Robin is a British anthropologist and professor with a special interest in primate behavior and evolution. He is perhaps best known for formulating “Dunbar’s Number”, which states that among humans, there is an upper limit of about 150 people with whom we can maintain stable social relationships.
Among his many books, he recently published How Religion Evolved And Why It Endures, in which he explores the deep history of human spirituality and its expression in both small-scale and large-scale societies. He joins the podcast to discuss the origins of religion and religion’s purpose in our societies.
Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.
Tom: Robin, welcome to the show.
Robin: Hi. Great to be here.
Tom: Great. I wanna start off by asking you a few questions of the formative experiences of your life. I was wondering, uh, where did you grow up, and like, what are some of your great curiosities as a child?
Robin: Well, I grew up in East Africa, as much as anywhere. Um, and in fact, from the earliest I can remember, um, was arriving in East Africa, we’d come from Australia
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: I didn’t really spend any time in Britain. I was, uh, I went to secondary school there, high school there at the age
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: And then even then I was, every holiday I was backwards and forwards back to East Africa, which to me was, I think broadly speaking, I, if you lived in those sort of places, in those kind of days, wildlife was everywhere. But also you were living amongst a huge variety of different peoples from different cultures because the European commuter was very small, but it was represented of every country in Europe, quite extraordinary.
From Poland, Spain, and Britain to, uh, Greece. I mean, they were all there, Armenians, you know, you name it.
The kids I went to school with came from all these different cultural backgrounds. And then also, of course, you know, the, there were the Indian communities. It was every Indian major Indian religion represented there with these kids. I knew about their religions and the differences between the different, um, ethnic groups from India
Tom: Yeah.
Robin: all the African tribes that you grew up in, you know, there were a number of Christianized ones that had been, uh, missioned as it were. But also,
Tom: Sure.
Robin: There were, uh, tribes that still adhered to their ancestral, in some cases monotheistic, religions like the Maasai who lived just up the road from us.
Um, some cases, you know, polytheistic religions of old, kind of animus type, um, uh, religions, and, you know, witch doctors and all this kind of stuff. So, I kind of grew up in this cultural, um, pot, really. And it, I think, I think it was probably very formative because it, uh, attuned me to differences between different cultural groups in a way, which very, very few people who’ve grown up in, you know, the industrialized west of North America, Europe, whatever, uh, ever get, get the experience of.
Tom: Yeah. You mentioned that you headed back to the UK for a secondary school, and did you attend college in the UK as well?
Robin: Yes, yes. I, um, ended up at Oxford University as an undergraduate.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: to philosophy. That’s what I was really excited about. At sort of senior high school level, they had at that point just started a new degree on psychology and philosophy. So that’s what I did. And, for that, I’m very grateful on both counts because clearly, I learned a lot from philosophy. But also, the psychology introduced me to the sciences.
We were actually taught in our first year by Nico Timburg and the great pathologist, who was in Zoology next door, as it happened. And they always got him to teach the first-year undergraduates some animal behavior. So, I got introduced to animal behavior and it, uh, prompted me to end up doing a PhD in all behavior in, Bristol University in Britain, a few years later studying monkeys in, in East Africa.
Tom: I’m wondering too, in terms of, uh, your foundation and studies of animal behavior, how does that background and foundation help you? Or what kind of insights does it provide? What kind of perspective does it provide in terms of understanding and studying human behavior?
Robin: Yeah, I, it’s true. I mean, I spent the first half of my career and 20, 25 years, in effect, studying mainly monkeys in the wild in Africa, but also antelope and feral goats, and I’m still working on things to do with primates, even as we speak. What I was mainly interested in, or what the kind of interest that developed over this long haul of actually sitting around, you know, staring into the eyeballs of, of wild animals, was really social evolution.
How, how, how did their societies evolve, uh, as it were
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: forms to much more complex forms. And that I think probably is a peculiarity of people who study monkeys naps, because obviously, they live in much more complex societies than any of the other animals. And that kind of got me interested a little bit in humans, which I’d always been interested in humans just through growing up in a kind of multi-ethnic society,
And so somewhere about halfway through my research career, there was a severe shortage of money for research, and it was just impossible to get money to go and do these kind of field projects in faraway places. And I started doing what we had done on monkeys previously, doing it on, on humans in the, in the park.
