Academy Of Ideas

This podcast was recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival at the Barbican in London on Sunday 21 October, 2012 From Boris Island to the Dale Farm gypsies, no building project seems too big or small to fall foul of the UK’s notoriously stringent planning laws, which sometimes seem to exist to prevent development rather than manage it. In contrast to China, which delivers new development equivalent to a country the size of Greece every six months, the UK planning system seems to be in a permanent state of denial. The Thames Gateway, High Speed Rail 2, Heathrow’s third runway, Battersea Power Station redux, Green Belt housing and even Eco-Towns have all run up against a wall. Perhaps the biggest issue is in housing, where building languishes at the lowest levels since the First World War. By some estimates, five million people are waiting on housing registers. According to Shelter, the younger generation bears the brunt with a fifth of 18- to 34-year-olds living with their paren

Despite the economic crisis, art in Greece is booming. By 2015, new museums and cultural organisations are scheduled to open their doors to the public, many of them privately funded rather than state-run as in the past. As Greek classical orchestras and opera companies find themselves in a bleak financial situation due to government spending cuts, private funding seems to have offered a way out. At the same time, non-traditional venues such as Syntagma Square’s metro station and airplane flights have been used as opera stages, in an effort to promote it to new audiences. Yet the question of how opera, along with other elite art forms such as classical music and theatre, can and should be made more accessible to all is a fraught one. Some argue, for example, that the key lies in demystifying some of opera’s difficulty by incorporating elements from popular culture and emphasising its contemporary socio-political relevance. Yet others warn that such an approach risks alienating current and poten

Recorded on Saturday 19 October, 2013. as part of the School Fights strand at the Battle of Ideas festival  The place of independent schools in Britain’s education landscape has never been so intensely debated. According to Martin Stephen, former high master of St Paul’s School, two of the three main political parties hate independent schools ‘to the core of their being’, while the Conservatives are run by so many public schoolboys that they cannot afford to extend ‘the merest hand of friendship’ to such schools without being caricatured by the media. But do private schools protest too much about ‘posh prejudice’? The 7% of pupils who attend fee-paying schools go on to dominate Oxbridge places and elite professions such as law, the media and science. Are those who defend private schools prepared to defend the perpetuation of such inequality on the grounds of individual freedom? Or is it not true that independent schools are full of ‘toffs’ when a third of pupils in schools

Recorded on Sunday 21 October, 2012 For many years, the only hybrid human/animal embryos that could be legally created in the UK were those resulting from fertilising a hamster’s egg with a man’s sperm, as a means of testing male fertility. In 2008, it became legal to create all manner of hybrid human/animal embryos for research purposes, provided that such embryos were destroyed within two weeks of their creation. 2012 saw the establishment of a new £5.8million Centre for Mitochondrial Research at Newcastle University, to develop techniques for preventing the transmission of debilitating mitochondrial disease. But these techniques cannot be tested in clinical trials without a change in the law, and the government has commissioned a ‘public dialogue’ on the issue. Some object that mitochondrial-exchange techniques involve the creation of children with ‘three parents’, while others claim that this objection misunderstands the relevant science. Those involved in such debates

Recorded on Sunday 21 October 2013 at the Battle of Ideas festival at the Barbican in London ‘Ideas are the cogs that drive history, and understanding them is half way to being aboard that powerful juggernaut rather than under its wheels’. AC Grayling Society seems woefully lacking in Big Ideas, and we seem to crave new thinking. In Britain, great hopes rest on the legacy of the Olympics, but however inspiring the sporting excellence we all witnessed, is it realistic that a summer of feel-good spectacle can resolve deep-rooted cultural problems, from widespread disdain for competitition to community fragmentation? In America, Mitt Romney has pledged to pit substantial ideas against the empty ‘yes, we can’ sloganeering of Barack Obama, with his running mate Paul Ryan dubbed the ‘intellectual’ saviour of the Republican Party, but can they really deliver? Europe, once the home of Enlightenment salons, is now associated more with EU technocrats than philosophes. Looking to the intellectual legacy of the past

Free will is at the root of our notions of moral responsibility, choice and judgment. It is at the heart of our conception of the human individual as an autonomous end in himself. Nevertheless, free will is notoriously hard to pin down. Philosophers have denied its existence on the basis that we are determined by the laws of nature, society or history, insisting there is no evidence of free will in the iron chain of cause and effect. Theologians have argued everything happens according to the will of God, not man. And yet, when we decide we want something and act on that, it certainly seems as if we are choosing freely. Are we just kidding ourselves? Some of the most profound contemporary challenges to the idea of free will come from neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists and biologists. They argue we are effectively programmed to act in certain ways, and only feel as if we make choices. Some argue, for example, that we can easily be nudged into certain types of behaviour if only the right