Brendan O'Neill on political correctness and its discontents

now for those of you who aren't familiar with CIS we are a public policy research organization that is primarily committed to promoting the principles of classical liberalism across the economics education and cultural spheres for the past 15 years Brendan O'Neill has been one of the world's leading critics of political correctness he's the editor of spiked online as Alan Jones said the other day he says things that you're not meant to say ladies and gentlemen please welcome Brendan O'Neill what I just want to talk about for about 10 or 15 minutes is two things firstly the problem with political correctness as I understand it and then the problem with some of the pushback against political correctness that is current that is currently taking place so on political correctness itself one of the most frequent criticisms that is made of people who oppose political correctness is that we just want to turn the clock back we want to go back in time to an era in which middle-class middle-aged white men ran everything and minority groups and women knew their place that's the criticism that's always made if you say I'm anti PC I don't like PC I hate PC I can't speak for all opponents of political correctness but I can't speak for myself and in my case the precise opposite is the case for me it's the exact opposite of that my concern about political correctness my opposition to political correctness is not driven by some warped nostalgia for an older whiter era but by the precise opposite it's precisely because I am committed to the idea of minority groups and women having a serious role to play in society and engaging in society on an equal footing with white men that I am opposed to political correctness because I think the most insidious achievement of political correctness has actually been to undermine some of the great social gains of the past 50 years or so particularly the idea of racial equality and gender equality and I think that's actually one of the things that she has done most effectively PC actually does the opposite of what it claims it doesn't expand the inclusion of all groups in public life and work life and everyday debate and cultural knowledge and all those other things we consider to be valuable it actually limits that engagement it's time user it makes it more difficult so let me just give you a few examples of what I mean by that I think one of the key things about political correctness and its policing of language and its policing of attitudes and its policing of how we think about the world has been its rehabilitation of racial thinking so this is one of the strange things about the period we're living all of a sudden it has become fashionable again to think in a racial way so you always see the ritual of racial announcement people will always announce their race before they say something as a white man or as a black woman there's this kind of you'll see this on campuses in particularly in particular you see in certain trendy political circles this ritual of racial announcement where everyone must tell you what their race is and you must engage with them at the level of their race and you also see it in the idea of cultural appropriation one of the key and craziest parts of political correctness which is this idea that you can't really borrow from other culture so if you're a white student who wears a sombrero that's offensive to Mexicans if you are Katy Perry and you wear your hair in cornrows that's offensive to black women and you're stealing black women's power that's one of the headlines that was written about Katy Perry and what the idea of cultural appropriation does it rehabilitates the idea of racial purity the idea that you should stick to your own race you should stay in your own lane you should do your own thing and not eat not even attempt to understand other cultures or other groups and the PC are obsessed with making us racially aware you're supposed to be racially aware all the time and I think we sometimes fail to appreciate what a how that destroys what was seen as the right way of engaging with the world in the 1950s 60s and 70s which was to refuse to be racially to not be racially aware to switch off your racial awareness that sometimes just kind of would creep up on you and instead judge people as individuals so political correctness actually rehabilitates the racial imagination and that's one of the ways I think in which it unwinds some of those social gains of the past 50 years then in doing that in relation to women I think one of the worst things one of the reasons I'm opposed mostly to the new feminism is not actually because I think it's a war on men and boys I know lots of people very respectable people have that point of view and that's fine my concern with it is actually that I think it demeans the idea of female autonomy because if you go around arguing as many new feminists do that we need censorship of lads mags and we need censorship of certain pop songs and we need to control sexual male behavior and everything from asking a woman if she wants a drink to put in your arm around her shoulder gets redefined as a form of sexual harassment what that actually does it communicates the message that women are fragile and are not as capable of negotiating public life as men are and that represents in my mind an unwinding and undoing of one of the key social gains of recent times which is that women are just as capable and in some cases probably better than men at dealing with work life and public life if you look at the trans movement the transgender movement which I won't go into much detail on because I think it's very strange in my view but I think one of the achievements of the transgender movement is to rehabilitate misogyny because the idea that womanhood is such a flimsy thing such a performance such a garment in essence that a man can assume it simply with a click of his fingers so that the gender recognition Act in the United Kingdom will allow you to change your gender without making any effort so I could go into work with a beard tomorrow and say call me Susan and then my workplace has to do that that will be the law I think that is misogynistic I think it demeans the idea of womanhood and undermines its biological cultural relational substance so I think there's a misogynistic element to that and that also represents an unwinding off the past so in these various different ways we can see how actually what PC greats against most is not really the old white world of the past when minority groups really didn't have much impact on public life but actually what came after that the revolution of equality the revolution of freedom the revolutions of liberation it's those things I think that are most harmed by political correctness and then what this logic does what this logic of victim culture does this kind of demeaning of minority groups it then has a terrible impact on the institutions of society so for example education a very important institution it's the key means through which one generation transmits the cultural knowledge to the next that's now become being completely interrupted by political correctness so the politically correct educational establishment thinks it is wrong to teach that Western civilization is anything special I think it's wrong to teach children too much dead white European male stuff you know that's really bad to continually treat them all this teach them all this stuff by white men and it all any wants to relativize education and give them things that is apparently more appropriate to their way of life to come down to their level in this incredibly paternalistic way and that's done in the name of not offending minority groups minority groups who are apparently very easily offended very weak and so on as PC would have us believe need to be protected from certain forms of