Right? Right there
Tom: Oh, fascinating.
Robin: if you like. Just sit and watch what folks do, and that kind of set the ball rolling really. But I think what really triggered it was when the proposal was made in the late eighties, that the recent primates had very large brains compared with any other vertebrates.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: Was that they had a lived in very complex societies and needed a big computer, if you like, to manage the relationships. And from then on, you know, it sort of opened up vistas because we began to see, well, know, why do we see these patterns of increasing complexity in primates? It’s not just that primates are more complicated than, let’s say deer or the antelope, but that they are gradations of complexity even within the primates.
Tom: Yeah.
Robin: At the end of which, of course sits these peculiar things called humans.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: and that. Began to get me interested in humans. And that really, I suppose, came out of the original primate analysis. ‘Cause what that produces this, um, thing known as the social brain hypothesis, which addresses that there’s a between social group size in primates and the size of their brains. I had the audacity of somewhere to say the stupidity to plug humans into the same and get a prediction for humans. And that prediction was small because it said our natural grouping size is about 150. That’s the number that’s now known as Dunbar’s Number. But it then, you know, turned out to be extremely common. You, you realize what, if you like what you’re looking for, then you start to see it everywhere, all over the place.
The, uh, Plains Indians of, the Midwest, those kind of folk hunter gatherers, the Amazonian Indians, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They all have this grouping level at about 150, so that’s what you kind of, where you’d expect to see it. But of course, we’ve um, as a species have gone on to live in ever bigger groups. Help us,
Tom: Yeah. Yeah.
Robin: to raise questions about, well, how is it possible? You know, how can we do it without killing each other? Basically, how do those social skills that we use, which turn out to be essentially the skills of diplomacy, those skills relate to the skills that monkeys and apes have? Do we see those kind of skills, if you like, in primitive form already there in the monkeys and apes, which essentially turns out to be the case. But if you look at the small scale, the small world in which we live, that’s to say, your personal social network. The collective of extended family and meaningful friends. That number turns out to be, uh, 150 on average. Again, there’s some variation around that, but it very consistently, we get the figure and from very, very large samples. And I think the biggest sample is Facebook. A data set 61 million Facebook pages, and the average number of friends on Facebook is 149.
Tom: So all the grief you got decades ago proposing this number, you feel a little bit vindicated now.
Robin: I feel very vindicated. Yes…….
Tom: One thing I’ve noticed as, as I look over your, long research career is your, eagerness to take on new challenges. So, studying from primates, moving to humans, and then, you know, more recently taking a particularly challenging complex phenomenon like the study of religion among humans. And I’d like to turn to that now. This book of yours that you wrote, fairly recently called How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures. And just as we’ve talked so far, I was thinking about your own experience of growing up in East Africa, your experience of interacting with different people, groups with different beliefs and practices. You had a solid foundation for leaping into that topic, and so I’d really love to explore that with you today.
Robin: I think this was the luck of, growing up in a place like East Africa where you were constantly mixing with lots of different ethnic and religious groups in a way you wouldn’t have been if you’d been living in your Los Angeles suburb or, your New York suburb or what have you, or even, you know, mostly probably your town in the Midwest.
My grandparents, I suppose you might say, were Presbyterian.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: My grandfather from Scotland, so both my parents came from that kind of Presbyterian background. The school they sent me to as a boarding school at the age of seven till I until 13 was run by a Catholic religious order. Then I went to boarding school in England, and that was very much the Anglican tradition, the Episcopalian tradition. And of course, we had lots of Greeks out there in East Africa, and they’re all Orthodox. Indeed, I worked in Ethiopia where I did my work for my PhD, and they have this very old tradition of Coptic Christianity there. And then, you can’t help but notice that other people from different ethnic groups belong to different religions. So, in the Indian communities, there were Sikhs, there were Parsis, the Sorrow, and, the, um, Gowans who were all Catholics, you know, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Janes, we had all the major Indian religions well represented there. And then, of course, I said earlier, the tribal religions still for the African, tribal people. So, you lived in this very, very wide-ranging religious cultural environment where you kind of saw, oh yes, they do something similar to us. Hmm.
