Andrew Doyle and Stephen Blackwood: The Morality of Satire

i've got the great pleasure today to have andrew doyle with me on the ralston college podcast andrew doyle is a satirist a writer and a doctor of renaissance english poetry thank you not not not a proper dog i can't heal you you know well well you know doctor in the you know in the sense of a teacher dr andrew doyle we could say anyway welcome andrew to the world's college podcast uh it's great to have you here thank you for having me it's a pleasure i alluded to your background in renaissance poetry could you just sketch out for us a little bit of your academic or educational background and we can sort of go from there into various other questions yes i was all set to to be an academic i was sort of going that in that direction um i was a i completed my doctorate at oxford university um and at the time i was also a part-time lecturer at the university um and in my my field was uh renaissance poetry specifically my doctorate was about renaissance poetry so i taught the undergraduates the shakespeare module at the college wadham college at oxford um and i also taught modules on i think uh tragedy and um it's going back a bit now um and theater modern british theater i think so um uh so i was all set to do that and then um and my background academically had been that i'd done my undergraduate degree at aberystwyth university and then i wanted to do a master's degree uh but specializing in renaissance literature and uh and i really wanted to stay at aberystwyth to be honest i loved the place but they didn't offer that course so i went to york and i was able to do that because i had a scholarship from york and then i was funded by the arts and humanities research board to to write the um doctoral thesis at oxford um and that was good for me because i wanted to focus on manuscript work a lot of manuscript works so the bodily library is by far the best place in the world for early modern manuscripts so uh so that all worked out really well one of the first things i did when i got to oxford was learn how to read the handwriting 16th century handwriting um and that was great so that so that was my trajectory but then i started feeling disillusioned with academia at oxford and i felt that i didn't want to do that as a career actually one of my supervisors explicitly warned me not to do it he said you'll run around you'll end up an elderly man running around the quad screaming why have i wasted my life that was his view on these things so um and i thought that was a bit alarmist but i i but it did tap into something that actually i wanted to be doing other things that were maybe a bit more creative rather than just writing about other people's work you know but like the professor and uncle vanya you know this idea of i want to i want to go and do some stuff for myself so i moved to london and i started putting on plays and writing comedy things mostly um uh and gradually sort of drifted away from academia that way but i ended up teaching at a secondary school because i'd run out of money and i i i wasn't qualified to do anything else so i ended up as a secondary school teacher for a number of years as well um before i was earning enough money from comedy and and performance to give that up so that's that's sort of my sort of vague background i guess before we started rolling the interview we were talking a bit about the idea that language is uh all there is that uh language is power and all there is is language no realities beyond that um can you give us a sense of of how you encountered that view in your doctoral studies uh and then we can you know sort of trace its its uh trace the widespread and influential character of that idea in other words well i didn't count that in my undergraduate studies i mean this was so built into academia of that era of the sort of late 90s early 2000s it was so kind of built in uh it was largely being promoted particularly in english literature you know has largely been promoted by over here the cultural materialists over in america the new historicists so um you know in order to pass a degree uh in english literature you would need to understand and grapple with um theory and and particularly post-modern theory and post-structuralist theory foucault derek uh these are the people who who um popularized this idea of uh that there is no reality but beyond the language we choose to express our world and that you know and this this notion was so sort of built in it was almost a kind of dogma so you so you'd end up just it wasn't even really up for discussion you know i remember going to conferences and things and people would just cite foucault um uncritically as though he was um i mean i mentioned to you before we started recording there's the book saint foucault by david halperin which is unashamedly i mean it describes itself as a hagiography it's unashamedly worshiping him as this kind of deity figure and that of course is not is not healthy um i mean there's a lot of interesting stuff that foucault did but there's also a lot of um of stuff that doesn't interest me and or a lot of flawed premises um so i think uh it was already built into to academia at that point and i think what's happened now is what we're seeing is that stuff this sort of stuff is a bit outdated i'd say but but it's filtering into the mainstream now i think that's what's happened that's why when you hear people talk about speech being a form of violence um you hear this very sort of sensorial uh attempt to control the way people speak because they believe that if certain speeches normalize that's the word they use normalized or legitimized uh then the world changes people's ideas change because because language constructs absolutely everything that idea is essentially an old post-structuralist idea it's a it's it it comes from there it's just migrated into the mainstream somehow that's the thing that i think we need to grapple with and a lot of the people who who do buy into this faith-based position um that language constructs reality and not only that that um that um um i suppose uh that we need to control certain forms of speech we need to control it for the sake of social justice this this all of this idea com has these origins in academia even though many of the people uh perpetuating it don't know about those origins they don't read uh foucault or derrida or anything like that they don't they don't go back to the source material they've just sort of imbibed uh the essential ideas somehow um so i think that's what we need to i think that's why understanding where it's come from is is important in terms of tackling it now yeah let's let's dig in a little bit further into the the fundamental character of this world view uh the i i think it maybe even goes back further in terms of first articulation maybe into the mid 19th century into marx and feuerbach and other figures of that sort i mean when you think when when marx says man makes religion religion does not make man and other things of that sort the driving idea seems to be that the there is no realm independent of what we ourselves are creating so it's a fundamentally constructivist standpoint well no this is why it's been so readily adapted by the it was so readily adopted by the post-structuralist that's exactly why because it lends itself to that esoteric worldview that almost religious worldview you know there's a really good reason why there's a whole chapter in joseph schumpeter's book um what's it called capitalism socialism and democracy is uh a sort of standard book in economic theory there's a chapter on marx as a religious figure and it makes complete sense and when when when deredar got hold of it i mean what what the french post structures of the 1960s were doing is they were substituting um money the economy for uh identity and power structures right so so it's a template that they used and and even the word marxist was used co-opted um and that's where you get all these arguments now about well are we dealing with cultural marxism and then genuine marxists would say that this is nothing to do with marxism um but it's a but it's a it's a it's a fair point that the the the uh the the originators of this very idea were openly co-opting marks so it just you're right i mean this stuff does go back a long long time but i think those are the key i think the key turning points are firstly when uh the the french theorists adapted marxian ideas for that for their own purposes and developed these this emphasis on language and power uh power knowledge as foucault had it um and then you get that other turning point which i know james lindsey and helen pluckers talk about in their new book cynical theories the applied post-modernism where you know you had the theory but then you had to generate a new generation of activists in the 1990s who wanted to apply the theory to society and change society so whereas you can go you know you can the old post-modernists were not activists in the way that the current crop are and that i think is the major turning point because now what we have is policy decisions in the government in the arts in education in higher education but also in in schools um in hr departments across the managerial classes and all of these things are being informed by postmodern ideas untested and unproven and largely outdated but they're being treated as truth rather than contested theories and applied to policy hence hate speech laws because then you know they're saying that if or the idea that if we don't control certain adverts and we've got the advertising standards authority banning certain adverts if they perpetuate stereotypes you've got the mayor of london taking down adverts from the tube if they perpetuate certain stereotypes about women uh because there is a belief that if you put this mass media stuff out there the country changes the minds of the plebians are are are corrupted which is uh of course the exact worldview that the old um like mary whitehouse and the old sort of um theocrats had um but that idea media affects theory taken as gospel right even though it's been debunked even though you know six decades of research in the media effects theory show that it doesn't isn't real that there isn't this correlation between uh mass media consumption and and the way the public behaves so we know that's something and the directs of the the direct effects model has been completely debunked but that doesn't matter because this is like i say a kind of faith uh religion idea that is now being applied as truth that's the problem it isn't that we can't have a discussion about things like systemic racism and you know structural inequalities and all that sort of stuff these are legitimate and valid discussions to be had the problem is that it is asserted as though it is truth so the evidence lies in the assertion so you can say you say britain is a fundamentally structurally racist and white supremacist culture and you go from there well no that's not a starting point that's a conclusion that you may or may not reach after much discussion and ever evidence-based thought that's not happening just skipping over the discussion bit and taking a faith-based position as the conclusion that's that's that's the problem that i see happening and i do see all of that coming from uh the problems in academia that's why i think fixing the humanities and the social sciences is probably the priority although and now i note it's infecting other areas of course as well like mathematics and science and that kind of thing yeah there's no question that this is a world view that is uh propagated by and through above all the university system and it it it goes from there into any and all other forms of culture because it's upstream of all those other forms of influence so you deconstruct the idea of beauty in a philosophical way that ends up architecturally being expressed in brutalism and in forms of visual culture that deny explicitly that there is any objectivity to harmony or proportion or any of these kinds of things and wish to insist that we confront directly the absence of those realities by building ugly things and so in that sense i mean architecture is actually one of the most one of the clearest forms of the ideological standpoint because we we have to look at this stuff every day let me tease out a few uh things what you've said the first is that i think the activism is baked into the constructivist standpoint because insofar as you think you know reality is just a construct well it's just a matter of having enough power to change what's real right i mean it's that's it just that's a perfectly logical move to make um the second thing is that and one often here's this invocation of a religious standpoint and i want to tease that out and also maybe push back on it a little bit because really the work that religion is doing in that sentence is a stand-in for an un critically accepted uh axiom something that's taken on faith so to speak but you know we also uh know that religion can have a rational content and you know in in fact that is in in in certainly in the western tradition that i know i mean the the uh going right back to the greeks and you know socrates relation to the oracle there is a discursive character to greek religion that is taken up through certainly christianity and judaism at certain uh periods certainly in uh in the other religious religions of the book islam for example so what i'm trying to get at is that their religion can be something that is simply uh non-rationally uh uh believed without any discursive or