Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Confucian confusions

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 4th June 2008

The Reith Lectures (BBC Radio 4)

The Reith Lectures have been going for 60 years, the acme of Radio Four’s ambition to reflect the cultural heart of the nation, named after the man who believed British broadcasting should inform and educate the nation. They’re something I’ve always felt I ‘should’ listen to, but have rarely stayed the course (apart from Daniel Barenboim’s brilliant musical improvisations in 2006, which were not universally admired). The first series was given by Bertrand Russell, who told his listeners in 1948 that although we as human beings had learnt ‘to understand and control to a terrifying extent the forces of nature outside us’ we had understood nothing about ‘those that are embodied in ourselves’.

Russell, who had a wonderful flowing delivery, grasping and keeping hold of the listener’s attention, was trying to create some kind of interplay, or rather exchange, between the intellectual life of the country and its ethics, its social behaviour. He wanted to make his philosophical endeavours relevant, and to put something of what he had understood about the universe and our existence within it into the melting-pot of real life. Without an ability to comprehend our own impulses and to restrain them as necessary, he advised, our great advances in science and technology would be as nothing.

This year’s ‘lectures’ (Radio Four has always insisted that they are not ‘talks’ — we are meant to listen and take in, not to converse) are being given by Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. His topic is China, or rather Chinese Vistas; an appropriate enough subject in the year of the Beijing Olympics, and crucially so now that the Western economies are facing a credit crunch that is in part being caused by the shifting balance of economic power.

The hall at the British Library was buzzing with anticipation on the night the first lecture was recorded, on a sweaty evening in late May. A top academic, whose interest lies in the history of China’s relations with the West, was, we hoped, going to give us some insight into that inscrutable Great Power, and perhaps also explain how in such a short time, since the demise of the Maoist dictators, the economies of East and West have become so deeply entwined. (Next time you try to replace a bit of blown-down fencing, or plug that hole in the roof, you’ll know what I mean. The cost of building materials is soaring, in direct relation to the height of the skyscrapers in Shanghai.)

1 | 2 Next page