EA #3. Unholy Catholic Ireland - Dr. Hugh Turpin

Dr. Hugh Turpin of Oxford University joins Feryl and Sahir on the podcast to share his work on  the decline of Catholicism in Ireland and the factors which have led to it. We also cover his current research with the Explaining Atheism project about understanding how Ireland, Northern Ireland and Poland, 3 regions with strong religious identities have seen steep declines in religious beliefs in recent years. We cover his book "Unholy Catholic Ireland: Religious Hypocrisy, Secular Morality, and Irish Irreligion" and discuss the history of religious identity in Ireland and what the future might hold.

Support us and reach out!
https://smoothbrainsociety.com
Instagram: @thesmoothbrainsociety
TikTok: @thesmoothbrainsociety
Twitter/X: @SmoothBrainSoc
Facebook: @thesmoothbrainsociety
Merch and all other links: Linktree
email: thesmoothbrainsociety@gmail.com

Transcript

0:04

What's the format anyway? I don't actually know what to expect really. Oh well, so the format is simple, so welcome to the Smooth Rains Society. But the format is real simple. It is basically I have no clue what you do. Feral has kind of tossed me in here. And the point is I'm trying to just learn. about your work and about your research and hopefully ask questions which can help me and the audience understand the concepts which you use in your research, what you're focusing on. Yeah, that's basically it. So hopefully it's just a blanket for this conversation. Think of this as Ayanna's lab. It's that chill. Like, come give us a general, like Sahar will introduce you and then basically it's over to you to just generally introduce your work. No, no, no. And then we'll just ask you some questions about your work. Okay. Yeah, cool. Super chill. Cool. So should I just get into introducing you then? So I've already welcomed all the listeners on to Back to the Smithman Society. This is one of the Explaining Atheism episodes. So again, Farow is here, of course. And Farow has brought along Dr. Hugh Turpin, who is Currently working at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. He has a PhD from Queen's University, Belfast and Aarhus University, Denmark in Cognitive Anthropology of Religion. Most recently he's published a book called The Unholy Catholic Ireland. It's a hypocrisy, secular morality and Irish ex-Catholicism. Is that a good enough intro or have I missed a few things here? And I think that's the old title of the book. It changed slightly. So it's called Unholy Catholic Ireland, religious hypocrisy, secular morality, and Irish irreligion. That's what it says. But you were close. Yeah. Oh yes. Well, that's on the website. That's what I'm going by. I only get your name and I have to Google it. So yeah, up to date. But speaking of up to date, if you could give us. a little bit of a background of how you got into this field of work and your interests and then maybe that would open up questions and we can go from there. Just a little background on yourself. Um, yeah, I mean, you know, you kind of wonder how, how far to go and how deeply to probe my own motivations for studying what I study, you know, I mean, um, so I suppose the bulk of my research, the most significant project so far has been looking at secularization in the Republic of Ireland. And by secularization, I mean, reducing interest in religion, reducing influence of religious institutions over society, all these different metrics. So once upon a time, Ireland was considered a kind of pious outlier in Western Europe, elsewhere in that part of the world. religion seemed to be losing power more quickly than anywhere else. Ireland was this kind of exception, often because, you know, Catholicism and Irishness are deeply intertwined. That's often the reason that's given. However, in recent decades, it's been dropping religion, particularly quickly, more quickly than other countries. So for example, most of these big quantitative data sets, let's say other Western European countries like France, let's say, or the UK or Germany, every generation is a little bit less religious than its parents' generation. And it's kind of a smooth intergenerational decline. And with Ireland, that's been happening too, but you see it accelerating from kind of the 90s to the present. It kind of goes off a bit of a cliff. And instead of just each generation being less religious than its parents, also everybody's getting less religious. all at once quite quickly. So this makes Ireland a bit of an anomaly. So that's pretty much what I studied. That's the main thing I studied. That's what the book is about. Why this sudden drop and how does it relate to various things that have been going on here in this country? And how does it relate to, I suppose, what religion, whatever we mean by that, was in the first place in this country? Was there something a bit different about it here? that contributed to this kind of rapid drop. And so that's my kind of main thing so far. And currently I'm working on a sort of follow-up project where I'm looking at atheism, or really, I suppose, really more than just the rejection of the religion you were brought up in. I'm looking at it in Ireland, Poland and Northern Ireland in comparison. So these are three European places that are also thought to be. sort of quite traditionally religious by the standards of Western and Central Europe, where sort of ethno-national identities and religion are really tightly intertwined. But at least in Ireland and Poland's case, where these are suddenly seem to be kind of coming apart for a lot of people. And Northern Ireland's its own highly complex situation, which maybe I'll get into later. Yeah, so that's my main thing. And I suppose, theoretically speaking, I began really, I began as an anthropologist. I kind of, I did philosophy as my undergrad ages ago, came out of it not really knowing what to do with my life. That's probably normal for a philosophy student. I mean, I think I went into it because I didn't know what to do with my life. And then came out of it the other end, relatively unchanged, perhaps more pretentious when I went in. Yeah, then I just kind of drifted off teaching English in Japan and other places for years and got tired of it and wanted to return to doing something that I found stimulating. So decided to try my hand at anthropology. So I did a masters in that, you know, I enjoyed it to a certain degree and also found it frustrating to a certain degree because I suppose I wanted clearer and more universal answers to big questions. And in recent decades, anthropology has generally moved away from that kind of direction. So I started, I developed an interest in the cognitive science of religion. And I kind of saw, I suppose, an opportunity to put some theories from that to the test within the society that I grew up in, you know, because Why was it secularizing so quickly? Why if, as these people say, religion is somehow sort of almost intuitively human and is found everywhere, but it's clearly not. And there are clearly conditions that make it prosper and others that make it decline. And so I kind of, you know, thought I'd use some of these tools from the CSR and related disciplines to look at this unusual case of Ireland. But then at the same time, when I started studying Ireland, I kind of realized much local complexity and nuance there was. So that kind of revived my interest in more traditional social anthropology as well. So the result is, you know, I would I dare to call myself a Renaissance man that seems so arrogant, you know, I wouldn't say that, but my work does kind of combine. certain measure of quantitative kind of big picture causal stuff with nitty gritty nuanced more anthropological detail to try and understand what's happening at a more kind of intimate level. I try to bring those levels together, you know. Yeah, I mean, and I suppose like then underneath it all there is the question like why study what you're studying, which is almost like a kind of psychoanalytic question, like what happened to you when you were growing up at Mengeria? interest in this, you know, because I could never be one of these people that, for example, says, you know, I'm studying Mesopotamian basket weaving or something like that. Like, you know, I couldn't do that. You know, it has to, it has to scratch some itch, you know, some something that you experienced somewhere that bothered you that got in there. And I think for me, it was, um, yeah, growing up in this society that it seemed, you know, you were expected to be Catholic, But at the same time, nobody really took it seriously. It was this very, very bizarre situation where we were living in kind of two worlds at once, with this kind of split dual consciousness, where if asked, yeah, you said you're Catholic, if asked in school, particularly the school system being run by the Catholic Church, you know, of course you believe in God, of course, yeah. But it makes no difference whatsoever to your life. You know, it's just a trivial kind of almost habitual kind of conformist type of experience, patently socially motivated, and not that important and yet obligatory. It's very ambiguous. It was such a confusing, ambiguous time. And I myself was, I suppose, more openly skeptical than many of