Helen Dale joins Brian Smith to discuss the Romans and us. 

Brian Smith:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening.

Hello, my name is Brian Smith and with me today is Helen Dale. Helen is a senior writer at Law & Liberty. She won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper. She read law at Oxford and Edinburgh. Her most recent novel, which we’ll talk about here extensively along with The Hand that Signed the Paper, is Kingdom of the Wicked, which was shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize for science fiction. Helen appears in a number of outlets including The Spectator, The Australian, Standpoint, and Quillette and has a very active Substack. Thank you for joining me Helen.

Helen Dale:

Thank you for having me Brian. Good to be here.

Brian Smith:

So I wanted to start off by talking about Kingdom of the Wicked, which I’ve read twice and I enjoy very much. And it takes the readers on a sort of strange journey to an alternate history and I hope you can tell our listeners a bit about the book and what led you to write it.

Helen Dale:

Well, first, it’s in two parts. There’s two books, but there isn’t going to be a third. So all the people who keep trying to say, “Please make it a trilogy and write a third book of Kingdom of the Wicked” are destined to be disappointed. Once I’d finished the second book of Kingdom of the Wicked, the story is indeed finished—as you can confirm—it comes to a natural end. So book one of Kingdom of the Wicked, which came out in 2017 is called Rules and book two of Kingdom of the Wicked, which came out in 2018–you can tell I wrote them back to back—is called Order. And the Rules and Order is from F. A. Hayek in Law, Legislation and Libert,y because I used a method from Hayek in order to develop the legal system in the books.

So what I’m going to do now, and this is very lazy of me, but it always works, is I’m going to read the blurb off the back of book one of Kingdom of the Wicked, which was written by my editor and my editor is very good at writing blurbs. I’ve written three novels and I’ve not written the blurb for any of them because I’m completely rubbish at this. And if there are any writers listening to this, they would think that I have been extremely lucky because most of the time the poor writer is forced to write the blurb. But my efforts are so pitiful that this has reliably been taken out of my hands by everybody. So I shall read the blurb off book one and you’ll see where this story is going.

784 ab urbe condita—31 AD. Jerusalem sits uneasily in a Roman Empire that has seen an industrial revolution and now has cable news and flying machines–and rites and morals that are strange and repellent to the native people of Judaea.

A charismatic young leader is arrested after a riot in the Temple. He seems to be a man of peace, but among his followers are Zealots and dagger-men sworn to drive the Romans from the Holy Land.

As the city spirals into violence, the stage is set for a legal case that will shape the future—the trial of Yeshua Ben Yusuf. Intricately imagined and ferociously executed, Kingdom of the Wicked is a stunning alternative history and a story for our time. Thank you, Matt Rubinstein, my editor, who wrote that.

Brian Smith:

Very good. So why’d you write this?

Helen Dale:

Well, after my first novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper was enormously, enormously successful, it was a massive bestseller and enormously, enormously controversial. And I had signed—like most writers do—with my first book I had signed what’s known as an option clause. Which in contract law gives your publisher effectively the right of first refusal on your second book or your next book. In my case, it would’ve been my second book. And when a book is sold, probably hundreds of thousands of copies by this point, the publisher really does expect you to write another one because your name has become a license to print money. And I also had this idea in my head that I would be a full-time writer.

And remember I had been admitted to university to study a combined qualification. This is an Australian thing where you do an arts degree and a law degree at the same time and it’s five or six years long; and you can do this with science or accountancy as well. But I had done it with liberal arts and my liberal arts was in classics. And so I actually abandoned the law studies at the time thinking I was going to be a full-time writer. And I started to write a second novel, which I thought I would use my classical education, my ability to read ancient languages to write a novel with a Roman empire setting.

And I started to do the research for it and put it together and so on and so forth. And I’d written about 40,000 words and I realized it was just dreadful… It was just unpublishable. I was writing to a contract, I was attempting to force myself to do something when I wasn’t ready to write it. I hadn’t thought about it long enough and I knew it was so bad—it was. And 40,000 words, I’m not a quick writer. 40,000 words represents a year’s work probably, maybe even more. But I have a recollection of it taking about a year of me being a full-time writer and just all this money piling up and me just trying to be a full-time writer and staring at the walls and trying to write this book.

I don’t know whether you have this in the United States, but Australia and the UK both have this system whereby that you get hard waste disposal and the local council, local authority, sends around notices saying if you’ve got hard waste that’s unsuitable for recycling or for your bin or so on and so forth, you leave it out on the curb on an appointed day and special disposal vehicles will come around and collect and it saves you a trip to the dump.

Brian Smith:

Yeah, we do.

Helen Dale:

And I admit I got all of the drafts of the manuscript, all of my notes, everything, boxed it all up and put it on the footpath with like a dud TV set and various other things for the council to take it away. I just wanted to embalm the entire thing in a giant block of Perspex and then fire it out of the solar system. And I then realized that I had made a very foolish decision abandoning the law degree and I had to go back to university to complete the law degree. I did various other things first. I mean—because I’d traveled all around Europe and particularly lived in Italy and things like this, worked in Italy, worked on archeological digs—did all sorts of stuff like that to do the research for the book.

And I just had to come back to the university some five, this was like five years later, six years later. It was enormously later than it should have been, where I still had this open enrollment in law. And I called the university and I called the law faculty and said, “Yeah, I was admitted.” And they all knew who I was because the first book won the Miles Franklin Award, which is the Australian equivalent of the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize. It had sold all these copies. It had been very controversial. And I said, “oh, I think I better come back to law school and do my law degree.” And I remember the secretary in the law department, “Did you not come up with an idea for another novel?” And I’m going, “It’s worse than that. I wrote 40,000 words of rubbish and had to throw it away.” And so I had to pay a fine, it was only $30, but I did have to pay a fine for just taking years to come back to start and then complete the law degree.

And after that I just did what lawyers do. I did my law qualifications. Three years of study I had to do. And I just went into a pupillage. I was at the bar and then I did very well at university and was kind of a bit of a star. And so I came and did my postgraduate qualifications in the law of England and Wales. I did what’s known as the BCL at Oxford where I was at Brasenose College. And then because I got a job in Scotland, I did Scots law Qualifications at the University of Edinburgh, while I was in practice up there for several years.

And the thing is, the idea of a book set in ancient Rome never really went away the whole time. I was working all these years. I was just working in various law jobs or studying or doing both at the same time. And I thought I would really like to write this book that would be… I think I can write a good book.

And I had written one short story for a magazine back in the ‘90s where I had specifically focused on the scene of how would a modern society respond to a Jesus Christ-like figure and what would the execution look like? About two paragraphs of that short story actually finished up in Kingdom of the Wicked, in book two of Kingdom of the Wicked. I mean I built it up very differently, because there’s a sting in the tail with, I’m quite good at plotting. I’ve always liked crime fiction and I know how it works, police procedurals, that kind of thing. Because I’ve been a lawyer. And that story culminated in execution by firing squad and it looked very South American, the caudillo and that kind of thing.

But I left it. That short story came out in like 1998 or something, but I then just left it and I was becoming sort of more economically successful as a lawyer and I had more experience and more knowledge to draw on and so on and so forth. So I gradually started to put together Kingdom of the Wicked. And I returned to that original short story that came out in the ‘90s and thought, “My goodness, it’s not just the case of how would we respond to someone like this.” And there are all various films or musicals that try to deal with this—Jesus Christ Superstar and Jesus of Montreal—and that kind of thing.

But the thing that was always important to me with a background in classics was the Romans were really different from us. And the thing is they look superficially like us. They look liberal because they have a republic, because they have the secret ballot, because they have constituencies, because they have—if you’re British—they have a constitution ordered by constitutional conventions. This is sort of before the Republic turns to rot, the Roman Republic. I mean they have women with unusually high status. You’ve even got, at local authority level, you’ve got some women voting, you’ve got a society that starts to look in terms of its social progress and social order and fluidity—the ability to move between classes.

It looks like the 18th and the 19th century in the UK, in England and Scotland. Remembering, of course, that Scotland, a big part of the Scottish Enlightenment was people like Adam Smith and David Hume drawing on Roman law, which is very distinctively used as part of the Scottish legal system in which I’m qualified and experienced and worked as a solicitor in Scotland (which is what British people call an attorney). Whereas a barrister in Scotland is called an advocate.

And that’s what they were in Ancient Rome, advocatus for a boy and advocata for a girl, as it’s Latin and it’s gendered, all romance languages have gender, grammatical and natural gender in that case. But the thing is, so you get this superficial similarity with the Romans because of this constitutionalism, because of things that are very important in American history.

I mean you read… Liberty Fund at some point sent me as a Christmas present, a complete edition of the Federalist Papers. There it is there. Federalist up on the wall there, which I then read, but I’d never read it before because I’m coming out of the British tradition. So I’m familiar with all of ours, Dicey and Bagehot and all the people that are in our traditions, or Alfred Deakin in Australia, the Constitutional Conventions, all of the things that feed into Britain and Commonwealth.

