Andrew Doyle: Free Speech and Why It Matters

[Music] welcome everyone i'm stephen blackwood i'm the president of ralston college a new venture endeavor in higher education based in savannah it's a great pleasure to have you all here with us today for an event that i'm both excited about and which i think is on a topic of great cultural importance it is my great pleasure to uh welcome to uh this series dr andrew doyle the satirist scholar of renaissance literature defender of free speech and i'm think i'm not out of line to say also my friend into this series andrew has just written a absolutely fantastic book free speech and why it matters this has just come out last week i think a week ago today if i'm not mistaken in any event it's widely available free speech and why it matters i was expecting this to be a very damn good book because i know andrew and admire his work and the subtlety of his mind um but i uh i'm trying to think of a uh an elegant way of saying it was even better than i thought it was uh i thought it would be i think you could subtitle this book um free speech not what you thought it was um uh for reasons that i hope this conversation will uh we'll get into the format of our event today is going to be uh very straightforward uh momentarily i'll turn things over to andrew he will give us a uh talk of as long as he likes probably uh you know 20 to 30 minutes or so uh shorter or longer as the spirit moves him and then uh he and i will proceed to have a conversation uh back and forth uh in which we will be uh hoping that your questions from the audience will play a not insignificant role um so uh please do submit those questions uh in the chat um uh just a little housekeeping i feel as though i have to tell you uh having uh uh played the entirety of that magnificent piece of music which you'll all recognize those of you who follow our podcast um i should say by the way we're live tweeting and live streaming this event if you'd like to follow us on on twitter at ralston college but that piece of music is of course by uh by the great bach it's that tokata in fugue and d minor uh uh played by gerard uh gerhard i guess it is opitz it's actually transcribed from organ into piano anyway i just absolutely love that and i hope that we're going to get a chance to talk about freedom and the arts uh in this conversation which plays a wonderful role uh one of the most moving parts of this book is when andrew talks about that in this terrific book anyway without further ado uh andrew thank you so much for joining us over to you thank you very much stephen and thank you to everyone at ralston college which is a an institution that i wholeheartedly support um thank you for having me i really appreciate this i did a book launch the the other night over zoom uh so that was quite uh an interesting experience having this invisible audience that i can't see but it's good to know that there are lots of people out there and hopefully we'll have some interesting questions afterwards um i'm going to keep this quite loose i'm going to cover some of the aspects of the book but i'm also going to talk a little bit about why i felt the book was necessary to write i think if you'd have asked me 15 years ago 20 years ago whether i would be writing a book about this about free speech i would have considered it extremely unlikely because my feeling has always been that surely in a liberal democracy uh the notion that freedom of speech needs to be robustly defended is a is an odd one because i took it as a given i took it for granted um and it's only my reading of late over the past 15 years 20 years or so does made me realize that free speech needs to be continually defended in every successive generation and that it isn't something that we can afford to be complacent about and i feel as though we are reaching a moment where the principle appears to be falling apart and more and more people are becoming skeptical about about the reasons why we need it so something's gonna miss in other words i i say in the book that a lot of people are having trouble putting their finger on what the problem might be and i put it like this in the book i say that the culture wars have left a substantial number of us feeling as though we are no longer on secure ground and that the the tremors are too persistent and that's an idea that i developed but i think it is this gnawing sense that a lot a lot of us have um that our freedoms are are slipping away in this piecemeal fashion and that's something i want to develop a little bit so i want to structure this in three ways i want to ask three questions really so the first question that i want to ask is where are we now in terms of freedom of speech what is the current situation the second question i want to ask is how did we get here and then finally i want to ask what we're going to do about it and it's my hope that in the question and answer session and in the discussion afterwards with stephen uh we might come up with some ideas because i i have to say i'm not entirely sure about the answer to that third question so i'll start with the the first question where are we now um in the book i've tried to talk about the situation in the uk and and the us as as well uh and uh touching on other areas such as canada and i think um obviously that i'm going to talk a bit about the uk um because we of course do not have a first amendment uh so we don't have constitutionally protected free speech and as a result of that i think we can see why things are slipping and to start i'm going to start with the the anecdote that i mentioned at the opening of the book which is that of the entrepreneur and former constable harry miller now i'm aware that a lot a lot of the audience here tonight are in the u.s and will not be familiar with this case but i think it's quite instructive uh so one day this this entrepreneur harry miller was contacted by a member of the police force and the police officer said to him that he was investigating what we call a non-crime hate incident it transpires that harry miller had retweeted a poem which was deemed to be offensive and somebody had contacted the police and said i'm offended by this poem i should emphasize that harry miller did not write the poem the poem was merely retweeted from his twitter account and so the police officer contacted him and said that this was a concern because the poem was allegedly a transphobic poem uh in other words it was critical of the idea that that people are able to biologically change sex um harry miller said to him well have i committed a crime and the police officer said no you've not not committed a crime this is a non-crime hate incident and a victim has got in touch with us and harry miller said why are you referring to this person as a victim rather than a complainant if no crime has been committed and in fact why are you bothering contacting me at all and he was utterly baffled by this and as a former police officer himself uh he knew that this was this this felt irregular to him and then the police officer in question used a phrase which i think anyone who is familiar with orwell or any form of dystopian fiction in fact will find very chilling and the phrase was this we need to check your thinking so i'll just repeat that phrase we need to check your thinking and the police officer went on to to uh explain to him that he'd been through police training and and he understood uh and he gave him some pseudo science about uh about uh transitioning and this kind of thing and talked about how people can be born with a male body but a female brain and this kind of thing and ultimately harry miller's thinking was not along the lines that the college of policing advance and propagate through their training schemes that's that's the bottom line really so this is quite this became quite a well-known uh event in the uk only because harry miller took them to task and eventually took them to the court and the high court did in fact rule that the police had been overzealous but stopped short of suggesting that the college of policing should revise their guidelines uh the other week here in the uk we had uh another incident where a an image went viral of a group of police officers who were standing outside a supermarket with a big digital billboard it was a billboard on the back of a van and it had been designed to shift slogans uh every now and then one of the big slogans that came up on this digital billboard was being offensive is an offense and this caused a lot of consternation because of course being offensive in of itself is isn't a crime and ultimately after people complained the police apologized and said no that's not that's not entirely correct however and this is the the problem with this firstly that billboard had been designed by a committee police officers had sat together in meetings and and discussed the wording and it's absolutely clear uh that the way that the police in the uk operate they believe that in fact being offensive is a a criminal offence you often see tweets from the police department saying expect a visit from us this weekend if you say anything offensive online for instance so there's that the second point about this this particular story is that in fact they were correct uh we have a thing in the uk called the 2003 electronic communications act which deems that anything that is written online that is considered grossly offensive is in fact against the law and can see you prosecuted and that is the benchmark the phrase is grossly offensive and that's all that a prosecutor needs to determine and there doesn't need to be any suggestion uh that there was hateful intent and i'll explain why why that is so firstly the the the cross the crown prosecution service in the uk has guidelines uh related to hate crime and hate speech and this is what they say they say that hate crime is any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person's disability or perceived disability race or perceived race or religion or perceived religion or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender so and they also mention that a hate incident is defined as a non-criminal act that is perceived by the victim or anyone else to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on the five protected characteristics that i've already outlined you'll notice that the word perceived appears a number of times in that document and this is the trouble this is still the case if you go to the uk government's hate speech online website it will tell you exactly the same thing so for instance if someone were to criticize me uh if someone were to even criticize my book and i decide that i think that that criticism is motivated by homophobia say then that will be recorded in the uk if i contact the police as a uh a non-crime hate incident at the very least if not a hate crime and does form part of hate crime statistics so this is a a real problem that we have in the uk if you take the last uh from the period 2014 to 2019 uh there were in fact 100 000 non-crime hate incidents recorded by police so they're spending an awful lot of time on this you might think it doesn't matter because a non-crime hate incident doesn't result in prosecution that's true it doesn't however it does show up on criminal disclosure checks a lot of jobs that you you apply for in the uk you are required to take what's called a disclosure and borrowing service check a dbs check and if anything comes up employers are likely to be nervous and possibly not hire you so it does have ramifications that someone in the uk can simply contact the police make a complaint say that they perceive that something was was based on hostility or prejudice due to protected characteristics and it's on your record forevermore and it could actually cost you work but quite aside from that there's a bigger principle at stake here which is of course that the police in a in a civilized society have absolutely no business investigating citizens uh for things that they say or think and i specifically say think as well because i feel we're losing sight of that as well because a lot certainly in america it's very common but over here more and more companies and corporations are instigating what is called unconscious bias training or implicit bias tests um and of course all of the research into those tests has proven that they don't actually have any effect whatsoever in fact in some cases the research has shown that these tests can have the impact of making a work environment more racist not less but quite aside from that your employer doesn't have the right in a liberal society to go probing around your private thoughts so all of this stuff is is happening and it is very troubling just to broaden this out a little bit to give you another flavor of what's going on at the moment um i've talked about the non-crime hate incidents recorded in england and wales in scotland um we have effectively a kind of one-party state in scotland there's a party called the scottish national party the snp who have no real competition um they do dominate scottish politics and they are very authoritarian they have a track record of authoritarianism from minimum pricing for alcohol to a ban on two for one pizzas because they don't trust their uh their citizens to look after themselves this kind of thing so they have that kind of nanny state quality uh they also have a justice secretary called hamza youssaf who is keen he has uh formulated this new hate crime bill which to this day they are still persisting with this hate crime bill and specifically the the trouble with this bill is that it would uh criminalize conversations in your private home if they are deemed to quote unquote stir up hatred whatever that means similarly there's actually a section of that bill which pertains specifically to the performance the public performance of a play and hamza youssef was asked about this uh in the scottish parliament and he said well yes but if a if a neo-nazi i'm paraphrasing here but someone from the far right uh were to create a play a drama in order to recruit people to their cause and put it on we should be able to prosecute that person now i don't know any neo-nazis myself but i'm pretty sure they're not into amateur dramatics and that's not how they go about uh recruiting so i don't know where he's getting that from but that that is a worry scotland as i've said particularly authoritarian and there was one one case which i'd like to mention to you because it really was a wake-up call to me um and this was uh just a few years ago now and this was a case of