Vale Felicia Huppert
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Jiroa, meaning meeting place for birds. Thought you'd like to know. Yes, this program is an unusual one, asking how much we really know about each other at a time when many apparently firm ideas are being upset, such as DAI, diversity, inclusion and equality. Yes, DAI has almost died in America in the last few weeks.

So it's interesting to see what my former colleague, writer and journalist Stan Grant, said about identity. And I quote him. I dislike the word identity, he wrote. To borrow from Kafka, it seems like a cage in search of a bird. Whatever happened to forgiveness? We live in such a prosecutorial age with endless grievances pitting us against each other.

That was Stan Grant on those tribes warring endlessly. But today I want to celebrate the opposite, and an Australian scientist called Professor Felicia Huppert, sometimes called the Professor of Happiness from Cambridge. When she died, by her own choice, having been very unwell, her heritage was noted internationally, and a remarkable tribute was held at the Bondi Pavilion by the beach.

But let's start this science show with the way my colleague Sanneke Dahr did in All in the Mind on Radio National, in a program about positive psychology. ♪

About 20 years ago, the field of psychology changed. It expanded. Until then, it was focused on all the things that can go wrong in people. Problems, you know, particularly mental health problems and how to treat and prevent them. But if you wanted to know what went right, what made people flourish, live well and function at their best, you were out of luck.

Then, psychology researchers started investigating these exact topics, in the process kickstarting a whole new stream of psychological study called positive psychology.

That's important because even if we've had a mental health problem, and it's incredibly important to get good treatment or preventive strategies, but even if we've had a problem, we don't want to just not have any more symptoms. We actually want our lives to go well. That's where positive psychology comes in. What does it mean to flourish and live well? How can we do that? And has the pandemic made it harder?

Spoiler, the answer is yes, but there is still lots we can do. The first thing to know about well-being is that it's not the same as simply being happy or experiencing pleasure. So happiness and pleasure can be very short-lived.

Also, we can get happiness or pleasure from things that may not be very good for us in the longer term. You know, alcohol or drugs or buying stuff that we think is going to make us happy. So well-being or flourishing is something that's more sustainable, something deeper. Dr Felicia Huppert is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Cambridge University and Honorary Professor at Sydney University.

She spent more than 15 years focused on the science of well-being, and she recently co-authored the book Creating the World We Want to Live In, How Positive Psychology Can Build a Brighter Future.

And well-being has become synonymous with things like yoga and green smoothies these days. But what Professor Huppert is talking about is broader than that. In the book, based on the science and the research, we've come up with five principles that are pretty foundational for developing well-being. And the first of these is the importance of connection to others. We are social animals, and a sense of belonging is profoundly important for our well-being.

And in fact, there's studies that show that if we feel socially excluded, it can cause as much pain as physical pain and activate the very same parts of the brain that are activated with physical pain. And of course, loneliness is something that people struggle with. And one of the antidotes to loneliness is finding ways to connect with others.

After social connection, Professor Huppert says the second principle for well-being is having a sense of autonomy. The sense that we can make choices and have some control over our lives. Of course, we can't have complete control or make choices because we live in social contexts and we have to consider other people. But a good rule of thumb is treat others as you would wish to be treated.

The third principle is having a sense of competence. A sense that, you know, we're effective in what we do and that's quite hard to do in new situations.

But the important thing there is to be open to new experience, to recognise that we're not always going to manage well and we might fail at things when we're not familiar with them. But to have a growth mindset and recognise that failure is not something that's an inadequacy in us, it's a growth opportunity. So that's a very important part of learning to be competent.

The fourth principle is paying attention to what's going well in life. And we have this inbuilt negativity bias that probably helped us when we were evolving and needed to be vigilant. But it doesn't serve us very well anymore. And it turns out that our well-being is greatly increased instead of focusing on the negative, we focus on the positive. We look at our and other people's strengths rather than their deficits.

And the fifth and final principle for well-being is having a sense of meaning. A sense that what we do is significant and worthwhile and makes a difference beyond the self. And there's lots of evidence that shows when people feel that their lives are meaningful or their work is meaningful, they just perform much, much better and they're much more fulfilled.

Sanakadar presented that program, All in the Mind, following the publication of Felicia Hubbert's book, Creating the World We Want to Live In, written also with others in psychology internationally. So what to make of this brilliant academic and her heritage? I'm with her two sons, Dr. Julian Hubbert, grew up here and represented Australia in the Science Olympics, winning a silver medal.

