upcoming programming exploring our nation's past. sign up today. next, author and philosopher ac grayling talks about the influences on war and democracy. topics include threats to democracy relate to go aauthoritarianism, including the u.k.'s decision to leave the european union. he is interviewed by former cia director michael hayden at a forum hosted by george mason university school of policy and government. what i would like to do now is it introduce general hayden. that introduction doesn't need to take a lot of time for i think the vast majority of the audience here. for those one or two of you

who've been asleep for 20 years, generally hayden is head of the national security, served in the united states military for over 30 years and retired as a four-star general officer, and the highest ranking u.s. air force intelligence officer ever. he continues his public service in a number of fashions. he is serving helping to educate the young people who are entering or have already entered the national security and intelligence work space, offering advice how that work should be done. he is also prominent in public speaking around the country and on cnn serves as one of that you are somewhere national security experts. and then lastly, as the author of two books, the first book if you've not seen it was "playing to the edge" a memoir that looked at the intelligence

community in the era of terror. and his new book coming out on the 1st of may is "the assault of intelligence." if you remember that and you go to amazon, you can order the book today and have it murray mailbox on the 1st of may and be amongst the first of your friends to read the book. i would like to welcome general hayden to the podium. [ applause ] >> i appreciate larry's infomercial. you may have to pay more for postage if you order through amazon. thank you for the opportunity to come and introduce someone we are delighted to have with us this evening. i cannot do the biography of ac grayling justice in the time we have remaining for tonight's event. and so i will not try to do

that. i will just try to hit a couple core points to explain why it was we thought we wanted him to be part of the center dialogue this year with regard to truth in a post-truth world. anthony was born in ro desha zimbabwe. he has become an icon of british education, a philosopher of history and a historian of philosophy all in one. an active media commentator for a long time wrote a weekly column on basic core issues for the british public as well as commenting from his perspective

on british public affairs a member of the u.n. human rights council as well. in 2011 he started a new college of the humanities in london to continue his life's work. bertrand russell award winner in 2016. and a year after that in 2016, i had a chance to experience anthony, even though he didn't have a chance to experience me. we were both at an event at a sma welsh village for a literary festival. i was there to push that other book that larry referred to. but my wife janine and i were there together and we wanted to take full advantage that we were there to see some of the other really wonderful events. one that struck my eye was this discussion that was going to go on in the big tent for this very

medieval fair-like activity. 1,400, 1,600 seats available, for a discussion of europe in the 17th century. we went and i was just absolutely struck by, number one, just the -- not just -- the word entertainment value is coming to mind, but that's not what i mean. the intellectual engagement value. i began to place things coming out of that discussion, the movement of the evidence-based approach to life. within the last year i was trying to write about evidence-based institutions, the press, the academy, intelligence in a post-truth world, and i dug

out my old brochure from where the festival took place. found the name, and hunted anthony down. we had some wonderful conversations on some of the topics that we will cover tonight. we've had conversations since then. they've always been beneficial to me. i hope in some way i've repaid the debt, but i'm sure it's not in equal measure as i think you will judge this evening after this evening's event. we begin with professor ac grayling talking a bit about democracy and war and other broad issues. i get a chance to come up here and sit in one of the chairs and continue the conversation between us, and then you're up. begin to form late in your mind the questions you want the professor to answer during our time together. with that, a good friend, dr.,

professor . ac. grayling. [ applause ] >> thank you very much indeed to general hayden and to the char school for this wonderful invitation. i will confess to you that today is my birthday, and i couldn't have had a better birthday present than this. [ applause ] thank you. why did i tell you that? the point about leaving your 21st birthday behind is that you really ought to be forgetting subsequent birthdays. so my themes are democracy and war, and because we haven't organized breakfast for you tomorrow morning, i'm going to have to be brief. i've got to really just touch heads of points on these two great topics. and the way i'll bring them together is as follows. i wrote a book recently on war,

why is war a feature of human history and human societies? what is the well spring of these destructive events which can tear down in a matter of seconds now with modern weaponry, what it may make many centuries to build um. the two questions that appear to press, and there are questions that need to be dug into to get the real texture of them are, is it human nature that somehow or other institutes a prompt for these violent confrontations between groups of people within a society? or is it the way we arrange our affairs? in the question and answer session or the discussion session, i will give you more reasons if you want them as to why i reached the conclusion in this book that i agree with

those people who say that war is an art fact of the way we arrange our political and our international affairs, that it is not something which is natural to human beings. even though we humans can from time to time feel very aggressive and want to punch somebody on the nose, mr. biden recently can we find to just such a sentiment, even though that might be the case, that is not the same thing as war. oddly, war is a matter of violence and destruction at the tip of the spear of military activity. most of what happens in preparation for war and arranging logistics, training soldiers, making plans requires calm and cool heads, rationality, o, which is a key

feature of war and zwishz wdists war as such instead of a saloon bar. that distinction is an important one, and we need to pay attention to the arguments that war is not a feature of human nature. if it were a feature of human nature, there would be far less post-traumatic stress disorder. this is a point we may go to later on, but my reason for coupling it with the reason of democracy is that as you know, it is a common place, not entirely accurate, but almost totally so that democracies don't make war on one another democracy make war upon other people, maybe on nondemocracies, but they tend on the whole not

to make war on one another. that's an interesting fact. all the more so because democracy in our world is very much under pressure at the moment. we look around the world and we see a number of figures on the world stage who, in their practice, mr. xi jinping is one, mr. erdogan in turkey is another, the leaders of poland and hungary in particular, but since 1945 the majority of countries in the world have pretended to become democracy, this is because they've looked at the great examples of democracies, united states of america and the western european countries, the wealthy countries, the countries which also have certain amount of military punch and other countries and wanted to emulate them by adopting that model. but now there's a different sets