And I’m just sort of sitting here thinking, I have a lot of respect for the people who wrote The Federalist, but they had clearly done the same thing that a lot of baby classicists do—of reading the ancient civilization thinking, “Oh, they’re just us. They’re just like us.”

Brian Smith:

Yeah, and they really do.

Helen Dale:

And they really do. And I’m not blaming those American statesmen for doing that. I’m not blaming your founders for doing that because, I mean, you get more awareness that they were different when you start really reading the debates of the Framers as they’re called in Australia. But the Framers were having all their constitutional debates leading up to the Australian constitution being drafted and then enacted in 1901 with federation. Their first big constitutional convention was in 1890. So it’s way, way later than the Americans. There had been huge amounts more research into what sort of society the Romans were.

And so you have to not see them—despite the superficial similarity—as 19th century or 18th century liberals. And when they do things that sound like liberals. So for example, I’ll give you a late pagan writer when he’s being critical of Christianity. He’s a pagan and he’s criticizing the Christians around him; his name Symmachus and he’s a senator. And he argues very beautifully and movingly, it’s a beautiful speech where he says, “Truth is the light on the hill. And all the religions are different paths up the hill, but they’ll all get to the truth eventually.” That sounds like… You can imagine someone like Mill writing that, or Locke.

But the reason he made that argument is not because he’s a liberal, he drew that argument from Hermeticism. So this is part of the Corpus Hermeticus, or Hermeticum, which was the basis of gnosticism and esoteric magic where the argument was—that people were making when they were putting the Corpus Hermeticum together in between the first century BC and the third century AD—Is that anyone can do this kind of magic. It doesn’t matter what religion they are. Okay. And what makes you special is not the religious belief or your lack of it. What makes you special and powerful and interesting is your ability to do this special kind of magic.

Brian Smith:

So access to the secret knowledge.

Helen Dale:

Access to the secret knowledge. The ability to see invisible systems, that kind of thing. So Symmachus is always read as a liberal by people, unless you have an awareness of ancient religion. That’s just one tiny example. There are other things that are pervasive all through the Roman legal system. Whilst the Romans did not believe that slaves were inferior forms of the human—slavery was contrary to natural law in the Roman world—the Roman conception of natural law was nothing like what natural law is to modern people or to even practitioners in the United States. There aren’t really many natural lawyers in the UK, we tend to be legal positivists. Law comes from the state, basically, and it doesn’t preexist the state, but we know what natural law is. We’re all taught it at university and how it has religious roots and so on and so forth.

Natural law to a Roman meant a combination of “everything in its right place” and “what you see around you in the natural environment”—it was a blend of those two. So it’s Darwin before Darwin, which is why when you read someone like Lucretius, it sounds very Darwinian, sounds like natural selection, that kind of thinking. And so that sent me off on a few different paths. But the big things I felt I had to bring out—and I would be very interested because you’ve mentioned to me just in private chat before this, when we’ve been at Liberty Fund conferences–there are certain things that really leaped out at you about the Roman characters in my books and their attitudes. But the thing that I had to bring out most strongly to a modern reader was that these people did not believe that anyone was morally, that people were morally equal.

They also thought that if you had a special gift—and they tended to divide the gifts up into blocks of three, so you get the ritualistic three thumps of European folklore, which is just pervasive—and the three traits were beauty, intellect, and courage. These were the three prize traits. This also existed in Greek society. And I will use the Greek heroes, heroines for this one, because they’re more familiar than the Roman ones. So beauty, Helen. Never mind that Helen’s an extremely dodgy person throughout the Homeric stories and is basically a nymphomaniac. Okay. But she’s blessed. She’s blessed. She has this gift of beauty. Cleverness can be male or female, more strongly so with the Romans, they didn’t have a problem with clever women. Women had high status in their society, but the Greek characters, the boy is Odysseus, who’s a massive sneak. He goes around behind everybody’s back.

Brian Smith:

Again. Not a nice guy.

Helen Dale:

Not a nice guy. And then the other one, the female, Penelope—who leads all those suitors up the garden path and then gets them all killed and all their servants killed and their servants weren’t exactly in on the attempt to try and race her off—but they all get killed too. And then courage, courageousness for which the model is Achilles, it’s a boy for that one. So you get intelligence—they recognize can be either sex, the others tend to be gendered—and then you get Achilles. And it’s very clear all the way through that Achilles is, as the British say, “a massive bellend.” Not a good person. And it’s because the thing is these civilizations didn’t work on our good and evil polarity. To be strong was to be good. To be weak was to be evil, to be a loser was to be evil.

So you could get things that sound quite radical. Slaves are fully formed humans. If you were a Roman citizen of either sex and you particularly fancied one of your slaves—and there is an element of mutuality in this, obviously, as opposed to just sexual exploitation—and you wanted to marry them, well you couldn’t marry a slave because slaves didn’t have capacity, legal capacity, contractual capacity. They couldn’t make a will, they couldn’t enter a contract. They couldn’t do all the things that a citizen could do or even non-citizens to a degree. But in this case, it’s particularly important the context of Roman citizens.

So you had to go through a manumission ceremony and free the slave and then go through multiple other steps so that the slave—particularly if the slave in question was female, to make sure that she became a citizen because Romans—like Jews—inherited their status from the mother.

Brian Smith:

From the mother.

Helen Dale:

Any Jewish people listening to this now can then go, “Oh, halachically Roman, that’s interesting,” and have a little giggle because it works the same way.

Brian Smith:

And I have to interject. So Helen has a great short story, the name of which I cannot remember.

Helen Dale:

I think it’s just called Angel and Monica, the name of the characters. And it’s from Shapers of Worlds: Volume Two, which is edited by a Canadian science fiction author called Edward Willett. Shapers of Worlds Volume Two. Edward Willett is the author, W-i-double L-E-double T. And it is a piece of Kingdom of the Wicked that finished up on the cutting room floor. And I was really upset when it was removed so I kept it. And when a science fiction publisher and writer came along to me and said, “I’m putting a collection together. Could you contribute an original short story to it,” I did. They got Angel and Monica from Kingdom of the Wicked—that I was forced to leave out.

Brian Smith:

And it has a wonderful account of exactly what you just described.

Helen Dale:

Yes.

Brian Smith:

And I think for my part, the things that stood out about the Romans in this story sort of fall into line with your account of those Greek heroes. It’s the propensity for cruelty and sort of lust for the games combined with being sort of magnanimous at the same time toward one’s inferiors, generous towards one’s peers. It’s this sort of interesting set of combined traits that are fairly foreign to a Christian worldview.

Because you have this sense of, well, once you have pure senses of moral equality, everyone ought to be treated sort of as they’re due when everyone is due the same sort of moral treatment. And so you can’t have this discontinuous attitude toward one kind of person or another, all while still seeing them as fully human. So it’s the union of opposites in a sort of Judaeo-Christian mindset that I thought was brought best to life in this novel. I don’t think I’ve read a novel that does as good a job at exploring this psychological distance and actually making it real for the reader where you don’t just see… I’ve seen attempts to portray this where the reader is brought to view the Roman from explicitly Christian or Jewish morals and sees them then as just sort of irredeemably wicked. But the distance isn’t actually explained and the cultural miscommunication isn’t explained, which you do.

Helen Dale:

Yeah, this is what I set out to do. I mean there are other attempts to, and some very good ones. I think Robert Graves’ I, Claudius books bring out the Roman attitude to disability very well.

Brian Smith:

Yes, that’s a good one.

Helen Dale:

But Robert Graves was not only a great writer, he was an eminent classicist in his own right, very fine translator, but he only could do one thing. And he’s doing that with the imperial family, which is very well documented. We’ve got lots of Roman historians writing about this. There’s lots of information on it, that kind of thing. So all he could really do was show the disability thing and how poor Claudius has to just… The expectation is we don’t care if you are disabled and it’s harder for you, you push yourself to Hell and back and make yourself as normal as possible because people are not going to accommodate you. And so he has to fix his stutter. He has to come to learn to speak. And if he doesn’t and if he dribbles on himself, they just sit around and laugh at him. He’s the butt of everybody’s jokes.

And yet at the same time—people who you would think as bad people for making him the butt of all their jokes—are not portrayed as otherwise particularly bad people. This is just something that Romans do. I mean, the only reason he survived is poshness. Because in a normal Roman family—a child with an obvious disability, it was probably cerebral palsy or something like that, those problems with walking, the scissored gate that he’s described as having is associated with cerebral palsy—even in a relatively middle class or well-to-do family that wasn’t aristocracy, he would’ve just been exposed.

Either exposed or the thing is… Exposed was the most common thing. But there was the right in Roman law when the child was, the infant was hideously disabled. And even to a degree the expectation that, as long as he got his wife’s consent to do it, so not just exposure, but to snap the neck. The paterfamilias, the male head of household, had to snap the child’s neck. And so you’ve just got this really… And Robert Graves does that really well in I Claudius; brings that out in the I Claudius books. But I just thought the underlying logic of the Romans is the majority of people are born to serve.