a man called marcus meeken who online is known as count dankula and you can gather from the name that he's a a comedian type person so he creates youtube clips um and funny videos and memes uh in order to just be mischievous that's the purpose of it and he created a film which you might have heard of it was just a short three minute video in which he trained his girlfriend's pug to give a nazi salute and to react enthusiastically whenever it heard uh some trigger phrases now the trigger phrases in of themselves could easily have caused offense because those phrases were z kyle and gas the jews obviously offensive phrases but the offense of course is mitigated by the joke because the joke is that this very cute adorable pug dog is dancing about and even doing a little nazi salute itself he trained the dog to do this in response to these terms and in fact the sheer ferocity of the terms themselves uh is the point of the juxtaposition that is the point of the joke i know i i needn't explain the joke because it is absolutely obvious and what's more to the point he actually explained the joke within the context of the video itself he said to whatever audience was out there i'm not a nazi i'm just trying to uh play a trick on my girlfriend because she keeps going on about how cute her dog is so i'm going to teach it to become a nazi so that's that's the joke however he was arrested for this uh and when he was arrested the police officer who arrested him said to him you are an actual nazi who's trying to train people to become nazis and i've written about this a number of times and i have said that i would have thought that if someone was in fact trying to recruit people uh to a kind of fourth reich then i don't think they would have done that through the medium of pug dogs but nevertheless the scottish police thought differently and it went as far as it went to court it was a two-year investigation and trial process and in the end he was found guilty even though the prosecution conceded that there was no evidence of hateful intent there was no evidence other than uh the material itself the video itself and that the prosecution and the judge in question knew what was going on in his mind just by intuition that appears to be the case because cyber crime intelligence had in fact investigated all of his emails all of his texts everything he'd ever sent and found absolutely no evidence uh whatsoever so it's a it's it is seems flippant because it's about a silly video and it's a joke video but actually the principle is actually quite frightening because he was found guilty and he was ultimately uh he did escape jail time but he was ultimately fined 800 pounds now the reason i mentioned that is because that is a very clear example of where a joke uh has landed someone uh with a criminal record uh at the moment in the uk uh there's a man waiting to see he might face up to six months in prison because he sent a nasty tweet about the late captain tom moore uh who is a the veteran who raised an awful lot of money for the nhs and it was an extremely distasteful tweet it wasn't a joke it was just a nasty tweet and um i don't approve of it and i'm sure most of the people watching wouldn't approve of it but i approve less of the state locking someone up for for being offensive so i think that's that's the the problem here and i think we'll probably get into that later is this idea that when you are defending free speech you often find yourself uh defending the speech rights of not very nice people because of course uncontroversial speech requires absolutely no protection so it it doesn't need your assistance and the problem as well is when you do defend those sorts of people uh who want to say these awful things things that you don't approve of you are often accused of complicity people will say well you obviously agree with what they're saying and actually that's absolutely not the case one of the um famous examples that i mentioned in the book is of course skokie in chicago in the 1970s uh where the aclu um supported the rights of neo-nazis to march and uh i have read the book by the head of the aclu at the time who just the book is called defending my enemy and he says about that he was effectively defending the rights of neo-nazis to speak freely because he wanted to defeat neo-nazism because he understood that if you dilute the principle of free speech then you dilute the very means by which we can resist uh such terrible people and it is so the prop the question we should always ask in these cases is is not are we defending the the speech that this awful person has said or are we actually standing up against the possibility of the state legislating and making decisions about what speech is acceptable and what speech is not acceptable and that really is the key question and if anyone who knows anything about history will know it's never a good idea to allow the state to have those powers it's very short-sighted even if you have a benevolent ruler at any given time that is not forever and you establish a precedent in law that can be used forever more and and we know this happens again and again so um in the uk we have problems with hate speech as i say you have your first amendment although i note that there are some activists in america who are uh busy hoping to undermine the first amendment and are keen to change this so that hate speech is no longer constitutionally protected now for me the question of hate speech is an interesting one it feels like a relatively recent invention in terms of the the phrase and the concept and more often than not what it is is it's a way to carve out exceptions to free speech protections it isn't really so much hate speech as speech that we hate and i think that's that's been evidenced again and again by people who cry hate speech whenever they hear something that they perceive to be offensive it is in fact the justification that social media platforms give for deleting the accounts of gender-critical feminists who are not transphobic who are not hateful but are concerned about the possibility that gender self-identification if someone who is for instance anatomically male can identify as female and gain access to women at women's only spaces such as prisons or indeed domestic violence refuge centers or in fact sports you know um there are some physical dangers which could be the ramification of someone who is biologically male playing against biologically female athletes and and there's no doubt about that so um but this is then referred to as hate speech as a means to not engage with the debate and therefore we can just put that aside we can say those people are transphobic and hateful we don't have to talk to them we don't have to take their their position seriously and of course the problem with that is it's it's it's just a means to evade the debate and actually when it comes to sensitive issues like that we need more discussion not less so that that gives you another example of hate speech but hate speech in of itself is not something that can possibly be meaningfully defined we we know that the european court of human rights and unesco have conceded this isn't something that can be defined if you if you look at there's a book by paul coleman called censored which meticulously goes through all of the hate speech regulations and legislation across the whole of europe and actually most of the book is is a facsimiles of all of these of this this legislation so you can see for yourself every country appears to have a different definition of what is hateful and that gets to the nub of the problem is that hate is far too nebulous a term uh to to to be used in legislation successfully or without the possibility of exploitation and abuse the other problem quite aside from all the the legal issues that we've got is is this question of council culture and i think um this is something that is often uh frequently misunderstood it's a phrase that's often used and it's a phrase that's often derided uh you'll hear a lot of people talking about how council culture doesn't exist all it is is uh we're holding the powerful to account and they're not used to that and to give an example of this you'll you'll probably have heard of the letter that appeared in harper's magazine uh relatively recently um i spoke to one of the the men who formulated the original draft of that letter that's thomas chatterton williams and um the letter was signed by all sorts of people people like michael atwood noam chomsky jk rowling and salman rushdie so people with a lot of left-wing credentials and in the letter it was quite an important step because this is one of the first time that major left-wing figures had stood up and and said uh that they support the principle of free speech and they're worried about the idea of council culture so what do we mean and people took this letter as evidence well look at all these people they're successful they're they're they're rich they're they they're not being cancelled what are they talking about but of course it was precisely their success that enabled them to write the letter in the first place because they are not at risk of cancellation the example of jk rowling is a good one uh she's obviously the world's most famous uh and wealthiest authors uh she cannot be cancelled so people you know but even though she has been through under a tirade of attacks she's been accused of transphobia even though she's never said anything transphobic uh she's been uh monstered demonized dehumanized people have sent her rape threats threats of violence all kinds of things uh on the basis of nothing in fact if you want to know what her views on on agenda and trans issues are all you need to do is read the very compassionate blog post she wrote about it uh on her website and it clears everything up but a lot of her critics in fact don't read it and if they do read it they do so uncharitably and they intuit a motive that isn't there so it is worth uh checking that out however but of course jk rowling has not been cancelled her publisher didn't cancel her last book and the reason for that is she's too successful however if you're a less lucrative author it's perfectly possible that you will be cancelled and in fact that did happen here in the uk in scotland there's an author called jillian philip who is a scottish children's author and she lost her publisher she was ditched because she stood up for jk rowling so um it just goes to show that in fact success does protect you from cancellation and that means that the majority vast majority of people who are quote unquote councils are ordinary working people who don't have the kind of reputation that kind of clout uh the kind of financial resources uh to protect themselves in these situations fortunately we've got a new organization in this country called the free speech union which was set up by toby young and they have defended all sorts of people valiantly uh who have been um threatened with a loss of earning a loss of income or indeed potentially fired or taken to court for things that they have said and we're not talking about racists and and homophobes and people who want to go on neo-nazi rants we're talking about normal people who've said something that has maybe been misinterpreted or misunderstood or maybe they've misspoken but the judgment has come down and this is what cancer culture means it's it's typically a very slight uh indiscretion and the response is massively disproportionate it's mostly driven online so people form these gangs and they dog pile and they attack they docks they put out private information they contact people's employers because they don't just want to destroy their reputation they want to destroy their livelihood the way in which they earn a living and um and that's what we mean by council culture this very disproportionate reaction uh to mistakes ultimately but not even always mistakes sometimes just simply unfashionable or unpopular opinions and this is the culture now so a good example was was when uh the editor of waitrose food magazine a man called sitwell um he received an email from a freelance journalist saying that she wanted to write about vegan food and he replied with an email that was very flippant and silly and it was he made some silly joke about well maybe we should round up vegans and feed feed force-feed the meat or something like this i mean it wasn't i'm paraphrasing it was just a silly email but instead of saying to him as this journalist could have done i was offended by that i'm a vegan i was upset can we talk about this um she instead screenshot the email posted it online uh and shamed him and in fact he was forced to resign from his post um that's an example of a kind of attitudinal shift i think uh more and more people have got to the position where they don't uh call in it's this idea of the difference between call in culture and call out culture they don't call in with someone and say oh this offended me this upset me um they publicly shame it's the sort of equivalent of the medieval period where you might put someone in the stocks and that's what you want in other words cancer culture is really revenge dressed up uh the singer nick cave has described it as mercy's antithesis and i think that is that is behind it it's that kind of bestial pleasure that a lot a lot of people get this kind of shard embroider when they see other people suffer and they want to be a part of that and it's a base instinct but it's one that is now legitimized uh broadly by by by broad behavior but also uh egged on by certain elements of the media who think that this is in any way justifiable so that's that's the council culture and i there is a chapter in the book on cancer college where i develop this a bit more fully um but i do think it's worth addressing because so many people don't really know what it what it means and if if you're and because so many people doubt that it exists if you're in any doubt about this um when i was compiling examples of people who lost their jobs in this way uh the list went on and on i mean it there were hundreds and i couldn't do that so i've just mentioned about nine or ten in the in the footnotes of the book um to give just a couple of examples in in june 2015 the nobel prize winning biochemist tim hunt was forced to resign from his honorary position at university college london because a journalist misrepresented jokes that he'd made at a conference in south korea um you may have heard in april 2019 the british philosopher roger scrutin was sacked as housing advisor to the conservative government uh