[on ideas and consequences] Well, a lot of people go on about how I'm a leftist, but I'm not really, because I believe that ideas have consequences. And why I like people like Weber [German sociologist
Max Weber (1864-1920)] is because they are challenging what I see as that crude left-wing vulgar Marxism that says that everything happens because of economic forces within society, that we are just surfing, our ideas are just expressions-froth on the deep currents of history, which is really driven by economics. I've never believed that. Of course, economic forces have a great effect on us. But actually, people's ideas have enormous consequences. And to be honest, if you had to reduce what I do, I spend my whole time just looking at how ideas have consequences, not necessarily what the promoters of them intended, because I think that's a really big thing in our time. I came into writing and describing and filming the world at the very moment that those old left-wing certainties were beginning to collapse, certainties that said somehow progress and modernity were on a inevitable path towards a particular destination in history. But it was also equally obvious to me the right-wing reaction-where you just bring a market force in to create a form of stability that goes nowhere-was equally not going to work. And I became interested in examining how ideas have led us to this position in ways that those who had the ideas didn't really intend. People like Weber who were, in a sense, conservative sociologists of the late nineteenth century were looking at the consequences of rationality. At how scientific ideas were used by those in power in modern society-and what the consequences then were. I think this is still incredibly important to look at today. And above all Weber's writings about bureaucracy. One of things I'm fascinated by at the moment is the rise of managerial theory. It works in absurd, comic ways. It leads to the police being told that they have a certain quota of criminals they have to catch, so if they can't catch them, they go and make them up. These are very comic, silly things that I would have done on a program like That's Life!, but they're also expressions of something that Weber wrote about back in nineteenth century which he called the "iron cage," about how rationality, when applied to social situations to try and control and manage societies, would often lead to absurd outcomes. Now, my brain can encompass both those things, the sort of silly "talking dogs" ideas of what bureaucracy leads to, but also intellectual theories about it. And I think the connections between them are very, very interesting. That's what inspires me. [2012]