conscious grasp of the content whether it's true or false or whatever but that's not true of all religion all the time no i call the social justice a religion largely as a rhetorical device okay because because i think in order to tackle it it has to be accessible and understandable and i think that's a good way a good way that that most people will just immediately understand is that the fundamental principle being um a group of powerful individuals who are not the majority but they are the powerful elite uh are expecting you to accept things that are true that are not true and expecting you to articulate the idea that these things are true without evidence that's something that you can broadly uh applied to the history of of the abrahamic religions i think that's a fair point i mean you can i'm not trying to suggest that that major religious practices are devoid of rationality or thought but there are um quite obvious examples where rationality is a hindrance i mean if you take for instance and more moreover the expression of a faith-based position is expressed expressed through rational terms so to give an example so let's take transubstantiation now the way that this is explained that the the bread that you see before you has literally become the flesh of christ right not figuratively not symbolically it is literally the flesh of christ but it still looks like bread and it still tastes like bread and it has the quality of bread now in order to justify this uh you get this concept of transubstantiation which is drawing from an aristotelian principle the idea of that everything has substance and accidents you know and what has happened here is that the substance of the bread has changed but the accidents its breadness remains uh the same okay now that's quite a convoluted way to to to expect people to accept what is effectively a magic trick except that this has taken place and it's dressed up in in such sort of difficult terms and and and esoteric terms that it's likely to evade a challenge for most people now this is this is something i think is very important about the current post-modernist social justice movement is that the jargon is deliberate the the the use of of terminology that is not understood the fact that when they talk about anti-racism they don't mean what everyone else means by the phrase anti-racism everyone else means to be opposed to racism they don't mean that okay they mean something very much more specific uh which is about a recognition of the uh the notion of white privilege of the notion of systemic racism and that and that if you are not being actively opposed to that original premise that you may or may not agree with then you are not being anti-racist so so it's things like that that partly they play on the ambiguity they play on people's good nature uh because who wouldn't want to be anti-racist right um but it's also designed to dress up something that's pretty flimsy i mean if you if you re and this has always been the case i remember reading judith butler's book gender trouble back in the 90s you know this sort of seminal work of queer theory you could pretty much summarize what she's saying in a blurb in a paragraph if you want if you chose to she just has an incredible way of going on for 200 pages uh and dressing everything up in the most convoluted uh obscurantist language uh and and and saying very little frankly so that's what i mean about the religious uh comparison uh i mean you you know it if you if you tell the congregation that the bread has turned to flesh actual flesh uh and they question that then you can throw this this uh philosophical philosophical concept of transubstantiation at them and it's going to stop them it's going to stop them from approaching it this is okay i don't understand this but there's a reason behind it the big words tell me so and then move on so it's a way of exercising control i mean one could have a long talk about the ways in which religion perversely uses philosophical standpoints uh in order to you know pull the wool over the eyes in the way that you're suggesting i'm not a scholar of 16th century 17th century theology but there's certainly in say richard hooker's account of what's going on in the sacraments there's a much richer account of that than comes to be portrayed subsequently but my fundamental point actually is that in the greco-christian uh standpoint that develops in the west what really is going on is the claim that truth is sovereign and so there is no claim that cannot be inspected i mean you know aquinas was was was if he had lived longer would probably have been excommunicated for holding to the high view of rationality that he he that he advocated the whole greek philosophical tradition emerges out of a phyllis it is a philosophical reflection on the poetic uh standpoint you know presented homer and the and and and the other poets and so it's a it's a it's not that the poets don't have anything true to say it's that it's held in a poetic or intuitive mode which then philosophy comes along to say well here's what actually are the here's what the philosophical or universal truths present in that are i think it's it's important to take these questions of religion outside of the context of the religions that are currently still practiced like whether it's christianity judaism or islam because the various dogmatisms and absurdities and irrational modes of behavior by certain adherents to those religions can uh let's say blind us to investigate the dynamic between say myth and philosophy or muthas and logos that are is otherwise present in history and so the point i'm looking to make is a simple one and that is that but a deep one and that is that myth which is often the mode that religion can take there can be true myths or myths that have truth in them but those truths need to be articulated by and grasped rationally you don't just say oh well because zeus says so that's therefore we should do whatever you say well wait no we can give a rational account of what is happening in the myth and that's how we know it's true not because we've received it simply as a myth but because now we see that the story is giving rise to a deeper reality or helping us grasp a deeper reality but i think that the the point that i'm looking to make here is that that very process is the one that's denied when you deny any kind of sovereignty to truth or rationality itself when you jettison that principle all you're left with in the end is power and the coercions that power can wreak in the world because you have denied that our thinking has any purchase on reality in fact reality has no reality so there's nothing there even to know i think you're absolutely right and i'm not i think it's worth emphasizing that the comparison with religion is not an attack on religion right the attack of the the the comparison with the social justice movement it's not it is it is like i say a rhetorical device to explain that you know it is the broad the broad brushstrokes the basic things like being told to express something that you know not to be true the fact that they seek to excommunicate people who don't agree they seek out heretics all of these sort of qualities that you would associate with a kind of caricatured vision of what religion is but nonetheless it is an effective way to to to explain those basic ideas uh i'm completely on board with what you're saying about the embedded truths in myths and the way that say you know you can look at the the two creation narratives in genesis and you could say you could you could even debunk them on the basis that there are two contradictory narratives in the same book um but that's not the point is it but the point isn't the the authentic uh historical matter the point is the the truths that they uh point to right and and so i which are reached from a perspective of rationality so i completely i can i'm completely on board with that and i suppose i i do need to make clear i mean i'm writing a book at the moment about this where i will be using this religion metaphor a great deal i need to make clear in that book what i'm doing there but it is not an attack on just religion per se that's not in fact it's not at all um it's an analogy i'm not yeah i i i completely get what you're saying and i and i and i think i fundamentally agree what i bristle with a bit is when people wish to use as a synonym for you you used like to wish to use religion simp as a blanket synonym for uh irrational beliefs and that's that's that's that's that's that's just not fair either to the history of religion or of philosophy it it it can be the way in which certain people take up religious beliefs but that can be the way people take up scientific beliefs it can be the way people take up any any number of beliefs can be taken up in an unreconstructed and and irrational way whether those beliefs are true or not is is sometimes irrelevant to when the view is taken up without regard for its truth you have no idea whether it's true i think that's the more important point about this isn't it that the it's the attack on the notion of truth itself that is the real problem that's why we've seen in just in the last week all of this incredible these debates on twitter about two how two plus two can equal five you know and and that you know this is not about uh i mean you know and this is coming from um major mathematicians at a major academic university uh institutions right so it's not really about the the technicalities of advanced math mathematics that's not that's not what this is what this is is an ideologically informed thing which attempts to undermine uh the the truths that we we we rely on in order to exist actually uh it's part of a broader project um so yeah i think that is i think that is a problem i think teaching people or telling people to be mistrustful of the idea of truth gets us absolutely nowhere you know it's it's i think you're completely right this this is really bedrock right i mean it's that's why i think that this is a world view that of which the most fundamental pillar is that there is no truth or that reality is fundamentally a construct because the truth is that the truth that we have arrived at is a form of oppression it it is there solely to uh perpetuate power structures based on race gender sexuality etc it has to be because it has to be if there is no underlying structure to reality right because if everything is simply a construct then the things we have received were simply constructions of the will to power of others right and that's why we should essentially weaponize all there ever is is the war of one will to power against another that's what that's that's fundamentally what the view what the view is whereas to believe in truth however hard it is to get to however complex however elusive however uh much it it it escapes us at times to believe in it is to think that there is a structure to reality which our thinking has purchased on and i suppose you can rationalize yourself to that conclusion but my point is that within that there is something uh that is ultimately being taken on belief at the heart of it that you know and well more than that it's it's it's many many years of people not just expressing uh similar views but but citing each other's views and then they've built up this kind of illusion that this is a real thing you know and yeah and i think i think i actually i should correct i said you know to believe in truth uh that that is already in a certain sense to misspeak because truth is precisely that which does not need to be taken simply on the basis of belief but which can be known discursively rationally in its universality and so truth is precisely that which has an inner illuminating logic that can be grasped and understood right and trying to uh erase that from civilization is such a self-defeating process i mean i can't tell you where where where this will go uh but it is a form of intellectual anarchy uh it it means that as a society we are utterly uh we have nothing left and and the the i don't think the dangers of that can be overstated um and i don't know how you fight back against that but i think one of the ways that you do that is like i say tracing the origin of this stuff and and and helping people to understand where it's come from and why it exists and why moreover it has so much power how much why where did it acquire such cultural clout you know i mean when a lot of these people were saying these things back when i was at university i mean there was no sense in which this would suddenly become uh the backbone of educational policy in the national curriculum there was no sense in which that could possibly happen so what's really interesting to me is the is the way in which fringe ideas from a a a group of academics have now got to the point uh where where they're pulling the strings of society where they are the the the puppet masters and and i think and this this incredible consensus within higher education now i mean i've noticed this recently that when i've seen um pylons on on twitter particularly uh which are emphasizing this idea of um western civilization as a structurally racist uh concept it's always it's blue checked academics who are piling in and and and and trying to bully others and berate others with their superior knowledge referencing their own phds referencing their own reading saying you don't know enough to understand this and that to me sounds a lot like uh the priests who who are telling the congregation we know we can this is a good reason why uh the bible was kept out of the vernacular