He's a former MP for Cambridge. Rowan, well, introduce yourself. Still an engineer? I'm not. I've actually quit just last year now, project management in construction, which was the engineering background. I'm now doing a master's degree in psychotherapy.

at the Australian College of Applied Professions. And Julian? I'm Julian Huppert. I run an interdisciplinary centre at Jesus College in Cambridge, so we get people to discuss some of the biggest issues of our time. We run some public events that are fun and interesting. Intellectual something in its title? It's called the Intellectual Forum.

That sounds awfully elitist. It's not a name I chose. If you have any better suggestions, please let me know. We generally just call it the IF. If. Reminds me of a certain poem. Absolutely. Do you miss politics? I miss the ability to get things done and to change the world to one we'd like to live in. I don't miss some of the pettiness. And frankly, it's the hardest I've ever worked.

If you take it seriously, it never stops because you will never be done helping your constituents. You'll never be done pushing for the changes that you want to do. There's no off time? None at all. I could tell you many, many stories of climbing Snowdon in the snow and ice with crampons and ice sacks at the top. There are a few of us taking shelter from the icy winds. And somebody said to me when we said hello to them, are you Julian? Yes. Are you free to speak at our Rotary event in September? Yes.

And I had to resist the urge to say, does it look like I've got my diary with me? Rowan, the celebration of your mother, Felicity Hubbard, at the pavilion in Bondi with wonderful sounds of the surf was a tribute I found profoundly moving.

far more moving than I expected. It was a superb tribute. And the interesting thing is, what you were doing was showing academically how superb she was, because many people would think a professor of happiness was a nice title, but it could be a bit eccentric in a Cambridge style and cute. It showed how Felicia had a formidable reputation.

as an academic. Yes, that's right. I mean, thank you for those words, Robyn. We tried to capture all of her essence, which in a way was easy because she was an academic to her friends and a friend in the academic world. But yes, she played a huge role and her influence will continue in that field of positive psychology of wellbeing. She was in it pretty much from the start.

and wrote some very important papers and had also just great influence on other people's research and presentation of the work. And yes, I think that will continue for decades. It's one of the lovely things about being an academic is that your papers will still be cited many years after your death. If you're a positive psychologist, you're not looking simply at how you can fix a malady. You're trying to see how you can point people

if they come to you, to a more hopeful way of living your life. Is that more or less the summary? Yes, it grew out of the area. There had been previously in medicine and in the psychological sciences a focus on the negative, as you say, on the sickness, the dysfunction, the ill health, ill mental health.

And in the 90s, 1990s is really when it started growing, was this idea of turning it around and saying, let's focus on the positives and develop those both individually and societally. If you move society, you actually affect more individuals than if you move the individuals one by one. And one of the pieces of work that she did with one of her students, colleagues, was a guy called Timothy Soh.

They went through the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual, which is the classification of psychological diseases.

and took all the negative terms in it and defined the opposites. So instead of depression, it might be flourishing. And they then sought to measure these because people hadn't measured them. And obviously, you need to measure things to work on them and improve them and focus on them. So that was a big piece that they did. That's one of those influential pieces of work that she did that still has an effect on the

Julian, having been in politics, you know how unforgiving it can be. Is it a way that positive psychology and the sort of work that Felicia was standing for could be productive even there? Yeah, absolutely. And I think some of the approaches of how you think about the world as a positive psychologist means you are looking for good things, how to enhance things, how to work with others, not always just to defeat them.

Politics at its best consists of people trying to work out how to create a better world. Mum and some colleagues wrote a brilliant work about creating the world we want to live in, which was very practical applications of positive psychology to a huge range of policy areas, environment, education, all sorts of other things. Politics at its worst is about how you defeat the other lot.

And I think Mum was never interested in that side, but much more interested in the positive side. And she had a lot of influence here in Australia, but certainly in the British Parliament, where there is an all-party parliamentary group that she essentially inspired trying to deliver some of her vision. One of the problems is that politics seems to be these days full of challenging words, slogans, if you like.

elitist. Elitist used to mean very, very good. You know, something the elite cricket player or academic who's working out how the universe was created. And nowadays it's an insult. Similarly,

Christ-like behaviour is sometimes called woke, rather. What do you think of the word woke? Look, I think it's a very strange word that's been actually twisted from some of the original things. It comes from some of the US black liberation movements and is now mostly used only really by the hard right to describe things they don't like.

And I'm not sure it's very, very well defined at all. But I think that's part of the problem is what is it people are trying to achieve? Politics has become very Manichean. There's good, there's evil, they fight with each other.

