big cities, a classic move from the village to the big city. where they are certainly earning money of the kind they could have only prints he dreamed of. so not only have a lifted up a

statistical level of poverty, they're almost any kind of world bank estimates that are normal income group. but their life is suffered a dramatic collapse in actual living standards. the fact that their living in a horribly polluted city, and islam. whatever money they're making is not not entitle them to anything more than a roof above their head. and sometimes they have to sleep in the open if they are doing jobs like that, taxi driving things like that. people simply sleep in the open, a tarp for the roof. so that kind of existence where you're making money but you can't afford come you're working 14 hours a day, you can't afford to have your family, h you can't afford to start a family, you are away from your parents. i've seen people recoil from

their experience and come back and retreat, go below the poverty line again because a whole lot of things that were important to them that made their life meaningful was not available to them when they moved above the poverty line. what i'm trying to say is his quantity measures that are used to assess progress are very deceptive. again they are leaving out a whole range of human experience, a whole range of human needs that are important, that a vital. and for many people, they simply don't want to be part of this particular adventure of economic progress. so many people i see are very much content to do their small businesses, a few errands here and there, farm is a bit and be genuinely idle. they do want to be part of the adventure of endless growth and endless consumption. we have forgotten it consists of

all kinds of people who don't subscribe to our ideologies, the ideologies of educated people, people are actually benefited from progress, who are essentially the main beneficiaries of the modern world ideology, the fact a lot of people don't want to be a part of it. i think, you know, a society that honors these diverse modes of existence, society that assumes that the good life is diversely conceived is in my book a good society, that society that consist of as only one way to be and there's only one way to go forward, which is the way of more growth and productivity and consumption and more work and so on and so forth. >> sounds like what you are setting out could come out of the book you described about the left behind.

i hope you get a chance to write because it is mesmerizing, the way you describe the lives of people who forget about progress, don't even want to participate in the ideology of growth. this has been fantastic. i'm so glad you are here. so glad you're still going to be here to talk with us during the reception and to sign books. if you have a book to be signed, on up to the aisle and pankaj will sign books you. at the table set up in a moment. take you so much. it's been a tremendous event and if so grateful to everybody who's been here, especially right before break. take us so much for coming, and thank you so much, pankaj. [applause] >> [inaudible conversations]

live today at noon eastern investigator journalist and best-selling author annie jacobsen is a guest on booktv's "in depth." >> from the pentagon documents what is clear is that it's moving humans in the military environment towards being comfortable with this idea of merging man and machine. >> she is known for her writings on war, weapons, security and government secrets and will discuss her recent books. join our live conversation with annie jacobsen with your calls emails, tweets and facebook questions live today at noon eastern on booktv's "in depth" on c-span2.