But, if you have natural excellences, they make you a better person. And if that means either your owner or your employer—because I’ve got a society that’s abolished slavery in these books for economic reasons—thinks you should be lifted up because you have a natural excellence from the gods or that you’ve inherited… Yeah, because they were Darwin before Darwin, they had a sense of things running in families. So they got that. They’ll do it in the sculpture, one of the things that a book that I’ve just been sent recently points out, how there’s a sculpture of a well-known Roman woman who was related to one of the emperors; and she’s his cousin or something. And it’s very deliberately pointed out that her and the emperor’s portrait have got the same chin. A lot of care has been shown that these two people are related to each other and that this particular talent that they have runs in families.

So I had to bring that out. And that has consequences for their legal system, which looks, once again—so you get the same thing as with Symmachus, the senator—you get something that looks really modern because it’s got all the same characteristics as the 19^th-century common law or 18^th-century, 19^th-century common law. This is a society that was starting to proto-industrialize, that was starting to have factories, that had a very strong sense of the law of contract. Understood difference between a relationship governed by contract, which is one-to-one, a relationship governed by tort, which is one to those to whom you owe a duty –so delict, the word is used in Latin—delictual liability. Understood the idea of property in the person, typical of a slave-owning society. So you have a concept like iniuria, your reputation can be injured; and it’s just passed into modern defamation law across the European continent and to a degree in Scotland.

So it looks really English. This society can look really English. It’s got functioning courts. It’s got a proper legal system, it’s got a police force, it’s got the rule of law. It’s got very early moves against self-help, like the Roman lawyers. You cannot adjudicate this dispute. The two blokes having a punch-up, having a square go-out in front of the pub or people having fights over their kid, their son’s gone off and shagged a girl and got her pregnant; you don’t turn up with the Roman equivalent of the shotgun. This needs to be dealt with through the courts, that kind of thing. So you’ve got all the things that you associate with the development of a modern legal system, which is why it’s the other great rival legal system to the common law because it’s extraordinary, they’re extraordinary lawyers.

But you’ve also got a situation—and many of your listeners will be Christian—so I’ll put a little bit of a gloss on it because there are some details in the story that would’ve happened that have been left out. But probably a lot of Christian listeners will be familiar with the story, in the Acts of the Apostles, of Paul being arrested for public order offense—in this case getting up and preaching Christianity in a Jewish venue where they didn’t want him. I think it was a synagogue, but I’m not sure. And they didn’t want him there. They wanted him to leave and he wouldn’t leave, and so the police were called. Police, but they’re just called soldiers in the text. But this would’ve been the police. And he’s taken away and he’s taken to the police station and they’re about to flog him. And he says, “I’m a Roman citizen.” And that’s just an incredibly basic thing. And he shows his papers.

And anyone who’s been on holidays to Europe, particularly going back a few years, they’ve learned that Brits and Americans don’t like it. But if you’re a little bit older and you went to Italy, say, 20 years ago, you’ll have had the experience of being asked for your passport at the desk when you check into a hotel, and then the man or woman at the desk takes away your passport and gives you your room key in exchange for it and puts the passport behind them. And it’s really unpleasant… I remember the first time it happened to me, and I can read the ancient language. I know what they’re like. It’s really shocking to someone from a common law system. Because the state wanted to know—and this is part of the duty of the censor, who was a figure in Roman administration, was to always know where everybody was—that was part of the census because this was the first civilization that did that. And so that means knowing where everybody is at any one time, which of course, can be exploited horribly.

One of the reasons why the Nazis were able to kill so many Jews was because they knew where they all lived. Everyone knew, and Hitler admitted it. Well, no, not Hitler himself because he wasn’t there at the Wannsee Conference, the conference to plan the Holocaust was held in early 1941. They admitted there that this would be an absolute nightmare in Britain because Britain doesn’t do that. Because they were still quite confident at being able to conquer the British Isles. And they were, “Well, nobody knows where anybody lives because that’s not what they do.” And he got Heydrich and Eichmann all going sort of ”screwed, again,” kind of thing.

Brian Smith:

We’re not going to be able to do it.

Helen Dale:

We’re not going to be able to do it. Or not easily, anyway. And so that sense of being able to prove that you are a certain class of person… And it meant something really dramatic in Paul’s case. They couldn’t just flog him, beat the crap out of him with the rattan like you see in Singapore. They couldn’t do that to him because he was a Roman citizen. Roman citizens could not be tortured. Non-citizens could be tortured, but only on application to court. And slaves could be tortured as of right.

Brian Smith:

Different rules for different people.

Helen Dale:

Different people. And yet none of those people are seen as less than fully human at any point. It’s a legal status, not a moral one. And so I just thought, almost nobody does this as a writer with a book set in the classical world. And when they do it, the books can become boring and weighed down with too much explanation and so on and so forth. So I thought, what I will do is I’ll do what Robert Heinlein does, or I’ll do what Margaret Atwood does. I will create this—use my knowledge of this society and bring their values and their legal system to it. But I will give them our modern technology—so that there’s less of a gulf with technical things that they can do—and leave their morality intact.

That then behooved me to do a couple of other things. One, different moral values lead to different technological development. I had to acknowledge that. I was about halfway through Book One when I realized that. Well no, this is a society that’s already heading down the path to Darwin. They’re going to have natural selection… The Origin of Species is going to be before Laws of Motion. So they’re going to get science in a different order because of the things that they valued and thought were important. It’s ironic that the best doctors in the Roman world were doctors of the gladiators, because they saw people chopped up—it’s dissection. Probably the most famous Roman doctor—who was Marcus Aurelius’s physician—started as a doctor of the gladiators. The guy who knew that the heart was a pump, which we forgot. And so that means science is in a different order.

So the thing that comes first is biology, and then it goes backwards, then it goes to chemistry because there are certain things in biology you can’t do without chemistry. And then it goes from chemistry finally to physics. So I had to have them behind a bit… It’s a bipolar world. It’s like the Cold War. So I have them behind the Han Chinese, who have gone in the Western direction, with physics first. And the Romans are kind of horrified because the Chinese have just sent a rocket into low Earth orbit. And that’s at the beginning of Kingdom of the Wicked: Book One. And because Pilate is watching television and seeing this report.

Brian Smith:

And so he sees the report.

Helen Dale:

He sees the report about, oh, low earth orbit. They know what it is because they’ve got physics, but they’re behind the Chinese, the Han Chinese, the Seres, as they call them, in this area. But they are massively ahead in genetics and biology and surgery and medicine because they started with Darwin at about the same time period—in terms of years elapsed—as we had Newton. So I had to do all of that. So all their scientific things are different. They’re in a different order because they’re starting from a different moral position and the things that interest them are starting in a different moral position.

And I then had the issue of, okay, so this set is in ancient Judaea. What is it about the Jews and the Romans in the period that made them at each other’s throats? And what I didn’t want to do—which is what you were alluding to earlier—was produce this situation where one side or the other are seen as the baddie. And I think I said—I don’t know whether I said it for a Law & Liberty piece, or it might have been actually for the Australian or the Wall Street Journal, it might have been for another outlet—but I know you’ve read it, because we were discussing it once, where I said, “I don’t want a society where it’s all shade or all light on one side or the other. And I don’t want a dystopia because I don’t write dystopias.” And I made a very deliberate decision that the society in Kingdom of the Wicked works, but it’s not a utopia.

And I didn’t want the situation—I didn’t want people, although this did later happen, unfortunately—to write to me and then say, “oh, I’d actually quite like to live there.” I got a lot of letters like that after the first book, people saying, “oh, I think I like your society and I think this society would work really well,” and so on and so forth. And I was just sitting there going, “presumably that means you have to be one of the Roman citizen characters, then, you don’t want to be a poor non-citizen. A wealthy non-citizen—like someone like Fortini—is okay because she’s quite posh. She’s a non-citizen, but she’s quite posh. So she’s fine. But a poor non-citizen in a society with no welfare state… Because they just don’t think like us. “Why are you paying for people to stay poor? Doesn’t this mean you will have more of them?” This is just Roman logic.

Brian Smith:

And they have that sort of ruthlessness and lack of concern. Again, I think that it goes back to this very Christian sense of equality. If you lack that, you are not going to develop any of these sympathies for lessers. I mean, now there are conceptions of noblesse oblige you see in this story.

Helen Dale:

Yes. The Romans absolutely had that. And that later passed into the medieval civilizations afterwards. And actually it informed the development of codes of chivalry and things like that, which is actually hugely important. You need things like chivalry and warrior codes. That happened in Japan as well with Bushido. Otherwise people can’t tell the difference between mounted warriors and gangs. Murderous gangs on horseback. You can’t tell the difference between the knight in shining armor and the highwayman. It’s really important.

Brian Smith:

And you don’t want war to be entirely unbounded.

Helen Dale:

Yes.

Brian Smith:

Destruction.

Helen Dale:

And destructive.

Brian Smith:

You want limits. And I also think that there’s a sense in which you see concepts in a story like this play out in a really strange way in the American South, for instance. Like noblesse oblige, which you see portrayed in many of the Roman characters, is part of the white Southerner Americans’ inability to understand people like Martin Luther King demanding a certain kind of status when generations before them would come hat in hand and say, “Please give me. Please pay for a school.” And the person was happy to oblige because their relative status—as the Southerner saw it—was respected. And equality defended it. Yeah.