because a journalist at the new statesman doctored his statements when from an interview posted them online these were statements that in fact uh scrutin was being explicitly opposed to racism by taking out a few words here and there the journalist from the new statesman uh made them sound like racist statements and as a result he was forced to step down from that commission i don't believe he ever got an apology from the new statesman for that um there's uh all sorts of examples here there's a man who was sacked from a supermarket after sharing a video online of the comedian billy connolly uh the the the segment mocked islamic suicide bombers um but even though the source of that uh the clip the stand-up clip that he shared was on a dvd that was being sold by the supermarket itself so there was there was a bit of incoherence there anyway more there are so many examples of this and there are actually whole threads that you i could link you to on twitter and online uh of people who are compiling examples of all of these um instances of council culture so when someone says to you cancer culture isn't true it's either because they don't know what we mean by cancer culture or uh they're just didn't they're engaging in denialism uh and that's that's something that we need to be aware of other problems just in terms of this question of where we are now i'm just watching the time i don't want to go overboard um uh the question of academic freedom is is a serious issue there was a 2020 report by the policy exchange in the uk that found that one in three conservative scholars claimed to self-censor for fear of consequences to their career there's an article in the atlantic i've noted down here a survey of 445 academics in the united states by the heterodox academy found that more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory what we have therefore is irrefutable evidence that a significant proportion of the academic body are not being honest about their opinion um because they think they might get fired or at least will be passed over for promotion or not get tenure this is a terrible scenario to be in and that this does speak to the kind of institutional capture uh when it comes to um this movement um and i think academic freedom is is something we're going to have to to talk about i think it's uh it's where a lot of the problems have originated in terms of free speech because an awful lot of academics are simply not in favor of free speech or don't know what it means i recently had a group of academics bombarding me uh with abuse online because i'd have blocked some of them of course i don't actually ever block people if they politely disagree i only block people if they're abusive or they always assume bad faith or try and intuit my motive or misrepresent my argument because i don't believe you can argue with someone who behaves in such a childish way um but they were so angry that they thought their free speech was being violated because i'd block them on twitter of course anyone who knows anything about free speech knows that the right not to listen is an important aspect of free speech and i was merely exercising my own and it's such a fundamental misunderstanding that it's quite depressing to see some of the most um supposedly educated people in the world not understanding such a basic premise uh in fact one a professor from oxford university was so incensed uh by this that he contacted my publisher the publisher of my book on free speech uh presumably in the hope of getting that book cancelled with no sense of irony or self-awareness there so that's what we're talking about uh in addition to academic freedom one of the other problems we face at the moment uh is um press freedom and uh i say this particularly in the uk uh because there's been a lot of efforts recently over here to reign in the media uh often in response to needlessly intrusive behavior we have very intrusive press over here perhaps more so than the us uh i think we're quite famous for it um and sometimes illegal contact conduct by journalists things like phone hacking and that kind of thing i mean my my response to this is always apply the law if a journalist has broken the law uh then he or she uh should be um prosecuted as a result but the idea of clamping down on press freedom is a problem um the government tried to instigate there was a regulating body here called impress the independent monitor for the press uh which was established in the wake of the leveston inquiry and this was commissioned by the uk government no newspapers in this country signed up to this independent regulator because they understood there was a real problem actually with this with the proposals because they were suggesting um that if somebody uh pursued a paper for instance then the paper themselves would be subject to all the costs even if they won and this would effectively be a means by which the powerful uh would be able to muzzle their critics and i think therefore press freedom is something we all have to be vigilant about every tyrant whoever comes to power every desk spot one of the first things they always do is they clamp down on press freedom you'll know that from reading about about world war ii and nazi germany for instance so one of the the second question i wanted to address is is how we got here and i think another instance of uh the current discourse of free speech is quite revealing in this regard and that is the question of big tech we we have seen a situation where a very small group of um multi-billion dollar corporations a a corporate oligopoly if you like has seized control of the de facto public square and they can make decisions about public discourse that has serious ramifications uh throughout the world you know and um this to me is a major threat to free speech because although libertarians that i've spoken to and um those who support the free market will always say well private companies can do whatever they please well i feel that argument is about 20 years out of date because they wield such incredible power and we've always known that when small groups of companies have too much power that's why we introduce anti-trust laws we always know that there's a problem there um and indeed with the the current state of affairs it's not as though you can you can simply set up your own platform we saw what happened with parlor when that happened the the big tech companies the silicon valley tech giants just found a way to shut that down they they destroy any competition in its nascent form and they have very uh bizarre and uh unclear um terms of service that are deliberately vague uh and formulated deliberately so so that they can ban people simply for having opinions they don't agree with so we're not talking about illegal content here uh we're talking about content they just don't like or find offensive the reason they can censor with impunity is because of a thing called the communications decency act and it's section 230 of that and that was set up for very good reason because media outlets often have comments sections and they can't possibly be expected to be held accountable for everything that get post that gets posted in those comments sections people could upload illegal material and if a news outlet failed to remove that material then they would be liable so they do need those legal protections uh the problem is that now whenever facebook or twitter or anyone like that is sued for content that appears that they have failed to remove say it's libelous content or something like that their defense will always be section 230 of the communications decency act and they will say we are not publishers we are platforms so therefore we are not responsible however if they are determined to censor opinions they don't like delete accounts of people for political reasons exercise such clear political bias then in fact they are curating the material on their side and they are acting like publishers if that is the case then they should be held accountable for the content on their site they can't have it both ways and this is something that we're going to have to address i don't think the current biden administration will be interested in addressing this uh largely because um of course the the tech giants are on side politically but it is something that needs to be addressed because it will ultimately affect anyone no matter who you support politically it's not a good idea to have uh small groups of billionaire companies who have more collective power than any nation state but none of the democratic accountability so i think when it comes to free speech that's that's a really key question and in terms of uh how we got here well i think it comes down to the ideology the driving ideology that you see among big tech tells us pretty much everything we need to know and that driving ideology is really uh what we would call critical social justice or social justice or intersectional politics or uh identity politics people don't know what to call it do they um colloquially it's become known as woke ideology uh and i think that's as good a term as any at the moment there are flaws to that term but let's go with that um and there is something at the heart of this movement that is inherently hostile to freedom of speech and i think it uh goes back to its origins if you trace its origins there's a very good book by james lindsey and helen pluck rose called cynical theories which traces the origins of this movement back to the early post-modernists the french post-modernists of the 1960s and 70s um the laetta and foucault and deredar and what we have now is actually a corruption of that it isn't post-modernism really it's a corrupted version of it but what they successfully do in this book is they show how uh with this focus on power structures in society particularly think of foco's notion of power working across society as a grid they took this idea but they also took the idea that our understanding of reality uh is entirely uh created by the language that we use they weren't saying that there's no such thing as objective truth but they're they're saying that we can never reach it because our perception of reality is completely constructed through language this is often why uh people like camille parler often talk point out uh that post-modernist traditional post models aren't very good at engaging with the visual arts for instance uh or dance or sculpture or painting because they're not equipped for it because they can only think linguistically and in deconstructive terms so when you have a situation where language is all-powerful you can see this resonate and reverberate within the language of contemporary social justice activists it's why they say things like words are violence it's why they say things like this kind of discourse normalizes hate that joke will legitimize uh hatred against marginalized groups it's that kind of notion uh this faith-based position um that language has this kind of incredible power and that people seem are like robots that simply respond mechanically on cue to language that they hear there's an example i give in the book of the british parliament where boris johnson was using this metaphor of the surrender bill he was describing a bill as the surrender bill he was using words like a traitor or betrayal and other politicians tried to connect that to the murder of an mp in the uk and said that language like that stokes violence you've had it recently in the u.s with people accusing donald trump of incitement because he uses uh phrases that are combative um a phrase like fighting and uh you know take to the field and these kind of phrases that are incredibly common uh in uh in political discourse now i'm not here to discuss the rights and wrongs of banning donald trump i i don't think i i don't think it was a good idea as it happens even though i'm not a supporter of trump but what i but what i would say is that the idea that a robust and colorful political language can incite violence is actually based on very meager evidence and certainly uh wouldn't meet the brandenburg test of incitement uh which you have in the u.s to determine whether incitement has occurred um so that's something to consider as well i'm sure we'll get onto an incitement but the way i feel that we got here is that um as i say the present-day social justice activists have this belief of the connection of language and power derived from the french post-modernists um and these same activists are often at the forefront of censorship of the arts and i can trace that or i i think i'm right to trace this to the thinkers of the frankfurt school people like herbert marcus and theodore adorno uh and hawkheimer and those people for whom popular culture and entertainment were seen as distractions from the revolutionary uh project so popular culture in other words in this formulation is a kind of means of social control and you see echoes of this again in in modern uh social justice and intersectional uh activists and the way that they talk about the importance of representation in in film theater and fiction uh you've had it recently with the banning of six of dr seuss's books um because their representation is deemed to be problematic never mind that he was born in 1904 and ethical standards change over time i would have thought it'd be easier to simply teach children about that uh rather than trying to erase the books on a side point as a result of that of course all of those books have now become best seller best sellers on amazon and that is of course what happens every time you try to censor something that draws attention to it it's called the streisand effect um so uh i'm i i know that stephen mentioned at the start that he wanted to talk about the impact on the arts so i'm not going to say too much about it now uh but only to say that i am a big believer in oscar wilde's uh statement that he made in the preface to the picture of dorian gray which was written in 1890 and he says there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book books are well written or badly written that is all and i realize i've been talking for an awful long time now so i'm gonna i do wanna hear from from you guys so i'm just gonna quickly go to my third question and just put it out there more than anything rather than talk about it which is where do we go from here and my fear is i mean more and more uh i feel that we are being polarized and i fear that the free speech debate has become about uh firstly it's been misunderstood as a debate about left versus right and people on the right are deemed to