for so long because they didn't want the masses reading the texts for themselves and and reaching their own judgments it's it's the same thing sorry to go back to the religious thing i know it's something that no i mean i i think i think i think that works both ways i mean there's there's there's no question that there's also a connection between the translation of the bible into the vernacular and modern freedoms as they develop throughout europe that is to say the the very conception that the individual as you know that the individual i mean what does it mean for the individual to be there's a phrase in french the fafsa fast that you know face to face with god that's what is going on in the translation of the scriptures into the into the vernacular and something you might say that is the uh spiritual metaphysical presumption of all of modern democratic freedom that is to say that the individual in its own in in its own internal subjectivity has a relation to what is most real and you know we can translate this completely out of the the religious context i'm simply trying to suggest that what's moving in that uh fundamental claim is is the underlying uh belief or presumption of all of modern subjectivity right and of course that subjectivity has as a whole long evolution at least in the west you know going back to the greeks through the middle ages and that's these are complicated matters that one could you know that the whole history is is is made up of but that the point is that our fundamental view about ourselves is that we have some relation to what's real that we ourselves can understand and that it seems to me is what is denied that's right essentially in the nihilism that is currently dominant there is no noble reality and you have no relation to whatever there is out there other rather than what we will tell you your relation can be and that's where the religion analogy breaks down because actually it's that that absence at the heart of this of this movement of this ideology uh is is precisely what is so horrifying about it so yeah i i i completely accept what you're saying here but the question becomes i mean just moving beyond what what analogies we we favor uh to describe this um and bear in mind by the way that a lot of the time when i talk about critical race theory for instance even even even using a phrase like that i will get people contacting me saying don't use phrases like i don't know what you mean when you say phrase like that so so in a sense you do have to find an accessible way particularly when so much is at stake um this is part of this just makes me this just makes me uh throws me into a almost a rage because the notion that the basic realities of human life should not be able to be understood by you know the average human being i mean that is a reprehensible notion that also frankly runs against you know everything we know about a human being's ability to you know run her his life and and so and this is right at the heart of the the corruption in the academy i mean the notion that that work in the humanities i listen there's a big difference between the science and humanities insofar as if you're a specialist in particle physics or you know the the the any other of the many sub-specialties of the sciences it is true that you might be able to give a bit of an explanation of basically the field that you're working on but you're not going to be able to understand the scholarship written in those fields if you do not have a very serious background in those fields which you could could take many many years to acquire and also particular intellectual abilities that other not everyone has so i understand that the papers written about particle physics are not things that me that i stephen blackwood should be able to understand because i don't the background of physics that is not true for the humanities in the main you can look at the the the most wonderful texts of the whole history of art history or of uh architecture or of history or of any of the other humanistic disciplines philosophy possibly accepted for reasons we could go into but fundamentally those things can be written about in a way that anyone who is literate can understand and that corruption is it has consequences so vast that we can hardly imagine them and we couldn't imagine them if it were not for the fact that we're actually living in them in the deconstruction of our culture all around us i i think i think the rage that you are experiencing is completely right i mean what you've got to remember is that there isn't compassion and empathy at the heart of this movement this is a movement that is works under the banner of social justice he's not interested in in in actually advancing social justice it is not a compassionate it is something that will leave people feeling totally without purpose and meaning and completely soulless that's what that's that's what it does so i can i completely understand and and it's also why you get this incredible what you're describing there i suppose we might call an attack on on history and this is something i i detected very early on even when i was an undergraduate and you know you'd the the the books that they were citing and the articles that they were citing had all this shared world view where anything that was written before the 80s anything that they dismissed as liberal humanism or biological essentialism or whatever and they just wrote off centuries of scholarship you know they just wrote it all off as being you know now we've come along uh and we're all going to be quoting each other and giving this this this illusion of incontrovertibility because we we all have the same ideas about the world we're all advancing the same position and we can completely claim that we are not building upon uh and we have not inherited the knowledge of our forebears that's that's a an absolute absolutely disastrous perspective to hold and this is i think a misunderstanding and there's a real mistrust isn't there about about conservatism and about the idea of of um not wanting things to change and that's not really what a culturally conservative person is saying they're saying that thing we do adapt and we do but we build upon the knowledge that we've inherited from the past and we have to do that um and so that hence all this attack on pulling down statues or decolonizing curricula and removing certain texts that might be deemed defensive by the standards of yesteryear okay so all of that stuff is going on um but i think it's a fundamental misunderstanding and i think uh i would consider myself i mean i'm i wouldn't say politically certainly not economically that i'm on the right but i i share with george orwell a very deep uh cultural conservatism i think i think it's important and essential uh to to draw upon uh past knowledge well yeah i think that you're because completely right and the fundamentally what the small c conservative view of tradition is supposed to be rightly understood is that we have received things that we may not completely understand we don't perpetuate them simply because they're from the past we must first come to understand them so we can think through well how does this relate to us today and what is what is the wisdom in this uh and how should we perhaps change these things to be more adequate to our understanding a fuller understanding of what we are so it's very much the relation between the the the myth and uh reason dialectic that we were talking about earlier that these are received and perhaps not understood but we shouldn't keep them just because they're from the past it may be that there and there are all kinds of perversities and the way things have been done in the past and so on and so forth but just because we don't understand them doesn't mean there isn't deep truth in them that we would neglect at our peril and so the notion that somehow tradition is opposed to rationality is precisely the kind of false opposition that leads to throwing out the very inherited wisdom that would allow us to live more richly than we can through our own impoverished existential immediacy right i mean the the idea that the parthenon has an inherent beauty has not come about because of a conspiracy of of dead white men who wish to to oppress other cultures it's something that there is a a truth to that that we would do well to reckon with through through you know reading through uh through our experiences of art uh through understanding all of this stuff that if you just if you just spoil it it's so reductive like if you just spoiled it down to power if power i mean look i'm not saying that power isn't important there are power relations in every conversation right but it's not everything it doesn't control absolutely everything it doesn't determine everything and certainly not in the case of art i don't think well well i think no one who knows anything about anything thinks that power isn't that isn't real or can't be manipulated right or can't be used to destructive and terrible ends what is fundamentally at work here though is whether truth is subject to power right and and and that's the worldview that i think well not only do i reject i think it can be shown to be untrue right truth is not subject to power i think this sense of how criticism works and that criticism has to be motivated or true criticism is based in an ideal according to which the criticism is able to criticize something that's falling short of an ideal that that dynamic is precisely the one that is denied by those who would deny truth so i mean it's often pointed out that to to assert there is no truth is already to enter into a contradiction because you yeah are making an assertion about things that you say is transcendent that undermines the very truth of the statement you are making this is what winds me up is that so much of the of the social justice ideology depends upon the very things that they seek to decry you know so much of it you know i mean there this emphasis on on the the destruction of grand narratives of tradition of the grand numbers of say religion or science or whatever and they're advancing their own grand narrative and this is their narrative their narrative is that they are on the right side of history they are uniquely qualified to detect the oppressive power structures that dominate our lives and they are the ones that will lead us out out of this to the promised land so it is by nature incoherent but more than that the incoherence is celebrated and often deliberately advanced i mean you take it right back to the to to to the post-structures they were doing that deliberately in what they wrote because part of the point is the incoherence because there is no truth but and yet they're expressing that as though it is true i mean it doesn't make it doesn't make sense even on their own terms yes and i think that's where that's also where the answer lies though because and this is where i think i mean this is what the whole platonic corpus is about is about bringing out of the questioning the interlocutor the back and forth of the inte of the of the dialogue itself to bring out that our very thinking has a relation to realities that transcend us right and so i think this is one of the things that needs to be said about the in relation to various protests of persistent inequalities or uh of uh racism or any any other form of injustice is that to point those very things out depends on the assertion of of an ideal that you can only know what is straight and sorry we only you can only look at what it say that something is crooked by view of what is straight you can only point out injustice with in with respect to an ideal of what justice is and so the critical stance precisely depends on is already implicated in and let's call it an intellectual conceptual metaphysical reality according to which the criticism has its bite and you say gosh you're right that was wrong it was wrong in relation to what would have been right because it works the the purpose the the there's a reason why the socratic method is is an ideal when it comes to argumentation because it does but if you approach it merely as well in this situation how is racism or power manifesting itself if that's you if that's how you approach any kind of dispute then sabotaging everything what were you looking to accomplish by creating the character of titania mcgrath so i don't think it i don't think it was as orchestrated as it seems in so far as i i mostly did it to entertain myself i think if i'm being honest okay so because i didn't i had no idea the the account would take off i mean i just started on twitter for obvious reasons twitter is the battleground that social justice activists use to disseminate their ideas so it makes complete sense that if you're going to satirize that do it on their own turf and so that's twitter um and then she started getting thousands of followers and i didn't you know and and then i got a book deal to write as her and then a second book and then a live tour and all this so it sort of exploded out you know and then it but but that's having said that uh there was all there was always a thought process behind the satirical points being made which i suppose is what you're getting at um and that thought process is to do with uh a i i suppose a standard satirical uh conceit of um reflecting uh the vices and absurdities that that that i perceive um by emulating them exaggerating them sometimes uh treating them hyperbolically in in my form of expression or or trying to tease out those contradictions that we were talking about the fundamental