of models on offer, in particular, of course,, the chinese model where there is no democracy and civil liberties hardly exist. you have a form of state capitalism, the result of which is a massively growing economy, a very powerful economy ruled by a regime which, in effect, promises to people who are in business or in productive industries the thing that businesspeople really like, which is stability and predictability. a point about democracy is that it doesn't provide quite the same measure of predictability, maybe it does stability, but predictability, well, if there's a change at the next election there might be a new tax regime or contradictions on emissions, so the business landscape is not quite as plain sailing as it is if you're a chinese businessman in china, just so long, of

course, as you behave yourself. that model would be a very attractive model, as you can imagine to the president of a developing country who thinks to him or herself, well, you don't have to bother about democracy. i can stay in power for the rest of my life and we can be a rich country and influential in our sphere. so for that reason, we might wonder to ourselves, isn't it worthwhile to try to defend and to promote the values of a democratic order, not merely because of the rather key point which i will reoccur to, that it does harvest the consent of the people who live in a democracy to the political and governmental order under which they live, and that is a key point, but also because of what democracy is in practice between elections. think of this. the sound of democracy is noise,

it's a babble, discussion, criticism, argument, people putting forward ideas, other people knocking them down, being hunted down by the press, yapping at your heels all the time to make sure you behave yourself. whereas by contrast, the sound of tyranny in silence. no opportunity for criticism or dissent. it's easy in those circumstances for civil liberties to go by the board. civil liberties matter. think of it. we all know privacy we give up because we've embraced with enthusiasm social media, stripped ourselves naked to any private or public agency that cares to have a look at us. i mentioned public agency with a certain diffidence in the circumstances. but a very good friend came to see me in london a few weeks ago. he lives in new york.

he said he put on his google calendar the fact that he had an outpatient appointment at a hospital in manhattan. and for the next three days he was bombarded with advertisements every time he went online for his local crematorium. this is a small indication that we are now very much under scrutiny from all directions because this very powerful, rather wonderful thing, the access that we have to cyber space of these electronic communications have stripped away our privacy. perhaps among our civil liberties, what shreds of privacy remain we still value, we still value our autonomy, right to congregate with others to discuss like tonight, above all we value freedom of expression, not that that's an absolute value. we know the trope, we know it's really a crime against humanity to shout fire in a crowded

theater, but we all know that. on a case-by-case basis, you can make a case for saying that there are times when perhaps we should be a little con strained about what we say. but in general, freedom of expression matters because without it you can't have an education system worth the name, you can't have cultural and artistic endeavor. so civil liberties hugely matter, and civil liberties are very intimately annexed to democracy. they grew up hand in hand by the enlightenment of the 17th century and depend on one another. so in those places in the world where democracy is under pressure, take, for example, turkey or hungary, the

diminution of civil liberties in those places goes hand in hand down the staircase, just as they went up the staircase together off the great revolution at the beginning of the modern period. again, that is the point about virtue. i would like to remind you of something that you all know because you were all reading plato in bed last night, so you very much remember what he says in book 8 of the republic about democracies. he gave democracy an extremely bad name. he thought that democracy is nothing owner a form of mob rule. he thought this because he thought the people of the demos were uninformed, self-interested, lacked any consideration for people who weren't themselves or their close kin who would have so many competing and conflicting desires and interests that there

would be anarchy and nothing of any value would get done. and he thfrd thought, as so many people did for so many centuries after his time, that one or another form of more authoritarian top-down governance was to be preferred to democracy. indeed, this view of the demos, it's a lofty con sending view when you think about it, is a view that is held by plenty of people today, famously winston churchill said democracy is the least bad of a lot of bad systems, but he said the strongest argument against democracy is just a few minutes conversation with any voter, because that would immediately bring to the fore these considerations that plato had

advanced. your own satirist megan kin said it's to have a pious hope that a collective wisdom will emerge with ignorance. but those aversions, those criticisms of what you might expect from the collective of the people are misguided. in the year 1647, in the mid of the 17th century, in a lull in the civil war in england when charles i defeats and he had been captured and put under house arrest, a little like this beautiful room we are in at the moment. you can imagine house arrest wasn't too tough an experience for him. the army of cromwell met in a little village at a suburb of london. there were a series of debates known as the putney debates in

which of the soldiers presented to the grandese of the army a set of demands. the soldiers risked their lives for a new order, a new constitutional order, in which we would have more say. they would be able to participate more. they wanted biennial parliaments and male suffrage. they wanted the rule of law to be guaranteed. they wanted to diminish the power of the house of lords because of course they owned so much in the states. but then they were regarded as revolutionary. famously, he argued back against the agitators, just a word, 17th century word mean agents, saying at the very, very least people, men who are

going to have some say in choosing the government and the laws under which they live, must have a vested interest in the nation's welfare. they must own property. if you don't have property, you can't have a vote. and if you give the vote to people without property, what are they going to do with it? they are going to use it to take the property away from the people who don't have the property. so we can't tolerate that. a man, a colonel thomas rainboro stood up and said it seems to me that the poorest in england has as much right to a say as the richest he in england, about a choice under the laws. and thereby he captures the point about democracy which is entirely missed by plato and churchill. entirely missed. mainly, that merely in virtue of being citizen of the state you have a right, an

entitlement to have some say in how your life is going to be managed in that society. just in virtue of that fact. quite independently of how much property you have or how much education you have, don't forget right up until half a century ago in england, if you were a graduate of the university of oxford or the university of cambridge, you had an extra vote because you were smart. you had two votes and everybody else had one. rather amazing. many would like to bring that back. [ laughter ] >> this idea it doesn't matter if you are male or female, rich or poor, in virtue of being citizen, you have that right. now an important point which is recognized by a whole litany of genius. from the end of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century, people who recognized this point about the right a person has to have his