education another institution that I think has been rattled pretty severely by political correctness is marriage marriage is one of those social institutions that I think is incredibly important it is the means through which children are raised and socialized and the community itself is expanded and kept coherent marriage has now been redefined I'm not going to dwell on this because I spectacularly lost lost the argument on same-sex marriage and my liberal secular critique of it but I do think that represents another institution which has been undone and again undone in the name of offering validation to a parent to apparently fragile minority group and at the most basic level the most basic level of the sex divide the gender divide which is the means through which young people in particular make sense of the world even that is now being erased and we all now are supposed to bow before the cult of gender fluidity and particularly in schools in Britain this is a very pronounced problem in schools teachers now don't say boys and girls anymore for fear of offending the naught point naught 1 percent of pupils who are gender confused and I think even there you have this unraveling off one of the core institutions of society which is the idea that there is a sex divide and and that they are complementary and that is an important part of human society I think it's really shocking that in the UK and Ireland as well and other countries are likely to be following suit you can now change your gender on your birth certificate now the reason I have a real problem with that is because when a child is born when a child was born in in August 1985 and the doctors and the birth registrar wrote down that a boy was born they were telling the truth that was true they were recording a public fact a historical fact a necessary fact for society to know who's in it society who's being born and who is who are the citizens you can now go back in time and replace that truth with a lie you can say that on the in August 1985 a girl was born and it's not true so I think a society that cannot even measure its citizenry it cannot even keep a log of who is being born where they're being born who they are and so on is really spectacularly a society that has lost its moral anchor and any sense of how to organize itself so what's important about political correctness I think is that it attacks both progressive gains the liberation of minority groups from a pressure and the liberation of women from second-class citizenship and then through attacking those progressive gains it also undermines the traditional institutions of society so as this double whammy effect of undermining racial and gender equality in a quiet insidious way and then as a knock-on effect of that undermining some important traditional institutions like education marriage the understanding of sex differences and so on and so forth finally I've run out of time but I just want to throw out a couple of quick concerns with some of the pushback against PC so I've established that I'm not a fan of political correctness I think it has a very bad impact on society but I do think we have to think carefully about how we revolt against it which I think we should but I think some of the revolts currently taking place are a problematic I think the trumpian revolt against PC is incredibly unhelpful it's very uncouth it's not particularly intelligent I think it's quite neater and it often adopt a mirror image of some of the problems with political correctness for example it replaces black victim culture or female victim culture with white male victim culture and that's has been a key part in fact of Trump's success is tapping into a sense of white victimhood so it kind of is a mirror image in many ways of political correctness I think the alt-right rebellion against political correctness is is now just actually boring it's just I think it's running out of steam which is a relief but I think that kind of knowingly provocative where you go on campuses and just scream in a feminists face and hope that it goes viral on YouTube those kind of things are just unhelpful and it's all heat and no light and what it does is just maintains the political correctness problem as a performance so that both sides end up in this kind of symbiotic relationship where the PC people need the alt-right loudmouth in order to prove that they do live in a oppressive patriarchal society and then the alt-right loudmouths need the PC to prove that pinkos have taken over the institutions and we're all going to hell in a handcart so there's an there is a marriage of convenience between those two things and no light is ever shed on the serious problems and so I think we have to think seriously about the impact that political correctness is having on society is tyranny by stealth which is to borrow a phrase that bill leek used in his submission to the Human Rights Commission when they were persecuting him for the speech crime of drawing a cartoon so we do have to think about the tyrannical impact it can have and the way in which in which it damages both social socially progressive moves forward and also traditional institutions and ideals but we have to do so in such a way that we enlighten people about the problems in society and tackle them in an intellectual thoughtful way because I think that's the only way to go forward in terms of making society less PC and more free thank you that's great Brennan thank you and now it's time for the conversation part of today's event and I call on my colleague and friend Jeremy Samet Jeremy is the head of our culture prosperity and civil society program over to you Jeremy well first I want to pick up the idea that PC is addressing these deep historical injustice ah's and you talked about in the first chapter of your book which is about cultural appropriation the idea here is that you know we are addressing these you know deep set of historical adjust injustice as an impression but the point you make there is actually a very nasty snobbishness about easy which is that to use a term the white woke class is actually signaling their moral and social superiority to people who they sees ordinary people who are indecent or oppressive or prejudiced absolutely I think one of the one of the most fascinating things at the moment is white self flagellation so there's this you know because whiteness is now has been redefined as an original sin the original sin of whiteness if you're born white you're a bad person there's nothing you can do about it that's one of the ideas that's pushed by political correctness you know the problem of white men in particular I'm always amazed by how many articles and tweets and everything else you can read which are just attacking why men and I've always thought would be a really good social experiment for someone just to set up a website which repeated all these headlines but it replaced white men with black men and I just think that would give a really interesting insight into that kind of discussion but but a lot of that stuff what's interesting is a lot of that stuff comes from white people you have a white people all the time who go on about the problem of white people and and there's this kind and the argument I make is that that kind of self-flagellation that kind of white self-loathing is actually a form of white pride because what they are saying is that we are woke white people we are racially aware we are socially aware we are good we know how horrible our history was we know how awful colonialism was we know how privileged we are we know that our privilege is built on the backs of slate all this kind of nonsense that they come out with they're really making a performance of their moral superiority to other white people you know the uneducated ones the ones who are sufficiently racially aware so the argument I'm making in that piece in the book is that it's