46: Douglas Davies

My guest this week is Professor Douglas Davies, Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. We learn about his Welsh background and how he has been in Durham for a total of 26 years, including the time he was there as a student. This interview takes a different form to most of the others in this podcast series in that it has less of an autobiographical dimension and it has made me rethink many of the questions at the heart of my research. Douglas discusses the concept of career planning, and its relationship to issues of social class, and why he thinks there is an element of futility to nostalgia as luck and chance are the two great facts of life. He talks about the problem that he has with retrospective ‘what if’ scenarios. Douglas asks whether with nostalgia we are looking for a prelapsarian paradise, ‘the perfect day’ and the desire for patterns and why they are a pathological expression of the drive for meaning. We talk about how people develop their worldviews and the problem with synchronicity and why we have the desire to see agency in the world. He thinks these are games played by the brain. We find out why for Douglas films are doing what myths have always done – namely, the overcoming of opposites, and we learn about the difference between values and ideas and their relationship with identity. He raises the concept of destiny and how it is invoked by terrorists and politicians and asks where nostalgia fits with this notion. The conversation then turns to the role of trivial events and how they impact on us and a stream of consciousness approach to life, and we find out why Douglas has a problem with revisiting special moments. We discuss whether nostalgia can be a positive evolutionary phenomenon and, conversely, we learn why there can be a side of nostalgia which entails engaging with fear. Douglas brings Durkheim into the discussion in the context of how society lives within us yet ‘I am me’, and we find out why the British don’t like apprenticeships. At the end of the interview we talk about how conventions change and the problem with predictive certainty and the ‘what have I learned?’ scenario and its relationship with wisdom as well as why, for Douglas, both the ‘looking back’ and ‘looking forward’ models are flawed. Please note: Opinions expressed are solely those of Chris Deacy and Douglas Davies and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of Kent.