Each of us thinks we're on the side of good. Other people, therefore, must be on the side of evil if they disagree. And that was completely against what mum thought was important. To give you one more domestic example, she really enjoyed playing Scrabble. It's something her mother had played. But she hated the idea of playing against somebody and would instead play cooperative Scrabble to see how can we both play to get the highest joint outcome. And that lovely idea applies in political life as well. How do we create...

a world, how do we create systems, how do we create policies that aren't about winners and losers, but about maximizing joint winning. Another field that she got involved in just a little bit close to the end of her life was in the legal sector. So she was involved here in Australia, particularly with a guy called Michael Appleby, looking at how to bring women

wellbeing, positivity, cooperation into the legal sector. The legal sector is not one that is famous for compassion and care for its workers or for the people who are experiencing it as

clients or defendants or whatever the case may be and she was really getting quite involved in speaking at conferences and so on and talking about how to bring compassion into the law. So as Julian was saying into politics, into Scrabble, but also into the law that was an area she was working on. I hope that will continue even though she's not involved in that anymore. Another example, in fact there's a wonderful phrase in the book, a headline,

Constructive journalism, one of the great oxymorons, don't you think, or what? Is it possible to have constructive journalism? I think that she certainly enjoyed journalism that was bringing an interesting story out into the world. She certainly enjoyed your show, Robin, for many years, many decades.

Thank you. I mean, right at the end of her life, she interestingly turned off from the news for the last four or five months of her life. And when I would sort of go and visit her and maybe want to share some significant news items, she actually made it very clear that she was

quite content that it really didn't affect her anymore. Her future was short and therefore she didn't need to attend to it and she was quite liberated from that. She had been a real news junkie, would listen to the RN Breakfast Show and the BBC and other news programs and keep abreast of it. I think though she was more focused on the positivity and even when listening to the news, she always used to wish that there could be more uplifting stories, more positive stories, more constructive stories, as you say, that...

explain the world and investigate the world around us, but focusing on identifying the positive experiences and activities that are going on all around the world. There are thousands of people that are doing great things for their local community, for their national communities, in science, in the arts.

We don't hear much about that. We occasionally see them mentioned in honours lists that someone has done great local community work, but it's just a very small mention. More focus on that was something she definitely believed in. Yes, one of the challenges, in fact, if you, as I am, in journalism, and you get the flood of bad news, and if you look at the wars, I mean, all those young men, tens of thousands of them in the last year being slaughtered, and...

The figures are beyond belief. And the news stories are beyond belief. And you wonder whether people can cope with that. And in the book, of course, there is also a mention of climate change and that sort of thing, which is terribly difficult for young people to deal with. I think Trump has suggested that's one of the reasons he's leaving the Paris Agreement, because stop the bad news, forget the idea. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's a hugely challenging thing. And as Rowan said, mum would like there to be positive stories and empowering stories, not just stories about there's an awful thing, it's happening, you can't do anything, but stories about things that people are doing and ways that you could get involved to really make a difference yourself.

The wars, I think, hit her quite hard. She was born in Uzbekistan at the end of the Second World War. The family had been in Poland and had fled into what's now Ukraine when Poland was attacked in 1939. So a war in the area that they had been in really did have impact on her.

But I think there is a responsibility to think not just about the negative things. There's a growing trend, I had a student who was working on this, of young people not wanting to work in the climate, environmental area because they find it so miserable that the stress they put themselves under because it's such an existential threat that they find they just can't work on it. They can't think about it because it's too difficult and painful.

Donald Trump, I think, would like the facts to be different. And I think many of us would like it to be a myth. It isn't. But it'd be much better if it was just made up and we're going to have a better world for nothing. But the fact is, it is going to happen. But let's have stories not just here's an awful thing, here's an awful thing, here's an awful thing. Here's a brilliant idea. Here's a thing we could do. Here's a way you could make a difference. Here's a way some other person is making a difference that you could follow.

And she liked to make a difference where she could, particularly climate change was something important to her and environmental considerations, which did mean that she kept every piece of cling film she had ever used. So we've had to clear those out from her top drawer. But also she did something very beautiful, which was every year on Valentine's Day, she no longer had a lover, as far as I'm aware, and so wasn't sending out Valentine's cards. But what she decided to do, particularly, I think, when I had children, she had grandchildren,

As the greatest act of love that she could imagine, every Valentine's Day she gave a donation, I think quite a sizable donation, to the Australian Conservation Foundation because she felt that that was the greatest act of love she could give to her grandchildren and to future generations was to care for the environment.