like it's a new form of white nationalism this is the great irony of this kind of new fashion for being politically correct and hating yourself because you're white it ends up as a form of white nationalism I know I'm a good white person in comparison with the underclass bad white people so yeah there's a horrible racial element all of that the other side of the PC divisiveness that you were talking about in speeches this idea that we are actually whining back the great liberal gains my own progressive gains that we've made on issues like race and an agenda there was a story in the Wall Street Journal which you may have noticed the other day which talked about how the consequence of the me2 movement on Wall Street in particularly investment banks there is now a sort of self segregating process right now where men won't go out to dinner with female colleagues they want mentors I won't even take meetings alone with women this is a I think this is a broader phenomenon as well because one of the things that you hear in this error of you know high PC offense taking sensitivity that people won't mix knowingly across gender lines in the workplace but along racial lines as well so in the name of preventing division we're actually creating division absolutely I thought that me too story I thought was the perfect example of the kind of thing I'm talking about which is what PC has done is completely screwed up the relations between the sexes is completely screwed up the Martin Luther King idea that you should judge people by their character rather than their color and in fact on some American campuses including the University of California they have a list of racial microaggressions and microaggression is the kind of the conversational thing you say which is unwittingly racist you know if you are someone where are you from a pony that's really racist so they had this list of microaggressions and one of them some of them are things like I don't see race or I only see the human race or I prefer to judge people by how they present themselves rather than their racial background exactly the things Martin Luther King said so Martin Luther King these days would probably hounded off campus so and and the reason they give for those things being racial microaggressions is because they deny people's racial experiences or they deny people's there's even one phrase they deny their experiences as as their racial history and their racial display and all this kind of stuff and the point I was making earlier is that in the past ignoring all that stuff would have been seen as the good progressive thing to do you know engaging with someone not if you meet someone you don't think I've God what color are you where might you come from what terrible history did your ancestor suffer you know in the past not doing that and refusing to do that was seen as the progressive thing and now the progressive thing is to constantly obsess over what color people are and then how you should engage with them because they're a different color from you so I think the me to stuff and the way in which that has segregated men and women or and threatens to do that even more and the way in which the rehabilitation of racial thinking and racial policing I think those two things are absolutely devastating to some of the good stuff of the 19th there was some good stuff of the 1960s and those those good things are being undone by all this so if the social replications are important what about how we push back against it and to start with that issue there is a school of thought particularly among some people here in Australia in the centre right which is that these cultural issues don't matter they argue that economics is far more important we should focus on that I think they don't understand what the ideological agendas around PC is that controlling language means ultimately controlling thought and there is a much bigger ideological agenda it's going on here I completely agree I think they are incredibly important issues you know so point all well made all the time that the control of language is always about controlling how you think and ultimately how you behave and I do think we are living through a period of an attempted social reengineering of society you know when when something like if you say there are only two genders if you said that on a campus in Britain now you'd be in trouble this possible you would not be invited to speak it's possible you'd be chased off campus that was a perfectly normal thing for everyone to say about five or six years ago so the speed with which this is happening the Maoist speed with which things just become unsalable in a very short period of time it should always get people's alarm bells ringing I did a talk about heresy at the University of Oxford the importance of heresy in relation to progress and how heresy fuels progress historically speaking and I said my heresy is that I don't think a man can become a woman and the meltdown was just extraordinary it was like it reminded me when I was growing up a Catholic when if you said you don't believe that the bread actually becomes the body of Christ that was like what you don't believe in transubstantiation get out of here it's now we have a secular version of that now and the same kind of hounding of anyone who doubts it so I think they're incredibly important issues I do think that it can look crazy you know if you if you find yourself like I often do writing a number of articles about the ins and outs of the transgender discussion you do think how did I end up here why is this happening to me but I think through all these issues a lot of very important things are being changed and altered in a way that we might soon lose control off and I think we've got to keep a handle on that or else we will lose the good stuff of society firstly equality and secondly those key institutions through which we transmit knowledge and information and socialization to the next generation Hannah Arendt made the point that the key responsibilities of adult society is to transmit the cultural knowledge of the past to the next generation and she said when you don't do that a break occurs and it's a break it could be quite difficult to fix I think we are now in that break to issues about that in terms of pushing back one is that one of the hard things in terms of pushing back is that so many of our institutions have adopted PCC so it's universities schools corporates to a large extent as well and if you actually go against PC within those organizations they can have you know serious professional social ramifications that's that's one issue second thing is that people on the other hand often say well isn't PC around issues like transgender being just being polite and you know respecting the rights and identities of different people however I think and do you agree that in a sense the gender stuff is a tipping point if in the name of PC we have to accept the absurd proposition that there's no such thing as a boy or a girl do you think that is something that will change engage more people is there still a silent majority out there interested in oh yeah I think there is a silent majority I think that's actually one of the most exciting things about the period we currently find ourselves in which is that people are in open revolt against the establishment I mean it's just I can't remember anything like this in my lifetime there are currently massive street riots in France against climate change policy that's unprecedented that's never happened before these are hundreds of thousands of people in an uprising they haven't seen since 1968 and I think it could actually be bigger than 1968 who are raging against an environmentally friendly fuel tax and as a consequence of that they're raising questions about the way in which governments mistreat drivers and people who have to use vehicles and all this kind of stuff