or her view accounted, taken into account, the consent of the people being, jefferson's famous phrase, are really important justifying condition for government. they would try to think of a way they could do that, they could harvest that consent by getting over the great problem that identified not so much about the short-term, but the fact that there would be differences of opinion and that, therefore, there would be this confrontations. so how do you get from the consent of the people to the other thing that we all have a right to? and that other thing that we have a right to is good enough government. now, what i mean by the phrase good enough government is because outside the beltway there is nothing in our world

perfect. so we know that government is never going to be perfect or indeed all the time good, but we want it to be good enough so that we can live our lives. after all, we have our families, our careers, we treasure our civil liberties. we want to be able to apply our energies if we so choose to create lives that feel good to live, which are flourishing and have in them achievement and value. that means we don't want to have to be looking over our shoulders all the time how we are going governed and laws we are going governed. we want to be able to express our preferences and choices and we want to translated into, parlayed into a good enough government for all of the things that we value. john walk, the founding fathers of this great nation here, benjamin constant, jon stewart

mill, i'm spanning a period of time between the 1608s and 1850s and '60s, they contributed to this discussion about how do you that. they model that between them they forged, it was the model of representative democracy, where the adjectives is a key term. the idea is if you can construct institutions and practices to be populated by people who represent the people at large, those institutions will, because of the way they are designed and structured to run, will deliver a good enough government to which the people have a right. and the idea of a representative is not the idea of a delegate or a messenger boy or girl. we don't send representatives to the house of commons in the u.k.

or to the house of representatives here just to be carriers of messages. we send them to do a job of work for us. we expect them to go get information, listen to discussion and argument, get the facts, debate, come to a judgment, and then act in the interest of the country. now, i just described the task of a representative, of course, is idealized because our representatives are more often representing their own individual interests and the party line much more than they are the interests of the country on every occasion. and the reason why that has happened is that as the franchise has been extended more and more, as the vote has been rolled out to more and more people so that, you know, by the early decades of the 20th century, most of what we think is the western liberal

democracies. i use the term liberal in the correct european sense of rational sensible person. but in the western liberal democracies and the idea of a universal suffrage for all adult members of society who haven't disqualified themselves is taken for granted. as that was extended so politicians realized they had to organize more and more. had to get themselves into parties. then they had to exact discipline in the parties to make sure they got the party agenda through. we have to reflect for a moment on the very concept of party discipline to see that it entails at the very least the seeds of an anti-democratic aspect. it may not always be so, but it can be so. i want to give you a vivid example of how the idea of the

control, the very nature, if you want to put it that way, of party discipline can really seem to act against both democracy and against the natural interests. and this relates to a tragedy unfolding on the other side of the atlantic which goes by the name of brexit. now, i am going to be entirely neutral about brexit and say it's a bloody stupid idea. most people who have any view of the matter and who know something both in the united kingdom itself and in the west of the european union would agree with that sentiment. in fact, they would think i was expressing myself rather mildly. well, about a year ago, just a few days over a year ago, the house of commons in london passed a bill and a notification bill empowering the prime minister of the united kingdom to notify the

european union that the united kingdom was going to leave the european european union. there was a point, i'd make a quick footnote this related to a subsection of the treaty about notification, but it was not about the decision that parliament is meant to take of the matter. that is another story under litigation in the u.k. i will leave it to its own devices. the vote in the house of commons for notifying the eu proceeded as follows. mp after mp after mp went into the lobby to vote in favor of the bill saying this is a terrible idea. this is a very bad idea. you shouldn't be doing it. it is known that the majority of members of the house of commons and a larger majority of the members of the upper house, the house of lords, are known as remainers. people who don't want brexit to

happen. and what they have supported, the government, both the government, governing party, the conservative party and the opposition party, labour party have supported these measures. they have demanded of their mps that they vote according to the leadership's wishes. be whipped, as it is. that's an expression you use here, too. there is an outstanding -- let me use a different more perjorative term. an egregious example of how party discipline effects the interests of the party line and not the interests of the country. this is just one little aspect. whether it's an important one, the way that our democracies have developed have this tract aspect to it. on the one hand, the widening. franchise. on the other hand, the fact that that meant that political

organization had to get more and more smart, and that agendas could be got through of the acting, therefore, having the effect of being anti- democratic on too many occasions as a result of the fact that a particular agenda may not actually represent what the interests of the country are. now, why might this happen? well, it's because both in this country and in the united kingdom we have a voting system for the house of representatives here and house of commons that the first path, the voting system, which itself is a very distorting system of electing representatives. let me give you an example. suppose you have a gerrymandered constituency somewhere, that might happen in somebody's imagination. >> and there are 100 voters in that constituency. those ten people stand. ten people manage to raise

enough money to stand in the election. eight of them get ten votes each. the other gets nine votes. the last of them gets 11 votes. those with 11 votes will go off to the house of representatives or to the house of commons. 89 people in that constituency will be unrepresented. now, that is a common place, a common place of elections in the united kingdom certainly. almost always, very, very few cases that governments have been elected on a genuine majority of votes. mostly 40% or less of the popular vote cast. yet the system artificially inflates the majority that they have in the parliament, and, therefore, because in the u.k. we don't have a constitution, happily, you do here, but we don't have a constitution in the u.k., there if you said that the constitution, the

unwritten constitution, i should say, is a set of understandings that nobody has, which is useful for politicians because they can do what they like with it. so you have a situation where an unrepresented voting system, party discipline, and then a number of other features, i'm going to them in the discussion period if you would like more detail on them, have this effect of making the system very vulnerable. if you have good people, people who are dedicated, people for whom government is a vocation, who desire to make a contribution to their country, and there are many such people, although, as you know, anybody who goes into politics, however idealistic they might be when they get there, they find that to get up the greasy pole you have to be attached to the rear end of the person above you on the greasy pole, compromised,

