Stephen Fry: Why uncertainty can be a superpower

Stephen Fry is an actor, comedian, writer and presenter. He is also a patron of Humanists UK and a vocal advocate for mental health.

Why is uncertainty an important intellectual value to you?

I’m very lazy when it comes to intellectual things, and therefore I almost don’t bother with reasons, because I am pretty much fully an empiricist, rather than a rationalist. I don’t need to explain why certainty is wrong by any logical or metaphysical twists and turns. I can just say, “Look at what happens when people are certain.” It’s empiricism, it’s what experience shows – people of certainty have nearly always, as far as I can see, got us into trouble. People who are more shadowed in doubt, and nuanced and uncertain, seem to be, if not more likely to provide solutions to world problems, at least less likely to contribute to the problems quite as much as the certain. I mean, really, all I’m saying is something I think most people instinctively understand, that dogma and doctrine and ideology have been pretty disastrous for the human race. We can look at the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason and say these got us a long way forward, but they were not doctrine.

What about moral certainties?

I suppose Immanuel Kant had one certainty, which was what he called “the starry skies above me and the moral law within me”. And I kind of go along with that. This idea that we have within us, somehow, in the same way as we have other instincts … this thing, this Jiminy Cricket on our shoulder that says, “No, that’s wrong.” And we can argue that it’s our parents who teach us that. The religious will say it’s from doctrine and text. But Kant understood, and I think most people understand, that it seems to be something inborn – or, if it is learned, it’s so profoundly and deeply embedded as to be almost the same thing. That’s to say, it’s not that one hears the voice of one’s parents saying, “That’s wrong.” It’s the whole chorus of humanity that instinctively understands that stealing is wrong, that lying is wrong, murder is wrong, meanness is wrong, cruelty is wrong, betrayal, deceit and all that. We just seem to know it. We certainly don’t need to be told it by a hierophant or a priest!

And I’ve always been aware of that. I believe I’ve always had a very high sense of morality and ethics – not that I’ve been a very moral and ethical person in my life, necessarily – but I’ve been aware of [these values], and they touch me and pain me when I fall short. Maybe I misjudge other people, but I do know people who genuinely don’t really seem to care that much about the moral or ethical mark they make on the world – or who may not, when they go to sleep at night, beat themselves up about it. But I do, and I’ve always had [this sense of morality] and it annoys me to some extent, because I’d love to be free of it.

How does the problem of other people’s “bad” behaviour square with the idea that this sense of right and wrong is something that is in all of us?

That’s a really good question. Obviously, those of us who have been active within humanism are particularly annoyed by the claim of religion that without it, there would be no moral sense, because that just is empirically nonsensical, and rationally nonsensical too – and this was exploded, as I’m sure you know, by Greek philosophers, way, way, way back. Looking around the world, we can see that [the moral sense] is something that is apparently inborn.

One could look for the solutions, as we love to do, through evolutionary psychology and ethology. But I suppose the question, really – and this is where we get to the Greeks – is happiness. We want to be happy, that’s pretty obvious. And the question that exercised the Greeks was whether you could be happy, if you were not virtuous? If you are not kind and decent, and good, and thoughtful, and generous, and open and honest.

So the question is, can you be happy if you’re not a good person?

And similarly, can you be good if you’re not happy? That suddenly becomes a kind of political idea, that you can’t be good if you’re not happy. Oscar Wilde and others kind of mocked Victorian morality [for example, the idea of the deserving poor] by saying, “If you’re poor and you’re suffering, the idea that you can waste time being good in a Victorian sense is pretty nonsensical.”

Is that your belief, then? You believe that human beings are set up to be good, if the conditions are right, and it’s poverty, or injustice, or things going wrong in our lives that might warp us a little?

And the kind of territorial horrors we’re seeing now in the Middle East. It’s so easy for me to sit here in my fat, comfortable, western luxury, and talk about how moral the world is now, everybody’s good. And yet we can see there’s so much suffering, cruelty, abuse, terror, exploitation, etc. We know there are terribly wicked people out there who are sex trafficking, who are selling arms right this minute. There is a lot of terrible behaviour going on, a lot of
awfulness.

Sometimes I think, rather than being a handwringing liberal – which is, I suppose, what I am – I should be more like [18th-century writer] Jonathan Swift. You know, a true satirist.

What is it about Swift that you admire?