be the defenders of free speech um or it's seen as a a ruse in order to mask far-right views and that is very troubling to me because i i i feel quite nervous about the idea that defending free speech something as honorable as defending free speech can so often kindle these very dishonorable suspicions this idea that uh anyone who is for free speech doesn't care about minority groups and and wants people to be as horrible to them as possible i mean this is absolutely the opposite of everything i know from working with free speech campaigners their concern is that uh they well they understand that the only way that marginalized voices can be heard is in fact through the defense of free speech that's what all of the civil rights luminaries from the 1960s understood that's why you had the movement in berkeley because they understood that women's rights and gay rights and rights for black people could not be advanced unless you have free speech at the start my concern at the moment is a lot of people on on my side of the argument people who will defend free speech have given up on liberal values and given up on persuasion i've had some criticism of this book that it is too nice that it is too polite that it's too uh amenable to those who have concerns about hateful speech well that's because firstly i think they have a point hateful speech is unpleasant and i understand why people's instinct is to get rid of it to censor it because it isn't nice i would rather live in a world where we didn't hear uh these awful reverberative notions expressed in the public square um that would be wonderful but what i don't want is to silence people and force them not to say it um and i think um are too many people who who believe in free speech now are saying effectively you will never reach those people the the social justice movement they're too entrenched in their ideology they're never going to change their mind but what i would say to those people is these ideologues are in the minority it's just that they have disproportionate power in higher education and in politics uh and in schools and in the arts and in media so yes they're extremely powerful but most people are still open to persuasion most people are somewhere in the middle i've spoken to an awful lot of people who yes they do support free speech but they are nervous about incitement or they're nervous about hateful people expressing hateful views and that is an understandable perspective so i wrote a book in an effort to reach out to those people and to persuade them not to insult them uh not to further entrench uh the the polarized notion of the culture war that's something i wasn't interested in and and and i fear that in going forward from here i mean there's always a place for the barbed acerbic approach i very much enjoy uh reading polemics and and writers who have that very waspish quality that can be an awful lot of fun but i don't think anyone's ever been persuaded by being insulted and i think ultimately uh the notion that freedom of speech is the seed bed of all of our freedoms is a compelling argument and it is something that we can with patients uh persuade everyone of thinking it's just going to take some time thank you very much thank you very much andrew for that very uh uh incisive introduction to the uh the the thrust of your book uh the contextualization of your book uh there's there's an awful lot in here that i i want to pick up on uh for those of you who perhaps missed our introduction we're talking about uh andrew doyle's new book free speech and why it matters i began by saying that i thought there was a certain sense in which you could call this book free speech not what you thought or not what you were expecting and uh what i mean by that andrew is a is a great compliment and i i hope this can come out in our conversation here there's one sense in which it would be easy enough to write a really fiery defense of free speech you know preaching to the choir you know mocking your opponents through your sheer rhetorical power trying to coerce people into saying they agreed with you you know mocking contradictions in your opponents um but that's just absolutely not what is uh going on here this is a a courageous but also i would say a a gentle book you are writing in ostentatiously good faith uh steel manning as some people say your opponent's arguments many of which you think have real moral force though in the end you uh suggest that the ends of those arguments can be better achieved through other means uh but in this and and this is is something that i uh expect will return to and what is present in not only your arguments but in the way that you make your arguments um you are affirming the freedom of thought of those who may be skeptical or opposed to freedom of speech and thought you you are yourself refusing coercion and domination through power and thus you are you are instantiating the freedom that you seek to defend uh it's a it's a it's a very beautiful and important thing uh uh you you've done here um so i'm i'm i thank you for that and i want to begin straight out of the gate here with some of the steel manning that you do of the your opponent's uh arguments um you know you you admit uh right out of the gate that it is uh there is a tendency or that there is now there are many many people who quote tend to perceive freedom of expression as being in conflict with minority rights and are willing to see it compromised for the sake of a more inclusive society um you know we we know that words can wound we know that we're capable of hurting each other we know there are people who have a hard time defending themselves that are disenfranchised oppressed weak um struggling abused can you just uh tell us summarize for us why you think those such people can be better defended through robust protections of freedom of speech than through limiting the hateful and terrible things people might say about them we've seen that in countries where free speech protections are poor um the marginalized groups tend to fare extremely badly uh and i think i i made the point that the civil rights activists knew this uh and and therefore knew that free speech protection was important i think the conflict lies when what the the counter argument is that when you have people in power who have all the speech they have all the platforms and other other voices are not heard and that's a legitimate uh concern but the answer to that is not to silence more of the powerful people it is to to hear other voices open up more uh means of discourse and dialogue and that's that's the way to do it and unless we can have these ideas out in the open unless we can speak freely to each other and listen to each other then we'll never reach any we'll never make any kind of progress largely because um the very act of reasoning of thinking things through is a collaborative endeavor it's about the way that we interact with each other and hear each other and talk to each other and that's why we we cannot get any further without this um so i think it's just a i think it's just a false approach which is this idea that you know we need to essentially essentially pull people uh down if there are those who are silenced now we need to actually elevate those who those voices that are silenced not the other way around i don't otherwise you're in that kind of crabs in a bucket situation thank you there there's a let me say let me ask you whether you think this is a solid line of reasoning there's a real sense in which uh of course we can make many moral arguments in defense of free speech and should but there is a there is a profound sense i was reading uh before an interview reading this stephen pinker's uh the blank slate recently and it really came to me that there is a there is a profound sense in which freedom of thought is a kind of evolutionary adaptation it is the means by which we situate ourselves in relation to the to the world and each other the means which we take in and process the data that we receive in a certain sense it's it's uh it's analogous to sight and it's actually quite interesting that in the history of philosophy for example going back to aristotle uh sight and uh seeing or vision or thinking are are often closely uh closely compared um but the point i'm making is that you would you would no sooner think you were at a dis you were at an advantage by you know closing your eyes uh when you were walking into traffic then you would uh in thinking that you if by limiting your ability to think or take in data about the world that you were somehow better off i mean how would the greeks have fared if they had had a prohibition against uh warnings of uh warnings against if they had a prohibition of warnings against threats to the state so when the persians were coming if it had been you know forbidden to say listen bad things are coming down the pipe we should prepare uh you can imagine what might have happened there imagine if it were forbidden to say that you know you to shout at someone when they were about to walk into traffic we've certainly seen with covid uh uh you know the the the serious problems if uh uh if data and uh free discourse is suppressed in our ability to handle this uh horrific pandemic now those are all physical examples but i'm using them because it seems to me the principle very much holds with deeper or more complicated matters that suppression of free thought and of speech which is the only means perhaps not the only but the primary means i mean we can perhaps we can mime things which is a kind of visual speech or something but ultimately freedom of speech is the means by which we have we means we have to portray and describe and share our thoughts with with each other so that fundamentally you know one can though i think one can make this on moral argument moral grounds i think it's helpful to situate this in terms of you know the very most basic things like you know do you or do you not want to know that the car is coming down the road do you or do you not want to i mean the the the at the at the most fundamental level freedom of speech is the means by which we can share the data the understanding that we have with each other so that those others and ourselves can have the benefit of that absolutely and to given the example that i i briefly touched on which is that of uh gender critical feminism there is a groundswell of particularly feminists and uh uh people who are concerned about women's rights uh that there is a perceived conflict um with a gender self-identification now uh twitter and social media have done an awful a a good job of banning anyone who expresses that point of view youtube has removed videos of anyone who's expressed that point of view do you really want not want to know and address and understand that there is this deep level of consternation in society over this issue about which we have not been allowed to have the discussion uh you know i've spoken to people even people in politics uh even people in the media who say they will not touch this subject they will not speak about it because to do so opens them up to incredible abuse and threats online and i understand why they would self censor center under those circumstances however if you were serious about trans rights or your or your belief in gender self-identification you would want to have these conversations because no progress is ever made without persuasion i mean i go back to the gay rights movement as a very good example gay rights equal marriage all of the rest of it was not achieved by locking people up by you for using the wrong terminology what would be the equivalent now to misgendering someone people in the uk are frequently investigated by the police and sometimes arrested and put in prison for misgendering um there's one famous case here one woman spell spent seven hours in a cell for misgendering someone on twitter um so that isn't going to persuade someone uh it's never ever gonna happen and i i do fear it's what i touched on at the end i do fear that people have simply given up on the notion that we can persuade because they just don't want to hear the unpleasant truths uh you mentioned the example of a shouting at someone who's walking into traffic we just don't want to hear it so we shut it out instead actually it's much better i mean there's a reason why that cliche uh sunlight being the best disinfectant uh is a cliche it's it's big it's because it makes complete sense um i do fear that this is uh more and more happening and i do think that it is tied to this this social justice ideology that has a real problem with truth actually uh and and and believes in advancing a kind of pseudo-reality where they can say for instance if you take the tenets of critical race theory everything about our culture is underpinned by white supremacy every human interaction is undergirded by racism as robin deangelo says in her book white fragility you don't go into a situation and say well was this situation racist you say how did racism manifest itself in this situation so this and all whenever they say for instance there have been people in the uk have said that oxford and cambridge university are systemically institutionally racist when you show data and research that proves that the opposite is the case and in fact that these are some of the least racist places on earth that data is disregarded and people will say yes but what about my lived experience which is what we used to call anecdotal evidence there's a reason we used to disregard anecdotal evidence not to suggest that people's experiences aren't valid and that we can't learn from them but that you don't extrapolate from that and make broad conclusions about an institutional society on the basis of one person's story what you do is you you look at data i mentioned the thing in the footnote in the um in the book about a study of higher education in the uk which found conclusively that instances of racism that were reported were vanishingly rare and the the headline of that article should have been this is great news we we've made so much progress uh to it to to virtually eliminate racism from universities the headline in fact said it was something like uh the the shocking extent of racism on our campuses it was the opposite of the truth and and that really worries me because i'm not saying that racism doesn't exist or that you shouldn't stamp it out where you find it or indeed that institutional racism can't exist we saw that well with jim crow is a good example of a system of racism um but to to start from the uh the premise that an