not telling the complete truth of something. all political careers, as you know, end in failure because you begin by annoying one group of people because you favor another, and then eventually you have annoyed all groups of people, which is why you failed in the end. and really politicians, if they want to be remembered with fection, should take a leaf out of the poet's book and die early. generally speaking, politics is a hard game. it's a difficult job for the politicians. but there is also one where the very nature of our order, even including the responsibilities of the fourth estates to try to keep politicians honest, will make them dishonest, make them cover things up and manage the truth. a famous remark, the economical of the truth, to reach all sorts of compromises in order to get anything done in the political order, which is makes us dissatisfied. so if it turns out that there

are people in government, people in positions of authority and power elected people, who are not of the very first rank and are not dedicated, then the way that the institutions of our representative democracy can be manipulated can act against the interests of the country. and that is happening. i just make one passing remark about the united states. after all, i am a visitor in your very, very wonderful country. i have gracious admiration for it. i love many things about it. but i can't help noticing that the electoral college was set up to make sure that unqualified people would not get into high office. i leave that one hanging in the air. i will say that in the case of the united kingdom, our democratic order there has, for too long, too long depended on the individual personal honor

of the people who have gone into politics. and as somebody who is very much a fan and a supporter of the great forge but nevertheless great ideal of the european union project, which of course has many difficulties and would take a long time, no doubt, to get right. it has so many good things about it. nevertheless, at the same time i think that the attitude of the british to the european union has too much been manipulated by misrepresentation of what it is and misunderstanding of its nature. the political order, the press in the united kingdom, the tabloid press, in particular, which is extremely partisan in this case of the eu. the idea of the eu has in just one respect militated against our politics in the united kingdom in the following sense.

the eu has made politics less ideological over time. the main parties have competed with one another over who best might manage the membership of the eu. all those great debates in the past with socialism, about capitalism, deep divisions between people who had passionate reasons for wanting to support one view of the world against another. those have faded away. as a result, you don't get that many first-rate people going into politics. there are more interesting things for them to do than to compete with one another about who is going to manage a system. one result would be, and this is an entirely personal judgment of i mean, second rate people, too many of them get into the system and they operate those institutions, and they operate those institutions in ways rather different than their predecessors did.

people who lived through the second world war. if you want to see what the point of the eu is, spend two minutes on youtube looking at footage of 1945 and ask yourself, isn't this a great idea, a project of peace and unity and the rest? but the statesman who actually experienced that and saw it with their own eyes are gone. the people who are now in politics in our country, in the united kingdom, are people without that kind of experience or insight, and they found that they can work believers of these institutions in ways that serve them and their partisan interests. and they forget something which is crucial in this balance between the right we have to say and the right we have to good government, and that is democracy is not majatorinar ism.

it's the aggregation of minorities. they respect to minorities, all those different minorities, their interests, their desires, their needs, and how they participate in the process is getting their consent is something that it really does take great political talent to achieve. but it also takes a respect for those institutions which were so carefully and painstakingly worked out by those great minds that i mentioned from mill and through your founding fathers here who devised the institutions of your constitution to try to ensure that democracy would deliver that good enough government. so if our democracies are under threat, it's very bad news because you put that against the background of the thought that democracies don't fight wars with one another, that countries which are authoritarian are all together too prone to using military

power and coercive moves to get their way. you look at a world now where, for example, the people's republic of china, it's extending its influence into the south china sea. it is exerting a huge amount of interest in africa. it is sucking up enormous amount of energy, resources from the middle east. it's a country which is growing in power and influence. it's a regional hedgement and will be, generally speaking , a super power. and its not a democracy. a model, too many, really, an unhealthy model. one of the great things about democracy is inefficiency. and i think that we should enjoy the fact that inefficiency, which is a protecter of civil liberties and gives us all a chance to have a say, is something that

we should cling to with as much enthusiasm as we can. let's work to stop the emotion of our democracies first by being alert to it, and perhaps, and it's on this concluding sentence that i will stop, and perhaps one of the most dangerous things that is happening in our democracies around the world today is the hornet's nest which has been opened by social media, the invasion of privacy, the use of these powerful influencing techniques, covert techniques of manipulation and influence which have changed the landscape of elections even just in the last few years. thank you very much, everybody. thank you. [ applause ]

>> i have a few questions, maybe drive the conversation forward. remember, everyone, think of questions you want to ask. you have a series of questions in my own land, but one in yours. i first saw you in june of 2016. you were staying at a country home with other contributors to the fair. breakfast, dinner, the conversation universally brexit. talked to people at the event. conversation universally brexit. i met no one in any of those encounters that thought brexit was a good idea. until the driver came to the home to take us to heathrow. we got into the car and asked him about brexit and he was the first one i met who actually was seriously considering that leaving the union was best for the united kingdom. what was going on? >> well, what you saw there is

that the [ inaudible ] >> help is on the way. how does that sound? >> evidently, i have -- so what you spotted there was a littery festival, let me put it bluntly. the kinds of people who wouldn't want to see brexit happen. then you met somebody who did want to see it happen. and there was very definitely a democratic class and income distinction between those who wish to leave and those who wish to remain. i think it's important in this discussion about the apparent choice that the country made to leave the eu since our politicians say the people have spoken, the people have chosen, and we should learn that a very, very significant fact, a fact which feeds into something

that has to happen after brexit, which is an examination of the political order in the united kingdom. and that is this. the people who were given the vote in the referendum, and i use that phrase advisedly because three groups of people deny the vote in the referendum. people who have material interests in the outcome. young people, 16, 17-year-olds. that demographic had been given the vote in the scottish independence referendum in 2014. there was a good precedent, since it was their future at stake. they were denied a vote. there have been discussion about giving them a vote, and it was turned down. citizens of other eu countries who live in the u.k. because of the movement and so on, live in the u.k., pay their taxes there, grow up their children there, have married british nationals, they weren't given a vote. yet, they have a big stake in