Now, there's an argument where we're sitting in the ABC and in Parliament and society in general about the extent of evil, if you like, in the population. How many bastards, how many nasties are there who are going to be unchangeable? What they want to do is kick the door down, solve the problem, make you pull your socks up and all the rest of it.

However, the counter-argument is that it is very easy to make a splash when you just kick the door open with a gun in your hand. You get huge press. You're almost guaranteed headlines in the following papers. But doing good and saving all sorts of things through to just being kind to people is

isn't headlines. What do you do about that? Well, I think you've hit on it. It's not a headline. And so there are people who do very bad things publicly in order to get the fame, in order to get their name in lights. It's a sort of cry for help of a particularly problematic one. And if they didn't get any coverage...

and you got coverage for doing a good thing, maybe some of them would say, look, if I want to be famous, it's not about doing some stupid, harmful thing. It's about doing some good thing. That might help. There are lots of divides about what we think of human nature. I think people are by far mostly good people at heart. And I think mum was very passionate about that, even at quite some limits. One person I was talking to said that one way you can tell that people are not that bad is that when somebody is terminally ill,

They don't go killing the people they don't like. We don't see rampages from people who, frankly, the legal system can't touch. If you have a month to live, there's no way a trial would happen. You won't see jail time. Nothing will happen. But that doesn't happen.

And so most people, when effectively protected from legal consequences, don't do anything bad like that at all. So I still think most people are trying to do good things for them, for the people around them, and for the wider world. They don't always feel empowered to do that. And I think when people are nervous about their living conditions, if they're struggling to feed their families or to house people, the stress builds up and people behave worse.

But I think most people at their hearts want to do good things for other people. And mum would always say there's actually really good research that giving money to somebody else or buying something for somebody else gives you more happiness, more pleasure than doing the same thing for yourself. And so there's good evidence. And for anybody listening here, buy something for somebody else and you'll be really happy. What about legacy? What do you know? Rowan, you're more or less in the field studying it.

for Felicia and for the positive things we've been talking about, are they being taken up or is it a kind of small but worthy tiny bit of activity in the corner? I think that as a society we have seen a shift towards well-being and mindfulness. We see it in individual people. You know, there are so many...

apps that support mindfulness meditation which is something that can also bring a lot of benefits and that mum was very engaged in. I think in the corporate world as well it's something that increasingly employers are starting to recognise, support their employees with in their office's built environment but also in the habits that they have and attitude towards leave and

Legacy was not a word that she sought. She thinks some leading academics might be the type that want to set up a memorial fund in their name or name a chair in their honor or something. That was certainly not her world, her view. She, though, would admit to having an influence on the sector. And I think that influence will continue. One of the ways is that she's

She was all about the evidence. And I think she has influenced a lot of people who might otherwise make beautiful statements and grand claims of things that even are probably true, but without evidence. And she would always say that's almost certainly true and lovely and important and worthwhile, but we must find evidence. We must find evidence.

do good studies, thorough studies, controlled as best as possible. I think that's an influence that she's had broadly on the sector that will go on. Yeah, so you mentioned employment just now. Martin Seligman, of course, one of the people who's strongly involved and written huge amounts and very well known in the corporate world. Yes, that's right. And look, she knew Marty very well. Marty and her were really both in the field from the very beginning. I think he was the one that sort of first

publicly used this term positive psychology, which was how that whole academic sector became known. She was a bit of a thorn in his side sometimes with respect to evidence. She had at least one

conference when he was talking, she, I think, possibly even interrupted, which is something she might have done, to call out to correct him on an evidence-based point. And I think he even said, yes, Felicia, we all know that you know the facts of this much better, but he was a great communicator of it. So, you know, there's a balance. And she did always have more of a focus on the academic end of it. She actually wasn't a comfortable communicator. She didn't love giving talks in part because she had an eyesight problem.

which meant that she couldn't see the slides behind her, which I think made it hard. She had to learn her speeches by heart. Towards the end of her life, she was more keen on making an impact. So this book, Creating the World We Want to Live In, was a big part of that. And as I say, getting involved in the legal sector, for instance, one of the last big pieces of research she did was also looking at applying well-being to nurses. You know, nurses have an incredibly strong

stressful, demanding, high-pressure job. And so they were looking at actually how to apply some well-being frameworks and training for nurses and measuring scientifically, getting the evidence for whether and how it works. So she was interested towards the end of her life more in applying it, but I think she will probably be remembered in the sector as the rigorous scientist behind these beautiful ideas.