incoherence of the movement that we've already discussed by replication of of their own viewpoint that that was sort of the point that's why sometimes titania's statements are indistinguishable from what actual social justice activists say and sometimes they are pushed into the realm where they're not where they're even too absurd to be believed although i ha i do know that sometimes when i do that uh they end up catching up that happens an awful lot you know um i i wrote tweeters to tanya talking about how in order to prove any white parents should prove that they're not racist by sending their teenage daughters and unaccompanied walking holidays in the tribal regions of northern pakistan and then forbes magazine i think two weeks later published an article doing exactly that why northern pakistan should be on every female solo traveler's bucket list that was the headline now now i'd written that knowing that it was an absurd proposition that actually even a social justice activist wouldn't say and then they said it and that's happened to me about six or seven times now um so in that respect and that isn't to be self-aggrandizing or suggest that i have the power of prophecy what what i'm what i'm saying is that ultimately if you know this ideology well and if you've if you've read the source materials or the foundational text if you want to call them that if you know it well you there is nothing too absurd that they will not eventually latch onto because the very idea of the denial of objective truth means that absurdity is a natural corollary i think yes let's let's stay with this a bit longer andrew because i think there's very very deep and and as it were fundamental things here you say you started tania partly his ways amusing yourself um but even that's worth thinking about because your humor is one of those things that you know we all think we understand and then you until you start thinking about it you say well why is something funny or what is going on when something is funny um i thought about this uh with young children you know when you're making a baby laugh and it could be a very simple thing where you go over here and then you go here and then you go quickly over here and they go oh yeah you know and so even for even for the infant humor depends on a comparison right between what i thought was going to happen and then what happened and that there's a perception that that that that uh difference is funny because it's against expectation yeah i think all humor depends on that consciousness of how something is different from what it with that to which it is being compared and this comes into satire i think because satire fundamentally depends on the the listener of the joke coming to perceive precisely that distance between the way someone is acting and well and then the question is what and i would say in the case of satire it's somehow in relation to their own declared principles we want to think that's often much misunderstood about humor is that humor is fundamentally on the side of the oppressed or the power or the the the less powerful it's actually a way of claiming power over in a sense the person who is abusing their power by pointing out that very contradiction so you know it's it you know it's like it's not it's not funny to make fun of someone with you know with down syndrome that's just me that's not that's not a joke that's just that's just a course uh and disgusting abuse of your own power that's not funny what's funny is when someone points out the disjunction between what someone with stature is saying or doing and that which they say they are doing right exactly and this is why i often think when when you hear the kind of activists who complain about jokes and the way that jokes normalize hatred and that kind of thing uh it's because they are interpreting those jokes as automatically interpreting them as mean and not thinking about what they're actually trying to achieve and that often makes me think that maybe this is because they have a mean streak themselves that they're they're so used i mean i don't want to speculate about what's going on in people's heads but there is that quality about it like why would you why when a comedian jokes about a tragedy say why would you jump to the assumption that he or she therefore revels in that tragedy why would you do that unless you yourself have that quality that your your instinct is a mean instinct is a vicious instinct because because no comedian does this you know i mean even basic things like after 9 11 when when people would be texting each other with sick jokes about 9 11 right and part of the joke was was an acknowledgement that you absolutely shouldn't laugh at this part of the reason why it created uh why humor can be created out of that it is a means to reinforce the that it is a tragic event that's part of the point um so i think this um assumption that jokes of all things are there to to normalize bigotry and hatred and to it and to attack the vulnerable i mean nine times i mean i'm i suppose that could conceivably be the case like you say a joke about a down syndrome person um which has no other uh effect but to denigrate that person well i can't name a single comedian who would make such a joke okay but the assumption is that people like to give a very obvious example when louis ck's set was leaked do you remember he he did a sort of work in progress show and it was leaked and a substantial section of that was talking about these uh school survivors of school shootings and the way it was reported in the mainstream press by the way in mainstream publications was louis ck makes fun of the victims of school massacres now if you listen to what he did and you genuinely come to that conclusion it means you don't understand a joke you don't understand what comedy is doing of course i mean the baseline assumption should be that he thinks it's a tragedy and we all share that we all know that but this interpretation this misinterpretation of that and and i can't decide whether that's willful or whether people have just reached this kind of point where they will interpret comedy literally jokes cannot be sustained with literal interpretations they are the opposite of that they are not literal statements of of what a comedian thinks they can never be it doesn't work it wouldn't be funny so um to what extent so to give another example when um the comedian andrew lawrence posted a tweet it was a joke tweet i i'm gonna get this wrong but let me try it he said um uh there's he pointed out the disparity in suicide rates between men and women that more men uh commit suicide than women and he said if feminists really cared about equality they would have to even add up by killing themselves right now then there was a i'm not doing the joke justice because that's not quite but that was the concept behind the joke and then there was a petition by a group of activists calling him him to be banned from tv banned from radio banned from the bbc on the grounds that he was inciting women to kill themselves now the only way that you can think that i mean you may not like the joke and that's fine you may not think it's funny you may think it's distasteful that is a reasonable uh response to have i and even to be offended that is completely reasonable but to make the leap that this comedian is therefore deliberately and willfully trying to incite women to kill themselves i mean you can't think that can you you can't have that literal-minded infantile view of a joke right so i wouldn't have i wouldn't mind it if the petition was simply i find this offensive i hate it but it wasn't that it was it was a misunderstanding of what the joke was doing and it was intuiting a motive that the comedian didn't have and this is like this is absolutely everywhere now and it's not just in terms of comedy but in terms of art as well trying to and this goes way back like we say this goes way back to the stuff that i was studying as an english literature student books like sexual politics by kate millet which was about which was i think published in the early 70s wasn't it and that was just um picking apart famous novel the work of famous novelists like d.h lawrence and trying to identify where the sexism lies where the misogyny lies when i was an undergraduate you just you just take a text and find out where it was homophobic or you would tease out its uh racist implications and you'd get a first you know and that's that's this thing this sort of moralizing view and this attempt this is this is at the heart of the deconstructive approach isn't it that you that you you you find what the what the uh what the artist or the creator is doing what power structures is that person attempting to uphold what that person secretly thinks and that's that's why and like i say these things um become part of mainstream culture now which is why whenever you get into an argument on twitter with a social justice activist they will always tell you what you are secretly thinking they will always tell you that they know what you are secretly thinking that they have this kind of um uh access to your private thoughts that that fundamentally goes back to what we were saying earlier that if there is no truth there is no independent structure to reality yeah everything is only a manifestation of a will to power and so right exactly that's why cynical theories is a great title for this uh book you mentioned by black rose and lindsay because the standpoint of cynicism is fundamentally that it's saying no there is no there is no deeper reality here there is no authenticity there's no sincerity there is no truth or beauty or anything like that it is only ever a manifestation of a will to power and if you're not acknowledging that that's just because you don't know what your actual world of power is so it's it's it's to deny the most the bedrock of human subjectivity which is that it is connected to the the whole wonderful complexity and often terrible nature of reality itself no one says this is easy or simple it's it's it's the deep complexity of the real and like you say this is why intent is not considered important now this is you know this goes back to roland barth and the death of the author the idea that it doesn't matter what as a creator you're intended to achieve uh what matters is the uh the perpetuation of power structures that that results you know if you i mean that's why you'll say even with a joke that people attack or that people find offensive sometimes they'll say this person is trying to stir up hate um or sometimes they say it doesn't matter what the intention of that person was this is the impact of what what what will happen anyway because this is my truth this is my interpretation of what that person has said and and you cannot degrade my truth um yeah i i think that's why teasing this stuff out is quite important because it affects it has an impact on the on the arts it has an impact on the way in which we can create the things that we can do um because it because it has this insistence on on literalizing absolutely everything um i mean i can think of some some specific examples i mean okay so to take an example from i did a stand-up show at the edinburgh fringe festival a couple of years ago where a woman stood up in the show and tried to stop this show complained vocally because she perceived that i was being misogynistic and i wasn't being misogynistic i was i was mocking the then leader of the country theresa may the prime minister um and my persona on stage is quite a catty waspish kind of onstage it's a theatrical you know i wouldn't i wouldn't slag off theresa may's appearance as andrew doyle as a person i wouldn't i don't do things like that my my persona on stage does because that's that's part of what he is he's this waspishcatty character um i said that she was starting to look very haggard i said that she was starting to resemble an nhs poster warning about the dangers of dehydration that was the that was the joke and she took real offenses even though i'd been doing similar things about male politicians that didn't matter so she'd interpreted this in this way misinterpreted it um and then what what i did was i mean what i should have done actually is if if she was saying that i'm a misogynist because of this joke that i'm making what i should have done in character was to actually explicitly become a misogynist explicitly say misogynistic things i should that would have been the more theatrically interesting thing to do what i actually did i think was explain the joke which doesn't make doesn't help because then it's no longer funny but in retrospect that's what i should have done it would have been much more theatrically interesting but if you approach standard comedy or any art form from a literal mindset you can't appreciate the theatricality of that maybe being offended and being uncomfortable and being shocked in a comedic context is actually quite an interesting thing is actually something that that we can there's a purpose to it you know and it's it's a it's a bad faith interpretation of the comedian if you think that all they're trying to do is is be mean or be nasty i mean that's maybe there are well that's why i think andrew that there there's a there's a there's a metaphysical underpinning to humor and just let me spell this this out tell me what you think you know this is one of the reasons it's so important to be able to make a joke about something tragic is that to be able to to laugh at something let's say something terrible happens in in your life diagnosis medically or or a loss of