the outcome. finally, british citizens who had been living abroad for 15 years or more were denied a vote. any of your own citizens would be delighted -- three constituencies were denied. of that franchise, 37% of the total voted to leave. 37% of the total electorate voted to leave. by any stretch of the imagination, and a constitutional order would not regard that as any kind of mandate for a major constitutional change of the kind that the present government has embarked on. so i could elaborate on this even further, but i really want to say that when those politicians who were in favor

of brexit in the u.k. say the people have chosen, the country has spoken, that 37% of the franchise represents 26% of the population. there was quite a big difference between people over 60 and people under 50 on the vote. most people under 50 were very much in favor of remaining in the e.u. the demographic tended to have a nostalgic view about the past and i have to say since it's nearly two years since the referendum, quite a significant amount have since died. we can say that that 37% today would be even less. >> let me ask you your views on some things happening in my homeland. we have talked personally about the question of truth and what does truth mean. folks like me can document, i imagine other americans in the room.

i mention president trump a lot. frankly, my presents on the president are reflections of trends in american society. so, you know, the president gets to truthful hyperbole. "the washington post" counts that as 2400 lies in the last 13 months. new jersey, muslims, celebrating 9/11. 9/11, families of 9/11, terrorists leaving the country a few days before the attack. none of which were true. i grew up in western pennsylvania, which is largely trump country. a journalist there is not just from western pennsylvania. she is from my neighborhood. selena has tracked trump country voting very well. selena came up with the famous phrase, people like me took trump literally but not seriously. people who voted for him took him seriously, but not literally. when i talk to trump supporters, they don't try to

defend everything the president says. they often say and always suggest or indicate or i can sense that the president is speaking not to the specifics of the truth, but to a greater truth, or that he is saying things that rhyme with a greater truth they believe in. what are we to -- you're a philosopher. what are we to think about what that means about truth? >> well, it raises, i think, a very interesting point, and also you are quite right. this is one of the central issues of our time. now, i am going give you two parts. the first part may seem a bit sneaky of me because i want to finish the point about brexit but relates to this, your drive out to heathrow. we pick up a lot of things that we might regard as not entirely true about the state of britain or about europe, but a great

deal of opinions and polemic assertion, which was very often deliberately false, have been leveled at the country really. i suppose people to use their vote, even to prompt people to think that the vote would not be a vote for leaving, but a purpose vote or a vote against this rather austerity, whether it's the government that have caused quite a lot of harm to the economy, to the people in the middle and lower next in the economy. so they wanted to believe it. it was something that they felt would be a solution to the dilemma or difficulty they felt. we have had this conversation about the great problem of inequality and injustice in society. we know in the last quarter of a century or more, people all around their developed economies are middle and lower income, have seen everything

stagnated. they have seen wealthy people get miles wealthier than they had been before. that sense of inequality and the injustice associated with it has been dramatically increased. and, therefore, when demagouges come along and say we understand you have a problem, you feel left behind, you feel left out, you feel you are being unfairly treated and we know what the solution is. here is where the problem comes from. it comes from the e.u. and there might be lots of stories about why the e.u. is bad or comes from the fact that there are too many mexicans crossing the border or we have outsourced too much production to the far east. i will provide that answer to you. that is powerful because it's a simple and direct message, it seems to speak to the concerns people have. but if it isn't backed up with evidence or details or fact or assessments of how it might actually be done, then it is

not worth anything any more than any other assertion is. that's point number one. point number two is that it very often happens that the people who use these sorts of claims to capture the loyalty, the vote, the support of people who are saying they are in a bad situation, then it is deliberately misuse of. so what's happening? it's a product of the fact that in recent years, and this is something which then social media has a part to play in also, that opinions have become something that people might sincerely believe in or feel extremely invested in and they want to assert that opinion and they have been given an opportunity to do so. everybody can now publish their view on twitter or facebook. and because of this, it doesn't matter what the details are or what the truth might be. and as a result, we are now

drowning in a tsunami of opinions and it's very, very easy for somebody who says, look, here's a fact, for people to say, yes, that's your fact. it's not mine. that's your truth. i don't accept it. >> that's interesting. i am going to quote you, all right? you're right. your crisis in democracy -- you write in your crisis of democracy describing a leader, someone who favors simple slogans instead of attention span, the immediate instead of the long term, the local and obvious instead of the larger picture, and all in the form of attitudes rather than worked out ideas. that matches very closely with what my former colleagues in the intelligence community describe as the morning briefing. [ laughter ] >> it's so true what mr.

alexander knicks said. he is the man until recently was the ceo of cambridge analytica. you may have heard of that institution? he said emotions, not reasons. emotion, not act. of course, we have known this for a long time. david hume. he points out that what motivates people to action is to how they feel about things, not logic. you remember the donkey who was positioned between two equally succulent bales of hay? since he had no more reasons to eat one than the other, he died of starvation. what you need to get people to do things is to feel a certain way, have a certain attitude. let me cite the example of brexit. i had a friend who in his wretchedness after the vote tried to soothe himself by

collecting stories from [ inaudible ] and i quote a couple to you. one lady said that she voted to leave because there was too much football on television. and another lady said she voted to leave because she wanted the old lightbulbs back. we have energy-saving lightbulbs. >> i get that one. >> she didn't like the glue. she wanted her light bulbs back. she blamed the e.u. for that. now, when you analyze those sorts of remarks, they just seem arbitrary and random. when you analyze them, you understand that that person had an attitude or a feeling about the e.u. and not a set of reasons, not a worked out account of the e.u. budget and the making of e.u. loans, but an attitude. attitudes are things which are very easy to manipulate and to