Absolutely. One of her books was The Science of Wellbeing and she was very keen to say what actually works. It's very easy to say do this thing and it's great. Some things work, some things don't and she was really quite committed. I think Rowan is completely right with what he says. But there are also policy areas where it is starting to make a real difference. Certainly in the UK, I live there, I don't know Australia as well. People are starting to think about public mental health. How do we help everybody to flourish a bit more rather than waiting until something goes wrong?

By analogy with public health, we don't wait until you're ill to start talking about a few basic things. So that's having some impact. There are economists who refer to her work. So GDP, which has been the big thing in economics for a very long time, is a completely rubbish measure.

because it takes account of many of the wrong things. Famously, if everybody starts doing their neighbour's laundry, GDP goes up quite a lot. But I'm not sure we'd all say things are much better. If you burn the building you leased like in Sydney down and then it's rebuilt, GDP has gone up. If you get cancer and it's treated, GDP goes up.

I think we'd all be happy with those not happening. So her work is used in economics. There's a number of people, Kate Raworth will talk about her work with donut economics. She was reading Roman Krishnarik's work, which links in about the good ancestor. And there's lots and lots of other threads that she's having here

in a huge range of areas. But as Rowan says, she wasn't a sort of telly star. She did do television. She did do government submissions. She worked on international panels. Did she go on demonstrations? She did go on demonstrations. Yes, absolutely. But not as a sort of person at the front shouting. She was very committed to many things. We found various letters from her over many decades, writing to ministers about things that she was concerned about. But almost always, what is the evidence for this? You say this. Is it true? How does this work?

And I think that is hugely important. And as we have a society that moves away from facts,

Actually, her work is even more important because there are trials that she was really interested in which didn't work. Here's an idea, sounds great, doesn't actually help children. And here's a different thing which does work. Let's do the one that works. Let's do the interventions that actually make a difference. So I think there will be a lot of things there. One of my favorite writers, Terry Pratchett, writes in one of his books, no one is truly dead until the ripples they've left in the world die away.

And mum's ripples will continue for a long, long time to come. They won't be Felicia Huppert branded ripples, but the ripples will be there for many, many decades. Felicia Huppert's sons, Rowan, as you heard, studying psychology now, having left engineering, and Dr Julian Huppert, a lecturer in chemistry, then the MP for Cambridge, and now at Jesus College, fostering ideas.

Felicia's book is Creating the World We Want to Live In. And do look up Sana Kedar's full All in the Mind programme for the longer story and the science. But here's another set of thoughts from the Bondi tribute on the importance of music. Meet Professor Caroline Wright from the University of Exeter. So firstly, I think music always had a big role in Felicia's life and she had loved it from a very early age and really appreciated music at a deep level.

I knew Felicia for nearly 25 years and throughout that time we shared many fantastic evenings at concerts together or listening to music, talking about music and thinking about really what it means. Like all things in her life she was very categorical about the music that she liked versus the music that she disliked but the music she liked she really loved.

She was particularly passionate about minimalist music, particularly the music of Philip Glass. And I remember with great joy one birthday giving her a box of CDs that was many hours of Glass music and just how joyful she was on receiving this to be able to listen to so much Philip Glass.

So the second thing I wanted to highlight when I was thinking about Felicia in music was just how incredibly supportive she always was of me personally as an amateur musician. I think one of her characteristics I guess that we probably all think of is how incredibly generous she was of spirit and supportive she could be of individuals and their passions. I played piano and written music throughout my life and she was incredibly positive and supportive of those activities.

I remember we went to a concert many years ago in Cambridge where I had a piece performed called The Rainbow Suite. As you might expect, seven movements all representing a different colour. And what made the evening even more memorable was that we then went to a bar afterwards where Felicia was determined to make sure we had seven cocktails of each of the seven different colours while we reflected on the music, what we'd thought of it. So that was just a really fun evening.

She also commissioned me to write a piece of music for her 60th birthday party, which I wrote a piece called 'Cooperative Scrabble', a duet for two people, trying to reflect the idea that, of course, she really liked to cooperate rather than compete, even when playing so-called competitive games. And the final thing I wanted to talk about was the role of music in the last few months of her life. I was lucky enough to go out to Australia and spend three weeks with her, a month or so before she died.

And although that period of time was difficult, there were also moments of joy. And we particularly enjoyed together sitting and listening to music and then talking about it. We spent actually many hours sharing with each other bits of music that we loved or new music that had come out that neither of us had heard before necessarily and then talking about it. And it was a really profound and joyous experience, actually. I think it meant a lot to both of us.

One of the pieces we listened to was a new recording of fabulous Bach Goldberg variations played by an Icelandic pianist. And I remember very vividly watching her face with her eyes shut as she listened to this incredible music, really revelling in the joy of it, but also hearing the incredible intellectualism and the cleverness with which Bach had created this incredible and timeless music.