my peers in school. It got me a bit of flack in school. You know, people didn't like it that much. And yet suddenly, over the space of a couple of decades, everybody has kind of become the way I was, you know. So I feel pissed off with them, perhaps. You know, it wasn't OK for me to ask these questions. And now suddenly it's OK for everyone to ask them. You know, so I don't know. Suppose I wanted to investigate that a bit. Or did I just want to kind of linger over the church's decline in this country to a certain degree, because I didn't particularly like going to Catholic school. Now I'm waffling and probably peeling away too many personal details. So let's move on. I was actually going to ask, well, probably not personal details, but I do not know much about Irish history or Irish context apart from a few things. And one of them is that Irish, the Irish in general are known to be very Catholic. And this deep drop off is intriguing to me. And therefore I wanted to know, is there any other kind of historic background which I need to know, I need to understand before I get into your book? Well, I, you know, I try to give people at least a kind of overview of the historic background. I'm not a historian, but it's important to know a bit about it. What would I say about it? I mean, Ireland has a very keen sense, I suppose, as a society has long done of its victimhood and its oppression by England. involved in that has been the construction of an identity as non-British, some way of maintaining a sense of oneself as different and separate culturally. During the 19th century, Irish as a language was starting to die off. People needed some way, I suppose, of differentiating themselves. And Catholicism, religion, became the main way to do that. A lot of this was also driven by British prejudice against not just Irish people, but by Catholicism as well. You know, you sort of take the... negative stereotypes being used against you and turn them into assets or elements to be defended. And also during the course of the 19th century, specifically after the famine in Ireland, there was a change in the nature of the Catholic Church. Previously it had been kind of disorganised, poorly staffed. Irish Catholicism was almost a kind of a folk religion. It was not very orthodox. There weren't very high rates of mass attendance and priests were badly trained, frequently drunken, and didn't have a great deal of control over what people thought and did. Well, it varied in different places in the country. But then in the middle of the 19th century, under a guy called Paul Cullen, Ireland's first archbishop, there was a real drive to reform the church and impose orthodox discipline on the people and make them, in essence, exemplary Catholics. And so the church's manpower increased greatly, its infrastructure increased greatly. Also by this time, there was no longer a kind of British effort to suppress Catholicism. They kind of realized, well, the Irish are never going to become Protestants in large numbers. So we may as well let them have their religion and perhaps it can even be a kind of a force for ensuring social order and compliance in a certain degree. So Irish people became very orthodox Catholic. There became a proliferation of people doing kind of Roman rituals and being concerned with being good, moral, devout Catholics and sexual chastity and all the rest of it. And some of this change can be linked to the changes in society that took place as a result of the famine. A lot of people died, a lot of people emigrated. and what remained from the people that went on to staff the church were this kind of emerging Catholic middle class that were very concerned with respectability. And then in the early 20th century, you know, after 1916, after later after independence, the country kind of emerged as this very poor place. which relied on the church to provide social certain social services, health care, education, and which was infused with this Catholic nationalism. No, I mean, what is there about Ireland that's enviable? Really, in Europe, it was like this backwater, this impoverished former colony with little to its name, right beside, you know, England, the old enemy. which was so powerful and successful. And how could we distinguish ourselves? Well, by being the best Catholics in the world, by being the purest and most unimpeachable Catholics. So you had this really, really Catholic society developing after independence, where this kind of the idea of being an Irish person and being a Catholic were almost one and the same thing. And people often ask, you know, did that make Ireland a theocracy? And it wasn't straightforwardly a theocracy. And part of the reason, I suppose, is that the church had such control through the education system and through people's sense of identity as Irish equals Catholic, that there was no need really for priests to dictate to politicians how to run the country. The politicians already intuitively obeyed them because they've been raised in this hyper-Catholic system. That persisted for much of the 20th century and it started to break apart gradually from the late 1960s onwards. The reason basically being that a new generation of politicians took over that were somewhat less formed by that Catholic nationalism and somewhat more global in their outlook. What they wanted was to produce the conditions for economic transformation in the country really. So the education system was somewhat overhauled. And this new economic model developed, that was all about getting in foreign money into the country, foreign direct investment, we call it Ireland. I suppose the roots were sowed for Ireland's later role in the 1990s as a kind of, um, 2000s as a tax haven for American corporations. So after that point in time, you see this kind of shift where, um, people get richer. know, at first gradually and then from the 90s pretty quickly. And they still, you know, feel they're still as they always say, you know, oh, I was born Catholic, but you can't be born Catholic. You know, you're supposed to get baptized Catholic. It's not an ethnic identity, we're told, but in Ireland, it pretty much is. But what you have happening over this period of time is the church is receding in importance as a kind of religion in people's lives and Catholicism is staying there, but just kind of as a habitual ethnic identity that you just are, but you don't really think about it all that much, except when a census comes through your letterbox or something like that. Then you remember to tick that correct box or when you're in school, you know, you say the right things or participate in various rites of passage because that's what you do. So this kind of more habitual version develops from let's say the 70s, 80s onwards. And that kind of loosens the connection. But then, and I suppose maybe we'll get into this later, then you also have from the 90s onwards, all these kind of revelations about the Catholic past, about these unsavoury aspects of that extremely different Catholic culture, various scandals, the abuse of children being one, but not the only one. So you get this backlash against that Catholic identity. Um, and that's where we are today. We're, we're somewhere quite far along in that process now. Um, yeah, there's, I mean, there's a lot of recent history to get into that I haven't got into there because I just, I suppose it's too recent perhaps to be considered the kind of historical background you're talking about. I don't know, when does history end and the present begin? It's, uh, I don't know. Well, technically your last sentence is also part of history. Wow, yeah, that's quite a lot. But for the purposes of this, I feel you said the recent trends were that people are really rejecting Catholicism at a much greater rate compared to other countries. Do you think a bit of it is because Catholicism in Ireland was accepted at a lot higher rate? So the initial drop now is a lot steeper and it's coming? Yeah. receding to the mean I guess the word mean in any way. Is there a mean and these kind of things? I don't know if there is a mean. But yeah, I mean, it is it is dropping from a higher, higher rate, definitely. And that that's part of the explanation. And I think Yeah, because it was a bit of a weird situation really, where you had this really highly religious country that became wealthy quite quickly compared to the speed that other countries might have done so. And it was also extremely globalised. It was an English speaking small country. You couldn't keep the outside world bay. You know, the effort to kind of maintain Catholic Ireland is this kind of hermetically sealed. devout insular bubble, when it was sandwiched between the UK and the US and became a kind of, you know, corporate haven for US money and was became an EU member in the 70s. You know, it was, it was a project that was doomed to fail. So I think you're right. It declined from a higher degree and there are reasons why that, that it could never be maintained at that higher degree. There are sort of like just factors about the place as a country. meant that conservative Catholic dream was maybe a pipe dream always. What were some of the other factors involved then? So I guess you mentioned, well, you've touched on saying there