nudge. the nobel prize was won by an econ miswho introduced this idea of nudging. nudges, influence had, drip feed of negative news about something will eventually form or help to form attitudes or shape attitudes in ways that will, in practice, result in voting one way or the other. we have to remember a fairly significant point, that at any yes, no, either/or vote, clinton/trump, in/out, yes/no kind of vote, you have two blocks of voters who have made up their minds how they are going to cast out of their vote and they are going to tune out of the campaign because they are not really interested. people have made up their minds. the people who are still influenced. if you get enough of them to move, you can swing the vote the way you want all elections,

all referendums are won on very, very small margins. this is why this targeting of untruth and attitude forming, emotionally charged messaging can have such a big impact. and in the case of brexit and of trump, it's the argument in my book, is that that happened in both those cases. >> let me ask a little bit, do a little diagnosis of our country. so president trump did a speech in poland last summer. it was a friendly venue, back to some of the comparisons you made earlier. it was a well crafted speech. it was a bit controversial. most of the observers commented it seemed to abandon the idea of america as an idea, america as a credal nation, america as a nation, blood and soil. two-part question. number one, do you

instinctively view america as a creedo nation? is it a universal creed? >> i think it is a c redal nation. >> i speak of someone described in american terms, you know, registered democrats slightly on the left maybe. >> slightly? >> you know about democrats and republicans. we have got some views about social justice, about making things possible for everybody, being inclusive, about valuing things like our autonomy as individuals, our liberty, but also recognizing that society

is a theater of compromise and cooperation, that we do better together and a civilized, mature society is one that looks like at a bit of a disadvantage or struggles in a very, very complex society, too difficult for them. that outlook is one i think could well be described as creedal. in the american creed, the idea is that every man has a chance. we all can become millionaires, you can all become president, you all have a great opportunity. what's interesting, and i speak as an outsider, an observer, but i report something that an american friend told me, that this idea of having this possibility as an american of reaching -- getting it to the top of the hill, that this possibility has seemed to have failed recently. people feel they are in the

cue, but the cue is not moving. what's worse is not just that the cue didn't moving, but some people are jumping the cue. and when you think about the sort of trump base attitude, it might be that you are stuck in the cue and the people are jumping it, they are women and mexicans. and that makes you very angry. you feel they are getting an advantage you are not getting because you could be ahead in the cue. that's a toxic attitude. it's a deeply resentful one. you can see how somebody would travel across the voting spectrum. is somebody who voted for obama voted for trump. why? what's happened? it's this attitude, this emotion which is riding them across that terrain. >> the speech after the speech in poland was the president in front of the united nations. i know your view on scottish succession. you have posted very strong.

but president trump mentioned one word in one form or another sovereignty 22 times in one speech in front of the u.n. what does that suggest to you? >> that's interesting. that's one of those words. it's like the word democracy, actually, until 101 years ago many major states men never mentioned it in positive terms. you remember that queen victoria in the 19th century thought that democrats were dangerous and vial people. and woodrow wilson said he was going to take the united states of america into the first world war to defend democracy. that was the first great statement by a great statesman about democracy as something which is very worthwhile. and in exactly the same way, the idea of sovereignty, not a feel-good team, not a term that

demagogues reach for easily, what does it mean where it's very difficult, even for mighty states like the united states, to act unilaterally where interdependencies are such that all the positives naturally carry the negatives about the degree of attitude of that people have to act. the very effort to try to introduce a world legal order, humanitarian law into national law, an international criminal court, and the resignation of the security counsel, trying to moderate or master what is in fact an international anarchy based on would-be sovereign entity and they try to act on a sovereign basis, for example a single country going to war

its neighbors. the idea of sovereignty is rather impractical and an empty idea. i should mention to you also that it is an idea in which is just because of its very, you know, nature is a marvelous resource for hypocrites in the following way. somebody says we would like to take control of our borders and sovereignty and not be ruled by a capitol. suppose that a scottish person talking about their relationship to the rest of the u.k. brexit says, no, no, that's nonsense. you can't leave the united kingdom. that's terrible. you ought to stay in. the strength that we get in unity and combining together, cooperation, pooling our resources, that's what you say. you say to that person, oh, okay, don't leave the u.k. we are stronger together, cooperating in no, no.

take back control of our borders. hypocrisy. it's a very handy term. >> one more question. more of a personal nature as a 39-year air force officer. you need to take that as kind of the two-minute clock to get your questions ready. seemingly out of the blue, and literally, i guess, in 2006 you wrote a book called among the dead cities which was your view of the strategic bombing campaigns of world war ii. what did you say and why did you choose this to write about? >> well, you will see now that more recently i published a book on why war happens in society. i have an interest as somebody who is a representative of the human rights council at the u.n., i have an interest in conflict and the problems of the international order.

but that earlier book was predicated on the following, and i mention something of this to you. when i was a little boy my great ambition was to be a spitfire pilot in the battle of britain, which would have required time travel, better eyesight, and probably since i was only 7, my mother's permission. i was so passionately interested in the air war. that interest blossomed away from the battle of britain and into the whole aspect of the air war in the second world war. and i noticed that almost every book about the air war was almost rather muted or half and half about the bombing campaign. and so it occurred to me that the allied nations, and especially the western allies, the u.k. and the u.s. and its other allies, had a duty, and duty was to beat the nazis and to beat japanese military aggression. that was the first duty of the

allied [ inaudible ] but we all know that the ends do not justify the means, and that if we are going to be very honest with ourselves, if we are going to scrutinize ourselves in the hope of learning some lessons, we need to look at all the different ways we behave. and in 1949, in the geneva convention, a cause was drafted for that convention outlying indiscriminal in any event attacks on -- indi scriminate attacks. the united states has not yet signed it. but this was a protocol on

civilian populations. the u.s. does observe it, having in practice is now international law. if you look at that, look at the logic behind it, look at the understanding of it, and most of the people who were in the royal air force, harris who was the head -- the other people, these were people who will been to public -- what we call public schools in the u.k., read their greek and latin, knew that he had written his account of the peloponyssian war, that the corruption of morality, he pointed out in the early years of the war the city of matardinia, the apple. he decided to punish them by burning the city to the ground.