But the exposures you have, which kind of prepare you, as it were, for, um, being able to engage on a level playing field with these other kinds of religions as you come across them, instead of looking at them in, in shock and going, oh, this is really weird stuff. It’s not weird. I’ve seen this kind of stuff before.
Tom: Yeah. Yeah, I can’t think of a more fortuitous life history to be able to give you the sort of background and foundation you need to do that study. So, well, I wanna jump now into the formal academic study of religion. And I’ve noticed in the reading that I’ve done, scholars love to quibble with each other about, you know, what is religion. And I appreciated how early in your book that you just lay out just a kind of a bare bones minimalist definition to work with. So, I’m gonna, I’m gonna read that quoting from you so that our listeners can have something to start with, and correct me if I’m wrong here, but you described your minimalist definition of religion that you work with in your book was belief in some kind of transcendental world inhabited by spiritual beings or forces. Do I have it right?
Robin: Absolutely right. Yep.
Tom: Okay, so if we take that definition for what it is, how far back does religion go in human history, and what kind of evidence do you look for to reach that conclusion?
Robin: The honest answer, as it were, is probably the earliest that you can be absolutely certain of religious beliefs archeologically is somewhere around 20, maybe 30,000 years ago, the point
Tom: Okay.
Robin: you have what are quite clearly deliberate burials. And, and
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: that archeologists use. They, you know, obviously, you know, they, they’re dealing with bones that have been sitting in the earth for a very long time. Uh, how do you know whether one was a deliberate burial or or not? And the answer is, well, if the bones are in a jumble, it probably isn’t. And the deliberate burial is it implies that the dead person is going somewhere else or has gone somewhere else. And therefore, they will need not only care and attention to their body, but also they will need stuff, um,
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: kind to, to take with them. They’ll need bowls or cattles or, um, their jewelry or maybe a sword. And so, the essence to archaeologists is there needs to be grave goods there because grave implies intentions on the part of the people that buried the person, and a belief that the, the person had gone to some other place and that some of the places, this transcendental world, the spirit world, if you like. My claim, I suppose, is they knew perfectly well where this place was because they had
Tom: Hmm.
Robin: experience of it through trance. And that’s to me, the essence of religion, that all the hunter-gatherers, and we can see examples of that in the archeological record from cave paintings, showing trance answers. But all the hunter-gatherers use trance to go and visit the spirit world. And it’s a dangerous place to go. And this is a, you have to remember, hunter-gatherers don’t have Gods, never mind a God.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: In a spirit world there are spirits and it’s people by good spirits and bad spirits. And the good spirits of your ancestors and the bad spirits are wicked spirits who try and prevent you from getting back into the real world. And in all hunter-gatherer societies, the access to the spirit world and back again is through a very small hole.
Tom: Okay.
Robin: And if you’ve ever been into trance, you will know about this. You have this kind of, usually, anyway, of light and what seems like a tunnel in front of you. And you go down through the tunnel, if you like, and come out the other side into the
Tom: Hmm.
Robin: world, and your problem is, you need to find the hole to get back out. And these wicked ogres out there are trying to deceive you and stop you getting back, because if you don’t get back, you’re gonna die.
Period.
Tom: Hmm.
Robin: And they knew that happened because people did die sometimes. Uh, of
Tom: Sure.
Robin: actually probably during, trance stances, ’cause they’re very exhausting. But you know, once you’re there, you have this visionary experience of it, and it is very real. And all the major religions all have this mystical, trance-based theme somewhere in them.
You know, Christianity certainly does. Islam does Judaism does, Hinduism does, Buddhism does, Sikhism does, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and they all speak of it as engaging directly with the mind of God. You feel you are intimately, literally, inside the mind of God. And so, it’s a very real and very, very powerful, experience. You can kind of go a little earlier back than that, probably because you, you have to wonder why the Neanderthal spent so much time in caves, and when they didn’t need
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: down to the bottom. You can understand ’em living in caves ’cause it was pretty cold, right? The
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: middle of the Ice A ge. But for some weird reason, if you like, uh, you know, they would go deep into the remote accesses of caves, where you often get these very echoy chambers that, you know, hype up this sense of the mystery of, these experiences and create this sense.