Now, Swift was a religious man, as you know; he was Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, he was a man of the cloth. But he was a true satirist, in that he absolutely did not let humanity off the hook. He presented humanity as completely disgusting. He made satirical points that were remorseless, like his Modest Proposal, which was that we should eat Irish children, because it would solve the problem of the excess of children [and ease the plight of their poor and starving families]. And it was so beautifully and rationally put, that he never excused himself from the irony to say, “Oh, boo, by the way, I’m being ironic.” He just stayed within it …

And he said – and I think this is a thing that a lot of satirists can probably agree with (and you’ll have to forgive the gendering, but that’s how it was in those days) – he said, “But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.” This is one of the things that’s really interested me over the years: the nature of the difference between the individual and the mass.

But let me just finish my point about satire. If I was a satirist, I would stop going on about morals here and morals there. And I would do similar things to Swift in terms of modest proposals.

What would you propose, if you were a modern Swift?

Here’s my modest proposal, that would instantly make the world a much better place, a happier place, a less violent place, a less aggressive place, a place where more people are likely to have an equal share of everything, and in which there will be so much less violence and aggression. And it is guaranteed, by the way. I’m not necessarily a big one for this, but it’s drug control. We have to outlaw the most dangerous drug in the world, which is called testosterone.

Without testosterone … Have you ever seen a cat that’s been spayed? From the yowling tomcat that fights in the alley, it becomes a little pudding, and you tickle it and it purrs, and it’s lovely, like a eunuch in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: pleasant, pleasing, slightly tubby because the weight gets put on.

And all these Andrew Tates, all these figures of toxic masculinity or however you want to describe it, would be fabulously reduced to being cosy, warm, sweet, and they wouldn’t have this territorial madness, this strange thing that testosterone adds to the human. It’s absolutely failsafe. It would work perfectly.

Very modest.

Yes, a very modest proposal – but apparently, there are problems.

Could we return to your point about the mass and the individual?

My interest really started when I was first in theatre and in the West End. I remember a play that was a moderate success, which is to say it was making money, but it wasn’t an absolute sold-out smash every night. It was eight shows a week. And I noticed that on Mondays, you would have about 40-50 per cent [seats sold], later in the run 60 per cent of the house; on Tuesday, it would be 60, 65, 70 per cent; Wednesday matinee would be 40 per cent; Wednesday evening would be 90 per cent. And then the rest of the latter part of the week would be sold out.

Now, let’s say you’re looking at the month of April, and in the first week of April, on that Monday, 52 per cent, and then the next Monday, 58 per cent. Why didn’t 30 or 40 per cent of the people who went on the second Monday come on the first Monday? Why don’t you have a Monday that is completely sold out, with queues around the block? But instead, it thins itself out. The individuals don’t know that, they’re just behaving according to whatever they want and need – “Oh, shall we go and see that play, darling?” And yet, it’s always the same.

Sherlock Holmes makes the point to Watson in The Sign of Four; he points out that although you can predict to a remarkable degree of accuracy what a mass of people will do, you cannot predict with any degree of accuracy what an individual will do. And it is a most
extraordinary thing.

Is that something that gives you pleasure, thinking of all those different people and the wonderful human diversity that there is? Is that something to value? You’ve talked about E. M. Forster before, and he valued it, as a novelist. In “Two Cheers for Democracy”, he thought that it was a good guarantee against conformity and totalitarianism.

Yes, I think that’s right. Also, I’m sure most of us face this strange sense that the human race is almost like rabid dogs in a cage. And you get too close to the cage, and the fierce yapping, barking, the slathering, and the horror of this creature, is what you get an impression of humanity being. But when you go out into the streets, or you sit next to someone on a bus, or in the pub, or you chat to them, it’s the opposite: everyone seems individually to be reasonable, kind of humorous, resigned about the mess of the world, not completely having swallowed a red pill or blue pill. There’s a kind of openness. Not all, of course – there are those who swallow all kinds of pills and conspiracy theories, and others who are loaded with prejudice against certain groups of people and all the rest of it.

But generally speaking, if you wanted to look at it in a gardening sort of way, of all the human seeds that you want to plant in the garden, there are only about two per cent that you’d say, “Oh, that’s a bit mouldy, throw that one away.’” The rest are really good, and will grow into wonderful flowers. But sometimes, the weeds are too strong.
And of course, you have to be aware that you and I as we talk, someone might listen, who is not well disposed towards us – and we are the weeds, as far as they’re concerned. We are the problem.

I’m fully aware that there are people further to the left of me, and further to the right of me, who regard my kind of centrist and progressive, vaguely tolerant liberal beliefs as not just fatuous and weak, but genuinely dangerous.

You seem to be saying you’re a woolly liberal, to use an old-fashioned phrase.

Yes – and maybe I shouldn’t be, as I say. Maybe I should be really fighting for the prohibition of testosterone, and walking up and down Oxford Street with a big sign.