She actually chose the aria from the Goldberg Variations as the piece that she listened to as she died, which I think is just an incredibly profound and beautiful piece of music. So I decided what could be more fitting than playing the next movement of that piece, so the first variation from the Bach Goldberg Variations.

which, as you'll hear, is an incredibly joyous and energetic piece. And I think it really encapsulates both Felicia's intellectualism, but also her joy in life and in music. ♪

Professor Caroline Wright in Exeter in England.

If you're someone who struggles to think in these ways and you're a bit negative or pessimistic, what can you or should you do? The first part is just knowing that it makes a difference. Absolutely, it's appropriate to be negative at times, to have disappointments and frustrations and sadness and anxiety and all of those things. But to recognise that actually it's also good to look for the positives no matter how small.

because they are very good for our health, for our relationships and for our capabilities as well. So just beginning with knowing that it's worth trying to look for these things and even just in the course of a day, just once or twice, noticing something positive and

And then building that up to make it more of a habit can really make a difference in our lives. Felicity Huppert, who died in August. I spoke to her sons, Julian and Rowan, after the celebration of her life and work at the Bondi Pavilion. And you'll find that work in detail on All in the Mind online, the science show on Radio National, where we revisit that question of identity as DEI goes down in the flames of Donald Trump's administration.

But what is DEI, woke and all that? Meet Jane Oromosu and her blacktionery where all is explained and much more. What made you write your little black book?

It was really on the request of a lot of the corporate work that Maggie, my co-author, and I do. We're a diversity and inclusion business. And when the tragic event of George Floyd happened, a lot of corporate clients said to us, we don't know what to do. We don't know what to say. We're afraid of making a mistake.

And we realised that there wasn't really anything tangible to help people navigate this really difficult time and place with black employees. And so we created My Little Black Book, a blacktionary. A blacktionary, yes.

May I call you a linguist or an anthropologist or what? Well, I'm curious for a start, Robin. But I think words evolve all the time. And blacktionary is an evolution of the word dictionary.

Right, but you could have done 'Bay-sion-ry' or 'White-on-ry' or... why black? Because it's through the lens of blackness. And is there such a thing? Because I've always had a problem. We're starting with the top of the alphabet. We won't go straight through, but... OK, before I go to black, accent. Now, I'm the only person I know of who's got no accent and everybody else has. You've got accent in your black-tionry, haven't you? Yes, accent bias.

And it's really interesting because we all have accents, every single one of us. So really, no one has an accent because everybody does.

Where's your accent from? That's really hard to say because I was born in the UK, but I went to Nigeria when I was five. But I had an English mother, as in she was from the north of the UK, north of England, and a Nigerian father. So what is my accent? Nigerians say you don't have a Nigerian accent. And when I'm in England, English people say to me,

You don't have an English accent. So I don't even know where my accent is from. I know it just sounds like me. We have a very great Australian. Well, he was a colleague of ours in the ABC called Stan Grant. And he said the problem with identity is you're taking such an uneducated risk.

looking for a clear identity you can put a label on. Of course, that's the exact thing that you're illustrating because when you're looking at me, for example, when I first came to Australia, they asked me, are you a Pommy bastard? And I said, well...

I discovered when my father died, my mother told me when I was 18 that they'd never been married. So in fact, I am a clear and obvious bastard in that technical sense. But I don't have any pommie in my blood whatsoever. You know, mother came from somewhere in the middle of Europe and the records have gone so nobody can find out.

My father was Welsh going back about 2000 generations. So no, bastard, yes, promi, no. So it's difficult putting labels on. How do you include people? How do you get diversity sorting when you can't actually identify them so clearly? Well, we have to identify ourselves first and we have to understand what labels have been given to us that we've accepted without necessarily challenging.

And then we need to start to pick it and go, is this really who I am? Is this how I want to be identified? Because I feel that our identity changes all of the time.

We're evolving as human beings all of the time. So who we were 10 years ago is not who we are today or who we're going to be in 10 years' time. And language evolves in the same way, so we've got to keep moving forward. So when you go to the corporate world and tell them that, and they say we want to sort things so we can be fair according to the new rules, D, E, I, et cetera, diversity and so on, if you don't know how diverse you are, how can you be included? Yeah.

Well, the first thing we say is have a look at your phone contacts and see how many people that are in your network either look like you or are different, because that's the first starting point. Because when we look through the lens of who we are first and the people we tend to socialise with or work with, if they're all the same, then maybe we need to kind of shake that up a little bit. I see. Yeah.