they executed the leaders. 12 years leader they did the same thing. confused to break its treaty with sparta and to join athens. the athenian generals said to the leaders, they said, the strong do what they can and the weak bear what they must. if you don't agree with us, that's the end of you. they didn't agree with them. the athenians killed them all. took the women and children into slavery and killed them. this is how things can go badly wrong in the time of war as the war goes on and corrodes us. the royal air force bomber command did not begin bombing civilian populations until the third year of the war. when the war started they

carried live munitions over the coast of continental europe. they asked them to surrender. that's an act of wishful thinking. they didn't carry muni until the third year of the year. when they did, they bombed by night and they bombed cities. lots of experimentation on kind of munitions. on hamburg, a raid code named operation gomora, five days of bombing, they bombed 30% roofs and blew out windows, and it caused the most tremendous [ inaudible ] more than 30,000 civilians who died that night of the firestorm did so because all the oxygen was taken out of their bombshell where they were hiding.

they couldn't breathe. and everybody caught in the firestorm was so badly burned that their corpses of the size of dolls. very early form of nepalm was used in the attack, a kind of phosphorus. so it was the most terrible attack. when you think that there was a committee in england called the committee against night bombing. and they said what their message was, which was we are fighting barbarians. why are we behaving like them? this was a telling question. i wanted to do this. i wanted to praise and honor the terribly brave and those who conducted this campaign in the war, but to say that the

policy is badly mistaken. >> your prose has gotten great credit for the deep respect you write about bomber command and the air force. >> i should say the united states army air force conducted itself in the european theater admirably. they bombed by day. they tried to do precision bombing. they tried to avoid civilian populations. and it wasn't until curtis leme took them -- >> in the pacific? >> yeah. >> with that, we should open to questions. larry, you have some? >> i will give the general and the professor a moment to take a sip of water and catch their breath. i wanted to offer a few instructions. a couple of our fine graduate students will be roaming the room with microphones. if you would like to ask a question, hold their attention. they will pass microphone to you. would love it if you stood and introduced yourself when you ask the question. i'd like to note that we are --

we have c-span here, who is taping the event for broadcast at a later date. if you are camera shy, we two have a reception following the event that we would love you to attend, everybody to attend, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions more personally at that time. so with that please raise your hand. >> please form your questions in the form of a question. >> right over here. >> go ahead and second up a second one over here. >> thanks very much for this great event tonight. in one of his books, historian

yuval h arari, the tremendous advances in article official intelligence, automation and other fields so going to leave what he calls a useless class because we can't stop this growth. how do we stop the benefits from these technologies to keep base in these fields, medicine, foreign policy, intelligence, but prevent what he says is a utopian view from coming to fruition and make sure that we have empowerment for this group that he believes will become useless in the future? >> one thing that is tremendously important to bear in mind, when we think about the future that takes application, artificial intelligence will bring about, and also genetic engineering of

human beings and new generations of human beings is that anything that can be done in the way either of the ucla of a.i. or genetic manipulation of the human genome, anything that can be done, will be done. however hard we try to stop it, however much we try to limit it, very rich people or somebody rather will make use of these things and these things will happen. and so it behooves us to try to be as, you know, prepared and proactive as we can be about how we can manage the outcome. the point that you raised is a very good one. for example, as you know, there is a distinction between artificial intelligent systems dedicated to a specific task like brain surgery or teaching mathematics to grade school children, driving a car, a bump in the road recently,

tragically. those dedicated systems do pose a risk from the point of view of the jobs that they will take away. you look at automation in industry. we see that happening already. we think back to the fact that people used to say, well, when there are great transitions into tuesdayed by -- introduced by technology, the move of people from one sector to the other tends to happen with temporary pain. people are out of work. then new things are discovered. the point is often made, 70% of the u.s. population in the 1870s was in agriculture. by the 1950s it was 3%. that whole movement of population had gone into other commercial and industrial activities and relatively -- it had nothing to do, but relatively painlessly. people forget, hover, there

however, there were 25,000 horses and later there were 9 million of them. what is that going to do for us? is it going to make us redundant or will we find new things to do. that is now an open question. a more serious question is whether artificial general intelligence, human-like intelligence, much superior to our human intelligence, the minute that we get a system which is as intelligent as we are, within hours can create vastly more intelligent systems. what would a system think to itself if it asked itself the question, what is the most disruptive, destructive element in the world today? what's the biggest nuisance in the world today? well, the answer is us, isn't it? that would be the end of us. unless we could somehow build into an agi system some kind of

restraint, ethical restraint or a way to switch it off if we are in the position to do so. i think there are genuine risks out there. also, huge, huge promises that ai might bring to us that might open up horizons that we can't begin to imagine. you consider that we've solved many problems that technologies have introduced in the past. we should be hopeful, we should be optimistic about it. after all, what's the alternative? pessimism, right? find a high building and jump off. so as far as genetic research is done and manipulation of the genome that produces 6'5" blonde 150 i. q. super athletes, that's going to happen. and you know, perhaps it may be we are now in charge of our own

evolution and it's inevitable in 300 years time people will look back on us, now, bad manners and what have you and think, well, thank heavens we discovered how to manipulate the genome. >> good evening, sir. you mentioned earlier that democracy has gone to the support of the governed. in the u.s. we have not declared war since world war ii, but we have this major conflict and major combat operations. what do you believe is the right feedback mechanism and the right level of support that the leadership should get from the government before entering into armed conflict? >> at the simplest and most basic, it would seem to me that the government of the day ought to be authorized to take action in defense of the state, of the nation, but that's to engage in