Well, the alternative to being a woolly liberal is being a harder sort of liberal, and being more firm about the truth and necessity of liberal values. But that’s an inbuilt problem with liberalism, isn’t it? You see both sides.

And it is what worries me about artificial intelligence. It’s taken us hundreds of years to realise that all human lives are of equal value, and that women are of equal value to men, and people of different races and outlooks and upbringings are of equal value, and there isn’t a hierarchy of worth amongst humanity.

And therefore, you must bake those values into AI, so that Chat GPT and other [programmes], when they’re scraping data from the internet, if they come across data that suggests women are inferior to men from somewhere, they must have an instinct, a prime directive to ignore that. Yes, we can all agree with that.

But we forget that Russia and China have their own AI. They have a totally different ethical framework, one in which the citizen is subjugated by their duties to the state, and they should report neighbours who misbehave and mock the supreme leader. And suggesting that one AI can’t sort of infiltrate another is like saying, “If I put the yellow dye in the Pacific, I haven’t put it in the Atlantic.” Well, there’s only one ocean on Earth, and there’s only one internet, really. There are firewalls and national attempts to control bits, but, generally speaking, we have to be very aware of the fact that – and this is the part that’s so depressing for cowards like me – that these values that you’ve very perfectly expressed, maybe have to be fought for.

And fighting for values is something that, instinctively, we [liberals] tend to go against. The pure logic of Oscar Wilde’s comment that the ability or the willingness to die for something doesn’t make it any truer.

You implied earlier that intellectual uncertainty led, for you at least, to a certain type of tolerance. Would you say that was one of your moral values?

I think so. I suppose I would combine that with the things that have most compelled my attention and love all my life, and that is the arts: literature and poetry and music, and so on. They add another dimension, which is the ability to put yourself in the heart and mind and soul of another person.

That’s what imagination is. Imagination is not fantasy. It’s not, “Gosh, I pictured this planet in which the mountains are shaped like shoes, and there are 17 suns.” Fantasy can be very charming, but imagination is knowing what it is to be that person or the other person, to know what it is to be the rapist as well as the raped. And what it is to be the abuser and the abused, and to be the hopeful, to be the side-lined, and the ignored.

The best artists are able to become other people, and therefore allow us to understand humanity and the feelings of others more than we otherwise might. I think that, combined with uncertainty, is a very useful way of being in the world. You don’t judge people, necessarily. I mean, obviously, you make judgements. But it is [a case of] testing oneself. Not allowing oneself to get above other people.

In the current mess of the world, taking a position is sometimes regarded as the ultimate good – you must declare what side you’re on. In American politics, British politics, Brexit, the Middle East – all these terrible places where man is handing out misery to man, to misquote
[Philip] Larkin.

It’s wonderful to tribalise yourself on to one side of that and to make an enemy that is clear. But experience and knowledge of humanity, and the empirical ability to look back at history, I think, shows us that that’s no way to be moral. The most moral thing you can be is effective. And I think one of the crimes of our age is that people would rather be right than effective.

You’re thinking politically here.

Yes, that’s right. But it’s also very easy, because I’m a sensitive soul, to worry about what’s being said about one, and to fill in all the arguments against one in one’s head. So you hear a chorus of people and you end up wringing your hands and feeling as Forster did at one point, since we’re addressing that great man.

Please, tell us the story.

Well, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, a lot of British and American intellectuals and artists joined the International Brigade to go and fight for the Republican cause against the fascists, and the young writers [W. H.] Auden and [Christopher] Isherwood, who both knew and were hugely inspired by Forster, decided they would go off to Spain. And they went to see Forster, and he was sitting in front of an electric fire with some toast and a cup of tea, in a very old tweed jacket, probably, and I dare say carpet slippers – because somehow, he always comes across as wearing carpet slippers. And when they said they were going, he said anxiously, “Oh, do you think I should go too?” And they looked at him and smiled and said, “Morgan” – he was always known as Morgan, his middle name – “Morgan, your place is here at Cambridge with a pen in your hand.” He said, “Oh, good.”

Imagine him fighting alongside [George] Orwell and [Ernest] Hemingway! But in that sense, I do think one of the wisest lines ever given in cinema was that of Inspector Callahan [played by Clint Eastwood] in the second Dirty Harry movie Magnum Force, where he says to Holbrook a number of times, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” And that is very important, you know.

And that’s as profound an observation as any to end our conversation.

Clint will always give us the answer!

This is an edited version of a conversation first published in the interview collection “What I Believe: Humanist ideas and philosophies to live by”, edited by Andrew Copson and published by Piatkus Books. It appeared in New Humanist’s Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.