that's incredibly important I think the brexit revolt is obviously my favorite thing in modern times I think it is credibly important and I think it does represent a rejection of the technocratic bureaucratic politically correct elites who currently run Europe very obviously is a rejection of those people so that's incredibly important I think even the vote for Trump even though I am NOT a fan of Trump and I've a problem with the trumpian approach to political correctness even the vote for Trump I think speaks to that kind of desire to reject the politically correct establishment Robi suave at Reason magazine makes a very I think he's writing a book on it makes a very good argument that the vote for Trump was in many ways a reaction against political correctness so a lot of stuff is happening a lot of very positive stuff is happening and so I do think there is a silent majority I do think there are people out there who think there are two genders that blasphemous thought you know it's not supposed to have who do think that marriage plays a special role in society who do think that you know men chatting up women is not sexual harassment there are there's a there's a whole world of common sense out there but it's not reflected in media and public discussion because that tends to be dominated by precisely the kind of people we're worrying about so we we are witnessing the capitulation of institutions to political correctness but at the same time I think of growing resentment among the public with a politically correct establishment so that's the key tension of our times which I think could be a very fruitful tension can I pick up the very issue in terms of you know where a lot of this stuff has come from and are pletely relation to the issue of same-sex marriage I think once could have been said that the gay liberation movement you know you know since gay people were the last of the Bohemians and it's sounding creasing ly that they are almost first among squares and it's this notion that the state is somehow responsible for people's dignity and their validation and it's like rather than the nanny state protecting us from harms who inflict on ourselves it's almost like we live in a daddy state where people constantly think valid validation and approval of all these things and at the price of trend of ultimately transgressing on other people yeah rights and freedom I I completely agree I think this is you know people will often say people will often compare the transgender movement to the gay liberation movement and I think they are completely opposite I really think there's no comparator serious comparison can be made between these two things because the gay liberation movement of the sixties while all the liberation movements the women liberation from gay liberation movement national liberation movements which obviously lots of Western progressives supported were about rejecting certain forms of authority and and demanding greater autonomy and choice they were liberal movements what you have now are identitarian supposedly left-wing identitarian movements they're actually about seeking validation rather than autonomy and approval particularly from the state rather than the right to determine your own destiny as you see fit regardless of whether the state agrees with you or not so the transgender movement it's the perfect example of that it's entirely opposite to the gay liberation movement the gay liberation movement argued against the medicalization of homosexuality the transgender movement argues for the medicalization of transgenderism the gay liberation movement argued for the state to get out of their lives by dismantling laws in particular which criminalized gay sex the transgender movement wants the state in their lives all the time in terms of more and more acts of law to offer recognition and validation and and certificates and all this kind of stuff so it's not a liberation movement at all it's actually it ties people into a kind of relationship almost a psychic enslavement with the establishment where they become incredibly reliant upon the establishments approval for their sense of self I think that's incredibly destructive and I don't think that just goes for the transgender movement I think across the board the identitarian movement which is you know in relation to all sorts of community minority politics now is largely about win in the backing of the state and winning resources from the state and in order to do that you often have to advertise your weakness rather than advertise your autonomy so you have to advertise your wounds look apathetic we are look how much we suffer from hate speech look how difficult our lives are please help us so you're incited all the to make a spectacle of your weakness whereas the older movements I think were invited people to make a spectacle of their strength and that's a really important difference picking that up we haven't used that I think we've used the word yet but all this is obviously in a background of identity politics and where I think it comes from his and the problem with identity politics is that it doesn't necessarily lie about the past of course in the past gay people people of color were you know oppressed and we denied their rights but so much of this is taught in the universities that you know people here that you know our history our histories of our societies are just full of racism and those racism or or prejudice continue to this day it's almost as if people in order to their their their identities are so politicized that they have to sort of almost find a way in contemporary society to prove that they are the oppressed the poor so it's issues like policing language over sensitivity and in these ways that fundamentally divide us rather than focus on commonalities yeah absolutely I think it's you know I just get bored of people talking about the past you know does this movement at Oxford University called roads must fall which is an attempt to take down a statue of Cecil Rhodes who was a colonialist and all these students who are Rhodes Scholar so these are incredibly privileged students from different parts of the world they say that the statue reminds them of them it makes them feel the wounds of history and makes them feel the pain the pain that these are some of the most comfortable comfortably off happy students in the world or they should be craning about feeling the pain of history and what you realize is that you know everyone talks about cultural appropriation but this is historical appropriation they're appropriate in the pain of past generations because and this is the important thing they're doing it because there's actually nothing in their lives that is particularly difficult and that's a real problem for them because today the great way in which you win social support and social validation is by being a victim so if you've got nothing your life that makes you a victim you you are you have to exaggerate stuff or you have to go looking in the past and borrow the suffering of your great-great-great great-grandfather and say oh that's it they're so and the point I made in one of the in a debate with one of these people is that it would be like me saying you know I can't bear to see an image of a potato because it would remind me of the potato famine and all my relatives who all died and they saw that was really offensive in that way but it's exact it's the exact same thing it's the exact same thing so this kind of trawling of history for some evidence of victimhood I find really obnoxious but it is all part of that constant incitement to play the victim card and playing the victim card has a really devastating impact on you as an individual because you kind of you disavow your own autonomy and say please help me I'm ridiculous and pathetic it has a devastating impact on freedom of speech because it police's what everyone says lest you