some some some kind i mean we're all living in the midst of suffering of various kinds i mean life is finite and to be human is to confront the the immense difficulty of our finitude and yet to be able to laugh at at something terrible that has happened to us i don't mean laughing at something terrible that's happened to someone else in that dip diminishing way it is in a way to be able to reclaim our own wholeness from that tragedy it is to be able to transcend with that which has been done to us to take an active and active reclaiming of ourselves and to if that is possible it must mean that reality itself enables that reclaiming and that reality is not something a zero-sum uh uh thing looking to obliterate you and either you claim your power and hurt others or you will be hurt it is actually to say no there's a non-zero sum nature to reality itself and my being able to laugh at this is a demonstration or incarnation of that sure i mean a repudiation of reality means that joke humor itself cannot work anymore and that that idea is so key what you're describing there is is so key to the way that we uh navigate life and existence as human beings i mean i i suppose it's because i've i've experienced it all i mean i have family and you know obviously my family are from northern ireland and they lived through the troubles and they often joked about i mean i've heard members of my family joke about some quite harrowing things that happened to them you know um and that is a way that you like you say it's a way to claim a kind of not to let yourself be the victim anymore it's a way for you to claim control over a situation dennis leary used to do jokes stand up routines about cancer and things like that and he'd get a lot of flack for it um again because the simplistic interpretation is that you're laughing because people are dying of cancer which is of course not not the case but he said that people would come up to him afterwards and say to and give requests say like oh i've had testicular cancer could you do something about testicular cancer why didn't you do that almost like they wanted to own this as well um and that's such a deep and beautiful thing i mean it's it's a little bit like why is sad music more beautiful than happy music you know if you think about the most beautiful music that you can uh i wish we could play some you know an example here of what i'm trying to get at here but it's the way in which the return to tonic at the end has taken up the return to harmony takes up the discord and so you've you've taken up and overcome not denied or denigrated but given the suffering its place but it's been transcended into a deeper and more coherent standpoint i mean that's that's what that's what laughter and in a certain sense all knowing is is a is it is a making comprehensible of the otherness and difficulty of experience right and and in particular the reality of death like you say you know there is something funny about being the only creature on this planet that is aware of its own mortality there is something funny about that because we we carry on life as normal we do all the things that we all the mundane things all the paying of the bills all the going to all the stuff that ultimately with the recognition that there will come a time where none of that will matter and we will we will be nothing right so that's a funny thing isn't it i i think there's something quite hilarious about that well to be able to laugh at that is actually to transcend in a certain sense to transcend death yeah right exactly you know i think the existentialist had a point about this is that why are you not you know the very fact that you are alive means that you're investing in existence you know it's it's that question of why don't you kill yourself right well i mean it wouldn't matter if i did i guess but but i have invested something in existence i believe in the sanctity of human life um but i'm also wearing the fundamental absurdity of human life and and the acknowledgment of the absurdity is a coping mechanism i suppose not not even a coping mechanism because i think that's quite cynical i think it's a celebration of of life actually it is to enter into a standpoint that sees more than our own life to be at work and life that's why you know what why something can terrible can be funny is because we're not simply constructing a reality in which that thing is not terrible it's ultimately a redemptive logic right because you're saying no this is not zero sum the very fact that this terrible thing can happen and that i can become greater than it means that somehow i am participating in a deeper underlying reciprocity to the real itself so here's here's a question for you just just to push on this very point yeah it's one thing for you to be making the joke uh as the author of titania yeah or the the person behind titania but do you think it's funny when you were the cel you when you were yourself the subject of humor because this is really the test of our own principles right can we laugh at ourselves how do you prevent yourself from becoming the thing that you are criticizing yeah i totally i totally understand that it's about reminding yourself to laugh at yourself basically and it is that thing of um nobody nobody likes to be laughed at or or because there is a way in which humor can be used as a bullying tool right there there is and there's absolutely futile to deny that because we all know it from the playground you know um and that's that's not that's not just not only is that not something that i i mean i don't do that so i don't pick on people and and make jokes about them and say look at look everyone laugh at this person that's just bullying i don't do that and yeah exactly and nor do comedians generally i i don't know of comedians that do that you know i mean it's not funny it's actually not funny it's just me right that's the whole question so if someone's making a joke about me on twitter and it is just me it is just horrible and mean and it says attack me then no i do not like that because and i think i wouldn't be a human being if i if i did um if someone makes a good natured joke about something i've said or me indeed then i then i'll be the first to laugh at it and maybe that's just an instinctive thing um but i and i think it's important to draw that distinction uh a personal attack that uses humor uh is a form of bullying and no i don't think that's funny um i mean they're free to do it and this is the other thing like you're free to say whatever you want but i don't have to appreciate it or get on board but a good nature joke about someone we all know we've all got groups of friends where we take the piss out of each other this is sort of at the heart of friendship is the ability to laugh at yourself um that's how friendships are sustained i can't imagine having friends that don't mock me all the time it wouldn't it wouldn't work um and we're all the same like that i think we i think we are um yeah well let's let's let's talk about that for a minute because that's that's a very that's a very deep point why is it that friendship at least very often needs depends upon the ability of your friends to point out your failings in a way that you laugh at them well i suppose it's partly to do with this is why i think so many people in the social justice movement don't have a sense of humor because to have a sense of humor about yourself means you're acknowledging your flaws right and it's such a totalitarian instinct that they don't believe they have flaws and they they have such a utopian worldview they think they've got all the answers and that is not compatible with the sense of humor you know that's what that's what that's why you see this very po face thing that's why tatani mcgrath is such a pro-faced the image of her the face that my friend lisa put together for me it's perfect she cannot laugh she's never laughed i think she laughed once there's a chance she regrets it you know so there's that that's that's what i'm getting at but it's interesting what you say as well about that distinction between humor used to bully and humor or satire used to expose advice or a folly so uh i had a recent experience which um might help to illustrate some of the points you're making if it doesn't just you can cut it out of the conversation it might be it might be red herring so i did i posted a tweet about now what tanya often does is is is fine newspaper articles that express this kind of absurd social justice mania right and and and and she'll post the article uh and they're usually from mainstream uh press so there was an article i it was from something like the telegraph like a major uh broadboard sheet paper in the country a major news outlet and i'm i did a screenshot of the article as she normally does and made some joke about content of the article i can't remember exactly what it was now the person who wrote the article because their name appeared in the screenshot because obviously they wrote the article uh then had some unpleasant attention from people on twitter attacking her for her absurdity right and then she sent me an email saying that she she was feeling bullied and that she was feeling attacked and that i i'd uh initiated the bullying right and i responded to her she didn't respond to my response but my the point that i was making was that i it this is not a there is there is a difference here i did not post that joke in order to mock her or attack her or to or to get people to bully her i was mocking the idea that was being expressed through a major newspaper and and the point is simply this that if as such we cannot mock um mainstream news outlets politicians people in power if we're not allowed to punch up then there is pretty much nothing we can do right that and that was i was asking the question how can satire work if i cannot make a comment about something in a very powerful institution such as a mainstream news outlet how can that work and yet at the same token i don't like the idea that some idiots uh send some mean and horrible messages to her off the back of my tweet but that's not my responsibility that's their responsibility and it's certainly not something i've ever promoted or advanced so i think that maybe that anecdote is useless but i'm trying to draw out this distinction between but i'm always thinking comedians are always thinking is this joke fair and and is it justified and and i can justify every joke i've ever said and you might disagree and say well actually i think you've you've made a miscalculation there and that what you're doing there is actually a form of of bullying and i will reflect on that and if i think you're right then i will they will concede but comedians have to be able to make those mistakes anyway we're treading such a fine line uh that that limit of people's tolerance and what you know that things are bound to be miscalculated from time to time um but i but what i will say is that any comedian worth assault doesn't go out of their way to bully anyway and the assumption shouldn't be that that's what they are trying to do yes this is that's very that's very well said when when we laugh our ability to laugh at ourselves is it is really to surrender our own sense of ourselves in the hope and in the belief that one can have a greater and deeper sense of oneself right so that's what laughed that's what the laughter is it's it's it's it's surrendering our own sense of self in the hope of reaching a deeper sense of self well acknowledgement of the ego and an acknowledgment of that which we have been socialized out of you know insofar as a child is solipsistic and sees themselves as being you know the center of the world absolutely everything and that we we learn we learn uh to to not hold that worldview we we learn to empathize we but it's still there at the core of us isn't it it's it it's it's still lurking within us and also maybe go on sorry no sorry no i didn't mean to interrupt you go ahead no no go ahead it's fine i think well to say not to be able to laugh at yourself is fundamentally to say that you're it's a it's an it's a fragility of your own subjectivity right that is unable to is uninterested and unwilling and in fact in the sense doesn't even believe is possible to engage in a deepening movement of your own uh self-knowledge and that's why i think that the repression of humor is part and parcel of this underlying nihilism because and that's why it's absolutely related to the denial of of of truth itself because it's it's very much of a piece to say that i can't let to not be able to laugh at yourself because you don't believe anything can come out of the exposure of your own failings is very much the same as to refuse to engage in a discussion that will show how your own views may be either partial or wrong it's it's related to the fact that there is a refusal to discuss or debate yes yes to open amongst the activists if they if they open their ideas up to scrutiny the ideas will fall apart and collapse and that's what and and it's tied into this utopian worldview and this inability to acknowledge that one all of us are often wrong about an awful lot of things at any given time and i think it probably is connected to um uh the way in which a refusal to confront reality or a negation of reality which manifests itself in say trigger warnings or so or says that we know we shouldn't study this thing because it might hurt me it might it might it might upset me and destabilize my my perception of the world or the truth that i choose to inhabit i think it is all tied together and i think it