Peace and Goodwill
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2021
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Christmas is the season of peace on earth and good will to all people. While we naturally want to endorse this sentiment, it is also a yearly reminder of how conflict and bad faith exist in our homes and in wider society. While some families will celebrate a long-anticipated and joyful reunion, others will be trying to hold their tongue about divisive issues like Brexit or Covid until the same time next year. Surely, we could all benefit from a bit more listening, understanding and compromising? But what if deeply-held principles, make compromise impossible without sacrificing one’s own integrity? Is it better to say nothing at all for short-term peace or speak forthrightly not knowing if the long-term outcome for the relationship will be one of rupture or repair? Beyond the domestic setting is the question of how we address the cultural warfare we see in the public discourse around us. What will it take for us to come out of our ideological trenches and stop our sniping? Perhaps it starts by recognising that we all have egos that are difficult to tame, and admitting we’re wrong doesn’t make us weak. We hear the calls to ‘disagree respectfully’, but how? For some, the very idea solves or advances very little, particularly for the most marginalised in society. For others, the point isn’t to solve anything but to live together in difference while upholding each other’s humanity. With Gabrielle Rifkind, Dr Becca Bland, Rev Steve Chalke and Sarah Stein Lubrano.
Producer: Dan Tierney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:03.6 | Good evening. The British, apparently, are world leaders in saying sorry. |
| 0:07.7 | We do it all the time, eight times a day on average, much more than other nations, |
| 0:11.5 | and a lot of the time when we've nothing to be sorry for. |
| 0:14.3 | It probably goes up over Christmas. |
| 0:16.5 | Most things do, over the season of peace and goodwill. |
| 0:19.8 | Joy for many, certainly, but also domestic violence, |
| 0:23.2 | suicides, and so much family breakdown, lawyers call the first working day after the holiday |
| 0:28.0 | divorce Monday. There's a real sense that however much we may apologise, we fall out a lot, |
| 0:34.1 | not just in our personal relationships, but in our political discourse. We've become |
| 0:38.4 | more dogmatic, more strident, less able to disagree decently. When should we keep quiet? |
| 0:45.0 | When should we say sorry properly? When should we compromise? Agree, respectfully to disagree. |
| 0:50.8 | And when should we stick to our guns because it's a matter of principle on which we are, of course, undoubtedly right? |
| 0:56.7 | That's our seasonal moral maze tonight. |
| 0:58.8 | The panel, Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist, the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser, the historian Tim Stanley, |
| 1:05.6 | and Nazia Afzal, the former chief crown prosecutor in the north-west of England. |
| 1:11.4 | Panel, Tim Stanley, you're a Brexiteer, rather a public one. |
| 1:15.0 | Is that the sort of thing that leads to conflict at times like these? |
| 1:18.8 | Our family Christmas has always been traditional and quiet, |
| 1:21.8 | because everyone has always refused to speak to each other. |
| 1:24.5 | That's a joke, that's a joke in case any of them are listening. |
| 1:28.5 | But I am sceptic of this idea that Christmas isn't a time for truth because the birth of Jesus is the |
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