know they offend someone and it has the devastating impact on those traditional institutions and I think that's the key thing it's true the cult of the victim that not only the individual autonomy is undone and the gains of that but also these traditional institutions because the reason we can't have the standards or anything else that we had in the past is a panic because it's offensive to these victim groups there was a I was lucky enough to be at the Battle of ideas conference in London which I recommend to everybody in October and there was a session on the whole roads must fall issue and I asked a question and made the point that in Australia we can't have a public gathering without you except at the CIS without having a welcome to country you can't we have given back lots of let the High Court has decided that the traditional owners of the land are Aboriginal people but at the same time we now have this push to you know change Australia day and one of the things I think is really important we talk about people dredging up historical historical fact is that at some point if we're going to have a society that reflects and respects everybody's right is forgetting sometimes something we should encourage people to do absolutely I think yeah I love Australia but there's one thing I don't like about Australia is in a constant state of apologizing even more than Britain and Britain is pretty bad like Tony Blair apologized for the Irish Famine for example you think was that really your fault I don't understand how that's possible but Australia does that or is just keep saying sorry all the time and there does come a point where I think okay guys that's history let's move on I can't remember there was some American commentator who was involved in a debate on the campus kind of member who it was and this young black woman in the audience was standing up and talking about history and so on and he said look this is the starting point of our discussion you have never been a slave and I have never been a slave owner and that has got to be the starting point of the discussion it doesn't matter you can't visit the sins of the fathers upon the children that's medieval so I do think there comes a point when you have to say and by you I mean people like you you have never stolen an aboriginal child you had nothing to do with that and that's the way it is so I do think there has to come a point we think okay we have to let history lie because this misuse of history for the purpose of demonizing certain majority groups in society as guilty of the crimes of history and also accentuate in the victimhood of minority groups is just really destructive its destructive of any serious attempt to understand what history was about and why there were problems and to treat it as an intellectual endeavor to know your history and to understand history its destructive of that because it's all entirely politicized and its destructive of cultural and social relations now where you're constantly having to divide people up into the beneficiaries of history and the victims of history so I think it's it's very poisonous and we need to draw a line in the sand the proponents of political correctness can never understand though why people push back against these issues and they don't send the people as you say are being blamed for things that they were actually not responsible for don't believe not responsible for however the problem and you allude to when you speak Beach about a lot of the pushback is that sort of Trump the milos the ork rights they have sort of given up on civility and a lot of their pushback is often and personal and it's just that plays into the hands of the of the PC group because if they see here's the problem this is why we need PC you're a free speech absolutist but I it is there's a difference isn't there between no ideas should be unsayable but there are some things you shouldn't say um yes I think civility is a good thing I'm slightly worried about however having said that I am slightly worried about the over-policing of incivility and I think it is worth bearing in mind that in the England in the English context for example one of the great justifications for censorship in the past was to tackle incivility so if you look back to the period of the 1640s and the 1650s when we had a revolution and a civil war and everything else all the pamphlets that were produced by the cromwell ian's and the Levellers and all these parliamentarians who wanted to behead the king and do all this kind of radical stuff all their pamphlets were completely uncivil they were libelous they were defamatory they made accusations against bishops and Kings that were completely enough ly untrue because that was the means through which they stirred up people and stirred them up to take action and so on and then laws were passed against incivility and then that had a very devastating impact on political discourse itself so I do think we have to try to find light I do think we are in a period right now I think one of the reasons we have incivility is because people are struggling to find a political language through which to express their opposition to the establishment so it does take on that 16:40 style you know just screaming at a politician and saying you're a or whatever it might be in this kind of infantile way because people are struggling for the context and the language and the and the meaning through which they might express their opposition so I understand where incivility comes from but I think you're absolutely right in relation to the alt-right people I'm glad that ship has sailed because I just think that was incredibly unhelpful that kind of knowingly uncivil discourse where you'd go on and say knowingly provocative things and then the or would start crying and everyone would start laughing I mean you know it was fun for three years but let's move on now so I'm glad that's gone but I do think the best way to challenge political correctness is not to rise to the base that people will call you a fascist and a trans Fobo and an islamaphobe and all this stuff and it is important not to rise to that and instead just to keep pushing the argument for freedom and equality and all those things that we think are being undermined by the tyranny by stealth of political grammars final question before we throw it up into the audience sometimes however even if you do win the battle against political correctness or the political class or the elites they still remain in control of the game in a sense I guess that's really the lesson of Briggs that brings it for a particular people in Australia was this great moment of hope and triumph the sort of belief that you could push on these political cultural social issues over a long time long term and and finally have success but that victory appears to be been squandered yes brexit is in a very precarious position right now is actually really quite scary so trees a maze withdrawal agreement is literally the opposite of brexit because it keeps us in certain EU institutions particularly the customs union arrangements and certain single market arrangements but it deprives us of the right unilaterally to leave those new arrangements without the say-so of the European Court of Justice so it literally makes Britain into a vassal state i mean it's far more shocking even than i anticipated it to be so actually we're in a work if it goes through which i think is unlikely they're voting on it next week we would be in a worse position than we were when we were in the European Union which is the thing seventeen point four million people voted against so it's in a very precarious position which i think is bad for the whole world because I do think breaks it has become something of a beacon to lots of people who would like to shake off the shackles of bureaucracy and technocracy and paternalism and restrictions on free trade