Moral Revolution: Rutger Bregman’s ‘must-listen’ Reith lectures

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Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian who is giving the BBC Reith Lectures this year.  I listened to the first lecture of the series, A Time of Monsters this weekend, and I was deeply struck by Bregman’s moral force, conviction and clarity. I would encourage all G+T readers to listen to the full 30 minute lecture:

A Time of Monsters: Rutger Bregman – Moral Revolution

The lecture has caused controversy because after the recording and editing, the BBC decided to censor Bregman’s words and remove a reference where he describes Donald Trump as ‘the most openly corrupt president in American history’. Bregman is appalled by this decision and released this video the day the lecture was broadcast. He said:

“The irony could not be bigger. The lecture titled ‘A time of monsters’ is about the cowardice of today’s elites: universities, corporations and media networks bending the knee to authoritarianism…For decades the Reith Lectures have been one of the BBC’s most important platforms for open debate and free expression. That’s why this really matters.”

Below I share some excerpts from the transcript of Bregman’s brilliant lecture:

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Growing up in the Netherlands, I was especially gripped by the tales of how our small country was occupied by the Nazis. I endlessly asked myself, what would I have done? Would I have had the courage to do what’s right?

As an adult, and as a historian, I still ask those questions, and they feel more urgent than ever. Today, it would feel dishonest to begin on an optimistic note. As the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1926, scribbling in a notebook from a fascist prison:

“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.”

Decay

What interests me is not Left vs. Right, it’s Courage v Cowardice, Virtue versus Vice.

And the truth is, the decay is everywhere. The moral rot runs deep across elite institutions of every stripe. If the right is defined by its shameless corruption, then liberals answer with a paralyzing cowardice.

[In the US] Dozens of corporations, media networks, universities and museums have already bent knee to the new regime. Some of the most prestigious law firms rushed to pledge their loyalty. But let’s not pretend that this was a fall from grace.

These firms spent years defending Wall Street criminals, tobacco conglomerates and opioid profiteers. They didn’t betray their principles. They revealed them. Their loyalty was never to justice or democracy, but to power and profit.

Secular temples

And where were these loyalties forged? The answer is simple. At the world’s most celebrated universities, at the greatest bastions of science and reason, in secular temples with grand columns and mottos inscribed in stone, “Truth” at Harvard, “Light and Truth” at Yale, and “In the nation’s service and the service of humanity” at Princeton.

Every year, thousands of brilliant teenagers write beautiful applications essays about the global problems they aspire to solve. Climate change, bold hunger, infectious disease, But a few years later, most have been funneled towards companies like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Kirkland & Alice.

Where talent disappears

A friend of mine who studied at Oxford calls it the ‘Bermuda Triangle of Talent’. Consultancy, finance, and corporate law. A gaping black hole that sucks up so many of our so-called best and brightest. A dark chasm that has tripled in size since the 1980s.

Sure, I know such companies like to spray a thin layer of purpose or corporate responsibility over their dubious business models.

Did you know that tobacco giant, Philip Morris, has a stellar ESG score?

Have you heard that British American tobacco was named both a climate leader and a diversity leader by the Financial Times?

And they really deserved it. Their CO2 compensation programs are state of the art and their inclusivity trainings are among the best in the business. They are doing so much good while killing millions of people.

Sham ‘awakening’

Please let’s not kid ourselves. There has been no moral awakening in the corporate world. Business for good, conscious capitalism, social impact. It was all mostly a sham. Beneath the talk, the cultural tide has been running in the other way for decades.

Just look at the American Freshman Survey, which has tracked the values of first-year college students since the 1960s. Half a century ago, when students were asked about their most important life goals, 80% to 90% named Developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Just 50% prioritized making a lot of money. Today, those numbers have flipped. Now 80 to 90% say that getting rich is what matters most and only half still value a meaningful philosophy of live.

Ambition without morality

We’ve taught our best and brightest how to climb, but not what ladder is worth climbing. We’ve built a meritocracy of ambition without morality, of intelligence without integrity, and now we are reaping the consequences. Declining trust, rising cynicism. And a new generation that sees power as inherently corrupt and all virtue as performance.

…What we need now is not just better policies or better politicians. We need a moral revolution. We need to revive an ancient idea, almost laughable in today’s climate, that the purpose of power is to do good.

Moral ambition

And that is the goal of this lecture series. To argue that the most urgent transformation of our time is not technological or geopolitical or industrial, but moral. We need a new kind of ambition, not for status, or wealth, or fame, but for integrity, courage, and public service, a moral ambition

It’s precisely because things can get much worse that they can also get much better. History is not just a record of the declines. It’s also full of astonishing turnarounds.

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All text taken from A Time of Monsters: Rutger Bregman – Moral Revolution