finds itself in those who would seek to control jokes and humor as well and moreover i think it is tied to a fear of loss of individual agency and power i mean there's a reason why tyrants and despots kill satirists historically it's a reason why even today that erdogan in turkey would have satirists jailed um for mocking him um it's why hannah arant in her book on violence talks about the best way to undermine authorities to mock it to joke about it tyrants hate uh anyone anyone who has invested so much in their own sense of righteousness cannot afford to be laughed at you know and that's that's why there is a mistrust of humor and the and the power of humor in in in the very people who who are who are so determined to expose the power structures that they believe that they can detect because they've taken a gender studies course or of course in critical race theory so they they are they have that superpower now that they can detect these invisible power structures that dominate society but in in themselves are very wary of a depletion of their own power i i find that there's a real deep irony though but what they are doing is it is perpetual i mean i i imagine that foucault would have a great time deconstructing their behavior because let's not forget that what they are doing is a perversion of pakodian ideas not not a reflection of it yeah but of course the irony is that that standpoint actually makes you less powerful in in a deeper sense just as one's a inability to admit when one is wrong makes one less right and so one is actually more in a world of falsehood than one would be if one had the humility to enter into deeper truths about oneself and the world isn't that strange though that it's not humility like it should be something you celebrate when when someone has pointed out your a flaw in your reasoning or who you are what you think what you believe and you come and you realize that they're right so either you you i mean obviously we all have egos that are fragile as you say but really is it is it more or less damaging to the ego to to perpetuate something you now know not to be true i'd say that what you should be doing is celebrating saying well of course that's fantastic you've proved me wrong i you know and this is something i wrote i i think i sent the article i wrote in standpoint magazine about critical thinking and one of the anecdotes that is raised is the richard dawkins anecdote when when he is back as an undergraduate and he was taught um uh now what was the name of the organism um this is going to really annoy me now uh anyway i'll put it in abstract terms so they had a visiting speaker come in who basically uh showed that this this this this organism was a reality uh the professor who worked at oxford had been teaching them for years that it wasn't it didn't exist and then all of a sudden he was presented with the evidence and he goes up to the front of the lecture hall after the lecture and says i want to thank you i've been wrong this past 15 years and everyone applauds and that's like that's um uh the golgi apparatus that's what it was sorry just because that's the name of this uh look i know nothing about science whatsoever i'm talking about the principle the principle is celebrating when you've been proven wrong i mean what a great what a liberating thing to be able to do what a way to actually uh i don't think it's damaging to the ego i think we treat it as though it is but that but that would suggest to me that if you're in an argument or a discussion um and you never want to be proven wrong and you never want to be exposed where where where there is a dearth of of thought in your process then you're arguing for the wrong reasons what what you're doing is you're you're arguing to establish your status you know you're arguing to win not not not to explore the discussions explore the substance of the discussion right does that make sense i mean this really this is why we come back to this whole fundamental premise about what what the nature of the human being is do you want to live in relation to what's real or do you want to live in some delusional state in which you know you're you're unable to interpret and make sense of in some sense the complexity of of reality i think this is an absolutely critical point because at the heart of this i mean if you say well you know if you're unable to laugh at yourself if you don't you're this wonderful anecdote you've just told about uh richard dawkins and the professor who who was thankful for having been correct what's that potentially publicly humiliated in front of all of his students that he'd been teaching about this about this organism for years so you could interpret that as a form of humiliation or you can interpret it as something positive right that's well yes and that's why that's why that's why that's why the the at the bedrock of this is a whole vision of what of what human subjectivity is in its relation to reality because if you think this is a zero-sum game in which somehow it's all about your own truth well then of course that's going to be threatened if it turns out that you know that that your uh limited standpoint was not the true one but if actually you think that your subjectivity is constituted and more fully constituted by a fuller relation to what's real well then you you rejoice you say well gosh i don't want to go for another second of my life deluded into thinking something that is is is is is is false is true and so yeah go ahead no well i'm just going to say maybe this accounts for the sheer venom uh that i that i experienced from people who are angry about the titania character because i think maybe it's to do with the fact that she does expose something um about their worldview that is on the face of it ridiculous maybe what's happening is people are recognizing it maybe maybe maybe what they see maybe they can maybe it's having that effect you know because otherwise i wouldn't be able to account for the the vitriol i wouldn't be able to account for it you know if i hear a joke and i don't find it funny then i just don't laugh and that's the end of it what i don't do is go on twitter and call someone a fascist evil ugly nazi scumbag who deserves to be killed or thrown in a volcano i had um and you know and the threats actual threats that get emailed to me that that kind of level that would suggest it's having an impact actually that maybe they're starting to rethink and it's uncomfortable it's what um peter pagozi and james lindsey wrote a book called how to have impossible conversations they talk about this idea of identity quakes i don't think they originated the term but they talk about it really eloquently and the idea that do you have something that is so inherent to your meaning and your identity as a human being destabilized is an unpleasant thing that's why when someone persuades you that you are wrong about something and you have to let go of something it's almost like you're killing off a part of yourself it's never easy to be dissuaded it's never a comfortable um and particularly when politics is so wrapped up in identity as it is now that the idea of being left-wing or right-wing is now not just a a matter of perspective but is something that is considered integral uh to one's sense of self right so maybe that's why i'm just raising this but maybe the venom it's always surprised me the venom because because i always think well if you don't find it funny that's fine just ignore it you know that so maybe that explains the venom that maybe they are starting to maybe they can see the point of her maybe that maybe they maybe they get it and that's why they're upset well this is why i think your satirical work is so important because it's not a private i mean it's not a narcissistic it's not a it's not an act of narcissism or uh self-congratulatory uh uh uh egoism you make public jokes in the hope that can't that it will bring others to a consciousness of what is going on so there is no there is no getting there is this is what the whole thing about humor there is no getting of the joke the joke doesn't have any stature at all until it's gotten right i mean it's precisely the coming to consciousness of what is funny or what the discrepancy is between what has been pointed out and the way someone has acted say their hypocrisy or whatever so it i take it that you have adopted this satirical standpoint precisely out of a you might say this i know many will disagree with me here but it's it's a profoundly good faith stance yeah because you are actually believing that those that you are uh satirizing yeah are capable of coming themselves to a more adequate more complete standpoint it is a fundamentally optimistic project yes i think i uh returned to uh w.h orton's definition of sato a distinction between satire and comedy where he talks about satire being angry and optimistic you know it rails against these things but it fundamentally believes that it can change and we can change for the good and whereas comedy he describes as good-natured and pessimistic insofar as it's resigned to how terrible things are and so just laughs at it right and i think that's a really uh useful distinction i've mentioned it a number of times because i just think it really nails something about that that satire is about an aspiration for societal societal change whether or not that comes about the aspiration is there so it is a fundamentally and it's also a fundamentally humane thing insofar as it it believes that people are not beyond redemption that that if you if you expect if you as we do with our friends as we were discussing if you mock your friend for a flaw that they have or for something they're doing wrong you know often the mockery is what will wake wake them up to that and and actually that's something that you should be grateful for uh if someone you know if someone were to satirize my political position and and ruthlessly mock it and expose it as being weak then that i would probably be grateful for that you know that it would enable me to to reflect on it and it would be you know i think that's something obviously you have to overcome that hurdle of the ego and the the the the as i said before the the temptation to interpret this as a form of humiliation but then you see you're just wrapped up in your status there which we all are of course we can't escape it but but you know through thought and and patience we can overcome that and i and that's why i think yes i think you're right i mean i would say this wouldn't i but i do believe that what i'm doing is good-natured and and optimistic and is more than anything driven by uh an optimism about humanity a a hatred of bullying i think i mean so what what's tinder although i'm often accused of bullying because i'm mocking uh identity politics the misinterpretation there of course is i'm never mocking marginalized groups of vulnerable groups i'm mocking those in power who uh paternalistically feel that they can look after and and determine what those groups should think and feel so it's it's the opposite of what they think it's it's it's everything is about and because i do feel the social justice movement it legitimizes bullying i've seen all you need to do if anyone's unclear about this is is is just have a look at the the venom and the vitriol that jk rowling has experienced from people who claim to be on the right side of history claim to be the good guys i have never in my life seen such sustained uh or just misogyny frankly there's the most grotesque crude misogyny hatred of her because she is a woman i've never seen anything like it um and these are thousands and thousands of tweets they're all sort of collected by someone on on medium someone collected all of these screenshots and it it makes you sick and it's often those who are that's that's the danger i see in the social justice movement is that it bullies people from a perspective that it thinks it's being compassionate it doesn't recognize its own but that it's the bully and um titania is an effort to expose this bullying and to stand up against bullying because i hate it um and ironically then i am accused of of bullying and the reason for that is the bullies believe themselves to be the underdogs in this case yeah yeah that's why i see it there to be a profoundly positive vision behind all true and effective satire and that to be true in your case and again it comes back to these to an underlying vision of what the real is that truth is not subject to power and that's why to take a standpoint of courage against bullies it's not a calcu it's not a power calculation it's not it's not one in which you say oh i'm going to win this fight well you may lose you might be taken out you can be you can be killed by a bully or or disenfranchised or whatever but to actually speak truth to power is precisely to put your faith in the transcendence of truth itself which is not subject to power and the law you're already trying so you're transcending the dominant uh zero-sum nihilism that is at work precisely by standing up and pointing towards a principle that transcends power and there's a risk that comes with that a very great risk i mean we're seeing that manifesting in cancer culture what we call cancer culture now and uh i've just written an article about this about how i think we need to be braver i think we need to you know when when when the hr department comes to us and tell us that we need to do these training courses to elucidate our own unconscious biases and you know we do we need to say well actually we need a conversation about whether this is