institution is systemically racist and then work backwards uh that you're starting with your conclusion working backwards that's not the way to do it it's a proposition that requires interrogation but if you don't believe in truth anymore then it doesn't matter if you're just an ideologue if you're just an activist the truth really doesn't matter and uh this kind of perversion of post-modernism is offering a a a false reality and this is also why these activists have no trouble telling you what you secretly think because actually it doesn't really matter what you what you argue or what you think it's what they've decided uh they would like to believe you think this is um and and i think this is connected uh to the idea of speech because i feel that through more speech you would arrive at the truth you know milton mentions this in area area pagitika he talks about the idea of let truth and falsehood he imagines it as a battle that truth and falsehood grapple uh because whoever knew uh uh truth come out worse in that situation i'm paraphrasing obviously but you know um that that is true what once we allow these debates to be aired and discussed we do edge nearer to the truth even if the truth is this ever receding horizon that we can't actually acquire we do get nearer to it but if you are just wanting to advance a false reality and work on that basis then you have no interest in truth to begin with there does seem i think you're completely right to say that there is a profound uh philosophical assumption present in the view that uh coercion is enough i mean essentially it is to say that their their your reality is a construct and if i have enough power then i can kind of remake it however i want so you know persuasion is is is unnecessary because there's no reality behind that we are trying to get at by the discussions that we are having in try to understand that instead you know it's a when reality is a kind of reviewed as a construct one falls into thinking that all i need is enough power to remake the world according to the uh the way i want i want it to be um but if in fact um you know reality is not a construct and that what matters is that we come to understand ourselves as as best as we can you describe i think wonderfully in the book you know the ever-seeding horizon or the way you put it about truth like it's not as though we're ever completely getting it we're just we're trying to constantly to understand the world and all of its complexity and reality and all of its complexity and depth and beauty and difficulty as we possibly can and we need all the help we can get to do that and um and so what under what is what is underlying what i was trying to get at with my uh words about your book a minute ago is is really when you dig into the the mechanics of how we come to see things as human beings you you you end up having to think very seriously about what that moment is that brings someone to see something they didn't see so let's let's take this out of a kind of political arena or or you know kind of highly uh charged environment for a second and just admit that like there are times when we actually do see things that other people don't see that are true like there are times when you know you know parents with children or friends with others that you you actually you actually see that someone does not have as full of an understanding of something as as as they might um and perhaps they're that's causing them pain or trouble or difficulty because they are in that sense maladapted to the complexity of reality through their only partial understanding but the the the place i'm going with this is that if you if you sincerely want them to understand things better well how do you go about that uh because you know i mean i had the pleasure of having spending time with um uh uh uh in in in uh in a in an interview with the young me park the great uh north korean defector and and one of my personal heroes and you know me's book is is a very uh deeply moving account of how the the the propaganda machine of the state in north korea is able to make people believe things i mean they believe all kinds of things that are simply not true we know they're not true um but what i want to argue is that though through coercion you may be able to make someone believe something you know think that it is so none of that has any bearing either on whether it is so or on whether they have seen things to be true or not it's just a kind of solipsistic world in which they think they know what things are true when they are not i mean you can be persuaded that you know the earth is is flat uh but that none of that has any any any effect on whether the earth is flat nor have you actually come to see things as true so what i'm trying to get at here is the the non-coercive way in which human beings come to see things as actually true so if you want someone to come to understand something that that you think is true um you you you you need to present this in such a way as their own lights can bring them to see that is true so for example let's take an easy example of say mathematics you know you can believe you can believe in a mechanical way that two plus two equals four and you've been taught it and you and it and it works so you just keep applying the principle that isn't that is completely separate of actually seeing that when you have two and two it makes four and now you understand the necessity of the truth that you uh that you now under that you that you previously had at the level of a kind of belief you now understand it in the in its kind of necessary internal intrinsic logic and the reason this is so important is because if we don't approach people like that no matter how coercive how powerful how much we threaten them we are not doing anything to actually move their minds so you say in the book for example that you know forced conversions are not conversions i mean i can i can say that i have converted to this view or that view or this religion or that view but none of that means i have actually inwardly in my mind converted and so i'm wondering if you can say uh a few words about um about the the the manner in which uh human beings come to see things as true yeah i i think if you don't believe that the the the wisest course of action is to bring people to a point of realization through their own thought processes it means that you don't value human beings actually you just value uh a scenario by which you can maintain control and that's where you get this coercion and and and and more to the point you do end up in a situation more often than not i mean it is absolutely true as you say that people can be convinced of falsehoods um but more often than not you have the the the forced conversion notion where people are effectively performing the truth that they've been told to perform and this is something that despots have always done is to uh one of the ways that you can completely dehumanize and and and uh disintegrate someone's individuality someone's very soul is by forcing them to utter things that they know not to be true that in a sense is even more self-destructive i believe than being um persuaded of falsehood uh where you are actually speaking untruths knowingly um and of course the the obvious example is 1984 that's what happens by the end of 1984 is that uh um winston ends up in a situation where he is uh almost unconsciously tracing the phrase two plus two equals five in the dust on the table and that is the the point at which and we don't know whether that is performative or he or his his mind has been so broken down and decimated by his torture uh that he is now uh perceiving the world in the false way uh that the party want him to but it is so uh utterly dehumanizing and so disregarding of humanity and the sanctity of human life um and and the i the notion of human intellectual autonomy um that i can never uh get on board with that i will never be of the view that it is sometimes better for people uh to be convinced of a noble untruth i i i won't get on board with that i think we can never give up because that is all we are if we cannot think we don't exist and that would trouble me i i'd wholeheartedly agree with what you're saying andrew uh this is right at the heart of what it means to be human and what what what is so sad in the effort to limit speech through coercive power rather than through argument for example is that it it instantiates the violence that it is aiming to prevent uh you write in your book uh wonderfully i believe this on page 39 for those of you who've not yet acquired this wonderful slender tome um you say to uh to make the leap from natural revulsion uh you say something we we all experience at certain times to to actively silencing the views with which we agree and would disagree and now i quote is to surrender to the authoritarian tendency by doing so we degrade ourselves by subordinating our reason to base our instincts so the limiting of the violent limiting of speech is itself to give over to the violence that at least those who are well intentioned in doing so wish to prevent anything you'd like to comment on in that regard i think just the the latter point you made about uh how sometimes this this imposition of values is well-intentioned that to me is particularly chilling um but we can see how this these things work in a day-to-day basis i mean i'm i'm now seeing it every day um to give an example from the the the aclu putting out a threat which has now basically become a an intersectional activist group and is completely reneged on the uh the obligation to defend free speech but but the thread that they put out saying there are no biological differences between men and women and there is no uh advantage to being biologically male in women's sports and they called these facts uh mythbusters they called it and they labeled it fact one fact two but they were the opposite of facts and it's just this thing of saying the reverse of the truth in such a bold assertive way um it's called gaslighting in fact that's the phrase that the uh the the social justice left invented for this very thing that they're so good at um and of course there's public pressure there now there are a lot of people who are convinced of the truth of of that twitter thread uh so there's that there's also an awful lot of people who will be willing to accept uh the truth of that because they don't want to face the consequences of not because they've seen how vicious uh and bullying and unforgiving uh the the people who who peddle those untruths are and then there are those who are who uh don't believe it but are too afraid to uh to to object and and this is just so common now um the other example obviously jk rowling i've mentioned because just just reiterating the idea that she's a hateful monster even though she's never said anything hateful um you know it's a problem for me i i will always get into arguments with people and say just quote me something hateful or transphobic she said and they never can and you would think under those circumstances they would reflect and say well maybe i'm wrong but they're so caught up in the in in in the pseudo-reality uh that there's no way out for them and that that it really troubles me that a lot of this is well intentioned because these people do believe they're on the side of the angels and they do believe that silencing speech is a way to uh purge society of evil forces which they see in every shadow incidentally i mean they've also one of the other myths that they bought into is that we live in a society that is more uh fascistic uh and evil and bigoted than ever before actually again the reverse is true not only are the uk and the us some of the most tolerant countries in the world they're some of the most tolerant countries that have ever existed uh so this this this complete negation of reality is is something that troubles me yeah there there there is a um there's a there's a huge amount of what you're saying there i want to uh read a quotation from your book um and then very soon i want to get some questions because we've got a pile of magnificent questions coming in here um but before i get to that quotation i just quickly andrew one of the points you make in your book is that you know many there are one of the challenges to defending uh this elemental as you call it principle is that you know there are many people who say terrible things at things that that we would never say and that we would ourselves openly condemn um and yet this this this disincentivizes others from and even ourselves from defending the principle because you can't help but feel as though somehow if you defend free speech you are you are somehow you know defending or aligning yourself or somehow implicitly condoning horrific things that people have said but you know you you make the point beautifully in the book that we have to be able to separate um the principle from the uh the the right that is this fundamental elemental right from the things that people will do with it and uh and it and it needs to be said that there is there is no good thing that could not be tarnished by you know the embrace or affiliation of people who are morally repugnant to us i mean literally nothing i mean feeding the hungry or protecting people from abuse or protecting people from racism or or or or defending the rights of the most vulnerable you know there are bad people who could who could as it were tarnish those very things but would we then say well we shouldn't be into that anymore because you know somehow these people we disagree who are who are getting in on this on this uh uh behind this principle well of course not and so at the heart of the the writing of your book i take it at the impetus to write the book is the conviction that the principles must be understood and defended independent of and and vitally so independent of uh what reputation the activities of those who engage in them have that's absolutely right i think i say in the book that i i think if you are willing to surrender your principles uh uh just simply because someone that you dislike adopts the same principles then those principles can only ever be said to have been tenuously held i i would urge anyone who's i mean we've all seen some sort of hate fueled types uh going on about free speech and the importance of free speech inevitably they will because their speech is going to be um unpopular shall we say it's going to be uh controversial and controversial speech is always uh you know causes problems so of course they would uh at least on the at least ostensibly uh