Helen Dale:

Like the posh lady in the book—and you see this all over the Roman Empire—who set up the beautiful library, the Agrippa Memorial Library in the name of the general who was her ancestor. And written on the plinth underneath a bust of Agrippa is de sua pecunia fecit, “built with her own money.” That kind of thing, because that’s the noblesse oblige of the posh Roman. And I put a lot of effort into portraying that culture. But there’s also this radical inequality that’s legally mandated. It’s not morally mandated, so people can suddenly shift. So Fortini—who goes from being a non-citizen to being paired off with a posh Roman—is immediately instructed by the materfamilias in Pontius Pilate’s household to stop referring to them by their titles. “No, you don’t use our titles anymore because you are engaged to him and he-”

Brian Smith:

You’re equal.

Helen Dale:

He went to the academy”—Romans didn’t call them universities, they called them academies—”he went to the academy with Pontius. And so therefore you are our friend.” That whole Roman idea of friendship, which was hugely important. And so she has to stop calling them by their titles… And she keeps stumbling because she wants to call them by their titles, because it’s just been drilled into her—non-citizen, even though she’s quite a well-off non-citizen and well-educated and very charming and so on and so forth, and had lots of advantages in life—she’s still a non-citizen. And so she keeps stumbling and doesn’t know that she must not call them by their titles anymore.

Brian Smith:

And there are rules in order that if you fail to observe them in this novel, in this world, there are consequences that aren’t easy to overcome, even when you’ve been elevated.

Helen Dale:

Yeah. Well, yes, because of course, this is the other thing, and this is a radically different thing from Christianity as well. Romans had high-class prostitutes and people have got this idea in their head, they think, “Oh, they mean an escort. They mean someone who’s a bit higher up the tree,” that kind of thing. No, no, no. These were high-class prostitutes that you actually had to doff your cap to. Sometimes they were part of the state religion. And Fotini, the Greek lass who’s been one, she falls into that category. So she’s the equivalent of university educated. She’s very clever, she’s very charming. She can think circles around lots of the other people in the book. And I show her doing this quite regularly because she is very clever. And so she’s used to having status. And one of the things I had to do to show—because if I was going to put all this time and effort into making sure I got the Roman morality and attitudes right—I had to do that for Jews in that period as well.

And Judaism changed after the destruction of the Temple and after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Before that period, Jews were basically a lot bolshier. I think it’s probably the best way of describing it. They were just a lot bolshier. They really did think they had, they had moral tickets on themselves that Romans considered to be unearned. They weren’t a big enough and fancy enough civilization. So they weren’t the Greeks, they weren’t the Persians—which were the other great civilizations in the area. They were at a sort of intermediate stage. They weren’t barbarians, because they had a written language and they had a law and they had an ancient religion—which were all things—Romans respected those things. But they certainly couldn’t put themselves on par with Greece. They couldn’t put themselves on par with Persia.

And the problem was, of course, you had comparison by reference because they were in the middle of those two other great civilizations, the Hellenistic civilization that expanded with Alexander the Great, and also its rival. The great rival civilization had always been and continued to be for hundreds and hundreds of years, even thousands of years, was of course Persia. And so they were seen to have ideas above their station. Their bucket of achievements wasn’t big enough for the sort of moral tickets they had on themselves, as far as Romans were concerned. And so I had to try to portray Jews fairly and accurately. And this involved…

And the difficulty I’ve got here is I can read Greek and Latin. I can’t read Hebrew, I can’t read Aramaic. So I was relying enormously on my Jewish friends who can read Hebrew and one other friend who actually learned ancient Aramaic as well as ancient Iranian, so I could capture the culture of the people involved. Because there were two things I had to get right. Not only did I have to give Jews in the period fair play in their relationship with the colonial power, I also had to get divisions between different groups of Jews right. Because a lot of Jews at the time looked at the early Christians and thought they were completely bonkers. And it wasn’t just for obvious things like the rules about circumcision, and stuff that comes up in Acts, but also things like Hell.

The Jewish conception of Hell in that period—if they believed it, and not all Jews did, there was a variety amongst different kinds of Jews, there are lots of different Jewish approaches and lots of arguments. This is still a big part; this was already a part of Jewish culture—all the rabbis in the temple disagreeing with each other in very learned and clever ways. So the idea of someone being sent to eternal punishment forever, a lot of Jews found really alarming. And one aspect of Christianity that comes up and up and up again in Jewish writers from that period is the idea that the people in Heaven could see the people in Hell being tortured. And the Jewish response to that–which I think is really interesting–was very much, “You got that off the Romans, didn’t you?” It was the idea of watching terrible cruelties.

Because one thing the Jews were consistent about, and this is to their credit—and I bring that out, I bring this out very strongly in the book—is they hated Roman blood sport. They weren’t real keen on the Olympic games either—because it was all these blokes running around in the buff with their bits flying around—but they would just turn their backs on that. Go, “No, that’s for the Greeks.” But they hated Roman blood sport. They thought it was absolutely appalling. Yet by the same token, they did things like stoning women for adultery—and if the Romans caught them doing it, they would just get all the men who were involved in stoning; they’d rescue the woman and then they’d execute the men.

And what I used, in order to capture this, I didn’t just use Roman records. I tried to use another example of where civilizations just were incredibly different and both very cruel, but in different ways.

Australian Aborigines would see convicts—when Australia was a penal colony—being flogged. Lined up at the triangle and flogged, the thing from the Royal Navy, which was exported out to the…When Australia was a penal colony and convicts were being transported from the British Isles. And Aborigines would see this and they would be appalled by it, and they would try to stop it. And you’d get these big brawny Aboriginal tribesmen who were really strong and really fit and had spent all their lives running around with spears and hunting kangaroos—so they were often much stronger than the British floggers. And so you would have situations where there’d be an enormous punch-up and then the Aboriginal would win. But then you’d have situations like—in nearly all of the Aboriginal communities that the white colonials found—if a woman gave birth to a set of twins, they would kill one. They would kill one of the twins.

Brian Smith:

Did not know that.

Helen Dale:

Because the thing is, there was a risk that if you had tried to breastfeed two at once, that only one would survive anyway. So it was best to pick the strongest one, keep it alive, and kill the weakling. And so European colonials saw this and were just horrified. So you had the same thing again. You had this terrible cruelty in both these civilizations, but what they defined as cruel was completely different. So I’ve got this with the Romans. I mean, all I’ve done is modernize the weapons because it’s so well documented. So you’ve got Jews being absolutely horrified with the Roman games and the Sanhedrin trying to stop it—trying to stop fights to the death basically—happening in the area of Jerusalem, which the Romans had a degree of respect for. They respected the Sanhedrin.

They admired the temple that Herod had built. And they thought it was well run. They thought it was a beautiful building and they thought it was well run. So I just brought those attitudes forward and modernized the weapons, basically, and a few other little details. But then you’ve also got the situation of—if a Roman patrol caught Jews stoning a woman for adultery or that kind of thing, they would just rescue the woman and execute the men. And instead of chopping them off with a sword, they’re just lining them up and going, “Bang!”

Brian Smith:

Yeah. Well, and I remember reading accounts of the British Empire with the Indian practice of sati. The British would do the same thing.

Helen Dale:

Yes, they did the same thing.

Brian Smith:

“You have a custom of burning…” I remember the quote from a British officer.

Helen Dale:

Lord Napier. I actually paraphrase Lord Napier in the book, but I give the words to a Roman official rather than-

Brian Smith:

Yeah, “You have this custom, so do we.”

Helen Dale:

“And our custom, if you burn the widow and we catch you, our custom is to build a gallows right next to where you’ve done it and then to hang you by the neck until you are dead.” Yeah. So it’s the same thing, though. I’m not a cultural relativist. I don’t think that all cultures are the same. I mean, sometimes you can have a situation where it’s the Devil against Beelzebub. So the Spanish conquistadors were pretty awful. But you have to say, “Well, I think the Incas and the Aztecs were kind of worse,” but it really is the Devil against Beelzebub. Whereas there are two empires in human history, the Romans and the British, where this is much, much harder to say because they generally did leave the places they colonized better than they found them. So I had to capture that as well.

There was a very good review in the main British fantasy magazine over here, British Fantasy Society, I think it is, written by a woman who’s also a classicist, although she’s an Egyptologist. So she specializes in ancient Egypt. And she made the point that we’re all very used to the empire being portrayed as the baddy. This is all the whole Star Wars thing and that kind of thing. But she said that just shows you that a lot of science fiction is written by Americans, who have a very different conception of empire despite being an empire themselves. And so she said, this is a book that’s sort of… Well, actually, maybe Darth Vader had a point.

Brian Smith:

No. And the fascinating thing for me though is you have a little hypothesis in it too, of how would the Romans have imposed their empire on the Mayans and the Aztecs and company? They would not have ended human sacrifice.

Helen Dale:

No.

