Moral Maze debate: Rutger Bregman’s call for a moral revolution

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science, Government, Technology

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, whose BBC Reith Lectures start this week, is calling for a moral revolution to change our societies for the better, charting how small groups of committed people – abolitionists, suffragettes, and temperance activists – have brought about positive social change.

Politics, Bregman argues, is in trouble in an age of apathy and backsliding democracy: “The moral rot runs deep across elite institutions of every stripe”, he says, “if the right is defined by its shameless corruption, then liberals answer with a paralyzing cowardice”.

So where might our moral salvation come? What are the deep values that underpin our contrasting political worldviews – left and right – and which should we look to prioritise now? Does any part of the political spectrum have the greatest claim to morality?

Chair: Michael Buerk Panel: Matthew Taylor, James Orr, Mona Siddiqui and Tim Stanley. Witnesses: Tim Montgomerie, Eleanor Penny, Joanna Williams, Paul Mason Producer: Dan Tierney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:07.0	Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it.
0:13.3	But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go?
0:19.2	I remember having this very sharp thought that what you do right now, this is it.
0:24.3	This defines your life.
0:26.0	I'm ready to talk and ready to listen.
0:28.3	I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this.
0:33.9	Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast.
0:37.0	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:38.7	Good evening. This year's Reith lecturer, Rutger Bregman, rubs the write-up the wrong way.
0:44.1	The Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson once ended an interview with the Dutch historian by calling him a
0:49.2	moron and suggesting he do something to himself that's actually anatomically impossible.
0:54.0	The BBC, by contrast, has presented him with a platform for his thesis that Western civilization is in an advanced stage of decay, akin to the fall of Imperial Rome.
1:04.2	America, under a precedent he calls a modern-day colligula, is corroding from within,
1:08.8	not through an absence of talent or wealth, but through
1:11.9	a lack of courage and virtue. Europe's no better, just quieter, sinking into irrelevance.
1:17.7	The right is corrupt, the left paralysed by cowardice. He's calling for a moral revolution,
1:23.2	pointing to the past when small groups have committed people, abolitionists, suffragettes,
1:28.2	temperance campaigners, an odd choice, you might think.
1:31.1	He says, achieved positive social change.
1:34.5	Is he right?
1:35.7	Where are the important values in today's competing, contrasting political worldviews?
	...

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