In view of that, however, what makes you confident that progress will actually rise up from the masses? And why do you put your faith in the masses rather than those who show an explicit lead, saying (for example): "This is wrong"? I find myself thinking about Edmund Burke on representation and delegation...

RS: His speech to the electors of Bristol.

RT: Yes. He was famously at odds with his constituents on many issues. And he tells them — though he didn't put it quite like this — "I'm here to be better than your best selves, not simply bound by mandates issued by your average selves." Does this assertion of moral leadership make you uneasy? 

RS: You're right: we depend upon moral leadership and we were given it 2,000 years ago. And we're all downstream from that. The emancipation of slaves was one of the first effects of the Christian revolution. And yes, there are these great leaders who completely change the way people look at things. Not always for the better, though. But this means that leadership isn't necessarily the bad thing that you might otherwise suppose I think it to be. 

But I would say, and this is something that is very much in keeping with your worldview, that most of us don't look for leadership. We look for examples. And we try to be friends with them. Our friends make a difference to our lives by setting an example. I met a colleague at a conference whose articles I'd read and disagreed with. And I thought: he's bound to be the normal, resentful academic who's going to hate the fact that I disagree with him. And instead there was this smiling person who welcomed me and gave me every possible encouragement. He attended this conference with his wife who'd had a stroke and is in a wheelchair, and he took her everywhere with him — across the Atlantic — and though she could no longer speak he was always soothing her with affectionate gestures. And I said to myself, there is an example. I couldn't do it, and yet he does it with a cheerful face. 

One of the problems we are living through is a decline in real friendship. Because of the ease of entertainment, people can retreat into their private study and look at the internet. And I know you agree with this, Raymond, that pornography is driving out sex — sex in the sense of a real erotic commitment to another person.

RT: I would agree with all that, because it seems to me that we live in a state of e-ttenuation" in the sense that electronic media are breaking up our daily lives into small episodes. At any given moment, people are receiving dozens of texts, mobile phone calls, emails, and gazing at a flickering, cluttered screen, etc. In short we are distracted. Unfortunately, boredom has actually been pre-empted — and boredom can be very productive, very fertile.