Going down through the various letters, I was struck by woke being in there. Woke, apparently, at the beginning of this year, was eliminated. Why do you have it in your book? The definition of woke in our book is a mindset of self-awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial equality. Woke is just the description of the behaviour of

and about the mindset that an individual adapts. Woke has been weaponized because

Going through this work of changing language, of moving ourselves into a place of being inclusive of everyone, regardless of who they are, where they're from, how they look, how we all speak, we're all different. We add to the wonderful tapestry of the world. But it's an uncomfortable process because the process starts within us. It's not from the outside. It has to start within us.

And individuals who feel really uncomfortable with having to challenge their current thinking neural pathways and changing them, that takes discomfort. And so we all have to become comfortable becoming uncomfortable to become and develop a mindset of self-awareness. That's all that woke means, nothing else. Before W, of course, is V, and I'd like to do a bit of virtue signalling here.

Okay, I came to Australia in 1972, not willingly, by a boat, well, a big ship that went via South Africa. I didn't want to go via South Africa because at that stage with apartheid in 1972 still going strong.

Having to choose the bench you're going to sit on or the loo that you were going to take, you know, Blanc. In other words, you go into the white loo. You're having to choose and be co-opted into a system which, frankly, I despised. Anyway, we went to a cafe which seemed to be mixed and there was a white manager there.

And he was very friendly and he saw the six-month-old baby, my son, then, all that time ago, and said, where are you going? Can we stay here? And so I said, no, we're actually going to Australia. Oh, you should stay here. Much better here. And on he went. He said, what's the baby's name? And I said, his name is Tom Mandela Williams. And the guy froze. He didn't know what to say. And in fact, the name in 1971...

when he got dubbed that, was something that was totally unusual. My son had a fairly hard time when he went to infant school and primary school. They called him Mandy. But suddenly there was the rock concert for Mandela. Everything changed. So, virtue signalling over and done with. What's your labelling of it there?

So in our book, virtual signalling is the act of pretending to be virtuous rather than having genuine passion for an issue.

And you saw that a lot on social media. We've noticed, especially with the death of George Floyd, where black squares were placed across a lot of different social media sites. Black Lives Matter. That's the one. Yeah, absolutely. And that is great in itself. But it's then what's the action that follows that action?

to make sure it's embedded within the organisation the individual works for or represents or within your own life? How are you making sure that you move it forward? And when it's just done because it's on trend, in fact, it has, I think, a more detrimental impact than a positive impact.

Because it means we all think the same. We'll all do it in the same way, which we call groupthink. But why don't we challenge? Why am I doing this? Is it to feel part of it? Is it for light? Is it just for immediate gratification to say that, yes, I'm in support of a terrible event that's happened?

Or is it because I'm really passionate about this? Really, really passionate. And it's important that we know the difference. And that's what our book is about. Really just helping individuals, including ourselves. How do we make the world a better place for everybody, regardless of the colour of your skin? Or in some people's terms, your race. Now, it just so happens in the science show and in practically all of the journals I've looked at,

There is one human race. In other words, you can have a body of people who can have children together and they're genetically pretty well, not identical, but they are coherent. And there could have been another race beyond the Urals, but no one found one. And many of the ancestors we've got, the hominids, as they're called, way back,

who would not necessarily have been so easy to mix with us, they're no longer there. Now, I can tell you I have got 2% of Neanderthal genes in me and a couple of other sets of genes.

But it's mostly European stuff, but it's one human race. Is that what you go along with in your book? Yes. Yes, we do. Rather than stirring the pot. And what's been the reaction so far? You know, I mentioned the possible confusion of corporate world saying, OK, what do we tell our HR departments to do now? We're slightly confused.

I would say that there is a real willingness in the corporate world to engage in how the language of race is evolving, because that was the reason we wrote the book. The question is, how do you know when the language of race evolves? How do you know when it changes? And that was really the question that we were asked a lot from our corporate clients, which led to the writing of the book.

Because they want to know what can they say? What should they not say? What is OK? What isn't OK? What's a microaggression versus a macroaggression? What's cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation? How can I make my workforce feel that they belong?

And similarly, a community, because with such, well, climate change and huge numbers of people having to leave their country because it doesn't work anymore, either because there's war or vast change with the waters coming up and removing your island. What do you do? And this is it. It's about we've got to realise that we're all in this together.

So let's all do a little bit. It's just a bit at a time every day so that we can really start to feel that we are one together. It will take time, Robin. There isn't a one-stop shop to fix everything. But it really is about how do we, as human beings, make us all feel included together as opposed to divided. And language can divide people.