was some scandals and the others probably yet being a pipe dream, but what are some of the other factors for this? Yeah. I mean, the thing is there are so many. sometimes I find it difficult to kind of say which ones were the most important ones. And I know the ones that are the most important in the public eye and in the media are scandals, basically. So that kind of begins in the early 90s, in 1992 or so. So it's the very beginning of this sort of period where people are becoming a bit more autonomous and less conformist with respect to religion. And I suppose that plays into the media asking questions that previously wouldn't have asked of priests and bishops and the church and this kind of thing. And the first one was there was this Eamonn Casey, a bishop, and they found out that he was a real kind of charismatic guy. He was always on the radio, on TV, you know, he was one of the people that kind of introduced Pope John Paul to when he came on this huge visit in Ireland in 1979. And it turned out that Casey had this secret lover, an American woman. And he had fathered a child with her and kept the child's secret. And at this point, you know, I think it was 92 or 93 that came out. It created a kind of wave of shock and scandal. You know, the church was this institution that's been telling everybody else how to live. And so had Casey. And then it turned out that he had this secret life and a lot of people were kind of shocked. many people were in denial. But it sort of opened the floodgates. And when you look at it now, it was completely innocuous. I mean, who cares if this man has a secret child? Because what was to come out later, the next wave, I suppose, was revelations of paedophile priests molesting children, you know. And so what you kind of see in Ireland is these waves come, these waves of scandal, and they get bigger each time. So there was... instances of particular abuse of priests like Brendan Smith was a famous one. And then it turned out that their activities have been known about and concealed by the church. So you got kind of another expansion where now the entire institution starts to get implicated in these things. And then you get kind of further kind of reappraisals of that Catholic culture. And you know, you get, for example, revelations coming out about Magdalen laundries. These are institutions where women who were in some way deemed. You know. less than perfect examples of Catholic rectitude were basically imprisoned and made to work in menial drudgery kind of labour and often abused. And then you have the industrial schools kind of very abusive institutions where poor and orphaned children were interned. And you get this kind of new picture emerging I suppose in the mid-2000s. of not just of there being a lot of clerical abuse or the church being corrupt, but somehow all of that Catholic society being a cruel, abusive, dark kind of a place. So you get this kind of reappraisal of Catholic Ireland, basically, a kind of inverted image, whereas before it's seen as this kind of bastion of moral purity. It begins to look. like this kind of almost totalitarian, abusive, dark kind of a place in public representations as people are revisiting and excavating these kind of secrets. There are all these government reports coming out, you know, and survivors are coming forward and it just, it's still going on to the present, you know, in 2017, a new category of institution was kind of being investigated, the mother and baby homes, these are places where women who got pregnant outside of marriage were shuttered up in shame, you know, and they gave birth and then the church basically, as far as we can understand, sold a lot of the children to American couples looking for kids to adopt and other, the death rates were very high in these institutions for children as well. Big controversy came when they found a load of, I think, infant remains in a disused septic tank beneath one of these institutions. So there was that. And then the latest wave, I suppose, has been yet another wave of scandal revolves around sexual abuse in elite institutions. So the kind of Irish equivalents of British public schools. So previous things that I'd looked at kind of abuse mostly in the industrial schools and by the Christian Brothers religious order that taught in a lot of Irish schools. And now it's even the upper crust of society are coming forward with their kind of revelations of having been molested and it being covered up. And it just seems to be a kind of ever spreading rot that moves through layers and layers of the past and becomes more entrenched and more difficult to quarantine. As the years go by to the point where now people ask questions like, you know, how did people not know all this stuff was going on? To what degree did they know but turn a blind eye? What was this society? Yeah, so you have this kind of expanding contamination of the Catholic past. And of course, from what I said earlier about this kind of decline in deep affiliation with the church to begin with as the country becomes richer and more autonomous and more confident. You have new generations being brought up in an environment where Catholicism is personally not very important. And what they associate with it is the horrible stuff they see on the news. It's this kind of irrelevant, sort of vaguely weird thing they talk about sometimes in school about love. God is love. And then it's this really dark stuff. Why would they want to remain affiliated? And into that, into that, you have the situation where the church left over from that definite, deference sort of Catholic past, there were certain things encoded in Irish law, there were, you know, like we had very, very strict anti-abortion laws for a while, for a long while, that were repealed in 2018. And there was a sort of in 2015, you know, a campaign for the legalization of same sex marriage as well. And through the Irish constitution, you know, through the way politics works here, the way these questions get decided is by public referendums. So a referendum is called, for example, on whether or not to liberalize abortion laws. There's loads of campaigning and this, you know, it creates this situation where people are given a option, I suppose, to oppose the Catholic position. And they kind of, in the course of this, you know, there's a lot of campaigning and a lot of dirty stuff gets dredged up again. And there's a lot of acrimony. But it also, once the tallies come in and it's found that, you know, people have voted to liberalize abortion laws, people kind of realize, oh, how Catholic were we really in the first place? If we all just voted this way? Are the majority voted this way? So these kind of. referenda or like. big kind of public revelations where afterwards it's sort of. enacted and disclosed that actually, we're not that Catholic, are we? You know, and they also create tension between people that want to keep these restrictions in place and people that don't. And so you get this kind of, and you'll often see this, this where, where religion is a bit of a kind of a threat to secular freedoms, you get strong anti-religious stances. You get this in the US, for example. Whereas, you know, if you look at Denmark or somewhere, there are plenty of atheists there that don't even really think about it. Or there are plenty of people that call themselves Lutherans and they don't believe, they don't care about not believing. It's irrelevant. It's a nice little tradition. Now there is a bit of that in Ireland too, but there are also the conditions that will build up a strongly anti-religious stance. Yeah. I think you explained this so well, I could listen to you literally all day. But my question then is, Catholicism still exists despite there being several reasons for it to not exist in Ireland. So what is the function that Catholicism serves now? Why is it that people still identify as Catholic, even though they may not particularly believe in it? Yeah, well, let's see. I mean, I mean, the majority of the population still identifies Catholic. In a way, I mean, I think there are probably several layers and answers to that. I'll try and go through them. One, I suppose, is family. You know, like grandparents are quite religious, perhaps parents a bit less so, but still somewhat, you know, and people don't want to want to damage intergenerational harmony and that kind of thing. So they'll continue to baptize their kids, you know, it's not a big part of their life, but they're willing to do these things just to keep social relations ticking over smoothly. Then you've got the institutional dimension. So the church still controls much of the education system, the vast majority of it. And even though the law has changed and they're not supposed to be able to discriminate based on religious affiliation, some people still think that they do. And there's just a kind of intuition there that it's the case. baptize their kids, you know, because they think it's favorably, it has a favorable impact on their educational outcomes. And then there's also just sort of a feeling of not wanting to be ostracized, you know, in school, all the kids do their rites of passage, they have their first confession, their communion and their confirmation, God, I remember going