and all these other things that the EU is really the archetype of that kind of new political establishment because you know the political establishment their right to be scared of brexit because it is I think the most open challenge to their moral and political authority off the past 40 years or so and I think if they manage to do over breaks it or destroy brexit or dilute it so much that it's just remained by another name I do think serious in all seriousness so that will set back the cause off arguing for greater freedom and greater choice by a long margin so I think everyone across the world who's interested in those issues has a vested interest in helping make sure that brexit happens it has to happen thanks Brendon Thank You Jeremy now it's time for Q&A and our first question comes from Claire Lyman Claire is the editor of Colette magazines our very popular online magazine and she addressed cos on three occasions this year Claire thanks Tom hi Brendan it was fascinating I'm wondering how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the future and the way I'm thinking of it is we've gone through periods of mass hysteria before and there was even an outbreak of political correctness back in the 90s the early 90s and then people like Camille Parlier came along and sort of shook things up and things got back to normal are we going through another phase of mass hysteria or is this something more sinister and larger and is it something that reflects a break or a bigger shift in Western culture I'm actually very optimistic right now largely because well largely because it breaks it but also because of other things that happen I'm very excited about what's happening in France I know it's quite violent and it's kind of concerns certain people off but I do think that's a very interest those are very interesting events too so I'm pretty optimistic in terms of these kind of slightly unprecedented revolts that are taking place whether through the ballot box on the streets so that makes me optimistic but I think at the same time political correctness is becoming more and more entrenched particularly in certain institutions I think the interesting thing about the 90s I've been I was talking to some of the people involved in the push back against 1990s political correctness like Wendy kumano in the US and also nadine strossen who was president of the American Civil Liberties Union in the 90s and they did a very good job of pushing back against not only politically correct censorship but also against the introduction of sexual harassment into workplaces sexual harassment codes rather and their argument that that was a way of policing sexual relations so they did a very good job of pushing back against that and they're really shocked to see that all this stuff has come back but I think the reason is that they may have won some battles in the 1990s but they lost the war and some of them didn't quite notice that they had lost the war they didn't notice that this stuff was gathering pace I always think it's incredibly important to remember that political correctness really takes hold I think in the 1980s which is the period in which Thatcher and Reagan were running the world so it seems counterintuitive but what I think it demonstrates is that that undercurrent that new political establishment creeping in and not necessarily in a democratic way has been going on for a long time and has been gathering pace so I think it's a pretty strong ideological movement I do think we it represents a break I think but I'm talking about the last 40 years or so represents a break from what went before that and I do think we have our work cut out for us in challenging it because I think it is more substantial and more deep-rooted than some of those 90s activists might have realized but the optimism I have is down to the fact that I do think there's a silent majority and I do think they're not willing to remain silent much longer and I think that's where we can really see some hope for change I think although the problem is that I think you're right if something is politically unsustainable it should be politically unsustainable things should change but my fear about the political class is is because the weapons that PC uses are so personal and you are not just seen as having a different political event you were seen as a bad person yeah with a whole range it makes it harder for the system to correct that's my fear and so the polluted class will hang on will alienate people who dissent from from what they see as the orthodoxies yeah and the system can't in a sense generate regenerated in the way it should I think that's true I think it's very difficult to raise criticisms of this stuff because you will be shot down as a fascist or all trite or transphobic all these phobias that they've invented to kind of demonize criticism off their ideological view of the world but it might take a long time I was in Mexico City a couple of weeks ago and they have this great Museum of the Inquisition the Inquisition was very strong in Mexico as well as in Europe and it's this really tacky Museum with all these kind of dummies being tortured and blood gushing out but it's also really it's also really interesting and historically substantial and it makes some points that really made me feel alarmed the first is that one of the key things about the Inquisition was the presumption of guilt that was absolutely essential to the Inquisition everyone was presumed to be guilty as soon as they were grasped up to the authorities and the other one was of course as we all know the restriction on certain books and the Vatican that eventually drew up a list of banned books and and banned ideas and all this stuff and you do i do see echoes of that today in the attacks on due process and particularly in the mid-to movement for example which presumes guilt people's lives have been destroyed on the basis of accusation alone which is entirely unjust and also in the way in which certain ideas and books and and ways of thinking are shunned from academic life and public life so and the thing to bear in mind this that this museum makes very clear is that the Inquisition was the Inquisition was considered for a long period of time to be a normal way of organizing society by a substantial number of people and I think that's currently what we have now next question Monica Monica Wilkie who wrote a lead piece in The Sydney Daily Telegraph on our emigration polls that showed increasing support for cutting immigration Monica thank you Tom Brendon you mentioned briefly your experience at Oxford University and I know that spiked has done a lot of work about free speech particularly on campuses you wrote a piece recently where you said that students should still be allowed to band speakers and I just wondered if you could talk through sort of the rights of free speech and then people still being allowed to ban shooters being allowed to ban speakers did I favor that was the right thing it was a piece on step-up sorry positive wasn't there was a patient spike recently where it said that students should be allowed to ban speakers if they want to okay I think yeah I think I know what you're referring to that I didn't write that piece apologies for that I don't think student band speakers but I think I know what you mean in Britain the government is currently trying to restrict censorship on campus and it's doing that by proposing new codes of conduct and new legally enforceable codes of conduct which would prevent students from banning speakers and I have a problem with that too because that is a government interference into student societies so I think that's what the person was writing about but my view of what's happening on campuses in the UK and increasingly in Australia is that it really does speak to all the sorts of problems we're talking about which is this sometimes visceral