However, it can also bring unity. And our role and our job and our book is about let's break down the barriers so that people feel unified, people feel comfortable together. Because the human brain, as you know, is wired to identify differences very, very quickly to see whether or not we are safe.

What we need to start to understand is we can override that. We can recognise that that's what's happening with our neural pathways, the way that we've been designed, that we are safe. But that's our job to do first. And then it's how do we connect each other? And I always say the universal language is a smile. We all understand that. My final question to you, what's been the response of scientists? Have they been in touch with you and said things?

One scientist has, one science journalist has. Do you know, that's a really good question. I need to give that thought. But I would say that science and language are interconnected. Yes, but have the scientists said, oh, you got that wrong or something like that? Oh, no, no, not at all. Not at all. And I would love for a scientist to say we got that wrong. It would be a wonderful conversation to have, or should I say discussion to have? Because it's all down to interpretation, is it not? I take your word for it, Jane. Thank you. Thank you.

Jane Oramasu wrote The Blacktionary with her friend Dr Maggie Semple, OBE, who's linked with Cambridge. The Blacktionary is published by Penguin.

Jane and I are ethnic, and if you miss some hard science in this so-called science show all about human beings, here's another ethnic scholar. He's 96 and was a mathematician at Harvard. Some of you who have small children may have perhaps been put in the embarrassing position of being unable to do your child's arithmetic homework because of the current revolution in mathematics teaching known as the new math. So as a public service here tonight, I thought I would offer a brief lesson in the new math tonight. We're going to cover subtraction.

This is the first room I've worked for a while. It didn't have a blackboard, so we will have to make do with more primitive visual aids, as they say in the ad biz. Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here. 342 minus 173. Now, remember how we used to do that. Three from two is nine. Carry the one. And if you're under 35 or went to a private school, you say seven from three is six. But if you're over 35 and went to a public school, you say eight from four is six. And...

Carry the one, so we have 169. But in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer. Here's how they do it now.

You can't take three from two, two is less than three, so you look at the four in the tens place. Now that's really four tens, so you make it three tens, regroup and you change the tens to ten ones and you add them to the two and get twelve and you take away three, that's nine, is that clear? Now instead of four in the tens place, you've got three 'cause you added one, that is to say ten to the two, but you can't take seven from three, so you look in the hundreds place.

From the three, you then use one to make 10 ones, and you know why four plus minus one plus 10 is 14 minus one? 'Cause addition is commutative, right? And so you got 13 tenths, and you take away seven, and that leaves five. Well, six actually, but... The idea is the important thing. Now go back to the hundredths place. You're left with two, and you take away one from two, and that leaves...

Everybody get one? Not bad for the first day. Hooray for new math, new math. It won't do you a bit of good to review math. It's so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it.

Now that actually is not the answer that I had in mind because the book that I got this problem out of wants you to do it in base 8. But don't panic. Base 8 is just like base 10, really.

if you're missing two fingers. Shall we have a go at it? Hang on. You can't take three from two. Two is less than three, so you look at the four in the eighths place. Now that's really four eighths, so you make it three eighths. Regroup and you change an eight to eight ones and you add to the two and you get one two bass eight, which is ten bass ten, and you take away three. That's seven. Okay? Okay?

Now instead of four in the eighth place, you've got three because you added one, that is to say eight, to the two, but you can't take seven from three, so you look at the 64s. 64. How did 64 get into it? I hear you cry.

Well, 64 is 8 squared, don't you see? When you ask a silly question, you get a silly answer. From the 3, you then use 1 to make 8 ones. You add those ones to the 3 and you get 1 free base. 8, or in other words, in base 10, you have 11 and you take away 7. And 7 from 11 is 4. Now go back to the 64s. You're left with 2 and you take away 1 from 2 and that leaves... Now let's not always see the same hands.

One, that's right. Whoever got one can stay after the show and clean the erasers. Hooray for new math, new math. It won't do you a bit of good to review math. It's so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it. Come back tomorrow night. We're going to do fractions.

Tom Lehrer at Harvard in the 50s and 60s. He's now 96 years old and still a mathematician. Maybe the mathematical quandaries he illustrated are still apparent. Australian students still struggle or opt out of maths? Next week, the Science Show brings you our new chief scientist, Tony Haymott, a glimpse...

How AI Conquers Mars, A Report from the Distant Future, and we visit Lord Howe Island. The science show is produced by David Fisher. He's also ethnic, and so am I. Robin Williams, and so was Carl. CPE. CPE.

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