effective or useful or you know or i mean i mentioned in that article a friend of mine an actor friend of mine she was her agent phoned her up and she said and said you haven't posted in support of black lives matter on your twitter account you have to do that that's compulsory because if you don't do that you're never going to get cast in anything again and to stand up to that and say it's not about whether or not i support black lives matter the principle here is that i shouldn't be compelled to to to express support for something by someone else right and to stand up for that principle i mean ultimately would cost her her career and livelihood it would so it's hard the the the personal costs of this are really really hard it's not for someone like me because i don't have a boss you know and i and i do what i want and i don't and i and i say what i want and i'm not being censored but if i still worked as a teacher if i still worked in the call center if i still had the jobs i used to have then i couldn't i couldn't say the things i say so that that's something like i say i think and we know this like we learned this at school standing up to the bullies is not a way to secure power for yourself it is often it is often a dangerous thing to do and then and then when enough people do it then it then then the bullying is overcome i mean i i made this analogy in the article i wrote about salem and it seems obvious and it's become almost cliched but look the only reason they stopped hanging people is because sufficient numbers of those villagers started saying no this isn't real is this this is you know once the governor's wife was accused they were emboldened that you know they were able to do this but but it came a kind of tipping point and i think there's a similar we're looking for a similar kind of tipping point now a recognition that these ideologues are in the minority it's just they're incredibly powerful and they've infiltrated all our powerful institutions cultural and political and educational so uh it it there is a risk and a lot of people will fall and a lot of people will lose their jobs by standing and already have lost their jobs by standing up to this stuff but there will be a tipping point when a sufficient number of people say no uh this isn't uh the society we want to live and we don't want this nihilistic worldview we don't we don't want to reject all objective truth and we don't want to be compelled to say things that we know not to be true more importantly which is the tactic of all uh death spots and when when sufficient numbers do that then it will embolden the government which has been completely uh negligent when it comes to this because they they feel under the thumb of the the of the influence of social justice activists as well um you know no one wants to be called racist no one wants to be called a nazi the fear of that because it's so debilitating in society to have that brand you know whether it's true or not it's the the and they know this they know that you know this this is the point that it is it is somewhat ironic that the only reason cancer culture is affected the only reason why smearing someone as a racist without cause is an effective strategy is because we live in a society where to do so makes you a pariah that if it undermines their point they see racism everywhere it's not it's still it's it's it and the very fact that their their smearing campaign will have an effect is because they're wrong about this it's because we live in a society that doesn't tolerate racism not not because we live in a society that enables it we absolutely don't tolerate it and nor should we this is very powerful andrew the only way to resist totally the totalitarian worldview that truth is subject to power is to speak truth with courage because that truth speaking is the only antidote to the nihilism that would coerce you into not doing so and the only way we can preserve a space for human beings to flourish is to speak the truth without fear right absolutely you wrote a wonderful piece recently on critical thinking and uh what it means to be a critical thinker um of course what is called critical thinking today in many universities is really just uh conventional forms of ideology that are digested uh uh hook line and synchro without any critical capacity whatsoever and so what are called critical studies are very often profoundly uncritically accepted so what i want to ask you about is how you you think independence of mind a genuinely uh critical cast of mind can be cultivated how how did that come about in your case did it have to do with your careful reading of the history of literature uh uh what were the uh generative or transformative moments towards your developing a subtle a nuanced standpoint in relation to the complexity of reality that was not simply doing what others said or feeling you must do what they say i think it's partly instinct and part experience i i think um i i i've always been sort of questioning when i'm told something but maybe that's because my background i i don't suppose that was always the case thinking about it i mean maybe it's to do with coming from a a religious background maybe it's to do with with um uh where i i suppose in order to have an objective view of identity politics and the damage it does i think it helps to have come from a background where identity was very important to you i think i uh my identity as a catholic for instance i think was very important to me particularly up until the age of 18 i think going to a convent school and all those sort of things and and and um you know it has real meaning for me and it still does and i think that's so having an awareness here's what i mean having an awareness of the allure of being part of an identity that is more than yourself is a good it helps you to understand where this is coming from i think certainly in terms of gay identity i i you know for i was very much part of the gay scene at a time when actually you would still say it in under hushed tones you know and and i understand the allure of that as well there's something quite thrilling about feeling that you're part of a group uh and that and and that you're part of a group that more than that that is that is victimized there's something quite thrilling about it um and and appealing and so and so i do understand the identitarian world view because i think i have to a degree experienced it um and i and i think we all have we all we all understand that idea of of the comfort that comes from from feeling part of a group and uh but then i think i i the more i read i think the way out of it is reading the more i read about it the more skeptical i became about it um i i was never i i i started challenging the idea of identifying you know people would describe me as a gay comedian for instance and i i started to push back on that a bit because i would say well i don't think i am a gay comedian i'm a comedian who happens to be gay for me being gay is is the same as being five foot ten or or being right handed you know it's not it's not it's a mundane uh aspect of who i am not something not i don't want to see the world through that you know i don't want i i think that's a damaging that's the that's the point i'm at at the moment is i i just think identity politics is damaging to you as an individual as well to everyone individually and i don't i simply don't want to do it and the expectation that we should is a is a real problem so i imagine that's where it comes from i think but who knows i mean i'm speculating here i don't know i don't know why i think the best thing that anyone can do is read a lot i think that's i think that's it i think i've just read an awful lot and i've read a lot of people's perspectives that i've i've done a lot of uncomfortable reading as far as i've read things that i don't i balk at it you know instinctively and i found kernels of truth within it um there are even kernels of truth within some of the social justice stuff that comes out you know i've read a lot of those books um there are books i mean like white fragility by robyn deangelo which has very little to recommend itself and even the the things she says that i mean there are occasional good points but they're just so fundamentally undermined by the fact that she builds her entire thesis on a false premise you know once the first step of an argument is wrong the whole argument falls apart so you know whatever good could have come out of that book is it cannot is not there unfortunately because it's just too rooted in this this belief system that isn't that is so wrong um but you can read other other people's books and and and and garner certain things from it absolutely and i think that's the key i think i think education is the key and and i don't mean that in the way that the social justice activists mean when they say oh educate yourself what they mean is read white fragility and agree with it when they say that um true education is about reading a wide variety of ideas and thinking about it considering reflecting on it and and and having the humility to accept that the position you're at might be will be wrong it will be wrong there's absolutely no way um that that you are right about everything that is an impossibility so so that's that's i think where the solution lies i think reinstating genuine critical thinking in schools is going to be the key and by that i don't i mean i've had a lot of conversations with people about this with educationalists particularly you know i used to teach a subject called critical thinking at a level in school and um i can see that that's not necessarily the way to go about this i think it should be these ideas should be embedded in the way we think about everything across the curriculum in all subjects not otherwise you just end up with a subject people think oh we've covered how to think critically in that subject and then we can you know we can go back to just being spoon-fed absolutely everything else we need to pass the exams and everything every other regard well actually it should be a more kind of fundamental change in pedagogy it should be something fundamental about the way things are taught that we don't currently have um teaching people to think questioningly to challenge to think critically isn't something that should be just uh boxed into one subject called critical thinking having said that i think there is some merit to teaching the socratic methods teaching basic principles of argumentation to kids so that they know that once you throw an insult once you make an ad hominem attack you've lost the argument once you've intuited the motive of someone else you've lost the argument well all these very very basic fallacies um but if you know them and if everyone adheres to them um we can have we can reach we can have these discussions these difficult discussions um that people aren't willing to have at the moment so i think that's that would be the way i'd like to see that i'd see like see fundamental changes in the educational system to incorporate a critical thinking that's the way i would approach it yes and do you think that critical thinking learning to think critically can be detached from content insofar as you know my well my sense of things certainly is that the idea that you can learn to think critically without some engagement with content itself that is to say it could be history it could be suffering it could be a poem uh that is actually to to reaffirm the very constructivist standpoint that uh we need to transcend because if you could just bring it all out of yourself it you know endlessly by just oh all of a sudden i'm going to become a critical thinker i mean one becomes more critical by engagement with the actual complexity of reality and of course your books are a way of accessing that so is suffering so i mean war and poverty all kinds of things can awaken one to a sense of the limits of one's standpoint and perspective um uh and i think that in education we've had one of the one of the reasons we're not cultivating critical thinkers is because we don't think the content matters we think you know it's just all about your opinions it's all about your own endless emotional expressiveness we have to know things we have to have a basic bedrock of knowledge upon which to build and and and that's yeah i don't think uh thinking critically can work if if you were ignorant of of of i mean just to give an example i mean i remember being at school in the history class and we were taught about the long march in china um and but rather than um uh learning the facts of what happened and when and who was involved we were asked to write a diary piece as a soldier on the march as you know outlining how we felt about it okay um that's not useful now to me so i i would i would have been in a much stronger position now educationally uh if i if they'd have just rammed the facts home and got them into my brain and then i can start thinking about those other ideas you know so there's there is that shift in um uh in in education generally to teach it from a position of uh well they call it they call it empathetic i don't think that's quite right but but but you know what is your opinion about this how do you feel about this rather than no just learn the basic facts i think i always feel that i've been totally failed by education in that respect uh and and the kind of the way that it currently works i think people need to become autodidacs you know they need to just teach themselves and and and once you have a bedrock of knowledge to build upon then then you're