intolerance of certain points of view or certain ways of thinking but every time I speak Oxford or Cambridge there's a protest the last time I spoke on Oxford a young woman started to hyperventilate I mean really she she she she literally had to be helped from the room after I made some comments on the rape culture so so that's where I think Claire's point about hysteria I think that there are some times if there is a flashes of salem like hysteria the way in which people kind of melt in front of words or ideas they disagree with and I think that's because and I made this point at a conference that Claire and I both spoke at in Sweden earlier this year that's because society no longer gives young people the raw materials of adulthood we don't socialize them in in such a way that they become capable of negotiating conflict in tension so one of the points one of the things I think is most problematic is anti-bullying initiatives in school now that doesn't mean I'm Pro bullying but the ever-expanding meaning of the word bullying and the way in which children are protected from any sort of rough-and-tumble or conflict or even fights in addition to helicopter parenting and kids not being allowed to play out and all that kind of stuff I think does have a very serious impact on their ability to develop autonomy and that's now playing out on campus you know these days kids aren't allowed out when I was young we weren't allowed in we were never you know in the summer holidays my mum would kick me and my five brothers out of the house and we were absolutely forbidden from coming back because she had work to do she couldn't have us around the house so that generational shift I think has a really devastating impact on how young people then become adults or don't become up let's move right along has got a lot of questions to get through next question James Phillips thanks Tom the you mentioned the institution of marriage in the u.s. I think I'm right in saying that the proportion of kids who grow up in households with two parents is highest towards the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum and and lowest towards the bottom end and a lot of the people at the upper end preach sorry preach that you know any form of household is okay and that's a liberal attitude to marriage or non marriage yeah they don't live by that their Creed and the people who suffer most from the breakdown of marriage the kids who are growing up in the single-parent households that's a understatement of opinion it's a it's an if you look at their performance they lots of indicators it's not a good thing for them and do you see a lot of this sort of hypocrisy and double standard in some of the issues around the political politically correct movement yeah absolutely Christopher lash makes this point in his book culture of narcissism published in 1979 which I still think is is the best guide to the world that we currently live in revolt of the elites yeah that came after the culture of narcissism was published in 79 and it's absolutely brilliant book and one of the things he talks about is the corrosion of marriage as an institution and the way in which the the political and cultural elites then tried to present that as a potentially positive thing so they talked about choice and single parents being just as good as two parents which everyone knows it's not true because apart for anything else it creates more work for the single parent and children miss out on the balance that is offered B by opposite sex relationships and marriages and so on so yes I do think there's a strong element where the political elites say one thing and do another but I think they underestimate the seriousness of corroding adult Authority in particular and the adalah thority is often expressed through the role of parenting so if you look at London for example I know that lots of people in Australia have been reading about our crime epidemic where there have been mass mass amounts of stabbings mass amounts of even acid attacks and parts of London are literally out of control there are parts of London how that I do not go to and I think that is a function of years and years and years of corroding the authority of parents corroding the sovereignty of the family corroding the the ability to discipline children in school in schools all those things have a knock-on effect and what you end up doing is churning out a new generation who have never been disciplined in any serious way and then as a consequence they become slightly out of control so we are starting to reap what we sow in relation to the undermining of those core community and family institutions through which children used to be socialized next question right hood thanks Brendan I just want to make a point I when I was coming a friend I was coming to this talk they said I didn't realize you were so conservative and I said well I'm not conservative you know and if anything I would argue the the forces of reaction coming from the left far more these days and you mentioned it the other night with a drew bolt oh the question of what is left and what is right now really we're you know you've got far more forces coming off of reaction from the left and also you mentioned that Andrew Boldt introduced you as a Marxist libertarian if you could just speak to that and just yeah I mean just those points I mean what is really this really Marxist libertarian yeah oxymoron everyone tells me it is I don't think it is no it's it's true the conservative thing really actually gets on my nerves because on Q&A the other night they announced at the end that I'm on on Monday and they said Brendan O'Neill editor of the conservative magazine spite which is it's just really straight I mean spike wants to abolish the monarchy yeah it's a helpline we want to abolish the monarchy abolish the House of Lords abolish the european union with pro freedom of speech were pro-choice we these are not really conservative we don't want to conserve society in that sense and so that's very strange but I do think Marxist libertarian sometimes I say that just to whine people because it really gets on their nerves but the I was asked about this last night did talk for the Menzies Research Center in a pub being Kings Cross last night a very classy event it was and people asked me about that and I always quote Trotsky I always quote my favorite ever line written by any political person which is from Trotsky and he said the role of a progressive is to increase the power of man over nature and decrease the power of man over man and that is how I view the world now whether that makes me a Trotskyist or not I don't know but I would that's how I would sum up my view of the world we need to increase the power of man over nature in terms of more development and progress in industrialization and growth and we need to decrease the power of man over man in terms of getting rid of censorship and social control in authoritarianism so am i Trotsky I don't know but that's certainly the best-ever description I've heard of what I think good progressive people should do Jeremy did labels foster simplistic divisions and create artificial alliances increasingly I think they do I think the terminology in in in dealing with these issues is important like I often fall into the left-right language but I actually think that the terms that we should use in relation to where all this stuff is come from is either progressive left or postmodern left because it comes from an ideological agenda which they basically believe you to control language there's no such thing as objective reality so if you can control language you can control societies and that's where that's where it's coming from can I just say one quick thing on that I think you know one of the things I really dislike about the modern left or whatever it is is the way they call everyone a fascist if they disagree with them