Brian Smith:

They would not have stopped-

Helen Dale:

And they don’t. They trade with them. They trade with them. And the closest they will come to it is you get individual moral conscience amongst Romans because they’ve abolished slavery, but they don’t react like the British. They’ve abolished slavery for economic reasons themselves because they’ve worked out comparative advantage and they’ve worked out, if you don’t abolish slavery, then human labor power never loses its comparative advantage. If you want a more buoyant economy, a more prosperous economy, you need labor markets. So they’ve worked that out because of course that’s the kind of thing that goes with Darwin, 18th century, 19th century, that kind of very contractual legalistic thinking. So it flows quite naturally. But what they don’t do—unlike the great and the good of the British Empire, I just set this up really deliberately, because the civilization next door—which is the local rival, imperial rival, not as powerful, but still very impressive, is Persia—and Persia still has slavery.

And I make it very clear that on the margins of the empire where the Persian border is butting up against the Roman border, there’s human trafficking going on because the Romans won’t do what the Brits did. The Romans will not send out their Navy and say, “You will not trade in slaves. We’re not going to do it, and if slaves finish up in our country, they’re instantly free because we don’t have slavery. We won’t send them back to you.” So they won’t do something like the Fugitive Slave Law. They don’t do that either. It’s a morally intermediate approach, but they’re not … “We’re going to stop you, Persia, from still having slaves.” And so what you finish up getting, is you get individual Stoics—my Quakers are the Stoics—I get individual Stoics like Claudia Procula who is Pilate’s wife and her dad was a Stoic and grandfather was a Stoic abolitionist.

And so what she does is she sets “woke” rules for her household servants. “You will not buy chocolate that has come from the Mexica and the Inca and made by slaves. You have to get non-slave chocolate. You’ll not get sugar from…” And she’s setting all these rules, which is exactly what people did in the 18th century in Britain. But the thing is, it was not the kind of thing that just people with their purchasing power could achieve by themselves. It was not possible. You needed to get the backing of the state. And they were very fortunate that the anti-slave state that from which they won backing just happened to be the greatest power in the world at the time, with a Navy. And so the Navy enforced it. I don’t-

Brian Smith:

And the British Navy did it.

Helen Dale:

Yeah. The British Navy did it.

Brian Smith:

That was where the-

Helen Dale:

Just send all the slave traders-

Brian Smith:

British Navy sunk the slave traders.

Helen Dale:

Sunk the slave-

Brian Smith:

They fought a war to do it.

Helen Dale:

Yeah. And sent them to the bottom of the ocean, that kind of thing. So my Romans don’t do that because they’re not the British, they’re not Christian, and they don’t have this idea of a sense of, “Oh, no, this is bad. We can’t have that. We can’t have that in our backyard. It’s not going to happen. And so we go to bring it to an end.” So they don’t do that. So they’re much less like the kind of good guys that we associate with goodness because they have the same kind of moral goodness. But they do do a lot of other good things, the good things that people like your Founding Fathers noticed in the Federalist Papers, which was a great read for me. They do peace, order, good government. And because I’ve modernized the technology, well, the trains run on time. The water is clean, the lights stay on. So it starts becoming a Monty Python joke then. You know, “What have the Romans done for us?” “It’s safe to walk the streets at night.”

Brian Smith:

It’s indoor plumbing.

Helen Dale:

Indoor plumbing.

Brian Smith:

Yeah. So-

Helen Dale:

So they do that and you just get this moral complexity. And I had a lot of fun doing that. But it was partly me just saying, “I’m fed up with people portraying the early Christians as all good guys, when they were much more morally ambiguous than that.” And you have to go and read Jewish sources to get the sense of the moral ambiguity. I do actually think some of the writing about the early Jewish opposition to Christianity is quite racist. The response when Christians didn’t get the Jews to come on board, basically, the traditional, observant—the Jews who became the kind of Jews everywhere, the ones who stayed Jewish, whether that was Sephardic or Ashkenazi or whatever, that division hadn’t developed at that point. It came later. But the real Jews—and they don’t get on board with the new religion, even though it is basically, “What type of Jew are you?” Christianity is really, really … particularly at the beginning, it’s really close to Judaism. And then they just get written off.

I hadn’t realized how close a lot of the things that the early Jesus followers were saying was to things that actual Pharisees were saying. And yet the Pharisees are written off as horrible people who were hypocrites and this kind of thing. So I had to try to capture that complexity in the civilization at the time and give everybody light and shade, give all my characters light and shade. So there are bad Jews, there are good Jews, there are bad Christians, there are good Christians, there are bad Romans, there are good Romans. And I tried to use my legal background to show what can go wrong in a society that has the rule of law. And I tried to bring that out strongly. This is even in law-giver societies—what can go wrong with those societies? And I mean you get sort of the mental image of it.

Even in the common law system, torture had become incredibly rare. But I always tweet on Bonfire Night, 5th of November, two images of Guy Fawkes’ signature before and after torture. Now, the common law was a great improvement on law anywhere else in the world. They had to get a warrant, not just from a judge, they had to get a warrant from the King to torture Guy Fawkes. But they did torture him. They broke all his fingers until they got a confession out of him. And generations of British school children still chant and they have no idea why—because unless they go to a good school, that teaches history—“Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder treason and plot.” You know, this kind of thing?

Brian Smith:

Yeah. I wanted to pivot to your earlier work, but not so much for us to do the same thing, plot summary and talking about themes of the book. What struck me the most after reading The Hand that Signed the Paper and the controversy around it was the way in which it dredged up for me the comparisons between 1990s political correctness and the sort of proto cancel culture that existed then, which by the time I hit university was being laughed at and pretty much on the way out except for studies departments, mercifully. But it still had this heavy echo. You read conservative or libertarian publications of the era, and they are still talking about the fresh wounds from this, which you received some of. I guess, I just wanted to have you maybe compare your experience of being canceled before it was a word, to the weirdness we now inhabit.

Helen Dale:

I mean, it was much harder in the 1990s, I should probably tell you. The Hand that Signed the Paper was published in 1994. I was still an undergraduate at the time, I was doing arts/law. And as I said earlier, I stopped doing the law because I thought I was going to be full-time writer and that turned out to be a very silly idea. And it was much harder to cancel someone. You still had the old idea that any publicity is good publicity, particularly when you’ve got something to sell. And so I have to acknowledge—I mean one of the reasons why I became a person in their twenties who owned a house free and clear and un-mortgaged was because my first novel was a bestseller. That caused problems of its own. Freddy DeBoer—who’s a modern writer, he has a Substack and he’s written an article—and if you read nothing else by this guy (because he has some quite weird economic ideas that are really quite bonkers) but this one piece, it’s called “The Rage of the Creative Underclass.”

And I think he might’ve called it… he might’ve paraphrased it, “The Creative Underclass is Still Raging,” words to that effect. You will find it very quickly if you Google on either of those phrases. And he talks about the number of people who want to be successful as artists of whatever sort—in my case as a novelist—compared to the number of people who actually finish up being successful. And it’s literally basically boatloads compared to a rowing eight. It really is. In mathematics, they call it a power law, which is where basically 10 per cent of the people make 90 per cent of all money in the creative arts. So that led to issues as well, a terrible, terrible envy that someone in their twenties had won all these prizes and was making all this money.

So there was that going on. I actually had books written about me where a significant part of the complaint was, “How dare this young woman make lots of money out of being a novelist,” basically. Just thinking, “if I’d actually finished the law degree, I’m not that far ahead of what I would’ve been making as a corporate lawyer. I hate to break it to you.” It’s why I went back to being a lawyer actually. When I didn’t have another novel to sell, I needed to do something else because once you have a house paid for, you can’t just sit in there, you need to pay the bills and feed yourself and all of the other things.

So it was harder to cancel someone then—in the sense that if they had a book or a record or something like that—you finished up just causing it to sell a lot more copies.

But you did have all of the other things. So I had people writing to employers if I was consulting or doing other work. And this went on for years. Actually, the last really serious time for it was when I was being cross-admitted in Scotland so I could practice as a Scottish solicitor, as well as one in England and Wales. I had formal representations made to the Law Society of Scotland that I was not a fit and proper person to be admitted to practice, that kind thing. And that was in 2012. 1994 to 2012, really, really long gap. The other thing that was that the epicenter of all of this nonsense was humanities and social science departments. When I went through, it was the humanities departments. And because of this Australian cultural tradition of blending a law degree with something else, it’s meant to make you more rounded and polished. That’s the theory.

Okay? And it probably does—it means if you have a traditional liberal arts degree, not the modern ones, which are basically crap, were crap, bum paper now, but if you did a fairly traditional one—you actually learned something useful, it made you widely read. I’ve sort of read the whole of the English canon and quite a lot of stuff in other languages as well, the ancient languages. So it hadn’t completely colonized the humanities back then, but we were all being forced to do a certain amount of these various compulsory theory subjects. So one of the reasons why—if you see me pop off about Derrida or Butler or Crenshaw or some woke idiot—is I actually read all their stuff because I was forced to read it as an undergraduate. I mean, I suppose I could have been lazy and just not read it. This is probably going to say something about me, but because of my results in the languages—which I’m really good at—I was heading towards what in Australia is called a university medal.