Now, you know, did they have religion in the sense we would recognize as religion? That’s hard to say, but, um, they, they certainly would’ve had the experiences would’ve, which would’ve led them to some kind of mystical experience. And if that’s the case, we are talking about religion going back, well, 500,000 years. And I think them, know we, we have at different stages, newer forms of religion coming in, but what they’re doing is simply bolting something else onto this very ancient, transcendental mystical sense of the spirit world, as it were. That’s never gone away. And that’s why you still have a strong mystical tradition in all the major religions.
Tom: Given the long history of humanity has taken place in very small groups, somewhere less than 150 people, maybe even just the size of, of dozens, how does a small-scale human societies, how does that shape the development of religion, given those small numbers?
Robin: The real question about how these societies form is not in terms of their rules and regulations, as you might say, but in terms of the sense of community. It got me very interested in the mechanisms we used to create this sense of belonging and bonding, and that turns out to be the product of a particular chemical in the brain. The endorphin system, the endorphins are part of the pain management system. The endorphins effect as an analgesic are 30 times more powerful, weight for weight, than morphine is. So, we are dealing with very powerful stuff. The great blessing of it is we don’t get addicted to it, it is very easy to trigger it, because what triggers it? Social interaction with other folks.
You know, in primates, monkeys and apes, they produce this effect, this bonding effect, through social grooming. So that’s leafing through the fur and removing bits of vegetation and stuff, and dead skin that’s kicking around. But it really, it’s the movement of the hands across the skin surface that triggers the endorphin system and gives them, this sense of community. And we still do it, you know, at the base of each hair follicle is a receptor for the endorphin system. So, just moving the hand across the skin, the bare skin triggers this system.
Tom: Yeah.
Robin: It turns out that in fact, even ears, the bit in the ear, the cochlear that you hear sound with, that is absolutely densely packed with these. So, the reason we nod our heads when we sing is because it triggers the endorphin, triggering cells in the cochlear. And that is
Tom: Oh wow.
Robin: to be the reason we rock babies and why they go to sleep.
Tom: Oh my gosh.
Robin: This is a very powerful, neurochemical if you like, but you know, as the monkeys and apes, you only groom with your nearest and dearest, really. And, and, uh, when we opted to evolve much, much bigger groups, and this goes back probably to moving out onto the more open savanna-type habitats, and we needed bigger groups, we had to find other ways of triggering the system. And, humans are inventive if nothing else. But we found a whole bunch of ways which you can trigger the system without having to touch somebody. So, it’s kind of virtual grooming. And, and these turn out to be what I call the, our social toolkit. Their laughter, singing, dancing, feasting, eating together, telling stories, particularly deeply emotional stories, and the rituals of religion. All of these trigger the endorphin system very quickly. It’s absolutely magical.
And what’s really interesting is how the rituals and the services of most of the modern religions that we have all have these elements in them.
You know, the singing, some of them have dancing, they all have feasting in some sense. And certainly all of them have emotional storytelling.
So, they’re called sermons.
Tom: Yep.
Robin: So what I think was going on here is the role that religion really played was in bonding these large communities of a couple of hundred, people—we’re still not talking about modern city sizes
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: or nation, state sizes. But what we’re talking about is the sort of basal natural human grouping of, of, you know, one to 200 people, but that’s, you know, way beyond what you could bond otherwise via, you know, the standard innate means of social grooming
Tom: Yeah. So, I wanna turn next to the, the larger scale societies and, and I think, I guess the, the second great kind of aha moment I had when reading your book, beyond seeing that connection between primates to small scale humans, and that form, that intimacy plays also that connection between small scale societies and large-scale societies.
You say that these social tools, that small groups of humans developed, laughter, singing, dancing, emotional storytelling, feasting rituals, you see those activities taken place in the small-scale groups and in the large-scale groups.
So, following on that, I wanna ask then about the things that are different. What kinds of innovations do the, these large-scale societies develop in order to make groups of groups kind of stick together? Where are the next level of innovations?