in a good position and you also you also then learn an awareness that you you'll never know enough there's so much we don't know and that will always be the case but but it's a start isn't it to learn that's why uh universities have developed cannons that's where the cannon comes from it's a recognition that we cannot know everything so we need to build on uh decades of people refining the things that we should be prioritized when it comes to learning about the past that's why the canon exists so this idea of destroying the canon of english literature say you know as sheffield university recently put out a video saying the only reason that we all study shakespeare and chaucer is because they're white men well this is not true and and it's ignorant and and it's dangerous um if if if if we cannot say that some things are objectively better than others if we cannot do that anymore if we can say that the only reason that shakespeare has any merit is because he was white and male and privileged and and that all of his work is about oppressing other groups then we're lost we're utterly lost so it's precisely to deny the universality of our human experience the whole identitarian standpoint of which you know these things are only relevant because i don't know this this you're gay and this author was gay or whatever the case or you know you're white in this author was white or you're a man and this author was a man that's precisely to deny the universality of our human experience you mentioned the canon of course there's no rigid ideological standpoint according to which something is in or something is out all the canon is is history's bequeathing to us it's sense that these books have over in some cases many centuries yeah been able to illuminate the depth and complexity of human experience with an extraordinary uh power and so yeah and it's really important it's not just academics that determine the canon either and i'm not saying that the canon isn't open to debate and discussion that the things don't left out get left out that should be studied and considered but it's also artists determine what the canon is you know just through the the influence just simply through that you know there's a reason why michelangelo matters and it's because so many art because he changed the course of our history so many artists were borrowed on him and stood on his shoulders and that's why it matters it wasn't some academic making an arbitrary decision in some ivory tower that's not how this works um you need to have that awareness yeah well the the the the evolution i mean that's why there's an objectivity to these things you know it's not simply uh uh i mean the whole the whole idea that shakespeare is only there because he had a certain powerful stature or whatever is precisely an expression of the standpoint that there is no underlying truth whatsoever uh yes is that it denies itself access to the very experiences and books and human possibilities that would awaken a deeper subjectivity right absolutely and so it's left with a kind of fragile existential immediacy that's unable to grapple with the complexity or depth of reality and so it becomes a kind of isolated fragile island rather than one that can open itself up to the to the beauty and complexity and difficulty of experience in a more robust and adequate way and we're already failing you know this isn't the case that people are introducing these policies and schools in university we are already failing i think the humanities is probably dead you know i think i think it's already the rot has already set in and we are we are not precisely what you say we are not helping people to people will be unable to experience subjectivity and existence in the way that they should because of these measures that have been that have been taken it's like roger scrutiny used to talk about how you couldn't people who don't appreciate classical music they don't understand what they're missing because they don't it just isn't there for them so they don't realize that this is a big deal that they haven't had the necessary training you know and that's and that's the way i feel about a lot of things that's why i say i feel like i've been failed by education i feel like you know when i've read enough about certain things when i've experienced certain things in a way then i then i start to realize what i had missed and what i would be missing if i hadn't uh explored a little more and and i and i feel very sad about that and i and that's why i think it should be a priority um and not to not to i mean it's being it's being dismissed as elitism this idea that that teaching kid shakespeare that's a form of elitism because they don't understand it well of course they don't understand it that's why you teach it to them and then they learn an understanding of it and then they and then ultimately the hope is that they that informs the way that they see the world and and and it's the opposite of elitist actually we're saying the opposite of elitist because what you're what you're saying is that this you know poor kid in the city chicago or whatever she is capable of understanding the depth of human experience in herself right but if we want to give this so she can do that right but if and if you said well this this black child can't understand shakespeare because he's white if you inaugurate that kind of racialized world view um then then you are doing something deeply damaging to humanity but also particularly to that child you know it's it's not and it's it's it's just experientially unsound anyway because we all know that as children when we were left to our own devices we often did empathize and read things that had nothing to do with our own i didn't just read stories about white gay boys you know it's not the way that that that worked so yeah i think that's something that we need i mean in london there's a school catherine burbleson you may know the headmister mistress of the michaelis i know of her but i don't know her personally yeah well she's been writing an awful lot about this about how a lot of schools are now teaching if the school is predominantly black they'll teach the kids stormzy rather than shakespeare they because they think that a black child can't engage with shakespeare it's the bigotry of low expectations it's actually racist it's a profoundly racist bigoted standpoint right but it's but it's couched in the in the terms of anti-racism again this is the problem it's the exact opposite of what it claims claims to be and i think civilizationally we're not at the high point let's be honest it needs to be this anti-elitist thing where everybody has access to art and more than access to art i mean we do that we you know the art galleries in london are all free that kind of thing but do people have to have the means and the education to appreciate what what art is do we have i mean i can't help but i just read um recently i read um benvenuto benvenutocillini's autobiography so he's the sculptor the florentine sculptor that's a folk that's a that's a that's a wild book if ever there was one he was oh it's amazing i know he's crazy his adventure story of anything it's crazy i mean he killed a bunch of people he got revenge on the death of his brother the guy who killed his brother by the way was acting in self-defense but but cellini then had this blood rage and had to go and get not a nice guy okay so let's just say that but the point the point is his account there's a moment in it's it's shortly after it's when he's um when he's making the perseus so you know the the the the bronze statue that's still in the piazza de la cena and yeah yes yeah yeah yeah i know i'm not assuming but it's it's here's a really good example of this actually so when i was younger and i saw that statue i was immediately drawn to it but i didn't really know why and and having read more about it and more about art generally of that period my experience of it is so much more immersive and and and uh and and stirring you know and i think that that only comes but the reason i mentioned that book is because there's a moment where he's talking about the unveiling of the perseus in the square and the people who gathered there across all backgrounds and classes and uh they applauded and cheered this this this unveiling and we're posting sonnets to it sonnets of in praise of this work of of art there's a kind of discernment there and that's by the way it's not just the posh people there's working-class people to everyone there's a kind of broad cultural discernment there that comes from a healthy culture i'm not saying there weren't problems with that culture what i'm saying though is that when it comes to art if we could cultivate that kind of thing again if that i mean it couldn't happen now could it you can't imagine for a start you wouldn't get a statue of that quality being unveiled in central london would you i mean last week we had a a statue of an ice cream with a fly on it uh being unveiled on the fourth plinth in in trafalgar square and you don't get people for start the artwork isn't good enough but you don't get people crowding around and cheering this contribution to our artistic culture this doesn't happen anymore i think we've lost something and i don't want to romanticize the past and say everything was great i mean you can't do that if you read celine's book because he's such a does such despicable things and these things were normalized you know let's not forget that you know he was only able to write the book because he was under house arrest for uh sexual misconduct so you know i'm not trying to romanticize it but what i am saying is when it comes to artistic appreciation wouldn't it be amazing if we could reinstill that sense of awe that comes with great art at a young age into children and not divide them up on the basis of race and saying that your only experience of art and enjoying art is going to be to what extent it reinforms your existing world views if we could do that then we might have a statute being unveiled in central london and crowds gathering and cheering and posting sonnets to it who knows but i just think that's a beautiful idea if we can reach it i get excited when i hear you speak this way because uh i profoundly believe that uh the time as as as bad as things are on twitter and as rancorous as so much of our public discourse is i profoundly believe that the time is right and right for a recovery of a more adequate sense of what human beings are and their relation to what's real yet precisely the irrationality the heightened fevered pitch of the discourse i mean when you have the most popular children's author of all time being reviled in this silly twitter sphere for essentially a a asserting a basic fact of nature you know that that discourse has become so untethered from the basic terms of human existence that it's it's lost its spiritual integrity it's spiritual intellectual integrity yeah you know when that happens that the standpoint is is uh in a kind of writhing empty last stages and yeah so i actually think there's a certain i i in a certain sense titania's popularity is itself a reason for optimism because it means that a lot of people are seeing the contradictions that tatani is pointing out but what i don't think is that we should be passive relative to our institutional life educationally politically culturally artistically etc and that's that's fundamentally what ralston college is about because we believe that unless there are institutions uh with an absolute commitment of freedom of thought determined to understand the depth and nature of reality in all of its fullness that we can't possibly have the forms of culture i i get it i get it because what you're saying is right that ultimately it's probably going to have to be private institutions people you know if if the rot has so far set into to the government and and to the education as it currently stands it's going to have to be people taking the plunge and setting up and the reason why it all work is because people are hungry for it people are people are hungry for that educational bedrock people are hungry to be able to think for themselves and they and they they can even even those who like myself who was not educated well i don't think um and i'm not i'm not denigrating my teachers i think that's because of the system i still knew i was missing something and i think people do feel they're missing something and and that's yeah yeah actually this is why i've i've i'm very optimistic we get emails almost every day from from young people from college students from young adults and from older adults who are longing for a richer engagement with the questions that that that their human life raises for them and what's amazing is there's there's there's never any mention of politics these are not people who say oh you should go out there and own the ribs or you must be you you have to come out there and defend the the the the conservatives or something like that what's amazing is there's a deep longing springing up for honest asking of real questions for engagement with the terms of what we are as human beings for thinking about it freely for for not being subject to the coercions that prevent our asking those questions yes the freedom and depth they demand i think it's i think it's a fundamental aspect of humanity i think we all have it and that's why there is cause to be optimistic i think [Music] you

Channel: Ralston College

Views: 11,145

Keywords:

Id: 0DpVK-yBULM

Length: 114min 7sec (6847 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021