In Britain it’ll be called something like a starred first or a congratulatory first. It’s basically the top of your year. Something like that. Remembering, it’s much, much harder—even these days—but certainly going back 30 years, to get really, really top marks in a British university system. The number of people who get firsts and the number of people above them who get starred firsts or university medals is tiny. So I was on track based on my grade point average for a university medal, if you were just taking my language subjects. But the thing is, if I’d have written what I actually thought about the theory that we were being taught, theoretical nonsense…

But we had to do the subjects, there were six of these subjects and they were bloody compulsory. And they’d only been made compulsory about two years before I started as an undergraduate in 1990, which is really annoying. I would’ve scuppered my chances for a university medal. And I basically thought, “discretion is the better part of valor,” and lied in my assessment. So I played the game and got really high marks in all my theory papers. But I did actually read the stuff. And I was building up this huge well of resentment against it. And this is something that is also … this is distinctively Australian and it doesn’t exist in any other country, the assessment in many states, it’s still the case, and certainly it was in the state that I was in … Australia’s a federal system, like the United States … that I was completing my high school. A significant part of the assessment is like your … was, at least, and I think it still is in most places, like your SATs.

And SATs are basically the Aussie versionsm called the ASAT, the Australian Scholastic Aptitude Test. Gee, how original, let’s just copy it off the Americans. And I think they were American tests, to be honest. They would just change things, like right and left on the road and stuff like that. But they could use dollars. And as long as they didn’t talk about dimes or quarters, or anything like that, which they would just change, I think we were basically just sitting American tests. Because I remember one of the practice tests, they’d spelled color, C-O-L-O-R, while Australia uses British spelling. Yeah. That kind of thing. So I’m pretty sure they’re just American tests. They were. They were just adapting them. But what that means is the academic results you needed on the ASAT to get into a law degree—as opposed to the liberal arts degree—It was like 200 points apart.

Brian Smith:

Difference. Wow.

Helen Dale:

And the ASAT, that Aussie SAT, like the American one is a very, very close proxy for IQ. And the thing is, the results you needed to get into law or medicine would place you in the Mensa group. You needed to be in the top 2% to 3% of the SAT result to get into law or medicine. Whereas to get into just a straight liberal arts qualification, you’d be like hundreds of points behind. And of course in the enrollments in all the liberal arts faculties, all the best results went to the law students. We would wipe the floor with all the humanities intake and the academics all knew it. They all knew who we were because the student lists would come into the faculties. And so they all knew who we were. And they all thought we were absolute awful arrogant pricks.

Excuse my French, you might have to edit that out.

But that is what they thought of us, to the point where rude things were said. And not just to me, I can gather you a bevy of Australian arts/law graduates who are either in the academy now or in private practice or have retired who had this experience. We would read some of this stuff that the liberal arts people are into—the Butlers and the Derridas and the Adornos and so on and so forth—and all the American critical race theorists. I remember being introduced to the concept of intersectionality. And of course the law students had all been taught set theory and logic. And of course that’s what she’s trying to describe. She’s trying to describe sets. And I just sat there and I just [unclear], “This is what she’s trying to describe, but she’s not very smart, so she doesn’t know how to do it properly.”

And I just got told, and it wasn’t just me—because other people were doing the same sort of thing—was “Will you law students shut up? We all know you hate us and you think that this is a giant wank, and anyway you’re all going go into practice and make squillions.” This was the kind of response that we all got. And it wasn’t just me, lots and lots of people who were doing the combined qualification got this. And so what it did with me, is I built up this enormous wall of resentment over all of it. And I thought, “This is just garbage. This is being taught at universities and it is absolute nonsense.” And Australians are the most utilitarian people on God’s Earth. So you know all those lovely articles that Law & Liberty publishes, about the wonderful beauty of classical education and how it’s character forming, and it makes people better and so on and so forth?

The Australian response to that is, “Yeah, well, all the commanders in the NKVD and the Waffen-SS, they all had all these wonderful arty-farty qualifications and look what nice people they were?” So the-

Brian Smith:

Yeah. Show me the cash value of this education.

Helen Dale:

Yeah. Show me the cash value of this education. And so the Australian one, particularly amongst conservatives, is basically, and I have to say it’s mine—adapted across to the UK—I would close four fifths of British universities. All of the former polytechnics would go back to being polytechnics. They would teach trade qualifications. The way to learn, get a liberal arts qualification, is in a library. And the money saved would be to have public libraries and Project Gutenberg and all of that—because the UK’s got a shorter copyright term—all over the UK. And if people are interested in that, they will educate themselves.

They don’t need some dodgy idiot at a university to do it for them. Yes, I realize Australians are a type “that will inhabit the dying Earth”, this is a phrase that’s used, some folks use about us, I think fairly. Yeah, we’ll survive because we have live in this country that’s full of everything that wants to kill you. So I just thought, “This is dreadful.” And so, I mean, people who are interested can read the introduction to the novel where I go through the literary hoax that I perpetrated, but I genuinely thought that the way to blow all this silly nonsense up was just to prove it wrong. And I have to say, when the Grievance Studies hoax people did theirs—where they hoaxed all the academic journals—I did warn them at the time. I said, “People won’t thank you for this.”

And I’ve just done an interview on ABC Radio National where I said, “The biggest lesson that I learned is that if you perpetrate an enormous literary hoax and you wrap all the people who take this stuff very seriously and genuinely believe it—and you wrap them in a giant omelette—they will not thank you for it. They will hate you.”

Brian Smith:

Or they’ll try to destroy you, which they’re doing to the trio of Grievous Studies authors.

Helen Dale:

And that’s what they tried to do to me. And it didn’t really work because, as I said, you couldn’t really cancel people then. You could make their lives really unpleasant. And there were things about my life that did become really unpleasant. There was a period there where I had police protection. There was a period there where the police took my post and I couldn’t have the post delivered to my house because they were concerned about what might be in it. I mean, the worst that had been in it that caused me to make a police report, in the first place, was I had people send me dog poop. They’d Postpak it up, Australia Post has these things called Postpak and they posted up dog poo. And I got it sent to me. So I went to the police about this and they said, “Oh, right.”

And they set this system up and basically I had this thing, every other day I had to walk to the local police station just down the road from me and collect my sorted mail. And there was just stuff I was not allowed to see and that kind of thing. It was pretty unpleasant, that kind of thing. And it was my first inkling that the people who … a lot of them who taught this, these sort of liberal artsy people—just weren’t very clever—to my thinking they weren’t clever and they weren’t brave. They lacked courage as well. I mean, I just don’t care what other people think of me. You can think I’m this, that and the other, I really don’t care. And I can think you’re this, that and the other. And just knock yourself out, I’m a columnist. I write disagreeable things in newspapers nearly every week. And if everybody started agreeing with me, I would start to worry because I’m an extremely disagreeable person.

Brian Smith:

But now we’re in this world where these people rely on the politics of shaming and making people doubt the courage of their convictions by throwing words like racist or sexist or … I think you’re up with that.

Helen Dale:

Misogynist. Misogynist or transphobic or whatever.

Brian Smith:

Misogynist.

Helen Dale:

Yeah.

Brian Smith:

And now, as you’ve written about recently, they’re shaming corporations and publishers and everyone else to go along with this series of linguistic innovations which-

Helen Dale:

Which otherwise they say that-

Brian Smith:

… aim at producing a flat world.

Helen Dale:

Yeah. They say that it will produce harm. And of course that destroys 19th century Gladstonian liberalism. I mean, although John Stuart Mill said it, it was sort of an indicia of 19th century British liberalism. They’re destroying the harm principle because the whole basis of the harm principle was, is if it doesn’t harm others, you can do what you like. But the thing is, you wreck that, you flatten it completely as soon as you say that words cause harm. Then you can’t raise the harm principle. The basis, the underlying basis of 19th century liberalism, you can’t raise it as a shield. Now the thing is, I am aware, I mean I’ve talked to people about this, that apparently the type of personality who doesn’t care what other people think is quite rare. This is one of those things that you learn by watching Jordan Peterson videos, basically.

I didn’t know anything about psychology. I did one psychology subject as a liberal arts undergraduate. And it was statistics, which was very useful. And they said to me, “Well, you just won the statistics prize, would you like to come and do more psychology?” And I read a few psychology papers and they’d do things like N equals 35. And I’d just sit there and I go, “No. Nope.”

Brian Smith:

You’re going, “No.”

Helen Dale:

“I’m not doing any more psychology.” “Why? What’s your problem with psychology?” “I think your entire discipline is about as genuine as a pile of three dollar bills.” I also said this to the philosophy department as well. Do you see the reputation of arrogant lawyers? And it wasn’t just me. Although the bloke I shared the set theory and logic prize with is an engineer and he said the same thing. This is the thing again, the higher marks, the IQ you needed for engineering and law and medicine was so much more than people who were just doing a straight science degree or a straight liberal arts qualification.

And so you just have this aristocracy of the professions in Australian universities. It still exists as far as I’m aware, to a large degree even now, at the good universities, at what gets called “the sandstones”. Which are the old ones that go back to the late 19th century, in the capital cities of each of the states. And so it was just I found this thing out by watching a Jordan Peterson video that this kind of personality, where you don’t care what other people think, is actually really quite rare. It’s apparently to do with being extremely disagreeable. And it’s particularly rare in women.

