In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg Folgen

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of a just war. There were theories about a justified or noble war before the birth of Christ, but it was his reported teachings and a powerful influence, particularly on the Emperor Constantine, which set the standard which had to be kept or bluntly modified. “I say unto you, love your own image,” Matthew writes, “bless them that curse you, be good to them that hate you and persecute you”. In the fifth century, the mighty St Augustus prised the Christian church away from Christ’s reported teachings and the idea of a Just War took root to be formalised and given power by St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and by other Christian commentators even up to this day. But after a century, our century, of almost unimaginably violent conflict, does the term a Just War have any meaning at all? The historian AJP Taylor wrote that "the medieval pursuit of the just war is a pursuit as elusive as the Holy Grail. For it is almost universally true that in war each side thinks itself in the right, and there is no arbiter except victory to decide between them". So is the Christian idea of the Just War simply a way of justifying aggression or is it a moral position to take?With Professor John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of Westminster and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy; Dr Niall Ferguson, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Jesus College, Oxford and author of The Pity of War.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss memory. At the start of the twentieth century Freud put memory at the centre of our psychology, and as the century has worn on what a nation remembers and what it should try to forget has become one of the binding political questions that modern societies face. As every second passes, humanity has a moment more to remember, and perhaps this fact alone goes a long way to explaining the ever changing role of memory, both in the mind of individuals and at the heart of the body politic. Memory, what to remember and when to forget, has personal and national implications. Whether we look to Chile, South Africa, Germany or Northern Ireland, these are all societies where the issue of memory is at the centre of the dilemmas and challenges they face. And in the mind of the individual too - as ever more forms of information crowd for space in our minds, and the image from someone else’s photograph can be more enduring than our own first hand experience of an event, can memory itself forever remain unchanged in its role within our psychology? Have our ways of remembering changed? Not in the sense neuro-biologists would explore the subject, but in its cultural and collective, as well as its individual, sense. “Memory is decidedly in fashion” writes Dr Nancy Wood, “whether attention is focused on the so-called return of repressed memories of the abused individual, or on the black holes in a nation’s recollection of its past. The topic of memory has become a compelling preoccupation”. With Professor Malcolm Bowie, Marshall Foch Professor of French Literature at Oxford University and Director of Oxford’s European Humanities Research Centre; Dr Nancy Wood, Chair of Media Studies, University of Sussex and author of Vectors of Memory.

Melvyn Bragg examines the history of what we know about the origins of the universe. Some four hundred years ago in Rome, one Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for his belief in other inhabited worlds - it’s a possibility which has fascinated scientists, writers, artists and the general public for centuries - and any consideration of the origins of life and matter on other planets, and indeed this one, inevitably raises huge questions. Do other worlds exist? How did our planet come into existence? How can we know anything at all about the origins of life and matter so many billions of years ago, and how has our thinking on these - amongst the deepest of questions - changed over the 20th century? Are we any closer to knowing whether other worlds exist and how our own planet came into being? And does the knowledge we have about these things change our perception of ourselves and our position in the universe?With Professor Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Royal Society Research Professor in Astronomy and Physics, Cambridge University; Professor Paul Davies, theoretical physicist and Visiting Professor at Imperial College, London.