my talk is probably suggested or part of
my talk is suggested by each one of
these words separately so the long
history of humanity is a clear
demonstration that we are at our best
when we are open open to new ideas open
to visitors to new people open to new
things open to new ways of working
however very few of us appears this is
for you
very few of us are bold enough to be as
open as peers this is his office space
which seems to have no boundary walls or
fences at all most of us live behind
walls these walls are dual purposed
they say keep out say go away leave me
alone
and they define me my my space we’re so
familiar with boundary walls that
they’re usually invisible unless they’re
like these and won a special award for
being groovy walls actually have to be
spectacular to be noticed but actually
there are only a very recent feature of
human societies look the Agricultural
Revolution whoops our eminence right
here though the Agricultural Revolution
which turned nomadic foraging
hunter-gatherers into settled
pastoralists about ten thousand years
ago
across the Middle East necessitated
self-defensive and self-defining walls
these walls around Jericho are
particularly famous archaeologists have
dated them to about ten thousand years
before Jesus was born about twenty miles
west across the hills a
the great walls include this spectacular
Chinese 10000 Li wall Li is a
measurement of about a third of a mile
construction started about the Year 220
BC on the orders of the Emperor Qin who
has given his name to China of course
and it had the dual purpose as with the
other walls that we looked at earlier of
keeping the barbarians out and defining
the Emperor’s domain with him it’s the
longest continuous human construction on
the planet the Roman lemaise Germanicus
was built as the Roman Empire’s northern
boundary it’s the second longest
continuous human construction on earth
it also had the dual purpose of keeping
barbarians out and stating very clearly
civilization ends here if we look at
this area in particular where as you can
see the River Rhine on the left-hand
side of the screen and the river Danube
in the bottom right-hand corner form of
natural boundaries but don’t meet the
lyma’s was built to keep the barbarians
out to close the gap to enclose a
particularly fertile area of what is
today southern Germany just here at Sal
Borg archaeologists have reconstructed
the gatehouse you can see the ramparts
and the walls to either side of the
picture and the gatehouse itself is no
small affair this wall which you can see
here is much more recent does anybody
know where it might be
the worst that can happen is that you
can be wrong we’ve already been told
that failure is good okay I see a hand
not Constantinople good idea good
thinking
what’s the wall Portugal Portugal no
European in construction but not in
Europe is the right answer so this is
the Dutch wall built in 1628 to define
their new Castello they call it New
Amsterdam developed by Peter Stuyvesant
those of you of a certain age might
remember Stuyvesant cigarettes and to
keep it separate from the red people who
lived here and the red people as the
Dutch called them their name for this
space stands still this is Manhattan
this wall we know as the Berlin wall
it’s the concrete section of what
Churchill called the iron curtain
properly speaking we should use it 1961
East German name the anti-fascist
protective barrier it’s the odd one out
of the walls that I’ve shown you anybody
know why well done
thank you this wall was built to keep
people in not to keep others out in our
own time walls are still being built the
Israelis call this the West Bank
security fence understandably the
Palestinians on the other side so this
is the Israeli side with the roadway and
this is the Palestinian side without the
Palestinians call it the apartheid wall
the Israelis built it between 2000 2003
understandably to reduce the jihadist
suicide bomber problem and it has worked
the wannabe Banksy clearly shows that
some of its neighbors have very
different dreams but this all has a long
reach what you read here is part of an
exam odds are given by a student in this
school a couple of weeks ago in a
religious studies exam about religious
conflict and you can see here that we
have the protagonists the Jews and
Palestine the Muslims conflict and so on
even here in provincial England that
wall and that division reaches us and
influences our students what can I say
the proposed scale of this wall is again
spectacular if it’s actually built it
would supersede the Roman lemaise and it
would become the second longest
continuous human construction on earth
walls like these are all born of fear
fear of the future and desperation
desperation to cling on to the status
quo or some falsely remembered golden
past
none of them achieved their aims for
very long
here is the Great Wall of China and most
of it looks like this and most of it has
usually looked like this throughout its
history there were only two periods when
the Great Wall was extensively developed
coherently
and rebuilt – last one was under the
Ming Dynasty starting in 1474 and more
recently in the 1950s the stretch around
Beijing near battling usually built
using as the original wall was built
using convict labour the Roman lyma’s as
you can see are overgrown and long
they were originally built to keep out
the Huns and the Goths and they failed
spectacularly Rome itself was sacked
within a couple of hundred years of
lyma’s being completed and just a few
years after that the new Roman Emperor
in the West was himself John so Wall
Street is now much more famous for other
things that wall I showed you earlier
had a life of less than 70 years it’s
new British owners removed it in 1699 to
make space for a new business district
and it’s still there I took this
photograph on a school trip to Berlin a
couple of weeks ago that some of you in
the audience joined me on and what a
super time we had thank you I took the
photograph because I particularly liked
the legend this one which loosely
translates as there are many walls to be