through these things, you know, and they don't want their kids to be ostracized. And so everybody kind of collectively does it, even though no individuals perhaps all that interested in it. Nobody wants to be, not nobody, but there's a reluctance to be the one that books the trend, you know. Then there's also the fact that the church is growing less powerful, is kind of, and has for a few decades tried to sort of made itself over in a more forgiving image. And, you know, people don't want to sever themselves from their traditions and their sense of historical, ethnic even. identity. There's a lot to like about Catholic tradition and the past as well. It's not just this abusive image. People kind of want to retain a sense of continuity with the past. They want to retain a sense of... I would say community, something like that. And the way this is achieved is through things associated with the church. And I think a part of it as well, another part of it is, is it's grown much less relevant. Um, and the irrelevance itself preserves it because if the thing is not that much of an imposition, if anymore, if being Catholic now really just means you, your, your kids get to do a communion, you know, right of passage in school, which is an exciting event for all the kiddies get dressed up. They all get told they're special. They all get to shake their relatives down for money. And they all get an iPhone 13 at the end of it with that money. Why would you not want to be part of that? You know, it's fun and it's easy. And there's no great kind of weight. So it's, it's a funny thing. It's a very strange thing in Ireland. You have this ambiguity where Catholicism is associated with a kind of soft core sense of, of belonging and community, even aside from matters of belief. No belief is for fanatics and Protestants. You know, like, maybe, maybe there's a God, maybe there isn't, that might be the kind of attitude. You don't have to make up your mind about the thing. To have a definite position is to be probably a little bit strange. You know, it's better just to float in this hazy ambiguity. Um, there's no need to decouple and, um, there's no need to rock the boat. So it's, it's that kind of, um, flexible. vaguely relevant kind of ethno-Catholic comforting belonging tie is still very strong in the country and that means you get a weird kind of front of tension between the ex-Catholic people you know the people who think that by maintaining this link you're propping up a contaminated and immoral institution and then the other people who are like God you people are just like a like kind of oppressive fundamentals, just like the Catholics that came before, can't we just, you know, have our communions and our iPhone 15s and our, you know, Catholic funerals and can't you just let us be ambiguous and somewhat inconsistent? What harm is there in it? So you get a funny kind of tension that way as well. And I suppose the question becomes like the future. Is Irish, you know, non-religion going to continue to... increase very rapidly. I don't know really, you know, I think it could go either way. Yeah, which of these positions is going to, I mean, they're both going to continue into the future. So vague, vague tailing off there. Sorry. No, that's good. The thing which I was thinking of with what you said was something which you also said at the very beginning. where you're talking about leaving Catholicism and then you talk about atheism. And are those two separate things or one of the same? Because I feel one is this hazy middle, while the other is, as you said, the people who say, no, there is no God. So when you talk about atheism in your work or when you talk about leaving religion in your work, are you talking about the same thing or are these like slightly different concepts? And are you making like distinctions between them? Good question. Yeah, they're different concepts. And there's a number of ways that they're different. I mean, atheism is really about. lack of belief, let's say, and even within that, there are like positive and negative understandings of that. Is it just the absence of a belief in a God, for example, or is it actively believing that there isn't one? And you can have that position alongside Catholic identity, confusingly enough, especially in Ireland, or without it. I mean, here's a good quote for you. I'm just going to pull it out to give you an example of what that's like, um, sorry, just bear with me a sec. So this is a quote from like the 1970s, I think. It's a famous novelist, John McGahern, who basically left Ireland because he was fired from his teaching job. One of his books was banned. A lot of books were banned in Catholic Ireland. And he married a foreign Protestant. And he said that was part of the reason for this prejudiced reaction against him. But then he returned to Ireland. I went to live in rural Ireland in Leitrim, I think it was, and got to know the locals there. And here's a conversation he had with one of them. Why don't you go to mass, John? I was asked by a dear friend and neighbour once. I'd like to, but I'd feel a hypocrite. Why would you feel that? Because I don't believe. But sure, none of us believe. Why do you go then? We go for the old performance, to see the girls, to see the whole show. It was completely unfazed by my question, even mimicking the pious prancing of a fashionable woman as she approached and left the communion realm. And laughed out loud, we go to see all the other hypocrites. So even in Catholic Ireland, there's possibly the case that there were quite a few people who were atheists, you know, maybe even kind of acknowledged it a bit of one another, but you still went through the motions. partly as a matter of social pressure and perhaps you cultivated this interior cynicism, but you were still Irish and Catholic. Even if you had that kind of hidden concealed atheism. So you can have atheism alongside Catholic identity. Now you see the emergence of a kind of new, more strident, more kind of, I mean, you see that the new atheist movement, you know, you associated with Dawkins and people like this and that. That was pretty popular here in Ireland because it arrived at the same time as all these scandals I've just talked about. So, yeah, they created an upsurge in that kind of strong atheist identity, which is quite different to what I just read out, where you wouldn't go along with that kind of Catholic stuff. You know, you'd be a principled atheist and you'd oppose all of it. Your behaviour and your beliefs would have to align properly, you know. But then there are all these people as well who've stepped away from Catholicism. Some of them may continue to think of themselves in some sense, steeped down as Catholic, but they have no truck with the church anymore. They don't practice. Their beliefs would not be orthodox, but they might not be atheists. They might have kind of spiritual, but not religious type beliefs. They might be agnostic. You know, there are a whole explosion of different stances. Yeah, so to say that everyone who leaves Catholicism becomes an atheist, or that all atheists have left Catholicism, that would be a huge simplification. And it would be wrong, you know. Um, I like to say that you coined this term, but you did not, but let's say that you popularized this term fuzzy fidelity. Oh, that was popular before. I know what you're going to say now. Yeah. But can you tell us more about it and how it relates to the phenomenon of not believing, yeah. Yeah. Of not believing but still being in the religion. Yeah. That's David Bowes' term. So we'll give credit to David for that. So I think what Fuzzy Fidelity is, is in these kind of quantitative measures in the European Social Survey and the WVS or stuff like that, you get this, you get a lot of kind of... I suppose the true marker of a secularizing society is growing disinterest in religion, not necessarily fiery objection to religion. That suggests religion is already strong in the society. Apathy is a better indicator that religion is actually failing. And fuzzy fidelity refers really to people who may go on to affiliate with the tradition, may have got a score in the middle of these kind of measures of belief and that kind of thing. Do you or do you not? believe in a God, I'll give that a kind of like a middling three out of a six or something like that. And so they're, they're kind of just boning it in really. They're not motivated to leave outright. And they're not that interested in practicing belief is it? Who knows? It's a side question. It's not very relevant. And I think what you see is growing numbers of people like that in a lot of European societies over the course of the 20th century. More and more people adopt that kind of stance. So you get this new kind of ordinary baseline emerging of relative religious indifference with a very superficial tie, perhaps motivated just by the kind of things I described earlier in Ireland of community and belonging and not wanting to rock the boat, not even caring that much. That becomes the new norm. Um, that's fuzzy fidelity. Uh, you, you keep the connection because it's, because you're not bothered rejecting it. Um, but I suppose what one might say about that is that if a motivation arrives, um, from outside or