defend free speech even if they don't uh agree with it you hear white nationalists attempting to defend free speech because they want they want to their right to uh to say the hateful things that they say by the way an awful lot of white nationalists don't actually believe in free speech and you hear that you they often get caught and got unguarded moments explicitly admitting that they don't actually believe in free speech do you know if they went to power i don't imagine that free speech would be their priority uh it's never been the case with the far right um but why would you i would ask anyone who is who is nervous about they see someone they don't like a popular figure who's who's very unpopular defending the notion of free speech if you are are going to surrender the principle yourself and i say well now i no longer agree with it you are gifting that person that you hate an incredible degree of power you're effectively saying that person that i really despise uh i've just said i'm just allowed to dictate what i will or will not think so just from a position of pure self-interest why would you do that why would you elevate that person to a level they don't deserve um hold on to your principles irrespective of who else holds them because the principle has to be divided from the person yes and furthermore the we are confident that in fact we are seeing a truth we should be all the more enthusiastic or willing and keen to help others understand that truth following the principle that you know that the more clearly you see the world the more clear you see the world the better off you are and thus we have actually a duty to engage with those with whom we think are are wrong you know courteously and to the best of our ability uh in fact it's kind of humanistic obligation we have uh to share what we know with each other uh on the topic of minorities i want to read this marvelous passage um in on page 33 andrew you write that true progressives understand that without freedom of speech and by extension freedom of thought and conscience nothing else can be achieved the civil rights luminaries of the 20th century who fought for black emancipation gay rights and women's suffrage all recognized that without freedom of speech theirs was a lost cause they embodied the memorable words of benjamin cardozo associate justice of the united states supreme court from 1932 to 1938 who described freedom of expression as quote the matrix the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom before we turn to audience questions would you like to comment on that um magnificent uh quote from uh justice cardozo i think it gets to the heart of it that um and this is one of the reasons why i wanted to i was working on another book before i started writing this one about the the culture wars and the situation we currently find ourselves in and i realized that actually at the heart of it free speech uh is is comes first and foremost because without it as i've argued uh we don't have any of those other those other freedoms and and that this is actually something that is is is is truly for everyone uh this is a principle that should not be triabilistic should not fall along politically partisan lines and it really troubles me that it does i i i made the point that when i was growing up uh it was often the right it was right-leaning tabloid newspapers who were calling for films to be banned movies to be banned books etc and now it's coming from the the identitarian left and you know publications like the guardian or the new york times those those are the voices that you'll now hear calling for censorship and i think we need to struggle out of this partisan perspective of freedom of speech look to what those civil rights luminaries achieved really consider why they thought freedom of speech was so important even when it came to their enemies speech um why we want to set precedence that big and the obvious answer is that if we if we attack uh freedom of speech um and allow it to be eroded then that will come back and bite us eventually as well so there's an awful lot of uh just just self-interest involved in this argument but yeah i just above all i want us to transcend uh this notion of that free speech is tied to a particular political ideology because they don't believe it is i'm going to turn now andrew to some of our audience questions thank you all so very much for not only joining us but for uh uh submitting these really lively and penetrating uh comments i'm sorry we won't be to get to them all but we are going to get through several of them starting right off i'm going to refer to you all in the comment section on first names uh if you don't mind mark writes thank you for these fascinating remarks you raise a variety of important points some of which are cultural in nature whereas others address the legal context for free speech how do you think we should disentangle these as a society it seems to me that many of the examples of quote cancel culture end quote exist outside of the legal arena and instead are choices made by companies and individuals to what extent are those individual and corporate actions themselves freedom of expression by those parties that's a really good question i think it's very important to effectively disentangle the cultural and the legal and the reason i say that is because there is a thing called the social contract which is that we all uh reach a kind of collective agreement on how best to exp on which forms of expression are acceptable say in the workplace or in public spaces or that kind of thing i don't think there's anything controversial about that and i don't think any anyone's being censored um this was of course what a lot of the political correctness movement of the 80s and the 90s was about it was a kind of fumbling towards a broadly agreed consensus on the on on on what speech is considered acceptable or not in other words decorum in other words politeness and i'm a big fan of decorum actually because i think that's the only way that dialogue can can occur but i think you need to separate that and of course there were overzealous people there always are who took things too far and and um and it you know that's why i say it's been a very messy the ever-evolving social contract is always a very messy business but there has to be a clear distinction between that and legal prescriptions against speech because ultimately although i'm a big believer in civility people should have the legal right to incivility um now if someone uh in a public space is rude to me throws insults then i also have my freedom of speech to retort to mock or to ignore and to walk away uh i feel that it would be uh a violation however of that person's rights for me to call the police and and have that person arrested that's the distinction that i would like to clearly to draw um i don't agree with incivility i don't think it's a good thing but i think people should be free to do that within the law and once they are not then that i that i think is a a genuine threat to free speech so does that make sense i'm trying to draw a distinction between those two things uh and and emphasizing that you can disapprove of certain forms of speech without having to see someone arrested for them let's let's let me ask a couple of follow-ups to that because um we have we have for example another question about the the tech oligopolies i think you called them um let's start there what do you think those who would who wish to defend the principle of freedom of speech uh uh can do or what should the their uh what do you how do you see the problem uh of these uh free agents corporations or individuals uh well all of them owned by private individuals um exerting such power over civil discourse how can that problem be tackled without betraying the very principle well there are a number of potential solutions i don't i don't profess to be an expert on what could be done here uh one thing i've proposed before and i don't know maybe i'm wrong about this and well i'm i'm almost certainly wrong about an awful lot of things but let's just let's just run with it if we believe that um that these companies ought to have legal protections to evade um criminal or responsibility for material that appears on their site in other words a legal defense that says they are in fact platforms not publishers could the legislation simply not be amended so that it only applies to illegal content in other words that it no longer applies to merely offensive content or or content uh that the you know the kids at silicon valley don't agree with and maybe that could be uh actually implemented uh within the framework of the legislation potentially rather than outright appealing it you know if you outright repealed section 230 of the communications decency act they would censor everything because they would be absolutely terrified of being responsible or sued for anything that appeared on the platform it would actually make matters worse but perhaps a modification of the legislation might be a way to do it uh the other uh broader solution is to get off social media i think we've we've tested it now it does i don't think it really works in terms of uh advancing the conversation any further um i think it you know it's a it's a playground it's a place for a frivolity you know i i obviously have a satirical character that i have online and there's that's what it's for it's you know i think i sometimes i do reach uh enter into a discussion online and it goes somewhere productive but those are very few and far between you know i mean we're talking maybe less than 10 of the time so i think ultimately when it comes to meaningful dialogue uh we need to develop other forums for that and that will be uh public debates uh universities new institutions like your own you know not uh at the back and forth of twitter which i i just don't i've lost all faith in it personally i don't know how helpful that is that's probably just me being very pessimistic well i think this does get the problem that uh mark was asking about uh uh culture because you know the the fact of the matter is many of the cancellations that take place or the culture of fear of intimidation it is in fact a culture it's it's not at least in many cases uh backed up by any course of power of the law of course you've given some examples uh very frightening ones in your talk about the way in which the law can be weaponized against the freedom of conscience and speech and indeed thought of free individuals but i think we and that is of course a matter of uh immense importance that your book addresses but we would be doing a serious disservice to the extent of the problem if we were not to begin with the acknowledgement that very often the mechanisms of oppression are not uh legal coercion uh there they're their cancellation or bullying or or you know so on and so forth and and what that means is that the law is not actually the problem um at least insofar as permitting speech is what we want if the law is permitting that then the laws itself not the problem in fact what it points to is that culture uh we is that what it points to is the fact that there are other drivers or contexts or incentives or disincentives that are extra legal and so what i want to ask you is really it's a very i think it's it's a very profound problem because you know that the things that the thing that's going on in your book andrew the the cast of mind the willingness to steal man the arguments of the other person the the humility to which you say has you just which you just demonstrated frankly by saying i'm you know i'm off i'm probably i'm certainly wrong about an awful lot of things that that humility is is an absolutely necessary virtue to discover what you do not know that's that's the you can't learn what you do not know if you're not open to seeing it if you don't think there's anything you do not know then you can't be open to seeing it and so my question is you know though of course i'm a very you know strong believer in the first amendment of the american constitution and of similar protections in other countries for all the reasons you say insofar as those still exist and yet we have this growing problem i think we have to acknowledge that the the cultivation of a culture of a certain kind of humility a certain kind of thanks for telling me that i didn't know what i didn't see but but but correspondingly modes of engaging with others that are charitable and and kind and have and are actually aiming to help someone see something you know if you if you call someone nasty names and approach them in violence uh you know with a coercive you know gun in hand you're very unlikely to get a good reception and so i'm wondering if you have you know by contrast if you approach someone in genuine spirit of human shared good and and humility about what you don't know uh then the outcome may be very one hope's very different so my my question is what are your reflections about the forms of life and culture whether of young children in parenting and and and education or uh at later ages that facilitate or support the kind of free and open relation to the world and the thoughts of others yeah well there's two things i think that are very important firstly your right to acknowledge the reality of cancer culture and the way it is driven by social media is not something that you can just wish away or or um or end by simply removing yourself from the sphere of social media but i think what you're we're hoping or to move towards is a general attitudinal shift uh the problem isn't those actually the bullies and the people who attempt to have people cancelled the problem is those in authority capitulating to those people um it wouldn't matter if if companies simply ignored them or refused to act on it i've always i did a thread on twitter a while ago i suggested a series of pledges that every company could take and at the top of this was we will never fire anyone or discipline anyone on the basis of complaints received online uh or or dog piles online or anything like that and i think it you know we saw this that you know when whenever someone just it just takes a couple of tweets to major companies about someone and they'll just fire them they just cut them loose because they're afraid of the negative publicity we have to somehow change the culture so that when people complain in this way the companies say so what it's not it's not your business and and don't act upon it it rarely happens though but however in the few instances where it does happen where the companies don't act on