offensive activity. there does need to be consent harvested in one way or another. it might be by maybe another election. in the united kingdom what might happen is a general election. but the idea there should be a sentiment in the nation based on understanding of the consequences and what's at stake, it seems to be a -- the unfortunate fact of history is that when kings, emperors, governments have decided to go to war, they try to harvest that consent by means of patriotism and how wonderful is your country? those are not democratic techniques. they are techniques of

propaganda. at the very least, we would say surely the commander-in-chief must have the right to authorize defense, but that you need something a bit more. maybe an agreement of congress for offensive activity. it erases a number of semantical issues. [captioners transitioning ]

it was a good thing, let me give you an different example. it was located. killing -- osama bin laden was the right thing to do no the short term but in the long term, the concept of the rule of law and respecting the rules of lay would have been good for the argument that we would all

like to make that, that's how the world works. the short term view and the long term view are in conflict with one another, often times, in times of emergency, the short term view tends to prevail. a couple more questions, who has the microphone. >> right here. >> brad smith of microsoft has called for a geneva convention in cyberspace, who do you think should be involved in that process if you think that the existing infrastructure we have, from a legal perspective is insufficient to deal with the attacks on civilian population? >> i back the idea of an international convention that

would include governments and ngo and the whole universe, to discuss this very important question, there are two issues that somehow have to be reconciled. until a few years ago, what people most valued about the international or cyberspace was the fact that it was open, it's democracy, it provided a huge number of opportunities and that people could get information if they were blocked in china and elsewhere, it was wonderful and transformed the world in positive ways but then the inevitable happened, people learned to game the system and used it to influence and manipulate and get a great amount of untruth out there in cyber spairgs how do we control

the heart while preserving the former, what kind of regime for managing the internet without making it the decision of the gate keepers who only allow certain voices to be heard and still give people a way to expressed themselves. general hayden is with me on this, the internet is the biggest world in history and part of the task that educates that is to try to help my students acquire that acumen that makes them good at evaluating reliable information from other information, i tell

a story about a french colleague of mine. berks rnard levi, he wears -- bernard levi. he wears his shirts open to his belly button, i asked why, he said base i am hot. he wrote a book a couple of years ago in which he quoted a thinker of the french enlightenment, then he only discovered in the book shops that there was though such character, it was made up from the internet but did not know until he checked it out. at the least, you need to equip people with the desire to get

the information, that leaves the more general question, how do you balance the need to stop this venomous hateful lie dispensing instrument which is the internet and cyber sprays and social media with the desire to have something open and free to have an international conversation from which we can all benefit, how do you balance these two things, it may be one of the biggest challenges that the world faces now. >> we have a question in the back of the room and then one more here, then we will call it an evening. >> hi, firstly i would like to thank you, learning something and knowing the truth, the more you know, the more questions you have, but i want to return

to our main theme. the influences of war and democracy, a lot of people say that war is antithet cal to the levers of democracy but jeffer soon said that the tree of liberty has to be refreshed 80 to 100 years with the blood of tyrants and patriots, so i wanted to you investigate who those influences are and maybe also include the idea. amount of troops in world war two, how it was different in terms of demographics than iraq and afghanistan. >> i have to say, one thing that jefferson said that i do

not agree with, in the 18th and 19th century, a number of people, including ruskin exposed the virtues the war, they said war is what strengthened people. how can that be? all of the good guys go out and die in the war and the bad people stay home and reproduce themselves. this idea, this poetic nonsense of refreshing liberty, i would rather have a great bunch of senators that did not have to learn about to be great senators by having to go to war, it would be so great if they did not learn that at the expenses of others. it's a great come back, when

you read accounts of how people behave in situation of battle, it's very interesting, i did an exption -- examination of war. a canadian was with the troops in normandy and the came under fire and returned the fire, he said stop shooting at me. clean the thing, it was obvious that he never had any intention of shooting anybody with it because he would have to dismantle it and clean it. they tried to get the troops to look up in the direction of the

enemy and point their rifles, that's how infective conscript can be. what that says is there is something about the way that people are appalled by the prospect of killing other people and the horrors of combat, you have highly effective body armor that infant you tri -- infant ri troops have today, many people who would have died in former conflicts but are alive today with terrible injuries, the tsunami of post traumatic

stress disorder. people who are great leaders like general hayden and people that directed men in difficulty are able to rise above that experience and they have the wisdom, they are states men after the war but the great majority of people, there is nothing nice about war. >> one last question over here. >> my question is about your comment on china, the unhealthy model. recently a month ago, xi had his term limits eliminated, against the constitution, what do you think of the direction that china is going? china has a lot of influence

both on soft power and military nowadays. >> i have to confess, i think that people should be a bit concerned. knot just the -- not just the west but also the neighbors of china, i am sure that the likelihood of china using it's military muscle is probably limited to its ambitions to get taiwan back and to keep control of the islands in the south china sea which is sees as important to its trade routes but also to influence the way that things happen in the pacific region and in the rest of asia, so the kind of decision that are made by an

authorize 10 yan long term government -- authoritarian long term government are not the ones that get made in democracies, they are about the long term national interest as seen by the leaders. this would be unacceptable in the democratic order. the fact that president xi has made himself president for life is a bad sign, it means, now, especially, that he has in his hands, the fate of the chief officers, now we have somebody who is as powerful in some ways and as controlling in some ways as trump, not that far off from being near where the united states is, somebody that is

obviously calculating and claf clevar and playing the long game. this is the chinese attitude, being patient and getting the advantage over the long term. you can be sure that xi becoming long term president is a step, a move. it's one that people are thinking about. >> we will reconvene in the cocktail hour afterwards where you can ask further questions, now please join me in thanking our guest

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