from, from within that suddenly drags that into awareness, I think you can see a kind of bit of a cascade effect. And I think that's maybe what we saw in Ireland. And I think. in Ireland, I think fuzzy fidelity might have been a little different because the sheer combination of that kind of ethnocatholic nationalist identity means that people who were in effect apathetic and fuzzy fidelity people on surveys and that kind of thing through habit and socially desirable responding might have been looking more Catholic than they really were. And then into this kind of situation, you have the scandals I described, launched into this kind of situation of fuzzy fidelity and apathy in a fairly large swathe of the population. And then you see this, this sort of drop off effect. Yeah. Do you think there are places where religion is kind of growing or increasing in the sense that you kind of hear a lot of, well, I guess, because most of your information comes from media and in media you usually see extremes and you often see, for example, during a when Russia invaded Ukraine and a lot of Ukrainian refugees were pouring into Europe, you had a lot of news presenters and reporters saying people take them in because they're like us, they're Christians, our Christianity is showing and all that and we wouldn't do this to Syrian refugees or whatever because it's a different religion. Do you think there are places in the world or there are certain circumstances which could probably increase religiosity? decreased over time? Yeah, I think there probably are. Um, to begin with this huge question, um, let's talk about the Syrians and the Ukrainians for a moment. Um, yeah, there's this, this sense that we'll let them in because of their religion, this is like the very much Polish situation where they were very welcoming to Ukrainian refugees, um, far more than they, they were the possibility of. Muslim refugees seem to terrify the conservative elements of Polish society and was used to sort of as a conservative talking point quite frequently there. We can't let them in, you know, but it suddenly changed when it was the Ukrainians. Yeah, I mean, is it religion or is it more like religion as a proxy for sort of ethnic similarity or something like that? You know, they're white too. You know, that's really what they're saying. Plus, I think there are situations that could... It's such a big question. I mean, if you look at the main theory, I suppose, on secularization is this idea of growing existential security and that the more people are secure and they unthreatened either by economic factors or other threats. the more they let go of religion, they don't need it so much anymore. Now, whether that's because they don't need the comfort of the beliefs, or they don't need the support of the communities, or they practice less and thus the ideas transmit less, we don't really know. But it does seem that those kind of conditions create a drop in religion. So the corollary of that would probably be that the opposite conditions would potentially increase it. greater threat might drive up commitment to religious identities that are tied to your group particularly, because you need the support of the group or you're opposing another group that has a different kind of religious background and that might drive up that religious identity. So yeah, there are definitely conditions where you could see that happening. I don't think secularization is some kind of teleological one-way predetermined kind of historically linear kind of thing. It could go into reverse, could stop happening. Who knows. But one thing I've been thinking about lately that interests me that I can't quite square with this existential security model is that what you hear a lot after I suppose decades of neoliberal rule in the West, this idea of Thatcherism and Reaganism wearing away at the... the social security net and Western societies and that kind of thing. And people now, young people now, not being able to get stable jobs and not being able to get houses and they're bled dry by rent and their mental health is going down the toilet and social media is driving us mad. Blah, blah, ah, you know, Donald Trump, the planet's burning, all the rest. And so you seem to be getting this surge in feelings of insecurity among young people with it would appear, you know. And yet that's also the demographic that's rejecting religion. I mean, so that seems to fly in the face slightly of the existential security hypothesis. But I think maybe the problem is that we, um, we need to have a more expansive definition of, do we need a more expansive definition of religion? Or do we need to acknowledge that religion has particular serve particular functions in the past and there are other things that are fulfilling those needs now that people are turning to, or they once may have turned to religion. So young people, they might be put off from a return to traditional religion because of its moral conservativism, probably, in the societies I'm talking about, the Western European American type societies. Maybe the fortunes of strong atheism are also in decline. You know, it might be seen as not particularly comforting worldview. It might be that people are getting into spirituality and meditation, you know, a little bit of astrology. God knows, you know, what direction people are going in. And maybe religion was this kind of combined package. in the past that gave people a sense of group belonging, a sense of beliefs that kind of ameliorated suffering and gave them a greater sense of security, something to turn to. And the package is coming undone, is unraveling. You know, people can feel like they're part of a community now over the internet. They can kind of get a simulation of that at least. They can get a sense of control perhaps through, you know, wellness or spiritual practices or something like that. of moral character and virtue by embracing various causes and campaigning for them. All of this might have been tied together before by religions, but now we seem to be in some sort of place where this is unraveled a bit. So it could be that people are doing some of the stuff that you would expect in conditions of existential insecurity, but it's no longer connected up to those traditional religious identities as it was before. I don't know. I think that's something that would merit further study. If the existential security model is the one, how come under conditions of increasing insecurity in, at least to the kind of Western capitalist nations, that's the way people feel among the young, how come they're not going back to religion? Yeah. I mean, that's also the pluralism hypothesis. The more you are exposed to different worldviews, the more you're exposed to different ideas, the less likely you will be to adhere to one, which probably also explains the new religion trends that are coming up where people are just coming up with a mix and mash of different religions. And yeah, there is that pluralism thing. And I suppose there's also the general, if the general Sorry. Yeah. Sorry, can I just say something to that, which even if your pluralism itself isn't new in its idea, because didn't Akbar, who was one of the emperors in the Mughal Empire, didn't he start his own religion at one point of time, which was a mix and match of Hinduism and Islam and a few other religions of that time from memory? So I think even that kind of concept of breaking and picking and choosing aspects of religions isn't. necessarily a new one. Sorry, I just wanted to. Well, I think you're definitely right there. I'm trying to think of other examples. But like, I mean, Japan being a long standing example where, you know, Buddhism, Shintoism, kind of elements of Confucianism are kind of mixed and matched and fused together. And it's definitely the idea that, that people didn't do this in the past. I think is wrong, perhaps with the rise of the monotheisms and their kind of fanatical insistence on there only being one God and you know, you better, and the religions of the book where you know, sign up to this completely or not at all. But I think the norm was probably to pick a mix in many, many societies for most of history. Yeah. Where were we? Oh, the pluralism thing. Yeah. Is that driving it down now? might be the pluralism and also, I suppose, the greater individualism of... people know that they kind of want their... want to be able to tailor a thing, even if everyone ends up kind of tailoring it the same way, and individualism actually looks like a bit of a conformist collective kind of thing. After all, people want the feeling that they're sculpting and carving out this particular thing for themselves. Yeah, I don't know. That was really vague. Sorry. Yeah. That was good. Okay, from the vagueness and from the theory, can we talk about your actual work? Because you also said that you've done a lot of quantitative stuff. So could you give me some sort of an idea of what that was like? Okay, yeah. What quantitative stuff have I done? So I suppose I began much, you know, much of the direction I've gone in my research is a result of the failure of an initial oversimplistic idea. And that was. There's this idea in the cognitive science of religion. It's a good idea and it's got a place. Credibility