it and refuse to do so and people refuse to apologize and refuse to capitulate the the mob loses its power straight away it just doesn't work um so that's what we should be aiming towards how you affect that kind of broad attitudinal shift i have absolutely no idea however the the other part of your question which i think is important is related to this which is i think it is about education you know i used to be a teacher i used to um you know i used to teach in fact a course on critical thinking um i think um you know i have endless optimism for young people you know they they they will not just naturally accept this very intolerant world that we've created for them um and and it is important i think and and in fact egalitarian for everyone to learn uh how to argue you know uh and it sounds quite prescriptive i'm saying there are rules to argument but actually just just if you want to participate in in the debate and and your first thought is to throw an insult to commit the ad hominem attack um you actually exclude yourself from the debate because that other person won't listen to you so i think if people just learnt the basics you know i'm so surprised most of the opinion columns i now read in the national press they're always doing the same thing they're always guessing the motives of the people they criticize they're always throwing cheap insults at the other person so there can never be any hope of a dialogue and and i'm sorry but under those circumstances it means that you simply cannot argue you're not capable of argumentation i do not believe you should argue with someone who's incapable of argumentation i think you should walk away it's pointless um and but i think having said that have faith in the fact that that doesn't apply to everyone you know that there's a lot of people out there who are willing to have open discussions and i think if education if we can just establish in in our teaching practice if children just left school realizing that once they throw insults they've lost they've they've withdrawn themselves from the argument then this world would be an infinitely better place wouldn't it yes and i think there's i do think there's a psychological uh element to this which is that if you if you don't think it's okay to be wrong you know i don't know if you're raised in such a way as to to be punished when you make a mistake or something um by contrast with you know being introduced to the world in a way that it's okay to be wrong it's not zero sum in fact it may be good to be wrong because you know then you realize that you were wrong and you'd become writer than you were it does seem to me there's a profound psychological element to this that that we all have a real responsibility to take seriously you know how we how we affirm the possibilities of being wrong such that it's okay to be and come to be right i think that's so important is this idea that this is why social media doesn't work for debates because your ego is damaged when you're proven wrong exactly right and so therefore uh the entire debate on social media is performative it's about winning to elevate your own status not about getting nearer to the truth and that's the that's the problem with it and i think absolutely i think if we could cultivate a society in which when you are proven wrong you are grateful for it that because you should be it it's it's because it means you're close to the truth jordan peterson writes about this in his book 12 rules for life he talks about that how it's actually quite painful to be proven wrong and to learn new things things that challenge your existing worldview i can't remember exactly how he describes it but it's like a shock of awakening i think that's the phrase he uses it's something that it hurts you know i've seen studies where people where it's it's reported that when someone disagrees with us on politics a lot of people take that as a physical personal slight they take it personally they feel like it's an insult actually it's the opposite it means that i respect you enough to disagree with your perspective and and and i want to talk to you about it but more than anything it's that humility is that if we could just teach ourselves however hard it is and i understand it i do i you know i don't like you know my ego suffers if i'm humiliated i've said something that's incorrect but but i like to think that i've trained myself to be able to to say thank you thank you for proving me wrong and now i i'm a better person i'm closer to the truth than i was it's a positive thing not a negative gosh i just think this is right at the heart of things moving on to another few questions um harvey asks isn't the fact that speech does have power one of the most potent reasons for protecting rather than limiting it if speech lacked the ability to inspire action then it would be impotent and not worth either protecting or suppressing absolutely i couldn't agree more i don't know what more to say about that because i think that hits a nail on the head it's it's uh yeah i i i don't know if you want to add something stephen i just i just agree um i'm i'm going to uh just i'm just going to um move on to uh some other questions here um uh though uh of course i think that is uh is is true here we are um a question from a certain i just saw it here sorry it takes a minute to uh to go through all these excellent questions a christopher asks what is your advice for a student raised by highly progressive parents and living in a woke city at a woke university my boomer parents live off of legacy media and think i'm fear-mongering my peers are actively woke what action should i take don't go to university maybe i look i don't know or go you know get a degree from ralston college i think ultimately there is a problem that a lot of people go to these universities uh that have become so captured by this ideology and they leave knowing less than they begun or they or they or they end up coming out being totally ill-equipped to deal with any of the realities of of the world uh because they've been trained in this pseudo-reality and not actual reality so um no i mean look i haven't given up quite on the universities yet i i vacillate back and forth on this i'm not sure what i know we've discussed this before i'm i'm not sure where i stand i think the future is probably in new institutions like ralston college who can provide a classical education proper education and encourage people to think um that will be important um but i don't uh it might be the case that the universities are a lost cause at the moment i think my true advice would be be a bit braver you know when you're surrounded by the woke as we call them when when that's everywhere i mean look i'm from the my background is in stand-up comedy in the arts and this my industry is is overwhelmingly uh woke and to to to speak out against it makes you makes yourself a bit of a pariah you know there's not many comedians who who like me all that much because of my the object of my satire and and and the things that i write about but i think if everyone was just a bit braver and just said what they thought you would firstly discover that there's more of us than you think and actually that the majority of people are extremely skeptical about this movement it's just that they have the power and let's face it they intimidate people into silence that is the secret of their success i mean the very fact that you're asking the question is is proof of the point that they are successful in their intimidatory tactics well actually i think argue back be loud be you know be be open about what you think and don't let them call you a nazi for it or whatever else ridiculous um epithet they wish to apply and and um you know and it will be tough for the short term i think um you do you know i've lost an awful lot of friends for for speaking truth um and i think i i mean i could have just carried on i could have just mimicked what they thought but but you know there's a lot of people who are doing that i get an awful lot of messages from other comedians or writers saying i really like what you're doing i can't share it you know but i really you know and i wish i could say the things you say and um but that gives me courage in a way because i i think well there's a lot of people out there there's more of us than you think and um yeah i think um standing up against it is the only way it's going to go away the idea that if you just ignore it it's it if you ignore it it will win so i think that's that's stand up against it really at the end of the day the very substance of our own lives is at stake in this because you either choose at every juncture that you would you were you have to sort of choose between whether you're going to be fundamentally externally guided what you call what uh i think it was orwell called you know gramophone people you're just going to put on whatever record others are playing uh but yeah that comes at the immense cost of abandoning the integrity of your own individuality your own subjectivity it's so self-destructive to lie ultimately it hurts you more than anyone else so it's it's you know in your own self-interest yeah yeah you really are you really are uh inverting the structure of your very personhood when you do that um another question is um isn't the most potent justification for freedom of speech the fact that if we suppress hate speech we lose the ability to discern who the real haters are when we do this we make society and all of us less secure if we know who and where the haters are we know on whom we should not turn our backs why is this argument never made i think it is made i i think i make it in the book um i i've i've seen it made elsewhere i think it's even more broad than that i mean certainly it's good to be able to identify uh if if someone has racist views and they express them then you know that person's a racist then i know i don't want that person within my circle of friends or in my you know it's but more than that it means that the potential to challenge their views exists if we don't know who they are and what they're saying that potential has been destroyed now i'm not the sort of person who would have the patience or the skill to to talk someone like that out of their viewpoints but there are people who do it i mentioned the example of daryl davis in the book because he's that the musician who has de-radicalized members of the kkk i don't even know how you would begin uh to do that but he he does and he's done it many times and it and it's i have so much admiration for him um and that to me is the ideal that that by allowing people to speak it opens up the possibility that they can change and become better people because people can challenge them if you don't they just sit in their little shadows on the internet and and fester and elaborate and expand uh frankly but more than that i think just if people were truthful about what they thought generally think about politics you know think about how much time you spend trying to gauge what the politician thinks because they're following the party line or won't express what they actually believe there's a phrase for this preference falsification the idea of preference falsification is that you uh you merely express the view that you believe will be well best received will be most popular not what you actually think and um you know if if if all our politicians just said what they actually thought you would know who you were voting for and you you know it would be it would be just a much better society it sounds a bit banal doesn't it just to say that wouldn't it be great if everyone told the truth but my god it would well this uh this raises this leads to two particular questions here one i'm having a hard time finding but the spirit of the question was um of course we should have laws that protect freedom of speech but do you believe that the free exchange of ideas always leads to the truth what is the relation this uh woman asked between free speech and let's say higher or more stable truth uh i i believe it's our most likely avenue to the truth i i don't think there's any guarantee and i certainly know that uh uh even with free expression it is perfectly possible to reach false conclusions of course that's the case uh but i think truth doesn't stand a chance without free speech so it is rather the uh the the better route now um andrew there's a very moving uh section in your book uh for those of you who have not yet read this really wonderful book free speech and why it matters there's an artist there's a chapter called the self-censoring artist and this is one of the most moving passages of the book in which you describe what coercion does to the arts uh you at one point say and i quote we can all agree that the censorship of artists by tyranus regimes is an abomination and yet there is something even more dispiriting about an artist who surrenders his or her freedom of expression voluntarily you go on to say for the true artist such obsequiousness is a kind of death would you say a word or two about the uh the arts and um uh censorship and just before i get there i want to link this to a question in the comments on this topic jerry asks not a week goes by when i do not get messages from opera companies and other arts organizations apologizing for their failure to be strong enough advocates for social justice anti-racism etc what is happening to the arts here i know these are not entirely the same question uh and answer them both or either as you like well we've reached a point where there is now um the the the predominant people within the arts world the ones with the power to commission new works of art um are overwhelmingly uh uh disciples of this ideology and they have come to the view that the arts are really there as pedagogical tools they are there to to spread a message uh and that to me is to misapprehend the purpose of art um that is not to say that artists cannot uh be political or pedagogic or anything else but if you are an artist and you are being uh compelled in that direction right so i've had playwright friends and writer friends and you know you know there's a thing called sensitivity readers now where a publisher will hire a sensitivity reader to check that the representation of characters from minority demographics is not offensive um but what this means in effect is that the artist is curtailing uh their individual freedom and their artistic expression uh for the purpose of a moral message and actually morality in my view has very little to do with art you know the some of the most exhilarating