Robin: Yeah, I mean, what’s important to remember about the, this sort of social toolkit as I call it, is that actually it was designed to help you bond with friends and family. What’s kind of interesting is some of them scale up extremely well to very large numbers of people. So not so good in those terms. But what really works very well is clearly things like singing, also, you know, the rituals of religion, ’cause in both of those you seem to be able to pack almost unlimited numbers of people in. The only constraint is physical space.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: When we started to live in villages, so the end of the ice age was, was very rich, in terms of the environment, um, particularly around the Mediterranean basin, and allowed people to live at very high densities. And then they started living in villages and eventually towns and cities, I think of Jericho and all these kinds of things. And the problem here is essentially how on earth do you get several thousand, maybe 10,000 people, I think was the estimate for Jericho, how do you get 10,000 people living together in very, very cramped conditions, without falling out with each other constantly, and indeed, presumably also without robbing each other all the time.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: And the answer is, religion provided the one mechanism which was really extremely powerful as a tool for managing large social groups like that. And it comes in two forms.
One is using these kinds of endorphin-producing rituals, which create this sense of belonging and bonding, and creates this sense of being kind and generous to, to those you live with. But also, it managed to introduce what some people have referred to as the policeman in the sky concept. Because what you see at that point is the appearance of what are called doctrinal religions. I say religions that have doctrines and gods they tend to be polytheistic. You know, you’ve got gods for different bits of the environment, a god for the stream, a spirit of the forest, whatever it may be.
And you’ve got gods of war and all these kinds of things. What these gods do is create a kind of theology, which explains how the world works and why, and also provides. A formal kind of rituals that have to be done to pacify these gods or to get them on your side. They tend to be kind of vindictive. These, these, uh, doctrinal religion gods, in the sense that they want you to sacrifice to them all the time. If you don’t sacrifice to them, you’re in trouble.
And these religions appeared about 8,000 years ago, 7,000 years ago. It’s the first point to which we see any evidence for religious spaces as, say, things like temples, buildings that clearly weren’t designed for living in. They will have sacrificial altars in them with, with, grooves to let the blood run out, things like that. Very much the kind of thing you see described in the Old Testament in the Bible.
They have moral codes, which are kind of handed down from the gods, but in, in a somewhat informal way. And that seemed to work very well, and those, those religions became very widespread with agriculture, which is what clearly was allowing people to live in very dense communities as were cities, and so on.
And sort of went on fairly gently until about 3002 and a half thousand years ago. And what you hit two and a half thousand years ago is what’s called the axial age, because you suddenly have a whole lot of new religions appearing all at the same time, all over the known world, in which you have what are now termed revealed religions appear so revealed. Religions are very distinctive in this sense from the general doctrinal religions, in that they are revealed by a particular person does. A particular
Tom: Hmm.
Robin: person says, I have had some experience with, uh, visions or communication with God. And I’ve, I’ve been told to instruct all the rest of you in the proper ways of doing things. They’re all monotheistic.
You know, sometimes with sort of gods of a kind, sometimes we call them saints, sometimes we call them, in the Buddhist traditions, sometimes they’re kind of junior gods, in Hindus but primarily are a single creator God who rules the whole world, tends to be much more interested in the wellbeing um. Humans and particularly their adherence to their particular religion, obviously. There’s often a sacred text that is, is passed on down, and the rituals become more formalized. You have a much more kind of formalized, powerful priesthood. And that’s because you have a moral code, which is a divine moral code. God, God is, you know, these are the 10 commandments. These were handed down via, in this case, Moses, but most of these sort of world religions have something similar to that.
So, they’re very, very different. They appear to have emerged at a time of enormous political unrest, in the aftermath of a major climatic crisis 4,000 years ago, as a huge invasion by people trying to find somewhere they could still survive because of the changing climate. And particularly in this sort of area along the Mediterranean basin through the Ganges plain in India and into China itself. And I think these religions appeared at that point as an attempt to kind of create some form of stability in the population. So, they tend to be in political groupings, societies, kingdoms, whatever you wanna call it, that have reached about a million people.
And it was an attempt to try and in the face of these onslaughts from outside, and that runs from about a thousand BC right up to about 580, Islam being kind of the last of that sequence. So, the Zoroastrians and folk like that, and the Buddhists and, and, uh, the Hindus.
Tom: It seems like there’s kind of an interesting paradox that these, the revealed religions don’t appear until there’s very complex societies, perhaps, you know, reaching up the size of a million people. Yet at the same time, the revealed religions are founded by individuals that are not necessarily in the elite.