And the normal thing is people don’t like being criticized by others. And their usual response, in most humans, is to pipe down, to be quiet. And I’m not like that. I mean, I don’t have terrible manners. I’m not the kind of person who will then go out and just argue with people just for the sake of it. You know how some people on the internet are like that? They must be more disagreeable than me. They will just get into arguments for the sake of getting into arguments, which I won’t do. I’ll often just, “Oh, you don’t like that? I don’t find that comedian funny. I won’t go to his show.” Whereas other people have to enter and have a big stooshie, as the Scots say, have a big stramash. I’m not like that.

And it’s also that I’m not completely impervious to criticism. It’s just I’ve got close friends whose opinions I value and I have family members whose opinions I value. And if they criticize me, I’d be really upset because they have things that they know; things about me—and they know things about themselves–which means they have tremendous insight into my character and tremendous insight into their own character. This is sort of a family proverb that we were all brought up with, that I got from my father, was don’t take criticism from people where you wouldn’t accept their advice. Don’t take criticism from people where you wouldn’t take their advice, words to that effect. And so when someone carries on about me and says, “I’m this, that, and the other,” I sit there and I go, “@DongFart69 on Twitter thinks I’m a terrible person.”

I really don’t care. You’re not my dad, basically. “Don’t take criticism from people you wouldn’t ask for advice.” That was the expression that my father–he used to put it like that. So this profile is apparently quite rare and I have to be aware of it. But what it means is that because human beings, I think if we had a planet full of people like me, there would be punch ups all the time because I’m so disagree-

Brian Smith:

There would be-

Helen Dale:

I’m just really disagreeable.

Brian Smith:

But it might also be a very polite society. I mean can you consider the Heinlein adage “an armed society is a polite society,” an equally disagreeable society might lead to politeness.

Helen Dale:

Well this is Britain, so we’re basically disarmed. But I am six foot one and 80 kilos and can punch pretty hard. So there’s that. I don’t know. But so what they’re relying on now, this tendency is to get people to shut up by criticizing them and shaming them. And most people are happy to go along with that. And the thing that is in addition to it–and this to me is actually the most important part because I experienced it admittedly late on in the game and it then later went away because I kicked up an enormous ruckus. I had the weapons to defend myself by that stange, at this point I was a corporate lawyer of some experience and that kind of thing. I will stop copping any crap from you people anymore, I’m going to grind you into the dirt, and I did.

I used my connections. I used the fact that I knew politicians in Australia, that kind of thing. If people are going to persist in this behavior, I’m going to make their lives very difficult in return. And I think it was part of the reason why everybody just backed off from me was, I will make you pay for this and I will make it hurt you and you won’t be able to keep doing it. I’m going to stop being polite and I’m going to stop being nice. I think, because some of the criticism that came, a lot of the criticism that came at me was from the organized Jewish lobby. I think the fear was that I would just defect to the pro-Palestine side. And because being pro-Palestinian gives you cover to really hack into Jews and criticize them in ways that if you’re not pro-Palestinian you can’t really get away with.

I didn’t ever want to do that, but I think that was the suspicion that would happen. I have seen people do that. They have used it as cover to just go, right you try to get people canceled, I’m going to make everybody think that you’re an arsehole who’s trying to run the world. And I’ve seen people do it completely cynically as well. So in a completely cynical way, oh “here’s an opportunity for me take down a lobbying outfit.” And it doesn’t matter how much money they’ve got, everyone just ignores them and writes them off and thinks they’re whinging, which is another outgrowth of this as well. So what has happened is you now get, overwhelmingly, I only got in a bit, only to a degree because it started in the nineties and you couldn’t really do it very effectively then. What you get now is the deliberate attempts to destroy people’s careers.

And what they do is, the classic thing is they get a person who’s got a mortgage and three kids and deprive them of the ability to speak—because of the great Francis Bacon line, “He who hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.” So you have to shut up. Suddenly in order to keep paying your bills and to pay your house off and to send your kids to school—to do all the things in a normal life in a developed country—is only possible if you are quiet. And that has become, to me, the standout feature of modern cancel culture. The harsh criticism, yes I see the Jordan Peterson point that most people find it really wounding when they’re harshly criticized and accused of being a racist or sexist or whatever. I’m sorry, the response to that is just to go: “the burden of proof is on the propounder, you’ve not proven a damn thing. Go fly a kite. Talk to the hand, tell someone who cares because I don’t.” That is very much my response to all of these.

Brian Smith:

And anyone who offers that response on one level is fine unless they’re vulnerable to the hostage-

Helen Dale:

To the hostage-

Brian Smith:

… taken line.

Helen Dale:

… unless they have “hostages to fortune.” And to me, I mean I have no problem when there’s a bad behavior. I mean, I’m a lawyer and I have no problem with using the power and the tools of the law to stop the behavior. People who try to get someone sacked for their views, it should be a possibly criminal, but certainly delictual, certainly a tortious liability. Let’s make it a tort, interference with an employment contract. Bang them with the tort, finish up in court. Now let’s see how big and brave you are when you’re trying to get a gender critical feminist sacked or whatever it is. I have zero cares. This is where I’m, once again: “Australians are the type of people who will inhabit the dying Earth.”

This is where I have zero principles about, “oh the state shouldn’t do this, or use the levers of power to legislate against people’s behavior” or so on and so forth. States have been doing this for a million years and if the law doesn’t work, the law becomes an ass. Then it falls into desuetude. One of the reasons why abortion was decriminalized in the United Kingdom was because the CPS couldn’t get any convictions. And it was bringing the law into disrepute. It wasn’t just the feminists, it was just that juries were just sitting there going-

Brian Smith:

We’re not going to pass it.

Helen Dale:

It’s like what’s happened with the war on drugs in your country. In Britain it was abortion and infanticide. I mean I suspect it probably has happened with the war on drugs in the UK a bit as well but I know less about that. I know the history with abortion, infanticide. Yeah, you just get juries going nope, bye.

Brian Smith:

We’re not going to do that.

Helen Dale:

We’re not going to do it. But the thing is, if you can make legal mechanisms, that’s why I prefer a civil suit with this kind of thing. Because a lot of these people are middle class professionals, who engage in this behavior. If you force them to put their hands in their pockets they’ll go, “oh okay, yeah, that would be bad. It might have an effect on my mortgage.” So yeah, I would have no problem with adding another tort—of interference with an employment contract—put it on the books. I just think that that’s how they’re winning. That’s how they do it. And the hatred that is directed against left-leaning people who can’t be held to ransom in that way—even if they do have a spouse and children—is just off the scale because they can’t be touched. And the two that come to my mind—one American and one British—are Joe Rogan in America and J.K. Rowling in the UK. They’re both so rich and so famous and-

Brian Smith:

So unconcerned.

Helen Dale:

… so unconcerned. You just got Joe Rogan having a spliff on national telly. I mean he’s hilarious. And are you seeing J.K. Rowling, every time people are going to her, “do you want this to be your legacy?” on Twitter? And she just quote-tweets them with “the royalty check eases the pain.” It’s her version of Joe Rogan having his massive spliff.

Brian Smith:

And in the absence of people like this being willing to publicly show spine, it’s much harder for anyone else to.

Helen Dale:

Yeah, it is.

Brian Smith:

It’s wonderful they do exist because it gives people who think their employers might back them in sort of middling public spaces, the willingness to take risks they otherwise wouldn’t do.

Helen Dale:

This is absolutely crucial. My personal legal solution to the problem, I mean I’ve mentioned the idea of a tort, which was actually… That argument—which has been written at length in a law journal—was developed by an Australian academic, a specialist private lawyer, Professor Katy Barnett at the University of Melbourne. She came up with that idea. But there are other social conditions where you can use the law as a tool. My personal fix, if you really wanted to just completely wreck cancel culture and its ability to destroy people’s lives: you import the First Amendment rules from the United States to cover your public spaces. And then you import Australia’s industrial relations legislation, its labor law—which is very, very protective of employees and makes it extremely difficult to sack an employee because of their views or their religion or something that’s come out of their mouths. This was developed in the 19th century when Australia was considered the working man’s paradise. And one of the ways employers had tried to break down the labor unions was if someone was a labor organizer, they’d sack him. And so the courts and then industrial-

Brian Smith:

They developed protections.

Helen Dale:

… they developed protections. First it was the courts, but then it was actually mandatory arbitration. And this sort of entire architecture of arbitration—conciliation and arbitration and very strong labor laws—is actually written into the Australian Constitution. So if you wanted to kill wokery dead using the law—and yes you would still have all these people carrying on and you would still have people having to be brave when someone says mean things to them, I’m sorry, you can’t fix that. You can’t stop people saying mean things. But if you wanted a legal shield, you have a combination of the First Amendment, and Australian labor relations and industrial relations law, you do that, it’s gone. You just kill it.

Brian Smith:

Now that is something I could get behind.

