HowTheLightGetsIn Festival 2023 preview: The event looking to overhaul the UK’s ‘suspicion of philosophy’

No one can accuse HowTheLightGetsIn Festival of lacking ambition. The annual philosophy and music event, held just across the Welsh border in the town of Hay-on-Wye, has always insisted on differentiating itself from the swathes of other literary and cultural festivals, where self-promotion is all too often the name of the game. Instead, over the course of four days and more than 300 events, HowTheLightGetsIn seeks to bring a warm accessibility to a cold and all-too-often foreboding area of study.

“It felt to me that in British culture we were a bit suspicious of philosophy,” Hilary Lawson, the festival’s founder, tells me. “But philosophy isn’t some sort of abstract, complicated, impossibly technically difficult subject. We are all philosophers. And so the topics in the festival are really trying to address the biggest questions that we are facing at the moment – but in a way which is very inclusive and involves everyone.”

Each year is centred on a theme, this year’s being “Error & Renaissance”. Lawson says: “The way that this theme works for us is we seek to identify errors that we [as a society] have made, and then look for what we might do in response to that.”

Addressing the many permutations of this topic, this year’s line-up includes a number of heavyweights, including former US presidential adviser Fiona Hill, former Tory MP Malcolm Rifkind, “legendary” Indian political figure Shashi Tharoor and outspoken Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Žižek. Punctuating the series of lectures, talks and debates are a variety of musical performances, spread across 12 stages. According to Lawson, the fact that lectures and debates can be broken up with music stops the “status game that invades a lot of events of this type”.

Belle and Sebastian, Anna Meredith and Gruff Rhys are among this year’s crop of performers, with genres ranging from folk, to jazz, to late-night electro-dance. “Music is there as a leveller,” Lawson says. “There’s a danger when you’re discussing ideas that you have the celebrity speakers, and they have a certain sort of status and other people feel that they can’t contribute – but we’re always trying to break that. We don’t have VIP areas.”

Here’s a brief snapshot of some of the festival’s highlights...

Anna Meredith

Composer and producer Anna Meredith brings her distinctive brand of electronic music to the first night of this year’s HowTheLightGetsIn Festival. In a review of Meredith’s Mercury Prize-shortlisted 2019 album Fibs, The Independent described the musician as “a much-needed creative force”, whose “shape-shifting genre-defiance constantly surprises and intrigues”. Friday 26 May, 11.15pm

New Powers and Fading Forces

Indian politician Shashi Tharoor, former British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind and US foreign affairs specialist Fiona Hill confront the decline of Western dominance on the global stage in this three-way debate. With Russia and China vying for a place at the top of the global food chain, and India in the throes of a massive population boom, is it time to overhaul the West’s egomaniacal self-image? Saturday 27 May, 4pm

The Morality of Sex

Held in partnership with The Independent, this debate focuses on the state of sex in modern society. Women’s correspondent Maya Oppenheim joins internet personality Steven Bonnell, filmmaker Myriam François and philosopher of psychoanalysis, sex and AI Isabel Millar to discuss carnal matters. Are regressive attitudes towards sex holding us back? Is it right to impose moral judgements on sociosexual behaviours? Is monogamy a norm that needs to be torn down? The panel will tackle these questions and more. Saturday 27 May, 6.45pm

The Life and Philosophy of Billy Bragg

Musician and activist Billy Bragg walks through a lifetime at the forefront of British protest music in this wide-ranging interview, conducted by Myriam François. The songwriter behind “Tank Park Salute” and “A New England” also features in the Manners Maketh Man debate later on the Sunday, in which he spars with philosopher Sophie Scott-Brown and academic Grafton Tanner over the role of politeness in public discourse, and the ways in which it can augment – or restrict – political dissent. You can read The Independent’s own interview with Bragg in the run-up to the festival. Sunday 28 May, 12.30pm

The End of Good and Evil

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, psychotherapist-philosopher Maria Balaska, and ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams all feature in this debate covering the function of a binary morality in contemporary society. Žižek – a figure whose eccentric mannerisms and pugnacious theories have turned him into rich fodder for internet memes – also features in the Game of Life debate, and delivers two hotly anticipated individual talks. Sunday 28 May, 4pm

The Trouble with String Theory

A strong panel has been wrangled for this debate on the merits of string theory: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, scientists Brian Greene and Tasneem Zehra Husain, and mathematician Eric Weinstein tackle one of the stickiest subjects in quantum physics. According to Lawson, the event will be “raising the question that maybe it’s wrong. Maybe string theory hasn’t delivered, or generated the explanations we thought it might. And if it doesn’t work, what might we do about it?” Sunday 28 May, 5.30pm

Gruff Rhys

Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys helps close out the weekend with a performance at HowTheLightGetsIn’s “Arena” stage. The Welsh artist has put out a number of acclaimed albums, both as a solo act and with a few different bands; in 2018, The Independent described his record Babelsberg as “a wryly written document of current social and political climates” with a “delicious sense of irony”.

More details on HowTheLightGetsIn Hay 2023, the world’s largest music and philosophy festival taking place in the idyllic book town of Hay, Wales, this 26-29 May, can be found here. As a festival partner, The Independent is offering a 20 per cent discount on tickets with the code INDY23. Don’t miss out on tickets here. For those of you who can’t be with us in person, all the debates and talks from the festival will gradually be released online in the months following the festival on the Institute of Art and Ideas online platform, IAI.TV