enhancing displays that religious beliefs transmit because, you know, there is no proof verification in the world of the existence of the gods. And how does somebody growing up in a social world come to take these things seriously? Well, the cue, the trigger is the social behavior that they see around them. other people are acting in such a way that suggests that they really do think these things are true, a cultural learner is likely to take them on board. And so I encountered this idea around the time that Irish religion was dropping and all these hypocrisies and scandals were emerging from the Catholic Church. And I thought, what about credibility undermining displays? You know, could it be that the opposite is causing this, this kind of opposite effect where believers are having their bubbles burst by these sudden revelations that maybe the paragons of their religion actually don't seem to be acting like they believe in it. I tried to test this quantitatively with an experiment that prime participants, one of two kind of stories about a priest, one which was kind of virtuous individual and one in which he was a paedophile or something like that. crud, no cred versus crud. Then I measured their levels of belief, both explicitly and using an implicit association task, which is itself a controversial task that many people think doesn't actually work. And I found nothing, you know, and the more I talk to people, I realized this was just the wrong way to go. That it's infinitely more complex than that. It's questionable whether people really believe that much even to begin with. the ones that are now dropping it. So the idea that there was this simple reaction between scandal and apostasy in Ireland, a simple equation that I could test through an experiment was just a naive pipe dream of a PhD student. You know, so that experiment didn't work. And then I use more kind of exploratory survey based methods, as well as my interviews and field work after that, one of which I like talking about. was the free list methodology. So this is where you just prompt somebody with a term. Like for example. Catholic Church, you know, the Catholic Church, what comes to mind when you think of the Catholic Church? And then your participant lists all their kind of associations. So, like, for example, my ones, I think I have them here. Yeah, I had hundreds of people respond to this and I split them between those, let's say, still call themselves Catholic and those who no longer call themselves Catholic. The whole sample was baptised Catholic. And just with these kind of intuitive, swift associations, the Catholics have clergy, mass, sacraments, communion, churches, Pope, God, that kind of stuff. The ex-Catholics, the first association, the swiftest thing they think of when they think of the Catholic Church is paedophilia. Now it's what comes to mind like that. After that, clergy, you have the idea of corruption, conservativism, authoritarianism, the education system, which is dominated by the poor. So it's an entirely negative list. And it's a good way of getting these kind of swift. reactions. Another, I used a lot of different quantitative measures and what I found was I used a measure of these credibility enhancing displays as well. And yeah, the less people had seen their parents act as though they believed, the less people themselves believed. So it kind of showed that there was this dual effect going on. Religion was fading, but into this condition of dark image at the same time. So I was able to use this kind of survey to show that more complicated picture than the kind of initial simplistic road experiment that I tried to run. Yeah, that's... That's one example, you know, because I used that survey to just see the extent to which people were rejecting Catholicism and what basically seemed to be their associations with it if they did. And then I combined that with the more qualitative stuff to dig deeper into what these associations did out there in the social world. Why were they so salient? How did people react to people who had different associations with the whole thing? Yeah, and then like it's because we've kind of been on this team now of Catholic Ireland, they have completely different work as well. And that I use experiments to probe, which I can talk about if you want, but it's got nothing to do with any of the rest of this. But is that too much of an on sequitur? I don't know. I was just working on FreeList today when Tajo walked into my office and scared me. Oh yeah? We could do a free list. We'll chat about that after the podcast. But before we segue into your experiments, can you tell us more about your work that's happening in Poland and North Ireland right now? I can tell you. And how it's related to Europe. But I don't have the results yet. So we're doing the interviews right now. I'm working with some researchers in Bialystok University in Poland. and I'm working with a young researcher up in Northern Ireland. So we're doing interviews, and I'm doing interviews here in Ireland, and we're getting 30 per country, where we're just kind of getting people's stories of people that consider themselves to have left Catholicism and also cultural Catholics in Ireland and Poland. And in the North, we're getting representatives of all the different religious backgrounds. So in the North, this divided society where you have Catholics and then you have various forms of Protestant, like the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian are the two biggest. Even within Presbyterian, there are subdivisions. So we're getting people and there are people with mixed background. So we're getting interviews with all these people and then I'm going to look through them and see what kind of themes are emerging and make representative surveys to try and get a kind of more. So I'll have the intimate detail again, but I'll also have the more coarse grained, but perhaps more representative data from the survey on what's causing the declines in religion in these societies. And certainly I think with Poland, it's a situation that's fairly similar in some respects, though with important differences to the Irish situation. I mean, recently in Poland, we've just seen a big change in government where the Law and Justice Party that ruled the country for the last while. was very, very conservatively Catholic and that not too long ago passed very restrictive abortion laws as just lost power, largely because of a youth backlash. So that's somewhat reminiscent of the kind of rapid secularization that we've seen in Ireland. It's very driven by opposition to conservative morality and the imposition of kind of theocratic restrictions on women and on that kind of sexual life. and these kind of things. So yeah, it's Poland is sort of close to what you see in Ireland and also maybe what you see in the United States with this kind of accelerating non religion there based on opposition to the connection between Christianity and republicanism. Northern Ireland is much more complex, at least for me. You know, people think it's both, they're both the same Ireland, you know, Ireland, they're both parts of Ireland, shouldn't it be straightforwardly comparable? But it's not really, you know, it's this divided society traditionally where Leaving your religion is harder to do because you're leaving your tribe, but you're kind of like, that's a win for the other side. If you do it, you don't want to do that. And there are patterns within Northern Irish non-religion, it seems, that require further explanation. It seems that more of the non-religious people now in Northern Ireland come from a Protestant than a Catholic background. One has to ask questions about why that might be. That's kind of what I'm exploring now. It's not that there aren't, I mean, religious practice has been in decline among the Catholics. There are, of course, non-religious people from a Catholic background that no longer affiliate. There are plenty of atheists. I mean, there always have been. The Catholic tradition of North draws on many, many different intellectual sources, like there are You know, Marxism and socialism were important components of elements of Irish republicanism as well, you know, as Catholicism. So there are very, very different strands that are all drawn together, but you might still be a Catholic, even if you're an atheist. That doesn't seem to be as true on the other side, somehow. And also, you know, you have noticed people are compared to down here in the associations with the Catholic Church and with non-religious people and bang, you know, it's all this, like, they're hypocrites, they're, they're paedophiles, they're authoritarians, they're all this kind of stuff. That stream of associations so far, in my experience, doesn't seem to be as strong for Northern Catholics. And there are reasons why this might be. One is the Catholic Church didn't have direct control over society in the North to the same degree it did down south. But the more I read about the history of what is often called the two communities up there, and the loyalist Protestant image of the church, the Catholic Church, and Catholics is often of the church as this kind of Machiavellian dark controlling force that's kind of hell bent on capturing