They’re not in political control of the, they seem to only arise once society has reached a level of size and complexity. How do you kind of reconcile that paradox of where the revealed religion comes from and then where the revealed religion appears?
Robin: I think this actually goes back to an interesting feature of religion or religions, uh, all the big religions as we have them, is they have this constant tendency to fragment at the bottom, to, to kind of spawn and sects, sometimes with very weird beliefs. Very weird theologies.
There are often only a few hundred people built around a small charismatic leader who, who says, now I’ve discovered something really true.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: And I think this is simply a consequence of the fact that religion’s origins are to deal with very small scale society. So, it has this intimacy to it, which as the religion gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it loses its intimacy. You know, it becomes anonymous.
And you see this very much in the literature on church plantings, for example, in the contemporary Protestant tradition. And the great dilemma that they’ve struggled with and, actually, looked at very closely, to try and understand it, what’s the optimal size for a congregation. What they found fits very nicely with what I suggest is that if your congregation is smaller than about 150 people, it works really well.
But the, this tendency, if you like to prefer this small, intimate environment, means that we are very attracted to charismatic leaders who come along and say, no, no, come and join my little group. And if you look back, of course, at the history of religion, it’s obvious, you know, where did Christianity come from? Well, it was the sect of Judaism . Where did Islam come from? It was a sect of Christianity plus Judaism in the Middle East where these two religions were very much mixed up, still, you know, at 5, 5, 600 AD.
Tom: Moving forward to religion today, from the long journey we’ve taken in some parts of the world, we see really plummeting participation rates in religion, and yet cities are still huge. And I’m wondering, to the degree to which you’ve looked at the present, how do you see humans maintaining social cohesion in the absence of religious participation, religious identities?
Robin: Yeah, it, it’s interesting, I mean, I think the evidence generally tends to suggest that people become less religious when economic circumstances are very benign, right? So, what seems to encourage people to take religion more seriously is very adverse economic situations or major catastrophes, famines, wars, what have you, those sort of circumstances. And that’s very interesting. In the context of charismatic leaders, very often the charismatic leaders are people from poor family backgrounds. You know, at the bottom of society.
Um, you know, a living as best they could times are, how did, why did Christianity take off in the Roman Empire? Because it was the people underneath the, the poor, not the folks at the top that, that, kept encouraging it. So, the sense of the modern world, if you like, we’ve been too successful, uh, with our, with our, our, uh, inventions and technologies and made life too easy and pleasant.
We’ve become too rich. So, the essence of, of this, I think is simply that, you know, religion is a major help to people who are living a very tough life. There’s no question about it, if you like, and that was suggested, I think, was by Sigmund Freud, actually, as one of the functions of religion is to create a community, a sense of community.
So, the question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing when you start to live in, city the size of Los Angeles or New York, and the answer is well, probably. It doesn’t help not to be religious because the alternative is you need some kind of law enforcement. The merit of religion, we, we are talking not about its spiritual aspects now, but about its practical aspects. The merit of religion is, it, is it makes people behave towards each other. On the whole, they tend not to behave decently to people from another religion, but at least to their fellow religionists they, they tend to behave rather better, because we may not be able to see what you get up to, behind the bicycle sheds, on Saturday night. Uh, but uh, there is somebody who does. And that’s because God is omniscient. He sees all these things, so be aware, behave better.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: And so your alternative, I’m afraid, probably does come down to a police force, and that’s probably not, not the ideal way to do it, and it’s not as effective as something about religion that kind of makes people behave better in a way which secular, laws and, and police forces aren’t so successful at. At the same time, I think we have to kind of recognize that any policeman from on high, as it were, whether it’s the government, is never going to be as effective as your bottom-up personal commitment. So, if you really want to make society cohere together, the best way to do it by far is to do it bottom up. Because you, as an individual, commit to behaving in a certain way, you are much more likely to do it than if I wag my finger at you and say you’ve got to.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Robin: And you know, how do we do that? Well, it really has to be about creating a sense of community, of national community, maybe of international community.
Tom: Robin, thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. It was really fun to, to walk through history together with you.
Robin: Oh, you’re very welcome. It’s always great stuff to talk about.