but then by the same token one of the things I dislike about the modern right is the way they call everyone who disagrees with them and Marxist so if you want if you think education should be provided by the government suddenly you're a Marxist or people talk about cultural Marxism now I know some people in this room will use the term cultural Marxism and think it's an important term it's my least favorite political phrase of modern times and I think it's it's an inaccurate disguise for what we're currently living through so I do think thinking and I fall back indict you know I'm always signing off lefties but at the same time I don't actually think they're properly left-wing so we all do it but I do think it sometimes pays just to be a bit careful about the language because you've got to move right along Tim James get Brendan thanks very much that was great I just wanted to ask you in a sense what's next and where does this go so it seems as though gender can be fluid and flexible sexuality can be fluid and flexible I know at that case in the Netherlands recently with that bloke has 69 wanted to identify does identify as a 49 year old and wanted to legally change his age I think the court declined him that opportunity but but what's next I mean where does this end really well that's the million-dollar question I think transracial ism is probably the next step at the moment everyone always people always laugh at trans racialist you know white people who identify is black and there are some people who do that but the point I always make is that to my mind that actually makes more sense than transgenderism I mean you know if I claim to be a black man that would be absolutely ridiculous but I have far more in common with a black man biologically speaking than I do with a woman so I've always argued that if I were to identify as the opposite race that would make more sense to me than if I were to identifies the opposite gender so who knows where it's going to go I do think I I do think there's going to become a breaking point at well we're already living through a breaking point but on issues like gender fluidity and so on I do think and hope there will be a breaking point among parents who will start saying well I don't necessarily want this fifteen-year-old boy in my girls locker room at school right I don't want him there he's probably a pervert of some description so I do think that kind of pushback is already happening and in some American schools and I think that will gather pace I hope because otherwise the question of where we'll end is anyone's guess final question Kirsty O'Sullivan has come up all the way from Melbourne to be with us today Kirsty thanks Brendan I just want to look at two points sorry initially just on that talking about the discipline of children it's so funny how they sort of there's that aspect of it where they do sort of tend to go wild and go crazy and yet at the other end they get disciplined at school for things like over enthusiastic high-fives and that kind of thing that always seems really bizarre to me but I'm just wondering if if you can think of a time or a moment where we've shifted from that that stages that are promoting how how strong or how good you might be to that sort of currency of the victimhood if you can think of anything that sort of changed that moment why did we change that's a good question I think the 1980s was key to this the 1980s suddenly in the British context is really when the left goes from talking about class to identity from jobs and the economy and so on to issues of culture and attitude and stuff like that so the 80s was very important I think it's probably relates to the left's increasing isolation their loss of political authority in that era and their increasing sense of distance from ordinary people so the more distant they became from ordinary people the more they lost interest in the issues of ordinary life like how do you make ends meet and so on and they become obsessed with these more eccentric trendy gender issues I think the 80s were important I think the 1960s were important I have this strong attachment to the 1960s I think a lot of it was very positive but I do think some crap kind of sneaked through and became overly dominant but I think in relation to all of this stuff the key argument I would make in relation to political correctness and is is constantly and this relates to a question you asked I mean you fight back by Khan certainly confronting people who say that you can't say that be more assertive say the things you're not supposed to say and do so from the perspective that a society in which all ideas are out in the open and can be heard and discussed it's always preferable to a society in which things unsaid all things are censored and that's got to be the key argument going forward that everything should be saleable in order that we can argue about it and talk about it ladies and gentlemen CIS is blessed with many distinguished scholars none more so than Stephen Schwartz who happens to be one of our nation's leading education experts a sound classical liberal who just happens to have been of all things a leading vice-chancellor at many of our universities Stephen Schwartz I can't hear my I can't hear it myself but people tell me I speak with an accent and if I do there's an explanation and that's because I grew up in the USA and in the 60s that Brendan has just alluded to and I grew up in a city in which about close to 40% of the people who lived there were black afro-american in today's terminology and I didn't know any of them I went to schools that didn't have any black people in them I shopped in shops that didn't have any are Americans in Amman at public swimming pool that didn't have any and we never interacted and then gradually the integration movement took place a friend of mine was the first afro-american first black student at the University of Georgia spent four years with no one speaking to her at the University in order to achieve the goal of an integrated colorblind society and now we have the University of Queensland I think which everybody knows here one of the universities in Queensland which runs a segregated computer lab and when students complained about the segregated computer lab they were dragged into the Australian Human Rights Commission and put through a hiring experience which some of them won't recover from for the crime of saying they think there should be integration and not segregation and somewhere up in heaven Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are weeping this is it's easy to poke fun at a lot of the zany political correct things that are going on especially the microaggressions and the all the other stupidity but what Brendan is showing us today is that this is not funny this is actually really serious and while I hope that Claire is right and that it all kind of goes away maybe it has the seeds of its own it's so stupid it probably contains the seeds of its own to Mars but for today I think brendan has reminded us that in or wels expression if Liberty means anything at all it means having the right to tell people what they don't want to hear and for that Brendan we are very grateful to you please join me [Music] you

Channel: Centre for Independent Studies

Views: 95,326

Keywords: Centre for Independent Studies, CIS, Identity Politics, Political Correctness, Victimhood, Inquisition, White Nationalism, Cultural Appropriation, Historical Appropriation, Transgenderism, Transracialsim, Social Re-engineering, Massive Hysteria, Freedom of Speech, Bureaucracy, Liberalism, Progressivism, Conservatism, Modern Right, Marxist Libertarian, free speech, easily offended, Brenden, Brendan, Oneill, PC, politically correct, ridiculous, say what i want, government telling me what to say

Id: h3vKl-JFTpw

Length: 63min 18sec (3798 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 13 2019