art that i have enjoyed and got the most out of is either from artists who are terrible human beings or even sometimes when the art itself does not have a positive moral message now the idea that if you if you you know you see it all the time at the moment where complaints about um uh television shows and movies and plays are often to do with things to do with either representation or depiction i remember seeing a review of uh david lynch's last series of twin peaks where the writer was saying um there's too much violence against women in the series and he needs to be called out for this well the people committing the violence against women are not pleasant characters when it's not an endorsement of violence against women to simply depict it it's such a fundamental misunderstanding and he's like saying uh that macbeth is an endorsement of regicide um simply because it depicts uh the murder of of um of um not bankrupt god i can't remember now who's the king in duncan the murder of duncan so but this idea or the scene with the infant the scene where the child is killed that's in endorsing infanticide or or that titus andronicus is endorsing rape simply by depicting rape it's a weird thing isn't it that that we've now got to the point where representation in art is seen as on a literal basis that all it is doing is is is a it's the artist sort of telling you what is good and bad and i think that's what's happened to comedy in this in the uk particularly is a lot of comedy now that gets on tv particularly is is merely um a comedian telling his or her audience what they should believe what they should think and if they don't do that they get called out and they don't get commissioned and they don't get back on tv and most of the people who contact me to say they can't be creative anymore because they know they have to follow a particular ideological line it is absolute death for the artist as i said in that the passage you read it there's no room for creativity there i think at the heart of so much art is moral ambiguity because humans are morally ambiguous and um i think i think it's a but ultimately what i will say just to round that off is that self-censorship is always a choice however and it is true that if you are an innovative and um and uh and you're an artist who takes risks in terms of how you represent things or what you create maybe it's true that you are less likely to be commissioned or commercially viable in the current climate but what i would say is that if you're if your goal as an artist is to be commercially viable you can't really be said to be much of an artist at all and i think above all you should be faithful to your muse yes it's interesting i mean this is a this is a huge topic we could go on up about at length because it really is related to everything you've been saying about human dignity and the question about you know what becomes of a human being if they stop listening to their own muse or the the light of their reason their conscience um it leads to the the implosion or or disintegration of the self um it's very interesting to ask you know why is it that um when art is subject to power it actually loses its power right because it it it it's betrayed the you could say the muse or you could say i think the it's relation to the depth and complexity of reality you know as soon as it becomes subordinate it's lost the freedom that allows it to communicate what it can at its best i think that's absolutely right and i think we can often detect it can't we when we see an artist as a made a decision for commercial reasons or because there's someone over his shoulder saying this is what you you want to be doing i think this is why so many people have lost patience with hollywood as well it's because you get nine times out of ten you go and see a hollywood film and now you get this sense of your being you're being hectored by a studio producer who thinks that you are a deeply immoral person and that you should you should be more tolerant about gay people so let's throw in these gay characters for no uh apparent purpose in the plot you know and not that i care i don't care that you see all sorts of different types of people on screen you know that's not the point it's when it's obviously been shoehorned in to teach the audience a lesson that's yeah because no exactly because then it's coercive we all know that there's great art that depicts uh uh racism or sexism or any other form of abuse or or or or disrespect uh or suppression of human individuals i mean that that art art is often doing that but we we know when it's not doing that when we're being coerced by uh by by power rather than being illuminated by truth well well to give an example there's a recent television adaptation a historical program where they've cast a black actor to play ann berlin now i wouldn't care about that and i wouldn't have probably even you know if that happened 15 years ago or 20 years ago they probably said well that's quite an interesting thing that they're doing there um but but now i know why they're doing it why they're doing it is because they're saying to the audience you live in a systemically racist society and you need to be educated and you need to you know so we're going to make amberlynn black now um you know there's nothing artistically interesting about that because of the intent behind it when they cast frances de la torres hamlet about 30 years ago that was interesting that's an interest you could even do say an all-black hamlet that and you might be doing something very artistically creative there but if all it's about is is saying that the audience are immoral and we need to make you better people then it is banal that is a really banal thing to do and that's why that's such a boring thing it's not because it's a black actor it's not to do with race it's to do with it the artistry does that make sense no absolutely and i think that there's a there's an added sense in which sometimes these arbitrary changes which are taken undertaken in let's just say with good intention to to you know promote uh uh to to to to promote a inclusivity or however you might put it often have sometimes kind of the opposite effect i mean you know there to portray something that could not have happened in the past because of prejudice as if it was happening in the past is a very i would say complicated thing i mean there's a and and by no means obviously in the interest of the the the uh principles of equality that one wishes to defend i thought the same thing about the queen's gambit fundamentally i mean you know if it's the case that women were forbidden to play chess at a certain period i mean that's the fact that is the that's the historical truth that in competition that's historical truth that we need to grapple with not pretend somehow it wasn't so uh because how can we change uh optim how can we advocate for equality in the now without actually admitting the depth and complexity of the barriers that uh some people have faced in the past uh and perhaps now it's the same reason why the idea to me of censoring uh current editions of huckleberry finn because of the use of racial slurs makes no sense to me because it roots it in the reality of the time first and foremost so to erase that it's almost to anesthetize the past and say things weren't as bad as they were it actually uh undermines the satire of the book it undermines the impact of the book which is let's face it an unambiguously anti-racist book and you're actually making that uh less impactful through perhaps good intentions but nevertheless wrong-headed i know we need to conclude soon but there's so many good questions i just want to rapid fire uh two or three others at you before we conclude um thank you all for submitting these uh tremendous questions lynn uh i think from scotland asks uh says she's very grateful for andrew's comments read the hate crime bill in scotland the bill as it stands now right now means a woman will risk a criminal charge for simply stating that sex is binary the scottish government are refusing to listen to the fears of women we've seen as we're seen as hateful for raising very real concerns the bill is terrifying i hate what scotland has become but the question is how can we make ourselves heard without being called hateful you can't and that's that's the problem is that in the current climate you will be called hateful for for saying what you what you believe to be true uh even for saying things that are objectively true such as that we we there is such a thing as biological sex however uh however much the um the snp would like to wish uh reality away uh they can't uh all they can do is make people pretend uh that it doesn't exist and and the more people who are willing to stand up and risk being called all the worst names under the sun and perhaps even risk prosecution yeah that's the only way this is going to to stop it definitely isn't going to stop if we just silence ourselves and self-censor uh that's not that's not the solution thank you the next question is how do we cope and treat the fake news argument today while generally speaking most people would agree that spreading vicious lies or misinformed information and false news is wrong we see today i think that's what the question meant that the term of fake news has become an excuse filling the purpose of silencing people um and this person points out this is done on both the left and the right and is easily exploited by anyone this is why you shouldn't censor people for being factually wrong uh that's what i would say uh if if something is factually wrong and demonstrably so then show it show it prove prove why it's wrong and produce better evidence but no don't censor it i recently and i note that a lot of the people who are now employed as fact checkers are ideologically partisan themselves and and they don't really fact check at all it happened to christopher ruffo the other day um he uh he's the man who's very famous for um being a kind of whistleblower for critical race theory in the way it's which it's infiltrated schools in particular um and uh he put an article out and and someone fact checked him as being false and he actually took them to task for it i think he might have even suggested the prospect of legal action i don't know i'd have to check that but in the end they had to say actually no you were right we just fact checked it wrong and the reason a lot a lot of fact checkers are from that sort of social justice mindset uh so and they don't believe in facts what they believe in is what is expedient to their cause so we frankly can't trust fact checkers and i don't trust the the label of fake news anyway because as the questioner implies it is so often used simply uh when facts are inconvenient just call it fake news and then you don't have to worry about it so just let people be wrong and if you want to show that they're wrong then do so that's the way that we solve it i uh would very much like for us to continue uh on and on uh but i think we must conclude but if you'll uh allow me on andrew uh though i know i've encouraged everyone to uh purchase your book i do want to read uh kind of a lengthy passage here or weave together a couple of passages uh which i found particularly stirring uh as we conclude and then of course give you a chance to make any final remarks that you'd like here i'm quoting from andrew doyle's free speech and why it matters as social creatures our fear of unpopularity is innate yet to repress the truth is to leave unchecked a parasite gnawing at the soul we make ourselves vulnerable because we are colluding with those we have deceived in what amounts to an artificial reality the pressure to lie corrals us into a morally compromising position where for the sake of our sanity we learn to believe our own fictions condemned to live as actors who have forgotten we are playing a role more often than not preference falsification is the symptom of the desire for an easy life conflict is hard the appeal of ideologies is that they absolve us of the obligation to think for ourselves many if not most are willing to sacrifice their freedom of speech and independent thought for the consolations of certitude it is in the interest of the powerful to encourage this kind of decility and thereby beget a flock of industrious sheep whatever the motive desire to be liked fear of animosity submission to authority for the stability it brings we find that in many cases the greatest threat to free expression comes from ourselves in on liberty 1859 john stewart mill repeatedly emphasizes the danger of outsourcing our moral agency to the putative wisdom of the crowd mill understood that our freedom of speech is not imperiled solely by the state's abuse of power but also by what he describes as the quote tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling his treatise is a cogent vindication of the primacy of the individual and this chapter concludes ultimately however self-censorship is a choice even at a time when speaking out can have ruinous personal consequences conformity and dishonesty for the sake of self-preservation are understandable but an affront to our conscience and dignity we might avoid the ire of the bullies in the short term but the eventual impact of our collective silence will be an innervated and infantile culture andrew i'm so grateful to you for writing this book and for joining us today is there anything you'd like to say in conclusion no i think anything i would say spontaneously would not be as as eloquent as what i wrote because i had time to think about it so i'm going to cut my losses at this point but just to say it is 11 o'clock here and that's why i'm drinking wine so i don't want anyone to think that i'm drinking during the day things haven't got that bad quite yet um uh uh thank you very much you um have inspired me by your affirmation of your opponents um on the question of free speech and given us an example i think of uh how we can help each other understand ourselves and the world as best we can thank you so much for joining us today i want to encourage everyone to check out andrew's book when you have a chance and i know i know not everyone may be uh part of it yet uh there is going to be a little what one calls after party discussion starting momentarily on clubhouse so if you'd like to join in on that uh please do thank you all for joining us andrew thank you very much thank you [Music] you

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Length: 116min 49sec (7009 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021