Helen Dale:

But the thing is, a lot of Americans—you would have to in your country—you’d have to give up contracts at-will—they’re gone.

Brian Smith:

Yeah.

Helen Dale:

Okay, there are things, Australians find this very uncivilized when we find out that this is a thing that exists in America. How can you have employer provided healthcare and contracts at-will? This does not compute. You have to separate those two or everyone’s jobs will be radically insecure. And the good things that you can get from contracts at-will are wrecked by the fact that you’ve got healthcare attached to people’s employment. This is stupid. I have watched Australians say this.

Brian Smith:

Yeah, well it is stupid. And this is another one of these weird artifacts of World War II.

Helen Dale:

World War II, because they couldn’t increase people’s wages-

Brian Smith:

Wage freezes.

Helen Dale:

… so they had to give them “jollies” as they call them in Britain, had to give employees a jolly.

Brian Smith:

And we’ve never gotten rid of them.

Helen Dale:

Very silly.

Brian Smith:

We’ve never gotten rid of them.

Helen Dale:

Very silly.

Brian Smith:

Well, this is the world we live in but I think-

Helen Dale:

This is the thing, yes, there are similarities with what I went through, but I wouldn’t be like a 50-year-old retiree who is able to work part-time for Liberty Fund and then just do my other writing in my own house with all my bills paid. I’m not J.K. Rowling or Joe Rogan, but I can pretty much say what I think, within the law—from a country that’s got strict libel and slander laws, much stricter than the US. So you do have to be a bit careful in Britain about just mouthing off because people will sue. You can’t get up for example and call a public figure a liar unless you can prove it on the balance of probabilities, that kind of thing. That’s the way, that’s what I mean—you have to be quite careful. But within the law, I’ve got a fair amount of freedom and I’m not rich like either of those people, but I was able to survive a cancellation attempt.

What seems to happen now is that unless you are very, very lucky, people don’t survive the cancellation at all, or they don’t survive them in the same form. Like Kathleen Stock has become a pretty well known writer in the UK. She’s written a very successful book. She writes in the British press all across the political spectrum and so on, which is great and good luck to her. 10 out of 10, 100-

Brian Smith:

She’s had to restart her career.

Helen Dale:

100% success behind Kathleen Stock, I think that this is terrific for her, but she was a full professor of philosophy at university. She probably thought she was going to be doing that until she was 65, perhaps even older, because the retirement age in the UK now is about 68—which means people will work for a lot longer. And sometimes if an academic is very eminent, British universities will come to an agreement to keep them working if they’re still able to take a full academic load. Her entire career was just… poof.

Brian Smith:

Yep.

Helen Dale:

I’m not quite sure if, that would be like me—if suddenly my three novels were unpublished tomorrow. Even if I kept all my other gigs, even if I kept my job at as Senior Writer at Law & Liberty and so on and so forth. I’ve got these sort of big chunks of things on my walls here; those are books that I’ve written. And I feel, when I look at Kathleen Stock, I feel, I look at her and I think that’s basically what’s been done. Her entire academic career, it’s like somebody lit it on fire. And that to me is the thing that is the change now. And she’s one who’s come out relatively well. There are people who I know who’ve been canceled who for whatever reason—it goes back a few years, before people, before the Free Speech Union was set up in the UK—that was able to use existing labor law in Britain, employment law, to defend people or before or the equivalent in Australia, once again using labor law to protect employees.

I know a guy who finished up in desperate poverty, I’m not going to say his name, he, he’s finally managed to climb out of it a little bit now, who was canceled in this case by nasty feminists, okay, that’s all I’ll say. And he was canceled and he lost his job and he lost his job and he was at Oxford. So we’re not talking some dummy here. And he basically spent the next seven years with no work. He had to sell his house. He finished up in a hostel, this kind of thing. And that’s a relatively common story of what… particularly when it happened, maybe say 10 years ago, where people literally did not know what was going on. I mean the first piece I wrote about this kind behavior and treatment of employees and sacking them for their views was actually—you’re going to laugh when I say this—it was published in April 2015 and it was published in of all places The Guardian. Do you think I would get published in The Guardian now? Helen Dale, senior writer at a-

Brian Smith:

Absolutely not.

Helen Dale:

… center right American think tank. Yeah. “Oh gee, I think a pig just flew past my window.”

Brian Smith:

No, and this is the change in the world that we now inhabit and absent great bravery and a lot of employers having the same fortitude as these people we’ve been talking about, you’re going to have this, or a legal remedy.

Helen Dale:

Or a legal remedy. I have no problem with legal remedies. All these people say you shouldn’t use the levers of… The reason you get elected to government is so that you get your hands on the levers of power and you pull them. And yes, you do have to pay attention to… if you’re going to try to use the levers to punish your opponents, be very careful. Because that’s the classic case of in a democracy there is no such thing.

Brian Smith:

What goes around comes around.

Helen Dale:

Yeah. What goes around comes around and you could have this used on you. Absolutely. But a facially neutral piece of legislation that can be applied to anyone who plays this game I have no problem with that at all. Yeah, I’m a lawyer, law is a tool. This is the great insight of Herbert Hart, the British—sort of the leader of British positivists, Herbert Hart and Joseph Raz, both of whom… Well Herbert Hart, was actually the principal of my college at Oxford, Brasenose. And his thing was, law isn’t just force backed by a sovereign, it’s also a tool. It helps you to do things. And people need to remember that law is this tool that allows you to do things. Being able to draft a will is a power. And the law gives that to you. It’s private law.

Helen Dale:

And so is seeking a remedy and [unclear] tort. This kind of thing, the law facilitates as much as it commands. “The law is sovereign command,” which tends to be the way natural lawyers oversimplify the positivist tradition is only a tiny, tiny part of what the law can do. So yeah, I’m a big fan of coming up with legal remedies. I thoroughly approve of the campaign in the UK that got the Academic Freedom Bill through both Houses of Parliament. It’s now received Royal Assent and it’s already working. The Oxford University Student Union tried to make life difficult for the Oxford Union. That’s the debating society. It’s one of the student societies—it invites guests—who got Kathleen Stock to come and give a talk and participate in a debate. I used to be in the Oxford Union. They do do debates, but they do talks and they do all sorts of other things. And I remember one of their buildings that the Oxford Conservative Association used to have their port and policy nights in; and there was not much policy, but there was an awful lot of port.

Brian Smith:

There was a lot of port.

Helen Dale:

When I was a student there. And basically the student union, which was dominated by all these weird lefties, was saying, “We will disaffiliate the Oxford Union,” which meant they can’t have a stall at Freshers’ Fair, which is when they make most of their money because people sign up and pay the membership, which is quite expensive. I remember when I was there, it was like 150 quid or something. It’s probably more now, inflation. And then suddenly the whole student union just went flip because that legislation had been passed and it was, “oh, crap they can litigate because the academic freedom legislation is in place.” And it provides remedies in tort in England and Wales and delict in Scotland.

Brian Smith:

And lawsuits are sometimes the answer.

Helen Dale:

Look, one of the reasons why in your country the trans disaster, medical disaster hasn’t been stopped quicker and it’s going to take a long time to stop aas all your silly people who wanted tort law reform—with juries handing out millions upon millions to people for medical negligence cases. I was always on the opposite side to all the libertarians who wanted tort law reform. I was sitting there going, no, “massive damages payouts exist to keep the medical profession from turning into Mengele.” And people thought that I was just being up myself as a lawyer. “Oh, you’re just fighting with your sister the doctor.” “So you’re just having an argument with your sister because she’s a doctor and you’re a lawyer.” But no, I actually think massive damages—payouts that bankrupt companies—are there for good reason. They’re to scare seven bells of whatnot out of you so that you don’t do something completely bizarre. Like give a 16-year old a double elective mastectomy.

Brian Smith:

But we are headed back in the opposite direction I think, finally, after all this time. Precisely because more and more people are seeing the necessity of it being easier to sue. And in the absence of that, there’s no constraint.

Helen Dale:

The law—imagine those old images that you see from those American films with the guy pulling on the railway brake—that’s what the law is there for. That’s what we’re supposed to do.

Brian Smith:

And though it takes time, we’re swinging back in the opposite direction. But I think this is a good place to stop.

Helen Dale:

It is. We’ve had a wonderful chat.

Brian Smith:

Had a wonderful conversation. Thank you for joining me. Helen Dale’s books can be found anywhere you purchase books. Go out and buy Kingdom of the Wicked and The Hand that Signed the Paper and learn for yourself all of the interesting exercises and sympathy she’s engaged in. You can follow her on Twitter @helen was it underscore dale?

Helen Dale:

@_helendale. There is a graphic designer in Yorkshire who got @helendale ahead of me, so I had to have an underscore. And I’ve been on Twitter since September 2013. I was the last—I was in practice still then. I was the last solicitor at my firm to sign up to Twitter. I thought the whole thing was a giant exercise in triviality and nonsense. And I eventually—I don’t know that I was exactly told by the managing partner that “everybody else in the firm is on Twitter and you have to be as well.” But it was very, very close to that.

Brian Smith:

And so on that follow her. And thank you for listening.

Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.