the North and on undermining northern and Catholics themselves as kind of feckless, lazy kind of. There's a lot of traditional historical image that Protestants had of Catholics. It can be a bit bigoted, you know, and there's bigotry going both ways, but the nature of that bigotry is somewhat different. And I think it's possible that if that's your background north. adopt this dark image of the Catholic Church, almost like adopting the image your traditional enemies have of your group. That probably inhibits people from, they may well complain about the church among themselves, but to openly adopt that kind of anti-Catholic image, I think it's much more difficult in a situation where you have an out-group that is anti-Catholic. that you're then playing into their hands. You know, so I think that complicates it. And then in terms of the growing kind of non-religion within Northern Irish society, an important thing, of course, is that the society is basically at peace now since the Good Friday Agreement. So people are not, younger people are not growing up at the same levels of sectarian tension they had before. So that's why you're seeing it growing partly. And a big factor in a lot of the interviews of notice seems to be the kind of experience of stepping beyond the bounds of your community. A lot of people talk about going to college, where they meet people from the other side of the go to college in the UK and they meet and they realize that the kind of tightly interwound kind of identities that they had before that they can let those go, you know. Yeah. So I wonder, you know, I need to look into it more, but I wonder, is there kind of like a really rather pronounced social class dimension, even more so in Northern Ireland, to leave in your religious affiliation that there is, when there's that dimension exists here in the south, but I wonder, is it even more strongly? tuned in the north where I kind of imagine that the middle class Protestant might leave Northern Ireland, go to university in the UK, not really planning coming back. And, you know, but somebody from a more working class, the industrialized background, the typical person, obviously, there's a huge variety of people and experiences. But it might not be so easy to up sticks and leave your sort of ethno-religious community in the same way. It might keep that link stronger. Even if you don't believe, you might still think, you know, no, I'm, I'm still a Protestant, but people around me are still part of that ethnic group. And my, my fate is still tied to theirs. I can't just, you know, I don't have some sort of really transferable, desirable skills as a, as a kind of. IT specialist that I can get a job anywhere in the world. You know, no, I'm rooted to this place, these traditions. So I, yeah, I actually, I feel hesitant even talking about the work because it's currently in process, you know, these are just kind of rough initial insights that may be overturned in time as we do more interviews and as we do the survey. But I will say that the more I look at it, the more complex it's getting, the more I feel I don't understand it, to be honest, and that I need to look more and more at it to try and figure it out. They were different, these places look from one another, even though from the outside, you know, it's see, oh, there's something somewhat similar going on in that religion was stronger than elsewhere in much of Europe. And now it's in decline. They're very, very different too, from each other. So exploring that is exciting and also intimidating. It's, it sounds really exciting. And I would love to have you on again to talk about what you find once all the surveys and everything is done. And you have your and you have, I guess research is always an ongoing thing, right? It's never actually done. But next, let's say next phase. Yeah. I have a lot of questions in the sense I was thinking about Oh, when you're giving examples, especially the one of the having two opposing groups in the same place. And in the sense leaving one is sort of like leaving your tribe is sort of even if you're not directly joining the other one, it might be a bit hesitant. Do you? And you also mentioned about Ireland in general trying to be anti British and therefore really adopting the the kind of Catholic moniker and I was just comparing it to all these other countries that I've lived in or like trying to compare the difference which I, it's just a personal anecdote I have no actual evidence for this but it often felt like when I went to the UK to study versus when I lived in India it felt like the people who practice Hinduism and Islam in or and did like the kind of traditional practices seem to do it a lot more in the UK than they did in India. And it was this and it was this kind of thing where maybe they're doing it. Well, one because they miss home, but also maybe the idea of if I give this up, I'm giving up this thing, which the West was obviously anti for so long. And it still is in many respects. So yeah, I was just, there's no actual question. It was just these thoughts It's a real question, isn't it, about the pluralism thing that Feral mentioned earlier, like, does it, in an environment where there are a lot of different religious identities, does it, does it enhance or does it reduce them? What are the conditions that determine that? Yeah. Because I mean, if you feel if these are part of an identity that perhaps is just almost unconscious at home, but then you move to another place and it becomes salient, perhaps because it's discriminated against or because you know, you feel you don't quite fit in and you're never going to be let fit in. Does that amplify that kind of what choice do you make? Do you do you leave it behind and attempt to integrate in some way? Or do you amplify that cultural identity? And, you know, feel closer to. other people who are also from your place of origin, because of this kind of more salient sense of yourself as being this kind of a person. And yeah, we can go different ways, can't it? Well, it's a lot of evidence about diaspora communities really preserving their cultural traditions. Oh, yeah. And almost as if it was in a time capsule. So when I was in London, when I was doing my masters, I went to celebrate Navratri and then I did some research that said Navratri is this Hindu Gujarati festival where you basically dance every evening for nine days. It's a very, I'm giving you a very like basic definition of the festival. And in Bombay, which is where I'm from, the culture has diversified where everyone dances in their own little circles and like, you know, there's a lot of variation in the kind of folk dance and it's a lot of creativity and innovation. Whereas when I was in London, they all danced in concentric circles around the goddess and they all did the same step in almost very regimented way of performing the ritual. And it was to answer your, I mean, I'm not answering the question we hadn't held on to back home. But yeah, I think you're right. I mean, the classic example from where I'm standing is often Irish Americans. Yeah, blah, disclaimer about variety and all sorts of different people. But yeah, like, sometimes you get the sense that they, they've held on to the idea of being Irish and Catholic. a lot more than we have here. And they might sometimes look at Ireland today and what the hell is happening? What's happening to the old country? You know, it's changed. It's not really Ireland anymore. Yeah, I just think about tourists coming over and, you know, looking for the family roots and wearing their tweed flat caps and they're with a shamrock tattooed on their arm and stuff like that. We're not really like that guys, you know, but they're not all like that, of course. But there is a certain contingent that seems to have clung on very, very strongly to a notion of Irishness that seems a little bit dated. Yeah. Because somehow, yeah, it is, isn't it? When you, when you move to a new place, somehow the, the traditions that were there at the point at which you moved are frozen in Aspic and then you're kind of. You've got the sense of yourself as well as different and need to preserve those traditions to I suppose to have a group around you that support you. And how do you know your group in this big kind of complex society? Well, by sharing traditions with them. These are the people you can rely on, the people that have these cultural markers. And so you preserve them. Awesome. Sarah, do you have any more questions? I would love to talk about this a lot, for a lot longer, but also, one, it's 12.30 at night here. Two, we've been recording for an hour. So I think we need to get you on again, of course, and then we can talk about this a lot more because this is really interesting. And these are things which I don't really think of in my day to day work and life as well. And of course, philosophy. you can keep discussing these things for ages, can't you? And you get the philosophy as frequent as well. But should we then do the wrap up stuff? Should we? Yeah. Unless, Fro, did you want to cover a couple of things before? Yeah. So Hugh, before we start doing the wrap up stuff, can you, in a minute, just summarize your project that is affiliated to EA? OK. For social media, so just in a minute. Social media, okay. So I'm looking at the growth of atheism and non-religion in three European societies that are often thought of as secularization outliers, but now seem to be changing unusually quickly. That is Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Poland. And yeah. right in the thick of it right now, I have no results as of yet. Well, provisional results. But yes, the project will look at the elements that are held in common between these situations where kind of national or ethnic identity and religion are very tightly intertwined and how that affects the secularization trajectory. And I suppose what we're kind of provisionally hypothesizing is that in these conditions, religion is sort of seems to be preserved outwardly, but it can tip perhaps more rapidly in these societies if the conditions are correct, if there are kind of factors that cause people to turn against these sort of habitual somewhat conformist kind of identities. Yeah. And thus far, I feel like this may be true of Ireland and Poland in particular, but I'm getting the impression as I do the research that that the north is quite distinctive from the other two. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, we're ready to move on to the... Awesome. ..to the wrap-up stuff. Cool. Yeah, so what we do is we always ask people, like every researcher, the list is the same, about 10 questions, which are kind of rapid fire. Not all of them are actually rapid fire, some require a bit of thinking, but... Oh no. Just to, yeah, just to have like a nice consistent kind of ending. So, Farah, do you want to ask the first question? Yeah. Do you prefer summer or winter? Man, I mean, my birthday and Christmas are both in winter and I used to love those, but now it's summer. As I get older, it's summer. Yeah. In fact, I've just come back from Lanzarote, getting a little bit of summer in the winter, you know. So yeah. Uh, movies or TV shows? movies with the exception of Twin Peaks, which I love. Yeah. Cats or dogs? Dogs, because I'm allergic to cats. So much as I might want, you know, I'm not able to. If you could have a super power, what super power would you have? Oh, I think invisibility because I'm just quite an anxious person. And sometimes I just want to disappear from social situations. It'd be fantastic if I actually could. Yeah. That is the most relatable thing ever. What's your favorite cuisine or food? Wow. Oh man. I mean, probably I don't know. It depends on my mood. But I'll say Japanese because I lived there for a while and I got to like it quite a lot. Okay. What is your least favorite type of music? Oh, yeah. Maybe rap metal. I mean, what a horrible combination. I was mashing the two of them together. Limp Bizkit are probably my least favorite band ever. There's something so crass about them. They just embody everything I hate. Now it's just really, really annoying. Yeah. Yeah, that was... I haven't even heard of them and I'm kind of glad I haven't. I googled them out. Yeah, they're painful. Yeah, they are. No, I think they've got a couple of decent songs, but generally speaking, yeah. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be? Oh, well, um... It's so big. The world is big. I really liked it. I lived in Denmark previously. I really liked it. And as I get old and tired, the idea of a kind of easy living society is more and more appealing. I wish I could give you an exciting answer to this and say, you know, I want to live in the Amazon rainforest or something like that, but no. I just want to live in a middle of the road Danish city and eat my cinnamon. Canail snail for breakfast and wander around in the evening, have a dip in the sea, maybe go into a sauna and sit around. Yeah, that sounds lovely. It sounds lovely, but the winters must be real harsh. That's true. I'd like to go somewhere else for the winters. Can I have two places? If you wish. Of course it's your answer. I don't know. I really don't know. I feel like I don't want to live in Ireland anymore because of the brutal house prices over here. the hell of trying to get, you know, to afford somewhere to live. I feel resentful of this country. Uh, it's not the country's fault, but like the way the housing situation is pissed me the hell off. So I often fantasize about moving elsewhere. Um, yeah, maybe, yeah, Denmark seems like a nice spot. Or maybe I'd go back to Kyoto where I lived before, because, you know, for me, nostalgia is important. I know that, you know, my brain revisits the past and I start to sentimentalize places I've been before. So I would probably end up going back to one of them. All right. What's something which people say, which you think is stupid or nonsensical? What's something people say? Yeah. So what's a quote or saying people say, which you think is nonsensical? I'm quite a cantankerous and in some ways intolerant person that's regularly irritated during the course of the day. So I It's actually nothing specific as a... There must be something. I feel like the whole podcast, you were like, of going popping off with like all the theories and all your answers and these questions have stumped you. Yeah, totally. Um, I really want to give you an answer. Sorry for taking time. I just, well, that really pisses me off. I'll tell you. Like the word like the word like just when it just. perforate sentences and people are saying it all the time, it kind of tilts up at the end. Like, like, and you get it with more and more it's infiltrating Irish English to the point where every second word of people's sentences straight over from America seems to be like, and ending their sentences on the kind of up speak, you know, a straightforward statement that's intoned like a question is always annoying. I want pizza. I want pizza. You know, like, why does it go up? It's not a question. That kind of thing. Farrow's closing her mouth there. I just, I'm guilty. Yeah, I'm guilty. You can, you can both hate a particular linguistic tick, but also use it. Like. Also like, use it. We had Adrian Wren on the podcast and he's a criminal psychologist and he said the exact same thing when I asked him a question. If I ever meet him, we'll perhaps bond over this. The same, the same hatred of the current lingo. Perhaps like bond over this? Yeah. Ah, now I'm doing it in my head. What have you done to me? I can't. I can't. I can't finish this. OK, last question on my part and then Sarah probably has one more. If you were not doing this, what would you be doing? In life, if you're not an academic. In an ideal world where everybody has universal basic income or something like that, I'd probably be something art related, drawing, painting. That kind of thing. I do that in my spare time anyway, or kind of like writing very bad fiction. Maybe I'd be good at it by now. I don't know. But if there's something creative like that, I like that kind of stuff. Anything that I can kind of tap into the kind of unconscious associations and things that swirl around in a kind of pre-rational state in my head. Draw those things together. Just to into an image or something that I feel scratches, something that I can't quite get at. rationally. I really like that. And it's a source of nourishment for me. Too much rationality is impoverished and maddening. So I'd be doing something that I could really indulge in the anarchic unconscious side of my existence. Yeah, instead I'm an academic. Fuck. Hugh, that totally matches your aesthetic though, as an artist, I can envision it. What kind of art do you do? Oh, well, it's been a while since I've... I like portraiture. And I also, lately I've gotten into... making video, but with found things and kind of splicing them together. And, you know, very primitively, I'm very bad at it. I should probably emphasize that. It's hard even to explain. Would you like to be the editor of my podcast? The editor of your podcast? You can do the video editing stuff. Oh man, I'm really bad at it. You would regret asking me to do that. I guarantee it. Um, unless you want a really low-fi backwards kind of 2003 Photoshop type aesthetic, if that's cool now, well then maybe, uh, maybe. Anything can be made cool. That's my belief. You were the trendsetter, as you said, in school with your beliefs and people just jumped on the bandwagon. Same thing. All right, final question is if you had one piece of advice to give the listeners, what would that be? Ask the listeners, everyone. feel like I'm not the right person to advise anybody how to live their life. think twice before you do a PhD. There's not that many jobs in the other end of it. Yeah. Fair enough. I agree with that. Yeah. That's a good one. Well, thanks. Thanks so much. Hugh, thanks so much for joining us. I look forward. I look forward to having you. It was, it was great. I feel like I've learned a lot and been able to relate to. and been able to relate to a lot of the things you've said as well, some of the ideas you've dropped there. So it'd be really good to have you back on and talk about your results and see if I can remember most of the conversation as well. Otherwise you need to do a whole recap. I'd love to anyway. Thanks for having me. So guys, thanks for all for being here. Take care. Everyone take care. Thanks for listening. And yeah, until next time.