torn down to be unbuilt is the sort of
German phrase I’d consider one of the
best built walls ever at the end of the
first world war most of northern France
looked like this even the cathedrals and
the churches weren’t sacrosanct and
understandably this injured war veteran
and later politician whose name has
become a byword for futility who
believed genuinely that he could work
out an answer that would stop this
horror happening to France again
Andre emotional understood very well
defensive techniques at the time he
understood very well france’s
capabilities and what he envisaged was a
system of defence that would protect
France from the Germans next door the
system that were
designed looks like here the stuff of
dreams the dreams almost of model makers
but these were not dreams these designs
were for actual fortifications which
were actually built to the disbelief of
the Nazis here is a particularly
unpleasant Nazi quote the legarre who
was one of the masterminds of the
Holocaust visiting to check out exactly
the reality of these fortifications and
their visits showed the Germans that all
their spy work across the border in the
1930s was well worthwhile they had no
idea that these fortifications were as
good as they were however although walls
like these can work there only ever very
limited in the ways that they can work
and they only ever work for very limited
amounts of time they cannot help us
against a future that we don’t
understand we cannot possibly know what
the future will bring the best defense
is an open mindset as I’d like to
discuss with you now even the youngest
of you in the audience have lived
through extraordinary and unpredictable
changes especially technological ones
these changes would probably have
bewildered your great-grandparents even
though they too lived through
extraordinary changes my grandmother was
your age she was a teenager when Louie
Blasio flew across the channel in the
first powered flight and my grandmother
learned about this from an old-fashioned
thing called a newspaper she herself
flew in a jumbo jet like this from one
continent or another and she even
watched man walk on the moon live on
television there’s a little warning
about the next slide it shows something
particularly revolting you’ll get a
sense of what’s coming from
next phrase an immunologist would
probably disagree with me that
future-proofing is an impossible and
wrongheaded dream the eradication of
smallpox must rank as one of mankind’s
greatest ever achievements but and it’s
a big but let’s think back to the future
proofing that Louie Maginot envisaged
with his line of Defense’s Frances
interwar future proofing was an
impossible dream that was the answer and
it took the Nazis about three weeks in
the summer of 1940 Hitler’s only problem
here was how much to tip his tour guide
that is true so the best approach to the
future is not to have fixed ideas of
defense or boundary the best approach is
to be open minded is to be skilled up is
to be generous and to be flexible
you
my talk is suggested by each one of
these words separately so the long
history of humanity is a clear
demonstration that we are at our best
when we are open open to new ideas open
to visitors to new people open to new
things open to new ways of working
however very few of us appears this is
for you
very few of us are bold enough to be as
open as peers this is his office space
which seems to have no boundary walls or
fences at all most of us live behind
walls these walls are dual purposed
they say keep out say go away leave me
alone
and they define me my my space we’re so
familiar with boundary walls that
they’re usually invisible unless they’re
like these and won a special award for
being groovy walls actually have to be
spectacular to be noticed but actually
there are only a very recent feature of
human societies look the Agricultural
Revolution whoops our eminence right
here though the Agricultural Revolution
which turned nomadic foraging
hunter-gatherers into settled
pastoralists about ten thousand years
ago
across the Middle East necessitated
self-defensive and self-defining walls
these walls around Jericho are
particularly famous archaeologists have
dated them to about ten thousand years
before Jesus was born about twenty miles
west across the hills a
the great walls include this spectacular
Chinese 10000 Li wall Li is a
measurement of about a third of a mile
construction started about the Year 220
BC on the orders of the Emperor Qin who
has given his name to China of course
and it had the dual purpose as with the
other walls that we looked at earlier of
keeping the barbarians out and defining
the Emperor’s domain with him it’s the
longest continuous human construction on
the planet the Roman lemaise Germanicus
was built as the Roman Empire’s northern
boundary it’s the second longest
continuous human construction on earth
it also had the dual purpose of keeping
barbarians out and stating very clearly
civilization ends here if we look at
this area in particular where as you can
see the River Rhine on the left-hand
side of the screen and the river Danube
in the bottom right-hand corner form of
natural boundaries but don’t meet the
lyma’s was built to keep the barbarians
out to close the gap to enclose a
particularly fertile area of what is
today southern Germany just here at Sal
Borg archaeologists have reconstructed
the gatehouse you can see the ramparts
and the walls to either side of the
picture and the gatehouse itself is no
small affair this wall which you can see
here is much more recent does anybody
know where it might be
the worst that can happen is that you
can be wrong we’ve already been told
that failure is good okay I see a hand
not Constantinople good idea good
thinking
what’s the wall Portugal Portugal no
European in construction but not in
Europe is the right answer so this is
the Dutch wall built in 1628 to define
their new Castello they call it New
Amsterdam developed by Peter Stuyvesant
those of you of a certain age might
remember Stuyvesant cigarettes and to
keep it separate from the red people who
lived here and the red people as the
Dutch called them their name for this
space stands still this is Manhattan
this wall we know as the Berlin wall
it’s the concrete section of what
Churchill called the iron curtain
properly speaking we should use it 1961
East German name the anti-fascist
protective barrier it’s the odd one out
of the walls that I’ve shown you anybody
know why well done
thank you this wall was built to keep
people in not to keep others out in our
own time walls are still being built the
Israelis call this the West Bank
security fence understandably the
Palestinians on the other side so this
is the Israeli side with the roadway and
this is the Palestinian side without the
Palestinians call it the apartheid wall
the Israelis built it between 2000 2003
understandably to reduce the jihadist
suicide bomber problem and it has worked
the wannabe Banksy clearly shows that
some of its neighbors have very
different dreams but this all has a long
reach what you read here is part of an
exam odds are given by a student in this
school a couple of weeks ago in a
religious studies exam about religious
conflict and you can see here that we
have the protagonists the Jews and
Palestine the Muslims conflict and so on
even here in provincial England that
wall and that division reaches us and
influences our students what can I say
the proposed scale of this wall is again
spectacular if it’s actually built it
would supersede the Roman lemaise and it
would become the second longest
continuous human construction on earth
walls like these are all born of fear
fear of the future and desperation
desperation to cling on to the status
quo or some falsely remembered golden
past
none of them achieved their aims for
very long
here is the Great Wall of China and most
of it looks like this and most of it has
usually looked like this throughout its
history there were only two periods when
the Great Wall was extensively developed
coherently
and rebuilt – last one was under the
Ming Dynasty starting in 1474 and more
recently in the 1950s the stretch around
Beijing near battling usually built
using as the original wall was built
using convict labour the Roman lyma’s as
you can see are overgrown and long
they were originally built to keep out
the Huns and the Goths and they failed
spectacularly Rome itself was sacked
within a couple of hundred years of
lyma’s being completed and just a few
years after that the new Roman Emperor
in the West was himself John so Wall
Street is now much more famous for other
things that wall I showed you earlier
had a life of less than 70 years it’s
new British owners removed it in 1699 to
make space for a new business district
and it’s still there I took this
photograph on a school trip to Berlin a
couple of weeks ago that some of you in
the audience joined me on and what a
super time we had thank you I took the
photograph because I particularly liked
the legend this one which loosely
translates as there are many walls to be
torn down to be unbuilt is the sort of
German phrase I’d consider one of the
best built walls ever at the end of the
first world war most of northern France
looked like this even the cathedrals and
the churches weren’t sacrosanct and
understandably this injured war veteran
and later politician whose name has
become a byword for futility who
believed genuinely that he could work
out an answer that would stop this
horror happening to France again
Andre emotional understood very well
defensive techniques at the time he
understood very well france’s
capabilities and what he envisaged was a
system of defence that would protect
France from the Germans next door the
system that were
designed looks like here the stuff of
dreams the dreams almost of model makers
but these were not dreams these designs
were for actual fortifications which
were actually built to the disbelief of
the Nazis here is a particularly
unpleasant Nazi quote the legarre who
was one of the masterminds of the
Holocaust visiting to check out exactly
the reality of these fortifications and
their visits showed the Germans that all
their spy work across the border in the
1930s was well worthwhile they had no
idea that these fortifications were as
good as they were however although walls
like these can work there only ever very
limited in the ways that they can work
and they only ever work for very limited
amounts of time they cannot help us
against a future that we don’t
understand we cannot possibly know what
the future will bring the best defense
is an open mindset as I’d like to
discuss with you now even the youngest
of you in the audience have lived
through extraordinary and unpredictable
changes especially technological ones
these changes would probably have
bewildered your great-grandparents even
though they too lived through
extraordinary changes my grandmother was
your age she was a teenager when Louie
Blasio flew across the channel in the
first powered flight and my grandmother
learned about this from an old-fashioned
thing called a newspaper she herself
flew in a jumbo jet like this from one
continent or another and she even
watched man walk on the moon live on
television there’s a little warning
about the next slide it shows something
particularly revolting you’ll get a
sense of what’s coming from
next phrase an immunologist would
probably disagree with me that
future-proofing is an impossible and
wrongheaded dream the eradication of
smallpox must rank as one of mankind’s
greatest ever achievements but and it’s
a big but let’s think back to the future
proofing that Louie Maginot envisaged
with his line of Defense’s Frances
interwar future proofing was an
impossible dream that was the answer and
it took the Nazis about three weeks in
the summer of 1940 Hitler’s only problem
here was how much to tip his tour guide
that is true so the best approach to the
future is not to have fixed ideas of
defense or boundary the best approach is
to be open minded is to be skilled up is
to be generous and to be flexible
you
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